by Philip Kerr
‘And how am I supposed to account for this little lot?’
‘I rather thought that you could handle the man who gave it to us. Frankly it’s just the sort of material that they’re keen on. The man’s name is Yuri. That’s all you need to know. There are map references and the location of the dead-letter box he’s been using. There’s a railway bridge near a little town called Mattersburg. On the bridge is a footpath and about two-thirds of the way along the handrail is broken. The top part is hollow cast metal. All you have to do is collect your information from there once a month, and leave some money and instructions.’
‘How do I account for my relationship with him?’
‘Until quite recently Yuri was stationed in Vienna. You used to buy identity papers for him. But now he’s getting more ambitious, and you haven’t the money to buy what he’s got to offer. So you can offer him to the Org. CIC has already assessed his worth. We’ve had all we’re going to get out of him, at least in the short term. There’s no harm done if he gives all the same stuff to the Org.’ Belinsky re-lit his pipe and puffed vigorously while he awaited my reaction.
‘Really,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to it. An operation of this sort is hardly deserving of the word “intelligence”. Believe me, very few of them are. But all in all a source like this and an apparently successful bit of murder leaves you pretty well accredited, old man.’
‘You’ll forgive my lack of enthusiasm,’ I said drily, ‘only I’m beginning to lose sight of what I’m doing here.’
Belinsky nodded vaguely. ‘I thought you wanted to clear your old pitman.’
‘Maybe you haven’t been listening. Becker was never my friend. But I really think he is innocent of Linden’s murder. And so did Traudl. So long as she was alive this case really felt as if it was worthwhile, there seemed to be some point in trying to prove Becker innocent. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘Come on, Gunther,’ Belinsky said. ‘Becker’s life without his girl is still better than no life at all. Do you honestly think that Traudl would have wanted you to give up?’
‘Maybe, if she knew the kind of crap he was into. The kind of people he was dealing with.’
‘You know that’s not true. Becker was no altar-boy, that’s for sure. But from what you’ve told me about her I’d bet she knew that. There’s not much innocence left anymore. Not in Vienna.’
I sighed and rubbed my neck wearily. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe it’s just me. I’m used to having things being a little more well-defined than this. A client came along, paid my fee and I’d point my suit in whatever direction seemed appropriate. Sometimes I even got to solve a case. That’s a pretty good feeling, you know. But right now it’s like there are too many people near me, telling me how to work. As if I’ve lost my independence. I’ve stopped feeling like a private investigator.’
Belinsky rocked his head on his shoulders like a man who has sold out of something. Explanations probably. He made a stab at one all the same. ‘Come on, surely you must have worked undercover before now.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Only it was with a sharper sense of purpose. At least I got to see a criminal’s picture. I knew what was right. But this isn’t clear-cut anymore, and it’s beginning to peel my reed.’
‘Nothing stays the same, kraut. The war changed everything for everyone, private investigators included. But if you want to see criminals’ photographs I can show you a hundred. Thousands probably. War-criminals, all of them.’
‘Photographs of krauts? Listen, Belinsky, you’re an American and you’re a Jew. It’s a lot easier for you to see the right here. Me? I’m a German. For one brief, dirty moment I was even in the SS. If I met one of your war-criminals he’d probably shake me by the hand and call me an old comrade.’
He had no answer for that.
I found another cigarette and smoked it in silence. When it was finished I shook my head ruefully. ‘Maybe it’s just Vienna. Maybe it’s being away from home for so long. My wife wrote to me. We weren’t getting along too well when I left Berlin. Frankly I couldn’t wait to leave, and so I took this case against my better judgement. Anyway she says that she hopes we can start again. And do you know, I can’t wait to get back to her and give it a try. Maybe —’ I shook my head. ‘Maybe I need a drink.’
Belinsky grinned enthusiastically. ‘Now you’re talking, kraut,’ he said. ‘One thing I’ve learned in this job: if in doubt, pickle it in alcohol.’
