A Slow Death (Max Drescher Book 1) (2 page)

3

He felt the knee being thrust into the small of his back before the ringing of the phone managed to penetrate his consciousness.

‘Get off.’

A tired and grumpy voice came from somewhere under the covers. ‘Max, for God’s sake, answer the damn phone; it's bound to be for you.’

‘Alright, alright.’ Still more than half asleep, Max lent across the side of the bed and groped blindly for the receiver. With his head hovering a couple of centimetres from the floor, he finally grasped the handset.

‘Yeah –’

‘Max?’

‘Yeah?’

‘It's Michael.’

‘Fuck,’ Max yawned, ‘Helmes hasn’t died in custody has he?’

‘Hardly,’ Rahn scoffed, ‘we couldn’t get that lucky.’

‘So what is it?’

‘Something has just come in.’

‘Uh-huh. Did I misread the assignments rota? Since when were we on the night shift?’

‘Something really quite nasty.’

Just as well,
thought Max
, otherwise I wouldn’t be getting up.
He rolled out of bed, careful not to take the blankets with him. ‘Bodies?’

‘Yeah. Six, apparently.’

‘Fuck.’ He grunted while Rahn gave him an address off Singerstrasse. ‘Okay, I'll see you there.’ Dropping the handset back on its cradle, he stood up, fearing that he might otherwise go back to sleep. Yawning widely, be began pulling on the clothes that had been discarded only a few hours earlier.

‘Work?’ asked the voice from under the covers.

‘Yeah. Go back to sleep.’

‘What time is it?’

Looking at the clock radio on the table by the bed, Max was surprised to see that it was not, in fact, the middle of the night. ‘It's almost nine.’ Heading towards the bathroom, he suppressed a fart. ‘Maybe we overdid a bit it last night.’

‘Oh my God, I need to get to the office.’

‘Take another hour,’ Max said gently. ‘It's not going to kill you. I'll go and make some coffee.’ Disappearing into the bathroom, he had a piss and a shower. Deciding not to bother with a shave, he gave his teeth a quick brush, while trying to avoid making any eye contact with the decrepit creature looking at him from the mirror.

Slipping into the kitchen, he filled the kettle and waited for it to boil. The dead would not rise up because he took five minutes to drink a coffee. ‘Let us eat and drink,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘for tomorrow we die.’ Well, tomorrow could wait. Today was shaping up to be more than busy enough.

As the kettle spluttered to a steamy climax, he went and collected the morning's
Tagesspiegel
from his doorstep. The front page of the newspaper was dominated by a photograph of a policeman being carried to an ambulance by his colleagues, blood streaming from a nasty-looking head wound. Beneath the picture was a breathless account of how 500 police officers, backed up by bulldozers and water cannons, faced a hail of petrol bombs, paving stones and bricks in running battles with anarchists and squatters which lasted more than seven hours. More than 100 rioters had been arrested. The report claimed that more than 70 policemen had been injured; at least 30 of the squatters were battered so badly that they had to be taken to hospital.

Thirty? And the rest.
Max re-read the article a second time, more carefully this time. Finding no mention of troublemaker-in-chief Erwin Helmes, he relaxed a little, moving on to a background piece looking at the causes of the problem.

‘As Eastern Europe opens up and more people arrive in Berlin,’
the author, a professor in Advanced Social Sciences at the Free University, pointed out,
‘there is a chronic lack of affordable housing for ordinary workers and students. Berlin Interior Senator, Erich Paetzold, denounced the violence and demanded that the city should not allow any more squatters.’

‘How would we go about doing that, then?’ Max mumbled to himself, glancing at an editorial, placed next to the story, complaining that unrest was damaging Berlin's image; undermining its campaign to take over from Bonn as the reunified country’s national seat of government.

‘Bonn can keep the bloody government,’ he groused, flipping the paper over. ‘At least we’re not terminally boring.’ Turning to the inside pages, he scanned a story about yet another politician resigning amid allegations that he had worked for the Stasi, the East German communist state's secret police. ‘I must recognize that in resolving the Stasi problem,’ the ousted politician was quoted as saying, ‘the difficult situation has arisen that an accused must prove his innocence, and that suspicion alone carries an enormous weight.’

Too true,
thought Max.
How long will the witch-hunt continue?

The piece went on to quote Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl saying that about five hundred suspected Stasi informants were still being sought. ‘Quite a long time, then,’ Max said to himself. ‘Happy days, indeed.’

