Games of The Hangman f-1

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  The notes continued, page after page. Beat von Graffenlaub was Swiss establishment personified. How had Rudi reacted to such a shadow? Action and reaction. Was that enduring theme some indication of the way it had been for Rudi?

  "Sod it," he said to himself quietly, as his thoughts of the dead Rudi passed on to the thought of Guido's wasting away. "Too much thinking about the dead and dying." He missed Etan.

  He packed and took the tram into the city center, where he boarded the train for Bern.

  10

  Max Buisard, the Chief of the Criminal Police (the Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo) of the city of Bern, was at his desk in police headquarters in Waisenhausplatz at six o'clock in the morning. Sometimes he started earlier.

  Such work habits would indicate, even if no other evidence were available, that the Chief Kripo had no Irish blood in him whatsoever. In Ireland — at least south of the border — there was no excuse for being awake, let alone working, at such an ungodly hour, save returning from a late night's drinking, insanity, or sex. Even Irish cows slept until nearly eight; later on Sundays.

  Buisard was, in fact, by origin a Swiss Romand, a French-speaking Swiss from the canton of Vaud, but he had been a resident of Bern for there out of his over four decades, and he worked hard at integrating. For instance, by the pragmatic if somewhat energetic expedient of having a wife and no fewer than two current mistresses, he had proudly succeeded in mastering Berndeutsch, the local dialect.

  His dedication did not pass unnoticed. Recently he had overheard an eminent member of the Bürgergemeinde refer to him as bodenständig — the ultimate Bernese accolade for a sensible, practical fellow, with his feet firmly on the ground. For a brief moment Buisard wondered if the rumors of his penchant for making love standing up — a by-product of his busy schedule, which combined sex with exercise — had circulated, but he dismissed the thought. He had faith in the discretion of his women and in the soundproofing of Bernese buildings.

  The Chief stared at the blotter in front of him. He had a problem, a large, rather fat problem,, with a heavy walrus mustache, a gruff manner, and an increasingly unpredictable temper.

  He added a mustache to the doodle on the blotter and then, as an afterthought, drew a holstered gun on the ponderous figure. What do you do with a first-rate veteran detective who has turned moody, troublesome, and downright irascible, and who also happens to be an old friend?

  Buisard drew a cage around the figure on his blotter, looked at it for a while, and sketched a door with a handle on both sides. The Bear needed to be contained, not stifled. Even in Switzerland — and certainly in Bern — the rules could be bent a little for the right reasons and by the right person. But this time something had to be done. There had been a string of incidents since the death of the Bear's wife, and the latest was the most embarrassing.

  The Bear normally operated as part of the drug squad. He was the most experienced sergeant in the unit and, like most Bernese policemen, was also regularly assigned to security duties guarding diplomats and visiting dignitaries. The latter was boring work but not too unpopular because the overtime pay came in handy. The presence of more than a hundred different diplomatic missions in the city also made security duties fairly regular. God alone knew what all those ambassadors, second secretaries, and cultural attachés did with their time, lurking down in the greenery of Elfenau, since all the diplomatic action was in Geneva, but that was God's problem.

  The Bear had enjoyed a pretty good reputation. He had been both effective and compassionate, not the easiest combination to maintain in the drug squad. He was reliable, cheerful, diligent, and accommodating — an ideal colleague, give or take a few idiosyncrasies. For instance, he liked to carry a very large gun, most recently a Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum revolver with a six-inch barrel. Buisard shuddered at the possible consequences if the Bear ever had to fire it in a public area.

  A stolen Mercedes, driven by a twenty-year-old drug addict desperate for something to sell to get a fix, had changed everything.

  Tilly had finished work at Migros, done the shopping for supper, and was waiting for a tram. The Bear was about to join her. He was less than a hundred meters away when it happened. He heard the sound as the car struck her. He saw her body fly through the air and smash against a plate glass window. The glass cracked in a dozen places but did not break. Tilly lay crushed at the bottom of the window, one arm jerking spastically, her blood staining the pavement.

