Phantoms of Breslau (15 page)

“I didn’t dare disturb your moment of contemplation as you admired the little Baroness, like quicksilver …”

“Did you not hear my question, Frédéric?” the Baroness said even more gently.

“A telephone call for you, Baroness,” Friedrich announced. “It’s the man who handed your Ladyship that strange business card a few moments ago.”

“You should spare yourself the word ‘strange’, my dear Frédéric,” hissed the Baroness. “You’re not here to make comments.”

“Yes, of course, your Ladyship.” Friedrich bowed, his eyes now revealing less readiness to sacrifice his life for his employer. “What am I to say to the gentleman?”

“I’ll talk to him.” She excused herself from the ladies for a few moments and floated across the garden, bestowing smiles all around. The warmest smile was for her husband, Baron Rüdiger II von Bockenheim und Bielau.

Climbing the steps to the villa, she looked once again at the business card and the word “Verte”. On the reverse were the words: “Concerning cabbies and carters”. The Baroness stopped smiling. She entered her boudoir and picked up the receiver.

“I’m not going to introduce myself,” said a man’s hoarse voice. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer truthfully. Otherwise the Baron will have to find out about his wife’s secret life … Why aren’t you saying anything?”

“Because you haven’t asked me anything.” The Baroness took a cigarette from a crystal case and lit it.

“I want to know the addresses of the men you take as escorts after your visits to the Hungarian King. They dress up – one as a carter, another as a cabby. I’m only interested in the ones who dress up as sailors.”

“You like sailors, do you?” The Baroness rippled with quiet laughter. “You want them to screw you, do you?” Obscenities excited her. She wanted to hear this man swear, in his voice hoarse with tobacco. She liked swearing and the smell of cheap tobacco.

“You’d know something about that, wouldn’t you? Answer me, you old bag, or do I have to speak to the Baron?” The man’s voice changed tone.

“You’re through to him already,” the Baroness replied. “Speak to this wretched blackmailer, darling!”

“Baron Rüdiger II von Bockenheim und Bielau speaking,” said a deep voice. “Don’t try to blackmail my wife, dear man. It’s despicable and base.”

Baron Rüdiger II von Bockenheim und Bielau replaced the receiver and left his study, kissing his wife on the forehead on the way.

“Let’s say goodbye to our guests, my little dawn,” he said.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 4TH, 1919
ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT

Baroness Mathilde von Bockenheim und Bielau sat at her escritoire writing a letter of warning to her friend Laura von Scheitler, a habitué of the Hungarian King whose noble title and coat of arms were brand new to her – just like her own. When she had finished the brief note, she sprayed the back of the paper with some perfume and put it into an envelope. She then tugged on the bell and, rubbing some cold cream bought at Hopp’s House of Beauty for the astronomical sum of three hundred marks into her alabaster complexion, she sat down at her dressing table
in front of the mirror. She waited for Friedrich and heard a knock at the door.

“
Entré
!” she called, and carried on rubbing the cream into her generous
décolleté
.

She looked into the mirror and saw two hands on her delicate skin. She felt one of them, rough and gnarled, over her mouth, while the other pulled her hair. The Baroness felt excruciating pain on her head and landed on the chaise longue. A man with red hair sat astride her, pinning her shoulders to the sofa with his knees. With one hand he again covered her mouth, and with the other slapped her sharply on the cheek.

“Are you going to be quiet, or shall I do it again?”

Baroness von Bockenheim und Bielau tried to nod. The red-headed man understood her gesture.

“The addresses of those sailors,” he said, and the Baroness realized that this was not the man she had spoken to on the telephone. “Male whores dressed up as sailors. Immediately!”

“Alfred Sorg,” she said quietly. “That’s the name of my sailor. I’ll give you his number. He brings other men too.”

The red-headed man snorted and climbed off the Baroness with obvious regret. She stood up, wrote a telephone number on a piece of paper and sprayed the reverse side with perfume. Her assailant tore the paper from her hands, opened the window and jumped down onto the lawn. The Baroness watched as he climbed the railings. She heard the roar of an engine and the squeal of tires. She pulled the scarlet cord again and sat down at her mirror. She spread a thick layer of cream onto her hands.

