The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion

by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

  “Emmenberger is a criminal,” the inspector gasped, powerless against such sanctimony. She’s a typical Emmental sectarian, he thought desperately, damn the lot of them.

  “The meaning and purpose of our life on earth cannot be a crime,” said Nurse Kläri, shaking her head disapprovingly as she cleared away the dishes.

  “I will turn you over to the police as an accom- plice,” the inspector threatened, well aware that he was reaching for his cheapest weapon.

  “You’re on Ward Three,” said Nurse Kläri Glauber, saddened by her patient’s stubbornness, and left the room.

  Angrily the old man reached for his mail. He recognized the envelope, it was the one Fortschig used to mail out his Apfelschuss. He opened it, and the newspaper fell out. It was written, as it had been for the past twenty-five years, on a rickety and by now no doubt rusty typewriter with a faulty l and r. “Der Apfelschuss. Swiss Protest Paper for the Inland and Surroundings. Published by Ulrich Friedrich Fortschig” was the printed title, and underneath, in typescript:

  AN SS TORTURER AS MEDICAL DIRECTOR

  If I did not have the evidence (wrote Fortschig)—proofs of such terrible clarity and irrefutable logic that no criminological or poetic fancy could have produced them but only reality itself—I would be forced to dismiss as the spawn of a sick imagination the truth that compels me to write down what I know. Let Truth take the stand, then, even if it makes us turn pale, even if it forever unsettles the trust we still place—despite everything—in humanity. That a human being, a Bernese, went about his bloody trade under an assumed name in an extermination camp near Danzig—I dare not describe in detail with what bestiality—appalls us; but that he should be permitted to direct a clinic in Switzerland is a disgrace for which we can find no words, and an indication that these may very well be our own latter days. May these words, therefore, initiate a trial that, although terrible and embarrassing for our country, must be risked. For our reputation is at stake, the harmless rumor that we are still honestly muddling through the sinister jungles of these times—(perhaps earning a little more money than usual with watches, cheese, and some weapons of not very great significance). So I am taking action. We shall lose everything if we gamble with justice, which is not a plaything, even if it should prove embarrassing for us Pestalozzis to receive a rap on the knuckles. As for the criminal, a doctor in Zürich, whom we shall not pardon, as he did not pardon, whom we are extorting, as he extorted, and whom we shall finally murder, as he murdered countless people—we know it is a death sentence we are writing (Barlach read that line twice); of this director of a private clinic we demand—to put it plainly—that he turn himself in to the Zürich police. Mankind, which is capable of everything and is increasingly adept at murder far and beyond any other skill or proficiency, this mankind of which we in Switzerland are also a part—since we too bear within us the seeds of that unfortunate tendency to regard morality as unprofitable and to equate profit with morality—should finally learn by the example of this mass murderer, this beast felled by the bare force of words, that the despised spirit of Man will break open even the mouths of the silent and force them to utter their own destruction.

  *

  As much as this bombastic text complied with Barlach’s original plan, which had simply and straightforwardly aimed at intimidating Emmenberger—the rest would somehow fall into place, he had thought with the careless self-confidence of an old criminologist—he now realized how thoroughly he had been mistaken. The doctor was not the type to be intimidated, far from it. Fortschig’s life was in danger, the inspector felt, but he hoped that the writer was already in Paris and therefore safe.

  And then it seemed that an unexpected possibility was presenting itself for Barlach to make contact with the outside world.

  A worker stepped into the room with an enlarged reproduction of Dürer’s “Knight, Death, and Devil” under his arm. The old man looked at him carefully. He was a good-natured, somewhat seedy fellow in his late forties, wearing blue work clothes. He immediately started disassembling the “Anatomy.”

  “Hey!” said the inspector. “Come here.”

  The man kept working. From time to time he would drop a pair of pliers, or a screwdriver, and bend down awkwardly to pick them up.

