A Man Without Breath

‘A standard NKVD vyshka,’ he remarked. ‘A nine-gram airmail from Stalin.’

‘You speak Russian?’

‘I’m an intelligence officer. It’s sort of expected.’ He stood up and nodded. ‘I also have French, English and some Polish.’

‘How does that come about?’ I asked. ‘You speaking Polish?’

‘I was born in Silesia. In Lubin. You know, if it hadn’t been for Frederick the Great bringing Lubin back into Prussia in 1742, I might well have been one of the Polish officers lying in this mass grave.’

‘There’s an amusing thought.’

‘Well, it looks like you’ve found what everyone has been looking for, Gunther.’

‘Not me,’ I said.

‘How’s that?’

‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,’ I said. ‘I’m not really here. Those are my orders. The SD and the ministry of propaganda are supposed to be a hundred miles from this site. Which is why I’m wearing an army uniform instead of an SD one.’

‘Yes, I was wondering about that.’

‘Even so, that might not stand close inspection. So I haven’t found anything. I think the report had better state that you found this body. All right?’

‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘You might need to make yourself popular with all the people you let down when you didn’t blow yourself up at the Arsenal.’

‘When you put it like that it’s a wonder I can look myself in the eye every morning.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that. It’s a long time since I so much as glanced at a mirror.’

*

With its chintz-curtained window, oak farmhouse chairs, open fireplace and framed watercolours of Berlin’s historic sites, the signals office was as neat as an old maid’s parlour. Underneath a shelf full of books and steel helmets there was a large table where plain-text messages could be written out on sheets of lined yellow paper. On this was a clean white tablecloth, a vase of dried flowers, a samovar full of hot Russian tea and a polished onyx ashtray. Ranged along the wall were a twenty-four- line switchboard, a five-watt Hagenuk transceiver, a big Magnetophon reel-to-reel tape-recorder, a Siemens Sheet-writer teletype machine, and an Enigma rotor-cipher machine with a Schreibmax printer attachment that could print all the letters of the alphabet onto a narrow paper ribbon, which meant the signal officer operating the Enigma didn’t have to see the decrypted plain-text information.

The under-officer in charge of the signals room was an open-faced young man with reddish hair and amber-framed spectacles. His hands were delicate and his touch on the massive Torn’s transmitting key was – according to Colonel Ahrens – as sure as a concert pianist’s. His name was Martin Quidde and he was assisted by an even younger-looking radio master recently arrived from the signals kindergarten in Lubeck, who had a nervously twitching thigh that looked as if it was permanently receiving a telegraph transmission from home. The pair of them regarded me with watchful respect, as though I were a chunk of raw pitchblende.

‘Relax boys,’ I said. ‘I’m not in an SD uniform now.’

Quidde shrugged as if such a thing hardly mattered to him, and he was right of course, it didn’t, not in Nazi Germany, where a uniform was a guarantee only that a man was afflicted with duties and superiors, and everyone – from some squirt in a pair of leather shorts to an old lady in a housecoat – could prove to be the Gestapo informer who revealed some careless word or patriotic shortcoming that put you in a concentration camp.

‘I’m not Gestapo and I’m not Abwehr. I’m just a prick from Berlin who’s here to do some amateur archaeology.’

‘Are there really four thousand Poles buried in our front garden, sir?’ Quidde was quoting the figure I had included in my telemessage to Goebbels.

‘That’s what it said on my message to the ministry, didn’t it?’

‘Do you reckon they murdered them out there?’

‘That’s certainly what it looks like,’ I said. ‘Brought them to the side of an open grave in twos and threes and shot them in the back of the head.’

The younger signaller, whose name was Lutz and who was manning the switchboard, answered a call only he heard and began to shift the cables in the switchboard around like so many chess pieces.

‘General von Tresckow,’ he said into his headset. ‘I have General Goerdeler for you, sir.’

‘Makes you think what we’re fighting, eh, sir?’ said Quidde.

‘Yes, it certainly does,’ I said. ‘We certainly can’t teach Ivan anything about cruelty, murder and deceit.’

‘You know, I’ve often had a peculiar feeling that something was not quite right about this place,’ said Quidde.

‘I get that feeling back in Berlin, sometimes,’ I said, being deliberately ambiguous again; it was up to Quidde what he chose to hear. ‘When I’m visiting friends who live near the old Reichstag. I don’t believe in ghosts myself, but it’s easy to understand why so many others do.’

Lutz started to deal with another call on the switchboard.