Then, pouring himself more wine, he said, “Let’s get to the point, Spät.”
I told him about Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler’s commission.
He knew all about that, Stüssi-Leupin interrupted my explanation, drank, the Knulpes had visited him as well. Hélène, Kohler’s daughter, had informed him about my commission, and he had studied Lienhard & Co.’s investigative reports.
I told him about my thoughts as to Kohler’s motive, about Hélène’s suspicion that he had been forced to commit murder, reported as well my meeting with Daphne, my visit to see the genuine Monika Steiermann, and how Benno had popped up at my office.
“Young man, what an opportunity,” Stüssi-Leupin said with amazement and again poured himself some wine.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I replied uncertainly.
“But of course you understand,” Stüssi-Leupin countered. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have come to me. Let’s assume we go along with Kohler’s game. Once we assume he is not the murderer, then another murderer is damned easy to find. It can only be Benno, which is why he’s wobbling at the knees. He went through over twenty million francs of the woman he presumed was Steiermann; Winter lets the genuine Steiermann know, the engagement falls apart, Benno is ruined, guns Winter down in the Du Théâtre. Voilà. That’s the version your employer needs and that you’re going to need as well.”
Stüssi-Leupin held his glass up to the light of the floor lamp. Honking horns could be heard coming from the little town below, kept up for several minutes—to judge by the motionless headlights, the lines of traffic had clogged.
Stüssi-Leupin laughed. “And the loveliest appeal case of the century falls into the lap of a greenhorn like you, of all people.”
“I have no commission to take over an appeal,” I said.
“The commission you have taken over leads directly to it.”
“Kohler murdered Winter,” I declared.
Stüssi-Leupin showed his amazement. “So what?” he said. “Were you there?”
At the back of the room a dark figure came down the stairs and limped toward us. As it moved nearer, I realized that it was a priest carrying a small black handbag. He stopped about ten feet away from Stüssi-Leupin, coughed, the panes of glass rose back up, the floodlights came back on, the granite gods cast their shadows into the reencased room. The priest was ancient, lopsided, wrinkled, and had a clubfoot.
“Your wife has received the last rites,” he said.
“Okay,” Stüssi-Leupin said.
“I shall say prayers,” the priest assured him.
“For whom?” Stüssi-Leupin asked.
“For your wife,” the priest specified.
“That’s your job,” Stüssi-Leupin replied listlessly, nor did he look up as the priest muttered something and limped toward the exit, where the housekeeper, who had let me in, opened the door for him.
“My wife is dying,” Stüssi-Leupin remarked offhandedly and finished off his glass of wine.
“In that case…” I stammered and got up.
“My God, Spät, you are squeamish,” Stüssi-Leupin said. “Sit down!”
I sat down, he poured himself another glass. The walls sank into the earth, the floodlights went out, we were sitting in the open again.
Stüssi-Leupin stared straight ahead.
“My wife has been gracious enough to spare me the torture of attending her on her deathbed,” he said, and it sounded indifferent. “That’s why the priest was with her, and now the doctor and a nurse are in there. My wife, Spät, not only got one helluva kick out of life, rich as hell and Catholic as hell, she was a helluva beautiful woman. Strange, that use of ‘hell.’ She cheated on me all her life. The doctor sitting there with her was her last lover. But I understand her. A man like me is pure poison for women.”
He laughed to himself, then abruptly changed the topic.
I was a fool, he said, I thought Isaak Kohler was guilty. He, Stüssi-Leupin, did too. True, all the witnesses contradicted one another; true, the murder weapon had never been found; true, there was no motive. Nevertheless. We thought he was guilty. Why? Because the murder had been committed in a crowded restaurant. Those who had been present had noticed the fact, one way or another, even though they now contradicted one another. And so we didn’t know absolutely, but we believed absolutely. That had surprised him even at the trial. There had been no questions about the murder weapon, nor had witnesses been cross-examined, and the judge had been satisfied with the statement of the commandant, who had indeed been sitting close by but had not mentioned if he had seen the murder with his own eyes or if he had questioned witnesses—plus the defense lawyer was a dud, and Jämmerlin had been in top form. It would take all we could muster to reconcile our knowledge of Kohler’s guilt with our belief in Kohler’s guilt. Our knowledge stumbled along behind our belief, a clever defense lawyer could manufacture an acquittal on that discrepancy alone. But we really should give good old Jämmerlin the chance to come up with a motive. Kohler had thrown a lucrative job my way because I didn’t understand anything about billiards. I had therefore drawn the conclusion—he had been listening carefully—that Kohler had killed in order to observe, to investigate, the laws of society, and had not admitted to such a motive precisely because the court would never have believed it. Dear friend, all he could say to that was that it was too literary a motive, the kind writers invent, even though he believed that with a man like Kohler it had to have been a very special motive. But of what sort?
