The End of the World in Breslau (37 page)

Mock felt blood rush to his brain. He stood up suddenly, knocking over the heavy chair. He hurried around the table and into the hall.
Grabbing the receiver of the Bakelite telephone, he dialled Hartner’s number.

“What was the number of the file stolen by one of the experts?” he shouted. Moments passed. “Repeat that, please,” he said when Hartner finally answered. “Yes, I’m taking it down … 4536.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 23RD, 1927 HALF PAST FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON

The Adler rolled slowly into the courtyard of Wirth & Co. Transport and Dispatch. Mock climbed out to see its owner standing on the ramp, frantically shouting something, waving his hand and opening the door to the counting-room. Mock stood in the glazed office for a moment, shaking the wet snow off his coat and hat.

“Mr Mock,” Wirth was clearly perplexed. “My man doesn’t know what to do with your naked fellow. You told him he wasn’t to leave the warehouse. But he called in my man, grabbed onto a pipe and pulled himself up twenty times …”

“In handcuffs?” Mock interrupted.

“Yes, in handcuffs. Then he wanted to be taken back to the cell where he’d been locked up ?rst. My man tried to brush him off, but he bellowed so loudly he had to be given a clout across the face. Even then he leaped up to the pipe and started pulling himself up again. Like an ape, Mr Mock. And then he yelled to be taken to that other cell, because that’s what you’d promised. Said he’d done twenty pull-ups … He got another clout, but that didn’t work. He’s yelling again. He’s some sort of lunatic, Mr Mock …”

“See what men do, Wirth,” Mock laughed, “to secure themselves better conditions? He can pull himself up on a tee-bar wearing handcuffs. That’s nice. See how much he wants to get to a warm cell? Such determination
must be rewarded. Lock him up in that cell, throw him some wood and coal, let him get the stove going and spend Christmas in the warmth.” He pulled a creased banknote from his pocket. “Buy him some bread and sausage with this. The cheapest. I’ll come and interrogate him properly after Christmas.”

“And who’s to watch over him? My men have families, you know …”

“I know, Wirth. They have families and they are exemplary citizens,” Mock stroked the seventeenth-century document in his breast pocket. “Nobody’s going to watch him. And I’ll hold on to the key.” He patted Wirth affectionately on the shoulder. “Happy Christmas, Wirth! Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 23RD, 1927 FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

A terrible mess reigned in Inge Gänserich’s apartment. Dresses, petticoats and stockings were strewn over two screens that stood in the middle of the room. Dirty plates with remnants of food towered on the table, while rows of empty wine bottles stood under it and on the sideboard. Dusty newspapers and magazines lay on the windowsill, above which hung a curtain held up by only one hook. In the centre of the room, next to the stove against which someone had smashed a guitar, stood the iron bed in which Erwin Mock was asleep.

His uncle closed the front door and looked around in disgust. He approached the sleeping youth and shook him hard by the shoulder. Erwin opened his eyes and closed them again, pulling the coverless eider-down over his head. Mock noticed the sour reek of digested wine coming from his nephew. He sat in the armchair, having first thrown aside its lumpy, shapeless cover, pulled a flick-knife from his pocket, opened it and scratched his neck with it under the corset. He then rolled a cigarette of
blond, Georgia tobacco, lit it and stared at the shape of Erwin’s body wrapped in the eiderdown. The boy began to wriggle about, until finally he poked out his dishevelled head.

“Forgive me for receiving you like this but …” he said with Difficulty, as if unable to squeeze the words through his parched throat, “we had a party last night, which went on until morning …”

“Where’s Inge?” Mock interrupted him.

“In the studio,” replied Erwin. “Working …”

Mock thought about his empty apartment without Sophie, and without Adalbert or Marta who had gone to see their family near Striegau, and even without the dog, Argos, which they had magnanimously taken with them so as to spare the Counsellor any trouble. Mock imagined the following day’s Christmas Eve dinner: he alone at the head of the huge table, cutting slices of roast goose; lighting candles on the Christmas tree; drunk, and singing carols so loudly that Doctor Fritz Patschkowsky from above has to thump the floor with his walking stick; staring at the telephone, a bottle of schnapps in his hand. He did not want his predictions to come true. He longed to be able to place a piece of carp on Erwin’s plate, drink schnapps and sing carols with him. Which was why he had to suppress his fury at his nephew’s drunkenness, at this pigsty in which he lived – which successive lovers of Breslau’s femme fatale used to clean – at his two-day truancy from school, and at his failure to find himself, which was something nobody could help him with.

“I am inviting you … both of you …” Mock corrected himself, “to join me for Christmas Eve dinner. Families ought to spend Christmas together …”

Erwin sat up in bed, scanned the table and reached for a glass with a little water in it. Contrary to Mock’s expectation, he did not drink, but poured it onto his palm and slicked down his hair, which was sticking out in all directions.

“Thank you very much, Uncle,” he tried not to mumble, “but I’m going to spend Christmas with Inge. And she won’t come to yours, Uncle. Unless you apologize to her for what happened in the past … Forgive me, Uncle … I have to go to the toilet on the landing …”

Erwin wrapped himself in a threadbare dressing gown – Mock guessed it to be a trophy passed on to subsequent lovers of the seductive artist – and staggered out of the room. The Counsellor went to the window and threw it wide open. He listened with some surprise to the patter of rain in the gutters as it cut across the snow-covered roofs, causing small avalanches and icicle daggers to break off. He heard Erwin’s footsteps and turned around.

“The day before yesterday, I suggested that you come and live with me; today I am inviting you to spend Christmas Eve with me,” said Mock slowly. “The day before yesterday we were interrupted by a paedophile. Today you try to cut the conversation short yourself. You told me to apologize to Inge, and went to the toilet. You didn’t wait for my reply; you didn’t want to know what it was because you thought I’d take offence and leave. You’d have a clear conscience and be able to spend Christmas Eve drinking wine in this filthy tip, this disgusting shakedown …” Mock stuck his cigarette into a plate of disintegrating herring. “You can always count on me, but can I count on you?”

Erwin got up and approached his uncle. He wanted to put his arms around him, but held back. Tears glistened in his eyes. He glanced over Mock’s shoulder and his tears immediately dried. Mock turned and saw Inge. She stood there without a hat and her black hair, wet with rain, was wrapped around her face. She stared at them, beautiful, scornful and drunk.

“Apologize to her, Uncle, apologize,” Erwin whispered.

“Apologies,” Mock said, fastening his coat, “must be preceded by a request for forgiveness. What are apologies worth if they are not accepted.
They only humiliate the one who apologizes. And I’m not going to ask her to forgive me.” Mock kissed Erwin on both cheeks. “Happy Christmas, Erwin,” he said, and then turned to Inge. “Happy Christmas, dear lady.”

Hearing no response from Inge, he left the apartment and paused in the dark corridor. He stroked the bottle of Franz’s favourite schnapps in his pocket. He knew how he would be spending Christmas Eve.

BRESLAU, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24TH, 1927 FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Mock stood in front of the bathroom mirror and glared in annoyance at the surgical corset that prevented him from wearing a bow tie. Helpless, dressed in a dinner jacket that had been immaculately pressed by his servant, he fiddled around at his neck trying to fasten to his shirt the largest available collar, which, because of the corset, kept bursting open and sticking out. Mock spat angrily into the washbasin and flung the collar onto the tiled floor. He turned on the hot water and rinsed the shaving lather off his razor. Steam settled on the mirror, filled the air and stopped his breath. He turned off the tap and left the bathroom.

The large table in the parlour was laid with a white tablecloth. On it stood only an ashtray, a pot of coffee and a platter with honey cake. Mock did not fetch any of the dishes Marta had prepared for him from the larder. He was not hungry; the previous night spent at the chessboard with a bottle of schnapps had taken away his appetite. He was not pleased they had found the serial killer. He was not pleased he had granted himself a day off. All that pleased him were the frost, which had frozen the puddles just before dawn, and the snow, which had spread a fluffy covering over the slippery black ice.

Bored and indifferent, he sat at the head of the table. “
Stille Nacht
”, which always made him sad, drifted from the radio. The thought of a solitary
Christmas Eve dinner had not yet struck him with its full force. He stared at the telephone, still believing it would ring. He thought about the beautiful, feminine hands picking up a receiver somewhere far away, and hesitantly placing it back on its cradle. He thought about words of forgiveness, a plea for forgiveness carried along the telephone wires, breaking through the crackling and unearthly whistling.

But the telephone did not ring. Mock went to his study and took out the chessboard and Überbrandt’s book,
Chess Traps
. He set up the pieces and began to play out the Schmidt versus Hartlaub game of 1899. But then he remembered that he had played it out the previous night, and that it did not present any more puzzles for him. He swiped his arm over the board and the pieces scattered across the floor.

He stood and walked around the table. He went to the Christmas tree and lit all the candles. He sat down, poured himself some coffee and picked at the cake with his fork. A short while later he fetched from his study the last few of the files he had taken from Hockermann’s house. He opened them and made an effort to go through their contents. He could not say what he had found in them, but instinctively felt that they contained nothing important. As he leafed through them he could feel Hockermann’s ironic eyes upon him, as well as those of Inge as he had tried to explain to Erwin that forgiveness is a prelude to apology. He held onto the thought feverishly, then got up and paced around the table, cup in hand.

“I can’t ask Inge for forgiveness. But can I ask Sophie?”

He looked at the telephone, approached it, returned to the table, lit a cigarette and sat down again. Then he leaped up, grabbed the receiver and almost blindly dialled Mühlhaus’ number.

“Good afternoon, Criminal Director,” he said when he heard a puff on a pipe and a drawn out “hello”. “I’d like to wish you and your whole family all the best for Christmas.”

“Thank you, and the same to you,” Mock heard, and imagined his chief’s eyes long fixed on the empty place at the table where his son, Jakob, had sat for many years.

“Criminal Director,” Mock said, feeling a pressure in his diaphragm, “I’d like to wish my wife a happy Christmas. Could you please give me Knüfer’s number in Berlin?”

“Of course, hold on a moment … Here, I’ve got it: 5436. Ask him to call me. I’d completely forgotten about him – I haven’t heard …”

Mock thanked him and hung up. The pressure in his diaphragm increased as he asked the telephonist to dial Berlin 5436. He replaced the receiver and waited to be connected. Minutes passed. He sat and smoked. Wax dripped from the candles on the tree. Mock glued his eyes to the telephone. After a quarter of an hour the receiver jumped on its cradle with a shrill ringing. He waited. He picked up after the third ring. The voice on the other end belonged to an elderly woman who was either crying or drunk.

“Good afternoon, Madame,” Mock shouted into the receiver, “I’m a friend of Rainer Knüfer. I’d like to wish him a happy Christmas. Can I speak to him please?”

“No, you can’t.” The woman was obviously crying. “He’s dead. He never came back from Wiesbaden. He was murdered there. Last Friday. Somebody wrung his neck. Broke his spine …”

The woman began to sob loudly and hung up. Mock was puzzled by this information. On a piece of paper he wrote “December 24th – Saturday”. He worked out that “last Friday” would have been December 16th. Everything began to fall into place. With shaking hands he untied the file in which Hockermann kept his bills and expenses. Among them was a train ticket for the Wiesbaden–Breslau line, dated December 16th. Mock cried out with delight.

“Now I’ve got another bit of evidence against you, you son of a whore.”

He then analysed the information about Knüfer from a different angle. Half a minute’s conversation was all that had been needed; he did not have to ask anything else. The last man to have seen Sophie was dead. His joy evaporated.

“Sophie’s guardian angel is dead,” he thought. “And she has vanished too. No Sophie, no pain.”

The telephone rang again. Mock picked up and heard a familiar voice in the receiver:

“It’s about your wife. Something’s very wrong.”

“Something’s wrong with her? Is she alive?” Mock yelled.

“She is, but she’s involved in something evil. In the cellar of Briegerstrasse 4.”