Du Pont was in the last bed on the left. His lamp was off. The nurse bent down to switch it on. The sudden light made Du Pont blink: he'd been lying dead still and watching my approach. His brows formed an angry V and a large bruise bloomed at his left temple. Another bruise marred his jaw and left cheek. His beard looked crooked somehow, and blood crusted on his chin. He raised a hand from beneath the starched covers to scratch his face. The back of his hand was bruised and one of his fingers was bandaged to a splint. He winced as he scratched.
'Thank you, nurse,' I said. 'I'll call you if I need you.'
The nurse paused, looked at Du Pont, put the case notes down on the night stand, and left.
'How are you, Andre?'
He said nothing.
Okay, so he was angry with me, I could understand that. After all, I'd given him at least one of those bruises.
'You know who sent me after you?'
Nothing.
'Ruth.'
He blinked. He shook both hands at me. After a few seconds, I realised he was making a writing gesture, miming a pencil on paper. I handed him my notebook and pencil. He scribbled on the page and gave me back the notebook. HOW IS SHE? I read.
'Worried about you, my friend. How long you going to be in here, did they say?' The book changed hands again.
NOT YET
'So what's with the scribbling?'
JAW WIRED SHUT
I laughed. That explained the crooked appearance of his beard, and the trouble speaking the receptionist had mentioned. Du Pont glared at me.
'Oh come on, Du Pont. To anyone who knows you, that's funny.'
He started to write something, then scratched it out so hard he tore a hole in the paper.
'Did the green man do this to you?'
?
Oh yeah, that's right. Green man was just the name I'd given him in my head. No one else would know that was how I thought of him.
'The guy I tied you to the railings with. The one with the gun who followed us. Did he do this?'
YES
'Why?'
Du Pont rolled his eyes and wrote: THE HELL SHOULD I KNOW? HE DIDN'T SAY
'He didn't say what he wanted?'
Du Pont shook his head. HE ASKED IF THE STORY I WROTE ABOUT GERTRUDE ALBERMANN WAS TRUE
'Which story?'
MONDAY'S STORY YOU IDIOT. THE ONLY ONE I WROTE ABOUT HER
'Oh, the one with the made-up interview with me? That the one you mean?'
YES
'Did he say anything else?'
HE'S ANGRY AT YOU FOR HITTING HIM AND TAKING HIS GUN
'Anything else?'
I'M ANGRY TOO
'I mean about the Albermann girl. Come on, Andre, you're the best damn reporter out there. If anyone could've got information out of this guy, it's you. You didn't get his name, I suppose?'
NO. ACCENT LOCAL. HAS A TEMPER. LIKES TO KICK. WEARS STURDY SHOES. THAT'S IT
'You didn't see what brand of shoe he was wearing?'
THE KIND THAT HURTS
'So was he following me or was he following you?'
Du Pont shrugged.
'I got a lead on the Emma Gross case,' I said. 'Does the name Frieda Brandt ring any bells?'
Give him his due, he thought it over for a while. Then he shook his head and scribbled some more in the notebook.
WHAT ELSE YOU GOT ON HER?
'I think she used to work as a nurse. Used to live down in Flehe, near the park, but that was at least eighteen months ago.'
SOUNDS LIKE A WELL-PAID NURSE. SHE UNREGISTERED?
'Yes.'
WHAT KIND OF NURSE?
'I don't know yet.'
WHAT KIND OF DETECTIVE ARE YOU?
'I found you, didn't I?'
We stared at each other. He didn't write anything for a couple of minutes and I stood in silence, waiting. He sighed, and wrote:
CAN YOU FIND OUT WHEN THEY'LL LET ME GO? TRY AND TELL RUTH. TELL HER I'M OK?
'No problem,' I said.
CAN YOU TELL HER I'M THINKING OF HER?
His eyes held no embarrassment, and nor did he shy away from my gaze. He scribbled some more.
