Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

‘This is the American sector,’ I reminded him. ‘The only way to get thrown off a train round here is to travel without a ticket. They even wait until the train stops moving.’

‘That’s Uncle Sam for you, hey? No, you’re right, Bernie. He’s better off with the Ivans. It wouldn’t be the first time they threw one of our people off a train. But I’d sure hate to be one of their trackmen. Damned dangerous, I’d say.’

We left the car and walked towards the house.

There was no sign that anyone was at home. Above the broad, toothy grin of a short wooden fence the darkened windows on the white stuccoed house stared back like the empty sockets in a great skull. A tarnished brass plate on the gatepost which, with typical Viennese exaggeration, bore the name of Dr Karl Heim, Consultant Orthodontic Surgeon, not to mention most of the letters of the alphabet, indicated two separate entrances: one to Heim’s residence, and the other to his surgery.

‘You look in the house,’ I said, opening the front door with the keys. ‘I’ll go round the side and check the surgery.’

‘Anything you say.’ Belinsky produced a flashlight from his overcoat pocket. Seeing my eyes fasten on the torch, he added: ‘What’s the matter? You scared of the dark or something?’ He laughed. ‘Here, you take it. I can see in the dark. In my line of work you have to.’

I shrugged and relieved him of the light. Then he reached inside his jacket and took out his gun.

‘Besides,’ he said, screwing on the silencer. ‘I like to keep one hand free for turning door handles.’

‘Just watch who you shoot,’ I said and walked away.

Round the side of the house I let myself in through the surgery door and, after closing it quietly behind me again, switched on the torch. I kept the light on the linoleum floor and away from the windows in case a nosy neighbour happened to be keeping an eye on the place.

I found myself in a small reception and waiting area which was home to a number of potted plants and a tankful of terrapins: it made a change from goldfish, I told myself, and mindful of the fact that their owner was now dead, I sprinkled some of the foul-smelling food that they ate on to the surface of their water.

That was my second good deed of the day. Charity was beginning to be a bit of a habit with me.

Behind the reception desk I opened the appointment-book and pointed the torch beam on to its pages. It didn’t look like Heim had much of a practice to leave to his competition, always assuming he had any. There wasn’t a lot of spare money around for curing toothache these days, and I didn’t doubt that Heim would have made a better living selling drugs on the black market. Turning back the pages I could see that he averaged no more than two or three appointments a week. Several months back in the book I came across two names I knew: Max Abs and Helmut König. Both of them were marked down for full extractions within a few days of each other. There were lots of other names listed for full extractions, but none that I recognized.

I went over to the filing cabinets and found them mostly empty, with the exception of one that contained details only of patients prior to 1940. The cabinet didn’t look as if it had been opened since then, which struck me as odd as dentists tend to be quite meticulous about such things; and indeed, the Heim of pre-1940 had been conscientious with his patients’ records, detailing residual teeth, fillings and denture-fitting marks for each one of them. Had he just got sloppy, I wondered, or had an inadequate volume of business ceased to make such careful records worthwhile? And why so many full extractions of late? It was true, the war had left a great many men, myself included, with poor teeth. In my case this was one legacy of a year’s starvation as a Soviet prisoner. But nevertheless I had still managed to keep a full set. And there were plenty of others like me. What need for König then, who I remembered telling me that he had had such good teeth, to have had all of his teeth extracted? Or did he simply mean that his teeth had been good before they went bad? While none of this was enough for Conan Doyle to have turned into a short story, it certainly left me puzzled.

The surgery itself was much like any other I had ever been in. A little dirtier perhaps, but then nothing was as clean as it had been before the war. Beside the black-leather chair stood a large cylinder of anaesthetic gas. I turned the tap at the neck of the bottle and, hearing a hissing sound, switched it off again. Everything looked like it was in proper working order.

Beyond a locked door was a small store-room, and it was there that Belinsky found me.

‘Find anything?’ he said.

I told him about the lack of records.

‘You’re right,’ Belinsky said with what sounded like a smile, ‘that doesn’t sound at all German.’

I flashed the torch over the shelves in the store-room.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what have we got here?’ He reached out to touch a steel drum on the side of which was painted in yellow the chemical formula H 2SO 4.

‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ I said. ‘That stuffs not from a schoolboy’s chemistry set. Unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s sulphuric acid.’ I moved the torch beam up the side of the drum to where the words EXTREME CAUTION were also painted. ‘Enough to turn you into a couple of litres of animal fat.’

‘Kosher, I hope,’ Belinsky said. ‘What does a dentist want with a drum-load of sulphuric acid?’

‘For all I know he soaks his false teeth in it overnight.’

On a shelf beside the drum, piled one on top of the other, were several kidney-shaped steel trays. I picked one of them up and brought it under the beam of the torch. The two of us stared at what looked like a handful of odd-shaped peppermints, all stuck together as if they had been half-sucked and then saved by some disgusting small boy. But there was also dried blood on some of them.

Belinsky’s nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘What the hell are these?’

‘Teeth.’ I handed him the torch and picked one of the spiky white objects out of the tray to hold it up to the light. ‘Extracted teeth. And several mouthfuls of them too.’

‘I hate dentists,’ Belinsky hissed. He fumbled in his waistcoat and found one of his picks to chew.

‘I’d say these normally end up in the drum of acid.’

‘So?’ But Belinsky had noticed my interest.

‘What kind of dentist does nothing but full extractions?’ I asked. ‘The appointment-book is booked for nothing but full extractions.’ I turned the tooth in my fingers. ‘Would you say that there was much wrong with this molar? It hasn’t even been filled.’

‘It looks like a perfectly healthy tooth,’ agreed Belinsky.

I stirred the sticky mass in the tray with my forefinger. ‘Same as the rest of them,’ I observed. ‘I’m no dentist, but I don’t see the point of pulling teeth that haven’t even been filled yet.’

‘Maybe Heim was on some kind of piece work. Maybe the guy just liked to pull teeth.’

‘Better than he liked keeping records. There are no records for any of his recent patients.’

Belinsky picked up another kidney-tray and inspected its contents. ‘Another full set,’ he reported. But something rolled in the next tray. It looked like several tiny ball bearings. ‘Well, what have we here?’ He picked one up and regarded it with fascination. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, I should say each one of these little confections contains a dose of potassium cyanide.’

‘Lethal pills?’

‘That’s right. They were very popular with some of your old comrades, kraut. Especially the SS and senior state and party officials who might have had the guts to prefer suicide to being captured by the Ivans. I believe that these were originally developed for German secret agents, but Arthur Nebe and the SS decided that the top brass had a greater need of them. A man would have his dentist make him a false tooth, or use an existing cavity, and then put this little baby inside. Nice and snug – you’d be surprised. When he was captured he might even have a decoy cyanide brass cartridge in his pocket, which meant our people wouldn’t bother with a dental examination. And then, when the man had decided the right time had come, he would work off the false tooth, tongue out this capsule and chew the thing until it broke. Death is almost instantaneous. That’s how Himmler killed himself.’