A Man Without Breath

CHAPTER 1

Monday, March 1st 1943

Franz Meyer stood up at the head of the table, glanced down, touched the cloth and awaited our silence. With his fair hair, blue eyes and neoclassical features that looked as if they’d been carved by Arno Breker, Hitler’s official state sculptor, he was no one’s idea of a Jew. Half of the SS and SD were more obviously Semitic. Meyer took a deep, almost euphoric breath, gave a broad grin that was part relief and part joie-de-vivre, and raised his glass to each of the four women seated around the table. None were Jewish and yet, by the racial stereotypes beloved of the propaganda ministry, they might have been; all were Germans with strong noses, dark eyes and even darker hair. For a moment Meyer seemed choked with emotion, and when at last he was able to speak, there were tears in his eyes.

‘I’d like to thank my wife and her sisters for your efforts on my behalf,’ he said. ‘To do what you did took great courage, and I can’t tell you what it meant to those of us who were imprisoned in the Jewish Welfare Office to know that there were so many people on the outside who cared enough to come and demonstrate on our behalf.’

‘I still can’t believe they haven’t arrested us,’ said Meyer’s wife, Siv.

‘They’re so used to people obeying orders,’ said his sister-in-law, Klara, ‘that they don’t know what to do.’

‘We’ll go back to Rosenstrasse tomorrow,’ insisted Siv. ‘We won’t stop until everyone in there is released. All two thousand of them. We’ve shown what we can do when public opinion is mobilized. We have to keep the pressure up.’

‘Yes,’ said Meyer. ‘And we will. We will. But right now I’d like to propose a toast. To our new friend Bernie Gunther. But for him and his colleagues at the War Crimes Bureau, I’d probably still be imprisoned in the Jewish Welfare Office. And who knows where after that?’ He smiled. ‘To Bernie.’

There were six of us in the cosy little dining room in the Meyers’ apartment in Lützowerstrasse. As four of them stood up and toasted me silently, I shook my head. I wasn’t sure I deserved Franz Meyer’s thanks, and besides, the wine we were drinking was a decent German red – a Spätburgunder from long before the war that he and his wife would have done better to have traded for some food instead of wasting it on me. Any wine – let alone a good German red – was almost impossible to come by in Berlin.

Politely I waited for them to drink my health before standing up to contradict my host. ‘I’m not sure I can claim to have had much influence on the SS,’ I explained. ‘I spoke to a couple of cops I know who were policing your demonstration and they told me there’s a strong rumour doing the rounds that most of the prisoners arrested on Saturday as part of the factory action will probably be released in a few days.’

‘That’s incredible,’ said Klara. ‘But what does it mean, Bernie? Do you think the authorities are actually going soft on deportations?’

Before I could offer my opinion the air-raid warning siren sounded. We all looked at each other in surprise; it had been almost two years since the last air raid by the Royal Air Force.

‘We should go to the shelter,’ I said. ‘Or the basement, perhaps.’

Meyer nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, firmly. ‘You should all go. Just in case it’s for real.’

I fetched my coat and hat off the stand and turned back to Meyer.

‘But you’re coming too, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘Jews aren’t permitted in the shelters. Perhaps you didn’t notice it before. Well, there’s no reason why you should have. I don’t think there’s been an air raid since we started to wear the yellow star.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I didn’t.’ I shrugged. ‘So, where are Jews supposed to go?’

‘To hell, of course. At least, that’s what they hope.’ This time Meyer’s grin was sardonic. ‘Besides, people know this is a Jewish apartment, and since the law requires that homes be left with their doors and windows open, to minimize the effect of a pressure wave from a bomb blast, that’s also an invitation to some local thief to come and steal from us.’ He shook his head. ‘So I shall stay here.’

I glanced out of the window. In the street below, hundreds of people were already being herded toward the local shelter by uniformed police. There wasn’t much time to lose.

‘Franz,’ said Siv, ‘we’re not going there without you. Just leave your coat. If they can’t see your star they’ll have to assume you’re German. You can carry me in and say I fainted, and if I show my pass and say I’m your wife then no one will be any the wiser.’

‘She’s right,’ I said.

‘And if I’m arrested, what then? I’ve only just been released.’ Meyer shook his head and laughed. ‘Besides, it’s probably a false alarm. Hasn’t Fat Hermann promised us that this is the best-defended city in Europe?’

The siren continued to wail outside like some dreadful mechanical clarion announcing the end of a night shift in the smoking factories of hell.

Siv Meyer sat down at the table and clasped her hands tight. ‘If you’re not going, then I’m not going.’

‘Neither am I,’ Klara said, sitting down beside her.

‘There’s no time to argue about this,’ said Meyer. ‘You should go. All of you.’

‘He’s right,’ I said, more urgently now as already we could hear the drone of the bombers in the distance; it was obvious this was no false alarm. I opened the door and waved the four women toward me. ‘Come on,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Siv. ‘We’re staying.’

The two other sisters glanced at each other and then sat down alongside their Jewish brother-in-law. This left me on my feet with a coat in my hand and a nervous look on my face. After all, I’d seen what our own bombers had done to Minsk and parts of France. I put on the coat and shoved my hands in the pockets so as to conceal the fact that they were shaking.

‘I don’t think they’re coming to drop propaganda leaflets,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’

‘Yes, but it’s not civilians like us they’re after, surely,’ said Siv. ‘It’s the government district. They’ll know there’s a hospital near here. The RAF won’t want to risk hitting the Catholic Hospital, will they? The English aren’t like that. It’s the Wilhelmstrasse they’ll be after.’

‘How will they know from two thousand feet up in the air?’ I heard myself utter weakly.

‘She’s right,’ said Meyer. ‘It’s not the west of Berlin they’re targeting. It’s the east. Which means it’s probably just as well we’re none of us in Rosenstrasse tonight.’ He smiled at me. ‘You should go, Bernie. We’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ I said and, deciding to ignore the air-raid siren like the others, I started to take off my coat. ‘All the same, I can hardly leave you all here.’

‘Why not?’ asked Klara.

I shrugged, but what it really came down to was this: I could hardly leave and still manage to look good in Klara’s lovely brown eyes, and I was quite keen that she should have a good impression of me; but I didn’t feel I could say this to her, not yet.

For a moment I felt my chest tighten as my nerves continued to get the better of me. Then I heard some bombs explode in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief. Back in the trenches, during the Great War, when you could hear the shells exploding somewhere else it usually meant you were safe, because it was commonly held that you never heard the one that killed you.

‘Sounds like it’s north Berlin that’s getting it,’ I said, leaning in the doorway. ‘The petroleum refinery on Thaler Strasse, probably. It’s the only real target around here. But I think we should at least get under the table. Just in case a stray bomb—’

I think that was the last thing I said, and probably it was the fact I was standing in the doorway that saved my life, because just then the glass in the nearest window frame seemed to melt into a thousand drops of light. Some of those old Berlin apartment buildings were made to last, and I later learned that the bomb that blew up the one we were in – not to mention the hospital on Lützowerstrasse – and flattened it in a split second would certainly have killed me had not the lintel above my head and the stout oak door that was hanging inside it resisted the weight of the roof’s metal joist, for this is what killed Siv Meyer and her three sisters.

After that there was darkness and silence, except for the sound of a kettle on a gas plate whistling as it came slowly to the boil, although this was probably just the sensation in my battered eardrums. It was as if someone had switched off an electric light and then pulled away the floorboards I’d been standing on, and the effect of the world disappearing from underneath my feet might have been similar to the sensation of being hooded and hanged on a gallows. I don’t know. All I really remember of what happened is that I was upside down lying on a pile of rubble when I recovered consciousness, and there was a door on top of my face which, for several minutes until I recovered enough breath in my bomb-blasted lungs to moan for help, I was convinced was the lid of my own damn coffin.

I had left Kripo in the summer of 1942 and joined the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau with the connivance of my old colleague Arthur Nebe. As the commander of Special Action Group B, which was headquartered in Smolensk, where tens of thousands of Russian Jews had been murdered, Nebe knew a thing or two about war crimes himself. I’m certain it appealed to his Berliner’s black humour that I should find myself attached to an organization of old Prussian judges, most of whom were staunchly anti-Nazi. Dedicated to the military ideals as laid down in the Geneva Convention of 1929, they believed there was a proper and honourable way for the army – any army – to fight a war. Nebe must have thought it very funny that there existed a judicial body within the German High Command that not only resisted having Party members in its distinguished ranks but was also quite prepared to devote its considerable resources to the investigation and prosecution of crimes committed by and against German soldiers: theft, looting, rape and murder could all be the subject of lengthy and serious inquiries – sometimes earning their perpetrators a death sentence. I thought it was kind of funny myself, but then, like Nebe, I’m also from Berlin, and it’s known that we have a strange sense of humour. By the winter of 1943, you found your laughs where you could, and I don’t know how else to describe a situation in which you can have an army corporal hanged for the rape and murder of a Russian peasant girl in one village that’s only a few miles from another village where an SS special action group has just murdered twenty-five thousand men, women and children. I expect the Greeks have a word for that kind of comedy, and if I’d paid a little more attention to my classics master at school I might have known what that word was.

The judges – they were nearly all judges – who worked for the Bureau were not hypocrites any more than they were Nazis, and they saw no reason why their moral standards should decline just because the government of Germany had no moral standards at all. The Greeks certainly had a word for that all right, and I even knew what it was, although it’s fair to say I’d had to learn how to spell it again. They called that kind of behaviour ethics, and my being concerned with rightness and wrongness felt good, since it helped to restore in me a sense of pride in who and what I was. At least for a while, anyway.

Most of the time I assisted the Bureau’s judges – several of whom I’d known during the Weimar Republic – in taking depositions from witnesses or finding new cases for the Bureau to investigate. That was how I first met Siv Meyer. She was a friend of a girl called Renata Matter, who was a good friend of mine and who worked at the Adlon Hotel. Siv played the piano in the orchestra at the Adlon.

I met her at the hotel on Sunday February 28th, which was the day after Berlin’s last Jews – some ten thousand people – had been arrested for deportation to ghettoes in the East. Franz Meyer was a worker at the Osram electric light-bulb factory in Wilmersdorf, which was where he was arrested, but before this he had been a doctor, and this was how he came to find himself working as a medical orderly on a German hospital ship that had been attacked and sunk by a British submarine off the coast of Norway in August 1941. My boss and the Bureau chief, Johannes Goldsche, had tried to investigate the case, but at the time it was thought that there had been no survivors. So when Renata Matter told me about Franz Meyer’s story, I went to see his wife at their apartment in Lützowerstrasse.

It was a short walk from my own apartment on Fasanenstrasse, with a view of the canal and the local town hall, and only a short walk from the Schulstrasse synagogue where many of Berlin’s Jews had been held in transit on their way to an unknown fate in the East. Meyer had only escaped arrest himself because he was a Mischehe – a Jew who was married to a German.

From the wedding photograph on the Biedermeier sideboard it was easy to see what they saw in each other. Franz Meyer was absurdly handsome and very like Franchot Tone, the movie actor who was once married to Joan Crawford. Siv was just beautiful, and there’s nothing absurd about that; more importantly so were her three sisters, Klara, Frieda and Hedwig, all of whom were present when I met their sister for the first time.

‘Why didn’t your husband come forward before?’ I asked Siv Meyer over a cup of ersatz coffee, which was the only kind of coffee anyone had now. ‘This incident took place on August 30th 1941. Why is he only willing to speak about it now?’

‘Clearly you don’t know very much about what it’s like to be a Jew in Berlin,’ she said.

‘You’re right. I don’t.’

‘No Jew wants to draw attention to himself by being a part of any inquiry in Germany. Even if it is a good cause.’

I shrugged. ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘A witness for the Bureau one day and a prisoner of the Gestapo the next. On the other hand I do know what it’s like to be a Jew in the East, and if you want to prevent your husband from ending up there I hope you’re telling the truth about all this. At the War Crimes Bureau we get lots of people who try to waste our time.’

‘You were in the East?’

‘Minsk,’ I said, simply. ‘They sent me back here to Berlin and the War Crimes Bureau for questioning my orders.’

‘What’s happening out there? In the ghettoes? In the concentration camps? One hears so many different stories about what resettlement amounts to.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t think the stories even get close to the horror of what’s happening in the eastern ghettoes. And by the way, there is no resettlement. There’s just starvation and death.’

Siv Meyer let out a sigh and then exchanged a glance with her sisters. I was fond of looking at her three sisters myself. It made a very pleasant change to take a deposition from an attractive and well-spoken woman instead of an injured soldier.

‘Thank you for being honest, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘As well as the stories one hears so many lies.’ She nodded. ‘Since you’ve been so honest let me be honest, too. The main reason my husband hasn’t talked before about the sinking of the SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim is because he hardly wanted to make a gift of some useful anti-British propaganda to Doctor Goebbels. Of course now that he’s been arrested it seems that this might be his only chance of staying out of a concentration camp.’

‘We don’t have much to do with the propaganda ministry, Frau Meyer. Not if we can help it. Perhaps it’s them you should be speaking to.’

‘I don’t doubt you mean what you say, Herr Gunther,’ said Siv Meyer. ‘Nevertheless British war crimes against defenceless German hospital ships make good propaganda.’

‘That’s just the kind of story which is especially useful now,’ added Klara. ‘After Stalingrad.’

I had to admit she was probably right. The surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad on February 2nd had been the greatest disaster suffered by the Nazis since their coming to power; and Goebbels’s speech on the 18th urging total war on the German people certainly needed incidents like the sinking of a hospital ship to prove that there was no way back for us now – that it was victory or nothing.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I can’t promise anything, but if you tell me where they’re holding your husband I’ll go there right now and see him, Frau Meyer. If I think there’s something in his story, I’ll contact my superiors and see if we can get him released as a key witness for an inquiry.’

‘He’s being detained at the Jewish Welfare Office, on Rosenstrasse,’ said Siv. ‘We’ll come with you, if you like.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s quite all right. I know where it is.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Klara. ‘We’re all going there anyway. To protest against Franz’s detention.’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ I said. ‘You’ll be arrested.’

‘There are lots of wives who are going,’ said Siv. ‘They can’t arrest us all.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve arrested all of the Jews.’

Hearing footsteps near my head, I tried to push the heavy wooden door off my face, but my left hand was trapped and the right too painful to use. Someone shouted something and a minute or two later I felt myself slide a little as the rubble that I lay on shifted like the scree on a steep mountain side, and then the door was lifted away to reveal my rescuers. The apartment building was almost completely gone, and all that remained in the cold moonlight was one high chimney containing an ascending series of fireplaces. Several hands placed me onto a stretcher and I was carried off the tangled, smoking heap of bricks, concrete, leaking water pipes and wooden planks and laid in the middle of the road, where I enjoyed a perfect view of a building burning in the distance and then the beams from Berlin’s defence searchlights as they continued to search the sky for enemy planes; but the siren was sounding the all-clear and I could hear the footsteps of people already coming up from the shelters to look for what was left of their homes. I wondered if my own home in Fasanenstrasse was all right. Not that there was very much in it. Nearly everything of value had been sold or traded on the black market.

Gradually, I began to move my head one way and the other until I felt able to push myself up on one elbow to look around. But I could hardly breathe: my chest was still full of dust and smoke and the exertion provoked a fit of coughing that was only alleviated when a man I half recognized helped me to a drink of water and laid a blanket on top of me.

About a minute later there was a loud shout and the chimney came down on top of the spot where I’d been lying. The dust from its collapse covered me, so I was moved further down the street and set down next to some others who were awaiting medical attention. Klara was lying beside me now at less than an arm’s length. Her dress was hardly torn, her eyes were open, and her body was quite unmarked. I called her name several times before it finally dawned on me that she was dead. It was as if her life had just stopped like a clock, and it hardly seemed possible that so much of her future – she couldn’t have been older than thirty – had disappeared in the space of a few seconds.

Other corpses were laid out in the street next to her. I couldn’t see how many. I sat up to look for Franz Meyer and the others, but the effort was too much and I fell back and closed my eyes. And fainted, I suppose.

‘Give us back our men.’

You could hear them three streets away – a large and angry crowd of women – and as we turned the corner of Rosenstrasse I felt my jaw slacken. I hadn’t seen anything like this on the streets of Berlin since before Hitler came to power. And whoever would have thought that wearing a nice hat and carrying a handbag was the best way to dress when you were opposing the Nazis?

‘Release our husbands,’ shouted the mob of women as we pushed our way along the street. ‘Release our husbands now.’

There were many more of them than I had been expecting – perhaps several hundred. Even Klara Meyer looked surprised, but not as surprised as the cops and SS who were guarding the Jewish Welfare Office. They gripped their machine pistols and rifles and muttered curses and abuse at the women standing nearest to the door and looked horrified to find themselves ignored or even roundly cursed back. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be: if you had a gun, then people were supposed to do what they were told. That’s page one of how to be a Nazi.

The welfare office on Rosenstrasse near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz was a grey granite Wilhelmine building with a saddle roof next to a synagogue – formerly the oldest in Berlin – partly destroyed by the Nazis in November 1938, and within spitting distance of the Police Praesidium where I had spent most of my adult working life. I might no longer have been working for Kripo but I’d managed to keep my beer-token – the brass identity disc that commanded such craven respect in most German citizens.

‘We’re decent German women,’ shouted one woman. ‘Loyal to the Leader and to the Fatherland. You can’t speak to us like that, you cheeky young bastard.’

‘I can speak to anyone like that who’s misguided enough to be married to a Jew,’ I heard one of the uniformed cops – a corporal – say to her. ‘Go home, lady, or you’ll be shot.’

‘You need a good spanking you little pip,’ said another woman. ‘Does your mother know you’re such an arrogant whelp?’

‘You see?’ said Klara, triumphantly. ‘They can’t shoot us all.’

‘Can’t we?’ sneered the corporal. ‘When we have the orders to shoot, I can promise you’ll get it first, granny.’

‘Take it easy corporal,’ I said and flashed my beer token in front of his face. ‘There’s really no need to be rude to these ladies. Especially on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘Yes sir,’ he said, smartly. ‘Sorry sir.’ He nodded back over his shoulder. ‘Are you going in there, sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I turned to Klara and Siv. ‘I’ll try to be as quick as I can.’

‘Then if you would be so kind,’ said the corporal, ‘we need orders, sir. No one’s told us what to do. Just to stay here and stop people from going in. Perhaps you might mention that, sir.’

I shrugged. ‘Sure, corporal. But from what I can see you’re already doing a grand job.’

‘We are?’

‘You’re keeping the peace, aren’t you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘You can’t keep the peace if you start shooting at all these ladies, now can you?’ I smiled at him and then patted his shoulder. ‘In my experience, corporal, the best police work looks like nothing at all and is always soon forgotten.’

I was unprepared for the scene that met me inside, where the smell was already intolerable: a welfare office is not designed to be a transit camp for two thousand prisoners. Men and women with identity tags on string around their necks like travelling children were lined up to use a lavatory that had no door, while others were crammed fifty or sixty to an office where it was standing room only. Welfare parcels – many of them brought by the women outside – filled another room where they had been tossed, but no one was complaining. Things were quiet. After almost a decade of Nazi rule Jews knew better than to complain. It was only the police sergeant in charge of these people who seemed inclined to bemoan his lot, and as he searched a clipboard for Franz Meyer’s name and then led me to the second-floor office where the man was being held, he began to unroll the barbed S-wire of his sharp complaint:

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all these people. No one’s told me a damn thing. How long they’re going to be here. How to make them comfortable. How to answer all of these bloody women who are demanding answers. It’s not so easy, I can tell you. All I’ve got is what was in this office building when we turned up yesterday. Toilet paper ran out within an hour of us being here. And Christ only knows how I’m going to feed them. There’s nothing open on a Sunday.’

‘Why don’t you open those food parcels and give them that?’ I asked.

The sergeant looked incredulous. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Those are private parcels.’

‘I shouldn’t think that the people they belong to will mind,’ I said. ‘Just as long as they get something to eat.’

We found Franz Meyer seated in one of the larger offices where almost a hundred men were waiting patiently for something to happen. The sergeant called Meyer out and, still grumbling, went off to think about what I’d suggested about the parcels, while I spoke to my potential war-crimes witness in the comparative privacy of the corridor.

I told him that I worked for the War Crimes Bureau and why I was there. Meanwhile, outside the building, the women’s protest seemed to be getting louder.

‘Your wife and sisters-in-law are outside,’ I told him. ‘It’s them who put me up to this.’

‘Please tell them to go home,’ said Meyer. ‘It’s safer in here than out there, I think.’

‘I agree. But they’re not about to listen to me.’

Meyer grinned. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’

‘The sooner you tell me about what happened on the SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, the sooner I can speak to my boss and see about getting you out of here, and the sooner we can get them all out of harm’s way.’ I paused. ‘That is if you’re prepared to give me a deposition.’

‘It’s my only chance of avoiding a concentration camp, I think.’

‘Or worse,’ I added, by way of extra incentive.

‘Well, that’s honest, I suppose.’ He shrugged.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’

He nodded and we spent the next thirty minutes writing out his statement about what had happened off the coast of Norway in August 1941. When he’d signed it, I wagged my finger at him.

‘Coming here like this I’m sticking my neck out for you,’ I told him. ‘So you’d better not let me down. If I so much as get a whiff of you changing your story I’ll wash my hands of you. Got that?’

He nodded. ‘So why are you sticking your neck out?’

It was a good question and probably it deserved an answer, but I hardly wanted to go into how a friend of a friend had asked me to help, which is how these things usually got fixed in Germany; and I certainly didn’t want to mention how attractive I found his sister-in-law Klara, or that I was making up for some lost time when it came to helping Jews; and maybe a bit more than only lost time.

‘Let’s just say I don’t like the Tommies very much and leave it at that, shall we?’ I shook my head. ‘Besides, I’m not promising anything. It’s up to my boss, Judge Goldsche. If he thinks your deposition can start an inquiry into a British war crime, he’s the one who’ll have to persuade the Foreign Office that this is worth a white book, not me.’

‘What’s a white book?’

‘An official publication that’s intended to present the German side of an incident that might amount to a violation of the laws of war. It’s the Bureau that does all the leg work, but it’s the Foreign Office that publishes the report.’

‘That sounds as if it might take a while.’

I shook my head. ‘Fortunately for you, the Bureau and the judge have a great deal of power. Even in Nazi Germany. If the judge buys your story we’ll have you home tomorrow.’

CHAPTER 2

Wednesday, March 3rd 1943

They took me to the state hospital in Friedrichshain. I was suffering from a concussion and smoke inhalation; the smoke inhalation was nothing new, but as a result of the concussion the doctor advised me to stay in bed for a couple of days. I’ve always disliked hospitals – they sell just a little too much reality for my taste. But I did feel tired. Being bombed by the RAF will do that to you. So the advice of this fresh-faced aspirin Jesus suited me very well. I thought I was due a bit of time with my feet up and my mouth in traction. Besides, I was a lot better off in hospital than in my apartment. They were still feeding patients in the state hospital, which was more than I could say about home, where the pot was empty.

From my window I had a nice view of the St Georg’s cemetery, but I didn’t mind that: the state hospital faces the Böhmisches Brewery on the other side of Landsberger Allee, which means there’s always a strong smell of hops in the air. I can’t think of a better way to encourage a Berliner’s recovery than the smell of German beer. Not that we saw much of it in the city’s bars: most of the beer brewed in Berlin went straight to our brave boys on the Russian front. But I can’t say that I grudged them a couple of brews. After Stalingrad I expect they needed a taste of home to keep their spirits up. There wasn’t a great deal else to keep a man’s spirits up in the winter of 1943.

Either way I was better off than Siv Meyer and her sisters, who were all dead. The only survivors of that night were me and Franz, who was in the Jewish Hospital. Where else? The bigger surprise was that there was a Jewish Hospital in the first place.

I was not without visitors. Renata Matter came to see me. It was Renata who told me my own home was undamaged and who gave me the news about the Meyer sisters. She was pretty upset about it too, and being a good Roman Catholic she had already spent the morning praying for their souls. She seemed just as upset by the news that the priest of St Hedwig’s, Bernhard Lichtenberg, had been put in prison and seemed likely to be sent to Dachau where – according to her – more than two thousand priests were already incarcerated. Two thousand priests in Dachau was a depressing thought. That’s the thing about hospital visitors: sometimes you wish they simply hadn’t bothered to come along and try to cheer you up.

This was certainly how I felt about my other visitor, a commissar from the Gestapo called Werner Sachse. I knew Sachse from the Alex, and in truth he wasn’t a bad fellow for a Gestapo officer, but I knew he wasn’t there to bring me the gift of a Stollen and an encouraging word. He wore hair as neat as the lines in a carpenter’s notebook, a black leather coat that creaked like snow under your feet when he moved, and a black hat and black tie that made me uncomfortable.

‘I’ll have the brass handles and the satin lining please,’ I said. ‘And an open casket, I think.’

Sachse’s face looked puzzled.

‘I guess your pay grade doesn’t run to black humour. Just black ties and coats.’

‘You’d be surprised.’ He shrugged. ‘We have our jokes in the Gestapo.’

‘Sure you do. Only they’re called evidence for the People’s Court in Moabit.’

‘I like you Gunther, so you won’t mind if I warn you about making jokes like that. Especially after Stalingrad. These days it’s called “undermining defensive strength” and they cut your head off for it. Last year they beheaded three people a day for making jokes like that.’

‘Haven’t you heard? I’m sick. I’ve got concussion. I can hardly breathe. I’m not myself. If they cut my head off I probably wouldn’t notice anyway. That’s my defence if this comes to court. What is your pay grade anyway, Werner?’

‘A3. Why do you ask?’

‘I was just wondering why a man who makes six hundred marks a week would come all this way to warn me about undermining our defensive strength – assuming such a thing actually exists after Stalingrad.’

‘It was just a friendly warning. In passing. But that’s not why I’m here, Gunther.’

‘I can’t imagine you’re here to confess to a war crime, Werner. Not yet, anyway.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘I wonder how far we could get with that before they cut off both our heads?’

‘Tell me about Franz Meyer.’

‘He’s sick, too.’

‘Yes, I know. I just came from the Jewish Hospital.’

‘How is he?’

Sachse shook his head. ‘Doing really well. He’s in a coma.’

‘You see? I was right. Your pay grade doesn’t run to humour. These days you need to be at least a Kriminalrat before they allow you to make jokes that are actually funny.’

‘The Meyers were under surveillance, did you know that?’

‘No. I wasn’t there long enough to notice. Not with Klara around. She was a real beauty.’

‘Yes, it’s too bad about her, I agree.’ He paused. ‘You were in their apartment, twice. On the Sunday and then the Monday evening.’

‘That’s correct. Hey, I don’t suppose the V-men who were watching the Meyers got killed, too?’

‘No. They’re still alive.’

‘Pity.’

‘But who says they were V-men? This wasn’t an undercover operation. I expect the Meyers knew they were being watched, even if you were too dumb to notice.’

He lit a couple of cigarettes and put one in my mouth.

‘Thanks, Werner.’

‘Look, you big dumb ugly bastard, you might as well know it was me and some of the other lads from the Gestapo who found you and pulled you off that pile of rubble before the chimney came down. It was the Gestapo who saved your life, Gunther. So you see we must have a sense of humour. The sensible thing would probably have been to have left you there to get crushed.’

‘Straight?’

‘Straight.’

‘Then thanks. I owe you one.’

‘That’s what I figured. It’s why I’m here asking about Franz Meyer.’

‘All right. I’m listening. Get your klieg light and switch it on.’

‘Some honest answers. You owe me that much at least.’

I took a short drag on my cigarette – just to get my breath – and then nodded. ‘That and this smoke. It actually tastes like a proper nail.’

