Phantoms of Breslau (3 page)

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Kurt Smolorz had not been working under Mock in Vice Department IIIb of Breslau’s Police Praesidium for long. He had landed there straight off the streets of Kleinburg, where he had walked the beat without knowing why; in truth, this beautiful villa district adjacent to South Park had about as much in common with crime as Constable Smolorz had with poetry. Yet on one warm day in 1918, it was precisely there that some dangerous criminals, sought by all the police in Europe, had crossed the constable’s path. And it was a happy day for him. Criminal Assistant Mock had been doing a routine check in a plush house of ill repute on Akazienallee. He had a habit of combining pleasure with work. After checking the income ledger and the health records, and when he had quizzed the madam about her more eccentric clients, he had begun to look around for his favourite lady who, as it turned out, was busy, along with two other employees, pleasuring two – and here the madam sighed – very rich gentlemen.

Intrigued by the configuration of two to three, Mock had peeped through a concealed window into the so-called pink room and received a shock. He had run out into the street and immediately bumped into the
red-headed constable, who was clanging his sword threateningly and tugging at the collar of a rascal he had apprehended a moment earlier for firing a catapult at passing droschkas. On Mock’s orders, Constable Smolorz had punished the rascal with a hefty clout and let him go. Then, together with Mock, he had burst into the pink room of Madame Blaschke’s establishment and – rubbing his eyes in astonishment at such a complicated arrangement of bodies as he had never seen before – arrested the two men, who had turned out to be none other than Kurt Wirth and his mute bodyguard Hans Zupitza, pioneers of European coercion and extortion. That day a great deal changed in the lives of the protagonists of this event, and they all became permanently linked: Wirth collaborated with Mock and was rewarded when the latter turned a blind eye to his extortion of smugglers who floated arms from Austria, coffee from Turkey and tobacco down the River Oder. Mock had become a rich and influential man in the criminal underworld, and this was to prove extremely useful to him. Smolorz, meanwhile, had gone from being a district constable to an employee at the Police Praesidium. Like all the
dramatis personae
, he held a sizeable bank account of dollars paid by Europe’s most wanted criminals in return for their freedom. Mock soon recognized Smolorz’s assets as a colleague, and one of the most valuable of these was his reticence.

Smolorz was silent even now as he sat next to Mock in a river-police motorboat steered by a uniformed boatswain. They navigated the shallow flood waters of the River Ohlau among sparse trees and partially submerged fields. The motorboat moored at a temporary landing stage not far from a paved road.

“New House!” shouted the boatswain, as he helped Smolorz and Mock to disembark.

A droschka was waiting for them on the road. Mock recognized the cabby, whose services the police had often found indispensable. He shook
his hand and threw himself onto the settle, rocking the carriage. Smolorz took the seat up on the box and the droschka moved off. Mock, attempting to forget the thirst which tormented him, studied the outbuildings of New House. The lowing of cattle could be heard from Swia$$$tniki Farm, two kilometres away. The smell of damp air from the Oder wafted through the sunlight. After a while they came to a lock where they climbed out of the droschka and crossed over to the island, Ottwitzer Werder.

At Ottwitzer Dam, among blackthorn bushes, Mock spied the destination of his morning’s travels across the flood waters of the Oder and the Ohlau tributary. A dangerous cascade of water spurting from the base of the dam kept at bay the gawpers who were standing on the embankment by the hamlet of Bischofswal, trying to see what the police had discovered on the island on which only the previous day they had enjoyed their picnics and beer. They were prevented from stepping onto the dam by the strong arms and fierce glares of three sword-bearing gendarmes who wore shakos adorned with a blue star and on their chests sported badges that gleamed with the words “Gendarme Station Schwoitsch”. Mock gazed with nostalgia at the elegant pseudo-Gothic building in the vicinity of Landungsbrücke and remembered the nocturnal pleasures to which he had so recently surrendered. Now duties of a different nature had summoned him to this distant corner of Breslau. He turned to the riverbank fringed with thorn bushes and to the pile of four – so Mock guessed – human bodies. They were covered with the Institute of Forensic Medicine’s grey sheets, which were always carried in the carriages and first cars to arrive from the Police Praesidium. Seven detectives were already there, five of whom were examining the ground immediately surrounding the bodies; squatting, they searched centimetre by centimetre the wet grass and rich earth which clung to their heels. Having examined a chosen square of ground, they grunted as they shifted the weight of their bodies from one foot to the other and, still squatting,
continued their search. Despite the coolness of the morning, none of them wore a jacket. Sweat trickled from beneath their bowler hats down to their moustaches. One of the men, not believing in the accuracy of photography, was drawing a shoe print he had found in the damp soil. Two policemen wearing jackets stood on a police barge moored to the bank and questioned two teenage boys in school uniform who were trembling as much from nerves as from the cold. One of the policemen waved to Smolorz and Mock, indicating a square of land marked out with little flags where the corpses lay covered with sheets. This man was their boss, Criminal Councillor Josef Ilssheimer, head of Vice Department IIIb, and the area he was pointing to had already been examined.

