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

  “Neither have I. I don’t have to. I’m a clairvoyant myself, although I must be the worst in the country. I sometimes get visions during an attack, but I can never interpret them correctly, or straightaway. Well, that’s an exaggeration, I’ve managed on a couple of occasions. But generally it’s when a murder has been committed, or there’s already been a kidnapping, that I hit myself on the forehead and say: ‘I’ve seen that before!’”

  The orchestra played on, and Mock remained silent. Popielski pushed aside his shot glass, poured some vodka into a water glass and in one go downed what must have been two thirds of it. He wiped his lips and looked at Mock with clear eyes.

  “I suffer from a minor form of epilepsy, Mock. The medication I’m on counteracts it almost completely. But when I want to have a vision I don’t take the medication to bring on an attack. And for that I need Szaniawski’s apartment, or to be precise, his bathtub.”

  Mock was agape and Popielski sighed with relief. He cut a large triangle of meat jelly with his fork and squeezed a segment of lemon over it. He put half the triangle in his mouth and chewed, shutting his eyes in bliss.

  “And can’t you bring on the attacks in your own apartment? Your own bathroom?” Mock’s eyes were round with amazement.

  “No.” Popielski swallowed a bite of aspic and looked at Mock with a certain amusement, even though this was the moment at which he would have to admit to the most ghastly truth about his epilepsy. “Unfortunately, I sometimes lose control of my bowels and my bladder during an attack, then fall asleep. The sleep usually lasts about a quarter of an hour but it can be longer. Imagine, Mock, the following scene: I’m in the bathroom for a long time, my cousin and daughter start to get worried, then knock or bang on the door. I don’t let them in so they call the caretaker. He prizes the door open and what do they all see? Popielski asleep in his own shit.”

  He broke off and anxiously studied Mock for signs of derision. He saw none, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “That’s why I sometimes need a discreet bathroom. Now do you understand? You’re the only person apart from Zaremba who knows why I go to Szaniawski’s. My cousin doesn’t even know, and I’ve been living with her for twenty years!”

  Mock refilled their glasses, to make up for lost time. They drank, took a bite and Mock immediately poured some more. They drank before the alcohol had even managed to run down into their stomachs. Both now felt the effects of the vodka: a slight burning of the cheeks, lethargy and a pleasant tiredness in their muscles.

  “I’m honoured that you’ve told me,” said Mock, breaking the silence. “I shall certainly keep your secret. I understand you perfectly well and apologize for my suspicions. I find those visions of yours fascinating. What did you see during your last session at Szaniawski’s? Tell me, maybe there were colours, symbolic figures? We’ll work them out together. After all, that complex Latin syntax we unravelled couldn’t have been any harder!”

  “Nothing.” Mock was sad to hear this. “It happens. I didn’t see anything, although I did hear something.”

  “What? I believe you. A few years ago I had this case in Breslau with a clairvoyant Jew who, in a trance, would foretell when people were going to die.”

  “Since you believe me I’ll tell you. A dog growling. It came from beneath the bathtub. And Szaniawski hasn’t got a dog. He hates all animals. There was no dog, it must have been part of my vision.”

  Mock pushed himself away from the table and clicked his fingers.

  “The bill!” he shouted.

  “Hold on, why the hurry?” Popielski put a hand on Mock’s arm in a friendly gesture. “I’ve told you my secret so we can have a proper drink! And now you want to run off!”

  “We’ve got a train to Kattowitz in an hour.” Mock was still looking around for the waiter. “I checked at the station today.”

  “And what are we going to go to Kattowitz for? And why so suddenly? To see some madwoman who says she was chewed up by an aristocrat? They could verify everything in Kattowitz on the spot and send us a detailed report.”

  “They said her injuries looked as though they had been made by a dog,” said Mock emphatically, “and you dreamed about a dog.”

  Popielski studied Mock’s face, looking for any hint of mockery or irony. He saw none. The German waited for his colleague’s decision; he sat sphinx-like, as if turned to stone, with only his fingers moving as they tapped out a rhythm on the table.

