Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“What? Around here? Are you joking? But I think he must be expecting someone. You, perhaps, if your name is Gunther. There’s a note stuck on the door.”

We quickly went up the last two flights of stairs and stopped in front of a door once painted scarlet but now hardly painted at all unless you counted the yellow star and the words JEWS OUT with which someone had thoughtfully defaced it. There was a blue envelope tacked onto the door frame. It was addressed to me. And the door was open just as the woman cleaning the stairs had said. I put the envelope in my pocket and, taking out Erich Goerz’s pistol, steered Noreen behind me.

“There’s something not right here,” I said, and pushed open the door.

As we went into the little apartment, Noreen reached up and touched a small brass plate on the door frame. “The mezuzah,” she said. “It’s a passage from the Torah. Most Jewish homes have one.”

I worked the slide on the little automatic and stepped into the small hallway. The apartment comprised two largish rooms. To the left was a living room that was a shrine to boxing and one boxer in particular: Isaac Deutsch. In a glass cabinet were some ten or fifteen empty wooden trophy stands and several photographs of Joey and Isaac. I imagined the trophies had been pawned a long time ago. The walls were papered with boxing posters, and piles of fight magazines were heaped around the room. On a table were a very stale loaf of bread and a fruit bowl containing a couple of blackened bananas that were now a world’s fair of tiny flies. A pair of ancient-looking boxing gloves hung from a nail on the back of the door, and a selection of rusting weights lay next to a bar that was leaning against a wall. Above it was a length of rope from which were hanging a shirt and a broken umbrella. There were a disemboweled armchair and, behind it, a full-length mirror with a crack in the glass. Everything else was just junk.

“Herr Deutsch?” My voice sounded tight in my chest, like I had a cuckoo nesting between my two lungs. “It’s Gunther. Are you home?”

We went back through the hallway and into the bedroom, where the curtains were drawn. There was a strong smell of carbolic soap and disinfectant. Or so I thought, anyway. A big brass bed stood opposite a wardrobe the size of a small Swiss bank vault.

“Joey? Is that you?”

In the curtained gloom I saw the outline of a figure on the bed and felt my hair lift the back of my hat. You spend ten years as a cop, sometimes you know what you’re going to see before you see it. And you know that it’s not everyone who can look it straight in the eye.

“Noreen,” I said. “I think Joey’s killed himself. We’ll only find out for sure when I draw the curtains and read that note. Maybe you’re the kind of writer who feels she needs to see everything. Who thinks she has a duty to report everything, unflinchingly. I don’t know. But it’s my opinion that you need to brace yourself or leave the room. I’ve seen enough bodies in my time to know that it’s never-”

“I’ve seen a dead body before, Bernie. I told you about that lynching in Georgia. And my father, he killed himself, with a shotgun. You don’t forget that in a hurry, I can tell you.”

Reflecting that it was interesting how quickly my concern to spare her feelings turned to something like sadism, I yanked the curtains open with no more argument. She wanted to play at being Turgenev, it was all right with me.

Joey Deutsch lay across his bed, still wearing the same clothes I had seen him in earlier. He was half twisted up off the mattress, as if some of the springs had burst out of the material under the small of his back. He was clean-shaven as before-only now it looked as if he were wearing a brown mustache and a small beard. These were corrosive burns and the result of whatever he had swallowed to poison himself. A bottle lay on the floor where he had dropped it, and next to this was a pool of bloody vomit. I picked the bottle up carefully and sniffed at the open neck.

“Lye,” I told her, but she had already turned away and was leaving the room. I followed her into the hallway. “He drank lye. Jesus. What a way to kill yourself.”

Noreen had pressed her face into a corner of the entrance hall like a disobedient child. Her arms were folded defensively across her chest and her eyes were closed. I lit a couple of cigarettes, tapped her on the elbow, and gave her one. I didn’t say anything. Whatever I might have said would have sounded like “I told you so.”

Still smoking, I went back into the living room. On top of a pile of fight magazines was a small leather writing folder. Inside were some envelopes and notepaper that matched the note addressed to me. So did the ink in the Pelikan he’d replaced in the little cylindrical leather sleeve. There was nothing that made me suspect anyone had forced him to write the note. The writing was neat and unhurried. I’d had love letters that were much less legible, although not for a long time. I read it carefully, as if Joey Deutsch had meant something to me. It seemed like the least I could do for a dead man. Then I read it again.

“What does it say?” Noreen was standing in the doorway. In her hand was a handkerchief, and in her eyes were some tears.

I held the note out to her. “Here.” I watched her read it, wondering what was going through her mind. If she actually felt anything for the poor guy who’d just killed himself, or if she was just relieved to have found an end for her story and a good excuse to go home. If that sounds cynical, maybe it was, but the truth was that her leaving Berlin was all I could think about now because, for the first time, I realized I was in love with her. And when you’re in love with someone you think might be about to leave you, it’s easier to be cynical, just to protect yourself from the pain you know is coming.

She offered the note back.

“Why don’t you keep it,” I said. “Although he never met you, I think he really meant you to have it. For your newspaper article. I kind of sold him on the idea that your piece could be a kind of memorial to Isaac.”

“It will be, I think. Why not?” She took the letter. “But what about the police? Won’t they need this? It’s evidence, isn’t it?”

“What do they care?” I shrugged. “Maybe you’ve forgotten how anxious they were to find out what happened to Isaac. All the same, perhaps we ought to get out of here before we have to wait around and answer questions we might not want to answer. Like how come I’ve got a gun without a license, and why I’ve got the mark of a dog leash across my face.”

“The neighbors,” she said. “That woman on the stairs. Suppose they tell the police about us. The note. She knows your name.”

“I’ll square her on the way out. Ten marks buys a lot of silence in this part of Berlin. Besides, you saw the door. These neighbors don’t exactly strike me as very neighborly. It’s my impression that they’ll be glad to see Joey dead and out of this building. And what do you think the polenta would do with a note like that? Print it in the newspaper? I don’t think so. Most likely they’ll destroy it. No, it’s best you keep it, Noreen. For Joey’s sake. And Isaac’s, too.”

“I guess you’re right, Gunther. But I wish you weren’t.”

“I get that.” I glanced around the miserable apartment and let out a sigh. “Who knows? Maybe he’s better off out of it.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“I don’t see things improving for Jews in this country. There are a bunch of new laws coming that will make things even tougher for anyone who’s not properly German, as they see it. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”

“Ahead of the Olympics?”

“Didn’t I mention it?”