A Man Without Breath

‘Oh, but it won’t be subtle, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I can promise you that much. Certainly nowhere near as subtle as in that nice picture. Smolensk is no bucolic demi-paradise. It’s a ruin all right, but it’s a ruin because that’s how our tanks and artillery have left it. It’s a ruin that’s full of ugly frightened people who were only just managing to eke out a living when the Wehrmacht turned up demanding to be fed and watered for not much money. Zeus won’t be seducing Io, it’ll be a Fritz trying to rape some poor peasant girl; and in Smolensk the pretty landscape isn’t covered in an amber glow of warm Italian sunlight but a hard permafrost. No, it won’t be subtle. And believe me, there’s nothing subtle about a body that’s been in the ground. It’s surprising how indelicate something like that turns out to be, and how quickly it becomes something very unpleasant indeed. There’s the smell for example. Bodies have a habit of decomposing when they’ve been in the earth for a while.’

I lit another cigarette and enjoyed their joint discomfort. There was a silence for a long moment. Von Dohnanyi looked nervous about something – more nervous than what he had just told me suggested, perhaps. Or maybe he just wanted to hit me. I get a lot of that.

‘But I take your point,’ I added, more helpfully this time, ‘about the SS, I mean. We wouldn’t want to upset them, now would we? And believe me I know what I’m talking about, I’ve done it before, so I’m equally anxious not to do it again.’

‘There is a fifth possibility,’ added Goldsche, ‘which is why I would prefer to have a proper detective on the scene.’

‘And that is?’

‘I would like you to make absolutely sure that this whole thing is not some ghastly lie dreamed up by the ministry of propaganda. That this body has not been deliberately planted there to play first us and then the world’s media like a grand piano. Because make no mistake about it, gentlemen, that’s exactly what will happen if this does turn out to be the dwarf’s ring.’

I nodded. ‘Fair enough. But you’re forgetting a sixth possibility, surely.’

Von Dohnanyi frowned. ‘And what is that?’

‘If this does turn out to be a mass grave, that it’s full of Polish officers that the German army murdered.’

Von Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said.

‘Is it? I don’t see how your second possibility can even exist without the possibility of the sixth one, too.’

‘That’s logically true,’ admitted Von Dohnanyi. ‘But the fact remains that the German army does not murder prisoners of war.’

I grinned. ‘Oh, well that’s all right then. Forgive me for mentioning it, sir.’

Von Dohnanyi coloured a little. You don’t get a lot of sarcasm in the concert hall or the Imperial Court, and I doubt he’d spoken to a real policeman since 1928 when, like every other aristocrat, he’d applied for a firearm permit so he could shoot wild boar and the odd Bolshevik.

‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘this part of Russia has only been in German hands since September 1941. There’s that and the fact that it’s a matter of military record which Poles were prisoners of Germany and which were prisoners of the Soviet Union. This information is already known to the Polish government in London. For that reason alone it should be easy to establish if any of these men were prisoners of the Red Army. Which is why I myself think it’s highly improbable that this could be something manufactured by the ministry of propaganda. Because it would be all too easy to disprove.’

‘Perhaps you’re right, Hans,’ admitted the judge.

‘I am right,’ insisted Von Dohnanyi. ‘You know I’m right.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said the judge, ‘I want to be sure exactly what we’re dealing with here. And as quickly as possible. So, will you do it, Gunther? Will you go down there and see what you can find out?’

I had little appetite to see Smolensk again, or for that matter anywhere else in Russia. The whole country filled me with a combination of fear and shame, for there was no doubt that whatever crimes the Red Army had committed in the name of communism, the SS had committed equally heinous ones in the name of Nazism. Probably our crimes were more heinous. Executing enemy officers in uniform was one thing – I had some experience of that myself – but murdering women and children was quite another.

‘Yes sir. I’ll go. Of course I’ll go.’

‘Good fellow,’ said the judge. ‘As I said already, if there’s even a hint that this is the handiwork of those thugs in the SS, don’t do anything. Get the hell out of Smolensk as quickly as possible, come straight home and pretend you know nothing at all about it.’

‘With pleasure.’