Phantoms of Breslau iem-3

by Marek Krajewski

  “Damn it!” he yelled, shaking his leg; the slipper flew straight into Mock’s face as he closed the hatch in the floor. His father sank onto his son’s bed and quickly unfastened the straps holding up his sock, which he removed and smelled.

  “Don’t get worked up,” smiled Mock. “I don’t use a chamber pot any more, and even if I did I wouldn’t hide it under my bed. It’s only water.”

  “Alright, alright …” muttered his father, pulling his sock back on with difficulty. He was still on his son’s bed. “Why do you need water under your bed? Oh, I know. It’s there ready for your hangover. You’re always knocking it back, knocking it back … If you got married, you’d stop drinking …”

  “Did you know, Father” — Mock handed his father the slipper, sat down at the table and sprinkled a few pinches of blond tobacco onto the oilcloth — “that schnapps actually helps me?”

  “Do what?” his father asked, taken aback by the friendly tone. His reproaches about alcohol and bachelorhood usually incensed his son.

  “Sleep through the night.” Eberhard lit a cigarette and arranged on the table the objects which would soon find themselves in his briefcase: the packet with bread and dripping, a tobacco pouch and an oilcloth file containing reports. “I’ve told you a hundred times — if I go to bed sober, I get terrible nightmares; I wake up and can’t get back to sleep! I prefer hangovers to nightmares.”

  “You know what’s better for helping you sleep?” The father began to make his son’s bed. “Chamomile and hot milk.” He straightened the sheet and suddenly looked up at him. “Do you always have nightmares when you’re sober?”

  “Not always,” Eberhard smiled, closing the steel fastenings on his briefcase. “Sometimes I dream of the nurse in Konigsberg. Red-headed and very pretty.”

  “You’ve been to Konigsberg? You never told me.” The father held up a jacket as his son slipped his arms and broad shoulders into the sleeves.

  “I was there during the war.” Eberhard fanned himself with his bowler hat and reached for his watch. “There’s nothing else to say. Goodbye, Father.”

  He made his way towards the hatch in the floor, hearing his father muttering behind his back: “He’d better not drink so much. Only chamomile and hot milk. Chamomile and hot milk.”

  In the Hospital of Divine Mercy in Konigsberg, a cadet officer of one year’s standing used to be given chamomile before he went to sleep. The beautiful, red-headed nurse gazed with admiration at the polished boots fitted with spurs that stood by his bed. She had called him “Officer”, not realizing that every scout from the artillery regiment wore spurs since they rode on horseback. Addressing him thus, she had poured spoonfuls of the infusion into his mouth. Twice-wounded Cadet Officer Mock did not have the strength to protest that he was not an officer, and was ashamed to admit that he had not passed his exams or undergone the appropriate training, but had found himself in the war simply through conscription. He was too shy to ask his angel her name, and he did not have the strength to turn his head to watch her go. In an attempt to broaden his field of vision, he had traced burning circles with his eyes. All they took in, unfortunately, was the neo-Gothic vaulting of the hospital. They did not see either the soldiers lying next to him or Cornelius Ruhtgard, the greying, slender orderly to whom Mock owed his life; and the red-headed nurse did not fall within the wounded cadet officer’s field of vision ever again. Much later, when his broken limbs had set and he could move around on crutches; when finally he learned that his injuries indicated that he must have fallen from a great height, that the orderly Ruhtgard — until recently a doctor in Cameroon — had, on his way to work, found him abandoned on Litauer Wallstrasse, and had quickly taken him to the hospital to treat his ribs and his lungs, which had been punctured by splintered rib bone; when Cadet Officer Mock knew all of this, he began his search for the red-headed nurse. Limping along, he rapped his crutches on the sandstone flags, but everywhere he met with a lack of understanding. The nurses grew impatient when the convalescent produced yet another description of their supposed red-headed colleague, looked them in the eyes for the hundredth time and tried to catch the scent of their bodies. The caretakers and ward attendants shook their heads, some tapping their brows when he spoke of steaming cups of chamomile, until finally the former doctor Ruhtgard, demoted to the rank of orderly, explained to the patient that the red-headed nurse may have been a figment of his imagination. Hallucinations were not unknown in people in similar states to that of Cadet Officer Mock on his arrival at the Hospital of Divine Mercy in Konigsberg. For he had been totally unconscious. Not because he had fallen from a great height, but from alcohol.

