A Man Without Breath

The local Gestapo was stationed in a two-storey house next to the railway station at Gnezdovo, so that officers could board the train and surprise anyone travelling on to the next stop, at Smolensk’s main station. The Gestapo always loved surprises, and so did I, which was why I was there, of course – although out of consideration for Lieutenant Voss I decided to spare him the ordeal of accompanying me to see Captain Hammerschmidt, who was in for a big surprise – perhaps the biggest surprise of his career. I pulled up in a cobbled yard next to a pair of camouflaged 260s, stepped out and took a longer look at the building in front of me. The bullet-marked walls were painted two contrasting shades of green, the darker matching the colour of the roof tiles, and there were bull’s-eye windows on the upper floor; the windows on the ground floor were all heavily barred. The clock above the arched entrance had stopped at six o’clock, which might have been meant as a metaphor, since that was often the time in the morning when the Gestapo preferred to call. In the grove of silver birch trees a short way from the house was a pile of sandbags fronted with an ominous-looking wooden post. Everything looked just as it ought to have done, although the building was, for my plainer taste, the wrong flavour: a sprinkling of chocolate chips on the mint ice-cream roof would hardly have looked out of place. Everything was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual; the Gestapo never has a problem with noisy neighbours. Even the squirrels in the trees were behaving themselves. Gradually a steam locomotive approached wheezily from the east. Very sensibly it didn’t stop at the deserted station – it was never a good idea to stop in the vicinity of the Gestapo. I knew that only too well, but I was never very good at listening to advice, especially my own.

I went inside, where several uniformed men behind several typewriters were doing their best to type with two fingers and to pretend that I didn’t exist. So I lit a cigarette and calmly glanced over some of the paper on the noticeboard. Among this was a wanted notice for Lieutenant Arkady Rudakov, which struck me as ironic, since from the emblem on the noticeboard and on some of the drawers on the filing cabinets – a yellow-handled sword against a red shield – I took the house to have belonged to the NKVD before it had belonged to the Gestapo.

‘Can I help you?’ one of the men said in a tone that was distinctly unhelpful. From the mild outrage I could hear in his querulous voice and see on his equally peevish face, he might have been addressing an impertinent schoolboy.

‘I’m looking for Captain Hammerschmidt.’

I went over to the window and pretended to look outside, but most of my attention was fixed on the fly running along the pane. The flies were everywhere now, following up the business of the Gestapo and the NKVD.

‘Not here,’ he said.

‘When are you expecting him back?’

‘Who wants to know?’ said the man.

‘I do.’ Now I was trying to match him for arrogance and contempt, well aware that I was about to win the game, and easily, too.

‘And who are you?’

I showed him my identity card, which was better than any ace, and my letter from the ministry.

The man folded.

‘Sorry sir. He was called back to Berlin, this morning. Unexpectedly.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘Compassionate leave, sir. A death in the family.’

‘That’s a surprise. Which is to say it isn’t a surprise at all. At least not to me, anyway.’

‘How’s that sir?’

‘What I mean is, I didn’t know there was any compassion in the Gestapo.’

I laid my business card on the corner of the man’s desk.

‘Tell him to come and find me at group HQ,’ I said. ‘That is when he’s finished grieving in Berlin. Tell him – tell him that I’m a friend of Tanya.’

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