“Can you not understand, Father,” yelled Eberhard, “that chamomile and milk don’t bloody well work on me? I don’t have a problem falling asleep, it’s the dreaming!”
Willibald Mock stared at his son, understanding nothing. The torso above the hatch. Clenched fists. Hangover gushing in his head like the sea. Chamomile and hot milk. The father grew pale and did not say a word.
“And tell that shitty chessplayer, Dosche, not to come here with his mongrel and not to thump on the windowsill so hard, or he’ll be sorry.”
Eberhard’s legs were now in the room too. Without looking at his father, he went to the basin, knelt beside it, removed his bowler hat and poured a few ladles of water over his wavy hair. He heard his father’s voice through the stream of water that gushed over his ears: “It’s not Dosche hammering on the sill, it’s somebody for you.”
Eberhard leaned towards the old man and slipped the sock over his foot.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
Kurt Smolorz had not been working under Mock in Vice Department IIIb of Breslau’s Police Praesidium for long. He had landed there straight off the streets of Kleinburg, where he had walked the beat without knowing why; in truth, this beautiful villa district adjacent to South Park had about as much in common with crime as Constable Smolorz had with poetry. Yet on one warm day in 1918, it was precisely there that some dangerous criminals, sought by all the police in Europe, had crossed the constable’s path. And it was a happy day for him. Criminal Assistant Mock had been doing a routine check in a plush house of ill repute on Akazienallee. He had a habit of combining pleasure with work. After checking the income ledger and the health records, and when he had quizzed the madam about her more eccentric clients, he had begun to look around for his favourite lady who, as it turned out, was busy, along with two other employees, pleasuring two — and here the madam sighed — very rich gentlemen.
Intrigued by the configuration of two to three, Mock had peeped through a concealed window into the so-called pink room and received a shock. He had run out into the street and immediately bumped into the red-headed constable, who was clanging his sword threateningly and tugging at the collar of a rascal he had apprehended a moment earlier for firing a catapult at passing droschkas. On Mock’s orders, Constable Smolorz had punished the rascal with a hefty clout and let him go. Then, together with Mock, he had burst into the pink room of Madame Blaschke’s establishment and — rubbing his eyes in astonishment at such a complicated arrangement of bodies as he had never seen before — arrested the two men, who had turned out to be none other than Kurt Wirth and his mute bodyguard Hans Zupitza, pioneers of European coercion and extortion. That day a great deal changed in the lives of the protagonists of this event, and they all became permanently linked: Wirth collaborated with Mock and was rewarded when the latter turned a blind eye to his extortion of smugglers who floated arms from Austria, coffee from Turkey and tobacco down the River Oder. Mock had become a rich and influential man in the criminal underworld, and this was to prove extremely useful to him. Smolorz, meanwhile, had gone from being a district constable to an employee at the Police Praesidium. Like all the dramatis personae, he held a sizeable bank account of dollars paid by Europe’s most wanted criminals in return for their freedom. Mock soon recognized Smolorz’s assets as a colleague, and one of the most valuable of these was his reticence.
Smolorz was silent even now as he sat next to Mock in a river-police motorboat steered by a uniformed boatswain. They navigated the shallow flood waters of the River Ohlau among sparse trees and partially submerged fields. The motorboat moored at a temporary landing stage not far from a paved road.
“New House!” shouted the boatswain, as he helped Smolorz and Mock to disembark.
A droschka was waiting for them on the road. Mock recognized the cabby, whose services the police had often found indispensable. He shook his hand and threw himself onto the settle, rocking the carriage. Smolorz took the seat up on the box and the droschka moved off. Mock, attempting to forget the thirst which tormented him, studied the outbuildings of New House. The lowing of cattle could be heard from Swia$$$tniki Farm, two kilometres away. The smell of damp air from the Oder wafted through the sunlight. After a while they came to a lock where they climbed out of the droschka and crossed over to the island, Ottwitzer Werder.
At Ottwitzer Dam, among blackthorn bushes, Mock spied the destination of his morning’s travels across the flood waters of the Oder and the Ohlau tributary. A dangerous cascade of water spurting from the base of the dam kept at bay the gawpers who were standing on the embankment by the hamlet of Bischofswal, trying to see what the police had discovered on the island on which only the previous day they had enjoyed their picnics and beer. They were prevented from stepping onto the dam by the strong arms and fierce glares of three sword-bearing gendarmes who wore shakos adorned with a blue star and on their chests sported badges that gleamed with the words “Gendarme Station Schwoitsch”. Mock gazed with nostalgia at the elegant pseudo-Gothic building in the vicinity of Landungsbrucke and remembered the nocturnal pleasures to which he had so recently surrendered. Now duties of a different nature had summoned him to this distant corner of Breslau. He turned to the riverbank fringed with thorn bushes and to the pile of four — so Mock guessed — human bodies. They were covered with the Institute of Forensic Medicine’s grey sheets, which were always carried in the carriages and first cars to arrive from the Police Praesidium. Seven detectives were already there, five of whom were examining the ground immediately surrounding the bodies; squatting, they searched centimetre by centimetre the wet grass and rich earth which clung to their heels. Having examined a chosen square of ground, they grunted as they shifted the weight of their bodies from one foot to the other and, still squatting, continued their search. Despite the coolness of the morning, none of them wore a jacket. Sweat trickled from beneath their bowler hats down to their moustaches. One of the men, not believing in the accuracy of photography, was drawing a shoe print he had found in the damp soil. Two policemen wearing jackets stood on a police barge moored to the bank and questioned two teenage boys in school uniform who were trembling as much from nerves as from the cold. One of the policemen waved to Smolorz and Mock, indicating a square of land marked out with little flags where the corpses lay covered with sheets. This man was their boss, Criminal Councillor Josef Ilssheimer, head of Vice Department IIIb, and the area he was pointing to had already been examined.
Mock and Smolorz entered the marked-out plot and took off their bowler hats. Ilssheimer came over to join them, lifting his feet high and moving swiftly. It seemed to Mock that their chief was about to perform a high jump and fall heavily on the sheets, but instead he stopped beside the bodies. He leaned over and tugged at the cloth. At first Mock could not make head nor tail of the stiff, blue limbs, frozen in rigor mortis. Stretched out before his eyes was a most peculiar sight, as if someone had arranged a pyre for a large bonfire. But instead of dry twigs and branches there were four human torsos from which heads, legs and arms protruded at various angles. Furthermore, all these limbs were connected to each other in some way or other: here a foot protruded from an armpit, there a knee grew from a collarbone, while a shoulder emerged from between a pair of shins. In many places, the skin of the deceased was pierced by sharp shards of bone, jutting through and disappearing among blue swellings. So as to set the twisted human limbs on a “top-bottom” or “right-left” axis, Mock’s eyes searched for a head. He soon found one, and thanks to a thick beard, he identified its gender as male. From beneath a sailor’s hat, long, pomaded strands of hair tumbled over the dead man’s face while curly, stiff bristles propagated over his jaw and on his upper lip. All this hair was stuck together with reddish-brown clots of dried blood mixed with a watery fluid. The source of all this gore was two eye-sockets — two dead lakes filled with blood and shreds of membrane from perforated eyes.