The Master of the Day of Judgment

by Leo Perutz

  That was my first reaction, but I changed my mind.

  "I'll have breakfast later," I told Vinzenz. "Ask the gentleman to be patient for a little while longer. Tell him I'll be with him in five minutes."

  The engineer was sitting at my desk when I went in. He looked tired, as if he had been up all night. There were five or six cigarette stubs in the ashtray in front of him, obviously he had chain-smoked while waiting for me. He was holding his head in his hands and staring into the void with a curiously glazed expression. His lower lip was slightly twisted, as if he were in physical pain, but that expression vanished from his face as soon as he was aware of my presence. He rose and approached me. There was a look of eager expectation in his eyes.

  "You must forgive me for disturbing you so early," he began, "but I really could not wait any longer."

  "No, I'm obliged to you," I replied. "Contrary to my usual habit, I slept much too long. Would you like a cup of tea?"

  "That's very kind of you, no tea, thank you, but if I may be so bold, a little brandy . . . Thank you, that's enough. Well, you know why I'm here."

  "I assume Felix sent you," I replied. "Has anything new happened since yesterday?"

  "No, not yet. Nothing new has happened so far," he muttered, and that glazed look reappeared in his eyes.

  "Then at the moment I really don't know ..."

  "I'm afraid I've disturbed you for nothing," he said. He sat leaning forward, looking past me with an entirely expressionless face. "I imagined you would be able to tell me to whom you talked on the telephone about Eugen Bischoff yesterday, you remember? You haven't thought any more about who the lady was?"

  "Yes, I have," I said hurriedly, and as I spoke I had a kind of inspiration. I suddenly reached a conclusion that struck me as convincing and irrefutable. "I have been thinking about it, and I have decided that the lady to whom I talked can only be an actress whom I must have seen on the stage, for Eugen Bischoff and I had few friends and acquaintances in common. But unfortunately I have so far failed to remember when and in what play or plays I have seen her."

  "Thank you," the engineer said briefly, staring blankly at the green silk prayer mat on the wall.

  "I think the name will occur to me, but you must give me time," I went on after a while. "Not too many people come into it, because recently I haven't been going to the theatre very much."

  The engineer sat listlessly facing me, resting his head on his hand. He still said nothing, and his silence became intolerable to me.

  "Supposing we met again this afternoon," I suggested, "say about five o'clock, if you'll allow me the time, I'm sure that by then ..."

  He interrupted me with a gesture.

  "No, don't trouble yourself any further," he said, and suddenly asked for the brandy bottle and started drinking one glass after another like a maniac.

  "At five o'clock this afternoon, you said," he went on after about the seventh glass. "At five o'clock this afternoon I shall know to whom you talked yesterday. As the situation is at present, there's no possible doubt about it."

  "Really?" I exclaimed in incredulous surprise. "Have you a clue, then? Honestly, I can't imagine how ..."

  "I know what I'm saying, you can depend on it," the engineer muttered, and helped himself to yet another glass of brandy and then a second and a third, he seemed to be used to drinking brandy by the tumblerful.

  "It would naturally be extremely important to find out who the lady is," I said. "I think we have some questions to put to her, don't you think so? Particularly ..."

  He shook his head.

  "I don't think we'll get anything from her," he said and relapsed into his brooding silence.

  A few minutes passed while we sat silently facing each other. In my bedroom Vinzenz was muttering to himself as usual. Sometimes he interrupted himself to hum the refrain of some Styrian soldier's song. Muffled street noises were audible through the open window, a passing lorry made the teacups, the brandy glasses and the silver milk jug rattle. I noticed on the desk the notes I had jotted down the night before, and I picked them up and put them in my pocket.

  The engineer suddenly rose to his feet. He paced very energetically up and down the room several times and stopped in front of my suitcases.

  "So that settles that," he said in completely different tones.

  "I'm sorry to have disturbed your sleep. It was really quite unnecessary. I see you're going away."

