Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited hours.’ Then she flinched as through the open car door we both heard Belinsky utter an obscene remark.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her.

‘I need your help. There’s a man in my room.’

‘So what’s new?’ said Belinsky.

Veronika bit her lip. ‘He’s dead, Bernie. You’ve got to help me.’

‘I’m not sure what I can do,’ I said uncertainly, wishing that we’d stayed longer in the Melodies. I said to myself: ‘A girl ought not to trust anyone these days.’ To her I said: ‘You know, it’s really a job for the police.’

‘I can’t tell the police,’ she groaned impatiently. ‘That would mean the vice squad, the Austrian criminal police, public health officials and an inquest. I’d probably lose my room, everything. Don’t you see?’

‘All right, all right. What happened?’

‘I think he had a heart attack.’ Her head dropped. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, only there is no one else I can turn to.’

I cursed myself again and then stuck my head back into Belinsky’s car. ‘The lady needs our help,’ I grunted, without much enthusiasm.

‘That’s not all she needs.’ But he started the engine and added: ‘Come on, hop in, the pair of you.’

He drove to Rotenturmstrasse and parked outside the bomb-damaged building where Veronika had her room. When we got out of the car I pointed across the darkened cobbles of Stephansplatz to the partly restored cathedral.

‘See if you can’t find a tarpaulin over on the building site,’ I told Belinsky. ‘I’ll go up and take a look. If there’s something suitable, bring it up to the second floor.’

He was too drunk to argue. Instead he nodded dully and walked back towards the Cathedral scaffolding, while I turned and followed Veronika up the stairs to her room.

A large, lobster-coloured man of about fifty lay dead in her big oak bed. Vomiting is quite common in cases of congestive heart failure. It covered his nose and mouth like a bad facial burn. I pressed my fingers against the man’s clammy neck.

‘How long has he been here?’

‘Three or four hours.’

‘It’s lucky you kept him covered up,’ I told her. ‘Close that window.’ I stripped the bedclothes from the dead man’s body and started to raise the upper part of his torso. ‘Give me a hand here,’ I ordered.

‘What are you doing?’ She helped me to bend the torso over the legs as if I had been trying to shut an overstuffed suitcase.

‘I’m keeping this bastard in shape,’ I said. ‘A bit of chiropractic ought to slow up the stiffening and make it easier for us to get him in and out of the car.’ I pressed down hard on the back of his neck, and then, blowing hard from my exertions, pushed the man back against the puke-strewn pillows. ‘Uncle here’s been getting extra food-stamps,’ I breathed. ‘He must weigh more than a hundred kilos. It’s lucky we’ve got Belinsky along to help.’

‘Is Belinsky a policeman?’ she asked.

‘Sort of,’ I said, ‘but don’t worry, he’s not the kind of bull who cares much for the crime figures. Belinsky’s got other fish to fry. He hunts Nazi war-criminals.’ I started to bend the dead man’s arms and legs.

‘What are you going to do with him?’ she said nauseously.

‘Drop him on the railway line. With him being naked it will look like the Ivans gave him a little party and then threw him off a train. With any luck the express will go over him and fit him with a good disguise.’

‘Please don’t,’ she said weakly. ‘He was very kind to me.’

When I’d finished with the body I stood up and straightened my tie. ‘This is hard work on a vodka supper. Now where the hell is Belinsky?’ Spotting the man’s clothes which were laid neatly over the back of a dining-chair by the grimy net curtains, I said: ‘Have you been through his pockets yet?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You are new at this game, aren’t you?’

‘You don’t understand at all. He was a good friend of mine.’

‘Evidently,’ Belinsky said coming through the door. He held up a length of white material. ‘I’m afraid that this was all I could find.’

‘What is it?’

‘An altar-cloth, I think. I found it in a cupboard inside the cathedral. It didn’t look like it was being used.’

I told Veronika to help Belinsky wrap her friend in the cloth while I searched his pockets.

‘He’s good at that,’ Belinsky told her. ‘He went through my pockets once while I was still breathing. Tell me, honey, were you and fat boy actually doing it when he was scythed out?’

‘Leave her alone, Belinsky.’

‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth,’ he chuckled. ‘But me? I just hope I die in a good woman.’

I opened the man’s wallet and thumbed a fold of dollar bills and schillings on to the dressing-table.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Veronika.

‘If I’m going to dispose of a man’s body I like to know at least a little more about him than just the colour of his underwear.’

‘His name was Karl Heim,’ she said quietly.

I found a business card. ‘Dr Karl Heim,’ I said. ‘A dentist, eh? Is he the one who got you the penicillin?’

‘Yes.’

‘A man who liked to take precautions, eh?’ Belinsky murmured. ‘From the look of this room, I can understand why.’

He nodded at the money on the dressing-table. ‘You had better keep that money, sweetheart. Get yourself a new decorator.’

There was another business card in Heim’s wallet. ‘Belinsky,’

I said. ‘Have you ever heard of a Major Jesse P. Breen? From something called the DP Screening Project?’

‘Sure I have,’ he said, coming over and taking the card out of my fingers. ‘The DPSP is a special section of the 430th. Breen is the CIC’s local liaison officer for the Org. If any of the Org’s men get into trouble with the US military police, Breen is supposed to try and help them sort it out. That is unless it’s anything really serious, like a murder. And I wouldn’t put it past him to fix that as well, providing the victim was anyone but an American or an Englishman. It looks as if our fat friend might have been one of your old comrades, Bernie.’

While Belinsky talked I quickly searched Heim’s trouser pockets and found a set of keys.

‘In that case it might be an idea if you and I were to take a look around the good doctor’s surgery,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a feeling in my socks that we might just find something interesting there.’

We dumped Heim’s naked body on a quiet stretch of railway track near the Ostbahnhof in the Russian sector of the city. I was keen to leave the scene as quickly as possible, but Belinsky insisted on sitting in the car and waiting to see the train finish the job. After about fifteen minutes a goods train bound for Budapest and the Orient came rumbling by, and Heim’s corpse was lost under its many hundreds of pairs of wheels.

‘For all flesh is grass,’ Belinsky intoned, ‘and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth.’

‘Cut that out, will you?’ I said. ‘It makes me nervous.’

‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them. Anything you say, kraut.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get away from here.’

We drove north to Wahring in the 18th Bezirk, and an elegant three-storey house on Türkenschanzplatz, close to a decent-sized park which was bisected by a small railway line.

‘We could have dropped our passenger out here,’ said Belinsky, ‘on his own doorstep. And saved ourselves a trip into the Russian sector.’