Death in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  “The sex lives of my Oriental Studies students,” – the line of Andreae’s lips became even thinner – “because, as you so aptly put it, ‘there were also some’, don’t interest me any more than does your own …”

  The Criminal Counsellor imagined the bell on the fire-engine going down Ursulinenstrasse just then, swung within his chest. He rose and approached the professor’s desk. Pressing his wrists hard against the back of the armchair he drew his face closer to the goatee.

  “Listen here, you old goat, maybe you’re the one who killed the girl. Did you chase her in your turban, as is your pleasure, you grotesque dwarf? Did you slash her velvet stomach with a double-edged dagger?” He moved away from the professor and sat down in his chair again. He ran his fingers through his damp hair.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to give this text to someone else for their expert opinion. On the other hand, what were you doing on Friday night between eleven and one? Please – don’t tell me. I know. But do you want the Dean of the Philology Department or your students to find out? There are, after all, ‘also some’ so inclined.”

  Andreae smiled.

  “Fortunately there are. Counsellor, I’ll translate this text as best I can. Besides, I have just remembered one student who exhibited – as you described it – certain aberrations. Baron Wilhelm von Köpperlingk.”

  “I don’t thank you.” Mock donned his hat.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME MAY 13TH, 1933

  TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  Kleinfeld was waiting for him in the Police Praesidium with Moses Hirschberg, a not so tall, hunched, dark-haired man of about forty. He repeated what the Counsellor already knew from Kleinfeld’s report.

  “Tell me, Hirschberg, where did you work before your present employment?”

  The waiter had suffered from some inflammation in his childhood which had left him with a tic: when he spoke, the right corner of his mouth was pulled a little upwards which made it look as if he were smiling idiotically or scornfully. Reciting a dozen or so moth-eaten establishments, Hirschberg did not stop smirking. The bell began to swing in Mock’s chest again. He approached the questioned man and struck him with his open palm.

  “Happy are you, Jew? Maybe it’s you who wrote that drivel in your vile language?”

  Hirschberg hid his face in his hands. The Criminal Secretary, Heinz Kleinfeld, one of the best policemen in the Criminal Department, had a father who was a rabbi. He stood, now, staring at the floor. Mock swallowed and gestured “take him away”. His palm was sore. He had hit the man a little too hard.

  He found his men in the briefing room. Looking at them, he gathered that he would not be hearing any valuable revelation from any of them. Hanslik and Burck had questioned twelve dealers in animals and none of them had heard of scorpions being sold. Smolorz had not come across a trace of a private menagerie, but he had acquired some interesting information. The owner of a shop selling rodents and snakes had vouchsafed that one of his regular clients, a stout, bearded man, bought poisonous reptiles and lizards. Unfortunately, the shopkeeper could not say any more about the man. Reinhardt and his men had questioned at least fifty brothel residents. One of them had stated that she knew a professor who liked to pretend he was quartering her with a sword while shouting in some foreign language. The policemen were surprised that this information seemed to make no impression on their Chief. Thanks to statements made by Detective Reinhardt’s prostitutes, they drew up a list of fifteen sadists and fetishists careless enough to invite “little girls” into their own apartments. Seven of these were not at home and eight had cast-iron alibis: indignant wives, every one of whom had confirmed that their uglier halves had spent the whole of the previous night in the marital bedchamber.

  Mock thanked his men and designated them similar tasks for the following day. When they had said goodbye to him, none too pleased at the prospect of a working Sunday, he said to Forstner:

  “Please come and see me at ten. We’ll pay a certain well-known person a visit. Then you will visit the university archives. Don’t be surprised – they’ll be open. One of the librarians is on special duty tomorrow. You will make a list of all those who have had anything to do with Oriental Studies: from one-term students to doctors of Persian Studies and Sanskrit specialists. A propos, do you know what Sanskrit is?”

