by Philip Kerr
“Influenza?”
“The old, the homeless, prisoners, and people who are institutionalized or mentally retarded, such as your wife, are especially vulnerable to the influenza virus,” he said.
“She’s not mentally retarded, “I said, frowning fiercely at him. “She’s depressed. That’s all.”
“These are facts, sir, facts,” said Dr. Effner. “Respiratory disease is the most common cause of death among individuals who are mentally retarded. You can’t argue with the facts, Herr Gunther.”
“I’d argue with Plato, Herr Doktor,” I said, biting my lip. It helped stop me from biting Effner on the neck. “Especially if the facts were wrong. And I’ll thank you not to mention death with such alacrity. She’s not dead yet. In case you hadn’t noticed. Or maybe you’re the kind of doctor who prefers to study patients instead of trying to cure them.”
Dr. Effner took a deep breath through flaring nostrils, came to attention even more—if such a thing were possible—and climbed into the saddle of a horse that was at least seventeen hands high. “How dare you suggest such a thing,” he said. “The very idea that I don’t care about my patients. It’s outrageous. Outrageous. We’re doing everything we can for—Fräulein Handlöser. Good day to you, sir.” He glanced at his wristwatch, turned smartly on his heel, and cantered away. Throwing a chair after him might have made me feel better, but it wouldn’t have helped Kirsten, or any of the other patients. There was enough noise already in that builder’s yard.
SEVEN
I stayed at the hospital for several hours. The nurse told me she’d call if there was any change for the worse, and since the only telephone was in my office, this meant going there instead of my apartment. Besides, Galeriestrasse was nearer to the hospital than Schwabing. It was twenty minutes by foot. Half that when the trams were running.
On my way back I stepped into the Pschorr beer house on Neuhauser Strasse for a beer and a sausage. I wasn’t in the mood for either, but it’s an old cop’s habit to eat and drink when you can, instead of when you’re hungry. Then I bought a quarter-liter of Black Death across the bar, holstered it, and left. The anesthetic was for what I guessed lay ahead. I’d lost one wife to influenza before, in the great pandemic of 1918. And I’d seen enough men dying in Russia to recognize all the signs. The hands and feet turning quietly blue. The spit in the throat that she couldn’t get rid of. The fast breathing followed by the holding of her breath, and then the fast breathing again. A slight smell of decay. The truth was I didn’t want to sit there and watch her die. I didn’t have the guts for it. I told myself I wanted to remember Kirsten full of life, but I knew the truth was different. I was a coward. Too yellow to see it through at her side. Kirsten could have expected more from me. I was certain I had expected a little more from myself.
I entered my office, switched on the desk lamp, placed the bottle beside the telephone, and then lay down on a creaking, green leather sofa I had brought from the bar at the hotel. Next to the sofa stood a matching button-back library chair with scabrous cracked-leather armrests. Beside the chair was a single pedestal rolltop desk and, on the floor, a threadbare green Bokhara, both of these from the office at the hotel. A conference table and four chairs took up the other half of my suite. On the wall were two framed maps of Munich. There was a small bookshelf with telephone directories, railway timetables, and various pamphlets and booklets I’d picked up at the German Information Bureau on Sonnenstrasse. It all looked a little better than it was, but not much. Just the kind of place you’d find the kind of man who didn’t have the nerve to sit beside his wife and wait for her to die.
After a while I got up, poured myself a shot of Black Death, drank it, and dropped back onto the sofa. Kirsten was forty-four years old. Much too young to die of anything. The injustice of it seemed quite overwhelming, and it would have been enough to shatter my belief in God, assuming I still had one. Not many people came back from a Soviet POW camp believing in anything much other than the human propensity to be inhumane. But it wasn’t only the injustice of her premature death that grated on my mind. It was also the downright bad luck of it. To lose two wives to influenza was more than just unlucky. It felt more like perdition. Surviving a war like the one we had just come through, when so many German civilians had died, only then to die of influenza seemed improbable somehow. More so than in 1918, when so many others had died of it, too. But then these things always seemed unjust when seen from the perspective of those who were left behind.
