by Pavel Mandys
It occurred to the commissioner that crimes perpetrated outside of office hours should be punished with an especially painful sentence, but he kept it to himself, and commenced the investigation with vigor.
He ordered the remnants of Golem to be scraped off the walls and the arch of the sanctuary, and for them to be delivered to the morgue. Then he interrogated Rabbi Flekeles (who, as per usual, didn’t know anything) and the other gathered Jews, with the same result. Finally, he carefully examined the site of the explosion, but in vain.
Therefore, he went back to the pub, but the vat with that exquisite smoked beer was almost empty and all the chairs were already turned upside down on the tables, perfectly aligned. The commissioner thus slapped Mrs. Albatross on her bottom, ate a bit of homemade onion soup while standing, wiped the tears from his eyes, and headed home to bed.
First thing in the morning, he took a coach and left for the General Hospital.
The morgue was cold and there was a sweet malodor of lifeless bodies. The pathologist, Doctor Tombs, as was his custom, addressed the dead: “You were a man, based on the completely calcified, swordlike spur on the sternum. More than forty years old. The cause of death was alcohol-induced fermentation. The murderer made you swallow so much yeast (probably baker’s, using a mechanical apparatus designed for force-feeding geese) that all of your body tissues started to ferment. The pressure of fermentation gasses bloated your body so that you looked like Golem, and eventually your body exploded.”
“What kind of apparatus?” Durman asked.
Doctor Tombs, after a short pause, took the commissioner to the adjoining morgue, where he and his colleagues had been fattening a goose in a wire cage amongst all the coffins. The bird was so morbidly obese that it filled the entire cage and swelled out of it through the wire loops. Doctor Tombs picked up an object similar to a gun, and forced it down the throat of the dead animal, inserting the iron tube into its esophagus first. From above, he poured potato dumplings into the funnel, and as he was turning the crank, the machine pumped the food directly into the goose’s stomach.
“Today is the feast of St. Martin, so the bird is going into the pot,” he called through the open door to the cadavers.
The commissioner was shaken by the image of the tortured animal. “Don’t you feel sorry for the poor thing?”
Tombs put the apparatus back into its place, caressed the goose through the cage, and shrugged. “Pleasure is born out of suffering.”
The commissioner searched the dead man’s clothes, and in the breast pocket he found a small piece of paper. On it, there was a drawing of a square with a rhombus inside, and inside of that, another square. The space between the large and small square was divided by lines into twelve isosceles triangles marked by the Roman numerals I through XII. Inside the image were scrawled some words.
“It’s a horoscope,” said Doctor Tombs, who was looking at the paper over the commissioner’s shoulder. “I know because I recently dissected an astrologer who had his horoscope tattooed on his heart.”
* * *
Durman visited the nearest astrologer, and after much ado the man disclosed to him that it was the horoscope of a man born in Prague on July 27, 1824, and that he was supposed to die on November 10, 1865, meaning a day before his actual death. His name was not there. To divine the date of death from heavenly bodies may have been possible, but it was unethical; therefore, most astrologers refused to do it. This horoscope was probably developed by an astrologer named Detlef Murbach, because he did belong to those few black sheep who, for a few pennies, would predict one’s death—in addition, Durman recognized his handwriting. Murbach lived somewhere in the ghetto . . . Wait a minute, it’s right here: Thin Street, number 88.
And true, at the given address, Murbach had rented a small shack built, with enviable courage, on the roof of a building, on a plank between two chimneys. When Durman climbed up the ladder and heaved open the hatch in the floor that served as a door, he didn’t find anything interesting inside. Absolutely nothing—except a bed, chair, table, plate with a spoon dried onto it, some frayed ephemeris charts, a small empty keg labeled baker’s yeast, and a used feeding apparatus. In the corner there was a cage with a goose inside, similar to the one in Doctor Tombs’s morgue. The bird was so fat that it could not get through the small opening in the cage, and Durman had to borrow pliers from the doorman and cut the wire. The emancipated goose was far bigger than the cage, and it held the form of a cube. The commissioner took it into his hands and threw it out the window.
