The One From the Other (11 page)

I didn’t care if Vincenz von Starnberg spent twenty years in Landsberg or not. I didn’t care if they hanged him in his cell with weights tied to his ankles. I didn’t care if his father died of a broken heart. I didn’t care if Stumpff was inclined to give his old university comrade a character reference or not. But I rang the doorbell all the same, even though I had told myself I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to make a pitch for the sake of SS Sturmbannführer von Starnberg, or for his father the baron. No, not even for a thousand marks. But I didn’t mind making a pitch for the sake of the peach. Being considered as some kind of angel in the pale blue eyes of Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was something I could live with.

SIX

Three days later I received a certified check drawn against the baron’s personal account at Delbrück & Co. for one thousand deutschmarks. It had been a while since I’d made any real money of my own, and for a while I just left the check on my desk so I could keep my eye on it. From time to time I picked it up and read it again, and told myself I was really back in business. Feeling good about myself lasted for the whole of one hour.

The telephone rang. It was Dr. Bublitz at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. He told me that Kirsten was ill. After developing a fever her condition had worsened and she had been transferred to the city’s General Hospital, near Sendlinger-Tor-Platz.

I ran out of the office, jumped on a tram, then hurried across Nussbaum Gardens to the Women’s Clinic on Maistrasse. Half of it looked like a building site; the other half looked like a ruin. I walked through a gauntlet of cement mixers, around a redoubt of new bricks and timber, and up the stone stairs. Builder’s dust ground under the soles of my shoes like spilled sugar. Hammering echoed loudly in the hospital stairwell with monotonous force, as if some prehistoric woodpecker was making a hole in an even larger tree. Outside, a pair of jackhammers were finishing a battle for the last foxhole in Munich. And someone was drilling the teeth of a very long-suffering giant while someone else was sawing off the leg of his even more long-suffering wife. Water was splashing into the courtyard outside, as if in some subterranean cavern. A sick coal miner or injured steelworker would have appreciated the peace and quiet of that place, but for anyone else with eardrums, the Women’s Clinic sounded like hell with all the windows open.

Kirsten was in a small private room off the main ward. She was feverish and yellow. Her hair was matted against her head as if she had just washed it. Her eyes were closed and her breathing rapid and shallow. She looked extremely ill. The nurse with her was wearing a face mask. From what I could see of her face it looked like a good idea. A man in a white coat appeared at my elbow.

“Are you the next of kin?” he barked. He was stout, with a center part in his fair hair, rimless glasses, a Hindenburg-size mustache, a stiff collar you could have cut corns with, and a bow tie off a box of chocolates.

“I’m her husband,” I said. “Bernhard Gunther.”

“Husband?” He searched his notes. “Fräulein Handlöser is married? There’s no record of that here.”

“When her family doctor referred her to the Max Planck, he forgot about it,” I said. “Maybe we didn’t invite him to the wedding, I don’t know. These things happen. Look, can we forget all that? What’s wrong with her?”

“I’m afraid we can’t forget it, Herr Gunther,” said the doctor. “There are regulations to be considered. I can only discuss Fräulein Handlöser’s condition with her next of kin. Perhaps you have your wedding certificate with you?”

“Not with me, no,” I said, patiently. “But I’ll bring it with me next time I come here. How’s that?” I paused and endured the doctor’s indignant scrutiny for a moment or two. “There’s no one else but me,” I added. “No one else will be visiting her, I can assure you of that.” I waited. Still nothing. “And if all that leaves you uncomfortable then answer me this. If she’s unmarried, why is she still wearing a wedding ring?”

The doctor glanced around my shoulder. Upon seeing Kirsten’s wedding ring still on her finger, he searched his notes again as if there might be some clue as to the proper course of action to be taken. “Really, this is most irregular,” he said. “However, given her condition, I suppose I will have to take your word for it.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

His heels came together and he nodded curtly back at me. I was quickly getting the impression that he had obtained his medical degree at a hospital in Prussia, somewhere they gave out jackboots instead of stethoscopes. But in truth it was a common enough scene in Germany. German doctors have always regarded themselves as being as important as God. Indeed, it’s probably worse than that. God probably thinks he’s a German doctor.

