There were yet other rooms whose contents we do not know, entire hallways unrecorded by history. Here speculation enters. Perhaps he had a dozen bedchambers, choosing among them depending upon his temper. Sometimes, thinking of Burke’s end, we picture him roaming the halls on a long night, never finding quite the right room.
Despite the invitations to hunting parties and long weekends at castles, or the occasional notice about his being seen with an actress, Burke’s life was solitary. He explained this as a necessity of his profession, claiming in one of his more famous maxims that a detective must form few attachments. But that did not mean his heart was immune to tender feelings. Through careful study, we have discovered evidence of a great passion.
In the summer of 1885 Burke was called to Wiesbaden to investigate a spate of jewel thefts. While pretending to be on holiday — attending the spa’s gatherings, circling the room with a glass of the waters — he met an Englishwoman named Olivia Ashdown. They were soon seen strolling through the Kurhaus Kolonnade and riding the funicular up the Neroberg, arms locked, engaged in long, close conversations. Never before had Burke so doted on a female. But the other bathers disapproved. Helmut Strauss, the noted horseman and one of Burke’s acquaintances, warned him that he went too far, that all were talking of his dark hands on her white bosom.
Burke promptly broke with Olivia, but after he solved the case (an elderly waiter was the thief) he stayed in Wiesbaden for a week. Such lingering is unprecedented; he always returned swiftly to Berlin at a case’s conclusion, yet this time he retired to a cottage above the city and sent for champagne and lobsters. Though the newspaper accounts make no mention of Olivia, it takes little effort to determine their break had merely been a ruse. When Burke finally returned to Berlin, the papers reported his surprisingly happy demeanor. With these details we have reconstructed the week he must have spent with Olivia: the long mornings in bed, the tender suppers in dishabille.
The evidence of Burke’s relationship with Olivia is scant, but it weighs heavily. Three months after Wiesbaden he was dining at Dressel’s when he received word of another rash of thefts, this time at Badenweiler. He left immediately, taking the express. Yet no record exists of the crimes at Badenweiler, nor at any of the other spa towns to which he was summoned every three months, and where he would stay for a week, lodged in seclusion outside town. He never commented on these “cases,” except to call them delightful.
How does one compare Burke’s cases, weigh the greatness of his reasoned deduction in one against that required for another?
The Wannsee Murder reportedly gave him the most fits. A body was found in an industrialist’s hunting lodge, arranged on a bier of pages torn from directories and volumes of Goethe. No one could identify the dead man, who was stripped of all his clothes. Burke took months to solve the case. The oddest is the Ware Killing, in which the murderer hired Burke to solve both crimes. Or is it the Bamberg Mystery, in which the bludgeoned duke seemed to come back to life? Then there are the cases he solved in single sittings, like the Theft of the Frankenheim Clock, the Affair of the Red Letter, the Case of the Hidden Blackmail, and his recovery of Müller’s collection of rare ferns, stolen in the light of day. Is that Burke at his most brilliant, his mind so keen he needn’t leave his study? Such cases are too numerous to count. The case that caught the most international attention was that of the Taskmaster: an underclerk in a shipping office who had organized an army of women — the daughters of Duisburg’s chief families — by sending them letters threatening them with slanders. He had ordered them to set fires for neither profit nor revenge, but for his pleasure alone.
When questioned on the subject, Burke would chuckle — a chuckle that stirred shivers in the listener, the reporters wrote — and say his greatest case was yet before him.
We know of three serious attempts made on Burke’s life.
The first came one evening while he was leaving a theater. A man ran up to him and stabbed at him with a dagger. The attacker missed, the blade passing through Burke’s coat, and was overpowered by a policeman. Burke identified him as Dr. Mildenberger, a government scientist who’d been ruined when the detective uncovered the Mosquito Ring’s plot to steal the war ministry’s supply of quinine.
Then the Black Lion, a band of anarchists that Burke had foiled multiple times, caught him halfway up the Siegess äule and shot at him. He escaped with only a slight wound.
In the third attempt, an assassin working for a consortium of villains — perhaps Bloch, though the connection was never firmly made — snuck into Burke’s rooms with the intention of garroting him in his sleep. The assassin got lost in the halls, and as he wandered from room to room Burke crept up behind him and stuck him with a blow dart from his collection, putting him instantly to sleep.
Doubtless there were more, but they have not been recorded. Once, when asked about the attempts, Burke said he did not mind. “Let them come. Very well. But they mustn’t touch—” At that he broke off. When pressed, he refused to say anything else, though it is generally agreed he was referring to the harrowing events of the Schott Affair, which had passed just months before.
Aside from the gossip at Wiesbaden, the only other specific mention of Olivia Ashdown in Burke’s history — and perhaps the greatest evidence of his love for her — comes in the middle of his investigation of the murder of the mirror magnate Johannes Schott. In 1893 Schott invited his family, as well as Burke and several old army friends, to his country mansion to celebrate his birthday weekend. But just before the first night’s dinner, Schott was found stilettoed in his study. At Burke’s insistence the police sealed the mansion while he examined the rooms and conducted interviews, and by the next morning he had discovered Schott’s son’s gambling debts, his valet’s true identity (he was Schott’s nephew), and a suspicious ash pile in the garden. Burke was about to question the rest of the staff when he received an unsigned telegram. To the consternation of the police and the papers, Burke fled to Bad Kreuznach.
There, the telegram had told him, Olivia — later identified by the papers as “an unknown woman”—lay dying. She had been poisoned, and as the doctors treated her, Burke contributed his knowledge of antidotes. The toxin was rare, taken from the back of a Borneo toad, and, despite the telegram’s warning, she had not been given a lethal dose. Once Olivia was beyond danger, Burke returned to the Schott mansion. Within an hour he identified the murderer as Schott’s wife, and as he questioned her she confirmed his suspicions, confessing she had arranged Olivia’s poisoning with the hope of stopping him. When Burke asked how she knew of his love, she answered, “I have a friend.” Scarcely before the last word had passed from her lips, she fell back in her chair and a bottle of prussic acid, which she must have emptied when she heard Burke’s steps outside her door, rolled from her hand.