“Thank you, Smolorz. Ah …” Anwaldt rubbed his nose nervously. “I’d be most grateful if you’d prepare a list of all the Turks who have lived in Breslau over the last eighteen months by tomorrow. Is there a Turkish Consulate here?”
“Yes, on Neudorfstrasse.”
“They’re bound to help you. Thank you, you’re free to go.”
Anwaldt was left alone in his cool office. He rested his forehead on the slippery, green surface of the desk and felt he was reaching the lowest point of the sinusoid — the critical point of his good and bad moods. He became painfully conscious of the fact that he reacted differently to other people: the furiously burning world outside released, in him, energy and action, the pleasant coolness of the office, surrender and resignation. (Each one’s a microcosmos connected to the movement of the universe; I’m not. I’m different from them. Haven’t I been told that ever since childhood? I’m an isolated mini-universe where multi-directional gravitation rules and welds everything into heavy, concentrated blocks.)
He abruptly got up, slipped his shirt off and leaned over the basin. Hissing with pain, he washed his neck and armpits then sat in his chair and allowed the water to run down his wounded torso in narrow streams. He wiped his face and hands on his vest. (Be active! Do something!) He picked up the receiver and instructed the runner to buy some cigarettes and lemonade, then closed his eyes and easily mastered the chaotic images. He tore them from himself and set them in order: “Scorpions in Marietta von der Malten’s belly. A scorpion on the Turk’s hand. The Turk killed Marietta.” This observation pleased Anwaldt with its self-evidence yet the prospect of ineffective work gave him cold feet. (The Turk killed the Baron’s daughter; the Turk guards Baron von Kopperlingk’s house; the Baron is protected by the Gestapo; ergo, the Turk has something to do with the Gestapo; ergo, the Gestapo is mixed up in the Baron’s daughter’s murder; ergo, I’m as weak and helpless as a child in the face of the Gestapo.)
A knock on the door. A kn-o-ck. The runner brought in an armful of bottles and two packets of strong Bergmann Privat cigarettes. The cigarette weakened him for a moment. He drank a bottle of the lemonade in one go, closed his eyes and again the thought-images became thought-sentences. (Lea Friedlander knows who pointed her father out to Mock and made a scapegoat of him. It could be someone from the Gestapo. If she’s going to be afraid to tell me, I’ll force her. I’ll withhold the morphine, terrorize her with the needle. She’ll do anything I say!) He rejected the erotic vision “she’ll do anything I say” and got up from his desk. (Be active!) He paced the room and voiced his doubts out loud:
“Where are you going to make her talk? In a cell. What cell? Here, in the Police Praesidium. What’ve you got Smolorz for? Great — you lock a doll like that up in a cell and all the screws and policemen are going to know about it within an hour. And most certainly the Gestapo.”
In moments of greatest discouragement, Anwaldt always turned his thoughts to entirely different matters. And so it was now: he engaged himself in studying the Baron’s file. He found several photographs of an orgy in some garden and a list of names unknown to him — names of those present at the parties. None betrayed Turkish descent. There was very little on the host himself. The ordinary life story of an educated Prussian aristocrat and a few official notes from the Baron’s meetings with Hauptsturmfuhrer S.A. Walter Piontek.
He buttoned his shirt and tightened his tie. He went downstairs slowly to the archives, picking up his Breslau police identification on the way. (Be active!) In the basement of the Police Praesidium, he met with bitter disappointment. On the orders of Doctor Engel — who was executing the duties of Police President — Piontek’s files had been transferred to the Gestapo archives. Anwaldt barely managed to get to his office: pain was shooting through his swollen heel, his wounds and abrasions burning. He sat down behind his desk and, in a hoarse voice, asked Mock, who was sunbathing on a Zoppot beach:
“When are you coming back, Eberhard? If you were here you’d extract Piontek’s and Baron von Kopperlingk’s files from the Gestapo … You’d find a safe place where we could subject Lea to a morphine detox … You’d surely find a vice in your memory for that crazy Baron … When are you finally coming back?”
Longing for Mock was longing for the Baron’s money, for tropical islands, for slaves with skin like silk … (You’ve built a fine tower, Herbert, with those bricks. Be active, force Lea to speak yourself, can’t you? You’ve built a fine tower, Herbert.)
† To what good? (Latin).
VI
BRESLAU, THAT SAME TUESDAY, JULY 10TH, 1934
SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
On the main road which lay at the end of Hansastrasse, Anwaldt found a small restaurant. Out of professional habit, he noted the owner’s name and the address: Paul Seidel, Tiergartenstrasse 33. There he ate three hot sausages immersed in a mash of boiled peas and drank two bottles of Deinart mineral water.
Ten minutes later and feeling somewhat heavy, he stood outside Fatamorgana Studio of Photography and Film. He thumped for some time — loudly and stubbornly — on the closed door. (No doubt she’s topped herself up with morphine again. But it’s the last time.) The old caretaker shuffled out of the gate on to the pavement.
“I haven’t seen Fraulein Susanne going out anywhere. Her servant left an hour ago …” he muttered, inspecting Anwaldt’s identification.
The policeman removed his jacket and resigned himself to the trickles of sweat: he did not even attempt to wipe them off with a handkerchief. He sat down on a stone bench in the yard next to a dozing pensioner in a perforated hat. One window-vent in Lea’s apartment, he noticed, was not quite closed. He barely managed to climb on to the sill — his swollen heel was aching and his stomach lay heavily. Slipping his hand inside, he turned the brass handle and, for a moment, struggled with the tangling curtain netting and rampant ferns standing on the window sill. He felt at home in this apartment and took off his jacket, waistcoat and tie, hung all this on the back of a chair and set off in search of Lea. He made towards the studio where, so he thought, he would find her lying, intoxicated. But, before he got there, he turned to the bathroom: the peas and sausages were sending out strong physiological messages.
Lea Friedlander was in the bathroom, her legs hanging over the toilet bowl, her thighs and shins smeared with faeces. She was naked. The thick cable wrapped around her neck was attached to the overflow pipe just below the ceiling and the corpse’s back was touching the wall. The painted crimson lips revealed gums and teeth from between which protruded a blue, swollen tongue.
Anwaldt threw up the contents of his stomach into the bidet. He then sat on the edge of the bath and tried to collect his thoughts. In no more than a few minutes, he was sure Lea had not committed suicide. There was no stool in the bathroom, nothing from which she could have kicked herself off. She could not have rebounded from the toilet bowl because she was not tall enough. She would have had to tie the loop on the thick drainpipe below the ceiling and then, holding on to it with one hand, place the loop around her neck. (Such a feat would have been hard for an acrobat let alone a morphine addict whom half a dozen men must have shagged that day. It looks as if someone very strong strangled Lea, hung the rope in the bathroom, lifted the girl and slipped her neck through the loop. Except that he forgot about the chair which would have made the trick credible.)