A Man Without Breath

Buhtz smiled with an almost boyish enthusiasm. ‘This begins to be interesting,’ he said, ‘since clearly this third shot you describe was fired not from a red nine but from a rifle.’

I nodded.

‘You need to know more about that rifle,’ he said.

‘Anything you can tell me would be useful.’

Buhtz glanced at the bullets in his hand and across the hall where commission members were now seating themselves at the various tables and reading lunch menus with rather obvious pleasure: for most of the forensic scientists who’d come to Smolensk the officers’ mess at Krasny Bor provided the best meal they’d had in a long time.

‘Well, now you come to mention it, I would rather like to escape from these fellows for a short while. Besides, it’s lamprey pie again. I’m never all that keen on lampreys, are you? Nasty things. That peculiar spiral-toothed mouth those creatures have. Horrible. Yes, why not, captain? Let’s go to my hut and we’ll take a closer look at what you’ve found.’

In his neat little hut Buhtz took off his military belt, opened the top button of his tunic, sat down, collected a magnifying glass off his table, switched on a desk light and scrutinized the bottom of the brass rifle casing I’d found near the abandoned Mauser stock.

‘On the face of it,’ he said, ‘I should have said this came from a standard infantryman’s M98. It’s a fairly ordinary eight-millimetre round by the look of it. Except for one thing. The M98 uses a rimless bottlenecked rifle cartridge, and this is rimmed, which leads me to think of a different rifle and to suppose that the cartridges were loaded with something a little different: something a little heavier and more suitable for game shooting. A Brenneke rifle bullet perhaps. Yes. Why not?’

He took the bullet and placed it under the lens of his microscope, where he stared at it for several minutes.

‘I thought as much,’ he murmured, eventually. ‘A TUG. A torpedo-tail deformation bullet with a hard core for bigger game, like deer. Developed in 1935. That’s what you have here.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘You’re lucky to be here, you know. You were shot at with a decent hunting rifle. If this had hit you, Gunther, you’d be missing a large part of your head. When I have more time I can probably tell you what metal this is; maybe a bit more than that, like where this ammo came from.’

‘You’ve already told me a great deal,’ I said, wondering how he knew that the shooter had aimed at my head – although perhaps it was just a reasonable assumption. ‘But what kind of a hunting rifle?’

‘Oh well, Mauser have been making excellent hunting rifles for fifty years. I would have said a Mauser 1898. But given the fact that I almost mistook this bullet, I might almost say a Mauser Oberndorf Model B or a Safari.’ Buhtz frowned. ‘Oh, I just had a thought. You know who has a pair of Obendorfs, don’t you? Here? At Krasny Bor.’

‘Yes,’ I said, grimly. ‘I already had the same thought myself.’

‘Tricky one, that.’

I lit a cigarette. ‘Look, I hate to ask you this again, sir, but would you mind keeping this quiet for now? The field marshal already dislikes me; his Putzer got drunk last night and started waving a gun around so I had to rubber-stamp his head.’

‘Yes, I heard about that from Voss this morning. It’s not like Dyakov. When you get to know him, Dyakov isn’t a bad fellow. For an Ivan.’

‘The field marshal isn’t going to like me any better if it gets around the camp that we think one of his favourite hunting rifles might have been used to murder me.’

‘Of course,’ said Buhtz. ‘You have my word. But look here, I owe a great deal to the field marshal; I owe my commission to him. But for him I’d still be languishing in Breslau, so I should hate it to get around that it was me who identified this bullet as coming from a rifle like his.’

I nodded. ‘I certainly won’t say anything about it,’ I told him. ‘For now.’

‘But you don’t seriously think for a moment that it was Gunther von Kluge who tried to kill you?’ he asked. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think if the field marshal actually wanted me dead he could find a much better way of doing it than to shoot me himself.’

‘Yes. He could.’ Buhtz smiled grimly. ‘Then again you could just stay here. If you wait in Smolensk long enough the Russians will be in your lap.’

*

I skipped lunch. After seeing Berruguete’s autopsy I wasn’t that hungry. The only meal I wanted to have was in the schnapps bottle on the mess table, but that would have meant enduring Ines Kramsta’s stony indifference to my existence. That hurt more than it ought to have done. So I went back to the car thinking I might drive to the castle and send a signal to the ministry telling them that the members of the commission had already forgotten about Berruguete, and that their work was proceeding as hoped. Sometimes it’s useful to have duties in which you can take refuge.