He went to the winding staircase and ran down as fast as his legs could carry him. Once he reached the ground floor and was out of the building, all his tiredness left him. He ran to the nearest crossroads and whistled with two fingers to passing droschkas, showing no interest whatsoever in the enormous, multi-storied building from which he had just emerged. Frenzel could only think of how to get home as quickly as possible, fetch his money, and go to watch the strongmen arm-wrestling across a beer-soaked table in a back room at Cafe Orlich.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919
A QUARTER TO SIX IN THE EVENING
The stairs groaned under the heavy footsteps of the three men. Mock, Wirth and Zupitza finally made it to the fourth floor of the tenement at Gartenstrasse 46. They stood panting outside the door of apartment 20 and sniffed the air in disgust. The rank odour came from the toilet on the landing.
“The lav’s probably blocked,” muttered Wirth as his gloved hand unlocked the apartment door with a picklock.
Mock kicked the half-open double door with a patent brogue — very gently, so as not to scuff the toe. Fetid air surged from the room. He screwed up his nose at a stench he abhorred, one which reminded him of a changing room at a sports gymnasium. He pulled out his Mauser and nodded to Zupitza to do likewise. Once in the dark hallway, he groped for the light switch and turned it on, drenching the hall in a dirty yellow glow. He leaped at once to the side to avoid a possible attack. None came. The brown, painted floorboards in the hallway creaked beneath their shoes. Zupitza wrenched open a huge wardrobe. It was empty save for some coats and suits. The dim light of a bulb covered with newspaper made it impossible to examine the clothes properly. Mock gestured to Wirth and Zupitza to search the main room while he turned on the light in the kitchen. The lighting proved as miserable as that in the hallway. He could, however, discern the mess one might expect to find in an apartment devoid of the female touch: stacks of plates covered in congealed tongues of sauce, cups with sooty traces of black coffee, rock- hard remnants of bread rolls and chipped glasses streaked with a tar-like liquid. This was everywhere: in the deep, semi-circular sink; on the table; on stools, and even on the floor. Mock was not at all surprised to see several glistening blowflies which lifted off at the sight of him to settle on the flaking wainscoting and on an embroidered picture bearing the words “The Early Bird Catches the Worm”. Despite the open window, there was an overwhelming smell of wet rags.
“No-one here!” he heard Wirth call from the main room. He left the kitchen and entered quarters which he thought would be far cleaner, as befits a place of work where hygiene plays rather an important role. He was not mistaken. The room had a window which gave on to the main road, and it looked like any other room that had not been cleaned for a week. Two huge iron beds were neatly covered with bedspreads embroidered with red roses. Between them was a bedside table on which stood a lamp with an intricately twisted shade. There were no pictures on the walls. It was a room with no soul, like in a miserable hotel where all one could do was lie on the bed, stare at the lamp, and try to banish suicidal thoughts. Mock sat on one of the beds and looked at his men.
“Zupitza, go and keep an eye on the caretaker for the rest of the evening and the whole of tomorrow.” He waited for Wirth to pass on his instructions in hand signals, then turned to the interpreter. “Wirth, you go and see Smolorz at Opitzstrasse 37, and bring him here. If he’s not at home, go to Baron von Bockenheim und Bielau’s villa at Wagnerstrasse 13 and give him this note.”
Mock took out his notebook, tore a page from it and wrote in an even, slanted script, far smaller than the classic Sutterline handwriting: “Kurt, come to Gartenstrasse 46, apartment 20, as soon as possible.”
“And I,” Mock said slowly in answer to Wirth’s mute question, “am going to wait here for the red-headed girl.”
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919
A QUARTER PAST SIX IN THE EVENING
Mock had realized long ago that, since leaving the hospital in Konigsberg, he was highly susceptible to women with red hair. Not wishing to believe that the red-headed nurse taking care of him was merely a figment of his imagination, a phantom brought to life by morphine, he would carefully scrutinize every
He was not frustrated now, even though he could not be at all sure that the girl standing on the threshold was not the one he had told Ruhtgard about during those frosty nights in Kurland. So little light came from the four sailors’ room that any woman standing in the doorway would have looked like a vision from a dream.
“Sorry I’m late, but …” Seeing a stranger, the girl broke off.
“Please, come in.” Mock moved away from the door on which he had heard a gentle knock a moment earlier.
The girl entered hesitantly. She looked around the empty apartment with unease and wrinkled her slightly upturned, powdered nose in disgust at the sight of the filthy kitchen. Mock closed the door with his foot, took her by the arm and led her into the main room. She removed her hat with its veil and tossed her summer coat onto one of the beds. She was wearing a red dress which reached down to her calves and stretched teasingly across her considerable breasts. The dress was old-fashioned, giving nothing away, and to Mock’s irritation it ended in a pleated frill. The girl sat on the bed next to her discarded coat and crossed one leg over the other, revealing high, laced boots.
“What now?” she asked with feigned fear. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock,” he replied, squinting at her. He said nothing more. He could not.
The girl gazed at him with a smile. Mock did not smile. Mock did not breathe. Mock’s skin was on fire. Mock was sweating. Mock was by no means sure if the girl sitting in front of him resembled the nurse in his dreams. At that moment the image of the red-headed angel from Konigsberg was blurred, indistinct, unreal. All that was real was the girl who was smiling at him now — charmingly, disdainfully and flirtatiously.
“And what of it, Criminal Assistant, sir?” She rested the elbow of her right arm in her left palm and gestured mutely with her middle and index finger that she wanted a cigarette.
“You want a cigarette?” Mock croaked, and seeing the amusement in her eyes he began to search his jacket pockets for his cigarette case. He opened it right in front of her nose and was taken aback when he realized that its lid had almost grazed her delicate nostrils. She deftly plucked out a cigarette from under the ribbon and accepted a light, holding Mock’s trembling hand in her slim fingers.
Mock lit a cigarette too and remembered old Commissioner Otton Vyhlidal’s advice. He was the one who had assigned him to work in Department IIIb, in a two-man team which, after the eruption of prostitution during the war, had become the official Vice Department. Vyhlidal, knowing that the young policeman could be vulnerable to a woman’s charms, used to say: “Imagine, Mock, that the woman was once a child who cuddled a fluffy teddy to her breast. Imagine she once bounced up and down on a rocking horse. Then imagine that once-small child cuddling to its breast a prick consumed by syphilis or bouncing up and down on greasy, wet, lice-ridden pubic hair.”
Vyhlidal’s drastic words acted as a warning now as Mock fixed his eyes on the red-headed girl. He set his imagination to work and saw only the first image: a sweet, red-headed child nuzzling her head into an ingratiating boxer. He could not envisage the child dirty, corrupted or destroyed by the pox. Mock’s imagination refused to obey him. He looked at the girl and decided not to overstretch his imagination. He sat on the bed opposite her.
“I’ve told you who I am,” he said, trying to make his voice as gentle as possible. “Now please reciprocate.”
“Erika Kiesewalter, Assistant Orgiast,” she said in a melodious, almost childish voice.
“You’re witty.” Mock, because of the contrast between her voice and the licentious nature of her words, remembered old Vyhlidal’s warning and slowly regained his self-control. “You like to play with words?”
