“Exactly,” Barlach replied. “And now, in the midst of my search, I get sick and come to you. That’s what I call bad luck, getting shipped to the Sonnenstein clinic; or is it good luck?”
“I cannot give a prognosis yet,” Emmenberger replied. “Hungertobel wasn’t exactly optimistic.”
“Well, you haven’t examined me yet,” said the old man, “and that’s the reason why I didn’t want good old Hungertobel present. We have to be open-minded if we want to make headway in our case. And I think that both you and I want to make headway. There is nothing worse than forming an opinion, about a criminal or a sickness, before one has studied the suspect in his environment and examined his habits.”
“That’s true,” the doctor replied. “As a doctor I don’t know anything about criminology, but what you say makes sense. Well, Herr Kramer, I hope that here you’ll be able to recover somewhat from the rigors of your profession.”
Then he lit a third cigarette and said, “I think the war criminals will leave you in peace here.”
Emmenberger’s answer made the old man suspicious for a moment. “Who is interrogating whom?” he thought, looking into Emmenberger’s face, a masklike visage in the light of the single lamp, the eyes behind the gleaming spectacles abnormally large and, it seemed, glittering with mockery.
“Dear doctor,” he said, “surely you wouldn’t claim that in a certain country there is no such thing as cancer.”
“Surely you’re not implying that there are war criminals in Switzerland!” Emmenberger laughed.
The old man scrutinized the doctor. “What happened in Germany happens in every country, given certain conditions. The conditions may vary. No man, no nation is an exception. I have been told by a Jew, Dr. Emmenberger, a man who underwent an operation without anesthesia in a concentration camp, that there is only one difference between human beings: the difference between the tormentors and the tormented. But I believe there is also the difference between the tempted and the spared. That puts you and me, as Swiss citizens, among those who were spared the ordeal of temptation, which is a blessing and not a fault, as many say; for we are supposed to pray: ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ So I have come to Switzerland, not to look for war criminals in general, but to ferret out one particular war criminal, although I have little more than an unclear picture of him. But now I am sick, Dr. Emmenberger, the hunt has collapsed overnight, and the quarry does not even know how close I was on his traces. A pathetic spectacle.”
“In that case your chances of finding your man are very slim,” the doctor replied indifferently, exhaling a puff of smoke that formed a milky, luminous ring above the old man’s head. Barlach saw him giving a sign to the woman with his eyes. She handed him a syringe. Emmenberger vanished for a moment into the darkness of the room. When he reappeared, he was holding a vial.
“Your chances are slim,” he said again as he filled the syringe with a colorless liquid.
But the inspector contradicted him.
“I still have a weapon,” he said. “Let’s take your method, doctor. I come to your hospital all the way from Bern through snow and sleet on this last dreary day of the year, and you receive me in the operating room for my first examination. Why do you do this? It’s unusual, wouldn’t you say, for a patient to be shoved straightaway into a room that would frighten him? You do this because you want to fill me with fear, for you can only be my doctor if you dominate me, and I am a noncompliant patient, I’m sure Hungertobel told you that. So you decided to give this demonstration. You want to dominate me in order to cure me, and fear is one of the means you are obliged to employ. It’s the same in my fiendish profession. Our methods are the same. My only leverage against the man I am looking for is fear.”
The needle in Emmenberger’s hand was pointed at the old man. “You’re a shrewd psychologist,” the doctor laughed. “It’s true, I wanted to impress you a bit with this room. Fear is a necessary tool. But before I exercise my art, let’s hear the rest about yours. How will you proceed? I’m curious. The hunted man does not know you’re hunting him, at least those are your own words.”
“He senses it without being sure, and that’s more dangerous for him,” Barlach replied. “He knows that I’m in Switzerland and that I’m looking for a war criminal. He’ll silence his suspicion and assure himself over and over that I’m looking for someone else and not him. Because, you see, he escaped from the world of unlimited crime into Switzerland, and by a masterly trick he left himself behind. A great secret. But in the darkest chamber of his heart he will know that I’m looking for him and not for anyone else, him and always and only him. And he will be afraid, and the more unlikely he thinks it is that I am really looking for him, the more his fear will grow, while I, Doctor, lie in my bed in this hospital with my sickness, with my impotence.” He stopped talking.
