The Execution of Justice

by Friedrich Duerrenmatt

  III

  Editor’s Afterword: By truly strange coincidence, I made the acquaintance of several persons who, as I only later realized, were not only involved in this multilayered story but had indeed also played the principal roles in it.

  It must have been around 1984. In Munich. I don’t keep a diary. My dates and times are never all that exact. I assume toward the end of May, and at the time I considered the whole story to be pure fabrication. A comfortable villa, a comfortable park receding beneath tall trees. In the park, along one side of the villa, tables have been laid. A pleasant hostess. Publishers, journalists, neatly measured doses from the world of film, theater, culture. As always, I mistake someone for someone else. Am uncertain whether some other woman is the same woman I assume she is. And in fact she turns out to be someone else. Then some other man is somebody totally different. In my fright, I frighten a director of a theater where I once knew everyone and now don’t know anyone. I think, he thinks I’m trying to palm a play off on him, and he thinks I’m trying to palm a play off on him. An actor is running around like a King Lear who has forgotten his lines and is inconsolable: “The theater is done for. There aren’t any new plays.” There’s another actor whom I’ve seen so often on television that I imagine he’s an old acquaintance, and he is bewildered, because this is the first time we’ve met. A woman arrives shoving an old man in a wheelchair. Elegant, self-confident, beautiful. Around fifty. I recognize her but don’t know her name. She greets me with reserve, uses the informal pronoun and calls me Max. She has mistaken me for someone else. Laughter. She apologizes. I feel honored. She goes back to formal address. Who was the old man? Her father. He has to be ancient. Close to a hundred. Delicate and fragile. Uncommonly animated. Pink skin. Thin white hair, trimmed moustache, well-groomed beard, full but shaped to a goatee. He has just come from a conference with the prime minister of Bavaria. About politics? About a foundation for effective science. I don’t understand. There is too much useless science around these days. I understand. She still thinks I know her, and I don’t. Our hostess is talking with the old man. Small talk. Laughs a lot. The old man must be witty. I sit down between the acquaintance I’m unacquainted with and the German widow of an Italian publisher, whom I once got to know during a day in Milan. The acquaintance whose name I can’t come up with has noticed that I don’t know who she is. She is dumbfounded. The widow is talking to me about an actress with whom I was once in love. She ran off with a fireman. After our meal, into the drawing room. The film and theater folk flock around the director. They are interested in art. The others around the old man in the wheelchair. They are interested in reality. An art critic holds the two spheres together for a few minutes with a speech thanking our hostess. He knows too much about art not to underestimate reality, and too much about reality not to overestimate art. Then the two spheres fall apart again. Some of them are discussing Botho Strauss, others Franz Josef Strauss. What did the old man think of the latter? Historian, not a meteorologist. What did he mean by that? The historian made long-term predictions. He was a metaphysician. Imagined that he had a handle on the Weltgeist. The meteorologist dared no more than short-term predictions. He was a scientist. Did not imagine he had a handle on our capsule of gas. The world was too opaque. What was politically possible? Quick surgical measures, and then observe the accidental effects. What did he mean by that? A firm that he had once voluntarily advised and had involuntarily managed had found itself in a difficult position. It was unnecessary to go into detail. Economic interrelationships were even more complicated than a capsule of gas, the predictions even less precise. The old man spoke easily, softly and quickly. Only now and then was there a noticeable soft clatter of dentures. It had merely revolved around the necessity of murdering someone or of having him murdered. Everyone was dumbfounded. Embarrassed. But then touched somehow. As if the old man were going to tell a love story. To be sure, broaching the topic of murder was a faux pas. Even the culture group lent an ear. It was almost as if the old man had eaten his fish with his knife. But kings and almost-centenarians are allowed to do that, too. “He’s simply charming,” an actress said, breathing heavily in our direction; I had seen her, or thought I had, on television or in a film. The screen and the tube bake faces into pastry. At least ten of them look alike. The old man accepted a glass of champagne. He sipped. A film director and actor, whom I had known for a long time, appeared. Of Swiss origin. The Russian-prince type, after the loss of his estates, accustomed to associating with serfs. Large, portly, his beard well-groomed, dressed