“If you’d be so kind, Mr Dosche,” replied the old man, “as to buy us a loaf of bread from Malguth’s on your way. It has to be from Malguth’s”.
“I know, I know, Mr Mock,” Dosche nodded and told his dog: “You stay here, Rot. Mr Mock will look after you. You can crap in the yard but not under the bench!”
Dosche set off in the direction of Rybnikerstrasse. The old man played with Rot. Murmuring, he tickled him lightly on the neck while the dog growled and squirmed, catching the old man’s hand gently in its teeth. Eberhard sat down next to his father and lit his first cigarette of the day. He smiled at the events of the night. He realized he had not got around to asking the girl about any clients in leather underpants. “Never mind,” he thought, “yesterday I was there outside working hours. As of today, the actual investigation starts. I’ll ask her today.”
“It’s so early and you’re already awake, Father.” He blew smoke straight at the sun.
“Old people get up early. They don’t wander around in the night and they sleep in their own beds.”
“I didn’t drink that much yesterday. I’m conducting a very difficult case over the next few weeks. I’ve been seconded to the Murder Commission, and I’m no longer booking whores. You ought to be pleased, Father.”
“You’re always knocking it back and mixing with whores.” The old man’s stale morning breath engulfed Mock like a cloud. “You ought to get married. A man ought to have a son to hand him a tankard of beer when he comes home from work.”
Mock placed an arm on his father’s bony shoulder and rested his head against the wall. He imagined this idyllic scene: his future son, Herbert Mock, handing him a tankard of beer and with a smile turning to his mother at the kitchen stove. The woman nods approvingly, praises Herbert: “You’re a good boy, you’ve given your papa some beer”, and stirs the large pot on the hob. She is tall and handsome, her generous breasts pressing tight against her clean apron, her skirt touching the pale, scrubbed floorboards. Mock strokes little Herbert’s hair, then walks up to his wife and holds her by the waist. Red hair frames her delicate face, the apron is a nurse’s apron, an appetizing smell emanates from the pot where syringes are being boiled. Mock lifts the lid and sees a decoction of bones. “Bones for shoe glue,” he hears his father say. Large globules float to the surface — human eyes.
Mock felt his lips burning, then shook his head and spat out the cigarette butt. A trickle of sweat flowed down from beneath his bowler hat. He looked about him. He was still sitting on the bench by the wall. His father was just disappearing through the gate. Mock got to his feet, picked up the cigarette butt — much to the concierge’s satisfaction — and hurried after his father. Willibald Mock had wanted to get home, but feeling tired he had sat down on a bench by the butcher’s shop. He was breathing heavily. Rot lay down beside him and hung his pink tongue out. Mock hurried over to his father, touched him on the hand and said:
“Let’s move out. I’m plagued by nightmares here. Right from the start, ever since we inherited this apartment after Uncle Eduard’s death, I’ve been plagued by phantoms in my dreams, right from the very first night in this foul butcher’s shop … That’s why I drink, do you understand? When I’m dead drunk, I don’t dream …”
“Every drunkard has some sort of excuse …”
“This isn’t some twisted explanation. I didn’t sleep at home last night and I didn’t have any bad dreams, not one. And now, I only just got here, I nodded off for a moment and had another bad dream …
“Chamomile and hot milk. That does the trick,” his father muttered. He began to breathe more easily and returned to his favourite pastime other than chess, that of amicably teasing Rot.
“I’ll buy a dog,” said Mock quietly. “We’ll move to the centre and you’ll be able to take the dog for a walk in the park.”
“And what else!” The old man caught the dog by its front paws and listened with pleasure to his growl. “He’d have diarrhoea like Rot. He’d be bound to soil the house … Anyway, stop talking nonsense. Get yourself to work. Be on time. Somebody’s always having to come to get you, always having to remind you it’s time for work … Look, here they are again.”
Mock turned to see Smolorz climbing out of a droschka. He did not expect to hear good news, and his intuition did not fail him.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1919
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
No noise from the street reached the mortuary on Auenstrasse; the rays of the strong September sun did not penetrate; the smoke and smell of the bonfires burning on the nearby banks of the Oder near Passbrucke did not float in on the air. In Doctor Lasarius’ kingdom reigned a silence that was broken only by the grating of trolleys bringing in more bodies. There was an odour hanging in the air like that of overboiled carrots, but nobody was cooking vegetables here. All that could bring a kitchen to mind was the sharpening of knives.
And so it was now. Doctor Lasarius’ assistant sharpened a knife, approached the corpse lying on the stone table and made an incision from the collar bone down to the pubic hair. The grey skin fell aside to reveal a layer of orange fat. Muhlhaus snorted violently; Smolorz rushed out of the mortuary, and when outside the building opened his mouth wide to take in as much air as he could. Mock stood on the viewing platform intended for medical students and fixed his eyes on the open body, absorbing the information the pathologist was passing on to his assistant.
“Male, aged about sixty-five.” Mock saw the assistant note the information beneath the name “Hermann Ollenborg”. “Height one hundred and sixty centimetres, weight seventy kilograms. Water on the lungs.” With a quiet crunch of the knife, Lasarius cut away the bloated, hard lobes of the lungs and made incisions with a pair of small scissors. “There, you see?” — he showed Mock the pulp and water that ran from the bronchi — “That’s typical of death by drowning.”
Lasarius’ assistant lifted the dead man’s skull a little, inserted the tip of his knife behind one ear and made another incision. He then got hold of the scored skin of the occiput and a whitish membrane and drew both layers across eyes which were no longer there. They had been gouged out.
