Death in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  “Yes, dear sirs … For over a week now, Maass has been exclusively reading a fourteenth-century manuscript entitled Corpus rerum Persicarum. I’ll take this work for analysis tomorrow and compare the translation you photographed with the original. Today I’m going to work on the writing in the saloon carriage and that unfortunate Friedländer’s prophecies. I’ll also find something out about this Ibn Sahim. I might possibly have the first pieces of information the day after tomorrow. I’ll contact you, Criminal Director.” Hartner put on his spectacles and lost interest in his interlocutors. The search for pure truth entirely extinguished his oratorical-didactic passion. He turned his complete attention to the bloody writing and, muttering something to himself, put forward his first intuitive hypotheses. Mock and Anwaldt rose and said goodbye to the obliging scholar. The latter did not reply, occupied exclusively with his thoughts.

  “He’s very polite, this Doctor Hartner. He must have a lot of responsibilities, yet he is ready to help us. How is that possible?” Anwaldt said, seeing that his first words provoked a strange smile on Mock’s face.

  “My dear Herbert, he has a debt of gratitude to repay me. And one so great that he will not – I assure you – be able to repay it even with the most laborious scholarly expertise.”

  IX

  KANTH, SUNDAY, JULY 15TH, 1934

  EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  Baron von Köpperlingk was taking a walk in the large park on his estate. The setting sun always awoke disturbing premonitions and unclear longings in him. The sharp, brassy cries of the peacocks strutting around the manor and the splashing of water in the pool where his friends were frolicking irritated him. The dogs’ barking annoyed him as did the untamed curiosity of peasant children whose eyes followed everything that happened behind the manor walls from trees and fences – even in the evenings and at night – like the eyes of animals. He loathed these impudent, unwashed brats who never averted their eyes and who, at the very sight of him, choked with mocking laughter. He glanced at the wall which surrounded the manor and thought he saw and heard them. Despite the rage which flared within him, he made his way to the manor with a distinguished gait. With the wave of a hand, he caught the attention of Josef, the butler.

  “Where’s Hans?” he said coldly.

  “I don’t know, your Lordship. Someone phoned him and he ran from the manor, very agitated.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “I didn’t consider it fit to worry your Lordship during his walk.”

  The Baron looked calmly at the old servant and counted to ten in his head. With great difficulty, he controlled himself and hissed:

  “Josef, please pass on to me any information concerning Hans, be it – in your eyes – of the least importance. If you don’t in future do this, even once, you’ll be begging in front of the Church of the Sacred Heart.”

  The Baron ran out to the drive and, facing the setting sun, shouted the name of his favourite butler several times. Hostile eyes answered him from the fence. He set off as fast as his legs could carry him towards the iron gates. The jeering looks pursued him; the evening air thickened. “Hans, where are you?” yelled the Baron. He tripped on even ground: “Hans, where are you? I can’t get up.” The evening air thickened; lead thickened in the Baron’s body. From behind the manor wall flashed the barrels of machineguns. Bullets whistled into the gravel alley, kicked up clouds of dust, wounded the Baron’s delicate body, did not allow him either to get up or to fall to the ground. “Where are you, Hans?”

  Hans was sitting next to Max Forstner in the back of the parked Mercedes, its engine still running. He was weeping. His sobs reached a crescendo when two men with smoking machineguns ran up to the car. They took the front seats. The car moved off with a screech.

  “Don’t cry, Hans,” Forstner said with concern. “You simply saved your life. Besides, I saved mine, too.”

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 15TH, 1934

  EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  Kurt Wirth and Hans Zupitza knew that they could not refuse Mock. These two bandits, before whom the entire criminal world of Breslau shook, had a double debt of gratitude owing to “good Uncle Eberhard”. Firstly, he had saved them from the noose; secondly, he had allowed them to carry on with dealings both profitable and completely at odds with German law. In exchange, he sometimes asked them to do that which they did best.