with casual care. Kissed the hostess’s hand, noticed the puzzled guests, passed over them in amusement, said with his unique heartwarming grandezza, “Hello, Herr Canton Deputy, hello, Hélène,” waved to me, not ungraciously, then said, “I see our canton deputy is about to tell his story. It’s fantastic,” poured himself a glass of champagne, sat down. The old man went on with his story. He exuded an authority that held everyone in his sway. It was not a matter of what he said, but of how he said it. And so it is quite impossible to reproduce the story as he told it. He hoped his hostess would forgive him for having spoken of murder so bluntly. Someone had asked him what was politically possible, he continued, or to that effect. Politics and business were governed by the same laws, the laws of power. That applied to war as well. In particular, business was a continuation of war by other means. As there were wars between nations, so there were wars between corporations. Civil wars corresponded to the internal struggles within a corporation. One was faced on all sides with the necessity of either excluding someone from power or of being excluded oneself. Which demanded a quick surgical measure, and that one then wait to see if it was successful or not. It required, he admitted, only in the rarest instances that murder be committed. Murders are actually ineffectual measures. Terrorism ruffles only the surface of the world’s structure. His murder had been necessary. But it was not murder that had been the problem, but the realization that only murder could help. Certainly he could have ordered the murder committed. All tasks could be delegated. But he would soon be a hundred and had always tied his own shoes till now. Should further murders prove necessary later on, they would take care of themselves, God had reached out only once to create the world. One nudge would suffice. And the solution to his problem had come to him like a bolt of lightning. He smirked. Over thirty years ago now, he had had to accompany a politician, a man as famous as he was disliked, from a private clinic to the airport. At the clinic, the famous politician had stood beside his bed wrapped in confusion and a thick winter coat. He was being followed. The inheritance tax he had got passed in parliament had ruined too many people. He would have to defend himself. He pulled a revolver from his pocket. He would use it to kill every disinherited heir. A nurse had rushed off screaming for help. Then he had stuck the revolver back in his pocket. The doctor came racing in with two aides. A colonel in the military, a crude man of medicine, whose diagnosis was that the illness had now invaded the politician’s brain as well, ah well, not all that bad in his profession, he’d simply pump his man full of tranquilizers, then send him on his way home, otherwise he might kick the bucket right here. After a brief struggle, during which one aide was knocked out, the poor fellow was relieved of his winter coat, revolver included, he was given a rear end—the ladies would excuse him—full of shots, packed back into his winter coat, and stuffed into his Rolls-Royce. And so he had driven into town with an armed, and crazy, statesman. A magnificent spring evening. Just as darkness fell. Around seven. Since his countrymen arose early, they dined early. While he was driving down Rämistrasse with the dozing genius of government finance at his side and watching people rush to get into the restaurants, there popped into his head a possible method for solving his problem in the most elegant manner. “My God,” said the German widow of the Italian publisher, “this is exciting.” The person, the old man went on, whose influence in the firm he had to eliminate was in the habit of dining at this hour in a very well known restaurant. The old man emp
tied his second glass of champagne. He had the driver stop, removed the revolver from the coat pocket of the softly snoring minister, made certain that he had guessed correctly and that the person in question was on the premises, whereupon he shot him and, back in the Rolls-Royce now, returned the revolver to the politician’s coat pocket and drove Her Majesty’s honorable minister out to the airport and loaded him on a special flight, which had then lifted the ailing party leader and his revolver through the air to his island, where no sooner had he arrived than he brought the former world empire to final financial ruin. Soft giggles from the culture section. The daughter maintained a ghostly, majestic calm. Her father could have related that he had been in charge of a concentration camp, and she wouldn’t have batted an eye. But we were all listening spellbound. As if to an old bomb-thrower. And yet amused, even delighted, charmed, by the ease and irony with which the old man told his tale, shifting it all into something abstract, unreal. A publisher asked in confusion: “And you?”