  “It defies logic,” said Popielski, and rested his elbows on the table. “Those visions of mine have nothing to do with the logistics of the investigation.”

  “You have your methods, I have mine. You believed me today, then I believed you. That’s all.” Mock looked at the man he was addressing with an impish grin. “Popielski, don’t ramble on! Don’t expect me to convince you of your own methods! You’ve gained a significant position in the police world – even if you got there by gazing into a crystal ball. To cut it short, let me say one thing: I want a crystal ball like that. Anyway, do you have a better – what am I saying! – a different trail to follow from the one in Silesia?”

  “Let’s go to Kattowitz, then.” The commissioner glanced at the dance floor, inhaled the scent of perfume, closed his eyes and gave a slight nod. “But not alone, eh? We’ve bored ourselves enough in each other’s company today.”

  THE LWÓW–KATTOWITZ TRAIN SATURDAY, JANUARY 30TH, 1937 EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

  Popielski, Mock and two Jewish prostitutes whose names they did not remember sat in the private compartment eating breakfast. The girls were resting, a little drink-sodden and dispirited, and their conversation kept falling apart. The men sat in silence. They were tired and short of sleep. They were both over fifty and their bodies did not recuperate as quickly as they had ten or twenty years earlier. They were not, however, suffering from post-alcoholic spleen – Baczewski’s vodka was of the very best quality and the food that went with it sumptuous and full of fat – or from debauchery-related scruples. Nor was the sight of the two girls – who the previous day had seemed desirable and attractive, but whom the sharp pale light of the morning revealed as having open pores, eye-lashes caked with make-up, greasy hair, an over-abundance of curves and gaps in their teeth – the reason for their morose mood. They were troubled by something entirely different. Two hours earlier, at Kraków station, they had been visited in their compartment by Inspector Marian Zubik, who just happened to be taking his sons for a winter holiday in Zakopane by the very same train.

  This was the last thing they would have expected to see after the stormy events of that evening and night. The previous day, on leaving the Palais de Dance, they had immediately gone to Main Station to buy tickets to Kattowitz. Unfortunately the private compartment had already been taken, and the single sleeping compartments too. They therefore had to make do with a compartment with two beds, one above the other. To make matters worse the festal night had swept all the prostitutes from the station and they had left for Kattowitz alone, frustrated and disappointed. In Przemyśl, however, Chairman Bronisław Bromberg, an industrialist returning from the winter fairs in Romania’s Chernivtsi, vacated the private compartment. Mock and Popielski had immediately transferred to the empty and luxurious quarters in the company of two young ladies, which the enterprising and generously remunerated conductor had found for them at Przemyśl station. Then the alcohol had not stopped flowing and the compartment appeared to burst at the seams; clothes flew about, the young ladies poured champagne over their naked bodies, shrieking and groaning, while Mock and Popielski had risen to the very peaks of their virility. Towards morning they had swapped partners and drunk to their brotherhood.

  Up to the moment which had put them in the aforementioned mood. The obliging conductor had come at six in the morning to report that he had just spoken to Inspector Zubik, who wished to visit their compartment. The inspector, as the conductor reported, had got off in Kraków and by chance had caught sight of Popielski standing in the window, relishing a
morning cigarette. The visit was to be a short one, the conductor assured them, as the train was about to leave.

  Mock and Popielski had tidied the compartment in a flash. They were not worried about the girls since both of them were next door, fast asleep. Zubik had entered, greeted his colleagues ceremoniously, enquired about the purpose of their trip, praised their diligence and then was struck dumb, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Popielski’s eyes had slowly followed.

  From the chandelier hung a stocking and two used condoms.