  Without waiting for a reply, Mock left his office. He walked along Schweidnitzer Stadtgraben towards Wertheim’s Department Store. He turned left into Schweidnitzer Strasse, passed the imposing statue of Wilhelm II flanked by two allegorical figures representing State and War, made a sign of the cross at the Church of the Sacred Heart and turned into Zwingerplatz. He walked past the local state school and dropped into Otton Stiebler’s coffee roasters. In the crowded room, dark with tobacco smoke and filled with a strong aroma, swarmed a fair number of aficionados of the black beverage. Mock entered the counting-room. The accountant immediately interrupted his sums, greeted the Counsellor and left, allowing him to talk freely over the telephone. Mock did not trust the police telephonists and often dealt with conversations demanding discretion from this receiver. He dialled the number of Mühlhaus’ home and, introducing himself, listened to the necessary information. Then he called his wife and justified his absence from dinner on account of an enormous work load.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME MAY 13TH, 1933

  HALF-PAST THREE IN THE AFTERNOON

  The Bishops’ Cellar in the Schlesischer Hof Hotel in Helmuth-Brückner-Strasse, in pre-Nazi times the Bischofstrasse, was famous for its exquisite soups, meat roasts and pork knuckle. The walls of the restaurant were decorated with oil paintings by the Bavarian painter, Edward von Grützner, depicting scenes from the somewhat unascetic lives of monks. Mock liked best the side room lit by a green, hazy light falling through the stained-glass window just below the ceiling. He came here very often at one time to surrender to dreams among rippling shadows, lulled by a subterranean silence, the quiet breath of the cellar. But the growing popularity of the restaurant had spoiled the sleepy atmosphere so enjoyed by the Counsellor. The shadows rippled still, but the slurping of the shopkeepers and storekeepers, as well as the yelling of the S.S. who swarmed the place of late, made the fictitious ocean waves fill Mock’s imagination not with solace so much as with silt and rough seaweed.

  The Criminal Counsellor was in a difficult situation. For several months now, he had observed worrying changes in the police. He knew that one of his best policemen, the Jew Heinz Kleinfeld, was regarded with disdain by many; one policeman, newly engaged by the Criminal Department, had refused outright to work with Kleinfeld, with the result that – from one day to the next – he had stopped working for the police. But that was at the beginning of January. Now Mock was not at all sure he would have thrown that Nazi out of work. Much had changed since then. On January 31st, the posts of Minister of Internal Affairs and Chief of the entire Prussian Police were taken by Hermann Göring; a month later, the new, brown-shirt Oberpräsident of Silesia, Helmuth Brückner, had moved into the impressive building of the Regierungsbezirk Breslau on Lessingplatz; and not quite two months later, the new President – shrouded in ill-repute – Edmund Heines had marched into the Police Praesidium of Breslau. A new order had come to pass. The old camp for French prisoners of war on Strehlener Chaussee in Dürrgoy had been turned into a concentration camp where the first to find themselves were Mock’s close acquaintances: the former President of Breslau police, Fritz Voigt, and the former Mayor, Karl Mach. Suddenly there appeared, in the streets, bands of juveniles, drunk with a sense of their own impunity and the vilest beer from Haas. Carrying torches and in a tight cordon, they surrounded transports of arrested Jews and anti-Nazis on whom hung wooden notices with “crimes” committed against the German nation inscribed on them. From one day to the next, streets had been given the names of brown-shirt patrons. In the Police Praesidium, members of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had suddenly become active; the Gestapo had overrun in the beautifu
l building’s west wing and all of a sudden the best men from other departments were having themselves transferred there. Heines – in defiance of Mühlhaus’ protests – had settled his favourite ward, Forstner, in the Criminal Department, and Mock’s particular enemy, a Counsellor Eile, had become Director of the newly created Jewish Department. No, today – in May of 1933 – Mock could not afford to react so decisively. He was in a difficult situation: he had to be loyal to von der Malten and the Masonic lodge which had facilitated his brilliant career yet, at the same time, he could not provoke the Nazis against him. What irritated him most was that he did not have any influence over the situation and his future depended on his finding the murderer of the Baron’s daughter. If it turned out that it was the member of some sect – as was highly probable – Hitler’s propaganda would find a convenient pretext to destroy Breslau’s Freemasons and anyone connected with them, therefore also Mühlhaus and Mock. That sectarian would very readily be transformed into a Freemason by the tabloids – the Stürmer, for example, and the cruel felony would be depicted as a ritual murder, a settling of accounts between Breslau’s three Lodges.