The kettle finally reached the boil. Filling his mug, Max let the drink cool before downing it in a succession of quick gulps. Humming the Scorpions’ ‘The Zoo’, he retrieved a fresh mug from the cupboard and half-filled it with coffee, adding a little milk from the fridge. Then he headed briskly back into the bedroom with the coffee and the carefully refolded newspaper under his arm.

From under the covers, there was not much sign of life. Max placed the coffee on the bedside table and put the
Tagesspiegel
beside it, open at the crossword puzzle. Going back into the kitchen, he retrieved a pen and placed it on top of the newspaper. ‘I've got to go,’ he said, reaching across the bed and kissing the sleepy form on the back of the head. ‘I brought you a coffee and the crossword. I’m sure that the office can wait for a while.’

The only reply he got for his trouble was an irritated grunt.

Max laughed. ‘Thanks for last night. I’ve got to go to work now. I'll call you later.’

4

Welcome to the zoo. All the animals are dead.
Your cage is being prepared.

Feeling like shit, Max flopped on to the sofa and fired up an HB cigarette, before enjoying a long, satisfying drag. As the smoke lazily made its way towards the ceiling, he wondered where he might get another cup of coffee. There was a decent café a block away but he wasn’t sure he could be bothered to get off his ass and walk over there.

As he took another puff on his smoke, one of the senior pathologists, Raimond Gerber, wandered in from the kitchen and gave him a dirty look. ‘I keep telling you, Max,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘those things will kill you. The evidence is mounting on almost a daily basis. Smoking causes cancer.’

‘Lots of things cause cancer,’ Max responded. ‘Anyway, I’ve got other things to worry about, doc.’

Gerber gave him a dismayed look. ‘What could possibly be more important than your health?’

‘I can guarantee you,
one hundred per cent
, that smoking will not kill me.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Gerber snapped.

Yes, I do,
Max thought.
Not that it’s any of your business.
Profoundly irritated by the pathologist’s dogmatism, he tried a change of tack. ‘We all have to go sometime.’

Gerber adopted the smug demeanour of the wise expert who has heard it all before. ‘Yes, but there’s no need to rush towards the exit.’

Exhaling a decent smoke ring, Max crossed his legs and merely smiled. He knew that Gerber was almost ten years older than himself. At the same time, the senior pathologist easily looked at least ten years younger than Max. Gerber was famous in the department for being a health freak. He didn’t smoke and he rarely drank. He had even run the Berlin marathon a couple of times; although he was no Ingo Sensburg, his times were, by all accounts, perfectly respectable.

For several moments, Gerber oozed professional detachment as he eyed the Kriminalinspektor. Finally, he delivered his verdict. ‘You look terrible.’

‘Thank you, Herr Gerber,’ Max coughed. He was beginning to feel like one of Gerber’s clients, ready for the slab.

‘Absolutely terrible.’

I bet that makes you feel better, doesn’t it, you bastard?
It suddenly crossed Max’s mind that one day he may well end up on Gerber’s table himself.
And sooner rather than later.
Shaking that unhappy thought from his brain, Max tried to offer up a grin.  ‘I feel terrible.’

Gerber muttered something about ‘the inevitable consequence of unorthodox lifestyles’.

Finishing his HB, Max refused to rise to the bait as he looked around for an ashtray. ‘Meanwhile you, Raimond, look to be in tip-top shape, as usual.’

The senior pathologist nodded as if such acclaim was merely his due. Immaculately turned out in a grey tweed suit, white shirt and red tie, he made Max – in his threadbare jeans, Adidas Gazelle trainers and Holger Czukay T-shirt under a black leather jacket – appear like a grubby student. Happily, that had been Max Drescher’s chosen look for some time now. The last twenty-five years, in fact.

‘
Wer wird denn gleich in die luft gehen, greife lieber zu HB
,’ Max quipped, parroting that irritating advertising jingle that said
Don’t freak out, have an HB instead
.

‘Don’t freak out when you get cancer,’ Gerber retorted grimly.

‘I'm in rude health,’ Max smiled. With no ashtray in sight, he held the remains of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Anyway, enough about me. What have we got here?’

‘Family of six,’ Gerber said, shaking his head sadly. ‘Mother, father, three young children: two girls and a boy.’

Max frowned. ‘Maths isn’t exactly my strong point, doc, but doesn’t that make five?’

‘There was also a teenage daughter,’ Gerber said sharply. ‘Thank you for letting me finish.’

‘Sorry.’

‘All of them were executed at close range.’ Gerber gestured towards the back of the house. ‘The husband's in there: lots of blood on the kitchen floor but nothing too exciting. But upstairs is a real mess.’

‘The neighbourhood’s going to shit,’ Max mused.

