Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t remember his stomach being that big.’

  Hamperl paused.

  ‘I can assure you it’s not big with fat,’ he said. ‘The man might be dead but the enzymes and bacteria in his belly are still very much alive and feeding on whatever still remains in his stomach. Probably last night’s dinner. In the process, these enzymes and bacteria produce gas. Here, let me demonstrate.’

  Hamperl pressed hard on the sheet still covering Kuttner’s stomach which caused the body to fart, loudly.

  ‘See what I mean?’

  Hamperl’s behaviour was a piece of crude theatre that seemed intended to make us feel uncomfortable. In a way I didn’t blame him for this at all. The Nazis were past masters at making others feel uncomfortable. Doubtless, the Professor was just paying us back, in kind. A fart from a dead Nazi was as eloquent a comment on the German presence in Czechoslovakia as I was ever likely to hear, or indeed smell. But Kahlo winced noticeably, and then bit his lip as he tried, vainly, to steady his nerves.

  Hamperl collected a long sharp curette off a neatly prepared instrument table and held it at arm’s length, like a conductor’s baton. The light from the abbey-sized windows caught the flat of the curette and it glittered like a bolt of lightning. Instinctively Kahlo turned away, and noting his discomfort at the symphony of destruction he was about to begin, Hamperl grinned wolfishly, exchanged a meaningful look with Doctor Honek, and said:

  ‘There’s one thing you can say about the dead, my dear fellow. They have an extraordinary ability to deal with pain. Any pain. No matter how bad it might seem to you. Believe me, this poor fellow won’t feel a thing as I seem to do my absolute worst. Much worse than perhaps you have ever seen inflicted on any human being before. However, do try not to let your imagination run away with you. The most terrible thing that could happen to this man happened several hours before he arrived in this hospital.’

  Kahlo shook his head and swallowed loudly, which sounded as if a very large frog had taken up residence in his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said to me. ‘I just can’t do this. I really can’t.’

  He covered his mouth, and left the room quickly.

  ‘Poor fellow,’ said Hamperl. ‘But probably it’s just as well he’s gone. We need all our attention for the task that now lies before us.’

  ‘Surely, that was your intention,’ I said. ‘To scare him off.’

  ‘Not at all, Commissar. You heard me try to reassure him, didn’t you? However, it’s not everyone who can witness this procedure with a cool head. Are you sure about yourself?’

  ‘Oh, I have no feelings at all, Professor Hamperl. None whatsoever. I’m like that curette in your hand. Cold and hard. And best handled with extreme care. Just one slip would be most unfortunate. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Quite clear, Commissar.’

  Hamperl threw back the remainder of the sheet covering Kuttner’s body and went quickly to work. Having photographed the two entry wounds on the dead man’s chest, and then probed them both, first with his finger and then with a length of dowel, he made a Y-shaped incision from Kuttner’s porcelain-pale shoulders, across his hairless chest and down to the pubic area which, unusually, appeared to have been shaved, and recently, too.

  Hamperl remarked upon this.

  ‘Well, you don’t see that every day. Not even in my profession. I wonder why he should have done this.’

  ‘I’ve a good idea,’ I said. ‘But it will wait.’

  Hamperl nodded. Then he was cutting through subcutaneous fat and muscle, and the speed of his scalpel was something to behold, with the flesh swiftly shrugged off the bone like the skin of a very large snake; and within only a few minutes there was just a mess of intestines and prime rib that might have been the envy of any good Berlin butcher. Especially in wartime.

  ‘There appears to be something lodged at the top of the oropharynx,’ said Hamperl. He looked up at me and added, ‘That’s the part of the throat just behind the mouth.’

  He collected a small white object, flicked it off his fingers’ ends into a kidney dish and then held it up for our joint inspection.

  ‘It appears to be a troche, perhaps,’ he said. And then: ‘No, this was not designed to dissolve in the throat, but in the stomach. It has hardly dissolved at all. A pilule. A tablet, perhaps.’

  ‘He was taking Veronal,’ I said. ‘A barbiturate.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Hamperl’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. ‘Well then, that is probably what it is. Only it could not have affected him very much in the condition you see it in now. Although this would be quite consistent with a case of overdose where someone has swallowed several pills all at once. Doctor Honek said there was initially some suspicion that this might have been a barbiturate overdose.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Until I found the bullet wounds.’

  ‘Quite.’

  At an almost imperceptible nod from Professor Hamperl, Doctor Honek stepped forward with a set of surgical bolt cutters and began to cut the ribs, which, under the steel jaws, snapped loudly like thick twigs, one by one, in order to expose the chest cavity. But there was one he hesitated to cut.

  ‘One of these ribs looks damaged, don’t you think so, sir?’ asked Honek.

  Hamperl bent down to take a closer look. ‘Chipped,’ he said. ‘Like a tooth. But not from a Veronal pilule. Most probably from a bullet.’