Emmenberger looked at him strangely, almost with pity, still holding the syringe.
“I doubt that you will succeed,” he said calmly. “But I wish you luck.”
The old man did not move a muscle. “He will die of fear,” he said.
Emmenberger slowly laid the syringe on the little glass and metal table that stood next to the stretcher. There it lay, a malignant sharp thing. Emmenberger stood slightly bent forward. “Do you think so?” he finally said. “Do you really think so?” His narrow eyes contracted almost imperceptibly behind his glasses. “It’s amazing to find someone still as hopeful as you are, and as optimistic, in these times. Your way of thinking is bold; let’s hope you don’t find yourself duped by reality one of these days. It would be too bad if you came to disheartening results.” He said this softly, slightly bemused. Then he slowly walked back into the darkness of the room, and the lights went on with a blinding glare. Emmenberger stood by the switchboard.
“I will examine you later, Herr Kramer,” he said, smiling. “Your illness is serious. You know that. It could be fatal—that suspicion has not been canceled. That, unfortunately, is my impression after our conversation. You have been open with me, I owe you the same. The examination will not be easy, it requires a bit of surgery. But we’d rather have that after the New Year, don’t you agree? Why disrupt a nice holiday? The main thing is that I have you under my wing.”
Barlach did not reply.
Emmenberger extinguished the cigarette. “Good Lord, Doctor Marlok,” he said, “I’ve been smoking in the operation room. Herr Kramer is an exciting visitor. You should slap his wrist and mine.”
“What’s this?” asked the old man when Dr. Marlok handed him two reddish pills.
“Just a sedative,” she said. But he drank the water she gave him with even greater uneasiness.
“Call for the nurse,” Emmenberger ordered from the switchboard.
Nurse Kläri appeared at the door. To the inspector, she looked like a good-natured executioner. “Hangmen are always good-natured,” he thought.
“Which room did you prepare for our Herr Kramer?” asked Dr. Emmenberger.
“Number seventy-two, Doctor,” Nurse Kläri replied.
“Let’s give him room number fifteen,” said Emmenberger, “we’ll have better control over him there.”
The inspector was again overcome by the tiredness he had felt in Hungertobel’s car.
When the nurse rolled the old man back into the hallway, the stretcher made a sharp turn, and Barlach, tearing himself out of his drowsiness, saw Emmenberger’s face.
He saw that the doctor was observing him carefully, smiling and serene.
Gripped by a fit of feverish shivering, he fell back.
THE ROOM
When he awoke (it was still night, close to ten thirty; he must have slept about three hours, he thought), he was in another room, which he surveyed with surprise and not without apprehension, but still with a certain satisfaction: for he hated hospital rooms, and it pleased him that this room was more like a studio, a technical room, cold and impersonal, as far as he could tell in the blue light of the night lamp that had been le
ft burning on his left. The bed in which he was lying—dressed in a night-shirt and well covered—was still the same stretcher on which he had been brought in; he recognized it right away, though it had been converted with a few simple manual adjustments. “They’re practical here,” the old man said quietly into the stillness. He swiveled the head of the lamp, sweeping the room with its beam; a curtain appeared—presumably there was a window behind it; the cloth was embroidered with strange plants and animals that gleamed in the light. “You can tell I’m hunting,” he said to himself.
He settled back in his pillow and reviewed what he had accomplished. It was little enough. He had carried out his plan. Now it was necessary to weave the net further, spin the threads tighter. It was necessary to act. But how, and how to begin? He did not know. He pressed a button on the little table. Nurse Kläri appeared.