  RYBNIK, THAT SAME JANUARY 30TH, 1937 NOON

  The deputy director of the psychiatric hospital, Doctor Ludwika Tkocz, hated men adoring her, which is why she was resolute, taciturn and rather brusque with them and put a prompt, effective and irrevocable stop to any flirtation. She had made a rule of this as far back as her days at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she had studied medicine. One of her colleagues had once coarsely joked in front of some students that Professor Władysław Heinrich had published her thesis in the Psychiatric Review not because of her light pen, but because of her light morals. Apart from the fact that this was nothing more than nasty, unfounded slander, Doctor Tkocz had realized one thing: to resort to sex in matters of scientific discourse was an act of desperation on the part of impotent, mediocre and envious individuals. She had kneed the student hard in the genitals, and as he writhed in pain, pronounced to everyone her personal manifesto condemning the limitations of sexual differences. And she had acted on it to this day: she had not married, so as not to be anyone’s slave; she used no eye make-up or lipstick, so that no man should slobber at the sight of her; and she dressed in men’s fashion so as not to be given special treatment as a woman.

  In the ten years that followed university she had made a brilliant career for herself. She had completed three supplementary years studying psychiatry at the Sorbonne with great success, passed her doctoral thesis with flying colours, and after taking up the position of deputy director at the psychiatric hospital – though not without a tiny bit of help from friends in high places – she was now working towards a professorship. She had never met the man of her life, who would need to be both resolute towards others, yet patient and yielding with her, brilliantly intelligent and at the same time capable of becoming merely a background to her disquisitions when the need arose. And yet she attracted weak, lost individuals who looked to her for support and a degree of care which was verging on the maternal. She could not abide such men. Once she had realized that she would never find her Platonic other half she ceased to care about relationships with the ugly sex. She snorted derisively at all rumour and spitefulness – which included no shortage of suppositions that she harboured Sapphic passions – and saw them off with a Silesian curse: “May lightning strike you!”, which she had often heard used by her father, a foreman at the Emma coalmine in Rybnik. She grew even more determined and sure of herself, definitively changed her skirt for a pair of trousers, and threw all her cosmetics – apart from soap and tooth powder – out of the bathroom.

  Despite her “anti-beauty” care regime and the relentless passage of time, Ludwika Tkocz had not succeeded in concealing her fine looks. The worst cataclysms in a woman’s appearance – hormonal tempests as well as ante- and post-natal fat deposits – passed by this delicate blonde with her porcelain complexion. She was not, therefore, surprised that the two men entering her office had devoured her with their eyes; she was used to it. But she was surprised that they were still staring at her now, despite the brusque manner in which she had greeted them, tearing her hand away from one as he had raised it to his lips, snapping that she hated such affections. These two must have been hopeless cases who would never understand the essence of a man–woman partnership. Two typical police officers who thought the world belonged to them, and that women were only waiting for them to beckon. Two puffed-up peacocks more than fifty years old, smelling of the best eau de cologne and flashing their signet rings, cigarette lighters and diamond tie-pins in front of her. Stuffed wallets were their guiding principle, and the wrinkled worms in their long johns their only concern! Worst of all was that she had immediately sensed a sudden change come about in the men when they found themselves in her presence. Discord between them grew with every word; they began to criticize each other, and make increasingly spiteful jokes at each other’s expense. She tasted bitterness in her mouth. Subconsciously they were competing for her, and she was supposed to be taken in by the chintz and beads of their mediocre intelligence! She looked at them with undisguised disdain, but held back. She did not want them to decipher her true feelings; she did not want to be helpless. Out of professional habit she began to register various details of their dress and behaviour.

  The bald man, after what no doubt seemed to him to be a well-aimed riposte directed at his stouter, dark-haired colleague, gazed at her in the hope that she would approve of his words. His beautiful, slender fingers were ready for any action, his well-built body was taut and his hazel-green eyes full of perverse anticipation.

