The Execution of Justice

by Friedrich Duerrenmatt

  “How do you like my servants, Mr. Lawyer?” the creature asked, and the one carrying it put the scotch to its mouth.

  “Impressive,” I said. “I thought they were your bodyguards.”

  “Impressive, but stupid,” it replied. “Uzbeks. The Russians got hold of them somewhere in deepest Asia and stuck them in the Red Army, then they ended up prisoners of the Germans, and since the Nazi anthropologists couldn’t agree on what race they were, they managed to stay alive. My father bought them at an institute for race research. You could get beasts like these very cheap in those days. Mankind’s useless left-over inventory. I call them Uzbeks because I like the word. Have you seen our garden gnomes, Mr. Lawyer?”

  The sweat was streaming down my face. The room was overheated.

  “A whole army of them, Frau Steiermann.”

  “Sometimes I have them put me among the females,” the creature said, laughing, “and nobody notices me, even when I move. Cheers.”

  The Uzbek carrying it held the scotch to its lips again. It drank.

  “To your health, Frau Steiermann,” I said and took a drink myself.

  “Sit down, Lawyer Spät,” it commanded. I sat down in the leather armchair. The immobile Uzbek stood in front of me, the creature in his arm.

  “So Daphne doesn’t want to return to me,” it said. “I always knew that someday she wouldn’t come back,” and in its little creased face tears appeared in the big eyes beneath the massive, almost hairless skull.

  Before I could say anything, the Uzbek placed the creature on my lap, pressed its glass of scotch in my free hand and, facing the window, fell to his knees, together with the other three. Their rear ends flew up. The creature clutched at me. I felt rather clumsy holding the two glasses.

  “They’re praying again. Five times a day. Usually they set me down on a cupboard,” it said.

  Then the creature commanded: “Drink.”

  I held the glass to its lips.

  “Isn’t Olympic Heinz simply beautiful?” it asked out of the blue and only then chugged its scotch.

  “Certainly is,” I replied and put the empty glass on the carpet beside my leather armchair. As I did, the creature almost fell off my lap.

  “Nonsense,” it said in a dark voice full of self-contempt. “Benno is a degenerate, cheap lady-killer that I’ve fallen in love with. I’m always falling in love with cheap men, because Daphne is always falling in love with cheap men.”

  The creature I was holding in my arms felt like a tiny skeleton.

  “I gave Daphne my name so that she could live the life I would have liked to live, and she’s lived it,” it declared. “I would have slept with everybody too. Have you slept with her too?” the creature asked, the voice dry and cool all of a sudden.

  “No, Frau Steiermann.”

  “Cut the prayers!” it commanded.

  The Uzbeks stood up. The one who had carried the creature in his arms took it back. I had automatically stood up as well, my whiskey on the rocks still in my hand. I had carried out my task and wanted to take my leave.

  “Sit back down, Mr. Lawyer,” it commanded. I obeyed. From the arms of the Uzbek it looked down at me. There was something menacing in its eyes now. Banned inside the little, crippled body, it could only express itself through its eyes and its voice.

  “A knife,” it said.

  One of the Uzbeks flipped open a switchblade, handed it to the creature.

  “To the Benno pictures,” it said.

  The Uzbek carried it to the photographs on the walls, and, as if operating on him, it calmly shredded the smiling Dr. Benno, shredded Dr. Benno as he meditated, slept, beamed, drank, shredded Dr. Benno in his tails, in his dinner jacket, in his tailored suit, in his riding breeches, shredded Dr. Benno as he shot his pistol, played the pirate at a costume ball, in his swimming trunks, without his swimming trunks, shredded Dr. Benno in his fencing garb at the Olympics, shredded Dr. Benno in his tennis outfit, Dr. Benno in his pajamas, Dr. Benno out hunting—we made room for her. I was surrounded by Uzbeks, the one carrying the little creature circled about us in the infernal heat of the den while scraps of shredded photographs began to cover the floor. When all had been shredded, we resumed our seats as if nothing had happened. The creature was again placed on my lap. I sat there like a father with an aborted monstrosity.

  “That did me good,” it said calmly. “Now I’ll dump Daphne. I’ll see to it that she becomes what she once was.”

  It looked up at me. The creased face seemed very ancient, as if the creature had been born before there were human beings.

