Phantoms of Breslau (8 page)

“Let’s move out. I’m plagued by nightmares here. Right from the start, ever since we inherited this apartment after Uncle Eduard’s death, I’ve been plagued by phantoms in my dreams, right from the very first night in this foul butcher’s shop … That’s why I drink, do you understand? When I’m dead drunk, I don’t dream …”

“Every drunkard has some sort of excuse …”

“This isn’t some twisted explanation. I didn’t sleep at home last night and I didn’t have any bad dreams, not one. And now, I only just got here, I nodded off for a moment and had another bad dream …

“Chamomile and hot milk. That does the trick,” his father muttered. He began to breathe more easily and returned to his favourite pastime other than chess, that of amicably teasing Rot.

“I’ll buy a dog,” said Mock quietly. “We’ll move to the centre and you’ll be able to take the dog for a walk in the park.”

“And what else!” The old man caught the dog by its front paws and listened with pleasure to his growl. “He’d have diarrhoea like Rot. He’d be bound to soil the house … Anyway, stop talking nonsense. Get yourself to work. Be on time. Somebody’s always having to come to get you, always having to remind you it’s time for work … Look, here they are again.”

Mock turned to see Smolorz climbing out of a droschka. He did not expect to hear good news, and his intuition did not fail him.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1919
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

No noise from the street reached the mortuary on Auenstrasse; the rays of the strong September sun did not penetrate; the smoke and smell of the bonfires burning on the nearby banks of the Oder near Passbrücke did not float in on the air. In Doctor Lasarius’ kingdom reigned a silence that was broken only by the grating of trolleys bringing in more bodies. There was an odour hanging in the air like that of overboiled carrots, but nobody was cooking vegetables here. All that could bring a kitchen to mind was the sharpening of knives.

And so it was now. Doctor Lasarius’ assistant sharpened a knife, approached the corpse lying on the stone table and made an incision from the collar bone down to the pubic hair. The grey skin fell aside to reveal a layer of orange fat. Mühlhaus snorted violently; Smolorz rushed out of the mortuary, and when outside the building opened his mouth wide to take in as much air as he could. Mock stood on the viewing platform intended for medical students and fixed his eyes on the open body, absorbing the information the pathologist was passing on to his assistant.

“Male, aged about sixty-five.” Mock saw the assistant note the information beneath the name “Hermann Ollenborg”. “Height one hundred and sixty centimetres, weight seventy kilograms. Water on the lungs.”
With a quiet crunch of the knife, Lasarius cut away the bloated, hard lobes of the lungs and made incisions with a pair of small scissors. “There, you see?” – he showed Mock the pulp and water that ran from the bronchi – “That’s typical of death by drowning.”

Lasarius’ assistant lifted the dead man’s skull a little, inserted the tip of his knife behind one ear and made another incision. He then got hold of the scored skin of the occiput and a whitish membrane and drew both layers across eyes which were no longer there. They had been gouged out.

“Write this down,” Lasarius said, turning to him. Blood was slowly filling the cavity in the body. “Internal bleeding into the right lung cavity. Perforations on the lungs made by a sharp instrument …”

The legs and arms of the corpse began to jerk. Lasarius’ assistant was sawing into the skull, causing the body to move. Mock swallowed and went outside. Mühlhaus and Smolorz were standing bare-headed in the morning sunshine, staring at the brick buildings of the university’s Department of Medicine and at the yellowing leaves on the old plane tree. Mock removed his bowler hat, loosened his buttoned collar and approached them.

“An angler found the body under the Scheitniger sluice,” Mühlhaus said. He extracted a pipe from the pocket of his frock coat, an anachronistic garment that was the object of much teasing in the entire Police Praesidium.

“Was a note about me, or to me, found on him?” asked Mock.

“‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” Mühlhaus extended his hand, holding in a pair of tweezers an ordinary sheet of paper torn from a squared exercise book. He pressed his pince-nez to his nose, brought the note closer to his eyes and read: “‘Mock, admit your mistake, admit you have come to believe. If you do not want to see more gouged eyes, admit your mistake’.” He handed the page to Mock. “Did you know this man, Mock?”

“Yes, he was a police informer, a man by the name of Ollenborg.” Mock slipped on a glove and scrutinized the scrap of paper. The writing was crooked and uneven, as if traced by somebody who was illiterate. “He was well acquainted with the people and the goings on in the port. I questioned him yesterday in connection with the Four Sailors case.”

“The writing is different,” Smolorz said. “Different to yesterday’s.”

“You’re right,” Mock looked at Smolorz with approval. “The piece of paper found on the four sailors was written in a neat hand by someone who went to school. The one on Ollenborg was written unevenly, messily and …”

“Which could mean they were written by the victims themselves. One of the ‘sailors’ went to secondary school … Explain something to me, Mock” – Mühlhaus filled all his respiratory passages with tobacco so as to kill off the odour of the mortuary – “How is it you’re here? I was informed by Duty Officer Pragst and I forbade him to tell anyone else about it. Only the angler, Pragst and myself know of the murder. Most strange.” He pondered for a few moments. “Yesterday the bodies were found several hours after the murder. The same thing today. Perhaps those boys yesterday and now the angler were somehow directed by the murderer … We ought to question them more closely …”

“Smolorz, show the Commissioner” – Mock made way for a hefty orderly who was pushing through another body on a squeaking trolley – “what I received today …”

“A letter was found in the Police Praesidium letterbox,” Smolorz stuttered. “Somebody dropped it in last night. Addressed to Criminal Assistant Mock. This was in the envelope.” He held a page from a maths exercise book under Mühlhaus’ nose.

“Don’t bother to read it to me,” Mühlhaus said, furiously sucking air into his pipe, which was going out. “I know what it says.”

“The same words are on the piece of paper in the envelope as were
found on Ollenborg’s remains,” Mock said. “And there’s a short footnote: ‘Location of body – Scheitniger sluice’. He’s telling us where he’s leaving the corpses.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1919
TEN TO NINE IN THE MORNING

The hot September sun broke into the Murder Commission’s briefing room at the Police Praesidium. The clatter of horses’ hooves, the grating of trams and the parping of automobiles rose up from the traffic on Schuhbrücke into the cloudless sky. Schoolchildren drifted along the narrow pavements, each with a briefcase under his arm or a belt holding a pile of exercise books slung over his shoulder. They were hurrying towards Matthiasgymnasium to be on time for their second lesson. Some of them dawdled, standing beneath the statue of St John Nepomuk to throw stones at the bursting husks of chestnuts. A coachman shouted in annoyance at some supplicants who were leaving the High Court and swarming into the road. An elderly man in a bowler hat approached the schoolboys and reprimanded them fiercely. “The schoolmaster, no doubt,” thought Mühlhaus. He closed the window and regretfully returned from the land of school memories. He looked at the gloomy, tired and irritated faces of his employees and felt a wave of despondency. He did not want to talk to these thick, hungover mugs; he did not know how to begin.

“Commissioner, sir.” Mock saved him the trouble of opening the discussion. “You can relieve all these men from the Four Sailors case, sir. They’re not needed …”

“I,” Mühlhaus said slowly, “am the one to decide who is going to work with me on this case.”

“Yes, Commissioner, sir.”

“And, just as a matter of interest” – the Commissioner approached the
window once more, but this time did not open it – “why do you say ‘all these men’ are not needed? And what does ‘all’ mean? All except you? Is that what you had in mind, Mock?”

“Yes, that’s what I had in mind.”

“Explain yourself!”

“The murderer, as we have already established, wants me to admit to some mistake. So he murders four lads with pouches over their balls. It’s supposed to be a spectacular murder, one that the whole town will be talking about, and is to prevent me from ever sleeping peacefully again. The image of the murdered boys with gouged eyes is to forever work its way into my head.”

“We already know that, Mock,” said Reinert, sounding bored.

“Shut up, my friend. It’s not your name that swine’s putting in his notes.”

“Reinert, don’t interrupt Criminal Assistant Mock,” Mühlhaus snarled. “Let him continue.”

“Smolorz has observed quite rightly” – Mock gazed in concentration at Reinert’s face as waves of anger passed over it – “that the murderer is going to carry on killing unless I admit to my mistake. And, unfortunately, he’s proved himself a good prophet. Gentlemen, the victims have nothing in common with each other …”

“Oh, but they do,” Kleinfeld spoke for the first time. “They’re somehow connected with water. The first four were sailors, or pseudo-sailors. They were, as Mr Mock has suggested, debauched regulars at brothels. It’s not for no reason that they were wearing sailors’ hats and leather pouches on their balls. The next victim is an old sailor and a police collaborator. All sailors, some inauthentic, one authentic.”

