A Man Without Breath

Six hours later Lieutenant Rex was outside the front door of the castle waiting to drive me to Smolensk airport. It was a beautiful clear morning with a sky as blue as the cross on a Prussian imperial flag and – if there was such a thing – surely a perfect day for flying. After almost four days in Smolensk, I was actually looking forward to spending twelve hours aboard a freezing plane. The regimental cook from Dnieper Castle had prepared a large flask of coffee and some sandwiches for me, and I’d even managed to get a Capuchin hood from army stores to wear under my crusher to help keep my ears warm. Life felt good. I had a book and a recent newspaper and the whole day to myself.

‘The colonel presents his compliments,’ said Rex, ‘and apologizes for not seeing you off himself, but he was unavoidably detained at Group headquarters.’

I shrugged. ‘In view of the events of last night I imagine he has a lot to talk about,’ I said.

‘Yes sir.’

Rex was quiet, for which I was grateful and which I attributed to the loss of his two comrades. I didn’t mention them. That was someone else’s problem now. All I cared about was getting on the plane back to Berlin before something else happened to keep me in Smolensk. I certainly wouldn’t have put it past Colonel Ahrens to speak to Field Marshal von Kluge and have my departure delayed long enough for me to investigate the murders. And Von Kluge could do it. I might have been SD, but I was still attached to the War Crimes Bureau, and that meant I was under army orders.

A short way past the railway station, we turned north onto Lazarettstrasse to find a small crowd gathered on a patch of waste ground on the corner of Grosse Lermontowstrasse. Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach, as if I had swallowed poison.

‘Stop the car,’ I told Rex.

‘It might be best if we don’t, sir,’ said Rex. ‘We’ve no escort and if that crowd turns ugly, it’ll be just you and me.’

‘Stop the fucking car, lieutenant.’

I got out of the bucket wagon, unbuttoned my holster, and walked toward the crowd, which parted in sullen silence to admit my passage. Horror does not need the dark, and sometimes a truly evil deed shuns the shadows. A makeshift gallows had been erected like so many tent poles from which six dead bodies were now hanging, five of them young men and all of them obviously Russian from their clothes. The men were still wearing their peasant-style caps. Around the neck of the central figure – a young woman who was wearing a headscarf, and missing one shoe – was a placard written in German and then Russian: WE ARE PARTISANS AND LAST NIGHT WE MURDERED TWO GERMAN SOLDIERS. None of them had been dead for very long – a pool of urine underneath one of the corpses that was turning in the wind had yet to freeze. It was one of the saddest sights I’d ever seen, and I felt a strong sense of shame – the same kind of shame I felt the first time I came to Russia and witnessed what happened to the Jews in Minsk.

‘Why did they do it? Last night I made it perfectly clear to everyone that it wasn’t partisans who murdered those men. I distinctly told your colonel. And I told Lieutenant Voss. I am certain they both understood that Ribe and Greiss were murdered by a German soldier. All of the available evidence points that way.’

‘Yes sir, I heard what happened.’

‘I meant all of it, too. Without exception.’

Lieutenant Rex backed towards me as if he didn’t want to take his eyes off the crowd, but to be fair it might just as easily have been that he didn’t want to look at the six people hanging from a beech-log gibbet.

‘I can assure you that this execution wasn’t anything to do with the colonel or the field police,’ explained Rex.

‘No?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well at least now I understand why your colonel didn’t want to accompany me to the airport himself. That was clever of him. He could hardly have avoided seeing this, could he?’

‘He wasn’t happy about it, sir, but what could he do? This is down to the local Gestapo. It’s them who carry out executions in Smolensk, not the army. And in spite of what you said just now – that it was a German soldier who murdered Ribe and Greiss – I believe they still thought it was necessary to make a point to the people of Smolensk that the murders of Germans will not go unpunished. At least that was the colonel’s information.’

‘Even if innocent people are punished,’ I said.

‘Oh, these people weren’t innocent,’ said Rex. ‘Not exactly anyway. I believe they were already being held in the Kiewerstrasse prison, for one thing or another. Black marketeers and thieves probably. We get a lot of them in Smolensk.’ Rex had drawn his pistol and was holding it stiffly at his side. ‘Now if you don’t mind, we really ought to get out of here before they string us up beside these others.’