Free The One From the Other by Philip Kerr

Munich’s main railway station. From there I walked through the bomb-damaged city center to the corner of Ludwigstrasse, where, in front of the charred ruins of the Leuchtenberg Palais and the Odeon, once the best concert halls in Munich, I took a tram north, in the direction of Schwabing. Here, nearly all of the buildings reminded me of myself, with only the housefronts standing, so that while the general appearance of the street seemed hardly impaired, everything was in reality badly damaged and burned out. It was high time I made some repairs. But I didn’t see how that was possible doing what I was doing. Working as the Adlon house detective in the early thirties, I had learned a little about running a grand hotel, but this had been very poor preparation for running a small one. The Ami was right. I had to go back to what I knew best. I was going to tell Kirsten that I intended to put the hotel up for sale, and that I planned to become a private detective again. Of course, telling her was one thing; expecting her to register any sign of comprehension was quite another. And whereas I still had a façade, Kirsten seemed like a complete ruin of her former self.
    On the north edge of Schwabing was the main state hospital. It was used as the American military hospital, which meant that Germans had to go somewhere else. That is, all except the lunatics, who went to the hospital’s Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. This was just around the corner from the main hospital, in Kraepelinstrasse. I visited her as often as I could given that I was running a hotel, which meant that lately I’d been coming only every other day.
    Kirsten’s room enjoyed a view of Prinz Luitpold Park to the southeast, but I could not have described her condition as comfortable. There were bars on the windows of the room and the three other women she shared it with were all severely disturbed. The room stank of urine and, from time to time, one of the other women would scream out loud, laugh hysterically, or throw something unspeakable in my direction. Also, the beds were verminous. There were bite marks on Kirsten’s thighs and arms, and on one occasion, I had been bitten myself. Kirsten herself was hardly recognizable as the woman I had married. In the ten months since leaving Berlin she had aged ten years. Her hair was long and gray and unwashed. Her eyes were like two spent lightbulbs. She sat on the edge of her iron bedstead and stared at the green linoleum floor as if it had been the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. She looked like some poor stuffed animal in the anthropological collection at the museum on Richard-Wagner-Strasse.
    After her father had died, Kirsten had fallen into a state of general depression and started drinking a lot and talking to herself. At first I had assumed she thought I was listening, but it was soon painfully clear to me that this was not the case. So I was actually pleased when she stopped talking to herself. The only trouble was that she stopped talking completely, and when it became apparent that she had withdrawn into herself, I summoned the doctor, who recommended immediate hospitalization.
    “She’s suffering from acute catatonic schizophrenia,” was what Dr. Bublitz, the psychiatrist treating Kirsten, had told me, about a week after her admission. “It’s not all that uncommon. After what Germany has been through, who can be surprised? Almost a fifth of our inpatients are suffering from some kind of catatonia. Nijinsky, the dancer and choreographer, suffered from the same condition as Frau Handlöser.”
    Because Kirsten’s family doctor had been treating her since she was a little girl, he had booked her into the Max Planck under her maiden name. (Much to my annoyance, it was a mistake that showed no sign of being rectified. And I had given up correcting the doctor when he called her Frau Handlöser.)
    “Will she get better?” I had asked Dr. Bublitz.
    “That’s a little hard to say,” he