Death in Breslau

chosen. I am the chosen one. I will earn masses of money.) He finished what remained of his tea.

“I’d like a transcript of Friedlander’s interrogation, please,” he tried to give his voice a hard edge.

“What do you need a transcript for?” Mock’s tone was no longer playful. “You’ve been working in the police for years and you know that sometimes the person being interrogated needs to be appropriately pressurized. The transcript has been touched up. It’s better that I tell you what happened. I’m the one who questioned him after all.” He looked out of the window and started to invent fluently. “I asked about an alibi. He didn’t have one. I had to strike him. (The man from the Gestapo, Konrad, forced him to talk in short order, no doubt. He has his methods.) When I asked about the strange writing with which he filled thick notebooks, he laughed that it was a message to his brothers who were going to avenge him. (I have heard that Konrad slashes through tendons with a razor.) I had to be far more persuasive. I told them to fetch his daughter. That did the trick. He calmed down immediately and confessed he was guilty. That’s all. (Poor girl … What to do? I had no choice but to hand her over to Piontek … He got her addicted to morphine and packed her into bed with various high-ranking types.)”

“And you believed a madman?” Anwaldt’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Whom you subjected to blackmail like that?”

Mock was sincerely amused. He assumed Muhlhaus’ attitude in face of Anwaldt — a kind-hearted grandfather stroking the head of a fantasizing grandson.

“Isn’t that enough for you?” A sarcastic smile spread over his lips. “Here I have a madman and epileptic who, as the doctor states, can perform miracles shortly after a fit; no alibi, strange writing in notebooks. If you, having such evidence, continued to look for the murderer, you’d never finish your investigation. But maybe you were equally discerning in Berlin and old von Grappersdorff finally sent you off into the country?”

“Director, sir, did all this really convince you?”

Mock consciously gave slow vent to his irritation. He adored the feeling: to control waves of emotion and to give them free reign at any moment.

“Are you running an investigation or drawing up a psychological profile of my person?” he shouted. But he had played it wrong; he had not scared Anwaldt in the least. Mock did not know that shouting did not work on him. He had heard it all too often in childhood.

“Sorry,” said the Assistant. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Look, my son,” Mock spread himself comfortably in his chair, toying with his wedding ring and, in his thoughts, constructing his own keen profile of Anwaldt. “If I had such thin skin, I wouldn’t have been able to work for what’s coming up to twenty-five years in the police.” He immediately realized that Anwaldt was pretending to be humble. This intrigued him to such an extent that he decided to join in this subtle game.

“You didn’t have to apologize. This way you revealed your weakness. I’ll give you some good advice: always hide your own weak points, expose those of others. That way you ensnare others. Do you know what it means, ‘to have something on somebody’ or ‘to hold someone in a vice’? That ‘vice’ might, for example, be gambling; or it might be harmoniously built ephebes; or again, Jewish origins. By tightening that vice, I have triumphed an infinite number of times.”

“Can you now use my weakness against me? Can you catch me in ‘the grips of anxiety’?”

“But why should I?”

Anwaldt ceased being humble. This conversation was giving him a great deal of pleasure. He felt like the representative of a rare scientific discipline, who suddenly meets another demon of the science in a train and is trying not to count the stations passing by inexorably.

“Why? Because I’ve renewed an investigation which you concluded with such incredible success. (From what I know, the investigation advanced your career prodigiously.)”

“Then run the investigation and don’t perform psychological vivisections on me!” Mock had decided to lose his temper a little again.

Anwaldt fanned himself for a while with a copy of the Breslauer Zeitung. Finally, he risked: “And so I am. Starting with you.”

Mock’s whole-hearted laughter resounded in the room. Anwaldt timidly chimed in. Forstner was listening at the door — in vain.

“I like you, son,” Mock finished his tea. “If you have any problems, call me any time, night or day. I’ve got a ‘vice’ for almost everybody in this city.”

“But not yet one for me?” Anwaldt was putting the elegant visiting card away in his wallet.

Mock got up, giving the sign that he considered the conversation over. “And that’s why I still like you.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 7TH, 1934

FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Apart from the kitchen, Mock’s study was the only room in his five-roomed apartment on Rehdigerplatz 1 to have north-facing windows. Only here was it possible to enjoy a pleasant coolness in the summer. The Director had just finished eating lunch, brought to him from the Grajecka restaurant across the courtyard. He sat at his desk and drank cold Haselbach beer which he had taken from the larder a short while ago. As usual after a meal, he was smoking and reading a book picked at random from his bookshelf. This time he had picked the work of a banned author: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud. He was reading the paragraph about slips of the tongue and slowly falling into much-desired sleep when it came to him that he had called Anwaldt “my son” that day. It was a slip of the tongue which, in Mock’s speech, was highly unusual. He considered himself to be a very reserved man and, under Freud’s influence, he believed it was precisely slips of the tongue which disclosed our hidden needs and desires. His greatest dream was to father a son. He had divorced his first wife after four years of marriage when she had betrayed him with a servant because she could no longer tolerate his increasingly brutal accusations of barrenness. Later, he had had many lovers. If one of them had only become pregnant, he would have married her without any hesitation whatsoever. Unfortunately, the succession of lovers all left the gloomy neurotic, found someone else and created more or less happy herds. They all had children. Mock, then forty, still did not believe in his infertility and continued to search for a mother for his son. Finally he found a former medical student whose family had disowned her because of her illegitimate child. The girl was expelled from university and became the mistress of a certain rich fence. Mock was questioning her regarding a case in which the fence was involved. A few days later, Inga Martens moved into an apartment on Zwingerstrasse which Mock had rented for her, and the fence — after the policeman had caught him in a “vice” — very willingly moved to Liegnitz and forgot about his lover. Mock was happy. He would come to Inga every morning for breakfast after intensive sessions at the swimming pool next door to her house. After three months, his happiness reached it zenith: Inga was pregnant. Mock made the decision to marry a second time; he had come to believe the old Latin saying — “amor omnia vincit”. After a few months, Inga moved out of Zwingerstrasse and gave birth to the second child of her lecturer, Doctor Karl Meissner who, in the meantime, had got a divorce and married her. Mock, for his part, had lost his faith in love. He stopped living an illusion and married a rich, childless Danish woman, his second and last wife.

The Director’s reminiscences were interrupted by the phone ringing. He was glad to hear Anwaldt’s voice.

“I’m taking advantage of your kind permission and calling. I have a problem with Weinsberg. He’s called Winkler now and is pretending not to know anything about Friedlander. He did not want to talk and almost set his dogs on me. Do you have ‘something’ on him?”

Mock considered for a full minute.

“I think so, but I can’t talk about it over the phone. Please come here in an hour. Rehdigerplatz 1, apartment 6.”

He replaced the receiver and dialled Forstner’s number. He asked him two questions and listened to the exhaustive replies. A moment later, the telephone began to ring again. Erich Kraus’ voice combined within itself two contrary intonations: the Chief of the Gestapo was at once asking and ordering.

“Mock, who is this Anwaldt, and what’s he doing here?”

Eberhard could not abide this arrogant tone. Walter Piontek had always humbly asked for information even though he knew that Mock could not refuse him, whereas Kraus brutally demanded it. Although he had worked in Breslau for only a week, the latter was already sincerely loathed by many for this lack of tact. “A parvenu from Frankenstein and a fanatic,” — whispered Breslau’s aristocrats, both those