Stüssi-Leupin pondered.
“You’ve drawn the wrong conclusion,” he then said. “Because you don’t understand anything about billiards. Kohler played à la bande.”
“A la bande,” I recalled. “That’s what Kohler said to me once. While he was playing billiards at the Du Théâtre. ‘A la bande. That’s how you have to beat Benno.’”
“And how did he play it?” Stüssi-Leupin asked.
“I don’t rightly know.” I thought back. “Kohler hit the ball to the edge, it ricocheted off and hit Benno’s ball.”
Stüssi-Leupin poured himself more wine.
“Kohler shot Winter in order to knock out Benno.”
“But why?” I asked stupidly.
“Spät, you really are too naïve,” Stüssi-Leupin said in amazement. “And here La Steiermann gave you the cue. Kohler manages her affairs. Even from prison. He’s not just weaving baskets. Steiermann needs Kohler, and Kohler needs Steiermann, Lüdewitz is just window dressing. But who is the master, who the servant? Kohler’s daughter has it right somehow. It was a murder done as a favor. Why not? And a kind of blackmail. Steiermann has her millions upon millions, but twenty million is still twenty million to her, and Kohler would have sensed that, and so he took out Benno by using Winter. Because Steiermann wished it. Perhaps she didn’t even have to express the wish. Perhaps he just guessed it.”
“An even crazier theory than the truth,” I said. “Steiermann loved Benno because Daphne loved him, and only dumped him when Daphne left her.”
“A more realistic theory than the truth, which is generally unbelievable,” he countered.
“No one would accept your theory,” I said.
“No one would accept the truth,” he replied, “no judge, no jury, not even Jämmerlin. It’s all played out on levels that are too high for the justice system to reach. The only theory that the courts will find plausible, when it comes to appeal, is that Dr. Benno is the murderer. Only he has a solid motive. Even if he’s innocent.”
“Even if he’s innocent?” I asked.
“Does that bother you?” he replied. “His innocence is a theory too. He is the only one who could have got rid of the revolver. Dear friend, take over the appeal, and in a few years you’ll be on a par with me.”
The telephone rang. He picked it up, put it down.
“My wife is dead,” he said.
“My condolences,” I stammered.
“Don’t mention it,” he said.
He was
about to pour himself more wine, but the bottle was empty. I stood up and poured him some of mine, setting the bottle down next to his.
“I’m driving,” I said.
“I understand,” he answered. “That Porsche must have cost a pretty penny.”
I did not sit back down again. “I’m not going to take on the appeal, Herr Stüssi-Leupin, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with this job. I’m going to destroy the results of the investigation,” I declared.
He held his glass up to the floor lamp.
“How large was your advance?” he asked.
“Fifteen thousand and ten thousand for expenses.”
A man with a bag came down the stairs, the doctor apparently, hesitated, trying to decide if he should come over to us, then the housekeeper appeared, led him out.
“You’re going to have trouble paying that back,” Stüssi-Leupin remarked. “And the total?”
“Thirty thousand plus expenses,” I answered.
“I’ll give you forty thousand, and you give me what you’ve found out.”
I hesitated.
“You want to take on the appeal.”
He was still gazing at his glass of red Talbot. “My business. Will you sell me the papers?”
“I suppose I have to,” I replied.
He drank down his glass. “You don’t have to, you want to.” Then he refilled his glass, held it up to the light again.
“Stüssi-Leupin,” I said and felt myself his equal, “if it comes to a trial, I’ll be Benno’s lawyer.”
I left. As I moved into the shadow of one of the erratics, he called after me, “You weren’t there, get that into your head, Spät, you weren’t there, and I wasn’t there either.” Then he emptied his glass and fell back asleep.
… Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler has notified me by telegram of his arrival: He will be landing on a flight from Singapore at 10:15 P.M., the day after tomorrow, and I will shoot him, and then shoot myself. So I have two nights left to finish my report. The announcement surprised me, maybe because I no longer believed he would ever come back. Granted, I am drunk. I was at the Höck, I’m always at the Höck of late, at one of the long wooden tables, among the other drunks. Been living off Giselle and the girls who’ve transferred here since the death of the Marquis, not from Neuchâtel, but from Geneva and Bern, while lots of the local girls have moved to Geneva or Bern, a considerable reorganization has been going on, which I personally have nothing to do with—can’t do anything legally, or illegally, I’ve got nothing to do but wait until the day after tomorrow at 10:15 P.M. Orchid Noldi has taken over Lucky’s old job, he’s from Solothurn, they say, worked his way up in Frankfurt, and is very elegant, his girls are wearing orchids now; the police are furious, you can’t outlaw orchids; a woman lawyer from Basel was crossing the street to the Bellevue at one in the morning with an orchid on her blouse—she was coming from a televised discussion about women’s right to vote—she was arrested, didn’t have an ID on her, a monumental scandal resulted; the police, the police spokesman, made fools of themselves—the latter by an inept démenti. Orchid Noldi is in absolute control, has brought Wicherten in as his lawyer, one of our best-regarded attorneys, who for reasons of social conscience has decided that he wants to defend the rights of such ladies—they pay taxes too, after all—and who advocates the introduction of massage parlors. Orchid Noldi indicated to me that, given my “lifestyle,” I’m no longer considered tenable in the trade, but that he wouldn’t dump me, he owed Lucky that much, he had consulted with his employees, as he put it, and for the time being I could stay on at the Höck; nor had the commandant bothered me again, no one seems interested in how Lucky and the Marquis met their end, and Daphne’s mysterious death has been completely forgotten. So that, though I don’t actually earn my living by pimping, I earn it by pumping. When the guests in the Höck ask me for addresses and I fork them over, free of charge, and then the guests—most elderly gentlemen—pay for my whiskey, well, that’s just doing things with a certain style, just second nature. Which explains my intoxicated condition, my wretched handwriting, and my haste, because to be honest, when I found Kohler’s telegram waiting for me, I went out on a binge, managed somehow to get back to Spiegelgasse, and here I sit, twenty hours later, at my desk. Luckily, and amazingly, I’ve still got a bottle of Johnnie Walker, but now I remember there was a dentist from Thun who looked me up at the Höck and whom I introduced to Giselle—I’ve just got back from the Monaco, not the Höck, as I’ve apparently implied—the haste with which I have to get all this down prevents me from either reading back over it or digressing from the point—I earned the bottle of Johnnie Walker; Giselle wasn’t smitten by the dentist, gave her the willies, drinking his Veuve Clicquot—the second bottle—he took out his dentures, first the uppers and then the lowers, had made them himself, showed us his initials, C.V., next to the upper left wisdom tooth, held the dentures in his hand, clattered away with them and tried to use them to bite Giselle’s breast; at the next table, Hindelmann laughed till the tears dribbled down his belly, especially when the dentist dropped his dentures under the table, not under our table, but under Hindelmann’s, where he was sitting with Marilyn, a new girl from Olten, which is where Orchid Noldi comes from too—no, he’s from Solothurn—wait, maybe he is from Olten—so that the dentist had to go crawling on all fours looking for them, because no one wanted to pick them up but kept kicking them on to the next table. Finally Giselle decided she would after all, it had grown late, what with all our laughing, and I got my Johnnie Walker. What annoyed me about Hindelmann’s whinnies was the absolutely wretched role he had played as part of the prosecuting team at Kohler’s trial. Trial, not appeal. Everyone expected Stüssi-Leupin to steer the case to an appeal, but his petition to the Department of Justice was a surprise all the same. Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler had never admitted that he had shot and killed Adolf Winter, professor of Germanics, in the Restaurant Du Théâtre. An eyewitness report was not sufficient if the defendant denied the charge; even an eyewitness could be mistaken. The Kohler case belonged therefore before a jury, not before the judges of a higher court. Therefore every juridical and legal means must be used to declare the old verdict invalid and to bring Kohler’s case before a jury as it deserved. Stüssi-Leupin’s position resulted first in a feverish ransacking of the case file and court records, which to the horror of the minister of justice, Moses Sprünglin, confirmed the fact that there had been no admission of guilt—people had simply regarded Kohler’s philosophical flourishes as such; secondly, in the minister of justice’s forcing Jegerlehner, the presiding judge of the appellate court, into an early retirement and his censuring the four other judges as well as Prosecutor Jämmerlin; and thirdly, in his handing the case over to a jury trial—a rash decision from a legal point of view. Jämmerlin’s temper tantrum had no effect, his petition to the Supreme Court was denied with almost sensational speed, posthaste, so to speak—a unique achievement for an organ of government so overworked it normally moves at a snail’s pace—in short, Kohler had his new trial by April of 1957. Jämmerlin would not yield, he wanted to appear as the prosecutor once again, but Stüssi-Leupin objected that he was biased. Jämmerlin fought like Satan himself, and only yielded when he heard that Stüssi-Leupin was going to call Lienhard as one of his witnesses. To be sure, Feuser was no match for Stüssi-Leupin either—which reminds me I haven’t yet given an account of the trial itself, nothing about the painful role the commandant played by declaring that he had not seen Kohler shoot, had merely assumed he had. Stüssi-Leupin pulled out all the stops. He was brilliant, I must admit. The witnesses he called so contradicted one another that the jury had to stifle their laughter and the audience simply squeaked with pleasure; Stüssi-Leupin played like a virtuoso on the theme of the revolver’s never having been found, on the fact that since this had been passed over, the corpus delicti was therefore lacking, which was of itself sufficient basis for acquitting Kohler. Gradually, however, Stüssi-Leupin shifted suspicion to Benno
, who at the time of the crime at the Du Théâtre had been the owner of a collection of revolvers—he was after all a Swiss master in pistol-shooting—which according to Lienhard he had tried to sell because of financial difficulties (a murmur passed through the courtroom); then followed intimations of a quarrel between Dr. Benno and Professor Winter, a cross-examination of Benno became unavoidable, everyone was anxiously awaiting his testimony, but Dr. Benno did not appear before the jury. I had been looking for him for days. I was determined to take over his defense, as I had told Stüssi-Leupin I would, and I badly needed information from Benno in order to investigate Kohler further, but even at the Sky-High Bar no one knew for sure. Feuchting figured he was hiding out at Daphne’s, she was a brick and wouldn’t leave an old lover in the lurch; a certain Emil E., a deodorant salesman, who had dropped his last month’s salary at her place on Aurorastrasse, had had the impression that someone else was in the apartment. But he still could not be located. People assumed he had fled. The police were notified, Interpol was called in, it was almost like Isaak Kohler’s arrest. Daphne made things difficult, demanded a search warrant; but the next morning, as Ilse Freude entered my office on Zeltweg, she found the jaunty fencer and master pistol-shot dangling from the chandelier, swaying in the breeze between the door she had opened and the open window—Benno had kept a key to his old office and had climbed up on my desk, formerly his desk; all the while I had been over at Daphne’s trying to track him down—for days I smelled of all sorts of perfumes, the ones that came from Emil E., the deodorant salesman… Maybe that’s the reason that I have no stomach for reporting about the trial: If Stüssi-Leupin had cross-examined Daphne, my renewed relationship with Daphne would have come up, and that with Hélène present, and he surely would have done it, if Benno had not got the jump on him by committing suicide, which was interpreted as an admission of guilt. Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler was acquitted with colors flying and trumpets blaring. As he was leaving the courtroom, he passed by me, stopped and regarded me with those cold, passionless eyes of his, and said that what had just gone on here had been the most wretched solution possible, that I had got myself into financial difficulty, well, my God, that was understandable, but why hadn’t I come to him instead of handing over the investigative reports to Stüssi-Leupin, who had then staged this ugly judicial production, an acquittal, for chrissake, it was embarrassing to have to stand there like an innocent lamb—who was all that innocent anyway? Then he said something that brought my anger to a white heat, made it clear to me that it was my duty to shoot Kohler down, because someone had to restore justice if all this was not to be an out-and-out farce: If only I had delivered the reports to him, he said, instead of selling them to Stüssi-Leupin, then Benno would have dangled from that chandelier without this silly trial, and then he gave me a poke as if I were a fellow scoundrel, sending me staggering into Mock, who was standing behind me and now pulled his hearing aid from his vest pocket and said, “Ah yes.” Kohler left the courthouse. Victory celebration at the Ameise Guild House. Speech by the mayor in hexameters, then off to Australia, and I came running with my revolver, too late. Everybody knows the story. That was a year and a half ago, and now it’s autumn again. It’s always autumn. My God, drunk again, I’m afraid my handwriting will be unreadable, and it’s eleven in the morning—another thirty-five hours and fifteen minutes—if I keep on boozing, there’ll be a catastrophe. Damn, if Hélène still loved me, that would be like my own death sentence. I can only assure you that I loved her, love her still maybe, although she’s sleeping with that old geezer Stüssi-Leupin, and not long ago I saw her with Friedli, he had his right arm around her shoulders, as if she had long ago become his property, but it’s of no consequence really. It’s not necessary for me to write about my conversation with Berger, the sect’s preacher, on the stairs a while ago—a while ago, I was going back to the Höck for one last time, but it was a bust, couldn’t rustle up any whiskey, the regulars were watching a soccer match and were