A Man Without Breath (33 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said aloud, because I had the strong idea that Batov’s suffering and death had been occasioned by the same information he had promised me – the photographic and documentary evidence of exactly what had happened in Katyn Wood. ‘I really am. If only – if only I’d come yesterday, the way I’d planned, then perhaps you’d still be alive.’

Of course it had already crossed my mind that Lieutenant Rudakov’s absence from his room at the SSMA was an indication that he had met a similarly grisly end, but it was now
that I started to wonder just how disabled the NKVD man had really been. Could Rudakov have fooled Batov into thinking his condition was perhaps worse than it was? What better way of hiding out from your NKVD colleagues than affecting a mental disability? In which case, wasn’t it perfectly possible that Doctor Batov had been murdered by the very man he’d been trying to protect? And wasn’t life just like that sometimes?

I went into the bedroom. I hadn’t met Batov’s only daughter before; I didn’t even know her name; all I really knew about the girl was her age and the fact that she wouldn’t ever be celebrating her sixteenth birthday or dancing
Swan Lake
in Paris. As a homicide detective I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, many of them female, and of course it’s fair to say that the war had rendered me even less sensitive than before to the sight of violent death, but nothing prepared me for the appalling sight that greeted me in that bedroom.

Batov’s daughter had been tied to the four corners of the bed and tortured with a knife, like her poor father. Her killer had slit her nose horizontally and cut off both her ears before opening the veins in one of her arms. She was still wearing a pair of rubber overshoes. Very likely she must have arrived back in the apartment after the killer had failed to extract the information he wanted from her father, and he had set to work with his knife on the daughter, whose mouth was similarly stuffed with a sock to stifle her loudest screams. But where I wondered were her ears?

Eventually I found both of them in the breast pocket of the dead man’s jacket, as if he had brought them into the room, one after the other, before Batov had told him what exactly he wanted to know.

A quick glance in the other bedroom confirmed that Batov
had indeed talked. A picture of Lenin had been taken down from the wall and was now leaning against it. The space it had covered was just raw brickwork, with several of the bricks torn out like the centre of a jigsaw puzzle. There was just enough room in this rectangular hiding place – which was about the height and width of a letterbox – to have hidden the ledgers and pictures Doctor Batov had promised to give to me.

In the bathroom I dropped my trousers and sat down on the toilet to do some thinking with a couple of cigarettes. Without the bloody distractions of the two bodies it was easier to reflect upon what I knew and what I thought I knew.

I knew that they had both been dead for not much more than a day: Batov’s own body had been covered with books and newspapers, which meant that access for female houseflies had been more difficult, but already masses of tiny eggs that had yet to hatch into maggots were covering the girl’s eyelids. Depending on the temperature, fly eggs usually hatched into larvae within twenty-four hours – especially when a body was found indoors, where things are warmer, even in Russia. All of which meant they had probably died the previous afternoon.

I knew it was a waste of time asking the floor lady if she’d seen or heard anything. For one thing my Russian wasn’t equal to the task of an interrogation, and for another her ear trumpet hardly encouraged the prospect of success. As a detective, I’d seen more promising witnesses in a mortuary. Not that I was feeling a lot like a homicide detective since murdering Martin Quidde.

I kept asking myself if there had been a way I could have avoided that, but the same answer kept on coming back at me: Quidde opening his mouth about what he knew to someone
in the Gestapo, the field police, Kripo, the SS or even the Wehrmacht would have been as good a way as any of destroying any future chance that Von Gersdorff – or one of his colleagues – might get to kill Hitler. No one’s life – not Quidde’s and certainly not my own – was more important than that. For the same reason, I knew I was going to have to tell Von Gersdorff about Quidde and the tape to prove to him that Von Kluge could no longer be trusted.

I knew that Batov’s killer enjoyed using a knife – a knife is such a close-quarters weapon that you have to take pleasure in the damage you can inflict on another human being. It’s not a weapon for someone who’s squeamish. I might have said that the man who had murdered Batov and his daughter was the same man who had murdered the two signallers, Ribe and Greiss – the throat-cutting was similar, of course – except that the motives for these crimes looked so entirely different.