  Now Eberhard Mock went down the stairs to his Uncle Eduard’s old butcher shop.

  “Chamomile and hot milk. Gets drunk, so he gets what’s coming to him,” came the voice of his father from overhead; he had remedies for all his son’s ailments.

  Eberhard heard a hard hammering on the windowsill. “Must be that moron Dosche with his foul dog,” he thought. “That mongrel’s going to be shitting all over the polished stairs again while Dosche and my father play chess all day.”

  The scrambled eggs and chives made him gag like a hair stuck in his throat. “Chamomile and hot milk. He knocks it back, always knocking it back.” Mock turned and went back up the stairs. His head appeared above the floor. The sill rattled again. His father was at the window, hopping on one foot; on his other hung a darned sock.

  “Can you not understand, Father,” yelled Eberhard, “that chamomile and milk don’t bloody well work on me? I don’t have a problem falling asleep, it’s the dreaming!”

  Willibald Mock stared at his son, understanding nothing. The torso above the hatch. Clenched fists. Hangover gushing in his head like the sea. Chamomile and hot milk. The father grew pale and did not say a word.

  “And tell that shitty chessplayer, Dosche, not to come here with his mongrel and not to thump on the windowsill so hard, or he’ll be sorry.”

  Eberhard’s legs were now in the room too. Without looking at his father, he went to the basin, knelt beside it, removed his bowler hat and poured a few ladles of water over his wavy hair. He heard his father’s voice through the stream of water that gushed over his ears: “It’s not Dosche hammering on the sill, it’s somebody for you.”

  Eberhard leaned towards the old man and slipped the sock over his foot.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919

  EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Kurt Smolorz had not been working under Mock in Vice Department IIIb of Breslau’s Police Praesidium for long. He had landed there straight off the streets of Kleinburg, where he had walked the beat without knowing why; in truth, this beautiful villa district adjacent to South Park had about as much in common with crime as Constable Smolorz had with poetry. Yet on one warm day in 1918, it was precisely there that some dangerous criminals, sought by all the police in Europe, had crossed the constable’s path. And it was a happy day for him. Criminal Assistant Mock had been doing a routine check in a plush house of ill repute on Akazienallee. He had a habit of combining pleasure with work. After checking the income ledger and the health records, and when he had quizzed the madam about her more eccentric clients, he had begun to look around for his favourite lady who, as it turned out, was busy, along with two other employees, pleasuring two — and here the madam sighed — very rich gentlemen.

  Intrigued by the configuration of two to three, Mock had peeped through a concealed window into the so-called pink room and received a shock. He had run out into the street and immediately bumped into the red-headed constable, who was clanging his sword threateningly and tugging at the collar of a rascal he had apprehended a moment earlier for firing a catapult at passing droschkas. On Mock’s orders, Constable Smolorz had punished the rascal with a hefty clout and let him go. Then, together with Mock, he had burst into the pink room of Madame Blaschke’s establishment and — rubbing his eyes in astonishment at such a complicated arrangement of bodies
as he had never seen before — arrested the two men, who had turned out to be none other than Kurt Wirth and his mute bodyguard Hans Zupitza, pioneers of European coercion and extortion. That day a great deal changed in the lives of the protagonists of this event, and they all became permanently linked: Wirth collaborated with Mock and was rewarded when the latter turned a blind eye to his extortion of smugglers who floated arms from Austria, coffee from Turkey and tobacco down the River Oder. Mock had become a rich and influential man in the criminal underworld, and this was to prove extremely useful to him. Smolorz, meanwhile, had gone from being a district constable to an employee at the Police Praesidium. Like all the dramatis personae, he held a sizeable bank account of dollars paid by Europe’s most wanted criminals in return for their freedom. Mock soon recognized Smolorz’s assets as a colleague, and one of the most valuable of these was his reticence.

