Phantoms of Breslau
( Inspector Eberhard Mock - 3 )
Marek Krajewski
Marek Krajewski
Phantoms of Breslau
Truth is like a sentence.
How did I deserve it?
Steven Saylor
BRESLAU, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2ND, 1919
A QUARTER PAST EIGHT IN THE MORNING
Criminal Commissioner Heinrich Muhlhaus slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Police Praesidium building at Schuhbrucke 49. Placing his foot on each step in turn, he pressed down with his full weight, to check whether the eighteenth-century sandstone would crack beneath the heels of his shining brogues. He would have liked to crumble the old stone to bits, scattering dust, and then retrace his steps to draw the caretaker’s attention to the mess. He would then be able to delay going into his office. He would not have to see the pained expression on the face of his secretary, von Gallasen, nor look at the wall calendar, filled with important deadlines, with its picture of the recently constructed Technische Hochschule, or the framed photograph of his son, Jakob Muhlhaus, taken at his confirmation. Above all, he could avoid the troubling and unpleasant presence of the pathologist, Doctor Siegfried Lasarius, whom the police messenger had announced a moment earlier. This information had spoiled the Commissioner’s mood. He did not like Lasarius, a man who considered the dead to be the best partners in conversation. And the dead appreciated him, too, even if they did not laugh at his jokes, lying as they were in the concrete troughs of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, bathed in the icy water that streamed from a shuddering rubber hosepipe. Every one of Lasarius’ visits heralded at best difficult questions, at worst serious problems. Nothing less than an interesting conceptual problem or a threat could induce Charon to leave his holdings. The Commissioner wanted to believe it was the former. He looked about him. He could see nothing that would give him an excuse to delay meeting the taciturn physician. Once again, he pressed his foot down on a stair. The lacquered leather of his shoes, reflecting the metallic leaves entwined around the bars of the banister and the colossal elevation of the stairs, creaked a little. A din and a loud cursing drifted up from the courtyard. Muhlhaus peered over a neglected fern, whose abominable condition was noticed by every woman who entered this male world. Although not a woman himself, he noted the gnarled twigs begging for water and, with an enraged expression, turned and ran downstairs towards the duty room. He did not reach it, however.
“Commissioner, sir!” he heard Lasarius’ stentorian voice from above. He stopped and caught sight of the dark spread of a hat and the damp pattern formed by sparse wisps of hair on a skull. Lasarius was descending majestically. “I couldn’t wait to see you.”
“It’s only five to nine,” Muhlhaus said, pulling out a silver fob watch from his waistcoat. “Can’t you wait a few seconds, Doctor? Is your business so urgent that we have to discuss it on the stairs?”
“There’s nothing to discuss.” Lasarius opened his leather briefcase and handed Muhlhaus two pages headed “Post-mortem Report”, then stared out at the courtyard where the caretaker and a carter were clanking cans of paraffin about. “We’re not going to say anything at all. Not a word. To anybody.”
“Especially not to Mock,” Muhlhaus rounded off after quickly reading the report. He observed the bewhiskered carter who was passing the cans to the caretaker and was so puffed up his waistcoat buttons seemed about to shoot across the courtyard in all directions. “Doctor Lasarius, don’t your stiffs have names? Why are these two anonymous? If you don’t know their names, you should give them some. Even farm cattle have names.”
“In my book, Commissioner Muhlhaus,” the physician murmured, “there’s no difference between cattle and humans, apart from the size of their heart or liver. What is it like in your profession?”
“We’ll call them …” the police officer passed over the question and glanced at the paraffin cart which bore the logo: “Lighting Articles — Salomon Beyer”. “… we’ll call them Alfred Salomon and Catarina Beyer.”
“I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” said Lasarius. He rested his briefcase on the banister, jotted down the names in the relevant spaces and made a sign of the cross over the pages.
“Not a word to anybody … especially Mock,” repeated Muhlhaus, lost in thought, and he shook the physician’s hand. “There’s no distinction between men and animals in my profession either. But it’s hard to keep files without names.”