  Wirth had met Zupitza twenty years earlier, in 1914, on the freight ship Prinz Heinrich, which sailed between Danzig and Amsterdam. They became friends without the use of unnecessary words – Zupitza was a mute. The clever, short and slim Wirth, ten years his elder, took the twenty-year-old mute giant under his wing and did not regret his decision a month later when Zupitza saved his life for the first time. It happened in a tavern in Copenhagen. Three drunk, Italian sailors wanted to teach the small, thin German some good manners – meaning how to drink wine. This cultural education entailed pouring gallons of sour Danish plonk down Wirth’s throat. When he was already on the floor, drunk, the Italians decided that they would not be able to civilize that Kraut anyway so it would be better if such a cad disappeared from the face of the earth altogether. They had begun enforcing this decision with the help of broken bottles when into the inn came Zupitza who, a moment earlier, had almost brought down the wooden privy where he had got his hands on one of the numerous girls who comforted sailors in Copenhagen. He had not, however, lost all of his energy in her arms. A few seconds later, the Italians had stopped moving. The following day, the gloomy waiter – whose countenance over time would frighten many – shook like jelly when, questioned by the police, he tried to put across in his unskilled tongue the sound of skin cracked open, the shattering of glass, the moans and the wheezing. When Wirth came to, he weighed out the pros and cons and in Amsterdam abandoned the sailor’s profession for ever. The inseparable Zupitza likewise disembarked permanently on to terra firma. Yet they did not break all contact with the sea. Wirth devised a means of survival not known in Europe at the time: extortion from port smugglers. The pair formed an efficient mechanism whereby Wirth was the brain, Zupitza the muscle. Wirth would lead the negotiations with the smugglers; if these proved not to be submissive, Zupitza would kidnap and murder them, using methods invented by Wirth. Soon all the police in post-war Europe were looking for them: in the docks of Hamburg and Stockholm, where they left their victims’ mutilated remains; in the brothels of Vienna and Berlin, where they spent mountains of increasingly worthless marks. They felt the chase on their backs. Chance associates began to betray them more and more frequently in exchange for worthless promises. Wirth had a choice: either to leave for America, where the Mafia awaited them, bloodthirsty and ruthless competition in the field of extortion, or to find a quiet and peaceful place in Europe. The first choice was very dangerous, the second virtually impossible, since European policemen everywhere, dreaming of fame, carried photographs of both bandits in their pockets.

  Nobody achieved that fame, but there was one man who consciously rejected it. This was a policeman from Breslau – Criminal Director Eberhard Mock – who, in the mid-’20s was in charge of so-called Vice Affairs in the Kleinburg district. It was shortly after his extraordinary promotion. All the newspapers wrote about the brilliant career of the forty-one-year-old policeman who, from one day to the next, had become one of the most important people in the city – Deputy to the Chief of the Breslau Police Criminal Department, Mühlhaus. On May 18th, 1925, during a routine check on a brothel on Kastanien-Allee, Mock, shaking with nerves, enlisted a constable from the street and, together, they burst into the room where the duo, Wirth and Zupitza, were mingling with a female trio. Mock, afraid that the arrested men might not obey him, shot them just in case, even before they had managed to clamber out from under the girls. Then, with his constable’s help, he tied them up and, in a hired cart, took them to Karlowitz. There, on the flood banks, Mock presented the two bound and bleeding bandits with his conditions: he would not stand them
up in front of a tribunal if they settled in Breslau and obeyed him unconditionally. They accepted the proposition without reservation. Nor were there any reservations as to the whole situation on the part of the constable, Kurt Smolorz. He was quick to pick up Mock’s reasoning, not least since it most intimately concerned his own career. Both bandits found themselves in a certain friendly brothel where, handcuffed to their beds, they were subjected to loving first aid. After a week of convalescence, Mock made his conditions explicit: he demanded the large sum of a thousand dollars for himself and five hundred for Smolorz. He did not trust German money, which was being wasted away at the time by the fatal disease, inflation. In exchange, he proposed to Wirth that he would close his eyes on the extortion racket against smugglers who, shunting their dirty goods to Stettin, paused in Breslau’s river port. It was an argument of a sentimental nature which inclined Wirth to accept these propositions unconditionally. Mock had decided to separate the inseparable companions and assured Wirth that – if the money was not handed over on time – Zupitza would be turned over to the hands of justice. A second important argument was the prospect of a peaceful, settled life instead of the wandering life they had led up until then. Two weeks later, Mock and Smolorz were wealthy men, while Wirth and Zupitza – sprung from the executioner’s axe – entered terra incognita, fallow ground which they swiftly cultivated in their own way.

