Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

I took out my cigarettes and offered one to Bömer.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Too bad. A lot of folks still believe we all smoked in the war to calm our nerves, but mostly it was to cover the smell of the dead. You should take up smoking, and not just to help out in a smelly situation like this. Smoking is essential for a detective. It helps convince us we’re doing something, even when we’re doing nothing much at all. You’ll find there’s a lot of nothing much at all that happens when you’re a detective.”

I threw off the sheet and stared hard at a man’s body the size of Schmeling’s bigger brother and the color of uncooked dough. Looking at him, you almost expected someone to shovel him into an oven and bake him back to life. The skin on his face looked like a hand left too long in the bathwater. It was crinkled like an apricot. Even his optician wouldn’t have recognized him. What was more, the pathologist had already been at work. A crudely sewn thoracic scar crossed the body from the chin to the pubic hair like a length of toy railway track. The scar traversed the center of the triangular mark on the man’s broad chest. Pinching the cigarette from my mouth, I went down for a closer look.

“Not a tattoo,” I said. “A burn mark. It looks a little like the tip of a flatiron, don’t you think?”

Bömer nodded. “Tortured?”

“Are there any similar marks on his back?”

“I don’t know.”

I took hold of a big shoulder. “Then let’s turn him over. You take the hip and the legs. I’ll turn the body. We’ll pull him toward us, and I’ll lean over and take a look.”

It was like moving a wet sandbag. There was nothing on his back except some lank hair and a birthmark, but as the body rested against our abdomens, Bömer swore uncomfortably.

“Too much for you, Richard?”

“Something just leaked out of his prick and onto my shirt,” he said, quickly stepping away from the slab and then staring in horror at a large brown-yellow wound in the center of his belly. “Shit.”

“Close. But not quite.”

“That was a new shirt. Now what am I going to do?” He pulled the material away from the skin of his belly and sighed.

“Haven’t you got a brown one in that trailer of yours?” I joked.

Bömer looked relieved. “Yes, I have.”

“Then shut up and pay attention. Our friend here wasn’t tortured, that much I’m sure of. Anyone using a hot iron on him would have used it more often than once if he’d meant to hurt him.”

“So why do it?”

I lifted one of the hands and bent the fingers into a fist as big as the fuel tank on a small motorcycle.

“Look at the size of these mitts. The scar tissue on the knuckles. Especially here, at the base of each small finger. And do you see this bump?” I let Bömer take a look at a bump that curled all the way around the back of the palm to a point just below the knuckle of the little finger. Then, lowering the left, I lifted the man’s right. “This one’s even more pronounced. This is a common fracture in boxers. I’d say this guy was a southpaw, too, which should help narrow it down a bit. Except that he hadn’t boxed in a while. See the dirt under these fingernails? No boxer would tolerate that. Only the pathologist here didn’t scrape them out, and no detective ought to tolerate that. If the medicine man doesn’t do his job, it’s up to you to put him straight.”

I took out my pocketknife and an Adlon envelope containing Muller’s resignation letter and scraped out what was underneath the dead man’s nails.

“I don’t see what a few crumbs of dirt are going to tell us,” said Bömer.

“Probably nothing. But evidence rarely comes in a large size. And it’s nearly always dirty. Remember that. Now all I need is to see the dead man’s clothes. And I need the use of a microscope for a few minutes.” I glanced around. “As I recall, there’s a laboratory somewhere on this floor.”

He pointed. “In there.”

While Bömer went to fetch the dead man’s clothes, I put the contents of his fingernails into a Petri dish and stared at them for a while underneath a microscope. I was no scientist and no geologist, either, but I knew gold when I saw it. There was just a tiny crumb, but it was enough to catch the light and my attention. And when Bömer came into the lab carrying a cardboard box, I went ahead and told him what I’d found, even though I knew what he was going to say.

“Gold, huh? A jeweler, maybe? That might also be evidence that the man was a Jew.”

“I told you, Richard. This man was a boxer. Most likely he was working on a building site. That would account for the dirt under the nails.”

“And the gold?”

“Generally speaking, outside of a goldsmith’s, the best place to look for gold is in the dirt.”

I opened the cardboard box and found myself looking through the clothes of a workingman. At a pair of strong boots. At a thick leather belt. At a leather cap. The cheap flannel shirt interested me more, as there were no buttons on it, and there were small tears on the material where they should have been.

“Someone tore this man’s shirt open in a hurry,” I said. “Most likely when his heart stopped beating. It looks as though someone tried to revive him after he drowned. That would certainly explain the shirt. It was ripped open so that an attempt could be made to start his heart again. With a hot iron. It’s an old boxing trainer’s trick. Something about the heat and the shock, I think. Anyway, that explains the burn.”

“Are you saying someone threw this man in the water and then tried to revive him?”

“Well, it wasn’t the Spree. You told me that yourself. He drowned somewhere else. Then someone tried to revive him. Then they dumped him in the river. That’s the chain of causation, but I can’t attach any whys to that. Not yet.”

“Interesting.”

I looked at the man’s jacket. It was a cheap corduroy from C &A. Except the lining had been opened and then restitched, and, squeezing the material under the breast pocket, I felt something crumple in my fingers. I took out my knife again, cut away some of the stitches on the lining, and picked out a folded piece of paper. Carefully I unfolded it until I was able to spread a strip of paper about the size of a schoolboy’s ruler on the bench beside the microscope. After being in the waters of the River Spree, whatever it was that had been printed on the strip of paper was gone forever. The paper was quite blank. But there was no mistaking its meaning.

Bömer’s face was equally blank. “Could this have been his name and address?”

“It might have been, if he was a ten-year-old boy and his mother worried about him getting lost.”

“Well, then. What does it mean?”

“It means that what you first suspected is now confirmed. I believe this strip of paper was probably a fragment from the Torah.”

“The what ?”

“If God is German, I for one won’t be at all surprised. Apparently he enjoys being worshipped, issuing people with ten commandments at a time, and has even written his own unreadable book. But the God that this man worshipped was the Hebrew God. Jews sometimes sew a piece of the word of God into their clothes, next to their heart. Yes, that’s right, Richard. He was a Jew.”

“Shit. God damn it all.”

“You really mean that, don’t you?”

“I told you, Gunther. The chief is never going to authorize me to investigate the death of a Jew. Damn it all. I thought this might have been a chance to prove myself. To lead a proper murder investigation, you know?”

I said nothing. It wasn’t that I was speechless, but I certainly didn’t feel like making a speech. What would be the point?