by Philip Kerr
“I thought I might help.”
“I thought you were squeamish about the sight of blood.”
“Me? Whatever gave you that idea? Anyway. We’re Bolle boys, right?”
“Right.”
“Bit of blood is par for the course when you’re out on the piss in Pankow, right?”
I nodded and handed him one of the Pervitin tablets, only he didn’t swallow it; instead he crushed it on the flat metal of his cigarette case with the car key and then separated the powder into two small parallel white lines.
“One of the Luftwaffe pilots from the local airport showed me this little trick,” he explained. “When they have to make a night flight and they need to wake up or sober up in a real hurry, the best and quickest way to do it is with a hot rail, like this.”
“You’re full of surprises, do you know that?”
Kaspel laid the end of the tube in the powder and then inhaled it noisily through one nostril and then the other, at which point he shuddered, uttered a series of loud expletives, blinked furiously several times, and then hammered the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. “Go and fuck yourself!” he yelled. “Go and fuck yourself. I am on fire. I am on fire. Now, that’s what I call a fucking air force.”
He shook his head and then let out a loud whoop that had me feeling more than a little alarmed and wondering what effect Hermann Temmler’s magic potion was having on my own body.
“Now let’s go and find the doctor,” said Kaspel, and hurried inside the hospital.
THIRTEEN
April 1939
Karl Brandt, who met us in a cold room in the hospital basement, was already dressed for surgery but under his immaculate white overalls he was wearing the black uniform of an SS major, which looked like some sort of contradiction. He was a tall, strikingly handsome, stern-looking man in his mid-thirties, with high cheekbones, light brown hair, and a very neat parting he touched nervously every so often with the side of his hand, as if there might be a wind in the hospital that would cause him to soon require the action of a comb. It was almost a leading man’s face—the kind of face that might have found him a starring role in one of Dr. Goebbels’s movies—except for the fact that there was something lacking in the man’s cold, dark eyes. It was hard to think that this was the face of a healer. Rather it seemed more like the face of a fanatic who might easily have prophesied the coming of a biblical flood and a new Cyrus from the north who would reform the church, or perhaps foretell the arrival of a new religion. A couple of years later, in Prague, I would come across his name again, in connection with the murder of General Heydrich, but at this particular moment, I’d never heard of him. He blinked at me with slow contempt as I stumbled my way through an apology, first for keeping him waiting and then for the lateness of the hour.
“We came as soon as we heard you were here, Doctor. I apologize if you’ve been waiting for very long. If it had been up to me, I’d have said this could certainly have waited until first thing in the morning, but the deputy chief of staff was most insistent that an autopsy should proceed with all possible speed. Of course, the sooner we find out exactly what happened to Dr. Flex, the sooner I hope to apprehend the culprit, and the sooner we can restore everyone’s peace of mind and the Leader can return to his beautiful home. Sir, I don’t know if you were acquainted with the victim, but if you were I would like to offer you my condolences and to thank you for agreeing to perform what might well be a distressing task. If you weren’t acquainted with him I should like to thank you, anyway. I do appreciate that forensic medicine is not your usual field, however—”
“I assume you must have attended a postmortem before in your capacity as a Murder Commission detective,” he said, interrupting me with an impatient wave of his hand. “In Berlin, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. More often than I care to remember.”
“It’s been more than ten years since I was a medical student and did any real anatomy, so we may have need of that forensic memory. I might also require your assistance from time to time, to help shift the body. Can you do that, Commissar?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Since you mention it, I did know the victim. But this will in no way affect my ability to carry out the autopsy procedure. And I am as eager to find a satisfactory conclusion to this tragic affair as anyone. For the sake of my friend, it goes without saying. And for the Leader’s peace of mind, as you say. Well, let’s get on with it. I haven’t got all night. The body is this way. We don’t have a pathology suite in this hospital. Sudden deaths are rare in Berchtesgaden and usually dealt with in Salzburg. The body is laid out in what passes for an operating theater here, which is as good a place as any to carry out a postmortem.”
Brandt turned on the heel of a highly polished jackboot and led the way into a brightly lit room, where the corpse of a very tall, thin man with a small beard, still dressed in his winter tweeds, was lying on a table. The apparent cause of death was immediately obvious: a large piece of skull, several centimeters square and still attached to his scalp, was hanging off the side of his blood-encrusted head like an open trapdoor and half of the man’s scrambled brains seemed to have spilled onto the table and the floor tiles like fragments of minced meat in a butcher’s shop. Karl Flex himself was staring up at the ceiling with openmouthed astonishment, his wide blue eyes unflinching against the bright light, almost as if he had seen the marvelous sight of the Lord’s angel of death come to fetch him from one world into the next. It was a shocking sight, even for a Murder Commission veteran like me. Sometimes the human body strikes me as more fragile than could reasonably be expected.
“Holy shit,” muttered Kaspel, and momentarily put his hand to his mouth. “That’s what I call a fucking head wound.”
“Best get all of the cursing done now, gentlemen,” Brandt said coldly, stretching some rubber gloves onto his hands.