‘What were you doing in Lützowerstrasse? And don’t say “just visiting”.’

‘When Franz Meyer got picked up by the Gestapo in the factory action, his missus figured on the War Crimes Bureau pulling his coal out of the fire. He was the only surviving witness to a war crime when a Tommy submarine torpedoed a hospital ship off the coast of Norway in 1941. The SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim. I took his deposition and then persuaded my boss to sign an order for his release.’

‘And what was in this for you?’

‘That’s my job, Werner. They point my suit at a possible crime and I try to check it out. Look, I won’t deny that the Meyers were very grateful. They invited me to dinner and opened their last bottle of Spätburgunder in celebration of Meyer’s release from the Jewish Welfare Office on Rosenstrasse. We were raising a glass when the bomb hit. But I can’t deny that I had a certain satisfaction in sticking one on the Tommies. Sanctimonious bastards. According to them, the Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim was just a troop-carrying convoy and not a hospital ship at all. Twelve hundred men drowned. Troops, perhaps, but injured troops who were returning home to Germany. His deposition is with my boss, Judge Goldsche. You can read it for yourself and see if I’m telling the truth.’

‘Yes, I checked. But why didn’t you all go to the shelter with everyone else?’

‘Meyer’s a Jew. He’s not allowed in the shelter.’

‘All right, but what about the rest of you? The wife, her sisters – none of them was a Jew. You must admit that’s a bit suspicious.’

‘We didn’t think the air raid was for real. So we decided to stick it out.’

‘Fair enough.’ Sachse sighed. ‘None of us will make that mistake again, I suppose. Berlin is a ruin. St Hedwig’s is burned out, Prager Platz is just rubble, and the hospital on Lützowerstrasse was completely destroyed. The RAF dropped more than a thousand tons of bombs. On civilian targets. Now that’s what I call a fucking war crime. While you’re at it, investigate that, will you?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Did the Meyers make any mention of any foreign currency? Swiss francs, perhaps?’

‘You mean for me?’ I shook my head. ‘No. I wasn’t even offered a lousy packet of cigarettes.’ I frowned. ‘Are you saying those bastards had money?’

Sachse nodded.

‘Well, they never offered me any.’

‘Any mention of a man called Wilhelm Schmidhuber?’

‘No.’

‘Friedrich Arnold? Julius Fliess?’

I shook my head.

‘Operation Seven, perhaps?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer?’

‘The pastor?’

Sachse nodded.

‘No. I’d have remembered his name. What’s this all about, Werner?’

Sachse took a pull on his cigarette, glanced at the man in the next bed, and drew his chair closer to me – close enough to smell his Klar Klassik shaving water; even on the Gestapo it made a pleasant change from stale bandages, piss on the windowpanes and forgotten bedpans.

‘Operation Seven was a plan to help seven Jews escape from Germany to Switzerland.’

‘Seven important Jews?’

‘No such thing. Not anymore. All of the important Jews have left Germany or are – well, they’ve left. No, these were just seven ordinary Jews.’

‘I see.’

‘Of course the Swiss are every bit as anti-Semitic as we are and won’t do anything unless it’s for money. We believe the conspirators were obliged to raise a large sum of money in order to ensure that these Jews could pay their own way and not constitute a burden on the Swiss state. This money was smuggled into Switzerland. Operation Seven was originally Operation Eight, however, and included Franz Meyer. We had them under surveillance in the hope that they might lead us to the other conspirators.’

‘That’s too bad.’

Werner Sachse nodded slowly. ‘I believe your story,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Werner. I appreciate it. All the same, I assume you still searched my pockets for Swiss francs when I was lying on the street.’

‘Of course. When you turned up I thought we’d hit pay-dirt. You can see how very sad I was to discover you were probably on the level.’

‘It’s like I always say, Werner. There’s nothing quite as disappointing as the discovery that our friends and neighbours are no more dishonest than we are ourselves.’

CHAPTER 3

Friday, March 5th 1943

A couple of days later the doctor gave me some more aspirin, advised me to get plenty of fresh air to help with my breathing, and told me I could go home. Berlin was rightly famous for its air, but it wasn’t always so fresh – not since the Nazis had taken over.

Coincidentally, it was the same day the authorities told the Jews still held in the welfare office that they could go home too. I couldn’t believe it when I heard, and I imagine that the men and women who were released could believe it even less than me. The authorities had gone so far as to track down some Jews who’d already been deported and had them sent back to Berlin and released, like the others.

What was happening here? What was in the minds of the government? Was it possible that after the huge defeat at Stalingrad the Nazis were losing their grip? Or had they really listened to the protests of a thousand determined German women? It was hard to tell, but it seemed the only possible conclusion. There were ten thousand Jews who had been arrested on February 27th, and of these, less than two thousand had gone to Rosenstrasse. Some had been remanded to the Clou concert hall on Mauerstrasse, others to the stables of a barracks on Rathenower Strasse, and still more to a synagogue on Levetzowstrasse in Moabit. But it was only at the Rosenstrasse, where Jews married to Germans were detained, that a protest had taken place, and it was only there that any Jews were released. The way I heard it later, all of the Jews from the other sites were deported to the East. But if the protest really had worked, it begged the question, what might have been achieved if mass protests had taken place before? It was a sobering thought that the first organized opposition to the Nazis in ten years had probably succeeded.

That was one sobering thought. Another was that if I hadn’t helped Franz Meyer he would certainly have stayed in the welfare office in Rosenstrasse and his wife and sisters would probably have remained with the rest of the women outside, in which case all of them would still live. Homeless, perhaps. But alive, yes, that was quite conceivable. There’s no amount of aspirin you can swallow that will take away that kind of toothache.

I left the state hospital but I didn’t go home. At least not right away. I took a Ringbahn train north-west, to Gesundbrunnen. To begin work again.

The Jewish Hospital in Wedding was about six or seven modern buildings on the corner of Schulstrasse and Exerzierstrasse, and next to St George’s Hospital. As surprising as the fact that such a thing as a Jewish hospital even existed in Berlin was the discovery that the place was modern, relatively well equipped, and full of doctors, nurses and patients. Since all of them were Jews, the place was also guarded by a small detachment of SS. Almost as soon as I identified myself at the front desk I discovered that the hospital even had its own branch of Gestapo, one of whose officers was summoned at the same time as the hospital director, Dr Walter Lustig.

Lustig arrived first, and it turned out we’d met several times before: a hard-arsed Silesian – they always make the most unpleasant Prussians – Lustig had been head of the medical department in the Police Praesidium at the Alex, and we’d always disliked each other. I disliked him because I don’t much care for pompous men with the bearing if not the height of a senior Prussian officer; he probably thought I disliked him because he was a Jew. But in truth, seeing him at the hospital was the first time I realized he was Jewish – the yellow star on his white coat left me in no doubt about that. He disliked me because he was the type who seemed to dislike nearly everyone who was in a subordinate position to him or ill-educated by his elevated academic standards. At the Alex we’d called him Doctor Doctor because he had university degrees in both philosophy and medicine, and never failed to remind people of this distinction.

Now, he clicked his heels and bowed stiffly as if he’d just marched off the parade ground at the Prussian military academy.

‘Herr Gunther,’ he said. ‘After all these long years we meet again. To what do we owe this dubious pleasure?’

It certainly didn’t seem as if his new lower status as a member of a pariah race had affected his attitude in any way. I could almost see the wax on the eagle with which he’d decorated his top lip. I hadn’t forgotten his pomposity, but it seemed I had forgotten his breath, which required a good half-metre at least for a man with a heavy cold to feel properly safe in his company.

‘Good to see you, too, Doctor Lustig. So this is where you’ve been keeping yourself. I always wondered what happened to you.’

‘I can’t imagine it kept you awake at night.’

‘No. Not in the least. These days I sleep like a dog without dreams. All the same I’m pleased to see you well.’ I glanced around. There were some Hebraic-looking design details on the wall but no sign of the kind of angular, astronomical artwork the Nazis were fond of adding to anything owned or used by Jews. ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Doc.’

Lustig bowed again, and then glanced ostentatiously at his pocket watch. ‘Yes, yes, but you know, tempis fugit.’

‘You have a patient, Franz Meyer, who was brought here on Monday night or perhaps the early hours of Tuesday morning. He’s the key witness in a war-crimes inquiry I’m carrying out for the Wehrmacht. I’d like to see him, if I may.’

‘You’re no longer with the police?’

‘No sir.’ I handed him my business card.

‘Then it seems we have something in common. Whoever would have thought such a thing?’

‘Life springs all sorts of surprises on the living.’

‘That’s especially true in here, Herr Gunther. Address?’

‘Mine, or Herr Meyer’s?’

‘Herr Meyer’s, of course.’

‘Apartment three, ten Lützowerstrasse, Berlin Charlottenburg.’

Curtly, Lustig repeated the name and address to the attractive nurse now accompanying him. Immediately and without being told, she went into the office behind the front desk and searched a large filing cabinet for the patient’s notes. Somehow I sensed Lustig was used to always having the first plate at dinner.

He was already snapping his fat fingers at her. ‘Come on, come on, I haven’t got all day.’

‘I can see you’re as busy as ever, Herr Doctor,’ I said as the nurse returned to his side and handed over the file.

‘There is some sanctuary in that, at least,’ he murmured, glancing over the notes. ‘Yes, I remember him now, poor fellow. Half his head is missing. How he’s still alive is beyond my medical understanding. He’s been in a coma since he got here. Do you still wish to see him? Perhaps wasting time is an institutional habit in the War Crimes Bureau just as much as it was in Kripo?’

‘You know, I’d like to see him. I just want to check he’s not as scared of you as she is, doc.’ I smiled at his nurse. In my experience nurses – even the pretty ones – are always worth a smile.

‘Very well.’ Lustig uttered a weary sigh that was part groan and walked quickly along the corridor. ‘Come along, Herr Gunther,’ he yelled, ‘you must pursue me, you must pursue me. We need to hurry if we are to find Herr Meyer capable of uttering the one all-important word that may provide the vital assistance for your inquiry. Evidently my own word counts for very little these days.’

A few seconds later we met a man with a largish scar under his ill-tempered mouth that looked like a third lip.

‘And this is why that is,’ added the doctor. ‘Criminal Commissar Dobberke. Dobberke is head of the Gestapo office in this hospital. A very important position that ensures our enduring safety and loyal service to the elected government.’

Lustig handed the Gestapo man my card.

‘Dobberke, this is Herr Gunther, formerly of the Alex and now with the Bureau of War Crimes in the Wehrmacht’s legal department. He wishes to see if one of our patients is capable of providing the vital testimony that will change the course of military jurisprudence.’

Quickly I walked after Lustig; so did Dobberke. After several days in bed, I figured such violent exercise could only do me good.

We went into a ward full of men in various states of ill health. It hardly seemed necessary, but all of these patients wore a yellow star on their pyjamas and dressing gowns. They looked undernourished, but that was hardly unusual by Berlin standards. There wasn’t one of us in the city – Jew or German – who couldn’t have used a square meal. Some were smoking, some were talking, and some were playing chess. None of them paid us much regard.

Meyer was behind a screen, in the last bed under a tall window with a view of a fine lawn and a circular ornamental pond. Not that he seemed likely to avail himself of the view: his eyes were closed and there was a bandage around a no longer completely round head, which reminded me of a partly deflated football. But even badly injured, he was still startlingly handsome, like some ruined marble Greek statue on the Pergamon altar.

Lustig went through the motions, checking the unconscious man’s pulse and taking his temperature with one eye on the nurse, and only glancing cursorily at his chart before tutting loudly and shaking his head. It was the kind of bedside manner that would have embarrassed Victor Frankenstein.

‘I thought so,’ he said, firmly. ‘A vegetable. That’s my prognosis.’ He smiled brightly. ‘But go ahead, Herr Gunther. Be my guest. You may question this patient for as long as you see fit. Just don’t expect any answers.’ He laughed. ‘Especially with Commissar Dobberke at your side.’

And then he was gone, leaving me alone with Dobberke.

‘That was a touching reunion.’ By way of explanation I added: ‘Formerly he and I were colleagues at the Police Praesidium.’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t say time or circumstances have mellowed him any.’

‘He’s not such a bad fellow,’ Dobberke said, generously. ‘For a Jew, I mean. But for him this place would never keep going.’

I sat down on the edge of Franz Meyer’s bed and sighed.

‘I don’t see this fellow talking to anyone soon, except Saint Peter,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen a man with a head injury like that since 1918. It’s like someone took a hammer to a coconut.’

‘That’s quite a lump you have on your own head,’ said Dobberke.

I touched my head, self-consciously. ‘I’m all right.’ I shrugged. ‘Why does it keep going? The hospital?’

‘It’s a garbage can for misfits,’ he said. ‘A collection camp. You see, the Jews here are an odd lot. They’re orphans of uncertain parentage, some collaborators, a few pet Jews who are under the protection of one bigwig or another, several attempted suicides—’

Dobberke caught the look of surprise on my face and shrugged.

‘Yes, suicides,’ he said. ‘Well, you can’t make someone who’s half dead walk on and off a deportation train, can you? That’s just more trouble than it’s worth. So they send those yids here, nurse them back to health and then, when they’re well again, put them on the next train East. That’s what’ll happen to this poor bastard if ever he comes round.’

‘So not everyone in here is actually sick?’

‘Lord, no.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I expect they’ll close it down soon enough. Word is that Kaltenbrunner has his eye on owning this hospital.’

‘That ought to come in handy. Nice place like this? Make a nice suite of offices.’

Following the death of my old boss, Reinhard Heydrich, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the new head of the RSHA, but quite what he wanted with his own Jewish hospital was anyone’s guess. His own drying-out clinic, perhaps, but I managed to keep that particular thought to myself. Werner Sachse’s advice to watch my mouth had been wearing red intelligence stripes; after Stalingrad everyone – but more especially Berliners, like me, for whom black humour was a religious calling – was probably well advised to keep a zip on the lip.

‘Will he get it? Kaltenbrunner?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

Because I wanted to look at anything other than poor Franz Meyer’s badly damaged head, I went to the window, which was when I noticed the flower arrangement on his bedside table.

‘That’s interesting,’ I said, looking at the card next to the vase, which was unsigned.

‘What is?’

‘The daffodils,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come out of hospital and no one sent me any flowers. And yet this fellow has fresh flowers, and from Theodor Hübner’s shop on Prinzenstrasse no less.’

‘So?’

‘In Kreuzberg.’

‘I still don’t—’

‘It used to be florist’s by royal appointment. Still is for all I know. Which means they’re expensive. Very expensive.’ I frowned. ‘What I mean to say is, I doubt there are many people in here who get fresh flowers from Hübner’s. In here or anywhere else for that matter.’

Dobberke shrugged. ‘His family must have sent them. The Jews still have plenty of money hidden under their mattresses. Everyone knows that. I was out East, in Riga, and you should have seen what these bastards had in their underwear. Gold, silver, diamonds, you name it.’

I smiled patiently, avoiding the obvious question of exactly how it was that Dobberke came to be looking for valuables in someone else’s underwear.

‘Meyer’s family were Germans,’ I said. ‘And besides, they’re all dead. Killed by the same bomb that gave him the centre parting in his hair. No, it must have been someone else who sent these flowers. Someone German, someone with money and taste. Someone who only has the best.’

‘Well, he’s not saying who they’re from,’ observed Dobberke.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not saying anything, is he? Doctor Lustig was right about that, at least.’

‘I could look into it if you thought it was important. Perhaps one of the nurses could tell you who sent them.’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Forget about it. It’s an old habit of mine, being a detective. Some people collect stamps, others like postcards or autographs; me I collect trivial questions. Why this, why that? Of course any fool can start a collection like that, and it goes without saying that it’s the answers to the questions that are really valuable, because the answers are a lot harder to track down.’

I took another long hard look at Franz Meyer and realized it could just as easily have been me lying in that bed with half a head, and for the first time in a long time I suppose I felt lucky. I don’t know what else you call it when an RAF bomb kills four, maims one, and leaves you with nothing more than a bump on the head. But just the idea of me being lucky again made me smile. Perhaps I’d turned some sort of a corner in my life. It was that and maybe also the apparent success of the women’s protest in Rosenstrasse and the other good luck I’d had not to have been part of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad.

‘What’s amusing?’ asked Dobberke.

I shook my head. ‘I was just thinking that the important thing in life – the really important thing after all is said and done – is just to stay alive.’

‘Is that one of the answers?’ asked Dobberke.

I nodded. ‘I think perhaps it’s the most important answer of all, wouldn’t you say?’

CHAPTER 4

Monday, March 8th 1943

It was a twelve-minute walk to work, depending on the weather. When it was cold, the streets froze hard and you had to walk slowly or risk a broken arm. When it thawed, you only had to beware of falling icicles. By the end of March it was still very cold at night but getting warmer during the day, and at last I felt able to remove the layers of newspaper that had helped to insulate the inside of my boots against a freezing Berlin winter. That made walking easier, too.

The Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) was housed in perhaps the largest office complex in Berlin: a five-storey building of grey granite on the north side of the Landwehr Canal, it occupied the whole corner of Bendlerstrasse and Tirpitzufer. Formerly the headquarters of the Imperial German Navy, it was better known as the Bendlerblock. The Bureau’s offices, at Blumeshof 17, looked onto the back of this building and a rose garden that, in summer, filled the air with such a strong smell of roses some of us who worked there called it the flower house. In my office under the eaves of the high red saddle roof, I had a desk, a filing cabinet, a rug on the wooden floor, and an armchair – I even had a painting and a little piece of bronze from the government’s own collection of art. I did not have a portrait of the leader. Few people who worked at the OKW did.

Usually I got to work early and stayed late, but this had very little to do with loyalty or professional zeal. The heating system in the flower house was so efficient that the cold windowpanes were always covered in condensation, so that you had to wipe them before you could look outside. There were even uniformed orderlies who went around building up the coal fires in the individual offices; which was just as well, as these were enormous. All of this meant that life was much more comfortable at the office than it was at home – especially when one considered the generosity of the OKW’s canteen, which was always open. Mostly the food was just stodge – potatoes, pasta and bread – but there was plenty of it. There was even soap and toilet paper in the washrooms, and newspapers in the mess.

The War Crimes Bureau was part of the Wehrmacht legal department’s international section, whose chief was the ailing Maximilian Wagner. Reporting to him was my boss, Judge Johannes Goldsche. He had headed the bureau from its inception in 1939. He was about sixty, with fair hair and a small moustache, a hooked nose, largish ears, a forehead as high as the roof on the flower house, and an Olympian disdain for the Nazis that stemmed from many years in private practice as a lawyer and judge during the Weimar Republic. His appointment to the bureau owed nothing to his politics and everything to his previous experience of war-crimes investigations, having been deputy director of a similar Prussian bureau during the Great War.

By state law the Wehrmacht was not supposed to be interested in politics, and it took this independence very seriously indeed. In the Wehrmacht’s legal office none of the six jurists charged with the regulation of the various military services were Party members. This is why – although I was not a lawyer – I fitted in very well. I think Goldsche regarded a Berlin detective as a useful blunt object in an arsenal that was filled with more subtle weapons, and he frequently used me to investigate cases where a more robust method of inquiry was required than just the taking of depositions. Few of the judges who worked for the bureau were capable of treating the shirking pigs and lying Fritzes that made up the modern German army – especially the ones who had committed war crimes themselves – as roughly as they sometimes deserved.

What none of these invariably Prussian judges perceived was that there were benefits that attached to being a witness in a war-crimes inquiry: a leave of absence from active service being the main one. As much as possible, we tried to interview men in the field, but it wasn’t every judge who wanted to spend days travelling to the Russian front, and one or two of the younger judges who did – Karl Hofmann for one – found themselves posted to active service. Those who had tried the experience were very nervous about flying to the front and, it’s fair to say, so was I. There are better ways to spend your day than bouncing around inside the freezing fuselage of an iron Annie in winter. Even Hermann Göring preferred the train. But the train was slow and coal shortages often meant that locomotives were stranded for hours – often days – on end. If you were a judge with the bureau, the best thing was to avoid the front altogether, to stay warm at home in Berlin and send someone else to the field – someone like me.

When I arrived at my desk I found a handwritten note summoning me to Goldsche’s office, so I took off my coat and belts, grabbed a notebook and a pencil, and went down to the second floor. It was a lot colder there, on account of the fact that several of the windows had been blown out by the recent bombing and were being replaced by some whistling Russians – part of a POW battalion of glaziers, carpenters and roofers that had come into being in order to make up for the shortage of German workmen. The Russians seemed happy enough. Replacing windows was a better job than disposing of unexploded RAF bombs. And probably anything was better than the Russian front, especially if you were a Russian, where their casualty rate was ten times worse than ours. Unfortunately that didn’t look like it was going to stop them from winning.

I knocked on Goldsche’s door and then entered to find him sitting by the fire wreathed like Zeus in a cloud of pipe smoke, drinking coffee – it must have been his birthday – and facing a thin, bespectacled, almost delicate man of about forty, who had a face as long and pale as a rasher of streaky bacon, and about as devoid of expression. Like most of the men I saw at the bureau, neither of them looked as if he belonged in uniform. I’d seen more convincing soldiers inside a toy box. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable wearing a uniform myself, especially as mine had a little black SD triangle on the left sleeve. (That was another reason Goldsche liked me working there; being SD gave me a certain clout in the field that wasn’t available to the army.) But their lack of obvious martial aptitude was more easily explained than my own: as civil servants within the armed forces, men like Goldsche and his unknown colleague had administrative or legal titles but not ranks, and wore uniforms with distinctive silver braid shoulder-boards to denote their special status as non-military soldiers. It was all very confusing, although I dare say it was much more confusing to people in the OKW how an SD officer like me came to be working for the bureau, and sometimes the SD triangle earned me some suspicious looks in the canteen. But I was used to feeling out of place in Nazi Germany. Besides, Johannes Goldsche knew very well I wasn’t a Party member – that, as a member of Kripo, I hadn’t had much choice in the matter of my uniform – and this was really all that mattered in the old Prussian’s republican book; this and the fact that I disliked the Nazis almost as much as he did.

I came to attention beside Goldsche’s chair and glanced over the pictures on the wall while I waited for the judge to address me. Goldsche was a keen musician, and in most of the pictures he was part of a piano trio that included a famous German actor called Otto Gebühr. I hadn’t heard the trio play but I had seen Gebühr’s performance as Frederick the Great in more films than seemed altogether necessary. The judge had music on the radio, although that was nothing to do with his love of music: he always turned on the radio when he wanted to have a private conversation, just in case anyone from the Research Office – which remained under Göring’s control – was eavesdropping.

‘Hans, this is the fellow I was telling you about,’ said Goldsche. ‘Captain Bernhard Gunther, formerly a commissar with Kripo at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, and now attached to the bureau.’

I clicked my heels, like a good Prussian, and the man waved a silent greeting with his cigarette holder.

‘Gunther, this is Military Court Official von Dohnanyi, formerly of the Reich Ministry of Justice and the Imperial Court, but these days he’s deputy head of the Abwehr’s central section.’

All of which meant of course that the special shoulder-boards and distinctive collar patches and civil servant titles were really quite unnecessary. Von Dohnanyi was a baron, and in the OKW this was the only kind of rank that ever really mattered.

‘Please to meet you, Gunther.’ Dohnanyi was softly spoken like a lot of Berlin lawyers, although perhaps not as slippery as some I’d known. I figured him for one of those lawyers who were more interested in making law than in using it to turn a quick mark.

‘Don’t be fooled by that witchcraft badge he’s wearing on his sleeve,’ added Goldsche. ‘Gunther was a loyal servant of the republic for many years. And a damn good policeman. For a while he was quite a thorn in the side of our new masters, weren’t you, Gunther?’

‘That’s not for me to say. But I’ll take the compliment.’ I glanced at the silver tray on the table between them. ‘And some of that coffee, perhaps.’

Goldsche grinned. ‘Of course. Please. Sit down.’

I sat down and Goldsche helped me to some coffee.

‘I don’t know where the Putzer got this,’ said Goldsche, ‘but it’s actually very good. As a lawyer I should probably have my suspicions about his being a blackie.’

‘Yes, you probably should,’ I remarked. The coffee was delicious. ‘At two hundred marks for a half-kilo that’s quite an orderly you have there. I’d hang on to him if I were you and learn to look the other way like everyone else does in this city.’

‘Oh dear.’ Von Dohnanyi smiled very faintly. ‘I suppose I should confess that the coffee came from me,’ he said. ‘My father gets it whenever he plays a concert in Budapest or Vienna. I was going to mention it before, but I hardly wanted to diminish your good opinion of the Putzer, Johannes. Now it seems I might get him into trouble. The coffee was a gift from me.’

‘My dear fellow, you’re too kind.’ Goldsche glanced my way. ‘Von Dohnanyi’s father is the great conductor and composer, Ernst von Dohnanyi.’ Goldsche was a tremendous snob about classical music.

‘Do you like music, Captain Gunther?’

Dohnanyi’s enquiry was scrupulously polite. Behind his round, frameless glasses the eyes didn’t care if I liked music or not; but then neither did I, and without the von in front of my name I certainly wasn’t nearly as scrupulous as he was about what I used to fill my ears.

‘I like a good melody if it’s sung by a pretty girl with a good pair of lungs, especially when the lyric is a vulgar one and the lungs are really noticeable. And I can’t tell an arpeggio from an archipelago. But life’s too short for Wagner, I do know that much.’

Goldsche grinned enthusiastically. He always seemed to take a vicarious delight in my capacity for blunt talking, which I enjoyed playing up to. ‘What else do you know?’ he enquired.

‘I whistle when I’m in the bath, which isn’t as often as I’d like,’ I added, lighting a cigarette. That was the other good thing about working for the OKW – there was always a plentiful supply of quite decent cigarettes. ‘Talking of which, it seems the Russians are here already.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked von Dohnanyi, momentarily alarmed.

‘Those fellows whistling in the corridor outside the door,’ I said. ‘The skilled German craftsmen from the local glazier’s guild who are repairing the flower-house windows. They’re Russians.’

‘Good Lord,’ said Goldsche. ‘Here? In the OKW? That hardly seems like a good idea. What about security?’

‘Someone’s got to repair the windows,’ I said. ‘It’s cold outside. There’s no secret about that. I just hope the glass is more durable than the Luftwaffe, because I’ve got the feeling the RAF is planning a return visit.’

Von Dohnanyi allowed himself a thin smile and then an even thinner puff of his cigarette. I’d seen children smoke with more gusto.

‘How are you feeling, anyway?’ Goldsche looked at the other lawyer and explained. ‘Gunther was in a house in Lutzow that was bombed while he was taking a deposition from a potential witness. He’s lucky to be here at all.’

‘That’s certainly the way I feel about it.’ I tapped my chest. ‘And I’m much better, thanks.’

‘Fit for work?’

‘Chest is still a bit tight, but otherwise I’m more or less back to normal.’

‘And the witness? Herr Meyer?’

‘He’s alive, but I’m afraid the only evidence he’s going to give any time soon is in the court of heaven.’

‘You’ve seen him?’ asked von Dohnanyi. ‘In the Jewish Hospital?’

‘Yes, poor fellow. A large part of his brain seems to have gone missing. Not that anyone notices that kind of thing very much nowadays. But he’s no use to us now, I’m afraid.’

‘Pity,’ said Goldsche. ‘He was going to be an important witness in a case we were preparing against the Royal Navy,’ he told Von Dohnanyi. ‘The British navy really does think it can get away with murder. Unlike the American navy, which recognizes all our hospital ships, the Royal Navy recognizes the larger-tonnage hospital ships but not the smaller ones.’

