“You’re right” said Ollenborg, who could only dream of using his teeth. “Irrigation, in this case, is a must. It’s like baptizing a brothel. After all, that’s what this new ship’s going to be used for …”
“What’s that rubbish you’re saying, old man?” A sailor with a strong Austrian accent had turned to Ollenborg. “What’s this ship supposed to be used for? A brothel? Am I to sail a brothel? Me, Horst Scherelick, a sailor on S.M.S. Breslau? Say that again, old man.”
Klaus reassured the sailor: “Oh, come, it was a slip of the tongue. My friend meant to say ‘initiate’, not ‘irrigate’. And you, Ollenborg,” he said more quietly, “stop jabbering or somebody’s going to stick a knife in your ribs.”
For a few minutes Mock looked on intently as Scherelick was pacified. Then he shifted his gaze to the huge magnum of champagne carried by a small boy in a sailor’s outfit. As he wondered whether the champagne was cold or warm, he once again felt a pang in his stomach and dry splinters in his throat. He beckoned to Smolorz and Ollenborg.
“I’ve a favour to ask of you, Smolorz,” he whispered. “Find that port director and bring him to the droschka. Discreetly. I’ll question him there. And you, Ollenborg, I’d like to talk to you now.”
Smolorz pressed his way through the throng and went off in search of the head of the river port. Mock distanced himself a little from the crowd, sat down on an old lemon crate and pulled out his cigarette case. Ollenborg squatted down next to him and willingly accepted a cigarette. The march “Under Full Sail” resounded on the quay, and an orchestra approached the ship in step with the music. When the musicians came into view, many of the sailors started cheering and throwing their hats in the air. The priest got to his feet, the businessmen looked about for the master of ceremonies and the ladies waited for the first daredevil to help themselves, uninvited, to the food and drink.
“Listen, sailor,” Mock said. “The moment director Wohsedt appears, you’re to point him out to me.”
“Yes, Officer sir,” Ollenborg replied.
“One more thing.” Mock knew he had to formulate his question skilfully. He did not, however, want to have to think. He wanted to drink. “Do you know, or have you heard of four young men, twenty, twenty-five years of age? Good-looking, bearded sailors? Maybe they came looking for work here? You might have seen them wandering around the port? They wore leather underpants. Here are their photographs — dead.”
“I don’t peer down people’s trousers, Officer sir,” Ollenborg said indignantly as he studied the pictures. “I don’t know what sort of under-pants anyone wears. And how do you know they were sailors?”
“Who’s asking the questions here?” Mock said in a raised voice, arousing the interest of a blonde woman in a blue dress who was walking past.
“I haven’t seen them and I haven’t heard of them,” Ollenborg smiled. “But allow me, Officer sir, to give you one piece of advice. Barba non facit philosophum.† Why are you looking at me like that? Because I’ve studied Latin? Once, on a voyage to Africa, I avidly read Georg Buchmann’s Geflugelte Worte;‡ I practically know it by heart.”
Mock said nothing. He did not feel like talking. Today it seemed hard to find the right words. Lost in thought, he watched the young blonde woman in the long blue dress and veil. She was on her way to the table but suddenly changed direction, approached the ice-cream and lemonade vendor and smiled at him. As she did so, she stuck out her neck which had been hidden by a high lace collar held in place with hooks; it was covered with dark, scaly patches. The vendor handed the woman some lemonade without her having to queue. “Where have I seen that girl before?” Mock asked himself. “In some brothel, no doubt,” was his own response. Trapped in a tedious existence, between booking prostitutes, alcoholic delirium and the superhuman effort it took to continue to show his father respect, Mock realized that he saw a harlot in every woman. But this is not what horrified him. He was already used to unhappy thoughts and his own partially feigned cynicism, and he was well acquainted with his own demons. But all of a sudden he was afraid for his future. What would he do if he had a wife who, faithful up to now, suddenly started coming home late at night, her lips concealing alcohol fumes, deceit lurking in her eyes, satiation slumbering in her body, and on her breasts the marks of passionate bites? What would this brave conquerer of indifferent prostitutes and venereal pimps do then? Mock did not know how he would behave. How much easier it would be if the entire female kind was made up of harlots! Then nothing would surprise him.
Sergeant Smolorz interrupted these dismal thoughts.
“The port’s director was in his office,” he said loudly, trying to shout above the orchestra which was now playing “Der Prasentiermarsch”, a tune from the time of East African colonization.
“And what, was he irrigating his wife?” Ollenborg said, spitting out his cigarette butt.
“Probably,” Smolorz muttered and pointed to the blonde who was drinking lemonade from a thick glass. Her scaly blotches were not visible. “She looks quite happy, doesn’t she?”
“That’s the port director’s wife?” asked Mock.
“I found his office. Went in. He and that woman were there. I introduced myself. He said goodbye to her nervously: ‘Bye, my little wifey. I’ll be there in a minute.’”
“Take me to his office,” Mock said, springing to his feet and talking more fluently now. “Now that he’s irrigated his wife, and before he launches the ship, the port director has some questions to answer.”
“I’ve already asked them,” Smolorz said as he pulled out a notebook. “And I showed him the photographs. He didn’t recognize the murdered men. But he gave me a list of all the agents in Breslau who recruit river-boat sailors.”
“How did you know I wanted to ask that?” Mock secretly admired the terseness and love of hard facts which distinguished his colleague.
“Ah well, I just guessed. I do know you a little.” Smolorz reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of dark beer with the Biernoth Tavern label. “I guessed this too. I do know you a little.”
