A Man Without Breath (17 page)

‘I thought you wanted to keep fools like me at arm’s length.’

‘That was before that stupid captain opened his mouth and
told you my name,’ I said. ‘And what better company for one fool than another?’

‘Is that what we are? Fools?’

‘Certainly. But at least we know we’re fools. And in today’s Germany that counts as a kind of wisdom.’

*

We went to the German Club – formerly the Herrenclub – at number two Jäger Strasse, which was a red sandstone neo-baroque hatchery for anyone with a von in his name, and the kind of place where you felt improperly dressed without a red stripe on your trouser leg and a Knight’s Cross around your neck. I’d been there once before, but only because I’d mistaken the place for Nero’s golden palace and they’d mistaken me for the mailman. Naturally women were not allowed. It was bad enough for the members to see the witchcraft badge on my tunic in there; if they had seen a female in that place someone would probably have fetched a red-hot stool.

Gersdorff ordered a bottle of Prince Bismarck. They shouldn’t have had any, but of course they did because it was the German Club and the seventy-seven princes and thirty-eight German counts who were among the members might have wondered what things were coming to when you couldn’t get a decent bottle of schnapps. I dare say that August Nöthling wasn’t the only shopkeeper in Berlin who knew how to get around the country’s strict rationing. We drank it neat, cold and quickly, with quiet patriotic toasts that someone eavesdropping on our conversation might have considered treasonable, and it was fortunate that we were in the bowling alley, which was empty.

After a while we were both a little drunk and bowled a few, which was when I informed Von Gersdorff of one aspect to the plot to kill Hitler I found repellent.

‘Something’s been nagging me ever since I got back from Smolensk,’ I said.

‘Oh? And what’s that?’

‘I don’t mind you trying to blow Hitler up,’ I said. ‘But I do mind about the two telephonists in Smolensk who had their throats cut because they overheard something they shouldn’t have.’

Von Gersdorff stopped bowling and shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘When did this happen?’

‘In the early hours of Sunday March 14th,’ I said. ‘The day immediately after the leader visited Smolensk. Two telephonists from the 537th were found murdered on the banks of the Dnieper River near a brothel called the Hotel Glinka. I was the investigating officer. Unofficially, anyway.’

‘Really, I know nothing about this,’ he insisted. ‘And I can assure you, Captain Gunther, that there is no one at Army Group HQ who would commit such a crime. Or indeed order such a crime to be carried out.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Of course I’m sure. These are officers and gentlemen we’re talking about.’ He lit a cigarette and shook his head. ‘But, look, this sounds much more like partisans. What makes you so sure it wasn’t some damned Popov who murdered them?’

I gave him the reasons. ‘Their throats had been cut with a German bayonet. And the murderer escaped riding a BMW motorcycle west, in the direction of Group headquarters. Also I suspect the two victims knew their murderer.’

‘God, how awful. But if it happened near a brothel, as you say, then perhaps it was just a soldiers’ argument about a prostitute.’

I shrugged. ‘The local Gestapo hanged some innocent people
for the crime, of course. In retaliation. So a proper sense of order has been restored. Anyway, I just thought I’d ask your opinion.’ I shook my head. ‘Perhaps it was an argument about a whore after all.’

I didn’t really believe that. Not that it mattered very much what I believed about the murders now I was back in Berlin. Trying to figure out who murdered the two army telephonists was down to Lieutenant Voss in Smolensk, and I told myself – and told Von Gersdorff – that if I never saw the place until the year 2043 it would be a hundred years too soon.

Monday, March 22nd 1943

It was his right leg. The minister limped into his office in the Leopold Palace at speed, and if the carpet hadn’t been so thick and the distance between the huge door and his desk hadn’t been quite so vast we might not have noticed the shiny special shoe and the even shinier metal brace. Well, almost. We were looking out for it, of course: there were so many jokes told about Joey’s cloven hoof that it was even more notorious than he was – almost a Berlin tourist attraction – and the judge and I kept a close eye on his club foot just so we could say that we’d seen it, in just the same way you wanted to be able to say you’d seen Lotte the bear in the pit at Köllnischer Park, or Anita Berber at the Heaven and Hell Club.

