Death in Breslau

Andreae smiled.

“Fortunately there are. Counsellor, I’ll translate this text as best I can. Besides, I have just remembered one student who exhibited — as you described it — certain aberrations. Baron Wilhelm von Kopperlingk.”

“I don’t thank you.” Mock donned his hat.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME MAY 13TH, 1933

TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Kleinfeld was waiting for him in the Police Praesidium with Moses Hirschberg, a not so tall, hunched, dark- haired man of about forty. He repeated what the Counsellor already knew from Kleinfeld’s report.

“Tell me, Hirschberg, where did you work before your present employment?”

The waiter had suffered from some inflammation in his childhood which had left him with a tic: when he spoke, the right corner of his mouth was pulled a little upwards which made it look as if he were smiling idiotically or scornfully. Reciting a dozen or so moth-eaten establishments, Hirschberg did not stop smirking. The bell began to swing in Mock’s chest again. He approached the questioned man and struck him with his open palm.

“Happy are you, Jew? Maybe it’s you who wrote that drivel in your vile language?”

Hirschberg hid his face in his hands. The Criminal Secretary, Heinz Kleinfeld, one of the best policemen in the Criminal Department, had a father who was a rabbi. He stood, now, staring at the floor. Mock swallowed and gestured “take him away”. His palm was sore. He had hit the man a little too hard.

He found his men in the briefing room. Looking at them, he gathered that he would not be hearing any valuable revelation from any of them. Hanslik and Burck had questioned twelve dealers in animals and none of them had heard of scorpions being sold. Smolorz had not come across a trace of a private menagerie, but he had acquired some interesting information. The owner of a shop selling rodents and snakes had vouchsafed that one of his regular clients, a stout, bearded man, bought poisonous reptiles and lizards. Unfortunately, the shopkeeper could not say any more about the man. Reinhardt and his men had questioned at least fifty brothel residents. One of them had stated that she knew a professor who liked to pretend he was quartering her with a sword while shouting in some foreign language. The policemen were surprised that this information seemed to make no impression on their Chief. Thanks to statements made by Detective Reinhardt’s prostitutes, they drew up a list of fifteen sadists and fetishists careless enough to invite “little girls” into their own apartments. Seven of these were not at home and eight had cast-iron alibis: indignant wives, every one of whom had confirmed that their uglier halves had spent the whole of the previous night in the marital bedchamber.

Mock thanked his men and designated them similar tasks for the following day. When they had said goodbye to him, none too pleased at the prospect of a working Sunday, he said to Forstner:

“Please come and see me at ten. We’ll pay a certain well-known person a visit. Then you will visit the university archives. Don’t be surprised — they’ll be open. One of the librarians is on special duty tomorrow. You will make a list of all those who have had anything to do with Oriental Studies: from one-term students to doctors of Persian Studies and Sanskrit specialists. A propos, do you know what Sanskrit is?”

Without waiting for a reply, Mock left his office. He walked along Schweidnitzer Stadtgraben towards Wertheim’s Department Store. He turned left into Schweidnitzer Strasse, passed the imposing statue of Wilhelm II flanked by two allegorical figures representing State and War, made a sign of the cross at the Church of the Sacred Heart and turned into Zwingerplatz. He walked past the local state school and dropped into Otton Stiebler’s coffee roasters. In the crowded room, dark with tobacco smoke and filled with a strong aroma, swarmed a fair number of aficionados of the black beverage. Mock entered the counting-room. The accountant immediately interrupted his sums, greeted the Counsellor and left, allowing him to talk freely over the telephone. Mock did not trust the police telephonists and often dealt with conversations demanding discretion from this receiver. He dialled the number of Muhlhaus’ home and, introducing himself, listened to the necessary information. Then he called his wife and justified his absence from dinner on account of an enormous work load.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME MAY 13TH, 1933

HALF-PAST THREE IN THE AFTERNOON

The Bishops’ Cellar in the Schlesischer Hof Hotel in Helmuth-Bruckner-Strasse, in pre-Nazi times the Bischofstrasse, was famous for its exquisite soups, meat roasts and pork knuckle. The walls of the restaurant were decorated with oil paintings by the Bavarian painter, Edward von Grutzner, depicting scenes from the somewhat unascetic lives of monks. Mock liked best the side room lit by a green, hazy light falling through the stained-glass window just below the ceiling. He came here very often at one time to surrender to dreams among rippling shadows, lulled by a subterranean silence, the quiet breath of the cellar. But the growing popularity of the restaurant had spoiled the sleepy atmosphere so enjoyed by the Counsellor. The shadows rippled still, but the slurping of the shopkeepers and storekeepers, as well as the yelling of the S.S. who swarmed the place of late, made the fictitious ocean waves fill Mock’s imagination not with solace so much as with silt and rough seaweed.