  “Give my regards to old Kohler,” it said. “He used to visit me often. Whenever I would get angry because he wanted to have his own way, I’d climb around in the library and throw books at him. But he always got his way. He’s still managing my affairs. From prison. That we’ve gone into the production of armored tanks and antiaircraft guns, mortars and howitzers, instead of optics and electronics, is Kohler’s doing. Do you think Lüdewitz is capable of that, or me? Just look at me.”

  The creature fell silent.

  “I’ve got nothing but bats in my belfry,” it then said, and the scorn and contempt in which the misshapen creature held itself was once again apparent.

  “Carry me out,” it commanded.

  The Uzbek picked it up in its arm.

  “Adieu, Mr. Lawyer Spät,” it said, cool, haughty mockery once again in its voice. The French doors were opened and the Uzbek bore Monika Steiermann out. The French doors closed again. I was alone with the two that had brought me in. They walked over to my leather armchair. One of them took the glass of whiskey from my hand—I was about to get up, but the other one pushed me back down. Then he threw the scotch in my face. The ice had melted. The two grabbed me up out of my chair, carried me out of the den, through the hall, out the front door, down through the park, past the garden gnomes, opened the entrance gate and tossed me in front of my Porsche. An old married couple walking along the sidewalk stared in amazement, first at me and then at the Uzbeks, who were soon lost from sight in the park.

  “Guest workers,” I said and pocketed the ticket the police had wedged under the windshield wiper. Blocking driveways is illegal.

  Report on a Summary Report of Reports: Three days after my visit to Wagnerstutz, the communiqué appeared in our world-famous local paper. It was written by a certain Äschisburger, member of Parliament and attorney for the Trög Amelioratory Works, Ltd.: The person who, once she had been turned loose from a boarding school on the Côte d’Azur, had kept our city holding its breath with her scandals for ten years now was not Monika Steiermann. She had been passing herself off as such with the kind permission of the physically handicapped heiress of the Trög Amelioratory Works, Ltd., but in reality she had been born Daphne Müller on 9 September 1930, the illegitimate child of Ernestine Müller, a teacher in Schangnau, canton of Bern, and of Adolf Winter, lecturer at our local university, who was murdered on 25 March 1955. This press announcement, recorded here in much the same manner as the MP handed it out, awakened the scandal that Äschisburger had intended it should; the press, always courteous until now, became ruthless, even the thrashing at the Breitingerhof was described in detail, with Pedroli disclosing that Benno owed him for three months’ room and board and that whereas he had assumed that Monika Steiermann would pay in the end, it had turned out that La Steiermann wasn’t La Steiermann at all. Neither Daphne nor Benno could be located; the mob came howling down on me, Äschisburger having hinted that I had visited the genuine Steiermann; Ilse Freude fought back like a lioness, several reporters shoved their way into my office all the same, I saved my hide with vague generalities, imprudently naming Cuxhafen, whom Pedroli hadn’t mentioned, and the mob was off and running to Reims: too late, Cuxhafen’s new Maserati had exploded during a trial heat, scattering both its own and the prince’s parts; on return to our city, the reporters besieged Mon Repos, caravans of cars on Wagnerstutz, no one was allowed into the park, let alone the vil
la; one reckless fellow who climbed over the wall at night equipped with all sorts of hi-tech apparatus found himself the next morning, with no idea how it had happened, outside the entrance gate, sans clothes and cameras, lying naked in the slush, for overnight and simultaneous with the communiqué, autumn had fallen upon our city, a storm wind had swept the trees of their rusty brown and yellow hues, then rain had set in, then snow, then rain, filthy sloppy mush covered the city, and there the reporter stood in it, freezing. But the scandal not only set the presses rolling, it enkindled imaginations. The town hatched the most asinine rumors, to which I paid no attention for much too long. I was too busy with my own problems. My clients began to drop away, the trip to Caracas fell through, the lucrative divorce fizzled out, no one at the tax office would trust me. My new start, begun with such hope, suddenly looked hopeless, Kohler’s advance was gone, I felt I had started to run a marathon as if it were the hundred meters and now there lay ahead an endless stretch before my law practice could begin turning a profit. Ilse Freude started looking for a new job. I confronted her.