The goose spread her wings, and for a moment it looked as if she would fly. But then her weight forced her down to the ground, where the fall broke her long white neck.
She died, but she died free.
The commissioner, based on the evidence, concluded that the victim of yesterday’s explosion in the synagogue had been the astrologer Detlef Murbach. Now all he needed to do was to track down the murderer.
* * *
Durman sent officers to all of the parishes in Prague to copy from their registries information on all males born on the twenty-seventh of July, 1824. There were only three: Kylián Smell, baptized in the St. Steven’s parish in the New Town; Baltazar Carbuncle, baptized in the St. Haštal’s parish in the Old Town; and Matěj Snide, baptized in the St. Joseph’s parish in Malá Strana. Snide had recently died of tuberculosis, and Smell was in the military in Halič, so only Carbuncle was left. The commissioner ordered a search for him around the entire city of Prague, and because it was evening already, he set out back to the ghetto, heading straight to the pub.
It was the feast of St. Martin, and everywhere there was the wonderful smell of roasted St. Martin’s goose. The commissioner, after his terrifying experience with the force-feeding apparatus, did not want to taste the goose at first, but his reservations didn’t last, and he finally gave up and ordered one entire goose without fixings. The lovely animal glistened like a golden crane gliding on a lake of iridescent grease. She was magnificently juicy, because during roasting she’d been continuously moistened with a stock of giblets. The crusty skin was decorated with feathers made of phyllo dough.
By the time he was finishing the meal, his eyes were bulging out of their sockets; still, he went for a goose period, or more like an exclamation point—a neck finely stuffed with mashed liver, fried in its own lard.
At the exact moment when the commissioner was ascending to the utmost apex of happiness, a man in a black coat approached his table. Quietly gazing at him with his bloodred eyes, the man simply stood there inhaling. The commissioner thought the man may have been shy to speak and so he kindly addressed him: “Would you like a cigar?”
At which point the man’s body cracked like a walnut along his breastbone.
Chaos ensued. Blood sprayed, the guests shrieked, goose meat burned and stuck to pans. The commissioner covered the corpse with a tablecloth, slapped the most hysterical women, had the pub cleaned with a wet mop, and ordered a large shot of rum for everybody, courtesy of the police. The people calmed down and Durman interrogated them.
The dead man had come in from the street. Why he burst, nobody knew. They knew him very well here; he was a regular. Actually, a nightly one. His name was Hubert Anywho, and he made a living as a teller. Not in a bank, but as a fortune-teller.
Durman, stuffed with goose like a goose stuffed with dumplings, barely dragged himself home into his small home, where he toppled onto his bed and started snoring before falling asleep.
* * *
The third day was a Sunday—no working, no murdering.
* * *
The following Monday morning, the commissioner finally succeeded in digesting the St. Martin’s goose and could continue with his investigation. According to the domicile registry, the suspect—Baltazar Carbuncle—lived on Wight Street, right at the gates to the ghetto. Furthermore, he discovered that Baltazar made a living as an organ repairman, but according to the accountant, he’d left his workshop yesterday without tellin
g anybody where he was going and he never returned.
In the meantime, a postmortem report from Doctor Tombs came in: the murderer of the fortune-teller had shoved into his larynx a tube with a valve, so that he was able to inhale but not to exhale. The air pressure in the lungs increased with each breath until it ripped him apart. The same valves could be found in organ pipes, so that the air didn’t return to the bags.