HEY, I WOULDN'T ASK BUT YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE KNOWS I'M HERE
'Okay, Du Pont, I'll do it.'
I'LL GET YOU BACK FOR THIS IF IT'S THE LAST THING I DO
I took the notebook and pencil and pocketed them. I laughed again, couldn't tell whether or not he was being serious.
'Andre, my friend. If you try and get me back for this, it
will
be the last thing you do.'
He turned away from me. I switched off his lamp and walked back through the ward to the nurses' station. The small, hairy-lipped nurse was there. She didn't smile at my approach. Her colleague had gone off somewhere but the cards were still laid out on the card table. Not a single card had moved or been added since my arrival, as far as I could tell.
'Any idea when he'll be okay to go home?' I said. 'He's missing his lady friend.'
'Should be some time tomorrow morning. Thursday morning, I mean, not later today. The doctor wants to check for concussion. If he's got concussion then I can't say. That's up to the doctor when he sees him.'
'Thank you, nurse.'
I went back to the woman at the reception and she rang a bell. A janitor came round the corner with a set of keys. He must have been nearing pensionable age. He looked fragile enough to break if he tried any cleaning. He led me to a door located down a flight of stairs and a good ten metres of dimly lit hallway. It was warm down there, but that was where the positives ended. This floor hadn't been swept in a while, and were those mouse droppings or dead insects littering the skirting board?
I waited while the old man unlocked the door and opened it with a flourish. I thanked him and entered the room. The room was full of dust, as well as paper and wooden cabinets and cardboard boxes that were collecting dust. Also cobwebs, which of course were collecting dust too.
I left the room two hours later with a running nose, running eyes, a sore throat and no goddamned information on Frieda goddamned Brandt.
I came up empty for Brandt at the Gerresheim Hospital down the road, too. By then it was after six am and I had a nice, ripe headache to lay beside my sore throat. Sick of walking at that point, I threw prudence to the wolves and took a cab south.
Twenty-five minutes of desultory cabbie talk about the economy later, we pulled up outside the Moorenstrasse entrance on the north side of the academy hospital complex. I went in, found the main reception and repeated my now over-familiar spiel about Brandt.
A white-coated doctor sidled up and cleared his throat. He'd yet to break into his fourth decade of life, and was so blond that his stubble was invisible until he got close. On reflex, I scratched at the five o'clock shadow on my chin.
'Excuse me,' the doctor said, 'but you were asking about Frieda?'
'I was. That is, I am.'
His smile spread across his face quicker than red wine on a white table cloth. 'Thank God, is she okay?'
'Well, that's just the point, she seems to have disappeared. I'm trying to locate her.'
'Oh, damn. I'd hoped it was good news. Or at least news.'
'Doctor, if there's something you can tell me, I'd be grateful. Anything could help.'
The doctor checked his glinting Rolex wrist watch.
'It's important that I locate Frau Brandt as soon as I can,' I said.
He handed the file he'd been holding to one of the three receptionists at the front desk. We walked down a wide hall and around a corner.
He opened a door and led me into the room beyond. The room was small, carpeted in blue, with overstuffed sofas and armchairs lining the undecorated walls. Outside, the sun had risen high enough that its rays were peeking through a window that looked out upon meadows and trees and the beginnings of yet another road begun before the stock market crash in New York the previous October had made finance so hard to come by. The fringes of the city were full of such unwound civic threads, all thanks to the machinations of faceless men in badly fitting suits in a crowded room in a faraway city where they didn't even speak the same language as me. Maybe political nuts like Du Pont had it right, after all. There were plenty in the labour unions, and plenty more sleeping rough in the streets and empty warehouses down by the docks, who would agree with him. Me? I didn't have the energy for all that. I had too much to do looking after myself, and I wasn't doing such a hot job in that department either.
'Would you like coffee?' the doctor asked.
