by Philip Kerr
“Your investigative method, perhaps? You could tell me something about that.”
“My method was a bit like what Field Marshal von Moltke said about a battle plan. It never survives contact with the enemy. People are different, Richard. It stands to reason that homicides are different, too. Perhaps if you were to tell me about a case you’re working on now. Better still, if you brought me the file, I could take a look at it and offer my thoughts. The chief mentioned one case that needed warming up. The murder of that cop. August Krichbaum, wasn’t it? Perhaps I could suggest something there.”
“That’s no longer a cold case,” said Bömer. “Looks like there may be a lead, after all.”
I bit my lip. “Oh? What’s that?”
“Krichbaum got himself murdered in front of the Kaiser Hotel, right? Pathologist reckoned someone clouted him in the gut.”
“Must have been quite a punch.”
“I guess if you’re not ready for it, it might be. Anyway, the hotel doorman got a look at the main suspect. Not much of a look, but he’s an ex-cop. Anyway, he’s looked at the photograph of every crook in Berlin, and no luck. Since then he’s been racking his brains and now reckons that the fellow who hit Krichbaum might have been another cop.”
“A cop? You’re joking.”
“Not at all. They’ve got him looking over the personnel files of the entire Berlin police force, past and present. As soon as he thumbs the right mug, they’ll have the guy, for sure.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
I lit a cigarette and rubbed the back of my neck uncomfortably, as if I could already feel the blade of the falling ax. It’s said that all you ever feel is a sharp bite, like the angry nip of the electric clippers in a gentlemen’s hairdressers. It took me a moment or two to remind myself that the hotel doorman’s description of the suspect had been of a man with a mustache. And it took me a while longer to remember that in the original photograph on my own police personnel file I had been wearing a mustache. Did that make it more or less likely that he could identify me? I wasn’t sure. I took a deep breath and felt my head swim a little.
“But I brought the file on something else I’ve been working on,” said Bömer, unbuckling his saddle-leather briefcase.
“Good,” I said, without enthusiasm. “Oh, good.”
He handed me a buff-colored file.
“A few days ago, there was a body found floating in the Mühlendamm Lock.”
“A Landwehr Top,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. So why didn’t the Mühlendamm Murder Commission deal with it?”
“Because there was some mystery about the man’s identity and about the cause of death. The man drowned. But the body was full of seawater, see? So he couldn’t possibly have drowned in the River Spree.” He handed me some photographs. “Plus, as you can see, an attempt had been made to weigh the body down. The rope around the ankles probably slipped the weight.”
“How deep is it there?” I asked, leafing through the pictures taken at the scene and in the morgue.
“About nine meters.”
I was looking at the body of a man in his late fifties. Big, blond, and typically Aryan, except for the fact that there was a photograph of his penis, which had been circumcised. Among German men that was a little unusual.
“As you can see, he might have been a Jew,” said Bömer. “Although from the rest of him, you wouldn’t say he looks like a Jew at all.”
“The strangest people are, these days.”
“I mean to say, he looks more typically Aryan, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Like a poster boy for the SA.”
“Well, let’s hope so.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning this: If it should turn out he’s German, then obviously we’d like to find out as much as we can. But if it should turn out that he’s Jewish, then my orders are that we don’t bother to investigate. That it’s understandable these things should happen in Berlin and not to waste any police time investigating it.”
I marveled at the calm way he said this. As if it were the most natural distinction in the world. I didn’t speak. I didn’t have to. I was looking at the pictures of a dead man. But I was still thinking about my own neck.
“Broken nose, cauliflower ear, big hands.” I flicked my cigarette away and tried to concentrate on what I was looking at, if only to get my mind off the death of August Krichbaum. “This fellow was no choirboy. Maybe he was a Jew, after all. Interesting.”
“What is?”
“That triangular mark on his chest. What is it? A bruise? The pathologist doesn’t say. Which is sloppy. Wouldn’t have happened in my day. I could probably tell a lot more from the actual body. Where is it now?”
“At the Charité Hospital.”
Suddenly, I figured that looking at Bömer’s Landwehr Top was the best way of taking my mind off August Krichbaum.
“Have you got a car?”
“Yes.”
“Come on. Let’s go and take a look. If anyone in there asks what we’re doing, you’re helping me to look for my missing brother.”
WE DROVE NORTHWEST in an open-top Butz. There was a two-wheel trailer attached to the back, almost as if Bömer were planning to go camping after he was through with me. This wasn’t so far from the truth.
“I lead a Hitler Youth troop of boys aged ten to fourteen,” he explained. “We were camping last weekend, which is why I still have the trailer attached to the car.”
“I sincerely hope they’re all still in there.”
“Go ahead and laugh. Everyone else at the Alex laughs. But I happen to believe in Germany’s future.”
“So do I, which is why I also hope you locked them in. The members of your youth troop, I mean. Nasty little brutes. I saw some the other day playing piggy in the middle with some old Jew’s hat. Still, I guess we should forget about it. I mean, it’s understandable that these things happen in Berlin.”
