Rosa

response to an unbearable situation were it not for the fact that Paul Wouters was not a victim of his circumstances. No doctor was needed to explain his horrifying condition. No, the real reason for his behavior was that Paul had been psychotic from his very inception: he had simply needed time to grow into it. Some are born evil, and Paul Wouters was one of the lucky few whose madness was no by-product of his setting. His father, Jacob, had learned to embrace his self-loathing; his mother had eventually succumbed to her self-pity; even his grandmother Anne could look to the world’s viciousness for her own. But Paul needed none of that. He felt no vindication, no joy in his killing. He killed because he could.

He was not, however, the man now lying naked on a slab at Sint-Walburga. In all fairness to the attendants, they had shaved part of the body yesterday afternoon: the top bit of his skull, so that the doctors could cut through and retrieve the brain. The doctors had been certain that the cause of Wouters’s mania would appear to them in the guise of some malformed lobe or conduit. The brain, however-now in a jar of formaldehyde on the shelf-had proved to be in perfect condition. The chief neurologist’s only response had been to utter the words “How very odd,” over and over again.

Yesterday’s disappointment, however, paled in comparison with this evening’s shock. Van Acker stared in disbelief as the thick locks of hair fell to the floor and revealed a face not at all similar to that of Paul Wouters. The shape and coloring of the narrow little body, on the other hand, were close enough to the contours van Acker remembered.

“You’re sure?” said Fichte, keeping his handkerchief over his nose as the attendants continued to scissor through the hair.

Van Acker shot him a frustrated, if tired, glance. “Yes, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. I’m sure.”

Wisely, Fichte chose not to answer.

Van Acker turned to the gathering of officials who had accompanied the two policemen to the asylum’s laboratory; he knew he was dealing with idiots. He spoke in French: “You mean to tell me that none of you saw an iota of difference in the man’s appearance, his attitude, his behavior?” Fichte might not have understood a word, but he knew that van Acker was taking his frustrations out on the people who could least help him. Worse, the doctors actually seemed to be pleased to have discovered that they had been dealing with the wrong brain: still hope for the lobe theory, after all. “That seems almost impossible to me,” van Acker continued. “Who were the morons who were supposed to be looking after him?”

The Superintendent spoke up: “There’s no need for that sort of language, Inspector. Clearly, a mistake has been made-”

“A mistake?” said van Acker, amazed at the man’s audacity. “What you have here, Monsieur, is nothing less than criminal. Men don’t simply trade places, and, I might be wrong here”-his words were laced with ridicule-“but who do you imagine would have volunteered for that role? I don’t think Mr. Wouters knew anyone who was eager to step in for a few weeks while he took the air. Do you?”

Everyone in the room remained silent. For a moment, van Acker looked at Fichte; he then turned away and began to shake his head. It was clear that he was more than a little embarrassed to have had a Berlin detective inspector witnessing this scene. Had Fichte been a bit more poised in his newfound position, he might have known what to say; instead, he stood there like everyone else.

Van Acker switched gears. For Fichte’s benefit-though probably more out of spite-he spoke in German: “I want a photograph taken of this man; I want every entry log you have for the past five months-who came, who went; I want guard rotations, doctor rotations-any rotation that had to do with our friend Wouters. And anything that might have happened out of the ordinary. The smallest thing. A misconnected telephone call. You have the records. I want to know about them.”

No one moved. Van Acker glanced sharply at the Superintendent, and the man realized he had no choice. He nodded to his colleagues, and the other men started for the door.

Fichte waited until most of the men were out in the hall before turning to van Acker. “The Kriminal-Kommissar would have done the exact same thing,” said Fichte. Realizing he might just have given the game away, Fichte quickly added, “Nikolai, I mean. Hoffner. You work the same way.”

For the first time in nearly three hours, van Acker’s jaw slackened. There might even have been the hint of a grin in his eyes. “You’re not a detective inspector, are you, Herr Fichte?”

Surprisingly, Fichte’s answer was no less forthright. “Not yet, Monsieur Le Chef Inspecteur. No.”

Van Acker’s grin grew. “Well, at least you’ve put me in good company.”

Hoffner reached across the desk for his cup, and checked the clock. He had corralled little Sascha for a second posting to the wire room almost three hours ago, but there was still no word from Fichte. Hoffner took a sip of the coffee, careful not to drip any of it onto the pages that were spread out in front of him.

He had stopped on this particular letter about an hour ago, when the word “relationship” had jumped out at him. The language was as dramatic as ever, but it was a different Luxemburg that Hoffner heard, now having discovered her secret within the shelves.

. . I know you don’t get much pleasure out of our relationship, what with my scenes that wreck your nerves, my tears, with all these trivia, even my doubts about your love. . It’s too painful to think that I invaded your pure, proud, lonely life with my female whims, my unevenness, my helplessness. And what for, damn it, what for? My God, why do I keep harping on it? It is over. .

Her despair was not so much for the solitude to come, as for her own fallibility: she felt no remorse, only a relief in the affair’s dissolution. Once again, Hoffner felt a certain kinship with this Rosa, and that, he knew, was dangerous. Victims needed to remain victims. The only mind Hoffner wanted to find his way into was that of the man who had wielded the knife.

Focusing on the page itself, Hoffner traced the imprints of the razorlike creases. The letter-sent to Leo Jogiches in the summer of 1897-had been read over and over, folded and unfolded a hundred times since then, and with an almost pious precision. Rosa’s fear that Jogiches might have laughed at its absurdity, or at its woman’s insecurity, had been completely unfounded. Not only had Jogiches held on to it, he had kept it with him at all times: in a billfold, from what Hoffner could tell. There was an unrefined, crushed leather residue on the sheets-the kind found only on the inside pockets of a man’s wallet-from years of safekeeping. K was evidently well-enough connected to have pried the letter loose from Jogiches’s grip.

Half an hour ago, Hoffner had discovered its companion piece-a second letter to Jogiches with identical creases and residue-written three years earlier, also kept in the billfold, and equally desperate. This time, however, a different kind of frustration dominated:

. . Totally exhausted by the never-ending Cause, I sat down to catch my breath, I looked back and realized I don’t have a home anywhere. I neither exist nor live as myself. . It’s boring, draining. Why should everyone pester me when I give it all I can? It’s a burden-every letter, from you or anyone else, always the same- this issue, that pamphlet, this article or that. Even that I wouldn’t mind if besides, despite it, there was a human being behind it, a soul, an individual. . Have you no ideas? No books? No impressions? Nothing to share with me?!. . Unlike you, I have impressions and ideas all the time, the “Cause” notwithstanding. . Now I’d like to ask you the following questions: 1. Is it right to say that in 1848 the French people fought mainly for general elections? 2. Did the Chicago demonstration take place in 1886 or 1887? 3. How many rubles to a dollar? 4. Did the strikes of the gas workers and longshoremen in England break out in 1889 and was it for an eight-hour day?. . Read my letter carefully, and answer all questions.

Hoffner wondered if Jogiches had kept the letter as a reminder to himself to be diligent in his humanity, or simply because he had enjoyed the adorable shift in tone at its end. Hoffner was guessing it had been a bit of both.

And yet, however charming Rosa’s caprice might have been, it was the care that Jogiches had taken with the letters that told Hoffner the most about his victim. From what he could gather, the romance between the two had