The Criminal Counsellor was in a difficult situation. For several months now, he had observed worrying changes in the police. He knew that one of his best policemen, the Jew Heinz Kleinfeld, was regarded with disdain by many; one policeman, newly engaged by the Criminal Department, had refused outright to work with Kleinfeld, with the result that — from one day to the next — he had stopped working for the police. But that was at the beginning of January. Now Mock was not at all sure he would have thrown that Nazi out of work. Much had changed since then. On January 31st, the posts of Minister of Internal Affairs and Chief of the entire Prussian Police were taken by Hermann Goring; a month later, the new, brown-shirt Oberprasident of Silesia, Helmuth Bruckner, had moved into the impressive building of the Regierungsbezirk Breslau on Lessingplatz; and not quite two months later, the new President — shrouded in ill-repute — Edmund Heines had marched into the Police Praesidium of Breslau. A new order had come to pass. The old camp for French prisoners of war on Strehlener Chaussee in Durrgoy had been turned into a concentration camp where the first to find themselves were Mock’s close acquaintances: the former President of Breslau police, Fritz Voigt, and the former Mayor, Karl Mach. Suddenly there appeared, in the streets, bands of juveniles, drunk with a sense of their own impunity and the vilest beer from Haas. Carrying torches and in a tight cordon, they surrounded transports of arrested Jews and anti-Nazis on whom hung wooden notices with “crimes” committed against the German nation inscribed on them. From one day to the next, streets had been given the names of brown-shirt patrons. In the Police Praesidium, members of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had suddenly become active; the Gestapo had overrun in the beautiful building’s west wing and all of a sudden the best men from other departments were having themselves transferred there. Heines — in defiance of Muhlhaus’ protests — had settled his favourite ward, Forstner, in the Criminal Department, and Mock’s particular enemy, a Counsellor Eile, had become Director of the newly created Jewish Department. No, today — in May of 1933 — Mock could not afford to react so decisively. He was in a difficult situation: he had to be loyal to von der Malten and the Masonic lodge which had facilitated his brilliant career yet, at the same time, he could not provoke the Nazis against him. What irritated him most was that he did not have any influence over the situation and his future depended on his finding the murderer of the Baron’s daughter. If it turned out that it was the member of some sect — as was highly probable — Hitler’s propaganda would find a convenient pretext to destroy Breslau’s Freemasons and anyone connected with them, therefore also Muhlhaus and Mock. That sectarian would very readily be transformed into a Freemason by the tabloids — the Sturmer, for example, and the cruel felony would be depicted as a ritual murder, a settling of accounts between Breslau’s three Lodges.

If the murderer turned out to be a mentally deficient pervert, Heines et consortes would certainly have Mock concoct an “anti-German” — Jewish or Masonic — biography for him. In both the first and the second case, the Counsellor, as an instrument in the hands of propaganda, would appear in an ambiguous light in the eyes of his protectors, the Freemasons. It was not surprising that von der Malten demanded that the murderer be given over to him; he would wreak bloody vengeance on the perpetrator while nipping any intrigue against the Lodge in the bud. Consequently, either handing over or not handing over the murderer to the Baron would mean a career in the Fisheries Police in Lubin for Mock. In the first instance, the brown-shirt newspapers, incited by Forstner, would write at length about the Masons administering justice off their own bats, in the second, Muhlhaus and his people in the Lodge would react correspondingly. Certainly, the Counsellor could break with the Lodge and become a Hitlerite, but remnants of “good taste”, which twenty-four years of police service had not eradicated, protested against this course, as did his awareness of the end to any future career: the Lodge could avenge itself on him in a very simple way — it could inform the appropriate people about his own Masonic