I knew I needed to find Rudakov even if he was dead in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Rudakov had heard everything Batov had told me about the documentary and photographic proof of the Katyn massacre, and he’d heard the deal Batov had demanded. If that wasn’t a motive for a former NKVD officer to kill a man and his daughter, I didn’t know what was. If he had killed the Batovs, then I guessed he was long gone, and the field police were hardly likely to catch someone who had been resourceful enough to have faked a mental disability for the best part of eighteen months.

I knew I had to go to the Kommandatura now and report the murders, so that the field police and the local Russian cops could be summoned to the crime scene. Death had undone so many in and around Smolensk that Lieutenant Voss was going to wonder if murder was becoming infectious
in the oblast that was his zone of responsibility. With four thousand men lying dead in Katyn Wood I was beginning to wonder that myself.

But most of all I knew I was about to have a big problem with the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda when I told him that the extra evidence I had promised him of exactly what had happened at Katyn had disappeared along with our one potential witness, and that we were now back to having to rely on the forensics and nothing else.

In that respect, it was fortunate for Goebbels and Germany and the Katyn investigation that Gerhard Buhtz was a highly competent forensic scientist – much more competent than I or Judge Conrad had anticipated.

I was about to discover just how competent he really was.

*

The officers’ canteen at Krasny Bor was a chintzy sort of place, a bit like a dining room in a provincial Swiss hotel, except for the Russian waiters wearing white mess jackets and the gleaming regimental silver on the sideboard; and no provincial Swiss hotel – even one at high altitude – ever had clouds inside the dining room: near the wooden ceiling of the canteen there was always a thick layer of tobacco smoke like a blanket of persistent fog over an aerodrome. Sometimes I would lean back in my chair and stare up at this grey fug and try to imagine myself back at Horcher’s in Berlin or even La Coupole in Paris. The food at Krasny Bor was as plentiful as it was at the Bendlerblock, and with an extensive wine list and a selection of beers that would have been the envy of any restaurant in Berlin, it was easily the best thing about being in Smolensk. The chef was a talented fellow from Brandenburg, and for Berliners like myself there was always an air of excitement when his two best dishes – Königsberger Klopse and lamprey
pie – were on the menu. So I was less than pleased when, just as I’d given my lunch order to the waiter, an orderly came and told me that Professor Buhtz was urgently requesting my presence in his laboratory-hut. I might have asked the orderly to tell Buhtz to wait until after lunch but for the fact that Von Kluge was seated at the next table and had certainly heard the details of the message, which, after all, came from someone who carried a major’s rank in the Wehrmacht. Von Kluge was always very Prussian about such things and took a dim view of junior officers shirking their duties in favour of their stomachs. He was an abstemious man and, unlike the rest of us, wasn’t much interested in the pleasures of the table. I expect he was thinking more about the pleasures of his bank account. So I stood up and went to find the forensic pathologist.

His makeshift laboratory was easily identifiable from the BMW motorcycle parked immediately outside. It was one of the larger huts on the outer perimeter of army headquarters at Krasny Bor. I knew Buhtz had an even larger and far better-equipped laboratory in the town hospital on Hospitalstrasse near the city’s main railway station, but he felt safer working at Krasny Bor, on account of the fact that the previous autumn some German doctors working in the hospital at Vitebsk had been kidnapped, genitally mutilated, and then murdered by partisans.

To my surprise, I found the professor in the company of Martin Quidde, whose dead body was now lying in an open coffin on the wooden floor. A crude Y-shaped stitch ran the length of his torso like the track for a small boy’s electric train set, and the top of his skull displayed the tell-tale purple line of having been removed and then replaced as if it had been the lid on a tea caddy. But it wasn’t Quidde that Buhtz
had summoned me to discuss in confidence; at least not right away.

‘Sorry to interrupt your lunch, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to discuss this in front of everyone in the mess.’

‘You’re probably right, sir. It’s never a good idea to discuss forensics when other men are trying to eat lunch.’

‘Well, this is rather urgent. And not to say sensitive. And I’m not talking about the stomachs of our fellow officers.’

‘What is it?’ I asked coolly.

