A Man Without Breath (7 page)

‘Is this a coincidence?’ I asked cheerfully. ‘Or did you come to see me off?’

‘I’m sorry?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, I didn’t recognize you. You’re flying to Smolensk, aren’t you, Captain Bernhard?’

‘Unless you know something different,’ I said. ‘And my name is Gunther, Captain Bernhard Gunther.’

‘Yes, of course. No, as it happens I’m travelling with you on the same plane. I was going to take the train and then changed my mind. But now I’m not so sure I made the right choice.’

‘I’m afraid you’re between the wall and a fierce dog with that one,’ I said.

We climbed aboard and took our seats along the corrugated fuselage: it was like sitting inside a workman’s hut.

‘Are you getting off at the Wolf’s Lair?’ I asked. ‘Or going all the way to Smolensk?’

‘No, I’m going all the way.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have some urgent and unexpected Abwehr business to attend to with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters.’

‘Bring a packed lunch, did you?’

‘Hmm?’

I nodded at the parcel he was holding under his arm.

‘This? No, it’s not my lunch. It’s a gift for someone. Some Cointreau.’

‘Cointreau. Real coffee. Is there nothing beyond your great father’s talents?’

Von Dohnanyi smiled his thin smile, stretched his thinner neck over his tailored tunic collar. ‘Would you excuse me please, captain.’

He waved at two staff officers with red stripes on their trousers and then went to sit beside them at the opposite end of the aircraft, just behind the cockpit. Even on a Ju52, people like Von Dohnanyi and the staff officers managed somehow to make their own first class; it wasn’t that the
seats were any better up front, just that none of these flamingos really wanted to talk with junior officers like me.

I lit a cigarette and tried to make myself comfortable. The engines started and the door closed. The co-pilot locked the door and put his hand on one of two beam-mounted machine guns that could be moved up and down the length of the aircraft.

‘We’re a crew member short, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘So does anyone know how to use one of these?’

I looked at my fellow passengers. No one spoke, and I wondered what the point was of transporting any of these men nearer the front; none of them looked as though they could have worked a door-lock, let alone an MG15.

‘I do,’ I said, raising my hand.

‘Good,’ said the co-pilot. ‘There’s a one-in-a-hundred chance we’ll run into an RAF Mosquito as we’re flying out of Berlin, so stay on the gun for the next fifteen minutes, eh?’

‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But what about in Smolensk?’

The co-pilot shook his head. ‘The front line is five hundred miles east of Smolensk. That’s too far for Russian fighters.’

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said someone.

‘Don’t worry,’ grinned the co-pilot. ‘The cold’ll probably kill you long before then.’

We took off in the early morning light, and when we were airborne I stood up, slid the window open and poked the MG outside, expectantly. The saddle drum held seventy-five rounds, but my hands were soon so cold I didn’t much fancy our chances of hitting anything with it and was quite relieved when the co-pilot shouted back that I could stand down. I was even more relieved to close the window against the freezing air that was filling the aircraft.

I sat down, tucked my numb hands under my armpits and tried to go to sleep.

*

Four hours later, as we approached Rastenburg, in Eastern Prussia, people turned around in their seats and, looking out of the windows, eagerly tried to catch a glimpse of the leader’s headquarters, nicknamed the Wolf’s Lair.

‘You won’t see it,’ said some know-it-all who’d been there before. ‘All of the buildings are camouflaged. If you could see it then so could the fucking RAF.’

‘If they could get this far,’ said someone else.

‘They weren’t supposed to get as far as Berlin’ said another, ‘but somehow, against all predictions, they did.’

We landed a few miles west of the Wolf’s Lair, and I went to look for an early lunch or a late breakfast but, finding neither, I sat in a hut that was almost as cold as the plane and ate some meagre cheese sandwiches I had brought with me just in case. I didn’t see Von Dohnanyi again until we were back on the plane.

The air between Rastenburg and Minsk was rougher, and from time to time the Junkers would drop like a stone before hitting the bottom of the pocket like a water bucket in a well. It wasn’t long before Von Dohnanyi was starting to look very green.

‘Perhaps you should drink some of those spirits,’ I said, which was a crude way of telling him that I wouldn’t have minded a drop of it myself.

‘What?’

‘Your friend’s Cointreau. You should drink some to settle your stomach.’

He looked baffled for a minute and then shook his head, weakly.