  That evening, they were happily drinking warm vodka in Gustav Thiel’s tavern on Bahnhofstrasse. The tiny man with a foxy face, slashed with scars, and the square, silent Golem accompanying him, made an unusual couple. Some of the customers laughed at them surreptitiously; one of the regulars was completely unabashed and openly expressed his amusement. The fat man with pink, wrinkled skin kept exploding into laughter and pointing his chubby finger in their direction. Since they were not reacting to his taunts, he recognized them as cowards. And there was nothing he liked more than to torment fearful people. He rose and, pushing his feet hard into the damp floorboards, made towards his victims. He stood near their table and laughed hoarsely:

  “Well then, my little man … Are you going to have a drink with good old uncle Konrad?”

  Wirth did not so much as glance up at him. He calmly drew strange shapes with his finger on the wet oilcloth. Zupitza gazed pensively at the pickled gherkins swimming in a murky solution. At last, Wirth turned his eyes to Konrad. Not of his own free will, certainly: the fat man had squeezed his cheeks and was ramming a bottle of vodka into his mouth.

  “Piss off, you fat pig!” Wirth with difficulty suppressed the memories of Copenhagen.

  The fat man blinked in disbelief and grabbed Wirth by the lapels of his jacket. Not noticing the giant rise from his seat, he butted his head, but before it reached the would-be victim’s face Zupitza’s open hand materialized and the assailant’s forehead collided with it. That same hand grasped the fat man by the nose and shoved him on to the counter. Wirth, in the meantime, was not idle. He leapt on to the bar, grabbed Konrad by the collar and slammed his head into the countertop wet with beer. Zupitza took advantage of the moment. He spread his arms and suddenly clapped them together. The fat man’s head found itself between two fists; blows from either side crushed his temples, soot poured over his eyes. Zupitza took the inert body under the arms while Wirth made way for him. Those present in the tavern were numb with fear. Nobody would laugh at the singular couple again. They all knew that Konrad Schmidt did not give in to just anyone.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 15TH, 1934

  NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  Unusual equipment had been arranged in cell no. 2 of the investigative prison in the Police Praesidium: a dentist’s chair, its arms and leg-rests fitted with leather straps and a brass buckle. At that moment, the straps tightly hugged the mighty, stout limbs of the man sitting in it, a man so terrified that he was almost swallowing his gag.

  “Did you know, sirs, that what every sadist fears most is another sadist?” Mock calmly finished his cigarette. “Consider, Schmidt, these men,” – he indicated Wirth and Zupitza – “they are the cruellest sadists in all Europe. And do you know what they like most? You won’t find out if you answer my questions nicely.”

  Mock signalled to Smolorz to remove the gag from Konrad’s mouth. The prisoner breathed heavily. Anwaldt asked the first question:

  “What did you do to Friedländer during the interrogation that made him admit to killing Marietta von der Malten?”

  “Nothing, he was simply afraid of us, that’s all. He said he killed her.”

  Anwaldt gave the signal to the duo. Wirth yanked Konrad’s jaw down, Zupitza thrust an iron rod into his mouth. He squeezed the upper first tooth with a small pair of pliers and broke it in half. Konrad screamed for almost half a minute. Then Zupitza removed the rod. Anwaldt asked the question again.

  “We tied the Jew’s daughter to the couch. Walter said we’d rape her if he didn’t admit to slashing up that one in the train.”

  “Which Walter?”

  “Piontek.”

  “And then he confessed?”

  “Yes. Why in the hell is he asking that?” Konrad turned to Mock. “For you, it’s …”

  He did not manage to finish. Mock broke in:

  “But you screwed that Jewish girl anyway, eh, Schmidt?”

