One must be wary of the newspaper and dime-novel illustrations, which often colored him darker than he was, thickened his lips, bulged his eyes. He was of middle height — five feet seven inches tall — and possessed a slight paunch, a rather large brow, and a strong nose with a rounded tip. His eyes were hazel, his skin a deep chestnut, his mouth often shaped into a slight smile that, as the kaiser famously remarked, simply said, “I know.” He never cultivated a mustache, kept his hair cropped close.
As for his dress, he wore English-cut suits of either gray or black wool, his sole ornaments three watch fobs hung from a golden chain. The fobs never changed, and any schoolchild in Wilhelm I’s Berlin could name them: the gold ship’s wheel to commemorate the Rhine Barge Mystery, the miniature shield presented to him by the Munich police in honor of his role in solving the Dubbel Murders, and the platinum-mounted bear claw given to him by the Prince von Schlieffen after he rescued Christiana, the prince’s intended, from her gypsy kidnappers. He wore them at all times — whether he was pursuing a clue in the sewers or lecturing the Reichstag on the criminal mind — perhaps as a warning of his constancy to those who would oppose him.
Not long after the Case of the Murdered Twin — when he began receiving regular commissions and collecting handsome fees — Burke moved from Prenzlauer Berg to Fasanenstrasse, on the far side of the Tiergarten. He occupied the entire fourth floor of his building. Rooms upon rooms circled the courtyard, and over the years he fitted them out to his exacting specifications. There were the main living quarters, of course, and the famous sitting room where he met his clients while reclining on his settee — to heighten the flow of blood to his brain, it was said. Then there were the rooms for his collections: one for the ordered cartons of lint and hair from the chief criminals of the Continent and Britain; one filled with jars of soils from around the world, which he employed in the identification of dirts found at crime scenes; and one for weapons of every description: blackjacks and saps, trays of bullets and blades, a kris from the Dutch East Indies, even an atlatl from the polar regions. The chief of these rooms was the library. There he made his experiments, and there he kept his famous blue-morocco volumes — a vast collection of books and pamphlets, ranging from studies of African beetle carapaces to treatises on the patterns of broken glass, used in the study of clues.
With each new case (the Mystery of the Blue Hussar, the Theft of the Archbishop of Mainz’s Diamond Miter), his fame swiftly grew. German bakers began producing the Moor’s Torte, a coffee-flavored pastry studded with “clues” (sultanas), and Moor Clubs spread across the Continent and in England — members blackened their faces and were given the details of a crime that must be solved by the end of the afternoon. Soon Burke was maintaining correspondence with other men of note (Kalb Ali Khan the philosopher-nawab of Rampur, Lord Roscomb the industrialist, Oscar Agardh the Swedish Darwin), and in 1884 he was summoned to Japan by Emperor Mutsuhito to solve the Golden Crane Murders plaguing the imperial family.
By 1881 one could open the newspaper on any given day, anywhere on the Continent and even in the United States, and read about Burke — that he had recovered a stolen painting for the State Museum or hunted the vitriol thrower Kurtz, that he had been seen having champagne with an actress at Dressel’s or sitting in Prince von Ysenburg’s box at the opera, or that he had received some new recognition from the kaiser or beaten the Prince of Wales at billiards. One famous article recorded the foods Burke ate in order to discover which aided his thinking (plums and kidneys, the reporter decided), while a number of others provided phrenological analyses of his skull, citing the enlarged organs of Comparison and Human Nature as the seat of his mental prowess.
In the course of his career, Burke battled many adversaries: the confidence man Reynolds, the assassin Fiori, the archspy Countess von Perlitz. But greatest and most dangerous of all was the shadowy crime broker Heinrich Bloch.
In the fall of 1886, six-year-old Liesl von Eberbach, the daughter of the interior minister, was stolen from her home. Within a day letters began arriving at the papers bearing blood-spotted scraps of her dress. The letters asked no ransom, made no demands, but warned the girl would be killed in a week’s time. None could understand the kidnappers’ motive, nor find the faintest trace of their whereabouts — the letters bore postmarks from around the empire. Liesl’s father called in Burke to investigate, and with only a water stain and a sample of dust he determined she was being held in the aquarium by two henchmen in the pay of Henri Guillard, the French ambassador’s attaché. Liesl was rescued, the city relieved, the interior minister supremely grateful.
But Burke was not satisfied. He recognized in the plan’s design a genius far beyond Guillard’s. Its purpose, in terrorizing Liesl’s father, was to force his resignation and cause the German government to fall. Burke couldn’t question Guillard — he hid himself in the embassy, claiming immunity — but when he tried the henchmen they gave him a name, Bloch. They never met the man, they said, nor knew who he was. But it seems they had told Burke enough. The next morning they were found murdered in their cells.
In the months and years that followed, Burke devoted himself to the study of Bloch, yet he discovered little about the fiend, why he turned to crime or how he came to dominate it. The bastard son of Joachim Bloch, spice merchant, and his Javanese mistress, Heinrich Bloch was given the running of his father’s spice house at a young age and used it as a front throughout his career. Living in the Nikolaiviertel as a simple burgher, Bloch kept a perfect cover. But Burke knew that Bloch arranged the bombing of Grand Duke Alexey’s carriage during his state visit, masterminded the Reichsbank Jewel Robbery, and plotted the mine collapse at Augsburg, in which a hundred men died. It was said that Bloch controlled a network of a thousand criminals in the city; that he was a past master of the bassoon, his instrument having once belonged to the only man he’d killed with his own hands; that as soon as he’d planned and seen the execution of a thousand crimes he would retire from the spice house and return to Java and live on a boat; that he demanded souvenirs from each of his terrible schemes and kept them in pine cabinets: a golden bolt from Alexey’s carriage, the preserved finger of one of the Reichsbank’s murdered clerks, a lump of bloodstained ore from Augsburg.
For six years Burke pursued Bloch but failed to prove his guilt in any crime. Some claim that Burke could have done so, but that he took a connoisseur’s pleasure in tracing each of Bloch’s plots and allowed him his freedom to ensure there would be more. Most, though, find such a suggestion preposterous. At the end of six years, in the winter of 1892, Bloch disappeared. The spice house was boarded up. Every trace of Bloch was gone. When Burke mentioned this to the papers, he said he suspected some new villainy but could not name it.
A tantalizingly brief mention in a catalog of homes of the celebrated, published in 1890 and discovered only recently, describes a room in Burke’s house holding a dozen glass curios filled with ceramic blackamoors. “Some stand nobly, others ride steeds, and yet others kneel and bear gifts,” the catalog reads. “Blackamoors of all shapes and sizes, bareheaded or in turbans and fezes.” His clients sent them, which tells us much, but what tells us more is that he kept them. For all our research, Burke himself remains a mystery, yet here we have a clue. He had a passage of Pushkin engraved on a brass tablet and mounted beneath the central curio, which the catalog gives thus: “He felt that he was for them a kind of rare beast, a peculiar alien creature, accidentally brought into a world with which he had nothing in common.” He was perhaps not as at home in Berlin as is commonly assumed, and with this passage as a lens we can see traces of a deep melancholy in Burke’s dinners alone at the Café Bauer, his solitary trips to the shore.