“I know you let him in, Frédéric,” she said gently as the butler appeared at her side. “As from tomorrow, I no longer want to see you in my house.”

“I don’t know what your Ladyship cares to mean.” Friedrich’s voice was full of solemnity and concern.

The Baroness turned to her servant and looked deeply into his eyes.

“There’s only one way you can save your position, Frédéric.” She turned back to the mirror and sighed. “I’m giving you one last chance.”

Seconds passed, then minutes. The Baroness combed her hair while Friedrich stood there, stiff as a poker.

“I’m listening, your Ladyship.” His voice betrayed unease.

“You’ll lose your position” – she gazed at her reflection with satisfaction and tore up the letter to Baroness von Scheitler – “unless you bring me that red-headed monster before the night is out.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 4TH, 1919
MIDNIGHT

In the Three Crowns beer cellar on Kupferschmiedestrasse 5–6 the air was heavy with tobacco smoke mixed with fried bacon, burned onions and human sweat. This odour drifted up towards the arched vault and enveloped the pseudo-Romanesque windows which gave on to the yard belonging to the White Eagle building. The fug was not alleviated by the few blasts of cold night air which blew in as the door opened to let in new customers. The traffic in the cellar was one way only. No-one was leaving; if someone left now, they would be considered a traitor by the others. In the Three Crowns, a meeting of the Breslau division of the
Freikorps
was under way.

Mock and Smolorz stopped at the back of the hall while their eyes adjusted to the stinging atmosphere. At the heavy tables sat men leaden with beer. They slammed their tankards on the oak tabletops swimming with white froth, clicked their fingers at the head waiter and hushed each other. To the eye of an experienced policeman their varied headgear was just as clear an indication of the men’s social standing as any military
decoration. Workers sat at tables wearing canvas caps with patent peaks, or soft caps made of oilcloth. Their social class was further highlighted by their collarless shirts and rolled-up sleeves. A little to one side were tradesmen, restaurateurs and clerks. Their distinguishing attire was a bowler hat, with the additional attribute of a stiff collar – many of which were crying out for a visit to the laundry. These men drank less and did not slam their tankards down, but it was from their cigars and pipes that the heaviest smoke bombs wafted. The third and largest group was made up of youths in helmets, or round caps with no peaks known as
Einheits-feldmützen
, very familiar to Mock.

The Criminal Assistant paid keen attention to this last group. His watchful eye penetrated the smoke screen and inspected the grey uniforms with their medals pinned on here and there. Just then, a young, handsome man wearing one such uniform climbed onto a podium where usually – when the
Freikorps
were not meeting – a few musicians would beguile the beer cellar’s guests as they ate their rissoles, a speciality of the house. The man now standing on the podium wore a medal which reminded Mock of the so-called Baltic Cross he himself had received for his service in Kurland.

“Brothers! Fellow companions in arms!” yelled the Knight of the Baltic Cross. “We must not allow the communists to poison our nation. We cannot let our proud Germanic peoples be defiled by the Bolshevik Asians and their lackeys!”

Mock switched off his sense of hearing. Otherwise he would have climbed onto the podium and slapped the young man whose ardour to fight was as inauthentic as his Baltic Cross. He knew the speaker well; he knew that, throughout the war, he had worked as a brave informer for the political police, which vehemently hunted down any sign of defeatism or lowering of morale among civilians. While Mock was delousing himself in the trenches; while, on the order of Captain Mantzelmann, he and
Cornelius Rühtgard were exposing their backsides to the icy north wind to crap; while they were pumping fountains of blood from the heads of Kalmucks; while they were looking into the sad eyes of dying Russian prisoners of war; while they were extracting fat larvae from infected wounds, this speaker, Alfred Sorg, was doing the rounds of taverns and listening bravely to embittered people; happily leading youngsters who were caught cursing the emperor to the nearest police station by the scruff of the neck; valiantly blackmailing young wives who abused the Reich’s name, and then courageously presenting these wives who were so missing their husbands with a choice: either to face prison or to indulge in a moment of oblivion, forgetting everything and, above all, their faithfulness to their husbands.

