A Man Without Breath

Voss handed me a flashlight, and although I was keen not to be involved, I made a nice show of casting a professional eye over the lieutenant’s crime scene. It was easy enough to call: two men in uniform, their bare heads bashed in and their throats neatly cut from ear to ear like a clown’s big smile, with blood all over the snow that, in the moonlight, hardly looked like blood at all.

‘Lieutenant? See if you can’t find their cunt covers, will you?’

‘Their what?’

‘Their hats, their fucking hats. Find them.’

Voss looked at one of his men and passed on the order. The man scrambled back up the bank.

‘And see if you can’t find a murder weapon, while you’re at it,’ I shouted after him. ‘Some kind of a knife or bayonet.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘So what’s the story so far?’ I asked no one in particular and without much interest in an answer.

‘Sergeant Ribe and Corporal Greiss,’ said the colonel. ‘Two of my best men. They were on switchboard and coding duty until about four o’clock this afternoon, after the leader left.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Manning the telephone exchange. The radio. Decoding teletype messages with the Enigma machine.’

‘So when they went off duty they left the castle, how? In a bucket wagon?’

‘No, on foot,’ said Ahrens. ‘You can walk it in half an hour.’

‘Only if it’s worth your while, I’d have thought. What’s the attraction around here? Don’t tell me it’s that church near the railway station or I’ll start to worry I’ve been missing out on something important.’

‘The Peter and Paul? No.’

‘There’s a swimming bath that’s used by the army on Dnieperstrasse,’ said Voss. ‘It seems they went there to swim and use the steam room, after which they both went next door.’

‘And next door is?’

‘A brothel,’ said Voss. ‘In the Hotel Glinka. Or what used to be the Hotel Glinka.’

‘Ah yes, Glinka, I remember him. He’s the father of Russian classical music, isn’t he?’ I yawned loudly. ‘I’m looking forward to acquainting myself with some of his music. It’ll make a pleasant change from a cold Russian wind. Christ, my ears feel like something bit them.’

‘The whores in the brothel claim the two men were there until midnight and then left,’ said Voss. ‘No trouble. No fights. Nothing suspicious.’

‘Whores? Why wasn’t I told? I just spent the evening alone with a good book.’

‘It wasn’t a place for German officers,’ said Voss. ‘It was a place for enlisted men. A cyria.’

‘What’s a cyria?’ I asked.

‘A round-up brothel.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So strictly speaking they weren’t whores at all. Just innocent girls from out of town who’d been pressed into some horizontal service for the fatherland. Now I’m glad I stayed in with my book. Who found them?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The bodies? Who found them? A whore? Another Fritz? The Volga boatman? Who?’

‘An SS sergeant came out of the Glinka for a breath of fresh air,’ explained Voss. ‘He’d had a lot to drink and was feeling ill, he says. He saw a figure bent over these two men down here and thought he was witnessing a robbery. He challenged the man, who ran off in the direction of the west bridge.’ Lieutenant Voss pointed along the riverbank. ‘That way.’

‘Which is ruined, right? So we can assume he wasn’t looking to make it across the river tonight. Not unless he was a hell of a swimmer.’

‘Correct. The sergeant pursued the figure for a while but lost him in the darkness. A moment later he heard an engine start up and a vehicle driving away. He claims it sounded like a motorcycle, although I must say I don’t know how he could tell that without seeing it.’

‘Hmm. Which way did the bike go? Did he say?’

‘West,’ said Voss. ‘It never came back.’

I lit a cigarette to stop me from yawning again. ‘Did he give you a description of the man he saw? Not that it matters if he was drunk.’

‘Says it was too dark.’

I glanced up at the moon. There were a few clouds, and from time to time one of these drew a dark curtain over the moon, but nothing in the way of weather that looked at all likely to delay a flight back to Berlin.

‘That’s possible, I suppose.’

Then I looked back at the two dead men. There’s something particularly awful about a man who’s had his throat cut; I suppose it’s the way it reminds you of an animal sacrifice, not to mention the sheer quantity of blood that’s involved. But there was an extra dimension of horror to the way these two men had been butchered – that was indeed the word – for such was the force used to cut their throats that each man’s head had almost been severed, so that the spine was clearly visible. If I’d looked closely I could probably have seen what each had had for dinner. Instead I lifted their hands to check for defensive cuts, but there were none.

‘I seem to recall that the partisans are fond of removing the heads of captured German soldiers,’ I said.

‘It has been known,’ allowed Voss. ‘And not just their heads.’

‘So it may be our killer meant to do the same but was disturbed by the SS sergeant.’

‘Yes sir.’