One of the other passengers, an SS lieutenant who had boarded the plane at Rastenburg, produced a hip flask of peach schnapps and handed it around. I took a bite off it just as we hit another big air pocket, and this one seemed to jolt all the life out of Von Dohnanyi, who fell onto the fuselage floor in a dead faint. Overcoming my natural instinct, which was always to leave the people in the first class to look after themselves, I knelt down beside him, loosened the collar on his tunic and poured some of the lieutenant’s schnapps between his lips. That was when I saw the address on Von Dohnanyi’s parcel, which was still under his seat.

Colonel Helmuth Stieff, Wehrmacht Coordination Dept., Anger Castle, Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, Prussia.

Von Dohnanyi opened his eyes, sighed and then sat up.

‘You just fainted, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Might be best if you lay on the floor for a while.’

So he did, and actually managed to sleep for a couple of hours while from time to time I wondered if Von Dohnanyi had simply forgotten to deliver his bottle of Cointreau to his friend Colonel Stieff at the Wolf’s Lair, or if perhaps he had changed his mind about handing over such a generous present. If the booze was anything like the coffee it was certain to be high-quality stuff, much too good to give away. He could hardly have forgotten about the parcel, since I was certain he had taken it with him when we got off the plane in Rastenburg. So why hadn’t he given it to one of the many orderlies for delivery to Colonel Stieff, or even, if he didn’t trust them, to one of the other staff officers who were going straight to the Wolf’s Lair? Of course one of them might equally have told von Dohnanyi that Stieff was no longer at the Wolf’s Lair – that would have explained everything. But like an itch that kept on coming back, no amount of scratching I did seemed
to take away from the fact that Von Dohnanyi’s failure to deliver his precious bottle just seemed strange.

There’s not an awful lot to do on a four-hour flight between Rastenburg and Minsk.

*

It was still light by the time we reached Smolensk several hours later, but only just. For almost an hour before that we’d been flying over an endless, thick green carpet of trees. It seemed there were more trees in Russia than anywhere else on earth. There were so many trees that at times the Junkers seemed almost immobile in the air and I felt as if we were drifting over a primordial landscape. I suppose Russia is as near as you can get to what the earth must have been like thousands of years ago – in more ways than one; probably it was an excellent place to be a squirrel, although perhaps not such an excellent place to be a man. If you were intent on hiding the bodies of thousands of Jews or Polish officers, this looked like a good place to do it. You could have hidden all manner of crimes in a landscape like the one below our aircraft, and the sight of it filled me with me dread not just for what I might find down there but also for what I might find myself faced with again. It was only a dark possibility, but I knew instinctively that in the winter of 1943 this was no place to be an SD officer with a guilty conscience.

Von Dohnanyi had made a full recovery by the time a clearing in the forest finally appeared to the north of the city like a long green swimming pool, and we landed. Steps were wheeled quickly into place on the tarmac and we stepped out into a wind that quickly cut a jagged hole in my greatcoat, then my torso, leaving me feeling as cold as a frozen herring and, in the centre of that enormous tract of forest, just as
out of place. I pulled my crusher about my frozen ears and looked around for a sign of someone from the signals regiment who was supposed to meet me. Meanwhile my erstwhile travelling companion paid me no attention as he came down the steps of the aircraft and was immediately met by two senior officers – one of them a general with more fur on his collar than an Eskimo – and seemed quite indifferent to my own lack of transport as, laughing loudly, he and his pals shook hands while an orderly loaded his luggage into their large staff car.

A Tatra with a little black and yellow flag bearing the number 537 on the hood drew up next to the staff car and two officers climbed out. Seeing the general, the two officers saluted, were cursorily acknowledged, and then walked toward me. The Tatra had its top up but there were no windows and it seemed another cold journey lay ahead of me.

‘Captain Gunther?’ said the taller man.

‘Yes sir.’

‘I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Ahrens, of the 537th Signals,’ he said. ‘This is Lieutenant Rex, my adjutant. Welcome to Smolensk. Rex was going to meet you by himself, but at the last minute I thought I’d join him and put you fully in the picture on the way back to the castle.’

‘I’m very glad you did, sir.’

A moment later the staff car drove away.

‘Who were the flamingos?’ I asked.

‘General von Tresckow,’ said Ahrens. ‘With Colonel von Gersdorff. I can’t say I recognized the third officer.’ Ahrens had a lugubrious sort of face – he was not unhandsome – and an even more lugubrious voice.

