Buhtz looked at the metal on his palm and nodded. ‘Nine-millimetre, by the look of it. Quidde was shot with a Walther however. Not a Mauser. A PPK.’
‘Yes, I know. Look sir, I need to know more of what only the author of Metal Traces in Bullet Wounds can tell me.’
‘Of course. I am at your service.’
‘There were three shots fired in Krasny Bor last night. Two at Berruguete and a third at someone else.’
‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ admitted the professor. ‘But then I did have more than one schnapps last night. Then again I’ve noticed that the trees and the ground sort of deaden the sound around here. It’s a noticeable phenomenon. The NKVD picked a good spot to murder those Polacks.’
‘I know there were three shots,’ I continued, ‘because the third shot was fired at me.’
‘Really? How do you know?’
‘Because fortunately it missed me and hit a tree from which this was dug out just a few minutes ago.’ I handed him the bullet and the second brass casing.
Buhtz smiled with an almost boyish enthusiasm. ‘This begins to be interesting,’ he said, ‘since clearly this third shot you describe was fired not from a red nine but from a rifle.’
I nodded.
‘You need to know more about that rifle,’ he said.
‘Anything you can tell me would be useful.’
Buhtz glanced at the bullets in his hand and across the hall where commission members were now seating themselves at the various tables and reading lunch menus with rather obvious pleasure: for most of the forensic scientists who’d come to Smolensk the officers’ mess at Krasny Bor provided the best meal they’d had in a long time.
‘Well, now you come to mention it, I would rather like to escape from these fellows for a short while. Besides, it’s lamprey pie again. I’m never all that keen on lampreys, are you? Nasty things. That peculiar spiral-toothed mouth those creatures have. Horrible. Yes, why not, captain? Let’s go to my hut and we’ll take a closer look at what you’ve found.’
In his neat little hut Buhtz took off his military belt, opened the top button of his tunic, sat down, collected a magnifying glass off his table, switched on a desk light and scrutinized the bottom of the brass rifle casing I’d found near the abandoned Mauser stock.
‘On the face of it,’ he said, ‘I should have said this came from a standard infantryman’s M98. It’s a fairly ordinary eight-millimetre round by the look of it. Except for one thing. The M98 uses a rimless bottlenecked rifle cartridge, and this is rimmed, which leads me to think of a different rifle and to suppose that the cartridges were loaded with something a little different: something a little heavier and more suitable for game shooting. A Brenneke rifle bullet perhaps. Yes. Why not?’
He took the bullet and placed it under the lens of his microscope, where he stared at it for several minutes.
‘I thought as much,’ he murmured, eventually. ‘A TUG. A torpedo-tail deformation bullet with a hard core for bigger game, like deer. Developed in 1935. That’s what you have here.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘You’re lucky to be here, you know. You were shot at with a decent hunting rifle. If this had hit you, Gunther, you’d be missing a large part of your head. When I have more time I can probably tell you what metal this is; maybe a bit more than that, like where this ammo came from.’
‘You’ve already told me a great deal,’ I said, wondering how he knew that the shooter had aimed at my head – although perhaps it was just a reasonable assumption. ‘But what kind of a hunting rifle?’
‘Oh well, Mauser have been making excellent hunting rifles for fifty years. I would have said a Mauser 1898. But given the fact that I almost mistook this bullet, I might almost say a Mauser Oberndorf Model B or a Safari.’ Buhtz frowned. ‘Oh, I just had a thought. You know who has a pair of Obendorfs, don’t you? Here? At Krasny Bor.’
‘Yes,’ I said, grimly. ‘I already had the same thought myself.’
‘Tricky one, that.’
I lit a cigarette. ‘Look, I hate to ask you this again, sir, but would you mind keeping this quiet for now? The field marshal already dislikes me; his Putzer got drunk last night and started waving a gun around so I had to rubber-stamp his head.’
‘Yes, I heard about that from Voss this morning. It’s not like Dyakov. When you get to know him, Dyakov isn’t a bad fellow. For an Ivan.’
‘The field marshal isn’t going to like me any better if it gets around the camp that we think one of his favourite hunting rifles might have been used to murder me.’
‘Of course,’ said Buhtz. ‘You have my word. But look here, I owe a great deal to the field marshal; I owe my commission to him. But for him I’d still be languishing in Breslau, so I should hate it to get around that it was me who identified this bullet as coming from a rifle like his.’
I nodded. ‘I certainly won’t say anything about it,’ I told him. ‘For now.’
‘But you don’t seriously think for a moment that it was Günther von Kluge who tried to kill you?’ he asked. ‘Do you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think if the field marshal actually wanted me dead he could find a much better way of doing it than to shoot me himself.’
‘Yes. He could.’ Buhtz smiled grimly. ‘Then again you could just stay here. If you wait in Smolensk long enough the Russians will be in your lap.’
I skipped lunch. After seeing Berruguete’s autopsy I wasn’t that hungry. The only meal I wanted to have was in the schnapps bottle on the mess table, but that would have meant enduring Ines Kramsta’s stony indifference to my existence. That hurt more than it ought to have done. So I went back to the car thinking I might drive to the castle and send a signal to the ministry telling them that the members of the commission had already forgotten about Berruguete, and that their work was proceeding as hoped. Sometimes it’s useful to have duties in which you can take refuge.
I drove out of the gates and east, along the main Smolensk road. About halfway there I saw Peshkov again, his coat flapping in the stiffening breeze. I didn’t stop to offer him another ride. I wasn’t in the mood to drive Hitler’s doppelgänger anywhere. I didn’t go to the castle either. Instead I kept on going. I suppose you might say that I was distracted, although that would have been an understatement. I had the distinct feeling that I’d lost so much more than the regard of a lovely woman – that in losing her good opinion of me I’d also lost the slightly better opinion that lately I’d formed of myself; but her good opinion was more important, not to mention her smell and her touch and the sound of her voice.
I had half an idea to go to the Zadneprovsky Market on Bazarnaya Square and buy another bottle, like the chekuschka that Dr Batov had bought for us, although I would have been just as satisfied with the more lethal brewski he had warned me about – possibly more so: complete and lasting oblivion sounded just fine to me. But a few blocks before the market, the field police had closed Schlachthofstrasse to all traffic – a security alert, they said; a suspected terrorist who was holed up in a railway shed near the main station – and so I turned the car around, drove a few metres west again, pulled up and just sat there, smoking another cigarette, before it dawned on me that I was right outside the Hotel Glinka. And after a while I went inside, because I knew they always had vodka in there and sometimes even schnapps and a lot of other ways to take a man’s mind off what is troubling him.
Without a doorman since the Rudakov brothers had left Smolensk, the Glinka’s madame was now in charge of the temple entrance as well as the girls inside; she was little more than a babushka with a rather obvious wig possessed of long, Versailles-style locks. Gap-toothed, with too much lipstick and a cheap black peignoir, she had the face and faux demure manner of a corrupted milkmaid and was about as greedy as a hungry fox, but she spoke reasonable German. She told me they weren’t open yet, but let me in all the same when she saw my money.