A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) (11 page)

When you fight a war with a Baedeker you don’t always know what you’re going to see.

In the colonel’s draughty little Tatra I drove east along the Vitebsk highway with Smolensk in front of me and the Dnieper River on my right. For most of the way the road ran between
two railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main station; it was a huge icing-cake of a place with four square corner towers and an enormous archway entrance. Like a lot of buildings in Smolensk it was painted green, and either green meant something significant in that part of Russia or green was the only colour of paint they’d had in the stores the last time anyone had thought of carrying out some building maintenance. Russia being Russia, I tended to subscribe to the second explanation.

A little further down the road, I stopped to consult my map and then turned south down Bruckenstrasse, which sounded promising given that I needed to find a bridge to cross the river.

According to the map the west and east bridges were destroyed, and that left three in the middle or, if you were a Russian, a log-raft passenger ferry that resembled something from my time at a boys’ summer camp on Rügen Island. On the north bank of the river I slowed the car as I came in sight of the local Kremlin – a fortress enclosing the centre of the ancient city of Smolensk. On a hilltop, behind the castellated red-brick walls built by Boris Godunov, stood the city’s cathedral with its distinctive pepper-pot domes and tall white walls, and looking to my eyes as ugly as an outsized wood-burning stove. At least now I could say that I’d seen it.

I showed my papers to the military police guards at the checkpoint on the Peter and Paul bridge, asked for directions to the German Kommandatura, and was directed to go south on Hauptstrasse.

‘You can’t miss it, sir,’ said the bridge sentry. ‘It’s opposite Sparkassenstrasse. If you find yourself on Magazinstrasse, you’ll have gone too far.’

‘Are all Smolensk street names in German?’

‘Of course. Makes it a lot easier to get around, don’t you think?’

‘It certainly does if you’re German,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that what it’s all about, sir?’ The sentry grinned. ‘We’re trying to make it as much like home as possible.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

I drove on, and in the shadow of the Kremlin wall on my right, I went along Hauptstrasse until I saw what was obviously the Kommandatura – a grey stone building with a pillared portico and several Nazi Party flags. An extensive series of German street pointers had been erected in the square in front of this building – many of them on a broken Soviet tank – but the general effect was not one of clarity of direction but confusion; a sentry stood in the middle of the pointers to help Germans make sense of their own signs. The red of the flags on the Kommandatura added an almost welcome splash of colour in a city that was as grey and green as a dead elephant. Underneath the flags a dozen or so soldiers were watching a boy, riding bareback on a spavined white horse, perform a few tricks with the nag. From time to time they would toss a few coins onto the cobbled street, where they were collected by an old man wearing a white cap and jacket who might have been some relation to the boy or possibly the horse. Seeing me, two of the soldiers came over as I pulled up and saluted.

‘Can’t leave it there, sir,’ said one. ‘Security. Best leave it around the corner on Kreuzstrasse, next to the local cinema. Always plenty of room there.’

Three very ragged children – two boys and a girl, I think – watched me park the Tatra in front of some German propaganda posters that were almost as scruffy as they were. I’d seen some poor children in my time, but none as poor
as these three urchins. Despite the cold all of them were barefoot and carrying foraging bags and mess tins. They looked as if they had to fend for themselves and were not having much success, although they appeared to be healthy enough. All of this looked a long way from the smiling faces and the soup bowls and the large loaves of bread depicted on the posters. Were their parents alive? Did they even have a roof over their heads? Was it any of my business? I felt a strong pang of regret as momentarily I considered the carefree life they might have been enjoying before my countrymen arrived during the summer of 1941. I wasn’t the type who ever carried chocolate, so I gave each of them a cigarette, assuming they were more likely to trade than smoke it. There are times when I wonder where charity would be without us smokers.

‘Thank you,’ said the oldest child, speaking German – a boy maybe ten or eleven. His coat had more patches than the map in my pocket and on his head was a side cap, or what the more graphically-minded German soldier sometimes called a cunt cover. He tucked the cigarette behind his ear for later, like a real working man. ‘German cigarettes are good. Better than Russian cigarettes. You’re very kind, sir.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘None of us are. Just remember that and you won’t ever be disappointed.’