  “Hey, you!” Barlach called impatiently, since the worker paid him no attention. “I’m Police Inspector Barlach. Do you understand: my life is in danger. Leave this house after you have finished your work and go to Inspector Stutz, any child knows him around here. Or go to any police station and have them connect you with Stutz. Do you understand? I need this man. Tell him to come and see me.”

  The worker still paid no heed to the old man, who was straining in his bed to formulate the words. It was getting more and more difficult for him to speak. Having unscrewed the “Anatomy,” the worker went on to examine the Dürer, first from close up and then holding it away from himself with both arms, arching his back. A milky light was falling through the window. For a moment it seemed to the old man that he could see a dim ball swimming behind white strips of fog. The worker’s hair and moustache lit up. It had stopped raining outside. The worker shook his head several times; apparently he found the picture uncanny. He briefly turned to Barlach and said very slowly, shaking his head to and fro and enunciating each syllable with peculiar, exaggerated clarity:

  “There is no devil.”

  “Yes, there is!” Barlach shouted hoarsely: “There is a devil, man! Right here in this hospital. Listen to me! I’m sure you’ve been told I’m crazy and nothing I say makes sense, but I’m telling you, my life is in danger, do you understand, my life is in danger: that is the truth, man, the truth, nothing but the truth!”

  The worker had tightened the last screw on the picture and turned to Barlach, pointing with a grin at the knight who sat so motionless on his horse. He made some inarticulate, gurgling sounds that Barlach did not understand right away, but finally he could make out their meaning:

  “Knight’s a goner,” said the man in the blue work clothes, pressing the words out of his obliquely twisted mouth: “Knight’s a goner, knight’s a goner!”

  Not until the worker had left the room and clum- sily slammed the door behind him did the old man realize that he had been talking to a deaf mute.

  He reached for the second newspaper Dr. Marlok had given him, and opened it. It was the Bernisches Bundesblatt, devoted to news of the city of Bern.

  Fortschig’s face was the first thing he saw. Under the photograph were the words “Ulrich Friedrich Fortschig,” and next to it: a cross.

  FORTSCHIG†

  “The wretched life of one of our city’s more notorious than famous writers ended on Tuesday night. The cause of his death has not yet been determined.” As Barlach read these words, he felt as if he was being choked. “This man,” continued the Bernisches Bundesblatt’s reporter in his characteristically unctuous manner, “whom Nature endowed with such beautiful gifts, did not know how to properly steward his talents. He began with expressionistic plays that produced a stir among the boulevard literati, but increasingly lost the ability to give shape to his imaginative powers” (at least they were imaginative powers, was the old man’s bitter response), “until he hit upon the unfortunate idea of issuing his own newspaper, the Apfelschuss, which he proceeded to issue irregularly enough in an edition of approximately fifty typewritten copies. Anyone who has read the contents of this scandal sheet knows enough: it consisted of attacks, not only against everything we hold sacred but against well known and respected personalities as well. He deteriorated steadily, and was often seen drunk, sporting the famous yellow scarf that earned him the nickname ‘lemon’ in many parts of the city, staggering from one pub to another, accompanied by a few students who cheered him on and celebrated him as a genius. About his death the following is known: Fortschig had been in a state of more or less constant inebriation since the New Year. Financed by some good-natured private source, he had published a new issue of Apfelschuss, a part
icularly sad specimen, containing an attack against an unknown, probably invented doctor with allegations that have been rejected as absurd by the medical community. He seems to have done this with the sole and wantonly destructive intention of creating a scandal. The fantastical nature of the attack is made evident by the mere fact that the author, while challenging the unnamed doctor with a great deal of pathos in his article to turn himself in to the Zürich police, simultaneously told all and sundry that he wanted to go to Paris for ten days.

