BooksBarbecue
Back The One from the Other
Chapters (50)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. SEVENTEEN
  23. EIGHTEEN
  24. NINETEEN
  25. TWENTY
  26. TWENTY-ONE
  27. TWENTY-TWO
  28. TWENTY-THREE
  29. TWENTY-FOUR
  30. TWENTY-FIVE
  31. TWENTY-SIX
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. THIRTY-NINE
  45. FORTY
  46. FORTY-ONE
  47. FORTY-TWO
  48. EPILOGUE
  49. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  50. Teaser chapter

The manila files were quite meticulous, being neatly arranged in alphabetical order. There were no records of what had happened before 1945, but for every person who had been infected with malaria since then, there was a detailed set of case notes. The first one I examined from the top drawer of the cabinet was for a Lieutenant Fritz Ansbach, who had been a German POW receiving treatment for nervous hysteria in the Partenkirchen hospital. He had been injected with malaria in the last days of November 1947. Within twenty-one days he had developed the full-blown disease, at which point the test vaccine, Sporovax, had been injected into his bloodstream. Ansbach was dead seventeen days later. Cause of death: malaria. Official cause of death: viral meningitis. I read several other files from that drawer. They were all the same. I left them out on the desk, ready to take with me when I went to Mönch. I had all that I needed. And I almost didn’t open the middle drawer in that evil filing cabinet at all. In which case I would never have come across the file labeled “Handlöser.”

I read the file slowly. And then I read it again. It used a lot of medical words that I didn’t understand and one or two that I did. There were lots of graphs showing the “subject’s” temperature and heart rate before and after they had put her arms inside a box containing up to a hundred infected mosquitoes. I remembered how I had thought she had been bitten by fleas or bed lice. And all that time, Henkell had been turning up at the Max Planck psychiatric hospital with his little box of death. They had given her the test vaccine, Sporovax IV, but it hadn’t worked. The way it hadn’t worked for any of the others. And so Kirsten had died. It was easily done. And very easily explained. Malaria could be written off as influenza just as easily as viral meningitis, especially in Germany, in a hospital where facilities were few. My wife had been murdered. I felt my stomach collapse in upon itself like an imploding balloon. The bastards had murdered my wife, just as surely as if they’d put a gun to her head and blown out her brains.