  Smolorz was silent even now as he sat next to Mock in a river-police motorboat steered by a uniformed boatswain. They navigated the shallow flood waters of the River Ohlau among sparse trees and partially submerged fields. The motorboat moored at a temporary landing stage not far from a paved road.

  “New House!” shouted the boatswain, as he helped Smolorz and Mock to disembark.

  A droschka was waiting for them on the road. Mock recognized the cabby, whose services the police had often found indispensable. He shook his hand and threw himself onto the settle, rocking the carriage. Smolorz took the seat up on the box and the droschka moved off. Mock, attempting to forget the thirst which tormented him, studied the outbuildings of New House. The lowing of cattle could be heard from Swia$$$tniki Farm, two kilometres away. The smell of damp air from the Oder wafted through the sunlight. After a while they came to a lock where they climbed out of the droschka and crossed over to the island, Ottwitzer Werder.

  At Ottwitzer Dam, among blackthorn bushes, Mock spied the destination of his morning’s travels across the flood waters of the Oder and the Ohlau tributary. A dangerous cascade of water spurting from the base of the dam kept at bay the gawpers who were standing on the embankment by the hamlet of Bischofswal, trying to see what the police had discovered on the island on which only the previous day they had enjoyed their picnics and beer. They were prevented from stepping onto the dam by the strong arms and fierce glares of three sword-bearing gendarmes who wore shakos adorned with a blue star and on their chests sported badges that gleamed with the words “Gendarme Station Schwoitsch”. Mock gazed with nostalgia at the elegant pseudo-Gothic building in the vicinity of Landungsbrucke and remembered the nocturnal pleasures to which he had so recently surrendered. Now duties of a different nature had summoned him to this distant corner of Breslau. He turned to the riverbank fringed with thorn bushes and to the pile of four — so Mock guessed — human bodies. They were covered with the Institute of Forensic Medicine’s grey sheets, which were always carried in the carriages and first cars to arrive from the Police Praesidium. Seven detectives were already there, five of whom were examining the ground immediately surrounding the bodies; squatting, they searched centimetre by centimetre the wet grass and rich earth which clung to their heels. Having examined a chosen square of ground, they grunted as they shifted the weight of their bodies from one foot to the other and, still squatting, continued their search. Despite the coolness of the morning, none of them wore a jacket. Sweat trickled from beneath their bowler hats down to their moustaches. One of the men, not believing in the accuracy of photography, was drawing a shoe print he had found in the damp soil. Two policemen wearing jackets stood on a police barge moored to the bank and questioned two teenage boys in school uniform who were trembling as much from nerves as from the cold. One of the policemen waved to Smolorz and Mock, indicating a square of land marked out with little flags where the corpses lay covered with sheets. This man was their boss, Criminal Councillor Josef Ilssheimer, head of Vice Department IIIb, and the area he was pointing to had already been examined.

  Mock and Smolorz entered the marked-out plot and took off their bowler hats. Ilssheimer came over to join them, lifting his feet high and moving swiftly. It seemed to Mock that their chief was about to perform a high jump and fall heavily on the sheets, but instead he stopped beside the bodies. He leaned over and tugged at the cloth. At first Mock could not make head nor tail of the stiff, blue limbs, frozen in rigor mortis. Stretched out before his eyes was a most peculiar sight, as if someone had arranged a pyre for a large bonfire. But instead of dry twigs and branches there were four human torsos from which heads, legs and arms protruded at various angles. Furthermore, all these limbs were connected to each other in some way or other: here a foot protruded from an armpit, there a knee grew from a collarbone, while a shoulder emerged from between a pair of shins. In many places, the skin of the deceased was pierced by sharp shards of bone, jutting through and disappearing among blue swellings. So as to set the twisted human limbs on a “top-bottom” or “right-left” axis, Mock’s eyes searched for a head. He soon found one, and thanks to a thick beard, he identified its gender as male. From beneath a sailor’s hat, long, pomaded strands of hair tumbled over the dead man’s face while curly, stiff bristles propagated over his jaw and on his upper lip. All this hair was stuck together with reddish-brown clots of dried blood mixed with a watery fluid. The source of all this gore was two eye-sockets — two dead lakes filled with blood and shreds of membrane from perforated eyes.

