Prague Fatale

CHAPTER 4

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.’

I went outside. It was a nice day so I decided to walk back to the Alex and eat lunch at a counter I knew on Karl Strasse, but that one was closed because of a lack of sausage. So was the one on Oranienburger Strasse. Finally I got a sandwich and a paper at a place near the Stock Exchange, only there was even less of interest in the sandwich than there was in the paper, and probably in the Stock Exchange, too. But it’s foolish to give up eating bread because you can’t get the sausage to put in it. At least I was free to still think of the bread as a sandwich.

Then again, I’m a typical Berliner, so maybe I’m just hard to please.

When I got back to the Alex I had the files on all of the summer’s S-Bahn murders sent up to my office. I suppose I wanted to make doubly sure that Paul Ogorzow was the real killer and not someone who’d been made to measure for it. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a Kripo run by the Nazis had done something like that. The only surprise was that they hadn’t already tried to pin the murders of Wallenstein, Baldur, Siegfried and Cock Robin on some hapless Jew.

It turned out that I wasn’t the first to review the Ogorzow files. The Record Memo showed that the Abwehr – military intelligence – had also looked at the files, and recently. I wondered why. At least I did until I remembered all the foreign workers who had been interviewed during the course of the investigation. But Paul Ogorzow had been a German railway-worker; rape and a violent hatred of women had been his motive; he hadn’t stabbed any of his victims, he had battered them to death. There was no telling if Fräulein Tauber’s attacker would have battered her or stabbed her after he’d finished raping her, but from the blow he’d given her face there could be no doubting his dislike of women. Of course, lust murders were hardly uncommon in Berlin. Before Paul Ogorzow, there had been other violent, sometimes cannibalistic killers; and doubtless there would be others after him.

Much to my surprise I was impressed at the thoroughness and scale of Commissioner Lüdtke’s investigation. Thousands of interviews had been conducted and almost one hundred suspects brought in for interrogation; at one stage male police officers had even dressed up as women and travelled the S-Bahn at night in the hope of luring the murderer into an attack. A reward of ten thousand Reichsmarks had been posted and, finally, one of Paul Ogorzow’s workmates – another railway employee – had fingered him as the murderer instead of one of the many foreign workers. But among those foreign workers who had been interviewed was Geert Vranken. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover his name on the list of those who had been interviewed; and yet I was. I read the transcript with interest.

A science graduate from the University in The Hague, Vranken had been quickly eliminated from Lüdtke’s inquiry when his alibi checked out; but, hardly wanting to rely on this alone – after all, his alibi relied on other foreign workers – he had been at pains to adduce evidence of his good character, and to this end he had offered the name of a German whom he’d met before the war, in The Hague. Lüdtke’s team of detectives, several of whom I knew, had hardly needed to take up this reference because, a week or so after Vranken’s interview, Paul Ogorzow had been arrested. The certainty – on my part – that for once the right man had been sent to the guillotine at Plotzensee, in July 1941, gradually gave way to a feeling of pity for Geert Vranken and, more particularly, the wife and baby he had left behind in the Netherlands. How many other families, I wondered, would be similarly destroyed before the war was over?

Of course, this was hardly normal for me. I’d seen plenty of murder victims in my time at the Alex, many of them in even more tragic circumstances than these. After Minsk I suppose my conscience was easily pricked. Whatever the reasons, I determined to find out if, as Commissioner Lüdtke had said it would, the State Labour Service had yet informed Vranken’s family that he had met with a fatal accident. Thus it was that I spent a fruitless hour on the telephone being rerouted from one bureaucrat to another before I finally gave up and wrote a letter myself, this to an address in The Hague that was in Vranken’s work book and which, prior to its issue by the State Labour Service, was where previously he had been employed. In my letter I made no mention of the fact that Geert Vranken had been murdered, only that he had been hit by a train and killed. His being stabbed six times was more than any family needed to be told.