  "Yes, to Bohemia. I have a small estate near Chrudim. Another brandy? I'm taking the seven o'clock train this evening."

  "May I ask what has persuaded you to leave here so suddenly?"

  "Roebuck that are waiting to be shot, that's all."

  "Do you think the roebuck on your estate would be very upset if you kept them waiting for a few days? Joking apart, baron, can't you postpone your trip for a few days?"

  "Frankly, I can't think of anything that would induce me to do that."

  "Don't be impatient with me straight away," the engineer said, raising his head and looking me in the face, "and permit me to be perfectly frank with you. I was at the Racing Club last night and talked about you with some good friends of yours, in fact you were the subject of a pretty lively discussion. No, you're not the man I first took you for, you're not an intellectual or an aesthete. Whenever your name was mentioned, it was in a strange tone of respectful hatred. It was said that in some of your affairs you displayed a certain — shall we call it a certain broad-mindedness in your choice of means. Someone referred to you as a splendid rogue — please remain seated, I am reporting facts, I have no intention of offending you. You want to go to your estate to shoot roebuck. I understand. But why? You're not responsible for Eugen Bischoff's death, you can't be. After all, if only half of what I was told about you was true, I don't understand why in this instance you did not defend yourself, why you did not give my friend Felix as good as you got from him."

  "And I, sir, don't understand what all this — what Felix has to do with my going away for a few days' shooting."

  "Do you want to play hide-and-seek with me?" asked the engineer, looking at me seriously. "Why? Don't deceive yourself, none of your friends will fail to remark on your talent for skilful stage management, even if in the newspaper accounts of your hunting accident there is no specific reference to it."

  I had to think for a few seconds before I realised what he meant. I rose to my feet, for I had no desire to continue this conversation. The engineer rose too. I realised from the flickering of his eyes, his flushed cheeks, and the fidgety movements of his hands that the alcohol was beginning to have its effect.

  "It's always disagreeable to meddle in other people's affairs," he went on in a kind of excitement. "All the same, I suggest to you that you postpone your trip for two days. I appreciate that you are in a situation in which you have no choice. But if I promise you that Felix and I will tell you the name of Eugen Bischoff's murderer within forty-eight hours?"

  This made no impression on me, I did not take it seriously, I was convinced that it was merely the alcohol that made him talk with such arrogant self-assurance. I felt challenged by this, and had an abrupt refusal ready on my lips. But then it occurred to me that he might have come across some new fact, some detail that had eluded me the day before. I don't know how it happened, but suddenly I felt practically certain that he knew something that I did not, and it seemed to me to be perfectly conceivable that he might have discovered a clue of some sort in the pavilion enabling him to draw conclusions about the identity of the unknown stranger whom he called the murderer.

  "Fingerprints?" I asked.

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly and did not answer.

  "Did the murderer leave fingerprints in the pavilion?" I asked.

  He shook his head.

  "No, there were no fingerprints or anything of that kind. Listen. The murderer has never been in the villa. Eugen Bischoff was alone in the pavilion the whole time."

  "But yesterday you said ..."

 
"That was a mistake. No-one was with him. When he fired the two shots he was wholly under the influence of an alien will — that's my view of the situation today. The murderer was not with him either at the time or beforehand, because I know he has not left his home for years ..."

  "Who?" I exclaimed in surprise.

  "The murderer."

  "You know who he is?"

  "No, I don't. But I have reason to believe he's an Italian who knows hardly a word of German and, as I said, has not left his flat for years."

  "And how do you know that?"

  "He's a monster," the engineer went on, ignoring my question. "A kind of monster, a man of huge physique, obviously morbidly fat and consequently condemned to complete immobility. So much for his physique. And the strange thing about it is that this repulsive creature has an extraordinary attraction for artists. One was a painter and the other an actor, hasn't that struck you?"

  "But how do you know that physically the man's a monster?"