  “It goes without saying,” Konrad’s eyes hid in folds of skin.

  “And now, tell us, who is this Turk with whom you tortured Anwaldt?”

  “That I don’t know. The boss simply told me that with this one here we … both … well …” here he indicated the Assistant with his eyes.

  Mock gave Zupitza the signal. The rod found itself in Konrad’s jaws again and Zupitza yanked the pliers down. What remained of the broken tooth crunched in its gum. At the next signal, Zupitza broke off a bit of the second upper first. Konrad choked on blood, wheezed and sobbed. After a minute, they removed the rod from his teeth. Unfortunately, Schmidt could not say anything because his jaw was dislocated. It took Smolorz a long time to put it back in place.

  “I am asking you again. Who is that Turk? What is his name and what is he doing at the Gestapo?”

  “I don’t know. I swear.”

  This time Schmidt pressed his jaws together so tightly as to make it impossible for them to reintroduce the rod. Then Wirth took a hammer and positioned a huge nail on the hand of the bound man. He slammed at the hammer. Konrad screamed. Not for the first time that day, Zupitza demonstrated his reflexes. When the Gestapo-man’s jaws flew open, the rod quickly found itself between them.

  “Are you going to talk or do you want to lose some more teeth?” asked Anwaldt. “Are you going to talk?”

  The prisoner nodded. The rod was removed.

  “Kemal Erkin. He came to the Gestapo in order to train. The boss holds him in high esteem. I don’t know any more.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mock was certain that Konrad had told them everything. Unfortunately – even too much. Because in the broken, stifled phrase “For you, it’s …” he had touched on the murky secret of Mock’s agreement with Piontek. Luckily, he had only brushed up against it. Mock did not know whether any of the men present could guess the rest of the sentence. He looked at the tired but clearly moved Anwaldt and at Smolorz, calm as usual. (No, they probably haven’t guessed.) Wirth and Zupitza looked at Mock in expectation.

  “We won’t get any more out of him, gentlemen.” He got up close to Konrad and gagged him again. “Wirth, there’s to be no trace left of this man, understood? Apart from that, I advise you leave Germany. You were seen in that tavern butchering Schmidt. If you’d acted like professionals and waited for him to go outside, you could safely carry on with your business. But you got carried away. Did you have to deal with him in the tavern? I had no idea you got so violent when someone offers you vodka. Too bad. Tomorrow, when Konrad doesn’t turn up for work … the day after tomorrow at the latest, the entire Gestapo in Breslau will be looking
for your distinctive mugs. In three days, they’re going to be looking for you all over Germany. I advise you to leave the country. Go somewhere far away … I consider your debt repaid.”

  X

  BRESLAU, MONDAY, JULY 16TH, 1934

  NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Konrad Schmidt’s body had been lying at the bottom of the Oder beyond Hollandwiesen for ten hours already when Mock and Anwaldt lit up their choice Bairam cigars from Przedecki’s and were having their first sip of strong, Arabic coffee. Leo Hartner did not conceal his pleasure. He was sure he was going to surprise and interest his listeners. Pacing his office, he constructed in his mind a plan of how to present his report, appropriately distributing the turning-points, composing apt recapitulations. Seeing that his guests were growing impatient with the prevailing silence, he began his lecture with apparent retardation.

  “My dear friends, in his Geschichte der persischen Litteratur Wilhelm Grünhagen mentioned a lost historical work from the fourteenth century describing the Crusades. This work, entitled The War of Allah’s Army against the Infidels, was supposed to have been written by a certain educated Persian, an Ibn Sahim. Gentlemen – ‘So what?’ – you may say. After all, many works have disappeared … here’s … yet another old manuscript … Such disdain would, however, be unfounded. If Ibn Sahim’s work had survived to this day, we would be in possession of yet one more source of the fascinating history of the Crusades, a source all the more interesting in that it was written by a man from the other side of the barricades – a Musulman.”

  Mock and Anwaldt lived up to the lecturer’s hopes. The epic delay of the narration did not disconcert either of the would-be Classicists. Hartner was excited. He placed his slim hand on the pile of papers: