End of the World in Breslau

by Marek Krajewski

  “Don’t be afraid, Reinert,” said Mock, grimacing as he swallowed the thick, milky-chocolate suspension. “If you’ve got a different theory, go ahead and tell us. I’m not going to rant and rage.”

  “Yes, I do have a different theory,” Reinert said emphatically. “So what if all the victims had different professions and were glaringly different in their education, interests and political views? There is something that brings people together irrespective of all that, and that is addictions: destructive ones such as, for example, gambling, sexual deviation, alcohol, drugs, and milder ones, such as all sorts of hobbies. That is the path we must follow. Investigate the victims’ past and ascertain what they had in common.”

  Reinert fell silent. Mock did not reveal the slightest inclination to disagree with him. He drank yet another cup of milk and watched the swift movements of the fountain pen with which the stenographer Lewin recorded Reinert’s theory.

  “Now I call upon you to give your hypothesis.” Spittle gurgled in Mühlhaus’ pipe as he fixed his eyes on Kleinfeld. “When everyone has presented his own point of view, I’ll decide which path to follow.”

  “Gentlemen, let us take a moment to look at the dates of the murders and the crime scenes.” Kleinfeld polished his pince-nez. “But not from Counsellor Mock’s angle. The first corpse, walled in at the shoemaker’s workshop, was the hardest to find. It was a real coincidence that the shoemaker was told about stinking eggs being bricked up in walls and that he smashed the wall down with a pick-axe. He might have waved it off and carried on working in the stench, or found another workshop. And the next craftsman to rent that hole might have done the same. The complaint brought to the owner of the tenement need not necessarily have led to the discovery of the corpse. The owner could have looked for something in the sewerage, and that would have been the end of the matter. In the end, some craftsman wouldn’t have cared about the stench and would have gone on working quite happily, grateful to have a workshop in such an excellent location. To put it briefly, Gelfrert’s body could have remained undiscovered. And what do you have to say, gentlemen, about Honnefelder and Geissen …?”

  “That’s it!” Reinert jumped, spilling a little coffee on his saucer. “Honnefelder was killed in his apartment. So he was certain to be found, but this might only have occurred once the stench of the corpse had become unbearable to his neighbours …”

  “And Geissen?” Kleinfeld drummed his claw-like fingernails on the desk.

  “Finding Geissen was an absolute certainty,” Mock joined in the discussion. “And half an hour after the crime was committed at that – when the doorman knocked to remind the client his time was up …”

  “So what we are seeing is something like a gradation,” Kleinfeld acknowledged Mock’s participation with noticeable satisfaction. “The first murder could have been discovered a very long time after it was committed or not at all, the second would certainly have been discovered, but only after a long time, the third would have been discovered after half an hour. How can we explain this gradual shortening of the time lapse?”

  “Do you have any suggestions?” Mühlhaus tapped his pipe on a crystal ashtray to empty it.

  “I do,” Kleinfeld said tentatively. “The murderer was afraid we would-n’t find the first victim – that’s why he killed the second …”

  “It’s obvious,” Mock cut him short. “He wants to draw our attention to the dates. If we hadn’t found the victims, we wouldn’t understand the murderer’s message carried by the calendar pages.”

  “I think the murderer wants to get close to us,” continued Kleinfeld, undeterred by Mock’s ironic smile. “I once read an account in the Criminology Archive about serial murderers in America. Some of them subconsciously want to be caught and punished for their crimes. This applies particularly to criminals who had a very strict upbringing, and who have a strong sense of guilt, punishment and sin. It looks like the man we’re after wants us to pick up his trail. But to be sure of this, we have to understand his mentality.”

  “But how can we understand the mentality of someone we don’t know at all?” Meinerer, to Mock’s scarcely concealed annoyance, was showing an interest in the case for the first time.

