A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) by Philip Kerr Page A
Authors: Philip Kerr
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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 betweentwo railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main
‘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 betweentwo railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main
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