The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz Read Free Book Online Page A

been confronted with a dead body, isn't it? Lucky you, baron," he said. "You peace-time officers! I thought so at once, because of the gingerly way you walked in. There's no need to watch your step, baron, you won't wake him up."
    I said nothing. He confidently threw his cigarette into the ashtray, which was several paces away from him, and immediately lit another.
    "I'm a Baltic German, didn't you know that?" he went on. "I was born at Mitau, and I was in the Russo-Japanese war."
    "Tsushima?" I asked. I don't know why that naval battle occurred to me, I thought he must have been a ship's engineer or something of the kind.
    "No," he said. "The Munho. Ever heard of it?"
    I shook my head.
    "The Munho. It's not a place but a river. Yellow water winding between the hills. It's better not to think about it. That's where they lay one morning, five hundred of them or more lying side by side, a whole formation of riflemen, with burnt hands and distorted yellow faces. Dreadful, dreadful, there's no other word for it."
    "A contact mine?"
    "No, high-tension currents. My handiwork. Sometimes when I remember it I say to myself: What of it, it happened in the Far East, five years ago and six thousand miles away, everything that happened there then is now dust and ashes. But it's no good, things like that stick, you don't forget them."
    He stopped, and blew a whole series of perfect smoke rings into the air. Anything connected with smoking that he now did suggested a juggling act.
    "And now they want to abolish war," he went on after a pause. "They want to abolish war. What good does that do? They want to abolish that and everything else of the kind," he said, pointing to the revolver. "But what good does it do? Human vileness remains, and that's the most lethal of all lethal weapons."
    Why did he say that to me? I said to myself in surprise and alarm. Does he hold me ultimately responsible for Eugen Bischoff's suicide?
    "He voluntarily took his own life," I said quietly.
    "Voluntarily?" the engineer exclaimed with a violence that alarmed me. "Are you quite sure of that? Let me tell you something, baron. I was first into this room. The door was locked from the inside, and I smashed the window, the broken glass is still there. I saw his face, I was the first to see his face, and I tell you that the horror on the faces of those five hundred on the Munho river who were climbing the hill in the dark was nothing in comparison with the horror on Eugen Bischoff's face. He had a mad fear of something that is hidden from us, and it was from that fear that he sought escape with the revolver. Went to his death voluntarily? No, baron, Eugen Bischoff was driven to his death."
    He lifted the rug and looked at the lifeless face.
    "Driven to his death as if with a whip," he then said, with an emotion in his voice which was quite inconsistent with the personality he normally displayed.
    I had turned away, because I could not look.
    "So, if I have understood you correctly," I said after a while — there was a lump in my throat and talking was an effort — "so you believe, if I have understood you correctly, that he had found out, that somehow or other it had come to his knowledge ..."
    "Found out what? What are you talking about?"
    "Presumably you know about the failure of the bank where all his money was?"
    "Oh? No, I know nothing about that. This is the first I've heard of it. No, baron, it wasn't that. The fear in his face was of a different kind. Money? No. It had nothing to do with money. You should have seen his face, there's no explanation of that."
    After a moment's silence he went on:
    "He could still speak when I came in, he said only a few words, I heard them, though they were more breathed than spoken. They were very strange words in the mouth of a dying man ..."
    He paced up and down the room and shook his head.
    "They were very strange words. I really knew him so little. One really knows so little about others. You knew him better, or at any