“I do not know, Mock,” Mühlhaus said, ignoring Kleinfeld’s statement, “how you intend to justify your peculiar suggestion that everyone except yourself should leave the investigative team. Besides, I’m not
interested in your justification. I’m not going to dismiss anyone or dispatch them to other cases. Gentlemen, there are now eight of us.” He looked around at his men and counted them out loud. “Holst, Pragst, Rohs, Reinert, Kleinfeld, Smolorz and Mock. Eight, and that’s how it’s going to stay. And now, down to business …” He went to the revolving board and below the words “doubting Thomas = Mock, Christ = murderer, murdered sailors = warning for Mock” written by Mock the previous day, he added: “In which brothel did the murderer meet the four sailors?” “Smolorz is going to look into that. As an employee of the Vice Commission he knows every brothel in the city. You’ll be assisted by my trusted men, Holst, Pragst and Rohs.” Below this the Commissioner wrote: “Ollenborg’s last moments”. “Kleinfeld and Reinert will take care of this. I want to see you all here, in this room, on Friday at nine in the morning. That’s all for today.”

“What about me?” Mock asked. “What I am to do?”

“Let’s go, Mock,” Mühlhaus said. “I’m going to introduce you to somebody.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1919
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

Doctor Kaznicz was Professor Hoenigswald’s assistant. He specialized in experimental psychology and described himself as a disciple of Freud and Wernicke. He held lectures and classes in psychoanalysis at the University of Breslau which took the form of experimentation on students. From these experiments he drew generalized conclusions which led the more malicious academics to state that “the psychology practised by Doctor Kaznicz is no more than a study of students”. His probing questions, which frequently touched on personal behaviour, initially annoyed Mock a great deal. Later, realizing he could not allow there to be
any more victims, he lowered his guard and told all he knew about the people he had met or been in contact with in as much as this contact may have inspired in somebody a desire for revenge. He did not mention Wirth, Zupitza or the nurse in Königsberg’s Hospital of Divine Mercy. Kaznicz’s assistant noted everything down carefully in a thick copybook and looked imploringly at his master for at least one nod of approval. The master, however, barely acknowledged his helper and merely nodded when Mock offered him ever bolder confessions from his childhood and youth. He would then smile encouragingly and repeat the same thing each time: “I understand.”

Mock heard these words clearly even as he lay in his bedroom alcove kissing a bottle of cognac. He cradled it in his arms, bestowing it with a tenderness no woman had yet received from him apart from those in his imagination and dreams – apart from the nurse in Königsberg, who may not even have existed. Behind the curtain, Mock’s father settled himself to sleep on his rickety bed, while in the alcove his son caressed his mistress Booze. “I understand,” Mock heard, and recalled the more interesting fragments of the psychological interview conducted over eight hours by Doctor Kaznicz. He pictured the psychologist’s wise eyes, and his faint smile through the thicket of his black beard when Mock recounted how he had tormented fat Erich Huhmann in the yard of their Waldenburg primary school. Twelve-year-old Mock, along with some other children, had poked his finger into Huhmann’s stomach and chest. The latter had cowered, struggled, squirmed; brick-red patches spread across the skin of his cheeks, blood ran from his nose and stained his buttoned collar, neatly ironed by his mother. Erich Huhmann fell to his knees among the bushes surrounding the yard; Erich Huhmann begged for mercy; Erich Huhmann begged heaven for the fiery sword of vengeance; Erich Huhmann dug a long needle into the bodies of the murdered sailors.

Mock acknowledged that this thought – that fat Erich Huhmann, taking revenge on him for past humiliations, could transport the bodies of the murdered men and break their bones – was absurd. “People change,” he thought, “grow up, grow strong, cultivate past hatreds.” Paying no attention to his father’s grumblings that he could not get to sleep because of his son’s creaking bed, Mock reached for his jacket which was hanging over the chair and pulled out a notebook. He took a large swig from his bottle and wrote down Huhmann’s name.

“I understand,” Mock heard Doctor Kaznicz say again and recalled another confidence he had shared that day. Schoolboy Eberhard Mock washed out a flask and test tube, then sat at a stone table in the chemistry laboratory. He had got the highest mark for proving that the salts of certain heavy metals do not dissolve in water to produce precipitation. Envious looks from the other boys. His body found no support, his arms flapped at his sides, his shoes slid forward along the floor, his hand grabbed the tray that held the chemicals, glass cracked, a pungent liquid spilled, his head hit the edge of the chair that Karl Giencke had pulled out from under him as a joke. Then Mock sees himself striking blindly with the tray; its pointed edge digging into Giencke’s head; a trickle of blood appearing on the spiteful schoolboy’s neck. Giencke losing consciousness; Giencke in hospital; Giencke in a wheelchair; Giencke walking again – “That Giencke has a funny way of walking!”