The End of the World in Breslau (22 page)

“In 1261, as Margraf writes in his work on the streets of Breslau,” Hartner’s eyes flitted from book to map, “these territories were officially added to the early town settlement on the Oder …”

The Director ran his finger over the map, tracing ellipses and irregular circles, some large and some smaller, which, with a little goodwill, could have been taken as having a common centre somewhere within Ring. Mock joined Hartner and slowly moved his finger along the blue snake of the Old Town moat.

“Is this the territory?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what was added to the town in the thirteenth century.”

“The territory within the moat, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So the territory bordered by the moat, within which the three murders were committed, is, apart from Dominsel, the oldest part of the city.”

“That is correct.”

“Do you understand now, sir?” Mock grabbed Hartner’s finger tightly and drew squiggles with it on this area of the map. “Do you understand now? I sat in the archives looking for evidence of events which might have taken place exactly on the days and months indicated by the calendar
pages found on the victims. But all these archives keep relatively new files, while the area in which the crimes were committed belongs to the oldest part of Breslau. And so this investigative path is not wrong, nor is it as fanciful as my chief and men would believe, but is simply a path …” Mock became thoughtful, searching for the right word.

“Along which you’re groping a little,” Hartner offered, moving away decisively from the map and thus reclaiming his finger. “Difficult, because the records are meagre and hard to decipher. Yielding few results and holding no prospect of success.”

“Well put.” Mock collapsed into the armchair, crossed his outstretched legs and closed his eyes. He noticed with pleasure that he felt sleepy, which meant that all the Erinyes, all the whores – named and unnamed, dead and alive – were taking pity on him, all the vermin-infested, quartered and bloodless corpses, and his entire world, were mercifully allowing him to sleep. He fell into a torpor and yet felt a strange stabbing sensation, perhaps in his diaphragm, perhaps in his heart or stomach. It was a stabbing he cultivated at times, particularly when he awoke after a bout of drinking; his body, twisted by a hangover, would then demand sleep, but his mind would order “Get up, you’ve got piles of work to do today.” Mock would then summon up some unpleasant image – his enraged chief; the hopelessness and tedium of police work; his subordinates’ stupidity – and keep it fixed until he felt a piercing pain and an anxiety that stopped him sleeping. He would then lift his head, throbbing with the hangover, hold it under a stream of cold water, rub eau-de-cologne over his pale cheeks and swollen eyelids and then, wearing a somewhat too-small bowler hat and a tie fastened as tightly as a noose, he would enter the old, cold walls of the Police Praesidium. As he sat there now in the eighteenth-century armchair, Mock felt a similar anxiety, but, unlike on those mornings after he had been drinking, he could not identify its source. No enraged Mühlhaus, no Sophie wrapped
in dirty bed-linen surrounded by cigarette ends, no waterfall of Geissen’s noble blood appeared before him. Mock knew he had to recreate the circumstances that had set off his anxiety. He opened his eyes and glanced at Hartner, who appeared to have forgotten about his guest and was pensively turning the crank of a metal pencil-sharpener secured to his desk.

“Director, sir, would you please repeat what you just said,” he croaked.

“I said,” Hartner retorted, still sharpening pencils, “that you’re groping in the dark, that you don’t have many sources to help you, that those you do have might be Difficult to decipher and interpret, and that I don’t predict any success in this investigation.”

“You’ve put it very well, Director, but please clarify what you mean when you say I ‘don’t have many sources’.”

“If you’re looking for something that happened in the past – in these places or even these buildings – then you have to find sources that hold the history of these places, meaning archival records,” Hartner explained patiently. “You said yourself that the archive materials you’ve been studying go back no further than the beginning of the nineteenth century, whereas – as we established a moment ago – the history pertaining to the crime scenes could be much older, seeing as they are situated in the oldest part of the town. That’s why I said the sources are meagre. There simply aren’t very many files dating from the thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.”

“If there are hardly any files,” Mock said irritably, “where would I find information about these places or buildings? Where would you, as a historian, look for them?”

“My dear Counsellor.” Hartner tried in vain to hide his impatience, “I am first and foremost a scholar of Semitic languages …”

“Stop bickering, Director.” Mock had a great respect for Hartner’s
modesty, a rarity among scholars who were not active lecturers and could not defend the fruits of their thoughts in the crossfire of student questioning. “As someone who has had a solid education in the Classics last century, a veritable
saeculum historicum
,† you know I consider you to be more of a polyhistor, a historian in Herodotus’ sense of the word …”

“That’s most kind.” Hartner’s impatience was waning. “I’ll try to answer your question, but you’ll have to be more precise about certain points. What do you mean by ‘information about these places’? The small quantity of files does not relieve us of the task of studying them in depth. So first we have to look at the old files. Then we have to start the factual research, look in a factual or terminological index of a textbook, for example. But what are we to look for? Are you thinking of legends connected to these places? Or the owners of these places and their inhabitants? What are you looking for?”

“Until recently I thought I was searching the files for a crime which we were to be reminded of years later, on the very same day of the month as it had been committed. By killing innocent people, the murderer wants us to reopen an old investigation and find the original criminal. But there’s nothing, not even a mention in our archival records about any crime committed in the first two places – I haven’t checked the third yet. So the hypothesis of reminding us of something after all these years falls through.”

“Yes …” Hartner interjected, dreaming of a lunch of meat loaf, red cabbage and potato dumplings, “… a crime intended to reopen an investigation into another committed years ago … That does, indeed, sound unlikely …”

Mock felt sleepiness and unidentified anxiety simultaneously. A moment later, his brain began to make connections. The anxiety was linked to a school building, to Sophie and to the words “recurrence” and
“crime”. He feverishly pondered whether he had been thinking about Sophie when walking or driving past some school. A few seconds later, an image came back to him from the day before: the announcement pillar near Elisabethgymnasium:
Spiritual father Prince Alexei von Orloff proves the imminent coming of the Antichrist. “He’s right, that spiritual father,”
Mock remembered thinking then.
“Crimes and cataclysms are recurring. I’ve been left by a woman once more and Smolorz has started drinking again.”

† Century of history.

Mock pictured himself leaving the flower shop. He had bought a copy of the
Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten
from a newspaper boy and his attention had been drawn to an unusual image on one of the announcement pages: a mandala, the wheel of change, encircled a gloomy old man with his finger raised upwards.
“Spiritual father, Prince Alexei von Orloff, proves that the end of the world is nigh. The next revolution of the Wheel of History is now taking place – crimes and cataclysms dating back centuries are recurring. We invite you to a lecture given by the sage from the Sepulchrum Mundi. Sunday, November 27th, Grünstrasse 14–16.”

Mock heard Hartner’s voice again: “ … a crime intended to reopen an investigation into another committed years ago … That does, indeed, sound unlikely …” He glanced glumly at Hartner. Now Mock knew why he had come. In a split second, the Director realized that his dream of a longed-for lunch might not be fulfilled that day.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 9TH, 1927 TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

A pencil with a golden ferrule moved quickly across the lined pages of a notebook. Hartner was jotting down Mock’s last instruction.

“Is that all?” he asked without enthusiasm, mentally relishing an exquisite meat loaf.

“Yes.” Mock took out a similar notebook, the notebook of travellers and policemen: black, bound with a rubber band, with a pencil attached by a narrow, canvas strip. “There’s one other thing I’d like to ask of you, Director. Please don’t mention my name or position to your staff. Remaining incognito is the best option in a situation where …”

“There’s no need to explain,” Hartner said quietly, in his imagination chewing on a dumpling with crunchy crackling, covered with sauce and a tangle of red cabbage.

“And please understand,” Mock said as he wrote the heading
CALENDAR MURDERER
in his notebook, “how awkward I feel handing instructions out to you.”

“My dear Counsellor, after the ‘four sailors’ case, you can go on handing out instructions to me for the rest of your life.”