in a bad mood because the Swiss were playing so badly, and the guys who normally asked me about addresses were in a bad mood too. The Monaco was closed. I didn’t have any money on me, had forgotten my wallet, I had to have some whiskey, I staggered into the Du Théâtre, it was empty too; Alfredo, if it was Alfredo, gave me a strange look, Ella and Klara emerged resolutely from the background, someone called my name. Stüssi-Leupin was sitting at the table where James Joyce had always sat, and with a motion of his hand invited me to sit down with him. Ella and Klara didn’t like to see this, but Stüssi-Leupin is Stüssi-Leupin. I should button up my fly, he suggested, and when I sat down, he remarked that I was letting myself go to hell, and poured some kirsch in his coffee. I needed a bottle of whiskey, I said, my mind elsewhere, my condition was hopeless, I realized that I couldn’t live without whiskey, the panic-stricken fear overcame me that I wouldn’t be able to get hold of any whiskey, while everything in me rebelled against drinking anything but whiskey, wine, say, or beer or schnapps or even the hard cider the clochards drink here (which is why they have bad livers but no rheumatism), some remnant of human dignity in me demanded that I drink only whiskey, for the sake of justice, which was destroying me, and there was Ella setting a glass in front of me. The Stüssi valley needed a lawyer again, Stüssi-Leupin said, his successor, the spokesman Stüssi-Sütterlin, had been shot during a hunt, someone had mistaken him for a chamois, either a Stüssi-Bierlin or a Stüssi-Feusi, or even a Stüssi-Moosi might have done it, the judge at the inquest in Flötigen had shelved the case, hopeless to try to solve it; that would be a job for me, I would be the first non-Stüssi to act as spokesman, and my readmission to the bar could be arranged. He was suggesting me of all people, I replied and chugged the whiskey; you of all people he replied, think about it, Spät, he went on, it was time for me to draw some conclusions, and if it was his, Stüssi-Leupin’s, passion to save even the guilty from the jaws of that old shark the justice system, if there was a chance for them to escape the beast, to employ that particular metaphor, it wasn’t because he wanted to make a fool of the justice system. A lawyer was not a judge: whether or not he believed in justice and in the laws deduced from that ideal was ultimately a matter of metaphysics, like the question about the nature of numbers, but the lawyer’s task was to investigate whether some fellow whom the justice system had collared ought to be regarded as innocent or guilty, quite apart from the fact of whether he was guilty or not. Hélène had told him about my suspicion, but my investigation had been inadequate, Hélène had been a stewardess at the time—good God, in those days people still thought there was something special about the job—but not on the plane on which the English minister had flown back to his island. He had flown on a military plane and would hardly have made use of a Swissair stewardess. That Hélène had been so vague in her answer to my question that day was quite understandable, she hadn’t understood the point of the question, and as far as what Kohler had had to say to me, which Mock had been reported to him, that was quite incomprehensible to him. Kohler had wanted a new trial; if he hadn’t wanted to stand there like an angel of innocence all he would have had to do was declare he had gunned down his old PEN Club brother and explain how, damn it all, he had managed to get rid of that revolver; he, Stüssi-Leupin, had a damned uneasy feeling; getting the old man acquitted had been his legal duty, but now it was dawning on him that he had let a beast loose, a lone wolf, the most dangerous sort; behind Kohler’s crime there lay a motive that he wouldn’t come clean about; at first he had thought that Steiermann was using Kohler, now it looked to him as if Kohler was using Steiermann. Winter, Benno, Daphne, the two pimps, a few too many corpses, and if I didn’t pipe down, I might suddenly find myself being fished out of the Sihl. Well then, I had my bottle of whiskey, and I have no idea how I got back to Spiegelgasse—while Stüssi-Leupin had been dishing out his wisdom, Ella had provided the whiskey—that I’ve been able to record the conversation at all is a miracle, it’s already one-thirty in the morning, I must have nodded off in the meantime
—so a little more than twenty hours—nineteen hours, I read the clock wrong, it’s two-thirty—and Kohler will—Dr.h.c. Kohler will—the conversation with Simon Berger must have taken place when I got back to Spiegelgasse with Stüssi-Leupin’s whiskey. It must be weeks now since the psalms of the Latter-day Saints of Uetli died away, they suddenly ceased to resound—Stuber from vice had been visiting me, was dropping some pretty clear hints that the officials were still of the opinion that there was some connection between me and organized hookerdom, when the hymn “Jesus Christ, from Thy wounds bloody” broke off all of a sudden and was followed by the sound of screams, protests, howls, a most peculiar noise, and then the thunder of many feet moving down the stairs, then deadly silence, and Stuber went on with his guesswork: which was why I ought to have been amazed to find the preacher standing at the door of the sect’s assembly room on the floor below me. He was leaning against the door, immobile, I tried to get by him, he tumbled on top of me. He would have fallen had I not caught him. As I pushed him away from me, I saw that his face was badly burned and his eyes were missing. Horrified, I tried to