‘Because the smaller ones are picking up our unwounded air crews?’ asked Von Dohnanyi.

‘That’s right. It’s a great pity this case collapsed before it even got started. Then again, it does make life a little simpler for us. Not to mention more palatable. Goebbels was interested in putting Franz Meyer on the radio. That wouldn’t have done at all.’

‘It’s not just the ministry of propaganda who were interested in Franz Meyer,’ I said. ‘The Gestapo came to see me while I was in the state hospital, asking questions about Meyer.’

‘Did they?’ murmured Von Dohnanyi.

‘What sort of questions?’ asked Goldsche.

I shrugged. ‘Who his friends were, that kind of thing. They seemed to think Meyer might have been mixed up in some sort of currency-smuggling racket in order to help persuade the Swiss to offer asylum to a group of Jews.’

Goldsche looked puzzled.

‘Money for refugees,’ I added. ‘Well, you know how bighearted the Swiss are. They make all that lovely white chocolate just to help sugar the lie that they’re peace-loving and kind. Of course they’re not. Never were. Even the German army was in the habit of recruiting Swiss mercenaries. The Italians used to call it a bad war when Swiss pikemen were involved because their kind of fighting was so vicious.’

‘What did you tell them?’ asked Goldsche. ‘The Gestapo?’

‘I didn’t tell them anything.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know about a currency racket. The Gestapo mentioned a few names, but I certainly hadn’t heard of them. Anyway, the commissar who came to see me – I know him. He’s not bad as Gestapo officers go. Fellow by the name of Werner Sachse. I’m not sure if he’s a Party member but I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t.’

‘I don’t like the Gestapo involving themselves with our inquiries,’ said Goldsche. ‘I don’t like it at all. Our judicial independence is always under threat from Himmler and his thugs.’

I shook my head. ‘The Gestapo are like dogs. You have to let them lick the bone for a while or they become savage. Take my word for it. This was a routine inquiry. The commissar licked the bone, let me fold his ears and then he slunk away. Simple as that. And there’s no need for alarm. I don’t see anyone winding up this department because seven Jews went skiing in Switzerland without permission.’

Von Dohnanyi shrugged. ‘Captain Gunther is probably right,’ he said. ‘This commissar was just going through the motions, that’s all.’

I smiled patiently, sipped my coffee, checked my own natural curiosity about exactly how it was that Von Dohnanyi had known Meyer was in the Jewish Hospital, and tried to bring the meeting to order. ‘What did you want to see me about, sir?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Goldsche nodded. ‘You’re sure you’re fit, now?’

I nodded.

‘Good.’ Goldsche looked at his aristocratic friend. ‘Hans? Would you care to enlighten the captain?’

‘Certainly.’ Von Dohnanyi put down his cigarette holder, removed his spectacles and then a neatly folded handkerchief, and started to clean the lenses.

I stubbed out my cigarette, opened my notebook, and prepared to take some notes.

Von Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘Please, just listen for now if you would, captain,’ he said. ‘When I’m finished you’ll perhaps understand my request that no notes are taken of this meeting.’

I closed the notebook and waited.

‘Following the Gleiwitz incident, German forces invaded Poland on the first of September 1939, and sixteen days later the Red Army invaded from the East, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed between our two countries on the 23rd of August 1939. Germany annexed western Poland and the Soviet Union incorporated the eastern half into its Ukrainian and Belarussian republics. Some four hundred thousand Polish troops were taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht, while at least another quarter of a million Poles were captured by the Red Army. It is the fate of those Polish men taken prisoner by the Russians with which we are concerned here. Ever since the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union—’

‘Germany’s always been unlucky that way,’ I said. ‘With her friends I mean.’

Ignoring my sarcasm, Von Dohnanyi put his glasses back on his face and continued: ‘Possibly even as soon as August 1941, the Abwehr has been receiving reports of a mass murder of Polish officers that took place in the spring or early summer of 1940. But where this took place was anyone’s guess. Until now, perhaps.

‘There’s a signals regiment, the 537th, commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Ahrens, stationed in a place called Gnezdovo near Smolensk – I understand from Judge Goldsche that you’ve been to Smolensk, Captain Gunther?’

‘Yes sir. I was there in the summer of 1941.’

He nodded. ‘That’s good. Then you’ll know the sort of country I’m talking about.’

‘It’s a dump,’ I said. ‘I can’t see why we thought it worth capturing at all.’

‘Er, yes.’ Von Dohnanyi smiled patiently. ‘Apparently Gnezdovo is an area of thick forest to the west of the city, with wolves and other wild animals, and right now, as you might expect, the whole area is under a thick blanket of snow. The 537th is stationed in a castle or villa in the forest that was formerly used by the Russian secret police – the NKVD. They employ a number of Hiwis – Russian POWS like those glaziers in the corridor – and several weeks ago some of those Hiwis reported that a wolf had dug up some human remains in the forest. Having investigated the site for himself, Ahrens reported finding not one but several human bones. The report was passed on to us in the Abwehr and we then set about evaluating this intelligence. A number of possibilities have presented themselves.

‘One: that the bones are from a mass grave of political prisoners murdered by the NKVD during the so-called Great Purge of 1937 to 1938 following the first and second Moscow trials. We estimate as many as a million Soviet citizens were killed and that they are buried in mass graves all over an area west of Moscow hundreds of square kilometres in size.

‘Two: that the bones are from a mass grave of missing Polish officers. The Soviet government has assured the Polish prime minister in exile, General Sikorski, that all Polish prisoners of war were freed in 1940, after having been transported to Manchuria, and that the Soviets have simply lost track of many of these men because of the war, but it seems clear to our sources in London that the Poles do not believe them. A key factor in the Abwehr’s suspicion that these bones might be those of a Polish officer is the fact that this explanation would fit with previous intelligence reports about Polish officers who were seen at the local railway station in Gnezdovo in May 1940. Remarks made by Foreign Minister Molotov to Von Ribbentrop at the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 have always led us to suppose that Stalin has a deep hatred for the Poles that dates from the Soviet defeat in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20. Also, his son was killed by Polish partisans in 1939.

‘Three: the mass grave is the site of a battle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. This is perhaps the most unlikely scenario, as the battle of Smolensk took place largely to the south of Smolensk and not the west. Moreover the Wehrmacht took over three hundred thousand Red Army soldiers prisoner, and most of these men remain alive, incarcerated in a camp to the north-east of Smolensk.’

‘Or working in the corridor outside,’ I said helpfully.

‘Please Gunther,’ said Goldsche. ‘Let him finish.’

‘Four: this is perhaps the most politically sensitive of all the possibilities and is also why I have asked you to forbear from taking notes, Captain Gunther.’

It wasn’t difficult to guess why Von Dohnanyi hesitated to describe the fourth possibility. It was hard to talk about this subject – hard for him and even harder for me, who had first-hand experience of some of these dreadful things that were so ‘politically sensitive’.

‘Four is the possibility that this is one of many mass graves in the region full of Jews murdered by the SS,’ I said.

Von Dohnanyi nodded. ‘The SS is very secretive about these matters,’ he said. ‘But we have information that a special battalion of SS attached to Gottlob Berger’s Group B and commanded by an Obersturmführer by the name of Oskar Dirlewanger was active in the area immediately west of Smolensk during the spring of last year. There are no accurate figures available, but one estimate we have holds Dirlewanger’s single battalion responsible for the murders of at least fourteen thousand people.’

‘The last thing we want to do is step on the toes of the SS,’ said Goldsche. ‘Which means this is a matter requiring great confidentiality. Frankly there will be hell to pay if we go around uncovering mass graves of their making.’

‘That’s a delicate way of putting it, Judge,’ I said. ‘Since I assume it’s me you want to send down to Smolensk and investigate this, then I’m supposed to make sure that this is the correct mass grave we’re uncovering, is that what you mean?’

‘In a nutshell, yes,’ said Goldsche. ‘Right now the ground is frozen hard, so there’s no possibility of digging for more bodies. Not for several weeks. Until then we need to find out all we can. So, if you could spend a couple of days down there. Speak to some of the locals, visit the site, evaluate the situation, and then come back to Berlin and report directly to me. If it is our jurisdiction, then we can organize a full war-crimes inquiry with a proper judge almost immediately.’ He shrugged. ‘But to send a judge at this stage would be too much.’

‘Agreed,’ said Von Dohnanyi. ‘It would send the wrong signals. Best to keep things low-key at this stage.’

‘Let me check my mental shorthand, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘About just what you want me to do. So as I know, for sure. If this mass grave is full of Jews, then I’m to forget about it. But if it’s full of Polish officers, then it’s the Bureau’s meat. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘That’s not a very subtle way of putting it,’ said Von Dohnanyi, ‘but yes. That’s exactly what’s required of you, Captain Gunther.’

For a moment he glanced up at the landscape above Goldsche’s fireplace as if wishing he could have been there instead of a smoky office in Berlin, and I felt a sneer start to gather at the edge of my mouth. The picture was one of those Italian campagnas painted at the end of a summer’s day, when the light is interesting to a painter, and some tiny old men with long beards and wearing togas are standing around a ruined classical landscape and asking themselves who’s going to carry out the necessary building repairs because all the young men are away at the wars. They didn’t have Russian POWs to fix their windows in those Arcadian days.

My sneer expanded to full contempt for his delicate sensibility.

‘Oh, but it won’t be subtle, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I can promise you that much. Certainly nowhere near as subtle as in that nice picture. Smolensk is no bucolic demi-paradise. It’s a ruin all right, but it’s a ruin because that’s how our tanks and artillery have left it. It’s a ruin that’s full of ugly frightened people who were only just managing to eke out a living when the Wehrmacht turned up demanding to be fed and watered for not much money. Zeus won’t be seducing Io, it’ll be a Fritz trying to rape some poor peasant girl; and in Smolensk the pretty landscape isn’t covered in an amber glow of warm Italian sunlight but a hard permafrost. No, it won’t be subtle. And believe me, there’s nothing subtle about a body that’s been in the ground. It’s surprising how indelicate something like that turns out to be, and how quickly it becomes something very unpleasant indeed. There’s the smell for example. Bodies have a habit of decomposing when they’ve been in the earth for a while.’

I lit another cigarette and enjoyed their joint discomfort. There was a silence for a long moment. Von Dohnanyi looked nervous about something – more nervous than what he had just told me suggested, perhaps. Or maybe he just wanted to hit me. I get a lot of that.

‘But I take your point,’ I added, more helpfully this time, ‘about the SS, I mean. We wouldn’t want to upset them, now would we? And believe me I know what I’m talking about, I’ve done it before, so I’m equally anxious not to do it again.’

‘There is a fifth possibility,’ added Goldsche, ‘which is why I would prefer to have a proper detective on the scene.’

‘And that is?’

‘I would like you to make absolutely sure that this whole thing is not some ghastly lie dreamed up by the ministry of propaganda. That this body has not been deliberately planted there to play first us and then the world’s media like a grand piano. Because make no mistake about it, gentlemen, that’s exactly what will happen if this does turn out to be the dwarf’s ring.’

I nodded. ‘Fair enough. But you’re forgetting a sixth possibility, surely.’

Von Dohnanyi frowned. ‘And what is that?’

‘If this does turn out to be a mass grave, that it’s full of Polish officers that the German army murdered.’

Von Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said.

‘Is it? I don’t see how your second possibility can even exist without the possibility of the sixth one, too.’

‘That’s logically true,’ admitted Von Dohnanyi. ‘But the fact remains that the German army does not murder prisoners of war.’

I grinned. ‘Oh, well that’s all right then. Forgive me for mentioning it, sir.’

Von Dohnanyi coloured a little. You don’t get a lot of sarcasm in the concert hall or the Imperial Court, and I doubt he’d spoken to a real policeman since 1928 when, like every other aristocrat, he’d applied for a firearm permit so he could shoot wild boar and the odd Bolshevik.

‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘this part of Russia has only been in German hands since September 1941. There’s that and the fact that it’s a matter of military record which Poles were prisoners of Germany and which were prisoners of the Soviet Union. This information is already known to the Polish government in London. For that reason alone it should be easy to establish if any of these men were prisoners of the Red Army. Which is why I myself think it’s highly improbable that this could be something manufactured by the ministry of propaganda. Because it would be all too easy to disprove.’

‘Perhaps you’re right, Hans,’ admitted the judge.

‘I am right,’ insisted Von Dohnanyi. ‘You know I’m right.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said the judge, ‘I want to be sure exactly what we’re dealing with here. And as quickly as possible. So, will you do it, Gunther? Will you go down there and see what you can find out?’

I had little appetite to see Smolensk again, or for that matter anywhere else in Russia. The whole country filled me with a combination of fear and shame, for there was no doubt that whatever crimes the Red Army had committed in the name of communism, the SS had committed equally heinous ones in the name of Nazism. Probably our crimes were more heinous. Executing enemy officers in uniform was one thing – I had some experience of that myself – but murdering women and children was quite another.

‘Yes sir. I’ll go. Of course I’ll go.’

‘Good fellow,’ said the judge. ‘As I said already, if there’s even a hint that this is the handiwork of those thugs in the SS, don’t do anything. Get the hell out of Smolensk as quickly as possible, come straight home and pretend you know nothing at all about it.’

‘With pleasure.’

I smiled wryly and shook my head as I wondered what magic mountain top these two men were on. Perhaps you had to be a judge or an aristocrat to look down from the heights and see what was important here – important for Germany. Me, I had more pressing concerns – myself for example. And from where I was sitting the whole business of investigating the mass murder of some Poles looked a lot like one donkey calling another donkey long-ears.

‘Is there something wrong?’ asked Von Dohnanyi.

‘Only that it’s a little difficult for me to see how anyone might think Nazi Germany could ever occupy moral high ground on an issue like this.’

‘An investigation and then a white book could prove extremely useful in restoring our reputation for fair play and probity in the eyes of the world,’ said the judge. ‘When all this is over.’

So that was it. A white book. An evidentiary record that influential and honourable men like Judge Goldsche and Court Official von Dohnanyi could produce from a Foreign Office archive after the war was concluded to show other influential and honourable men from England and America that not all Germans had behaved as badly as the Nazis, or that the Russians had been just as bad as we were, or something similar. I had my doubts about that working out.

‘Mark my words,’ said Dohnanyi, ‘if this is what I think it is then it’s just a beginning. We have to start rebuilding our moral fabric somewhere.’

‘Tell that to the SS,’ I said.

CHAPTER 5

Wednesday, March 10th 1943

At six a.m. on a bitterly cold Berlin morning I arrived at Tegel airfield to board my flight to Russia. A long journey lay ahead, although only half of the other ten passengers climbing aboard the three-engined Ju52 were actually going as far as Smolensk. Most it seemed were getting off at the end of the first leg of the journey – Berlin to Rastenburg – which was a mere four hours. After that there was a second leg, to Minsk, which took another four hours, before the third leg – two hours – to Smolensk. With stops for refuelling and a pilot change in Minsk, the whole journey to Smolensk was scheduled to take eleven and a half hours, all of which helped explain why it was me being sent down there instead of some fat-arsed judge with a bad back from the Wehrmacht legal department. So I was surprised when I discovered that one of the other dozen or so other passengers arriving on the tarmac in a chauffeur-driven private Mercedes was none other than the fastidious court official from the Abwehr, Hans von Dohnanyi.

‘Is this a coincidence?’ I asked cheerfully. ‘Or did you come to see me off?’

‘I’m sorry?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, I didn’t recognize you. You’re flying to Smolensk, aren’t you, Captain Bernhard?’

‘Unless you know something different,’ I said. ‘And my name is Gunther, Captain Bernhard Gunther.’

‘Yes, of course. No, as it happens I’m travelling with you on the same plane. I was going to take the train and then changed my mind. But now I’m not so sure I made the right choice.’

‘I’m afraid you’re between the wall and a fierce dog with that one,’ I said.

We climbed aboard and took our seats along the corrugated fuselage: it was like sitting inside a workman’s hut.

‘Are you getting off at the Wolf’s Lair?’ I asked. ‘Or going all the way to Smolensk?’

‘No, I’m going all the way.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have some urgent and unexpected Abwehr business to attend to with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters.’

‘Bring a packed lunch, did you?’

‘Hmm?’

I nodded at the parcel he was holding under his arm.

‘This? No, it’s not my lunch. It’s a gift for someone. Some Cointreau.’

‘Cointreau. Real coffee. Is there nothing beyond your great father’s talents?’

Von Dohnanyi smiled his thin smile, stretched his thinner neck over his tailored tunic collar. ‘Would you excuse me please, captain.’

He waved at two staff officers with red stripes on their trousers and then went to sit beside them at the opposite end of the aircraft, just behind the cockpit. Even on a Ju52, people like Von Dohnanyi and the staff officers managed somehow to make their own first class; it wasn’t that the seats were any better up front, just that none of these flamingos really wanted to talk with junior officers like me.

I lit a cigarette and tried to make myself comfortable. The engines started and the door closed. The co-pilot locked the door and put his hand on one of two beam-mounted machine guns that could be moved up and down the length of the aircraft.

‘We’re a crew member short, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘So does anyone know how to use one of these?’

I looked at my fellow passengers. No one spoke, and I wondered what the point was of transporting any of these men nearer the front; none of them looked as though they could have worked a door-lock, let alone an MG15.

‘I do,’ I said, raising my hand.

‘Good,’ said the co-pilot. ‘There’s a one-in-a-hundred chance we’ll run into an RAF Mosquito as we’re flying out of Berlin, so stay on the gun for the next fifteen minutes, eh?’

‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But what about in Smolensk?’

The co-pilot shook his head. ‘The front line is five hundred miles east of Smolensk. That’s too far for Russian fighters.’

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said someone.

‘Don’t worry,’ grinned the co-pilot. ‘The cold’ll probably kill you long before then.’

We took off in the early morning light, and when we were airborne I stood up, slid the window open and poked the MG outside, expectantly. The saddle drum held seventy-five rounds, but my hands were soon so cold I didn’t much fancy our chances of hitting anything with it and was quite relieved when the co-pilot shouted back that I could stand down. I was even more relieved to close the window against the freezing air that was filling the aircraft.

I sat down, tucked my numb hands under my armpits and tried to go to sleep.

Four hours later, as we approached Rastenburg, in Eastern Prussia, people turned around in their seats and, looking out of the windows, eagerly tried to catch a glimpse of the leader’s headquarters, nicknamed the Wolf’s Lair.

‘You won’t see it,’ said some know-it-all who’d been there before. ‘All of the buildings are camouflaged. If you could see it then so could the fucking RAF.’

‘If they could get this far,’ said someone else.

‘They weren’t supposed to get as far as Berlin’ said another, ‘but somehow, against all predictions, they did.’

We landed a few miles west of the Wolf’s Lair, and I went to look for an early lunch or a late breakfast but, finding neither, I sat in a hut that was almost as cold as the plane and ate some meagre cheese sandwiches I had brought with me just in case. I didn’t see Von Dohnanyi again until we were back on the plane.

The air between Rastenburg and Minsk was rougher, and from time to time the Junkers would drop like a stone before hitting the bottom of the pocket like a water bucket in a well. It wasn’t long before Von Dohnanyi was starting to look very green.

‘Perhaps you should drink some of those spirits,’ I said, which was a crude way of telling him that I wouldn’t have minded a drop of it myself.

‘What?’

‘Your friend’s Cointreau. You should drink some to settle your stomach.’

He looked baffled for a minute and then shook his head, weakly.

One of the other passengers, an SS lieutenant who had boarded the plane at Rastenburg, produced a hip flask of peach schnapps and handed it around. I took a bite off it just as we hit another big air pocket, and this one seemed to jolt all the life out of Von Dohnanyi, who fell onto the fuselage floor in a dead faint. Overcoming my natural instinct, which was always to leave the people in the first class to look after themselves, I knelt down beside him, loosened the collar on his tunic and poured some of the lieutenant’s schnapps between his lips. That was when I saw the address on Von Dohnanyi’s parcel, which was still under his seat.

Colonel Helmuth Stieff, Wehrmacht Coordination Dept., Anger Castle, Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, Prussia.

Von Dohnanyi opened his eyes, sighed and then sat up.

‘You just fainted, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Might be best if you lay on the floor for a while.’

So he did, and actually managed to sleep for a couple of hours while from time to time I wondered if Von Dohnanyi had simply forgotten to deliver his bottle of Cointreau to his friend Colonel Stieff at the Wolf’s Lair, or if perhaps he had changed his mind about handing over such a generous present. If the booze was anything like the coffee it was certain to be high-quality stuff, much too good to give away. He could hardly have forgotten about the parcel, since I was certain he had taken it with him when we got off the plane in Rastenburg. So why hadn’t he given it to one of the many orderlies for delivery to Colonel Stieff, or even, if he didn’t trust them, to one of the other staff officers who were going straight to the Wolf’s Lair? Of course one of them might equally have told von Dohnanyi that Stieff was no longer at the Wolf’s Lair – that would have explained everything. But like an itch that kept on coming back, no amount of scratching I did seemed to take away from the fact that Von Dohnanyi’s failure to deliver his precious bottle just seemed strange.

There’s not an awful lot to do on a four-hour flight between Rastenburg and Minsk.

It was still light by the time we reached Smolensk several hours later, but only just. For almost an hour before that we’d been flying over an endless, thick green carpet of trees. It seemed there were more trees in Russia than anywhere else on earth. There were so many trees that at times the Junkers seemed almost immobile in the air and I felt as if we were drifting over a primordial landscape. I suppose Russia is as near as you can get to what the earth must have been like thousands of years ago – in more ways than one; probably it was an excellent place to be a squirrel, although perhaps not such an excellent place to be a man. If you were intent on hiding the bodies of thousands of Jews or Polish officers, this looked like a good place to do it. You could have hidden all manner of crimes in a landscape like the one below our aircraft, and the sight of it filled me with me dread not just for what I might find down there but also for what I might find myself faced with again. It was only a dark possibility, but I knew instinctively that in the winter of 1943 this was no place to be an SD officer with a guilty conscience.

Von Dohnanyi had made a full recovery by the time a clearing in the forest finally appeared to the north of the city like a long green swimming pool, and we landed. Steps were wheeled quickly into place on the tarmac and we stepped out into a wind that quickly cut a jagged hole in my greatcoat, then my torso, leaving me feeling as cold as a frozen herring and, in the centre of that enormous tract of forest, just as out of place. I pulled my crusher about my frozen ears and looked around for a sign of someone from the signals regiment who was supposed to meet me. Meanwhile my erstwhile travelling companion paid me no attention as he came down the steps of the aircraft and was immediately met by two senior officers – one of them a general with more fur on his collar than an Eskimo – and seemed quite indifferent to my own lack of transport as, laughing loudly, he and his pals shook hands while an orderly loaded his luggage into their large staff car.

A Tatra with a little black and yellow flag bearing the number 537 on the hood drew up next to the staff car and two officers climbed out. Seeing the general, the two officers saluted, were cursorily acknowledged, and then walked toward me. The Tatra had its top up but there were no windows and it seemed another cold journey lay ahead of me.

‘Captain Gunther?’ said the taller man.

‘Yes sir.’

‘I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Ahrens, of the 537th Signals,’ he said. ‘This is Lieutenant Rex, my adjutant. Welcome to Smolensk. Rex was going to meet you by himself, but at the last minute I thought I’d join him and put you fully in the picture on the way back to the castle.’

‘I’m very glad you did, sir.’

A moment later the staff car drove away.

‘Who were the flamingos?’ I asked.

‘General von Tresckow,’ said Ahrens. ‘With Colonel von Gersdorff. I can’t say I recognized the third officer.’ Ahrens had a lugubrious sort of face – he was not unhandsome – and an even more lugubrious voice.

‘Ah, that explains it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The third officer – the one you didn’t recognize, the one who got off the plane – he was also an aristocrat,’ I explained.

‘It figures,’ said Ahrens. ‘Field Marshal von Kluge runs Army Group HQ like it’s a branch of the German Club. I get my orders from General Oberhauser. He’s a professional soldier, like me. He’s not an aristocrat; and not so bad, as staff officers go. My predecessor Colonel Bedenck used to say that you never really know exactly how many staff officers there are until you try and get into an air-raid shelter.’

‘I like the sound of your old colonel,’ I said, walking toward the Tatra. ‘He and I sound as if we’re cut from the same cloth.’

‘Your cloth is a little darker than his, perhaps,’ said Ahrens pointedly. ‘Especially the cloth of your other uniform – the dress one. After what he saw in Minsk, Bedenck could hardly bear to be in the same room as an officer of the SS or SD. Since you’re to be billeted with us for security reasons, I might as well confess I feel much the same way. I was a little surprised when Major-General Oster from the Abwehr telephoned and told me that the Bureau was sending an SD man down here. There’s little love lost between the SD and the Wehrmacht in my corner.’

I grinned. ‘I appreciate a man who comes right out and says what’s on his mind. There’s not a lot of that around since Stalingrad. Especially in uniform. So as one professional to another let me tell you this. My other uniform is a cheap suit and a felt hat. I’m not the Gestapo, I’m just a policeman from Kripo who used to work homicide, and I’m not here to spy on anyone. I intend going home to Berlin just as soon as I’ve finished looking at all the evidence you’ve gathered, but I tell you frankly sir, mostly I’m just looking out for myself, and I don’t give a damn what your secrets are.’

I put my hand on a long shovel that was attached to the Tatra’s bonnet. The little cars were no good in mud or on snow and frequently you had to dig them out or shovel gravel under the wheels: there was probably a sack of it behind the back seat.

‘But if I am lying to you, colonel, you have my permission to bang me on the head with this and have your men bury me in the woods. On the other hand, you might think I’ve already said enough to bury me yourself.’

‘Fair enough, captain.’ Colonel Ahrens smiled and then took out a little cigarette case. He offered one to me and to his lieutenant. ‘I appreciate your candour.’

We puffed them into life until it was almost impossible to distinguish smoke from our hot breath in freezing cold air.

‘Now then,’ I said. ‘You mentioned something about being billeted with you? If I didn’t need it to go back to Berlin, I could cheerfully hope that I never again saw a Junkers 52.’

‘Of course,’ said Ahrens. ‘You must be exhausted.’

We climbed into the Tatra. A corporal named Rose was at the wheel, and we were soon bowling along quite a decent road.

‘You’ll be staying with us in the castle,’ said Ahrens. ‘That’s Dnieper Castle, which is along the main road to Vitebsk. Nearly all of Army Group Centre, the Air Force Corps, the Gestapo and my lot are located west of Smolensk, in and around a place called Krasny Bor. The General Staff is headquartered in a nearby health resort which is as good as it gets around here, but we’re not badly off at the castle in signals. Are we, Rex?’

‘No sir. We’re well set, I think.’

‘There’s a cinema and a sauna – there’s even a rifle range. Grub’s pretty good, you’ll be glad to hear. Most of us – at least the officers anyway – we don’t actually go into Smolensk itself very much at all.’ Ahrens waved at some onion-dome spires on the horizon to our left. ‘But it’s not a bad place, to be honest. Rather historic, really. There are more churches hereabouts than you could polish the floor with. Rex is your man for that sort of thing, aren’t you lieutenant?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Rex. ‘There’s a fine cathedral, captain. The Assumption. I do recommend you see that while you’re here. That is, if you’re not too busy. By rights it shouldn’t be there at all: during the siege of Smolensk at the start of the seventeenth century, the defenders of the city locked themselves in the crypt where there was an ammunition depot and blew it and themselves up to prevent it from falling into Polish hands. History repeats itself, of course. The local NKVD used to keep some of its own personnel and domestic case files in the crypt of the Assumption Cathedral – to protect them against the Luftwaffe – and when it became clear that the city was about to be captured by us they tried to blow them up, like they did in Kiev, at the city’s Duma building. Only the explosives didn’t go off.’