“My name is Dr. Effner,” he said. “Your wife—Frau Gunther—she is extremely ill. Gravely ill. Not doing well. Not doing well at all, Herr Gunther. She was transferred here during the night. And we’re trying our best, sir. You may be assured of that. But it’s my opinion that you must prepare yourself, sir. Prepare yourself for the worst. She may not survive the night.” He spoke like a cannon, in short, fierce bursts of speech, as if he had learned his bedside manner in a Messerschmitt 109. “We will make her comfortable, of course. But everything that can be done, has been done. You understand?”

“Are you saying she might die?” I asked, when, at last, I was able to get a shot back at him.

“Yes, Herr Gunther,” he said. “I am saying that. She is critically ill as you can see for yourself.”

“What on earth’s wrong with her?” I asked. “I mean, I saw her only a few days ago and she seemed fine.”

“She has a fever,” he said, as if this was all the explanation that was required. “A high fever. As you can see, although I don’t advise you to get too close to her. Her pallor, her shortness of breath, her anemia, her swollen glands—these all lead me to suppose that she has a bad case of influenza.”

“Influenza?”

“The old, the homeless, prisoners, and people who are institutionalized or mentally retarded, such as your wife, are especially vulnerable to the influenza virus,” he said.

“She’s not mentally retarded, “I said, frowning fiercely at him. “She’s depressed. That’s all.”

“These are facts, sir, facts,” said Dr. Effner. “Respiratory disease is the most common cause of death among individuals who are mentally retarded. You can’t argue with the facts, Herr Gunther.”

“I’d argue with Plato, Herr Doktor,” I said, biting my lip. It helped stop me from biting Effner on the neck. “Especially if the facts were wrong. And I’ll thank you not to mention death with such alacrity. She’s not dead yet. In case you hadn’t noticed. Or maybe you’re the kind of doctor who prefers to study patients instead of trying to cure them.”

Dr. Effner took a deep breath through flaring nostrils, came to attention even more—if such a thing were possible—and climbed into the saddle of a horse that was at least seventeen hands high. “How dare you suggest such a thing,” he said. “The very idea that I don’t care about my patients. It’s outrageous. Outrageous. We’re doing everything we can for—
Fräulein Handlöser.
Good day to you, sir.” He glanced at his wristwatch, turned smartly on his heel, and cantered away. Throwing a chair after him might have made me feel better, but it wouldn’t have helped Kirsten, or any of the other patients. There was enough noise already in that builder’s yard.

SEVEN

I stayed at the hospital for several hours. The nurse told me she’d call if there was any change for the worse, and since the only telephone was in my office, this meant going there instead of my apartment. Besides, Galeriestrasse was nearer to the hospital than Schwabing. It was twenty minutes by foot. Half that when the trams were running.

On my way back I stepped into the Pschorr beer house on Neuhauser Strasse for a beer and a sausage. I wasn’t in the mood for either, but it’s an old cop’s habit to eat and drink when you can, instead of when you’re hungry. Then I bought a quarter-liter of Black Death across the bar, holstered it, and left. The anesthetic was for what I guessed lay ahead. I’d lost one wife to influenza before, in the great pandemic of 1918. And I’d seen enough men dying in Russia to recognize all the signs. The hands and feet turning quietly blue. The spit in the throat that she couldn’t get rid of. The fast breathing followed by the holding of her breath, and then the fast breathing again. A slight smell of decay. The truth was I didn’t want to sit there and watch her die. I didn’t have the guts for it. I told myself I wanted to remember Kirsten full of life, but I knew the truth was different. I was a coward. Too yellow to see it through at her side. Kirsten could have expected more from me. I was certain I had expected a little more from myself.

