A Man Without Breath

I shook my head in exasperation. There was an important decision to be made now and absolutely no time to think it through. That’s how it is with a lot of crime. It’s not that you mean to commit one, it’s just that you’ve run out of viable options. One minute you’ve got some stupid young fool snarling his contempt and telling you to go and fuck yourself and threatening to compromise the only extant source of viable conspiracy against Adolf Hitler, and the next you’ve pressed a Walther automatic against the back of his thick head and pulled the trigger and the young fool has collapsed on the wet ground with blood spraying out of his helmet like a new oil well and you’re already thinking how you can make his necessary but regrettable murder look like a suicide – so that maybe the Gestapo won’t hang another six innocent Russians in retaliation for the death of one German.

I glanced around the little park. The drunks were too soaked to notice or to care – it was hard to tell which. From his lofty stone pedestal Glinka had seen the whole damn thing, of course; and it was odd, but for the first time I realized that the way the sculptor had caught the composer he appeared to be listening to something. It was clever: it almost looked as if Glinka had heard the shot. Quickly I made my own pistol safe and pocketed it, then I took Corporal Quidde’s own identical Walther. I worked the slide to put one in the breech and fired another shot into the ground close by before placing the automatically cocked pistol carefully in his hand. I felt very little for the dead man – it’s hard to feel sorry for a fool – but I did feel half a pang of regret that I’d been forced to kill one damn fool for the sake of several others.

Then I picked up the second empty bullet casing and the dispatch case with the incriminating tape – leaving it there was not an option – and walked quickly away, hoping that no one would hear the sound of my loudly beating heart.

Later on it occurred to me that I had shot – or to be more exact, executed – Martin Quidde in the exact same way as the NKVD had murdered all those Polish officers. It’s fair to say that this gave me some cause for reflection. I also learned that the music on the fence around Glinka’s feet was from his opera A Life for the Tsar. That’s not a great title for an opera. But then A Life for a Group of Posh Traitors doesn’t have much of a ring to it either. And on the whole, I much prefer solving a murder to committing one.

*

After what had happened in Glinka Park I didn’t feel much like going to see Doctor Batov. I’m peculiar like that. When I kill a man in cold blood it unsettles me a little, and the good news I had to tell the doctor – that the ministry had approved his resettlement to Berlin – might have sounded rather less like good news than it ought to have done. Besides, I was half expecting Lieutenant Voss of the field police to come around to Krasny Bor and take me on in the role of a consulting detective just like before. That’s certainly what I wanted to happen. The fact of the matter is, I was hoping to steer his simple mind away from any wild theories he might have had about murder. I wasn’t back in my tiny little wooden bungalow for very long when true to form, he came calling.

There was something mutt-like about Voss. That might just have been the brightly polished metallic gorget he wore on a chain around his thick neck to show that he was on duty – this was the reason why most Fritzes referred to the field police as kennel hounds or attack dogs – but Voss had such a lugubriously handsome face it would have been easy to confuse him with the real thing. His earlobes were as long as his leather coat and his big brown eyes contained so much yellow that they resembled the distinctive field police badge he wore on his left arm. I’ve seen pure-bred bloodhounds that looked more human than Ludwig Voss. But he was no amateur soldier: the Eastern Front ribbon and infantry assault badge told a more heroic story than simple law enforcement. He’d seen a lot more action than manning the barrier on a turnpike.

‘A fire, a kettle, a comfy chair, it’s a nice place you have here, Captain Gunther,’ he said, glancing around my cosy room. He was so tall he’d had to stoop to come through the door.

‘It’s a bit Uncle Tom’s cabin,’ I said. ‘But it’s home. What can I do for you, lieutenant? I’d open a bottle of champagne in your honour but I think we drank the last fifty bottles last night.’

‘We’ve found another dead signaller,’ he said, brushing aside the wisecrack.

‘Oh, I see. This is becoming an epidemic,’ I said. ‘Was his throat cut, too?’

‘I don’t know yet. I just picked up the report on the radio. A couple of my men found the body in Glinka Park. I was hoping you might come and take a look at the scene with me. Just in case there’s some sort of pattern to all this.’