27
It was late when we drove back from the Melodies Bar, a nightclub in the 1st Bezirk. Belinsky drew up outside my pension and as I got out of the car a woman stepped quickly out of the shadow of a nearby doorway. It was Veronika Zartl. I smiled thinly at her, having drunk rather too much to care for any company.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited hours.’ Then she flinched as through the open car door we both heard Belinsky utter an obscene remark.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her.
‘I need your help. There’s a man in my room.’
‘So what’s new?’ said Belinsky.
Veronika bit her lip. ‘He’s dead, Bernie. You’ve got to help me.’
‘I’m not sure what I can do,’ I said uncertainly, wishing that we’d stayed longer in the Melodies. I said to myself: ‘A girl ought not to trust anyone these days.’ To her I said: ‘You know, it’s really a job for the police.’
‘I can’t tell the police,’ she groaned impatiently. ‘That would mean the vice squad, the Austrian criminal police, public health officials and an inquest. I’d probably lose my room, everything. Don’t you see?’
‘All right, all right. What happened?’
‘I think he had a heart attack.’ Her head dropped. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, only there is no one else I can turn to.’
I cursed myself again and then stuck my head back into Belinsky’s car. ‘The lady needs our help,’ I grunted, without much enthusiasm.
‘That’s not all she needs.’ But he started the engine and added: ‘Come on, hop in, the pair of you.’
He drove to Rotenturmstrasse and parked outside the bomb-damaged building where Veronika had her room. When we got out of the car I pointed across the darkened cobbles of Stephansplatz to the partly restored cathedral.
‘See if you can’t find a tarpaulin over on the building site,’ I told Belinsky. ‘I’ll go up and take a look. If there’s something suitable, bring it up to the second floor.’
He was too drunk to argue. Instead he nodded dully and walked back towards the Cathedral scaffolding, while I turned and followed Veronika up the stairs to her room.
A large, lobster-coloured man of about fifty lay dead in her big oak bed. Vomiting is quite common in cases of congestive heart failure. It covered his nose and mouth like a bad facial burn. I pressed my fingers against the man’s clammy neck.
‘How long has he been here?’
‘Three or four hours.’
‘It’s lucky you kept him covered up,’ I told her. ‘Close that window.’ I stripped the bedclothes from the dead man’s body and started to raise the upper part of his torso. ‘Give me a hand here,’ I ordered.
‘What are you doing?’ She helped me to bend the torso over the legs as if I had been trying to shut an overstuffed suitcase.
‘I’m keeping this bastard in shape,’ I said. ‘A bit of chiropractic ought to slow up the stiffening and make it easier for us to get him in and out of the car.’ I pressed down hard on the back of his neck, and then, blowing hard from my exertions, pushed the man back against the puke-strewn pillows. ‘Uncle here’s been getting extra food-stamps,’ I breathed. ‘He must weigh more than a hundred kilos. It’s lucky we’ve got Belinsky along to help.’
‘Is Belinsky a policeman?’ she asked.
‘Sort of,’ I said, ‘but don’t worry, he’s not the kind of bull who cares much for the crime figures. Belinsky’s got other fish to fry. He hunts Nazi war-criminals.’ I started to bend the dead man�
�s arms and legs.
‘What are you going to do with him?’ she said nauseously.
‘Drop him on the railway line. With him being naked it will look like the Ivans gave him a little party and then threw him off a train. With any luck the express will go over him and fit him with a good disguise.’
‘Please don’t,’ she said weakly. ‘… He was very kind to me.’
When I’d finished with the body I stood up and straightened my tie. ‘This is hard work on a vodka supper. Now where the hell is Belinsky?’ Spotting the man’s clothes which were laid neatly over the back of a dining-chair by the grimy net curtains, I said: ‘Have you been through his pockets yet?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘You are new at this game, aren’t you?’
‘You don’t understand at all. He was a good friend of mine.’
‘Evidently,’ Belinsky said coming through the door. He held up a length of white material. ‘I’m afraid that this was all I could find.’