  She remained in a coma for three months. Her brain was dead. The Bear stayed with her for days on end. He held her hand. He kissed her. He told her stories and read out loud from the papers. He brought her flowers arranged in the special way she liked. The life support system hissed and dripped and made electronic noises. People spoke to him. Occasionally he was asked to sign papers. One day they switched her off.

  And the Bear's heart was broken.

  * * * * *

  Beat von Graffenlaub had not slept until nearly dawn. The numbness he had experienced when he first heard of Rudi's death had gradually turned to feelings of pain and guilt and a growing emptiness.

  Why had Rudi killed himself? What had happened to him in Ireland? What was Rudi thinking during that brief moment just before he jumped? Did he take long to die? Was there pain? Why had he not talked to someone first? Surely there must have been some hint of what he was contemplating, some sign, some change in behavior.

  Was there anything he, Beat von Graffenlaub, wealthy, influential, acclaimed and respected by his peers, could have done — should have done — to preserve the life of his son? Anything? Somehow he knew that there was; there just had to be — but what?

  The clock radio woke von Graffenlaub fully. For a few moments he lay there, his eyes still closed, listening to the news. Erika had objected to this early morning habit, but it had been months since they had made love. Erika now slept in the apartment she had created a few doors away. She needed space to cultivate her creativity, she had said. He had not objected. It would have been pointless. The signs of her disenchantment had been present and growing for a couple of years.

  He thought back, with a pang, to those early years of closeness and sensuality, when they just had to be together and divorcing Claire was a price well worth paying; dear, stuffy, conventional Claire, now dead. Well, he had paid the price willingly and had pushed from his mind the risks of marrying a woman nearly thirty years his junior. But time had caught up with him. At sixty-one, physically trim and fit through he was, he knew that Erika was slipping away, more probably was lost to him.

  He recalled Erika's distinctive, musky odor and could feel hot wetness against his mouth. He could hear the special sounds she made when excited. He felt his erection growing, and he moved to look at the sultry features damp with the sweat of passion — and to enter her.

  For the briefest of time Erika's presence remained with him even after he opened his eyes and looked around the room. Then came the full onslaught of grief and loneliness.

  * * * * *

  Ivo was untroubled by the combined smell of fourteen unwashed bodies sleeping on grubby mattresses on the floor of the small room. One couple had woken half an hour earlier and made love quietly, but for the last ten minutes the only sounds were those of sleep.

  He decided to wait a little longer. The Dutchman, van der Grijn, had drunk enough to poleax any normal man for half a day, but he had still managed to stay awake, talking and drinking, until the early hours, before collapsing with a grunt. Ivo, small and slight, was not eager to tangle with the huge heroin courier. Ivo was almost permanently high in a miasma of marijuana. Occasionally he sniffed glue or popped a few pills. He enjoyed, but could rarely afford, cocaine. But he hated heroin.

  Heroin had killed the one person he had truly loved. While he was in prison for demonstrating and throwing rocks at policemen in Zurich, little Hilda, fifteen years old, had overdosed in the ladies' rest room of the Zurich Bahnhof; she was found facedown in a toilet bowl. Little Hilda had carried no paper
s, but she had eventually been identified as a result of the slim volume of Ivo's poems she carried, thirty-six photocopies pages.

  "A short book," said the Zurich policeman after he had shown Hilda's photograph to Ivo in prison. They had been driving to the morgue for the formal identification.

  "How long should a book be?" said Ivo. He was pale, but regular prison food had filled out his slight body. Curiously he felt no hostility toward those who had imprisoned him. The policemen and guards were strict but fair.

  From the depths of his despair, he swore total revenge on all heroin pushers. And so, at the age of seventeen, Ivo came to live in the Autonomous Youth House in Bern. He became its unofficial guardian. Most of its inhabitants were harmless, rootless youths in search of something other than Switzerland's ordered and disciplined society — the “boredom and air-conditioned misery of capitalism,” as the phrase put it. Some of the visitors were more dangerous, benefitting from official tolerance to push hard drugs and traffic in more lethal wares.

