Death’s Head Read online

  She was sitting with her back to the wall. Her hands were crossed in her lap. Her legs were apart. One broken shoe lay some inches away from her. The ring on her left hand looked painfully tight because the bone of the ring-finger was the colour of chalk. Her hair had fallen across her eyes and her mouth was open, giving her once again the appearance of a vulnerable child. Her blouse was open, and her breasts visible. They were thin and white and the nipples hardly apparent.

  She seemed to be asleep. Or, like a child in a child’s game, pretending sleep. Only the opening of the flesh around her neck and throat indicated otherwise. Grunwald wanted to shake her, bring her out of her sleep. But that was quite impossible. Someone had taken an instrument – a knife, razor, anything sharp – and had slit her across the throat. The blood had drained away, running over her neck and shoulders into a pool on the floor beside her. He stepped away. Who had done it? The American? Had he come back and killed her?

  Mesmerized, Grunwald stared at the girl. It was difficult to avoid the feeling that really she wasn’t dead, that she was merely pretending: synthetic blood, a fixed posture, breath held back into the lungs – a grotesque joke. He was trembling. The sight of death did this to him. He touched the girl’s arm. Strangely her flesh was still warm but the heat was rapidly leaving her body. Moving back, he leaned against the wall. He hadn’t liked the girl. But seeing her now brought back some of the fears he had been suppressing himself, some of the sounds and sights and smells that had been haunting his mind restlessly. He went slowly towards the stairs. Nobody would care that she had been killed. There would no investigation and no arrest. Another prostitute slashed – so what? An official shrug. A blind drawn on a dirty window. A file closed.

  A man and a woman were climbing the stairs towards him. A sense of panic assailed him. The man, hanging grimly to the woman’s arm, raised his head and saw Grunwald. The woman, sensing something, stopped. Climbing the last steps slowly, the man reached the landing. Grunwald felt he should apologize – for being there, for the girl’s body, for the fact of his existence. The man caught his breath and told the woman to fetch a doctor. She didn’t hestitate. Grunwald heard her footsteps ringing down the stairs as she turned and ran.

  ‘It’s too late for a doctor,’ Grunwald said.

  The man, as if a practical solution to the problem were exclusively his, leaned over the dead girl. He was breathing heavily. ‘You’re right. It’s too late for anything but an undertaker.’ He straightened up and looked at Grunwald.

  ‘Do you know the girl?’

  ‘Only vaguely.

  The man took off his cap, a belated mark of respect. ‘Did you find her like this?’

  ‘She was lying there. Just as you see her now.’

  The man spat. ‘A pretty thorough job all the same. See the clean line across the throat. Whoever did that to her knew exactly where to make his cut. Very tidy.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ Grunwald said.

  The man replaced his cap. His face was grubby and bearded and yet, incongrously, the clothes he wore were clean and neat. He said, ‘We’ve got to get a doctor anyway. For the death certificate.’

  Grunwald turned his face away from the girl. The man lit a cigarette. ‘It’s nasty,’ he said. ‘Neat and nasty.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grunwald said. He wondered if he might leave now – there was nothing for him to do here. He remained where he was, experiencing the odd sensation that he had been completely stripped of any purpose or function. He looked at the man who was smoking silently. Somehow the smell of the place seemed more intense than before and he was aware of the large numbers of flies that floated through the air, as if they had come from nowhere in the hope of picking at the girl’s remains. He looked down the stairs to the landing below. A thin light filtered through some broken glass.

  ‘Any idea who might have done it?’

  Grunwald shook his head. He could have mentioned the American, but what would have been the point? If he remained silent it was a relatively simple affair: a young prositute murdered by an unknown person. If he opened his mouth and mentioned the soldier, it threw open all kinds of complicated possibilities.

  ‘She’s only a kid,’ the man said. ‘We’d better wait here until Elsie comes back, with the doctor.’ He sat down on the cold stone and crossed his legs. Grunwald remained standing, his eyes fixed to the point of light coming up from below. He listened to the sound of the man smoking, the faint whisper as the cigarette came apart from his lips and the swift intake of air when he drew the smoke into his throat.

