A Man Without Breath

During the late summer of 1941 I’d heard a strong rumour around the Alex about an atrocity that a police battalion was supposed to have committed at a place called Babi Yar, near Kiev. But it was only a rumour and – at the time – easily discounted, because even then being a policeman was supposed to mean that you weren’t a criminal. It’s odd how quickly these things change. By the spring of 1943 I had enough experience of the Nazis to know that with them the worse a rumour sounded the more likely it was to be true. Besides, I’d already seen something of what had happened in Minsk, and that was bad enough – I was still haunted by the memory of what I’d witnessed there – but no one in Berlin ever employed the same hushed tones of horror to talk about Minsk as they used when they mentioned Babi Yar. All I knew for sure was that as many as thirty-five thousand Jewish men, women and children had been shot in a ravine during the course of one September weekend, and that the officer commanding that operation – Colonel Paul Blobel – was now standing beside me in Katyn Wood.

I guessed Blobel was about fifty, although he looked much older. The shadows under his eyes were full of a darkness that was much more than skin-deep. He was bald, with a narrow thin mouth and a long nose. It was probably my imagination, but there was something of the night about Blobel, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the fingers and nails of the hands he held tightly behind his back had been as long as the legs of his black boots. He wore his black SD coat buttoned up to the neck like a bus conductor in winter, but he looked for all the world as if he’d been a visitor from the very pit next to which we were standing.

‘You must be Captain Gunther,’ he said to me, in an accent that might have been from Berlin and which reminded me that among the many things a man can have for breakfast, a few of them come out of a tall bottle.

I nodded.

‘Here is a letter of introduction,’ he said with a lisping, rodent-like earnestness, showing me a neatly typed letter. ‘I would ask you to pay particular attention to the signature at the bottom of the page.’

I glanced over the contents, which were headed ‘Operation 1005’ and requested that ‘every cooperation should be afforded the bearer in the execution of his top-secret orders’. I also noted the signature; it was hard not to look at it several times, just to make sure, and then to fold it very carefully indeed before handing it back, gingerly, almost as if the paper was impregnated with sulphur and might burst into flame at any moment. The letter had been signed by the Gestapo chief himself, Heinrich Muller.

‘Like I was sitting at the front of the class,’ I said.

‘Gruppenfuhrer Muller has entrusted me with a most delicate task,’ he said.

‘Well, that makes a change.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled thinly. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

I certainly had no inclination to spend any time in the company of such a man as this. The easy thing would have been to have told him to get lost; and after all, Blobel’s being there – and, moreover, wearing his SD colonel’s uniform – was contrary to everything I had agreed to with Reich minister Goebbels. But because I wanted this man gone from Katyn Wood as soon as possible I was resolved to answer his questions and cooperate with his mission – in so far as I was able. The last thing I wanted was Blobel causing trouble at Gestapo headquarters and Blobel bringing the full authority of Muller down on our heads because I or someone else had obstructed him, and, worst of all, Blobel still there the next day when the Polish delegation arrived in Smolensk.

He seemed to relax a little after my poor joke, and out of his pocket came a corrugated steel hip flask that was almost as big as a soldier’s gas-mask can. He unscrewed the cap and offered the flask to me. As a homicide detective, I’d made it a rule never to drink with my clients, but it had been a long time since I’d been able to keep up that standard. Besides it was good schnapps, and a large bite helped to dull the effect on my spirits of the company I was keeping, not to mention the business of exhuming four thousand murder victims. The stink of human decay was ever present, and I was never near the main grave for very long before I lit a cigarette or covered my nose and mouth with a cologne-soaked handkerchief.

‘How can I be of assistance to you, colonel?’

‘May I speak frankly?’