“Yes.” The pencil found its way between Mock’s teeth. “And so you agree to my sitting in your study and working alongside you, be it till morning?”

“On one condition …”

“Yes?”

“That you allow me to invite you to lunch now … I will, of course, first give the appropriate instructions to my employees.”

Mock smiled, nodded, stood up laboriously and sat at the neat, nineteenth-century davenport desk at which Hartner’s secretary usually wrote down the Director’s orders each morning. Hartner placed the telephone in front of him and opened the door to the front office.

“Miss Hamann,” he addressed his secretary and indicated Mock. “The professor is an associate of mine, and a friend. Over the next few hours, perhaps days, we will be working together on a few scholarly issues. My study is his study and all his instructions are mine.”

Miss Hamann nodded and smiled at Mock. The same smile as Sophie’s, but a different hair colour. Mock dialled Meinerer’s number and,
before Hartner had closed the door, embraced Miss Hamann’s slender waist and prominent bust with one glance. With the Director’s melodious words “all his instructions” still ringing in his ears, he set his imagination to work, evoking immodest and wild scenes in which he and Miss Hamann were the key players.

“Meinerer,” he muttered when he heard his subordinate’s characteristic falsetto, “please come to the University Library on Sandstrasse. There’ll be a cardboard file with the addressee’s name on it waiting for you with Director Hartner’s secretary, Miss Hamann. You’re to take it to Hotel Königshof on Claasenstrasse. Irrespective of any tasks Mühlhaus may have given you, my order to follow Erwin still holds. My nephew should be finishing his classes in an hour. Is Reinert anywhere near you? No? Then please find him for me.”

Quickly assured by Meinerer of his compliance, Mock waited for Reinert to come to the telephone.

“Please ask Doctor Smetana to come and see me,” Hartner’s loud baritone resounded through the door. “He’s to bring the Register of Loans with him.”

“Reinert, I’m glad you’re there,” Mock looked down at the notes he had made in his slanting writing. “Don’t let Prince Alexei von Orloff out of your sight for a second. You don’t know who he is? I haven’t got time to explain to you now. You’ll find something about him on every announcement pillar in town and in every newspaper, and certainly in the edition of the
Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten
that went out the day we found Gelfrert. You’re to alternate with Kleinfeld.”

“Specht, from the cataloguing department,” Hartner’s voice bellowed, “is to bring the catalogue boxes labelled ‘Breslau’, ‘Criminology’, and ‘Silesia’. Alright, I’ll repeat that: ‘Breslau’, ‘Criminology’, ‘Silesia’. And please make an appointment for me to speak over the telephone to the Director of the Municipal Library, Theodor Stein. Yes, Doctor Theodor
Stein. In the afternoon, evening … it doesn’t matter.”

Mock dialled another number and soon managed to persuade a young man at the other end to interrupt Counsellor Domagalla’s important meeting.

“Warm greetings to you, Herbert,” he said when he heard the somewhat irritated voice of his bridge partner. “I’m conducting an important case just now. Yes, yes, I know I’m disturbing you, but the matter is very urgent. I’m going to have to look through the files of all the followers of sects your men have investigated. Apart from that I need to know everything there is to know about the Sepulchrum Mundi and its leader, Alexei von Orloff. Fine, note it down … You don’t know how to spell Sepulchrum? What did you get in Latin? Just as I thought …”

“From the main reading room” – the Director’s voice betrayed excitement – “they’re to bring me the following books without delay: Barthesius’
Antiquitates Silesiacae
and
The Criminal World of Ancient Breslau
by Hagen.”

Mock telephoned again but gave no more orders; instead, he listened to Mühlhaus’ raised voice. At one point he held the receiver away from his ear, tapping a cigarette against the davenport with his free hand. When the voice fell silent for a moment, Mock put the cigarette between his lips and began a strange dialogue in which his own laconic statements were constantly interrupted by the angry and intricately constructed phrases of his chief.