Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
Heroin had
killed the one person he had truly loved.
While he was in prison for demonstrating and throwing rocks at policemen
in Zurich, little Hilda, fifteen years old, had overdosed in the ladies' rest
room of the Zurich Bahnhof; she was found facedown in a toilet bowl.
Little Hilda had carried no papers, but she
had eventually been identified as a result of the slim volume of Ivo's poems
she carried, thirty-six photocopies pages.
"A short
book," said the
They had been driving to the morgue for the
formal identification.
"How long
should a book be?" said
Ivo.
He was pale, but regular prison food had
filled out his slight body.
Curiously he
felt no hostility toward those who had imprisoned him.
The policemen and guards were strict but
fair.
From the
depths of his despair, he swore total revenge on all heroin pushers.
And so, at the age of seventeen, Ivo came to
live in the Autonomous Youth House in
He became its unofficial guardian.
Most of its inhabitants were harmless,
rootless youths in search of something other than Switzerland's ordered and
disciplined society — the “boredom and air-conditioned misery of capitalism,”
as the phrase put it.
Some of the
visitors were more dangerous, benefitting from official tolerance to push hard
drugs and traffic in more lethal wares.
Ivo preyed
upon heroin pushers.
Operating with the
cunning and desperation of one with nothing to lose, he stole their drugs and
flushed them down the toilet in bizarre homage to his dead love.
When the mood struck him, he informed to the
police — in strange, elliptical messages, never in person or by phone, always
in writing.
He had
lubricated the zipper on his grimy sleeping bag with graphite powder.
He slipped out of his bag noiselessly and
crept toward the sleeping Dutchman.
Within seconds the small packet of glassine envelopes had been removed,
and Ivo tiptoed out of the room.
In the toilet
he opened each envelope, one by one, and shook the powder into the bowl until
the water was filmed with white.
He
replaced the heroin with powdered glucose and reassembled the packet.
He put toilet paper over the powder in the
toilet bowl but, worried about noise, did not flush.
He returned to
the sleeping room.
The Dutchman
slumbered on.
Ivo returned the doctored
packet to the seamed leather jacket.
Still no reaction.
Reassured, Ivo crept out of the room again and this time risked flushing
the toilet.
The heroin vanished into the
sewers of
Ivo went into
the kitchen, made himself a pot of tea, and lit up the first roach of the
day.
He sat cross-legged on the kitchen
table and stared out of the window into the gray light of false dawn.
He hummed to himself and rocked from side to
side.
He felt good.
Hilda would be pleased.
But what about Klaus?
Beautiful Klaus, who could make money so easily from a few hours of
giving pleasure, who was desired by so many men and women?
There had been something about the man who
picked Klaus up.
It just did not feel
right.
No reason, just feelings.
Ivo had been some little distance away.
He had not seen the blond mustache and
beard.
He had heard conversation and
laughter.
Then they had walked away from
him into the darkness, the blond man's arm around Klaus.
The thunk of a car door — an expensive car by
the sound — the faint whisper of an engine, then silence.
Klaus hand to come back in a couple of hours
as he had promised.
Ivo had slept
alone.
Klaus was Ivo's friend.
If only life
was like the Lennon song "Imagine."
If only life was like that.
Ivo
sang and rocked in time to the music.
He
would do something tomorrow about Klaus, or maybe the day after that, or maybe
Klaus would just turn up.
Just imagine.
*
*
*
*
*
The lusts,
self-doubt, and sorrows of the night receded with the first sting of the icy
cold shower.
Beat von
Graffenlaub was a man of rigorous self-discipline and practiced routine.
By 0630 he was having breakfast at a small
Biedermeier table by a window overlooking the River Aare.
He wore a charcoal gray flannel suit, a crisp
white handmade shirt, and a black silk tie.
His shoes were a tribute to his valet's expertise at military spit
polish:
they did not shine, they
positively glowed.
His socks were of
light gray silk.
A solitary red
rose rested in a slim
At exactly 0655, von
Graffenlaub would insert the flower in this buttonhole, don his navy blue cashmere
overcoat, and at the stroke of 0700 would leave his house on Junkergasse to
stroll toward his offices on Marktgasse.
He could cover the short distance between home and office in less than
ten brisk minutes, but even after a lifetime of familiarity he took pleasure in
walking about the ancient city of
Each morning and evening, time and weather
permitting, he made a short detour, lengthening his walk to half an hour and
arriving at his office at exactly 0730.
This morning,
after he had left Junkergasse, he detoured into the grounds surrounding the
fifteenth-century Münster.
The terrace between
the church and the ramparts was known as the Platform.
It overlooked the river, flowing swiftly
along below,
its
waters icy and swollen from the
melting snows of winter.
Von
Graffenlaub rested his outstretched arms on the low wall that bordered the
river side of the terrace and breathed in and out deeply.
The cool morning air felt pure and clean in
his lungs.
In the distance he could see
the snowcapped mountains of the Bernese Oberland.
He looked up
the river toward the Kirchenfeldbrücke, the elegant nineteenth-century iron
bridge that linked the old medieval city with the more newly developed
residential district of Kirchenfeld.
