The association was not fortuitous. No, it was inevitable. The screams of a man tortured and- Kraftstudt! These naturally went together. During the Second World War a Kraftstudt served as investigator in a Nazi concentration camp at Graz. For his part in the murders and inhuman treatment he got a life sentence at the Nuremberg trials.
I remembered the man's photo in all newspapers, in the uniform of an SS Obersturmfuhrer, in a pince-nez, with wide-open, surprised eyes in a plump good-natured face. People wouldn't believe a man with such a face could have been a sadist. Yet detailed evidence and thorough investigation left no room for doubt.
What had happened to him since the trials? Maybe he had been released like many other war criminals?
But what had mathematics to do with it all? What was the connection between a sadistic interrogator and the solutions of differential and integral equations?
At this point the chain of my reasoning snapped, for I was powerless to connect those two links. Obviously there was a link missing somewhere. Some kind of mystery.
Hard as I beat my brains, however, I could think of nothing plausible. And then that girl who said, "They will know." How scared she was!
After a few days of tormenting guess-work. I finally realised that unless I cracked the mystery I would probably crack up myself.
First of all I wanted to make sure that the Kraftstudt in question was that same war criminal.
4
Finding myself at the low door of Kraftstudt and Co. for the third time, I felt that what was to happen next would influence my whole life. For no reason I could understand then or later, I paid off the taxi and rang the bell only after the cab swung round the corner.
It seemed to me that the young man with his crumpled old-mannish face had been waiting for me. Without saying a word he took me by the hand and led me through the dark subterranean maze into the reception hall where I had been on the two previous occasions.
"Well, what brings you here this time?" he asked in what seemed to me a mocking tone of voice.
"I wish to speak to Herr Kraftstudt personally," I demanded.
"Our firm is not satisfying you in some way, Professor?" he asked.
"I wish to speak to Herr Kraftstudt," I insisted, trying not to look into his prominent black eyes, which now shone with malicious mockery.
"As you wish. It's none of my business," he said after a long scrutiny. "Wait here."
Then he disappeared through one of the doors behind the glass partition.
He was gone over half an hour arid I was dozing off when a rustle came to me from a corner and out of the semi-darkness stepped a white-smocked figure with a stethoscope in hand. "A doctor," flashed through my mind. "Come to examine me. Is this really necessary to see Herr Kraftstudt?"
"Follow me," the doctor said peremptorily and I followed him, having no idea what was to happen next and why I had ever started it.
Light filtered into the long corridor in which we now were through a skylight high up somewhere. The corridor ended with a tall massive door. The doctor stopped.
"Wait here. Herr Kraftstudt will see you presently."
In about five minutes he opened the door wide for me.
"Well, let's go," he said in the tone of a man who was regretting what was going to happen.
I obediently followed him. We entered a wing with large bright windows and I shut my eyes involuntarily.
I was brought out of my momentary stupor by a sharp voice:
"Why don't you come up, Professor Rauch?"
I turned to my right and saw Kraftstudt in a deep wicker-work chair, the very man whom I remembered so well from the newspaper pictures.
"You wished to see me?" he asked, without greeting me or rising from his desk. "What can I do for you?"
I controlled myself with an effort and went right up to his desk.
"So you have changed your occupation?" I asked, looking hard at him. He had aged in those fifteen years and the skin on his face had gathered into large flabby folds.
"What do you mean, Professor?" he asked, looking me over carefully.
"I had thought, Herr Kraftstudt, or rather hoped that you were still…"
"Ah, I see." And he guffawed.
"Times have changed, Rauch. Incidentally, it's not so much your hopes I am interested in at present, as the reasons that brought you here."
"As you can probably guess, Herr Kraftstudt, I have a fair knowledge of mathematics, I mean modern mathematics. I thought at first you had organised an ordinary computer centre equipped with electronic machinery. However I'm now convinced that this is not the case. In your establishment it's men who solve the problems. As only men of genius would solve them. And what is most strange-with monstrous, inhuman speed. If you like, I presumed to come and meet your mathematicians, who are indeed extraordinary men."
Kraftstudt first smiled, then began to laugh quietly, then louder and louder.
"I don't see the joke, Herr Kraftstudt," I said indignantly. "My wish appears ridiculous to you, does it? But don't you realise that anybody with an interest in mathematics would have the same wish on seeing the kind of solution I got from your firm?"
"I'm laughing at something quite different, Rauch. I'm laughing at your provincial narrow-mindedness. I'm laughing at you, Professor, a man respected in the town, whose learnedness has always boggled the imagination of immature maidens and old spinsters, at the way you hopelessly lag behind the swift strides of modern science!"
I was staggered by the insolence of that ex-Nazi interrogator.
"Listen, you," I shouted. "Only fifteen years ago your speciality was applying hot irons to innocent people. What right have you to prattle about swift strides of science? Come to that, I wished to see you to find what methods you use to force the brilliant people in your power to perform work which would take men of genius several years or perhaps all their life to do. I'm very glad I have found you. I consider it my duty as a scientist and citizen to let all the people in our town know that a former Nazi hangman has chosen as his new trade to abase men of science, men whose duty has always been to work for the good of humanity."
Kraftstudt got up from his chair and, frowning, approached me.
"Listen to me, Rauch. Take my advice and do not provoke me. I knew you would come to me sooner or later. But I never imagined you would be such an idiot. Frankly speaking, I thought I would find in you an ally, so to speak, and a helper."
"What?" I exclaimed- "First you explain to me by what honest or dishonest means you are exploiting the people who bring you profit."
Before my very eyes his face shrunk into a lump of dirty-yellowish skin. The pale-blue eyes behind the pince-nez turned into two slits that bore into me acidly. For a fleeting moment I had a feeling of a thing being examined by a prospective buyer.
"So you want me to explain to you how honestly our firm operates? So you're not satisfied with having your idiotic sums done for you as they should be done in the twentieth century? You want to experience for yourself what it means to be solving such problems?" he hissed, his vile face a mask pulsating with rage and hate.
"I don't believe all is above-board here. Your reputation is proof enough. And then I overheard one of your men screaming-"
"That's enough," Kraftstudt barked. "After all I never asked you to come. But since you are here -and in such a mood-we'll make use of you whether you like it or not."
I had been unaware that the doctor who had brought me there was standing all the time behind me. At a signal from Kraftstudt a muscular hand closed on my mouth, and a piece of cotton soaked in something pungent was thrust under my nose. I lost consciousness.
5
I came to slowly and realised that I was lying stretched on a bed. Voices of men in a heated argument crowded in on me. For a while all I knew was that their subject was scientific. Then, as my head cleared a little, I could understand what it was about.