End of the World in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  “Sexual deviation and possible perversion: bisexuality, dressing as a courtesan, jewellery worn on naked flesh, extensive foreplay before intercourse.”

  On the table stood an enormous gramophone player with a record still in place. The needle crackled as it traced small circles. The girl was sitting on a sofa, her legs and arms outspread. Her head had been almost completely severed, and her occipital bone rested on frail shoulder blades. Her eye sockets ran with brownish clots. A black streak of blood covered her eyes with a sticky film, stuck to her temples and encircled her shapely ears in narrow streams. This macabre headband rendered identification impossible.

  “He chopped her head off and gouged out her eyes with a bayonet,” said Lasarius, and began his detailed examination par excellence. “She had V.D. Didn’t have intercourse before death. There are no signs of penetration.”

  “Past and present diseases not known,” thought Mock.

  After he had been tied to the chandelier, Geissen’s blood had filled his cranium with a thick and viscous weight. The pressure had increased, his cheeks had grown purple, and the throbbing in his ears had intensified. The merciful bayonet, aimed at the groin artery, had cut short the suffering of this conservative councillor, advocate of strong paternal authority, champion of cheap, rented accommodation, and lover of opera.

  “Political opinions and adherence to party: sympathy for the N.S.D.A.P.,† or rather, the primitive power of its members.”

  “They’ve been dead for two hours,” said Mühlhaus. “I questioned the brothel madam. She doesn’t know who the deceased is. His identity is known only to us – you two, Ehlers and myself. Oh, and Krummheltz, but he won’t breathe a word … Krummheltz was on the night beat. Alone. He’s the one who was summoned by our shaken madam. This is what we know: Geissen didn’t come very often, but when he did come it was always at the same time of day, six in the morning, when most of the girls had sunk into heavy, well-earned sleep. He wanted to remain incognito. He always arranged to be with the same girl. By telephone. This one he was seeing for the first time. She was new here. He received her sweet lashes to the sound of opera.” Mühlhaus looked at Der Ring des Nibelungen on the gramophone. “So we know what he liked. Opera. Both in the bedchamber and out.”

  “Interests other than sex: the music of Mahler; favourite objects and dishes: teddy bears, Berlin porcelain, coffee with an equal amount of milk, poppy-seed twists, Fach’s cherry liqueur, Astoria cigarettes, strong men with a strong odour …” Mock thought on.

  “At six in the morning,” continued Mühlhaus, “there were no other clients in the brothel; all the girls – apart from this one here – were asleep. Including the madam. The only people on the move in this place were our lovers and the doorman, Franz Peruschka. One of his duties is to remind the guests when they’ve gone over their allotted time. Peruschka knocked on the door several times and, when no-one answered, went in, saw this romantic scene and woke the madam. Whereupon she ran hysterically into the street and saw Krummheltz doing his rounds. He phoned Ehlers, who was on night duty, and Ehlers tried without success to phone Counsellor Eberhard Mock. He didn’t know you’d taken the phone off the hook. He phoned me. I arrived, examined the scene of the crime and went straight to your apartment. That’s it.”

  “I’ve got a hangover today.” Mock rubbed his swollen eyelids with his fingers. “Which is probably why I don’t understand everything. There was one other person on the move in the brothel. The murderer. Or maybe not … Maybe there really were only three people.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t understand you, Criminal Director. Geissen’s hanging from a chandelier. A very strong man must have hung him there. Apart from the councillor, the only man – and a pretty strong man at that – was the doorman, Franz What’s-his-name. My question is: is Franz What’shis-name being held at the station? Has he admitted his guilt? Has anyone even locked him up, Criminal Director? Where is he?”

  “With his boss. Calming her down. He’s very gentle with her. One can assume that their relationship is not merely professional. The madam has suffered a shock. Besides,” – Mühlhaus spread himself out comfortably on the sofa right next to the murdered girl – “do you think I woke you up and brought you here out of spite? Just think about it. Is it normal for the chief, his deputy and one of three rank and file officers from the Murder Commission to visit the scene of the crime and conduct an investigation together? Or perhaps something like this has already happened in the past, hmm?”