  “My dear sir,” she addressed the bald man in German, a language she particularly disliked, “before you even attacked your colleague with that poor joke about biting out of passion … before you showed how bright you are, you asked whether the patient Maria Szynok has a family. Well, she doesn’t. She has no family. She is a ward” – she peeped into a cardboard file – “of the Mielęcki Orphanage in Kattowitz. It is so typical of this state and its welfare institutions!” She looked sternly over her glasses at the men she was addressing, as if they were the very state she was criticizing. “Brought up by nuns to hold her own body in contempt! Taught that her only goal is to get married and have five children … It’s not surprising that when for whatever reason she did not manage to achieve this goal she took to daydreaming. For some that would be as far as it goes; in her case the daydreaming turned to paranoia, and severe paranoia at that, revealed straightaway by the stress of that mysterious event which occasioned the arrival of the police. Perhaps it was rape? Hence these fabrications of hers about being married to some mythical count, some prince on a white horse. I simply cannot work out those wounds on her face …” She lost herself in thought for a while. “I wouldn’t entirely believe the local forensic pathologist, who has concluded that she was bitten by a dog. He’s irresponsible. He didn’t even examine her internally, so we can’t know whether she was raped or not. My interpretation of her injuries is completely different …”

  “In what way?” The dark-haired man had hazel-green eyes too. “How would you interpret them? We’d be curious to know!”

  “Don’t be so inquisitive!” the bald man delighted in scolding him. “Or you’ll provoke the doctor into giving us another scientific lecture like the one we had when we arrived. If I hear one more thing about affective illness and manic depression I’m really going to go mad … On the other hand, that wouldn’t be so bad. To be a patient of yours and see you every day …” His lips parted to reveal strong, even teeth.

  “My interpretation” – only now did Doctor Tkocz notice the bald officer’s carefully tended beard – “is as follows. These wounds were self-inflicted as a form of self-punishment, or as a prelude to future reasoning. In other words, she harmed herself as it were for the future, so as to explain her failure to find a husband: I can’t find a husband? Not surprising – I’m so ugly … That’s how she’s going to explain it to herself when she gets out of here and is at least partially cured – which could take ten years!”

  “And then she’ll find herself one more reason.” The bald man crossed his legs and displayed his shiny brogues, on which there was not even a trace of the snow and mud which covered the streets after the recent thaw. “She’ll say to herself: I’m old and ugly …”

  “I don’t believe a woman of thirty is old!” Doctor Tkocz felt herself grow red, something she hated above all.

  “There, you see, Edward” – the dark-haired man adjusted his pearl-coloured tie, which contrasted beautifully w
ith his dark, pinstriped suit – “your suppositions have proved correct. This Maria Szynok is insane and her story about some count is pure fantasy … You were right, we could have ascertained all this in Lwów without coming all the way here, although I” – and here he smiled at the doctor – “don’t regret having made the journey at all …”

  “Nor do I.” The bald man’s tie beneath the snow-white collar of his shirt was, so the doctor noticed, very neat and tied in a Windsor knot. “But I don’t agree with you. I think we can believe the patient.”

  “Are you joking?” His colleague raised his hands in a gesture of despair and bared his amber cufflinks. “I know you had a dream about a dog, but believe me, Edward, this is a false trail! If this gnawing had been the work of the Minotaur, he’d have killed her afterwards! So why didn’t he kill her? Why did he run the risk of such danger? She could have recognized him, after all!”

  “He probably didn’t come from here.” The bald man got up, reached for an expensive fountain pen and used it as a pointer. “After the murders in Mościce and Drohobycz he became more cautious. Now he’s killing in different towns, even different countries. Breslau, Kattowitz …”

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” broke in Doctor Tkocz. “Perhaps you could clarify something for me! What dog? What Minotaur? The one the newspapers wrote about a few years ago? If that’s the case, then there has never been a murder committed by the Minotaur here in Kattowitz!”

  “There, you see?” The dark-haired man laughed triumphantly. “He hasn’t murdered anyone here! And still I ask myself: why did he supposedly gnaw her, and yet not kill her?”

  “Let me answer that.” The bald man began to pace the room, sweeping his eyes indifferently over Doctor Tkocz’s diplomas hanging on the walls. “Maybe she was no longer a virgin? The Minotaur only murders virgins, after all!”