Phantoms of Breslau (26 page)

“I was at the caretaker’s” – Zupitza set his hands to work while Wirth translated into his characteristic German with its Austrian lilt – “and was keeping my eye on him all the time. He was uneasy. He kept looking around as if he wanted to go somewhere. All the more reason for me to keep an eye on him. I took him to the toilet. Stood outside the door. For a long time. In the end I knocked. Several times and – nothing. I forced the door. The window was open. The caretaker had escaped through the window. Mr Smolorz can take it from there.”

“Didn’t you hear what Wirth said?” Mock growled at Smolorz. “Out with it!”

“This is what Zupitza wrote.” Smolorz handed Mock a piece of paper with large scribblings. “Then we questioned the neighours. Nobody knows where Frenzel is. One said that he was a gambler. We’ve combed the local gambling dens. Nothing.”

Yet another corpse. The following day, or in a few days time, the murderer would send Mock a letter. They would go to a given address and find Frenzel with his eyes torn out. The organ grinder’s little girl would
sing yet another verse. And you, Mock, you are to go home and talk to your father, and repair all the damage you’ve done. Admit you’re defeated, Mock. You’ve lost. Hand over the investigation to others. To those who haven’t made any mistakes that will be punished by people having their eyes gouged out or their lungs pierced.

Mock walked slowly to the table and grasped its edge. The surface shuddered and bounced, and then a moment later it was up in the air. Wirth and Zupitza fled to the wall, dishes crashed to the floor, glass shattered, plates gave an ear-piercing wail and cups screeched. The noise was terrible, and became intolerable when eighty-five kilograms of Mock jumped on to the upturned table. Fragments of crockery gave out their last strains, a shattered complaint, a grating
requiem
.

Panting, Mock stepped off the table and immersed his head in the iron sink. Cold water rushed around his neck and burning ears.

“Towel!” he yelled from the sink’s cool interior.

Somebody put a sheet round his shoulders. Mock stood upright and covered his head with it. Streams of water flowed down inside his collar. He felt as if he were in a tent; he would have liked to be in a tent at that moment, far from everything. After a while he uncovered his head and took stock of the anxious faces.

“We’re ending this investigation, gentlemen,” he spoke very slowly. “Criminal Commissioner Heinrich Mühlhaus will take over. I’ll just take down Erika Kiesewalter’s statement and you, Smolorz, are going to hand it to the Commissioner. He’ll know that they’ve got to find a man with a daughter in a wheelchair. Well, what are you staring at? Read the statement, then you’ll know what it’s all about.”

“And what about the people in the storeroom? Are we going to let them go?” Wirth asked nervously.

“You take them to a detention cell. Tomorrow night Guard Buhrack will be waiting for you. He’ll look after them. Any other questions?”

“Criminal Assistant, sir,” Smolorz mumbled. “What about her? The storeroom, or straight to Buhrack?”

There was silence. Mock looked at Erika as she stood in the doorway. Her nurse’s hat was now askew. Her lips were trembling and her vocal organs were positioning themselves to ask a question. But the bellows of her lungs could not expel the air. She stood breathless.

“What happens” – Smolorz had become exceptionally talkative – “if Mühlhaus wants to question her himself?”

Mock was staring at Erika. She shivered as the clock in the hall struck three times. The shivering did not subside, even though she was wrapped in an eiderdown. He looked at the nurse’s starched housecoat, at Smolorz, who was unhealthily excited, and then came to a decision.

“If Criminal Commissioner Mühlhaus wants to question the witness, Miss Erika Kiesewalter, he’s going to have to put himself to the trouble of going to the seaside.”

RÜGENWALDERMÜNDE, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1919
NOON

Erika clenched her teeth. A moment later she sank slowly down onto Mock and snuggled her face between his neck and collarbone. She was breathing heavily. Mock swept the damp hair from her temple. Gradually her numbness passed and she slid from the man onto the tangle of sheets.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t cry out,” he said, barely able to control the shaking in his voice.

“Why?” she asked in a whisper.

“The receptionist didn’t believe we were married. He didn’t see any wedding rings. If you had yelled out that would have just confirmed his suspicions.”

“Why?” she repeated drowsily, and closed her eyes.

“Have you ever seen a married couple not leave their bed for fifteen hours?”