  She was sitting in the reception room behind her desk, had placed a small mirror on her keyboard and was painting her lips carmine. Her hair, which yesterday had been blond as straw, was black with a hint of blue that looked more like green. It was five minutes before six.

  “You’ve been spying on me, Herr Spät!” Ilse Freude protested and went on putting on her makeup.

  “Well, when you talk that loud on the phone with the employment agency,” I defended myself.

  “I presume I’m allowed to sound things out,” she replied, having finished with her makeup, “but I won’t leave you high and dry, what with this mountain of work that’s ahead of us.”

  “What mountain of work?” I asked in astonishment.

  Ilse Freude did not answer at first, but set her all-but-bursting shoulder bag on the desk and carelessly tossed in her mirror and lipstick.

  “Herr Spät,” she declared, “you look harmless enough, much too kindhearted for a lawyer, lawyers aren’t supposed to look like that. I know lawyers, and their looks either inspire confidence or there’s something artsy about them, like pianists, but without the tails, but you, Herr Spät—”

  “What’s your point?” I interrupted impatiently.

  “My point is that you’re a sly dog, Herr Spät. You don’t look like a lawyer, but you are one. And you want to free that innocent canton deputy from prison, too.”

  “What is all this nonsense, Ilse?” I said in amazement.

  “Why else would you have received a check for fifteen thousand francs from Deputy Kohler?”

  I was dumbfounded. “How do you know about that?” I snapped at her.

  “I do have to straighten up your desk every once in a while,” she spat back, “what with the mess you leave. And now you’re bullying me.”

  She wiped her eyes. “But we’ll manage. You just get that nice canton deputy out. I’ll stick with you. Like a burr! We’ll manage it together, Herr Spät!”

  “You believe old man Kohler is innocent?” I asked, aghast.

  Ilse Freude stood up gracefully, despite her respectable fullness, hung her bag over her shoulder.

  “Why, the whole town knows that,” she said. “And who the real murderer is, too.”

  “Well now I’m all ears,” I said and a sudden chill ran over me.

  “Dr. Benno,” Ilse declared. “He was Swiss master in pistol shooting. It’s in all the newspapers.”

  Later I had dinner with Mock at the Du Théâtre. He had invited me, a rarity for that old tightwad. I accepted the invitation, although I knew that Mock invited people only when he was sure they would decline. But I was curious to know whether it was true that ever since Winter’s murder Mock had been dining at his table. It was true. To my surprise, Mock greeted me amiably, but hardly had I taken my seat when the commandant joined us—the first time I had ever met him—and it turned out that he had come in order to make my acquaintance, had in fact organized our get-together, was our host and paid for everything at the end as well. Mock had only been the bait. The commandant ordered liver-dumpling soup, tournedos rossini with home fries and green beans, plus a bottle of Chambertin, in memory of Winter, as he put it, who had been a dreadful gasbag, it was true, but a splendid chowhound. It had always been a joy to watch him go at it. I had the same. Mock chose from the cart: roast beef with mashed potatoes. There was something macabre about the meal. We ate in silence, so it was really quite unnecessary for Mock to lay his hearing aid next to his plate so that he could eat in peace. Then the commandant ordered a mousse au chocolat, and I told him about my conversation with Ilse Freude.

  “You’ve no idea, Spät, just how right your oddball secretary is. The rumor started at the prison. The warden and the guards all swear that Kohler cannot possibly be the murderer. How that old crook has managed it, hell only knows. But let a few people believe some bit of nonsense and others will believe it as well. It’s like an avalanche. Larger and larger chunks of believers in nonsense come tumbling down. At first it was the homicide squad itself that believed it. Well, you see, it’s really no concern of yours, Spät, but Lieutenant Herren is not well liked, and his squad would be more than happy if it turned out that Kohler’s arrest was a mistake, and as for the rest of the police force, they’re jealous of the homicide squad, while the fire department and the employees of the traffic division suffer from an inferiority complex over against the police, and now the avalanche can’t be stopped and has reached the general population, who rejoice in our every setback anyway. In mine especially, and all at once the murderer has been turned into an innocent lamb. And then you add the fact that it was a popular murder, one that suited a lot of people to begin with, and that the guilds and the circle around Kohler—the senators, the members of Parliament, the cabinet, the canton deputies, the town council and whoever else has their finger in the pie, all the general directors, the bosses and execs—are annoyed by the energetic way Jämmerlin proceeded and the way the judges fell right over for him. They have nothing against a guilty verdict, but they had counted on a sentence with probation or even on an acquittal on grounds of temporary insanity, which of course doesn’t count as insanity in a politician. Kohler’s innocence would be a balm for many wounds, Spät.”

