The End of the World in Breslau (3 page)

BRESLAU, THAT SAME NOVEMBER 28TH, 1927
SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Mock opened his eyes and listened for a while to the persistent calls of milkmen. The coldness of the morning penetrated his body, squeezed as it was into an armchair. He opened his mouth with difficulty and ran his parched tongue over the sandpaper of his palate. Since no position in the armchair was less than painful, Mock decided to stand up. He wrapped himself in his dressing gown and padded down the sandstone floor of the hall in his bare feet. Argos the dog expressed his usual morning delirium, not shared to any degree by his master. In the bathroom, Mock dipped his toothbrush into a box of Phönix powder and began his oral ablutions. The result was such that to the acidic-alcoholic effluvium was added an acrid aftertaste of cement. Mock furiously spat the grey paste into the basin and soaped his huge badger brush with Peri shaving cream. The razor was an object he should have used that day only under close supervision. A sharp prick, and he realized he had cut himself. The small trickle of blood was very light, much lighter than the blood which had poured from Sophie’s nose the previous night. Mock studied his reflection.

“How is it that I can look you boldly in the eye?” He wiped his face dry and patted it with Welzel eau-de-cologne. “Because nothing happened yesterday. Besides, I remember nothing.”

Their servant, Marta Goczoll, was busy in the kitchen while her husband, the butler Adalbert, stood straight as an arrow, holding more than a dozen ties in one hand and a hanger with a suit and white shirt in the other. Mock dressed hurriedly and tied a deep-red tie around his neck. Marta tucked its fat knot under the wings of his collar. Mock just managed to squeeze his swollen feet into his shoes – freshly polished by Adalbert – threw his pale, cashmere coat over his shoulders, donned his hat and left the apartment. On the landing, a large Pomeranian began to fawn on him. Mock stroked the dog. Its owner, the lawyer Patschkowsky,
looked with contempt at his neighbour from whom, as every day, emanated a smell of alcohol and eau-de-cologne.

“There was a terrible noise coming from your apartment last night. My wife couldn’t get to sleep until morning,” Patschkowsky drawled.

“I was training the dog,” Mock mumbled.

“Your wife, more likely,” Patschkowsky’s pince-nez glinted in the yellow light of the hallway lamp. “You think you’re allowed to do anything, don’t you? That dog of yours wailed with a human voice.”

“Some animals speak with a human voice a month before Christmas Eve.” Mock felt the urge to throw his neighbour down the stairs.

“Is that so?” Patschkowsky raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“I’m talking to one of them even now.”

The lawyer stood as if turned to stone, staring for a moment into Mock’s bloodshot eyes. Then he walked slowly downstairs, plucking up the courage to offer one last witty “Is that so?”

Mock turned back to his apartment. Finding that the door to the bedroom was locked from the inside, he reeled into the kitchen. Adalbert and Marta were sitting anxiously at the table.

“You haven’t eaten any breakfast, sir. I’ve made scrambled eggs with chanterelle mushrooms.” Marta revealed the gaps in her teeth.

“Enjoy it yourselves,” Mock smiled effusively. “I wanted to wish you a good day. May it be as good as last night. You slept well, did you?”

“Yes, sir.” It seemed to Adalbert that he could still hear Sophie’s dreadful screams and the dull scratching of the dog’s paws against the closed bedroom door.

Mock left the apartment, squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME NOVEMBER 28TH, 1927
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Criminal Sergeant Kurt Smolorz was one of the finest employees of the Breslau Police Praesidium. His brutality was cursed by villains and his laconic reports praised by his bosses. One of his superiors valued yet another of his virtues above all others – his perspicacity. Smolorz demonstrated this virtue very clearly that morning – twice. First, when he walked into Mock’s office with its dark wood panelling and saw the red impression of Mock’s signet ring on its owner’s forehead, a clear sign that the Counsellor had been resting his tired brow on it. He did not report right away the terrible crime committed in the Griffins tenement on Ring where, by order of Criminal Director Heinrich Mühlhaus, he and his boss were to present themselves without delay. He knew that Mock was in no condition to understand anything just then.

