by Philip Kerr
For all that, I took a certain amount of satisfaction in doing what I did for a living; clearing up shit and washing corpses seemed like a suitable penance for what I’d done before. I was a cop, not a proper cop, but a useful stooge in the SD for the likes of Heydrich, Nebe, and Goebbels. It wasn’t even a proper penance like the one undertaken by the old German king Henry IV, who famously walked on his knees to Canossa Castle to obtain the Pope’s forgiveness, but perhaps it would do. Besides, like my heart, my knees are not what they once were. In small ways, like Germany itself, I was trying to inch my way back to moral respectability. After all, it can hardly be denied that little by little can take you a long way, even when you’re on your knees.
In truth, that process was working out for Germany a little better than it was working out for me, and all thanks to the Old Man. This was what we called Konrad Adenauer, on account of how he was seventy-three when he became West Germany’s first postwar chancellor. He was still in power at eighty-one, leading the Christian Democrats and, unless you were a radical Jewish group like Irgun, who’d tried to assassinate the Old Man on more than one occasion, it had to be admitted he’d made a pretty good job of it, too. Already people were talking about “the Miracle on the Rhine” and they weren’t referring to Saint Alban of Mainz. Thanks to a combination of the Marshall Plan, low inflation, rapid industrial growth, and plain hard work, Germany was now doing better economically than England. This didn’t surprise me that much; the Tommies always were too bolshy for their own good. After winning two world wars they made the mistake of thinking the world owed them a living. Perhaps the real miracle was how the rest of the world seemed to have forgiven Germany for starting a war that had cost the lives of forty million people—this in spite of the Old Man having denounced the whole denazification process and brought in an amnesty law for our war criminals, all of which certainly explained why there was a lingering and general suspicion that many old Nazis were now back in government. The Old Man had a useful explanation for that, too: he said you needed to make sure you had a good supply of clean water available before you threw out your dirty water.
As someone who washed dead Germans for a living, I couldn’t disagree with this.
Of course, I had more dirty water in my bucket than most and above all else I was appreciating my newfound obscurity. Like Garbo in Grand Hotel, I just wanted to be alone and loved the idea of being anonymous more than I liked the short beard I’d grown to help make this work. The beard was yellowish gray, vaguely metallic; it made me look wiser than I am. Our lives are shaped by the choices we make, of course, and more noticeably by the choices that were wrong. But the idea that I had been forgotten by the cops, not to mention the world’s major security and intelligence agencies, was pleasing, to say the least. My life looked good on paper; indeed it was the only place it looked as if it had been well spent, which, speaking as someone who’d been a cop for many years, was in itself suspicious. And so, to facilitate my life as Christof Ganz, in my spare time I would often go back over the bare facts of his life and invent some of the things he’d done and achieved. Places I’d been, jobs I’d had, and, most important of all, my wartime service on behalf of the Third Reich. In much the same way that everyone else had done in the new Germany. Yes, we’ve all had to become very creative with our résumés. Including, it seemed, many members of the Christian Democrats.
I took another drink with my breakfast, just to help me sleep, of course, and went to bed, where I dreamed of happier times, although that might just as easily have been a prayer to the god of the black cloud, dwelling in the skies. Since prayers are never answered it’s hard to tell the difference.
TWO
–
When I went into work the following evening the Moosach bomb victim was still there, laid out on the slab like a vulture’s abandoned banquet. Someone had tied a name tag to his toe which, given the fact that his leg was no longer attached to his body, seemed imprudent to say the least. His name was Johann Bernbach, and he was just twenty-five years old. By now I knew a little more about the bomb from what was in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A five-hundred-pounder had exploded on a building site next door to a beer hall in Dachauerstrasse, less than fifty meters from the municipal gasworks. The gasometer contained over seven million cubic feet of gas, so the feeling expressed in the newspaper was that the city had had a lucky escape with just two people killed and six injured and I said as much to Bernbach when I saw him.
“I hope you had a few beers tucked away when you got your ticket punched, friend. Enough to take the edge off the shrapnel. Look here, it won’t matter much to you now, but your unexpected death is not being treated with quite the reverence it warrants. To put it bluntly, Johann, it seems everyone’s glad it’s only you who’s burnt toast. There was a gasometer near where that giant marrow went off. It was full of gas, too. More than enough to keep my little department in this hospital busy for weeks. Kind of fitting you should end up here, given it was an Ami bomb that killed you. Until last year this was the American hospital. Anyway, I’ve done my best for you. Pulled most of that glass out of your corpse. Tidied up your legs a bit. Now it’s up to the undertaker.”
“Do you always talk to your customers like this?”
I turned around to see Herr Schumacher, one of the hospital managers, standing in the doorway. He was an Austrian, from Braunau am Inn, a small town on the German border, and although he wasn’t a doctor, he wore a white coat anyway, probably to make himself look more important.
“Why not? They seldom answer back. Besides, I have to talk to someone other than myself. I’d go mad otherwise.”
“My God. Oh, Jesus. I had no idea he looked as bad as this.”
“Don’t say that. You’ll hurt his feelings.”
“It’s just that there’s a man upstairs on Ward 10 who’s prepared to formally identify this poor wretch before he’s discharged this evening. He’s one of the other people who were caught up in yesterday’s bomb blast—he’s now a patient in this hospital. The man’s in a wheelchair but there’s nothing wrong with his eyes. I was hoping you could wheel him down here and help take care of it. But now that I’ve seen the corpse—well, I’m not so sure he wouldn’t faint. Jesus Christ, I know I almost did.”
“If he’s in a wheelchair maybe that won’t matter so much. Afterwards I can always wheel him somewhere to recover. Like another hospital, perhaps.” I lit a cigarette and steered the smoke back out through my grateful nostrils. “Or at least somewhere they have clean laundry, anyway.”
“You know you really shouldn’t smoke in here.”
“I know. And I’ve had complaints about it. But the fact is I’m smoking for sound medical reasons.”
“Name one.”
“The smell.”
“Oh. That. Yes, I do see your point.” Schumacher took one from the packet I waved under his nose and let me light him. “Don’t you usually cover them up with something? Like a sheet?”
“We weren’t expecting visitors. But while the laundry guys are on strike all the clean sheets are for the living. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”
“Okay. But isn’t there anything you can do about his face?”
“What would you suggest? An iron mask? But that’s not going to help with the formal identification process. I doubt this poor Fritz’s mother would recognize him. Let’s certainly hope she doesn’t have to try. But given his more obvious similarity to nothing you can put into words that don’t take the name of the Lord in vain the way you just did, I think we’re probably into the more hermetic realm of other distinguishing marks, don’t you agree?”
“Does he have any?”
“He has one. There’s a tattoo on his forearm.”
“Well, that should help.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a number.”
“Who gets themselves tattooed with a number?”
“Jews did, in th
e concentration camps. For identification.”
“They did that?”
“No, actually we did that. Us Germans. The countrymen of Beethoven and Goethe. It was like a lottery ticket but not a lucky one. This fellow must have been in Auschwitz when he was a kid.”
“Where’s that?”
Schumacher was the kind of stupid Austrian who preferred to believe that his country was the first free nation that had fallen victim to the Nazis and hence was not responsible for what had happened, but it was a harder argument to make on behalf of Braunau am Inn, which was rather more famous as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and quite possibly why Schumacher had left in the first place. I couldn’t blame him for that. But I wasn’t disposed to argue with anything else he believed. He was my boss after all.
“Poland, I think. But it doesn’t matter. Not now.”
“Well, look, see what you can do about his face, Herr Ganz. And then go and fetch the witness, would you?”
When Schumacher had gone, I searched around for a clean towel and in a cupboard I found one the Amis must have left behind. It was a Mickey Mouse Club towel, which was less than ideal but it looked a lot better than the man on the slab. So I laid it gently over his head and went upstairs to collect the patient.
He was dressed and expecting me and while I’d been expecting him I wasn’t expecting the two cops who were with him, although I should have been because he’d agreed to help identify a dead body, and that’s what cops do when they’re not directing traffic or stealing watches. The smaller of the cops was in uniform and the other was dressed like a civilian; what was worse, I vaguely recognized the big Fritz in plainclothes and, I suppose, he vaguely recognized me, which was unfortunate as I’d hoped to avoid the Munich cops until my beard was a better length, but it was too late for that now. So I grunted a general-purpose good evening, which was a couple of consonants short of being sullen, took hold of the chair, and wheeled the patient toward the elevator with the two cops in tow. I didn’t worry about them minding my manners as I was just a night porter after all, and they didn’t have to like me, they just had to follow me down to the mortuary. It wasn’t a good wheelchair since it had a definite bias to the left but that was hardly surprising, given the size of the injured man. Of greater surprise, perhaps, was the fact that the chair managed to roll at all. The patient was a fattish man in his late thirties, and his beer belly sat on his lap like a bag containing all his worldly goods. I knew it was a beer belly because I was working on getting one myself, just as soon as I had a pay rise. Besides, his clothes stank of beer, as if he’d had a two-liter stein of Pschorr in his lap when the bomb went off.
“How well did you know the deceased, Herr Dorpmüller?” asked the detective as he tailed us along the corridor.
“Well enough,” said the man in the wheelchair. “For the last three years he was my pianist at the Apollo. That’s the cabaret theater I run in the Munich Hotel, just up the road from the beer house. Johann could play anything. Jazz or classical. To some extent my wife and I were all the family he had, given what had already happened to him. It’s too bad that it should be Johann who was killed like this, of all people. I mean after what he’d gone through in the camps as a boy. What he survived.”
“Do you remember anything at all?”