  “He never got to Paris. He had already postponed his departure by a day, and on Tuesday evening gave a dinner in his shabby apartment in the Kesslergasse to celebrate his imminent departure. His guests were the musician Botzinger and the students Friedling and Sturler. Around four o’clock in the morning, Fortschig—who was very drunk—went to the bathroom, which is situated in the hallway opposite his room. Since he left the door to his study open in order to clear out some of the acrid tobacco smoke that had gathered, the bathroom door was visible to his three guests, who continued to drink at the table without noticing anything unusual. They became alarmed when he did not return after half an hour, and when he did not respond to their calling and knocking, they rattled the lock of the door, but were unable to open it. Botzinger hurried downstairs and asked the policeman Gerber and the nightwatchman Brenneisen for help. These two men finally broke open the door and found the unfortunate author dead in a twisted position on the floor.

  “Just how this unfortunate event came to pass is still not clear. However, foul play is out of the question, as the city’s Examining Magistrate, Dr. Lutz, informed the press at this morning’s conference. Although the autopsy appears to suggest a blow with some hard object from above, the physical location of Fortschig’s death makes this impossible. The bathroom window, situated on the fifth floor, opens onto a light shaft that is too narrow for a person to climb up and down. Subsequent tests by the police have proved this beyond a doubt. Furthermore, the door must been locked from the inside, for none of the well-known tricks by which this can be simulated were employed, according to the police experts. The door has no keyhole and is locked with a heavy bolt. There remains no explanation other than to presume an unfortunate fall on the part of the writer, which is made all the more plausible by the fact that, as Professor Detling pointed out, he was drunk to the point of stupor …”

  As soon as the old man had read this, he dropped the newspaper. His hands clutched the blanket.

  “The dwarf, the dwarf!” he shouted in the room, for all at once he had realized how Fortschig had died.

  “Yes, the dwarf,” replied a voice with a calm, superior air from the door, which had imperceptibly opened.

  “You will admit, Inspector, that I have found myself an executioner the like of which is not easily found.”

  In the door stood Emmenberger.

  THE CLOCK

  The doctor closed the door.

  He was not wearing the white lab coat he had worn when the inspector had first seen him. Instead he wore a dark striped suit with a white tie on a silvergray shirt—a carefully groomed appearance, almost dandyish, all the more so since he wore yellow leather gloves, as if he was afraid of soiling himself.

  “So now we Bernese are among ourselves,” said Emmenberger, bowing slightly before the helpless, skeletal old man. The gesture seemed more polite than ironic. Then he took a chair that had stood concealed behind the curtain, and sat down next to the bed with the back of the chair turned toward the inspector, so that he could press it against his chest and put his crossed arms on top of it. The old man had regained his composure. Carefully he reached for the newspaper, folded it, and put it on the night table. Then he crossed his arms behind his head.

  “You had poor Fortschig killed,” he said.

  “It seems to me that a man who pens a death sentence with such bombastic flourish deserves a lesson in manners,” the doctor replied in an equally matter-of-fact voice. “Even writing is getting to be a dangerous profession again. Ultimately it’s a good thing for literature.”

  “What do you want from me?” asked the inspector.

  Emmenberger laughed. “That’s my question to ask, don’t you think? What do you want from me?”

  “You know very well what I want.”

  “Certainly,” said the doctor. “I know it very well. And so do you know perfectly well what I want from you.”

  Emmenberger stood up and went to the wall, looking at it for a moment, with his back turned toward the inspector. Somewhere he must have pushed a button or a lever; for the wall with the dancing men and women opened noiselessly, like a folding door, revealing a spacious room with glass cupboards containing surgical instruments, glittering knives and scissors in metal containers, bunches of cotton, syringes in milky liquids, bottles, and a thin red leather mask—all spotless and neatly arranged. In the middle of the now enlarged room stood an operating table. But at the same time, slowly and menacingly, a heavy metal screen descended in front of the window. The room lit up. For the first time, the old man noticed the neon tubes that were fitted into the ceiling in the spaces between the mirrors. Suspended in the blue light above the cupboards was a large, round, greenish, radiant disk—a clock.

  “You intend to operate on me without anesthesia,” the old man whispered.

  Emmenberger did not reply.

  “Since I am a weak old man, I’m afraid I will scream,” the inspector continued. “I don’t think you will find me a brave victim.”