  Honek went back to work. He was even quicker than the Professor and within a couple of minutes Hamperl was slicing through the remains of the diaphragm and reflecting back the whole chest-plate, like the top of a boiled egg, to expose the dead man’s heart and the lungs.

  ‘Quite a lot of blood has pooled inside the diaphragm,’ he murmured.

  By now Albert Kuttner was hardly recognizable as a human being. His intestines – most of them – were resting on the upturned palm of his own hand as if, like the perfect aide-de-camp he had possibly hoped to become, he might assist even in the process of his own dissection.

  Hamperl placed the chest-plate on a nearby table where it remained like the remains of a Christmas goose.

  I cleared my nose, noisily.

  ‘Commissar? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m just trying to see the lighter side of things that you were talking about earlier, sir.’

  ‘Good.’

  But the Professor sounded almost disappointed that I was not yet lying on the floor.

  ‘Cutting the pulmonary artery,’ he said to Honek. ‘Checking for blood clots. Which we have. Probably a post-mortem blood-clot.’ He slashed some more of the lungs and then squeezed the heart. ‘Feels like something hard in here. A bullet probably. See if you can find it, will you, Doctor Honek?’

  He handed the heart to the other man and got to work with the scalpel again, slashing at the flesh holding what looked like a shiny red football.

  ‘The liver, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Very good, Commissar Gunther. The liver it is.’ Hamperl laid the liver in another dish before removing the spleen as well.

  ‘Looks like this got hit, too,’ he said. ‘It’s almost in pieces.’

  I went over to the table where Honek was still palpating the heart to isolate the bullet, and glanced briefly at the spleen.

  ‘It’s a mess all right.’

  ‘That certainly covers all of what’s in the medical dictionary,’ observed Hamperl.

  Honek had isolated the bullet. He cut it out and laid it in a separate metal tray like a gold-prospector putting aside a precious nugget. This was easier on the eye than watching Hamperl clamp Kuttner’s small intestine so that he could haul it out in one block. I’d seen one too many of my comrades in the freezing cold of the trenches with their steaming guts hanging out of their tunics to view that particular sight with any equanimity.

  So far we had been there for less than thirty minutes and already the kidneys were being removed.

  The second bullet was lodged deep in t
he spine and took several minutes to gouge out.

  When that was done Hamperl asked, ‘Do you wish me to remove the brain?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it will be necessary.’

  ‘Then that would appear to be that, for now.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, it will take a while to analyse the organs, the haematology, and the contents of the stomach. Naturally I will test the quantities of Veronal present then.’

  ‘At this moment in time I must ask you both not to make any verbal reference to a second bullet,’ I said. ‘As far as anyone else is concerned, just the one shot was fired.’

  ‘Am I to understand that you plan on using this subterfuge as the basis for some incriminating piece of cross-examination?’ said the Professor.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am. You can mention your real findings in your written report, of course.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Professor. ‘It’ll be our little secret until you say otherwise, Commissar.’

  When both bullets were lying in a tray I took a closer look. I’d seen enough spent lead in my time to recognize metal from a thirty-eight when I saw it.

  ‘Right now, I’d be grateful if you were to indulge me with your first thoughts, sir.’

  ‘All right.’

  Professor Hamperl sighed and then thought for a moment.

  ‘Both shots seem to have been fired at fairly close range,’ he said. ‘Of course I should have to check the shirt for powder burns to give you an accurate distance, but the size of the entry wounds persuades me, strongly, that the shooter could not have been more than half a metre away when these shots were fired. The angle of the entries would seem to indicate that the person who fired the shots was immediately in front of him. The grouping of the shots was tight, as if the two shots were fired in very quick succession before the victim moved very much.’

  ‘If the shooter fired at only half a metre’s distance, why didn’t the slugs go straight through him?’

  ‘One clipped the rib and lost most of its velocity before it penetrated the heart, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Hamperl said thoughtfully. ‘And the other lodged deep in the spine, as you saw. That’s why.

  ‘As I say, we’ll have to see how much barbiturate was absorbed by his organs but on the basis of the organ damage and the amount of blood that was in the diaphragm, I’d say it was the shots that killed him, not the Veronal.’

  ‘What do you know about that stuff?’

  ‘Barbital? It’s been around for a good while. Almost forty years. It was first synthesized by two German chemists. Bayer sells the stuff as a soluble salt or in tablet form. Ten to fifteen grammes would be a safe dose; but fifty or sixty could be lethal.’

  ‘That’s not much of a margin for error,’ I said.

  ‘Of course for someone using it regularly, they would soon develop a tolerance of the drug and possibly require a higher dose, which they might easily accommodate without any mishap. But if they left off taking it for a while, it’d be a mistake to start again with a high dose. Possibly a lethal one.’

