The End of the World in Breslau (33 page)

“Do you, Counsellor sir, imagine that I’m going to be persuaded to betray my friend by such an interesting proposal?” Briesskorn was twirling a second cigarette in his long fingers. “I know Piechotta hates me, and he would sooner break with you than stop tormenting me …”

“You insult me.” Mock finished his coffee and, getting up from the table, carefully felt for the bottle in his coat pocket. “You doubt my word … You’re not stupid – you’ve understood my proposal correctly. But you think I want to deceive you, that I’m a petty swindler, a shady
cheat, right? Young man, do you know the meaning of friendship between men?”

“Erwin is at Inge Gänserich’s,” said Briesskorn and crushed the unlit cigarette in his fingers. The pale Georgia tobacco crumbled onto the marble surface of the table.

“Thank you, sir.” Mock offered his hand. The schoolboy grabbed it and held on to it tightly.

“A man’s word and friendship between men are without doubt the surest things in the world,” said Briesskorn. “I believe you, Counsellor sir … The fact that I have revealed Erwin’s whereabouts to you doesn’t mean our friendship will die …”

“The surest thing in the world,” Mock turned his hat in his fingers, “is death. Write that to your Lotte.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 21ST, 1927 HALF PAST FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON

Mock did not need to ask anyone who Inge Gänserich was, nor where she lived. He knew the annexe at Gartenstrasse 35, behind Hartmann’s haberdashery, perfectly well. This, he remembered from his files, was where the famous painter who had arrived in the Silesian capital ten years earlier now lived. At first she had tried her luck as a model. She was notorious for the fact that, if she agreed to pose for an artist, it explicitly meant she had consented to share a bed with him. Her consent was not granted very often, however, and to a large extent depended on what she would be paid. It was therefore no surprise that beautiful, mysterious and taciturn Inge became a model and muse to only the wealthiest of painters. To one of these, a certain Arno Gänserich, a painter of surrealist underwater seascapes, Inge had given her consent twice: once shortly after he had been introduced to her, and then at the altar. After a grand wedding, the
young couple had lived at Gartenstrasse 35 and, to the horror and fury of their quiet and industrious neighbours, had continued with their wedding celebrations most nights for over a year. This was where Mock had seen Inge for the first time when, in 1920, he had been called in by his boss at the time, the Chief of Police of the fifth district, to quell a wild, drunken orgy organized by the newly married couple. The painterly passion of the guests at the party had made Mock’s life a misery. He had roundly cursed the artistic talents of the men and women who, intoxicated with morphine, had tipped out pots of paint and mixed it together with their naked bodies, using the floor as a palette. Mock had grabbed Inge and covered her with a blanket, and then began the Difficult struggle of leading her out of the apartment. Even today, as he passed Hartmann’s haberdashery, he could feel her teeth in his hand, still see her pour over his suit of expensive, Polish Bielsko wool a pot of blue oil paint otherwise used by her husband in his attempts to depict the melancholy of an underwater-scape. Mock also remembered, as if from a distance and in slow motion, how he had raised his fist above Inge’s shapely head and struck her a blow.

He cast aside these memories of violence against the arrested woman, and turned his thoughts to what fate had in store for Inge some time later. He remembered another summons, an autumn night and the armchair in which Arno Gänserich had ended his own life, just after he had discovered his wife with her slender thighs wrapped around the shaved head of a strongman from Busch Circus.

Mock paused on the landing and opened the window. Despite the cold, he felt sweat trickle down the inside of his surgical corset. Children were skidding around in the small yard by the light of a gas lamp. Their joyful cries startled a flock of crows who were besieging the lids of rubbish bins, and mingled with two more rasping sounds. The first of these came from a knife-grinder who had set up his pedal-powered machine in the yard, and was sharpening knives destined to sink into the
soft bellies of Christmas Eve carp. The second rasping came from the water pump, where a little girl in a darned coat was swinging off its handle to fill her bucket, the heels of her over-large shoes clopping on the packed snow in time with the screech of the rusty mechanism. From the old, roofless shack at the very end of the yard there rose a thin trickle of smoke. Two children dressed as American Indians had dug four stakes into the dirt floor and hung a patched blanket over them to construct a wigwam, in the centre of which burned a campfire. A moment later Mock heard the wild cries of redskins coming from the wigwam.

