by Philip Kerr
‘You’ll do,’ he said.
I jerked my head upwards. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Why, has he been giving you trouble?’
‘No, I just wondered.’
‘Tell me, have you had jaundice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t catch it. Just don’t kiss him or try to fuck him. All the same, I’ll see that he’s moved onto another bunk, in case he pisses on you. Transmission is through excretory products.’
‘Transmission?’ I said. ‘Of what?’
‘Hepatitis. I’ll get them to put you on the top bunk and him on the bottom. You can give him some water if he gets thirsty.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’
The doctor sighed wearily. ‘I really haven’t the faintest idea.’
Later on, when, with a considerable degree of discomfort, I had been moved by the medical orderlies on to the bunk above, and its previous occupant had been moved below, I looked down over the edge of my pallet at the man who represented my only way out of Dachau. It was not an encouraging sight. From my memory of the photograph in Heydrich’s office, it would have been impossible to identify Mutschmann but for the ganglion, so yellow was his pallor and so wasted his body. He lay shivering under his blanket, delirious with fever, occasionally groaning with pain as cramp racked his insides. I watched him for a while and to my relief he recovered consciousness, but only long enough to try, unsuccessfully, to vomit. Then he was away again. It was clear to me that Mutschmann was dying.
Apart from the doctor, whose name was Mendelssohn, and three or four medical orderlies, who were themselves suffering from a variety of ailments, there were about sixty men and women in the camp hospital. As hospitals went it was little more than a charnel-house. I learned that there were only two kinds of patient: the sick, who always died, and the injured, who sometimes also got sick.
That evening, before it grew dark, Mendelssohn came to inspect my stripes.
‘In the morning I’ll wash your back and put some more salt on,’ he said. Then he glanced disinterestedly down below at Mutschmann.
‘What about him?’ I said. It was a stupid question, and only served to arouse the Jew’s curiosity. His eyes narrowed as he looked at me.
‘Since you ask, I’ve told him to keep off alcohol, spicy food and to get plenty of rest,’ he said drily.
‘I think I get the picture.’
‘I’m not a callous man, my friend, but there is nothing I can do to help him. With a high-protein diet, vitamins, glucose and methionine, he might have had a chance.’
‘How long has he got?’
‘He still manages to recover consciousness from time to time?’ I nodded. Mendelssohn sighed. ‘Difficult to say. But once coma has set in, a matter of a day or so. I don’t even have any morphine to give him. In this clinic death is the usual cure that is available to patients.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘Don’t get sick, my friend. There’s typhus here. The minute you find yourself developing a fever, take two spoonfuls of your own urine. It does seem to work.’
‘If I can find a clean spoon, I’ll do just that. Thanks for the tip.’
‘Well, here’s another, since you’re in such a good mood. The only reason that the Camp Committee meets here is because they know the guards won’t come unless they absolutely have to. Contrary to outward appearances, the SS are not stupid. Only a madman would stay here for any longer than he has to.
‘As soon as you can get about without too much pain, my advice to you is to get yourself out of here.’
‘What makes you stay? Hippocratic oath?’
Mendelssohn shrugged. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said.
I slept for a while. I had meant to stay awake and watch Mutschmann in case he came round again. I suppose I was hoping for one of those touching little scenes that you see in the movies, when the dying man is moved to unburden his soul to the man crouching over his deathbed.
When I awoke it was dark, and above the sound of the other inmates of the hospital coughing, and snoring, I heard the unmistakeable sound, coming from the cot underneath, of Mutschmann retching. I leaned over and saw him in the moonlight, leaning on one elbow, clutching his stomach.
‘You all right?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he wheezed. ‘Like a fucking Galapagos tortoise, I’m going to live for ever.’ He groaned again, and painfully, through clenched teeth, said: ‘It’s these damned stomach cramps.’
‘Would you like some water?’