“Sorry, sir, but—holy shit.”
“Smoke if it helps to keep your mouth busy, Captain. It certainly won’t bother me. I much prefer the sweet smell of tobacco to that of antiseptic. Or the sound of your cursing. Just as long as you don’t pass out.”
Kaspel needed no second invitation and immediately lit up, but I shook my head at his open cigarette case when it came my way. I certainly didn’t want anything interfering with my understanding of how Karl Flex had met his death. Besides, I needed both hands for the camera, and was already taking pictures of the dead man with my expensive new toy.
“Is that strictly necessary?” complained Brandt.
“Absolutely,” I answered, focusing on the ruined skull, which looked very like the empty shell of the boiled egg I had eaten for breakfast that morning. “Every picture tells a story.”
“I assume that all of the victim’s personal effects have been removed from his pockets?” Brandt asked Kaspel.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “They’re in a bag on a table in the dispensary next door, awaiting the commissar’s inspection.”
“Good,” said Brandt. “Then we needn’t worry too much about how we remove the victim’s clothes.” He handed me a pair of very sharp scissors. Then he fetched another pair, started to cut up the leg of the dead man’s trousers, and invited me to do the same on the other side. “All the same, it does seem a shame. I mean, look at this.” He opened Flex’s jacket to reveal a label. “Hermann Scherrer of Munich. If this suit wasn’t already covered in blood then one might have tried to save it.”
I put down the Leica and took hold of a trouser leg and was about to start using the scissors when a rather sleepy bee crawled out of the turnup.
“What about saving this chap, instead?”
“It’s just a bee, isn’t it?” said Brandt.
“I need a bag,” I said, allowing the bee to crawl on my hand for a moment. “Or an empty pill bottle.”
“You’ll find some in the dispensary,” said Brandt.<
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With the bee still attached to the back of my hand I went into the dispensary and found a small bottle. While I waited patiently for the bee to crawl inside, I glanced around, noting with some surprise that the dispensary seemed to be well stocked with Losantin and natron.
“Why don’t you take its photograph?” Brandt said through the open door.
“Maybe I will if I can get it to smile.”
Once the bee was bottled I went back into the operating theater and set about catching up with Brandt, whose sharp scissors had already progressed as far as the dead man’s waist. Meanwhile, Brandt had invited Kaspel to remove the dead man’s shoes, his thick socks, and his necktie.
“With a Raxon tie, you’re always well-dressed,” said Kaspel, repeating the company’s famous advertising slogan. “Unless it’s like this one and covered with blood.”
“By the way,” said Brandt, slicing open the man’s shirt like an impatient tailor, and then the vest that lay underneath. “Beyond the obvious fact that he was shot in the head, what are we looking for? I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I could open his sternum and look for traces of poison if you want. But—”
“Back in the trenches, I had a friend who was shot through the neck,” I said. “I kept pressure on it, with my hand, to stop him bleeding out, like you were supposed to do. Only to find that it was the second shot, in the chest, which I didn’t even see, that killed him. Life’s full of surprises like that. And death more so.”
“This man’s been shot just the once,” said Brandt. “And that’s what killed him, too. I’ll stake my reputation on it.”
“That’s a shrewd guess now that you’ve got his shirt open, sir,” said Kaspel.
Kaspel had Flex’s shoes off and was inspecting the maker’s label on the insole.
“This fellow was a good German, all right.” Kaspel’s constant chatter was drug-related, of course. I was feeling quite chatty myself. “A real Nazi, I reckon.”
“Why do you say so?” I asked.
“Lingel shoes.”
Lingel shoes of Erfurt were fond of proclaiming their own Aryan purity, with the implication that other shoe manufacturers—Salamander, for example—were racially tainted. It was the sort of stunt that all sorts of German manufacturers had tried to pull since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
I sliced through the dead man’s underpants—for some reason Brandt had left them uncut—to expose his genitals.
“Does that look normal to you?” I asked Brandt.
“What do you want? A ruler?”
“I was thinking about the color. His cock looks a bit red to me.”
Brandt stared momentarily at Flex’s genitals and then shrugged. “I really couldn’t say.”
But there was something about the dead man’s cock that made me fetch my camera again. Brandt winced and shook his head.
“You’re a callous pair, I must say,” observed Brandt.
“I don’t think he’s feeling shy, sir,” I said, and took a picture of Karl Flex’s cock. “And I’m certainly not planning to publish these in the local newspaper.”
I put down the camera and turned back to the table, where the dead man’s clothes were now hanging off him like a second skin. And finally we had arrived at the bloody ruins of Flex’s head.
“This time we’re looking for a bullet,” I said, feeling around in the dead man’s matted blond hair. “Sometimes you’ll find one sticking to the scalp. Or under a man’s shirt collar. Or even on the floor.”
I stirred the heap of brain matter on the table and on the floor with my forefinger, but there wasn’t anything metallic in there, I was sure about that. I stood up and came back to the head. Brandt was staring into the hole like a child standing over a rock pool.
“We’re also looking for a bullet hole,” I said.
“There’s a hole all right,” said Brandt. “As big as the Atta Cave, that one.”