“Well, well, our nurse from Biglen by the Burgdorf-Thun railroad line,” the old man greeted her. “You see how well I know Switzerland, even though I’ve lived abroad all these years.”
“Well, Herr Kramer, what is it? You finally woke up?” she said, with her round fists on her hips.
The old man looked at his watch again. “It’s only ten thirty.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No,” said the inspector, who felt weak.
“You see, the gentleman’s not even hungry. I’ll call Doctor Marlok, you’ve met her. She’ll give you another injection,” the nurse retorted.
“Nonsense,” the old man grumbled, “I wasn’t given an injection. Why don’t you switch on the ceiling lamp instead, I’d like to have a look at this room. One does like to know where one is.”
He was quite angry.
A white, but not glaring, light went on. It was difficult to tell where it came from. Now the room was clearly visible. The ceiling above the old man—he noted this only now—was a single mirror. This annoyed him considerably: to see himself looming overhead might prove to be a bit eerie. “Everywhere these mirrored ceilings,” he thought, “it could drive you crazy.” But secretly he was horrified by the skeleton staring down at him when he looked up. “This mirror is lying,” he thought. “There are mirrors that distort everything, I can’t be that emaciated.” He looked around the room, forgetting the nurse, who was waiting without moving. On his left was a glass panel set in a gray surface into which naked figures were carved, dancing men and women, purely linear and yet three-dimensional; and from the right, greenish-gray wall, between door and curtain, tilting into the room like the lid of a grand piano, hung Rembrandt’s “Anatomy,” a seemingly senseless detail, but it was calculated to combine with the dancers in a way that gave the room a frivolous air; and this impression was only increased by the black, rough-hewn wooden cross that hung over the door in which the nurse stood.
“Well, now, Nurse,” he said, still amazed that the room had changed so much with the light; for before, he had only noticed the curtain and had seen nothing of the dancing men and women, the “Anatomy,” and the cross; and now the sight of this unknown world filled him with apprehension: “Well, now, Nurse, this is a rather peculiar room for a hospital that is supposed to make people healthy and not insane.”
“We’re on Mount Sonnenstein,” Nurse Kläri replied, folding her hands over her belly. “We try to meet all requests,” she chattered, shining with probity, “the most pious ones and the others too. My word of honor, if you don’t care for the ‘Anatomy,’ you can have Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ or a Picasso.”
“In that case I’d rather have ‘Knight, Death, and Devil,’” the inspector said.
Nurse Kläri pulled out a notebook. “Knight, Death, and Devil,” she said as she wrote the words down. “We’ll put it up tomorrow. A lovely picture for a death-room. Congratulations. The gentleman has good taste.”
“I think,” replied the old man, amazed at the crudeness of this Nurse Kläri, “I think I’m not quite at that point yet.”
Nurse Kläri pensively wagged her red, fleshy head. “Oh yes, you are,” she said emphatically. “This place is for dying only. Exclusively. I have never seen anyone leave Ward Three. And you are in Ward Three, that’s all there is to it. Everyone has to die some time. Read what I have written about it. It was published by the Liechti printshop in Walkringen.”
The nurse pulled a little pamphlet out of her bosom and put it on the old man’s bed: Kläri Glauber: Death, the Goal and Purpose of our Life on Earth. A practical guide.
“Shall I fetch Doctor Marlok?” she asked triumphantly.
“No,” the inspector replied, still holding the goal and purpose of our life in his hands. “I don’t need her. But I would like the curtain over to the side. And the window open.”
The curtain was pulled to the side; the light went out. The old man turned off the night lamp.
Nurse Kläri’s massive figure disappeared in the door’s illuminated rectangle, but before it closed, he asked:
“Nurse, one more time! You answer all questions straight off the cuff, I’m sure you can give me the truth about this: Is there a dwarf in this house?”
“Of course,” came the brutal reply from the rectangle. “You saw him.”
Then the door closed.
“Nonsense,” he thought. “I will leave Ward Three. What’s there to stop me? I’ll call Hungertobel. I’m too sick to do anything worthwhile against Emmenberger. Tomorrow I’m going back to Salem hospital.”
He was afraid and was not ashamed to admit it.
Outside was the night and around him the darkness of the room. The old man lay on his bed, hardly breathing.
“At some point the bells should ring,” he thought. “The bells of Zürich, ringing in the new year.”
Somewhere a clock struck twelve.
The old man waited.
Again a clock struck somewhere, and then again, each time twelve merciless strokes. Stroke after stroke, like the strokes of a hammer on a bronze gate.
No ringing of bells, not even the faintest sound of a happy, jubilant crowd.
The new year came silently.
“The world is dead,” the inspector thought over and over: “The world is dead. The world is dead.”
He felt a cold sweat on his forehead, drops slowly gliding along his temple. His eyes were wide open. He lay motionless. Humble.
Once again he heard twelve distant strokes, dying away over a desolate city. Then he felt himself sinking into some shoreless ocean, some dark and vast space.
He woke up at dawn, in the twilight of the new day.
“They didn’t ring in the new year,” he thought again and again. The room felt more menacing than ever.
For a long time he stared into the rising dawn, the gradually brightening green-gray shadows, until he realized:
The window was barred.
DOCTOR MARLOK
“I see we’ve woken up,” said a voice from the door to the inspector, who was staring at the barred window. Into the room, which was filling more and more with a foggy, phantom-like morning light, stepped an old woman in a doctor’s white coat. In her withered, swollen features Barlach recognized with difficulty and with horror the face of the doctor he had seen with Emmenberger in the operation room. He stared at her, tired and shaken by disgust. Without paying any attention to the inspector, she raised her skirt and injected a syringe through her stocking into her thigh; then she stood up straight, pulled out a pocket mirror, and applied make-up. The old man watched this procedure with fascination. He seemed no longer to exist for the woman. Her features lost their coarseness and regained the freshness and clarity he had noticed, so that, leaning motionless against the door jamb, the woman standing in his room was the one whose beauty had struck him at the time of his arrival.
“I understand,” said the old man, slowly awakening from his torpor, but still exhausted and confused. “Morphine.”
“Certainly,” she said. “It’s a necessity in this world—Inspector Barlach.”
The old man stared o
ut into the morning, which was darkening; for it was raining outside, pouring into the snow that, he presumed, was still on the ground, and then he said softly, and as if in passing:
“You know who I am.”
Then he stared out the window again.
“We know who you are,” the doctor confirmed, still leaning against the door, both hands buried in the pockets of her smock.
“How did you find out?” he asked, though in fact he was not at all curious.
She tossed a newspaper on his bed.
It was the Bund.
On the front page was his picture, as the old man noticed right away, a snapshot taken in the spring, when he had still smoked Ormond-Brazils, and the caption said: “Retired: Hans Barlach, Detective Inspector of the Bern City Police.”
“Of course,” the inspector muttered.
And then, as he cast a second, disconcerted and irritated glance at the newspaper, he saw the date.
It was the first time he lost his composure.
“The date,” he shouted hoarsely: “The date, Doctor! The date of the newspaper!”
“So?” she asked, not a flicker of movement in her face.
“It’s the fifth of January,” the inspector gasped desperately. Now he understood the absence of the New Year’s bells, the whole horror of the past night.
“Did you expect a different date?” she asked sarcastically, and with obvious curiosity, raising her eyebrows slightly.
He screamed: “What did you do to me?” and tried to sit up, but fell back into the bed.
His arms waved about in the air a few times, then he lay motionless again.
The doctor pulled out a cigarette case and took out a cigarette. She seemed untouched by anything.
“I don’t want any smoking in my room,” said Barlach, quietly but firmly.
“The window is barred,” the doctor replied, with a nod toward the raindrops running down behind the iron bars.
“I don’t think you have any say around here.”
Then she turned to the old man and stepped up to his bed, her hands buried in the pockets of her coat.
The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion Page 7