  When he suffered from a hangover, Mock was tormented by various sensitivities. After eating fried onion, the delicate smell of burning would not leave him for the entire day; the keen odour of a horse — or even worse, that of a sweating man — would evoke associations of sewage and cause convulsions in his bowels; spittle meandering down a window grille would hasten his mistreated stomach’s reflexes … In order to function in any way, a hungover Mock should be left to himself in the lair of his bedding, isolated from all stimuli. But today the world did not protect him. Mock glanced at the wisps of hair, stiff with blood, that fell from beneath the sailor’s hat, at the curled growth of the beard, at the sparse hair on the torso and the pubic hair that poked out from beneath the leather pouch covering the victim’s genitals. He felt all this hair in his throat and started to take deep breaths. He gazed up at the bright, September sky and through his mouth released the sour stench of his hangover, the onion-like reek of chives, the insipid smell of scrambled eggs. He kept his head tilted back and inhaled rapidly. He felt he was losing his balance and gave himself a violent jolt, almost toppling Smolorz who was standing behind him on one leg wiping a mud-covered shoe with his handkerchief. Smolorz stepped aside and Mock sat down on the damp grass. Still busy with the dirty toe of his shoe, Smolorz did not help him to his feet. The world did not favour Mock today; it was not protecting him.

  Ilssheimer nodded and stared at the Landungsbrucke from where a small steam boat was departing. The investigative police had already gathered the evidence. They rolled down their shirtsleeves, donned their jackets and exhaled clouds of smoke into the dew-scented air. A huge van stopped on the opposite bank and eight stretcher-bearers in leather aprons emerged. A man in his forties hopped down after them wearing a doctor’s gown tied at the neck and a top hat which barely covered his skull. In a voice hoarse from tobacco, he began to give out orders. The stretcher-bearers penetrated the crowd, clearing a way for their boss, their folded stretchers serving as pikes to break up the dense throng. A moment later, the dam was swarming with employees from the Institute of Forensic Medicine who were making their way forward carefully, holding on to the taut rope. The unsecured far side of the dam still spurted water, whipping up cones of thick froth. The police officer who had been questioning the two schoolboys with Ilssheimer now shut his notebook and called every-body’s attention with an authoritative glance. Waving his left hand he dismissed those giving evidence towards the moored barge and extended his right to the man in the top hat who was now making his way down the dam.

  “A good day to you, Doctor Lasarius!” he ca
lled, then he raised both arms and boomed at the policemen: “Gentlemen, silence, please!”

  The detectives stamped their cigarettes into the ground; the schoolboys soon disappeared, squeezing past the knees of the stretcher-bearers; Doctor Lasarius removed his top hat and began to inspect the bodies, tossing the broken limbs about; his men rested on their stretchers as if they were spears; Smolorz shook the mud off his trousers and Mock leaned towards Ilssheimer and asked:

  “Councillor sir, who is that?”

  “My name is Criminal Commissioner Heinrich Muhlhaus,” said the police officer giving the orders, as if he had heard Mock’s question, “and I’m the new chief of the Murder Commission. I’ve come from Hamburg, where my duties were similar. And now, ad rem. Two schoolboys from Green Oak Community School came to the dam at half past seven this morning for a cigarette. They found the bodies of four men; two lying on the ground, the other two on top of them.” The police officer approached the bodies and used his walking stick as a pointer. “As you see, gentlemen, the deceased are lying in a very irregular configuration. Where one has his head, another has his legs. All are practically naked.” The walking stick spun pirouettes. “All they are wearing are sailor’s hats on their heads and leather pouches over their genitals. This peculiar outfit is why I’ve invited Vice Department IIIb of the Police Praesidium to work with us. We have here its chief, Criminal Councillor Ilssheimer.” Muhlhaus glanced respectfully at his colleague. “With his best men, Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock and Criminal Sergeant Kurt Smolorz.” Muhlhaus’ tone as he uttered the adjective “best” expressed at least a shadow of doubt. “Briefing in my office at midday sharp, after the post-mortem examination. That’s all from me. Over to you, Doctor.”