As Goebbels limped into the room the judge and I stood up and saluted in the customary way and he flapped a delicate little hand back over his shoulder in imitation of the way the leader did it – as if swatting an irritating mosquito, or dismissing some sycophant, of which there seemed to be a plentiful supply in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. I suppose it was just that kind of place: before the ministry took over the building in 1933 the palace had been the
residence of the Hohenzollerns, the royal family of Prussia, which had employed more than a few sycophants itself.

Goebbels was all smiles and apologies for keeping us waiting. It made a nice change from the kind of hate that was usually heard spilling out of his narrow mouth.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please forgive me,’ he said in a deeply resonant voice that belied his dwarfish stature. ‘I’ve been on the telephone complaining to the High Command about the situation we found at Kharkov. Field Marshal von Bock had reported that all German supplies would be destroyed rather than left behind for the enemy; but when Field Marshal von Manstein took the city again he discovered large quantities of our supplies still undestroyed. Can you believe it? Of course von Bock blames Paulus, and now that Paulus is conveniently a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, who is there to contradict him? I know some of these people are your friends, Judge, but really, it beggars belief. It’s hard enough to win a war without being lied to by people on your own side. The Wehrmacht really needs to be combed out. Did you know that the generals are demanding rations for thirteen million soldiers when there are only nine million Germans under arms? I tell you the leader ought to take the severest action against someone.’

Goebbels sat down behind his desk and almost vanished until he leaned forward on his chair. I was tempted to go and fetch him a cushion, but in spite of his continuing smile, there was good reason to doubt he had a sense of humour. For one, he was short, and I’ve never yet met a short man who could laugh at himself as easily as a taller one; and that’s as true a picture of the world as anything you’ll find in Kant or Hegel. For another he was a doctor of philosophy, and nobody in Germany ever calls himself doctor unless he wants
to impress upon other people how impeccably serious he really is.

‘How are you, Judge?’

‘Fine, sir, thank you.’

‘And your family?’

‘We’re all fine sir, thank you for asking.’

The doctor clasped his hands and bounced them excitedly on the blotter, as if chopping herbs with a mezzaluna. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band, although he was famously married. Maybe he figured that none of the starlets at the UFA studios in Babelsberg he was reputedly fond of banging would recall having seen the pictures that had been in every German magazine of the minister marrying Magda Quandt.

‘It’s a great pity your investigation into the sinking of that hospital ship didn’t come off,’ Goebbels said to me. ‘The British are experts at occupying the moral high ground. That would have removed them from it, permanently, make no mistake. But this is even better, I think. Yes, I read your report with great interest, Captain Gunther, great interest.’

‘Thank you, Herr doctor.’

‘Have we met before? Your name seems familiar to me. I mean before you were with the War Crimes Bureau.’

‘No, I’d certainly have remembered meeting you, sir.’

‘There was a Gunther who used to be a detective with Kripo. Rather a good one by all accounts. He was the man who arrested Gormann, the strangler.’

‘Yes sir, that was me.’

‘Well, that must be it.’

I was already nervous about meeting Dr Goebbels – about ten years ago I’d been asked to drop a case as a favour to Joey, but I hadn’t, and I wondered if this was what he remembered. And our little exchange did nothing to make me feel any less
like a man sitting on hot coals. The judge was equally nervous – at least he kept tugging at the stud of his wing collar and flexing his neck before he answered the minister’s questions, as if his throat required a little more space to swallow whatever it was that he was going to have to agree to.

‘So, do you really think it’s a possibility?’ Goebbels asked him. ‘That there is some sort of a mass grave hidden down there?’

‘There are lots of secret graves in that part of the world,’ he said, carefully. ‘The problem is making absolutely sure that this is the right one: that this is indeed the site of a war crime committed by the NKVD.’

He nodded at a manila file that lay on top of a copy of that day’s
Völkischer Beobachter
.

‘It’s all there in Gunther’s report, sir.’

‘Nevertheless I should like to hear the captain talk about it, himself,’ Goebbels said smoothly. ‘My own experience of written reports is that you can usually get more out of the man who wrote it than the report itself. That’s what the leader says. “Men are my books”, he says. I tend to agree with that sentiment.’