  “It happened last week,” muttered Mock. “We met at Honnefelder’s murder …”

  Mühlhaus took a dark brown envelope from his briefcase and, using tweezers, gently extracted from it a page from a wall calendar dated December 9th, 1927.

  “There was an apothecary’s rubber band around Geissen’s wrist,” he said pointedly. “And this calendar page was held in place by it.”

  “Forgive me,” Mock retorted. “But the doorman could have killed Geissen and pretended to be the ‘calendar murderer’.”

  “Please don’t drink any more, Eberhard.” There was genuine concern in Mühlhaus’ voice. “Alcohol doesn’t do your imagination any favours – nice name by the way, ‘calendar murderer’ – it just kills any logic. The role played by the calendar in the Gelfrert-Honnefelder-Geissen cases is not known to any speculating newspapers, nor to anyone other than our men from the Murder Commission.” Mühlhaus slapped his thigh with his palm. Mock could have sworn his chief had slapped the naked thigh of the dead girl instead. “And Franz Peruschka certainly didn’t know about it.”

  “And why do you assume that the murderer of Gelfrert, Honnefelder and Geissen isn’t Franz Peruschka?” asked Mock.

  “From what Criminal Sergeant Krummheltz has told us, we know the madam was hysterical and, forgetting there was a telephone in the house, ran into the street. But before she got that far, she tripped on the drive and fell. The astonished Krummheltz, who was just passing, saw Peruschka run out after her. The doorman rushed to help the elderly lady and fainted. Please continue with your observations, Doctor Lasarius.”

  “Peruschka suffers from an acute form of agoraphobia.” The pathologist stuck a finger into the deceased’s mouth. “When he finds himself outside in an open space, he faints. He couldn’t have killed Gelfrert and Honnefelder because he would have had to leave the house.”

  “Doctor,” Mock stared pensively at Lasarius’ thick neck. “Is it possible for this man to have been born in this building and then never left it?”

  “He can only go out with his eyes closed. In cases of acute agoraphobia that’s the only way, and it’s not always effective at that.”

  “So if Peruschka was the murderer, he would’ve had to have an accomplice who could take him to Gelfrert and Honnefelder?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Lasarius said.

  “How did you manage to arrive at a diagnosis so quickly? Surely agoraphobia is quite rare – I’ve never heard of it – and you’re a physician, not a psychiatrist.”

  “I would never have arrived at it,” – Lasarius glanced at his palms, cracked from formaline – “but when the doorman came to his senses, he showed me his recruitment papers, which describe him as being unfit for service due to mental illness. Like you, the military doctor didn’t have the faintest idea of the existence of such an ailment, so he didn’t give it a name – he just accurately described the symptoms. That’s how I recognized it. The illness itself has been described in detail by Oppenheim and Hoch. Another dissertation on the subject was published recently, but I can’t remember the name of its author …”

  “Peruschka could have feigned the swoon,” Mock muttered, unconvinced. “And secured himself an excellent alibi … There was no shortage of malingerers using false certificates during the war …”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” Mühlhaus said with annoyance. “You think Peruschka faked it during the war so that, twelve years later, he would have an alibi for Geissen’s
murder? You’re too distrustful.”

  “Shame it’s only at work …” Mock lit a cigarette and blew an elegant smoke ring. “Clients pay by the hour at this brothel. How much time has passed since Geissen bled to death?” he asked Lasarius.

  “When the iliac artery in the groin has been severed, a person bleeds to death in about five minutes,” said the pathologist.

  “So the murderer had,” Mock continued, “ten minutes to stun them both, gag Geissen, hang him upside down, sever his artery and then slash the girl’s throat. A veritable blitzkrieg. But this must have been executed after something like a quarter of an hour, when the client would have been so heated he would have been oblivious to this blessed world …”

  “Does it really take that long?” Mühlhaus interrupted with a peevish smile.