move on up the stairs, to my room, but Berger wouldn’t let go of me, he clasped me in his arms and shouted that he had stared into the sun to gaze upon God, and when he had seen God he had gained his sight, he once was blind but now could see, he could see, and screaming this, he tugged at me so that we both ended up lying on the stairs leading up to my room. I don’t know what all he told me, I was too drunk to comprehend it, it was probably nonsense, all those babblings about the sun’s interior, the total darkness that reigned there, which at the same time was the hiddenness of God, which you can recognize only when you let the sun burn away your eyes, only then did you perceive how God was submerged inside the sun as a dimensionless point of perfect blackness, sucking the sun into Himself with an endless thirst, without ever growing larger, as if He were a bottomless hole, the abyss of abysses, and how the sun was emptying itself into its interior, and thus was expanding, no one noticed it as yet, but tomorrow night at ten-thirty it would happen, the sun, having become pure light, would burst into rays and expand at the speed of light, scorching everything, the earth would evaporate in a huge aura of light; that’s the gist of it, he talked like a drunk to a drunk, which I was at the time and am even drunker now and don’t know why I’m writing about this sectarian preacher, who stood up in front of his congregation with his head all wrapped up, declared the end of the world, and demanded that his followers should let their eyes be burned out by the sun as his had been, and then ripped the veil away: the screams, protests, howls, that most peculiar noise I had heard, the congregation thundering down the stairs—that had been his answer. Have read back over what I’ve written. About three hours now until I have to leave for the airport. The commandant must have got here at seven-thirty this morning, maybe even before that, he was sitting right in front of my couch, I was amazed to see him sitting there when I awoke, which is to say, I only noticed him after I had thrown up and was returning from the toilet, tried to lie back down on the couch. The commandant asked if he should make some coffee, then without waiting for my answer went over to the kitchenette, I fell asleep again, and when I came to, the coffee was ready, we drank it in silence. Did I know, the commandant then asked, that I was one in ten, and when I asked what his strange question meant, he replied that he let every tenth person go and that I was one of those. Otherwise he would have had to arrest me beside Daphne’s grave; like myself he had been a lawyer, even less successful than I, employed only now and again as a public defender, and so he had ended up with the police; he was a socialist and his friends in the party, who would never have dreamed of turning to him if they had had personal need of a lawyer, had fixed him up with a job in the criminal division of the municipal police, as the legal advisor; that he had slid his way to the top and ended up as commandant had not been the result of any special achievement, political intrigue had washed him up onto those higher shores, and it was the same with the other levels of the justice system; not that he meant to imply that there was corruption, but the claim by the justice system to represent something objective, some sort of sterilized instrument free of every social bias and prejudice, was so far from being the real state of affairs that he could not regard the Kohler case as tragically as I; to be sure, I had made the mistake of taking on the commission and of handing the reports over to Stüssi-Leupin, which resulted in Kohler’s being able to harass Benno to death-by-chandelier and win his retrial, but—regardless of whether Kohler was innocent or not—and everyone knew after all that the canton deputy had shot and killed the university professor, even he, the commandant, had no doubts of that—when he looked at me now and considered the mess I had got myself into by rebelling against an acquittal, which, though juridically speaking most remarkable, was itself incontestable and thus perfectly justified—even if it had put justice in checkmate—then I had no choice, if I wanted to see justice done in this affair, but to condemn Kohler and myself to death and to carry out the death sentence on us both, to take the revolver that I had kept hidden behind my couch and use it to dispatch Kohler and then myself into the next world; all of which he, the commandant, considered quite logical, but also quite absurd, because before justice—taken as an absolute, which after all it was, in the ideal sense—I was no better off than Kohler, he needed to remind me only of the role I played in Daphne’s death. Before justice, Kohler and I stood face to face as two murderers. By comparison, a judge performed a perfectly acceptable service. He had to see to the proper functioning of an imperfect institution, which the justice system admittedly was, taking care that the rules of the human game were observed at least to some extent. A judge no more needed to be a just man himself than the pope needed to be a believer. But whenever someone took it upon himself to execute justice, things got damned inhuman. Such a fellow overlooked the fact that sometimes swindling was more human than propriety, because the world’s gears needed to be greased from time to time, a task for which our nation seemed to have a particular knack. Such a fanatic of justice must himself be a just man, and he would leave it to me whether I was that or not. You see, Commandant, I am quite capable of recording our