Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

Goerz looked at his driver and laughed. “Shall I tell you what I think?” he said. “I think you used to be a cop. And I think you still are. A secret cop. Gestapo. I’ve never seen anyone who looked less like a hotel employee than you do, my friend. I’ll bet that’s just a cover story so you can go around spying on people. And more important, on us.”

“It’s the truth, I tell you. Look, I know you didn’t kill Deutsch. It was an accident. That much was clear from the autopsy. You see, he couldn’t have drowned in the canal, because his lungs were full of seawater. That’s what made the polenta suspicious in the first place.”

“There was an autopsy?” It was the square-looking man-the living sculpture-who spoke. “You mean they cut him open?”

“Of course there was an autopsy, you dumb schmuck. That’s the law. Where do you think this is? The Belgian Congo? When a body’s found, a body has to be investigated. Surgically and circumstantially.”

“But when they finished with him, they’d have given him a proper burial, right?”

I groaned with pain and shook my head. “Burials are for Otto Normals,” I said. “Not unidentified bodies. There’ s been no identification. Not formally. No one claimed him, see? I’m only investigating it because the Ami woman wanted to find out about the guy. The polenta doesn’t know shit about him. As far as I know, the body went to the Charité Hospital. To the anatomy class. The kids with the forceps and the lancets got to play with him.”

“You mean medical students?”

“I don’t mean students of political economy, you stupid bastard. Of course medical students.”

I was beginning to see that this was a sensitive subject to the man with the jaw that looked as if it had been cut from a piece of marble. But with my tongue loosened from the pain I was feeling from the heat of the stove, I kept on talking regardless. “By now they’ll have sliced him open and used his dick to make an oxtail soup. His skull’s probably an ashtray on some student’s desk. What do you care, Hermann? You’re the people who dumped the poor bastard in the canal like a pail of restaurant garbage.”

The square-looking man with the marble chin shook his head grimly. “I thought at least he’d get a decent burial.”

“I told you, decent burials are for citizens. Not floaters. It seems to me that the only person who’s tried to treat Isaac Deutsch with any respect is my client.” I tried to twist away from the stove, but it was no good. I was beginning to feel like Jan Hus.

“Your client.” Erich Goerz’s voice was full of contempt, like some grand inquisitor. He started to beat me again. The dog lead whistled through the air like a flail. I felt like a dusty rug at the Adlon. “You’re going. To tell us. Exactly. Who the hell. You are…”

“That’s enough,” said the square-looking man with the marble chin.

I didn’t see what happened next. I was too busy pressing my chin into my chest and closing my eyes, trying to ride out the pain of the beating. All I know is that suddenly the beating stopped and Goerz hit the floor in front of me with blood pouring from the side of his mouth. I looked up just in time to see Marble Jaw neatly sidestep a big haymaker from Goerz’s driver before lifting him off his toes with a fist that came flying up from the basement like an express elevator. The driver went down like a tower of wooden blocks, which was as satisfying to me as if I had toppled him myself.

Marble Jaw took a breath and then started to untie me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For what I said about your nephew, Isaac.” I pulled the ropes away and wrestled my back clear of the stove. “I’m right, aren’t I? You are Isaac’s uncle Joey?”

He nodded and helped me to stand. “The back of your coat’s scorched through,” he said. “I can’t see what your back looks like, but it can’t be too bad. Otherwise we could probably smell it.”

“There’s a comforting thought. By the way, thanks. For helping me.” I put my arm around his huge shoulder and straightened painfully.

“He’s had that coming for a long time,” said Joey.

“I’m afraid all of what I said was true. But I’m sorry you had to hear about it like that.”

Joey Deutsch shook his head. “I suspected as much,” he said. “Goerz told me different, of course, but in my guts I suppose I knew different. I wanted to believe him, for Isaac’s sake. I guess I had to hear it from someone else for it sink in.”

Erich Goerz rolled slowly onto his stomach and groaned.

“That’s quite an uppercut you’ve got on you, Joey,” I said.

“Come on. I’ll get you home.” He hesitated. “Can you stand by yourself?”

“Yes.”

Joey bent down over the unconscious driver and retrieved a set of car keys from the man’s waistcoat pocket. “We’ll take Erich’s car,” he said. “Just in case these two bastards come after us.”

Goerz groaned again and contracted, slowly, into a fetal position. For a brief second I thought he might be having some sort of convulsion until I remembered what Blask, the site foreman, had told me about the gun strapped to Goerz’s ankle. Only it wasn’t strapped to his ankle anymore. It was in his hand.

“Look out!” I yelled, and kicked Goerz in the head. I’d meant to kick his hand, but as I raised my foot I lost control and fell onto the floor again.

The pistol fired harmlessly, breaking a windowpane.

I crawled over to Goerz to look at him. I hardly wanted another man’s death on my conscience. He was unconscious, but fortunately for me, and more especially him, Erich Goerz was still breathing. I retrieved my ID card from the floor, where he had tossed it angrily a few minutes earlier, and picked up the pistol. It was a Bayard semiautomatic 6.35-millimeter.

“French cigarettes, French gun,” I said. “Makes sense, I suppose.” I made the gun safe and pointed it at the door. “Anyone else out there, do you think?” I asked Joey.

“You mean, like him? No, it was just these two, the three truck drivers, and, I’m sorry to say, me. After Isaac got killed, they took me on the payroll. As extra muscle, they said, but I guess it was just as much about ensuring that I kept my mouth shut.”

As Joey helped me walk to the door, I got a better look at him and saw a man who didn’t look much more Jewish than I did. The hair on the side of a head as big as a watermelon was gray, but on top it was blond, and as curly as an Astrakhan coat. The huge face was both florid and pasty, like old bacon. Small brown eyes sat on either side of a broken nose that was sharp and pointy. The eyebrows were almost invisible, as were the teeth in his gaping mouth. Somehow he put me in mind of a man-sized baby.

We went downstairs, and I recognized that we were in the Albert the Bear. There was no sign of a proprietor, and I didn’t ask. Outside, the fresh morning air helped revive me a little. I got into the passenger seat of the Hanomag and, almost destroying the gears, Deutsch quickly drove us away. He was a terrible driver and narrowly missed colliding with a water trough on the corner.

It turned out that he lived not so very far away from me in the south-eastern part of the city. We dumped what was left of the Hanomag in the car park of the cemetery on Baruther Strasse. Joey wanted to take me to a hospital, but I told him I thought I’d probably be all right.

“How about you?” I asked him.

“Me? I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about me, son.”

“I just cost you a job.”

Joey shook his head. “I shouldn’t ever have taken it.”

I lit us both a cigarette. “Feel up to talking about it?”

“How do you mean?”