  ‘You live around here?’ he asked.

  Grunwald said, ‘Not exactly.’

  The man seemed satisfied with this answer. ‘Elsie will bring a doctor. There’s one that lives a couple of streets away. If he’s at home. They’re kept pretty busy these days, I imagine.’

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ Grunwald leaned against the wall. The scent of tobacco, the smell of excrement, the noise of the flies, and the unbearable presence of the dead girl – these things combined to sicken him. He felt dizzy and for no apparent reason afraid. He wished that Elsie would come quickly with the doctor so that he could get away from the place as soon as possible.

  The man sighed and threw down his cigarette. He looked at his wristwatch. ‘What’s keeping Elsie, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Perhaps the doctor is busy.’

  The man nodded and clenched and unclenched his fists in a show of impatience. He sat back against the wall and took his tobacco tin from his jacket.

  After the April boycott in 1933 Martha asked him to think seriously about leaving Germany. It was the first time she had made such a request and Grunwald was surprised. It was true that the position of the Jews was worsening but this was a fact that Grunwald unhestitatingly attributed to the poor economic situation. As soon as this improved it would follow that the position of the Jews would improve as well – but Martha, who had been shocked by the boycott, disagreed. After all, what had the Völkischer Beobachter said a few days later. Saturday’s boycott is to be regarded merely as a dress rehearsal for a series of measures that will be carried out unless world opinion, which is against us at the moment, definitely changes. A dress rehearsal: what would the real thing be like? The SA would exchange their propagandist leaflets and warnings to the Jews for rifles, and their random acts of violence for the swifter discipline of the machine-gun.

  Wouldn’t Grunwald leave? Why wouldn’t he? What did he owe to Germany? Didn’t he see that he was like a cripple who after all other treatment has failed persists in being ministered to by a crank? Didn’t he see how dumb his faith was? Did he imagine that because he himself hadn’t been beaten or terrorized in a public street he was safe? Did he believe that nothing could ever touch him? That even obscure laws created in Nuremberg were irrelevant to his life?

  Martha’s questions remained unanswered and eventually for a time she stopped asking them, as if she were prepared to play along with Grunwald’s game. When she heard that something had happened to Frau Becker or to Herr Zuckerman or that Rabbi Gerstein had been abused in the street, she mentioned these facts like someone discussing surprising changes in the weather: a freak snowstorm in the middle of July, a heatwave on New Year’s Day. Her outbursts were infrequent but when they happened she poured them out hurriedly as if she were reciting some catalogue of misery, repeating every act of vandalism and violence so that she might make Grunwald see the strength of her case. And when Grunwald eventually realized, it was much too late.

  He loved her. In many ways he admired her. She was more intelligent than he was, and more perceptive. When the boy was born he hoped that he would inherit her traits rather than his own. She had a certain courage that he could never hope to emulate and he realized, many years later, that even if she had died in the most painful and degrading of circumstances, she would have died with her courage intact. The thoughts consoled him in a small way.

  He never stopped to wonder how the boy had
died.

  The man had lit a fresh cigarette. When he heard the sound on the stair below he stood up and turned to Grunwald.

  ‘That might be Elsie now,’ he said.

  Grunwald did not know how long he had been standing in the same waiting position. His limbs were numb and frozen. He watched the stairs and saw the woman come into view. She had a headscarf knotted tightly around her hair and it was glistening with fine drops of rain.

  ‘I’ve got the doctor,’ she said.

  ‘It took you long enough,’ the man said.

  Elsie whipped off her scarf and shook it. ‘I couldn’t find him at first.’ She had reached the landing and saw the dead girl for the first time. ‘Oh, Jesus. Who did that to her?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Do you know her?’

  Elsie said, ‘I’ve seen her a few times. She didn’t say much. She kept to herself.’