Mock and Smolorz entered the marked-out plot and took off their bowler hats. Ilssheimer came over to join them, lifting his feet high and moving swiftly. It seemed to Mock that their chief was about to perform a high jump and fall heavily on the sheets, but instead he stopped beside the bodies. He leaned over and tugged at the cloth. At first Mock could not make head nor tail of the stiff, blue limbs, frozen in rigor mortis. Stretched out before his eyes was a most peculiar sight, as if someone had arranged a pyre for a large bonfire. But instead of dry twigs and branches there were four human torsos from which heads, legs and arms protruded at various angles. Furthermore, all these limbs were connected to each other in some way or other: here a foot protruded from an armpit, there a knee grew from a collarbone, while a shoulder emerged from between a pair of shins. In many places, the skin of the deceased was pierced by sharp shards of bone, jutting through and disappearing among blue swellings. So as to set the twisted human limbs on a “top-bottom” or “right-left” axis, Mock’s eyes searched for a head. He soon found one, and thanks to a thick beard, he identified its gender as male. From beneath a sailor’s hat, long, pomaded strands of hair tumbled over the dead man’s face while curly, stiff bristles propagated over his jaw and on
his upper lip. All this hair was stuck together with reddish-brown clots of dried blood mixed with a watery fluid. The source of all this gore was two eye-sockets – two dead lakes filled with blood and shreds of membrane from perforated eyes.

When he suffered from a hangover, Mock was tormented by various sensitivities. After eating fried onion, the delicate smell of burning would not leave him for the entire day; the keen odour of a horse – or even worse, that of a sweating man – would evoke associations of sewage and cause convulsions in his bowels; spittle meandering down a window grille would hasten his mistreated stomach’s reflexes … In order to function in any way, a hungover Mock should be left to himself in the lair of his bedding, isolated from all stimuli. But today the world did not protect him. Mock glanced at the wisps of hair, stiff with blood, that fell from beneath the sailor’s hat, at the curled growth of the beard, at the sparse hair on the torso and the pubic hair that poked out from beneath the leather pouch covering the victim’s genitals. He felt all this hair in his throat and started to take deep breaths. He gazed up at the bright, September sky and through his mouth released the sour stench of his hangover, the onion-like reek of chives, the insipid smell of scrambled eggs. He kept his head tilted back and inhaled rapidly. He felt he was losing his balance and gave himself a violent jolt, almost toppling Smolorz who was standing behind him on one leg wiping a mud-covered shoe with his handkerchief. Smolorz stepped aside and Mock sat down on the damp grass. Still busy with the dirty toe of his shoe, Smolorz did not help him to his feet. The world did not favour Mock today; it was not protecting him.

Ilssheimer nodded and stared at the Landungsbrücke from where a small steam boat was departing. The investigative police had already gathered the evidence. They rolled down their shirtsleeves, donned their jackets and exhaled clouds of smoke into the dew-scented air. A huge van
stopped on the opposite bank and eight stretcher-bearers in leather aprons emerged. A man in his forties hopped down after them wearing a doctor’s gown tied at the neck and a top hat which barely covered his skull. In a voice hoarse from tobacco, he began to give out orders. The stretcher-bearers penetrated the crowd, clearing a way for their boss, their folded stretchers serving as pikes to break up the dense throng. A moment later, the dam was swarming with employees from the Institute of Forensic Medicine who were making their way forward carefully, holding on to the taut rope. The unsecured far side of the dam still spurted water, whipping up cones of thick froth. The police officer who had been questioning the two schoolboys with Ilssheimer now shut his notebook and called every-body’s attention with an authoritative glance. Waving his left hand he dismissed those giving evidence towards the moored barge and extended his right to the man in the top hat who was now making his way down the dam.

