Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

The man in the shorts jumped to his feet, flicked away his cigarette, and stepped out of the bus shelter. I saw that he was wearing a gray wool Tracht jacket now that made him look exactly like a grown-up Hansel who was looking for his Gretel, except that Hansel was never so dangerous. With his silenced gun close to his waist he advanced carefully into the trees, leaving me plenty of time to tiptoe across the slippery road behind him. I knelt by the bus stop and paused. A moment later, I almost cried out as I felt a searing pain in my knee, and it was a second or two before I realized that it was resting on the Stasi man’s hot cigarette end. I cursed silently, brushed it quickly off my trousers, and then stepped into the bushes. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t even hear him and I hardly wanted to move again until I was quite sure where he was. And then I heard the man a few meters ahead, coming slowly in my direction with one thing on his mind: to find and kill me. In truth, I might have stayed there a while longer and later on walked through the forest and into the Saarland, perhaps without very much hindrance. It was then that I saw it. The black cat. I reached out to stroke it and snatched back my hand when I found its fur was wet and sticky. Suddenly I realized that the Stasi man’s bullet hadn’t missed the cat after all. The animal had been shot as it crossed the road and had limped into the bushes where it collapsed and died. Tears welled up in my eyes — I was tired but I felt sick for my newfound friend, sick and angry now. Angry for the cat and angry that my life had been turned upside down by Erich Mielke and the Stasi, angry enough and perhaps tired enough to want to exact some kind of revenge. So, holding my breath, I crouched down behind a thick tree trunk, drew the carving knife from my sock, and waited for the man in shorts to come close enough for me to cut his throat. While I waited I caught sight of the burn hole in the knee of my trousers. I also had the beginning of a hole in the sole of my shoe and I wasn’t far off looking like a genuine clochard, so the last thing I needed was a large bloodstain on the sleeve of my jacket, because it’s impossible to kill a man with a cold blade and not end up resembling a character in a tragedy by Shakespeare. There’s nothing like blood on your clothes to attract attention. And the thing most murderers usually forget is just how much blood there is in a human body. A human being isn’t much more than a soft-sided jerry can full of liquid. Even as I was crouching there I remembered a bookmaker called Alfred Hau; he stabbed a man to death in an apartment in Hoppegarten — a man who’d weighed close to one hundred and fifty kilos — and the cops reckoned almost eight liters of blood came gushing out of his fat torso, so much that it leaked through the bare floorboards and onto the kitchen ceiling of a Kripo detective who lived in the apartment below. It was probably the easiest arrest the Berlin Murder Commission ever made. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that using my knife was out of the question.

I stabbed the knife into the ground from where I might retrieve it, if needed. Then I whipped off my silk scarf, quickly tied a couple of knots along the length of it, wrapped an end tight around each of my wrists, and held it taut between my hands like an Ismaili assassin. Slowly, with my back pressed against the trunk, I stood up, and taking a silent, deep breath, tried to steady my already twisted nerves. I’d seen the bodies of men who had been strangled — it’s probably the most common form of murder a cop ever sees — and I knew what to do: when there are two or more firm knots in the scarf or the rope, homicide is almost certain, but of course actually doing it was a very different proposition. In my limited experience, killing a man in cold blood usually involves killing a significant part of yourself. It’s a fact that many men of my own acquaintance belonging to the SS Einsatzgruppen had often needed to get drunk in order to murder Jews, and even in the higher ranks, nervous breakdowns were common. I didn’t consider myself like any of those but the thought of the dead cat and then the cruel way the Stasi had half-hanged me in Villefranche turned what was left of my heart to stone. I make no excuses for that. It was bastards like the man in the leather shorts who’d put me in this situation in the first place. It was him or me, and I hoped it would be him.

He paused next to the tree behind which I was standing but I waited in a state of suspended animation, the way a hungry tiger waits patiently until it is absolutely sure of a successful attack. I was close enough to smell my quarry now. The soap he’d used to wash himself with the previous day. The Old Spice on his face. The Brylcreem in his yellow hair — he looked like Lutz Moik, the German film actor. The smoke of the Gauloises he’d smoked that was sticking to his quaint clothes. The Mentos he was sucking. I could even smell the leather dressing on his stupid shorts. I almost wondered if he could smell me. I know I could. I was hoping he’d see the dead cat and bend down to inspect his cruel handiwork. It was easy enough to see the little pile of fur that lay in the moonlight like a fairy’s black velvet cushion and the red ruby of blood in its dead center.

“Hey, kitty, kitty. Did someone put the cat out?” And then the bastard laughed a high-pitched girlish laugh and shot the cat again, just for the hell of it. The silenced gun in his hand sounded not much louder than an old-fashioned mousetrap springing into action but no less lethal for that. And now I felt real hatred for him and the new Germany — another new Germany no one wanted — that he represented. Shooting the cat again was a sign that he had relaxed a little, that and the fact that he slipped a packet of cigarettes from a pocket in his leather bib, and pulled one out with his lips. Then he reached into his pocket for the lighter.

Which was when I attacked.

Hooking the silk scarf around his scrawny neck, I pushed him forward onto the damp ground and as he fell, I shoved a knee hard into the small of his back and then knelt on him while I tightened my ligature mercilessly, one knot up against his larynx and the other against his carotid arteries. His face was buried in the cat’s dead body, which seemed appropriate but he was as strong as a bull, much stronger than I’d expected, and even as I set about trying to subdue him I was cursing myself for not just stabbing him in the neck as I’d originally planned. He twisted one way and then the other like a man whose whole body was convulsed with a large current of electricity. The thing about strangling a man is to remember that most such deaths are accidental, that it takes less time to kill someone like this than might be imagined — or so the forensic pathologists had always told me. Most victims of strangling are women — housewives strangled by drunken husbands who don’t know what they’re doing until it’s too late. It’s one thing strangling a woman after a night out on the beer; but it’s another strangling a wiry, powerful man who was perhaps half my age. What gave me extra strength was the certainty that the German wearing the shorts would have killed me with no more thought than he’d given to shooting the cat.

The first ten or fifteen seconds were the worst for us both; he kicked and bucked like an angry rodeo horse desperate to unseat its rider and it took every bit of my strength just to lie on top of him and keep him pinned down, pulling with all my might on both ends of the silk scarf to maintain the pressure. After I’d obstructed the blood flow to his brain for at least twenty or more seconds he was clawing at my hands, which is when his legs started to slow down at last; and after more than a minute I was certain I was lying on top of the body of a dead man. I knew this with even greater certainty when I detected the strong smell of his bowels in his shorts; the unpleasant fact is that when you have all your weight compressing a man’s dying body, it’s like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. Something has to give. But still I stayed there a while longer, tightening the scarf one last time until every drop of blood was gone from his brain, every milliliter of air was gone from his lungs, and, it seemed to my wrinkling nostrils, every bit of shit was squeezed out of his arse.