  "A monster. A human freak of nature," the engineer repeated. "How do I know that? You now think me a marvel of perspicacity, but actually I only had a bit of luck in my inquiries. "

  He interrupted himself and looked attentively at the wood carving of the armchair in front of my desk.

  "Biedermeier chairs are known for their fragility, aren't they?" he said. "This furniture certainly isn't Biedermeier. Is it Chippendale? Well, Dr Löwenfeld overheard a telephone conversation in the director's office that Eugen Bischoff had with a lady who may have been the one to whom you spoke yesterday. Do you know Dr Löwenfeld?"

  "The director's secretary?"

  "Dramatic adviser or secretary or producer, I don't know what his job at the theatre is. I met him this morning and he told me . . . Wait a moment."

  The engineer produced a tram ticket from his waistcoat pocket on the back of which he had scribbled some notes.

  "Dr Löwenfeld remembered the conversation word for word," he went on. "This is what Eugen Bischoff said: 'You want me to bring him? Impossible, my dear lady. Your Biedermeier furniture would never stand the weight — and there's no lift where he lives, how could I get him down the stairs?' That was all. Then came some of the conventional phrases with which one ends a telephone conversation."

  He carefully folded the ticket and looked at me inquiringly.

  "Well?" he said. "What do you think of that?"

  "I think it rather hazardous to draw such far-reaching conclusions from those few words," I said. "How do you know it was the murderer whom they were talking about?"

  "Who else could it have been?" the engineer replied. "The man who can't go out because there's no lift in the building he lives in is the murderer, I'm certain of that. I now know what he's like. A freak of pathological bulk, and very likely lame into the bargain. Do you think it will be very difficult to find him?"

  He began developing his plans for my benefit, striding up and down the room.

  "For one thing, there's the Medical Association whom we could ask. A 'case' of that kind could hardly be unknown to the specialists. Then there's the fact that human beings of that size nearly always have heart trouble. So I may be able to find out more about him from a heart specialist. He's an Italian, and apparently doesn't understand a word of German, and that further reduces the number of possible suspects. But I hope to be able to save myself the trouble of following up all these possible leads, because I think there will be a much simpler way of finding the murderer. There's only one thing I don't understand. What attracted Eugen Bischoff to this Italian? Did he have a taste for monsters and freaks of nature?"

  "How do you know the murderer is an Italian?" I asked.

  "To say I know it would be an over-statement," the engineer replied. "It's only a conclusion I've drawn. No doubt you'll again call it hazardous. That doesn't matter. I'll try to explain to you why I'm convinced that the murderer must be Italian, and then you can say what you like about it."

  He collapsed into the armchair and rested his chin on the backs of his clasped hands.

  "I must go back to the prehistory of the case," he began. "Do you remember that the naval officer whom Eugen Bischoff told us about set out to track down his brother's killer? We know what happened. One day he came home unusually late for his midday meal, and he committed suicide an hour later. That day he had found and spoken to his brother's murderer. That's clear to you, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "Then listen to this. In the last days of his life Eugen Bischoff similarly came home very late, the first time on Wednesday and the second time on Friday. He came by taxi, because at table he mentioned that he had some trouble ahead with the police — his driver had collided with the trailer of a tram in the Burggasse, and he would have to give evidence. On Saturday, when he came home late again, he was tired, distracted and monosyllabic. Dina assumed that rehearsals had gone on longer than usual, but did not ask about it. Today I discovered that on all three days rehearsals ended at the usual time. So you see that in both cases the circumstances that preceded the crime were the same. I can see only one difference, but it's an important one. You know what I'm referring to?"

  "No."

