Authors: Dan Vyleta
The Quiet Twin (27 page)
‘Who would have guessed?’ he murmured, laid her palm against his cheek. ‘You’ve made a talker out of me.’
She closed her eyes then and did not open them again until he left. Beer turned off the light and went to bed.
Cretins
Herbert Gerdes’ 1936 film
Erbkrank – ‘The Hereditary Defective’ –
was screened in all of Germany’s five thousand cinemas. By law, each screening of the silent documentary had to be accompanied by a speaker accredited by the National Socialist Racial and Political Office. Through the documentary, the German public was granted access to the wards of a mental asylum. Among the film’s exhibits there were patients who were ‘hereditarily deaf and dumb’; ‘two brothers, both sexual offenders, with deformed hands, the younger of whom had committed a sexual murder’; ‘an idiotic Negro bastard from the Rheinland’; ‘an epileptic brother and sister’; a ‘thirty-seven-year-old fraudster’; a ‘frequently convicted alcoholic’; a ‘forty-four-year-old epileptic guilty of multiple sexual murders’; ‘four feeble-minded brothers and sisters’; a ‘foreign violent criminal’; and an ‘illegitimate idiot’ who had been ‘in institutions for the last twenty-two years’.
Erbkrank
had a running time of twenty minutes. It was the third in a series of six films promoting the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring that gave the State the power to initiate forced sterilisations. Not one of these films openly advocated the killing of the mentally or physically handicapped. The feeling persisted amongst Party leaders that a segment of the German and Austrian population would resist the open adoption of such measures. Other films made in Germany in the same year as
Erbkrank
include Luis Trenker’s Western
The Emperor of California,
Victor von Plessen’s documentary
The Headhunters of Borneo,
Carl Lamac’s Sherlock Holmes mystery
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
and George Pal’s 3-D animated short
Four Aces So Close You Can Touch Them.
‘
Here, have a cigarette.’
It wasn’t yet 8.30, the morning keen and bright. Rain had given way to sunshine: it glared in puddles and was caught in the streaky glass of windows; dried the mud that caked the gutters; warmed the skin but not the bones.
‘Go on then,’ she said and watched the man tap one from the crumpled pack. His fingers were thick and calloused, the cuticles and fingernails blackened with dried blood. He was wearing a white smock, freshly pressed, and clean apart from the stain at the bottom of his chest pocket, no bigger than a coin. Had he been a teacher, one would have thought his pen had dripped: red, the colour of correction. It was fifty years, now, she’d been done with school. They had known each other even then. Somewhere along the line he had dropped the familiar ‘Martha’.
‘Here you go, Frau Vesalius,’ he said, then resumed their earlier conversation. ‘The whole place was a terrible mess, is what I hear. My nephew works in the police, called me first thing this morning. Blood everywhere, he says, signs of a fight. Killer cut him open like a fish, from the bladder to the ribs.’ He paused for a puff. ‘But I suppose you know all that.’
She shrugged non-committally. ‘The times we live in,’ she offered.
‘Why, yes, the times.’
‘They cut the Professor’s dog up just the same.’
‘Not quite. Multiple stab wounds is what my nephew says. More pincushion than dog.’ He pointed at his abdomen with the air of a man who knows what he is talking about. His name was Gehrke. He was the butcher.
‘I hear they called a headshrinker in,’ he continued. ‘A Dr Bern.’
‘Dr Beer. He lives in the building, you know. His wife left him.’
The butcher weighed this information, his big hand rising to pluck the cigarette from his lips.
‘A good man, this Beer?’
Vesalius shrugged. ‘He looks after the Professor’s niece.’
‘Oh yes? What’s wrong with her?’
‘She needs a husband.’
He laughed, and she joined him, stubbed out her cigarette, half-smoked, against the wall of his shop, then pocketed the stump. They were standing in the expanse of courtyard outside the shop’s back door. She had come early and asked for a minute of his time.
