“An ex-colleague, a bull at the Alex, showed me the body in the morgue and gave me the file. That’s all. I used to work Homicide, see? They’d run out of ideas on who the guy might be and figured I might offer a new perspective.”
Goerz looked at his driver and laughed. “Shall I tell you what I think?” he said. “I think you used to be a cop. And I think you still are. A secret cop. Gestapo. I’ve never seen anyone who looked less like a hotel employee than you do, my friend. I’ll bet that’s just a cover story so you can go around spying on people. And more important, on us.”
“It’s the truth, I tell you. Look, I know you didn’t kill Deutsch. It was an accident. That much was clear from the autopsy. You see, he couldn’t have drowned in the canal, because his lungs were full of seawater. That’s what made the polenta suspicious in the first place.”
“There was an autopsy?” It was the square-looking man—the living sculpture—who spoke. “You mean they cut him open?”
“Of course there was an autopsy, you dumb schmuck. That’s the law. Where do you think this is? The Belgian Congo? When a body’s found, a body has to be investigated. Surgically and circumstantially.”
“But when they finished with him, they’d have given him a proper burial, right?”
I groaned with pain and shook my head. “Burials are for Otto Normals,” I said. “Not unidentified bodies. There’ s been no identification. Not formally. No one claimed him, see? I’m only investigating it because the Ami woman wanted to find out about the guy. The polenta doesn’t know shit about him. As far as I know, the body went to the Charité Hospital. To the anatomy class. The kids with the forceps and the lancets got to play with him.”
“You mean medical students?”
“I don’t mean students of political economy, you stupid bastard. Of course medical students.”
I was beginning to see that this was a sensitive subject to the man with the jaw that looked as if it had been cut from a piece of marble. But with my tongue loosened from the pain I was feeling from the heat of the stove, I kept on talking regardless. “By now they’ll have sliced him open and used his dick to make an oxtail soup. His skull’s probably an ashtray on some student’s desk. What do you care, Hermann? You’re the people who dumped the poor bastard in the canal like a pail of restaurant garbage.”
The square-looking man with the marble chin shook his head grimly. “I thought at least he’d get a decent burial.”
“I told you, decent burials are for citizens. Not floaters. It seems to me that the only person who’s tried to treat Isaac Deutsch with any respect is my client.” I tried to twist away from the stove, but it was no good. I was beginning to feel like Jan Hus.
“Your client.” Erich Goerz’s voice was full of contempt, like some grand inquisitor. He started to beat me again. The dog lead whistled through the air like a flail. I felt like a dusty rug at the Adlon. “You’re going. To tell us. Exactly. Who the hell. You are . . .”
“That’s enough,” said the square-looking man with the marble chin.
I didn’t see what happened next. I was too busy pressing my chin into my chest and closing my eyes, trying to ride out the pain of the beating. All I know is that suddenly the beating stopped and Goerz hit the floor in front of me with blood pouring from the side of his mouth. I looked up just in time to see Marble Jaw neatly sidestep a big haymaker from Goerz’s driver before lifting him off his toes with a fist that came flying up from the basement like an express elevator. The driver went down like a tower of wooden blocks, which was as satisfying to me as if I had toppled him myself.
Marble Jaw took a breath and then started to untie me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For what I said about your nephew, Isaac.” I pulled the ropes away and wrestled my back clear of the stove. “I’m right, aren’t I? You are Isaac’s uncle Joey?”
He nodded and helped me to stand. “The back of your coat’s scorched through,” he said. “I can’t see what your back looks like, but it can’t be too bad. Otherwise we could probably smell it.”
“There’s a comforting thought. By the way, thanks. For helping me.” I put my arm around his huge shoulder and straightened painfully.
“He’s had that coming for a long time,” said Joey.
“I’m afraid all of what I said was true. But I’m sorry you had to hear about it like that.”
Joey Deutsch shook his head. “I suspected as much,” he said. “Goerz told me different, of course, but in my guts I suppose I knew different. I wanted to believe him, for Isaac’s sake. I guess I had to hear it from someone else for it sink in.”
Erich Goerz rolled slowly onto his stomach and groaned.