“You’re irreplaceable,” Mock said as he spontaneously squeezed Smolorz’s hand.
The orchestra began to play “Marsch der freiwilliger Jager”. From behind the building strode a red-faced, fifty-year-old man in a top hat. His cheeks looked fit to burst with a surplus of blood, and the buttons on his waistcoat strained under the pressure of excess fat. He approached the table, picked up a glass of champagne with his plump fingers, and raised it in a toast.
“That’s Wohsedt, the director of Wollheim’s shipyard,” Ollenborg informed them.
The buzzing in Mock’s ears — intensified by the bubbles in the beer — drowned out Wohsedt’s speech. The police officer heard only the words “godmother” and “my wife”. Whereupon a buxom, short, fifty-year-old woman who had previously been sitting next to the priest made her way to the table where the magnum of champagne stood. She smashed the bottle against the hull of the ship and gave it its mythological Germanic name. The blonde in the blue dress put down her glass of lemonade and watched the ceremony. Mock sipped his beer slowly, straight from the bottle. Unlike Smolorz, who no longer knew which was the wife and which the mistress, he was not surprised by anything. To his satisfaction he was able to confirm that the world was returning to its old ways.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
Cabby Helmut Warschkow, who for several years now had been working solely for the Police Praesidium, was riding up on the box in a most uncomfortable position, forced as he was to share the seat with Sergeant Kurt Smolorz, the size of whose body was inversely proportional to the economy of his speech. Pressed into the iron frame by Smolorz’s hefty shoulders, he lashed his whip, deep down beside himself with indignation that his carriage was being used for ignoble purposes by Eberhard Mock from Vice Department IIIb. Mock had closed the roof and, having thus isolated himself from prying eyes, was subjecting an innocent girl in a blue dress — whom he had none too courteously invited into the droschka during the ship-launching ceremony — to a ritual as old as the hills. Warschkow’s suspicions, however, were wrong. The rocking of the carriage was not caused by the movement of Mock’s loins but by the bumpiness of the alley in South Park along which they were travelling. The otherwise lecherous Mock, looking at the scales on the girl’s neck, thought of everything but the mating dance and its consequences. The girl herself was in no way innocent; on the contrary, she was highly amenable to the kinds of requests made by men that no virgin could satisfy. Now she was reacting with equal submission to Mock’s demands, beating her shapely breast and swearing to “sir” that, whatever the consequences, she would confirm that she had been kept by Wohsedt for several months now, especially since it was he who had infected her with “this filth”.
“I beg of you, don’t lock me up … I have to work … I have a small child … No doctor’s going to stamp my book …”
“You have two options,” Mock said, feeling disgust towards the sick girl, and disgusted with himself for revelling in her consternation. “Either I bring you in for having an out-of-date health record or I don’t. In which case you have only one way out: to work with me. Agreed?”
“Yes, agreed, honourable sir.”
“Now you’re addressing me as you should.”
“Yes, honourable sir. And that’s how I’m going to address you from now on, honourable sir.”
“So you’re Wohsedt’s kept woman. Do you have other clients as well?”
“Sometimes, honourable sir. He keeps me, but he’s too miserly to have exclusivity.”
“Are you sure he’s the one who infected you?”
“Yes, honourable sir. He had it already the first time I was with him. He liked biting my neck. He infected me like a rabid dog.”
Mock studied the girl. She was shaking. Tears glistened in her cornflower-blue eyes. He touched her cold, wet hand. She was moulting, layers of skin flaked from her neck. Mock felt sick; he was revolted by all kinds of things when he had a hangover. With a hangover he could never be a dermatologist.
“What’s your name?” he said, swallowing.
“Johanna, and my three-year-old daughter’s name is Charlotte.” The girl smiled, pulling her high collar further up over her neck. “My husband died in the war. We’ve also got a little boxer. We love her … She’s called …”
When he was young Mock had a boxer at his family home in Waldenburg. The dog would lie on its side and little Ebi would snuggle his head into its short fur. In the winter, the dog was happiest lying beneath the stove. Dog-catcher Femersche also lived in Waldenburg. The dogs he disliked most were Alsatians and boxers.
“I don’t give a damn what your mongrel is called!” Mock roared and pulled out his wallet. “I don’t give a damn about your bastard child!” He took out wads of banknotes and threw them into the girl’s lap. “I’m interested in one thing only: that you get rid of that fungus! There’s enough money for you to live off for a month. The doctor won’t take anything from you, he’s a friend of mine: Doctor Cornelius Ruhtgard, Landsbergstrasse 8. You’re to come and see me in a month, when you’re cured! If you don’t, I’ll track you down and destroy you! You don’t believe me? Ask your friends! Do you know who I am?”
“I do, honourable sir. You paid me a visit when I was working in the Prinz Blucher cabaret, Reuscherstrasse 11/12.”
“Ah, that’s interesting …” Mock tried to remember the circumstances. “Was I a client of yours? And what? How did I behave? What did I say?”
“You were …” she hesitated, “after some alcohol …”
“And what did I say?” Mock felt increasingly tense. Often, after nights of heavy drinking, he would hide his head in the sand like an ostrich. To his companions in these nocturnal escapades he would say: “Don’t remind me of it. Don’t talk about it. Not a word. Not a single word.” But now he wanted to know. May it fall on him like a sentence.
“You told me, honourable sir … that I look like your beloved … nurse… Except that she was ginger …”