‘I knew there was a reason it wasn’t on my itinerary.’

‘Oh, the cathedral is quite safe,’ said Rex. ‘Most of the explosive has been removed, but our engineers think there are still lots of hidden bombs in the crypt. One of our men had his face blown off when he opened a filing cabinet down there. So it’s just the crypt that remains out of bounds to visitors. Most of the material is of limited military intelligence value, and probably out of date by now, so the more time that passes the less important it seems to risk looking at it.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s really a very impressive building. Napoleon certainly thought so.’

‘I had no idea he got this far,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Rex. ‘He really was the Hitler of—’ he stopped, mid-sentence.

‘The Hitler of his day,’ I said, smiling at the nervous lieutenant. ‘Yes, I can see how that comparison works very well for us all.’

‘We’re not used to visitors, as you can see,’ said Ahrens. ‘On the whole we keep ourselves to ourselves. For no other reason other than secrecy. Well, you’d expect tight security with a signals regiment. We have a map room that indicates the disposition of all our troops from which our future military intentions are plain; and of course all of the group’s communications come through us. It goes without saying that this room and the actual telephone room are barred to ordinary access, but we do have lots of Ivans working at the castle – four Hiwis who are permanently on site and some female personnel who come in every day from Smolensk to cook and skivvy for us. But every German unit has Ivans working for them in Smolensk.’

‘How many of you are there?’

‘Three officers including myself and about twenty non-commissioned officers and men,’ said Ahrens.

‘And how long have you been here?’

‘Me personally? Since the end of November 1941. If I remember rightly, on thirtieth November.’

‘What about partisans? Get any trouble from them?’

‘None to speak of. At least not close to Smolensk. But we have had air attacks.’

‘Really? The pilot on the plane said this was too far east for the Ivan air force.’

‘Well he would, wouldn’t he? The Luftwaffe is under strict orders to maintain that bullshit argument. But it’s just not true. No, we’ve had air attacks all right. One of the troop houses in our compound was badly damaged early last year. Since then we’ve had a big problem with German troops cutting down the wood around the castle for fuel. That’s the Katyn Wood. The trees provide us with excellent anti-aircraft cover, so I’ve had to forbid entry to the Katyn Wood to all German soldiers. It’s caused problems because this obliges our troops to forage further afield, which they’re reluctant to do, of course, because that exposes them to the risk of partisan attack.’

This was the first time I’d heard the name Katyn Wood.

‘So tell me about this body. The one the wolf discovered.’ I laughed.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Only that we’ve got a wolf and some woodcutters, and a castle. I can’t help thinking there should be a couple of lost children in this story, not to mention a wicked wizard.’

‘Maybe you’re it, captain.’

‘Maybe I am. I do make a wicked fire-tongs punch. At least I used to when you could get any brown rum and oranges.’

‘Fire-tongs punch.’ Ahrens repeated the words dreamily and shook his head. ‘Yes, I’d almost forgotten that.’

‘Me too until I mentioned it.’ I shivered.

‘I could certainly use a cup now,’ said Lieutenant Rex.

‘Just another enjoyable thing that sneaked out of Germany’s back door and left no forwarding address,’ I said.

‘You know, you’re a strange fellow for an SD officer,’ said Ahrens.

‘That’s what General Heydrich told me once.’ I shrugged. ‘Words to that effect anyway – I’m not exactly sure. He had me chained to a wall and was torturing my girlfriend at the time.’

I laughed at their obvious discomfort, which in truth was probably less than mine. I was hardly as used to the cold as they were, and the rush of freezing air through the windowless Tatra took my breath away.

‘You were about to say, about the body,’ I said.

‘Back in November 1941, shortly after I arrived in Smolensk, one of my men pointed out that there was a sort of mound in our little wood and that upon this mound was a birch cross. The Hiwis mentioned some shootings had taken place in the Katyn Wood the year before. Shortly after that I said something about it in passing to Colonel von Gersdorff, who’s our local chief of intelligence, and he said he too had heard something about this, but that I shouldn’t be surprised because this kind of Bolshevik brutality was exactly what we were fighting against.’

‘Yes. That’s what he would say, I suppose.’

‘Then in January I saw a wolf in our wood, which was unusual because they don’t come so near the city.’

‘Like the partisans,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Mostly they stay further west. Von Kluge hunts them with his own Putzer, who’s a Russian.’

‘So he’s not particularly worried about partisans?’

‘Hardly. He used to go after wild boar, but in winter he prefers to hunt wolves from a plane – a Storch he keeps down here. Doesn’t even bother to land and collect the fur, most of the time. I think he just likes killing things.’

‘Around these parts that’s infectious,’ I said. ‘Anyway, you were saying about the wolf.’

‘It had been on the mound in the Katyn Wood, next to the cross, and had dug up some human bones, which must have taken a while as the ground is still like iron. I suppose it was hungry. I had a doctor take a look at the remains and he declared that they were human. I decided it must be a soldier’s grave and informed the officer in charge of war graves around here. I also reported the discovery to Lieutenant Voss of the field police. And I put it in my report to group, who must have passed it on to the Abwehr, because they telephoned and said you were coming. They also told me not to talk about it with anyone else.’

‘And have you?’

‘Until now, no.’

‘Good. Let’s keep it that way.’

It was dark by the time we reached the castle, which wasn’t really a castle at all, but a two-storey white stucco villa of about fourteen to fifteen rooms, one of which was assigned temporarily to me. After an excellent dinner with real meat and potatoes I went with Ahrens on a short tour, and it quickly became obvious that he was rather proud of his ‘castle’ and even prouder of his men. The villa was warm and hospitable, with a large roaring log fire in the main entrance hall, and, as Ahrens had promised, there was even a small cinema where once a week a German film was screened. But Ahrens was especially proud of his home-made honey because, with the help of a local Russian couple, he kept an apiary in the castle grounds. Clearly his men loved him. There were worse places to see out a war than Dnieper Castle, and besides, it’s hard to dislike a man who is so enthusiastic about bees and honey. The honey was delicious, there was plenty of hot water for a bath, and my bed was warm and comfortable.

Fuelled up on honey and schnapps, I slept like a worker bee in a temperature-controlled hive and dreamed about a crooked house with a witch in it and being lost in the woods with a wolf prowling around. The house even had a sauna and a small cinema and venison for supper. It wasn’t a nightmare because the witch turned out to like sitting in the sauna, which was how we got to know each other a lot better. You can get to know anyone well in a sauna, even a witch.

CHAPTER 6

Thursday, March 11th 1943

I awoke early the next morning feeling a little tired from the flight but keen to get on with my inquiry, because of course I was even keener to return home. After breakfast, Ahrens got the key to the cold storeroom where the remains were kept and we went down to the basement to examine these. I found a large tarpaulin laid out on the stone floor. Ahrens drew back the top part to reveal what looked like a tibia, a fibula, a femur and half a pelvis. I lit a cigarette – it was better than the stale, meaty smell coming off the bones – and dropped down on my haunches to take a closer look.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, handling the tarpaulin.

‘From an Opel Blitz,’ said Ahrens.

I nodded and let the smoke drift up my nostrils. There wasn’t much to say about the bones except that these were human and that an animal – presumably the wolf – had been chewing them.

‘What happened to the wolf?’ I asked.

‘We chased it off,’ said Ahrens.

‘Seen any wolves since?’

‘I haven’t but some of the men might have. We can ask if you like.’

‘Yes. And I’d like to see the spot where these remains were found.’

‘Of course.’

We fetched our greatcoats and were joined outside by Lieutenant Hodt and Oberfeldwebel Krimminski from the 537th, who had been guarding against German soldiers looking to take wood for their fires. At my request, the Oberfeldwebel had brought an entrenching tool. We walked north along the snow-covered castle road towards the Vitebsk highway. The forest was mostly birch trees, some of them recently felled, which seemed to bear out the colonel’s story regarding troop foraging.

‘There’s a fence about a kilometre away that marks the perimeter of the castle land,’ said Ahrens. ‘But there must have been some sort of a fight around here, as you can still see some trenches and foxholes.’

A little further on we turned west off the road and began the more difficult task of walking in the snow. A couple of hundred metres away we came upon a mound and a cross made from two pieces of birch.

‘It’s about here that we came across the wolf and the remains,’ explained Ahrens. ‘Krimminski? The captain was wondering if any of us had seen the animal since.’

‘No,’ said Krimminski. ‘But we’ve heard wolves at night.’

‘Any tracks?’

‘If there were any the snow covered them up. It snows most nights around here.’

‘So we wouldn’t know if the wolf had come back for seconds?’ I said.

‘It’s possible, sir,’ said Krimminski. ‘But I haven’t seen any signs of that having happened.’

‘This birch cross,’ I said. ‘Who put it there?’

‘Nobody seems to know,’ said Ahrens. ‘Although Lieutenant Hodt has a theory. Don’t you, Hodt?’

‘Yes sir. I think this is not the first time human remains have been found around here. My theory is that when it happened before, the locals reburied them and erected the cross.’

‘Good theory,’ I said. ‘Did you ask them about it?’

‘No one tells us very much about anything,’ said Hodt. ‘They’re still afraid of the NKVD.’

‘I shall want to speak to some of these locals of yours,’ I said.

‘We get on pretty well with our Hiwis,’ said Ahrens. ‘It didn’t seem worth upsetting the saucer of milk by accusing anyone of lying.’

‘All the same,’ I said. ‘I shall still want to speak to them.’

‘Then you’d better speak to the Susanins,’ said Ahrens. ‘They’re the couple who we have most to do with. They look after the hives and tell the Russian staff what to do in the castle.’

‘Who else is there?’

‘Let’s see: there’s Tsanava and Abakumov – they look after our chickens; Moskalenko who chops wood for us; the laundry is done by Olga and Irina. Our cooks are Tanya and Rudolfovich. Marusya, the kitchen maid. But look here, I don’t want you bullying them, Captain Gunther. There’s a status quo here I wouldn’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Colonel Ahrens,’ I said. ‘If this does turn out to be a grave full of dead Polish officers, then it’s probably already too late for that.’

Ahrens swore under his breath.

‘That is unless you yourselves shot some Polish officers,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps the SS. I can more or less guarantee that no one back in Berlin is interested in uncovering any evidence of that.’

‘We haven’t shot any Poles,’ sighed Ahrens. ‘Here, or anywhere else.’

‘What about Ivans? You must have captured a lot of Red Army after the battle of Smolensk. Did you shoot any of them, perhaps?’

‘We captured about seventy thousand men, many of whom are now held in Camp 126, about twenty-five kilometres to the west of Smolensk. And there’s another camp in Vitebsk. You are welcome to go and take a look at them for yourself, Captain Gunther.’ He bit his lip for a moment before continuing: ‘I’m told that conditions there have improved, but in the beginning there were so many Russian POWs that conditions in the Ivan camps were extremely harsh.’

‘So what you’re saying is that there was probably no need to shoot them when they could just as easily be starved to death.’

‘This is a signals regiment, damn it,’ said Ahrens. ‘The welfare of Russian POWs is not my department.’

‘No, of course not. I wasn’t suggesting that it was. I’m merely trying to establish the facts here. In wartime people have a habit of forgetting where they’ve left them. Don’t you agree, colonel?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said stiffly.

‘Your predecessor, Colonel Bedenck. What about him? Did he shoot anyone in this wood, perhaps?’

‘No,’ insisted Ahrens.

‘How can you be sure of that? You weren’t here.’

‘I was here, sir,’ said Lieutenant Hodt. ‘When Colonel Bedenck was in command of the five hundred and thirty-seventh. And you have my word that no one has been shot in this wood by us. No Russians and no Poles.’

‘Good enough,’ I said. ‘All right then, what about the SS? Special Action Group B was stationed in Smolensk for a while. Is it possible the SS left a few thousand calling cards down there?’

‘We’ve been at this castle since the beginning,’ said Hodt. ‘The SS were active elsewhere. And before you ask, I’m certain of that because this is a signals regiment. I myself set up their SS command post with telephone and teletype. And the local Gestapo. All of their communications with Group HQ would have come through us. Telephone and teletype. And all their other traffic with Berlin. If any Poles had been shot by the SS, I’m certain I would have known about it.’

‘Then you might also know if any Jews had been shot around here.’

Hodt looked awkward for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would.’

‘And were there?’

Hodt hesitated.

‘Come now, lieutenant,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to be coy about this. We both know the SS have been murdering Jews in Russia since the first day of Operation Barbarossa. I’ve heard tell that as many as half a million people were butchered in the first six months alone.’ I shrugged. ‘Look, all I’m trying to do is establish a perimeter of safe inquiry. A pale beyond which it’s not wise for me to go walking in my size forty-six policeman’s boots. Because the last thing any of us wants to do is to lift the lid of their hive.’ I glanced at Ahrens. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? Bees? They don’t like it when you open their hive, right?’

‘Um, no, you’re right,’ he said. ‘They don’t particularly like it.’ He nodded. ‘And let me answer that question. About the SS. And what they’ve been up to around here.’

He led me a short distance away from the others. We walked carefully as the ground was icy and uneven under the snow. To me the Katyn Wood felt like a dismal place in a country that was full of equally dismal places. Cold air hung damp around us like a fine curtain, while elsewhere pockets of mist rolled into hollows in the ground like the smoke from invisible artillery. Crows growled their contempt for my inquiries in the tops of the trees, and overhead a barrage balloon was moored to prevent overflights by enemy aircraft. Ahrens lit another cigarette and yawned a steamy plume.

‘It’s hard to believe, but we prefer it here in winter,’ he said. ‘In just a few weeks from now this whole wood will be full of mosquitoes. They drive you mad. Just one of many things that drive you mad out here.’ He shook his head. ‘Look, Captain Gunther, none of us in this regiment is very political. Most of us just want to win this war quickly and go home – if such a thing is still possible after Stalingrad. When that happened, we all listened to the radio, to hear what Goebbels would say about it. Did you hear the speech? From the Sportspalast?’

‘I heard it.’ I shrugged. ‘I live in Berlin. It was so loud I could hear every word Joey said without even having to turn on the fucking radio.’

‘Then you recall how he asked the German people if they wanted a war more radical than anything ever imagined. Total war, he called it.’

‘He has quite a turn of phrase, does our Mahatma Propagandi.’

‘Yes. Only it seems to me – to all of us at the castle – that total war is what we’ve had on this front since day one, and I don’t recall anyone asking any of us if this is what we wanted.’ Ahrens nodded at a line of new trees. ‘Over there is the road to Vitebsk. Vitebsk is less than a hundred kilometres west of here. Before the war there were fifty thousand Jews living there. As soon as the Wehrmacht took over the city, the Jews living there started to suffer. In July of 1941 a ghetto was established on the right bank of the Zapadnaya Dvina River and most of the Jews who hadn’t run away and joined the partisans or just emigrated east were rounded up and forced to live in it: about sixteen thousand people. A wooden stockade was built around the ghetto, and inside this conditions were very hard: forced labour, starvation rations. Probably as many as ten thousand died of hunger and disease. Meanwhile, at least two thousand of them were murdered on some pretext or another at a place called Mazurino. Then the orders came for the liquidation of the ghetto. I myself saw those orders on the teletype – orders from the Reichsführer SS in Berlin. The pretext was that there was typhoid in the ghetto. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t. I myself delivered a copy of those orders for Field Marshal von Kluge informing him of what was happening in his area. Later on I learned that about five thousand of the Jews who remained alive in the ghetto were driven out into the remote countryside, where they were all shot. That’s the trouble with being part of a signals regiment, captain. It’s very hard not to know what’s going on, but God knows I really wish I didn’t. So, to answer your question specifically – about that beehive you were referring to: halfway to Vitebsk is a town called Rudnya, and if I were you I should confine my inquiries to anywhere east of there. Understand?’

‘Yes sir. Thank you. Colonel, since you mentioned the Mahatma, I have another question. Actually it was something my boss mentioned to me back in Berlin. About the Mahatma and his men.’

Ahrens nodded. ‘Ask it.’

‘Has anyone from the propaganda ministry ever been here?’

‘Here in Smolensk?’

‘No, here at the castle.’

‘At the castle? Why on earth would they come here?’

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been here to film all those Soviet POWs you told me about, that’s all. To help prove to the folks back home that we were winning this war.’

Of course, this wasn’t the reason I’d asked about the propaganda ministry, but I couldn’t see how I could explain my suspicions without calling the colonel a liar.

‘Do you think we’re winning this war?’ he asked.

‘Winning or losing,’ I said. ‘Neither one looks good for Germany. Not the Germany I know and love.’

Ahrens nodded. ‘There have been days,’ he said, ‘many days, when I find it hard to like what I am or what we’re doing, captain. I, too, love my country but not what’s being done in its name, and there are times when I can’t look my own reflection in the eye. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. And I recognize myself when I hear you talking treason.’

‘Then you’re in the right place,’ he said. ‘You hear as much as we do in the five hundred and thirty-seventh, then you’ll know that there’s plenty of treason talked in Smolensk. This might be one reason why the Leader is coming here on a morale-building visit.’

‘Hitler’s coming here to Smolensk?’

‘On Saturday. For a meeting with Von Kluge. That’s supposed to be a secret by the way. So don’t mention it, will you? Although everyone and his dog seems to know about it.’

Alone, with an entrenching tool in my hand, I took a walk around the Katyn Wood. I went slowly down a slope into a dip in the ground that seemed to be a natural amphitheatre and even slower up the other side, with my army boots sounding like an old horse eating oats as they crunched down in the snow. I don’t know what I was looking for. The frozen ground underneath the snow was as hard as granite and my futile attempts at excavation merely amused the crows. A hammer and chisel might have yielded better results. In spite of the birch cross, it was hard to imagine much had ever taken place in that wood. I wondered if really anything of significance had happened there since Napoleon. Already it felt like I was on a wild goose chase. Besides, I cared little for the Poles. I’d never liked them any more than the English who, apparently able to ignore the role that perfidious Poland had played during the Czech crisis of 1938 – it wasn’t just the Nazis who had marched in there, it was the Poles, too, in pursuit of their own territorial claims – had stupidly come to the aid of Poland in 1939. The few bones I had seen back in the castle were evidence of nothing very much. A Russian soldier who had died in his foxhole perhaps and later been found by a hungry wolf? It was probably the best thing that could have happened to the Ivan given the awful situation Ahrens had described at Camp 126. Starving to death was easy to do in a world policed and patrolled by my own tender-hearted countrymen.

For half an hour I blundered around, getting colder. Even wearing gloves my hands felt frozen and my ears ached as if someone had hit them with the entrenching tool. What on earth were we doing in this desolate permafrosted country, so very far from home? The living space Hitler craved so much was fit only for the wolves and crows. It made no sense at all, but then very little of what the Nazis did made much sense to me. But I doubt that I was the only one who was beginning to suspect that Stalingrad might have the same significance as the retreat of Napoleon’s Grand Army from Moscow: surely everyone except Hitler and the generals knew we were finished in Russia.

In the distance close to the road to Vitebsk a couple of sentries pretended to look the other way, but I could hear their laughter quite clearly: there was something about the Katyn Wood that had a curious effect on sound, holding it within the line of trees like water in a bowl. But their opinion just made me more determined to find something. Being bloody-minded and proving other people wrong is what being a detective is all about. It’s one of the things that made me so popular with my many friends and colleagues.

Scraping at the snow and occasionally reaching to pick something up, I found an empty packet of German cigarettes, a buckle off a German carbine sling, and a piece of twisted wire. Quite a haul for half an hour’s work. I was just about to call it a day when I turned too quickly on my heel, slipped and fell down the slope, twisting my knee in a way that left it feeling stiff and painful for days afterwards. I swore loudly, and still sitting in the snow picked up my crusher and hauled it back on my head. A glance at the sentries near the road revealed that they had their backs turned squarely to me, which probably meant that they didn’t want to be seen laughing at the SD officer who’d fallen on his arse.

I put down my hand to push myself up, which was when I found an object that was only part frozen to the ground. I pulled hard and the object came away in my hand. It was a boot – a riding boot of the kind worn by an officer. I put the boot to one side and, still sitting, set to work scraping at the frozen ground on either side of me with the entrenching tool. A few minutes later I had a small metallic object in my hand. It was a button. I pocketed the button and recovering the boot, I stood up and limped back to the castle, where I washed my little find very carefully in warm water.

On the face of the button was an eagle.

In the afternoon I interviewed the Susanins, the Russian couple who helped to look after the 537th at Dnieper Castle. They were in their sixties and as wary and unsmiling as an old sepia photograph. Oleg Susanin wore a black peasant’s blouse with a belt, dark trousers, a grey felt hat and a longish beard; his wife looked not dissimilar. Since their German was better than my Russian but with a vocabulary that was restricted to food, fuel, laundry and bees, Ahrens had arranged for me to have the services of a translator from group headquarters – a Russian called Peshkov. He was a shifty-looking fellow with round pince-nez glasses and a Hitler moustache. He wore a German army greatcoat, a pair of German officer’s boots, and a red bow-tie with white polka-dots. Later on, Ahrens told me he’d grown the moustache in order to look more pro-German.

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ I said. Peshkov spoke excellent German.

‘It’s an honour to be working for you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m entirely at your service while you’re in Smolensk. Day or night. You have only to ask. You can usually leave a message for me with the adjutant, sir. At Krasny Bor. I make myself available there every morning at nine o’clock precisely.’

But while Peshkov was quite fluent in German, he never smiled or laughed and was completely different from the Russian who had accompanied him to Dnieper Castle from group HQ at Krasny Bor, a man called Dyakov, who seemed to be a sort of local hunting guide and general servant for Von Kluge – his Putzer.

Ahrens explained that German soldiers had rescued Dyakov from an NKVD murder squad. ‘He’s quite a fellow,’ said Ahrens, as he continued to introduce me to the two Russians. ‘Aren’t you, Dyakov? A complete rogue, probably, but Field Marshal von Kluge seems to trust him implicitly, so I’ve no choice but to trust him, too.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Dyakov.

‘He seems to have a soft spot for Marusya, one of our kitchen maids, so when he’s not with Von Kluge he’s usually here, aren’t you, Dyakov?’

Dyakov shrugged. ‘This is very special girl, sir. I should like to marry her but Marusya says no and, until she does, I must keep trying. If there was any work for her somewhere else I guess I’d be there instead.’

‘Peshkov on the other hand hasn’t a soft spot for anyone other than Peshkov,’ added Ahrens. ‘Isn’t that right, Peshkov?’

Peshkov shrugged. ‘A man has to make a living, sir.’

‘We think he might be a secret Jew,’ continued Ahrens, ‘but no one can be bothered to find out for sure. Besides, his German is so good it would be a shame if we had to get rid of him.’

Both Peshkov and Dyakov were Zeps – Zeppelin volunteers, which is what we called all the Russians who worked for us who were not POWs; those were Hiwis. Dyakov wore a heavy coat with a lambswool collar, a fur hat and a pair of black leather German pilot’s gloves that he said were a gift from the field marshal, just like the Mauser Safari rifle he carried on a sheepskin strap over his shoulder. Dyakov was a tall, dark, curly-haired fellow with a thick beard, hands the size of a balalaika, and unlike Peshkov his face always wore a broad and engaging smile.

‘You take the field marshal wolf-hunting,’ I said to Dyakov. ‘Is that right?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘See many wolves around here?’

‘Me? No. But it’s been a very cold winter. Hunger brings them nearer to the city in search of scraps. A wolf can get a good meal out of an old piece of leather, you know.’

We all went to sit in the castle kitchen, which was the warmest place in the house, and drank black Russian tea from a battered samovar, sweetening it with some of the honey the couple made. The delicious smell of the sweetened tea wasn’t quite strong enough to mask the dark smell of the Russians.

Peshkov liked the tea but he didn’t much like the Susanins. He spoke roughly to them – rougher than I would have liked under the circumstances.

‘Ask them if they remember any Poles in this area,’ I told him.

Peshkov put the question and then translated what Susanin had said. ‘He says that in the spring of 1940 he saw more than two hundred Poles in uniform in railway trucks at Gnezdovo station. The train waited for an hour or so and then started again, going south-east toward Voronezh.’

‘How did they know they were Poles?’

Peshkov repeated the question in Russian and then answered: ‘One of the men in the railway wagons asked Susanin where they were. The man said he was Polish then.’

‘What was that word they used?’ I asked ‘Stolypinkas?’

Peshkov shrugged. ‘I haven’t heard it before.’

‘Yes sir,’ said Dyakov. ‘Stolypinkas were the prison wagons named after the Russian prime minister who introduced them under the tsars. To deport Russians to Siberia.’

‘How far is the station from here?’ I asked.

‘About five kilometres west,’ said Peshkov.

‘Did any of these Poles get out of the wagons?’

‘Get out? Why should they get out, sir?’ asked Peshkov.

‘To stretch their legs, perhaps. Or be taken somewhere else?’

Peshkov translated, listened to Susanin’s answer, and then shook his head. ‘No, none of them. He’s sure of that. The doors remained chained, sir.’

‘What about this place? Were there ever any executions around here? Of Jews? Of Russians, perhaps? And why is there a cross in the middle of the Katyn Wood?’

The woman never spoke at all, and Oleg Susanin’s answers were short and to the point, but I’ve questioned enough men in my time to know when someone is holding something back. Or lying.

‘He says that when NKVD had this house they were forbidden to come to Dnieper Castle for security reasons so they don’t know what went on here,’ said Peshkov.

‘There was a fence all the way around the land then,’ added Dyakov. ‘Since the Germans arrived, the fence has been broken down by soldiers foraging for firewood, but some of it is still there.’

‘Don’t be so rough with them,’ I told Peshkov. ‘They’re not accused of anything. Tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Peshkov translated again, and uncertainly the Susanins both nodded a faint smile in my direction. But Peshkov remained contemptuous.

‘Take my word for it, boss,’ he said. ‘You have to speak roughly to these people or they won’t answer at all. The babulya is a real peasant, and the starik is a stupid bulbash who’s spent his whole life in fear of the Party. They’re still terrified the NKVD will come back – even after eighteen months of German occupation. As a matter of fact I’m a little surprised these two are still here. It goes without saying that if those mudaks ever do come back here these two will be Russian fertilizer. Know what I’m saying? Day one they’ll be shot just because they worked for you fellows. With all due respect to your colonel, about the only thing that’s kept them here are their beehives.’

‘Like Tolstoy, yes?’ Dyakov laughed loudly. ‘Still, it makes for a nice cup of tea, yes?’

‘Aren’t you afraid of what will happen if the NKVD comes back?’

Peshkov glanced at Dyakov and shrugged.

‘No sir,’ said Peshkov. ‘I don’t believe they are coming back.’

‘That is a matter of opinion,’ I said.

‘Me? I don’t have any beehives, boss.’ Dyakov grinned widely. ‘There’s nothing to keep Alok Dyakov here in Smolensk. No sir, when the shit starts coming up through the floor I’m going to Germany with the field marshal. If it was just being shot, I could live with that, if you know what I mean. But there’s plenty worse the NKVD can do to a man than put a tap in the back of your head. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’

‘What was the NKVD doing here?’ I asked the two Russians. ‘Here? In this house.’

‘I don’t know sir,’ said Peshkov. ‘Frankly it was better never to ask such questions. To mind one’s own business.’

‘It’s a nice house. With a cinema. What do you think they were doing? Watching Battleship Potemkin? Alexander Nevsky? You must have some idea, Dyakov. What’s your opinion?’

‘You want me to guess? I guess they were here getting drunk on vodka and watching movies, yes.’

I nodded. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your help. I am very grateful to you both.’

