The girl had a brief convulsive episode. The staff prevented her from swallowing her tongue. Then her pupils dilated and she lapsed into deep unconsciousness. With her pulse growing fainter, the chaplain was summoned from the dining room on the off-chance the girl was Roman Catholic. She was read the last rites. Finally, at around two o’clock, as a rainstorm broke over the city, an ambulance arrived and raced her up the Avus speedway to Berlin. When she finally awoke, her memory was a blank. She did not even know her name.
A police search was hastily organised the next day. In the woods around the capital, tent colonies frequently sprang up, full of unemployed men and their families – a tiny fraction of the workless millions who drifted like human flotsam from one conurbation to the next. The papers speculated that it was in such an ‘enclave of despair’ that the truth would be found. With the press looking on, sixteen officers trudged through the woods outside Caputh, searching for evidence. The Tuesday edition of the Berliner Morgenpost carried a photograph of the men hunched beneath their oilskins or crouching down to examine depressions in the leaf-strewn earth. But they found no tent colony, nor evidence that there had ever been any. From a forensic point of view, the operation yielded little: a few scraps of fabric, a hairclip, a boot caked in mud that appeared to be almost new. They also recovered the soggy remains of a hand-bill issued to advertise a public lecture at the Philharmonic Hall. The lecture was entitled The Present State of Quantum Theory. The principal speaker was Professor Albert Einstein.
The library closed its doors at six. Alma stepped out onto Unter den Linden, sheltering her eyes against the evening sunshine. It had rained while she was inside. The cobblestones were dark and slick. Music blared from a loudspeaker nearby, male voices and marching bands echoing back and forth between the sooty imperial façades.
Robert was waiting for her in a new Daimler. As soon as he saw her, he climbed out, giving her a hopeful smile as he held open the passenger door.
The students had taken their work outside the library, wheeling trolley-loads of books towards a waiting truck. One of them winked at Alma as she came down the steps. His smile was white, like the triangle of handkerchief protruding from the top pocket of his blazer. Alma frowned as he began to throw his load onto the truck with all the care of a labourer shifting coal.
‘What are they doing?’ she asked.
‘Having fun, by the look of it,’ Robert said.
He put a hand on her shoulder. His concern for her was surprising. He had always been a cheerful soul, but she had never believed him capable of real tenderness. The fact that they were equally bewildered by recent events, were both struggling to come to terms with Martin Kirsch’s disappearance, had brought them closer.
As they drove past the little square in front of the opera house, Alma saw the books again. They were in piles six feet high. It was then she understood: they were about to be burned.
Two
October, 1932
Martin Kirsch was in the washroom when he heard it: a rasping, metallic scream. It seemed to come up through the plug hole – a terrible scream of pain and horror. He stood frozen before the sink, hands dripping, staring down into the rusty O of darkness.
Kirsch had come in early to catch up on some paperwork in peace and quiet. All week, truck-loads of election campaigners and paramilitaries had been driving up and down the Schönhauser Allee, sounding horns, singing and jeering. Fights erupted when the police weren’t watching. Smashed teeth and splintered bones. His landlady, Frau Schirmann, kept the front door bolted and deadlocked. He’d been forced to wake her just to get out.
It was still barely light outside. The patients were always asleep at that hour. The dormitories were on the other side of the building anyway. Still he remained transfixed, listening, in case the scream came again. But all he heard was the water as it dripped from his fingers onto the cracked white porcelain.
Pipes, it was just the pipes. A boiler playing up. An air lock. Stupid of him. He straightened up, reached for a towel. These old buildings, they creaked and groaned worse than old men.
A voice again, only different now: faster and softer. Panting – or was it sobbing? He held his breath, leaned closer.
‘No no no no no no no no.’
Water going down a drain somewhere. The air lock clearing. Not a human voice at all.
