A Man Without Breath (13 page)

‘So it may be our killer meant to do the same but was disturbed by the SS sergeant.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘On the other hand, their side arms are still holstered and the flaps are still buttoned, which means they weren’t afraid of him.’ I started going through one of the men’s pockets. ‘Which is another mark against this being partisans. And almost certainly a partisan would have taken these weapons. Weapons are more valuable than money. Still, there’s no sign of a wallet.’

‘It’s here sir,’ said Voss, handing me a wallet. ‘Sorry. I took both of their wallets when I was trying to identify them earlier.’

‘May I see one of those?’

Voss handed me a wallet. I spent a couple of minutes going through the contents and found several banknotes.

‘I guess these whores aren’t charging much money. This man has plenty of cash left. Which is unusual for a man leaving a brothel. So. The motive wasn’t robbery but something else. But what?’ I shone the flashlight up the slope towards the street and the brothel. ‘Perhaps just murder. It looks as if their throats were cut here, as they lay on the ground.’

‘How do you work that out?’ asked Colonel Ahrens.

‘The blood has soaked the hair on the backs of their heads,’ I said. ‘If their throats had been cut while they were standing up it would be all down the front of their tunics. Which it isn’t. Most of it is on the snow here. Neat job, too. Almost surgical. Like their throats were cut by someone who knew what he was doing.’

The field policeman came back with one of the dead men’s cap in his hand. ‘Found the caps on the street, sir. Left the other where it was so you could take a look for yourself.’

I took the cap and opened it up and found blood and hair on the inside.

‘Come on,’ I said, smartly. ‘Show me.’ And then to Ahrens and Voss: ‘You wait here, gentlemen.’

I followed the man back up the bank, to a spot on the street where another field policeman was standing with his flashlight trained helpfully on the other cap. I picked it up and inspected the inside; there was blood in this one, too. Then I walked back down the bank to Ahrens and Voss, pointing the flash one way and then the other.

‘The killer probably hit them on the head up on the street,’ I said. ‘And then dragged them down here where it was quiet, to kill them both.’

‘Do you think it was partisans?’

‘How should I know? But I suppose unless we can prove it wasn’t, the Gestapo will want to execute some locals just to show everyone they’re on the job and taking things seriously, as only the Gestapo can.’

‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘That’s probably why you’re not working for the Gestapo, lieutenant. Wait a minute. What’s this?’

Something glinted in the snow – something metallic. But it wasn’t a knife or a bayonet.

‘Anyone know what this is?’

We were looking at two rippled pieces of springy, flat metal that were joined together by a small oval socket at the end; the pieces of metal shifted around like a pair of playing cards in my fingers. Colonel Ahrens took the object from my hand and examined it for himself.

‘I think it’s the inside of a scabbard,’ he said. ‘For a German bayonet.’

‘Sure about that?’

‘Yes,’ said Ahrens. ‘This is meant to hold the bayonet in place. Stops it from jumping out. Here you.’ Ahrens spoke to the field policeman. ‘Are you carrying a bayonet?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Hand it over. And the scabbard.’

The policeman did as he was told, and with the aid of his Swiss officer’s knife the colonel had soon extracted the holding screw from the man’s scabbard and withdrew an identical spring interior.

‘I had no idea that’s how the bayonet stays sheathed,’ said Voss. ‘Interesting.’

We went back up the slope toward the Hotel Glinka. ‘Tell me, colonel, are there any other brothels in Smolensk?’

‘I really wouldn’t know,’ he said, stiffly.

‘Yes there are, Captain Gunther,’ said Voss. ‘There’s the Hotel Moskva to the south-east of the city, and the Hotel Archangel near the Kommandatura. But the Glinka is the nearest to the castle and the 537th Signals.’

‘You certainly know your brothels, lieutenant,’ I said.

‘As a field policeman, you have to.’

‘So if they were on foot as you say, colonel, it’s likely the Glinka would have been their establishment of choice.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that, either,’ said the colonel.

‘No, of course not.’ I sighed and looked at my watch, wishing I was already at the airport. ‘Maybe I should keep my questions to myself, colonel, but I had the head-hammered idea you actually wanted my help with this.’