There was no point resisting. I nodded, collapsing into the nearest sofa with a yawn. My body was too tired to carry it through though, and I stretched without managing to work out any of the tension in my legs or shoulders. The doctor went through an open door into an adjoining room. He added coffee grounds and water to a pot, lit the stove and put the pot on to boil.
'Milk and sugar?' he asked.
'Neither.'
'Good man. Nor me.' His speech seemed old-fashioned for such a young man.
The doctor wiped his fingers on a stained piece of cotton that might once have been a towel. I hoped he washed his hands before surgery. When he came back into the sitting room, his white coat was unbuttoned. He was wearing suit trousers and waistcoat beneath, and a white shirt topped off with a high collar and a blue-and-white striped neck tie. A pink scar slashed across his forehead, a scar that I'd taken at first to be a mark from wearing a hat that was too small.
'You have information for me, doctor?'
He sat at the other end of my sofa and leaned towards me, fiddling with his wedding ring. 'It's not good news. Frieda left the hospital under fraught circumstances.'
'Would you care to elaborate?'
'She was a good nurse, a damn good nurse. In fact, she was a midwife, and I think the best in the hospital. I'd just qualified when I arrived here back in '24. Even fresher-faced then.' He stroked his chin to emphasise the point. 'Oh, hold on.'
He leapt up and into the kitchen, made the coffee and returned with two steaming cups of the stuff in under two minutes. His clipped movements were neat and precise. Of course, he was too young to have served in the trenches. Perhaps the military bearing ran in the family.
A midwife, though. That stirred something in me. I didn't like the sound of it.
I sipped my coffee and scalded the roof of my mouth sufficiently to jolt me awake. Coffee spilled onto my crotch; I realised I'd been rubbing my belly.
'Oh, look out fella,' the doctor cried. 'You want a towel for that?' He groped for the kitchen, halfway to his feet. I thought of the stained towel.
'No doctor, please, don't trouble yourself. Just clumsiness, is all.' I patted at my overheated testicles with overheated fingers and hoped I hadn't done myself too much damage. I shifted in my seat and moved to a drier spot, crossing my legs to cover the stain. Well, I was awake now, damn it, and my guts were aching too, but what the hell had set that off?
'Where was I?' the doctor said.
'Midwife,' I prompted. 'Damn good one.'
'That's right. I'm an obstetrician. Dr Flensburger. Julius Flensburger.'
'Detective Thomas Klein.'
He extended a hand and we shook.
'Glad to know you, detective,' he said.
'So, Nurse Brandt?'
'Yes, quite right. Back to the point. Nurse Brandt pretty much held my hand through my first year and kept on dispensing advice for the next few. Until it all started to go wrong.'
'How do you mean wrong?'
'Little things at first. Showing up in the odd stock take, you know. A phial here, a phial there. Small enough to be clerical error, so it went without comment. Her work continued fine. Top notch, in fact. If you could get Frieda in for your births then you damned well asked for her, and every one of us would breathe a sigh of relief on coming in for our rounds if we saw her name on the roster.'
He sipped his coffee. I sipped mine. It was strong and thick and I had to stop myself draining the contents of my cup all at once and then asking for more.
'By – when was it, now? – winter of '28, I think, it was obvious we had a problem. Not just the odd phial, but at least half a dozen in several stock takes, even a whole batch in one. So we upped the number of stock takes and rotated the duty to be sure.'
'Forgive me doctor. What was going missing?'
'Oh of course, you wouldn't know, would you? I do apologise.' He took another sip and I had to wait for him to swallow. 'It was our morphine stocks.'
A junkie midwife. I liked the sound of that even less than plain old midwife. 'I see.'
'I'm sure you do. So we started locking the stuff in a special cabinet and restricting the keys. The, er, bursar of the academy looked through the records and noticed that phials went missing every time poor old Frieda was on one of her shifts. He came to me with this and of course I wouldn't hear of it, was all for boxing his ears and sending him out on a stretcher. But he kept on about it and he ground me down and so we agreed in the end to an experiment.'