‘I am glad to have been of assistance,’ said Peshkov.

It was hard to know which of them was lying – Peshkov, Dyakov, or the Susanins – but I knew someone was. I had the proof of that in my own trouser pocket. Even as I nodded and smiled at the Russians, I had my hand around the button I had found in Katyn Wood.

When I went outside on my own to think things over, Dyakov followed me.

‘Peshkov speaks good German,’ I said. ‘Where did he learn?’

‘At university. Peshkov’s a very clever man. But me I learned German at a place called Terezin, in Czechoslovakia. When I was a boy I was prisoner of the Austrian army in 1915. I like Austrians. But I like Germans more. Austrians are not very friendly. After the war I was a schoolteacher. Is why NKVD arrested me.’

‘They arrested you because you were a schoolteacher?’

Dyakov laughed loudly. ‘I teach German, sir. That is fine in 1940 when Stalin and Hitler are friends. But when Germany attacks Russia, then NKVD think I am enemy and arrest me.’

‘Did they arrest Peshkov, too?’

Dyakov shrugged. ‘No, sir. But he wasn’t teaching German, sir. Before the war I believe he worked at the electricity power station, sir. I believe he learned to do this job in Germany. With Siemens. Is very important job, so that could be why NKVD didn’t arrest him.’

‘Why isn’t Peshkov doing that job now?’

Dyakov grinned. ‘Because there’s no money to be made doing that. The Germans at Krasny Bor pay him very well, sir. Good money. Better than electricity worker. Besides there are Germans running electricity power station now. They don’t trust Russians to do this.’

‘And the hunting? Who taught you to hunt?’

‘My father was hunter, sir. He taught me to shoot.’ Dyakov grinned. ‘You see sir? I’ve had very good teachers. My father and the Austrians.’

CHAPTER 7

Friday, March 12th 1943

I awoke thinking I must be back in the trenches, because there was a strong smell of something horrible in my nostrils. The smell was like a dead rat only worse, and I spent the next ten minutes sniffing the air in various areas of my room in the castle before finally I decided that the source of the stink was underneath my own bed. And it was only when I went down on my hands and knees to look that I remembered the frozen leather boot I had tossed on the floor the previous morning; except that the boot and whatever was still in the boot was now frozen no longer.

I took a deep breath, and at the same time I looked inside the leg of the boot, squeezing the toe. There were several hard objects inside it, the remains of a decayed foot to add to the colonel’s collection of bones on the floor of the cold storeroom downstairs. I had a good idea that the foot and the leg bones wrapped in the tarpaulin had belonged to the same man, because the boot had been chewed in several places, presumably by the wolf. But there was something else in the boot beside a dead Pole’s stinking foot, and gradually I peeled out of the leg a piece of oiled paper that must have been wrapped around the dead man’s calf. At first I was inclined to believe that the Pole had simply tried to insulate his leg against the cold, much as I did with my own poorer-quality boots; but newspaper would have done for that – oiled paper was for preserving things, not keeping them warm.

I unfolded the paper as best I could, using the leg of the bed and a chair. It was folded in half and inside the fold were several typed sheets of onion-skin paper. But in spite of the oilskin paper, what was written was almost illegible, and it was clear it was going to require the resources of a laboratory to decipher what was written on these pages.

Until the ground thawed it was hard to see how I was going to make much more progress with this preliminary investigation, and it looked as if the button would have to be evidence enough. But I wasn’t happy about that. One button, an old boot and a few bones didn’t seem like much of a haul to take back to Berlin. I badly wanted to know what was written on the pages before I mentioned them to anyone. I wasn’t about to make myself or the bureau a sucker for some elaborate lie dreamed up by the propaganda ministry. All the same, I couldn’t help but think that if the Mahatma’s men had planted evidence of a massacre in Katyn Wood, they’d have made it a little more obvious and easy for someone like me to find.

I dressed and went downstairs to find some breakfast.

Colonel Ahrens looked pleased when I told him I had probably concluded my investigation and would be returning to Berlin just as soon as possible. He looked a lot less pleased when I told him that I had reached no firm conclusions.

‘At this stage I really can’t say if the bureau will want to take this any further. Sorry sir, but that’s just the way it is. I’ll be off the back of your collar just as soon as I can get on a plane home.’

‘You won’t get a flight out of here today. Saturday looks like a better bet. Or even Sunday. There will be plenty of planes arriving here tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The leader. He’s coming here, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Look, I’ll telephone the airfield and arrange things for you. Until then you’re welcome to make use of the facilities here at the castle. There’s a shooting range if you care for that kind of thing. And there’s a movie in the theatre this afternoon and evening. All leave is cancelled from midnight tonight, so the movie has been brought forward. I’m afraid it’s Jud Süss. All we could get at short notice.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s not one of my favourites.’ I shrugged. ‘You know, maybe I’ll take a look at the local cathedral after all.’

‘Good idea,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ll lend you a car.’

‘Thank you, sir. And if you could give me a map of the city, I’d be grateful. From a distance it’s hard to tell one onion dome from another.’

I didn’t give a damn about the cathedral. I had no intention of looking at the place, or anything else for that matter, but I didn’t want Colonel Ahrens knowing that. Besides, I don’t believe in tourism during wartime, not any more. Sure, when I was stationed in Paris during 1940 I’d walked about a bit with a Baedeker and seen a few of the sights – Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower – but that was Paris: you could always read a Frenchman in a way you couldn’t ever do with a Czech or an Ivan. I’d learned a bit of caution since then, and even in Prague I didn’t go abroad with the Baedeker very much. Not that there ever were any Baedekers written about Russia – what would have been the point? – but the principle holds good I think, as two examples might serve to illustrate.

Heinz Seldte was a lieutenant in a police battalion I knew from the Alex in the early Thirties; I helped get him a leg up into Kripo. He was one of the first Germans into the city of Kiev in September 1941, and on a quiet summer’s afternoon he decided to go and look at the city’s Duma building on Khreshchatyk, which is the main street – apparently it was a big deal, with a spire and a statue of the archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kiev. What he didn’t know – what nobody knew – was that the retreating Red Army had booby-trapped the whole fucking street with dynamite, which they exploded with radio-controlled fuses from over four hundred kilometres away. The historic buildings of Khreshchatyk – the Germans renamed the ruins Eichhornstrasse – were never seen again; nor was Heinz Seldte.

Victor Lungwitz was a waiter from the Adlon Hotel. He waited tables because he couldn’t make a living at being an artist. He joined an SS Panzer Division in 1939 and was sent to Belarus as part of Operation Barbarossa. When he was off-duty he liked drawing churches, of which Minsk has almost as many as Smolensk. One day he went to look at some old church on the edge of town. It was called the Red Church, which ought to have put him on his guard. They found Victor’s drawing but no sign of him. A few days later a mutilated body was found in some marshland nearby. It took them a while to identify poor Victor: the partisans had cut almost everything off his head – his nose, his lips, his eyelids, his ears – before cutting off his genitals and letting him bleed to death.

When you fight a war with a Baedeker you don’t always know what you’re going to see.

In the colonel’s draughty little Tatra I drove east along the Vitebsk highway with Smolensk in front of me and the Dnieper River on my right. For most of the way the road ran between two railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main station; it was a huge icing-cake of a place with four square corner towers and an enormous archway entrance. Like a lot of buildings in Smolensk it was painted green, and either green meant something significant in that part of Russia or green was the only colour of paint they’d had in the stores the last time anyone had thought of carrying out some building maintenance. Russia being Russia, I tended to subscribe to the second explanation.

A little further down the road, I stopped to consult my map and then turned south down Bruckenstrasse, which sounded promising given that I needed to find a bridge to cross the river.

According to the map the west and east bridges were destroyed, and that left three in the middle or, if you were a Russian, a log-raft passenger ferry that resembled something from my time at a boys’ summer camp on Rügen Island. On the north bank of the river I slowed the car as I came in sight of the local Kremlin – a fortress enclosing the centre of the ancient city of Smolensk. On a hilltop, behind the castellated red-brick walls built by Boris Godunov, stood the city’s cathedral with its distinctive pepper-pot domes and tall white walls, and looking to my eyes as ugly as an outsized wood-burning stove. At least now I could say that I’d seen it.

I showed my papers to the military police guards at the checkpoint on the Peter and Paul bridge, asked for directions to the German Kommandatura, and was directed to go south on Hauptstrasse.

‘You can’t miss it, sir,’ said the bridge sentry. ‘It’s opposite Sparkassenstrasse. If you find yourself on Magazinstrasse, you’ll have gone too far.’

‘Are all Smolensk street names in German?’

‘Of course. Makes it a lot easier to get around, don’t you think?’

‘It certainly does if you’re German,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that what it’s all about, sir?’ The sentry grinned. ‘We’re trying to make it as much like home as possible.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

I drove on, and in the shadow of the Kremlin wall on my right, I went along Hauptstrasse until I saw what was obviously the Kommandatura – a grey stone building with a pillared portico and several Nazi Party flags. An extensive series of German street pointers had been erected in the square in front of this building – many of them on a broken Soviet tank – but the general effect was not one of clarity of direction but confusion; a sentry stood in the middle of the pointers to help Germans make sense of their own signs. The red of the flags on the Kommandatura added an almost welcome splash of colour in a city that was as grey and green as a dead elephant. Underneath the flags a dozen or so soldiers were watching a boy, riding bareback on a spavined white horse, perform a few tricks with the nag. From time to time they would toss a few coins onto the cobbled street, where they were collected by an old man wearing a white cap and jacket who might have been some relation to the boy or possibly the horse. Seeing me, two of the soldiers came over as I pulled up and saluted.

‘Can’t leave it there, sir,’ said one. ‘Security. Best leave it around the corner on Kreuzstrasse, next to the local cinema. Always plenty of room there.’

Three very ragged children – two boys and a girl, I think – watched me park the Tatra in front of some German propaganda posters that were almost as scruffy as they were. I’d seen some poor children in my time, but none as poor as these three urchins. Despite the cold all of them were barefoot and carrying foraging bags and mess tins. They looked as if they had to fend for themselves and were not having much success, although they appeared to be healthy enough. All of this looked a long way from the smiling faces and the soup bowls and the large loaves of bread depicted on the posters. Were their parents alive? Did they even have a roof over their heads? Was it any of my business? I felt a strong pang of regret as momentarily I considered the carefree life they might have been enjoying before my countrymen arrived during the summer of 1941. I wasn’t the type who ever carried chocolate, so I gave each of them a cigarette, assuming they were more likely to trade than smoke it. There are times when I wonder where charity would be without us smokers.

‘Thank you,’ said the oldest child, speaking German – a boy maybe ten or eleven. His coat had more patches than the map in my pocket and on his head was a side cap, or what the more graphically-minded German soldier sometimes called a cunt cover. He tucked the cigarette behind his ear for later, like a real working man. ‘German cigarettes are good. Better than Russian cigarettes. You’re very kind, sir.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘None of us are. Just remember that and you won’t ever be disappointed.’

Inside the Kommandatura I asked the desk clerk where I could find an officer, and was directed to the first floor. There I spoke to a slimy fat Wehrmacht lieutenant who could have given a whole week’s rations to the children outside and not even noticed. His army belt was on its last notch and looked as if it might have appreciated some time to relax a little.

‘Those people in the street outside, doesn’t it bother you they look so desperate?’

‘They’re Slavs,’ he said, as if that was all the excuse needed. ‘Things were pretty backward in Smolensk before we got here. And believe me, the local Ivans are a lot better off now than they ever were under the Bolsheviks.’

‘So is the Tsar and his family, but I don’t figure they think that’s a good thing.’.

The lieutenant frowned. ‘Was there something specific I could help you with, sir? Or did you just come in here to give your conscience a little air?’

I nodded. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. That’s exactly what I was doing. Forgive me. As a matter of fact I’m looking for some sort of scientific laboratory.’

‘In Smolensk?’

I nodded. ‘Somewhere that might own a stereo microscope. I need to carry out some tests.’

The lieutenant picked up the telephone and turned the call-handle. ‘Give me the department store,’ he said to the operator. Catching my eye, he explained: ‘Most of the officers stationed here in Smolensk are using the local department store as a barracks.’

‘That must be handy if you need a new pair of underpants.’

The lieutenant laughed. ‘Conrad? It’s Herbert. I have an officer of SD who’s trying to find a scientific laboratory here in Smolensk. Any ideas?’

He listened for a moment, uttered a few words of thanks and then replaced the receiver.

‘You could try the Smolensk State Medical Academy,’ he said. ‘It’s under German control, so you should be able to find what you’re looking for there.’

We went to the window and he pointed to the south.

‘About half a kilometre down Rote-Kreuzer Strasse and on your right. Can hardly miss it. Big canary-yellow building. Looks like the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin.’

‘It sounds impressive,’ I said and walked to the door. ‘I guess the Ivans in Smolensk can’t have been as backward as all that.’

It was a short drive to the Smolensk State Medical Academy and, as promised, it wasn’t easy to miss. The academy was enormous but, like a lot of buildings in Smolensk, the place showed signs of the ferocity of the battle waged by the retreating Red Army, with many of the windows on the five stories boarded up, and the yellow stucco façade pitted with hundreds of bullet holes. The triple arches of the entrance were protected with sandbags and on the roof was a Nazi flag and what looked like an anti-aircraft gun. While I was there an ambulance pulled up out front and disgorged several heavily-bandaged men on stretchers.

When the German medical personnel and Soviet nurses on the front desk were done admitting the new arrivals I explained my mission to one of the orderlies. The man listened patiently and then led the way up and through the enormous hospital, which was full of German soldiers who had been wounded during the battle of Smolensk and were still awaiting repatriation to the fatherland. We reached a corridor on the fifth floor where there was not one but several laboratories, and he presented me courteously to a small man wearing a white coat that was a couple of sizes too big for him, as well as mittens and a Soviet tank crewman’s helmet which he snatched off when he saw me standing there. The bow was unctuous, but understandable when dealing with SD officers.

‘Captain Gunther, this is Doctor Batov,’ said the orderly. ‘He’s in charge of the scientific laboratories here at the academy. He speaks German and I’m sure he will be able to assist you.’

When the orderly left us alone, Batov looked sheepishly at the tanker’s helmet. ‘This ridiculous hat, it keeps the head warm,’ he explained. ‘It’s cold in this hospital.’

‘I noticed that, sir.’

‘The boilers are coal-fired,’ he said, ‘and there’s not so much coal about for things like heating a hospital. There’s not much coal around for anything.’

I offered him a cigarette and he took one and tucked it behind his ear. I lit one myself and looked around. The lab was reasonably well equipped for the purposes of instructing Russian medical students; there were a couple of work benches with gas taps, burners, chemical hoods, balances, flasks, and several stereo microscopes.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘I was hoping I might be able to use one of your stereo microscopes for a while,’ I said.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ushering me towards the instrument. ‘Are you a scientist, captain?’

‘No, sir. I’m a policeman. From Berlin. Before the war we’d just started using stereo microscopes in ballistics work. To identify and match bullets from the bodies of murder victims.’

Batov paused by the stereo microscope and switched on a light beside it. ‘And do you have a bullet you wish to examine now, captain?’

‘No. It’s some typewritten papers I wanted to take a look at. The paper got damp and some of the words are hard to read.’ I paused, wondering how much I could tell him. ‘Actually, it’s more complicated than that. These papers have been exposed to cadaveric fluid. From a decaying body. They were inside a boot in which the human leg wearing it had disintegrated down to the bone.’

Batov nodded. ‘May I see?’

I showed him the papers.

‘Even with a stereo microscope this will be difficult,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Best of all would be to use infrared rays, but unfortunately we’re not equipped with that kind of advanced technology here at the Academy. Perhaps it would be better to have them treated in Berlin after all.’

‘I have good reasons for preferring to see what can be achieved here right now in Smolensk.’

‘Then you’ll probably need to wash these documents with chloroform or xylol,’ he said. ‘I could do this for you, if you liked.’

‘Yes. I’d be grateful if you could. Thanks.’

‘But may I ask, exactly what are you hoping to achieve?’

‘If nothing else, I’d like to be able to find out what language the papers are written in.’

‘Well, we can treat one sheet of paper, perhaps, and see how that works.’

Batov went to look for some chemicals and then started to wash one of the pages; while he worked I sat and smoked a cigarette and dreamed that I was back in Berlin, having dinner with Renata at the Adlon Hotel. Not that we ever did have dinner at the Adlon, but it wouldn’t have been much of a daydream if any of it had been remotely possible.

When Batov had finished cleaning the page he dried it carefully, flattened the paper with a sheet of glass and then arranged the page underneath the prism of the microscope.

I drew an electric light a little closer and looked through the eyepieces while I adjusted the zoom control. A blurred word moved into focus. The alphabet wasn’t Cyrillic and the words weren’t written in German.

‘What’s the Russian word for soldier?’ I asked Batov.

‘Soldat.’

‘I thought so. Zolnierz. That’s the Polish word for soldier. Here’s another. Wywiadu. No idea what that means.’

‘It means intelligence,’ said Batov.

‘Does it?’

‘Yes. My wife was Ukrainian–Polish, sir, from the Subcarpathian province. She studied medicine here before the war.’

‘Was?’

‘She’s dead now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, doctor.’

‘Polish.’ Batov paused and then added. ‘The language on the document. That’s a relief.’

I looked up from the eyepieces. ‘Why is that?’

‘If it’s in Polish it means I can offer to help you,’ explained Batov. ‘If it was in Russian – well, I could hardly betray my own country to the enemy, now could I?’

I smiled. ‘No, I suppose not.’

He pointed at the stereo microscope. ‘May I have a look?’

‘Be my guest.’

Batov looked through the eyepieces for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yes, this is written in Polish. Which makes me think that a better division of labour would be if I read out the words – in German, of course – and you wrote them down. That way – in time – you would know the entire contents of the document.’

Batov sat up straight and looked at me. He was dark and rather earnest, with a thick moustache and gentle eyes.

‘You mean one word at a time?’ I pulled a face.

‘It’s a laborious method, I do agree, but it has the merit of also being certain, don’t you think? A couple of hours and perhaps all of your questions about this document might be answered and perhaps, if you agreed, I might earn a little bit of money for my family. Or perhaps you might give me something I can trade on Bazarnaya Square.’

He shrugged. ‘Alternatively, you are welcome to borrow the stereo microscope and work on your own, perhaps.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘I don’t know. To be perfectly honest I’m not used to German officers asking me for permission to do anything in this academy.’

I nodded. ‘All right. It’s a deal.’ I took out my wallet and handed over some of the occupation Reichsmarks the bureau office in Berlin had issued me with. Then I handed him the rest of the bills as well. ‘Here. Take it all. With any luck I’m flying home tomorrow.’

‘Then we had better get started,’ said Batov.

It was late when I got back to Dnieper Castle. Most of the men were having dinner. I joined the officers’ table in the mess where chicken was on the menu. I tried not to think about the three ragged children I’d seen in Smolensk that afternoon while I was eating, but it wasn’t easy.

‘We were beginning to worry,’ said Colonel Ahrens. ‘Can’t be too careful around here.’

‘What did you think of our cathedral?’ asked Lieutenant Rex.

‘Very impressive,’ I said.

‘Glinka, the composer, came from Smolensk,’ added Rex. ‘I’m rather fond of Glinka. He’s the father of Russian classical music.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘To know who your father is. It’s not everyone who can say that these days.’

After dinner the colonel and I went to his office for a smoke and a quiet word – or at least as quiet as could be achieved given that it was next to the castle’s cinema theatre. Through the wall I could hear Süss Oppenheimer pleading for his life in front of the implacable burgers of the Stuttgart town council. It made an uncomfortable soundtrack to what promised to be an equally uncomfortable conversation.

He sat behind his desk facing a good deal of paperwork. ‘You don’t mind if I work while we talk? I have to compile these duty logs for tomorrow. Who’s manning the telephone exchange, that kind of thing. I have to post this on the noticeboard before nine o’clock so everyone knows where they’re supposed to be tomorrow. Von Kluge will have my guts if there’s a problem with our telecommunications when Hitler’s here.’

‘He’s flying from Rastenburg?’

‘No, from his forward HQ, at Vinnitsa, in the Ukraine. His staff call it the Werewolf HQ, but don’t ask me why. I believe he’s going on to Rastenburg tomorrow night.’

‘He gets around, does our leader.’

‘Your flight back to Berlin is fixed for early tomorrow afternoon,’ said Ahrens. ‘I don’t mind saying that I wish I was coming with you. The news from the front is not good. I’d hate to be in Von Kluge’s boots when the leader drops in for a chat tomorrow and demands a new offensive this spring. Frankly our troops aren’t nearly up to that task.’

‘Tell me, colonel, how soon is the ground around here likely to thaw?’

‘End of March, beginning of April. Why?’

I shrugged and looked generally apologetic.

‘You’re coming back?’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Someone else.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘We won’t know for sure until we find a complete body of course, but I’ve a pretty shrewd idea that there are Polish soldiers buried in your wood.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I’m afraid it’s true. Just as soon as the ground thaws, my boss, Judge Goldsche, will probably send a senior army judge and a forensic pathologist down here to take charge of the investigation.’

‘But you heard the Susanins,’ said Ahrens. ‘The only Poles they saw around here remained on the train at Gnezdovo.’

I thought it best to avoid telling him that either the Susanins or perhaps Peshkov were clearly lying. I’d caused enough trouble for Ahrens already. Instead I handed him the button.

‘I found this,’ I said. ‘And the remains of a man’s foot in an officer’s riding boot.’

‘I don’t see that a fucking button and a boot tell us very much.’

‘I won’t know for sure until I consult an expert, but that looks to me like a Polish eagle on the button.’

‘Balls,’ he said angrily. ‘If you ask me that button could just as easily be from the coat of a White Russian Army soldier. There were Whites under General Denikin fighting the Reds in this area until at least 1922. No, you must be mistaken. I don’t see how something like that could have been covered up. I ask you, does this place feel like somewhere that’s built in the middle of a mass grave?’

‘When I was at the Alex, colonel, the only time we ever paid much attention to our feelings was when it was lunchtime. It’s evidence that counts. Evidence like this little button, the human bones, those two hundred Polish officers in the railway siding. You see, I think they did get off that train. I think they maybe came here and were shot by the NKVD in your wood. I’ve some experience of these murder squads, you know.’

I hardly wanted to tell the colonel about the document in Polish I had discovered and that Doctor Batov had painstakingly translated for me with his stereo microscope. I figured that the fewer people who knew about that the better. But I had little doubt that the bones found in Katyn Wood had belonged to a Polish soldier, and the bureau seemed certain to have a major war-crimes investigation in Smolensk just as soon as I could get home to Berlin and make my report to Judge Goldsche.

‘But look here, if there are two hundred Poles buried out there, what difference will it make to those poor buggers now? Answer me that. Couldn’t you pretend that there’s nothing of interest here? And then we can get on with our lives and the normal business of trying to get through this war alive.’

‘Look, colonel, I’m just a policeman. It’s not up to me what happens here. I’ll make my report to the bureau and after that then it’s up to the bosses and to the legal department of the High Command. But if that button does turn out to be Polish—’

I left my sentence unfinished. It was hard to know exactly what the result of such a discovery might look like, but I sensed that the colonel’s cosy little world at Dnieper Castle was about to come to an end.

And so I think did he, because he swore loudly, several times.

CHAPTER 8

Saturday, March 13th 1943

It snowed again during the night, and the room was so cold I had to wear my greatcoat in bed. The window frosted on the inside and there were tiny icicles on the iron bedstead as if a frozen fairy had tiptoed along the metalwork while I had been trying to sleep. It wasn’t just the cold that kept me awake; every so often I thought of those three barefoot children and wished I’d given them something more than a few cigarettes.

After breakfast I tried to stay out of the way. I hardly wanted to remind Colonel Ahrens by my presence that I was soon to be replaced by a judge from the War Crimes Bureau. And unlike many of the men in the 537th I had no great desire to be up at dawn to stand on the main road to Vitebsk and wave to the leader as he drove from the airport to an early lunch with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters. So I borrowed a typewriter from the signals office and spent the time before the flight back to Berlin writing up my report for Judge Goldsche.

It was dull work and a lot of the time I was looking out the window, which was how I came to see Peshkov, the translator with the toothbrush moustache, having a furious argument with Oleg Susanin at the end of which Susanin pushed the other man onto the ground. There was nothing very interesting about this except that it’s always interesting to see a man who looks a bit like Adolf Hitler being shoved around. And so seldom seen.

After lunch, Lieutenant Hodt drove me to the airport, where security was predictably tight – as tight as I’d ever seen: there was a whole platoon of Waffen SS Grenadiers guarding two specially equipped Focke-Wulf Condors and a squadron of Messerschmitt fighters that were waiting to escort the real Hitler’s flight to Rastenburg.

Hodt left me in the main airport building, where an advance party of Hitler’s staff officers were enjoying a last cigarette before the leader’s convoy arrived – it seemed that the leader did not permit smoking aboard his own plane.

While I was waiting, a young bespectacled Wehrmacht lieutenant came into the hall and asked the assembled company which of us was Colonel Brandt. An officer wearing a gold equestrian’s badge on his army tunic stepped forward and identified himself, whereupon the lieutenant clicked his heels and announced he was Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff and that he had brought a parcel from General von Tresckow for Colonel Stieff. My interest in this little exchange was only piqued when the lieutenant handed over the very same package containing two bottles of Cointreau that Councillor von Dohnanyi – to whom Von Schlabrendorff bore a strong resemblance – had brought with him on the plane from Berlin the previous Wednesday. This made me wonder – again – why Von Dohnanyi had not delivered the parcel to someone when we’d touched down in Rastenburg. Perhaps if I’d been a proper security service officer I might have made some mention of this fact – which struck me as suspicious – but I had enough on my plate already without interfering with the job of the Gestapo or the leader’s uniformed RSD bodyguards. Besides, my interest in the matter faded as a burly flight sergeant entered the hall and announced that our own flight to Berlin had been delayed until lunchtime the following day.

‘What?’ exclaimed another officer – a major with an impressive scar on his face. ‘Why?’

‘Technical problems, sir.’

‘Better we find out on the ground than when we’re in the air,’ I told the major, and went to look for a telephone.

CHAPTER 9

Sunday, March 14th 1943

I spent another night at Dnieper Castle, and this time my sleep was interrupted not by cold, nor by thoughts of the three ragged children I’d met – and certainly not by any spiritual feeling about what might have happened in Katyn Wood – but by Lieutenant Hodt arriving in my room.

‘Captain Gunther,’ he said.

‘Yes, what is it, lieutenant?’

‘Colonel Ahrens apologizes for disturbing you and requests that you join him as soon as possible. His car is outside in front of the castle.’

‘Outside? Why? What’s happened?’

‘It would be best if the colonel explained things to you, sir,’ said Hodt.

‘Yes. Yes, of course. What time is it?’

‘Two a.m., sir.’

‘Shit.’

I got dressed and went outside. An army Kübelwagen was waiting in the snow with the engine running. I climbed in alongside Colonel Ahrens and behind another officer I hadn’t seen before. Around the second officer’s neck was a metal gorget that identified him as a member of the uniformed field police, which was the easily recognized equivalent of the Kripo beer token I’d once carried in my coat pocket when I’d been a plainclothes detective. It was already obvious to me that we weren’t going to the local library. As soon as I was seated, the NCO driving the bucket punched it loudly into gear and we set off swiftly down the drive.

‘Captain Gunther, this is Lieutenant Voss of the field police.’

‘If it wasn’t so late I might be pleased to meet you, lieutenant.’

‘Captain Gunther works for the War Crimes Bureau in Berlin,’ explained Ahrens. ‘But before that he was a Kripo police commissar at the Alex.’