“That’s quite an uppercut you’ve got on you, Joey,” I said.
“Come on. I’ll get you home.” He hesitated. “Can you stand by yourself?”
“Yes.”
Joey bent down over the unconscious driver and retrieved a set of car keys from the man’s waistcoat pocket. “We’ll take Erich’s car,” he said. “Just in case these two bastards come after us.”
Goerz groaned again and contracted, slowly, into a fetal position. For a brief second I thought he might be having some sort of convulsion until I remembered what Blask, the site foreman, had told me about the gun strapped to Goerz’s ankle. Only it wasn’t strapped to his ankle anymore. It was in his hand.
“Look out!” I yelled, and kicked Goerz in the head. I’d meant to kick his hand, but as I raised my foot I lost control and fell onto the floor again.
The pistol fired harmlessly, breaking a windowpane.
I crawled over to Goerz to look at him. I hardly wanted another man’s death on my conscience. He was unconscious, but fortunately for me, and more especially him, Erich Goerz was still breathing. I retrieved my ID card from the floor, where he had tossed it angrily a few minutes earlier, and picked up the pistol. It was a Bayard semiautomatic 6.35-millimeter.
“French cigarettes, French gun,” I said. “Makes sense, I suppose.” I made the gun safe and pointed it at the door. “Anyone else out there, do you think?” I asked Joey.
“You mean, like him? No, it was just these two, the three truck drivers, and, I’m sorry to say, me. After Isaac got killed, they took me on the payroll. As extra muscle, they said, but I guess it was just as much about ensuring that I kept my mouth shut.”
As Joey helped me walk to the door, I got a better look at him and saw a man who didn’t look much more Jewish than I did. The hair on the side of a head as big as a watermelon was gray, but on top it was blond, and as curly as an Astrakhan coat. The huge face was both florid and pasty, like old bacon. Small brown eyes sat on either side of a broken nose that was sharp and pointy. The eyebrows were almost invisible, as were the teeth in his gaping mouth. Somehow he put me in mind of a man-sized baby.
We went downstairs, and I recognized that we were in the Albert the Bear. There was no sign of a proprietor, and I didn’t ask. Outside, the fresh morning air helped revive me a little. I got into the passenger seat of the Hanomag and, almost destroying the gears, Deutsch quickly drove us away. He was a terrible driver and narrowly missed colliding with a water trough on the corner.
It turned out that he lived not so very far away from me in the south-eastern part of the city. We dumped what was left of the Hanomag in the car park of the cemetery on Baruther Strasse. Joey wanted to take me to a hospital, but I told him I thought I’d probably be all right.
“How about you?” I asked him.
“Me? I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about me, son.”
“I just cost you a job.”
Joey shook his head. “I shouldn’t ever have taken it.”
I lit us both a cigarette. “Feel up to talking about it?”
“How do you mean?”
“My Ami friend. The journalist. Noreen Charalambides. She’s the one writing about Isaac. I imagine she’d like to speak to you. To get your story and Isaac’s.”
Joey grunted without much enthusiasm for the idea.
“Given that he’s got no actual grave, it could be like a kind of memorial,” I said. “To his memory.”
While Joey considered this idea, he puffed at the cigarette. In his mallet-sized fist it looked more like a safety match.
“Not a bad idea at that,” he said finally. “Bring her around this evening. She can get the whole story. If she doesn’t mind slumming it.”
He gave me an address in Britz, near the meat-canning factory. I jotted it down on the inside of my cigarette pack.
“Does Erich Goerz know this address?” I asked.
“Nobody does. There’s just me that lives there now. If you can call it living. Since Isaac died I’ve let myself go a bit, you know? There doesn’t seem to be much point in looking after the place now that he’s gone. Not much point in anything at all, really.”
“I know what that’s like,” I said.
“Been a while since I had any visitors. Maybe I could tidy up a bit. Put things in order before—”
“Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said quietly. “No trouble at all.” He nodded resolutely. “Matter of fact, I should have done it a while ago.”
He walked away. I found a phone booth and telephoned the Adlon.
