If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr

“Please discreetly hand me a packet of Fromms.” I lifted the lid on the toilet seat and checked the water in the lavatory. There was nothing in the water. In a wastepaper basket by the desk I found an empty Fromm wrapper. I did all the things a real detective would have done except make a tasteless joke. I was going to leave that to Dr. Küttner.
    By the time he came through the door I was about to ready to toss him a probable cause, but professional courtesy made me hang on to it until he’d earned his retainer.
    “People in expensive hotels are seldom ever really ill, you know,” he said. “At sixteen marks a night they usually wait until they’re back home to be really ill.”
    “This one won’t be going home,” I said.
    “Dead, is he?” said Küttner.
    “It’s beginning to look that way, Herr Doctor.”
    “Makes a change to be doing something for my fee, I suppose.”
    He took out a stethoscope and set about looking for a heartbeat. “I had better go and inform Frau Adlon,” Pieck said, and left the room.
    While Küttner worked his trade, I took another look at the body. Rubusch was a big, heavy man with short, fair hair and a face as fat as a hundred-kilo baby. In bed, from the side, he looked like a foothill in the Harz Mountains. Without his clothes it was hard to place him, but I was sure there was a reason other than the fact that he was staying in the hotel why he seemed familiar to me.
    Küttner leaned back and nodded with what looked like satisfaction. “He’s been dead for several hours I should say.” Looking at his pocket watch, he added, “Sometime between the hours of midnight and six o’clock this morning.”
    “There are some nitro pills in the bathroom, Doc,” I said. “I took the liberty of looking through his things.”
    “Probably an enlarged heart.”
    “An enlarged everything, by the look of him,” I said, and handed the doctor the little slip of folded paper. “And I do mean everything. There’s a packet of three minus one in the bathroom. That, plus some makeup on the towel and the smell of perfume in the air, leads me to suggest that, perhaps, the last few hours of his life may have included a very happy few minutes.”
    By now I had noticed a clip of brand-new banknotes on the desk and was liking my theory more and more.
    “You don’t think he died in her arms, do you?” asked Küttner.
    “No. The door was locked from the inside.”
    “So this poor fellow could have had sex, shown her out, locked the door, gone back to bed, and then expired after all the exertion and excitement.”
    “You’ve got me convinced.”
    “The useful thing about being a hotel doctor is that people such as yourself don’t ever get to see that my surgery is full of sick people. Consequently, I look like I actually know what I’m doing.”
    “Don’t you?”
    “Only some of the time. Most medicine comes down to just one prescription, you know. That you’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”
    “He won’t.”
    “There are worse ways to hit the slab, I suppose,” said Küttner.
    “Not if you are married, there aren’t.”
    “Was he? Married?”
    I lifted the dead man’s left hand to show off a gold band.
    “You don’t miss much, do you, Gunther?”
    “Not much, give or take the old Weimar Republic and a proper police force that catches criminals instead of employing them.”
    Küttner was no liberal, but he was no Nazi, either. A month or two earlier I had found him in the men’s room, weeping at the news of Paul von Hindenburg’s death. All the same, he looked alarmed at my remark, and for a moment he glanced down at Heinrich Rubusch’s body as if he might report my conversation to the Gestapo.
    “Relax, Doc. Even the Gestapo haven’t yet worked out a way of making an informer out of a dead man.”
     
    I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the front and picked up the message for Rubusch, which was only from Georg Behlert expressing the hope that he had enjoyed his stay at the