  If the murderer turned out to be a mentally deficient pervert, Heines et consortes would certainly have Mock concoct an “anti-German” – Jewish or Masonic – biography for him. In both the first and the second case, the Counsellor, as an instrument in the hands of propaganda, would appear in an ambiguous light in the eyes of his protectors, the Freemasons. It was not surprising that von der Malten demanded that the murderer be given over to him; he would wreak bloody vengeance on the perpetrator while nipping any intrigue against the Lodge in the bud. Consequently, either handing over or not handing over the murderer to the Baron would mean a career in the Fisheries Police in Lubin for Mock. In the first instance, the brown-shirt newspapers, incited by Forstner, would write at length about the Masons administering justice off their own bats, in the second, Mühlhaus and his people in the Lodge would react correspondingly. Certainly, the Counsellor could break with the Lodge and become a Hitlerite, but remnants of “good taste”, which twenty-four years of police service had not eradicated, protested against this course, as did his awareness of the end to any future career: the Lodge could avenge itself on him in a very simple way – it could inform the appropriate people about his own Masonic past.

  Nicotine always clarified Mock’s mind. And so it was now: a brilliant idea came to him – the perpetrator commits suicide in his own cell and a speedy funeral follows. (The Nazis will not then be able to force me to prepare the criminal’s anti-German biography. I will tell them that he is already dead and I have no time to play at bureaucracy and invent protocols of interrogation. I will also be justified vis-à-vis the Lodge because even if Hitlerite newspapers concoct the appropriate curriculum vitae for him, I will truthfully say I had nothing to do with it.) That would save him.

  A moment later, however, he grew dispirited; he had not taken into account another disagreeable eventuality: what would happen if he simply failed to find the murderer?

  The waiter stood a litre, stoneware tankard of Kipke beer before him. He was on the point of asking whether, perhaps, the Counsellor needed anything else when the latter turned his unseeing eyes on him and said emphatically: “If I don’t find that bastard, I’ll create him myself!” Paying no attention to the surprised waiter, Mock grew thoughtful: the faces of possible murderers began to flit in front of his eyes. Feverishly he wrote several names on the napkin.

  He was interrupted in this catalogue by the person he had arranged to meet. S.A.-Hauptsturmführer Walter Piontek of the Gestapo looked like a good-natured innkeeper. He squeezed Mock’s small hand with his enormous, beefy paw and sat down comfortably at the table. He ordered the same as Mock – pike with spicy crudités of turnip. Before getting to the point the Counsellor composed a character profile of his interlocutor: an overweight Brandenburgian, bare, freckled skull pasted down with clumps of red hair, green eyes, beefy cheeks; a lover of Schubert and underage girls.

  “You know everything,” he said without introduction.

  “Everything? No … I know no more than that man over there …” Piontek indicated a man reading a newspaper. On the first page of the Schlesische Tageszeitung could be seen a huge headline: Baron daughter’s death in Breslau–Berlin train. Counsellor Mock in charge of investigation.

  “Much more, I should think,” Mock rounded up the last piece of crunchy pike with his fork and drank the remainder of his beer. “Off the record – I’m asking you for help, Hauptsturmführer. There is no greater expert on religious sects and secret organizations in the whole of Breslau, maybe the whole of Germany. The symbolism is clear to you. I am asking you to find an organization which uses the symbol of a scorpion. All your wisdom and advice will be welcome and most certainly reciprocated in the future. After all, the Criminal Investigation Department – and I personally – have also information at our disposal which might be of interest to you.”

  “Do I have to yield to the requests of higher C.I.D. officials?” Piontek smiled broadly and half-closed his eyes. “Why should I help you? Is it because my chief and yours are on first name terms and play skat every Saturday?”