  Again, Emmenberger did not reply. Instead he said: “Do you see that clock?”

  “I see it,” Barlach said.

  “It’s ten thirty,” the doctor said, checking his watch. “I will operate on you at seven.”

  “In eight and a half hours.”

  “In eight and a half hours,” the doctor confirmed. “But now, sir, I think we have something to discuss. There’s no getting around it; then I won’t disturb you any more. I’ve been told people like to be alone during their last hours. Fine. But you’re giving me an inordinate amount of work to do.”

  He sat down on the chair again, its back pressed against his chest.

  “I think you’re used to that,” the old man retorted.

  Emmenberger was taken aback for a moment. “I’m pleased,” he finally said, shaking his head, “that you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Let’s start with Fortschig. He was sentenced to death and executed. My dwarf did a good job. Climbing down the light shaft of the house in the Kesslergasse, after a strenuous promenade across wet roof tiles, cats purring all around him, then squeezing through that little window and landing a truly powerful and deadly blow with my car key against the skull of our poetaster on his throne—this was not easy for my little Tom Thumb. I was really on edge, waiting in my car next to the Jewish cemetery, wondering whether the little monkey could pull it off. But the devil is barely three and a half feet tall, and he works without a sound and, most important, invisibly. After only two hours he came hopping back in the shadow of the trees. As for you, Inspector, I’ll have to take care of you myself. That won’t be difficult, we can spare ourselves further words, which could only be painful for you. But what, for God’s sake, shall we do about our mutual acquaintance, our dear old friend, Doctor Samuel Hungertobel?”

  “What makes you think of him?” the old man asked warily.

  “Why, he brought you here.”

  “I have nothing to do with him,” the inspector said quickly.

  “He’s been calling twice a day, asking how his old friend Kramer is doing, and wanting to speak to you,” Emmenberger said with furrowed brow, looking faintly distressed.

  Barlach involuntarily glanced at the clock above the glass cupboards.

  “Quite right, it’s ten forty-five,” said the doctor, regarding the old man in a thoughtful, but not hostile, manner. “Let’s get back to Hungertobel.”

  “He took care of me, tried to help me with my sickness, but he has nothing to do with you and me,” the inspecto
r stubbornly replied.

  “Did you read the report underneath your picture in the Bund?”

  Barlach was silent for a moment. He was trying to imagine what Emmenberger’s question was aiming at.

  “I don’t read newspapers.”

  “It’s about your retirement, and it refers to you as a famous local personality,” Emmenberger said. “Nevertheless Hungertobel checked you in here under the name of Blaise Kramer.”

  The inspector’s face was immobile.

  “I checked into his hospital under that name,” he said. “Even if he had seen me before, he could hardly have recognized me in the state I’m in.”

  The doctor laughed. “Are you telling me that you got sick in order to look me up here on the Sonnenstein?”

  Barlach did not answer.

  Emmenberger looked at the old man sadly. “My dear Inspector,” he continued, with slight reproach in his voice, “you’re not making our interrogation any easier.”

  “I’m the one to interrogate you, not the other way around,” the inspector retorted.

  “You’re breathing heavily,” Emmenberger noted with concern.

  Barlach no longer replied. All he could hear was the ticking of the clock. It was the first time he heard it. Now I’ll hear it over and over, he thought.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you admitted your defeat?” asked the doctor in a friendly manner.

  “I don’t seem to have a choice,” Barlach replied, dead-tired, pulling his hands out from behind his head and putting them on the blanket. “The clock. If it wasn’t for the clock.”

  “The clock, if it wasn’t for the clock,” the doctor repeated. “Why do we keep going around in circles? At seven I will kill you. That will simplify the case for you insofar as you can examine the Emmenberger-Barlach case with me in an objective, unbiased manner. We are both scientists with opposing aims, chess players sitting in front of one board. You have made your move, now it’s my turn. But there’s one peculiar thing about our game: One of us will lose or else we both will. You have already lost your game. Now I’m curious to find out whether I will have to lose mine as well.”