Phantoms of Breslau (21 page)

“I know it’s early, Wirth. Don’t say anything, just listen. You’re to lock Alfred Sorg up in the ‘storeroom’. He’s the man I questioned in the yard behind the Three Crowns. He’ll either be there or at the Four Seasons.”

He replaced the receiver and became aware of Christel Rühtgard
standing in the doorway of her bedroom. The anger in her swollen eyes made her resemble her father.

“Why do you want to lock Alfred up? What’s he done to you?” Mock heard her say as he made towards her father’s office. “You’re a foul monster! A miserable, drunken beast!” she yelled as he closed the door behind him.

Doctor Rühtgard was leaning out of the window, pouring the hot coffee from Mock’s cup onto the lawn. He turned towards Mock.

“You’ve had your coffee, Mock. And now leave!”

“Don’t behave like some offended countess.” Mock was clearly pleased with his comparison. He felt perfidiously exhilarated and a faint smile appeared on his face. “Spare yourself the melodramatic gestures and tell me what’s happened! And without any preludes such as ‘You’re asking
me
?’”

“The day before yesterday my daughter returned from a concert at night. She was shaking all over.” Rühtgard stood holding an empty cup with tracks of aromatic Kainz coffee running down its sides. “She said she bumped into you during the walk she decided to take after the concert. You were drunk and insisted on seeing her home. On the way you were vulgar towards her. By this you’re to understand that you’re forbidden from entering this house again.”

Mock strained his memory, but no Latin verse, no passage of prose came to mind which might calm him. He stared at a print on the wall showing a scene from the Gospels – the healing of the man possessed. At the bottom was written the year 1756. It dawned on Mock how he might quell his anger. He recalled an episode from school: Professor Moravjetz had thrown dates from German history at his pupils, who quickly translated them into Latin.

“
Anno Domini millesimo septingentesimo quinquagesimo sexto
,” Mock said, and flopped into the armchair.

“Are you out of your mind, Mock?” Rühtgard gaped in amazement and the cup twisted on its handle spilling a few drops of coffee on his desk.

“If you believe your daughter, there’s no point in us talking.” Mock got to his feet and leaned over the desk. He looked into Rühtgard’s eyes without blinking. “Shall I go on, or am I to obey your order and leave?”

“Go on,” Rühtgard sighed, and he placed his hand on the head of a stork standing on a small, mahogany grand piano. The piano opened, the stork bent over and in its beak caught a cigarette which had appeared in place of the keyboard. Rühtgard took the cigarette from the bird’s beak and closed the lid of the cigarette case.

“Only one thing in what your daughter says is true: the fact that I used inappropriate language towards a young lady from a good home. I won’t say any more. And not because I gave her my word of honour that I’d be discreet. I could quite easily grant myself dispensation … No, that’s not the reason … Someone once said that at times, truth is like a sentence. You don’t deserve a sentence.”

Rühtgard pulled greedily on his cigarette for a minute and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. A blue fog hung over the surface of the desk.

“Pour yourself some coffee,” he said quietly. “I’m not interested in what my daughter has been up to … Probably the same thing her mother liked so much … I never told you …”

“About her mother? Never. Only that she died of cholera in Cameroon. Before the war, when you had a well-paid job there.”

“I’ve told you too much then.” Rühtgard did not look at Mock, but squinted at a point somewhere in the corner of the room. “May she be swallowed by eternal silence.”

Mock fell heavily into the expansive armchair. Silence. Rühtgard quickly stood up and went to the Waldenburg service to pour Mock some coffee. He pressed the stork’s head and stuck the cigarette offered by the
bird into Mock’s mouth. He walked out of his office, leaving his guest with an unlit cigarette between his lips.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919
HALF PAST SEVEN IN THE MORNING

Mock and Rühtgard sat in the dining room and buried their spoons in a mixture of soft-boiled eggs, butter and several leaves of parsley which filled two tall glasses delicately etched with slender lilies.

“Tell me, Ebbo.” Rühtgard poured a stream of honey onto a crispy roll. “Why have you come to see me?”

“The diet didn’t help.” Mock sucked up the eggy concoction with gusto and helped himself to two fat veal sausages. “I still had nightmares. I’m going to tell you something you might not believe, or might even laugh at.” Mock broke off and fell silent.