He took off his leather apron and then led me to a microscope by a frosted window. ‘You remember the skull I took away from Katyn Wood? Your dead Polack?’

‘How could I forget? Outside of a play by William Shakespeare it’s not often you see a man with a decomposing head under his arm.’

‘That Polish officer wasn’t – as you might have expected he would have been – shot with a Russian pistol like a Tokarev or a Nagant.’

‘I’d have thought the hole was too small to be from a rifle,’ I muttered.

Buhtz switched on a light near the microscope and invited me to take a look at the shell casing.

‘No, indeed, you’re quite right,’ he said as I peered through the eyepiece. ‘Quite right. On the bottom of the shell casing that your Russian friend Dyakov found in the mass grave you’ll see that the trademark and calibre are clearly visible on the brass.’

He was pulling on his army tunic while he spoke. I dare say that slicing open Corporal Quidde meant he’d worked up an appetite.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Geco 7.65. Bloody hell, that’s the Gustav Genschow factory in Durlach, isn’t it?’

‘You really are a detective, aren’t you?’ said Buhtz. ‘Yes, it’s a German shell. A 7.65 won’t fit a Tokarev or a Nagant. Those pistols only take 7.62-calibre ammo. But 7.65 does fit a Walther like the one I bet you’re wearing under your arm.’

I shrugged. ‘So what are you saying? That they were shot by Germans after all?’

‘No, no. I’m saying they were shot by German weapons. You see, I happen to know that before the war, the factory exported weapons and ammunition to the Ivans in the Baltic states. The Tokarev and the Nagant are all right as far as they go. The Nagant you can actually use with a sound-suppressor, unlike any other pistol, and a lot of NKVD murder squads like to use it where silence is required. It really is very quiet. But if you want to get the job done as efficiently and quickly as possible and you don’t mind about the noise – and I can’t see that they would have minded, particularly, in the middle of Katyn Wood – then the Walther is your weapon of choice. I’m not being patriotic. Not in the least. The Walther doesn’t jam, and it doesn’t misfire. If you’re shooting four thousand Polacks in one weekend then you need German pistols to get the job done. And my guess is that you’ll find that all four thousand of these fellows were topped in the same way.’

Now I remembered Batov describing a briefcase full of automatic pistols, and I guessed that these must have been Walthers.

‘Makes it a hell of a lot harder to argue that these fellows were all shot by the Ivans,’ I said. ‘There’s a delegation of prominent Polacks arriving here from Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin next week, including two fucking generals, and we’re going to have to tell them that their comrades were shot with German pistols.’

‘You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the NKVD used
Walthers for another reason too. Other than their reliability. I think they might have used them to help cover their tracks. To make it look like we did it. Just in case anyone ever discovered this grave.’

I groaned, loudly. ‘The minister is going to love this,’ I said. ‘On top of everything else.’

I told him about Batov and the documentary evidence that no longer was.

‘Sorry,’ said Buhtz. ‘All the same I’m going to ask the ministry to telephone the Genschow factory and see what their export records say. It’s possible they can locate a batch of similar ammunition.’

‘But you said this is standard German issue, didn’t you?’

‘Yes and no. I’ve been working in the field of ballistics since 1932, and even though I say so myself, I’m something of an expert in this field. I can tell you Gunther that while the calibre remains standard, over the years the trace metallurgy of ammunition can change quite a bit. Some years there’s a bit more copper; other years there might be a bit more nickel. And depending on how old this ammunition is, we might be able to get an idea about when it was made, which would help to substantiate the export record. If we can do that we might be able to say for sure that this bullet was part of a batch of ammo exported to the Baltic Ivans in say 1940, when we had the non-aggression pact with Comrade Stalin. Or even before the Nazis were in power, when we had those Red-loving bastards in the SPD running the show. That would be documentary proof that they did do it, and almost as good as finding a Russian-made bullet.’

I saw little point in mentioning my own former allegiance to the SPD, so I nodded silently and stood away from the microscope.

‘So then,’ said Buhtz, ‘perhaps we’ll just tell the Polish delegation what we know about the bodies that we’ve found so far, and leave it at that for now. No point in speculating unnecessarily. Under the circumstances I think we should let them take over as much of the actual work at the site as possible.’