The Minotaur's Head: An Eberhard Mock Investigation (Eberhard Mock Investigation 4) Read online

  “Help!” yelled Kasprzak. “Help! Murder!”

  At that moment he heard Popielski’s voice:

  “Police! Disperse! Can’t you see we’ve caught a thief?”

  Kasprzak raised his head with difficulty and through the rear window watched as one of the musicians spat at Popielski’s feet. Then the driver who had dragged him into the car threw a blanket stinking of oil over his head. Somebody grabbed him under his arms, pulled him back out of the car, opened the back door, pushed him onto the seat then tumbled in heavily beside him. The last thing the teacher heard was the odd pronounciation of “hairless-s-s” with double or even triple the number of “s”s. He thought the word came from the lips of the musicians.

  LWÓW, THAT SAME JANUARY 29TH, 1937 FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  The Chevrolet passed the crossroads of Kleparowska and Janowska and stopped. Kleparowska was lit only by the feeble light coming from apartment buildings and the yellow glow of one solitary streetlamp which swayed in the wind three metres above the uneven cobblestones. Sitting next to Zaremba, Popielski glanced anxiously at the windows of the drinking-den. The raised voices and the singing confirmed his fears that there must be a large number of customers – both drunk and politically minded – who would react angrily at the sight of the police officers.

  “Wiluś,” he said to Zaremba, “Mock and I are going to take this citizen, and you, brother, will drive home as quickly as you can so that the rabble in the tavern don’t recognize our car. Wait there for my call. We’ll certainly be needing you again today” – he gestured to Kasprzak who was being held down in the back seat by Mock – “to get rid of his carcass somewhere.”

  Zaremba nodded and waited as Popielski climbed out, opened the door, grabbed Kasprzak by the legs and tugged hard. The latter yanked his handcuffed hands taut and spluttered something, despite the gag. “Mock’s done a good job of incapacitating him,” Popielski thought with a certain admiration. The German drew up his legs, rested the soles of his feet on the teacher lying next to him and, cursing his own belly and panting loudly, he pushed the delinquent out. When almost all of Kasprzak’s body apart from his head was on the cobblestones, Mock jumped out of the car, walked around it and grasped the prostrate man – who hung thrashing about like a fish between the car seat and road – beneath the arms. Popielski took him by the legs and nodded. At this mute command they just about managed to pull him towards the doorway. Once inside, Mock felt the slippery leather of his gloves and the material of Kasprzak’s coat lose contact. He tried to push one hand deeper into the man’s armpit, but the attempt was in vain.

  The collision of Kasprzak’s head with the first wooden step was as loud, or so it seemed to them, as a small explosion. The door to the ground-floor apartment opened, and Popielski realized that the worst possible thing was about to happen – they were going to be exposed. A vision appeared to him in a flash: he was standing in Commander Goździewski’s office being handed his dismissal along with a life-long injunction which forbade him from carrying out state duties. Both he and Mock froze in anticipation of how the events would develop.

  Meanwhile, in the doorway to the apartment stood two men with their coats unbuttoned, swaying on their legs. The peaked cap of one had slid to the back of his head, the wire glasses of the other to the tip of his nose. Both were drunk.

  “Yeah, Józek, give us a kiss,” yelled one of them.

  “You gorgeous hunk,” yelled back the other. “Just us two in the world, you and me!”

  The men fell into each other’s arms and their drunken kisses were like slaps on a cheek. Popielski winked at Mock. Both grasped Kasprzak beneath the arms and began to drag him up the stairs, soon disappearing from the patch of light cast by the open door. Kasprzak mumbled something. The sound and the commotion on the stairs did not go unnoticed by the two drunks.

  “Wha’s happenin’?” One of them pushed his glasses up his nose and tried to make out the dark silhouettes on the stairs.

  “Ay, my pal’s gone and got plastered,” said Popielski in street lingo, “and I’m bringin’ ’im ’ome!”

  Kasprzak’s shoes thumped up the stairs, the tails of his coat wiped the dust and dragged through the cigarette butts. They found themselves on a landing between two floors. A button rolled down the wooden steps. A rusty nail protruding from a banister caught on the pocket of Kasprzak’s trousers, digging fast into the material and making it impossible to carry him any further. They tugged. Nothing. The drunks were still staring up at them, but semi-darkness and vodka blurred their vision. Popielski tugged once more and heard the ripping of material, but the body did not budge another inch on the turn in the staircase.