The Glinka was a fussy-looking white building with more architecturally effeminate flourishes than a courtier’s lace handkerchief. On the roof there was a short castellated spire with a weather vane; on the street was an archway entrance with thick, pepper-pot columns that put you in mind of a cut-price Philistine temple, and I half expected to find some muscular Ivan chained between them for the amusement of a local fertility god. As it was, there was just a bearded doorman holding a rusty sabre and wearing a red Cossack coat and an unlikely chestful of cheap medals. In Paris they might have made something out of a doorway like that, just as they might have made the interior of the place seem attractive or even elegant, with plenty of French mirrors, gilt furniture and silk curtains – the French know how to run a decent brothel in the same way they know what makes a good restaurant. But Smolensk is a long way from Paris and the Glinka was a hundred thousand kilometres from being a decent brothel. It was just a sausage counter – a cheap bang house where simply walking through the dirty glass door and catching the strong smell in
the air of cheap perfume and male seed made you think you were risking a dose of drip. I felt sorry for any man who went there, although not as sorry as I felt for the girls, many of them Polish – and a few of them as young as fifteen – who’d been taken from their homes for ‘agricultural work’ in Germany.

A few minutes of conversation with a selection of these unfortunates was enough to discover that Ribe and Greiss had been regulars at the Glinka, that they had behaved themselves impeccably – or at least as impeccably as was required in the circumstances – and that they had left alone just before eleven p.m., which was just enough time for them to get back to the castle in time for the midnight roll-call. And I quickly formed the impression that the ghastly fate that had befallen the two soldiers could have had little or nothing to do with what had happened in the Glinka.

When I had finished questioning the Polish whores of the Glinka I went outside and drew a deep breath of clean cold air. Colonel Ahrens and Lieutenant Voss followed and waited for me to say something. But when I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned against one of the entrance pillars, the colonel interrupted my thoughts impatiently.

‘Well, Captain Gunther,’ he said. ‘Please tell us. What impression have you formed?’

I lit a cigarette and shook my head. ‘That there are times when being a man seems almost as bad as being a German,’ I said.

‘Really, captain, you are a most exasperating fellow. Try to forget your personal feelings and concentrate on your job as a policeman, please. You know damn well I’m talking about my boys and what might have happened to them.’

I threw my cigarette onto the ground angrily and then felt angrier for wasting a good cigarette.

‘That’s good coming from you, colonel. You wake me up to help out the local field police with an extra set of cop’s eyes and then you put on your spurs and try to get stiff when the cop’s eyes see something they don’t like. If you ask me, your damned boys had it coming if they were in there. I feel bad enough just going through the door of a wurst-hut like that, see? But then I’m peculiar that way. Maybe you’re right. Sometimes I forget that I’m a German soldier.’

‘Look, I only asked about my men – they were murdered after all.’

‘You got stiff with me, and if there’s one thing a Berliner hates it’s someone who gets stiff with him. You might be a colonel but don’t ever try to push a ramrod up my ass, sir.’

‘Captain Gunther, you have a most violent temper.’

‘Maybe that’s because I’m tired of people thinking that any of this shit really matters.
Your men were murdered.
That would be laughable if this whole situation in Russia wasn’t so tragic. You talk about murder like it still means something. In case you hadn’t noticed, colonel, we’re all of us in the worst place in the world with one boot in the fucking abyss, and we’re pretending that there’s law and order and something worth fighting for. But there isn’t. Not now. There’s just insanity and chaos and slaughter and maybe something worse that’s yet to come. It’s only a couple of days since you told me that sixteen thousand Jews from the Vitebsk ghetto ended up in the river or as human fertilizer. Sixteen thousand people. And I’m supposed to give a damn about a couple of off-duty Fritzes who got their throats cut outside the local sausage counter.’

‘I can see that you are a man under strain, sir,’ said the colonel.

‘We all are,’ I allowed. ‘It’s the strain of constantly having
to look the other way. Well, I don’t mind telling you, the muscles in my neck are getting tired.’

Colonel Ahrens seethed quietly. ‘I’m still awaiting an answer to a perfectly reasonable question, captain.’

‘All right, I’ll tell you what I think, and you can tell me that I’m deluded and then the lieutenant here can take me to the airport. Colonel, your men were killed by a German soldier. Their side arms were still holstered so they didn’t believe they were in any danger, and in this moonlight it’s highly unlikely the murderer could have surprised them. Could be they even knew their killer. It’s an uncomfortable forensic fact, but most people do know the person who murders them.’

