A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) (4 page)

Friday, March 5th 1943

A couple of days later the doctor gave me some more aspirin, advised me to get plenty of fresh air to help with my breathing, and told me I could go home. Berlin was rightly famous for its air, but it wasn’t always so fresh – not since the Nazis had taken over.

Coincidentally, it was the same day the authorities told the Jews still held in the welfare office that they could go home too. I couldn’t believe it when I heard, and I imagine that the men and women who were released could believe it even less than me. The authorities had gone so far as to track down some Jews who’d already been deported and had them sent back to Berlin and released, like the others.

What was happening here? What was in the minds of the government? Was it possible that after the huge defeat at Stalingrad the Nazis were losing their grip? Or had they really listened to the protests of a thousand determined German women? It was hard to tell, but it seemed the only possible conclusion. There were ten thousand Jews who had been arrested on February 27th, and of these, less than two thousand had gone to Rosenstrasse. Some had been remanded to the
Clou concert hall on Mauerstrasse, others to the stables of a barracks on Rathenower Strasse, and still more to a synagogue on Levetzowstrasse in Moabit. But it was only at the Rosenstrasse, where Jews married to Germans were detained, that a protest had taken place, and it was only there that any Jews were released. The way I heard it later, all of the Jews from the other sites were deported to the East. But if the protest really had worked, it begged the question, what might have been achieved if mass protests had taken place before? It was a sobering thought that the first organized opposition to the Nazis in ten years had probably succeeded.

That was one sobering thought. Another was that if I hadn’t helped Franz Meyer he would certainly have stayed in the welfare office in Rosenstrasse and his wife and sisters would probably have remained with the rest of the women outside, in which case all of them would still live. Homeless, perhaps. But alive, yes, that was quite conceivable. There’s no amount of aspirin you can swallow that will take away that kind of toothache.

I left the state hospital but I didn’t go home. At least not right away. I took a Ringbahn train north-west, to Gesundbrunnen. To begin work again.

The Jewish Hospital in Wedding was about six or seven modern buildings on the corner of Schulstrasse and Exerzierstrasse, and next to St George’s Hospital. As surprising as the fact that such a thing as a Jewish hospital even existed in Berlin was the discovery that the place was modern, relatively well equipped, and full of doctors, nurses and patients. Since all of them were Jews, the place was also guarded by a small detachment of SS. Almost as soon as I identified myself at the front desk I discovered that the hospital even
had its own branch of Gestapo, one of whose officers was summoned at the same time as the hospital director, Dr Walter Lustig.

Lustig arrived first, and it turned out we’d met several times before: a hard-arsed Silesian – they always make the most unpleasant Prussians – Lustig had been head of the medical department in the Police Praesidium at the Alex, and we’d always disliked each other. I disliked him because I don’t much care for pompous men with the bearing if not the height of a senior Prussian officer; he probably thought I disliked him because he was a Jew. But in truth, seeing him at the hospital was the first time I realized he was Jewish – the yellow star on his white coat left me in no doubt about that. He disliked me because he was the type who seemed to dislike nearly everyone who was in a subordinate position to him or ill-educated by his elevated academic standards. At the Alex we’d called him Doctor Doctor because he had university degrees in both philosophy and medicine, and never failed to remind people of this distinction.

Now, he clicked his heels and bowed stiffly as if he’d just marched off the parade ground at the Prussian military academy.

‘Herr Gunther,’ he said. ‘After all these long years we meet again. To what do we owe this dubious pleasure?’

It certainly didn’t seem as if his new lower status as a member of a pariah race had affected his attitude in any way. I could almost see the wax on the eagle with which he’d decorated his top lip. I hadn’t forgotten his pomposity, but it seemed I had forgotten his breath, which required a good half-metre at least for a man with a heavy cold to feel properly safe in his company.

‘Good to see you, too, Doctor Lustig. So this is where you’ve
been keeping yourself. I always wondered what happened to you.’

‘I can’t imagine it kept you awake at night.’

‘No. Not in the least. These days I sleep like a dog without dreams. All the same I’m pleased to see you well.’ I glanced around. There were some Hebraic-looking design details on the wall but no sign of the kind of angular, astronomical artwork the Nazis were fond of adding to anything owned or used by Jews. ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Doc.’

