The Pathological Institute was at the Charité Hospital just across the canal from Lehrter Station. With its red-brick exterior, its Alpine-style wooden loggias, its clock and distinctive corner tower, the oldest teaching hospital in the city was much the same as it had always been. Inside, however, things were different. Within the main administrative building, the portraits of more than a few of the Charité’s famous physicians and scientists had been removed. The Jews were Germany’s misfortune after all. These were the only spaces available in the hospital and if they could have put some beds on the walls they would have done it. The wards and corridors – even the landings outside the elevators – were full of men who had been maimed or injured on the front.
Meanwhile the morgue in the Institute was full to over-flowing with dead soldiers and the still unidentified civilian victims of RAF bombings and blackout accidents. Not that their problems were over. The Army Information Centre wasn’t always very efficient in notifying the families of those serving men who had died; and in many cases the Army felt that the responsibility fell on the Ministry of Health. But however the deaths were caused, the Ministry of Health believed responsibility for dealing with deaths in Berlin lay properly with the Ministry of the Interior, which, of course, was only too willing to leave such matters to the city authorities, who themselves were inclined to dump this role on the police. So, you might have said that the crisis at the morgue – and that’s exactly what it smelled like – was all my fault. Me and others like me.
It was, however, with the hope of taking advantage of this bureaucratic incompetence that I went there in search of Geert Vranken’s corpse. And I found what was left of it sharing a drawer in the cold room with a dead prostitute from Lichterfelde and a man from Wedding – most likely a suicide – who had been killed in a gas explosion. I had the mortuary attendant lay out the Dutchman’s remains on a slab that looked and smelt worse than it ought to have done, but with an extreme shortage of cleaners in the hospital – not to mention carbolic soap – the dead assumed less and less of the hospital’s dwindling resources.
‘Pity,’ grumbled the attendant.
‘What is?’
‘That you’re not from the State Labour Service so I can get rid of him.’
‘I didn’t know he was looking for a job.’
‘He was a foreign worker. So I’m waiting on the paperwork that will enable me to send his remains down to the incinerator.’
‘I’m from the Alex, like I said. I’m sure there are jobs there that could be done by dead men. My job, for example.’
For a moment the morgue attendant thought of smiling and then thought better of it.
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I said and took out the switchblade I had found on the ground under Nolli Station.
At the sight of the long blade in my hand, the attendant backed off nervously. ‘Here, what’s your game?’
‘It’s all right. I’m trying to establish if this knife matches the victim’s stab wounds.’
Relaxing a little, he nodded at Vranken’s remains. ‘Least of his problems I should have thought: Being stabbed.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But before a train ran him over—’
‘That would explain a lot.’
‘Someone stabbed him. Several times.’
‘Evidently not his lucky day.’
I slid the blade into one of the more obvious wounds in the dead man’s pale torso. ‘Before the war you used to get a proper lab report with photographs and descriptions so that you didn’t have to do this kind of thing.’
‘Before the war you used to get beer that tasted like beer.’ Remembering who and more particularly what I was, he added quickly, ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with the beer now, of course.’
I didn’t say anything. I was glad he’d spoken out of turn. It meant I could probably avoid filling out the morgue’s paperwork – Commissioner Lüdtke had told me to drop the case, after all – as a quid pro quo for ignoring the attendant’s ‘unpatriotic’ remark about German beer. Besides I was paying nearly all of my attention to the knife in the stab wound. I couldn’t say for sure that it was the murder weapon, but it could have been. It was long enough and sharp enough, with just one edge and a blunter upper side that matched the wound almost perfectly.
I pulled the blade out and looked for something to wipe it with. Being a fussy type, I’m particular about the switchblades I keep in my coat pocket. And I figured I’d already encountered enough germs and bacteria just walking through the hospital without squirrelling away a private cache of my own.
‘Got anything to wipe this with?’
‘Here,’ he said, and taking it from me he wiped it with the corner of his lab coat.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I could see that he was anxious to get rid of me and when I suggested that there was probably no need to bother with the paperwork, he agreed with alacrity.
‘I don’t think he’ll tell, do you?’ said the attendant. ‘Besides, I don’t have a pen that works.’