BRESLAU, THAT SAME OCTOBER 2ND, 1919
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock staggered out of Affert’s tobacconists in a dark gateway on the north side of Ring. The October sun dazzled his cloudy irises over which, every now and again, his swollen eyelids drooped. Swaying on his feet, he leaned on the gate to the Ring Theatre and slipped a pince-nez with vivid yellow lenses onto his nose. Now, thanks to the skill of Jena Opticians, everything around him was drenched in a bright glow. Acrid cigarette smoke found its way between the lenses and the whites of Mock’s eyes, which were scored with red veins. Mock gasped and blew out the smoke, instinctively covering his eyes with his hands. He hissed in pain: his eyelids were a mass of neuron endings, and hard nodules drifted beneath the clammy skin. Holding on to the wall with one hand, he proceeded like a blind man and turned into Schmiedebrucke. His palm glided over the glazed shopfront of Proskauer’s Menswear. Glare reflecting off the golden watches laid out in the window of Kuhnel’s pierced his eyes. He scraped along the rough walls of the building occupied by the German Fisheries Company until he eventually crossed Nadlerstrasse and hit upon the glass door of Heymann’s Coffee House.
Mock staggered inside. At this time of day the coffee house was still empty and quiet. In the main room, a boy in a stiff white apron was busy stacking tables and chairs into pyramids, breaking up the activity from time to time with skilful swipes of a damp cloth to gather dust and cigarette ash from the surfaces of the tables and tablecloths. Seeing Mock trip and fly straight towards the fragile pyramid of furniture, he unintentionally swung his cloth and whipped the face of this early customer. The bright-yellow pince-nez danced on its chain, Mock lost his centre of gravity, and the tables and chairs their stability. The boy watched aghast as the well-built, dark-haired man landed on the chairs’ jutting legs and curved back-supports, breaking some of them with a terrible crash while starched tablecloths tumbled onto his head. Particles of dust flickered in the October morning sun. An open salt cellar fell into Mock’s thick hair and salt trickled down his cheeks with a faint rustle. The Criminal Assistant closed his eyes in defence and the stinging intensified. He was pleased — the pain would prevent him from falling asleep, would work better than the six cups of strong coffee which he had already managed to consume since five o’clock that morning. Contrary to the young waiter’s assumption, there was not a milligram of alcohol in Mock’s veins. Mock had not slept for four days; Mock was doing everything he could so as not to sleep.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME OCTOBER 2ND, 1919
A QUARTER PAST NINE IN THE MORNING
Although Heymann’s Coffee House was not yet open, two men sat there raising cups of steaming black coffee to their lips. One of them was smoking cigarette after cigarette, the other — ivory stem of his pipe clenched between his teeth — expelled small columns of smoke from the corner of his mouth into the thicket of his beard. The young waiter did everything he could to make the dark-haired man — a police officer, as it turned out — forget the recent incident. He cleared away the broken furniture, brought coffee and milk, had the famous Friedrichshof biscuits delivered from S. Brunies, the nearby patisserie, twisted cigarettes into his li
ttle pipe-shaped cigarette-holder for him, and listened attentively to the conversation in order to read every wish of the man he had so severely mistreated. At one point the victim of his cleaning manoeuvres took a few sheets of folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed them to the bearded man. The latter read them, puffing out squat mushrooms of smoke from his pipe. His companion brought a small phial to his nose and the pungent smell of urine drifted across the table. The boy escaped behind the bar in disgust. The bearded man read carefully, his features and folds of skin forming a question mark.
“Mock, why have you written this absurd statement to the press? And why are you showing it to me?”
“Commissioner, sir, I am …” — Mock pondered his next words, as if speaking a language he was not in full command of — “a loyal subordinate. I know that if … if a newspaper were to print this, then I’m finished. Yes, finished. Dismissed from the police force. Without a job. That’s why I’m telling you about it.”
“And what?” In a shaft of sunlight which cut through the clouds of smoke, tiny droplets of spittle could be clearly seen settling on Muhlhaus’ beard. “You want me to save you from being thrown out?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Mock whispered, afraid he might close his eyes at any moment and be transported to the land of his childhood: to the Heuscheuergebirge, covered in dry leaves and warmed by the autumn sun, where he used to go with his father. “I’m like a soldier, informing my commanding officer of my resignation.”