Lustig bowed again, and then glanced ostentatiously at his pocket watch. ‘Yes, yes, but you know, tempis fugit.’

‘You have a patient, Franz Meyer, who was brought here on Monday night or perhaps the early hours of Tuesday morning. He’s the key witness in a war-crimes inquiry I’m carrying out for the Wehrmacht. I’d like to see him, if I may.’

‘You’re no longer with the police?’

‘No sir.’ I handed him my business card.

‘Then it seems we have something in common. Whoever would have thought such a thing?’

‘Life springs all sorts of surprises on the living.’

‘That’s especially true in here, Herr Gunther. Address?’

‘Mine, or Herr Meyer’s?’

‘Herr Meyer’s, of course.’

‘Apartment three, ten Lützowerstrasse, Berlin Charlottenburg.’

Curtly, Lustig repeated the name and address to the attractive nurse now accompanying him. Immediately and without being told, she went into the office behind the front desk and searched a large filing cabinet for the patient’s notes. Somehow I sensed Lustig was used to always having the first plate at dinner.

He was already snapping his fat fingers at her. ‘Come on, come on, I haven’t got all day.’

‘I can see you’re as busy as ever, Herr Doctor,’ I said as the nurse returned to his side and handed over the file.

‘There is some sanctuary in that, at least,’ he murmured, glancing over the notes. ‘Yes, I remember him now, poor fellow. Half his head is missing. How he’s still alive is beyond my medical understanding. He’s been in a coma since he got here. Do you still wish to see him? Perhaps wasting time is an institutional habit in the War Crimes Bureau just as much as it was in Kripo?’

‘You know, I’d like to see him. I just want to check he’s not as scared of you as she is, doc.’ I smiled at his nurse. In my experience nurses – even the pretty ones – are always worth a smile.

‘Very well.’ Lustig uttered a weary sigh that was part groan and walked quickly along the corridor. ‘Come along, Herr Gunther,’ he yelled, ‘you must pursue me, you must pursue me. We need to hurry if we are to find Herr Meyer capable of uttering the one all-important word that may provide the vital assistance for your inquiry. Evidently my own word counts for very little these days.’

A few seconds later we met a man with a largish scar under his ill-tempered mouth that looked like a third lip.

‘And this is why that is,’ added the doctor. ‘Criminal Commissar Dobberke. Dobberke is head of the Gestapo office in this hospital. A very important position that ensures our enduring safety and loyal service to the elected government.’

Lustig handed the Gestapo man my card.

‘Dobberke, this is Herr Gunther, formerly of the Alex and now with the Bureau of War Crimes in the Wehrmacht’s legal
department. He wishes to see if one of our patients is capable of providing the vital testimony that will change the course of military jurisprudence.’

Quickly I walked after Lustig; so did Dobberke. After several days in bed, I figured such violent exercise could only do me good.

We went into a ward full of men in various states of ill health. It hardly seemed necessary, but all of these patients wore a yellow star on their pyjamas and dressing gowns. They looked undernourished, but that was hardly unusual by Berlin standards. There wasn’t one of us in the city – Jew or German – who couldn’t have used a square meal. Some were smoking, some were talking, and some were playing chess. None of them paid us much regard.

Meyer was behind a screen, in the last bed under a tall window with a view of a fine lawn and a circular ornamental pond. Not that he seemed likely to avail himself of the view: his eyes were closed and there was a bandage around a no longer completely round head, which reminded me of a partly deflated football. But even badly injured, he was still startlingly handsome, like some ruined marble Greek statue on the Pergamon altar.

Lustig went through the motions, checking the unconscious man’s pulse and taking his temperature with one eye on the nurse, and only glancing cursorily at his chart before tutting loudly and shaking his head. It was the kind of bedside manner that would have embarrassed Victor Frankenstein.

‘I thought so,’ he said, firmly. ‘A vegetable. That’s my prognosis.’ He smiled brightly. ‘But go ahead, Herr Gunther. Be my guest. You may question this patient for as long as you see fit. Just don’t expect any answers.’ He laughed. ‘Especially with Commissar Dobberke at your side.’

And then he was gone, leaving me alone with Dobberke.

‘That was a touching reunion.’ By way of explanation I added: ‘Formerly he and I were colleagues at the Police Praesidium.’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t say time or circumstances have mellowed him any.’