  “Close that door!” yelled someone from inside the apartment. “It’s cold and there’s flies comin’ in!”

  “I’m just closing it!” The bespectacled man peered up at the landing. “But there’s one needs lightin’ up ’ere, ‘e’s draggin’ a sozzled mate.”

  “Lightin’ up for who?” Chairs and shoes scraped across the sawdust covering the floor of the tavern. “Show us who’s been dragged then! Maybe it’s Tadzio? He’s never been one for appearances!”

  Popielski and Mock tugged. In vain. DISTINGUISHED SECONDARY-SCHOOL PROFESSOR BATTERED BY FAMOUS POLICE OFFICER was the headline Popielski already saw before his eyes. Downstairs, the voices of those annoyed by the cold coming through the open door now grew in volume. “Life-long injunction not to carry out state duties”. Popielski experienced a peculiar itch in his gums – the sign of imminent fury. He reached towards Kasprzak’s stomach and grasped his belt, then jammed his heel against a stair, clenched his teeth and heaved. At that moment he noticed the nail caught on the professor’s trousers, and without unhooking it glanced furiously at Mock. They tugged and the nail tore Kasprzak’s trousers, piercing his underpants and skin. Through the gag came a painful groan, and the body moved upwards as the point of the nail slashed material and ploughed through skin. Kasprzak’s head thumped against the ground on the first floor.

  The door slammed below. Darkness fell. Mock and Popielski caught their breath while Kasprzak lay still on the floor. After a while Popielski straightened up and kicked one of the doors, which opened onto Juliusz Szaniawski standing in a strip of red light. He was wearing a luxuriant wig, tight underpants and the stiff skirt of a ballerina. The scent of Turkish incense and a red glow emanated from the apartment, in which the “Czardas” from Swan Lake was playing loudly on a gramophone.

  “You didn’t warn me of your visit, Commissioner.” The dancer waved his hand, and smoke from his cigarette whirled in the demonic glow. “Or of your friends …” He glanced indifferently at Mock and at the man lying on his doorstep with a sack over his head. “But welcome, welcome as always. Your little nest is free.”

  LWÓW, THAT SAME JANUARY 29TH, 1937 SIX O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  The light was on in Szaniawski’s bathroom, which he grandiloquently called the “bathing room” or “Popielski’s little nest”. Kasprzak lay in the bathtub undressed down to his underwear; his clothes had been rolled into a bundle and shoved in a corner. Mock was sitting on a chair, Popielski on the closed water-closet. They sat in their shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled up and ties loosened, smoking and staring at Kasprzak with heavy, fixed eyes. It was stuffy, they found it hard to breathe, and a moment earlier they had almost been exposed. They glared darkly at the man in the tub, their eyes filled with an anger they did not have to feign.

  “Kasprzak,” said Popielski slowly and emphatically, “you said you’d never seen me at the theatre. True, I rarely go. And do you know why? Because the actors shout too loud and stamp their feet too hard on stage. I’ve got a limited imagination and somehow can’t be persuaded I’m in Capuletti’s palace, for example, when some floorboard on the stage keeps creaking …”

  Kasprzak seemed not to hear Popielski’s words. He sucked in air and groaned in pain, licked his finger and gingerly touched the wound on his thigh. Blood ran to the bottom of th
e tub in a little stream; his long johns hung in tatters on either side of his leg, revealing a thin, hairy shin. One none-too-clean sock had sagged down over his ankle and below his knee flapped a rubber garter. He shivered as if he were in an Eskimo’s igloo, not an overheated bathroom.

  “You’re to write a letter which I’m going to dictate to you.” Popielski lifted the lid of the water-closet, threw in his cigarette butt and pressed the handle. “I’ll keep it as a souvenir. And if I hear that you’re talking to my daughter outside school hours, if I hear that you still want to use her in your plays, if I hear that you’re gushing about her acting talent, I’m going to go to Headmistress Madler with it. And if that doesn’t help I’m going to show the letter to the municipal authorities and Sprawiedliwosc will print it the following Saturday under the headline ‘Belated flirtations of a schoolteacher’. And the first thing you’re to do is dismiss my daughter from her role in Medea. Do you understand?”