His
gaze followed the flow of the river to the old waterworks below.
A flurry of activity caught his attention.
Two police
cars, an ambulance, and several unmarked vehicles were parked by the water's
edge.
As he watched, uniformed police
dragged what looked like a body from the river.
He could see the pale white dot of the body's face before it was covered
by a blanket.
The face filled his
vision.
It was that of his dead
son.
He turned away.
Nausea swept through him, and his skin felt
clammy.
He threw up over the parapet, and
a spasm of shivering shook his body.
*
*
*
*
*
A noose hung
from a hook in the corner of the Chief Kripo's office.
Buisard had brought it back from a police
chief's conference in the
States
It was a souvenir, he had said, an exact replica of a hangman's noose,
as used before technology — in the shape of the electric chair and gas chamber
and lethal injection — took over in most of the civilized world.
Maybe next
time he'll bring back an electric chair, thought the Bear.
Buisard insisted that the hangman's knot had
thirteen coils in it, but each time the Bear counted, he could only make it
only twelve.
He started counting again
out of the corner of his eye.
According
to Pierrepoint, the famous English hangman, it was an inefficient way to hang
someone anyhow.
More often than not, the
large American knot and the standard American five-foot drop resulted in a slow
death through strangulation.
Pierrepoint
used a variable drop and a simple slip knot located under the angle of the left
jaw by a rubber claw washer.
After the
fall, the knot would finish under the chin and throw the head back, fracturing
the spinal column, almost always between the second and third cervical
vertebrae.
Instant death, or so said the
hangman.
"Heini,"
said Buisard, "will you, for God's sake, pay attention?
It's got thirteen coils, no matter what you
say."
"You're
the chief," said the Bear.
"And I'd
like to stay that way," said Buisard.
The Bear
raised his shaggy eyebrows.
"I'm not
suspending you," said Buisard, "although you well deserve it.
But I'm taking you off the drug squad for a
month.
You can keep your desk in the
Bollwerk, but I'm assigning you to minor crimes — out of harm's way."
"Investigating
stolen bicycles and missing pets," said the Bear.
He glowered.
"Something
like that," said Buisard.
"Think of it as a cooling-off period."
"The son
of a bitch deserved to be thumped," said the Bear.
"He was drunk and throwing his weight
around."
"You may
well be right," said Buisard, "but he was part of the German foreign
minister's party and on an official diplomatic visit to this city.
He did have a diplomatic passport."
The Bear
shrugged and rose to his feet.
"One
moment," said Buisard.
"There
is an Irishman coming to
I have a letter of introduction
about him from a friend of mine in
I've been asked to look after him if he wants
to be shown around, a sort of professional courtesy."
"So now
I'm a tourist guide."
The Chief
Kripo smiled just a little meanly.
"Not at all.
Heini, you are one of
attractions."
"Up
yours," said the Bear amiably, and ambled out of the room.
The Chief went
over and started counting the thirteen coils in the hangman's noose.
He made it twelve.
He swore and started again.
*
*
*
*
*
The day was
crisp and cold, the snow melted from the streets and the lowlands around.
In the distance ice and snow held the higher
ground.
Jagged mountain peaks looked
unreal against a clear blue sky.
Fitzduane was
enchanted by
He felt exhilarated; he just knew that
somewhere in this beautiful, unspoiled, too-good-to-be-true medieval city lay
the answer to his quest, the reason for a hanging.
He walked,
more or less at random, for several hours.
Sooner or later he always seemed to reach the River Aare.
The river surrounded the old city on three
sides, forming a natural moat and leaving only one side to be defended by a
wall.
As the city had expanded, the wall
was sited farther and farther up the peninsula.
The old walls were gone, but two of the distinctive towers that marked
the landward entrance to the city remained.
It had been
the quaint custom of the Bernese — prior to the tourist trade's taking off — to
use the entrance tower as a prison.
Shortly after
he arrived, Fitzduane had booked himself into a small hotel on
Gerechtigkeitsgasse.
Just outside the
hotel entrance, an intricately carved statue, perched on top of a fluted
pillar, crowned a flowing fountain.
The
carving was painted in red and blue and gold and there bright colors.
The dominant female figure— showing a
surprising amount of leg — held a sword in one hand, scales in the other, and
was blindfolded:
the
Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen, the Fountain of Justice.
At the foot of
this dangerous-looking Amazon, and well placed to look up her skirts, were the busts
of four unhappy-looking individuals whom Fitzduane subsequently found out were
the Emperor, Sultan, Pope, and Magistrate — the main dispensers of random
justice when the fountain was erected in 1543.
At frequent
intervals around the city there were fountains, all painted in exotic colors,
each unique in itself.
In Kramgasse the
fountain was identified by a life-size bear, wearing a gold helmet with a
barred visor, standing in the pose of a Landsknecht; at his feet was a little
bear eating grapes.
Everywhere there
were bears:
carved bears, painted bears,
drawn bears, printed bears, stamped bears, wrought-iron bears, big bears, small
bears, even real bears.
Fitzduane had
never seen so many bears.