  “You aren’t listening to me, Hauptsturmführer.” Mock did not intend to lose his temper any more that day. “I am offering you something profitable: an exchange of information.”

  “Counsellor,” Piontek devoured his pike with gusto. “My chief told me to come. I am here. I have eaten some tasty fish and carried out my chief’s instructions. Everything is in order. The case is no concern of mine whatsoever. There, you see,” he pointed a fat finger at the page of the paper spread out in front of him: Counsellor Mock in charge of investigation.

  Mock bowed once again in his thoughts to his old chief. Criminal Director Mühlhaus was right – Piontek was a man who had to be stunned and made breathless. Mock knew that any attack against Piontek would involve great risk, which is why he still hesitated.

  “Did your chief not ask you to help us?”

  “He did not even suggest it,” Piontek’s lips were stretched into a smile.

  Mock took a few deep breaths and felt the sweet sense of power gather within him.

  “You will help us, Piontek, with all the strength at your command. You’ll set every last grey cell to work. If needs be, you’ll study in the library … And do you know why? Because it is not your chief who’s asking for this, or Criminal Director Mühlhaus, or even I myself … You are being implored by the delightful eleven-year-old hussy, Ilsa Doblin, whom you raped in your car, paying her drunken mother generously; you are being asked by Agnes Härting, that chatterbox with bunches whom you embraced in Madame le Goef’s boudoirs. You even came out quite well on the photographs then.”

  Piontek’s broad grin never wavered.

  “Give me a few days,” he said.

  “Of course. Please contact no-one but me. It is, after all, Counsellor Mock in charge of the investigation.”

  II

  BRESLAU, SUNDAY, MAY 14TH, 1933

  TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Baron Wilhelm von Köpperlingk occupied the two top floors of the beautiful, art-nouveau, corner building on Uferzeile 9, not far from the Engineering College. In the doorway stood a young butler with gentle eyes and studied manners.

  “The Baron is awaiting you in the games room. Please follow me.”

  Mock introduced himself and his assistant. The Baron was a slender and very tall man of about forty, with the slim, long fingers of a pianist. The hairdresser and the female manicurist had only just taken their leave. The Baron tried to draw the Counsellor’s attention to the results of their labours by performing numerous gestures with his hands – but in vain. Because Mock was not watching the Baron’s hands. He was looking around with interest at the enormous room. His attention was drawn to various details of the décor in which he could not make out any sense, detect any central idea, any predominant feature, not to mention style. Nearly every piece of fu
rniture contradicted the purpose of its existence: the wobbly gold chair, the armchair from which grew a huge steel fist, the table with embossed Arabian ornaments rendering it impossible to stand even a glass on it. The Counsellor did not know much about art, but he was sure that the enormous paintings depicting the Lord’s Passion, the danse macabre and orgiastic cavortings were not the work of a person in their right mind.

  Forstner’s attention, on the other hand, was drawn to three terrariums full of spiders and myriapods. They stood on metre-high legs by the French windows leading to a balcony. A fourth terrarium next to the blue-tiled stove was empty. It was home, usually, to a young python.

  The Baron finally managed to attract the policemen’s attention to his manicured hands. They noticed, with surprise, that he was using them to lovingly caress that very python, which was now wrapped around his shoulder. The servant with beautiful eyes set out the tea and shortbread on an art-nouveau plate with a stand in the shape of a ram’s horns. Von Köpperlingk indicated some soft, Moorish cushions scattered on the floor to the policemen. They sat down, cross-legged. Forstner and the servant exchanged quick glances, which did not escape either Mock’s or the Baron’s attention.

  “You have an interesting collection in the terrariums, dear Baron,” Mock panted as he got up again from the floor to inspect the specimens. “I never thought myriapods could be so large.”

  “That’s a Scolopendra gigantea,” the Baron said with a smile. “My Sarah is thirty centimetres long and comes from Jamaica.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve seen a scolopendra.” With relish, Mock inhaled the Egyptian cigarette handed to him by the butler. “How did you bring this specimen in?”

  “There’s a middle-man in Breslau who – to order – imports various, all sorts of …”