‘Water, yes. My tongue is as dry as -’ He was overcome by another fit of retching. I climbed down gingerly, and fetched the ladle from a bucket near the bed. Mutschmann, his teeth chattering like a telegraph button, drank the water noisily. When he’d finished he sighed and lay back.
‘Thanks, friend,’ he said.
‘Don’t mention it,’ I said. ‘You’d do the same for me.’
I heard him cough his way through what sounded like a chuckle. ‘No I fucking wouldn’t,’ he rasped. ‘I’d be afraid of catching something, whatever it is that I’ve got. I don’t suppose you know, do you?’
I thought for a moment. Then I told him. ‘You’ve got hepatitis.’
He was silent for a couple of minutes, and I felt ashamed. I ought to have spared him that agony. ‘Thanks for being honest with me,’ he said. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘Hindenburg Alms.’
‘What for?’
‘Helped a Jew in my work kommando.’
‘That was stupid,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead anyway. Risk it for someone who’s got half a chance, but not for a Jew. Their luck is long gone.’
‘Well, yours didn’t exactly win the lottery.’
He laughed. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘I never figured on going sick. I thought I was going to get through this fuck-hole. I had a good job in the cobbler’s shop.’
‘It’s a tough break,’ I admitted.
‘I’m dying, aren’t I?’ he said.
‘That’s not what the doc says.’
‘No need to give me the cold cabbage. I can see it in the lead. But thanks anyway. Jesus, I’d give anything for a nail.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘Even a roll up would do.’ He paused. Then he said: ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
I tried to conceal the urgency that was crowding my voice-box. ‘Yes? What’s that then?’
‘Don’t fuck any of the women in this camp. I’m pretty sure that’s how I got sick.’
‘No, I won’t. Thanks for telling me.’
The next day I sold my food ration for some cigarettes, and waited for Mutschmann to come out of his delirium. It lasted most of the day. When eventually he regained consciousness he spoke to me as if our previous conversation had been only a few minutes earlier.
‘How’s it going? ‘How are the stripes?’
‘Painful,’ I said, getting off my bunk.
‘I’ll bet. That bastard sergeant with the whip really lays it on like fuck.’ He inclined his emaciated face towards me, and said: ‘You know, it seems to me that I’ve seen you somewhere.’
‘Well now, let’s see,’ I said. ‘The Rot Weiss Tennis Club? The Herrenklub? The Excelsior, maybe?’
‘You’re putting me on.’ I lit one of the cigarettes and put it between his lips.
‘I’ll bet it was at the Opera - I’m a big fan, you know. Or perhaps it was at Goering’s wedding?’ His thin yellow lips stretched into something like a smile. Then he breathed in the tobacco smoke as if it was pure oxygen.
‘You are a fucking magician,’ he said, savouring the cigarette. I took it from his lips for a second before putting it back again. ‘No, it wasn’t any of those places. It’ll come to me.’
‘Sure it will,’ I said, earnestly hoping that it wouldn’t. For a moment I thought of saying Tegel Prison, but rejected it. Sick or not, he might remember differently, and then I’d be f
inished with him.
‘What are you? Sozi? Kozi?’
‘Black-marketeer,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
The smile stretched so that it was almost a rictus. ‘I’m hiding.’
‘Here? From whom?’
‘Everyone,’ he said.
‘Well, you sure picked one hell of a hiding place. What are you, crazy?’
‘Nobody can find me here,’ he said. ‘Let me ask you something: where would you hide a raindrop?’ I looked puzzled until he answered, ‘Under a waterfall. In case you didn’t know it, that’s Chinese philosophy. I mean, you’d never find it, would you?’
‘No, I suppose not. But you must have been desperate,’ I said.
‘Getting sick . . . was just unlucky . . . But for that I’d have been out . . . in a year or so . . . by which time . . . they’d have given up looking.’
‘Who would?’ I said. ‘What are they after you for?’
His eyelids flickered, and the cigarette fell from his unconscious lips and onto the blanket. I drew it up to his chin and tapped out the cigarette in the hope that he might come round again for long enough to smoke the other half.
