A Man Without Breath

After we’d disposed of the French – something that never takes very long for Germans – Von Gersdorff and I took Voss aside and asked him to sit with us for a while in the Abwehr colonel’s car. In his long field policeman’s coat and cunt cap, the tall military policeman – he had been the tallest of any man standing beside the graves – cut a handsome figure. Slimmer men look good wearing a cunt cap, and when they’re German officers they look businesslike, as if they have no time for appearances and formalities. There was just a hint of Heydrich about his canine features and in the way he bore himself, and for a moment I wondered what the former Reichsprotector of Bohemia would have made of my efforts in Katyn. Not much, probably.

Von Gersdorff handed out cigarettes and we were soon enclosed in a fug of tobacco smoke that made a very pleasant change from the rank air of Katyn Wood.

‘Tell us about Alok Dyakov,’ said the colonel, coming straight to the point.

‘Dyakov?’ Voss shook his head. ‘He’s a fox, that one. You know, for a former schoolteacher, he’s an excellent shot with a rifle. The other week one of the motorcycle lads who outride the field marshal’s car told me that he saw Dyakov take a dog down at seven hundred and fifty metres. Apparently they thought it was a wolf, but it turned out to be some poor fucking farmer’s mutt. Dyakov was very upset about it, too. Loves dogs, he said. Loves dogs, hates Reds. True, he’s got a telescopic sight on that rifle – same as the field marshal – but whatever he was teaching I don’t think it was Latin and history.’

‘What kind of a sight?’ I asked.

‘Zeiss. ZF42. But that rifle isn’t really designed to have a sight. The rifle has to be machined by a skilled armourer.’

‘That’s right,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘I have one like that myself.’

‘What, here in Smolensk?’

‘Yes. Here in Smolensk. Should I speak to a lawyer?’

Seeing Voss frown at that, I put him squarely in the picture and then prodded him for some more information about the Russian Putzer.

‘It was probably early September, 1941,’ said Voss. ‘My boys were on the south-east of the city, inside the Yelnya salient.’

‘That was a fifty-kilometre front that our Fourth Army had extended from the city to form a staging area for a continued offensive toward Vyazma,’ explained Von Gersdorff. ‘The Russians attempted an encirclement that failed thanks to our air superiority. But it only just failed. It was the most substantial reverse our armies suffered, until Stalingrad.’

‘We were operating on the flanks of the salient,’ continued Voss. ‘About ten kilometres along the Mscislau Road and charged with mopping up any last pockets of resistance. Partisans, a few deserters from the 106th Mechanized Rifle Division and the Twenty-Fourth Army, some NKVD units. Our orders were simple.’ He shrugged, and began to look evasive. ‘Anyone still resisting was to be shot, of course. Also anyone who had surrendered who fell within the guidelines issued by General Muller that we were still enforcing back then. Until they were cancelled in June last year.’

Voss was talking about Hitler’s Commissar Order demanding that prisoners who were active representatives of Bolshevism – which certainly included NKVD – should be shot summarily.

‘We’d already shot a lot,’ he said. ‘It was payback for what we’d been through. The Geneva Convention doesn’t seem to count for a lot the further you get from Berlin. Anyway, we came across this open-topped GAZ that had gone off the road near a farm.’

The GAZ was a Russian four-wheel-drive vehicle – the equivalent of a Tatra.

‘There were three people sitting in it. Two of them were wearing NKVD uniforms – the driver and one of the men in the back. They were dead. The third man, Dyakov, was in civvies. He was only half conscious and still handcuffed to the side rail in the back of the GAZ, and seemed very pleased to see us when he came around a bit. He claimed he’d been arrested by the NKVD and that he was being taken to prison, or worse, by the other two whom he’d attacked when the road in front of the car had been strafed by a Stuka.

‘We found the keys to the manacles, and fixed him up – he’d been banged about a bit when the car came off the road, and possibly also by the two NKVD when they arrested him. He spoke good German, and when we interrogated him he told us he was a German language teacher at the school in Vitebsk, which was why he’d been arrested in the first place, although by then he was making his living as a poacher. According to him, speaking German automatically brought you under suspicion from the secret police, but we later formed the impression that the real reason he’d been arrested was probably more to do with him being a poacher than anything else.’

‘What papers did Dyakov have on him?’ I asked.

‘Just his propiska,’ said Voss. ‘That’s a residency permit and migration-recording document.’

‘No internal passport?’