Филип Керр - Greeks Bearing Gifts

I took another drink with my breakfast, just to help me sleep, of course, and went to bed, where I dreamed of happier times, although that might just as easily have been a prayer to the god of the black cloud, dwelling in the skies. Since prayers are never answered it’s hard to tell the difference.

When I went into work the following evening the Moosach bomb victim was still there, laid out on the slab like a vulture’s abandoned banquet. Someone had tied a name tag to his toe which, given the fact that his leg was no longer attached to his body, seemed imprudent to say the least. His name was Johann Bernbach, and he was just twenty-five years old. By now I knew a little more about the bomb from what was in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . A five-hundred-pounder had exploded on a building site next door to a beer hall in Dachauerstrasse, less than fifty meters from the municipal gasworks. The gasometer contained over seven million cubic feet of gas, so the feeling expressed in the newspaper was that the city had had a lucky escape with just two people killed and six injured and I said as much to Bernbach when I saw him.

“I hope you had a few beers tucked away when you got your ticket punched, friend. Enough to take the edge off the shrapnel. Look here, it won’t matter much to you now, but your unexpected death is not being treated with quite the reverence it warrants. To put it bluntly, Johann, it seems everyone’s glad it’s only you who’s burnt toast. There was a gasometer near where that giant marrow went off. It was full of gas, too. More than enough to keep my little department in this hospital busy for weeks. Kind of fitting you should end up here, given it was an Ami bomb that killed you. Until last year this was the American hospital. Anyway, I’ve done my best for you. Pulled most of that glass out of your corpse. Tidied up your legs a bit. Now it’s up to the undertaker.”

“Do you always talk to your customers like this?”

I turned around to see Herr Schumacher, one of the hospital managers, standing in the doorway. He was an Austrian, from Braunau am Inn, a small town on the German border, and although he wasn’t a doctor, he wore a white coat anyway, probably to make himself look more important.

“Why not? They seldom answer back. Besides, I have to talk to someone other than myself. I’d go mad otherwise.”

“My God. Oh, Jesus. I had no idea he looked as bad as this.”

“Don’t say that. You’ll hurt his feelings.”

“It’s just that there’s a man upstairs on Ward 10 who’s prepared to formally identify this poor wretch before he’s discharged this evening. He’s one of the other people who were caught up in yesterday’s bomb blast — he’s now a patient in this hospital. The man’s in a wheelchair but there’s nothing wrong with his eyes. I was hoping you could wheel him down here and help take care of it. But now that I’ve seen the corpse — well, I’m not so sure he wouldn’t faint. Jesus Christ, I know I almost did.”

“If he’s in a wheelchair maybe that won’t matter so much. Afterwards I can always wheel him somewhere to recover. Like another hospital, perhaps.” I lit a cigarette and steered the smoke back out through my grateful nostrils. “Or at least somewhere they have clean laundry, anyway.”

“You know you really shouldn’t smoke in here.”

“I know. And I’ve had complaints about it. But the fact is I’m smoking for sound medical reasons.”

“Name one.”

“The smell.”

“Oh. That. Yes, I do see your point.” Schumacher took one from the packet I waved under his nose and let me light him. “Don’t you usually cover them up with something? Like a sheet?”

“We weren’t expecting visitors. But while the laundry guys are on strike all the clean sheets are for the living. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”

“Okay. But isn’t there anything you can do about his face?”

“What would you suggest? An iron mask? But that’s not going to help with the formal identification process. I doubt this poor Fritz’s mother would recognize him. Let’s certainly hope she doesn’t have to try. But given his more obvious similarity to nothing you can put into words that don’t take the name of the Lord in vain the way you just did, I think we’re probably into the more hermetic realm of other distinguishing marks, don’t you agree?”

“Does he have any?”

“He has one. There’s a tattoo on his forearm.”

“Well, that should help.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a number.”

“Who gets themselves tattooed with a number?”

“Jews did, in the concentration camps. For identification.”

“They did that?”

“No, actually we did that. Us Germans. The countrymen of Beethoven and Goethe. It was like a lottery ticket but not a lucky one. This fellow must have been in Auschwitz when he was a kid.”

“Where’s that?”

Schumacher was the kind of stupid Austrian who preferred to believe that his country was the first free nation that had fallen victim to the Nazis and hence was not responsible for what had happened, but it was a harder argument to make on behalf of Braunau am Inn, which was rather more famous as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and quite possibly why Schumacher had left in the first place. I couldn’t blame him for that. But I wasn’t disposed to argue with anything else he believed. He was my boss after all.

“Poland, I think. But it doesn’t matter. Not now.”

“Well, look, see what you can do about his face, Herr Ganz. And then go and fetch the witness, would you?”

When Schumacher had gone, I searched around for a clean towel and in a cupboard I found one the Amis must have left behind. It was a Mickey Mouse Club towel, which was less than ideal but it looked a lot better than the man on the slab. So I laid it gently over his head and went upstairs to collect the patient.

He was dressed and expecting me and while I’d been expecting him I wasn’t expecting the two cops who were with him, although I should have been because he’d agreed to help identify a dead body, and that’s what cops do when they’re not directing traffic or stealing watches. The smaller of the cops was in uniform and the other was dressed like a civilian; what was worse, I vaguely recognized the big Fritz in plainclothes and, I suppose, he vaguely recognized me, which was unfortunate as I’d hoped to avoid the Munich cops until my beard was a better length, but it was too late for that now. So I grunted a general-purpose good evening, which was a couple of consonants short of being sullen, took hold of the chair, and wheeled the patient toward the elevator with the two cops in tow. I didn’t worry about them minding my manners as I was just a night porter after all, and they didn’t have to like me, they just had to follow me down to the mortuary. It wasn’t a good wheelchair since it had a definite bias to the left but that was hardly surprising, given the size of the injured man. Of greater surprise, perhaps, was the fact that the chair managed to roll at all. The patient was a fattish man in his late thirties, and his beer belly sat on his lap like a bag containing all his worldly goods. I knew it was a beer belly because I was working on getting one myself, just as soon as I had a pay rise. Besides, his clothes stank of beer, as if he’d had a two-liter stein of Pschorr in his lap when the bomb went off.

“How well did you know the deceased, Herr Dorpmüller?” asked the detective as he tailed us along the corridor.

“Well enough,” said the man in the wheelchair. “For the last three years he was my pianist at the Apollo. That’s the cabaret theater I run in the Munich Hotel, just up the road from the beer house. Johann could play anything. Jazz or classical. To some extent my wife and I were all the family he had, given what had already happened to him. It’s too bad that it should be Johann who was killed like this, of all people. I mean after what he’d gone through in the camps as a boy. What he survived.”