There was no reply. He got out of bed, pulled on his long johns and trousers, then stretched his braces and let them go. They slapped loudly against his naked torso. He whistled the well-known song “Frau Luna”, opened the window that gave onto the sea and breathed smells which transported him to the Königsberg of his past, when nobody demanded he admit to some nameless offences or blackmailed him with eyeless corpses. The waves beat hard against the sun-baked sand and the two piers built on mounds of vast boulders. As he gazed at these constructions which embraced the port like a pair of arms, Mock tasted microscopic salty drops on his lips. From the nearest smokehouse wafted an aroma which set this fanatical lover of fish quivering nervously. He swallowed and turned towards Erika. She was no longer asleep. The slap of his braces had evidently woken her and she was resting her head on her knees, staring at him. Above her head hung a model of a sailing yacht which swayed in the salty breeze.

“Would you like some smoked fish?” he asked.

“Yes, very much,” she smiled timidly.

“Well, let’s go then,” Mock said as he buttoned up his shirt and tried on the new tie Erika had chosen for him in Köslin the previous day.

“I don’t feel like going anywhere.” She got out of bed and, stretching after her short nap, ran several paces across the room. She put her arms around Mock’s neck and with slender fingers stroked his muscular, broad shoulders. “I’m going to eat here …”

“Shall I bring you some?” Mock could not resist kissing her and gliding his hand over her naked back and buttocks. “What would you like? Eel? Plaice? Salmon, perhaps?”

“Don’t go anywhere.” She moved her lips towards his. “I want eel. But I want yours.”

She clung to him and kissed him on the ear.

“I’m afraid,” Mock whispered into her small, soft lobe tangled in a net of red hair, “that I might not be able … I’m not twenty any more …”

“Stop talking,” she rebuked him in a stern voice. “Everything’s going to be fine …”

She was right. Everything was fine.

RÜGENWALDERMÜNDE, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1919
TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

They left the Friedrichsbad Spa House Hotel holding hands. Two droschkas and a huge double-decker omnibus with a metal sign announcing its route between Rügenwalde and Rügenwaldermünde were parked in front of the porch of this massive building. Not far from the hotel stood a group of primary-school children and a bald, stout teacher who, as he fanned himself with his hat, was telling his charges that during the Napoleonic wars Prince Hohenzollern himself had taken the waters at this spa; the corpulent preceptor made use of his finger and pointed to a name plaque attached to the wall. Mock also noticed a pretty girl sitting alone on a bench outside the spa house, smoking a cigarette. He had worked long enough in the Vice Department to be able to indentify her profession.

They passed several houses on Georg-Büttner-Strasse and stopped at an ice-cream parlour. Erika attacked her icy column of raspberry scoops like a child and, much to Mock’s surprise, even bit into it, the very idea of which made his own teeth ache. The rasping of a barrier announced that the raised bridge had now been lowered. They crossed it and found themselves on Skagerrak Strasse. They followed the left side of the street and entered the first house on the corner, a tavern. Mock asked the innkeeper, a Mr Robert Pastewski – this was the name that appeared above the
entrance – for a dozen Reichsadler cigarettes for himself, and the same number of English Gold Flakes for Erika.

The strength of the burning September sun was tempered by a wind coming from the sea, which entangled Erika’s hair as she stood on the narrow pavement.

“I’m hungry,” she complained, and looked meaningfully at Mock.

“But …” – Mock was troubled – “we’d have to go back to the hotel …”

“I’m not speaking in metaphors now.” The wind tossed a strand of hair into her eyes. “I really do want to eat.”

“Then we’re going for some real smoked eel,” he said. “But I’ll buy you a roll first. Let’s go …”

He stepped into a nearby bakery and was enveloped by the smell of warm bread. The only customers in the place were two sailors, who were leaning on a counter decorated with starched tapestries and talking to the fat baker. They were speaking so fast in a Pomeranian dialect that Mock could hardly understand what they were saying. But one thing he did know: neither of them was buying anything, and the baker was not paying the slightest attention to him. Mock felt a vague unease, but could not get to the root of it. “It’s the two sailors, no doubt,” he thought to himself, “not four but two.”

“And what would the esteemed gentleman like?” the baker asked in a strong Pomeranian accent.

“Two doughnuts, please. What’s the filling?”