  ‘So it has to be handled with care.’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s powerful stuff. My own sleep would have to be very disturbed to want to take it myself. All the same it’s a lot better than its predecessor: bromides. There’s no unpleasant taste with Veronal. In fact, there’s not much taste at all.’

  ‘Any side effects?’

  ‘It would certainly affect the heart rate, the pulse, and the blood pressure. And of course that would substantially affect the bleeding. Perhaps there would have been more blood exiting from the wounds if this man hadn’t sedated himself. As it is, most of the blood from the wounds was in the diaphragm.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to mix the stuff with alcohol. It reacts badly in the stomach. I’ve seen cases of people who mixed it and were choked to death when they vomited in their sleep.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Will there be anything else?’

  ‘I believe there’s a way that you can find out if he was homosexual.’

  Hamperl didn’t bat an eyelid.

  ‘Ah, yes, I see. The shaven pubic area. Yes, it is unusual for a man to shave himself down there. It might indicate an effeminate inclination, yes. I see what you mean. Intriguing, isn’t it?’

  ‘There were other things that make me think he might be homosexual,’ I added. ‘Things I can’t tell you about. But I would like to know for sure.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ agreed Hamperl, ‘in a habitual sodomite the anus becomes dilated. It loses its natural puckered orifice and develops a thicker, keratinized skin. Or even becomes like an open shutter on a camera. I assume you’re referring to that. Would you like me to take a look?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Doctor Honek, would you help me to turn the cadaver over, please?’

  The two men wrestled the gutted body onto what there was of its front and spread the dead man’s buttocks.

  After a moment or two Hamperl started to shake his head.

  ‘The anus looks all right to me. Of course, the fact that there has been no apparent interference doesn’t indicate that he wasn’t homosexual. But I could always swab the anus for semen when I do some of the other tests. And swab his penis for traces of faecal matter.’

  ‘Please do that.’

  Hamperl was trying to conceal a gleeful, triumphant smile. ‘An SS officer who was homosexual. Perhaps that’s why he was murdered. I can’t imagine this sort of thing goes down well in Berlin.’

  Hamperl exchanged a look with Doctor Honek, who was looking equally amused.

  ‘Of course one hears things. About Berlin and transvestitism.’

  I nodded. ‘All the same, if I were you I wouldn’t mention this either. The SS doesn’t have much of a sense of humour about that sort of thing. It would be a shame to find that out the hard way.’

  ‘You’ll have my histological report on the organs and my pathological diagnosis in forty-eight hours, Commissar.’

  ‘Thanks, again.’

  The Professor escorted me to the door.

  ‘So, Commissar, will you be leaving your own body to science do you think? For medical students to use in the anatomy lab.’

  I glanced at the shambles that was a man I had been speaking to about a painting by Gustav Klimt at Jungfern-Breschan just twenty-four hours earlier.

  ‘No, I don’t think I will.’

  ‘Pity. A man as tall as you must have a fine skeleton. I sometimes think that the real fun stuff for our bodies doesn’t start until we’re dead.’

  ‘I’m already looking forward to it.’

  Kahlo apologized again as Klein drove us away from the hospital.

  ‘You get used to it,’ I said.

  ‘Not me. Not ever. It was the smell of the ether that really got to me I think. Reminded me of when my mother died.’

  ‘Bad huh?’ said Klein.

  Kahlo shook his head, but his expression told a different story and seeing it in his rear-view mirror Klein reached into the leather pocket on the inside of the driver’s door and took out a silver flask.

  ‘I keep this for cold days,’ he said and handed it to me.

  ‘It doesn’t get much colder than that,’ I said. ‘Not for Captain Kuttner, anyway.’ I took a bite off the flask, which was full of good schnapps, and handed it back to Kahlo.

  ‘That bastard.’ Kahlo upended the flask. ‘That bastard Professor was enjoying it, too. My discomfort. Did you hear him, sir? The way he started laying it on. I thought, fuck this. I’m off. He’s having a laugh at my expense.’

  ‘That he was,’ I said. ‘But a man has to take pleasure in his work where and when he can. Especially in this country.’

  I bent forward to the floor of the car, lit a cigarette and handed it back to him.

  ‘There was a time when I took pleasure in my work, too. When I was good at it. Those were the days when the Berlin Murder Squad was the best in the world. When I was a real detective. A professional. What I didn’t
know about the science of murder wasn’t worth knowing. But now.’ I shook my head. ‘Now I’m just an amateur. A rather quaint and old-fashioned amateur.’

  It was five-thirty in the afternoon, and back in the library at the Lower Castle irritation and disappointment hung in the air like mustard gas ready to contaminate the lungs of all who were unfortunate enough to breathe it in. SS and Gestapo officers shook their heads and smoked furiously and looked around for someone to blame. Opinions were offered and rejected angrily and offered again until voices were raised and accusations made. There appeared to be several of them in the library, and while ultimately there was only one man whose opinion counted there were others who were determined not to be held responsible for ‘the failure’.