  Mock shoved his plate away and plugged his hearing aid into his ear.

  “Kohler has given you a very strange commission, and now there’s all this idiotic talk that he’s innocent and that windbag Benno is the murderer. Just because he’s a crack shot, in a country where everyone imagines himself one. But why did the numbskull have to go into hiding?” the commandant said and went to work on his mousse au chocolat. “Don’t like it. Kohler’s commission, the rumor that he’s innocent, and Benno’s disappearance all fit together somehow.”

  “Spät has fallen into a trap,” Mock said and began to draw on the tablecloth with a charcoal crayon: a rat, caught in the trap, but still gnawing at the bacon.

  Back on Zeltweg, Lienhard was sitting in my office.

  “How did you get in?” I asked indignantly.

  “That’s unimportant,” Lienhard replied and pointed at my desk. “The reports.”

  “Do you think Kohler is innocent too?” I asked, my suspicions aroused.

  “No.”

  “Mock thinks I’ve fallen into a trap,” I said gloomily.

  “Depends on you,” Lienhard answered.

  A hundred fifty pages, typed single-spaced, telegram style. Where I had expected a hypothetical discussion, vague conjectures, here I stood with facts in my hand. Instead of persons unknown, there was a name. The reports themselves were of varying worth, and were generally to be greeted with caution. The interrogation of witnesses by Schönbächler: Witnesses do contradict one another, but the extent of contradiction here was amazing. Examples: One waitress maintained that Kohler had shouted “Bastard,” while the manager of a lingerie shop who was sitting at the next table that day (“I got splashed with grav
y”), stated that Kohler’s words had been “Good day, old friend.” A third witness claimed to have seen the canton deputy shake hands with the professor. One of them said that after he had shot Winter dead, Kohler had run smack into Lienhard. A question mark was appended here, with Lienhard’s notation: “Wasn’t there.” Further contradictory testimony covering more than fifty pages. Now there is no such thing as an objective witness. Every witness tends to blend subconscious invention into his experience. An event to which he is witness takes place both outside and inside the witness. He perceives the event in his own way, imprints the event on his memory, and his memory goes on reimprinting. His memory reproduces a very different event. And then the discrepancies were multiplied because Schönbächler, in contrast to the police, had interrogated all the witnesses. The more witnesses, the more contradictory the statements; the contradictions filled over fifty pages. Finally, there was the passage of time: The event had occurred a year and nine months before. Fantasy had had time to reshape memory, and then there was wishful thinking, grandstanding, etc.—another fifty pages could have been filled with the statements of those people who imagined they were present at the murder but weren’t. But Schönbächler had made a careful investigation. Feuchting’s report: His methods were the simplest. He asked direct questions—he could afford to, because he always asked direct questions. It didn’t even attract attention when he made inquiries. He made inquiries about everything, even about things that were nonsensical, or that appeared to be nonsensical. At the end, he pieced his stones together, ever so painfully, with the glue of countless martinis, to form a mosaic that was thought-provoking, since it confirmed the statements of the various witnesses appearing in Schönbächler’s report, several of whom claimed that Dr. Benno had also been at the Du Théâtre; others, that he had approached the professor before Kohler had; and still others, that he had sat at the same table; and one who even stated that he had left the restaurant immediately after the canton deputy; and a bar waitress testified that shortly after Winter’s murder, Benno had burst into the bar, dancing with joy, breaking glasses, and shouting, “The louse is dead, the louse is dead,” elbowing everyone and declaring that he would marry her now. People had assumed he meant Steiermann, had congratulated him and had accepted invitations to the wedding. All of this had taken place at the Sky-High Bar, so named because of its potent schnapps, a thieves’ den near the cathedral where Benno had often been seen of late. In Benno’s case this “of late” had been going on now for more than two years. He came from a good home, had had a good education and top honors in school, a career in sports, brilliant success in society, an engagement to Steiermann, the wealthiest match in the city—but Benno had suddenly deteriorated, had changed, was shunned. It was generally assumed that Steiermann had broken off the engagement. A lot of foreign trips, rumors that he was gambling. At first he was still able with some effort to maintain his connections with