  “We’ll have to ask a psychiatrist who’s had dealings with criminals to give us a hypothesis, to attempt an expert opinion,” said Kleinfeld slowly. “Let him write something like a report: what could the time lapses signify? Why does he murder so elaborately? And what could those calendar pages mean? There’s never been a serial killer in Breslau before. Let’s assemble copies of files on serial killers throughout Germany, for example Grossmann, Haarmann the butcher of Hanover, and others. Let our expert read them. Maybe he’ll find similarities. That’s all that occurs to me at this stage, Criminal Director.”

  “A fair amount, indeed” Mühlhaus remarked with a smile. “And what do the Counsellor’s closest colleagues say?”

  Ehlers’ silent expression clearly proclaimed: “Nothing that Mock wouldn’t say.” Meinerer, on the other hand, said:

  “I think we ought to check the dates bearing in mind the significance of numbers. Perhaps they have a symbolic meaning. A specialist in the Kabbala ought to be brought in on the case.”

  A drop of ink fell onto Lewin’s shorthand notes. The old stenographer sighed, then spreading his arms and raising them to heaven, shouted:

  “I cannot bear to hear such nonsense! He” – pointing to Meinerer – “wants to take on a Kabbala specialist! Do you have any idea what the Kabbala is?”

  “Did anybody ask you for your opinion, Lewin?” Meinerer asked coldly. “Concentrate on your duties.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” the stenographer laughed loudly – his forthright language made him a favourite with Mühlhaus – “I’ll throw in another idea. Draw some lines on the map to join up the crime scenes. A mysterious sign is sure to appear. Perhaps the symbol of a sect … Shall we give it a go …?” He went to the map of Breslau on the wall.

  “Yes, let’s,” Mock said seriously. “Ring 2 – the Griffins tenement, Burgfeld 4 and Taschenstrasse 23–24. Well, what are you waiting for, Lewin … Stick some pins in.”

  “Could it be possible that you got bottom marks in geometry at school, Counsellor?” Lewin responded in astonishment. “One way or another, it’s going to form a triangle. Three points – three vertices.”

  Ignoring the stenographer’s gabbling, Mock stood up, walked over to the map and stuck pins into the three crime scenes. They formed an obtuse triangle. Mock stared at the coloured pinheads for a moment, then took his coat and hat from the hat-stand and made towards the door.

  “Where are you off to, Mock?” Mühlhaus growled. “The briefing’s not over.”

  “My dear gentlemen, these buildings are all located within the perimeter of the Old Town moat,” he said quietly, gazing at the map. A second later he was gone.

  BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 9TH, 1927 NOON

  “Counsellor, so what if these buildings are located within the perimeter of the Old Town moat?” Leo Hartner, Director of the University Library, smiled faintly.

  Mock rose from the newly upholstered, eighteenth-century green-plush armchair and began to pace Hartner’s office feverishly. The thick purple carpet muffled his steps as he went to the window and gazed at the bare tree tops on Holteihöhe.

  “Director, sir, I spent practically a whole day at the Construction Archives recently.” Mock turned away from the window and leaned against the sill. “Then in the Evidence Archives looking for any trace of a crime which might have taken place in these buildings because, as I’ve told you …”

  “I know, you’ve told me, ‘what matters are the means, place and time,’” interrupted Hartner somewhat impatiently. “Not the victim …”

  “Exactly …” Mock relieved the sill of his weight. “And I found nothing … Do you know why? Because the archives I visited only hold files from the nineteenth century, with very few earlier ones. The archivists informed me that
most of the older files were inundated during the flood of 1854. The Municipal Archives, on the other hand, house files from an earlier date: criminal, construction, and all the others. So that something that is imperative to our case may have taken place in these buildings earlier, but for various reasons all trace of it has disappeared, or can only be found by a specialist reader of old documents.”

  “I still don’t understand why you attach so much importance to the fact that these crimes were committed within the perimeter of the Old Town moat.”

  “My dear Director,” Mock said, approaching the map of Breslau on the wall and studying the date at the bottom of it, “this beautiful map was produced in 1831, so it probably represents the town within boundaries that were established at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Am I mistaken?”

