Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  He had almost died. Schwarzenbach had almost killed him. And he had been on the point of accepting the fact, of acquiescing in the event of his own murder.

  Schwarzenbach discarded the empty matchbox and made his way towards the front door. Where was Grunwald now? How had the Jew managed to slip away just when it seemed that – Schwarzenbach looked up and down the street and then, turning round, went back into the building.

  14

  ‘What is it? What do you want?’

  The woman held the door open a little way. Because of the angle of light it was hard for Schwarzenbach to make out her features. He moved forward.

  ‘You want to come in, do you?’

  Schwarzenbach said, ‘For a little while.’

  She held the door open and showed him down a corridor that led into a large room.

  ‘What can I do for you then?’ she asked.

  She sat on the mattress and looked at him with a bored expression while she began to undo the buttons of her nightdress.

  ‘I didn’t come here for sex,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘What do you want then?’ She left the buttons undone. Her breasts were large and heavy and an attempt had been made to cover the cracked nipples with a scarlet lipstick.

  ‘I want some information,’ he said.

  ‘Are you police?’

  Schwarzenbach found a chair and sat down. ‘There was a man with you not long ago –’

  ‘He’s gone, sweetheart.’

  ‘I know he’s gone,’ Schwarzenbach said and noticed, with some fascination, that his fingers were smeared with Grunwald’s blood.

  ‘I can’t give you any information,’ she said. She lay back across the mattress and fingered her own breasts, as though to excite him. He found the spectacle dreary.

  He took some money from his pocket and threw it on the floor.

  ‘Tell me what you know about him.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ she said, and made no move to pick up the banknotes. ‘He’s a pathetic wretch whose life has been ruined by the concentration camps –’

  ‘I’m not interested in the past,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘Did he tell where he was living? Did he tell you anything about his future plans?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She shook her head and stared at him. ‘Even if I knew anything, I doubt if I’d tell you.’

  Schwarzenbach shifted his feet on the bare floorboards. He was in no mood to be buggered around by a whore. If she knew anything, if Grunwald had mentioned anything about his whereabouts, he was determined to find out. He looked again at the blood on his fingers: it was already dry. It was dry and sticky and the sight of it contributed to his frustration. Grunwald had eluded him: the little Jew was free, somewhere in the city, moving somewhere now across the darkness.

  ‘If you know anything, I suggest you tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Why should I? If you want him, you’d better find him.’

  ‘I said that you better tell me anything you know.’

  ‘Look, I don’t like being imposed upon. I don’t like men who get me out of bed in the middle of the night for no reason at all. What do you want him for anyway? He hasn’t done any harm –’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I love your manners. You must have gone to all the right schools.’

  ‘Shut up. I’m not interested in your opinions.’ Schwarzenbach looked round the room. If the whore knew nothing, he was wasting his time. But Berlin was a large city with a thousand secret places and he could spend too much time looking for the Jew. He got up from his chair and walked around the room.

  ‘Look, I don’t like this,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you leave? You know where the door is, don’t you?’

  Schwarzenbach stood over the mattress, looking down at her. She covered her breasts with the nightdress and tried to sit up. He placed his foot on her body and pinned her down.

  ‘You better tell me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t like to think you’re keeping something back from me.’

  ‘You’re hurting me.’ She tried to struggle and he increased the pressure of his foot.

  ‘I can do better than this,’ he said. ‘I’m not even trying.’

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she said again and placed her hands on his foot, attempting to shift it.

  He laughed, pushing his foot hard into her belly until her eyes had begun to water. And then he released the pressure and stepped back from the mattress.

  ‘What did he tell you? What did he say?’

  ‘He told me nothing,’ she answered. ‘What do you expect? It was just a casual encounter, that’s all. Do you think he fed me his whole bloody life-story? You’re mad.’

  Schwarzenbach wasn’t satisfied: ‘You’re lying to me.’

