A Man Without Breath

I took a deep breath, and at the same time I looked inside the leg of the boot, squeezing the toe. There were several hard objects inside it, the remains of a decayed foot to add to the colonel’s collection of bones on the floor of the cold storeroom downstairs. I had a good idea that the foot and the leg bones wrapped in the tarpaulin had belonged to the same man, because the boot had been chewed in several places, presumably by the wolf. But there was something else in the boot beside a dead Pole’s stinking foot, and gradually I peeled out of the leg a piece of oiled paper that must have been wrapped around the dead man’s calf. At first I was inclined to believe that the Pole had simply tried to insulate his leg against the cold, much as I did with my own poorer-quality boots; but newspaper would have done for that – oiled paper was for preserving things, not keeping them warm.

I unfolded the paper as best I could, using the leg of the bed and a chair. It was folded in half and inside the fold were several typed sheets of onion-skin paper. But in spite of the oilskin paper, what was written was almost illegible, and it was clear it was going to require the resources of a laboratory to decipher what was written on these pages.

Until the ground thawed it was hard to see how I was going to make much more progress with this preliminary investigation, and it looked as if the button would have to be evidence enough. But I wasn’t happy about that. One button, an old boot and a few bones didn’t seem like much of a haul to take back to Berlin. I badly wanted to know what was written on the pages before I mentioned them to anyone. I wasn’t about to make myself or the bureau a sucker for some elaborate lie dreamed up by the propaganda ministry. All the same, I couldn’t help but think that if the Mahatma’s men had planted evidence of a massacre in Katyn Wood, they’d have made it a little more obvious and easy for someone like me to find.

I dressed and went downstairs to find some breakfast.

Colonel Ahrens looked pleased when I told him I had probably concluded my investigation and would be returning to Berlin just as soon as possible. He looked a lot less pleased when I told him that I had reached no firm conclusions.

‘At this stage I really can’t say if the bureau will want to take this any further. Sorry sir, but that’s just the way it is. I’ll be off the back of your collar just as soon as I can get on a plane home.’

‘You won’t get a flight out of here today. Saturday looks like a better bet. Or even Sunday. There will be plenty of planes arriving here tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The leader. He’s coming here, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Look, I’ll telephone the airfield and arrange things for you. Until then you’re welcome to make use of the facilities here at the castle. There’s a shooting range if you care for that kind of thing. And there’s a movie in the theatre this afternoon and evening. All leave is cancelled from midnight tonight, so the movie has been brought forward. I’m afraid it’s Jud Suss. All we could get at short notice.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s not one of my favourites.’ I shrugged. ‘You know, maybe I’ll take a look at the local cathedral after all.’

‘Good idea,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ll lend you a car.’

‘Thank you, sir. And if you could give me a map of the city, I’d be grateful. From a distance it’s hard to tell one onion dome from another.’

*

I didn’t give a damn about the cathedral. I had no intention of looking at the place, or anything else for that matter, but I didn’t want Colonel Ahrens knowing that. Besides, I don’t believe in tourism during wartime, not any more. Sure, when I was stationed in Paris during 1940 I’d walked about a bit with a Baedeker and seen a few of the sights – Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower – but that was Paris: you could always read a Frenchman in a way you couldn’t ever do with a Czech or an Ivan. I’d learned a bit of caution since then, and even in Prague I didn’t go abroad with the Baedeker very much. Not that there ever were any Baedekers written about Russia – what would have been the point? – but the principle holds good I think, as two examples might serve to illustrate.

Heinz Seldte was a lieutenant in a police battalion I knew from the Alex in the early Thirties; I helped get him a leg up into Kripo. He was one of the first Germans into the city of Kiev in September 1941, and on a quiet summer’s afternoon he decided to go and look at the city’s Duma building on Khreshchatyk, which is the main street – apparently it was a big deal, with a spire and a statue of the archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kiev. What he didn’t know – what nobody knew – was that the retreating Red Army had booby-trapped the whole fucking street with dynamite, which they exploded with radio-controlled fuses from over four hundred kilometres away. The historic buildings of Khreshchatyk – the Germans renamed the ruins Eichhornstrasse – were never seen again; nor was Heinz Seldte.