There was a knock at the door. I opened it to reveal a tall, good-looking woman. She smiled uncertainly at me and then at the name on the frosted glass in the door. “Herr Gunther?”
“Yes.”
“I saw the light on in the street,” she said. “I telephoned earlier but you were out.” But for the three small, semicircular scars on her right cheek, she would have been quite beautiful. They reminded me of the three little kiss curls worn by Zarah Leander in some old film about a bullfighter that had been a favorite of Kirsten’s. La Habanera. It must have been 1937. A thousand years ago.
“I haven’t yet managed to find myself a secretary,” I said. “I’ve not been in business that long.”
“You’re a private detective?” She sounded a little surprised and stared hard at me for several seconds, as if she was trying to gauge what kind of man I was and whether or not she could depend on me.
“That’s what it says on the door,” I said, acutely aware that I wasn’t looking my dependable best.
“Perhaps I’ve made a mistake,” she said, with one eye on the bottle open on the desktop. “Forgive me for disturbing you.”
At any other time I’d have remembered my manners and my lessons from charm school and ushered her into a chair, put away the bottle, and asked her, politely, what seemed to be the trouble. Maybe even offered her a drink and cigarette to calm her nerves. It wasn’t uncommon for clients to get cold feet standing on the threshold of a private detective’s office. Especially the women. Meeting a detective—seeing his cheap suit and getting a noseful of his body odor and heavy cologne—can be enough to persuade a potential client that sometimes it’s better not to know what they thought they wanted to know. There’s too much truth in the world. And too many bastards who are ready to give it to you, right between the eyes. But I was a little short on manners and all out of charm. A dying wife will do that to you. Out of habit, I stood aside, as if silently inviting her to change her mind and come inside, but she stayed put. Probably she had caught the liquor on my breath and the watery, self-pitying look in my eyes, and decided that I was a drunk. Then she turned away on one of her elegant high heels.
“Good night,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
I followed her out onto the landing and watched her clip-clop across the linoleum floor to the top of the stairs. “Good night yourself,” I said.
She didn’t look back. She didn’t say anything else. And then she was gone, leaving a trail of something fragrant in her wake. I hoovered the last traces of her into my nostrils and then breathed her into the pit of my stomach and all the important places that made me a man. The way I was supposed to. It made a very pleasant change from the smell at the hospital.
EIGHT
Kirsten died just after midnight, by which time I’d had enough anesthetic for it to feel just about bearable. The trams weren’t running so I walked back to the hospital, just to prove that I could do it like a regular guy. I’d seen her alive; I didn’t need to see her dead, but the hospital wanted it that way. I even took our marriage certificate. I figured it was better to get it over with before she stopped looking like a human being. It always amazes me how quickly that happens. One minute a man is as full of life as a basketful of kittens, and a few hours later he looks like an old waxwork at the Hamburg Panoptikum.
A different nurse met me, and a different doctor, too. Both of them were an improvement on the day shift. The nurse was slightly better-looking. The doctor was recognizably human, even in the dark.
>
“I’m very sorry about your wife,” he whispered with what seemed like a very proper show of respect, until I realized that we were standing in the middle of the ward, beside the night nurse’s desk, and surrounded by sleeping women who weren’t quite as sick as my wife had been. “We did everything we could, Herr Gunther. But she was really very ill.”
“Flu was it?”
“It seems so.” In the light of the desk lamp he came up very thin, with a round white face and pointy red hair. He looked like a one-man coconut shy.
“Kind of odd, though, wouldn’t you say?” I remarked. “I mean, I haven’t heard of anyone else who’s got the flu.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we’ve had several cases. There’s a case on the next ward. We’re very concerned that it will spread. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the last serious outbreak of flu, in 1918. And of how many died. You remember that, don’t you?”
