Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  CHAPTER 4

  The Pathological Institute was at the Charité Hospital just across the canal from Lehrter Station. With its red-brick exterior, its Alpine-style wooden loggias, its clock and distinctive corner tower, the oldest teaching hospital in the city was much the same as it had always been. Inside, however, things were different. Within the main administrative building, the portraits of more than a few of the Charité’s famous physicians and scientists had been removed. The Jews were Germany’s misfortune after all. These were the only spaces available in the hospital and if they could have put some beds on the walls they would have done it. The wards and corridors – even the landings outside the elevators – were full of men who had been maimed or injured on the front.

  Meanwhile the morgue in the Institute was full to over-flowing with dead soldiers and the still unidentified civilian victims of RAF bombings and blackout accidents. Not that their problems were over. The Army Information Centre wasn’t always very efficient in notifying the families of those serving men who had died; and in many cases the Army felt that the responsibility fell on the Ministry of Health. But however the deaths were caused, the Ministry of Health believed responsibility for dealing with deaths in Berlin lay properly with the Ministry of the Interior, which, of course, was only too willing to leave such matters to the city authorities, who themselves were inclined to dump this role on the police. So, you might have said that the crisis at the morgue – and that’s exactly what it smelled like – was all my fault. Me and others like me.

  It was, however, with the hope of taking advantage of this bureaucratic incompetence that I went there in search of Geert Vranken’s corpse. And I found what was left of it sharing a drawer in the cold room with a dead prostitute from Lichterfelde and a man from Wedding – most likely a suicide – who had been killed in a gas explosion. I had the mortuary attendant lay out the Dutchman’s remains on a slab that looked and smelt worse than it ought to have done, but with an extreme shortage of cleaners in the hospital – not to mention carbolic soap – the dead assumed less and less of the hospital’s dwindling resources.

  ‘Pity,’ grumbled the attendant.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That you’re not from the State Labour Service so I can get rid of him.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was looking for a job.’

  ‘He was a foreign worker. So I’m waiting on the paperwork that will enable me to send his remains down to the incinerator.’

  ‘I’m from the Alex, like I said. I’m sure there are jobs there that could be done by dead men. My job, for example.’

  For a moment the morgue attendant thought of smiling and then thought better of it.

  ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I said and took out the switchblade I had found on the ground under Nolli Station.

  At the sight of the long blade in my hand, the attendant backed off nervously. ‘Here, what’s your game?’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m trying to establish if this knife matches the victim’s stab wounds.’

  Relaxing a little, he nodded at Vranken’s remains. ‘Least of his problems I should have thought: Being stabbed.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But before a train ran him over—’

  ‘That would explain a lot.’

  ‘Someone stabbed him. Several times.’

  ‘Evidently not his lucky day.’

  I slid the blade into one of the more obvious wounds in the dead man’s pale torso. ‘Before the war you used to get a proper lab report with photographs and descriptions so that you didn’t have to do this kind of thing.’

  ‘Before the war you used to get beer that tasted like beer.’ Remembering who and more particularly what I was, he added quickly, ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with the beer now, of course.’

  I didn’t say anything. I was glad he’d spoken out of turn. It meant I could probably avoid filling out the morgue’s paperwork – Commissioner Lüdtke had told me to drop the case, after all – as a quid pro quo for ignoring the attendant’s ‘unpatriotic’ remark about German beer. Besides I was paying nearly all of my attention to the knife in the stab wound. I couldn’t say for sure that it was the murder weapon, but it could have been. It was long enough and sharp enough, with just one edge and a blunter upper side that matched the wound almost perfectly.

  I pulled the blade out and looked for something to wipe it with. Being a fussy type, I’m particular about the switchblades I keep in my coat pocket. And I figured I’d already encountered enough germs and bacteria just walking through the hospital without squirrelling away a private cache of my own.

  ‘Got anything to wipe this with?’

  ‘Here,’ he said, and taking it from me he wiped it with the corner of his lab coat.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  I could see that he was anxious to get rid of me and when I suggested that there was probably no need to bother with the paperwork, he agreed with alacrity.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll tell, do you?’ said the attendant. ‘Besides, I don’t have a pen that works.’

  I went outside. It was a nice day so I decided to walk back to the Alex and eat lunch at a counter I knew on Karl Strasse, but that one was closed because of a lack of sausage. So was the one on Oranienburger Strasse. Finally I got a sandwich and a paper at a place near the Stock Exchange, only there was even less of interest in the sandwich than there was in the paper, and probably in the Stock Exchange, too. But it’s foolish to give up eating bread because you can’t get the sausage to put in it. At least I was free to still think of the bread as a sandwich.

  Then again, I’m a typical Berliner, so maybe I’m just hard to please.

  When I got back to the Alex I had the files on all of the summer’s S-Bahn murders sent up to my office. I suppose I wanted to make doubly sure that Paul Ogorzow was the real killer and not someone who’d been made to measure for it. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a Kripo run by the Nazis had done something like that. The only surprise was that they hadn’t already tried to pin the murders of Wallenstein, Baldur, Siegfried and Cock Robin on some hapless Jew.

