Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“My Ami friend. The journalist. Noreen Charalambides. She’s the one writing about Isaac. I imagine she’d like to speak to you. To get your story and Isaac’s.”

Joey grunted without much enthusiasm for the idea.

“Given that he’s got no actual grave, it could be like a kind of memorial,” I said. “To his memory.”

While Joey considered this idea, he puffed at the cigarette. In his mallet-sized fist it looked more like a safety match.

“Not a bad idea at that,” he said finally. “Bring her around this evening. She can get the whole story. If she doesn’t mind slumming it.”

He gave me an address in Britz, near the meat-canning factory. I jotted it down on the inside of my cigarette pack.

“Does Erich Goerz know this address?” I asked.

“Nobody does. There’s just me that lives there now. If you can call it living. Since Isaac died I’ve let myself go a bit, you know? There doesn’t seem to be much point in looking after the place now that he’s gone. Not much point in anything at all, really.”

“I know what that’s like,” I said.

“Been a while since I had any visitors. Maybe I could tidy up a bit. Put things in order before-”

“Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble,” he said quietly. “No trouble at all.” He nodded resolutely. “Matter of fact, I should have done it a while ago.”

He walked away. I found a phone booth and telephoned the Adlon.

I told Noreen some of it but not all. The part about me spilling almost the whole story to Erich Goerz I didn’t tell her. The only consolation there was that I hadn’t mentioned the name of the hotel where she was staying.

She said she’d come right over.

IOPENED THE DOOR WIDE, but not as wide as Noreen’s eyes. She stood there, wearing a red dress underneath her sable coat and looking at me with a mixture of shock and bewilderment, much as Lotte must have looked upon discovering she had arrived in time to find that young Werther had just succeeded in blowing his brains out. Assuming he had any brains.

“My God,” she whispered, touching my face. “What happened to you?”

“I just read a portion of Ossian,” I said. “Second-rate poetry always affects me this way.”

She pushed me gently aside and closed the door behind her.

“You should see me when I’m really affected by something good. Like Schiller. I’m bedridden for days.”

She shrugged off her coat and tossed it onto a chair.

“You might not want to do that,” I said. I was trying not to feel embarrassed about the place, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s been a while since that chair was properly deloused.”

“Do you have any iodine?”

“No, but I have a bottle of kummel. Matter of fact, I think I’ll have one myself.”

I went over to the sideboard to pour a couple of drinks. I didn’t ask if she wanted one. I’d seen her drink before.

While she waited, she glanced around. The living room had a sideboard, an armchair, and a folding table. There was a high bookcase built into the walls, and it was full of books, several of which I’d read. There were a stove and a small fireplace with an even smaller fire. There was also a bed, since the living room happened also to be the bedroom. Through an open doorway was a garbage area that was also the kitchen. On the other side of the frosted kitchen window was a security grille and a fire escape, just to make the mice feel safe. Next to the front door was the door to the bathroom, only the bath was hanging upside down on the ceiling, right above the lavatory, where a man sitting there might contemplate the inconvenience of taking a bath in front of the fire. The floor was linoleum throughout, with a small collection of stamp-sized rugs. Some people might have thought it a bit of a dump, but to me it was a palace or, to be more accurate, the meanest room in a palace, the one where the servants kept their junk.

“I’m waiting for my interior decorator to come back with a portrait of the Leader,” I said. “After that it should look nice and cozy.”

She took the drink I offered her and stared closely at my face. “That weal,” she said. “You should put something on it.”

I pulled her closer. “How about your mouth?”

“Do you have any Vaseline?”

“What’s that?”

“First-aid petroleum jelly.”

“Hey, listen, I’ll live. I was at the Battle of Amiens and I’m still here, and believe me, that takes some doing.”

She shrugged and pulled away. “Go ahead. Be tough. But I had the funny idea I care for you, which means I don’t like it that you’ve been whipped. If anyone’s going to whip you it ought to be me, only I’ll make sure I don’t leave any marks.”

“Thanks, I’ll bear it in mind. Anyway, it wasn’t a whip. It was a dog leash.”

“You didn’t mention a dog.”

“There wasn’t a dog. It’s my impression that Goerz would prefer to carry a whip, but people on the tram look at you a bit strangely when you go around with one of those in your hand. Even in Berlin.”

“Do you think he hits his Jewish workers with it?”

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised.”

I tossed back the kummel, held it on my tonsils for moment, and then let it roll, enjoying the warmth as it spread through my body. Meanwhile Noreen found some chamomile ointment and anointed my more obvious wounds with it. I think it made her feel better. I poured myself another kummel. Which made me feel better.

WE WALKED TO A TAXI RANK and took a cab to the address in Britz. South of another modern apartment building called the Horseshoe and next to the Grossmann Coburg canned-meat factory was a decayed archway that was the entrance to a series of courtyards and tenement buildings of the kind that might convince any architect that he was some kind of messiah come to save people from their squalor and poverty. Personally, I never minded a little squalor. To be honest, for a long time after the war I hardly noticed it.

Passing through another archway, we came upon a tatty sign for infrared health lamps painted onto the brickwork. That seemed a little optimistic, to say the least. We mounted a dark stairway that led up into the building’s tomblike interior. Somewhere a barrel organ was churning out a melancholy tune that matched our lowering spirits. A German tenement building could have sucked all the light out of the second coming.

Halfway up the stairs we passed a woman who was on her way down. There was a bicycle wheel in her hand and a loaf of bread under her arm. A few steps behind her was a boy of about ten or eleven wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The woman smiled and nodded a little bow in Noreen’s direction or, as seemed more likely, at the sable coat she was wearing. This prompted Noreen to ask if we were on the right flight of stairs for Herr Deutsch. The woman with the bicycle wheel answered respectfully that it was, and we carried on up, stepping carefully around a second woman who was on her knees, scrubbing the stairs with a heavy brush and something noxious in a bucket. She had heard us ask about Joey Deutsch, and as we moved past, she said, “Tell that Jew it’s his turn to clean the stairs.”

“Tell him yourself,” said Noreen.

“I did,” said the woman. “Just now. But he paid no notice. Didn’t even come to the door. Which is why I’m doing it myself.”

“Perhaps he’s not in,” said Noreen.

“Oh, he’s in there, all right. He must be. I saw him go up there a while ago and I haven’t seen him come down. Besides, his door is open.” She went at the steps with the brush for several seconds. “I expect he’s avoiding me.”

“Does he normally leave his front door open?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.