‘I can’t believe what you’re saying,’ said Ahrens.

‘I’ll give you some more reasons why I believe what I do in a moment,’ I said. ‘But if I may? The initial attack probably occurred on the street. The murderer hit them on the head with a blunt instrument and most likely threw it into the river. He must have been quite powerful because that’s how it looks from their head injuries – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ribe and Greiss might eventually have died from those blows alone. Then he dragged them down to the river. His doing that is another reason to assume he was strong. He made damn sure of what he was doing, too, from the size of the bayonet cuts. I’ve seen carthorses with smaller mouths than those wounds. He cut their throats while they were still unconscious, so he must have wanted to make sure they were dead. And I think that’s significant. Also I had the impression that the laceration ends higher on one side of each man’s neck than the other. The left side of the neck as you look at it, which might suggest a left-handed man.

‘Now then: maybe he was disturbed and maybe he wasn’t.
It’s possible he meant to push the bodies into the water and let them float away to give him more time to escape. That’s what I would have done. With or without a head, a body that’s been in the water takes a while to start talking back to a pathologist – even an experienced one, and I don’t imagine there are too many of those in Smolensk right now.

‘When he got on his toes and made a run along the riverbank, he was running for his motorcycle – yes, I don’t doubt the SS sergeant was right about that. There’s nothing else sounds like an air-cooled BMW. Not even Glinka. Partisans can steal motorcycles, of course, but they’d hardly be brazen enough to ride one around right here in Smolensk, with so many checkpoints around the city. If he parked the bike to the west his name wouldn’t appear on a field policeman’s checklist either. And let’s not forget that it was a German murder weapon, too. According to the witness, the bike drove west along the road to Vitebsk. And given that the west bridge is down it’s certain that he didn’t cross the river. Which means your murderer must be stationed out that way. To the west of Smolensk. I expect you’ll find the bayonet somewhere on that road, lieutenant. Without the spring in the scabbard it might even have fallen out.’

‘But if he drove west,’ said the colonel, ‘that would mean you think he must have been going to the 537th at the castle, the General Staff at Krasny Bor, or the Gestapo at Gnezdovo.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘If I were you, lieutenant, I’d check out the vehicle logs at all three. Chances are that’s how you’ll catch your man. German bike, German knife, and the perpetrator stationed along the road to Vitebsk.’

‘You’re not serious,’ said the colonel. ‘About where the perpetrator is now serving, I mean.’

‘I can’t say that I envy you the job of unsticking some of those damned alibis, lieutenant. But like it or not, that’s just how it is with murder. It rarely ever unravels as neatly as an unwanted woollen pullover. Now as to why he killed them, well that’s harder to answer. But since we’ve eliminated robbery and a fight over a favourite whore, that suggests this was murder with a detestable motive, according to the way the law writes it – in other words, it was killing with intent. That’s right, gentlemen, he set out to kill them both. The question is, why today? Why today and not yesterday, or the day before, or last weekend? Was it just opportunity, or could there have been some other reason? You’ll only find that out, lieutenant, when you look into these two lives much more closely. Discover who they really were and you’ll find your motive, and when you find that you’ll be a damn sight nearer to finding their killer.’

I lit another cigarette and smiled. I felt calmer now that I’d let off some steam.

‘You could find them,’ said the colonel. ‘If you stayed on a while, here in Smolensk.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Not me.’ I looked at my watch. ‘In eight hours I’m going back to Berlin. And I’m not coming back again. Not ever. Not even if they put a bayonet to my throat. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to return to the castle. It’s possible I can still get a little sleep before my journey.’

*

Six hours later Lieutenant Rex was outside the front door of the castle waiting to drive me to Smolensk airport. It was a beautiful clear morning with a sky as blue as the cross on a Prussian imperial flag and – if there was such a thing – surely a perfect day for flying. After almost four days in Smolensk, I was actually looking forward to spending twelve hours
aboard a freezing plane. The regimental cook from Dnieper Castle had prepared a large flask of coffee and some sandwiches for me, and I’d even managed to get a Capuchin hood from army stores to wear under my crusher to help keep my ears warm. Life felt good. I had a book and a recent newspaper and the whole day to myself.