“A good day to you, Doctor Lasarius!” he called, then he raised both arms and boomed at the policemen: “Gentlemen, silence, please!”

The detectives stamped their cigarettes into the ground; the schoolboys soon disappeared, squeezing past the knees of the stretcher-bearers; Doctor Lasarius removed his top hat and began to inspect the bodies, tossing the broken limbs about; his men rested on their stretchers as if they were spears; Smolorz shook the mud off his trousers and Mock leaned towards Ilssheimer and asked:

“Councillor sir, who is that?”

“My name is Criminal Commissioner Heinrich Mühlhaus,” said the police officer giving the orders, as if he had heard Mock’s question, “and I’m the new chief of the Murder Commission. I’ve come from Hamburg, where my duties were similar. And now,
ad rem
. Two schoolboys from Green Oak Community School came to the dam at half past seven this morning for a cigarette. They found the bodies of four men; two lying on
the ground, the other two on top of them.” The police officer approached the bodies and used his walking stick as a pointer. “As you see, gentlemen, the deceased are lying in a very irregular configuration. Where one has his head, another has his legs. All are practically naked.” The walking stick spun pirouettes. “All they are wearing are sailor’s hats on their heads and leather pouches over their genitals. This peculiar outfit is why I’ve invited Vice Department IIIb of the Police Praesidium to work with us. We have here its chief, Criminal Councillor Ilssheimer.” Mühlhaus glanced respectfully at his colleague. “With his best men, Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock and Criminal Sergeant Kurt Smolorz.” Mühlhaus’ tone as he uttered the adjective “best” expressed at least a shadow of doubt. “Briefing in my office at midday sharp, after the post-mortem examination. That’s all from me. Over to you, Doctor.”

Doctor Lasarius completed his perfunctory examination. He removed his top hat, wiped his forehead with fingers that had touched the corpses, reached into his gown and, after some time, extracted a cigar stump. He accepted a light from one of the stretcher-bearers and said with deliberate irony:

“Thank you, Commissioner Mühlhaus, for so accurately specifying the time of the post-mortem. I was not aware until now that I was your subordinate.” His voice became serious. “I’ve ascertained that the four men have been dead for approximately eight hours. Their eyes have been gouged out and their arms and legs broken. Here and there contusions are visible on their limbs which would indicate imprints made by the sole of a shoe. That’s all I can say for now.” He turned to his men: “And now we can remove them from here.”

Doctor Lasarius fell silent and watched as the stretcher-bearers grabbed the corpses by their arms and legs and gave them a mighty swing. The bodies landed on the stretchers, leather suspensories protruding from between their spread legs, and then came the dull thump of the
remains as they hit the deck of the police barge. On Lasarius’ orders, the schoolboys standing on deck turned their heads from the macabre sight. The doctor set off towards the car, but before he had gone far he stopped in his tracks.

“That’s all I can say for now, gentlemen,” he repeated in a hoarse voice. “But I have something else to show you.”

He looked around and extracted a thick, dry branch from the bushes. He rested it on a stone and jumped on it with both legs. A brittle crack resounded.

“Everything points to the fact that this is how the murderer broke their limbs.” Lasarius flicked his cigar stump into the thorn bushes beside the Oder. The cigar caught on one of the bushes and hung there, wet with spittle, torn from lips a moment earlier by fingers sullied by the touch of a corpse.

Mock felt hair in his throat once more and squatted. Seeing his convulsions, the police officers moved away in disgust. Nobody held his sweating temples; nobody pressed his stomach to hasten its work. Today, the world was not looking after Mock.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

The large motorboat in which the six plain-clothes police officers sat had not seen a war; it came from Breslau’s river police surplus. Steering it was First Mate Martin Garbe, who studied the men from beneath the peak of his hat. When their broken conversation began to bore him, he looked out at the unfamiliar river banks overgrown with trees and lined with formidable buildings. Although he had lived in Breslau for a couple of years, he had only been working for the river police for a few weeks and the city as seen from the Oder fascinated him. Every now and then he leaned towards
the police officer nearest to him, a slim man with Semitic features, to make sure he was correctly identifying the places they passed.