  “ … meaning the murderer started work at a quarter past six, when Geissen had been at it for quarter of an hour, and then waited for the victim to bleed to death. Five minutes. Then he left.”

  “How?”

  “The same way he came in – through the window.”

  “I’ve inspected the lawn meticulously. There were no tracks in the snow; it’s hard, but not packed down. There’s a small mound by the window to that room, but it’s untouched.”

  “It could have been another client who’d slipped into the girl’s room. There are usually a fair number here on a Sunday, and any one of them could have hidden himself without attracting the doorman’s attention …”

  “Maybe you’re right, but how did he get out? Franz Peruschka claims not to have slept a wink.” Mühlhaus got to his feet and fastened his coat. “Your theory, apart from the means of entry and exit, is credible. I haven’t got a hangover today, yet there’s something I don’t understand either: why did the murderer wait for the victim to bleed to death? When he’d had his artery severed and been hung upside down, the man was going to die anyway. So why did the swine wait for Geissen to bleed to death? How did you arrive at that?”

  “Bear this in mind.” Mock held the calendar page with the tweezers. “If it’s the same psychopath who killed Gelfrert and Honnefelder, then he has to behave in a similar manner. He attached the paper to the other two after they died. There can be no doubt about that. This time he also had to wait for his victim to die. Then he left, hid in the corridor, behind a curtain for example, and waited until Franz went to remind the client that his time was up. Any regular knows that’s part of the doorman’s job …”

  “Is that so?” Mühlhaus pressed tobacco into his pipe.

  † What has passed is in death’s dominion.

  † Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – National-Socialist German Workers’

  “Yes, Criminal Director, the murderer has to be a regular at brothels. So he waited for the doorman to come and break into the room, then he quietly slipped out of the building.”

  “You’re beginning to think sensibly, Mock.” Mühlhaus looked at Lasarius. “Doctor, how long does a hangover last?”

  “After port, a fair while,” said Mock pensively.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 9TH, 1927 NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Mock merged into the crowd milling around the stalls on Neumarkt. He glanced at his watch. He still had an hour before his train left for Berlin. He wanted to spend it in the company of the bottle of dogberry schnapps that was pleasantly weighing down his right coat pocket.

  All around, he heard cries of satisfaction and fierce bargaining. He leaned against the little wall surrounding the fountain in the square and, like the Neptune who hovered over it, observed the traders with irony. A fat forester, ruddy with cold and wearing a hat decorated with the emblem of von Maltzan’s Militsch forests, extolled in Silesian German the Advent wreaths he was selling and collected orders for Christmas trees. At a neighbouring stall stood a formidable Silesian woman, her prominent backside wrapped in layers of striped aprons. She was arguing in Polish with her diminutive husband, who was smiling ingratiatingly at some servant girl and pressing a wicker basket containing a fine-looking goose into her hand. Next to them, a whiskered baker waved his arms and pointed at his spiralling pyramids of pastries snowed over with icing and blackened with poppy seeds.

  Mock stroked the bottle of schnapps, loitered at the Silesian stall and listened with pleasure to the rustle of the Polish language. Sophie could imitate the Poles brilliantly. She did not do so willingly, however, claiming her lips hurt from the effort of it. The Pole, paying no attention to his wife’s reprimands, offered the goose to another client. The latter hesitated briefly and then bought the bird, asking the vendor to gut it. He lay the bird’s head on a chopping block and, from under the awning, produced a military, non-commissioned officer’s bayonet with zur erinnerung an MEINE DIENSTZEIT† engraved upon it.

  “From the Franco-Prussian war. His grandfather’s no doubt,” thought Mock.

  The body of the goose lost its invaluable crown. A bayonet chopped off the bird’s head, a bayonet set loose a bloody waterfall from von Geissen’s neck, a bayonet rolled the shapely skull of a brothel girl onto her frail shoulder blades, a bayonet severed her retinas, a bayonet drilled into the slippery mucus of her eye sockets. In a flash, Mock realized he did not even know the girl’s name. He had not asked Mühlhaus for it.