‘What’s this all about, colonel?’ I asked Ahrens.

‘Two of my men have been murdered, captain.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Was it partisans?’

‘That’s what we’re hoping you can help us to find out.’

‘I guess there’s no harm in hoping,’ I said sourly.

We drove east along the road to Smolensk. A sign on the road said: PARTISAN DANGER AHEAD. SINGLE VEHICLES STOP! HOLD WEAPONS READY.

‘It looks like you’ve already made up your minds,’ I observed.

‘You’re the expert,’ said Voss. ‘Perhaps, when you’ve taken a look at the scene, you’ll tell us what you think.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘As long as everyone remembers that I’m boarding a plane back to Berlin in ten hours.’

‘Just take a look,’ said Ahrens. ‘Please. Then, if you wish, you can take your flight home.’

The ‘if you wish’ part I didn’t like at all, but I kept my mouth shut. Lately I’d got a lot better at doing that. Besides, I could see the colonel was upset, and telling him I really didn’t give a damn about who had killed his men wasn’t exactly going to smooth my already delayed departure from Smolensk. I wanted to stay on in that city like I wanted to take an ice-cold bath.

A few blocks west of the railway station the road split and we took the southern route down Schlachthofstrasse before turning right onto Dnieperstrasse, where the driver skidded to a halt. We got out and walked past an Opel Blitz that was full of field policemen and down a snow-covered slope to the edge of the Dnieper River, where another bucket wagon was parked with its spotlight trained on two bodies lying side by side at the water’s half-frozen edge. Two of the lieutenant’s men were standing beside the bodies and stamping their feet against the cold and the damp. The river looked as black as the Styx and almost as still in the moonlit silence.

Voss handed me a flashlight, and although I was keen not to be involved, I made a nice show of casting a professional eye over the lieutenant’s crime scene. It was easy enough to call: two men in uniform, their bare heads bashed in and their throats neatly cut from ear to ear like a clown’s big smile, with blood all over the snow that, in the moonlight, hardly looked like blood at all.

‘Lieutenant? See if you can’t find their cunt covers, will you?’

‘Their what?’

‘Their hats, their fucking hats. Find them.’

Voss looked at one of his men and passed on the order. The man scrambled back up the bank.

‘And see if you can’t find a murder weapon, while you’re at it,’ I shouted after him. ‘Some kind of a knife or bayonet.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘So what’s the story so far?’ I asked no one in particular and without much interest in an answer.

‘Sergeant Ribe and Corporal Greiss,’ said the colonel. ‘Two of my best men. They were on switchboard and coding duty until about four o’clock this afternoon, after the leader left.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Manning the telephone exchange. The radio. Decoding teletype messages with the Enigma machine.’

‘So when they went off duty they left the castle, how? In a bucket wagon?’

‘No, on foot,’ said Ahrens. ‘You can walk it in half an hour.’

‘Only if it’s worth your while, I’d have thought. What’s the attraction around here? Don’t tell me it’s that church near the railway station or I’ll start to worry I’ve been missing out on something important.’

‘The Peter and Paul? No.’

‘There’s a swimming bath that’s used by the army on Dnieperstrasse,’ said Voss. ‘It seems they went there to swim and use the steam room, after which they both went next door.’

‘And next door is?’

‘A brothel,’ said Voss. ‘In the Hotel Glinka. Or what used to be the Hotel Glinka.’

‘Ah yes, Glinka, I remember him. He’s the father of Russian classical music, isn’t he?’ I yawned loudly. ‘I’m looking forward to acquainting myself with some of his music. It’ll make a pleasant change from a cold Russian wind. Christ, my ears feel like something bit them.’

‘The whores in the brothel claim the two men were there until midnight and then left,’ said Voss. ‘No trouble. No fights. Nothing suspicious.’

‘Whores? Why wasn’t I told? I just spent the evening alone with a good book.’

‘It wasn’t a place for German officers,’ said Voss. ‘It was a place for enlisted men. A cyria.’

‘What’s a cyria?’ I asked.

‘A round-up brothel.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So strictly speaking they weren’t whores at all. Just innocent girls from out of town who’d been pressed into some horizontal service for the fatherland. Now I’m glad I stayed in with my book. Who found them?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The bodies? Who found them? A whore? Another Fritz? The Volga boatman? Who?’

‘An SS sergeant came out of the Glinka for a breath of fresh air,’ explained Voss. ‘He’d had a lot to drink and was feeling ill, he says. He saw a figure bent over these two men down here and thought he was witnessing a robbery. He challenged the man, who ran off in the direction of the west bridge.’ Lieutenant Voss pointed along the riverbank. ‘That way.’

‘Which is ruined, right? So we can assume he wasn’t looking to make it across the river tonight. Not unless he was a hell of a swimmer.’

‘Correct. The sergeant pursued the figure for a while but lost him in the darkness. A moment later he heard an engine start up and a vehicle driving away. He claims it sounded like a motorcycle, although I must say I don’t know how he could tell that without seeing it.’

‘Hmm. Which way did the bike go? Did he say?’

‘West,’ said Voss. ‘It never came back.’

I lit a cigarette to stop me from yawning again. ‘Did he give you a description of the man he saw? Not that it matters if he was drunk.’

‘Says it was too dark.’

I glanced up at the moon. There were a few clouds, and from time to time one of these drew a dark curtain over the moon, but nothing in the way of weather that looked at all likely to delay a flight back to Berlin.

‘That’s possible, I suppose.’

Then I looked back at the two dead men. There’s something particularly awful about a man who’s had his throat cut; I suppose it’s the way it reminds you of an animal sacrifice, not to mention the sheer quantity of blood that’s involved. But there was an extra dimension of horror to the way these two men had been butchered – that was indeed the word – for such was the force used to cut their throats that each man’s head had almost been severed, so that the spine was clearly visible. If I’d looked closely I could probably have seen what each had had for dinner. Instead I lifted their hands to check for defensive cuts, but there were none.

‘I seem to recall that the partisans are fond of removing the heads of captured German soldiers,’ I said.

‘It has been known,’ allowed Voss. ‘And not just their heads.’

‘So it may be our killer meant to do the same but was disturbed by the SS sergeant.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘On the other hand, their side arms are still holstered and the flaps are still buttoned, which means they weren’t afraid of him.’ I started going through one of the men’s pockets. ‘Which is another mark against this being partisans. And almost certainly a partisan would have taken these weapons. Weapons are more valuable than money. Still, there’s no sign of a wallet.’

‘It’s here sir,’ said Voss, handing me a wallet. ‘Sorry. I took both of their wallets when I was trying to identify them earlier.’

‘May I see one of those?’

Voss handed me a wallet. I spent a couple of minutes going through the contents and found several banknotes.

‘I guess these whores aren’t charging much money. This man has plenty of cash left. Which is unusual for a man leaving a brothel. So. The motive wasn’t robbery but something else. But what?’ I shone the flashlight up the slope towards the street and the brothel. ‘Perhaps just murder. It looks as if their throats were cut here, as they lay on the ground.’

‘How do you work that out?’ asked Colonel Ahrens.

‘The blood has soaked the hair on the backs of their heads,’ I said. ‘If their throats had been cut while they were standing up it would be all down the front of their tunics. Which it isn’t. Most of it is on the snow here. Neat job, too. Almost surgical. Like their throats were cut by someone who knew what he was doing.’

The field policeman came back with one of the dead men’s cap in his hand. ‘Found the caps on the street, sir. Left the other where it was so you could take a look for yourself.’

I took the cap and opened it up and found blood and hair on the inside.

‘Come on,’ I said, smartly. ‘Show me.’ And then to Ahrens and Voss: ‘You wait here, gentlemen.’

I followed the man back up the bank, to a spot on the street where another field policeman was standing with his flashlight trained helpfully on the other cap. I picked it up and inspected the inside; there was blood in this one, too. Then I walked back down the bank to Ahrens and Voss, pointing the flash one way and then the other.

‘The killer probably hit them on the head up on the street,’ I said. ‘And then dragged them down here where it was quiet, to kill them both.’

‘Do you think it was partisans?’

‘How should I know? But I suppose unless we can prove it wasn’t, the Gestapo will want to execute some locals just to show everyone they’re on the job and taking things seriously, as only the Gestapo can.’

‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘That’s probably why you’re not working for the Gestapo, lieutenant. Wait a minute. What’s this?’

Something glinted in the snow – something metallic. But it wasn’t a knife or a bayonet.

‘Anyone know what this is?’

We were looking at two rippled pieces of springy, flat metal that were joined together by a small oval socket at the end; the pieces of metal shifted around like a pair of playing cards in my fingers. Colonel Ahrens took the object from my hand and examined it for himself.

‘I think it’s the inside of a scabbard,’ he said. ‘For a German bayonet.’

‘Sure about that?’

‘Yes,’ said Ahrens. ‘This is meant to hold the bayonet in place. Stops it from jumping out. Here you.’ Ahrens spoke to the field policeman. ‘Are you carrying a bayonet?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Hand it over. And the scabbard.’

The policeman did as he was told, and with the aid of his Swiss officer’s knife the colonel had soon extracted the holding screw from the man’s scabbard and withdrew an identical spring interior.

‘I had no idea that’s how the bayonet stays sheathed,’ said Voss. ‘Interesting.’

We went back up the slope toward the Hotel Glinka. ‘Tell me, colonel, are there any other brothels in Smolensk?’

‘I really wouldn’t know,’ he said, stiffly.

‘Yes there are, Captain Gunther,’ said Voss. ‘There’s the Hotel Moskva to the south-east of the city, and the Hotel Archangel near the Kommandatura. But the Glinka is the nearest to the castle and the 537th Signals.’

‘You certainly know your brothels, lieutenant,’ I said.

‘As a field policeman, you have to.’

‘So if they were on foot as you say, colonel, it’s likely the Glinka would have been their establishment of choice.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that, either,’ said the colonel.

‘No, of course not.’ I sighed and looked at my watch, wishing I was already at the airport. ‘Maybe I should keep my questions to myself, colonel, but I had the head-hammered idea you actually wanted my help with this.’

The Glinka was a fussy-looking white building with more architecturally effeminate flourishes than a courtier’s lace handkerchief. On the roof there was a short castellated spire with a weather vane; on the street was an archway entrance with thick, pepper-pot columns that put you in mind of a cut-price Philistine temple, and I half expected to find some muscular Ivan chained between them for the amusement of a local fertility god. As it was, there was just a bearded doorman holding a rusty sabre and wearing a red Cossack coat and an unlikely chestful of cheap medals. In Paris they might have made something out of a doorway like that, just as they might have made the interior of the place seem attractive or even elegant, with plenty of French mirrors, gilt furniture and silk curtains – the French know how to run a decent brothel in the same way they know what makes a good restaurant. But Smolensk is a long way from Paris and the Glinka was a hundred thousand kilometres from being a decent brothel. It was just a sausage counter – a cheap bang house where simply walking through the dirty glass door and catching the strong smell in the air of cheap perfume and male seed made you think you were risking a dose of drip. I felt sorry for any man who went there, although not as sorry as I felt for the girls, many of them Polish – and a few of them as young as fifteen – who’d been taken from their homes for ‘agricultural work’ in Germany.

A few minutes of conversation with a selection of these unfortunates was enough to discover that Ribe and Greiss had been regulars at the Glinka, that they had behaved themselves impeccably – or at least as impeccably as was required in the circumstances – and that they had left alone just before eleven p.m., which was just enough time for them to get back to the castle in time for the midnight roll-call. And I quickly formed the impression that the ghastly fate that had befallen the two soldiers could have had little or nothing to do with what had happened in the Glinka.

When I had finished questioning the Polish whores of the Glinka I went outside and drew a deep breath of clean cold air. Colonel Ahrens and Lieutenant Voss followed and waited for me to say something. But when I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned against one of the entrance pillars, the colonel interrupted my thoughts impatiently.

‘Well, Captain Gunther,’ he said. ‘Please tell us. What impression have you formed?’

I lit a cigarette and shook my head. ‘That there are times when being a man seems almost as bad as being a German,’ I said.

‘Really, captain, you are a most exasperating fellow. Try to forget your personal feelings and concentrate on your job as a policeman, please. You know damn well I’m talking about my boys and what might have happened to them.’

I threw my cigarette onto the ground angrily and then felt angrier for wasting a good cigarette.

‘That’s good coming from you, colonel. You wake me up to help out the local field police with an extra set of cop’s eyes and then you put on your spurs and try to get stiff when the cop’s eyes see something they don’t like. If you ask me, your damned boys had it coming if they were in there. I feel bad enough just going through the door of a wurst-hut like that, see? But then I’m peculiar that way. Maybe you’re right. Sometimes I forget that I’m a German soldier.’

‘Look, I only asked about my men – they were murdered after all.’

‘You got stiff with me, and if there’s one thing a Berliner hates it’s someone who gets stiff with him. You might be a colonel but don’t ever try to push a ramrod up my ass, sir.’

‘Captain Gunther, you have a most violent temper.’

‘Maybe that’s because I’m tired of people thinking that any of this shit really matters. Your men were murdered. That would be laughable if this whole situation in Russia wasn’t so tragic. You talk about murder like it still means something. In case you hadn’t noticed, colonel, we’re all of us in the worst place in the world with one boot in the fucking abyss, and we’re pretending that there’s law and order and something worth fighting for. But there isn’t. Not now. There’s just insanity and chaos and slaughter and maybe something worse that’s yet to come. It’s only a couple of days since you told me that sixteen thousand Jews from the Vitebsk ghetto ended up in the river or as human fertilizer. Sixteen thousand people. And I’m supposed to give a damn about a couple of off-duty Fritzes who got their throats cut outside the local sausage counter.’

‘I can see that you are a man under strain, sir,’ said the colonel.

‘We all are,’ I allowed. ‘It’s the strain of constantly having to look the other way. Well, I don’t mind telling you, the muscles in my neck are getting tired.’

Colonel Ahrens seethed quietly. ‘I’m still awaiting an answer to a perfectly reasonable question, captain.’

‘All right, I’ll tell you what I think, and you can tell me that I’m deluded and then the lieutenant here can take me to the airport. Colonel, your men were killed by a German soldier. Their side arms were still holstered so they didn’t believe they were in any danger, and in this moonlight it’s highly unlikely the murderer could have surprised them. Could be they even knew their killer. It’s an uncomfortable forensic fact, but most people do know the person who murders them.’

‘I can’t believe what you’re saying,’ said Ahrens.

‘I’ll give you some more reasons why I believe what I do in a moment,’ I said. ‘But if I may? The initial attack probably occurred on the street. The murderer hit them on the head with a blunt instrument and most likely threw it into the river. He must have been quite powerful because that’s how it looks from their head injuries – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ribe and Greiss might eventually have died from those blows alone. Then he dragged them down to the river. His doing that is another reason to assume he was strong. He made damn sure of what he was doing, too, from the size of the bayonet cuts. I’ve seen carthorses with smaller mouths than those wounds. He cut their throats while they were still unconscious, so he must have wanted to make sure they were dead. And I think that’s significant. Also I had the impression that the laceration ends higher on one side of each man’s neck than the other. The left side of the neck as you look at it, which might suggest a left-handed man.

‘Now then: maybe he was disturbed and maybe he wasn’t. It’s possible he meant to push the bodies into the water and let them float away to give him more time to escape. That’s what I would have done. With or without a head, a body that’s been in the water takes a while to start talking back to a pathologist – even an experienced one, and I don’t imagine there are too many of those in Smolensk right now.

‘When he got on his toes and made a run along the riverbank, he was running for his motorcycle – yes, I don’t doubt the SS sergeant was right about that. There’s nothing else sounds like an air-cooled BMW. Not even Glinka. Partisans can steal motorcycles, of course, but they’d hardly be brazen enough to ride one around right here in Smolensk, with so many checkpoints around the city. If he parked the bike to the west his name wouldn’t appear on a field policeman’s checklist either. And let’s not forget that it was a German murder weapon, too. According to the witness, the bike drove west along the road to Vitebsk. And given that the west bridge is down it’s certain that he didn’t cross the river. Which means your murderer must be stationed out that way. To the west of Smolensk. I expect you’ll find the bayonet somewhere on that road, lieutenant. Without the spring in the scabbard it might even have fallen out.’

‘But if he drove west,’ said the colonel, ‘that would mean you think he must have been going to the 537th at the castle, the General Staff at Krasny Bor, or the Gestapo at Gnezdovo.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘If I were you, lieutenant, I’d check out the vehicle logs at all three. Chances are that’s how you’ll catch your man. German bike, German knife, and the perpetrator stationed along the road to Vitebsk.’

‘You’re not serious,’ said the colonel. ‘About where the perpetrator is now serving, I mean.’

‘I can’t say that I envy you the job of unsticking some of those damned alibis, lieutenant. But like it or not, that’s just how it is with murder. It rarely ever unravels as neatly as an unwanted woollen pullover. Now as to why he killed them, well that’s harder to answer. But since we’ve eliminated robbery and a fight over a favourite whore, that suggests this was murder with a detestable motive, according to the way the law writes it – in other words, it was killing with intent. That’s right, gentlemen, he set out to kill them both. The question is, why today? Why today and not yesterday, or the day before, or last weekend? Was it just opportunity, or could there have been some other reason? You’ll only find that out, lieutenant, when you look into these two lives much more closely. Discover who they really were and you’ll find your motive, and when you find that you’ll be a damn sight nearer to finding their killer.’

I lit another cigarette and smiled. I felt calmer now that I’d let off some steam.

‘You could find them,’ said the colonel. ‘If you stayed on a while, here in Smolensk.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Not me.’ I looked at my watch. ‘In eight hours I’m going back to Berlin. And I’m not coming back again. Not ever. Not even if they put a bayonet to my throat. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to return to the castle. It’s possible I can still get a little sleep before my journey.’

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.’

‘You know, I should have realized something like this might happen,’ I said. ‘I should have gone to Gestapo headquarters last night and told them myself. Made an official report. They would have listened to the little fucking skull and crossbones on my hat.’

‘Sir. We ought to go.’

‘Yes. Yes of course.’ I sighed. ‘Take me to the airport. The sooner I get out of this hellhole the better.’

Looking more than a little relieved, Rex followed me back to the car, and suddenly he was full of talk that was mostly explanation and evasion of the kind I’d often heard before and would doubtless hear again.

‘No one likes to see that sort of thing,’ he said, as we drove north up Flugplatzstrasse. ‘Public executions. Least of all me. I’m just a lieutenant of signals. I worked for Siemens in Berlin before the war, you know. Installing telephones in people’s houses. Fortunately I don’t have to get involved with that side of it. You know – police actions. So far I’ve got through this war without shooting anyone, and with any luck, that’s not going to change. Frankly I could no more hang a bunch of civilians than I could play a Schubert impromptu. If you ask me, sir, the Ivans are decent salt-of-the-earth fellows just trying to feed themselves and their families, most of them. But try telling that to the Gestapo. With them everything is ideological – all Ivans are Bolsheviks and commissars and there’s never any room for compromise. It’s always “Let’s make an example of someone to deter the rest”, you know? If it wasn’t for them and the SS – what happened over at the ghetto in Vitebsk was quite unnecessary – well, really Smolensk is not such a bad place at all.’

‘And there’s even a fine cathedral. Yes, you mentioned it before. I just don’t think I know what a cathedral is for, lieutenant. Not anymore.’

It’s hard to feel good about your homeland when so many of your fellow countrymen behave with such callous brutality. Leaving Smolensk far below and behind me, my heart and mind felt as severely jolted by the sight of those six hanged men and women as the plane soon was by pockets of warmer air that the pilot called ‘turbulence’. This was so heart-stoppingly severe that two of the plane’s other passengers – a colonel from the Abwehr named Von Gersdorff, who was one of the aristocrats that had met Von Dohnanyi at Smolensk airport the previous Wednesday, and an SS major – were swiftly crossing themselves and praying out loud; I wondered how much good a prayer in German could be. For a while the two officers’ prayers provided a source of some small sadistic pleasure to me. They were a satisfactory hint there might be some justice in an unjust world, and the way I was feeling I would hardly have cared if our plane had met with a catastrophic accident.

Perhaps it was the vigorous shaking of the plane we endured for over an hour that banged something loose in my head. I had been thinking about Captain Max Schottlander, who was the Polish author of the military intelligence report – for this was what it was – I had found inside his frozen boot, and which Doctor Batov had translated for me. Suddenly, as if the lurching movement of the plane had brought part of my brain to life, I wondered what effect might be achieved if ever I was to disclose the report’s contents – although to whom these contents might be disclosed was hard to answer. For a moment a number of ideas as to just what could be done crowded my brain all at once; but finding no more than a fleeting thought attached to each, these ideas seemed to vanish simultaneously, as if a warmer, more hospitable mind than my own had been required to give them all a chance to thrive, like so many of Colonel Ahrens’s bees.

What was more certain and enduring in my mind was the belief that what I had discovered in that boot was now a source of no small danger to me.

CHAPTER 10

Thursday, March 18th 1943

There were hundreds of snowdrops growing in the garden of the flower house; spring was in the air and I was back in Berlin; the Russian city of Kharkov had been retaken by von Manstein’s forces, and the previous day a number of prominent state and Party figures had been named in the trial of a notorious Berlin butcher called August Nöthling. He’d been accused of profiteering, although it would have been more accurate to describe his real crime as that of having supplied large quantities of meat without the requisite food coupons to high government officials such as Frick, Rust, Darré, Hierl, Brauchitsch and Raeder. Frick, the minister of the interior, had received more than a hundred kilos of poultry – this at a time when it was rumoured the food ministry was considering reducing the daily meat ration by fifty grams.

All of this ought to have put me in a better mood – generally speaking there was nothing I enjoyed more than a very public scandal involving the Nazis. But Judge Goldsche had asked me to come and see him a second time to discuss my report on Katyn Wood, and although he had already dispatched Judge Conrad to Smolensk to take charge of an investigation that was still unofficial and secret, I had a bad feeling my part in it was not yet over. The reason for this feeling was simple: despite having been back in the office for three days, I had yet to be assigned to another case, even though a new one was already demanding a high level of investigation.

Grischino was an area to the north-west of Stalino, in Russia. Following a counteroffensive in February, the area had been retaken by the 7th Armoured Division, which found that almost everyone in a German field hospital – wounded soldiers, female nurses, civilian workers – some six hundred people including eighty-nine Italians, had been murdered by the retreating Red Army. For good measure the Reds had raped the nurses before cutting off their breasts and then slitting their throats. Several judges – Knobloch, Block, Wulle and Goebel – were already in Jekaterinovka taking depositions from local witnesses, and this left the bureau severely overstretched. There were a few survivors from the Grischino Massacre now in Berlin’s Charité Hospital who had yet to be deposed by a bureau member, and I could not understand why Goldsche hadn’t asked me to do it immediately upon my return from Smolensk. I’d seen the photographs that were supplied by the Propaganda Service Battalion. In one particular house, the bodies were piled up to a height of 1.5 metres. Another picture of ten German soldiers lying in a line by the side of the road showed that the skulls of the men had been flattened to one third of their normal size, as if someone had driven a truck or a tank over them, most likely while they were still alive. Grischino was the worst war crime committed against Germans I had seen since coming to the bureau, but the judge did not seem inclined to discuss it with me.

‘These murders in Smolensk that you looked into,’ he said, lighting his pipe. ‘Is there anything in that for us, do you think?’

Brahms was playing on the radio in his office, which suggested we were going to have a very private conversation.

‘I assume you mean the two soldiers from the signals regiment and not the six civilians the Gestapo hanged in the street.’

‘I wish they wouldn’t overreact like that,’ said Goldsche. ‘Killing innocent people in retaliation. It really compromises what we’re about in this department. You can dress that kind of thing up any way you like, but it’s still a crime.’

‘Will you tell them or shall I?’

‘Oh, I think it’s best coming from you, don’t you think? After all, you used to work for Heydrich, Bernie. I’m sure Müller will listen to you.’

‘I’ll get right on it, Judge.’

Goldsche chuckled and sucked on his pipe. The chimney in his office must have been bomb-damaged – which was common enough in Berlin – because it was hard to distinguish the smoke off the coal fire from the smoke off his pipe.

‘I’m certain it was a German who killed them both,’ I said. My eyes were starting to water, although that could just as easily have been the syrupy Brahms. ‘It was probably an argument about a whore. That’s one case we can leave to the local field police.’

‘What’s he like, this Lieutenant Ludwig Voss?’

‘He’s a good man, I think. Anyway, I told Judge Conrad he could rely on him. Not so sure about Colonel Ahrens. The man is a little too protective of his men to be really helpful to us. His men and his bees.’

‘Bees?’

‘He keeps an apiary at the castle where the 537th are quartered, which is right in the middle of Katyn Wood. For the honey.’

‘I don’t suppose he gave you any?’

‘Honey? No. In fact by the time I left I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me at all.’

‘Well, there are going to be plenty of bees buzzing around his ears before this particular investigation’s over,’ observed Goldsche. ‘And I expect that’s why, don’t you?’

‘I’ll bet August Nöthling could have sold you some honey.’

‘He’s a butcher.’

‘Maybe so. But he still managed to supply twenty kilos of chocolate to the minister of the interior and the field marshal.’

‘That’s exactly what one would expect of a man like Frick. But I certainly didn’t expect it of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.’

‘When you’ve been retired by the leader, what else can an old soldier do but eat if he’s not to fade away?’

The judge smiled.

‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘For me, I mean? Why don’t you let me depose those wounded soldiers in the Charité? The ones from Grischino.’

‘Actually, I’m going to depose them myself. Just to keep my hand in. Anyway, I was hoping to catch two birds with one trap. I suffer from fearful indigestion, and it occurred to me I might persuade one of the doctors or the nurses to let me have a bottle of liver salts. There’s none to be had in any of the shops.’

‘As you wish. I’m certainly not going to stand between you and your liver. Look, I’m not anxious to head back to Russia, but it strikes me there’s a lot of work to do in Stalino, right now. That’s near Kharkov, isn’t it?’

‘That depends on what you mean by near. It’s three hundred kilometres south of Kharkov. That’s much too far to send you, Bernie. I need you here in Berlin. Especially now and this weekend.’

‘Would you mind telling me why?’

‘I’ve been warned by the ministry of propaganda that we can expect a summons to the Prince Carl Palace at any time. So that we might brief the minister himself on what you discovered in Katyn Wood.’

I let out a groan.

‘No, listen Bernie, I want you to make sure that there is nothing in your report he can find fault with. I don’t think the bureau can afford to disappoint him again so soon after the disappointment he felt after we lost our witness to the sinking of the SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim.’

‘I should have thought that overcoming disappointment is what propaganda is all about.’

‘Besides, it’s Heroes Memorial Day this Sunday. Hitler’s inspecting an exhibition of captured Soviet military material and making a speech, and I need someone with a uniform to accompany me to the Armoury Building and help represent this department. All of the general staff will be there, as usual.’

‘Find someone else, Judge. Please. I’m no Nazi. You know that.’

‘That’s what everyone in this department says. And there is no one else. It seems that this weekend there is only you and me.’

‘It will be just another rant by the great necromancer about Bolshevik poison. But now I begin to understand. That’s why there are so many judges from the bureau out of town, isn’t it? They’re avoiding this duty.’

‘That’s very true. None of them want to be anywhere near Berlin this weekend.’ He puffed his pipe for a moment and then added: ‘Perhaps they’re afraid of failing to show the proper amount of respect and enthusiasm for the leader’s ability to lead our nation in such a solemn moment of national commemoration.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, they might just be afraid.’

I lit a cigarette – if you can’t beat them, join them – and took a long drag before speaking again.