‘This neighbourhood’s always been shit,’ Gerber observed.

‘Maybe that’s why we love it so.’
Max had lived in this area for more than twenty years. The place had colour; it had character; it had
brio
. Put simply, it just wasn’t very German. Full of immigrants, dropouts and lowlifes, it was exactly the kind of place where a cop should want to live.

‘The day I finish working in Kreuzberg, I’ll be off,’ Gerber observed, ‘for good. Berlin wears you down. The wife wants a place in the countryside.’

‘Nice,’ Max grimaced.

‘You live around here, don’t you?’ Gerber asked, not bothering to hide his distaste.

‘Yeah,’ Max nodded. ‘I have a place just on the other side of Oranienstrasse.’

‘Close to your clientele.’

‘But, of course,’ Max laughed. Then, getting back to the matter in hand, he waved his extinguished cigarette stub in the direction of the ceiling. ‘Is Michael Rahn upstairs?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Gerber nodded. ‘He's been here about half an hour already. Maybe 40 minutes.’

‘That's Mikey,’ Max smiled as he dropped his stub into his jacket pocket. ‘Always one step ahead, if not two.’ Pushing himself out of the sofa, he struggled to his feet.

‘Are you going upstairs?’ Gerber asked.

‘No need.’

Gerber gave him a funny look. ‘You’re not feeling squeamish, are you?’

‘Hardly. I’ve got one of the strongest stomachs in the department.’ Max patted his belly. There seemed to be rather more of it than he remembered. Then again, that was nothing unusual in a man of his age. He turned his attention back to Gerber. ‘But I’m not a voyeur, either. I get the picture already. I don’t need to dip my fingers in the blood of children.’

‘But –’

Max cut him off with an imperious wave of the hand. ‘Just let Michael know when we can expect your report and tell him that I'll see him back at the station.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be delighted to know that you turned up,’ Gerber snorted.

‘This isn’t the only thing on my plate right now,’ Max shrugged, shuffling towards the door. ‘And anyway, it’s not like the poor bastards are going anywhere, is it?’

5

Looking morosely at the
No Smoking
sign on the far wall, Max sat in a small airless room on the third floor of the Charité Universitätsmedizin, wondering how long he would have to wait for his next HB. The young doctor sitting behind the cheap plywood desk kept his head bowed as he read and re-read the information on the sheet of paper in his hand.
Take your time,
Max thought sourly. I
t’s not like either of us have got anywhere else that we’d rather be.

When he finally looked up, the mixture of distaste and embarrassment on the doctor’s face told Max all he needed to know.

That’s that, then.

Blushing, the young man cleared his throat. ‘I'm sorry, Herr Drescher,’ he said finally. ‘The results are clear. There is no doubt.’

‘Right.’ Feeling a surge of adrenalin through his body, Max jumped to his feet.

‘There is information available for you to read,’ the doctor prattled on, ‘and, of course, counselling is available.’

Counselling? I don’t think so.
‘Of course,’ he said, moving towards the door.

‘For your … family as well,’ the doctor added. Carefully folding the sheet of paper, he slipped it into a plain envelope and stood up. Coming round the desk, he handed the envelope to Max. ‘This is for you,’ he mumbled. ‘There are some phone numbers at the bottom – people who can help.’

Help with what?
Max wondered. He took the envelope and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. ‘Thank you,’ he smiled, struck down by a sudden bout of politeness as he gave the youngster a consoling pat on the shoulder. ‘I will be sure to give them a call.’

Still red in the cheeks, the doctor stared at the worn linoleum on the floor. ‘And you will want to inform your employer.’

I very much doubt that,
Max thought, opening the door. ‘My employer?’

‘They will need to know – for insurance purposes.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’
Don’t I have a right to confidentiality?
That was something he would have to speak to the union about. He waited for the doctor to resume eye contact before asking: ‘Isn’t that something you would do?’

‘Oh no. No, not at all.’ For a moment, it looked like the idea would push the young fellow to tears. ‘I mean, the University has a duty of, er, care to yourself, one that means that we could not disclose any –’

‘Doctor-patient confidentiality.’

‘Yes, exactly.’ The doctor’s face brightened somewhat as they returned to the world of abstract principles.

‘I see,’ Max nodded. ‘Thank you for clarifying the situation.’

Retreating back behind his desk, the doctor collected his remaining papers and placed them neatly in a pile. ‘That's it,’ he said, closing the file, the relief in his voice obvious. ‘Good luck.’ With some reluctance, he forced himself to raise his gaze and look directly at the patient one last time.

But Max Drescher had already left.