Филип Керр - Greeks Bearing Gifts

“Do you remember anything at all?”

“Not really. We were just about to leave to open the cabaret for the evening when it happened. Do you know exactly what happened yet? With the bomb, I mean.”

“It looks as if one of the men working on the building site next door to the beer hall where you were drinking must have struck the bomb with a pickax. Only we’ve yet to find anything of him left to ask about that. Probably never will, either. My guess is that the local smokers will be inhaling his atoms for the next few days. You’re a lucky man. A meter nearer the door and you’d have been killed for sure.”

As I wheeled the man along I couldn’t help but agree with the detective. I was looking down at two burned ears that looked like the petals on a poinsettia, and there was a long length of stitching on the man’s neck that put me in mind of the Trans-Siberian Railway. His arm was in plaster and there were tiny cuts all over him. Clearly Herr Dorpmüller had enjoyed the narrowest of escapes.

We took the elevator down to the basement where, outside the mortuary door, I lit another Eckstein and like Orson Welles narrated a few somber words of warning before taking them inside to see the main feature. If I cared about their stomachs that was only because I was the one who was probably going to have to mop the contents of their stomachs off the floor.

“All right, gentlemen. We’re here. But before we go in I feel I ought to tell you that the deceased isn’t looking his best. For one thing, we’re a little short of clean laundry in this hospital. So there’s no sheet over his body. For another, his legs are no longer attached to his body, which is quite badly burned. I’ve done all I can to tidy him up a bit but the fact is you aren’t going to be able to identify the man in here in the normal way, which is to say, from his face. He doesn’t have a face. Not anymore. From the look of it his face was shredded by flying glass, so it bears no more relation to the photograph in his passport than a plate of red cabbage would. Which is why there’s a towel covering his head.”

“Now you tell me,” said the detective.

I smiled patiently. “There are other ways of identifying a man, I think. Distinguishing marks. Old scars. I even heard of something they’ve got now called fingerprints.”

“Johann had a tattoo on his forearm,” said the man in the wheelchair. “A six-figure identification number from the camp he was in. Birkenau, I think. He only showed it to me a couple of times but I’m more or less sure the first three numbers were one four zero. And he’d just bought a pair of new shoes from Salamander.”

While he inspected the tattoo I found the shoes and let him inspect them, too. Meanwhile I stood beside the uniformed cop and nodded when he asked if he could smoke.

“It’s the smell,” he confessed. “Formaldehyde, is it?”

I nodded again.

“Always sets me off.”

“So is it him?” asked the detective.

“Looks like,” said Dorpmüller.

“You’re sure?”

“Well, as sure as I can be without looking at his face, I suppose.”

The detective looked at the Mickey Mouse towel covering the dead man’s head and then, accusingly, at me.

“How bad is it really?” he asked. “His face.”

“Bad,” I said. “Makes the Wolf Man look like the Fritz next door.”

“You’re exaggerating. Surely.”

“No, not even a little. But you can feel free to ignore my advice any time you like. Nobody else listens to me down here, so why should you?”

“Goddamn it,” he snarled, “how do they expect me to positively ID a body without a face?”

“It’s a problem all right,” I said. “There’s nothing like a mortuary to remind you of the frailty of human flesh.”

For some reason the detective seemed to hold me accountable for this inconvenience, as if I was trying to frustrate his inquiry.

“What the hell’s the matter with you people in here, anyway? Couldn’t you have found something else to cover his face? Not to mention the rest of him? I’ve heard of naked culture in this country but this is ridiculous.”

I shrugged an answer, which didn’t seem to satisfy him but that wasn’t my problem. I never minded disappointing cops that much. Not even when I was a cop.

“This stupid towel is disrespectful,” insisted the detective. “And what’s worse is you know it is.”

“It was the American hospital,” I said by way of an explanation. “And the towel was all I had.”

“Mickey Mouse. I’ve a good mind to report you, fellow.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It is disrespectful. I’m sorry.”

I snatched the towel away from the dead man’s head and threw it in the bin, hoping to make the detective shut up. It almost worked, too, except that all three men groaned or whistled at once and suddenly it sounded like the South Pole in there. The cop in uniform turned on his heel to face the wall and his plainclothes colleague put a big hand over his bigger mouth. Only the injured Fritz in the wheelchair stayed looking, with horrified fascination, the way a rabbit stares at a snake that is about to kill it, and perhaps recognizing for the first time the micrometer-thin narrowness of his own escape.

“That’s what a bomb does,” I said. “They can erect all the monuments and statues they want. But it’s sights like this poor fellow that are the real memorials to the futility and waste of war.”

“I’ll call an undertaker,” whispered the man in the wheelchair, almost as if, until that very moment, he hadn’t quite believed that Johann Bernbach was actually dead. “As soon as I get home.” And then he added: “Do you know any undertakers?”

“I was hoping you might ask me that.” I handed him a business card. “If you tell Herr Urban that Christof Ganz sent you he’ll give you his special discount.”

It wasn’t much of a discount, but it was enough to cover the small tip I’d receive from Herr Urban if he got the business. I figured the only way I was ever going to get out of that mortuary was by looking out for my own future.

It was ten o’clock that night when Adolf Urban, the local undertaker, showed up to take Johann Bernbach away to his new and more permanent home. Urban rarely said very much but on this occasion — moved by the sight of the dead man’s face, some new business, and perhaps a few drinks he’d enjoyed before coming to the Schwabing Hospital — he was gabby, at least for an undertaker.

“Thanks for the tip,” he said, and handed me a couple of marks.

“I don’t know that it was such a good one, maybe. You’ve got your work cut out with this one.”

“No. It will be a closed casket, I should think. Be wasting my time trying to make this fellow look like Cary Grant. But your face interests me more, Herr Ganz.”

I almost winced, and hoped I hadn’t been recognized. From previous conversations I knew Urban had cremated some of the less important Nazis the Amis had hanged at Landsberg in 1949. Not that any of them were telling tales but in my experience you can’t be too careful when it comes to a past you’re trying to shake off like a bad cold.

“The fact is I’m short of a pallbearer. I was thinking — you being here on nights n’all — you could come and make a bit of extra cash working for me during the day. Come on. What else are you going to do in the daytime? Sleep? There’s no money in that. Besides, you’ve got the face for it, I think, Herr Ganz. Mine’s a business that requires a poker face and yours looks like it was grown under the felt on a card table. Doesn’t give anything away. Same as your mouth. Man in my business needs to know when to keep his trap shut. Which is nearly always, always .”