‘What is it you want then, Frau Vesalius? Meat for the party, I suppose.’
‘So you’ve heard about the party?’
He grunted, flicked his cigarette into the dirt. ‘They say the detective invited himself last night. Brazen, they say. A man like a pig. But then, I wouldn’t mind going myself. They say the Mayor might be coming.’
‘Here’s what we need.’ She passed him a list she had written on the back of an old envelope.
He studied it and frowned.
‘I’m not sure I can get all this. What with the rationing–’
‘He has special dispensation.’
‘Even so.’
She nodded, put a hand out in farewell.
‘Get what you can, butcher. I’ll see to the rest.’
‘Will do,’ he said, his big hand swallowing hers. When they’d been eight, she had given him a thrashing once, for lifting up her skirt in play, and kissed him, too, in the doorway of a church: her lips on his rosy cheek.
She went to the baker’s next, ordered a cake and bought two
Topfengolatschen
, for which Speckstein had a special passion.
On the way back into her building, Frau Vesalius stopped for a natter with the janitor, exchanging the same gossip and settling some items of business, all with a minimum of fuss. Upstairs, she found the flat empty. She stored the shopping, then crept through each of the rooms, making sure she was quite alone. A furtive trip to the row of Speckstein’s crystal decanters provided her with a half-glass of apricot brandy. She returned to the kitchen, sat down by the window, and took one of the
Golatschen
from the brown-paper bag, a buttery pastry filled with curd cheese. It was still warm. Eating it quickly, sipping at the glass of brandy, she looked out across the yard. Frau Berger was sitting at her window, peeling potatoes in the sun. She looked tired. Her youngest was in hospital with a bad case of measles. Yesterday’s crowd had left cigarette butts scattered all across the yard. A street hawker strolled in, placed his box near the trunk of the chestnut, and got busy collecting the soggy fag ends into his upturned hat. The Novaks’ wireless was playing, as always too loud; Frau Novak singing along in her flat voice. Somewhere in a nearby yard a carpet was being beaten, its rhythms breaking up the song’s, and a child bawled shrilly for its mother.
As she was finishing the last of the liquor, Vesalius peered across to the Grotter flat, now the scene of a great crime. The police had left the curtains open, and when she strained her eyes she thought she could make out a dark stain on the wall near the window. She washed the glass, replaced it, then carefully wiped up the
Golatsche
’s crumbs. If the Professor asked her why she had brought home only a single pastry, she could always claim the baker had sold out. After all, it was wartime. There were hardships to be borne by all.
It was his lunch hour. Anton Beer sat at his desk, typing up his report, first detailing the trauma to the body (a single knife-thrust to the upper-right quadrant of the abdominal cavity that had punctured the liver at the height of the gall bladder, resulting in fatal levels of blood loss), then reconstructing the events in Grotter’s flat. ‘Angle and type of wound are consistent with self-injury,’ he typed. ‘Width and profile of wound match the knife found at the crime site. Victim’s blood-alcohol level indicates advanced state of inebriation at time of self-wounding. Blood patterns and position of body point to panic and severe disorientation. The victim evidently hoped to stop the bleeding by pressing his jacket to the wound, then attempted to barricade himself in his bedroom (perhaps hiding from his daughter, Anneliese Grotter, age ten). Verdict: accidental suicide.’
Beer finished typing, picked through his prose. It made no effort to comprehend the level of despair (of drunkenness, of folly) that would induce a man to draw the curtains and cut into his body with a bone-handled knife, and failed to sketch the mad urge that had sent him from the kitchen out into the corridor, searching for God knows what, then compelled him back into the bedroom, where he’d huddled behind the closed door, watching the blood fill up his coat, his numb, flailing legs dragging over first a chair and then one corner of the heavy bed in the vain effort to seal the door. He had left no note of explanation, nothing but the photo of his wife that they had pulled out of his jacket pocket, stained to the point where all one could see of her was a naked leg jutting from the bottom of a bathing costume. At least Beer assumed it was his wife. The leg had been flabby, sand-freckled, white. She had, Teuben had told him, long left the country: had gone to the Americas and left behind no known address. There were no other living relatives. A life-insurance policy for some paltry amount had been found among the dead man’s papers and contained the usual clause that excluded suicide as a valid basis for claim. At work, Grotter had gone on the sick; a liver condition not unconnected with the drinking. A younger Beer would have felt compelled to construct from all this some narrative of motive; at thirty-four and tired, he was content to simply type up the bare facts.
