Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

When I awoke it was dark, and above the sound of the other inmates of the hospital coughing, and snoring, I heard the un-mistakeable 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 finished 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.’