half.
During the night, Mutschmann's breathing grew shallower, and in the morning Mendelssohn pronounced that he was on the edge of coma. There was nothing that I could do but lie on my stomach and look down and wait. I thought of Inge a lot, but mostly I thought about myself. At Dachau, the funeral arrangements were simple: they burned you in the crematorium and that was it. End of story. But as I watched the poisons work their dreadful effect on Kurt Mutschmann, destroying his liver and his spleen so that his whole body was filled with infection, mostly my thoughts were of my Fatherland and its own equally appalling sickness.
It was only now, in Dachau, that I was able to judge just how much Germany's atrophy had become necrosis; and as with poor Mutschmann, there wasn't going to be any morphine for when the pain grew worse.
There were a few children in Dachau, born to women imprisoned there. Some of them had never known any other life than the camp. They played freely in the compound, tolerated by all the guards, and even liked by some, and they could go almost anywhere, with the exception of the hospital barrack. The penalty for disobedience was a severe beating.
Mendelssohn was hiding a child with a broken leg under one of the cots. The boy had fallen while playing in the prison quarry, and had been there for almost three days with his leg in a splint when the S S came for him. He was so scared he swallowed his tongue and choked to death.
When the dead boy's mother came to see him and had to be told the bad news, Mendelssohn was the very model of professional sympathy. But later on, when she had gone, I heard him weeping quietly to himself.
'Hey, up there.' I gave a start as I heard the voice below me. It wasn't that I'd been asleep; I just hadn't been watching Mutschmann as I should have been.
Now I had no idea of the invaluable period of time for which he had been conscious. I climbed down carefully and knelt by his cot. It was still too painful to sit on my backside. He grinned terribly and gripped my arm.
'I remembered,' he said.
'Oh yes?' I said hopefully. 'And what did you remember?'
'Where I seen your face.' I tried to appear unconcerned, although my heart was thumping in my chest. If he thought that I was a bull then I could forget it. An ex-convict never befriends a bull. It could have been the two of us washed away on some desert island, and he would still have spat in my face.
'Oh?' I said nonchalantly. 'Where was that, then?' I put his half-smoked cigarette between his lips and lit it.
'You used to be the house-detective,' he croaked. 'At the Adlon. I once cased the place to do a job.' He chuckled hoarsely. 'Am I right?'
'You've got a good memory,' I said, lighting one myself. 'That was quite some time ago.'
His grip tightened. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I won't tell anyone. Anyway, it's not like you were a bull, is it?'
'You said you were casing the place. What particular line of criminality were you in?'
'I was a nutcracker.'
'I can't say as I recall the hotel safe ever being robbed,' I said. 'At least, not as long as I was working there.'
'That's because I didn't take anything,' he said proudly. 'Oh, I opened it all right. But there was nothing worth taking. Seriously.'
'I've only got your word for that,' I said. 'There were always rich people at the hotel, and they always had valuables. It was very rare that there wasn't something in that safe.'
'It's true,' he said. 'Just my bad luck. There really was nothing that I could take that I could ever have got rid of. That's the point, you see. There's no point in taking something you can't shift.'
'All right, I believe you,' I said.
'I'm not boasting,' he said. 'I was the best. There wasn't anything I couldn't crack. Here, I bet you'd expect me to be rich, wouldn't you?'
I shrugged. 'Perhaps. I'd also expect you to be in prison, which you are.'
'It's because I am rich that I'm hiding here,' he said. 'I told you that, didn't I?'
'You mentioned something about that, yes.' I took my time before I added: 'And what have you got that makes you so rich and wanted? Money? Jewels?
He croaked another short laugh. 'Better than that,' he said. 'Power.'
'In what shape or form?
'Papers,' he said. 'Take my word for it, there's an awful lot of people who'd pay big money to get their hands on what I've got.'
'What's in these papers?'
His breathing was shallower than a Der Junggeselle cover-girl.
'I don't know exactly,' he said. 'Names, addresses, information. But you're a clever sort of fellow, you could work it.'
'You haven't got them here, have you?'
'Don't be stupid,' he wheezed. 'They're safe, on the outside.' I took the dead cigarette from his mouth and threw it onto the floor. Then I gave him the rest of mine.
'It'd be a shame for it never to be used,' he said breathlessly. 'You've been good to me. So I'm going to do you a favour Make 'em sweat, won't you? This'll be worth a lorry load of gravel to you on the outside.' I bent forwards to hear him speak. 'Pick 'em up by the nose.' His eyelids flickered. I took him by the shoulders and tried to shake him back to consciousness.
Back to life.
I knelt there by him for some time. In the small corner of me that still felt things, there was a terrible and terrifying sense of abandonment. Mutschmann had been younger than I was, and strong, too. It wasn't too difficult to imagine myself succumbing to illness. I had lost a lot of weight, I had bad ringworms and my teeth felt loose in their gums. Heydrich's man, S S Oberschutze Burger, was in charge of the carpenter's shop, and I wondered what would happen to me if I went ahead and gave him the code-word that would get me out of Dachau. What would Heydrich do to me when he discovered that I didn't know where Von Greis's papers were? Send me back? Have me executed? and If I didn't blow the whistle, would it even occur to him to assume that I had been unsuccessful and that he should get me out? From my short meeting with Heydrich, and what little I had heard of him, it seemed unlikely. To have got so near and failed at the last was almost more than I could bear.
After a while I reached forwards and drew the blanket over Mutschmann's yellow face. A short stub of a pencil fell onto the floor, and I looked at it for several seconds before a thought crossed my mind and a glint of hope once more shone in my heart. I drew the blanket back from Mutschmann's body. The hands were tightly bunched into fists. One after the other I prised them open. In Mutschmann's left hand was a piece of brown paper of the sort that the prisoners in the cobbler's shop used to wrap shoe repairs for the S S guards in. I was too afraid of there being nothing to open the paper immediately. As it was, the writing was almost illegible, and it took me almost an hour to decipher the note's contents. It said, 'Lost property office, Berlin Traffic Dept.
Saarlandstr. You lost briefcase sometime July on Leipzigerstr. Made of plain brown hide, with brass lock, ink- stain on handle. Gold initials K. M. Contains postcard from America. Western novel, Old Surehand, Karl May and business papers. Thanks. K. M.'
It was perhaps the strangest ticket home that anyone ever had.
Chapter 19
It seemed that there were uniforms everywhere. Even the newspaper-sellers were wearing S A caps and greatcoats. There was no parade, and certainly there was nothing Jewish on Unter den Linden that could be boycotted. Perhaps it was only now, after Dachau, that I fully realized the true strength of the grip that National Socialism had on Germany.
I was heading towards my office. Situated incongruously between the Greek Embassy and Schultze's Art Shop, and guarded by two storm-troopers, I passed the Ministry of the Interior from which Himmler had issued his memo to Paul Pfarr regarding corruption. A car drew up outside the front door, and from it emerged two officers and a uniformed girl whom I recognized as Marlene Sahm. I stopped and started to say hallo and then thought better of it. She passed me by without a glance. If she recognized me she did a good job disguising it. I turned and watched