“I don’t have anything against the Jews myself.”
“But. There’s always a ‘but’ after that particular sentiment. It’s like a stupid little trailer attached to the car.”
“But I do believe our nation has become weak and degenerate. And that the best way of turning that around is to make being German seem like something important. To do that properly, we have to make ourselves a special thing, a race apart. To make ourselves seem exclusively German, even to the extent of saying that it’s no good being a Jew first and a German second. There’s no room for anything else.”
“You make camping sound fun, Bömer. Is that what you tell the boys around the campfire? Now I understand what the trailer’s for. I suppose it’s full of degenerate literature to get the bonfire going.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Christ, did you speak like this when you were a detective at the Alex?”
“No. Back then we could all still say what the hell we liked.”
He laughed. “All I’m trying to do is explain why I think we need the government we have now.”
“Richard. When Germans look to their governments to fix things, you know we’re really in the shit. If you ask me, I think we’re an easy people to govern. All you have to do is make a new law once a year that says, do as you’re damn well told.”
We drove across Karlsplatz and onto Luisenstrasse, passing the monument to Rudolf Virchow, the so-called father of pathology and an early advocate of racial purity, which was probably the only reason why his statue hadn’t been moved. Next to the Charité Hospital was the Pathological Institute. We parked the car and went inside.
A red-haired intern wearing a white jacket showed us down to the ancient morgue, where a man armed with a pump-action spray gun was making short and pungent work of what remained of that summer’s insect life. I wondered if the stuff worked on Nazis. The man with the spray gun led us into the cold store, which, from the smell, wasn’t quite cold enough. He hit the air with some insecticide and walked us around a doz
en, sheet-covered bodies laid out on slabs like a tented village, until we found the one we were looking for.
I took out my cigarettes and offered one to Bömer.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Too bad. A lot of folks still believe we all smoked in the war to calm our nerves, but mostly it was to cover the smell of the dead. You should take up smoking, and not just to help out in a smelly situation like this. Smoking is essential for a detective. It helps convince us we’re doing something, even when we’re doing nothing much at all. You’ll find there’s a lot of nothing much at all that happens when you’re a detective.”
I threw off the sheet and stared hard at a man’s body the size of Schmeling’s bigger brother and the color of uncooked dough. Looking at him, you almost expected someone to shovel him into an oven and bake him back to life. The skin on his face looked like a hand left too long in the bathwater. It was crinkled like an apricot. Even his optician wouldn’t have recognized him. What was more, the pathologist had already been at work. A crudely sewn thoracic scar crossed the body from the chin to the pubic hair like a length of toy railway track. The scar traversed the center of the triangular mark on the man’s broad chest. Pinching the cigarette from my mouth, I went down for a closer look.
“Not a tattoo,” I said. “A burn mark. It looks a little like the tip of a flatiron, don’t you think?”
Bömer nodded. “Tortured?”
“Are there any similar marks on his back?”
“I don’t know.”
I took hold of a big shoulder. “Then let’s turn him over. You take the hip and the legs. I’ll turn the body. We’ll pull him toward us, and I’ll lean over and take a look.”
It was like moving a wet sandbag. There was nothing on his back except some lank hair and a birthmark, but as the body rested against our abdomens, Bömer swore uncomfortably.
“Too much for you, Richard?”
“Something just leaked out of his prick and onto my shirt,” he said, quickly stepping away from the slab and then staring in horror at a large brown-yellow wound in the center of his belly. “Shit.”
“Close. But not quite.”
“That was a new shirt. Now what am I going to do?” He pulled the material away from the skin of his belly and sighed.
“Haven’t you got a brown one in that trailer of yours?” I joked.
Bömer looked relieved. “Yes, I have.”
“Then shut up and pay attention. Our friend here wasn’t tortured, that much I’m sure of. Anyone using a hot iron on him would have used it more often than once if he’d meant to hurt him.”
“So why do it?”
I lifted one of the hands and bent the fingers into a fist as big as the fuel tank on a small motorcycle.
“Look at the size of these mitts. The scar tissue on the knuckles. Especially here, at the base of each small finger. And do you see this bump?” I let Bömer take a look at a bump that curled all the way around the back of the palm to a point just below the knuckle of the little finger. Then, lowering the left, I lifted the man’s right. “This one’s even more pronounced. This is a common fracture in boxers. I’d say this guy was a southpaw, too, which should help narrow it down a bit. Except that he hadn’t boxed in a while. See the dirt under these fingernails? No boxer would tolerate that. Only the pathologist here didn’t scrape them out, and no detective ought to tolerate that. If the medicine man doesn’t do his job, it’s up to you to put him straight.”
I took out my pocketknife and an Adlon envelope containing Muller’s resignation letter and scraped out what was underneath the dead man’s nails.
“I don’t see what a few crumbs of dirt are going to tell us,” said Bömer.
“Probably nothing. But evidence rarely comes in a large size. And it’s nearly always dirty. Remember that. Now all I need is to see the dead man’s clothes. And I need the use of a microscope for a few minutes.” I glanced around. “As I recall, there’s a laboratory somewhere on this floor.”
