Death in Breslau

The Baron ran out to the drive and, facing the setting sun, shouted the name of his favourite butler several times. Hostile eyes answered him from the fence. He set off as fast as his legs could carry him towards the iron gates. The jeering looks pursued him; the evening air thickened. “Hans, where are you?” yelled the Baron. He tripped on even ground: “Hans, where are you? I can’t get up.” The evening air thickened; lead thickened in the Baron’s body. From behind the manor wall flashed the barrels of machineguns. Bullets whistled into the gravel alley, kicked up clouds of dust, wounded the Baron’s delicate body, did not allow him either to get up or to fall to the ground. “Where are you, Hans?”

Hans was sitting next to Max Forstner in the back of the parked Mercedes, its engine still running. He was weeping. His sobs reached a crescendo when two men with smoking machineguns ran up to the car. They took the front seats. The car moved off with a screech.

“Don’t cry, Hans,” Forstner said with concern. “You simply saved your life. Besides, I saved mine, too.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 15TH, 1934

EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

Kurt Wirth and Hans Zupitza knew that they could not refuse Mock. These two bandits, before whom the entire criminal world of Breslau shook, had a double debt of gratitude owing to “good Uncle Eberhard”. Firstly, he had saved them from the noose; secondly, he had allowed them to carry on with dealings both profitable and completely at odds with German law. In exchange, he sometimes asked them to do that which they did best.

Wirth had met Zupitza twenty years earlier, in 1914, on the freight ship Prinz Heinrich, which sailed between Danzig and Amsterdam. They became friends without the use of unnecessary words — Zupitza was a mute. The clever, short and slim Wirth, ten years his elder, took the twenty- year-old mute giant under his wing and did not regret his decision a month later when Zupitza saved his life for the first time. It happened in a tavern in Copenhagen. Three drunk, Italian sailors wanted to teach the small, thin German some good manners — meaning how to drink wine. This cultural education entailed pouring gallons of sour Danish plonk down Wirth’s throat. When he was already on the floor, drunk, the Italians decided that they would not be able to civilize that Kraut anyway so it would be better if such a cad disappeared from the face of the earth altogether. They had begun enforcing this decision with the help of broken bottles when into the inn came Zupitza who, a moment earlier, had almost brought down the wooden privy where he had got his hands on one of the numerous girls who comforted sailors in Copenhagen. He had not, however, lost all of his energy in her arms. A few seconds later, the Italians had stopped moving. The following day, the gloomy waiter — whose countenance over time would frighten many — shook like jelly when, questioned by the police, he tried to put across in his unskilled tongue the sound of skin cracked open, the shattering of glass, the moans and the wheezing. When Wirth came to, he weighed out the pros and cons and in Amsterdam abandoned the sailor’s profession for ever. The inseparable Zupitza likewise disembarked permanently on to terra firma. Yet they did not break all contact with the sea. Wirth devised a means of survival not known in Europe at the time: extortion from port smugglers. The pair formed an efficient mechanism whereby Wirth was the brain, Zupitza the muscle. Wirth would lead the negotiations with the smugglers; if these proved not to be submissive, Zupitza would kidnap and murder them, using methods invented by Wirth. Soon all the police in post-war Europe were looking for them: in the docks of Hamburg and Stockholm, where they left their victims’ mutilated remains; in the brothels of Vienna and Berlin, where they spent mountains of increasingly worthless marks. They felt the chase on their backs. Chance associates began to betray them more and more frequently in exchange for worthless promises. Wirth had a choice: either to leave for America, where the Mafia awaited them, bloodthirsty and ruthless competition in the field of extortion, or to find a quiet and peaceful place in Europe. The first choice was very dangerous, the second virtually impossible, since European policemen everywhere, dreaming of fame, carried photographs of both bandits in their pockets.

