A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) (13 page)

‘And next door is?’

‘A brothel,’ said Voss. ‘In the Hotel Glinka. Or what used to be the Hotel Glinka.’

‘Ah yes, Glinka, I remember him. He’s the father of Russian classical music, isn’t he?’ I yawned loudly. ‘I’m looking forward to acquainting myself with some of his music. It’ll make a pleasant change from a cold Russian wind. Christ, my ears feel like something bit them.’

‘The whores in the brothel claim the two men were there until midnight and then left,’ said Voss. ‘No trouble. No fights. Nothing suspicious.’

‘Whores? Why wasn’t I told? I just spent the evening alone with a good book.’

‘It wasn’t a place for German officers,’ said Voss. ‘It was a place for enlisted men. A cyria.’

‘What’s a cyria?’ I asked.

‘A round-up brothel.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So strictly speaking they weren’t whores at all. Just innocent girls from out of town who’d been pressed into some horizontal service for the fatherland. Now I’m glad I stayed in with my book. Who found them?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The bodies? Who found them? A whore? Another Fritz? The Volga boatman? Who?’

‘An SS sergeant came out of the Glinka for a breath of fresh air,’ explained Voss. ‘He’d had a lot to drink and was feeling ill, he says. He saw a figure bent over these two men down here and thought he was witnessing a robbery. He challenged the man, who ran off in the direction of the west bridge.’ Lieutenant Voss pointed along the riverbank. ‘That way.’

‘Which is ruined, right? So we can assume he wasn’t looking to make it across the river tonight. Not unless he was a hell of a swimmer.’

‘Correct. The sergeant pursued the figure for a while but lost him in the darkness. A moment later he heard an engine start up and a vehicle driving away. He claims it sounded like a motorcycle, although I must say I don’t know how he could tell that without seeing it.’

‘Hmm. Which way did the bike go? Did he say?’

‘West,’ said Voss. ‘It never came back.’

I lit a cigarette to stop me from yawning again. ‘Did he give you a description of the man he saw? Not that it matters if he was drunk.’

‘Says it was too dark.’

I glanced up at the moon. There were a few clouds, and
from time to time one of these drew a dark curtain over the moon, but nothing in the way of weather that looked at all likely to delay a flight back to Berlin.

‘That’s possible, I suppose.’

Then I looked back at the two dead men. There’s something particularly awful about a man who’s had his throat cut; I suppose it’s the way it reminds you of an animal sacrifice, not to mention the sheer quantity of blood that’s involved. But there was an extra dimension of horror to the way these two men had been butchered – that was indeed the word – for such was the force used to cut their throats that each man’s head had almost been severed, so that the spine was clearly visible. If I’d looked closely I could probably have seen what each had had for dinner. Instead I lifted their hands to check for defensive cuts, but there were none.

‘I seem to recall that the partisans are fond of removing the heads of captured German soldiers,’ I said.

‘It has been known,’ allowed Voss. ‘And not just their heads.’

‘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.