Eisner saw him and waved. Kirsch waved back.
‘Please excuse me,’ he said to the girl. ‘I have to … I’ll be just a minute.’
The girl seemed to understand. She nodded and turned away. Kirsch just had enough time to ask for her name. She hesitated before answering, as if the matter required some thought, and then said ‘Elisabeth’. He suspected at once that this was not her real name, but a fiction she had made up on the spot.
It proved difficult getting away from Eisner, who seemed in no hurry to be alone with his date. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Elisabeth dance with another man, and then another. Both were drunk and importunate, pulling her closer than she wanted to be. Finally Eisner took to the dance floor, but by this time, Elisabeth was nowhere to be seen.
Kirsch went back to the Tanguero the next night and the next, and every night after that. But he had never seen her again. Perhaps she had gone back to wherever she came from. More likely she had met someone, someone who had whisked her away to a better life in a better part of town.
It was all for the best probably, he told himself. His interest had been a manifestation of pre-marital panic, an episode best forgotten.
He looked into his glass. Carmen was playing with one of her big silver earrings. ‘So, you were here that night,’ he said.
‘I’m always here.’
‘Do you remember the girl I danced with?’
Carmen looked over his shoulder at a man who had just walked through the door. ‘Not really.’
‘Try.’
‘Are you going to dance with me?’
‘Try to remember. She called herself Elisabeth.’
Carmen studied his face for a moment. ‘Oh her. The dark one.’
‘That’s right.’
Carmen giggled. ‘She looked like she cut her own hair.’
‘Tell me her name, her full name.’
‘Why? You want to look her up?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, I can’t help you. She isn’t…’ Carmen lowered her voice. ‘She doesn’t work around here.’
‘I know. I just thought perhaps you’d talked to her. Since you’re always here.’
A sly look crossed Carmen’s face. She reached up and took off his spectacles. ‘I tell you what: you have a dance with me, and I’ll tell you everything I know.’
But it was obvious from the way she said it that she didn’t know anything at all.
Five
Robert Eisner was outside the common room with two of the junior psychiatric nurses. As soon as he saw Kirsch at the end of the corridor, he hurried over. It was clear from the anxious pinch of his eyebrows that the news about Nurse Ritter was out.
‘There you are. I was afraid you weren’t going to show up.’
Kirsch had intended to come in early, but an uncomfortable night had put paid to that plan. ‘Why wouldn’t I? I’m not sick.’
He realised he had been holding his left arm. The Salvarsan injection had produced a steady ache that even alcohol wouldn’t mask. He carried on towards his office.
‘I’m talking about yesterday,’ Eisner said. He was five years younger than Kirsch, but with his smooth skin and clear blue eyes, he could have passed for twenty. ‘What in God’s name got into you?’
Kirsch wasn’t sure whether to resent his curiosity or welcome it. ‘Nothing got into me. I was passing the treatment room –’
‘In the basement?’
‘The patient was having a seizure, and Mehring wasn’t there.’
Eisner fell silent as they climbed the stairs, the unfamiliar furrows deepening on his brow. ‘Look, I know you’re not happy with these insulin procedures, but –’
‘Ten per cent of patients go into an irreversible coma. For the rest, the effect is about the same as a sharp blow to the head.’
‘Yes, yes. But what I don’t understand is: why you and Nurse Honig …’ Eisner shrugged helplessly. ‘Why you had to assault her.’
Kirsch stopped. ‘Is that what she’s saying? I assaulted her?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
Kirsch pictured the confrontation, Nurse Honig’s puffy red face up close to his, eyes red-rimmed and bulging. At worst, he had nudged her aside.
‘Mehring. He put her up to this.’
‘Mehring?’ Eisner thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets. ‘So you didn’t…?’
‘She’s making it up.’
Eisner fell behind a little as they reached the corridor. ‘Well, of course, she and Mehring, they’re thick as thieves.’
‘Exactly. She owes him her job.’