  There was another noise on the stairs below. A slow, heavy footstep; the sound of a man who realizes it is too late to rush. For some reason Grunwald shivered.

  He watched the man’s shadow rise against the wall and then the man himself came into view.

  ‘Here he is,’ Elsie said.

  The doctor was wearing a broad-rimmed hat and a threadbare black overcoat. In his right hand he carried a leather bag. He walked with an odd swaying motion, as if his movement originated in his shoulders rather than in his legs.

  Grunwald stepped back against the wall. The sudden fear that he felt was like a flash of light. The doctor climbed the last few stairs and reached the landing.

  ‘This is the girl, Doctor,’ Elsie said, as though such an explanation were needed.

  Without speaking the doctor put down his bag and then leaned over the girl’s body.

  Terrified, Grunwald watched. The doctor’s hands probed the wound in the girl’s neck. He had seen those hands before. He stepped back as far as he could, afraid again.

  The doctor stood up and looked at Elsie. ‘A death certificate. That’s all I can give you. Someone will have to be notified. Someone will have to come and take the corpse away.’

  Grunwald heard the strange clipped voice that had a faint hypnotic quality about it. He had heard it before. It came to him again, a fading echo.

  The doctor picked up his bag. He wiped his hands on a rag and then pulled on a pair of gloves. He looked at Elsie and then at Elsie’s man. And finally, inevitably, he noticed Grunwald. The expression on his face did not alter. He said, ‘She’s been murdered. There’s no doubt about that.’

  Grunwald felt faint. Before he knew what he was doing he said, ‘Doctor Schwarzenbach.’

  The doctor looked puzzled. ‘Schwarzenbach? You must be mistaken. My name is Lutzke. Doctor Lutzke.’ He shrugged his shoulders and turned to the woman. ‘If you’ll return to my surgery I’ll give you the certificate. And then we can notify the authorities.’

  Grunwald stood upright, forcing his body away from the wall. He felt intensely weak: something had entered him, something had struck all the strength from his body. He watched the doctor turn to go down the stairs.

  ‘Doctor?’

  The doctor stopped. ‘Yes?’

  Whatever he had intended to say would not be forced from his mouth. ‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

  The doctor gazed at him for a second and then, to the woman, said, ‘If you’ll come with me.’

  Elsie followed him down the stairs

  Schwarzenbach. Gerhardt Schwarzenbach.

  Grunwald stood for a time on the street. The man had said that he would stay long enough to make a statement to the authorities. Grunwald had replied that he would return. Rain, driven by sharp wind, numbed his face. He started to walk.

  Schwarzenbach was in Berlin. Calling himself Lutzke. And still practising medicine. Dr Schwarzenbach.

  On the corner of the street Grunwald wondered which way to turn. He had a sudden desire to urinate and went behind some rubble. He thought of the dead girl and how ironic it was that Schwarzenbach had been the one to sign the certificate of death. He thought of Schwarzenbach’s hands touching the flap of damp skin round the girl’s throat. Schwarzenbach had perfect hands and had always been proud of them. He polished and protected them as if they were sensitive instruments that had to be kept beautiful because they were on permanent display. He wore gloves in cold weather so that the icy air could not get at his skin and in summer he covered his fingers with a protective liniment. He thought more of his hands than of anything else and he guarded them as someone might guard a priceless relic.

  Gerhardt Schwarzenbach was here in Berlin. Grunwald realized for the first time what this might mean.

  He walked until he reached the junction of Kurfürsten and Potsdamerstrasse and then he hesitated. The rain was falling heavily now and he had to find shelter quickly.