He made his way upstairs, trying to remember more about Inge: opening nights of exhibitions, during which her perfect body would be wrapped in nothing but a sheet of velvet cloth; her lovers, representatives of every profession; her eroticized paintings, which disturbed the sleep of tranquil Breslauers, and her thick file in the archives of the Vice Department. All this Mock now meticulously gathered from the recesses of his mind to be used as a weapon against his crafty opponent. Someone was standing on the landing outside Inge’s door. With one hand the Counsellor reached for his gun, with the other flicked on his cigarette lighter. The tiny flame illuminated the corridor. Mock put away his old Walther and offered his free hand to the man.

“Good, Meinerer,” he panted. “You’re where you should be.”

Meinerer held out his hand without a word. In the silence of the winter afternoon, in the semi-darkness of the stairway, they could hear the moans of a woman that not even the cries of the Indians outside could drown out. The sounds were coming from beyond Inge Gänserich’s door, and to them was added the dreadful squeaking of bed springs.

“Is that my nephew?” asked Mock. He did not wait for a reply and looked at Meinerer with concern. “You’re tired. Take tomorrow off. Come and see me the day after tomorrow at eight, for a briefing … You’ve carried out your assignment well. We’re closing Erwin Mock’s case. As
of now, you’ll be on the ‘calendar murderer’ case with us.”

Meinerer turned without a word and went down the stairs. Mock smiled at the thought of his nephew and listened again. Minutes passed; the light in the stairwell went on and off as shabbily dressed inhabitants of the tenement passed by. One of them, an old railwayman, asked Mock what was he doing there, but a police identification card soon satisfied his curiosity. A woman’s voice called her children in for supper, the shouting in the yard died down, Inge’s moans died down, and the pump, the knife-grinding machine and the bed on which Erwin Mock had been proving his manhood no longer squeaked.

Mock pressed the doorbell and waited. A long time. A very long time. Eventually the door opened a little and Mock beheld a face that came to him in his dreams sometimes as Erinyes, as pangs of conscience. Inge knew who her latest lover’s uncle was, and so Mock’s visit could not have been a mistake. She opened the door wide and turned back into what he remembered was the only room in the apartment, leaving the Counsellor alone in the dark hall. Mock looked around and, to his surprise, did not see any easels. He breathed in but did not detect the smell of paint. His surprise was even greater when he found nothing amongst the mess to point to the profession of the mistress of the house. Erwin sat on the squeaky bed in silence, wrapped in a sheet that was gradually growing damp with his sweat.

“How nice it is here, Mrs Gänserich,” said Mock, sitting down at a table strewn with cigarette ends on which he barely found room for his elbows. “Could you leave us alone for a minute, please?”

“No,” Erwin said firmly. “She’s to stay.”

“Fine.” Mock removed his coat and hat. For lack of anywhere to put them, he slung the coat over his shoulders and put the hat on his knee. “Then I’ll be brief. I have a favour to ask of you. Don’t give up school. You’re a first-class pupil. You’ve got your final exams in a few months. Get
them over with and then study German, philosophy or anything else your father doesn’t agree to …”

“But you don’t agree to it either, Uncle. At dinner three or four weeks ago you said …”

“I said what I said,” Mock grew annoyed. “And I regret it. But it wasn’t what I really thought at all. I wanted to tell you that when I went to fetch you from the casino, but you were too drunk.”

“The words ‘I’m sorry’ come hard to you,” said Inge. Mock gazed at her for a moment and struggled with fury, admiration and a desire to humiliate the artist. In the end, admiration won out. Inge was simply too beautiful with her dark hair loose. The mature male smelled warm bed-linen, a hot body, and sensed total satisfaction. He smiled at her and turned once more to Erwin.

“Finish school and pass your exams. If you don’t want to live with your father, come and live with me. Sophie is very fond of you.” He walked over to his nephew and patted him on the neck. “I’m sorry.” He stood the bottle of schnapps on the table. “Let’s all drink and make up.”