Nobody achieved that fame, but there was one man who consciously rejected it. This was a policeman from Breslau — Criminal Director Eberhard Mock — who, in the mid-’20s was in charge of so-called Vice Affairs in the Kleinburg district. It was shortly after his extraordinary promotion. All the newspapers wrote about the brilliant career of the forty-one-year-old policeman who, from one day to the next, had become one of the most important people in the city — Deputy to the Chief of the Breslau Police Criminal Department, Muhlhaus. On May 18th, 1925, during a routine check on a brothel on Kastanien-Allee, Mock, shaking with nerves, enlisted a constable from the street and, together, they burst into the room where the duo, Wirth and Zupitza, were mingling with a female trio. Mock, afraid that the arrested men might not obey him, shot them just in case, even before they had managed to clamber out from under the girls. Then, with his constable’s help, he tied them up and, in a hired cart, took them to Karlowitz. There, on the flood banks, Mock presented the two bound and bleeding bandits with his conditions: he would not stand them up in front of a tribunal if they settled in Breslau and obeyed him unconditionally. They accepted the proposition without reservation. Nor were there any reservations as to the whole situation on the part of the constable, Kurt Smolorz. He was quick to pick up Mock’s reasoning, not least since it most intimately concerned his own career. Both bandits found themselves in a certain friendly brothel where, handcuffed to their beds, they were subjected to loving first aid. After a week of convalescence, Mock made his conditions explicit: he demanded the large sum of a thousand dollars for himself and five hundred for Smolorz. He did not trust German money, which was being wasted away at the time by the fatal disease, inflation. In exchange, he proposed to Wirth that he would close his eyes on the extortion racket against smugglers who, shunting their dirty goods to Stettin, paused in Breslau’s river port. It was an argument of a sentimental nature which inclined Wirth to accept these propositions unconditionally. Mock had decided to separate the inseparable companions and assured Wirth that — if the money was not handed over on time — Zupitza would be turned over to the hands of justice. A second important argument was the prospect of a peaceful, settled life instead of the wandering life they had led up until then. Two weeks later, Mock and Smolorz were wealthy men, while Wirth and Zupitza — sprung from the executioner’s axe — entered terra incognita, fallow ground which they swiftly cultivated in their own way.

That evening, they were happily drinking warm vodka in Gustav Thiel’s tavern on Bahnhofstrasse. The tiny man with a foxy face, slashed with scars, and the square, silent Golem accompanying him, made an unusual couple. Some of the customers laughed at them surreptitiously; one of the regulars was completely unabashed and openly expressed his amusement. The fat man with pink, wrinkled skin kept exploding into laughter and pointing his chubby finger in their direction. Since they were not reacting to his taunts, he recognized them as cowards. And there was nothing he liked more than to torment fearful people. He rose and, pushing his feet hard into the damp floorboards, made towards his victims. He stood near their table and laughed hoarsely:

“Well then, my little man … Are you going to have a drink with good old uncle Konrad?”

Wirth did not so much as glance up at him. He calmly drew strange shapes with his finger on the wet oilcloth. Zupitza gazed pensively at the pickled gherkins swimming in a murky solution. At last, Wirth turned his eyes to Konrad. Not of his own free will, certainly: the fat man had squeezed his cheeks and was ramming a bottle of vodka into his mouth.

“Piss off, you fat pig!” Wirth with difficulty suppressed the memories of Copenhagen.

The fat man blinked in disbelief and grabbed Wirth by the lapels of his jacket. Not noticing the giant rise from his seat, he butted his head, but before it reached the would-be victim’s face Zupitza’s open hand materialized and the assailant’s forehead collided with it. That same hand grasped the fat man by the nose and shoved him on to the counter. Wirth, in the meantime, was not idle. He leapt on to the bar, grabbed Konrad by the collar and slammed his head into the countertop wet with beer. Zupitza took advantage of the moment. He spread his arms and suddenly clapped them together. The fat man’s head found itself between two fists; blows from either side crushed his temples, soot poured over his eyes. Zupitza took the inert body under the arms while Wirth made way for him. Those present in the tavern were numb with fear. Nobody would laugh at the singular couple again. They all knew that Konrad Schmidt did not give in to just anyone.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 15TH, 1934

NINE O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

Unusual equipment had been arranged in cell no. 2 of the investigative prison in the Police Praesidium: a dentist’s chair, its arms and leg-rests fitted with leather straps and a brass buckle. At that moment, the straps tightly hugged the mighty, stout limbs of the man sitting in it, a man so terrified that he was almost swallowing his gag.

“Did you know, sirs, that what every sadist fears most is another sadist?” Mock calmly finished his cigarette.