hairless chest and down to the pubic area which, unusually, appeared to have been shaved, and recently, too.
Hamperl remarked upon this.
‘Well, you don’t see that every day. Not even in my profession. I wonder why he should have done this.’
‘I’ve a good idea,’ I said. ‘But it will wait.’
Hamperl nodded. Then he was cutting through subcutaneous fat and muscle, and the speed of his scalpel was something to behold, with the flesh swiftly shrugged off the bone like the skin of a very large snake; and within only a few minutes there was just a mess of intestines and prime rib that might have been the envy of any good Berlin butcher. Especially in wartime.
‘There appears to be something lodged at the top of the oropharynx,’ said Hamperl. He looked up at me and added, ‘That’s the part of the throat just behind the mouth.’
He collected a small white object, flicked it off his fingers’ ends into a kidney dish and then held it up for our joint inspection.
‘It appears to be a troche, perhaps,’ he said. And then: ‘No, this was not designed to dissolve in the throat, but in the stomach. It has hardly dissolved at all. A pilule. A tablet, perhaps.’
‘He was taking Veronal,’ I said. ‘A barbiturate.’
‘Is that so?’ Hamperl’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. ‘Well then, that is probably what it is. Only it could not have affected him very much in the condition you see it in now. Although this would be quite consistent with a case of overdose where someone has swallowed several pills all at once. Doctor Honek said there was initially some suspicion that this might have been a barbiturate overdose.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Until I found the bullet wounds.’
‘Quite.’
At an almost imperceptible nod from Professor Hamperl, Doctor Honek stepped forward with a set of surgical bolt cutters and began to cut the ribs, which, under the steel jaws, snapped loudly like thick twigs, one by one, in order to expose the chest cavity. But there was one he hesitated to cut.
‘One of these ribs looks damaged, don’t you think so, sir?’ asked Honek.
Hamperl bent down to take a closer look. ‘Chipped,’ he said. ‘Like a tooth. But not from a Veronal pilule. Most probably from a bullet.’
Honek went back to work. He was even quicker than the Professor and within a couple of minutes Hamperl was slicing through the remains of the diaphragm and reflecting back the whole chest-plate, like the top of a boiled egg, to expose the dead man’s heart and the lungs.
‘Quite a lot of blood has pooled inside the diaphragm,’ he murmured.
By now Albert Kuttner was hardly recognizable as a human being. His intestines — most of them — were resting on the upturned palm of his own hand as if, like the perfect aide-de-camp he had possibly hoped to become, he might assist even in the process of his own dissection.
Hamperl placed the chest-plate on a nearby table where it remained like the remains of a Christmas goose.
I cleared my nose, noisily.
‘Commissar? Are you all right?’
‘I’m just trying to see the lighter side of things that you were talking about earlier, sir.’
‘Good.’
But the Professor sounded almost disappointed that I was not yet lying on the floor.
‘Cutting the pulmonary artery,’ he said to Honek. ‘Checking for blood clots. Which we have. Probably a post- mortem blood-clot.’ He slashed some more of the lungs and then squeezed the heart. ‘Feels like something hard in here. A bullet probably. See if you can find it, will you, Doctor Honek?’
He handed the heart to the other man and got to work with the scalpel again, slashing at the flesh holding what looked like a shiny red football.
‘The liver, is it?’ I asked.
‘Very good, Commissar Gunther. The liver it is.’ Hamperl laid the liver in another dish before removing the spleen as well.
‘Looks like this got hit, too,’ he said. ‘It’s almost in pieces.’
I went over to the table where Honek was still palpating the heart to isolate the bullet, and glanced briefly at the spleen.
‘It’s a mess all right.’
‘That certainly covers all of what’s in the medical dictionary,’ observed Hamperl.
Honek had isolated the bullet. He cut it out and laid it in a separate metal tray like a gold-prospector putting aside a precious nugget. This was easier on the eye than watching Hamperl clamp Kuttner’s small intestine so that he could haul it out in one block. I’d seen one too many of my comrades in the freezing cold of the trenches with their steaming guts hanging out of their tunics to view that particular sight with any equanimity.
So far we had been there for less than thirty minutes and already the kidneys were being removed.
The second bullet was lodged deep in the spine and took several minutes to gouge out.
When that was done Hamperl asked, ‘Do you wish me to remove the brain?’
‘No. I don’t think it will be necessary.’
‘Then that would appear to be that, for now.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, it will take a while to analyse the organs, the haematology, and the contents of the stomach. Naturally I will test the quantities of Veronal present then.’
‘At this moment in time I must ask you both not to make any verbal reference to a second bullet,’ I said. ‘As far as anyone else is concerned, just the one shot was fired.’
‘Am I to understand that you plan on using this subterfuge as the basis for some incriminating piece of cross-examination?’ said the Professor.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am. You can mention your real findings in your written report, of course.’
‘Very well,’ said the Professor. ‘It’ll be our little secret until you say otherwise, Commissar.’
When both bullets were lying in a tray I took a closer look. I’d seen enough spent lead in my time to recognize metal from a thirty-eight when I saw it.
‘Right now, I’d be grateful if you were to indulge me with your first thoughts, sir.’
‘All right.’
Professor Hamperl sighed and then thought for a moment.
‘Both shots seem to have been fired at fairly close range,’ he said. ‘Of course I should have to check the shirt for powder burns to give you an accurate distance, but the size of the entry wounds persuades me, strongly, that the shooter could not have been more than half a metre away when these shots were fired. The angle of the entries would seem to indicate that the person who fired the shots was immediately in front of him. The grouping of the shots was tight, as if the two shots were fired in very quick succession before the victim moved very much.’
‘If the shooter fired at only half a metre’s distance, why didn’t the slugs go straight through him?’
‘One clipped the rib and lost most of its velocity before it penetrated the heart, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Hamperl said thoughtfully. ‘And the other lodged deep in the spine, as you saw. That’s why.
‘As I say, we’ll have to see how much barbiturate was absorbed by his organs but on the basis of the organ damage and the amount of blood that was in the diaphragm, I’d say it was the shots that killed him, not the Veronal.’
‘What do you know about that stuff?’
‘Barbital? It’s been around for a good while. Almost forty years. It was first synthesized by two German chemists. Bayer sells the stuff as a soluble salt or in tablet form. Ten to fifteen grammes would be a safe dose; but fifty or sixty could be lethal.’
‘That’s not much of a margin for error,’ I said.
‘Of course for someone using it regularly, they would soon develop a tolerance of the drug and possibly require a higher dose, which they might easily accommodate without any mishap. But if they left off taking it for a while, it’d be a mistake to start again with a high dose. Possibly a lethal one.’
‘So it has to be handled with care.’
‘Oh yes. It’s powerful stuff. My own sleep would have to be very disturbed to want to take it myself. All the same it’s a lot better than its predecessor: bromides. There’s no unpleasant taste with Veronal. In fact, there’s not much taste at all.’