“This looks more like an exit wound,” I said. “I’m looking for a smaller one. An entry wound, perhaps.” I felt around the scalp for a moment. By now my hands were covered in sticky, day-old blood. There seemed to be only one pair of rubber gloves in that theater. “And here it is. About two or three centimeters below the exit wound.”
“Let me see,” said Brandt.
He let me guide his forefinger into a hole about the size of a pfennig, and then nodded.
“By God, you’re right. It is a hole. Quite fascinating. Right on the occipital bone. The bullet enters here, just to the left of the lambdoid suture and exits a few centimeters higher up in an explosion of temporal bone and brain matter. The people standing next to him must have been considerably bloodied.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I said.
“Sometimes it’s easily forgotten just how destructive a bullet wound can be.”
“It is if you weren’t in the trenches,” I said. “For anyone who was, like me and Captain Kaspel here, this was an almost daily sight. Which is our excuse for what you call being callous.”
“Hmm. Yes. I take your point, Commissar. Sorry.”
“Can we get another picture, sir? Perhaps you could indicate this hole with a pen or a pencil?”
“You mean stick it in there?”
“If you would, sir. Makes it easier to know what’s what in the photograph. And how big the hole is.”
I rinsed my hands and then collected up the Leica. And when Brandt was ready with his pencil, I took several pictures of the bullet hole.
“I suppose you would like me to search the skull cavity for any bullet fragments,” said Brandt.
“If you wouldn’t mind, sir.”
Brandt put his hand inside Flex’s head and began to palp what remained of the brain in search of something hard. It looked like someone scooping out a pumpkin for St. Martin’s Day.
“Given the state of the victim’s cranium, it seems unlikely that we will find anything,” he said. “Chances are that any bullet fragments are lying somewhere on the Berghof terrace.”
“Agreed, sir. Which makes it a pity that some helpful idiot thought to scrub the blood away.”
“Still, we’d best make sure, I suppose.” But after a while, Brandt shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
“Thank you anyway, sir.”
“I suppose we’d better turn him over,” Brandt said helpfully, “now that I’ve seen that entry wound. Just to make quite sure, as you say.”
We cut the remainder of the clothes off Flex’s body and then turned him over in search of another bullet hole. His thin white body was quite unmarked but I took another picture anyway, for my own memory’s sake. By now I was acutely aware of how much like a dead Christ Karl Flex actually looked. Perhaps it was the beard that did it, or the clear blue eyes; and perhaps all men look a bit like Christ when they’re laid out for burial; then again, perhaps that’s the whole point of the story. But of one thing I was quite certain: with a head wound like that it was going to take longer than three days for Karl Flex to be resurrected alongside the just and the unjust.
“That’s going to be quite an album when you’ve finished,” observed Kaspel.
“Commissar, if you’re in agreement with me,” said Brandt, “I’m going to record the cause of death as gunshot wound to the head.”
“I agree.”
“Then I think we’ve probably finished, don’t you?” said Brandt. “Unless there’s anything else you want me to do here?”
“No, sir, and thank you. I’m very grateful for everything.”
Brandt drew a sheet over the corpse, and moved the clothes into a neat pile under the table with the edge of his boot.
“I’ll have a medical orderly come in and tidy up first thing in the morning,” he said. “As for the body, what do you want to do with it? I mean, I imagine he must have some family somewhere.”
I followed Brandt to the sink, where he washed his hands.
“That’s up to Martin Bormann,” I said. “I understand that there’s a need for discretion here. That there’s a need to prevent the Leader from being alarmed by this unfortunate event.”
“Yes, of course. Well then, I’ll let you ask him what’s to be done with the corpse, shall I?”
I nodded. “There is just one more thing, sir. You say you knew the man well. Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”
“No,” said Brandt. “Karl Flex had lived in the area for several years, and although he wasn’t from this part of the world—he was from Munich—he was very well liked by almost everyone in Obersalzberg. At least, that was my impression. He was my next-door neighbor, more or less. My wife, Anni, and I live in Buchenhohe, back up the mountain, and a little farther east of the Leader’s Territory. Lots of people who work in Obersalzberg live there.”
“What were his interests?”
“Reading. Music. Winter sports. Cars.”
“Any girlfriends?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
“But he did like girls.”
“I really couldn’t say. I assume so. What I mean is, he never talked about anyone in particular. Why do you ask?”
“I’m just trying to paint a picture of the man and why someone shot him. Perhaps a jealous husband. Or the aggrieved father of some unfortunate local girl. Sometimes the most obvious motives turn out to be the right ones.”
“No. There was nothing like that. I’m certain of it. Now if you’ll excuse me, Commissar. I really have to get back to my wife. She’s not at all well.”
Brandt snatched off his overall and walked out without another word. I can’t say he was much of a doctor but it was easy to see why Hitler kept him around. Ramrod-straight and with the solemn manner of a taper-bearer he looked good in his black uniform and while he didn’t seem like the kind of doctor who had the cure for anything very much, he could certainly have frightened away a persistent cough or cold. He certainly frightened me.