Then an undertaker came in, with a telegram: ANOTHER MURDER HAS JUST OCCURRED IN THE GHETTO, RABBI STREET, NUMBER 391. —CRYSTAELO
Durman immediately left for the given address. A still-warm corpse lay in a pool of its own blood, pierced with a stiletto which the perpetrator had left in the wound. According to the maid, his name was Crystaelo and he was a fortune-teller. He was a young, wealthy-looking man clothed in a violet silk smoking jacket, with a nightcap on his head. Investigating his domicile in the ghetto, Durman found a big and pricey cabinet filled with books, along with other volumes lined up along several bookshelves, and stacked in any free space in unstable columns, mountains, and steeples. The man had also used books as a defense against the murderer. From the door to the corpse, seven books pierced with the same weapon were scattered.
The commissioner picked up and aligned the books. The titles on their spines composed a curious poem:
Baking Desserts
Child Rearing
Milano Tour Guide
Rules of Jewish Fasting
Grooming Ginger Mustaches
The Second Czech King
Weathercock of the Candlestick Makers Guild
He had a feeling that a message was hidden in the connection between these books, but he could not figure it out. His pensive moment was interrupted by a manly mixture of spermaceti and the musky smell of hair gel that was used by only one person in Prague—his best friend and assistant, an autarchic detective, one Egon Alter. Egon brushed the book spines with an extended digit on the silver hand on the head of his walking cane, and declared in an operatic baritone: “The connection among the books carries tidings.”
Alter, as it happened, had a peculiar talent of always finding himself in the right place at the right time, and often it appeared that he was able to read thoughts.
“The Czech king Vladislav I was crowned by the Holy Roman Caesar Bedřich I Barbarossa. And Barbarossa means . . .” Durman started thinking aloud.
“Ginger mustache!” added Alter, and continued: “The Czech army led by King Vladislav in the year 1158 conquered the famous city of Milan without a fight . . .”
“. . . by roasting children made of dough in front of the city gates. The denizens of Milan believed that the Czechs actually devoured children and opened their gates to them . . .”
“. . . which they should not have done because the Czechs robbed the city and thus acquired tremendous spoils. The most valuable was . . .” Alter let Durman pick up the thread.
“. . . a menorah, a sacred candelabrum with seven branches from the Solomon Temple in Jerusalem. This temple had been destroyed twice on the same day on the ninth of the month Av; first in 586 before Christ by the Babylonians, and the second time in 70 AD by the Romans. To this day, Jews commemorate that horrible day with . . .”
“. . . a fast,” said Alter. “And where is the candelabrum now?”
“In the church treasury of the St. Vít Cathedral, obviously,” answered Durman.
“And that’s where the perpetrator hides, clearly. That’s what the books were supposed to tell us. Let’s go arrest him.”
They were already on their way out, but the commissioner suddenly returned and skimmed the books one more time. “Dear Egon, look over here,” he said triumphantly, and pointed to a circular stain on the title page. “This time your own genius has betrayed you. We’re not going to any cathedral. The answer to the conundrum is here in the ghetto.”
* * *
The friends hurriedly walked a few blocks through the winding streets of the ghetto. They entered the house, climbed up the creaky stairs, and knocked on a door.
The door opened a crack, and a surly face appeared in the small opening: “I do not wish to be interrupted.”
The commissioner displayed his police badge, with the Byzantine eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. “Baltazar Carbuncle, I am arresting you for a triple murder.”
“Well, come in.”
They entered a small room with a view of a wall. The cracked mirror on the wall multiplied the little that was there: the dirt line in the sink, a small stove with a crooked pipe, and a worn sofa.
There was a momentary silence, then both Durman and Carbuncle spoke at once:
“Why did you kill them?”
“How did you find me?”
“When you answer my questions, I’ll answer yours,” the commissioner promised.
“Okay. The astrologer Murbach learned from the stars that I would die this year, 1865, on the tenth of November. I killed him because I did not die on that day.”
“Why did you want to know the time of your death?” Alter asked.
“Because since my childhood, I have feared uncertainty more than death. Every day, I was dying of fear that it would be my last. When I learned from my horoscope when I would die, I finally got rid of that fright. But once it became clear that that prediction had been wrong, the terrible fright returned.”