‘What is it?’
‘An altar-cloth, I think. I found it in a cupboard inside the cathedral. It didn’t look like it was being used.’
I told Veronika to help Belinsky wrap her friend in the cloth while I searched his pockets.
‘He’s good at that,’ Belinsky told her. ‘He went through my pockets once while I was still breathing. Tell me, honey, were you and fat boy actually doing it when he was scythed out?’
‘Leave her alone, Belinsky.’
‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth,’ he chuckled. ‘But me? I just hope I die in a good woman.’
I opened the man’s wallet and thumbed a fold of dollar bills and schillings on to the dressing-table.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Veronika.
‘If I’m going to dispose of a man’s body I like to know at least a little more about him than just the colour of his underwear.’
‘His name was Karl Heim,’ she said quietly.
I found a business card. ‘Dr Karl Heim,’ I said. ‘A dentist, eh? Is he the one who got you the penicillin?’
‘Yes.’
‘A man who liked to take precautions, eh?’ Belinsky murmured. ‘From the look of this room, I can understand why.’ He nodded at the money on the dressing-table. ‘You had better keep that money, sweetheart. Get yourself a new decorator.’
There was another business card in Heim’s wallet. ‘Belinsky,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of a Major Jesse P. Breen? From something called the DP Screening Project?’
‘Sure I have,’ he said, coming over and taking the card out of my fingers. ‘The DPSP is a special section of the 430th. Breen is the CIC’s local liaison officer for the Org. If any of the Org’s men get into trouble with the US military police, Breen is supposed to try and help them sort it out. That is unless it’s anything really serious, like a murder. And I wouldn’t put it past him to fix that as well, providing the victim was anyone but an American or an Englishman. It looks as if our fat friend might have been one of your old comrades, Bernie.’
While Belinsky talked I quickly searched Heim’s trouser pockets and found a set of keys.
‘In that case it might be an idea if you and I were to take a look around the good doctor’s surgery,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a feeling in my socks that we might just find something interesting there.’
We dumped Heim’s naked body on a quiet stretch of railway track near the Ostbahnhof in the Russian sector of the city. I was keen to leave the scene as quickly as possible, but Belinsky insisted on sitting in the car and waiting to see the train finish the job. After about fifteen minutes a goods train bound for Budapest and the Orient came rumbling by, and Heim’s corpse was lost under its many hundreds of pairs of wheels.
‘For all flesh is grass,’ Belinsky intoned, ‘and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth.’
‘Cut that out, will you?’ I said. ‘It makes me nervous.’
‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them. Anything you say, kraut.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get away from here.’
We drove north to Währing in the 18th Bezirk, and an elegant three-storey house on Türkenschanzplatz, close to a decent-sized park which was bisected by a small railway line.
‘We could have dropped our passenger out here,’ said Belinsky, ‘on his own doorstep. And saved ourselves a trip into the Russian sector.’
‘This is the American sector,’ I reminded him. ‘The only way to get thrown off a train round here is to travel without a ticket. They even wait until the train stops moving.’
‘That’s Uncle Sam for you, hey? No, you’re right, Bernie. He’s better off with the Ivans. It wouldn’t be the first time they threw one of our people off a train. But I’d sure hate to be one of their trackmen. Damned dangerous, I’d say.’
We left the car and walked towards the house.
There was no sign that anyone was at home. Above the broad, toothy grin of a short wooden fence the darkened windows on the white stuccoed house stared back like the empty sockets in a great skull. A tarnished brass plate on the gatepost which, with typical Viennese exaggeration, bore the name of Dr Karl Heim, Consultant Orthodontic Surgeon, not to mention most of the letters of the alphabet, indicated two separate entrances: one to Heim’s residence, and the other to his surgery.
‘You look in the house,’ I said, opening the front door with the keys. ‘I’ll go round the side and check the surgery.’
