Free Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher Page B

himself and asked to be put through to the Charité.
     
    The black car could not have travelled faster if the two women in the zinc coffins at the back had still been alive. After they left the restricted area the driver put his foot down like a getaway car driver. Rath looked across at him.
    ‘Slow down,’ he said. ‘Two corpses are more than enough.’
    The driver muttered and laid off the gas a little. He had started grumbling when he heard they were going to the morgue in the Charité. Dr Schwartz was otherwise engaged but had requested that the two dead women be brought to him. Wolter had stayed behind in the flat, while Rath had been obliged to travel in the mortuary car with Dr Völcker between him and the driver. The Red doctor had insisted, and Wolter had given his consent. Thus Uncle was rid of the troublemaker, and Rath was lumbered with him.
    The co-driver had groaned when he heard how many people were accompanying the two corpses. ‘This isn’t a police van, it’s a mortuary car.’ Grumpily he had cleared his space, and was now sitting in the back between the coffins, cursing at each bend.
    Although his eyes were open, Rath was scarcely aware of the world outside the car windows. He saw the traffic on Kottbusser Damm, saw the Friday hustle and bustle on Oranienstrasse, but it all seemed like a dream. Outside of Neukölln everything seemed normal again, but that normality was at the same time unreal. It hardly seemed credible that only a few kilometres away a state of emergency had been declared and shots were being fired, that people were dying. The image of the dead women had been burned into his brain. The younger of the two was only twenty-six years old, the older of the pair fifty. Their papers felt so heavy in the inside pocket of Rath’s coat it was as if they were printed on lead.
    Since the mortuary car had set off from Hermannstrasse, he hadn’t exchanged a single word with Völcker. He observed the doctor’s gaunt figure out of the corner of his eye, sitting in a creased grey coat that was slightly too big for him. There was a tinge of grey stubble on his pointed chin, and his eyes were focused on the road ahead.
    Rath finally broke the silence. ‘You’re a doctor,’ he asked, so suddenly that Dr Völcker gave a start, ‘so why did you become a communist?’
    For the first time since they had left Neukölln, Völcker looked at him. ‘It doesn’t tally with your world view, does it?’
    Rath was annoyed by the doctor’s self-righteous tone, and even more annoyed that Völcker was, in a way, correct. It always surprised him when academics called themselves communists. For Rath, communists grew out of the lumpenproletariat. People raised in an environment like that barely stood a chance. Either they became communists or they became criminals, or both. Criminals, communists – for many policemen they were one and the same. Didn’t communists also want to steal? To dispossess the middle classes using violent means? The Penal Code called that robbery; the Commune called it revolution.
    While Rath could half understand some poor devil pinning his last hopes on the communists, it made the intellectuals who preached revolution even less fathomable. They were the ones elevating robbery to an ideology. As long as it occurred on a mass scale, you could call it a revolution and justify it academically. It was these ideologues in particular that Rath couldn’t stand, muddleheads who always knew best, who believed they had a monopoly on the truth. Völcker was someone he placed in this category, although the doctor didn’t give the impression of being particularly muddled – just of being even more of a know-it-all.
    ‘Have you ever been to some of the damp-infested hovels that certain people in this city still use to extract money from the working classes?’ Völcker dug a little deeper when Rath didn’t respond. ‘Do you know the conditions some people are forced to live in?’
    Rath was