Inside the Kommandatura I asked the desk clerk where I could find an officer, and was directed to the first floor. There I spoke to a slimy fat Wehrmacht lieutenant who could have given a whole week’s rations to the children outside and not even noticed. His army belt was on its last notch and looked as if it might have appreciated some time to relax a little.

‘Those people in the street outside, doesn’t it bother you they look so desperate?’

‘They’re Slavs,’ he said, as if that was all the excuse needed. ‘Things were pretty backward in Smolensk before we got here. And believe me, the local Ivans are a lot better off now than they ever were under the Bolsheviks.’

‘So is the Tsar and his family, but I don’t figure they think that’s a good thing.’.

The lieutenant frowned. ‘Was there something specific I could help you with, sir? Or did you just come in here to give your conscience a little air?’

I nodded. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. That’s exactly what I was doing. Forgive me. As a matter of fact I’m looking for some sort of scientific laboratory.’

‘In Smolensk?’

I nodded. ‘Somewhere that might own a stereo microscope. I need to carry out some tests.’

The lieutenant picked up the telephone and turned the call-handle. ‘Give me the department store,’ he said to the operator. Catching my eye, he explained: ‘Most of the officers stationed here in Smolensk are using the local department store as a barracks.’

‘That must be handy if you need a new pair of underpants.’

The lieutenant laughed. ‘Conrad? It’s Herbert. I have an officer of SD who’s trying to find a scientific laboratory here in Smolensk. Any ideas?’

He listened for a moment, uttered a few words of thanks and then replaced the receiver.

‘You could try the Smolensk State Medical Academy,’ he said. ‘It’s under German control, so you should be able to find what you’re looking for there.’

We went to the window and he pointed to the south.

‘About half a kilometre down Rote-Kreuzer Strasse and on
your right. Can hardly miss it. Big canary-yellow building. Looks like the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin.’

‘It sounds impressive,’ I said and walked to the door. ‘I guess the Ivans in Smolensk can’t have been as backward as all that.’

*

It was a short drive to the Smolensk State Medical Academy and, as promised, it wasn’t easy to miss. The academy was enormous but, like a lot of buildings in Smolensk, the place showed signs of the ferocity of the battle waged by the retreating Red Army, with many of the windows on the five stories boarded up, and the yellow stucco façade pitted with hundreds of bullet holes. The triple arches of the entrance were protected with sandbags and on the roof was a Nazi flag and what looked like an anti-aircraft gun. While I was there an ambulance pulled up out front and disgorged several heavily-bandaged men on stretchers.

When the German medical personnel and Soviet nurses on the front desk were done admitting the new arrivals I explained my mission to one of the orderlies. The man listened patiently and then led the way up and through the enormous hospital, which was full of German soldiers who had been wounded during the battle of Smolensk and were still awaiting repatriation to the fatherland. We reached a corridor on the fifth floor where there was not one but several laboratories, and he presented me courteously to a small man wearing a white coat that was a couple of sizes too big for him, as well as mittens and a Soviet tank crewman’s helmet which he snatched off when he saw me standing there. The bow was unctuous, but understandable when dealing with SD officers.

‘Captain Gunther, this is Doctor Batov,’ said the orderly.
‘He’s in charge of the scientific laboratories here at the academy. He speaks German and I’m sure he will be able to assist you.’

When the orderly left us alone, Batov looked sheepishly at the tanker’s helmet. ‘This ridiculous hat, it keeps the head warm,’ he explained. ‘It’s cold in this hospital.’

‘I noticed that, sir.’

‘The boilers are coal-fired,’ he said, ‘and there’s not so much coal about for things like heating a hospital. There’s not much coal around for anything.’

I offered him a cigarette and he took one and tucked it behind his ear. I lit one myself and looked around. The lab was reasonably well equipped for the purposes of instructing Russian medical students; there were a couple of work benches with gas taps, burners, chemical hoods, balances, flasks, and several stereo microscopes.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘I was hoping I might be able to use one of your stereo microscopes for a while,’ I said.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ushering me towards the instrument. ‘Are you a scientist, captain?’