“You’re one of the men I want for my new murder commission.” The bowl of Muhlhaus’ pipe gurgled. “I don’t want idiots who trample over evidence left at crime scenes, whose only assets are exemplary military service. I don’t want former informers who work for both sides. And I don’t want to lose you because of this absurd statement of yours which will make a laughing stock of the entire Police Praesidium. You’ve been holding back from sleep for several days now. If you’ve gone clean out of your mind, as both this statement and your behaviour seem to indicate, then you won’t be much use to me anyway. So you have to tell me everything. If you remain silent, I’ll take you for a lunatic and leave. If you talk nonsense, I’ll also leave.”
“Commissioner, sir,” Mock said, placing the phial of smelling salts on the table. “Please hold this under my nose if I start to fall asleep. I’m glad you don’t mind the stench of ammonia. Hey, you,” he called to the boy. “What time do you open? We’ve enough time, Commissioner,” he said when he heard the answer. “And you, boy, I want you out of my sight. Come back just before opening time.”
The boy ran out, happy to relieve his nostrils of the unpleasant smell. Mock rested his elbows on the table, slipped on his world-brightening pince-nez, and turned his face towards the sunlight pouring through the lace curtains on the front window. He rubbed his eyes, hissed in pain and then slapped them with open palms. Fireworks exploded beneath his eyelids. The corners of his eyes stung. His cigarette burned down in the ashtray.
“I’m fine now,” Mock said, taking a few breaths. “I won’t fall asleep. I can tell you now. As you might have gathered, it’s all to do with that investigation of ours, the Four Sailors case …”
BRESLAU, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
HALF PAST SEVEN IN THE MORNING
Mock opened the heavy two-winged door and found himself in a flagstoned hallway in near darkness. He made his way forward slowly, without bothering to muffle the ringing of his spurs. Suddenly he came across a velvet curtain, and drawing it aside he entered another hallway, a waiting room with doors leading to several rooms. One of them was open but another curtain hung from its lintel, which made Mock hesitate for a moment. In one of the waiting-room walls, instead of a door, there was a window that gave, so Mock assumed, on to the ventilation pit. On its outside sill stood a paraffin lamp whose feeble glow barely penetrated the dusty windowpane. In this meagre twilight, Mock could make out several figures sitting in the waiting room. He did not, however, manage to get a closer look at them since his attention was drawn to the curtain hanging at the door of the room. It moved abruptly, and from behind it came a sigh. Mock made towards it but a tall man in a top hat barred his way. When Mock tried to move him aside, the man took off his headwear. In the pale semi-darkness, knots of scar tissue were clearly visible as they refracted the light. Instead of eyes, the man had a tangle of criss-crossing and interweaving scars.
Mock looked at their thick lines, at the dark patches that stood out on the wall next to his bed. He rubbed his eyes and turned away from the wall. The curtain isolating his bed alcove was bathed in sunlight.
From beyond the curtain came the sound of his father’s bustling. Mugs clattered, stove lids rattled, fire crackled and bread crunched beneath the weight of a knife. Mock reached for the metal jug beside his bed and sat up so as not to spill the water as he drank. He tilted the jug and liquid poured into his dried-up orifice of a mouth and over his rough, swollen tongue. It flowed in a broad stream and soaked his nightshirt, which was tied at the neck with stiffly starched straps. Rusty rings squeaked along the metal rail, the curtain parted and let a bright band of light into the stuffy alcove.
“You look like the seven plagues of Egypt,” said a short, stocky man holding a chipped mug in his gnarled fingers.