‘Wait a minute. Is something going to happen, Judge? At the Armoury? To the general staff?’

‘I think something is going to happen, yes,’ said the judge. ‘But not to the general staff. At least not right away. Afterwards it’s quite possible there may be some kind of overreaction on the part of the Gestapo and the SS. Of the kind we were discussing earlier. So I wouldn’t forget your firearm if I were you. In fact, I’d be very grateful if you made sure you brought it with you. I’ve never been much of a shot with a pistol.’

Even as the judge was speaking I remembered a remark made by Colonel Ahrens during one of our more frank conversations – something about the amount of treason talked in Smolensk – and suddenly a lot of what I’d seen seemed to make sense: the package addressed to Colonel Stieff in Rastenburg that Von Dohnanyi had carried all the way from Berlin and which – strangely – Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff had asked Colonel Brandt to carry on Hitler’s plane back to Rastenburg must surely have been a bomb, albeit a bomb that hadn’t exploded.

And what better motive could there be for someone to have killed a couple of telephonists than the possibility that they had overheard the details of a plan to kill Hitler? But when that plan had failed, another plan must have been put into action. That made sense, too: Hitler was increasingly a recluse and the opportunities to kill him were few and far between. All the same, if this was indeed why the two telephonists had been murdered, I found the act repugnant. Hitler certainly deserved to die, and secrecy was undoubtedly important if his assassination was ever to be carried out, but not if that meant the cold-blooded murder of two innocent men. Or was I just being naïve?

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The mist clears. I begin to see the elf-king, father. He’s near.’

The judge frowned, trying to recognize my allusion. ‘Goethe?’

I nodded. ‘Tell me something, Judge,’ I said. ‘I suppose Von Dohnanyi’s involved.’

‘Christ, is it that obvious?’

‘Not to everyone,’ I said. ‘But I’m a detective, remember? It’s my job to smell when the fuse is burning. However, if I’ve guessed, it’s possible others might guess too.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s why the bomb didn’t go off on Hitler’s plane. Because someone else figured it out.’

‘Christ,’ muttered the judge. ‘How did you know about that?’

‘You know, for an intelligence officer with the Abwehr your friend isn’t very clever,’ I said. ‘Brave, but not smart. He and I were on the same plane down to Smolensk. If you’re going to carry a parcel that’s addressed to someone in Rastenburg it looks a lot less suspicious if you deliver it the first time you’re there.’

‘That parcel you saw was only ever the back-up plan to Plan A.’

‘And what was that? Fix the brakes on Hitler’s car? Nobble the vegetarian option in the officer’s mess? Push him over in the snow? The trouble with these damned aristocrats is that they know everything about good manners and being a gentleman and absolutely nothing about cold-blooded murder. If you’re going to do this kind of thing you need a professional. Like the person who murdered those two telephonists. Now he knew what he was doing.’

‘I don’t know for sure what the plan was then.’

‘So what do you know? I mean how are they going to try it this time?’

‘Another bomb, I believe.’

I smiled. ‘You know your salesmanship stinks, Judge. You invite me along to a party and then tell me that a bomb is going to explode while we’re there. My enthusiasm for Sunday morning is diminishing all the time.’

‘A very brave officer from Army Group Centre in Smolensk, who has the duty of taking Hitler round an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry, has agreed to carry a bomb in his jacket pocket. I believe it’s his plan to be as close to the leader as possible when it goes off.’

I wondered if this officer was the Abwehr colonel I’d seen on the plane back from Smolensk. I would have asked the judge, but I thought I’d probably unnerved him quite enough with my remarks about Von Dohnanyi. I certainly didn’t want Goldsche calling this officer and telling him to call off the assassination just because of what I’d guessed.

‘Then we’d better just hope for the best,’ I said. ‘Usually that’s the only option available in Nazi Germany.’

CHAPTER 11

Sunday, March 21st 1943

The Zeughaus or Arsenal was a baroque building of pinkish stone on Unter den Linden that housed a military museum. In the centre of the façade was a classical open pediment, and surrounding the roof was a spindle balustrade along which were arranged a series of twelve or fourteen suits of classical armour, made of stone and empty, as if ready to be claimed by a busload of Greek heroes. But I was inclined to think of these empty suits of armour as belonging to men who were already dead, and therefore more typical of Nazi Germany and the disastrous war we were now waging in Russia. This seemed especially true on the first Heroes Memorial Day that Berlin had witnessed since the surrender at Stalingrad, and there would have been many of the several hundred officers who paraded in front of the huge staircase on the north side of the inner courtyard to hear the leader’s ten-minute speech who had the same unpalatable thought as me: our true heroes were lying under several feet of Russian snow, and all the memorials in the world wouldn’t alter the fact that Hitler’s retreat from Moscow would not be long in following Napoleon’s, and with equally terminal effect upon his leadership.

It was however a more imminent termination to Hitler’s leadership that many of us were praying for on that particular Sunday morning. We stood there to attention, under the barrels of the 10-centimetre field guns Army Group Centre had taken from the Reds, and I for one could cheerfully have wished that someone would fire a fragmentation shell at our beloved leader: the 10-centimetre K353 delivered a 17-kilogram shell containing about six hundred bullets and was devastating to 50 per cent of targets in a 20- to 40-metre area. Which sounded just fine to me. I would probably have been killed as well, but that was all right just so long as the leader didn’t walk away from an explosion.

We listened to a sombre piece of Bruckner that did little to make anyone feel optimistic about anything; then, bare-headed and wearing a grey leather greatcoat, the leader walked to the lectern, and like a malevolent fisherman casting a long line into an infernal black lake, he sought to hook our lowered spirits with an announcement of a lifting of the ban on furlough for serving men because the front had been ‘stabilized’. Then he got to more standard fare about the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the warmonger Churchill, and how the enemies of the Reich meant to abduct and then to sterilize our male youth before eventually slaughtering us in our beds.

In that place of war and destruction, Hitler’s cold, hard voice seemed darker and more subdued than normal, which did nothing to encourage any feeling at all, let alone soldierly sentiment for fallen comrades. It was like listening to the sepulchral tones of Mephistopheles as, in some cavernous mountain hall, he threatened us all with hell. Only the threats were no good; hell was waiting just down the road and we all knew it. You could smell it in the air like hops from a local brewery.

In spite of all Judge Goldsche had told me, I didn’t really believe anything was going to happen to Hitler, but it certainly didn’t stop me hoping that Colonel von Gersdorff – for that was the Abwehr assassin’s name, and as I’d suspected he was indeed the officer who had been on the plane back from Smolensk – would prove me wrong.

As the leader finished speaking, everyone – myself included – applauded enthusiastically. I glanced at my watch and told myself that I was applauding because Hitler’s speech had lasted a comparatively short ten minutes, but this was a lie and I knew it: applauding a speech by the leader was a simple condition of self-preservation – the hall was full of Gestapo. Acknowledging the applause with a perfunctory Hitler salute, the leader walked to the entrance of the exhibition, where he was greeted by the colonel, and at a distance – a safe one, I hoped – the rest of us followed.

According to the judge, Von Gersdorff’s tour of the exhibition was due to last thirty minutes; in the event, it lasted less than five. As I entered the exhibition hall where a number of Napoleonic standards were on display I saw the leader turn on his heel and then move quickly through a side door and out of the Arsenal onto the riverbank, leaving his would-be assassin bewildered by this unexpected turn of events. Short of chasing after Hitler and throwing himself into the back of his Mercedes, Von Gersdorff’s attempt to kill the leader looked very much as if it was over before it had even begun.

‘That wasn’t supposed to happen,’ muttered the judge. ‘Something’s gone wrong. Hitler must have been tipped off.’

I glanced around the exhibition hall. Those members of Hitler’s SS bodyguard who still remained behind seemed quite relaxed. Others – officers with red stripes on their trouser legs, who were presumably in on the plot – rather less so.

‘I don’t think that’s the case,’ I said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any sign of alarm on the part of the SS.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’ The judge shook his head. ‘Christ, the man’s luck is uncanny. Damn him, he seems to have an instinct for self-preservation.’

Von Gersdorff continued standing where he was, seemingly at a loss about what to do next, mouth wide open like the Engelberg Tunnel. Around him were several officers who clearly had no idea the colonel was carrying explosives that might go off at any moment.

‘I’m not so sure about your friend’s instinct for self-preservation,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Colonel von Gersdorff. He’s still carrying a bomb, isn’t he?’

‘Oh God, yes. What’s he going to do?’

For another minute or so we watched, and gradually it became quite clear to us that Von Gersdorff wasn’t going to do anything. He kept looking around as if wondering why he was still there and had not yet been blown to smithereens. Suddenly it seemed I had to get him out of there: brave men of conscience were rather thin on the ground in Germany in 1943. I had the evidence of my own shaving mirror to remind me of that.

‘Wait here,’ I told the judge.

I walked quickly through the exhibition, pushing my way past the other officers toward the colonel. I stopped in front of him and bowed politely. He was about forty, dark and balding, and if I had doubted his courage, there was always the Iron Cross first class around his neck – not to mention what he had hidden in his greatcoat pocket – to remind me. I figured I had a less than even chance of being blown up. My heart was in my mouth and my knees were shaking so much it was only my boots that were holding me up. It might have been Heroes Memorial Day but I wasn’t feeling in the least bit heroic.

‘You must come with me, colonel,’ I said, quietly. ‘Now, sir, if you don’t mind.’

Seeing me, and more importantly the little silver death’s head on my cap and the witchcraft badge on my sleeve, Von Gersdorff smiled a sad smile, as though he was being arrested, which was my intention – or at least to leave him with the impression that he was being arrested. His hands were shaking and he was as pale as a Prussian winter’s day, but still he remained rooted to the spot.

‘It would be best for everyone if you didn’t wait any longer, sir,’ I said firmly.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a quiet air of resignation. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘This way, please.’

I turned on my heel and walked out of the exhibition hall. I didn’t look around. I didn’t need to. I could hear Von Gersdorff’s boots on the wooden floor immediately behind me. But on our way out of the exhibition hall, an SD captain called Wetzel whom I knew from the Gestapo took my arm.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked. ‘Why did the leader leave so abruptly?’

‘I don’t know why,’ I said, pulling my arm away from his grip. ‘But it seems something he said has left the colonel feeling a little upset, that’s all. So if you’ll excuse us.’

I looked around. By now I could see the fear in Von Gersdorff’s eyes, but was he afraid of me or – more likely – the bomb in his pocket?

‘This way, sir,’ I said and led him to a lavatory, where the colonel hesitated, so I was obliged to take him by the elbow and thrust him urgently inside. I checked the six cubicles to see that there was no one else in there. We were in luck; we were alone.

‘I’ll keep watch,’ I said, ‘while you defuse the device. Quickly, please.’

‘You mean, you’re not arresting me?’

‘No,’ I said, positioning myself immediately behind the door. ‘Now disarm that fucking bomb before we both find out the true meaning of Heroes Memorial Day.’

Von Gersdorff nodded and walked over to a row of washhandbasins. ‘Actually, there are two bombs,’ he said, and from the pockets of his greatcoat he carefully withdrew two flat objects that were each about the size of a rifle magazine. ‘The explosives are British. Clam mines used for sabotage. Odd that the Tommy ordnance for this kind of work should be better than ours. But the fuses are German. Ten-minute mercury sticks.’

‘Well, it’s good that we can make something right,’ I said. ‘Makes me feel really proud.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand why they haven’t gone off yet.’

Someone pushed at the lavatory door and I opened it just a crack. It was Wetzel again, his long hooked nose and thin moustache looking very ratlike through the gap in the door.

‘Is everything all right, Captain Gunther?’ he asked.

‘Better find another one,’ I told him. ‘The colonel’s being sick, I’m afraid.’

‘Do you want me to have someone fetch a mop and a bucket?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no need for that. Look, it’s kind of you to offer your help but the colonel is a bit of a mess, so it might be best if you left us alone for a minute, all right?’

Wetzel glanced over my shoulder as if he didn’t quite believe my story.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

He nodded and went away, and I looked anxiously around to see Von Gersdorff carefully withdrawing the fuses from one of the mines.

‘It’ll be me throwing up if you don’t hurry up and defuse those things,’ I said. ‘That fucking Gestapo captain is going to come back any minute. I just know he is.’

‘I still don’t understand why the leader left so quickly,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘I was about to show him Napoleon’s hat. Left behind in his coach after Waterloo and recovered by Prussian soldiers.’

‘Napoleon was defeated. Perhaps he doesn’t like to be reminded of that. Especially now we’re doing so well in Russia.’

‘Yes, perhaps. Nor do I really understand why you’re helping me.’

‘Let’s just say I hate to see a brave man blow himself up just because he’s dumb enough to forget he’s got a bomb in his pocket. How’s it coming along?’

‘Are you nervous?’

‘Whatever gave you that idea? I always get a kick out of being near explosives that are about to go off. But next time I’ll be sure to wear some armour plating underneath my coat and some earplugs.’

‘I’m not that brave, you know,’ he said. ‘But since my wife died, last year—’

Von Gersdorff removed the second fuse and dropped the two mercury sticks into the lavatory.

‘Are they safe?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, pocketing the two mines again. ‘And thank you. I don’t know what came over me. I suppose I must have just frozen – like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s certainly what it looked like.’

He came to attention immediately in front of me, clicked his heels and bowed his head.

‘Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,’ he said. ‘At your service, captain. Whom do I have the honour of thanking?’

‘No.’ I smiled and shook my head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I don’t understand. I should like to know your name, captain. And then I should like to take you to my club and buy us both a drink. To calm our nerves. It’s just around the corner.’

‘That’s kind of you, Colonel von Gersdorff. But perhaps it’s best you don’t know who I am. Just in case the Gestapo should ask you for a list of all the people who helped you organize this little disaster. Besides, it’s hardly the kind of name that someone like you would ever remember.’

Von Gersdorff straightened perceptibly, as if I had suggested he was a Bolshevik. ‘Are you suggesting that I would ever betray the names of brother officers? Of German patriots?’

‘Believe me, everyone has his limit where the Gestapo is concerned.’

‘That would not be the conduct of an officer and a gentleman.’

‘Of course it wouldn’t. And that’s why the Gestapo don’t employ officers and gentlemen. They employ sadistic thugs who can break a man as easily as one of those mercury sticks of yours.’

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

Von Gersdorff walked stiffly toward the lavatory door like a man – or more accurately an aristocrat – who had been grossly insulted by a common little captain.

‘Wait a minute, colonel,’ I said. ‘There’s a particularly nosy Gestapo officer outside that door who believes you came in here to throw up. At least, I hope he does. I’m afraid it was the only story I could think of in the circumstances.’ I ran the tap to fill one of the basins. ‘Like I say, he’s a suspicious bastard and he already smells a rat, so we’d better make my story look a little more convincing, don’t you think? Come here.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Save your life, I hope.’ I scooped some water into my hands and threw it into the front of his tunic. ‘And mine, perhaps. Here, hold still.’

‘Hang on. This is my dress uniform.’

‘I don’t for a minute doubt your courage, colonel, but I happen to know this is your second failure within as many weeks, so I am not confident that you or any of the people working with you really know what the hell you’re doing. You and your posh friends seem to lack all of the lethal qualities that are necessary to be assassins. Let’s just leave it there, shall we? No names, no thank yous, no explanations, just goodbye.’

I threw some more water onto the front of Von Gersdorff, and hearing the door open, I just had time to haul the towel off the roller and to start mopping down his front. I turned to see Wetzel standing in the room. The smile on his rodent’s face looked anything but friendly.

‘Is everything all right?’ he said.

‘I told you it was, didn’t I?’ I said, irritably. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Yes you did, but—’

‘I didn’t flush the lavatory,’ murmured Von Gersdorff. ‘Those sticks are still in there.’

‘Shut up and let me do the talking,’ I said.

Von Gersdorff nodded.

‘What’s got into you, Wetzel?’ I said. ‘Damn it all, can’t you take a fucking hint? I said I was handling it.’

‘I have the distinct impression that there’s something not quite right in here,’ said Wetzel.

‘I didn’t know you were a plumber. But go ahead. Be my guest. Now you’re here, see if you can unblock the toilet.’ I threw the towel aside, gave the colonel a quick up and down and then nodded. ‘There you go, sir. A little damp, perhaps, but you’ll do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Von Gersdorff.

‘That’s all right. Could happen to anyone.’

Wetzel wasn’t the type to back away from an insult; he picked up a clothes-brush and tossed it to me. I caught it, too.

‘Why don’t you brush him down while you’re at it?’ said Wetzel. ‘A new career as a gentleman’s valet or a lavatory attendant would seem appropriate in the circumstances.’

‘Thanks.’ I fussed at the colonel’s shoulders for a few seconds and then put down the brush. It was probably a safer although rather less pleasurable option than trying to shove it up Wetzel’s rectum.

Wetzel sniffed the air, loudly. ‘It certainly doesn’t smell like someone has been ill in here,’ he said. ‘Why is that, I wonder?’

I laughed.

‘Did I say something funny, Captain Gunther?’

‘The things the Gestapo will try and pinch you for these days.’ I nodded at the six cubicles next to us. ‘Why don’t you check that the colonel here flushed the toilet while you’re at it, Wetzel?’

There was a bottle of lime water on the shelf behind the basins. I picked it up, pulled out the cork, and splashed some on to the colonel’s hands. He rubbed them on his cheeks.

‘I’m all right now, Captain Gunther,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your assistance. It was most kind of you. I shan’t forget this. I really thought I was about to faint back there.’

Wetzel glanced behind the door of the first cubicle.

I laughed again. ‘Find anything, Wetzel? A Jew on the wing, perhaps?’

‘We have an old saying in the Gestapo, captain,’ said Wetzel. ‘A simple search is always better than suspicion.’

He stepped into the second cubicle.

‘It’s the last one,’ murmured Von Gersdorff.

I nodded.

‘The way you say that, Wetzel, it sounds homespun, almost friendly,’ I said.

‘The Gestapo is not unfriendly,’ said Wetzel. ‘So long as someone’s not an enemy of the state.’

He came out of the second cubicle and went into the third.

‘Well there are none of those in here,’ I said brightly. ‘In case you didn’t notice, the colonel was about to guide the leader around the exhibition. They don’t let just anyone do that, I expect.’

‘And how is it that you two are friends, captain?’

‘Not that it’s any of your damn business, but I’ve just got back from Army Group Centre in Smolensk,’ I said. ‘That’s where the colonel is stationed. We were on the same plane back to Berlin. Isn’t that right, colonel?’

‘Yes,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘All of the exhibits for today’s display were collected by Army Group Centre. The enormous honour of being the leader’s guide this morning fell to me, I’m happy to say. However I think I must have picked up some sort of bacillus while I was down there. I just hope that the leader doesn’t get it.’

‘Please God he doesn’t,’ I said.

Wetzel stepped into the fourth cubicle. I saw him glance into the toilet bowl. If he did the same in the sixth and last cubicle he would surely see the two mercury sticks and we would be arrested, and that would be the end of us. It was whispered around the Alex that Georg Elser – the Munich bomber of August 1939 – had been tortured by Heinrich Himmler, in person, following his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the leader; the rumour was that Himmler had almost kicked the man to death. It was anyone’s guess what had happened to him since then, but the same rumour said he had been starved to death in Sachsenhausen. About assassins the Nazis were never anything less than vengeful and vindictive.

‘Is that why he left so abruptly, do you think?’ I asked. ‘Because he could see that you were ill and didn’t want to catch it himself?’

‘Perhaps.’ Von Gersdorff closed his eyes and nodded, catching on at last. ‘I think it might have been, yes.’

‘I can’t say I blame him,’ I said. ‘There was typhoid around Smolensk when we left. In Vitebsk, wasn’t it? Where all those Jews died?’

‘That’s what I told the leader,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘When he visited our headquarters in Smolensk last weekend.’

‘Typhoid?’ Wetzel frowned.

‘I don’t think I have typhoid,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘At least, I hope not.’ He clutched his stomach. ‘However. I do feel rather ill again. If you’ll excuse me gentlemen, I’m afraid I am going to throw up once more.’

The colonel moved away from me and presented himself immediately in front of the Gestapo captain, who recoiled noticeably as, for a brief moment, Von Gersdorff placed a hand on his shoulder before launching himself into the last cubicle. He closed and then locked the door hurriedly behind him. There was a short pause and then we heard the sound of him retching loudly. I had to hand it to the colonel. He was a hell of an actor. By now I was almost convinced myself that he was ill.

Wetzel and I faced each other with obvious dislike.

‘There’s nothing personal in this. The fact I don’t like you, Captain Gunther, has nothing to do with what I’m doing here.’

‘Make sure you flush that machine pistol, colonel,’ I said loudly, through the door. ‘And while you’re at it, those two bombs in your pockets.’

‘I’m just doing my job, captain,’ said Wetzel. ‘That’s all. I’m just trying to make sure that everything is in order.’

‘Sure you are,’ I said, pleasantly. ‘But in case you didn’t notice, the cat’s already been swept down river. I don’t doubt the leader would be most impressed with your efforts to ensure his safety, Captain Wetzel, but he’s gone – back to the Reich chancellery and a nice lunch, I’ll be bound.’

Von Gersdorff retched again.

I went over to the basin and started to wash my hands furiously.

‘I forget,’ I said. ‘Is typhoid caught in the air or do you have to eat something that’s been contaminated?’

For a moment Captain Wetzel hesitated. Then he quickly washed his hands. I handed him the towel. Wetzel started to dry his hands, remembered that I’d used the towel to purportedly wipe the vomit off the colonel’s tunic, and dropped it abruptly on the floor; then he turned and left.

I let out a breath, leaned against the wall, and lit a cigarette.

‘He’s gone,’ I announced. ‘You can come out now.’ I took a deep drag of smoke and shook my head. ‘I’m impressed with the way you kept up with all that puking. It sounded very convincing. I think you’d have made quite an actor, colonel.’

The cubicle door opened slowly to reveal a very pale-looking Von Gersdorff.

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t an act,’ he said. ‘What with the bombs and that fucking Gestapo captain, my nerves are shot to pieces.’

‘Perfectly understandable,’ I said. ‘It’s not every day that you try to blow yourself up. That sort of thing takes guts.’

‘It’s not every day you fail, either,’ he said bitterly. ‘Another ten minutes and Adolf Hitler would have been dead.’

I gave him a cigarette and lit it with the butt of my own.

‘Got any family?’

‘A daughter.’

‘Then don’t be so hard on yourself. Think of her. We might still have Hitler, but she still has you, and that’s what’s important right now.’

‘Thank you.’ For a moment Von Gersdorff’s eyes filled up; then he nodded and wiped them quickly with the back of his hand. ‘I wonder why he did leave so abruptly.’

‘You ask me? The man isn’t human at all. Either that or he got a sniff of that cologne you were wearing before I splashed that lime water on your hands. It was horrible.’

Von Gersdorff smiled.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I think we need that drink after all. You mentioned a club? Around the corner?’

‘I thought you wanted to keep fools like me at arm’s length.’

‘That was before that stupid captain opened his mouth and told you my name,’ I said. ‘And what better company for one fool than another?’

‘Is that what we are? Fools?’

‘Certainly. But at least we know we’re fools. And in today’s Germany that counts as a kind of wisdom.’

We went to the German Club – formerly the Herrenclub – at number two Jäger Strasse, which was a red sandstone neo-baroque hatchery for anyone with a von in his name, and the kind of place where you felt improperly dressed without a red stripe on your trouser leg and a Knight’s Cross around your neck. I’d been there once before, but only because I’d mistaken the place for Nero’s golden palace and they’d mistaken me for the mailman. Naturally women were not allowed. It was bad enough for the members to see the witchcraft badge on my tunic in there; if they had seen a female in that place someone would probably have fetched a red-hot stool.

Gersdorff ordered a bottle of Prince Bismarck. They shouldn’t have had any, but of course they did because it was the German Club and the seventy-seven princes and thirty-eight German counts who were among the members might have wondered what things were coming to when you couldn’t get a decent bottle of schnapps. I dare say that August Nöthling wasn’t the only shopkeeper in Berlin who knew how to get around the country’s strict rationing. We drank it neat, cold and quickly, with quiet patriotic toasts that someone eavesdropping on our conversation might have considered treasonable, and it was fortunate that we were in the bowling alley, which was empty.

After a while we were both a little drunk and bowled a few, which was when I informed Von Gersdorff of one aspect to the plot to kill Hitler I found repellent.

‘Something’s been nagging me ever since I got back from Smolensk,’ I said.

‘Oh? And what’s that?’

‘I don’t mind you trying to blow Hitler up,’ I said. ‘But I do mind about the two telephonists in Smolensk who had their throats cut because they overheard something they shouldn’t have.’

Von Gersdorff stopped bowling and shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘When did this happen?’

‘In the early hours of Sunday March 14th,’ I said. ‘The day immediately after the leader visited Smolensk. Two telephonists from the 537th were found murdered on the banks of the Dnieper River near a brothel called the Hotel Glinka. I was the investigating officer. Unofficially, anyway.’

‘Really, I know nothing about this,’ he insisted. ‘And I can assure you, Captain Gunther, that there is no one at Army Group HQ who would commit such a crime. Or indeed order such a crime to be carried out.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Of course I’m sure. These are officers and gentlemen we’re talking about.’ He lit a cigarette and shook his head. ‘But, look, this sounds much more like partisans. What makes you so sure it wasn’t some damned Popov who murdered them?’

I gave him the reasons. ‘Their throats had been cut with a German bayonet. And the murderer escaped riding a BMW motorcycle west, in the direction of Group headquarters. Also I suspect the two victims knew their murderer.’

‘God, how awful. But if it happened near a brothel, as you say, then perhaps it was just a soldiers’ argument about a prostitute.’

I shrugged. ‘The local Gestapo hanged some innocent people for the crime, of course. In retaliation. So a proper sense of order has been restored. Anyway, I just thought I’d ask your opinion.’ I shook my head. ‘Perhaps it was an argument about a whore after all.’

I didn’t really believe that. Not that it mattered very much what I believed about the murders now I was back in Berlin. Trying to figure out who murdered the two army telephonists was down to Lieutenant Voss in Smolensk, and I told myself – and told Von Gersdorff – that if I never saw the place until the year 2043 it would be a hundred years too soon.

CHAPTER 12

Monday, March 22nd 1943

It was his right leg. The minister limped into his office in the Leopold Palace at speed, and if the carpet hadn’t been so thick and the distance between the huge door and his desk hadn’t been quite so vast we might not have noticed the shiny special shoe and the even shinier metal brace. Well, almost. We were looking out for it, of course: there were so many jokes told about Joey’s cloven hoof that it was even more notorious than he was – almost a Berlin tourist attraction – and the judge and I kept a close eye on his club foot just so we could say that we’d seen it, in just the same way you wanted to be able to say you’d seen Lotte the bear in the pit at Köllnischer Park, or Anita Berber at the Heaven and Hell Club.

As Goebbels limped into the room the judge and I stood up and saluted in the customary way and he flapped a delicate little hand back over his shoulder in imitation of the way the leader did it – as if swatting an irritating mosquito, or dismissing some sycophant, of which there seemed to be a plentiful supply in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. I suppose it was just that kind of place: before the ministry took over the building in 1933 the palace had been the residence of the Hohenzollerns, the royal family of Prussia, which had employed more than a few sycophants itself.