  It turned out that I wasn’t the first to review the Ogorzow files. The Record Memo showed that the Abwehr – military intelligence – had also looked at the files, and recently. I wondered why. At least I did until I remembered all the foreign workers who had been interviewed during the course of the investigation. But Paul Ogorzow had been a German railway-worker; rape and a violent hatred of women had been his motive; he hadn’t stabbed any of his victims, he had battered them to death. There was no telling if Fräulein Tauber’s attacker would have battered her or stabbed her after he’d finished raping her, but from the blow he’d given her face there could be no doubting his dislike of women. Of course, lust murders were hardly uncommon in Berlin. Before Paul Ogorzow, there had been other violent, sometimes cannibalistic killers; and doubtless there would be others after him.

  Much to my surprise I was impressed at the thoroughness and scale of Commissioner Lüdtke’s investigation. Thousands of interviews had been conducted and almost one hundred suspects brought in for interrogation; at one stage male police officers had even dressed up as women and travelled the S-Bahn at night in the hope of luring the murderer into an attack. A reward of ten thousand Reichsmarks had been posted and, finally, one of Paul Ogorzow’s workmates – another railway employee – had fingered him as the murderer instead of one of the many foreign workers. But among those foreign workers who had been interviewed was Geert Vranken. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover his name on the list of those who had been interviewed; and yet I was. I read the transcript with interest.

  A science graduate from the University in The Hague, Vranken had been quickly eliminated from Lüdtke’s inquiry when his alibi checked out; but, hardly wanting to rely on this alone – after all, his alibi relied on other foreign workers – he had been at pains to adduce evidence of his good character, and to this end he had offered the name of a German
whom he’d met before the war, in The Hague. Lüdtke’s team of detectives, several of whom I knew, had hardly needed to take up this reference because, a week or so after Vranken’s interview, Paul Ogorzow had been arrested. The certainty – on my part – that for once the right man had been sent to the guillotine at Plotzensee, in July 1941, gradually gave way to a feeling of pity for Geert Vranken and, more particularly, the wife and baby he had left behind in the Netherlands. How many other families, I wondered, would be similarly destroyed before the war was over?

  Of course, this was hardly normal for me. I’d seen plenty of murder victims in my time at the Alex, many of them in even more tragic circumstances than these. After Minsk I suppose my conscience was easily pricked. Whatever the reasons, I determined to find out if, as Commissioner Lüdtke had said it would, the State Labour Service had yet informed Vranken’s family that he had met with a fatal accident. Thus it was that I spent a fruitless hour on the telephone being rerouted from one bureaucrat to another before I finally gave up and wrote a letter myself, this to an address in The Hague that was in Vranken’s work book and which, prior to its issue by the State Labour Service, was where previously he had been employed. In my letter I made no mention of the fact that Geert Vranken had been murdered, only that he had been hit by a train and killed. His being stabbed six times was more than any family needed to be told.

  CHAPTER 5

  I had an office in the Police Praesidium, on the third floor – a small room on the corner underneath the tower and overlooking the U-Bahn station on Alexanderplatz. The view out of the window on a late summer evening was the best thing about it. Life didn’t look quite so dismal at that kind of altitude. I couldn’t smell the people or see their pale, undernourished and sometimes just plain hopeless faces. All the streets came together in one big square just the same as they had done before the war, with trams clanging and taxis honking their horns and the city growling in the distance the way it always did. Sitting on the windowsill with my face in the sun, it was easy to pretend there was no war, no front, no Hitler and that none of it had anything to do with me. Outside there wasn’t a swastika in sight, just the many varieties of specimen in my own favourite game of girl spotting. It was a sport I was always passionate about and at which I excelled. I liked the way it helped me tune in to the natural world, and because girls in Berlin are visible in a way that other Berlin wildlife is not, I never seemed to grow tired of it. There are so many different girls out there. Mostly I was on the lookout for the rarer varieties: exotic blondes that hadn’t been seen since 1938 and fabulous redheads wearing summer plumage that was very nearly transparent. I’d thought about putting a feeder on my windowsill but I knew it was hopeless. The climb up to the third floor was simply too much for them.

  The only creatures that ever made it up to my office were the rats. Somehow they never run out of energy, and when I turned back to face the room with its awful portrait of the Leader and the SD uniform that was hanging in an open closet, like a terrible reminder of the other man I’d been for much of the summer, there were two of them coming through the glass door. Neither of them said anything until they were seated with their hats in their hands and had stared at me for several seconds with preternatural calm, as if I were some lesser being, which of course I was, because these rats were from the Gestapo.