His facial features, which had absorbed the fumes of boiling shoe-glue, his brown liver spots and stern, grey eyes had combined to make Willibald Mock the bogeyman of local children. Eberhard Mock was not afraid of his father, as he had long since ceased to be a child. He was thirty-six years old and had a piece of metal in his thigh, as well as rheumatism, bad memories, and a weakness for alcohol and red-headed women. Now, above all else, he had a hangover. He stowed the jug under his bed, sidestepped his father and entered the sun-drenched room which served as both kitchen and his father’s bedroom. Uncle Eduard, who had died several months earlier, had once jointed beef carcasses here, flattened tender pieces of pork and pounded sticky chunks of liver. It was here that he had stuffed intestines smelling of Riesengebirge bonfires, and then hung rings of sausages above the stove where Willibald Mock had set milk to warm for his hungover son.
“Don’t drink so much,” his father said as he left the alcove. Grey whiskers bristled above his thin lips. “I never neglected my work. I always sat down to my shoes at the same time each day. My hammering in the workshop was like the cuckoo of a clock.”
“I’ll never match up to you, Father,” said Mock a touch too loudly as he went over to the basin by the window and splashed his face with water. He opened the window and hung a razor-sharpening strap onto a nail. “Besides, I’m on duty a little later today.”
“What kind of duty is that?” Willibald Mock struggled with small bottles of medicine. “Booking whores and pimps. You should be out on the beat helping people.”
“Let it be, old man,” Mock said as he sharpened his razor and rubbed soap onto the thick bristles of a shaving brush. “You, on the other hand, spent your life breathing in the odour of other people’s smelly feet.”
“What did you say?” His father cracked eggs into a cast-iron frying pan. “What did you say? You’re talking quietly on purpose because I’m deaf.”
“Nothing. I’m talking to myself.” Mock scraped the foam off his cheeks with the razor.
His father sat down at the table, breathing heavily. He stood the frying pan with its yellowy mush on the bread board from which he had first carefully removed all crumbs. Then he spread slices of bread with dripping and arranged them one on top of the other to form a rectangular stack, evening out the edges so that none protruded at the sides. Eberhard Mock wiped the foam from his face, rubbed his cheeks and chin with a shaving stick, pulled on his vest and sat down at the table.
“How can you knock back so much?” With a pair of scissors, his father snipped the stalks of an onion growing in a flower pot and sprinkled them over the scrambled eggs. He separated the slices of bread he had already stuck together and scattered a tiny amount o
f chives between each one, and then stuck them back together and wrapped them in greased parchment. “I never got so drunk. But you do almost every day. Remember to bring the paper home — I’ll use it again tomorrow.”
Mock ate the semi-liquid egg garnished with its thatch of chives with relish, then got to his feet, slid the frying pan into a tub of water by the washbasin, put on his shirt, fastened a square collar to it and knotted his tie. On his head he placed a bowler hat, then he walked to the corner of the room and opened a hatch in the floor. He descended the steps to the former butcher’s shop and stopped to glance at the row of hooks from which pigs’ carcasses had once hung, at the polished counter, at the gleaming shop window and stone slabs that slanted slightly towards a drain covered with an iron grille. Uncle Eduard had once poured warm animal blood into this grille.
Mock heard the wheeze of his father’s breathing and violent coughing coming from overhead. He smelled coffee being poured into a thermos. The coffee’s steam had momentarily taken his father’s breath away, he thought, or rather whatever had not already been taken away by the bone-glue fumes. Mock stepped outside, tinkling the brass bell on the doorframe.
From the window Willibald Mock watched his son as he walked through the back door and into the yard. Bowing to the caretaker, Mrs Bauert, Eberhard Mock glimpsed the friendly smile bestowed on him by the maid of Pastor Gerds — the tenant of a four-roomed apartment at the front of the house — who was standing by the pump. Snorting at a stray cat, he accelerated his step, jumped over a puddle and, unfastening his trousers and swearing at the excessive number of buttons, forced the rusty padlock and entered the privy in the corner of the yard.
His father closed the window and returned to his chores. He washed the frying pan, plate and milk pan, and wiped the oilcloth that was fastened to the table with drawing pins. He took his medicines and sat in the old rocking chair for a moment in silence. He stepped into his son’s alcove and stared at the tangled sheets on the bed. As he leaned over to fold them, his foot kicked the jug containing what remained of the water. It overturned and water ran into one of his leather slippers.
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