Goebbels was all smiles and apologies for keeping us waiting. It made a nice change from the kind of hate that was usually heard spilling out of his narrow mouth.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please forgive me,’ he said in a deeply resonant voice that belied his dwarfish stature. ‘I’ve been on the telephone complaining to the High Command about the situation we found at Kharkov. Field Marshal von Bock had reported that all German supplies would be destroyed rather than left behind for the enemy; but when Field Marshal von Manstein took the city again he discovered large quantities of our supplies still undestroyed. Can you believe it? Of course von Bock blames Paulus, and now that Paulus is conveniently a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, who is there to contradict him? I know some of these people are your friends, Judge, but really, it beggars belief. It’s hard enough to win a war without being lied to by people on your own side. The Wehrmacht really needs to be combed out. Did you know that the generals are demanding rations for thirteen million soldiers when there are only nine million Germans under arms? I tell you the leader ought to take the severest action against someone.’

Goebbels sat down behind his desk and almost vanished until he leaned forward on his chair. I was tempted to go and fetch him a cushion, but in spite of his continuing smile, there was good reason to doubt he had a sense of humour. For one, he was short, and I’ve never yet met a short man who could laugh at himself as easily as a taller one; and that’s as true a picture of the world as anything you’ll find in Kant or Hegel. For another he was a doctor of philosophy, and nobody in Germany ever calls himself doctor unless he wants to impress upon other people how impeccably serious he really is.

‘How are you, Judge?’

‘Fine, sir, thank you.’

‘And your family?’

‘We’re all fine sir, thank you for asking.’

The doctor clasped his hands and bounced them excitedly on the blotter, as if chopping herbs with a mezzaluna. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band, although he was famously married. Maybe he figured that none of the starlets at the UFA studios in Babelsberg he was reputedly fond of banging would recall having seen the pictures that had been in every German magazine of the minister marrying Magda Quandt.

‘It’s a great pity your investigation into the sinking of that hospital ship didn’t come off,’ Goebbels said to me. ‘The British are experts at occupying the moral high ground. That would have removed them from it, permanently, make no mistake. But this is even better, I think. Yes, I read your report with great interest, Captain Gunther, great interest.’

‘Thank you, Herr doctor.’

‘Have we met before? Your name seems familiar to me. I mean before you were with the War Crimes Bureau.’

‘No, I’d certainly have remembered meeting you, sir.’

‘There was a Gunther who used to be a detective with Kripo. Rather a good one by all accounts. He was the man who arrested Gormann, the strangler.’

‘Yes sir, that was me.’

‘Well, that must be it.’

I was already nervous about meeting Dr Goebbels – about ten years ago I’d been asked to drop a case as a favour to Joey, but I hadn’t, and I wondered if this was what he remembered. And our little exchange did nothing to make me feel any less like a man sitting on hot coals. The judge was equally nervous – at least he kept tugging at the stud of his wing collar and flexing his neck before he answered the minister’s questions, as if his throat required a little more space to swallow whatever it was that he was going to have to agree to.

‘So, do you really think it’s a possibility?’ Goebbels asked him. ‘That there is some sort of a mass grave hidden down there?’

‘There are lots of secret graves in that part of the world,’ he said, carefully. ‘The problem is making absolutely sure that this is the right one: that this is indeed the site of a war crime committed by the NKVD.’

He nodded at a manila file that lay on top of a copy of that day’s Völkischer Beobachter.

‘It’s all there in Gunther’s report, sir.’

‘Nevertheless I should like to hear the captain talk about it, himself,’ Goebbels said smoothly. ‘My own experience of written reports is that you can usually get more out of the man who wrote it than the report itself. That’s what the leader says. “Men are my books”, he says. I tend to agree with that sentiment.’

I stirred a little under the minister’s sharp eye.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do think it’s a possibility. A strong possibility. The local inhabitants are quite unequivocal that there isn’t a grave in Katyn Wood. However, I believe that’s probably a good sign that there is. They’re lying, of course.’

‘Why would they lie?’ Goebbels frowned, almost as if he regarded lying as something quite inexplicable and beyond all countenancing.

‘The NKVD might be gone from Smolensk but the people are still afraid of them. More than they’re afraid of us, I think. And they’ve got good reason. For twenty years the NKVD – and before them the OGPU and the Cheka – have been murdering Russians wholesale.’ I shrugged. ‘We’ve only been doing it for eighteen months.’

Goebbels thought that was very funny.

‘I’ll say one thing for Stalin,’ he said, ‘he knows the best way to treat the Russian people. Mass murder is as primitive a language as there is, but it’s the best language in which to talk to them.’

‘So, there’s that,’ I said. ‘And there’s the fact that what they actually told me flies in the face of what I found lying on the ground.’

‘The bones and the button; yes, of course.’ Goebbels pinched his lower lip thoughtfully.

‘It’s not much to go on, I’ll admit, but I’ve had it verified as belonging to the greatcoat of a Polish officer.’

‘Is it possible that the coat could have been stolen from a Polish officer by a Red Army soldier, who was subsequently killed in the battle of Smolensk?’ asked Goebbels.

‘That’s a good question. What you say is certainly a possibility. But against that are the numerous intelligence reports the Abwehr had received of Polish officers seen on a train parked in a local railway siding. These would seem to confirm at least that at some stage in 1940 there were certainly Poles in the vicinity of Smolensk.’

‘Many or all of whom may have been murdered by the NKVD,’ said Goebbels.

‘But we won’t really know for sure that there’s more than one body until the ground thaws and we’re able to carry out a proper exhumation.’

‘When is that thaw likely to happen?’

‘A couple of weeks at least,’ I said.

Goebbels grimaced with impatience. ‘There’s no way of speeding this up? Building fires on the ground, for example. Surely there must be something we can do.’

‘Not without the risk of destroying important evidence,’ said Goldsche.

‘I’m afraid that for the moment we’re at the mercy of the Russian winter,’ I said.

Goebbels took his long chin in his hands and frowned. ‘Yes, yes of course.’

He was wearing a grey three-piece suit with wide lapels, a white shirt and a striped tie. The tie was without any sort of knot, just a Party badge for a tie-pin – like a nurse’s collar – which added a fussy and curiously feminine touch to his appearance.

‘Gentlemen, I hear what you say. However, at the risk of stating the obvious let me make quite clear to you both the enormous propaganda value to us that this investigation presents. After the disaster of Stalingrad and the likelihood of another disaster in Tunisia, we need a coup like this. Jews all over the world are doing their best to make Bolshevism look innocent and to represent it as a lesser danger to world peace than National Socialism. They maintain the lie that the dastardly deeds typical of the Russian beast simply never happened. Indeed, in Jewish circles in London and Washington the present slogan is that the Soviet Union is destined to lead Europe. We cannot allow this to pass unchallenged. It is our job to stop it. It’s only Germany that stands between these monsters and the rest of Europe and it’s time that Roosevelt and Churchill woke up to this fact.’

He must suddenly have realized that he wasn’t giving a speech in the Sports Palace because he came to an abrupt stop.

A few seconds passed before Judge Goldsche spoke. ‘Yes sir. Of course, you’re right.’

‘The very second the ground down there thaws, I want a dig to commence,’ said Goebbels. ‘We can’t afford any delay in this matter.’

‘Yes sir,’ agreed the judge.

‘But since we have a little time before then,’ continued Goebbels, ‘two weeks you say, Captain Gunther?’

I nodded.

‘Might I ask a question, Herr Reich minister?’ said the judge. ‘You say “we”. Are you referring to Germany as a whole or to this particular ministry?’

‘Why do you ask, Judge Goldsche?’

‘Because the standard protocol is that the Bureau of War Crimes prepares investigative reports and the Foreign Office publishes them as white books. Reich minister Von Ribbentrop doesn’t like it when the normal protocol is ignored.’

‘Von Ribbentrop.’ Goebbels snorted with disgust. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Judge Goldsche, the current foreign policy of this country is to wage total war on its enemies. There is no other foreign policy. We use Von Ribbentrop to speak to the Italians and the Japanese and not much else.’ Goebbels grinned at his own joke. ‘No, you can leave the Foreign Office to me, gentlemen. Let them publish their silly white book, if that makes them happy. But this investigation is a propaganda matter now. Your first port of call in this matter is me. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Herr Reich minister,’ said the judge, who looked sorry he’d ever mentioned a white book.

‘More importantly, perhaps we can turn this delay to advantage. Let us suppose for a moment that it is indeed a mass grave containing some unfortunate Polish officers. I should like to hear your thoughts on the proper way to go about handling things when eventually we’re able.’

The judge looked puzzled. ‘In the usual way, Herr doctor. We should act carefully and with patience. We must allow the evidence to lead us, as it always does. The business of judicial forensic inquiry is never something that can be rushed, sir. It requires painstaking attention to detail.’

Goebbels did not look satisfied with this answer. ‘No, with respect, that won’t do at all. We’re talking about the crime of the century here, not a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.’

He flicked open a cigarette box on the desk and invited us to help ourselves. Goldsche declined in order to continue his line of argument, but I took one: the box was made of white enamel with a handsome gold eagle on the lid and the cigarettes were Trummers, which I hadn’t seen – or more importantly smoked – since before the war. I was tempted to take two and put one behind my ear for later.

‘If the evidence is to sustain the investigation, we must proceed with caution, sir,’ said the judge. ‘I’ve never seen an investigation that was improved by haste. It contributes to error of interpretation. When we rush things we leave ourselves vulnerable to criticism by enemy propaganda: that we faked something, perhaps.’

But Goebbels was hardly listening. ‘This goes beyond all normal protocols,’ he said, trying to stifle a yawn. ‘I thought I made that clear already. Look, the leader himself has taken an interest in this case. Our intelligence sources in London inform us that relations between the Soviets and the Polish government in exile are already under considerable strain. It’s my estimation that this would certainly break those relations altogether. No, my dear judge, we cannot allow the evidence to lead us, as you say. That is much too passive a response to an opportunity like this. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, your approach, while being very proper as you say, lacks imagination.’

For once I couldn’t help but agree with the minister, but I kept my own counsel. Goldsche was my boss after all, and I had no wish to embarrass the man by disagreeing with him in front of Dr Goebbels. But perhaps Goebbels sensed something like this, and when our meeting was apparently over and the judge and I were being ushered to the door, the minister asked me to wait behind.

‘There’s something else I wish to discuss with you, captain,’ he said. ‘If you’ll forgive us, Johannes, it’s a private matter.’

‘Yes, of course, Herr Reich minister,’ said Goldsche, and looking a little nonplussed was led out of the building by one of the minister’s younger lackeys.

Goebbels closed the door and politely ushered me over to a sitting area – a yellow sofa and some armchairs – under a window as tall as a hop-picker’s wooden legs in what passed for a cosy corner of his office. Outside was the Wilhelmplatz and the underground railway station, which is where I could have wished to be – anywhere but the place in which I was now sitting down for a quiet tête-à-tête with a man I thought I despised. But the greater discomfort I was feeling came from the realization that – in person at least – Goebbels was courteous and intelligent, even charming. It was hard to connect the man I was talking to with the malignant demagogue I’d heard on the radio ranting at the Sports Palace for ‘total war’.

‘Is there really a private matter you want to discuss with me?’ I asked. ‘Or was that just a way of getting rid of the judge?’

But the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda was not a man to be hurried by a nobody like me.

‘When my ministry first moved into this beautiful house, back in 1933, I had some builders from the SA come in during the night to knock off all the stucco and wainscoting. Well, what else were those thugs good for except to smash things? Believe me, this place was like something in aspic jelly, and badly in need of some modernization. After the Great War, the building had been occupied by some of those old Prussian farts from the Foreign Office, and when they turned up the next day to take away their papers – you can’t imagine how much dust there was on those – they were absolutely horror-struck at what had been done to their precious building. It was actually quite amusing. They walked around with their mouths open, gasping like fish in a trawlerman’s net, and protesting loudly to me in their posh High German accents about what had happened in here. One of them even said: “Herr Reich minister, do you know that you might be put in prison for this?” Can you imagine it? Some of these old Prussians belong in a damned museum.

‘And these judges in the War Crimes Bureau, they’re not much more than relics themselves, captain. Their attitudes, their working methods, their accents are positively antediluvian. Even the way they dress. You would think it was 1903 and not 1943. How can a man feel comfortable in a stiff collar? It’s criminal to ask a man to dress like that just because he happens to be a lawyer. I’m afraid every time I look at Judge Goldsche I see the previous British prime minister – that old fool Neville Chamberlain with his ridiculous umbrella.’

‘An umbrella is only ridiculous if it’s not raining, Herr Reich minister. But really, the judge is not the fool he looks. If he sounds ridiculous and slow, that’s just how law is. However, I think I get the picture.’

‘Of course you do. You used to be a top detective. That means you know about law in real life, not what’s in a lot of dusty legal textbooks. I could have spent the next hour talking to Judge Goldsche and he’d have given me the same old nonsense about “standard practice” and “proper procedure”.’ Goebbels shrugged. ‘That’s why I sent him away. I want a different approach. What I don’t want is all his Prussian stucco and dusty wainscoting and piss-elegant protocol. You understand?’

‘Yes. I understand.’

‘So, you can speak freely now that he’s gone. I could sense that you didn’t agree with what he was saying but that you were too loyal to say so. That’s commendable. However, unlike the judge you’ve actually been on the scene. You know Smolensk. And you’ve been a cop at the Alex and that means something. It means that whatever your politics used to be, your methods were the most modern in Europe. The Alex always had that reputation, did it not?’

‘Yes. It did, for a while.’

‘Look, Captain Gunther, whatever you say here and now will be in confidence. But I want your own opinions about how best to handle this investigation, not his.’

‘You mean if we do find some more bodies in Katyn Wood when it thaws?’

Goebbels nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘There’s no guarantee we will. And there’s another thing. The SS were busy in that area. There are Ivans digging for food down there who worry that they’re going to pull a lot more than a potato out of the ground. Frankly, it’s probably a lot easier to find a field that doesn’t contain a mass grave than one that does.’

‘Yes, I know and I agree – we’ll have to be careful. But the button. There is the button you found.’

‘Yes, there’s the button.’

I didn’t mention the Polish captain’s intelligence report – the one I’d found in his boot. It had left me in no doubt that there were Polish officers buried in Katyn Wood, but I had some very good reasons for not mentioning this to the minister – my own safety being the most important.

‘Take your time,’ said Goebbels. ‘I’ve got plenty of time this morning. Would you like some coffee? Let’s have some coffee.’ He picked up the telephone on the coffee table. ‘Bring us coffee,’ he said, curtly. He replaced the receiver and settled back on the sofa.

I stood up and helped myself to another Trummer, not because I wanted another smoke but because I needed time to arrive at an answer.

‘Gunther, I know you’ve handled large-scale, high-profile murder inquiries under the eyes of the press before,’ he said.

‘Not always satisfactorily, sir.’

‘That’s true. Back in 1932, I seem to remember you screwing up a press conference in the police museum at the Alex to talk about the lust murder of a young girl. As I recall, you had a small disagreement with a reporter by the name of Fritz Allgeier. From Der Angriff.’

Der Angriff was the newspaper set up by Joseph Goebbels during the last days of the Weimar Republic. And I had good reason to remember the incident now. During the course of the investigation – which proved fruitless, as the killer was never apprehended – I’d been asked by a man named Rudolf Diels, who subsequently took charge of the Gestapo, to drive the case into a sand dune. Anita Schwarz had been a cripple, and Diels had hoped to move the case out of the public eye in order to spare the feelings of the similarly disabled Goebbels. I refused, which did little to help my career in Kripo, although at the time it was already more or less over. Soon after that I left Kripo altogether, and stayed out of the force until, some five years later, Heydrich obliged me to return.

‘You have an excellent memory, sir.’ I felt my chest tighten, but it was nothing to do with the cigarette I was smoking. ‘I don’t remember what your newspaper said about that press conference, but the Beobachter described me as a liberal left-wing stooge. Are you sure you want my opinions about this investigation?’

‘I remember that, too.’ Goebbels grinned. ‘You were a stooge, through no fault of your own however. But look, all that’s behind us.’

‘I’m relieved you think so.’

‘We’re fighting for our survival now.’

‘I can’t disagree with that.’

‘So please. Give me your best thoughts about what we should do.’

‘Very well.’ I took a deep breath and told him what I thought. ‘Look, sir, there’s a cop’s way to run an investigation, there’s a lawyer’s way to run one, and then there’s a Prussian lawyer’s way of doing it. It seems to me that what you want is the first, because it’s the quickest. The minute you put lawyers in charge of something, everything runs slow; it’s like oiling a watch with treacle. And if I tell you that this needs a cop running things down there it’s not because I want the job. Frankly, I never want to see the place again. No. It’s because there’s an extra factor here.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The way I look at it is this, and I hope you’ll forgive my foolhardy honesty here, but it seems to me that you need this inquiry to be completed urgently, within the next three months – before the Soviets overrun our positions.’

‘Don’t you believe in our final victory, captain?’

‘Everyone on the Russian front knows that the whole thing is going to come down to Stalin’s maths. When we recaptured Kharkov it cost the Reds seventy thousand men and us almost five thousand. The difference is that while the Ivans can afford to lose seventy thousand men we can ill afford to lose five thousand. After Stalingrad, there’s a good chance of a Russian counterattack this summer – on Kharkov and on Smolensk.’ I shrugged. ‘So, this inquiry has to be handled quickly. Before the end of the summer. Perhaps earlier.’

Goebbels nodded. ‘Let’s suppose for a moment that I agree with you,’ he said. ‘And I don’t say that I do. The leader certainly doesn’t. He believes that once the colossus that is the Soviet Union starts to totter, it will suffer an historic collapse, after which we’ll have nothing to fear from an Anglo-American invasion.’

I nodded. ‘I’m sure the leader knows the situation better than me, Herr Reich minister.’

‘But go ahead anyway. What else would you recommend?’

The coffee arrived. It gave me time to fetch another cigarette from the elegant box on the table and to wonder if I should mention another idea. Good coffee has that effect on me.

‘As I see it, we’ve got two weeks before we can do anything – and I think it’s going to take two weeks to make this happen. I mean, it won’t be easy.’

‘Go on.’

‘This is going to sound crazy,’ I said.

Goebbels shrugged. ‘Speak freely, please.’

I pulled a face, and then drank some coffee while I mulled it over for another second.

‘You know, I talk to my mother a lot,’ confessed Goebbels. ‘Mostly in the evening when I return from work. I always think she knows the voice of the people much better than me. Better than a lot of the so-called experts who judge things from the ivory tower of scientific inquiry. What I always learn from her is this: the man who succeeds is the man who is able to reduce problems to their simplest terms and who has the courage of his convictions – despite the objections of intellectuals. The courage to speak, perhaps, even when he believes that what he is suggesting sounds like madness. So, please captain, let me be the judge of what’s crazy and what isn’t.’

I shrugged. It seemed ridiculous for me to be worrying about the image of Germany abroad. Would one less crime laid at our door really make any difference? But I had to believe there was a possibility it might.

‘Coffee’s good,’ I said. ‘And so are the cigarettes. You know a lot of doctors say smoking is not good for you. Mostly I ignore doctors. After the trenches I tend to believe in things like fate and a bullet with my name on it. But right now a lot of doctors is what I think we need. Yes sir, as many corpse handlers as we can muster. In other words a lot of forensic pathologists, and from all over Europe, too. Enough to make this look like an independent inquiry, if such a thing is possible in the middle of a war. An international commission, perhaps.’

‘You mean assembled in Smolensk?’

‘Yes. We dig the bodies up under the eyes of the whole world so that no one can say that Germany was responsible.’

‘You know, that’s quite an audacious idea.’

‘And we should try to make sure that anyone from the government or the National Socialist Party, but especially the SS and the SD, has as little to do with the investigation as possible.’

‘This is interesting. How do you mean?’

‘We could put the whole investigation under the control of the International Red Cross. Better still, under the control of the Polish Red Cross, if they’ll wear it. We could even arrange for a few journalists to accompany the commission to Smolensk. From the neutral countries – Sweden and Switzerland. And perhaps some senior Allied prisoners of war – a few British and American generals, if we have any. To use as witnesses. We could put them under parole and let them have free access to the site.’ I shrugged. ‘When I was a cop handling a murder inquiry, you had to let the press in on things. When you didn’t they’d think you were trying to hide something. And that’s especially true here.’

Goebbels was nodding. ‘I like this idea,’ he said. ‘I like it very much. We can take pictures and shoot newsreel like it’s a proper news story. And we could also let the neutral country journalists go where they want, speak to whoever they want. Everything in the open. Yes, that’s excellent.’

‘The Gestapo will hate that, of course. But that’s good, too. The press and the experts will see it and draw their own conclusions: that there are no secrets in Smolensk. At least there are no German secrets.’

‘You leave the Gestapo to me,’ said Goebbels. ‘I can handle those bastards.’

‘There is one argument against it, however,’ I said. ‘And it’s a pretty damned important one.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I should think that anyone in Germany who is related to one of our men taken prisoner at Stalingrad would find it profoundly worrying to be reminded of what the Reds are capable of. I mean there’s no telling that our boys haven’t met or will meet the same fate as those Polish officers.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And it’s a terrible thought. But if they’re dead, they’re dead, and there’s nothing we can do about that. On the other hand, if they’re still alive I tend to think that shining a light on this particular crime might actually help to keep them that way. After all, the Russians are certain to deny responsibility for these poor Poles, and it would hardly support their argument if they were unable to show the world that their German POWs are alive.’

I nodded. Joey could be pretty persuasive. But he hadn’t finished with me yet. In fact, he’d hardly even started.

‘You know, it’s right what you said – about lawyers. I’ve never liked them very much. Most people think I’m a lawyer myself, because of my Ph.D. But my doctoral thesis at Heidelberg University was about a romantic playwright called Wilhelm von Schütz. He was the first to translate Casanova’s memoirs into German.’

For a moment I wondered if this might be why Joey was such a womanizer.

‘I even wrote a novel, you know. I was a very open, Renaissance sort of fellow. After that, I was a journalist and I gained a real respect for policemen.’

I let that one go. During the Weimar Republic, my old boss at Kripo, Bernhard Weiss, had been a frequent target of the Nazi newspapers because he was a Jew, and at one time Weiss had even sued Goebbels for libel and won. But when the Nazis took power, Weiss had been obliged to flee for his life to Czechoslovakia, and then England.

‘And of course two of my favourite movies are about the Berlin police: M and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse. Subversive and hardly conducive to the public good, but really quite brilliant, too.’

I had the vague memory that the Nazis had banned Mabuse, but I couldn’t remember for sure. When the minister of propaganda is interested in your opinion it tends to affect your concentration.

‘So, I agree with you one hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘A policeman is what this investigation needs most. Someone who’s in charge but not obviously in charge, if you know what I mean. It could even be someone authorized by this ministry to do everything, from securing the area – after all, there might be some Russian saboteurs down there who’d like to conceal the truth from the world – to ensuring the full cooperation of those damned flamingos at Army Group Centre. They won’t like this any more than the Gestapo. Von Kluge and Von Tresckow. Believe me, I’ve had to put up with that kind of snobbery all my life.’

This sounded worryingly like my own opinion.

Goebbels took out a cigarette case and quickly lit a cigarette, warming to his own train of thought. I had a horrible feeling that he was measuring me up for the job he was starting to describe.

‘And of course it will have to be someone who can make sure that there is no wasted time. Perhaps you’re right about that, too. About Stalin’s maths. And think about it, Captain Gunther. Think about the sheer diplomatic and logistical nightmare of making sure that all those foreigners and journalists are allowed to do their jobs without interference. Think about the overwhelming need for there to be one man behind the scenes, making sure that everything runs smoothly. Yes, I do ask you to think about that, please. You’ve been there. You know what’s what. In short, what this investigation needs is a man to manage the site and the situation. Yes, it’s obvious to me that his investigation needs you, Captain Gunther.’

I started to disagree, but Goebbels was already waving away my objections with the back of his hand.

‘Yes, yes, I know you said you didn’t want to return to Smolensk, and I can’t blame you for that. Frankly, I can’t think of anything worse than being away from Berlin. Especially when it’s a dump like Smolensk. But I’m appealing to you, captain. Your country needs you. Germany is asking you to help clear her name of this bestial deed. If like me you want the truth about this awful crime to be laid at the door of the Bolshevik barbarians who carried it out, then you’ll accept this task.’

‘I don’t know what to say, sir. I mean it’s flattering, of course. But I’m not at all diplomatic.’

‘Yes, I’d noticed that already.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘If you do this service for me you will not find me ungrateful. You’ll soon find that I’m a good person to have on your side, captain. And I’ve a long memory, as you already know.’ He started to wag his finger at me in the same way I’d seen him do on the newsreels. ‘Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I never forget my friends.’

There was of course an opposite side to this coin, though Goebbels was too clever to draw it to my attention right away, not while he was still trying to seduce me. On the whole I prefer to do the seducing myself, but it was increasingly clear to me that there wasn’t going to be room for me to refuse a man who only had to pick up the telephone again and instead of ordering coffee instruct one of his lackeys to have the Gestapo turn up at the door on Wilhelmplatz to give me a lift to Prinz Albrechtstrasse. So I listened, and after a while I started to nod my compliance, and when he asked me straight out, yes or no, if I would take the job, I said I would.

He smiled and nodded his appreciation. ‘Good, good. I appreciate it. Look, I’ve not made that journey myself but I know it’s a brutal one, so I’ll have my own plane fly you down there. Shall we say tomorrow? You can have whatever you need.’

‘Yes, Herr Reich minister.’

‘I’ll speak to Von Kluge himself and make sure you have his full cooperation as well as the best accommodation that’s available. And of course I’ll draw up some letters patent explaining your powers as my plenipotentiary.’

I didn’t much like the idea of representing Goebbels in Smolensk. It was one thing taking charge of the Katyn Wood investigation and an international commission; but I hardly wanted soldiers looking at me and seeing the cut-out of a man with a club foot and a sharp line in suits and phrase-making.

‘These things have a habit of not remaining secret for very long,’ I said, carefully. ‘Especially in the field. For form’s sake it would be best if the powers granted to me in your letter made it quite clear that I am acting as a member of the War Crimes Bureau and not the ministry of propaganda. It wouldn’t look good if one of those journalists or perhaps someone from the International Red Cross gained the impression that we were trying to stage-manage the situation. That would discredit everything.’

‘Yes, yes, you’re right, of course. For the same reason you had better go down there wearing a different uniform. An army uniform, perhaps. It’s best we keep the SS and the SD as far away from the scene as possible.’

‘That most of all, sir.’

He stood up and ushered me to the door of his office.

‘While you’re down there I shall expect regular reports on the teletype. And don’t worry about Judge Goldsche, I shall telephone him immediately and explain the situation. I shall simply say that all of this was my idea, not yours. Which of course he’ll believe.’ He grinned. ‘I flatter myself that I can be very persuasive.’

He opened the door and walked me down the magnificent staircase so quickly I hardly noticed the limp, which was, I suppose, the general idea.

‘For a while after your time in Kripo you were a private detective, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘When you get back we’ll talk again. About another service you might be able to do for me this summer. And which you’ll certainly find is considerably to your advantage.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

The sun was shining, and as I walked out of the ministry onto Wilhelmplatz it seemed to me that my own shadow had more substance and character than I did, as if the body occluding the light behind it had been cursed into spineless insignificance by some evil troll, and for no good reason I stopped and spat onto the black contour as if I had been spitting onto my own body. It didn’t make me feel any better. In lieu of bending my own ear with accusations of cowardice and craven cooperation with a man and a government I loathed, it was nothing more – or less – than an expression of the dislike I now felt for my own person. Sure, I told myself, I had said yes to Goebbels because I wanted to do something to help restore Germany’s reputation abroad, but I knew this was only partly true. Mostly I agreed with the diabolic doctor because I was afraid of him. Fear. It’s a problem I often have with the Nazis. It’s a problem every German has with the Nazis. At least those Germans who are still alive.