good, lucrative families, but soon was no longer on their invitation lists, and was finally boycotted. He was still living in grand style but had turned to selling off whatever he could rescue from his former days of glory: etchings, furniture, several crates of vintage Bordeaux. A few items he sold had not belonged to him, pieces of jewelry and such, two lawsuits were pending. (I shall pass over an exact accounting of Olympic Heinz’s debts, they were catastrophic, absolutely bizarre, more than twenty million all told.) Strangely enough, Feuchting’s findings about Benno were equally valid for Winter, the murder victim (except for the debts): foreign trips to PEN Club conventions that had never been held but about which he would talk for weeks, rumors about visits to casinos. Winter, too, had been hanging around the Sky-High Bar, bringing with him his penchant for quoting Goethe—once he had left the third floor of the Du Théâtre and the table frequented by the literati. There he would sit with the publishers, editors, theater critics and the literohagiographic authorities of our city, part of their joint effort to prevent control of our city’s culture from slipping out of their hands. That illustrious circle tolerated him, but with mocking smiles, and called him Mahadöh when he would run off to his Niederdorf go-go girls. It was doubtless true, Lienhard said in conclusion, that if one excluded Kohler as the murderer, Benno was the only other possible perpetrator. He had believed Daphne was Monika Steiermann. Then something had happened between him and Winter. As a result of that incident, Daphne had broken things off with Benno, and Benno had gone bankrupt. As Steiermann’s fiancé his credit was unlimited; without Steiermann he had none. I felt my mistrust growing. Lienhard’s version did not fit the facts. Daphne had ended her affair with Benno only after he had beaten her, and Monika Steiermann had dropped Benno only after Daphne had called things off with her. Winter and Lüdewitz had known that Daphne was not Monika Steiermann, but they weren’t the only ones. For someone to assume another person’s identity and vanish into thin air herself is not an easy matter; other parties have to be in on the secret. A few people in the government bureaucracy must have known. And Kohler had known too. Steiermann herself had told me that. Maybe a great many people had known. The trap into which, according to Mock, I had fallen could only consist of my having willy-nilly fueled the fires of belief in Kohler’s innocence, even when I did not share that belief. I had been made a part of it by taking on Kohler’s commission. In yielding to the fiction that he was not the murderer, I had to run smack into another murderer—if it wasn’t Brutus who slew Caesar, then it was Cassius; it if wasn’t Cassius it was Casca. Maybe. Maybe it wasn’t the warden and the guards who had started the rumor that Kohler was innocent, maybe it was me. How did the commandant know about my commission? The guard, Möser, had been present when he gave it to me; the Knulpes, Hélène, Förder, Kohler’s private secretary, plus various lawyers, and Lienhard, and then which of his men? Ilse Freude knew—could she keep her mouth shut? Maybe Kohler’s commission was already the talk of the town; I was of course convinced that he had committed the murder out of scientific curiosity, but by taking on the job I had let my research lead away from Kohler instead of to him. Had that been the point of his commission? By delivering the investigative reports to the man who commissioned them, would I be the prime mover of some obscure maneuver? But I was in a bind. Lienhard would soon present his expense account. I needed money, and my only source of money was Kohler. I had to go on. Despite my scruples. Or was there a way out? It occurred to me to track down my erstwhile boss, Stüssi-Leupin, and consult with him. But I hesitated. Then I decided that I wouldn’t go to him after all, nor deliver the reports, come what might. And then I hesitated no longer. Dr. Benno paid me a visit in the night between Friday, November 30, and Saturday, December 2, 1956. Around midnight. I don’t remember precisely. Because on that night his fate was decided—and my own. I was sitting at what had been his desk, studying the report for the third time, when he flung open the door to the office that had once belonged to him. He was a big man, turned ponderous, with long stringy black hair combed across to cover his bald head. He limped over to my desk. The effect was of a man who had grown too heavy for the framework of his bones. He propped himself against the desk top with hands that, in comparison with his ponderous body, seemed almost childlike, stared at me from the half-light of the desk lamp. He was no longer sober, a desperate man whose helplessness awakened sympathy. I leaned back. His black suit was shiny and greasy.