  “No,” said Hartner. He reached towards a shelf by his desk and took down a book, then opened it slowly and leafed through it carefully. Within a few minutes he had found the information he was looking for. “You’re not mistaken. In 1808 the villages of Kletschenkau, Tschepin and Elbing, as well as the land alongside the Ohlau and what is known today as Ofenerstrasse, were added to our metropolis on the Oder. This map represents the city after these villages were annexed to it.”

  “When earlier, before 1808, had the town’s territory been expanded?” Mock asked in the sharp tone of an interrogator.

  Hartner paid no attention to the Counsellor’s tone of voice and focussed his entire attention on the book. A moment later he had the answer.

  “In 1327. The territory of the so-called New Town was added at that time.” Hartner approached Mock, took him by the arm, led him to the window and pointed to the high-rise Cheque Post Office building. “Meaning the area beyond Ohlau Ufer and Alexanderstrasse.”

  “And earlier still?” Mock stared at the eleven-storeyed skeleton of the Post Office building jutting out from behind the trees on Holteihöhe.

  Hartner screwed up his nose, detecting alcohol on his guest, and went back to the map. Pointing at it with one hand, he held the book in the other. His glasses slipped to the tip of his nose and his short, greying hair bristled at the nape of his neck.

  “In 1261, as Margraf writes in his work on the streets of Breslau,” Hartner’s eyes flitted from book to map, “these territories were officially added to the early town settlement on the Oder …”

  The Director ran his finger over the map, tracing ellipses and irregular circles, some large and some smaller, which, with a little goodwill, could have been taken as having a common centre somewhere within Ring. Mock joined Hartner and slowly moved his finger along the blue snake of the Old Town moat.

  “Is this the territory?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what was added to the town in the thirteenth century.”

  “The territory within the moat, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the territory bordered by the moat, within which the three murders were committed, is, apart from Dominsel, the oldest part of the city.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Do you understand now, sir?” Mock grabbed Hartner’s finger tightly and drew squiggles with it on this area of the map. “Do you understand now? I sat in the archives looking for evidence of events which might have taken place exactly on the days and months indicated by the calendar pages found on the victims. But all these archives keep relatively new files, while the area in which the crimes were committed belongs to the oldest part of Breslau. And so this investigative path is not wrong, nor is it as fanciful as my chief and men would believe, but is simply a path …” Mock became thoughtful, searching for the right word.

  “Along which you’re groping a little,” Hartner offered, moving away decisively from the map and thus reclaiming his finger. “Difficult, because the records are meagre and hard to decipher. Yielding few results and holding no prospect of success.”

  “Well put.” Mock collapsed into the armchair, crossed his outstretched legs and closed his eyes. He noticed with pleasure that he felt sleepy, which meant that all the Erinyes, all the whores – named and unnamed, dead and alive – were taking pity on him, all the vermin-infested, quartered and bloodless corpses, and his entire world, were mercifully allowing him to sleep. He fell into a torpor and yet felt a strange stabbing sensation, perhaps in his diaphragm, perhaps in his heart or stomach. It was a stabbing he cultivated at times, particularly when he awoke after a bout of drinking; his body, twisted by a hangover, would then demand sleep, but his mind would order “Get up, you’ve got piles of work to do today.” Mock would then summon up some unpleasant image – his enraged chief; the hopelessness and tedium of police work; his subordinates’ stupidity – and keep it fixed until he felt a piercing pain and an anxiety that stopped him sleeping. He would then lift his head, throbbing with the hangover, hold it under a stream of cold water, rub eau-de-cologne over his pale cheeks and swollen eyelids and then, wearing a somewhat too-small bowler hat and a tie fastened as tightly as a noose, he would enter the old, cold walls of the Police Praesidium. As he sat there now in the eighteenth-century armchair, Mock felt a similar anxiety, but, unlike on those mornings after he had been drinking, he could not identify its source. No enraged Mühlhaus, no Sophie wrapped in dirty bed-linen surrounded by cigarette ends, no waterfall of Geissen’s noble blood appeared before him. Mock knew he had to recreate the circumstances that had set off his anxiety. He opened his eyes and glanced at Hartner, who appeared to have forgotten about his guest and was pensively turning the crank of a metal pencil-sharpener secured to his desk.