Beer signed the report hastily, glanced at his watch, and ran to unlock the front door. It was nearly two o’clock: his afternoon hours were about to begin. Two women were already queuing on the landing and followed his request to take a seat in his waiting room. One held out an envelope to the doctor, saying she had found it leaning against the front door: she’d picked it up, she said, so that it wouldn’t get stained. Beer read the enclosed note while he prepared his surgery.
‘The little girl is in the hospital,’ it read.
The words were clumsily written, the note unsigned. He stuck it in his pocket, threw on his doctor’s coat, called in the first of the patients. The sun lit up the dust and grime upon his window. It was time he had someone come and clean the flat.
Beer had just begun to put some questions to the patient (the old woman had launched into a long story about her overworked son and had yet to mention any ailment of her own) when the phone rang. Beer excused himself, stepped out into the corridor. He was unsurprised to hear Teuben’s voice.
‘I’ve finished the report,’ he said brusquely. ‘I can drop it off at the station later if you like.’
‘Never mind that, Doctor. I’m sending a man over to pick you up. He’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes. Kindly wait for him on the street. There’s something I’d like you to see.’
‘It’s impossible. I have practice hours, Detective.’
Teuben chuckled. ‘But Doctor. It’s a matter of public safety. Surely you can’t refuse.’
‘I will lose all my patients over this nonsense.’
‘Hardly. Once the war gets going good and proper, half the doctors in the city will be called to the front. Plenty more patients coming your way. One way or the other.’
He rang off, not waiting to hear any further objections. Defeated, Beer ran back to his patient. The old woman was sitting on the examination table where he left her, her knotty legs dangling like a child’s. Her hat was in her lap.
‘There is nothing wrong with you,’ he barked at her. ‘What is it you want from me?’
‘My son is hungry.’
‘Why doesn’t he come himself?’ he yelled, but had already grabbed the form that attested to the need for improved rations, signed and stamped it, his face reddening with anger. He saw her off, then stepped into his waiting room, which was slowly filling up with patients. Four faces were looking at him.
‘I’m afraid I have to close,’ he said. ‘An emergency.’
The people grumbled, but stood up at once. Only one of them lingered, a young man with puffy eyes and dark, lank hair whose cheeks were flushed with a high fever.
‘Tomorrow?’ he asked, embarrassed by his dire need.
‘First thing,’ Beer promised. ‘I’ll open a half-hour early, make up for lost time.’
‘Bless you,’ said the man, eyes smiling from their swollen sockets.
Beer closed the door behind him, ran into the bedroom to turn Eva, then quickly took to the stairs. Outside, the police car had yet to arrive, and he stood smoking for a minute, hands in his pockets and gazing up into the sun.
The little girl is in the hospital
, the note had read. He hoped this meant she was all right.
Teuben met him in his office. It was a large, whitewashed room with a near-empty desk standing at its centre; two bookshelves filled with files and many yards of empty space. Dustballs danced upon the parquet flooring when Teuben’s secretary opened the door for Beer, then settled once he’d stepped into the room. The windows were thrown wide open, cold air pouring in along with the sun. Teuben stood motionless, leaning the backs of his thighs against his desk. He wore a cardigan today, buttoned up to the knot of his tie, looked pale and somehow very happy, unbruised by their near sleepless night. Beer handed him his autopsy report. Neither of them had uttered a greeting.