“Not really. We were just about to leave to open the cabaret for the evening when it happened. Do you know exactly what happened yet? With the bomb, I mean.”
“It looks as if one of the men working on the building site next door to the beer hall where you were drinking must have struck the bomb with a pickax. Only we’ve yet to find anything of him left to ask about that. Probably never will, either. My guess is that the local smokers will be inhaling his atoms for the next few days. You’re a lucky man. A meter nearer the door and you’d have been killed for sure.”
As I wheeled the man along I couldn’t help but agree with the detective. I was looking down at two burned ears that looked like the petals on a poinsettia, and there was a long length of stitching on the man’s neck that put me in mind of the Trans-Siberian Railway. His arm was in plaster and there were tiny cuts all over him. Clearly Herr Dorpmüller had enjoyed the narrowest of escapes.
We took the elevator down to the basement where, outside the mortuary door, I lit another Eckstein and like Orson Welles narrated a few somber words of warning before taking them inside to see the main feature. If I cared about their stomachs that was only because I was the one who was probably going to have to mop the contents of their stomachs off the floor.
“All right, gentlemen. We’re here. But before we go in I feel I ought to tell you that the deceased isn’t looking his best. For one thing, we’re a little short of clean laundry in this hospital. So there’s no sheet over his body. For another, his legs are no longer attached to his body, which is quite badly burned. I’ve done all I can to tidy him up a bit but the fact is you aren’t going to be able to identify the man in here in the normal way, which is to say, from his face. He doesn’t have a face. Not anymore. From the look of it his face was shredded by flying glass, so it bears no more relation to the photograph in his passport than a plate of red cabbage would. Which is why there’s a towel covering his head.”
“Now you tell me,” said the detective.
I smiled patiently. “There are other ways of identifying a man, I think. Distinguishing marks. Old scars. I even heard of something they’ve got now called fingerprints.”
“Johann had a tattoo on his forearm,” said the man in the wheelchair. “A six-figure identification number from the camp he was in. Birkenau, I think. He only showed it to me a couple of times but I’m more or less sure the first three numbers were one four zero. And he’d just bought a pair of new shoes from Salamander.”
While he inspected the tattoo I found the shoes and let him inspect them, too. Meanwhile I stood beside the uniformed cop and nodded when he asked if he could smoke.
“It’s the smell,” he confessed. “Formaldehyde, is it?”
I nodded again.
“Always sets me off.”
“So is it him?” asked the detective.
“Looks like,” said Dorpmüller.
“You’re sure?”
“Well, as sure as I can be without looking at his face, I suppose.”
The detective looked at the Mickey Mouse towel covering the dead man’s head and then, accusingly, at me.
“How bad is it really?” he asked. “His face.”
“Bad,” I said. “Makes the Wolf Man look like the Fritz next door.”
“You’re exaggerating. Surely.”
“No, not even a little. But you can feel free to ignore my advice any time you like. Nobody else listens to me down here, so why should you?”
“Goddamn it,” he snarled, “how do they expect me to positively ID a body without a face?”
“It’s a problem all right,” I said. “There’s nothing like a mortuary to remind you of the frailty of human flesh.”
For some reason the detective seemed to hold me accountable for this inconvenience, as if I was trying to frustrate his inquiry.
“What the hell’s the matter with you people in here, anyway? Couldn’t you have found something else to cover his face? Not to mention the rest of him? I’ve heard of naked culture in this country but this is ridiculous.”
I shrugged an answer, which didn’t seem to satisfy him but that wasn’t my problem. I never minded disappointing cops that much. Not even when I was a cop.
“This stupid towel is disrespectful,” insisted the detective. “And what’s worse is you know it is.”
“It was the American hospital,” I said by way of an explanation. “And the towel was all I had.”
“Mickey Mouse. I’ve a good mind to report you, fellow.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It is disrespectful. I’m sorry.”
&nbs
p; I snatched the towel away from the dead man’s head and threw it in the bin, hoping to make the detective shut up. It almost worked, too, except that all three men groaned or whistled at once and suddenly it sounded like the South Pole in there. The cop in uniform turned on his heel to face the wall and his plainclothes colleague put a big hand over his bigger mouth. Only the injured Fritz in the wheelchair stayed looking, with horrified fascination, the way a rabbit stares at a snake that is about to kill it, and perhaps recognizing for the first time the micrometer-thin narrowness of his own escape.
“That’s what a bomb does,” I said. “They can erect all the monuments and statues they want. But it’s sights like this poor fellow that are the real memorials to the futility and waste of war.”
“I’ll call an undertaker,” whispered the man in the wheelchair, almost as if, until that very moment, he hadn’t quite believed that Johann Bernbach was actually dead. “As soon as I get home.” And then he added: “Do you know any undertakers?”
“I was hoping you might ask me that.” I handed him a business card. “If you tell Herr Urban that Christof Ganz sent you he’ll give you his special discount.”