conversation—or better, your lecture, since I didn’t say a word, just lay there, soiled with vomit, and listened to you—with at least tolerable accuracy as to the gist of it; nor was I at all astonished that you had guessed what I decided from the very beginning I was going to do; and maybe that’s why I let myself go to the dogs, possibly that’s why I helped Lucky and the Marquis from Neuchâtel with their alibi, apparently that’s why I’ve become what I am, too shabby for even an Orchid Noldi and beneath the dignity of the ladies he represents—all of it for only one reason: so that I could be just as guilty as Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler, for then my sentence and my executing that sentence upon myself are as just as anything in the world, because justice can only be executed among those who are equally guilty; just as there is only one crucifixion, the one on the Isenheim Altar, a crucified giant hangs on the cross, a ghastly corpse, beneath whose weight the beams to which he is nailed sag, a Christ even more dreadful than those for whom this altar was painted, for lepers; when they saw that God hanging there, justice was established between them and the God who, so they believed, had sent leprosy upon them: This God had been justly crucified for them. I’m sober as I write this, Herr Prosecutor Feuser, I’m sober as I write this, and for precisely that reason I beg you not to reprimand the commandant for not taking away my revolver; our entire conversation, or better, the commandant’s entire straight-arrow lecture was not intended to be fatherly; that stuff about every tenth person that he lets go—whoever wants to believe that, well let them—but he’d probably be only too glad if he could catch every tenth criminal, the whole thing was meant as a provocation. He was mad at himself afterward for not having arrested me at the funeral, when the umbrella flew off and he took the stiletto from my hand; but I know him, he thinks fast, he understood that not only would the question of who murdered
Daphne Müller have had to be reopened but also the question of who had murdered the murderers, and he would then have found himself in Monika Steiermann’s domain, and who wants to pick a fight with a prosthesis empire that’s about to get back into the arms business; but when two hours from now—more precisely, two hours and thirty minutes from now—I take my shot at Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler, the commandant will jump in, even if the shots have no effect—oh yes, Herr Prosecutor, let’s agree to this much: First of all, the commandant with his touching lecture was trying to ensure that those shots, if I was going to shoot, would not be dangerous; but you had no way of knowing, Herr Commandant (I’m addressing you again now), that I had long ago exchanged the blanks for real bullets. Which is why I never went into detail about the secondhand shop on the ground floor. Pure instinct. So that you wouldn’t go into detail about it. The one-eyed fellow who ran it was quite a character, you could find everything in there. Was. For that’s all past now, the secondhand dealer moved out three weeks ago, his store on the ground floor is empty, as is his first-floor apartment, and everything is silent and deserted among the Saints of Uetli, and yesterday (or the day before, or the day before that) I also found a registered letter that I received months ago but never read, informing me that the house on Spiegelgasse, while a landmark building, is in total disrepair and in desperate need of renovation, that the latter is to be undertaken by Friedli, who will gut the inside and build luxury apartments in the old frame, his newest enterprise, and that I am to vacate my apartment by October 1st, and since October 1st has long since passed, I’ve had to wander around town trying to scare up my last bottle of whiskey, came up with it at some point, yesterday, from Stüssi-Leupin at the Du Théâtre, otherwise I would have scared up a bottle in the apartment of the one-eyed secondhand dealer, not whiskey but a bottle of grappa, the same way I found the bullets in his shop, in the bell of an alpine horn, and then tossed in the blanks with which you, Herr Commandant, had loaded my revolver. Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler and I will die to the strains of Swiss folk music. But before I—even though sobriety threatens me more and more, like some sun rising up before me into which, like the mad preacher, I am forced to stare—before I drive out to the airport in less than an hour (in my VW, it didn’t survive its repairs all that well, meaning, I didn’t let them finish, lack of funds), I have one last word for you, Commandant: I retract my suspicion. You acted correctly. You wanted to allow me the freedom of my decision, did not want to compromise my dignity. I am sorry that I have decided differently from what you hoped. And now a final confession: In my game of justice, I have gambled not only myself away but Hélène as well, the daughter of the man whom I shall murder, and who is my murderer. I shall shoot myself because I shall have shot him. Futurum exactum. I remember now the Latin lessons an old pastor gave me at the orphanage, preparing me for high school in the city. I’ve always liked talking about the orphanage, I even told Mock about it, although it was difficult to carry on a conversation with him. Once, when a writer was telling us about the death of his mother, to whom he apparently had been quite devoted, I began to explain the advantages of the orphanage and described the family as the breeding place of crime, saying that all this constant