“I’ll wait for you in the car, Counsellor sir,” Smolorz said, and left to bring the new black Adler up to the gate of the Praesidium. This was not the only reason the Sergeant had taken his leave so swiftly. Mock discovered another when, cursing, he rolled into the passenger seat and saw Smolorz’s red-haired hand holding out a bottle of milk. Mock opened it and greedily took a few gulps. He was now ready to hear the story. Smolorz turned on the ignition.

“The Griffins tenement, eight o’clock this morning,” Smolorz spoke just as he wrote his reports. “Shoemaker Rohmig couldn’t stand the smell in his workshop and knocked down a wall. Behind it was a corpse.”

It was not far from the Police Praesidium at Schuhbrücke to Ring. Mock drank the last drops of milk as Smolorz parked the Adler outside the Lottery Bookmakers on Nicolaistrasse. In the inner courtyard of the Griffins tenement, outside the shoemaker’s workshop, stood a uniformed policeman who saluted as they approached. Next to him was a whiskered consumptive who bore the weight of his heavy leather apron with heroic
effort, and a stout woman who could not accept the fact that there was no bench in the dirty yard. Every few seconds, magnesium lit up the wretched room filled with the odour of old shoes, rotten with sweat, and bone glue. When Mock and Smolorz walked in they detected another smell, one well known to them and unique in its nature. A counter, sticky with glue, divided the workshop in two. Two walls were lined with cellar shelves on which stood rows of shoes. There was a small window and a door in the third, and from the fourth wafted that familiar stench. An opening of roughly one metre by one metre had been knocked through this wall. The police photographer, Ehlers, was kneeling in front of it, poking his lens into the dark recess. Mock held his nose and peered in. From the darkness of the small niche, his torch picked out a hairless skull covered with decomposing skin. The hands and feet had been tied to hooks on the far side of the recess. The Counsellor looked at the corpse’s face once again and discerned a fat maggot trying to worm its way into the film that covered one eye. He quickly stepped out of the workshop, removed his coat, threw it to the uniformed policeman and, legs astride, leaned his hands on the outside wall. Smolorz, hearing the sounds coming from his boss, reproached himself for failing to anticipate the combined effects of a hangover, a bottle of milk and a disintegrating corpse. From his trouser pocket, Mock pulled out a handkerchief on which Sophie had embroidered his initials and wiped his mouth. He turned his face to the sky and greedily swallowed drops of falling rain.

“Take the pick-axe,” he told the uniformed policeman, “and bring the wall down so we can get the body out. Smolorz, tie a handkerchief around your mouth and nose and search the recess and the dead man’s pockets, and you, Ehlers, do what you can to help Smolorz.”

Mock pulled on his coat, adjusted his hat and cast his eye around the yard.

“And who are you?” he said, aiming a brilliant smile at the stout lady who was shifting from one leg to the other.

“Ernst Rohmig, master shoemaker,” the consumptive eagerly introduced himself without being asked. He hunched his shoulders to adjust his leather armour.

“The tenement administrator,” the lady huffed. Cheap dye flaked from her greasy hair which was wrapped around curlers. “Get on with it, sir. Do you think I can stand around for ever worrying about the extra money I’m going to have to pay someone to clean up the wall you’ve fouled? Now, please introduce yourself! I am Mathilde Kühn, the owner’s plenipotentiary, and you are?”

“Eberhard Mock, ladies’ prize-fighter,” muttered the Criminal Counsellor, turning abruptly and squeezing himself once more into the little room. “Ehlers, tidy up here and gather anything that might be of importance. Smolorz, question these people.”

Mock trotted off to the tenement lobby, passing Smolorz who was huddled under an umbrella with those he was questioning, trying to avoid venom on the one hand and bacilli of tuberculosis on the other. At the entrance door Mock greeted Doctor Lasarius from the police mortuary, followed slowly by two men carrying a stretcher.

Mock stood outside the building and distractedly watched the traffic in the street, already busy at this hour. A couple were so engrossed in each other they did not notice him. The young man accidentally jostled the Counsellor and immediately apologized, politely removing his hat. The girl glanced at Mock and instantly turned away her face, which was ashen with tiredness. The night’s rocking in the droschka had obviously disagreed with Rosemarie.

Mock looked about and quickly strode off towards Apelt florists. In the made-up eyes of the plump flower girl, he detected a flicker of interest. He ordered a basket of fifty tea roses and asked for it to be delivered to “Sophie Mock, Rehdigerplatz 2”. On a cream-coloured card, which he requested be attached to the bouquet, he wrote in his beautiful script:
“Never again, Eberhard”, and then he paid and left the flower girl alone with her mounting curiosity.

A newspaper boy got under his feet. Mock dismissed him, pressing a few pfennigs into his hand and then, wielding a newspaper under his arm, cut diagonally across the western side of Ring. A moment later he was sitting in the Adler, smoking his first cigarette of the day and waiting for Smolorz and Ehlers. He passed the time reading the
Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten
. On one of the announcement pages, his eye was caught by an unusual illustration. A mandala, the wheel of change, was drawn around a gloomy old man with his finger pointing 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 held by the sage from the Sepulchrum Mundi. Sunday, November 27th, Grünstrasse 14–16.” Mock lowered the window and flicked his cigarette end straight at the approaching Smolorz. The latter shook the ash from his coat and climbed into the car, passing over Mock’s apologies in silence. Into the back clambered Ehlers, weighed down by his tripod, and Criminal Assistant Gustav Meinerer, the fingerprint expert.

“Rohmig has been renting his workshop for a month now: from 24th October, to be exact.” Smolorz opened his police notebook. “From July to the end of October, according to the old bag, the workshop was empty. Anyone could have broken in. The caretaker is often drunk and asleep instead of keeping watch. He’s disappeared somewhere now. Probably recovering from a hangover. The shoemaker complained about the stink from the beginning. His brother-in-law, a mason, had told him about a joke masons play if they don’t get paid properly. They set an egg into the wall. And it stinks. Rohmig thought there was an egg behind his wall, and he decided to get rid of it this morning. He knocked down the wall with a pick-axe. And that’s it.”

“What did you find?” asked Mock.

“This.” From a brown envelope, Smolorz extracted a wallet of crocodile leather and handed it to Mock.

Mock examined the wallet. It contained an identity card in the name of Emil Gelfrert – born February 17th, 1876, musician, bachelor, living at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Strasse 21 – a notebook with addresses and telephone numbers, a receipt from a laundry in the same name, a card for the Municipal Library, a few tram tickets and a postcard from Riesengebirge with the words: “To my sweet, best wishes from the mountains, Anna, Hirschberg, July 3rd, 1925.”

“Is that all?” Mock asked, as the men from the mortuary carried “sweet” to the hearse parked nearby.

“No, there was this too. Someone had pinned it to his waistcoat.” With his tweezers, Smolorz held up a page from a universal calendar dated September 12th, 1927. No writing, simply an ordinary page from a calendar, which some unfortunate people – those who monitor the passing time, that is – tear off each day. The page was pierced by a small safety pin.

“No fingerprints,” Meinerer added. “Doctor Lasarius estimates the date of the murder as being in August or September.”

“Smolorz, we’re going to Friedrich-Wilhelm-Strasse, to the musician’s apartment.” With some relief, Mock became aware of pangs of hunger. His body was ready for a beer and a roll with paprika dripping. “Maybe we shall meet the faithful Anna there, waiting patiently with her needlework for her artist’s return from the Philharmonia?”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME NOVEMBER 28TH, 1927
TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Elisabeth Pflüger undressed slowly, arranging her clothes neatly on a chair. She unfastened her stockings from her suspenders. Sophie Mock
admired her narrow, white hands as they slowly rolled down the smooth stockings. Elisabeth removed the suspender belt, then slipped off her silk knickers. She was completely naked. In the slender fingers of her left hand she held a small silver case; in her right dangled an engraved spoon with a long handle. She dipped the spoon into the case and held it close to Sophie’s face.

“It’s very good cocoa,” she whispered. Sophie inhaled through her nostrils, shuddered and ran her fingers over her velvety, slightly reddened nose.