  The Counsellor lit a cigarette. He stood quite still among the stalls, and suddenly no longer heard all the bargaining and sales patter, as coarse as the blows of a flail. The murdered girl, slaughtered like an animal, was indeed a nameless body to him, one of the many filthy reservoirs into which the city’s poor and wealthy relieve themselves of their frustrations, blindly sowing seeds from which nothing is ever born. Although Mock knew many prostitutes, he did not believe in the existence of “whores with hearts of gold” – he simply had not met any. He had often stroked their slender backs as they shook with sobs, assailed by genuine pain, but just as often he had seen how, beneath the alabaster skin, their muscles tensed during the acrobatics they performed with their clients. Snuggled into their breasts, he had often heard the fast and anguished beating of their hearts; but far more often those same breasts bounced teasingly in front of his face, while puckered lips and eyes squeezed shut in feigned ecstatic raptures.

  † As a reminder of my military service.

  Until now he had not seen many murdered prostitutes, but all had possessed names, thanks to which he could neatly place their files into the relevant compartment of his register, which Doctor Lasarius described as “containing unnatural – that is, not venereal – causes of death for the priestesses of Venus”.

  “This murdered girl was unworthy even of the company of those like her; even after death she has landed outside the pale of her dirty caste simply because I was not interested in her name,” Mock thought. “And it’s only because I’m chasing after another whore whose name is – yes indeed – the same as my own. That is the only reason I have robbed that butchered girl of the most basic right, of finding herself in the same file as all this city’s filth.”

  In his mouth Mock tasted the bitterness of his conscience, and turned back. He did not go to the station from where the Berlin train was due to leave half an hour later; Rainer Knüfer could look for deceitful Sophie in the city of Marlene Dietrich by himself. Not far from the stall where the Silesian goose-vendor’s bayonet had flashed in the bright winter sun, he threw away his ticket to the city on the Spree, and remained in the city on the Oder. He turned into Messerstrasse, tossed his half-empty bottle of schnapps to a beggar sitting outside the Three Roses tenement, and dragged himself towards the Police Praesidium – this gloomy, silent Criminal Counsellor cherished order in his files above all.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 9TH, 1927 TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  All the officers from the Murder Commission were present in Mühlhaus’ office; all, that is, except Smolorz. The group was complemented by Reinert and Kleinfeld, Mühlhaus’ detectives for special assignments. Coffee and milk steamed in cups. Shafts of tobacco sm
oke swirled lazily in the sun.

  “Any ideas?” Mühlhaus asked.

  Everyone remained silent. Their heads were buzzing with Mock’s disquisition. Means, place and time – only these are important. The victim is immaterial, incidental. That was Mock’s theory, a theory with which no-one but he agreed. Tired from trying for half an hour to convince them – in vain; tired from thinking about Sophie, from remembering the bloody wound inflicted on the nameless whore; tired from the several generous swigs of dogberry schnapps, he looked at Reinert, Kleinfeld, Ehlers and Meinerer and read resignation and boredom in their eyes. This they shared with the stenographer, an old Jew by the name of Herman Lewin who, with hands folded on top of his belly, sat twiddling his thumbs at the speed of lightning. Mock poured himself another cup of hot milk and reached for the tray of chocolates that stood on a lace napkin. Mühlhaus’ red, swollen eyelids were closed. Only the bands of smoke rising to the ceiling from his lidded pipe testified to the feverish workings of his brain.

  “Do I have to call upon you one by one, gentlemen, to answer like schoolboys?” the chief opened his eyes and whispered ominously. “Counsellor Mock has presented you with his hypothesis. Do you all agree with it? Does nobody have any comments? Maybe you will be inspired when I repeat what the Mayor and the President of Police both said when they lost patience with us on hearing of Councillor Geissen’s death. Reinert, what do you think about all this?”