  "Strange that it hasn't occurred to you. Well, the murderer exercised a strong suggestive influence over his victim. To all appearances the naval officer succumbed to this on the very first day. In Eugen Bischoff's case it took the murderer three days to impose his will. Can you explain that to me? Actors in general are easily suggestible people, one would expect a naval officer to put up a much more energetic resistance. I have thought about it, and have found only one satisfactory explanation. The murderer speaks a language familiar to the naval officer in which, however, Eugen Bischoff could make himself understood only in clumsy and roundabout ways. From that I conclude that the man must be an Italian, for Italian was the only foreign language of which Eugen Bischoff had any knowledge. You may be right, baron, it's a hypothesis and a very bold one, that I admit ..."

  "It could be you're right," I said, for I remembered that Eugen Bischoff really was a great lover of Italy and all things Italian. "Your train of thought strikes me as completely logical. You have almost persuaded me."

  The engineer smiled. An expression of satisfaction appeared on his face. My admission obviously gave him pleasure.

  "I admit that I should have hit on those ideas myself. All honour to your detective acumen. I no longer doubt that you'll discover the identity of the lady to whom I talked on the telephone yesterday before I do."

  The smile vanished from his face and furrows appeared on his brow.

  "Not much detective acumen will be needed for that, I'm afraid," he said slowly. He raised his hands and dropped them again, and that gesture betrayed a resignation the reason for which I did not understand.

  He relapsed into silence. He took a cigarette from his silver cigarette case and held it between his fingers. He was so lost in thought that he forgot to light it.

  "You see, baron," he said after a pause, "while I was sitting here waiting for you, I had — it won't be easy to make the association intelligible to you — well, while I was sitting here I was naturally thinking about the lady on the telephone and her really strange reference to the Day of Judgment — I myself don't know how it happened — but suddenly I saw the five hundred dead of the Munho river."

  He stared blankly at the cigarette in his hand.

  "That is, I didn't see them," he went on. "But something made me think what it would be like if I were confronted with five hundred yellow distorted faces, all of them desperate at the certainty of death, looking at me accusingly ..."

  He tried to strike a match, but it broke.

  "A childish idea, of course. You're right," he said after a while. "What does that shadowy phrase mean to people of the present day? The Day of Judgment, an empty phrase from the past. God's Judgment Seat. Do those words rouse any feeling in you? Of course when the sound of the Dies Irae resounded from the pulpit your forefathers were stricken with mad terror and
went down on their knees. The Yosches" — he suddenly assumed a casual, conversational tone as if what he was talking about, while perhaps not uninteresting, was not of any real importance — ' the Yosches come from a very Catholic area, the Neuburg Palatinate, don't they? I see you're surprised that I know so much about your family background. Don't imagine that I normally take any interest in the genealogy of baronial houses, but one likes to know with whom one is dealing, so last night at the club I looked up the Almanach de Gotha . . . What was I saying? No, I wasn't frightened, no, of course I wasn't, that would have been absurd. All the same, it was a very strange feeling. Brandy is an excellent way of getting rid of troublesome ideas."

  His cigarette was alight at last, and he leaned back and blew blue smoke rings into the air, I watched them, and all sorts of ideas came into my head. Suddenly I felt I had found the key to the engineer's strange character. This fair, broad-shouldered giant, this robust and determined man of action, had his heel of Achilles. He had talked about this long-past war experience for the second time in twenty-four hours. He was no drinker, to him drink was merely a sanctuary, a place of brief refuge from a desperate struggle in which he was involved. A burning sense of guilt that would not heal over followed him through the years and gave him no respite. The slightest reminder of it cast him down utterly.

  The clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven. The engineer rose to say goodbye.

  "I have your word for it, haven't I? You're postponing your trip," he said, and held out his hand.

  "What gave you that idea?" I said irritably, for I had not given him any such assurance. "I have not changed my plans. I'm leaving today."

  "Is that so?" he exclaimed angrily. "Have I been wasting my time? I've spent two hours trying to get you to see reason, and ..."

  I looked him in the face. He immediately saw that this was not the way to talk to me.

  "I beg your pardon," he said. "I've been very stupid. At bottom the whole affair is no concern of mine."