Death in Breslau (29 page)

Anwaldt received the sword ceremoniously. He stood astride and bowed his head as if he were going to be anointed. From his lips emerged a thin, derisive giggle.

“Dear Father, your pathos makes me laugh. Did the von der Maltens always talk like that? I speak far more simply: I’m called Herbert Anwaldt, I’ve got nothing to do with you and I don’t give a damn about this pantheon of yours, which you’re going to end. I’m going to start my own. I’m going to give it a beginning, I, the bastard of a Polish chambermaid and an unknown father. So what? Nobody will know about it in seven centuries, and corrupt chroniclers will write up a polished life history. But I have to live, start my own family. And my life means the extinction of the von der Malten family. My life will blossom on your ruin. Do you like the metaphor?”

He raised the sword and struck. The skin on the Baron’s head split, revealing the bare bone of the skull. Blood stuck to the neatly combed hair. Von der Malten threw himself on the stairs with the cry: “Police!”

“I am the police,” Anwaldt climbed the stairs in his father’s tracks. The old man tripped and fell. He thought he was lying on a wet sheet in the servants’ stuffy quarters. The beige carpet covering the stairs sucked in the brownish-red gore. The pitiful strings of his long johns wound around the leather slippers.

“I beg you, don’t kill me … You’ll go to prison … but here you’ve got a fortune …”

“ ‘I am relentless and cannot be bought’ replies death.” Anwaldt rested the sword’s blade under the Baron’s rib. “You know that treatise? It was created when your ancestor Godfryd cut into the bellies of Arabian virgins with his Durendal.” He felt the blade hit upon an obstacle. He realized it had got stuck in the carpet. Behind the Baron’s back.

He left the trembling sword and curled-up body on the stairs and turned to face the old servant who had been watching the spectacle with dumb horror.

“Look, old man, here the knight Heribert the Invincible von Anwaldt has punished the lecherous one, the follower of Satan, the Yesidi … Give me the scorpions and we’ll fulfil the eternal prophecy … Aren’t they here? … Wait …”

As Anwaldt, on all fours, was searching for scorpions on the floor, the Baron’s chauffeur, Hermann Wuttke, appeared in the hall and, without second thoughts, grabbed a heavy, silver candlestick. The sun was rising. The people of Breslau looked up at the sky and cursed yet another stifling day.

†
“Man pure, by crime untouched.”
(Horace,
Hymns
1, 22, 1)

XVI

OPPELN, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13TH, 1934
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

The Breslau–Oppeln train was two minutes late, which to Mock, who was used to the punctuality of German trains, seemed unpardonable.
(It’s no surprise that in a state governed by Austrian sergeants, everything breaks down.)
The train slowly drew in to the platform. Mock saw a man in a carriage window laughing and gesticulating wildly to he did not know whom. He glanced at Smolorz. He, too, had noticed the jester; he dashed towards the waiting room with the high, ornamental vault. The train came to a halt. Mock spied Erkin in the same window and right behind him the grinning man helping a lady take down a heavy suitcase. Erkin jumped briskly out of the carriage and made towards the waiting room. The jester threw the travelling valise of the unpleasantly surprised lady roughly on to the platform and swiftly followed him.

There were only a few travellers in the waiting room. The Turk walked towards the underground tunnel leading to the city. The way down was divided lengthwise by an iron barrier. He walked down on the right. After years of living in Germany, he had managed to get to know Prussian “
Ordnung
” so that, on seeing a man climbing in the opposite direction yet on the right hand side of the barrier and against the current, his hand
instinctively flew to his inside pocket where he kept a gun. After a moment, he withdrew it. The man was nearing Erkin, manoeuvring his body in such a way as not to deviate from a straight line. Parallel to the drunkard, but on the correct side of the barrier, walked four S.S.-men and a hunched pen-pusher in a hat. The drunkard got close to Erkin and blocked his way. Swaying to all sides, he was attempting to put a crooked cigarette in his mouth. The Turk, laughing to himself at his suspicions, said he did not have a light and tried to pass him, but he felt such a powerful blow to his stomach that he had to double over. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the S.S.-men leaping over the barrier. He did not have time to lean against the wall before they came up to him from the back. The abusive lady approached, tugging her heavy suitcase. The stocky man in a tight coat and a hat shoved her roughly aside. In his hand, he held a revolver. Erkin slipped his hand into his pocket, but it was the last move he managed to make. Pushed forcefully, he fell on to the barrier and hung there a moment. Two of the S.S.-men pressed him down and the pen-pusher aimed a terrible blow with a rubber truncheon. Erkin did not lose consciousness, but grew numb. He saw the stocky man in the overly tight coat walk up slowly, reassuring the Railway Protection Officer by holding up his identification. He was grinning broadly. The office worker with the rubber truncheon, clearly enraged by the mediocre results of his first blow, pursed his lips and took another, mighty swing.

OPPELN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14TH, 1934
ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

The wind blew through the gaps in the garage door. The cold restored Erkin’s consciousness. He was in an unnatural half-sitting position, both hands handcuffed to iron grips protruding from the wall. He shuddered with the cold. He was naked. Blood had coagulated over his eyes.
Through a red fog, he saw the stocky man. Mock walked up to him and said quietly:

“The day has finally come, Erkin. Who will avenge poor Marietta von der Malten? I will. You can understand that very well, can’t you? Vengeance, after all, is your sacred duty. I really do like your customs as far as vengeance is concerned.” Mock searched his pockets and pulled a disappointed face.

“I have no hornets or scorpions with me. Somehow I forgot them. But, you know, your death is going to be like Marietta’s in one respect. You won’t be a virgin any more …” he glanced to the side. A man emerged from the darkness. In a face covered with pustules, burned tiny eyes. A shudder ran through the Turk. It ran through him again when he heard the clatter of a belt buckle and the sound of trousers being lowered.

Schlesische Tageszeitung
, July 22nd, 1934, p.1

THE MISERABLE DEATH OF A MASON

On Thursday, in the early hours of the morning, Baron Olivier von der Malten, one of the founders and members of the Freemasons’ Lodge, “Horus”, was killed in his residence on Eichen-Allee 13, Breslau. The killer is his illegitimate son Herbert Anwaldt from Berlin. According to witness Mattias Döring, the Baron’s butler, Anwaldt arrived at von der Malten’s residence in the night so as to impart some important news to the Baron. According to our informant, he had that very day learned that he was the Baron’s unlawful son and it was on that subject that he had wanted to talk to him at this unusual hour. The despair of a rejected child, the strong feelings of a scorned foundling, took the upper hand over reason, and Anwaldt, after a sharp altercation, pierced his father-not-father with
a stiletto and was then incapacitated by H. Wuttke, the Baron’s chauffeur, who practically battered the killer to death with a candlestick. The accused, in a very serious condition, was taken to the University Clinic where he will remain under police surveillance.

One conclusion can be drawn from this sad story; Freemasons are morally dirty. They should be eliminated from society.

Tygodnik Ilustrowany
, December 7th, 1934,
p.3 (frag. from article
Abyss of Foolishness
)

 … Our western neighbours are using all they can in their campaign against the Jews and Freemasons, even the most repulsive of crimes. Here is an example. Last month, a mentally ill policeman murdered, in Breslau, a generally respected aristocrat, a member of the Freemasons’ Lodge, “Horus”, whom he considered to be his own father. Newspapers which are loudspeakers of German propaganda, such as the
Völkischer Beobachter
, are bursting with anti-Masonic hysteria. The alleged father (there is no mention of the mother) is presented as being scum who threw his own child into a cesspool; the latter, on the other hand, is considered by all and sundry as the just one who had avenged his own father’s wrongs. The effect is such that the demented knifeman, after a tribunal farce, has been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten
, November 29th, 1934, p.1

PATRICIDE CONVICTED TO TWO YEARS’ IMPRISONMENT

After a trial lasting almost four months, former Criminal Assistant
Herbert Anwaldt – whom the people call the bastard-avenger – has been convicted to two years’ imprisonment and, on his release, to compulsory psychiatric care for the murder of his father, Baron Olivier von der Malten. The court, when presenting its grounds for such a conviction, pointed to the burning harm caused to his child – raised in an orphanage – by the well-known aristocrat and liberal philanthropist. This discordance between the Baron’s words and his actions, his glaringly heinous injustice, appeared – to the court – to partially justify the crime committed under severe provocation by Anwaldt, who suffers a nervous disorder …

Breslauer Zeitung
, December 17th, 1934

FAREWELL TO HEAD OF CRIMINAL DEPARTMENT OF BRESLAU POLICE, EBERHARD MOCK. MERITORIOUS POLICEMAN TAKES ANOTHER STATE POSITION

Today, to the sound of marches played by the garrison orchestra, Breslau’s Police Praesidium bid a ceremonious farewell to Director Eberhard Mock, who is to take over a different government post. Mock, plainly moved, said goodbye to the institution with which he had been associated since youth. We have unofficially learned that he is not leaving the city which owes him so much …