  “Director, sir, would you please repeat what you just said,” he croaked.

  “I said,” Hartner retorted, still sharpening pencils, “that you’re groping in the dark, that you don’t have many sources to help you, that those you do have might be Difficult to decipher and interpret, and that I don’t predict any success in this investigation.”

  “You’ve put it very well, Director, but please clarify what you mean when you say I ‘don’t have many sources’.”

  “If you’re looking for something that happened in the past – in these places or even these buildings – then you have to find sources that hold the history of these places, meaning archival records,” Hartner explained patiently. “You said yourself that the archive materials you’ve been studying go back no further than the beginning of the nineteenth century, whereas – as we established a moment ago – the history pertaining to the crime scenes could be much older, seeing as they are situated in the oldest part of the town. That’s why I said the sources are meagre. There simply aren’t very many files dating from the thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.”

  “If there are hardly any files,” Mock said irritably, “where would I find information about these places or buildings? Where would you, as a historian, look for them?”

  “My dear Counsellor.” Hartner tried in vain to hide his impatience, “I am first and foremost a scholar of Semitic languages …”

  “Stop bickering, Director.” Mock had a great respect for Hartner’s modesty, a rarity among scholars who were not active lecturers and could not defend the fruits of their thoughts in the crossfire of student questioning. “As someone who has had a solid education in the Classics last century, a veritable saeculum historicum,† you know I consider you to be more of a polyhistor, a historian in Herodotus’ sense of the word …”

  “That’s most kind.” Hartner’s impatience was waning. “I’ll try to answer your question, but you’ll have to be more precise about certain points. What do you mean by ‘information about these places’? The small quantity of files does not relieve us of the task of studying them in depth. So first we have to look at the old files. Then we have to start the factual research, look in a factual or terminological index of a textbook, for example. But what are we to look for? Are you thinking of legends connected to these places? Or the owners of these places and their inhabitants? What are you looking for?”

  “Un
til recently I thought I was searching the files for a crime which we were to be reminded of years later, on the very same day of the month as it had been committed. By killing innocent people, the murderer wants us to reopen an old investigation and find the original criminal. But there’s nothing, not even a mention in our archival records about any crime committed in the first two places – I haven’t checked the third yet. So the hypothesis of reminding us of something after all these years falls through.”

  “Yes …” Hartner interjected, dreaming of a lunch of meat loaf, red cabbage and potato dumplings, “… a crime intended to reopen an investigation into another committed years ago … That does, indeed, sound unlikely …”

  Mock felt sleepiness and unidentified anxiety simultaneously. A moment later, his brain began to make connections. The anxiety was linked to a school building, to Sophie and to the words “recurrence” and “crime”. He feverishly pondered whether he had been thinking about Sophie when walking or driving past some school. A few seconds later, an image came back to him from the day before: the announcement pillar near Elisabethgymnasium: Spiritual father Prince Alexei von Orloff proves the imminent coming of the Antichrist. “He’s right, that spiritual father,” Mock remembered thinking then. “Crimes and cataclysms are recurring. I’ve been left by a woman once more and Smolorz has started drinking again.”

  † Century of history.

  Mock pictured himself leaving the flower shop. He had bought a copy of the Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten from a newspaper boy and his attention had been drawn to an unusual image on one of the announcement pages: a mandala, the wheel of change, encircled a gloomy old man with his finger raised upwards. “Spiritual father, Prince Alexei von Orloff, proves that the end of the world is nigh. The next revolution of the Wheel of History is now taking place – crimes and cataclysms dating back centuries are recurring. We invite you to a lecture given by the sage from the Sepulchrum Mundi. Sunday, November 27th, Grünstrasse 14–16.”