Eisner nodded firmly. ‘Then Nurse Ritter, she wasn’t –’
‘I suppose it was me who bit her. Is that the story?’
‘No. Sergeant Stoehr did that, after you …’ Eisner came over and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘The important thing is: can anyone back up your side of the story?’
He hurried across the road towards the main hospital, Eisner in tow. There were no visiting hours until the afternoon; so they decided to evade the formalities by going through Triage.
‘That Dr Brenner’s a stickler for procedure,’ Eisner said, as they crossed the road. ‘And he thinks psychiatrists are quacks. He’ll send us away for sure.’
An ambulance was parked outside the entrance. A wounded man was being carried inside. His shirt had been torn off and across one shoulder the purple-black flesh was badly swollen. They followed, the wounded man staring at them with a frozen look of shock on his face.
In the Emergency Department every bed was taken. Teams of doctors and nurses were working on both sides of the room, all talking at once, trying to stabilise their patients: establishing airways, plumbing in drips, administering morphine. Blood was smeared across the grey linoleum. Overnight, the street fighting had flared again, in Friedrichshain and Neukölln. Shots had been fired at a beer hall in Pankow. Eisner said some of the ambulance crews had refused to pick up the wounded until first light.
At the far end of the room, someone started yelling. A nurse ran out from behind a screen, bumping into Kirsch. A sterile bowl and instruments went crashing to the floor.
‘Uh! You … sch–schwein!’ The voice crackled with demonic rage.
The nurse bent down to pick up her things. A lock of hair had slipped out from under her cap. It hung limply across her forehead. Through a gap in the screen, Kirsch glimpsed a pair of legs in baggy brown trousers kicking wildly.
Two orderlies were trying to hold the patient down. He was young, twenty-five at most, got up head-to-foot in the pseudo-military regalia of a storm trooper. He was staring in stunned outrage at the torn remains of his shirt and undershirt and the blood-soaked dressing taped across his stomach.
Kirsch watched the doctors and nurses work. Perhaps it was just the gravity of the wound, the rate of blood loss, but they seemed edgy, flustered. Two weeks earlier a storm trooper had been rushed to a hospital in Lichterfelde with head injuries. He had been struck with an iron bar, and died a few hours later. The next day a posse of his comrades had appeared at the hospital, accusing the resident surgeon of letting their man die deliberately. They had clubbed him to the ground and thrown him from a second-storey window. He would have died if there hadn’t been a motor car parked underneath with a canvas roof. At least a dozen people had witnessed the assault, but no arrests had been made.
Everyone at the Charité knew the story, though it wasn’t often discussed. Politics, even political violence, was considered an unsuitable subject for conversation, as if discussion could only lead to disagreement and division, and in the process, make matters worse. If it was acceptable to give voice to any political view, it was only to the consensus of the professional classes generally: that the republic was falling apart, that political violence was a symptom of its failure and that sooner or later, something would have to be done.
The storm trooper went pale. He blinked slowly, then his head lolled back onto the pillow. Around him, the pace of ac
tivity grew frantic as they prepared him for surgery.
Kirsch felt Eisner’s hand on his arm.
‘Not our problem, eh?’
Outside Triage they took a wrong turn and found themselves in a storage area. Three of the trolleys had bodies on them. A grimy forehead and a head of ragged hair peeped over the top of a sheet.
It was quieter on the next floor. The ceilings were high, the walls white, everywhere a background echo of measured footsteps and hushed voices. Kirsch began to have doubts about the chances of getting Nurse Ritter on his side. He had disobeyed instructions and she had been wounded because of it. Perhaps the best thing was to go directly to the director and explain himself, but Eisner was having none of it.
‘Attack is the best form of defence. Catch the old bugger in a lie and you’re in the clear.’
A porter was pushing a laundry basket down the corridor. They asked him for the women’s wards. He pointed absently back the way he had come.
‘There was a nurse brought in here yesterday,’ Kirsch said. ‘Her name was Ritter. She had a wound?’ He indicated the place, an inch beneath the ear. ‘A young woman, dark hair.’