“Wild rose jam.”

“Fine. Two please.”

The baker took his money, handed him a paper cone of doughnuts and went back to his conversation with the sailors.

“Listen, Zach,” Mock heard one of them say as he was on his way out. “Who was that?”

In response he tinkled the bell above the door and glanced at Erika,
who seemed bored. With the tip of her shoe she was drawing some figures in heaps of sand scattered across the uneven pavement. Mock handed her the cone and absentmindedly erased the mysterious annotations with his shoe.

“
Noli turbare circulos meos
,”
^†
Erika said, pretending to take a swing at him; instead she stroked his clean-shaven cheek. At that moment he recognized the source of his anger.

“What am I supposed to say,” he thought as he walked beside her in silence. “I’m supposed to ask her where she knows that sentence from, and whether she went to secondary school, but every idiot knows it, after all. It doesn’t prove she’s educated or well read. ‘I’m a hetaera,’ she said to me when I asked about her profession; she uses the concept of a ‘metaphor’ correctly and quotes Cicero. Who is this whore, this crafty little whore? Maybe she wants me to start asking her about her past, her parents and her siblings; maybe she wants me to feel sorry for her and hug her. And she’s putting me to the test. Delicately and subtly. First she ruts like a she-cat in heat, then she quotes sentences in Latin which must be rattling around somewhere in that head of hers, which must be as good as empty with all this debauchery. ‘I partake in debauchery,’ she said. I wonder if she did the same way as that cripple – with three at a time.”

They walked on. Erika ate the second doughnut with relish. As they passed a large square house with huge green doors carrying a sign which read
SOCIETY FOR THE AID OF THE SHIPWRECKED
, Erika crushed the empty cone and asked casually:

“I wonder if there’s a society for the aid of the life-wrecked?”

Crafty whore. She wants me to feel sorry for her; she wants me to see her as a child snuggling into the fur of a fawning boxer.

Mock stopped outside the smokehouse and said something he later long regretted.

“Listen to me, Erika” – he controlled the tone of his voice but not what he said – “you’re not a whore with a heart of gold. There’s no such thing. You’re simply a whore. And that’s all. Don’t confide in me; don’t tell me about your miserable childhood; don’t tell me about your monster of a step-father and your mother whom he raped. Don’t tell me about your sister who gave herself an abortion at the age of fifteen. Don’t try and squeeze any tears out of me. Do what you’re best at, and don’t say anything.”

“Alright, I’ll watch myself,” she said with no suggestion of tears. “Are we going to that smokehouse or not?”

She walked past Mock and made her way towards a temporary counter on which a fishmonger in a rubber apron and sailor’s hat had arranged lightly smoked eels. He watched her slim back, which was shaking. He ran to her, turned her round and made to kiss away her tears. He did not do so, however, as Erika was not crying, she was shaking with laughter.

“My childhood was normal and nobody raped me,” she spluttered. “And talking of life’s wrecks, I wasn’t thinking about myself at all, but about a certain man …”

“A man who goes by the name of Kurt, no doubt? Go on, say it!” Mock was shouting, heedless of the fishmonger’s knowing eyes which said “that’s what young wives are like”. “That’s why you like the name Kurt so much, eh? You told me that the day before yesterday! Kurty, eh? Who was Kurty? Go on, tell me, damn it!”

“No.” Erika became serious. “The man’s name is Eberhard.”

8.IX.1919

It was remarkable, the occultists’ conference organized by Professor Schmikale, the representative of the Thule order in Breslau. The whole
world and their father were invited! Ludwig Klages himself, Lanz von Liebenfels and even Walter Friedrich Otto! They did not, however, trouble themselves to come to this out-of-the-way Silesian province. Instead, the first of these sent his assistant, some lisping lad who gave a completely incomprehensible lecture on the cult of the Pelasgians’ Great Mother goddess. Furthermore he kept on suggesting that Klages’ master, Friedrich Nietzsche, was in constant spiritual contact with the Magna Mater. It was she who allegedly gave him the idea to call Jahwe and Jesus “usurpers of divinity”. At the same time he mercilessly criticized the young Englishman Robert Graves, who in a lecture had dared to claim that it was he who had come up with this term for the Jewish gods. It’s ridiculous! A paper on who was the first to think up some trivial formulation!