  She sat up on the mattress, her arms around her knees, an expression of fear on her face. He looked at her distastefully: in the old days such anti-social elements were sent to corrective camps.

  ‘I’ll give you a second to reconsider.’

  ‘There’s nothing to reconsider,’ she said. ‘Christ, I’ve had enough of this. If you don’t leave now, I’ll call the police.’

  ‘The police?’ Schwarzenbach laughed: ‘What makes you think the police will come?’

  She was standing now, looking at him desperately: ‘Please believe me. I can’t tell you anything.’

  He went towards her and caught her by the hair. He twisted her neck backwards and then pulled her body towards him. With his free hand he struck her twice across the mouth and then, releasing her, threw her on to the mattress. Her lip was cut: a single line of thin blood ran across her chin.

  ‘You’re insane,’ she said. ‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t know anything!’

  He knelt beside her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He touched the blood with the tips of his fingers: it glistened in the dim reflection of the electric light. He twisted his hand in her hair, coiling strands around his fingers.

  ‘He must have said something to you. He was here for more than two hours. What did you talk about?’

  She turned her face away from him. ‘We chattered. We didn’t really talk of anything important.’

  He stared at her a moment. Under the chipped makeup he could see the thin veins that carried life around her body: they were so frail, so simply destroyed. He gazed at his own hands and then, swinging the right arm in a short arc, struck her hard across the mouth with his fist. She cried out, twisting her body away from him.

  ‘You can do much better than you’ve done so far,’ he said. ‘You’d better think hard because I don’t have much time to waste on you.’

  ‘My front tooth. I think you’ve broken it.’ She held her hands to her mouth to stop the flow of blood.

  ‘You can get another one,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Think. Think hard.’

  She lay back, defeated, closing her eyes. ‘All right. He said something about …’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Munich.’

  ‘Munich?’

  She sat up and looked at him hopefully: ‘That’s right. He wanted desperately to go back to Munich.’

  ‘You’re lying. Why should he want to go to Munich?’

  ‘That’s what he said. Munich. To see if any of his relatives were still alive.’

  Schwarzenbach clenched his hands together. It sounded wildly improbable. Why should Grunwald want to go back there?

  ‘You’re still lying,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Seriously. It’s the truth. He asked if I could help him get back to Munich.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I gave him the address of a man who sometimes drives a truck down there and told him that he could fix himself up with a lift.’

  ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

  She was examining the blood on her hands, wiping her fingers in the folds of her nightdress. ‘I swear it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place? You could ha
ve spared yourself some trouble.’ Schwarzenbach stood up. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and stood in the centre of the room, looking down at her. ‘What’s the name of this man?’

  ‘Arnold Neurer. He has a small garage in an alley that runs off the Rosenheimer Strasse.’

  Schwarzenbach raised one hand to his lips in a gesture of silence. ‘We’ve never met. Do you understand that? If I discover that you tell anyone about our little talk, I’ll come back.’

  The cellar was flooded: on the surface of the water floated various items of debris that Grunwald peered at through the darkness, as if in the hope that he might find a dry place to lie down in. His neck ached and there was a painfully hard sensation in his throat. He sat down on the steps: water dripped from a place above, running down the damp walls. Closing his eyes, he thought: I almost died. Schwarzenbach almost killed me. To be close to death was like falling into a violent sleep, like dropping endlessly into a place where there was neither light nor warmth nor any kind of sensation. Schwarzenbach almost killed me. Did I want to die?

  On the bottom step he reached out and cupped his hand in the water and splashed his face. There was a taste of staleness on his lips and his tongue felt swollen and immense, a foreign object in his mouth. His chest burned, as if heart and lungs had been held and squeezed by a pair of strong hands, and for a moment he imagined that he was bleeding inside. He lay back across the steps and listened to the constant drip of water, trying to recover his strength.