The porter reeked of tobacco. He had pitted skin and dyed hair. ‘I know who you want,’ he said.
They were bending over her, like pathologists over an interesting corpse. Dr Brenner shone a penlight into her eyes while the ward sister made notes on a clipboard. Something had gone wrong. Nurse Ritter lay motionless, apparently unconscious. A drip had been plumbed into her wrist.
Brenner was fifty, unkempt and short-sighted, his fleshy face folded in on itself by the action of perpetual squinting. He was well enough known at the psychiatric clinic. Over the years, he had shared a number of patients with Dr Bonhoeffer, mostly neurological cases brought about by head injuries. But this was not a neurological case, nor a psychiatric one. It was a case of routine injury, a flesh wound.
The blood drained from Kirsch’s face. When last they spoke, Dr Brenner had been concerned about infection. Bite wounds were dirty wounds. But an infection would have taken days to set in. Even a bite from a rabid dog wouldn’t have rendered her comatose that quickly.
Brenner sighed and leaned closer. Nurse Ritter’s pale arms lay at her sides, palms upward.
‘Pupillary reflex present,’ he said. ‘We’ve essential brain stem function at least.’
The brain stem. The nut-sized morsel of grey matter that kept the vital organs functioning: heart beating, lungs pumping. It performed a host of essential tasks, none of them requiring either consciousness or thought.
‘We’ll move on to the deep tendon reflexes.’ Brenner straightened up, realised that he and the sister were no longer alone. ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’
Kirsch stepped closer to the bed. In his mind all he could see was the bite wound. He saw it opening like the petals of a flower, straining at the web of stitches, purple, swollen and suppurating: a bite from Cerberus, a taste of Sergeant Stoehr’s internal world.
‘That’s all right, Dr Brenner,’ Eisner said. ‘Our mistake.’
Kirsch didn’t move. He could see her face now for the first time. But it wasn’t Nurse Ritter’s face.
Eisner leaned towards him. ‘Wrong patient, Martin. Let’s go, shall we?’
Brenner frowned and went back to work, pulling a small wooden hammer from his coat pocket. The ward sister folded down the covers. They were going to test the reflexes, checking for nerve damage.
‘Martin? What’s the matter?’
Her skin was like wax, her bloodless lips cracked and swollen, her eyelids puffy. But it was her – Kirsch was in no doubt: the girl from Grenadierstrasse. They had dressed her in a hospital smock, the kind that was laced up the back like a straitjacket. Smeary black bruises discoloured her neck.
It was the last place he had ever expected to find her. He felt a surge of panic, a sudden shortness of breath. A better part of town. She was supposed to have gone to a better part of town.
Brenner turned the girl’s hands over. ‘You’re Dr Bonhoeffer’s people, aren’t you? Did he send you?’
Eisner shot Kirsch a quizzical glance. ‘We were looking for Fräulein Ritter. We were told –’
‘Nurse Ritter was discharged this morning,’ the sister said. ‘She went home.’
Kirsch was standing at the foot of the bed. The girl’s stillness was horrible. It was a stillness like death. ‘What happened to her?’
Brenner gently smacked the hammer against her wrist. There was no response. ‘Unclear. She was found unconscious. The temporal lesion doesn’t look serious; so I suspect it was hypothermia that put her in the coma.’
‘A coma? How long has she been –’
‘We’re not sure. Forty-eight hours or so. Possibly longer.’ Brenner brought the hammer down again. The forearm twitched. ‘Brachioradialis reflex present, but weak.’
The sister made a note. Brenner leaned across the bed and repeated the test on the left arm.
‘But she’ll come out of it. She will come out of it?’
‘Hard to say. It depends on the extent of the brain damage. In my experience, the longer the coma, the worse the prognosis.’ Brenner continued to work, tapping and probing the girl’s arms from elbow to fingers, checking for impairment of the central nervous system with the precision of a violinist tuning up. ‘The likelihood is, she won’t survive.’