  5

  The tables in the darkened room were crowded and waitresses had to push energetically through if they wanted to serve drinks. Over everything hung a blanket of tobacco smoke so thick it seemed deliberately to have been woven in the air. Away in a corner, partly hidden by a curtain, a man played a piano and sometimes a sad-faced girl would get up and attempt to sing over the noise. Most of the customers were American soldiers but here and there Germans sat drinking in tight little groups, men who were making a decent living on the black market and who could afford to spend time discussing world affairs and how, since the fall and surrender of the Reich, Germany had become a better place to live in. Grunwald took some coins from his coat and asked for a beer and the barman, staring at him as if a memory of a time when Grunwald would not have been served had crossed his mind, drew the beer slowly from the tap.

  Grunwald looked for a chair but none was vacant. Eventually he decided to stand near the pianist and listened to the girl as she made yet another attempt to sing her song to an unwilling and uninterested audience. He was aware of a curious mood about the place; it was somehow transitory and people were drinking as if they suspected that next day the supply of alcohol would cease to exist, as if some sort of decree would prohibit them from ever drinking again. The girl opened her mouth and shouted the first line of her song and as she sang her body swayed back and forth to the rhythm of the piano. The pianist, a thin man in shirtsleeves, touched the keys with an expression of contempt. Grunwald, suddenly cold, put his free hand into the pocket of his coat. It was impossible, even in the midst of so much noise and human company, not to remember Schwarzenbach leaning over the body of the girl and the sight of his fingers on the slashed throat.

  He felt a sensation of fear. It was connected with Schwarzenbach; it had something to do with seeing the doctor again and something to do with the way he had so casually brushed aside Grunwald’s utterance of his name, and his insistence that he was called Lutzke. And yet it was more than merely seeing Schwarzenbach again. Other phantoms seemed to come alive and the questions that had frequently gone through Grunwald’s mind appeared to answer itself. Where were they now? The Obersturmführers, like Mayer, the doctors, like Schwarzenbach, the other thousands of men who had manned the machine and made it run with barbarous efficiency? The answer was that they still existed – under other names, living in other districts, doing other jobs. Their uniforms safely tucked away at the bottom of trunks, their party cards dutifully burned, they perhaps raised hens and collected eggs and men like Mayer, retired forcibly in their prime, presumably tended flowers in rural Bavarian gardens and persisted in denying that they had ever done anything else. And Schwarzenbach? What did he feel now when he came across a typhoid case or cured a child’s measles? Or found it difficult to get the right sort of medicine when he needed it? Or brought a new baby into the universe?

  For a moment Grunwald was conscious of his own physical self: the shabby overcoat, the unshaven face, the thinness that seemed to emphasize his appearance of Jewishness. And seeing himself in this way brought back yet another image – of a thousand men walking through mud towards an unknown destination, like soldiers searching for a batt
lefield upon which no war could conceivably be fought, a thousand men ploughing through acres of mud in falling, cutting rain, some sinking in marshes, some stumbling, all moving as fast as they could, hurrying, the ice of the rain slashing through their garments, aware of the cry of the dogs that came up through the darkness out of the electric lamps and the noise of men in greatcoats who carried rifles and sometimes fired random bullets into the crowd.

  Grunwald listened to the girl singing: a soldier came back from the war, from a faraway front, and couldn’t find his girl because she had died in an air-raid. A thousand men had gone across the mud and some had fallen and you could sometimes hear the clutching noise the mud made as it sucked against their flesh. And the dogs. The rattle of chains. The sullen cries of the dogs and the shouts of the guards and the way the lamps penetrated the darkness, gathering into their bands of light the frozen breath of a thousand men.

  Gerhardt Schwarzenbach had practised medicine in a surgery near to the Prinzenstrasse. The house was nineteenth century and Schwarzenbach’s name, together with that of his partner Dr Muller, was embossed on a brass plate nailed to the front door. The doctors occupied rooms on the ground floor, Schwarzenbach’s being to the rear of the house with windows that looked into a small, walled garden. The Munich practice was profitable and popular chiefly because Schwarzenbach was efficient: his patients often thought that he regarded the human body as a mechanic might a machine, that he conceived of human existence as nothing more than a mass of physical impulses and reactions. But he was efficient, and this fact cancelled the impression of aloofness that he presented.