“Write this down,” Lasarius said, turning to him. Blood was slowly filling the cavity in the body. “Internal bleeding into the right lung cavity. Perforations on the lungs made by a sharp instrument …”
The legs and arms of the corpse began to jerk. Lasarius’ assistant was sawing into the skull, causing the body to move. Mock swallowed and went outside. Muhlhaus and Smolorz were standing bare-headed in the morning sunshine, staring at the brick buildings of the university’s Department of Medicine and at the yellowing leaves on the old plane tree. Mock removed his bowler hat, loosened his buttoned collar and approached them.
“An angler found the body under the Scheitniger sluice,” Muhlhaus said. He extracted a pipe from the pocket of his frock coat, an anachronistic garment that was the object of much teasing in the entire Police Praesidium.
“Was a note about me, or to me, found on him?” asked Mock.
“‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” Muhlhaus extended his hand, holding in a pair of tweezers an ordinary sheet of paper torn from a squared exercise book. He pressed his pince-nez to his nose, brought the note closer to his eyes and read: “‘Mock, admit your mistake, admit you have come to believe. If you do not want to see more gouged eyes, admit your mistake’.” He handed the page to Mock. “Did you know this man, Mock?”
“Yes, he was a police informer, a man by the name of Ollenborg.” Mock slipped on a glove and scrutinized the scrap of paper. The writing was crooked and uneven, as if traced by somebody who was illiterate. “He was well acquainted with the people and the goings on in the port. I questioned him yesterday in connection with the Four Sailors case.”
“The writing is different,” Smolorz said. “Different to yesterday’s.”
“You’re right,” Mock looked at Smolorz with approval. “The piece of paper found on the four sailors was written in a neat hand by someone who went to school. The one on Ollenborg was written unevenly, messily and …”
“Which could mean they were written by the victims themselves. One of the ‘sailors’ went to secondary school … Explain something to me, Mock” — Muhlhaus filled all his respiratory passages with tobacco so as to kill off the odour of the mortuary — “How is it you’re here? I was informed by Duty Officer Pragst and I forbade him to tell anyone else about it. Only the angler, Pragst and myself know of the murder. Most strange.” He pondered for a few moments. “Yesterday the bodies were found several hours after the murder. The same thing today. Perhaps those boys yesterday and now the angler were somehow directed by the murderer … We ought to question them more closely …”
“Smolorz, show the Commissioner” — Mock made way for a hefty orderly who was pushing through another body on a squeaking trolley — “what I received today …”
“A letter was found in the Police Praesidium letterbox,” Smolorz stuttered. “Somebody dropped it in last night. Addressed to Criminal Assistant Mock. This was in the envelope.” He held a page from a maths exercise book under Muhlhaus’ nose.
“Don’t bother to read it to me,” Muhlhaus said, furiously sucking air into his pipe, which was going out. “I know what it says.”
“The same words are on the piece of paper in the envelope as were found on Ollenborg’s remains,” Mock said. “And there’s a short footnote: ‘Location of body — Scheitniger sluice’. He’s telling us where he’s leaving the corpses.”
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1919
TEN TO NINE IN THE MORNING
The hot September sun broke into the Murder Commission’s briefing room at the Police Praesidium. The clatter of horses’ hooves, the grating of trams and the parping of automobiles rose up from the traffic on Schuhbrucke into the cloudless sky. Schoolchildren drifted along the narrow pavements, each with a briefcase under his arm or a belt holding a pile of exercise books slung over his shoulder. They were hurrying towards Matthiasgymnasium to be on time for their second lesson. Some of them dawdled, standing beneath the statue of St John Nepomuk to throw stones at the bursting husks of chestnuts. A coachman shouted in annoyance at some supplicants who were leaving the High Court and swarming into the road. An elderly man in a bowler hat approached the schoolboys and reprimanded them fiercely. “The schoolmaster, no doubt,” thought Muhlhaus. He closed the window and regretfully returned from the land of school memories. He looked at the gloomy, tired and irritated faces of his employees and felt a wave of despondency. He did not want to talk to these thick, hungover mugs; he did not know how to begin.
“Commissioner, sir.” Mock saved him the trouble of opening the discussion. “You can relieve all these men from the Four Sailors case, sir. They’re not needed …”
“I,” Muhlhaus said slowly, “am the one to decide who is going to work with me on this case.”
“Yes, Commissioner, sir.”
“And, just as a matter of interest” — the Commissioner approached the window once more, but this time did not open it — “why do you say ‘all these men’ are not needed? And what does ‘all’ mean? All except you? Is that what you had in mind, Mock?”
“Yes, that’s what I had in mind.”
“Explain yourself!”
“The murderer, as we have already established, wants me to admit to some mistake. So he murders four lads with pouches over their balls. It’s supposed to be a spectacular murder, one that the whole town will be talking about, and is to prevent me from ever sleeping peacefully again. The image of the murdered boys with gouged eyes is to forever work its way into my head.”
“We already know that, Mock,” said Reinert, sounding bored.
“Shut up, my friend. It’s not your name that swine’s putting in his notes.”
“Reinert, don’t interrupt Criminal Assistant Mock,” Muhlhaus snarled. “Let him continue.”
“Smolorz has observed quite rightly” — Mock gazed in concentration at Reinert’s face as waves of anger passed over it — “that the murderer is going to carry on killing unless I admit to my mistake. And, unfortunately, he’s proved himself a good prophet. Gentlemen, the victims have nothing in common with each other …”