‘He’s not such a bad fellow,’ Dobberke said, generously. ‘For a Jew, I mean. But for him this place would never keep going.’

I sat down on the edge of Franz Meyer’s bed and sighed.

‘I don’t see this fellow talking to anyone soon, except Saint Peter,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen a man with a head injury like that since 1918. It’s like someone took a hammer to a coconut.’

‘That’s quite a lump you have on your own head,’ said Dobberke.

I touched my head, self-consciously. ‘I’m all right.’ I shrugged. ‘Why
does
it keep going? The hospital?’

‘It’s a garbage can for misfits,’ he said. ‘A collection camp. You see, the Jews here are an odd lot. They’re orphans of uncertain parentage, some collaborators, a few pet Jews who are under the protection of one bigwig or another, several attempted suicides—’

Dobberke caught the look of surprise on my face and shrugged.

‘Yes, suicides,’ he said. ‘Well, you can’t make someone who’s half dead walk on and off a deportation train, can you? That’s just more trouble than it’s worth. So they send those yids here, nurse them back to health and then, when they’re well again, put them on the next train East. That’s what’ll happen to this poor bastard if ever he comes round.’

‘So not everyone in here is actually sick?’

‘Lord, no.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I expect they’ll close it down soon enough. Word is that Kaltenbrunner has his eye on owning this hospital.’

‘That ought to come in handy. Nice place like this? Make a nice suite of offices.’

Following the death of my old boss, Reinhard Heydrich, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the new head of the RSHA, but quite what he wanted with his own Jewish hospital was anyone’s guess. His own drying-out clinic, perhaps, but I managed to keep that particular thought to myself. Werner Sachse’s advice to watch my mouth had been wearing red intelligence stripes; after Stalingrad everyone – but more especially Berliners, like me, for whom black humour was a religious calling – was probably well advised to keep a zip on the lip.

‘Will he get it? Kaltenbrunner?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

Because I wanted to look at anything other than poor Franz Meyer’s badly damaged head, I went to the window, which was when I noticed the flower arrangement on his bedside table.

‘That’s interesting,’ I said, looking at the card next to the vase, which was unsigned.

‘What is?’

‘The daffodils,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come out of hospital and no one sent me any flowers. And yet this fellow has fresh flowers, and from Theodor Hübner’s shop on Prinzenstrasse no less.’

‘So?’

‘In Kreuzberg.’

‘I still don’t—’

‘It used to be florist’s by royal appointment. Still is for all I know. Which means they’re expensive. Very expensive.’ I frowned. ‘What I mean to say is, I doubt there are many people in here who get fresh flowers from Hübner’s. In here or anywhere else for that matter.’

Dobberke shrugged. ‘His family must have sent them. The Jews still have plenty of money hidden under their mattresses. Everyone knows that. I was out East, in Riga, and you should have seen what these bastards had in their underwear. Gold, silver, diamonds, you name it.’

I smiled patiently, avoiding the obvious question of exactly how it was that Dobberke came to be looking for valuables in someone else’s underwear.

‘Meyer’s family were Germans,’ I said. ‘And besides, they’re all dead. Killed by the same bomb that gave him the centre parting in his hair. No, it must have been someone else who sent these flowers. Someone German, someone with money and taste. Someone who only has the best.’

‘Well, he’s not saying who they’re from,’ observed Dobberke.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not saying anything, is he? Doctor Lustig was right about that, at least.’

‘I could look into it if you thought it was important. Perhaps one of the nurses could tell you who sent them.’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Forget about it. It’s an old habit of mine, being a detective. Some people collect stamps, others like postcards or autographs; me I collect trivial questions. Why this, why that? Of course any fool can start a collection like that, and it goes without saying that it’s the answers to the questions that are really valuable, because the answers are a lot harder to track down.’

I took another long hard look at Franz Meyer and realized it could just as easily have been me lying in that bed with half a head, and for the first time in a long time I suppose I felt lucky. I don’t know what else you call it when an RAF bomb kills four, maims one, and leaves you with nothing more than a bump on the head. But just the idea of me being
lucky again made me smile. Perhaps I’d turned some sort of a corner in my life. It was that and maybe also the apparent success of the women’s protest in Rosenstrasse and the other good luck I’d had not to have been part of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad.