HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘Take off your cap in the presence of Herr Procurator,’ Koch ordered brusquely. The man obeyed, and his baldness came to light with all the starkness of harsh deformity, the crown of his head as pocked and cratered with boils and scars as his face. Had it not been for his height and build, and his ability as a soldier of the King, he would have found employment in a travelling freak-show and nowhere else. He glanced beyond me, challenging Koch to meet his eye. Those eyes were large and black, and darted around with fiery energy. He would have been handsome if Fate had dealt him a better hand. With those high cheekbones, aquiline nose, square jaw and strong chin, he might have been an artist’s model or the lover of a baroness in a better world.

  ‘Shall I remove the plates, sir?’ Koch enquired.

  ‘Leave them be.’ I had no wish to diminish Koch in the eyes of this man. ‘You have been assisting in the investigation of the murders under the direct supervision of Professor Kant, have you not?’ I said, addressing Lublinsky.

  His eyes darted from me to Koch, then back again, and he opened his mouth to speak. If I had been shocked by his face, his voice horrified me. A spluttering wild baboon seemed to have been let loose in his oral cavity, a beast he had great trouble in taming. I must have shown my difficulty, for he suddenly stopped short, then started up again, pronouncing his words more slowly to avoid the nasal and guttural emissions that made his speech so difficult to comprehend.

  ‘Professor who?’ he whined, the words whistling from a severely cleft palate. ‘I did what I was told. Reports, they wanted. Reports, they got.’

  ‘But you were also paid to make drawings for Professor Kant.’

  ‘Oh, him!’ he exclaimed. ‘Was he a professor?’

  ‘Who did you think he was?’ I asked.

  Lublinsky shrugged. ‘I wasn’t paid to think, sir. I didn’t care. I gave him what he asked for. The world is full of old men with strange tastes.’

  I forced myself to look at him, and tried to imagine what was going though his mind. Everything in Königsberg seemed to be tainted, sick, removed from the normal light of day. In that instant I felt oppressed by the necessity that obliged me to be a part of it. What ‘talent’ had Professor Kant divined in this improbable man?

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I said, and soon I wished I had not asked.

  A great deal of patience was needed to make sense of his babble. His name was Anton Theodor Lublinsky. He was a native of Danzig. He had enrolled in the light infantry ten years before, and seen fighting in Poland. For three years he had been stationed in Königsberg, where, he chose to specify, he’d been happy until quite recently.

  ‘Are you not content here, Lublinsky? What changed your mind?’ I asked, thinking that he had a perfect right to be unhappy wherever he might happen to find himself.

  ‘I’d rather be fighting, sir.’ He seemed to smoulder at the idea, then added gruffly, ‘On the battlefield you see your enemy face to face.’

  His coal-black eyes blazed defiantly, then looked away.

  What had he seen to induce him to prefer military action and the risk of being killed? I leaned across the table, slammed my fist down hard, then stared into his eyes. The sharp odour of his person mingled with the stench that had impregnated the room. I had to force myself not to look away.

  ‘I have read your official reports, Lublinsky,’ I said. ‘I found them less than complete. Tell me exactly what you observed at the scene of the murder near The Baltic Whaler. You were the first to see the body, were you not?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That’s not exact, sir. I was with another gendarme. Then, there was the woman…’

  ‘One year ago,’ I recapped, ‘you were sent to the scene. You spoke with the woman who had found the body. Is that exact? I want to know precisely what was said on that occasion.’

  Lublinsky began to speak in a gabble. Had I closed my eyes, I might been listening to some mysterious Greek oracle, or a voice conjured up from beyond the grave by Vigilantius. I studied the man’s lips in the hope of understanding, while Koch prodded, corrected and interpreted.

  That morning, he reported, a cold wind was sweeping in from the sea. He had risen at four to assume command of the guard. As he was relieving the night officer, word came in that a body had been found near the port. He and Kopka, his second-in-command, went off to examine the find, leaving the night-officer at his post. They both welcomed the opportunity to be out and about, instead of hanging around at the Fortress with nothing to do. At the scene, they found a corpse and a woman. There was no one else. The sun had not yet risen, the streets were still deserted.

  ‘What did you see there, Lublinsky?’

  He was silent for some time.

  ‘I’ve stared Death in the face a thousand times, sir,’ he said suddenly, glaring fiercely at me. ‘Oceans of blood, fearsome wounds, the agony of grapeshot. There was none of that in Merrestrasse. But I felt no better on that count.’

  He and Kopka had found no sign of violence, nothing to indicate how the murderer had dealt the coup de grâce. Even so, it was obvious that the victim had not died of natural causes.

  ‘Obvious, Lublinsky?’

  The body of Jan Konnen had pitched forward on his knees, the head resting against the bare stone. It was the same position Muslims adopted when they prayed to their God, he said. As nothing was to be learned from the corpse, they had turned their attention to the woman. A midwife on her way to deliver a baby. The woman refused to say a word. She was shaking with fright. Then, Kopka had a bright idea. He went to procure a pint of gin from a nearby inn.

  Lublinsky paused, and seemed to think long and hard before he continued. ‘She wasn’t the killer, sir. That was clear enough.’

  ‘Clear? What was clear about it?’

  He sucked in a mighty gasp of air through his mouth like a suffocating animal. ‘She was terrified.’

  ‘What was this woman’s name?’

  He hesitated again.

  ‘I want to know the midwife’s name,’ I repeated firmly. ‘You failed to record that in your report.’

  A cloud of emotions seemed to tear at his face and mouth.

  ‘Withholding information is a criminal offence,’ I warned him.

  ‘Anna, sir,’ he said, after some moments of brooding silence. ‘Anna Rostova.’

  ‘Did she tell you this while Kopka was away?’ I asked.

  Lublinsky’s large hands began to trawl nervously over his uniform, adjusting his buttons, straightening his collar, rolling his cap up tightly into a tube. At last, he glanced at me and nodded.

  ‘And why would she do that? How did you win her confidence?’

  He flushed bright red. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said. ‘I…that is, I thought she might have taken a fancy to me.’

  That a man so ugly might take advantage of the promise of sexual favours from a woman extravagant enough to offer them did not seem far-fetched. I could almost sympathise.

  ‘For no other reason?’

  An expression of pain took possession of Lublinsky’s face. Of all the sordid details of this story that recur most frequently to my mind, Lublinsky’s ruined face most disturbs my sleep and dreams. His eyes darted around the room, his mouth opened and closed like a carp beached on a fouled hook.

  ‘It was pity, sir. Her only child had died of smallpox, she said. She knew what I had suffered. That was the reason she gave.’

  I looked at Lublinsky long and hard. His laboured breathing was the only sound in the room.

  ‘What exactly did this woman propose?’ I asked, preparing myself to hear a squalid confession of sexual degeneracy.

  Before he chose to answer, Lublinsky played with his fingernail at the hole in his cheek until the blood flowed. Then, resentment burst from him violently, as if some private dam of reserve had suddenly given way.

  ‘She told me that the Devil had murdered him.’

  ‘The Devil,’ I repeated mechanically.

  ‘She had seen his claws, sir.
’

  ‘Did you see them too?’ I asked with all the ingenuity at my disposal.

  ‘No, sir. There was nowt to see. I examined the corpse. There was nothing. No wound, no weapon. Only Satan could have done it, she said.’

  ‘So, you saw nothing, but you believed her. Why did you not include these details in your written report?’ I objected.

  Lublinsky did not respond. Instead, a violent quivering shook his limbs. I did not comprehend the battle going on in his head, the invisible enemy that had him by the throat.

  ‘She said…she’d…help me, sii’ he murmured at last.

  ‘A midwife, Lublinsky? How could a midwife help you?’

  He raised a hand to his scarred and blistered face. ‘She promised to cure me. I caught the fever in Poland. I should have died, but didn’t. I wish I had. I was engaged to a lass from Chelmo, She ditched me when she saw my face. And that was just the start of it. My mates in the regiment avoided me. Called me Son of Satan, they did. Five years this has been going on. Five years, sir! Anna said she’d save me. She swore I’d have skin like a baby’s arse, and I believed her. She was the first female…’ He gulped for air. ‘…to look at me in all that time. Before Kopka came back, I sent her on her way. I had her address…’

  ‘One thing remains unsaid. Two things, to be precise,’ I interrupted him. ‘What had Anna Rostova seen that you did not see? And how did she intend to cure your ills? You risk prison for not having done your duty, remember.’

  He needed no threatening. ‘I’m as badly off as I was a year ago,’ he said with anger, holding his face up to the light. He seemed almost to glory in the ruin Nature had made. ‘Anna said the Devil would end my suffering. That was why he’d left his claw behind.’

  I tried to keep calm. ‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’

  Lublinsky shrank back in silence.

  ‘Don’t make things worse,’ I warned. ‘Describe this…claw.’

  ‘A long thing like a pointed bone,’ he declared at last. ‘The claw of Lucifer. It has great powers. That’s why she took it from the body.’

  ‘Powers, Lublinsky? Which powers are you talking of?’

  ‘To cure…To kill, sir. She said she’d cure my face with that object from Hell. It was charged with the life of the dead man. He’d been the sacrifice. His life was to be my healing.’

  I sat back as Lublinsky leaned across the table, his misery turning to anger.

  ‘Look at me, sir. Just look at my damned face!’ he cried. ‘Wouldn’t you have done the same?’

  I stared at the ravages of his illness, steeling myself against compassion.

  ‘Your face is horridly disfigured,’ I said, coldly. ‘Am I to understand that you never saw this kind-hearted woman again?’

  Lublinsky lowered his gaze.

  ‘You know the answer, Herr Procurator.’

  ‘What did she do to help you?’

  ‘This, sir. She did this.’ He touched the black hole in his left cheek, his voice tingling with rage. ‘She pricked my face with the Devil’s claw.’

  ‘Were you not wounded in a duel?’ I said, throwing a glance in Koch’s direction.

  ‘No blade could do this. Only a witch,’ he replied in a whisper, slouching on the bench, wishing to appear less large a man than he actually was.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Since the first murder, sir.’

  ‘The woman still has the claw in her possession, then?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  He turned his face away and stared at the wall.

  ‘Yesterday, sir,’ he whispered after some moments.

  I understood at once what he meant. ‘There was a murder the day before yesterday. You saw her whenever another innocent died. Correct?’

  Lublinsky bunched his fists and turned to face me. ‘Each murder made that thing more powerful. I’d be a step nearer healing. That was what she told me.’

  I looked directly into his eyes, and made no effort to stifle the distaste I felt for him. The smallpox had deformed his mind as surely as it had ruined his once-handsome face.

  ‘Why you are telling me this now?’ I said.

  He shifted uneasily. ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘You know what I mean. You didn’t write a word of this in your reports. You said nothing to Procurator Rhunken, nor Professor Kant. And yet, you have decided to tell me. Now! You know that she is lying, don’t you? She cannot help you, no matter how many people die. You are handing her to me as a form of revenge. You want Anna Rostova to be caught and punished because she fooled you. Isn’t that true?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘What happened to Kopka?’ I pressed him. ‘Where was he when the other bodies were found?’

  Lublinsky wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  ‘He deserted, sir.’

  ‘Why would he have done such a thing?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘I’ve no idea, sir. He ran away. That’s all I know,’ he said, staring fixedly ahead, his face as dark and vengeful as a demon’s mask in a Lenten morality play.

  ‘Very good,’ I said, jumping to my feet. ‘Now, you will take us to see this woman without any more delay. Come, Koch.’

  Aboard the coach, travelling in silence, each locked in his own thoughts, towards the address that Lublinsky had given the driver, I found myself unable to look at the man sitting before me in the gloom without a sense of overwhelming physical revulsion. Of all the victims of the events that had taken place in Königsberg, and of those that had still to unfold, Anton Theodor Lublinsky aroused the most pity in me.

  Now, that feeling is mingled with the taint of moral disgust.

  Chapter 18

  Königsberg…

  The first time I heard the word, I was barely seven years old. General von Plutschow was returning to his country home when he called on us in Ruisling one day. My father’s oldest comrade at the military academy was a national hero. He had been the guest-of-honour at a ceremony in Königsberg the previous day commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the glorious battle of Rossbach, which had taken place in 1757. General von Plutschow had led the charge of the Seventh cavalry that day, and secured the national victory. As a special treat, my younger brother, Stefan, and I were allowed to attend the guest in the visitors’ salon. We listened open-mouthed to the colourful account that the general gave of the magnificent gala event at which the King himself had been present. And all the while the visitor was speaking, I could not drag my eyes from the place where his right arm ought to have been. General von Plutschow’s empty sleeve was folded up and pinned to his silver epaulette with a gold medal.

  ‘Königsberg is the essence of all that is most honourable, most truly noble, in our great nation,’ my father enthused when the general had finished speaking, and my mother had dabbed the tears from her cheeks. Henceforth, the glorious name of Königsberg and the lost arm of General von Plutschow were inextricably linked in my mind long before I ever saw the city. To my way of thinking, Königsberg was a place where only glorious things could happen, and where the very best of people lived. Despite the murders that had brought me there, despite the killing of Morik, and the suicide of the Totzes, I still cherished the fond belief that Königsberg was a blessed place, and that it could be restored to its rightful peace with the help of Immanuel Kant.

  But that evening, as the carriage followed the directions that Lublinsky gave the coachman and we left the centre of the city far behind, I began to see the other side of Königsberg, the dark underbelly of a wretched beast, a world of misery and poverty that I could never have imagined existing in the place where General von Plutschow had been honoured, where Professor Immanuel Kant had been born, a city that he praised as a sort of earthly paradise.

  We were going to a district called The Pillau. It was a port of sorts, Koch explained, a shallow, shelving beach where whalers landed their catch, cutting up the meat and drying it on the windsw
ept shore. Even with the windows closed, the stench that entered the coach was abominable. The rot of blubber and the decay of gutted carcasses fouled the air as the vehicle progressed along the eastern branch of the Pregel estuary towards the Baltic Sea. The way was dark, the dwellings few and miserable. An atmosphere of imminent danger seemed to lurk in every rut and pothole of the muddy track down which we jolted. The mingling of the cold salt water of the sea and the warmer waters of the river produced a dense fog, which seemed to thicken with every fateful turn of the carriage wheels.

  ‘Are we going in the right direction, Sergeant?’ I asked. I had no wish to lose our way in that forsaken place.

  ‘I’ve only been out here a couple of times myself, sir,’ Koch replied, peering intently out of the window. ‘But I doubt that Lublinsky wishes to mislead us.’

  Wrapped up in silence inside his dark military cloak, his disfigurement concealed by his oversized cap and high tunic collar, Officer Lublinsky stared fixedly out of the window as if to keep the sight of his unhappy face from our intrusive eyes.

  I followed his gaze into the darkness, and thought of the fishermen hard at work out there on the boundless sea. If the fog were to swallow their boats and our coach, would anyone know where to start looking for us? Far off, a foghorn let out a mournful groan, but there was no comfort in the sound.

  ‘This is it,’ Lublinsky broke the gloomy silence, leaning even closer to the window and staring out, his nose pressed flat against the glass. The swinging carriage-lamp lit his deformed profile, and a strangely ambiguous feeling welled up inside me. Distaste for the part that he had played in helping the woman hide the murder weapon, embarrassment for the humiliation he was now undergoing on her account. But there was no time for idle sentiment that night. Everything happened at a rush. Koch tapped on the roof, the coachman stopped, and we jumped down. The fog was like a wet sponge, my face was damp in an instant, and Lublinsky set off briskly towards a row of lean-to hovels which loomed up out of the gloom. A feeble glow lit one of the dirty windows. At the porch of the cottage, he turned, looked at me for an instant, then began to hammer a military tattoo on the narrow door with his fist.