“Go on, then.” Rühtgard attacked a soft pear with his fruit knife.

“Remember how we used to entertain ourselves at night on the front with weird stories?” When Rühtgard murmured his affirmation, Mock went on: “Remember Corporal Neymann’s stories about his haunted house? Well, my house is haunted. Understand, Rühtgard? It’s haunted.”

“I could ask what you by mean haunted,” Rühtgard said. “But first of all I know you don’t like that kind of question and, secondly, I’ve got to go to the hospital in a minute. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to hear you out. We can talk on the way. So, how does this ‘haunting’ manifest itself?”

“Noises …” Mock swallowed a mouthful of sausage. “I’m woken up by noises in the night. I dream about people with their eyes gouged out, and then a thumping on the floor wakes me up.”

“That’s all?” Rühtgard allowed Mock to pass at the dining-room door.

“Yes.” Mock accepted his bowler hat from the servant. “That’s all.”

“Listen to me carefully, Eberhard,” said Rühtgard slowly once they were on the stairs. “I’m not a psychiatrist but, like everyone else these days, I am interested in the theories of Freud and Jung. There are some very good passages in them.” They stepped out onto sun-drenched Landsbergstrasse and set off alongside the park. “Especially where they write about the relationship between parents and children. Both scholars write about paranormal phenomena. Jung apparently experienced them in his own house in Vienna … Both he and Freud advise hypnosis in such situations … Perhaps you could try it?”

“I don’t see why.” They turned left into Kleinburgstrasse. Mock stopped to let a young woman with a child in a huge wicker pram go by before they briskly walked on, passing the Communal School building with its garden and playground. After a lengthy silence he said: “This is happening in my house, not in my head!”

“I read several of Hippocrates’ tracts in Greek during my medical studies.” Rühtgard smiled and led Mock to the right into Kirschallee, towards the enormous water tower. “That’s your field … I suffered like hell over that Greek text … I don’t remember now which of them has a description of the brain of an epileptic goat. Of course we can’t be sure if it really did have epilepsy. Hippocrates dissected the brain and concluded that there was too much moisture in it. The poor animal might have had hallucinations, but it would have been enough to drain some water from its brain. The same applies to you. A part of your brain is responsible for your nightmares and for the noises in your house. All we have to do is work on it – perhaps with the help of hypnosis – and it’ll be over and done with. You’ll never dream of those dead, blinded people whose murderer you’re after ever again.”

“Are you trying to say” – Mock stopped, removed his bowler and wiped his brow with a handkerchief – “that those terrifying phantoms are in my brain? That they don’t actually exist?”

“Of course they don’t,” Rühtgard exclaimed with joy. “Can your father hear them? Can that dog hear them?”

“My father can’t hear them because he’s deaf.” Mock stood stock still. “But the dog can. He growls at someone, jumps up at someone …”

“Look, the dog is reacting to you.” Rühtgard was flushed with the ardour of his argument. They passed the water tower and made their way along the narrow path between the sports ground and the Lutheran community cemetery. He took Mock by the arm and accelerated his step. “Come on, let’s walk faster or I’ll be late for the hospital. And now listen. Something wakes you, something that’s in your head, and you wake the dog. The dog sees his master on his feet and greets you. Understand? He’s not fawning on a ghost, he’s fawning on you …”

For a long while they did not say anything. Mock tried to choose his words carefully.

“If you saw what I saw, you’d think differently.” They were nearing the imposing Wenzel-Hancke Hospital building, where Doctor Rühtgard worked in the Department of Contagious Diseases. “The dog was on the other side of the room, standing by the hatch in the floor wagging its tail.”

“You know what?” Rühtgard stopped on the steps leading up to the hospital and looked intently at Mock’s ravaged countenance. Every wrinkle and every bit of puffiness caused by his sleepless nights was accentuated by the merciless September sun. “I’ll prove to you that I’m right. I’ll stay at your place tonight. I sleep very lightly, the slightest sound wakes me up. Today I’ll find out whether phantoms actually exist. See you this evening! I’ll come to your place after supper, before the ‘phantom’s hour’, meaning midnight!”

Rühtgard opened the hospital’s huge double door and was about to reply to the old porter’s greeting when he heard Mock’s voice and saw his friend’s massive frame coming up the steps. The Criminal Assistant caught him by the sleeve, his face hard and his eyes fixed.

