“Yes.” She inhaled deeply. “I like games of the tongue …”
Mock did not register this innuendo because he was seized by a terrible thought: that his interrogation was sentencing this girl to death, to having her eyes gouged out, to having a metal needle stuck in her lungs. “To save her,” he thought, “I’ll have to isolate her in the ‘storeroom’. And what if I never catch the murderer? Will she have to sit in Wirth’s old counting-room for years while her velvety skin wrinkles and withers? I can still save her! I won’t ask her any questions. But if the murderer’s following me, how can he know whether I’ve questioned her or not? He’ll kill her anyway. Yet without her evidence I might not catch him, and I’ll be forcing her to stay in that old counting-room, with blemishes and wrinkles creeping over her withered skin. Besides, if we don’t catch the murderer, everyone stored away at Wirth’s place is going to get old, not only the girl.”
“Stop staring at me like an idiot and don’t talk nonsense,” he snarled — and forced himself to think, “What do I care about some whore and her alabaster skin!” — “Answer my questions! Nothing more.”
“Yes, Officer sir.” Erika stood up, opened the window and flicked a column of ash into the warm, autumnal evening. The air resounded with the grating of trams and the clip-clopping of horses’ hooves. The waist of her dress was dark and sat on her hips, accentuating their roundness. Mock felt that strong tension which awakens teenage boys from the deepest sleep, and which for ageing men is a sign that not everything in life has yet been lost. “I’ll ask her a question,” he thought, “and she’ll answer me. I’ll ask her another and be calm.”
“Answer my questions,” he repeated hoarsely. “Quickly. First question, what’s your profession?”
“Hetaera,”† said the girl, making way towards the bed. This time she sat modestly, and her face displayed nothing but concentration.
“How do you know that word?” Mock’s surprise diminished the tightness he felt.
“I read this and that.” A smile appeared on her face which Mock thought impudent. “I’m especially interested in antiquity. I even played Medea in an amateur production. I’m trying my hand at acting.”
“Why did you come here? To this apartment?” Mock closed his eyes to conceal the contradictory feelings that were preying on him.
“I’ve been coming here every Saturday. For several weeks.”
“And you plied your … profession here?” Mock took his time picking the right words.
“The one I ply, but not the one I dream of.”
“And what do you dream of?”
“Acting,” she whispered and a blush suffused her cheeks. She clenched her teeth as if trying to stop herself crying. Then she laughed derisively.
“You’re to describe accurately what you did here last Saturday,” said Mock, and thought, “She’s probably mentally ill.”
“Same as every other.”
“Tell me everything.”
“It excites you, does it, sir?” she asked, lowering her childlike voice.
“You don’t have to give me the details. Tell me broadly.”
“I don’t know what that means, broadly …” Another smile.
“Go on, damn it!” Mock yelled. “The four men who used to live here are dead. Do you understand?”
“I’m sorry.” Mock wanted to believe that the fear in her face resulted from his shouting and not her acting abilities. “Right, I’ll tell you. I was hired by a wealthy man. I don’t know his name. I met him in the Eldorado, where I’m a dance-hostess. He had a beard. He danced with me, then we went to my room. He proposed a regular commission. To partake in debauchery. I agreed, on condition that I could back out after the first time if I didn’t like it.”
The girl fell silent and picked at the bedspread with her slender fingers.
“Go on,” Mock said quietly, so as to hide his hoarseness. “It’s not the first time I’ve met somebody like you. I’m not aroused by stories of hetaeras … Gone are the days when I was excited by the works of Alciphron.”
“Shame,” she said gravely.
“Shame? Why?” Anger surged in Mock. He felt himself being manipulated by this crafty whore.
“I’m ashamed to talk about it,” she said in the same serious tone of voice. “If I aroused you, I’d simply be doing my job, which is arousing men. But otherwise, I don’t know how to say …”
“Use the term ‘to look after’ to describe the act you abandon yourself to when you’re doing your job.”
“Fine,” she whispered, and told him everything. “The man accepted my condition and gave me this address. I was to come here every Saturday after six. He was quite insistent about the time. So I came. I didn’t do anything perverted. There were six people in the room. The man who hired me, a young girl in a wheelchair and four young sailors. The sailors lived here. I suspect they weren’t sailors at all, but dressed up. Sailors live on ships, they don’t rent themselves out as … On my client’s instructions I’d get undressed. One of the sailors would look after me. My client would transfer the girl from the wheelchair to the bed and then the three other sailors took care of her. The girl would watch me and my … the one who was with me, and it obviously had a great effect on her because when she’d had enough of watching she very willingly looked after the three sailors all at once. It was like that every time.”
“And your client never looked after you?” Mock gulped. “Or the girl in the wheelchair?”
“God forbid!” Erika shouted.
“Why weren’t you with them last Saturday?”
“I was indisposed.”
“So the four sailors took care of the invalid?”
“Probably. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
Somebody knocked energetically. Mock pulled out his Mauser and made towards the door. Through the peep-hole he saw Smolorz. He let him into the hallway and breathed in the smell of alcohol. Smolorz was swaying slightly.
“Listen, Smolorz, you’re to keep an eye on the girl,” he said, nodding towards Erika, “until we transport her to the ‘storeroom’. You’re even to accompany her to the toilet. And one other thing. You’re not to lay a finger on her! Come back in one hour. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but you have to be sober. Do you understand?”
Smolorz nodded and left. He did not argue or protest. He knew his chief well enough, and knew what it meant when his chief addressed him informally, as he had done in the note delivered by Wirth: it certainly did not bode well. Mock closed the door behind him, went back into the room and looked at Erika. Her expression had changed.
“Sir,” she whispered. “What storeroom? Where do you want to lock me up? I’ve got to work. This job is finished. I’ve got to dance at the Eldorado.”
“No,” Mock whispered back. “You’re not going to work at the Eldorado. You’re going to work here.”
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1919
A QUARTER PAST SEVEN IN THE EVENING
Mock lay next to Erika straining his memory to count the women he had had in his life. But this was not in order to add another trophy to his collection. They were no trophies. Most were prostitutes, usually when he was drunk, and usually without much satisfaction. Mock counted all the women he had had and could not fully square his accounting. Not because there had been a vast multitude of them, but because during intercourse he had often been in a stupor or a fever, and could not remember whether these encounters could be called what is commonly termed
He got up and covered the girl’s slim body with his jacket. He could not resist running his hand over her white skin speckled here and there with islands of freckles; he could not resist slipping his hand beneath her arm to touch her sleeping breasts, which only a moment earlier had been full of life and urgently demanding their due.
He stood wearing nothing but his long johns and observed her shallow sleep. A scene from Lucretius’ poem “De rerum natura” unexpectedly came to his mind: a man is drenched in sweat, his voice and tongue falter, a hum