Kirsch steadied himself against the end of the bed, surprised at the strength of his own reaction. It was disproportionate, unnatural. Physical. This was a woman he hardly knew.
Brenner flexed one of the girl’s legs and placed it over the other, cradling her foot as he struck the Achilles tendon. The toes were bruised. It looked as if she had fractured a toe. There was dried blood beneath her nails.
‘Do you know her name?’
Brenner pulled the gown up to the girl’s knees. She had fallen, judging from the grazes and the bruising.
‘Not yet,’ Brenner said. ‘The police are hoping someone will come forward.’
‘Wait a second.’ Eisner was at his side. ‘This was in the papers. I read about this. Two little boys found her in the woods, near Caputh.’ The sister frowned at him over her clipboard. ‘All they found was a programme, for a physics lecture.’
‘A physics lecture?’ Kirsch said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Didn’t you read about it? It was a lecture by Albert Einstein.’ Eisner folded his arms as he looked her up and down, like a man surveying a new make of car in his neighbour’s driveway. ‘That’s why they call her the Einstein girl.’
quanta
Six
Dr Oswald Brenner lurched awake. He was still behind his desk, the departmental budget estimates for the coming year spread out before him, numbers that a whole evening of trimming and paring had not brought down to the requisite size. He fumbled for his spectacles, aware now of hurried footsteps clacking down the corridor outside. Hastily he hooked the spectacles over the back of his ears and squinted up at the clock. It was almost eleven o’clock. He had been asleep for –
A door banged. He heard voices, what sounded like an argument. The footsteps got louder, then stopped outside his office.
‘What in God’s name …?’
There was an urgent knock, then one of the junior nurses stuck her head round the door. ‘Dr Brenner sir? I think you’d better come.’
Nurse Friedrich: very junior, highly strung and inadequately educated.
‘Nurse Friedrich, please do not run in this hospital. It will do our patients no good at all to have you blundering into them.’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor. It’s the coma patient. The Einstein –’ Nurse Friedrich checked herself. ‘The patient they found in the …’
She was so out of breath she could hardly get the words out.
‘I know who you mean. What about her?’
Someone else ran down the corridor. Footsteps pounded up the stairs towards the women’s wards.
‘She’s …’ Nurse Friedrich’s
legs flexed at the knees, as if she was struggling to contain a full bladder. ‘I think you’d better come.’
Someone had tipped off the newspapers. Reporters began arriving at the hospital even before the police, though Dr Brenner barred them from the premises. Hours later they were still hanging around outside, buttonholing anyone who looked like they might have information. Standing at the common-room window, Kirsch watched them pacing up and down beside the police inspector’s car: thin, hungry-looking men with shifty demeanours, like dogs expecting to be kicked.
He had been told the story by Robert Eisner, who had heard it from the nurses. The Einstein girl had woken suddenly from her coma, screaming. A duty nurse had hurried over, but the girl seemed hysterical. She had smashed a glass against the bedstead and tried to push it in the nurse’s face. The nurse ran for help, but by the time she returned, the patient had vanished. After a hue and cry they had finally found her out on the fire escape. It wasn’t clear, Eisner said, if she was hiding or intent on throwing herself off. It took two male orderlies and a shot of phenobarbital to get her back inside. She had remained sedated ever since.
Eisner was in the common room now, slouched in a worn leather armchair, his nose in the Neue Berliner Zeitung. Stories about the election results covered the front page. As far as the Reichstag was concerned, it was another stalemate. Except for the Communists, most political parties had lost seats. But then, since President Hindenburg had taken to appointing his governments without reference to the people’s elected representatives, it was hard to see how this would make any difference.
‘Looks like von Papen won’t last much longer,’ Eisner said. ‘The army are sick of him.’
One of the reporters sauntered round the back of a parked truck and began to urinate against the wheel.
‘You’d prefer Hitler?’
‘For Chancellor?’ Eisner turned over a page. ‘Hindenburg would rather cut his own throat. Hitler’s far too plebeian.’
The Einstein Girl Page 4