praise of familial happiness made me want to vomit, which visibly annoyed the writer, but Mock just laughed, though with him one never knew what he was getting from a conversation and what he was missing—if as usual he had misplaced his hearing aid, he could read lips, or so I assume, though he disputes this (another one of his tricks), but my bragging about having grown up without father or mother, he said, gave him an eerie feeling, but fortunately, he continued in his fussy way—the writer had long since departed—I had become a lawyer and had no plans to become a politician, although that was always still a possibility, but a man who waxed enthusiastic about an orphanage was worse than someone who spent his youth quarreling with his father or mother or with both, as he, Mock, had, who had loathed his old man and old lady, as he put it, although they had both been the soul of Christian kindness, but he had hated them because they had conceived eight children plus himself, without ever asking a single member of that excessively numerous squad of children whether he or she wanted to be born, conception was a crime without parallel; whenever he chiseled furiously away at some lump (he meant one of his stones), he always imagined that he was taking his revenge on either his father or his mother, but in my case he had to ask what sort of person I was with this orphanage mania of mine. Fine, he, Mock, had hate in his belly for those who had conceived him, had given him birth, and then hadn’t swept him up into the next garbage can, and he was hewing that hate out of stone into a figure, into a form that he loved because he had created it, and that, if it could feel, would hate him in turn, just as he had hated the parents who had loved him, whose problem child he had been; all of which was only human, a cycle of hate and love between creator and creation, but when, in comparison, he tried to imagine someone like me, who instead of hating those who gave him life, instead of hating life itself, loved an institution that had brought him forth and trained him, and who therefore was predestined to spawn a passion for the nonhuman, for an ideology, or for just a single principle, for justice, to take an example, and then when he went on to imagine how such a person would deal with those fellow humans who did not live up to his principle of justice, staying with that example (and who could ever live up to it really?), it made him break out in a sweat of purest anxiety. His hate was productive, mine destructive, the hate of a murderer. “Good God, Spät,” he concluded his barely comprehensible line of reasoning, “I feel sorry for you. You’re damned screwed-up.” After which I never entered his studio again. Why am I telling you about this conversation, Herr Commandant? Because this sculptor, currently being lionized in Venice, is right as hell. I am a test-tube human, bred in a model laboratory, raised according to the principles of the pedagogues and psychiatrists that our nation has produced along with precision watches, psychopharmaceuticals, secret bank accounts, and eternal neutrality. I would have been a model product of this experimental institute, except that I lacked one thing: a billiard table. Thus I was placed into the world without being able to see through it—because I had never come to grips with it, because I imagined it was governed by the rules of the orphanage in which I grew up. Quite unprepared, I was cast into the system in which humans prey upon one another; quite unprepared, I saw myself confronted by the instincts that form them, greed, hate, fear, cunning, the thirst for power, but I was equally helpless when subjected to the feelings that make that predatory system humane: dignity, moderation, reason, and, ultimately, love. I was swept away from human reality like a nonswimmer in a raging river; struggling not to perish, I myself became a beast of prey as I perished, to whom came—after my conversation that night with Stüssi-Leupin, during which I sold him the materials that would serve to acquit a murderer—the murderer’s daughter: Hélène was waiting for me in my law office on Zeltweg, in the posh, roomy apartment that I had taken over from Benno. Only now am I struck by the fact that she was waiting for me in my apartment, not at the door. In the armchair in front of my desk. And that she knew her way around inside. But then Benno—who hadn’t fallen for him? She came because she trusted me, and so she surrendered herself because I desired her, but I lacked the courage to trust her as well, failed to believe she desired me because she loved me. And so our love failed. I did not tell her that her father had not been forced to murder (even if that infernal dwarf may have wanted it), that he was simply taking pleasure in playing God on this wretched planet of ours, and that I had sold myself twice over, once to him and once to a star lawyer who took his pleasure in letting the game of justice be played out, like a master who magnanimously takes over in a chess game that a novice has begun. And so we slept together, without speaking to each other, unaware that there is no happiness without speech. Which is perhaps why the only real happiness is momentary, like the happiness I sensed that night as I became aware of what could have become of me, of a possibility
beyond my grasp, which lay within me but which I had not actualized, and because I was happy then, for one whole night long, I was convinced that I would become what I did not become. When we stared at each other the next morning, we knew it was all over. Now I have to get to the airport.
The Execution of Justice Page 14