He pointed. “In there.”
While Bömer went to fetch the dead man’s clothes, I put the contents of his fingernails into a Petri dish and stared at them for a while underneath a microscope. I was no scientist and no geologist, either, but I knew gold when I saw it. There was just a tiny crumb, but it was enough to catch the light and my attention. And when Bömer came into the lab carrying a cardboard box, I went ahead and told him what I’d found, even though I knew what he was going to say.
“Gold, huh? A jeweler, maybe? That might also be evidence that the man was a Jew.”
“I told you, Richard. This man was a boxer. Most likely he was working on a building site. That would account for the dirt under the nails.”
“And the gold?”
“Generally speaking, outside of a goldsmith’s, the best place to look for gold is in the dirt.”
I opened the cardboard box and found myself looking through the clothes of a workingman. At a pair of strong boots. At a thick leather belt. At a leather cap. The cheap flannel shirt interested me more, as there were no buttons on it, and there were small tears on the material where they should have been.
“Someone tore this man’s shirt open in a hurry,” I said. “Most likely when his heart stopped beating. It looks as though someone tried to revive him after he drowned. That would certainly explain the shirt. It was ripped open so that an attempt could be made to start his heart again. With a hot iron. It’s an old boxing trainer’s trick. Something about the heat and the shock, I think. Anyway, that explains the burn.”
“Are you saying someone threw this man in the water and then tried to revive him?”
“Well, it wasn’t the Spree. You told me that yourself. He drowned somewhere else. Then someone tried to revive him. Then they dumped him in the river. That’s the chain of causation, but I can’t attach any whys to that. Not yet.”
“Interesting.”
I looked at the man’s jacket. It was a cheap corduroy from C&A. Except the lining had been opened and then restitched, and, squeezing the material under the breast pocket, I felt something crumple in my fingers. I took out my knife again, cut away some of the stitches on the lining, and picked out a folded piece of paper. Carefully I unfolded it until I was able to spread a strip of paper about the size of a schoolboy’s ruler on the bench beside the microscope. After being in the waters of the River Spree, whatever it was that had been printed on the strip of paper was gone forever. The paper was quite blank. But there was no mistaking its meaning.
Bömer’s face was equally blank. “Could this have been his name and address?”
“It might have been, if he was a ten-year-old boy and his mother worried about him getting lost.”
“Well, then. What does it mean?”
“It means that what you first suspected is now confirmed. I believe this strip of paper was probably a fragment from the Torah.”
“The what?”
“If God is German, I for one won’t be at all surprised. Apparently he enjoys being worshipped, issuing people with ten commandments at a time, and has even written his own unreadable book. But the God that this man worshipped was the Hebrew God. Jews sometimes sew a piece of the word of God into their clothes, next to their heart. Yes, that’s right, Richard. He was a Jew.”
“Shit. God damn it all.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?”
“I told you, Gunther. The chief is never going to authorize me to investigate the death of a Jew. Damn it all. I thought this might have been a chance to prove myself. To lead a proper murder investigation, you know?”
I said nothing. It wasn’t that I was speechless, but I certainly didn’t feel like making a speech. What would be the point?
“I don’t make police policy, Gunther,” said Bömer. “Even Liebermann von Sonnenberg doesn’t do that. If you really want to know, the policy comes down from the Ministry of the Interior. From Frick. And Frick gets it from Goering, who probably gets it from—”
�
��The devil himself. I know.”
Suddenly I badly wanted to be away from Richard Bömer and his vaulting forensic ambition. And it was now obvious in a way it hadn’t been obvious before that being a policeman had changed a lot more than I had supposed. I couldn’t ever go back to the Alex even if I had wanted to.
“I expect there will be other murders, Richard. In fact, I’m sure of it. In that respect at least, you can rely on the Nazis.”
“You don’t understand. I want to be a detective, like in the stories. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. A proper detective, like you were, Gunther. But police states are bad for crime and bad for criminals. Because everyone’s a policeman in Germany now. And if they’re not yet, they soon will be.” He kicked the laboratory workbench and swore again.
“Richard. You almost make me feel sorry for you.” I picked up the dead man’s file and handed it back. “Well, I can’t say it’s not been fun. I’ve missed the job. I’ve even missed the customers. Can you believe that? But from now on I’m going to miss the job the way I miss the Lustgarten. Which is to say, not at all. Because it’s not the same. It’s not like it used to be. When someone gets murdered—it doesn’t matter who it is—you investigate. You investigate, because that’s what you do when you live in a decent society. And when you don’t, when you say that someone’s death isn’t worth the candle, then the job’s not worth having anyway. Not anymore.”
I held the file out to him. But he stared at it as if it wasn’t there.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Take this. It’s yours.”
But we both knew it wasn’t.
Ignoring the file, he turned and walked out of the laboratory, and although I wasn’t there to see it, the Pathological Institute, as well.
A few months later Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg told me that Richard Bömer had left KRIPO and joined the SS. At the time it looked like the better career move.