—“My good man,” the old man replied, extracting a fat cigar from an etui (I would guess, remembering my own smoking days, that it was a Topper), “my good man,” he was forgetting two things. The social circles in which we moved, and the justice system, which, though perhaps more unconsciously than consciously, accommodated itself to whatever social circle it was to render a decision about, even though—especially in regard to members of the privileged class—it would sometimes proceed all too frenetically in an attempt to deny the prejudices which it in fact did have. But why should he bore us. He was arrested, sentenced by an appellate court, but then acquitted by a jury, despite the fact that the murder had taken place in full public view. Well, you see, necessity demanded it. Several pieces of evidence were missing. The witnesses contradicted one another. The murder weapon was never found. Who was going to look in a minister’s coat? They hadn’t been able to prove he had a motive. A corporation is a shadow world for a prosecutor. And then quite by chance, a Swiss world master in pistol-shooting had been present, who, when they tried to interrogate him, had hanged himself; one simply needed good luck, it was of course also possible that the fellow had shot at the very moment that he, he was seventy years old at the time, had been about to shoot; but the reality was a dead man, with his head lying in his tournedos rossini and green beans, as he recalled, and how this reality had come about was ultimately a secondary matter. He lit the cigar with which he had been playing, a little like a conductor with his baton. Suddenly the guests broke into laughter, several of them clapped, a fat journalist opened a window and laughed out into the night: “A joke to beat all.” All of them were convinced of his innocence. Including me. Why, really? Because of his charm? His age? Delicious, the German widow of the Italian publisher beamed; our hostess remarked that life writes the most improbable tales; the daughter regarded me, coldly, attentively, as if trying to determine if I believed the story. The old man smoked his cigar and managed a trick I never could, he blew smoke rings. He understood, he said, that an innocently accused man was not as embarrassing as a murderer, and thus the hearty applause, it was his fate that no one wanted to believe he had committed a murder. Nor, he assumed—and he turned to me as he said it—did I believe him, though in writing my comedies I sent my heroes off into eternity by the truckload. Renewed laughter, people were having a great time, strong coffee was served, cognac. All that was left, the old man began once more, while concentrating on the ash of his cigar, which he had not knocked off but was carefully allowing to grow, was the moral question. Suddenly he was a different person. No longer a hundred years old but timeless. Whether he had killed or had only intended to kill, he said, in moral terms it was the intent that counted, not the execution. Yet the moral question was a question of justifying an act that did not correspond to the general principles of a society that ostensibly was governed by such principles. Thus the justification could be categorized as a dialectical one. Everything can be justified dialectically, and thus morally as well. Which was why he considered every justification a matter of bad style, or to overstate it, every morality immoral; he could only note that he had acted in the best interest of the corporation, which went bankrupt all the same, by the way, so that even his lovely murder had proved useless, whether he had committed it or someone else had, which then allowed one to answer the question of what was politically possible: If at all, then purely by accident, and, when something is achieved by accident, it represents the opposite of what one wanted to achieve. Then he offered his apologies. Our gracious hostess would be so kind as to excuse him and allow his daughter, Hélène, to take him to the Vier Jahreszeiten. She rolled him out without so much as a glance my way. I considered the story to be a fabrication. Who commits murder that way? But that the old man had once been powerful and had had considerable influence was not to be overlooked, why else would Strauss have received him? I thought of him as a business mogul who had his skeletons in the closet, but maneuvers on the market make for more complicated tales than murders, and so he had chatted away about a fabricated murder, which he could be sure that people would not think him capable of, in contradistinction to market speculations. No sooner was I in my taxi than I had forgotten his story and was pondering nothing more than the dialectic under which he had ordered morality, when suddenly I remembered his name: Kohler, Isaak Kohler. I had dined across from him once at a banquet given for the Friends of the Schauspielhaus. Next to him his daughter. At some point. Many years ago. I don’t recall what the occasion for the celebration was. Endless speeches. Kohler sat there that night looking tanned and robust; his daughter remarked that he had just returned from a trip around the world.