During the night, Mutschmann’s breathing grew shallower, and in the morning Mendelssohn pronounced that he was on the edge of coma. There was nothing that I could do but lie on my stomach and look down and wait. I thought of Inge a lot, but mostly I thought about myself. At Dachau, the funeral arrangements were simple: they burned you in the crematorium and that was it. End of story. But as I watched the poisons work their dreadful effect on Kurt Mutschmann, destroying his liver and his spleen so that his whole body was filled with infection, mostly my thoughts were of my Fatherland and its own equally appalling sickness. It was only now, in Dachau, that I was able to judge just how much Germany’s atrophy had become necrosis; and as with poor Mutschmann, there wasn’t going to be any morphine for when the pain grew worse.
There were a few children in Dachau, born to women imprisoned there. Some of them had never known any other life than the camp. They played freely in the compound, tolerated by all the guards, and even liked by some, and they could go almost anywhere, with the exception of the hospital barrack. The penalty for disobedience was a severe beating.
Mendelssohn was hiding a child with a broken leg under one of the cots. The boy had fallen while playing in the prison quarry, and had been there for almost three days with his leg in a splint when the S S came for him. He was so scared he swallowed his tongue and choked to death.
When the dead boy’s mother came to see him and had to be told the bad news, Mendelssohn was the very model of professional sympathy. But later on, when she had gone, I heard him weeping quietly to himself.
‘Hey, up there.’ I gave a start as I heard the voice below me. It wasn’t that I’d been asleep; I just hadn’t been watching Mutschmann as I should have been. Now I had no idea of the invaluable period of time for which he had been conscious. I climbed down carefully and knelt by his cot. It was still too painful to sit on my backside. He grinned terribly and gripped my arm.
‘I remembered,’ he said.
‘Oh yes?’ I said hopefully. ‘And what did you remember?’
‘Where I seen your face.’ I tried to appear unconcerned, although my heart was thumping in my chest. If he thought that I was a bull then I could forget it. An ex-convict never befriends a bull. It could have been the two of us washed away on some desert island, and he would still have spat in my face.
‘Oh?’ I said nonchalantly. ‘Where was that, then?’ I put his half-smoked cigarette between his lips and lit it.
‘You used to be the house-detective,’ he croaked. ‘At the Adlon. I once cased the place to do a job.’ He chuckled hoarsely. ‘Am I right?’
‘You’ve got a good memory,’ I said, lighting one myself. ‘That was quite some time ago.’
His grip tightened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell anyone. Anyway, it’s not like you were a bull, is it?’
‘You said you were casing the place. What particular line of criminality were you in?’
‘I was a nutcracker.’
‘I can’t say as I recall the hotel safe ever being robbed,’ I said. ‘At least, not as long as I was working there.’
‘That’s because I didn’t take anything,’ he said proudly. ‘Oh, I opened it all right. But there was nothing worth taking. Seriously.’
‘I’ve only got your word for that,’ I said. ‘There were always rich people at the hotel, and they always had valuables. It was very rare that there wasn’t something in that safe.’
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Just my bad luck. There really was nothing that I could take that I could ever have got rid of. That’s the point, you see. There’s no point in taking something you can’t shift.’
‘All right, I believe you,’ I said.
‘I’m not boasting,’ he said. ‘I was the best. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t crack. Here, I bet you’d expect me to be rich, wouldn’t you?’
I shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I’d also expect you to be in prison, which you are.’
‘It’s because I am rich that I’m hiding here,’ he said. ‘I told you that, didn’t I?’
‘You mentioned something about that, yes.’ I took my time before I added: ‘And what have you got that makes you so rich and wanted? Money? Jewels?’
He croaked another short laugh. ‘Better than that,’ he said. ‘Power.’
‘In what shape or form?’
‘Papers,’ he said. ‘Take my word for it, there’s an awful lot of people who’d pay big money to get their hands on what I’ve got.’