  One of the men wore a double-breasted navy chalk-stripe, and the other, a dark grey three-piece suit with a watch-chain that glittered like his eyes. The one wearing the chalk-stripe had a full head of short, fair hair that was as carefully arranged as the lines on a sheet of writing paper; the other was even fairer but losing it on the front almost as if his forehead had been plucked like one of those medieval ladies in a rather dull oil painting. On their faces were smiles that were insolent or self-satisfied or cynical but mostly all three at the same time and they regarded me and my office and probably my very existence with some amusement. But that was okay because I felt much the same way myself.

  ‘You’re Bernhard Gunther?’

  I nodded.

  The man with the chalk-stripe suit checked his neatly combed hair fastidiously, as if he had just stepped out of the barber’s chair at the KaDeWe. A decent haircut was about the only thing in Berlin that was not in short supply.

  ‘With a reputation like yours I was expecting a pair of Persian slippers and a calabash.’ He smiled. ‘Like Sherlock Holmes.’

  I sat down behind my desk facing the pair and smiled back. ‘These days I find that a three-pipe problem’s just the same as a one-pipe problem. I can’t find the tobacco to smoke in it. So I keep the calabash hidden in the drawer alongside my gold-plated syringe and some orange pips.’

  They kept on looking, saying nothing, just sizing me up.

  ‘You fellows should have brought along a blackjack if you were expecting me to talk first.’

  ‘Is that what you think of us?’

  ‘I’m not the only one with a colourful reputation.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Are you here to ask questions or for a favour?’

  ‘We don’t need to ask favours,’ said the one with the basilica skull designed by Brunelleschi. ‘Usually we get all the cooperation we require without having to ask anyone a favour.’ He glanced at his colleague and did some more smiling. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ The one with the neat hair was like a thicker-set version of von Ribbentrop. He had no eyebrows to speak of and big shoulders: I didn’t think he was a man you wanted to see taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves in search of answers. ‘Most people are only too willing to help us and it’s rare we are ever obliged to ask for something as quaint as a favour.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I put a match in my mouth and started to chew it slowly. I figured that as long as I didn’t try inhaling it, my lungs would stay healthy. ‘All right. I’m listening.’ I leaned forward and clasped my hands with an earnest reverence that bordered on the sarcastic. ‘And if it persuades you to come quickly to the point then this is me looking all ready and willing to help the Gestapo in any way that I can. Only do stop trying to make me feel very small or I’ll start to question the wisdom of letting you sit in my office with your hats in your hands.’

  Chalk-stripe pinched the crown of his hat and inspected the lining. For all I knew it had his name and rank written there just in case he forgot them.

  ‘You know my name. So why don’t you introduce yourselves?’

  ‘I’m Commissar Sachse. And this is Inspector Wandel.’

  I nodded politely. ‘Delighted, I’m sure.’

  ‘How much do you know about the Three Kings? And please don’t mention the Bible or I shall conclude that I’m not going to like you.’

  ‘You’re talking about the three men who came to Berlin from Czechoslovakia in early 1938, aren’t you? I’m sorry, Bohemia and Moravia, although I’m never quite sure of the difference and anyway, who cares? The Three Kings are three Czech nationalists and officers of the defeated Czech Army who, having conducted a series of terrorist attacks in Prague – it is still called Prague, isn’t it? Good. Well then, having orchestrated a campaign of sabotage there they decided to bring their war here, to the streets of Berlin. And as far as I know, for a while they were quite successful. They planted a bomb at the Aviation Ministry in September 1939. Not to mention one in the doorway here at the Alex. Yes, that was embarrassing for us all, wasn’t it? No wonder the Press and radio didn’t mention it. Then there was the attempt on Himmler’s life at the Anhalter Railway Station in February of this year. I expect that was even more embarrassing, for the Gestapo, anyway. I believe the bomb was placed in the left luggage office, which is an obvious place and one that should certainly have been searched in advance of the Reichsführer-SS’s arrival in the station. I bet someone had a lot of explaining to do after that.’

  Their smiles were fading a little now and their chairs were starting to look uncomfortable; as the two Gestapo men shifted their backsides around,
the wagon-wheel backs creaked like a haunted house. Chalk-stripe checked his hair again almost as if he’d left the source of his ability to intimidate me on the barbershop floor. The other man, Wandel, bit his lip trying to keep the death’s head moth of a smile pinned to his delinquent mug. I might have stopped my little history there and then out of fear of what their organization was capable of, but I was enjoying myself too much.

  I hadn’t considered the concept of suicide by Gestapo until now, but I could see its advantages. At least I might enjoy the process a little more than just blowing my own brains out. All the same, I wasn’t about to throw my life away on some small-timers like these two; if ever I did decide to blow a raspberry in some senior Nazi’s face I was going to make it count. Besides, it was now plain to me that they really were after a favour.

  ‘You know, the word here in Kripo is that the Three Kings get a kick out of embarrassing the Gestapo. There’s one particular story doing the rounds that one of them even stole Oscar Fleischer’s overcoat.’

  Fleischer was head of the Gestapo’s Counterintelligence Section in Prague.