Hamperl’s behaviour was a piece of crude theatre that seemed intended to make us feel uncomfortable. In a way I didn’t blame him for this at all. The Nazis were past masters at making others feel uncomfortable. Doubtless, the Professor was just paying us back, in kind. A fart from a dead Nazi was as eloquent a comment on the German presence in Czechoslovakia as I was ever likely to hear, or indeed smell. But Kahlo winced noticeably, and then bit his lip as he tried, vainly, to steady his nerves.
Hamperl collected a long sharp curette off a neatly prepared instrument table and held it at arm’s length, like a conductor’s baton. The light from the abbey-sized windows caught the flat of the curette and it glittered like a bolt of lightning. Instinctively Kahlo turned away, and noting his discomfort at the symphony of destruction he was about to begin, Hamperl grinned wolfishly, exchanged a meaningful look with Doctor Honek, and said:
‘There’s one thing you can say about the dead, my dear fellow. They have an extraordinary ability to deal with pain. Any pain. No matter how bad it might seem to you. Believe me, this poor fellow won’t feel a thing as I seem to do my absolute worst. Much worse than perhaps you have ever seen inflicted on any human being before. However, do try not to let your imagination run away with you. The most terrible thing that could happen to this man happened several hours before he arrived in this hospital.’
Kahlo shook his head and swallowed loudly, which sounded as if a very large frog had taken up residence in his throat.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said to me. ‘I just can’t do this. I really can’t.’
He covered his mouth, and left the room quickly.
‘Poor fellow,’ said Hamperl. ‘But probably it’s just as well he’s gone. We need all our attention for the task that now lies before us.’
‘Surely, that was your intention,’ I said. ‘To scare him off.’
‘Not at all, Commissar. You heard me try to reassure him, didn’t you? However, it’s not everyone who can witness this procedure with a cool head. Are you sure about yourself?’
‘Oh, I have no feelings at all, Professor Hamperl. None whatsoever. I’m like that curette in your hand. Cold and hard. And best handled with extreme care. Just one slip would be most unfortunate. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Quite clear, Commissar.’
Hamperl threw back the remainder of the sheet covering Kuttner’s body and went quickly to work. Having photographed the two entry wounds on the dead man’s chest, and then probed them both, first with his finger and then with a length of dowel, he made a Y-shaped incision from Kuttner’s porcelain-pale shoulders, across his hairless chest and down to the pubic area which, unusually, appeared to have been shaved, and recently, too.
Hamperl remarked upon this.
‘Well, you don’t see that every day. Not even in my profession. I wonder why he should have done this.’
‘I’ve a good idea,’ I said. ‘But it will wait.’
Hamperl nodded. Then he was cutting through subcutaneous fat and muscle, and the speed of his scalpel was something to behold, with the flesh swiftly shrugged off the bone like the skin of a very large snake; and within only a few minutes there was just a mess of intestines and prime rib that might have been the envy of any good Berlin butcher. Especially in wartime.
‘There appears to be something lodged at the top of the oropharynx,’ said Hamperl. He looked up at me and added, ‘That’s the part of the throat just behind the mouth.’
He collected a small white object, flicked it off his fingers’ ends into a kidney dish and then held it up for our joint inspection.
‘It appears to be a troche, perhaps,’ he said. And then: ‘No, this was not designed to dissolve in the throat, but in the stomach. It has hardly dissolved at all. A pilule. A tablet, perhaps.’
‘He was taking Veronal,’ I said. ‘A barbiturate.’
‘Is that so?’ Hamperl’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. ‘Well then, that is probably what it is. Only it could not have affected him very much in the condition you see it in now. Although this would be quite consistent with a case of overdose where someone has swallowed several pills all at once. Doctor Honek said there was initially some suspicion that this might have been a barbiturate overdose.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Until I found the bullet wounds.’
‘Quite.’
At an almost imperceptible nod from Professor Hamperl, Doctor Honek stepped forward with a set of surgical bolt cutters and began to cut the ribs, which, under the steel jaws, snapped loudly like thick twigs, one by one, in order to expose the chest cavity. But there was one he hesitated to cut.
‘One of these ribs looks damaged, don’t you think so, sir?’ asked Honek.
Hamperl bent down to take a closer look. ‘Chipped,’ he said. ‘Like a tooth. But not from a Veronal pilule. Most probably from a bullet.’