He replaced his spectacles and peered under the row of sinks. The plumbing was fifty years old: heavy galvanised iron, blisters of rust bubbling through a skin of grey paint. After the water trap, the outlet took a dog-leg towards the stalls before disappearing through the floor. Underneath the washroom were the ground-floor offices, and underneath them lay the basement, partially cleared out for the deputy director’s experiments. There were sinks down there, he recalled, in the old laundry. The plumbing was all connected, like a giant telephone exchange.
He looked at his watch: seven o’clock. He leaned down again and gingerly put his ear to the outlet.
Just whispers now, a distant gurgling. A tap, tap, tap. Then voices again, funnelling through metal – women’s voices.
‘Disgusting pig.’
He jumped. The voice was perfectly clear.
A rattle of taps. Water hissing through the system.
The door swung open behind him. The deputy director walked in, heel-caps clacking on the tiled floor: Dr Heinrich Mehring, wing-collared and meticulously bald, under his arm his usual copy of Kreuz-Zeitung.
‘Good morning, Dr Kirsch.’ Kirsch straightened up. ‘Forgot your coat again?’
All medical staff were supposed to wear their white coats on duty. The director insisted upon it. It was important, he believed, to maintain a clear professional distance between patient and practitioner.
‘No, Herr Doctor. I don’t plan to see any patients today.’
Mehring opened one of the cubicle doors and raised himself on tiptoe. He liked to get a view of the pan from a safe distance before committing himself. ‘But they might see you. I think that’s the point, isn’t it? There’s a spare one in my office if you need it.’
Apparently the pan passed muster. Mehring closed the cubicle door and locked it. Kirsch heard him open the newspaper.
He hadn’t been down to the basement since Mehring had requisitioned it. He recalled a warren of storage rooms, a repository of redundant medical texts, an ancient boiler maintained by a watchful janitor of few words and fewer teeth. Mehring preferred the basement to the available rooms above ground. He wanted to conduct his experiments in conditions of scientific isolation, as if contact with the rest of the clinic might invalidate his findings.
The focus of his work was a new form of treatment, pioneered at the Lichterfelde Sanatorium a few miles away. A psychiatrist there, called Manfred Sakel, had injected recovering opium addicts with insulin, a hormone used to reduce sugar levels in the bloodstream. The agony of their withdrawal – the tremors, the vomiting, the anxiety – seemed to lessen. But Sakel got the best results when the dose was so high it put them into hypoglycaemic shock. With brains starved of sugar, his patients went into comas from which they could only be revived with heavy doses of glucose. Sakel was unclear whether it was the shock aspects of the treatment that were effective or the resulting comas, but he reported finding his patients’ behaviour much improved. They were less argumentative, hostile, uncooperative. He had continued his work at the University of Vienna, applying the same techniques to patients diagnosed with dementia praecox – or schizophrenia, as it had become known. Although a formal paper was still awaited, it was rumoured that his results were equally impressive. Patients sent into comas five or six times a week were no longer plagued with psychotic thoughts. Their delusions evaporated, or seemed not to affect them. And while they were prone to disorientation and memory loss, they also became less wrapped up in themselves, and far less prone to inappropriate displays of emotion. As Sakel had put it, they became less ‘complicated’.
Dr Mehring had followed Sakel’s work with interest. As
soon as a nursing vacancy had become available, he had filled it with a member of Sakel’s old team at Lichterfelde. He had theories of his own on how to take the shock approach further. He believed it was changes to the brain’s electrical activity that lay behind the effects Sakel reported, opening up the prospect of exciting new treatments.
Kirsch had read reports of the procedure. The subject was woken at six every morning and taken at once to a windowless room. There the staff laid him on a bed and propped up his head with pillows. Then they fed a greased rubber tube through his left nostril and down through his oesophagus into his empty stomach. At the other end of the tube was a glass reservoir of sugar water suspended behind the bed. The sugar was there to bring him out of the coma at the designated time. Equipment for faster intervention was laid out on a tray: sealed bottles of thirty-eight per cent glucose solution and syringes.
At seven o’clock they injected insulin into a vein in the subject’s left forearm, the dose mounting day by day from twenty units to forty to eighty until the comas began. Some patients showed unusual insulin resistance. They fought to stay awake, arms and legs twitching and trembling, as if to lose consciousness meant descent into some place of terror. As their bodies went into shock, goose pimples came up on their arms, they began to sweat, their mouths filled with saliva, so that they had to be rolled onto their sides to keep from drowning.
Kirsch had asked that his schizophrenia patients be exempted from Mehring’s experiments. He was sure that putting them through such trials would disrupt his treatment, which depended on winning their trust. He had raised the matter with the director, Dr Bonhoeffer, and, when that did not produce results, with the patients’ families. As far as he could tell, Mehring had taken no notice.
The service lift came to a stop. Kirsch left the door open and headed down the central passageway. Electric light bulbs had been suspended from the ceiling. They pulsed brighter then dimmer with the fluctuating voltage of the hospital generators. The air was thick with a sour smell of paint.
The books had all gone. The repository and the old laundry had been turned into treatment rooms. Heavy self-closing doors had been freshly installed. He pushed the nearest door open an inch. Two of Mehring’s nurses were standing over an iron bed. One of them had a sponge in her hand, the other a clipboard. A patient lay between them, bare gnarled feet sticking out from under a woollen blanket.
The feet were bent towards each other, the toes clenched tight like fists. Clasp-knife rigidity, they called it, usually a symptom of spasticity or lesions in the brain.
The feet twitched.
‘Clean him up later. He’ll just do it again.’
Nurse Regina Honig had been recruited from the Lichterfelde Sanatorium. She didn’t take orders from anyone but Dr Mehring. She was tall and heavy-set, with pale skin that looked permanently sunburned. The other nurse was called Ritter. She was a thin, nervous woman with deep-set insomniac eyes. Kirsch had never heard her speak, at least not in conversation. He had the impression she was painfully shy.
Nurse Honig looked at her pocket watch and made a note on the clipboard. The patient began to convulse. The blanket was kicked to the floor. Kirsch recognised one of his patients: Andreas Stoehr. A strangled, gargling noise sounded in his throat.
Nurse Ritter bent over him. ‘Do you think we should turn him over?’
Kirsch couldn’t stand and watch. He stepped into the room. ‘What’s happening?’
Nurse Honig looked up, frowned, then came marching towards him, a hand held up in front of her.
‘Dr Kirsch, we’re in the middle of a procedure. If you’d be so kind …’
She’d been warned about his interfering.
He pushed past her. They had Stoehr strapped down on the bed. From wrist to elbows his arms were bruised from the insulin shots, circles of black and purple like the progress of a disease. His face had the drawn look of the imminently dead. His thick, spiky hair was unevenly dappled with tufts of white and grey. From his freshly soiled pyjamas rose a stink of urine.
Stoehr’s head was rocking from side to side, mouth contorting as he tried to vomit up the rubber tube plumbed through his oesophagus.
‘He does this,’ Nurse Honig explained. ‘He fights the coma. It’s just a transitional phase.’
‘He’s choking,’ Kirsch said.
Nurse Honig placed herself in front of him.
‘He can’t choke, Dr Kirsch. He has nothing to choke on.’
Stoehr’s jaws began working furiously. He was trying to bite on the tube, to force it out of his mouth. A streak of saliva ran down his cheek.
Nurse Ritter looked on nervously, turning a ring round and round on her finger. ‘Shall we put him on his side, Sister?’ she said again.
Stoehr made a rasping noise. His eyes blinked open.
‘B-b-black dogs!’
He bellowed, tugging at his straps.
‘He’s having a fit,’ Kirsch said. ‘Take him out of it.’
The foam was bubbling from Stoehr’s mouth like a pan boiling over. The gargling sound was horrible.
‘Sister?’ Nurse Ritter looked worried.
