Free March Violets by Philip Kerr Page A

or sad according to the success of their enterprise.
    I walked on down Alexanderstrasse and passed Entrance Three, in front of which a couple of traffic police, nicknamed ‘white mice’ because of their distinctive short white coats, were climbing off their powder-blue BMW motorcycles. A Green Minna, a police-van, came racing down the street, Martin-horn blaring, in the direction of Jannowitz Bridge. Oblivious to the noise, the two white mice swaggered in through Entrance Three to make their reports.
    I went in by Entrance Two, knowing the place well enough to have chosen the entrance where I was least likely to be challenged by someone. If I was stopped, I was on my way to Room 32a, the Lost Property Office. But Entrance Two also serves the police morgue.
    I walked nonchalantly along a corridor and down into the basement, past a small canteen to a fire exit. I pushed the bar on the door down and found myself in a large cobbled courtyard where several police cars were parked. One of these was being washed by a man wearing gumboots who paid me no attention as I crossed the yard and ducked into another doorway. This led to the boiler room, and I stopped there for a moment while I made a mental check of my bearings. I hadn’t worked at the Alex for ten years not to know my way around. My only concern was that I might meet someone who knew me. I opened the only other door that led out of the boiler room and ascended a short staircase into a corridor, at the end of which was the morgue.
    When I entered the morgue’s outer office I encountered a sour smell that was reminiscent of warm, wet poultry flesh. It mixed with the formaldehyde to make a sickly cocktail that I felt in my stomach at the same time as I drew it into my nostrils. The office, barely furnished with a couple of chairs and a table, contained nothing to warn the unwary of what lay beyond the two glass doors, except the smell and a sign which simply read ‘Morgue: Entrance Forbidden’. I opened the doors a crack and looked inside.
    In the centre of a grim, damp room was an operating-table that was also part trough. On opposite sides of a stained ceramic gulley were two marble slabs, set slightly at an angle so that fluids from a corpse could drain into the centre and be washed down a drain by water from one of the two tall murmuring taps that were situated at each end. The table was big enough for two corpses laid head-to-toe, one on each side of the drain; but there was only one cadaver, that of a male, which lay under the knife and the surgical saw. These were wielded by a bent, slight man with thin dark hair, a high forehead, glasses, a long hooked nose, a neat moustache and a small chin-beard. He was wearing gumboots, a heavy apron, rubber gloves and a stiff collar and a tie.
    I stepped quietly through the doors, and contemplated the corpse with professional curiosity. Moving closer I tried to see what had caused the man’s death. It was clear that the body had been lying in water, since the skin was sodden and peeling away on the hands and feet, like gloves and socks. Otherwise it was in largely reasonable condition, with the exception of the head. This was black in colour and completely featureless, like a muddy football, and the top part of the cranium had been sawn away and the brain removed. Like a wet Gordian knot, it now lay in a kidney-shaped dish awaiting dissection.
    Confronted with violent death in all its ghastly hues, contorted attitudes and porcine fleshiness, I had no more reaction than if I had been looking in the window of my local ‘German’ butcher’s shop, except that this one had more meat on display. Sometimes I was surprised at the totality of my own indifference to the sight of the stabbed, the drowned, the crushed, the shot, the burnt and the bludgeoned, although I knew well how that insensitivity had come about. Seeing so much death on the Turkish front and in my service with Kripo, I had almost