‘Ah, that explains it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The third officer – the one you didn’t recognize, the one who got off the plane – he was also an aristocrat,’ I explained.

‘It figures,’ said Ahrens. ‘Field Marshal von Kluge runs Army Group HQ like it’s a branch of the German Club. I get my orders from General Oberhauser. He’s a professional soldier, like me. He’s not an aristocrat; and not so bad, as staff officers go. My predecessor Colonel Bedenck used to say that you never really know exactly how many staff officers there are until you try and get into an air-raid shelter.’

‘I like the sound of your old colonel,’ I said, walking toward the Tatra. ‘He and I sound as if we’re cut from the same cloth.’

‘Your cloth is a little darker than his, perhaps,’ said Ahrens pointedly. ‘Especially the cloth of your other uniform – the dress one. After what he saw in Minsk, Bedenck could hardly bear to be in the same room as an officer of the SS or SD. Since you’re to be billeted with us for security reasons, I might as well confess I feel much the same way. I was a little surprised when Major-General Oster from the Abwehr telephoned and told me that the Bureau was sending an SD man down here. There’s little love lost between the SD and the Wehrmacht in my corner.’

I grinned. ‘I appreciate a man who comes right out and says what’s on his mind. There’s not a lot of that around since Stalingrad. Especially in uniform. So as one professional to another let me tell you this. My other uniform is a cheap suit and a felt hat. I’m not the Gestapo, I’m just a policeman from Kripo who used to work homicide, and I’m not here to spy on anyone. I intend going home to Berlin just as soon as I’ve finished looking at all the evidence you’ve gathered, but I tell you frankly sir, mostly I’m just looking out for myself, and I don’t give a damn what your secrets are.’

I put my hand on a long shovel that was attached to the
Tatra’s bonnet. The little cars were no good in mud or on snow and frequently you had to dig them out or shovel gravel under the wheels: there was probably a sack of it behind the back seat.

‘But if I am lying to you, colonel, you have my permission to bang me on the head with this and have your men bury me in the woods. On the other hand, you might think I’ve already said enough to bury me yourself.’

‘Fair enough, captain.’ Colonel Ahrens smiled and then took out a little cigarette case. He offered one to me and to his lieutenant. ‘I appreciate your candour.’

We puffed them into life until it was almost impossible to distinguish smoke from our hot breath in freezing cold air.

‘Now then,’ I said. ‘You mentioned something about being billeted with you? If I didn’t need it to go back to Berlin, I could cheerfully hope that I never again saw a Junkers 52.’

‘Of course,’ said Ahrens. ‘You must be exhausted.’

We climbed into the Tatra. A corporal named Rose was at the wheel, and we were soon bowling along quite a decent road.

*

‘You’ll be staying with us in the castle,’ said Ahrens. ‘That’s Dnieper Castle, which is along the main road to Vitebsk. Nearly all of Army Group Centre, the Air Force Corps, the Gestapo and my lot are located west of Smolensk, in and around a place called Krasny Bor. The General Staff is headquartered in a nearby health resort which is as good as it gets around here, but we’re not badly off at the castle in signals. Are we, Rex?’

‘No sir. We’re well set, I think.’

‘There’s a cinema and a sauna – there’s even a rifle range. Grub’s pretty good, you’ll be glad to hear. Most of us – at least
the officers anyway – we don’t actually go into Smolensk itself very much at all.’ Ahrens waved at some onion-dome spires on the horizon to our left. ‘But it’s not a bad place, to be honest. Rather historic, really. There are more churches hereabouts than you could polish the floor with. Rex is your man for that sort of thing, aren’t you lieutenant?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Rex. ‘There’s a fine cathedral, captain. The Assumption. I do recommend you see that while you’re here. That is, if you’re not too busy. By rights it shouldn’t be there at all: during the siege of Smolensk at the start of the seventeenth century, the defenders of the city locked themselves in the crypt where there was an ammunition depot and blew it and themselves up to prevent it from falling into Polish hands. History repeats itself, of course. The local NKVD used to keep some of its own personnel and domestic case files in the crypt of the Assumption Cathedral – to protect them against the Luftwaffe – and when it became clear that the city was about to be captured by us they tried to blow them up, like they did in Kiev, at the city’s Duma building. Only the explosives didn’t go off.’