“Do you know her name yet?” Mock asked (and then told himself, “She must have been called Johanna.”). “Were her eyes gouged out?”
“We don’t know her name,” von Gallasen replied, surprised that Mock had shaken hands with an ordinary beat officer. “None of the gawpers knew her. Your colleague Domagalla has dug up the address of a pimp living in the vicinity …”
“They’re just bringing him in,” said Officer Stieg, pointing to two uniformed policemen and a short man with wispy blond hair and a top hat who was traipsing up the steep stairs between them.
“I asked you whether her eyes had been gouged out,” Mock said, and his thoughts replied: “Yes, he stuck a bayonet into her eye socket and twisted it a couple of times.”
“No … Of course not … The eyes are untouched,” muttered Officer Stieg. “Tieske, tell the character in the top hat to have a good look at her, then bring him here! At the double!” he yelled to the uniformed policemen.
“Stieg, please tell me everything ab ovo!” Mock said, irritating von Gallasen who was higher than Stieg in rank, height and birth, and therefore believed that he ought to have been asked first.
“Ab what?” Stieg said, having no idea what was expected of him.
“From the beginning,” Mock explained. “Didn’t you learn Latin at school?”
“This morning, Christianne Seelow from number twenty-four on the fourth floor,” Officer Stieg began, “was hanging out her washing on the roof. A gust of wind blew one of her sheets down into the ventilation pit. She went downstairs and discovered the body. The caretaker, Alfred Titz, ran to the police station. That’s it. Do you want to see her?”
Mock shook his head and imagined Johanna’s body covered by a sheet blown down from the roof by a merciful wind. The blond man in the top hat appeared next to them, evidently not pleased at the sight of Mock.
“Do you know her, Hoyer?” Mock asked, and in his mind he heard the pimp reply: ‘Yes, her name is Johanna. I don’t know her surname.”
“No, Commissioner sir,” Hoyer answered. “She wasn’t from our district. I once saw her in the inn by the yard, but my girls soon drove her out. We don’t like competition.”
“What, was she so pretty?” asked Mock.
“She wasn’t bad,” Hoyer said, smiling at his lewd recollections. “To be honest, someone could have made quite a profit out of her … I wanted to take her on, but my girls didn’t like her. They teased her.” Hoyer smiled again, this time at Mock. “I’ve got six girls to look after. Sometimes I give in. You can’t argue with all six at once …”
“Fine,” Mock muttered, and tipped his bowler hat in farewell. He was bursting with joy. It was not Johanna. “Defensive pessimism is the best possible attitude to have in the world,” he thought, “because is there anything worse than unpleasant disappointment, than a painful surprise?”
“Teased her? How?”
Mock heard von Gallasen question Hoyer and thought: “The lad wants to ask at least one question. He likes interrogating people. One day it’ll bore him.”
“They called her names.”
“Such as?” asked the novice detective. Mock paused on the stairs to hear the answer.
“Eczema,” laughed Hoyer.
3. IX.1919
Recently my thoughts have been focussing on an anticipation of events. This evening as I passed a shop selling clocks, I caught sight of a painting advertising a timepiece on a strap which you fasten around your wrist. These watches are still a novelty, and one often sees them advertised in the windows of department stores. The black strap in the painting encircled a man’s suntanned wrist. It immediately reminded me of a woman’s leg sheathed in a stocking. The black watch strap reminded me of a suspender. A short while later I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner. The waiter discreetly placed the business card of a brothel on my table. On it was a drawing of a young woman wearing a tight dress and displaying legs in stockings with suspenders. I ate my supper and approached the tenements into which the prostitute I was tailing the day before yesterday had disappeared. I waited. She emerged at about midnight and winked meaningfully at me. A moment later we were in a droschka, and a quarter of an hour after that at the place where we bring offerings to the souls of our ancestors. She undressed, and for a generous sum allowed me to tie her up. She did not protest even when I gagged her. She had terrible eczema on her neck. This constituted the fulfilment of anticipation. After all, yesterday I offered up to science Director W., aged sixty, who had identical eczema. And his was on the neck too!
After a while I began my lecture. She listened, and suddenly she began to reek of fear. I moved away from her and continued my subtle interpretation of two passages from Augsteiner. I’ll summarize what I told her here:
Incarnations of the soul, writes Augsteiner, appear in a space that is hostile to them. The soul, which in itself is good because it is identical to the concept of man, because he himself is eo ipso the effluence of the element of the soul, which ex definitione cannot be evil because ex definitione it is opposed to that which pertains to substance, ergo bodily, ergobad; and so the soul becomes incarnate where the bad element finds expression, in order to balance out the attributes of evil which dwell within it. In this way, the emanation of the soul brings about a natural harmony, namely deity. And now for a partial, empirical confirmation of Augsteiner’s theses. The soul of that vile Director W., aged sixty, appeared in the place where he became a victim of torment — in this very house, on the ground floor. And it is this soul which indicated where Director W. had hidden the letter to his wife, deceitful yet protesting his innocence. This does not tally with Augsteiner’s views because the soul remained deceitful — just as it had done in this man during his lifetime, so the soul continued to do evil because it convinced the wife that her husband was no shameless adulterer, but an angel. But the soul destroys the evil in the otherwise correct suspicions of Director W.’s wife, allowing her to be steeped in blissful ignorance. Blissful ignorance is the absence of evil, ergo — is good.
Using the prostitute as an example, I wanted to check whether the soul is more intelligent than I who direct it, or whether — according to Augsteiner — the elementum spirituale can become independent of its conjurer. And here is the experiment I carried out. Once I had induced a sense of horror and dread in the woman, I broke her arms and legs one at a time, and each time I said that her suffering was due to Eberhard Mock who lives in Klein Tschansch, at Plesserstrasse 24. I didn’t gouge out her eyes because I wanted to see the fear in them, and the desire for revenge. Besides I had another reason not to do so: I wanted her soul to remember me well. To whom would it come? To me, who tortured her, or to the man who is the main cause of her death? I’m interested to know whether I have power over her soul, and whether I can direct it to the house of the man who is our greatest evil. If manifestations of spiritual energy occur at this address, it will be proof that I have power over the elementum spirituale. I will be the creator of a new theory of materialization. A theory which, we must add, is true because it has been proven.