A Man Without Breath

I shook my head. I couldn’t think of anything that was worse than giving away military secrets; then again, those were the days in which my ideas of what was worse and what was worst were limited by a naive faith in the inherent decency of my fellow Germans. After almost twenty years in the Berlin police, I thought I knew all about corruption, but if you are not corrupt yourself, then I think you cannot ever know just how corrupt others can be in their pursuit of wealth and favour. I think then I must still have believed in things like honour and integrity and duty. Life had yet to teach me the hardest lesson of all, which is that in a corrupt world about the only thing you can rely on is corruption and then death and yet more corruption, and that honour and duty have little place in a world that has had a Hitler and a Stalin in it. And perhaps the most naive thing about my reaction was that I was actually surprised at what Quidde told me next.

‘On the tape you can clearly hear Adolf Hitler and Gunther von Kluge talking for almost fifteen minutes. They talk about the new summer campaign, but only in passing, before Hitler starts asking Von Kluge about his family estates in Prussia, and it very soon becomes more apparent that Hitler is visiting headquarters in Smolensk largely because in spite of his declared previous generosity to the field marshal he has heard a few rumours back in Berlin that Von Kluge is somewhat dissatisfied with his leadership. Von Kluge then proceeds to make a few weak denials and insists he is committed to the future of Germany and to defeating the Red Army, before Hitler comes to the real point of his being there. First of all, Hitler mentions a cheque for one million marks that the German Treasury gave Von Kluge in October 1942 to help improve his estates. He mentions that he’d given a similar sum to Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. He also reminds Von Kluge that he’d promised to help with any future costs of running these estates, and to this end he has brought his own personal chequebook with him. What you then hear is Hitler writing out another cheque, and while the amount isn’t actually mentioned on the recording, you can hear from what the field marshal says when the leader hands it over that this time it’s at least as much as a million marks again, perhaps even more. Either way, at the end of the recorded conversation Von Kluge assures the leader of his unswerving loyalty and insists that the rumours of his own dissatisfaction were much exaggerated by those in the High Command who were jealous of his relationship with Hitler.’

For a moment I closed my eyes. Almost everything was now explained – why a German had murdered the two signallers. It seemed obvious to me that the reason they had been killed was to silence them both about the discovery of this huge bribe. Someone acting for Hitler or Von Kluge or perhaps both of them had murdered the two signallers. It was also clear exactly why Von Kluge had decided to withdraw from an Army Group Centre plot to murder Hitler while he was in Smolensk: this would have had nothing to do with the absence of Heinrich Himmler in Smolensk and everything to do with a cheque for approximately one million marks.

No less clear than any of this however was the gut-liquefying certainty that Martin Quidde had now put me in the same grave danger as himself.

I rolled my eyes and lit a cigarette. For a second the wind caught the smoke and blew it in my eyes and made them water. I wiped them with the back of my hand and then contemplated using it to try to slap some sense into Corporal Quidde. Maybe it was too late for that, but I hoped not.

‘Well, that’s a hell of a story,’ I said.

‘It’s true. It’s all on the tape.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it. Nor do I doubt the fact that I may never sleep again. I like a scary story now and then. I even liked Nosferatu when it was in the cinema. But your little tale is too scary even for me. What the hell do you expect me to do with this, corporal? I’m a cop, not fucking Lohengrin. And if I want to commit suicide I’ll take a nice little holiday in Solingen before I jump off the Mungsten bridge.’

‘I thought, maybe, you might get a starting handle on the case,’ said Quidde. ‘Those men were murdered after all. What’s the point in having a war-crimes bureau and a field police if you don’t investigate real crimes?’

I handed back the dispatch case.