  Ivo preyed upon heroin pushers. Operating with the cunning and desperation of one with nothing to lose, he stole their drugs and flushed them down the toilet in bizarre homage to his dead love. When the mood struck him, he informed to the police — in strange, elliptical messages, never in person or by phone, always in writing.

  He had lubricated the zipper on his grimy sleeping bag with graphite powder. He slipped out of his bag noiselessly and crept toward the sleeping Dutchman. Within seconds the small packet of glassine envelopes had been removed, and Ivo tiptoed out of the room.

  In the toilet he opened each envelope, one by one, and shook the powder into the bowl until the water was filmed with white. He replaced the heroin with powdered glucose and reassembled the packet. He put toilet paper over the powder in the toilet bowl but, worried about noise, did not flush.

  He returned to the sleeping room. The Dutchman slumbered on. Ivo returned the doctored packet to the seamed leather jacket. Still no reaction. Reassured, Ivo crept out of the room again and this time risked flushing the toilet. The heroin vanished into the sewers of Bern.

  Ivo went into the kitchen, made himself a pot of tea, and lit up the first roach of the day. He sat cross-legged on the kitchen table and stared out of the window into the gray light of false dawn. He hummed to himself and rocked from side to side. He felt good. Hilda would be pleased.

  But what about Klaus? Beautiful Klaus, who could make money so easily from a few hours of giving pleasure, who was desired by so many men and women? There had been something about the man who picked Klaus up. It just did not feel right. No reason, just feelings. Ivo had been some little distance away. He had not seen the blond mustache and beard. He had heard conversation and laughter. Then they had walked away from him into the darkness, the blond man's arm around Klaus. The thunk of a car door — an expensive car by the sound — the faint whisper of an engine, then silence. Klaus hand to come back in a couple of hours as he had promised. Ivo had slept alone. Klaus was Ivo's friend.

  If only life was like the Lennon song "Imagine." If only life was like that. Ivo sang and rocked in time to the music. He would do something tomorrow about Klaus, or maybe the day after that, or maybe Klaus would just turn up.

  Just imagine.

  * * * * *

  The lusts, self-doubt, and sorrows of the night receded with the first sting of the icy cold shower.

  Beat von Graffenlaub was a man of rigorous self-discipline and practiced routine. By 0630 he was having breakfast at a small Biedermeier table by a window overlooking the River Aare. He wore a charcoal gray flannel suit, a crisp white handmade shirt, and a black silk tie. His shoes were a tribute to his valet's expertise at military spit polish: they did not shine, they positively glowed. His socks were of light gray silk.

  A solitary red rose rested in a slim Waterford crystal vase. At exactly 0655, von Graffenlaub would insert the flower in this buttonhole, don his navy blue cashmere overcoat, and at the stroke of 0700 would leave his house on Junkergasse to stroll toward his offices on Marktgasse. He could cover the short distance between home and office in less than ten brisk minutes, but even after a lifetime of familiarity he took pleasure in walking about the ancient city of Bern. Each morning and evening, time and weather permitting, he made a short detour, lengthening his walk to half an hour and arriving at his office at exactly 0730.

  This morning, after he had left Junkergasse, he detoured into the grounds surrounding the fifteenth-century Münster. The terrace between the church and the ramparts was known as the Platform. It overlooked the river, flowing swiftly along below, its waters icy and swollen from the melting snows of winter.

  Von Graffenlaub rested his outstretched arms on the low wall that bordered the river side of the terrace and breathed in and out deeply. The cool morning air felt pure and clean in his lungs. In the distance he could see the snowcapped mountains of the Bernese Oberland.

  He looked up the river toward the Kirchenfeldbrücke, the elegant nineteenth-century iron bridge that linked the old medieval city with the more newly developed residential district of Kirchenfeld. His gaze followed the flow of the river to the old waterworks below. A flurry of activity caught his attention.