“You mentioned some dead blinded men a moment ago. Tell me, how do you know about the investigation I’m conducting?” Fear rang in Mock’s voice. “I must have blurted something out on Wednesday, when I was drunk. Is that it?”

“No. It’s not.” Rühtgard squeezed Mock’s hand tightly. “You do far worse things when you’re drunk, things you push out of your conscious mind. I know about the murders from little Elfriede on Reuscherstrasse.”

“From
who
? What the bloody hell are you talking about?” Mock tried to tear his hand away from the iron grip.

“You know those buildings on Reuscherstrasse.” Rühtgard would not let go of Mock’s hand. “The ones enclosing all those courtyards. If you were to go into one of the yards at midday, what would you hear, Ebbo?”

“I don’t know … children screaming and playing certainly, on their way home from school … noise from several factories and taverns …”

“What else? Think!”

“The crooning of organ grinders, that’s for sure.”

“Right.” Rühtgard let go of his friend’s hand. “One of the organ grinders is called Bruno. He’s blind. Lost his eyes in the war, in an explosion. He plays and his daughter, Little Elfriede, sings. When Elfriede sings, tears flow from Bruno’s eye sockets. Go there today and see what Elfriede is singing about.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919
NOON

Mock sat in his office in the Police Praesidium trying to stifle the incessant musical rondo which had been going around in his head for over an hour, ever since he had returned from his gloomy walk through the labyrinth of inner yards between Reuscherstrasse and Antonienstrasse. In the dark side streets, from which not even the sweltering September sun
could burn away the musty dampness, pan vendors had set up temporary stalls; grindstones whistled in a hiss of sparks and organ grinders set down their boxes and played picaresque and romantic urban ballads. The yard’s morality play, sung by Bruno the organ grinder’s ten-year-old daughter, did not belong in either of those categories:

In the city of Breslau after the war
No longer safely can you all live.
For a vampire prowls, a terrible brute,
Like a spider, a bloody web does he weave.

Mock looked up at his colleague, Herbert Domagalla, who was clattering on the platen of a Torpedo typewriter, transforming the statements given by the prostitute sitting opposite him into the rhythmic scansion of well-oiled machinery. Mock grabbed a pencil and snapped it in two. A small splinter of wood hit the prostitute on the cheek, and she glared at Mock. He was looking at her too, but he did not see her. Instead he saw himself the day before: an energetic police officer who blackmails his chief, gets carte blanche to do what he likes and then, his head brimming with ideas, follows in the murderer’s footsteps with his loyal helpers from the criminal underworld. After the death of a prostitute covered in rashes, that same police officer turns into a dried-up, moaning little soul who renounces everything he is doing and at night shakes with terror at imaginary ghosts. The following day that weepy and meek anima over-dramatizes his experiences in the presence of a friend from the front.

The vampire kills in our dark city streets.
Our officers strive to track the fiend down.
Led by our brave Commissioner Mock,
A hunt for the vampire runs through the town.

Soon I will tell you why Mock leads this case,
I’ll tell you what gives him this admirable knack
But now, for the moment, I must be still
For a grim shudder runs down my back.

Mock rested his chin on one fist and thumped his desk with the other. The inkwell and chewed bone penholder jumped, the antique sand shaker with Breslau’s coat of arms rocked, the rolled-up newspaper with its headline prisoners of war return rustled. The prostitute glared at Mock again.

“If only you had seen me yesterday,” he said to her and broke off.

“Pardon?” Domagalla and the prostitute said at the same time.

Mock ignored them and continued in his head: “… you’d have seen a moron, fluctuating between contradictory decisions. One minute he abandons Alfred Sorg to the mercy of the murderer, then he locks him up in Wirth’s ‘storeroom’. One minute he wants to attack the perpetrator, the next he practically drowns in tears for fear that somebody he has questioned is going to die. I’ve got the address of the four sailors. Why haven’t I gone there? Because I’m afraid of killing somebody. I’m like Medusa: I kill with my eyes. I drill holes in stomachs and pierce lungs with my eyes alone. So how am I supposed to conduct this investigation, damn it? Not look at people? Not question them? Write letters?” After this last question, an answer occurred to him.