I stirred a little under the minister’s sharp eye.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do think it’s a possibility. A strong possibility. The local inhabitants are quite unequivocal that there isn’t a grave in Katyn Wood. However, I believe that’s probably a good sign that there is. They’re lying, of course.’

‘Why would they lie?’ Goebbels frowned, almost as if he regarded lying as something quite inexplicable and beyond all countenancing.

‘The NKVD might be gone from Smolensk but the people are still afraid of them. More than they’re afraid of us, I think. And they’ve got good reason. For twenty years the NKVD – and
before them the OGPU and the Cheka – have been murdering Russians wholesale.’ I shrugged. ‘We’ve only been doing it for eighteen months.’

Goebbels thought that was very funny.

‘I’ll say one thing for Stalin,’ he said, ‘he knows the best way to treat the Russian people. Mass murder is as primitive a language as there is, but it’s the best language in which to talk to them.’

‘So, there’s that,’ I said. ‘And there’s the fact that what they actually told me flies in the face of what I found lying on the ground.’

‘The bones and the button; yes, of course.’ Goebbels pinched his lower lip thoughtfully.

‘It’s not much to go on, I’ll admit, but I’ve had it verified as belonging to the greatcoat of a Polish officer.’

‘Is it possible that the coat could have been stolen from a Polish officer by a Red Army soldier, who was subsequently killed in the battle of Smolensk?’ asked Goebbels.

‘That’s a good question. What you say is certainly a possibility. But against that are the numerous intelligence reports the Abwehr had received of Polish officers seen on a train parked in a local railway siding. These would seem to confirm at least that at some stage in 1940 there were certainly Poles in the vicinity of Smolensk.’

‘Many or all of whom may have been murdered by the NKVD,’ said Goebbels.

‘But we won’t really know for sure that there’s more than one body until the ground thaws and we’re able to carry out a proper exhumation.’

‘When is that thaw likely to happen?’

‘A couple of weeks at least,’ I said.

Goebbels grimaced with impatience. ‘There’s no way of
speeding this up? Building fires on the ground, for example. Surely there must be something we can do.’

‘Not without the risk of destroying important evidence,’ said Goldsche.

‘I’m afraid that for the moment we’re at the mercy of the Russian winter,’ I said.

Goebbels took his long chin in his hands and frowned. ‘Yes, yes of course.’

He was wearing a grey three-piece suit with wide lapels, a white shirt and a striped tie. The tie was without any sort of knot, just a Party badge for a tie-pin – like a nurse’s collar – which added a fussy and curiously feminine touch to his appearance.

‘Gentlemen, I hear what you say. However, at the risk of stating the obvious let me make quite clear to you both the enormous propaganda value to us that this investigation presents. After the disaster of Stalingrad and the likelihood of another disaster in Tunisia, we need a coup like this. Jews all over the world are doing their best to make Bolshevism look innocent and to represent it as a lesser danger to world peace than National Socialism. They maintain the lie that the dastardly deeds typical of the Russian beast simply never happened. Indeed, in Jewish circles in London and Washington the present slogan is that the Soviet Union is destined to lead Europe. We cannot allow this to pass unchallenged. It is our job to stop it. It’s only Germany that stands between these monsters and the rest of Europe and it’s time that Roosevelt and Churchill woke up to this fact.’

He must suddenly have realized that he wasn’t giving a speech in the Sports Palace because he came to an abrupt stop.

A few seconds passed before Judge Goldsche spoke. ‘Yes sir. Of course, you’re right.’

‘The very second the ground down there thaws, I want a dig to commence,’ said Goebbels. ‘We can’t afford any delay in this matter.’

‘Yes sir,’ agreed the judge.

‘But since we have a little time before then,’ continued Goebbels, ‘two weeks you say, Captain Gunther?’

I nodded.

‘Might I ask a question, Herr Reich minister?’ said the judge. ‘You say “we”. Are you referring to Germany as a whole or to this particular ministry?’

‘Why do you ask, Judge Goldsche?’

‘Because the standard protocol is that the Bureau of War Crimes prepares investigative reports and the Foreign Office publishes them as white books. Reich minister Von Ribbentrop doesn’t like it when the normal protocol is ignored.’