Somebody nudged Mock and handed him a pile of pamphlets, saying “Pass them on”. Mock studied them. They urged young men to join the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division. On one of them a member was pointing to a picture of a charming town above which a moulting, Polish white eagle with hideous talons and a foul, gaping beak spread its wings, while another
Freikorps
soldier aimed his bayonet at the beast. Beneath the cartoon was a quotation from Ernst von Salomon: “Germany burned darkly in daring minds. Germany was always there where it was being fought for, it showed itself where armed hands strove for its continued existence, it blazed where those possessed of its spirit dared to spill the last drops of their blood on its behalf.”

“I wonder whether Germany was in the trenches at Dünaburg,” thought Mock. “I wonder whether von Salomon, writing about ‘last drops of blood’, saw my comrades in arms dying of diphtheria, with bloody diarrhoea running down their trousers.” The Criminal Assistant looked at another pamphlet with a picture of the American president blowing soap bubbles. One of the bubbles contained the caption: “President Wilson’s pipe dreams”.

“Do what you must!” thundered Alfred Sorg from the podium. “Be victorious, or die and leave the final decision to God!”

Still trying not to listen, Mock gazed in disbelief at the five-bullet Mauser 98 rifles leaning ostentatiously against the tables. He remembered a scout at Dünaburg who had informed von Thiede, the commander of the regiment, about a meeting of Russian spies at a Jewish inn. Mock and his scout platoon had burst through the inn door. A din erupted. Platoon Commander Corporal Heinz ordered them to shoot. Mock pulled the trigger of his Mauser 98, which belched thick smoke. There was a deathly silence. The smoke subsided. The communists were either female or at most ten years old. Later, Corporal Heinz laughed his head off, and he was still laughing when a bayonet ground into his guts. One of the men in the platoon which had arbitrated at the homes of the alleged spies had lost respect for his Führer. When Heinz had been found lying in the mud near his quarters with a ripped-up belly, Mock, as a police officer in civilian life, was given the task of conducting an investigation. The perpetrator was not found. Mock had been rather indolent, and a month later he was demoted by Regiment Commander von Thiede for not conducting the investigation skilfully enough. Since Mock had suffered some light wounds, von Thiede sent him to Königsberg in the hope that the police officer with the rebellious attitude would not return to his regiment. There Mock fell out of a window, and then as a convalescent he did indeed end up somewhere else: with Field Orderly Cornelius Rühtgard under the command of Captain Mantzelmann, who so loved the cold hygiene of the north.

The speaker sat down at a table at the front next to a young woman at whose sight Mock began to quiver. He knew her well; it was to her that his friend Rühtgard had dedicated his stories during the war. He bit his lip and once again suppressed the urge to slap Alfred Sorg across the face. The girl, unable to take her eyes off the inflamed speaker, was clapping
as enthusiastically as everyone else in the Three Crowns. Everyone, that is, apart from two police officers from Division IIIb who in their search for phony sailors had dropped into a nest of
Freikorps
supporters. Mock showed no enthusiasm because he was overcome by sad thoughts; Smolorz did not clap because his arm was being held down by two hands belonging to a man with butler’s whiskers, who was whispering something in his ear. Smolorz had recognized him and was listening carefully.

BRESLAU, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1919
ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Customers rolled out of the beer cellar after the
Freikorps
meeting, pumped up with equal measures of patriotism and beer. One man had drunk little, since his plans for the night would have been hindered by too much alcohol. With his arm around the slender waist of the girl next to him, Alfred Sorg felt the demon in his trousers petulantly demand an offering. He thought about his pockets – there was nothing with which to pay for a room by the hour – and about his miserable little room where two members of the so-called Erhardt brigade would shortly be snoring.

He scanned the street and noticed a shadowy opening between two buildings that led into a yard. That dark, damp cleft awoke in him a chain of associations which aroused him again. He stopped, put his arms around the girl and pressed a beery kiss onto her mouth. She parted her lips and her legs. He simultaneously slipped his tongue into her mouth and a knee between her thighs. He picked her up and they disappeared into the narrow opening. The damp draught did not surprise Sorg; the pungent smell of garlic, however, did.