  Kasprzak did not respond. Popielski winked at Mock who got up heavily from the chair and leaned over the tub.

  “Yes, I do!” yelled Kasprzak, looking at Mock. “I’ve understood everything!”

  Popielski got to his feet and pushed his colleague’s chair towards the tub. From the pocket of Kasprzak’s jacket he pulled a visiting card and a fountain pen. He then passed him the jacket.

  “Wipe your hands on this!” he muttered. “Or you’ll stain the card. Now write!”

  “What am I supposed to write?” Kasprzak pushed himself up in the bath with a hiss of pain and uncapped the pen.

  “I’m about to dictate.” Popielski was so astounded by how readily Kasprzak had agreed that for a moment he could not collect his thoughts. “‘Dear, beloved Rita! I can’t stop thinking about you. Your talent is magnificent, unique. Oh, how I dream of touching your hand! Your lips I don’t dare to touch, even in my dreams …’”

  “There’s no more room after ‘even in my dreams’.” Kasprzak’s eyes revealed the eagerness of a class toady. “May I have another card, please?”

  Popielski deliberated for a moment. The very thought of Rita being kissed by this thin, hairy goat repulsed him. His gums were still itching. Neither Kasprzak’s blood nor his fawning readiness to obey any order had diffused his anger. He could still picture the sunny September afternoon when Rita had rushed happily into the house after her first day at school and shouted joyfully, “Papa, that old fogey Mąkos doesn’t teach me Polish any more. I’ve got a new teacher who gives such wonderful lectures, and he loves the theatre!” Leokadia had smiled over her cards and asked, “And is he handsome, this new Polish teacher?”

  Popielski approached the bathtub. Kasprzak did not even groan when the side of the commissioner’s hand struck his jaw. The Bakelite pen fell to the tiled floor and shattered into several small pieces.

  “So, handsome, are you then, Professor?” hissed Popielski, raising his hand once again, despite the sharp pain shooting along it from the previous blow. “Casanova, are you?”

  He did not have time to strike, however, because Mock caught his wrist in one strong hand, and with the other pushed him against the wall.

  “Calm down, damn it!” Mock squeezed Popielski’s wrists and watched his face contort. “Do you want to beat him to death? We’ve achieved our aim. He’s in our hands, locked in a vice from which he won’t escape until your daughter’s final exams. That’s how the Mock and Popielski partnership works!”

  “I’m corrupt, I’m corrupt,” said Popielski, only half conscious.

  “We’re all corrupt!” yelled Mock. “Here, take a look at real corruption!”

  At this he opened a hatch in the wall which Popielski had not even known existed. This little window gave onto the living-room, from which incense smoke and music now flowed into the bathroom, and through it they saw a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah. Szaniawski had already discarded his pants and was performing the “Dance of the Cygnets” on the table amongst the empty wine bottles wearing nothing but a tutu and wig. Beneath the table three naked men were crawling about on all fours, each with a peacock feather pinned in his hair.

  Popielski collapsed into the chair. Mock pulled out a cigarette, lit it and passed it to the commissioner. Professor Kasprzak wheezed in the tub. Mock wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “High time we had some vodka, don’t you think?” he sighed.

  LWÓW, THAT SAME JANUARY 29TH, 1937 ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT

  They clinked glasses and swallowed Baczewski’s cumin vodka with pleasure, along with a bite to eat; Mock had chosen herring roll-mops, Popielski a terrine with lingonberry sauce. They sat in the Palais de Dance near the Grand Theatre and watched the slowly revolving circular dance floor on which couples were dancing the playful “Lambeth Walk”. On their table stood a bowl of meat jelly and a platter of herrings, terrine and goose necks stuffed with liver. A bottle of champagne peeped from an ice-bucket and a slender, iced carafe of vodka towered over the plates.