“Better than you,” I said.
“For that reason alone,” he said, “the occupation authorities are anxious to contain the possible spread of any infection. Which is why we’d like to seek your permission to order an immediate cremation. In order to prevent the virus from spreading. I appreciate that this is a very difficult time for you, Herr Gunther. Losing your wife at such a young age must be dreadful. I can only guess what you must be going through right now. But we wouldn’t ask for your full cooperation in this matter unless we thought it important.”
He was giving it plenty of choke, as well he needed to after the master class in cold-blooded indifference exhibited by his stiff-necked colleague, Dr. Effner. I let him rev some more, hardly liking to intercept his continuing effusions of sympathy with what I was really thinking, which was that before being a spinner in the Max Planck, Kirsten had been a real blue, always drunk, and before then, something of a slut, especially with the Americans. In Berlin, immediately after the war, I had suspected that she was little more than a snapper, doing it for chocolate and cigarettes. So many others had done the same, of course, although perhaps with a little less obvious enjoyment. Somehow it seemed only appropriate that the Americans should have their way with Kirsten in death. After all, they’d had their way with her often enough while she had been alive. So when the doctor had finished whispering his pitch, I nodded and said, “All right, we’ll play it your way, Doc. If you think it’s really necessary.”
“Well, it’s not so much me as the Amis,” he said. “After what happened in 1918, they’re really worried about an epidemic in the city.”
I sighed. “When do you want to do it?”
“As soon as possible,” he said. “That is, immediately. If you don’t mind.”
“I’d like to see her first,” I said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “But try not to touch her, okay? Just in case.” He found me a surgical mask. “You’d better wear this,” he added. “We’ve already opened the windows to help air the room, but there’s no point in taking any risks.”
NINE
The next day I traveled out to Dachau to see Kirsten’s family lawyer and give him the news. Krumper had been handling the sale of the hotel, but so far without success. It seemed that nobody wanted to buy a hotel in Dachau any more than he wanted to stay in one. Krumper’s offices were above the marketplace. From the window behind his desk there was a fine view of St. Jakob’s and the town hall and the fountain in front of the town hall that always put me in mind of a urinal. His office was very like a building site except that there were piles of files and books on the floor instead of bricks and planks.
Krumper was bound to a wheelchair because of a hip injury he had received during one of Munich’s many air raids. Monocled and grouchy, with a cartoon voice and a pipe to match, he was shabby but competent. I liked him in spite of the fact that he had been born in Dachau and lived there all his life without ever having thought to inquire what was happening east of the town. Or so he said. He was very sorry to hear the news of Kirsten’s death. Lawyers are always sorry to lose a good client. I waited for the expressions of sympathy to subside and then asked if he thought I should drop the price of the hotel.
“I don’t think so,” he said carefully. “I’m sure somebody will buy it, although perhaps not as a hotel. As a matter of fact there was a woman here just yesterday asking about the place. She had some questions I wasn’t able to answer, and I took the liberty of giving her your business card. I hope that was all right, Herr Gunther.”
“Did she have a name?”
“She said her name was Frau Schmidt.” He put aside his pipe, flipped open the cigarette box on his desk, and invited me to take one. I lit us both as he continued. “A good-looking woman. Tall. Very tall. With three little scars on the side of her face. Shrapnel scars probably. Not that she seemed at all self-conscious of them. Most women would have grown their hair a bit so that you wouldn’t notice. Not her, though. And not that it really spoiled her looks at all. But then it’s not every woman who would feel confident of that, is it?”
Krumper had just described the woman who had turned up at my office the previous evening. And I had an idea that she wasn’t interested in buying a hotel.
“No indeed,” I said. “Maybe she’s in a dueling society, like the Teutonia Club. Bragging scars to make her more attractive to some lout with a rapier in his hand. What was that crap the kaiser used to say about those old clubs? The best education a young man can get for his future life.”