  Two police cars, an ambulance, and several unmarked vehicles were parked by the water's edge. As he watched, uniformed police dragged what looked like a body from the river. He could see the pale white dot of the body's face before it was covered by a blanket. The face filled his vision. It was that of his dead son. He turned away. Nausea swept through him, and his skin felt clammy. He threw up over the parapet, and a spasm of shivering shook his body.

  * * * * *

  A noose hung from a hook in the corner of the Chief Kripo's office. Buisard had brought it back from a police chief's conference in the United States. It was a souvenir, he had said, an exact replica of a hangman's noose, as used before technology — in the shape of the electric chair and gas chamber and lethal injection — took over in most of the civilized world.

  Maybe next time he'll bring back an electric chair, thought the Bear. Buisard insisted that the hangman's knot had thirteen coils in it, but each time the Bear counted, he could only make it only twelve. He started counting again out of the corner of his eye. According to Pierrepoint, the famous English hangman, it was an inefficient way to hang someone anyhow. More often than not, the large American knot and the standard American five-foot drop resulted in a slow death through strangulation.

  Pierrepoint used a variable drop and a simple slip knot located under the angle of the left jaw by a rubber claw washer. After the fall, the knot would finish under the chin and throw the head back, fracturing the spinal column, almost always between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Instant death, or so said the hangman.

  "Heini," said Buisard, "will you, for God's sake, pay attention? It's got thirteen coils, no matter what you say."

  "You're the chief," said the Bear.

  "And I'd like to stay that way," said Buisard.

  The Bear raised his shaggy eyebrows.

  "I'm not suspending you," said Buisard, "although you well deserve it. But I'm taking you off the drug squad for a month. You can keep your desk in the Bollwerk, but I'm assigning you to minor crimes — out of harm's way."

  "Investigating stolen bicycles and missing pets," said the Bear. He glowered.

  "Something like that," said Buisard. "Think of it as a cooling-off period."

  "The son of a bitch deserved to be thumped," said the Bear. "He was drunk and throwing his weight around."

  "You may well be right," said Buisard, "but he was part of the German foreign minister's party and on an official diplomatic visit to this city. He did have a diplomatic passport."

  The Bear shrugged and rose to his feet.

  "One moment," said Buisard. "There is an Irishman coming to Bern for a few days. I have a letter of introduction about him from a friend of mine in Dublin. I've been asked to look after him if he wants to be shown around, a sort of pr
ofessional courtesy."

  "So now I'm a tourist guide."

  The Chief Kripo smiled just a little meanly. "Not at all. Heini, you are one of Bern's attractions."

  "Up yours," said the Bear amiably, and ambled out of the room.

  The Chief went over and started counting the thirteen coils in the hangman's noose. He made it twelve. He swore and started again.

  * * * * *

  The day was crisp and cold, the snow melted from the streets and the lowlands around. In the distance ice and snow held the higher ground. Jagged mountain peaks looked unreal against a clear blue sky.

  Fitzduane was enchanted by Bern. He felt exhilarated; he just knew that somewhere in this beautiful, unspoiled, too-good-to-be-true medieval city lay the answer to his quest, the reason for a hanging.

  He walked, more or less at random, for several hours. Sooner or later he always seemed to reach the River Aare. The river surrounded the old city on three sides, forming a natural moat and leaving only one side to be defended by a wall. As the city had expanded, the wall was sited farther and farther up the peninsula. The old walls were gone, but two of the distinctive towers that marked the landward entrance to the city remained.

  It had been the quaint custom of the Bernese — prior to the tourist trade's taking off — to use the entrance tower as a prison.

  Shortly after he arrived, Fitzduane had booked himself into a small hotel on Gerechtigkeitsgasse. Just outside the hotel entrance, an intricately carved statue, perched on top of a fluted pillar, crowned a flowing fountain. The carving was painted in red and blue and gold and there bright colors. The dominant female figure— showing a surprising amount of leg — held a sword in one hand, scales in the other, and was blindfolded: the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen, the Fountain of Justice.