'There is a doctor, Henry Kennedy… Here, I'll write that down for you.' She passed him the slip of paper and he read it carefully as if he might discover some hidden meaning in the name. 'He is from London; working at the Charité on a year's contract…'
'Yes, Frau Direktor?'
'For a year's residence he would have been screened, wouldn't he?'
'Yes, Frau Direktor.'
She wanted the next bit to sound as casual as possible. 'Could you let me see the file?'
'It wouldn't be kept in this building, Frau Direktor.' She looked at him. 'But I could look it up.'
'I don't really need the file or even a copy.'
'You just need to know that there are no complications,' offered Renn.
'Exactly, Herr Renn. He is someone I know socially; I will have to see him from time to time.'
'All is clear, Frau Direktor.'
Pankow has long been one of the most desirable residential districts of the central part of Berlin. This was where smartly dressed East Germans arrived to dinner parties in imported cars! And here, Fiona had discovered to her great surprise, there were households that boasted live-in domestic help.
But the clinic was not in the most salubrious part of Berlin-Pankow. It was a three-storey building in imitation marble. Its bleak neo-Renaissance style, monumental proportion and the pockmarks of wartime artillery damage suggested that it was a surviving example of Berlin's Third Reich architecture.
She was glad of her beautiful fur-lined coat. It was snowing: large flakes that came spinning down like discs and made loud crunching noises underfoot. The temperature had dropped with a suddenness that caught even the residents off guard, and the streets were quiet.
The driver found the clinic without any trouble. There was a wall around the building and a tall gate that opened for her car. The ornamental entrance doors surmounted a wide flight of stone steps with a relief, suggesting columns, on each side of it.
The lobby was lit by soft grey light that came from clerestory windows, set deep into the wall above the entrance. Its floor was an intricate mosaic, depicting Roman maidens broadcasting flowers, and the doors on every side were closed. Doktor Wieczorek's name was painted on a wooden plaque and inserted, together with those of other senior medical staff on duty that day, into a large board on the wall behind the reception desk.
'Yes?' The receptionist was a young man with black hair upon which he'd used a generous amount of hair cream. He wore a washable grey linen jacket, a white shirt and black tie. It was a kind of uniform. He was writing something in a ledger and didn't look up.
'Doktor Samson,' said Fiona. The profound trust that Germans showed for doctorates of any sort had persuaded her to start using her academic qualification.
'Your business?' The young man still didn't look up.
'Stand up when you talk to me!' said Fiona. She didn't raise her voice but the tone was enough to remind the young man that a visitor from the Stasi was expected this afternoon.
He leapt to his feet as if scalded and clicked his heels. 'Ja, Frau Doktor.'
'Take me to Doktor Wieczorek.'
'Doktor Wieczorek… Herr Dok Dok Dok…' said the young man, stuttering and red-faced.
'Immediately. I am on State business,' said Fiona.
'Immediately, Frau Doktor. Yes, immediately.'
Doktor Wieczorek was an elegant forty-year-old specialist who had spent time in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow and at the well-known mental hospital which was a part of the Chernyakhovsk prison. He had wavy hair that was beginning to grey at the temples, and a manner that suggested consummate medical expertise. Under his white jacket he wore a smart shirt and silk tie. His firm voice and avuncular manner relaxed her immediately, and so did his readiness to make little jokes about the bureaucracy that he constantly faced and so seldom defeated. 'Coffee?'
'No thank you,' said Fiona. There had been an attempt to make the austere little office look homely with the addition of an oriental carpet and an antique clock that chimed the hours.
'Tea? Tea with milk?' He smiled. That was the only thing I could remember about the British when I was a child: the way they poured cold milk into their tea and ruined it. No? Well we'll get on with this "familiarization visit". There is not a great deal to see in the building. At present we have twenty-three patients, one of whom I expect to be able to send home in a month or two. Some, I'm afraid, will never go home, but in the matter of clinical psychiatry I am always reluctant to say there is no hope.' He smiled at her. 'Do you know what we do here?'
'No,' she said.
He turned far enough to get from the shelf a large glass jar inside which a brain was to be seen in murky formalin, 'Look at that,' he said, putting it on the desk. 'That's the brain of "Der Grosse Gustaf", who was a music hall performer of the nineteen thirties. Anyone in the audience could ask him such questions as who fought Max Schmeling in 1933. He'd immediately tell them it was Max Baer who won on a technical knockout in the tenth round in New York City.'
'That's impressive,' said Fiona.
'I'm interested in boxing,' explained Wieczorek. He tapped the jar. 'But "The Great Gustaf" could answer any sort of question: he had a brain like an encyclopedia.'
'Why is it here?'
'There remains in the Soviet Union a small but influential group of medical men who think that slicing up the human brain will reveal some of nature's secrets. Lenin's brain was sliced up and studied under the microscope. So was Stalin's. So were a lot of lesser brains before and since.'
'What did they find?'
'That seems to be a State secret.'
'They discovered nothing, you mean?'
'I didn't say that, did I?' He tapped the jar again. 'But I saved Gustaf from such indignity. Gustaf has his brain intact.'
'Where did you get such a thing?'
'It came from the Charité Hospital at the end of the war. All hospitals have a roomful of such stuff. When the Red Army infantry got into the Charité during the fighting in 1945 they found the generals, and other high-ups who'd been hanged for trying to assassinate Hitler. Their bodies were still preserved in the post-mortem room refrigerators there. The cadavers had been sent from the Plötzensee prison and no one had been told what to do with them. And there was the medical museum, with all sorts of other stuff, over there too but the Red Army high command disapproved and the exhibits were sent to other institutions. We got Gustaf's brain.' He shook the jar so that the brain moved. 'The distribution of the exhibits started a lot of silly rumours. They said that-Ernst Rohm's heart had been sent to the University Hospital in Leipzig and it had been contained in a test tube.' He put the jar back on the shelf. 'You must forgive me: physicians are inclined to develop a macabre sense of humour.'
'What sort of success rate do you have. Doctor?'
'They are all failures when they come here,' said Wieczorek. 'We only get patients for whom some other institution can do no more. For most of them we can merely keep the fires under control. It is like the job of your security service, isn't it? Are we drawn to such work, do you think?'
'Surely you are better equipped to answer that question,' said Fiona.
'I cannot answer on your behalf, but for me and many of my colleagues I suspect that dealing in failure provides an excuse for a lack of success. And like you perhaps, I enjoy the challenge of such fragile, complicated and deceptive disciplines. Can you ever be sure that you are right?' He paused. 'Right about anything at all?'
'Sometimes,' said Fiona. 'You still haven't told me about your methods.'
'Carl Jung once said, "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." I think about that a lot. Methods? What can I tell you?' He looked at her with polite interest. The treatment of seriously disturbed patients has changed radically over the years. First and foremost there remains the old-fashioned analytical session in which patients are encouraged to delve into their own minds. As Freud discovered, it is a lengthy process. So along came the neuro-surgeons who drilled holes into the skull and destroyed brain cells and nerve fibres with surgical instruments.' He waited while the horror of that became clear to her. 'Then came a time when it seemed as if electric shocks through the brain could provide lasting improvement, and that seemed to be the panacea everyone had awaited. It wasn't the answer we had hoped for. But the chemists were waiting their turn, and patients were given massive doses of Dexedrine followed by Seconal and whatever new drug the West German chemical companies were anxious to sell. Now I suppose many specialists are beginning to think that amid his claptrap, Freud may have had a few worthwhile ideas after all. But analysis on the couch is a very long process: we'll never have enough analysts to fight mental illness in that laborious way.'