‘What’s in these papers?’
His breathing was shallower than a Der Junggeselle cover-girl.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘Names, addresses, information. But you’re a clever sort of fellow, you could work it.’
‘You haven’t got them here, have you?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he wheezed. ‘They’re safe, on the outside.’ I took the dead cigarette from his mouth and threw it onto the floor. Then I gave him the rest of mine.
‘It’d be a shame . . . for it never to be used,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You’ve been good . . . to me. So I’m going to do you a favour. . . . Make ’em sweat, won’t you? This’ll be worth . . . a lorry load . . . of gravel . . . to you . . . on the outside.’ I bent forwards to hear him speak. ‘Pick ‘em up . . . by the nose.’ His eyelids flickered. I took him by the shoulders and tried to shake him back to consciousness.
Back to life.
I knelt there by him for some time. In the small corner of me that still felt things, there was a terrible and terrifying sense of abandonment. Mutschmann had been younger than I was, and strong, too. It wasn’t too difficult to imagine myself succumbing to illness. I had lost a lot of weight, I had bad ringworms and my teeth felt loose in their gums. Heydrich’s man, S S Oberschutze Bürger, was in charge of the carpenter’s shop, and I wondered what would happen to me if I went ahead and gave him the code-word that would get me out of Dachau. What would Heydrich do to me when he discovered that I didn’t know where Von Greis’s papers were? Send me back? Have me executed? and If I didn’t blow the whistle, would it even occur to him to assume that I had been unsuccessful and that he should get me out? From my short meeting with Heydrich, and what little I had heard of him, it seemed unlikely. To have got so near and failed at the last was almost more than I could bear.
After a while I reached forwards and drew the blanket over Mutschmann’s yellow face. A short stub of a pencil fell onto the floor, and I looked at it for several seconds before a thought crossed my mind and a glint of hope once more shone in my heart. I drew the blanket back from Mutschmann’s body. The hands were tightly bunched into fists. One after the other I prised them open. In Mutschmann’s left hand was a piece of brown paper of the sort that the prisoners in the cobbler’s shop used to wrap shoe repairs for the S S guards in. I was too afraid of there being nothing to op
en the paper immediately. As it was, the writing was almost illegible, and it took me almost an hour to decipher the note’s contents. It said, ‘Lost property office, Berlin Traffic Dept. Saarlandstr. You lost briefcase sometime July on Leipzigerstr. Made of plain brown hide, with brass lock, ink-stain on handle. Gold initials K.M. Contains postcard from America. Western novel, Old Surehand, Karl May and business papers. Thanks. K.M.’
It was perhaps the strangest ticket home that anyone ever had.
19
It seemed that there were uniforms everywhere. Even the newspaper-sellers were wearing SA caps and greatcoats. There was no parade, and certainly there was nothing Jewish on Unter den Linden that could be boycotted. Perhaps it was only now, after Dachau, that I fully realized the true strength of the grip that National Socialism had on Germany.
I was heading towards my office. Situated incongruously between the Greek Embassy and Schultze’s Art Shop, and guarded by two storm-troopers, I passed the Ministry of the Interior from which Himmler had issued his memo to Paul Pfarr regarding corruption. A car drew up outside the front door, and from it emerged two officers and a uniformed girl whom I recognized as Marlene Sahm. I stopped and started to say hallo and then thought better of it. She passed me by without a glance. If she recognized me she did a good job disguising it. I turned and watched her as she followed the two men inside the building. I don’t suppose I was standing there for more than a couple of minutes, but it was long enough for me to be challenged by a fat man with a low brimmed hat.
‘Papers,’ he said abruptly, not even bothering to show a Sipo pass or warrant disc.
‘Says who?’
The man pushed his porky, poorly shaven face at me and hissed: ‘Says me.’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you’re sadly mistaken if you think you are possessed of what is cutely known as a commanding personality. So cut the shit and let’s see some ID.’ A Sipo pass flashed in front of my nose.