Erwin turned to the window to hide his emotion. Inge put a handkerchief to her mouth and began to cough; and in her eyes, fixed on Mock, tears appeared. He stared back at her, but he was not thinking about her. He was thinking about what he had said: “Sophie is very fond of you”; about a reunion with his wife: they are together again, Erwin is staying with them, sleeping in Mock’s study, Erwin studies for his exams, Sophie goes to see him in her husband’s study …

“You have to apologize to her too, Uncle,” Erwin said.

Silence. Then a terrifying howl resounded in the yard. Boots thudded on packed snow. Somebody had tripped or slipped on the ice and fallen heavily. Mock rushed to the window and strained his eyes. He saw nothing in the dim gaslight apart from a crowd gathered around the shack. He made for the door. The floorboards in the hallway boomed
under his feet. The wooden stairs boomed. He ran out into the yard and raced across the ice, plunging into the crowd and pushing his way through. People allowed them to pass in stony silence. Mock shoved aside the last man barring his way into the shack. The latter turned furiously towards him. Mock recognized him as the old railwayman whom he had frightened with his identification. On the dirt floor of the shack lay the tattered blanket that had been used as a wigwam. From under it, in a pair of torn tights, protruded legs that were as thin as a stick. Fresh bloodstains covered the tights and a pair of shoes that were clearly too large. The rest of the body was concealed by the blanket, and next to it lay a bucket and some scattered chocolates.

Mock leaned against the wall of the shack and opened his mouth to catch snowflakes. The old railwayman came up to him and spat in his face.

“Where were you,” he asked, “when he was murdering the child?”

Twenty uniformed policemen in shakoes and belted greatcoats burst into the yard, led by a senior officer with a sword at his side. The policemen surrounded the people and the shack. The crowd stood in silence looking at the whiskered faces of these guardians of law and order, at their holsters and tall caps. Mock was still leaning against the wall, feeling the damp flakes of snow tickle him at the top of his surgical corset. He did not approach the policemen, did not show his identification. He did not want to be one of them; he wanted to be a railwayman, a tailor, a travelling salesman.

Meinerer entered the yard with several armed police and a man lugging a camera tripod. He crossed the yard diagonally towards a corner from which emanated the unmistakeable smell of a cesspit. There, small toilet windows that were painted over in white stretched up the entire height of the building. The entrance to the lowest toilet was up a few steps straight from the yard.

“I locked him in there,” Meinerer pointed his finger at the door unnecessarily.

The policemen accompanying Meinerer marched off in the direction he was pointing, while the remainder unfastened their holsters and eyed the crowd with hostility; it had begun to stir threateningly.

“Kill the son of a whore! People, kill that son of a whore!” roared the railwayman, and he threw himself at the nearest policeman. The latter drew his gun and fired into the air. The crowd obediently stopped dead. Mock felt a shudder run through his entire body and closed his eyes. All the corpses he had seen appeared before him: Counsellor Geissen offered him a cigar; Gelfrert blew into his French horn; Honnefelder shouted “Sieg heil”; Rosemarie Bombosch revealed her thin thighs to him with an alluring smile. And here, in this gloomy shack, he was visited by his father, who set out his tools and impaled a shoe on his shoemaker’s last. Then the old blanket that had been a wigwam moved and the little girl crawled out from beneath it to join the other phantoms. A hand-knitted scarf was wound tightly around her neck and in her side there was a well-sharpened knife.

Mock covered the girl’s remains again and reached for his gun. He no longer wanted to be a craftsman or a travelling salesman. Nor did he want to be a guardian of the law. He wanted to be an executioner.

He pulled his police identification card from his pocket, squeezed through the crowd and ran towards the toilet. Two policemen were dragging out a man who was handcuffed to the pedal-powered knife-grinding machine. The man was numb with cold and his blue lips were moving as if in prayer. His clothes – a workman’s apron and overalls – were covered in blood. The policemen kicked him to the ground. The knife-grinding machine struck him on the temple.