  What now? He could go to the authorities and tell them what had happened: piece by piece they would drag his story out of him, stage by stage they would reconstruct the events of his history. He rested his face on the damp concrete. Suddenly he was cold, shivering all over, his body trapped in a cold circuit. He hadn’t been so cold since the journey back from Poland: the crowded train that stank of horse dung, the prisoners dead and dying, the icy black Polish sky split by the fire of machine-guns.

  The journey back from Poland into the disintegrating remains of the Reich was a trip to nowhere. Nobody would speak to Grunwald: a woman, her hair in rags, an object that looked like a baby clutched against her breasts, spat at him. He felt sad and aloof, wounded by his own pity, betrayed. Did human life mean so much to him? It must have done: it must have meant more to him than anything else. He wiped the warm saliva from his face with his sleeve and looked out of the truck at the dead Polish landscape: fractured here and there by shells and bombs, carrying burned-out farmhouses as if they were the symptoms of some corrosive disease, it had the appearance of another planet. It was hostile – and yet it could not be worse than the train.

  How much did these prisoners know about him? How much was just rumour or gossip or suspicion? He looked different from them, he looked cleaner and healthier, his uniform was neater and untorn: but how much did they know about him? At the next siding where the train stopped, he waited until the guards had unbolted the sliding doors of the truck and he took his chance: he slipped out of the truck and down the embankment into a field. Somewhere someone fired a rifle: whether it was aimed at him he could not tell. He ran through fields, field after field, until he came to a wood. He lay down in the cold bracken under a bare tree and realized that for the first time in years he was free: he was free – in a sense.

  He listened to the constant drip of water. Raising his head from the steps he looked around the darkened cellar. What now? How could he stay in Berlin now? The very question restricted his choice of movement. He could go anywhere, and yet there was nowhere he could think of: except Munich. The prospect pained him. He was afraid, – both of staying in Berlin and of going to Munich. He had heard it said that Munich had suffered damage in the war: the Ostbahnhof had been destroyed, that the Frauenkirche, the Peterskirche and the Rathaus had been directly hit by bombs, he had heard that most of the city centre had been annihilated. But did these facts mean anything to him? There were two Munichs: the one in which he had lived and worked until the beginning of the chaos and the other – flattened by Allied bombs and occupied now by the Americans. Between the two – between the memories of the Englischer Garten and the Maximilianstrasse, the recollections of Schwabing and afternoons on the Sonnenstrasse, and the thought that all of this had been crippled and killed – there was nothing.

  He stared at the dirty water and the floating objects in front of him and it seemed to him that the past was a desperate animal he could not bring himself to unchain.

  He knew then that he could not go to the authorities.

  A light was burning in the workshop. Schwarzenbach stopped outside the half-open door and looked inside. A truck, partly covered by tarpaulin, stood against the wall and the hood had been lifted off. A man was examining the engine, his body bent over the side. In one hand he held a torch, in the other a spanner.

  Schwarzenbach pushed the door open and stepped inside. The man looked up: he was about fifty, his face smeared with engine grease. He switched off the torch and rubbed his hands on the sides of his trousers.

  ‘I’m looking for Neurer,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘Which Neurer?’ the man asked.

  ‘Arnold.’ Schwarzenbach looked round the workshop. Tools of various descriptions hung neatly from hooks on the wall, and there were cans of paint, a blowtorch, several wooden crates.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ the man asked.

  ‘You’re Arnold Neurer?’

  The man shifted the spanner from one hand to the other. ‘What do you want?’

  Schwarzenbach said, ‘I won’t take up too much of your time.’

  The man shrugged: ‘I’ve got a run to make in the morning, and if I can’t get this bloody engine fixed –’

  ‘I won’t keep you.’ Schwarzenbach sat down on one of the crates. ‘I’m looking for someone.’

  The man continued to wipe his hands. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘He might have come to see you,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘Why should he want to see me?’ Neurer looked suspicious now, as if uncertain about Schwarzenbach’s purpose.