‘We have everything under control.’ Nurse Honig put her hands on Kirsch’s shoulders, trying to turn him away. ‘The deputy director will be back presently. I don’t think he’d –’
A violent, strangling sound sent her scurrying back to the bed. ‘Get his head over.’ She dropped her clipboard and thrust a pan under Stoehr’s chin while Nurse Ritter rolled his head onto his left, using the flat of her hands. His arms jerked in their restraints.
Kirsch scanned the instrument trolley, looking for hypodermics. They were supposed to keep shots of glucose ready for emergencies. Intravenous injection acted quicker on the brain than ingestion through the stomach.
There were two syringes lying side by side, primed and ready.
Stoehr’s whole body lurched. The legs of the iron bed screeched against the floor. Nurse Ritter staggered backwards.
‘Hold him!’ Nurse Honig shot Kirsch a hostile look, as if this were all his fault. ‘I don’t know why he’s playing up like this.’
Kirsch picked up the hypodermic, squeezing out the air. ‘Stand back. Please.’
‘Doctor, you can’t. We’re in the middle –’
‘I’ll take full responsibility.’
‘But Dr Mehring’s programme …’
He took Stoehr’s hand, straightening the arm. The surface veins had been cut into so many times, there wasn’t a good spot left.
Stoehr’s hand suddenly tightened around his. The grip was surprisingly strong for such a skinny man. ‘They found me.’ He was staring at Kirsch, eyes bulging. ‘You told them. You.’
‘Just try to relax.’
Stoehr’s body convulsed. He slumped back, moaning. Kirsch fought to undoe the strap around his wrist. He would have to give the shot in the upper arm, like a vaccination.
‘Doctor, that isn’t advisable.’ Nurse Honig’s face was flushed. ‘Without the straps he could –’
‘Get away? Can you blame him?’
‘Dr Mehring gave specific instructions that glucose was not be administered until –’
She had grabbed Kirsch by the arm. He shook himself free.
‘Dr Mehring is not here.’
‘Nonetheless –’
Nurse Ritter screamed. With his free arm Stoehr had swung out and grabbed her by the hair. Now he was pulling her towards him.
‘Black dogs!’
Her cap tumbled off as he dragged her head down, long brown hair spilling over them both.
Stoehr’s mouth gaped open. Kirsch saw canines and incisors, cracked and yellowed, a sickly white tongue. Stoehr’s eyes were open but unfocused, a bestial blank.
‘B-b-black.’
Before anyone could reach him, Stoehr sank his teeth into the flesh beneath Nurse Ritter’s ear. There came a squelching, crunching sound. A squirt of blood shot up his cheek.
Nurse Ritter was on the floor, clutchi
ng her bloody wound and screaming when Dr Mehring hurried into the room.
Three
Kirsch had taken a special interest in Andreas Stoehr. The case was difficult – certainly none of his colleagues had been in any hurry to work on it – but Kirsch knew the moment he read the file that it was one he had to take.
Stoehr was thirty-four years old, a one-time sergeant in the 140th Infantry Regiment. He had been arrested outside the opera house carrying two stick grenades and a can of paraffin, with which he said he intended to destroy the building. Upon interrogation, he had insisted that the opera house concealed the mouth of a secret tunnel connecting the surface of the Earth to the ninth circle of Hell, where traitors were incarcerated and those who had plotted to destroy the rightful God. These vengeful souls, he said, had been recruited by Satan and were returning via the opera house to colonise the Earth. Stoehr had been sent for psychiatric evaluation to the Charité Psychiatric Clinic, where he had been diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox of the paranoid subtype.
Stoehr had dreams of drowning. The dread of suffocation haunted him day and night. He would not take the U-Bahn in wet weather for fear of being trapped in the tunnels. Walking over a bridge he would tremble with fear at the thought of the dark waters sliding by beneath his feet. In the middle of the night he would wake up screaming for air.
The Einstein Girl Page 2