‘Anything you say.’ Belinsky produced a flashlight from his overcoat pocket. Seeing my eyes fasten on the torch, he added: ‘What’s the matter? You scared of the dark or something?’ He laughed. ‘Here, you take it. I can see in the dark. In my line of work you have to.’
I shrugged and relieved him of the light. Then he reached inside his jacket and took out his gun.
‘Besides,’ he said, screwing on the silencer. ‘I like to keep one hand free for turning door handles.’
‘Just watch who you shoot,’ I said and walked away.
Round the side of the house I let myself in through the surgery door and, after closing it quietly behind me again. switched on the torch. I kept the light on the linoleum floor and away from the windows in case a nosy neighbour happened to be keeping an eye on the place.
I found myself in a small reception and waiting area which was home to a number of potted plants and a tankful of terrapins: it made a change from goldfish, I told myself, and mindful of the fact that their owner was now dead, I sprinkled some of the foul-smelling food that they ate on to the surface of their water. That was my second good deed of the day. Charity was beginning to be a bit of a habit with me.
Behind the reception desk I opened the appointment-book and pointed the torch beam on to its pages. It didn’t look like Heim had much of a practice to leave to his competition, always assuming he had any. There wasn’t a lot of spare money around for curing toothache these days, and I didn’t doubt that Heim would have made a better living selling drugs on the black market. Turning back the pages I could see that he averaged no more than two or three appointments a week. Several months back in the book I came across two names I knew: Max Abs and Helmut König. Both of them were marked down for full extractions within a few days of each other. There were lots of other names listed for full extractions, but none that I recognized.
I went over to the filing cabinets and found them mostly empty, with the exception of one that contained details only of patients prior to 1940. The cabinet didn’t look as if it had been opened since then, which struck me as odd as dentists tend to be quite meticulous about such things; and indeed, the Heim of pre-1940 had been conscientious with his patients’ records, detailing residual teeth, fillings and denture-fitting marks for each one of them. Had he just got sloppy, I wondered, or had an inadequate volume of business ceased to make such careful records worthwhile? And why so many full
extractions of late? It was true, the war had left a great many men, myself included, with poor teeth. In my case this was one legacy of a year’s starvation as a Soviet prisoner. But nevertheless I had still managed to keep a full set. And there were plenty of others like me. What need for König then, who I remembered telling me that he had had such good teeth, to have had all of his teeth extracted? Or did he simply mean that his teeth had been good before they went bad? While none of this was enough for Conan Doyle to have turned into a short story, it certainly left me puzzled.
The surgery itself was much like any other I had ever been in. A little dirtier perhaps, but then nothing was as clean as it had been before the war. Beside the black-leather chair stood a large cylinder of anaesthetic gas. I turned the tap at the neck of the bottle and, hearing a hissing sound, switched it off again. Everything looked like it was in proper working order.
Beyond a locked door was a small store-room, and it was there that Belinsky found me.
‘Find anything?’ he said.
I told him about the lack of records.
‘You’re right,’ Belinsky said with what sounded like a smile, ‘that doesn’t sound at all German.’
I flashed the torch over the shelves in the store-room.
‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what have we got here?’ He reached out to touch a steel drum on the side of which was painted in yellow the chemical formula H2 SO4.
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ I said. ‘That stuff’s not from a schoolboy’s chemistry set. Unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s sulphuric acid.’ I moved the torch beam up the side of the drum to where the words EXTREME CAUTION were also painted. ‘Enough to turn you into a couple of litres of animal fat.’
‘Kosher, I hope,’ Belinsky said. ‘What does a dentist want with a drum-load of sulphuric acid?’
‘For all I know he soaks his false teeth in it overnight.’
On a shelf beside the drum, piled one on top of the other, were several kidney-shaped steel trays. I picked one of them up and brought it under the beam of the torch. The two of us stared at what looked like a handful of odd-shaped peppermints, all stuck together as if they had been half-sucked and then saved by some disgusting small boy. But there was also dried blood on some of them.