  ‘He might ask you to take him to Munich.’

  Neurer smiled for the first time. ‘That’s not my line of country. I don’t carry human cargo. It’s not worth the effort.’

  Schwarzenbach frowned. ‘The information I have is different.’

  ‘I don’t know where you get your information from,’ Neurer said. ‘But you must have picked it up wrongly. I carry supplies. That’s all I ever take.’

  ‘What supplies?’

  ‘That depends,’ Neurer leaned against the truck and took a cigarette butt from his overalls. He struck a match on the cab door. ‘Sometimes it’s medical supplies. Sometimes it’s spare parts of machinery. It depends. Take tomorrow morning, if you like. I pick up some medical stuff and I run it down to Stuttgart first, then to Munich, and I come back empty.’

  ‘I’m not from the police,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘You don’t have to lie to me.’

  ‘Who’s lying?’ Neurer weighed the spanner in the palm of his hand.

  ‘I was reliably informed that you sometimes carried people.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I was told by a woman.’ Schwarzenbach paused, and realized that he had not asked the woman’s name.

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘She lives in the Barbarossa Strasse.’ Schwarzenbach watched for Neurer’s reaction, but the man’s face did not alter.

  ‘Does she? And she said I sometimes took passengers along, did she?’

  Schwarzenbach felt curiously uneasy: had the woman lied to him after all?

  Neurer stepped on the cigarette, swivelling his foot round until he had crushed it. ‘What’s the name of this person you’re looking for?’

  ‘Grunwald.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Neurer said.

  ‘I think he’ll come to see you,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘And if he does, I want to know about it.’

  ‘I told you – I don’t carry passengers
.’ Neurer looked suddenly annoyed. ‘It’s not worth it. Suppose I took someone along, and he didn’t have the proper papers, and suppose I got stopped at a checkpoint somewhere – that would land me in the shit, now wouldn’t it?’

  Schwarzenbach said nothing: he knew instinctively that the man was lying to protect himself. Neurer picked up his torch and switched it on.

  ‘Excuse me, I’ve got this bloody engine to attend to,’ he said.

  Schwarzenbach rose from the crate. Taking some money from his pocket, he pressed it into the man’s hand.

  ‘What’s this?’ Neurer asked.

  ‘For your trouble,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘Have you got a pencil?’

  Neurer indicated a shelf where there were several blunt pencils in an old tobacco tin. Schwarzenbach wrote down his telephone number on the nearest piece of paper he could find – an old garage bill – and he handed it to Neurer.

  ‘If Grunwald comes here to ask for your help, I want to know about it. Do you understand that? Have I made myself clear?’

  Neurer stuffed the paper into the top pocket of his overalls.

  ‘I know what you want,’ he said.

  The door at the rear of the workshop was opened, and a boy of about fifteen came in, carrying a mug of what looked like coffee.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

  Neurer looked at him in surprise, as if the question were meaningless. ‘My son. Why?’

  Schwarzenbach shrugged and watched as the boy handed the mug to his father.

  ‘It’s time you stopped for a break,’ the boy said, and turned to look at Schwarzenbach. Schwarzenbach hesitated a moment, as though he were about to say something else, and then he moved towards the door.

  At the door he stopped and looked round. Both Neurer and his son were staring at him blankly.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Neurer,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘You know where to find me.’

  He went out into the alley, and turned his coat up against the cold. There was something about Neurer that disturbed him but he could not isolate whatever it was: the man behaved suspiciously, he was sullen, indifferent – and yet whatever it was that irked Schwarzenbach, he knew it was none of these things. It was something else altogether: it was as if Neurer were part of some silent conspiracy against him, as if Neurer knew something he would never reveal no matter how much money he was paid. Going down the Rosenheimer Strasse, Schwarzenbach tried to shrug this odd sensation aside but it persisted, nagging him like an ache that he could not quite locate.