“I’ll call an undertaker,” whispered the man in the wheelchair, almost as if, until that very moment, he hadn’t quite believed that Johann Bernbach was actually dead. “As soon as I get home.” And then he added: “Do you know any undertakers?”
“I was hoping you might ask me that.” I handed him a business card. “If you tell Herr Urban that Christof Ganz sent you he’ll give you his special discount.”
It wasn’t much of a discount, but it was enough to cover the small tip I’d receive from Herr Urban if he got the business. I figured the only way I was ever going to get out of that mortuary was by looking out for my own future.
THREE
–
It was ten o’clock that night when Adolf Urban, the local undertaker, showed up to take Johann Bernbach away to his new and more permanent home. Urban rarely said very much but on this occasion—moved by the sight of the dead man’s face, some new business, and perhaps a few drinks he’d enjoyed before coming to the Schwabing Hospital—he was gabby, at least for an undertaker.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said, and handed me a couple of marks.
“I don’t know that it was such a good one, maybe. You’ve got your work cut out with this one.”
“No. It will be a closed casket, I should think. Be wasting my time trying to make this fellow look like Cary Grant. But your face interests me more, Herr Ganz.”
I almost winced, and hoped I hadn’t been recognized. From previous conversations I knew Urban had cremated some of the less important Nazis the Amis had hanged at Landsberg in 1949. Not that any of them were telling tales but in my experience you can’t be too careful when it comes to a past you’re trying to shake off like a bad cold.
“The fact is I’m short of a pallbearer. I was thinking—you being here on nights n’all—you could come and make a bit of extra cash working for me during the day. Come on. What else are you going to do in the daytime? Sleep? There’s no money in that. Besides, you’ve got the face for it, I think, Herr Ganz. Mine’s a business that requires a poker face and yours looks like it was grown under the felt on a card table. Doesn’t give anything away. Same as your mouth. Man in my business needs to know when to keep his trap shut. Which is nearly always, always.”
His own face was a lopsided, almost obscene thing, like a piece of melted plastic, with a permanently wet nose that resembled a very red and stubby cock and balls, and eyes that were almost as dead as his clients.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It is in Germany.”
“But while my face might fit your requirements, I don’t have the wardrobe for it. No, not even a tie.”
“That’s not a problem. I can kit you out, suit, coat, tie, just as long as you like black. You might have to get rid of that wispy beard. Makes you look a bit like Dürer. On second thought, keep it. Without it you’ll be too pale. That’s no good in a mourner. You don’t want to look like someone who’ll come back after dark and feast on one of the bodies. We get a lot of that in Germany. So. What do you say?”
I said yes. He was right, of course; quite apart from being almost nocturnal I needed the cash and there was no money to be made staying in bed all day. Not with my figure. So a week or two later found me wearing a black tailcoat and tie, with a shiny top hat on my head, and an expression on my lightly trimmed face that was supposed to convey sobriety and gravitas. The sobriety was debatable: the early morning schnapps was a habit I was finding hard to control. Fortunately for me it was the same expression I used for dumb insolence and skepticism and all the other winning qualities that I possess, so it didn’t require me to be Lionel Barrymore to pull it off. Not that I put much store by my qualities; any man is just made up of some deportment and behavior that have met with the silent approval of a very small number of women.
It was snowing heavily when I climbed out of a car in the Ostfriedhof Cemetery as one of four men employed to carry Bernbach’s casket into the crematorium where, Urban said, the Amis had secretly cremated the twelve top Nazis they’d hanged at Nuremberg in 1946. Less well known was the fact that the ashes of my second wife, Kirsten, were also to be found in Ostfriedhof. When it was all over and Urban came to give me my pay and my tip I said nothing about this, largely out of shame that I hadn’t visited the place in the cemetery wall where the urn with her remains was to be found—not once since her death. But now I was there I intended to remedy that. Suddenly I felt properly uxorious.
“I thought the dead man was a Jew,” I said to Urban as we watched the mourners file out of the neo-Gothic Holy Cross Church where we’d just committed his body to the flames. These included most of the people from the Apollo cabaret, as well as the big irritable detective I’d recognized in the mortuary at the hospital.
“Not practicing.”
“Does that make a difference? If you’re a Jew?”
“I wouldn’t know. But these days it’s not so easy finding someone to conduct an ikey funeral in this town. Last time I did one the family had to send to Augsburg for a rabbi. Also there’s the fact that Jews prefer to be buried, not cremated. And with the ground this hard that makes