  They were silent. The fact that Popielski had just dismissed two young hostesses who had wanted to sit at their table irritated Mock. Popielski, on the other hand, was thinking over the day’s events, and quite dispassionately now: Kasprzak’s humiliation, Zaremba’s arrival at Szaniawski’s apartment, their throwing the teacher out with a sack over his head at the corner of Rzeźnia and Starozakonna, followed by four fruitless hours at the Investigative Bureau interrogating representatives of Armenian and Georgian minorities whom Herman Kacnelson had not managed to deal with before being beaten up at Kanarienfogel’s tavern. Popielski and Mock had put Rita and Lodzia on the sleeper to Kołomyje, and then had been politely greeted by Mr Zehngut, owner of the Palais de Dance himself, who had offered them the director’s loge. Mock spoke first:

  “Let’s have another drink. I feel like some of that delicious aspic.” He waved at the meat jelly. “But I can’t have any without vodka.”

  “Why?” said Popielski mechanically, without looking at him. “Don’t you like it?”

  “On the contrary.” Mock reached for the bottle. “I like it too much. But I don’t want to put on any more weight.”

  “And what’s vodka got to do with it?” Popielski shouted over the music.

  “A forensic pathologist I know,” said Mock, leaning towards the commissioner’s ear, “a doctor rerum naturalium, claims that fat dissolves in alcohol. With alcohol it doesn’t settle around your waist, but dissolves harmlessly somewhere else in your body.” He patted his belly and burst into affected laughter.

  Popielski did not join in. From the height of their loge he watched the dance floor without the least interest, tightly gripping his glass and with it drawing small circles on the tablecloth. Mock felt anger gathering within him, not because the festive evening was dragging in unbearable silence, but because something else was bothering him. He simply could not believe that this man, whom he had almost caught red-handed frolicking with a beautiful woman, had taken him to a cave of Sodomites where he felt at home and even had his own “nest”. He did not know how to tell Popielski that their partnership could not exist without total trust, without their revealing to each other even their darkest secrets. Yet he was afraid that Popielski would confess to something terrible about his sexuality, which Mock did not want to know for fear of it ruining their police partnership.

  “I have something to confess.” The orchestra had stopped playing and in the silence Popielski stared at Mock, as if reading his thoughts. “A shameful secret of mine …”

  “There’s something I forgot to tell you,” Mock cut in. “We got a telegram from Kattowitz today. A twenty-year-old woman in a mental hospital. Face gnawed. She claims she was bitten by an aristocrat …”

  “Please don’t interrupt!” Popielski threw back a vodka without taking a mouthful of food. “What do we care about some mad woman from Silesia! Listen to what I have to say …”

  “We’ve got to go there,” Mock did not let him finish. “It could be important!”

  “For God’s sake
, stop interrupting me!” yelled Popielski, springing up and loudly scraping his chair, much to the waiter’s alarm.

  “I don’t damn well care,” said Mock, on his feet now too and leaning over the table, “about your intimate relationship with that ‘soft brother’ Szaniawski! He’s got nothing to do with our investigation! Don’t play at being Hamlet, damn it! First you despair about some teacher, and now you want to disclose your sexual proclivities to me! I do not want to hear about it, I tell you! Concentrate on the investigation and get yourself some balls!”

  Mock’s words rang out across the room during the interval in the music. The silence brought Popielski to his senses. He regained his wits and hoped that the speed with which the German had hurled his insults had made it impossible for anyone to understand them, all the more so as the most suggestive of them were not clear even to him. The orchestra started up a tango and Popielski calmly sat down at the table.

  “I don’t understand.” He got out an Egyptian cigarette and tapped it on the table. “What do you mean ‘soft brother’?”

  “Isn’t that what they called homosexuals in Austria?” Mock was still on his feet, but had changed his tone of voice.

  “Listen to me.” Popielski drew deeply on his cigarette. “You’ll find out in a moment what ties me to Szaniawski.” He raised his hand when Mock wanted to interrupt once more. “In fact nothing ties me to the man, but a great deal ties me to his apartment. He makes his bathroom available to me whenever I should want it. And I want it when I feel an attack coming on. Yes, my good man, I suffer from epilepsy – you must already know. But what you don’t know is that sometimes during my attacks I get visions. Have you ever used a clairvoyant in the course of your work with the police?”

  “No, never.”