The End of the World in Breslau by Marek Krajewski Read Free Book Online

which, as Mock knew, heralded immense agitation. Mühlhaus pressed his stiff bowler onto his forehead and indicated with a movement of the head that Ehlers should leave the room. When the photographer had relieved his superiors of the sight of his pained face, Mühlhaus fixed his eyes on Mock’s chest. This evasion of Mock’s eyes did not portend anything good.
“A macabre murder, Mock, is it not?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“Indeed, Criminal Director.”
“Does my presence not surprise you, Mock?”
“Indeed it does, Criminal Director.”
“Yet it shouldn’t.” Mühlhaus pulled a pipe from his pocket and began to fill it. Mock lit a cigarette. The intense taste of his Bergmann Privat smothered the stench of chopped limbs.
“I had to come, Mock,” Mühlhaus went on, “because I don’t see your men here. Neither Smolorz nor Meinerer. After all, somebody besides you has to be at the scene of such a dreadful crime. Somebody has to help you perform your duty. Especially when you’ve got a hangover.”
Mühlhaus blew out a thick swirl of smoke and drew near to Mock,carefully avoiding the tub of fingers whose nails were covered in dirty, coagulated blood. He stood so close to Mock that the latter felt the heat from his pipe, shuttered as it was with a metal lid.
“You’ve been drinking for a good number of days now,” Mühlhaus continued in a dispassionate tone. “You’re making some peculiar decisions. You’ve detailed your men off to other cases. And what cases are these? More important, perhaps, than two macabre murders?” Mühlhaus, sucking energetically, tried to re-kindle the tobacco before it went out. “What is more important right now than the walled-in musician Gelfrert or Honnefelder, the unemployed locksmith’s apprentice, who has been hacked to pieces?”
Mock opened his mouth in mute astonishment, provoking a malicious smile on Mühlhaus’ face.
“Yes. I’ve done the work. I know who the deceased was.” Mühlhaus sucked on his extinguished pipe. “Someone had to do it. Why not the Chief of the Criminal Department?”
“Criminal Director …”
“Silence, Mock!” Mühlhaus shouted. “Silence! The constable on duty who took down the report this morning found neither Smolorz nor Meinerer. It’s a good thing he found the hung-over Counsellor Eberhard Mock. Listen to me, Mock. I’m not interested in your private investigations. Your job is to find the perpetrators of these two crimes. That is what this city wants; that is also what your friends and mine want. If I discover one more time that instead of working you have gone for a beer, I’ll have a word with those men of rigid moral principles to whom you owe your promotion and I’ll tell them a story about a wife-beating alcoholic. As you see,” he added calmly, “there is nothing I don’t know.”
Mock carefully stamped out his cigarette and thought about the Horus Lodge Masons who had helped him in his career; he thought too about the subordinate Meinerer who, feeling himself undervalued,had poured out his troubles to Mühlhaus; and about loyal Smolorz, now hiding in a droschka staring fixedly at the door of the tenement on Rehdigerplatz, his eyes watering in the wind; and about the young painter, Jakob Mühlhaus, who, thrown out of the house by his morally impeccable father, sought happiness in the company of other male artists.
“If you know everything, Criminal Director,” Mock said, tapping another cigarette against the bottom of his cigarette-case, “then I should very much like to hear about the locksmith’s apprentice Honnefelder before he encountered the embittered and frustrated woodcutter.
“That woodcutter,” Mühlhaus smiled sourly, “judging by his love of calendars, must also be rather a good mason.”

BRESLAU, THAT SAME NOVEMBER 29TH, 1927
TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
    It had become warmer and melting snow had begun to course down the streets. Dirty clumps slid off the roof of the droschka as Sophie and