“You paint a very vivid picture, Herr Gunther,” said Krumper, fingering a small scar on his cheekbone as if he, too, had enjoyed the kind of education favored by the kaiser. For a moment or two he was silent, opening a file that lay on his overcrowded desk. “Your wife left a will,” he said. “Leaving everything to her father. She hadn’t made a new will since his death. But as her next of kin you inherit everything anyway. The hotel. A few hundred marks. Some pictures. And a car.”
“A car?” This was news to me. “Kirsten owned a car?”
“Her father’s. He kept it hidden throughout the war.”
“I think he was probably quite good at keeping things hidden,” I said, thinking of the box his SS friend had buried in the garden. I was certain he must have known about it, contrary to what the American who dug it up had believed.
“In a garage on Donauwörther Landstrasse.”
“You mean that old Fulda tire place on the road to Kleinberghofen?” Krumper nodded. “What kind of a car?”
“I don’t know much about cars,” said Krumper. “I saw him in it before the war. Very proud of it, he was. Some sort of duo-tone cabriolet. Of course, business was better then and he could afford to run it. At the beginning of the war he even buried the wheels to stop anyone requisitioning it.” Krumper handed me a set of car keys. “And I know he looked after it, even though he didn’t drive it. I’m sure it will be in good running order.”
A few hours later I was driving back to Munich in a handsome-looking two-door Hansa 1700 that looked as good as it had the day it left the Goliath works in Bremen. I went straight to the hospital, collected Kirsten’s ashes, and then drove all the way back to Dachau and the Leitenberg Cemetery, where I had arranged to meet the local undertaker, Herr Gartner. I handed over her cremains and arranged for a short service of remembrance the following afternoon.
When I got back to my apartment in Schwabing, I tried some of the anesthetic again. This time it didn’t work. I felt as lonely as a fish in a toilet bowl. I had no relations and no friends to speak of other than the guy in the bathroom mirror, who used to say hello in the morning. Lately even he had stopped speaking to me and seemed, more often than not, to greet me with a sneer, as if I had become obnoxious to him. Maybe we had all become obnoxious. All of us Germans. There were none of us the Americans looked at with anything other than quiet contempt, except perhaps the party-girls and the snappers. And you didn’t need to be Hanussen the clairvoyant to read the minds of our new friends and protectors. How could you let it happen
? they asked. How could you do what you did? It’s a question I had often asked myself. I didn’t have an answer. I don’t think any of us will ever have an answer. What possible answer could there ever be? It was just something that happened in Germany once, about a thousand years ago.
TEN
About a week later she came back. The tall one. Tall women are always better than short ones, especially the kind of tall women that short men seem to favor, who really aren’t that tall, they just seem that way. This one wasn’t quite as tall as the hoop on a basketball court, but a lot of her was just hair and a hat and high heels and hauteur. She had plenty of that. She looked as if she needed help as much as Venice needed rain. That’s something I appreciate in a client. I enjoy being pitched at by someone who’s not used to words like “please” and “thank you.” It brings out the ’forty-eighter in me. Sometimes even the Spartacist.
“I need your help, Herr Gunther,” she said, sitting down very carefully on the edge of my creaking green leather sofa. She kept hold of her briefcase for a moment, hugging it to her ample chest like a breastplate.
“Oh? What makes you think so?”
“You’re a private detective, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but why me? Why not use Preysings in Frauenstrasse? Or Klenze on Augustinerstrasse? They’re both bigger than me.”
She looked taken aback, as if I’d asked what color underwear she had on. I smiled encouragingly and told myself that so long as she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, I would just have to guess.
“What I’m trying to find out, Fräulein, is if someone recommended me. In this business, it’s the sort of thing you like to know.”
“Not Fräulein. It’s Frau Warzok. Britta Warzok. And yes, you were recommended to me.”
“Oh? By whom?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say.”