I had to admit she had a point. Berlin cops had stopped being people when they married into the Reich Main Security Office – the RSHA – and joined a Gothic-looking family that included the Gestapo, the SS and the SD.
‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you don’t want the police buzzing in your ears any more than me. Not with your American cigarettes and all those cans in that bag of yours. No, I should think they might ask you some very awkward questions, which you don’t look able to answer.’
‘I guess you do have a point there, at that.’
‘Especially not wearing a suit like that.’
Her visible eye was giving me the up and down.
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing. It’s a nice suit. And that’s the point. It doesn’t look like you’ve been wearing it very much lately. Which is unusual in Berlin for a man with your accent. Which makes me think you must have been wearing something else. Most likely a uniform. That would explain the cigarettes and your quaint opinions about the police. And the tin cans, for all I know. I’ll bet you you’re in the Army. And you’ve been in Paris, if that tie is what I think it is: silk. It matches your pre-war manners, Parsifal. Manners are something else you can’t get in Berlin any more. But every German officer gets to behave like a real gentleman when he’s stationed in Paris. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. So, you’re not a professional blackie. Just an amateur blackie, making a little money on the side while you’re home on leave. This is the only reason you’re naïvely talking about the police and reporting what happened to me this evening.’
‘You should have been a cop yourself.’ I grinned.
‘No. Not me. I like to sleep at night. But the way things are going, before very long we’re all going to be cops whether we like it or not, spying on each other, informing.’ She nodded meaningfully at the door. ‘If you know what I mean.’
I didn’t say anything as Frau Lippert came back carrying a tray with two cups of tea.
‘That’s what I mean,’ added Fräulein Tauber in case I was too dumb to understand her the first time.
‘Drink your tea,’ I said. ‘It’ll help keep that eye down.’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘This is good tea,’ I told Frau Lippert.
‘Thank you, Herr—?’
‘That is, I don’t see how it can help a blue eye.’
I nodded, appreciating the interruption: it was Fräulein Tauber’s turn to help me. It wasn’t a good idea to tell Frau Lippert my name. I could see that now. The old woman wasn’t just the house guard dog; she was also the building’s Gestapo bloodhound.
‘Caffeine,’ I said. ‘It causes the blood vessels to constrict. You want to reduce the amount of blood that can reach your eye. The more blood that seeps out of the damaged capillaries on that lovely face of yours, the bluer your eye will get. Here. Let me have a look.’
I took away the cold compress for a moment and then nodded.
‘It’s not so blue,’ I said.
‘Not when I look at you, it’s not.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘You know, you sound just like a doctor, Parsifal.’
‘You can tell that from mm-hmm?’
‘Sure. Doctors say it all the time. To me, anyway.’
Frau Lippert had been out of this conversation since it started and must have felt that it lacked her own imprimatur. ‘She’s right,’ said the old woman. ‘They do.’
I kept on looking at the girl with the cold compress in her hand. ‘You’re mistaken, Fräulein. It’s not mm-hmm your doctor is saying. It’s shorter, simpler, more direct than that. It’s just Mmm.’
I drained my tea cup and placed it back on the tray. ‘Mmm, thank you.’
‘I’m glad you liked it,’ said Frau Lippert.
‘Very much.’
I grinned at her and picked my bag of canned food off the floor. It was nice to see her smile back.
‘Well, I’d better be going. I’ll look in again sometime just to see you’re all right.’
‘There’s no need, Parsifal. I’m all right now.’
‘I like to know how all my patients are doing, Fräulein. Especially the ones wearing Guerlain Shalimar.’
CHAPTER 4
The Pathological Institute was at the Charité Hospital just across the canal from Lehrter Station. With its red-brick exterior, its Alpine-style wooden loggias, its clock and distinctive corner tower, the oldest teaching hospital in the city was much the same as it had always been. Inside, however, things were different. Within the main administrative building, the portraits of more than a few of the Charité’s famous physicians and scientists had been removed. The Jews were Germany’s misfortune after all. These were the only spaces available in the hospital and if they could have put some beds on the walls they would have done it. The wards and corridors – even the landings outside the elevators – were full of men who had been maimed or injured on the front.
Meanwhile the morgue in the Institute was full to over-flowing with dead soldiers and the still unidentified civilian victims of RAF bombings and blackout accidents. Not that their problems were over. The Army Information Centre wasn’t always very efficient in notifying the families of those serving men who had died; and in many cases the Army felt that the responsibility fell on the Ministry of Health. But however the deaths were caused, the Ministry of Health believed responsibility for dealing with deaths in Berlin lay properly with the Ministry of the Interior, which, of course, was only too willing to leave such matters to the city authorities, who themselves were inclined to dump this role on the police. So, you might have said that the crisis at the morgue – and that’s exactly what it smelled like – was all my fault. Me and others like me.
It was, however, with the hope of taking advantage of this bureaucratic incompetence that I went there in search of Geert Vranken’s corpse. And I found what was left of it sharing a drawer in the cold room with a dead prostitute from Lichterfelde and a man from Wedding – most likely a suicide – who had been killed in a gas explosion. I had the mortuary attendant lay out the Dutchman’s remains on a slab that looked and smelt worse than it ought to have done, but with an extreme shortage of cleaners in the hospital – not to mention carbolic soap – the dead assumed less and less of the hospital’s dwindling resources.
‘Pity,’ grumbled the attendant.
‘What is?’
‘That you’re not from the State Labour Service so I can get rid of him.’
‘I didn’t know he was looking for a job.’
‘He was a foreign worker. So I’m waiting on the paperwork that will enable me to send his remains down to the incinerator.’
‘I’m from the Alex, like I said. I’m sure there are jobs there that could be done by dead men. My job, for example.’
For a moment the morgue attendant thought of smiling and then thought better of it.
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I said and took out the switchblade I had found on the ground under Nolli Station.
At the sight of the long blade in my hand, the attendant backed off nervously. ‘Here, what’s your game?’
‘It’s all right. I’m trying to establish if this knife matches the victim’s stab wounds.’
Relaxing a little, he nodded at Vranken’s remains. ‘Least of his problems I should have thought: Being stabbed.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But before a train ran him over—’