A Man Without Breath

Dr Marianne Kramsta had a noticeably galvanizing effect on the officers’ mess at Krasny Bor: it was as if someone had opened a grimy window and let the sunshine into that stuffy wooden room. Almost every officer in group HQ seemed to find her attractive, which was no surprise to me and probably not to her either, since she hadn’t dressed for dinner so much as armed herself for the conquest of all the Germans in Smolensk. Perhaps this is not entirely fair: Marianne Kramsta was wearing a very fetching grey crepe dress with a matching belt and long sleeves, and while she looked good, the plain fact of the matter is that she would have looked good wearing a truck tarpaulin. I watched with some amusement as one man drew out her chair, another fetched her a glass of Mosel, a third lit her cigarette, and a fourth found her an ashtray. All in all, there was a great deal of bowing and heel-clicking and kissing of her hand, which by the end of the evening must have looked like a Petrie dish. Even Von Kluge was struck with her, and having insisted that Dr Kramsta and Professor Buhtz join him and General von Tresckow at the field marshal’s own table, it wasn’t long before he was ordering champagne – I dare say that after cashing Hitler’s cheque he could afford it – and conducting himself like a smitten young subaltern in a romantic novel. Generally everyone behaved as if there had been an officers’ ball after all – with only one girl – and I’d almost made up my mind that the beautiful doctor had completely forgotten our date when, just after nine o’clock and underneath everyone’s widening eyes, she presented herself at my own insignificant corner table holding a fur coat and asked me if I was ready to drive her into Smolensk to see the Assumption Cathedral.

I jumped up like a young subaltern myself, stubbed out a cigarette, helped the lady on with the coat and ushered her outside to a 260 I’d borrowed for the evening from Von Gersdorff. I opened the car door, and ushered her inside.

‘Oooh, has it got a heater?’ she said when I was seated beside her.

‘A heater, seats, windows, windscreen wipers, it’s got everything except a spade,’ I said as we drove away.

‘You’re not kidding,’ she said.

I glanced to my right and saw she was holding the stock of a broom-handle Mauser on her lap. The stock was like a holster/carry-case: you clicked open the back of the stock and out came the gun that attached to it. Very neat.

‘It was in the door pocket,’ she said. ‘Like a road map.’

‘The fellow who owns this car is with the Abwehr,’ I said. ‘He likes to get where he’s going. A broom-handle Mauser will do that for you.’

‘A spy. How exciting.’

‘Be careful with that,’ I said, instinctively. ‘It’s probably loaded.’

‘Actually it’s not,’ she said, checking the breech for a moment. ‘But there’s a couple of stripper clips in the door pocket. And really, you mustn’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I’ve handled guns before.’

‘So I see.’

‘I always liked the old box cannon,’ she said. ‘That’s what my brother used to call this gun. He had two.’

‘Two guns are always better than one. That’s my philosophy.’

‘Sadly it didn’t work for him. He was killed in the Spanish Civil War.’

‘On which side?’

‘Does it matter now?’

‘Not to him.’

She returned the Mauser to the inside of the stock and then to the leather door pocket. Then she flipped open the glovebox.

‘Your spy friend,’ said Marianne. ‘He doesn’t believe in taking any chances, does he?’

‘Hmm?’ I glanced at her again, and this time she was drawing a bayonet from its scabbard and scraping the edge with the flat of her thumb.

I slowed the car at the gate, waved at the sentries on duty and drove onto the main road, where I slipped the spindle shift into neutral, lifted the clutch, pulled on the handbrake and took a closer look at the bayonet.

‘Careful, it’s as sharp as a surgeon’s catlin,’ she said.

It was a standard-issue K98 of the kind you’d have found on any German soldier’s bolt-action short rifle; and she was right: the edge was paper-thin.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘It’s just a bayonet.’

‘Yes. It’s just a bayonet, isn’t it?’

I nodded and handed it back to her to return to the glovebox – after all, Von Gersdorff’s bayonet wasn’t missing a scabbard. And I saw little point in telling her that a bayonet had been the probable weapon in the murders of four people in Smolensk, one of them a young woman who had been tortured.

‘I suppose I thought that the man who owns this car wasn’t exactly the type to use a knife.’

I told myself he was hardly the type to blow himself up either. I put the car back in gear and drove on.

‘Then again, you can’t be too careful in an enemy country at night.’

‘You make that sound like I should stay very close to you, Gunther.’

‘Like a pill I swallowed. But you’re the doctor. I guess you’ll know what’s healthy for both of us.’

‘Call me Ines, would you? Most people do.’

‘Ines? I thought your name was Marianne.’