“Where are you going to make her talk? In a cell. What cell? Here, in the Police Praesidium. What’ve you got Smolorz for? Great — you lock a doll like that up in a cell and all the screws and policemen are going to know about it within an hour. And most certainly the Gestapo.”
In moments of greatest discouragement, Anwaldt always turned his thoughts to entirely different matters. And so it was now: he engaged himself in studying the Baron’s file. He found several photographs of an orgy in some garden and a list of names unknown to him — names of those present at the parties. None betrayed Turkish descent. There was very little on the host himself. The ordinary life story of an educated Prussian aristocrat and a few official notes from the Baron’s meetings with Hauptsturmfuhrer S.A. Walter Piontek.
He buttoned his shirt and tightened his tie. He went downstairs slowly to the archives, picking up his Breslau police identification on the way. (
“When are you coming back, Eberhard? If you were here you’d extract Piontek’s and Baron von Kopperlingk’s files from the Gestapo … You’d find a safe place where we could subject Lea to a morphine detox … You’d surely find a vice in your memory for that crazy Baron … When are you finally coming back?”
Longing for Mock was longing for the Baron’s money, for tropical islands, for slaves with skin like silk …
† To what good? (Latin).
VI
BRESLAU, THAT SAME TUESDAY, JULY 10TH, 1934
SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
On the main road which lay at the end of Hansastrasse, Anwaldt found a small restaurant. Out of professional habit, he noted the owner’s name and the address: Paul Seidel, Tiergartenstrasse 33. There he ate three hot sausages immersed in a mash of boiled peas and drank two bottles of Deinart mineral water.
Ten minutes later and feeling somewhat heavy, he stood outside Fatamorgana Studio of Photography and Film. He thumped for some time — loudly and stubbornly — on the closed door.
“I haven’t seen Fraulein Susanne going out anywhere. Her servant left an hour ago …” he muttered, inspecting Anwaldt’s identification.
The policeman removed his jacket and resigned himself to the trickles of sweat: he did not even attempt to wipe them off with a handkerchief. He sat down on a stone bench in the yard next to a dozing pensioner in a perforated hat. One window-vent in Lea’s apartment, he noticed, was not quite closed. He barely managed to climb on to the sill — his swollen heel was aching and his stomach lay heavily. Slipping his hand inside, he turned the brass handle and, for a moment, struggled with the tangling curtain netting and rampant ferns standing on the window sill. He felt at home in this apartment and took off his jacket, waistcoat and tie, hung all this on the back of a chair and set off in search of Lea. He made towards the studio where, so he thought, he would find her lying, intoxicated. But, before he got there, he turned to the bathroom: the peas and sausages were sending out strong physiological messages.
Lea Friedlander was in the bathroom, her legs hanging over the toilet bowl, her thighs and shins smeared with faeces. She was naked. The thick cable wrapped around her neck was attached to the overflow pipe just below the ceiling and the corpse’s back was touching the wall. The painted crimson lips revealed gums and teeth from between which protruded a blue, swollen tongue.
Anwaldt threw up the contents of his stomach into the bidet. He then sat on the edge of the bath and tried to collect his thoughts. In no more than a few minutes, he was sure Lea had not committed suicide. There was no stool in the bathroom, nothing from which she could have kicked herself off. She could not have rebounded from the toilet bowl because she was not tall enough. She would have had to tie the loop on the thick drainpipe below the ceiling and then, holding on to it with one hand, place the loop around her neck.
Suddenly, he heard the curtain flutter in the window through which he had climbed. A draught.
In the door, stood a huge, dark man. He took a rapid swipe. Anwaldt jumped aside, treading on the silk petticoat lying on the floor. His right leg slid back; the entire weight of his body rested on his swollen left foot; it was more than he could take. The left leg gave way under him; Anwaldt bent forward in front of the Turk. The latter clasped his hands and gave a blow from below — to the chin. The policeman collapsed backwards into the enormous bathtub. Before he realized what had happened, he saw the assailant’s face over him and an enormous fist armed with a knuckleduster. The punch in his solar plexus took his breath away. A cough, wheezing, a blurred image, wheezing, wheezing, night, wheezing, night, night.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 10TH, 1934
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
The icy water restored Anwaldt’s consciousness. He was sitting, quite naked, in a windowless cell, tied to a chair. Two men in black, unbuttoned S.S. uniforms were observing him. The shorter of the two twisted his long, intelligent face in a grimace reminiscent of a smile. He reminded Anwaldt of his secondary school maths teacher who used to pull similar faces when one of his pupils could not solve a problem.
The man from the Gestapo walked around the cell, where the stench of sweat was almost palpable.
“Bad, Anwaldt, isn’t it?” he clearly expected an answer.
“Yes …” the tortured man gasped. His tongue caught the jagged remains of his front tooth.
“Everybody’s bad in this city.” He circled the chair. “Yeees, Anwaldt. So what are you doing here … in this Babylon? What brought you here?”
The man in uniform lit a cigarette and put the flaming match to the prisoner’s crown. Anwaldt flung himself about; the stink of burning hair was suffocating. The second torturer, a sweaty, fat man, threw a wet rag over his head, extinguishing the fire. The relief was short-lived. That same Gestapo man squeezed the prisoner’s nose with one hand while, with the other, he shoved the rag into his mouth.
“What’s your assignment in Breslau, Berliner?” the muffled voice repeated. “Enough, Konrad.”
Freed of the stinking gag, Anwaldt fell into a long fit of coughing. The slim Gestapo man waited patiently for an answer. Not getting one, he looked at his helper.
“Herr Anwaldt doesn’t want to answer, Konrad. He evidently feels safe. He thinks he’s protected. But who’s protecting him?” he spread his hands. “Criminal Director Eberhard Mock, perhaps? But Mock isn’t here. Do you see Mock anywhere, Konrad?”
“No, I don’t, Herr Standartenfuhrer.”
The slim man bowed his head and uttered in a pleading voice:
“I know, I know, Konrad. Your methods are foolproof. No secret remains, no name blotted from memory, when you question your patients. Allow me to cure this patient. May I?”
“Of course, Herr Standartenfuhrer.”