I entered my office, switched on the desk lamp, placed the bottle beside the telephone, and then lay down on a creaking, green leather sofa I had brought from the bar at the hotel. Next to the sofa stood a matching button-back library chair with scabrous cracked-leather armrests. Beside the chair was a single pedestal rolltop desk and, on the floor, a threadbare green Bokhara, both of these from the office at the hotel. A conference table and four chairs took up the other half of my suite. On the wall were two framed maps of Munich. There was a small bookshelf with telephone directories, railway timetables, and various pamphlets and booklets I’d picked up at the German Information Bureau on Sonnenstrasse. It all looked a little better than it was, but not much. Just the kind of place you’d find the kind of man who didn’t have the nerve to sit beside his wife and wait for her to die.

After a while I got up, poured myself a shot of Black Death, drank it, and dropped back onto the sofa. Kirsten was forty-four years old. Much too young to die of anything. The injustice of it seemed quite overwhelming, and it would have been enough to shatter my belief in God, assuming I still had one. Not many people came back from a Soviet POW camp believing in anything much other than the human propensity to be inhumane. But it wasn’t only the injustice of her premature death that grated on my mind. It was also the downright bad luck of it. To lose two wives to influenza was more than just unlucky. It felt more like perdition. Surviving a war like the one we had just come through, when so many German civilians had died, only then to die of influenza seemed improbable somehow. More so than in 1918, when so many others had died of it, too. But then these things always seemed unjust when seen from the perspective of those who were left behind.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it to reveal a tall, good-looking woman. She smiled uncertainly at me and then at the name on the frosted glass in the door. “Herr Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“I saw the light on in the street,” she said. “I telephoned earlier but you were out.” But for the three small, semicircular scars on her right cheek, she would have been quite beautiful. They reminded me of the three little kiss curls worn by Zarah Leander in some old film about a bullfighter that had been a favorite of Kirsten’s.
La Habanera.
It must have been 1937. A thousand years ago.

“I haven’t yet managed to find myself a secretary,” I said. “I’ve not been in business that long.”

“You’re a private detective?” She sounded a little surprised and stared hard at me for several seconds, as if she was trying to gauge what kind of man I was and whether or not she could depend on me.

“That’s what it says on the door,” I said, acutely aware that I wasn’t looking my dependable best.

“Perhaps I’ve made a mistake,” she said, with one eye on the bottle open on the desktop. “Forgive me for disturbing you.”

At any other time I’d have remembered my manners and my lessons from charm school and ushered her into a chair, put away the bottle, and asked her, politely, what seemed to be the trouble. Maybe even offered her a drink and cigarette to calm her nerves. It wasn’t uncommon for clients to get cold feet standing on the threshold of a private detective’s office. Especially the women. Meeting a detective—seeing his cheap suit and getting a noseful of his body odor and heavy cologne—can be enough to persuade a potential client that sometimes it’s better not to know what they thought they wanted to know. There’s too much truth in the world. And too many bastards who are ready to give it to you, right between the eyes. But I was a little short on manners and all out of charm. A dying wife will do that to you. Out of habit, I stood aside, as if silently inviting her to change her mind and come inside, but she stayed put. Probably she had caught the liquor on my breath and the watery, self-pitying look in my eyes, and decided that I was a drunk. Then she turned away on one of her elegant high heels.

“Good night,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I followed her out onto the landing and watched her clip-clop across the linoleum floor to the top of the stairs. “Good night yourself,” I said.

She didn’t look back. She didn’t say anything else. And then she was gone, leaving a trail of something fragrant in her wake. I hoovered the last traces of her into my nostrils and then breathed her into the pit of my stomach and all the important places that made me a man. The way I was supposed to. It made a very pleasant change from the smell at the hospital.

EIGHT

Kirsten died just after midnight, by which time I’d had enough anesthetic for it to feel just about bearable. The trams weren’t running so I walked back to the hospital, just to prove that I could do it like a regular guy. I’d seen her alive; I didn’t need to see her dead, but the hospital wanted it that way. I even took our marriage certificate. I figured it was better to get it over with before she stopped looking like a human being. It always amazes me how quickly that happens. One minute a man is as full of life as a basketful of kittens, and a few hours later he looks like an old waxwork at the Hamburg Panoptikum.

A different nurse met me, and a different doctor, too. Both of them were an improvement on the day shift. The nurse was slightly better-looking. The doctor was recognizably human, even in the dark.