A Man Without Breath

‘Don’t worry about it. I have the same problem. I think everyone does. That’s what they rely upon. That kind of fear. Normal human frailty makes cowards of us all.’

Voss nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘So, what do we do now?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. The fact is, I think I know too much already. And I wish I didn’t. I thought I had a pretty good reason why Ribe and Greiss were murdered.’

‘Oh? You didn’t tell me. What is it, if you don’t mind me asking?’

I shook my head. ‘Take my word for it, lieutenant, this is another thing you don’t want anyone to know about. Especially the Gestapo. Anyway, now I find there’s another equally good but very different reason that could have got them killed. They were in a vice racket. With any racket it’s easy for things to go wrong: maybe someone thinks they’ve been short-changed on a deal. Money’s the best reason in the world to hold a grudge and commit murder. When Ribe and Greiss were found with their throats cut near the Hotel Glinka, perhaps they’d been collecting the money from the doorman who’d had it off the girls. And that’s another motive for murdering them, of course. If someone saw the doorman handing them large handfuls of cash, well that might have got their throats cut for them, too.

‘And then there’s the Rudakov connection. Dr Batov was going to give me documentary evidence of what happened here at Katyn Wood. Only someone tortured and murdered him to prevent that from happening. His patient, Lieutenant Rudakov, was one of the NKVD men who had carried out this massacre. But now he’s missing, and so is a man who might have been his brother who was a doorman and pimp at the Glinka.’

‘I just thought of something, sir,’ said Voss. ‘Those two NCOs from the panzer grenadiers we hanged for the rape and murder of two Russian women.’

‘What about them?’

‘They were from the Third Division,’ explained Voss. ‘The third absorbed the 386th Motorized Division, which more or less ceased to exist after Stalingrad.’

‘So they might have been driving for the signals racket, too,’ I said. ‘Like Viktor Reuth. Earning a little extra cash on the side. And they’d have had a better reason than the signals boys to be on the road.’

‘Perhaps that was what your Corporal Hermichen wanted to trade for his life,’ said Voss. ‘That they were part of the same racket as the two dead men.’

‘Yes, it might,’ I said. ‘It just might.’

I lit a cigarette and let the sweet tobacco smoke exorcise my nostrils of the loathsome stink of death that hung in the air. Unlike Dr Kramsta, I didn’t have any Carat to sprinkle on my handkerchief; I didn’t even have a handkerchief.

‘I’ll want to speak to this Tanya,’ I said. ‘I’d like to find out how many more girls from the house on Olgastrasse were nurses who had day jobs at the Smolensk State Medical Academy. Where is she now?’

‘Cooling her heels at the prison on Gefangnisstrasse. And probably trying to charm the guards into letting her go. Very beautiful is our Tanya. And very seductive.’

‘A blonde you say?’

‘Blonde and blue-eyed with skin like honey. Like a girl on the front page of New People.’

‘I like her already. All the same, sometimes I think attractive women in this part of the world are just like trams, lieutenant.’

‘How do you mean, sir?’

‘I don’t see one in weeks and then I meet two in one day.’

*

There was no women’s wing at Gefangnisstrasse, but some of the holding cells – in which several prisoners were held at once – were for women only, which counted for something, I suppose. All of the guards were men from the army or the field police, and while they treated their female charges with respect that was only in comparison with their male prisoners. Thanks to the many female soldiers who fought for the Red Army, it was generally held among Germans that Russian women were as potentially deadly as Russian men. Perhaps more so. The weekly Wehrmacht newspaper often had a story of a honey-trap sklyukhu going off with some unsuspecting Fritz who ended up losing more than just his virginity.

They brought Tanya to the same depressing room where I had interviewed the unfortunate Corporal Hermichen, and as soon as I saw her I realized I had seen her before, but Russian nurses’ uniforms being as severe as they were, she’d looked very different from how she looked now. Voss had not exaggerated: her hair was the colour of my father’s pocket-watch and her eyes were as blue as a midsummer moon. Tanya was the kind of blonde who could have stopped a whole division of cavalry with one flash of her underwear.

‘Why am I still being kept here, please?’ she asked Voss anxiously.

‘This man wants to ask you a few questions, that’s all,’ said Voss.

I nodded. ‘If you answer honestly we’ll probably let you go, Tanya,’ I told her, gently. ‘Today, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t think you’ve done very much wrong in the great scheme of things. Now that I’ve met you I’m not sure that anyone has.’

She nodded. ‘Thank you.’