‘No, sir. I’m a policeman. From Berlin. Before the war we’d just started using stereo microscopes in ballistics work. To identify and match bullets from the bodies of murder victims.’

Batov paused by the stereo microscope and switched on a light beside it. ‘And do you have a bullet you wish to examine now, captain?’

‘No. It’s some typewritten papers I wanted to take a look at. The paper got damp and some of the words are hard to read.’ I paused, wondering how much I could tell him. ‘Actually, it’s more complicated than that. These papers have been exposed to cadaveric fluid. From a decaying body. They were
inside a boot in which the human leg wearing it had disintegrated down to the bone.’

Batov nodded. ‘May I see?’

I showed him the papers.

‘Even with a stereo microscope this will be difficult,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Best of all would be to use infrared rays, but unfortunately we’re not equipped with that kind of advanced technology here at the Academy. Perhaps it would be better to have them treated in Berlin after all.’

‘I have good reasons for preferring to see what can be achieved here right now in Smolensk.’

‘Then you’ll probably need to wash these documents with chloroform or xylol,’ he said. ‘I could do this for you, if you liked.’

‘Yes. I’d be grateful if you could. Thanks.’

‘But may I ask, exactly what are you hoping to achieve?’

‘If nothing else, I’d like to be able to find out what language the papers are written in.’

‘Well, we can treat one sheet of paper, perhaps, and see how that works.’

Batov went to look for some chemicals and then started to wash one of the pages; while he worked I sat and smoked a cigarette and dreamed that I was back in Berlin, having dinner with Renata at the Adlon Hotel. Not that we ever did have dinner at the Adlon, but it wouldn’t have been much of a daydream if any of it had been remotely possible.

When Batov had finished cleaning the page he dried it carefully, flattened the paper with a sheet of glass and then arranged the page underneath the prism of the microscope.

I drew an electric light a little closer and looked through the eyepieces while I adjusted the zoom control. A blurred
word moved into focus. The alphabet wasn’t Cyrillic and the words weren’t written in German.

‘What’s the Russian word for soldier?’ I asked Batov.

‘
Soldat
.’

‘I thought so.
Zolnierz
. That’s the Polish word for soldier. Here’s another.
Wywiadu
. No idea what that means.’

‘It means intelligence,’ said Batov.

‘Does it?’

‘Yes. My wife was Ukrainian–Polish, sir, from the Subcarpathian province. She studied medicine here before the war.’

‘Was?’

‘She’s dead now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, doctor.’

‘Polish.’ Batov paused and then added. ‘The language on the document. That’s a relief.’

I looked up from the eyepieces. ‘Why is that?’

‘If it’s in Polish it means I can offer to help you,’ explained Batov. ‘If it was in Russian – well, I could hardly betray my own country to the enemy, now could I?’

I smiled. ‘No, I suppose not.’

He pointed at the stereo microscope. ‘May I have a look?’

‘Be my guest.’

Batov looked through the eyepieces for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yes, this is written in Polish. Which makes me think that a better division of labour would be if I read out the words – in German, of course – and you wrote them down. That way – in time – you would know the entire contents of the document.’

Batov sat up straight and looked at me. He was dark and rather earnest, with a thick moustache and gentle eyes.

‘You mean one word at a time?’ I pulled a face.

‘It’s a laborious method, I do agree, but it has the merit of
also being certain, don’t you think? A couple of hours and perhaps all of your questions about this document might be answered and perhaps, if you agreed, I might earn a little bit of money for my family. Or perhaps you might give me something I can trade on Bazarnaya Square.’

He shrugged. ‘Alternatively, you are welcome to borrow the stereo microscope and work on your own, perhaps.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘I don’t know. To be perfectly honest I’m not used to German officers asking me for permission to do anything in this academy.’

I nodded. ‘All right. It’s a deal.’ I took out my wallet and handed over some of the occupation Reichsmarks the bureau office in Berlin had issued me with. Then I handed him the rest of the bills as well. ‘Here. Take it all. With any luck I’m flying home tomorrow.’