A Man Without Breath

I went into the bedroom. I hadn’t met Batov’s only daughter before; I didn’t even know her name; all I really knew about the girl was her age and the fact that she wouldn’t ever be celebrating her sixteenth birthday or dancing Swan Lake in Paris. As a homicide detective I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, many of them female, and of course it’s fair to say that the war had rendered me even less sensitive than before to the sight of violent death, but nothing prepared me for the appalling sight that greeted me in that bedroom.

Batov’s daughter had been tied to the four corners of the bed and tortured with a knife, like her poor father. Her killer had slit her nose horizontally and cut off both her ears before opening the veins in one of her arms. She was still wearing a pair of rubber overshoes. Very likely she must have arrived back in the apartment after the killer had failed to extract the information he wanted from her father, and he had set to work with his knife on the daughter, whose mouth was similarly stuffed with a sock to stifle her loudest screams. But where I wondered were her ears?

Eventually I found both of them in the breast pocket of the dead man’s jacket, as if he had brought them into the room, one after the other, before Batov had told him what exactly he wanted to know.

A quick glance in the other bedroom confirmed that Batov had indeed talked. A picture of Lenin had been taken down from the wall and was now leaning against it. The space it had covered was just raw brickwork, with several of the bricks torn out like the centre of a jigsaw puzzle. There was just enough room in this rectangular hiding place – which was about the height and width of a letterbox – to have hidden the ledgers and pictures Doctor Batov had promised to give to me.

In the bathroom I dropped my trousers and sat down on the toilet to do some thinking with a couple of cigarettes. Without the bloody distractions of the two bodies it was easier to reflect upon what I knew and what I thought I knew.

I knew that they had both been dead for not much more than a day: Batov’s own body had been covered with books and newspapers, which meant that access for female houseflies had been more difficult, but already masses of tiny eggs that had yet to hatch into maggots were covering the girl’s eyelids. Depending on the temperature, fly eggs usually hatched into larvae within twenty-four hours – especially when a body was found indoors, where things are warmer, even in Russia. All of which meant they had probably died the previous afternoon.

I knew it was a waste of time asking the floor lady if she’d seen or heard anything. For one thing my Russian wasn’t equal to the task of an interrogation, and for another her ear trumpet hardly encouraged the prospect of success. As a detective, I’d seen more promising witnesses in a mortuary. Not that I was feeling a lot like a homicide detective since murdering Martin Quidde.

I kept asking myself if there had been a way I could have avoided that, but the same answer kept on coming back at me: Quidde opening his mouth about what he knew to someone in the Gestapo, the field police, Kripo, the SS or even the Wehrmacht would have been as good a way as any of destroying any future chance that Von Gersdorff – or one of his colleagues – might get to kill Hitler. No one’s life – not Quidde’s and certainly not my own – was more important than that. For the same reason, I knew I was going to have to tell Von Gersdorff about Quidde and the tape to prove to him that Von Kluge could no longer be trusted.

I knew that Batov’s killer enjoyed using a knife – a knife is such a close-quarters weapon that you have to take pleasure in the damage you can inflict on another human being. It’s not a weapon for someone who’s squeamish. I might have said that the man who had murdered Batov and his daughter was the same man who had murdered the two signallers, Ribe and Greiss – the throat-cutting was similar, of course – except that the motives for these crimes looked so entirely different.

I knew I needed to find Rudakov even if he was dead in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Rudakov had heard everything Batov had told me about the documentary and photographic proof of the Katyn massacre, and he’d heard the deal Batov had demanded. If that wasn’t a motive for a former NKVD officer to kill a man and his daughter, I didn’t know what was. If he had killed the Batovs, then I guessed he was long gone, and the field police were hardly likely to catch someone who had been resourceful enough to have faked a mental disability for the best part of eighteen months.