I told Noreen some of it but not all. The part about me spilling almost the whole story to Erich Goerz I didn’t tell her. The only consolation there was that I hadn’t mentioned the name of the hotel where she was staying.
She said she’d come right over.
22
I
OPENED THE DOOR WIDE, but not as wide as Noreen’s eyes. She stood there, wearing a red dress underneath her sable coat and looking at me with a mixture of shock and bewilderment, much as Lotte must have looked upon discovering she had arrived in time to find that young Werther had just succeeded in blowing his brains out. Assuming he had any brains.
“My God,” she whispered, touching my face. “What happened to you?”
“I just read a portion of Ossian,” I said. “Second-rate poetry always affects me this way.”
She pushed me gently aside and closed the door behind her.
“You should see me when I’m really affected by something good. Like Schiller. I’m bedridden for days.”
She shrugged off her coat and tossed it onto a chair.
“You might not want to do that,” I said. I was trying not to feel embarrassed about the place, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s been a while since that chair was properly deloused.”
“Do you have any iodine?”
“No, but I have a bottle of kummel. Matter of fact, I think I’ll have one myself.”
I went over to the sideboard to pour a couple of drinks. I didn’t ask if she wanted one. I’d seen her drink before.
While she waited, she glanced around. The living room had a sideboard, an armchair, and a folding table. There was a high bookcase built into the walls, and it was full of books, several of which I’d read. There were a stove and a small fireplace with an even smaller fire. There was also a bed, since the living room happened also to be the bedroom. Through an open doorway was a garbage area that was also the kitchen. On the other side of the frosted kitchen window was a security grille and a fire escape, just to make the mice feel safe. Next to the front door was the door to the bathroom, only the bath was hanging upside down on the ceiling, right above the lavatory, where a man sitting there might contemplate the inconvenience of taking a bath in front of the fire. The floor was linoleum throughout, with a small collection of stamp-sized rugs. Some people might have thought it a bit of a dump, but to me it was a palace or, to be more accurate, the meanest room in a palace, the one where the servants kept their junk.
“I’m waiting for my interior decorator to come back with a portrait of the Leader,” I said. “After that it should look nice and cozy.”
She took the drink I offered her and stared closely at my face. “That weal,” she said. “You should put something on it.”
I pulled her closer. “How about your mouth?”
“Do you have any Vaseline?”
“What’s that?”
“First-aid petroleum jelly.”
“Hey, listen, I’ll live. I was at the Battle of Amiens and I’m still here, and believe me, that takes some doing.”
She shrugged and pulled away. “Go ahead. Be tough. But I had the funny idea I care for you, which means I don’t like it that you’ve been whipped. If anyone’s going to whip you it ought to be me, only I’ll make sure I don’t leave any marks.”
“Thanks, I’ll bear it in mind. Anyway, it wasn’t a whip. It was a dog leash.”
“You didn’t mention a dog.”
“There wasn’t a dog. It’s my impression that Goerz would prefer to carry a whip, but people on the tram look at you a bit strangely when you go around with one of those in your hand. Even in Berlin.”
“Do you think he hits his Jewish workers with it?”
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised.”
I tossed back the kummel, held it on my tonsils for moment, and then let it roll, enjoying the warmth as it spread through my body. Meanwhile Noreen found some chamomile ointment and anointed my more obvious wounds with it. I think it made her feel better. I poured myself another kummel. Which made me feel better.
WE WALKED TO A TAXI RANK and took a cab to the address in Britz. South of another modern apartment building called the Horseshoe and next to the Grossmann Coburg canned-meat factory was a decayed archway that was the entrance to a series of courtyards and tenement buildings of the kind that might convince any architect that he was some kind of messiah come to save people from their squalor and poverty. Personally, I never minded a little squalor. To be honest, for a long time after the war I hardly noticed it.
Passing through another archway, we came upon a tatty sign for infrared health lamps painted onto the brickwork. That seemed a little optimistic, to say the least. We mounted a dark stairway that led up into the building’s tomblike interior. Somewhere a barrel organ was churning out a melancholy tune that matched our lowering spirits. A German tenement building could have sucked all the light out of the second coming.