“And what about the yeast?”
Carbuncle shrugged. “It was simply at hand. Murbach applied it to his nose to treat the itchiness.”
“And the fortune-teller, Anywho?”
“He claimed to know the future. So I tested him. I asked how he would die. He said: While making love to a beautiful girl. It was not true. That’s why I brought the valve and rammed it down his throat.”
“And the third one?”
“At the beginning, I thought that Crystaelo was a true clairvoyant . . .” The murderer sank into his memories . . .
* * *
When he went to the clairvoyant’s house, he looked for the door knocker in vain. He was just about to knock using his fist when he noticed a small plaque with an inscription:
CRYSTAELO
Divination, prophecy, augury, clairvoyance.
Do not knock. If I do not open, I am not home.
Before he finished reading, the door silently opened and the inscription became blurry. The clairvoyant invited him in.
“I want . . .” Carbuncle started, but Crystaelo interrupted him with a gesture.
“I know, you want to know the place and time of your death. I know both, but I will only half fulfill your wish: I will tell you when you’ll die though not where.”
Carbuncle offered him money, all his possessions, but it did not work.
“If I want money, I’ll buy a lottery ticket.”
Carbuncle pleaded and prodded—in vain. Finally he started threatening to kill the clairvoyant, but Crystaelo only laughed: “You dummy, I lost interest in living a long time ago. I am denied surprise, curiosity, and suspense. I cannot play any game, happenstance plays no role in my life. The worst is—I will never know love, because with every woman I know beforehand what will happen to her.”
Desperate, Carbuncle looked around and noticed a stiletto, casually placed in the umbrella stand. He picked up the weapon and attacked. The clairvoyant deflected seven thrusts with seven books, but the eighth time, he dropped his hands and let the steel tip pierce his heart.
“You’ll die today at eight in the evening,” he whispered, and then he himself drew his final breath.
* * *
The commissioner looked at his golden watch with an inscription from the emperor engraved on the cap. It was five to eight in the evening.
“Can I ask questions now?” the murderer asked politely.
“Of course.”
“Why aren’t you looking for me in the cathedral? Have you not discovered the secret of the seven books? The clairvoyant chose them on purpose to give you a lead because I had really wanted to hide in the cathedral. I recently d
iscovered a secret hiding place there when I was repairing the organ. But I solved his riddle, and that’s why I was hiding here in the ghetto where I have never been before, and nobody knows me here. I rented this room in a house, the number of which I decided based on a coin toss. What gave me away?”
The commissioner smiled. “Sometimes even a novice defeats the chess master, because he plays too simply. You found a message hidden within another message, but the true one was the first. Stenography inside out. The books were not pointing to the cathedral but here. All seven pierced books had a stamp on the title page with an address of the antique store of Isaac Goldschmerz, which is located on the first floor of this house.”
In his pocket, Durman’s golden watch played Papageno’s “Aria” from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and within moments the church bells from the surrounding quarters joined in.
Eight in the evening.
“Will you shoot me, commissioner? Or perhaps throw me out the window? Or suffocate me?” Carbuncle asked sprightly. “I have nothing to be sorry about. I wanted to get rid of the fear of uncertainty and I did get rid of it. Even now, knowing that in a short while I will die, I am happier than not knowing it and continuing to live.”
“You can go—you are free,” the commissioner said simply.
“How come? You’re not going to kill me? Not even arrest me?”
“That wouldn’t be punishment. In any case, you will die sooner or later, and I hope it’s later. But if I let you live now, uncertainty will torture you every day and that is far worse than death. You said so yourself.”
The villain blanched so much that under his skin, his blood vessels drew out as if in an anatomical atlas.
At the door, the commissioner turned and added: “The first ones were charlatans—good riddance. But the third one was a true clairvoyant. So now you know that Crystaelo lied to you, and why.”