A Man Without Breath Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes were closed and there was a bandage around a no longer completely round head, which reminded me of a partly deflated football. But even badly injured, he was still startlingly handsome, like some ruined marble Greek statue on the Pergamon altar.
    Lustig went through the motions, checking the unconscious man’s pulse and taking his temperature with one eye on the nurse, and only glancing cursorily at his chart before tutting loudly and shaking his head. It was the kind of bedside manner that would have embarrassed Victor Frankenstein.
    ‘I thought so,’ he said, firmly. ‘A vegetable. That’s my prognosis.’ He smiled brightly. ‘But go ahead, Herr Gunther. Be my guest. You may question this patient for as long as you see fit. Just don’t expect any answers.’ He laughed. ‘Especially with Commissar Dobberke at your side.’
    And then he was gone, leaving me alone with Dobberke.
    ‘That was a touching reunion.’ By way of explanation I added: ‘Formerly he and I were colleagues at the Police Praesidium.’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t say time or circumstances have mellowed him any.’
    ‘He’s not such a bad fellow,’ Dobberke said, generously. ‘For a Jew, I mean. But for him this place would never keep going.’
    I sat down on the edge of Franz Meyer’s bed and sighed.
    ‘I don’t see this fellow talking to anyone soon, except Saint Peter,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen a man with a head injury like that since 1918. It’s like someone took a hammer to a coconut.’
    ‘That’s quite a lump you have on your own head,’ said Dobberke.
    I touched my head, self-consciously. ‘I’m all right.’ I shrugged. ‘Why
does
it keep going? The hospital?’
    ‘It’s a garbage can for misfits,’ he said. ‘A collection camp. You see, the Jews here are an odd lot. They’re orphans of uncertain parentage, some collaborators, a few pet Jews who are under the protection of one bigwig or another, several attempted suicides—’
    Dobberke caught the look of surprise on my face and shrugged.
    ‘Yes, suicides,’ he said. ‘Well, you can’t make someone who’s half dead walk on and off a deportation train, can you? That’s just more trouble than it’s worth. So they send those yids here, nurse them back to health and then, when they’re well again, put them on the next train East. That’s what’ll happen to this poor bastard if ever he comes round.’
    ‘So not everyone in here is actually sick?’
    ‘Lord, no.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I expect they’ll close it down soon enough. Word is that Kaltenbrunner has his eye on owning this hospital.’
    ‘That ought to come in handy. Nice place like this? Make a nice suite of offices.’
    Following the death of my old boss, Reinhard Heydrich, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the new head of the RSHA, but quite what he wanted with his own Jewish hospital was anyone’s guess. His own drying-out clinic, perhaps, but I managed to keep that particular thought to myself. Werner Sachse’s advice to watch my mouth had been wearing red intelligence stripes; after Stalingrad everyone – but more especially Berliners, like me, for whom black humour was a religious calling – was probably well advised to keep a zip on the lip.
    ‘Will he get it? Kaltenbrunner?’
    ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
    Because I wanted to look at anything other than poor Franz Meyer’s badly damaged head, I went to the window, which was when I noticed the flower arrangement on his bedside table.
    ‘That’s interesting,’ I said, looking at the card next to the vase, which was unsigned.
    ‘What is?’
    ‘The daffodils,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come out of hospital and no one sent me any flowers. And yet this fellow has fresh flowers, and from Theodor Hübner’s shop on Prinzenstrasse no less.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘In Kreuzberg.’
    ‘I still don’t—’
    ‘It used to be florist’s by royal appointment. Still is for all I know. Which means they’re expensive. Very