The Minotaur's Head: An Eberhard Mock Investigation (Eberhard Mock Investigation 4) Page 19

  Helmut bowed and left. Mock sighed, ate a dumpling and dug his fork into the pork knuckle. He did not, however, manage to bring it to his lips. Popielski, completely tense, was pressing his arm firmly to the table. The German stared at him, his mouth – into which the piece of meat was fated not to disappear – gaped open. Fat now ran down the pork and dripped onto the tablecloth.

  “The fake count came here from afar, I repeat, from afar. He met matron Nowoziemska, who recommended this restaurant to him. He jotted down some figures on the tablecloth”– Popielski pressed Mock’s hand to the table as the veins on his forehead swelled – “and in the interim gnawed the face of Maria Szynok. And the first two victims were found in the vicinity of Lwów. Do you know what the European capital of mathematics is?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Do you or don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t … Probably Gettingen. Or Paris, Berlin?”

  “No, my friend.” There was pride in Popielski’s voice. “It’s Lwów. My city.”

  “I know what you want to say. That the Minotaur is a mathematician who scribbled some formulae on the tablecloth. And that in his letter to the marriage bureau he wrote that he’d be coming from far away. You’ve linked the two facts. But he could just as easily be a businessman living in Warsaw who was working out his profits in a spare moment … Your capital city is also far away, surely. And let me finally eat this pork knuckle, damn it!”

  “Did you know there’s a famous café in Lwów called the Scotch House, where mathematicians meet?” Popielski let go of Mock’s arm. “And did you know that for years and years they used to write on the tablecloths there, or even the tables themselves, just like that fake count? Perhaps he used to go there, too, and hasn’t got out of the habit?”

  “Maybe …” Mock chewed on the pork knuckle with relish. “I can understand that you want to go back to your home town … And that you don’t feel like explaining yourself to this Commissioner Holewa or whatever his name is … But you’re relying on only two pieces of information and your intuition. And we’re to go back because of that? We’ve still got a lot to do here. Question the girl’s neighbours, for example …”

  “You’re saying I’ve randomly linked two pieces of information. But there’s still a third fact, and it’s the most important. I should have started with it. And it’s the reason we’re catching the next train to Lwów. Do you know what our count is called? How he introduced himself in his letter? Count Hugo Dionizy von Banach. And do you know who Professor Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus and Professor Stefan Banach are?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly!” said Popielski, carefully arranging his cabbage on the remaining pieces of pork knuckle. “They’re mathematicians from Lwów and regulars at the Scotch House. Let’s go. We’ll just pop into Matrimonium and perhaps get some more information from there. I regret not having asked Miss Nowoziemska about the gorilla’s accent – I’m sure that observant woman would have detected a Lwów ring to it.”

  KATTOWITZ, THAT SAME FEBRUARY 1ST, 1937 TWO O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  Miss Klementyna Nowoziemska was in the habit of eating lunch at about two o’clock in the nearby Theatre Restaurant. She would then lock her office and hang a notice on the door which read: LUNCH BREAK. BACK AT 15.30. And this is what she did today. She donned her sable-fur coat and little hat with a flower fastened on a fancy loop, then made towards the door with her handbag beneath one arm and the notice beneath the other. The door opened, and there stood a short man wearing a coat and hat and carrying a walking stick.

  “I’m just on my way to lunch.” Miss Klementyna tapped a red fingernail on the varnished notice. “Would you like to accompany me? We can talk just as easily there.”

  The first blow almost fractured her eye-socket. Warm blood covered the eye and a red mark appeared on her forehead which soon turned blue. The knock threw Miss Nowoziemska against the wall. She slid down it on rigid legs and fell heavily on her tail bone. Her assailant unscrewed the lower part of his walking stick to reveal a ten-centimetre-long steel spike. He raised his hands and rammed the spike into her head, pushing it through the woman’s hat and skull with equal ease. He pressed on the spike and twisted it as far as it would go. He was merciful. He did not want her to see him lean over her, dig a knife into her cheek, make a deep incision and into the cut slip his upper teeth. He did not want her to see him tip his head back and the red pulp slop onto the parquet floor.

  PART II

  The Minotaur’s Chamber

  “All negligence is deliberate, every random encounter is a planned meeting, every humiliation a punishment, every failure a secret success, every death a suicide.”

  From “Deutsches Requiem”, Jorge Luis Borges, 1942

  WOROCHTA, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8TH, 1937 FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  Rita Popielska schussed down the slope which led from the recently built chalet to a dark strip of beech trees. Her shapely figure, porcelain complexion, and cheeks which in the frost and wind had turned the colour of rosy apples, drew everybody’s attention. Older women looked at Rita with a slight disdain during meals at the chalet, taking it as understood that every beautiful girl will sooner or later become a street-walker or a kept woman; younger women looked with envy; men, on the other hand, with either lust or helpless resignation. Rita, not even realizing that she provoked such assorted emotions in others, threw herself into snow-related pursuits with passion, as if every day was the last of her winter holiday. The only contact she had with Aunt Leokadia, who was forever playing bridge, was at mealtimes in the restaurant. Even then she did not have to put up with her aunt’s sardonic glances and smart comments, however, because from the very first day two men had fought their way to her table: the Krzemicki brothers, the younger of whom, Adam, was a student at Lwów Polytechnic and the older, Zygmunt, a cadet with the Kresowy Fusiliers at Stanisławów. During meals Rita launched herself joyfully into bright, flirtatious conversations with both young men, especially when Aunt Leokadia, after swallowing a couple of mouthfuls, hurried off to the palm-filled foyer from whence came the scent of cigars and the rustle of cards being dealt. With a carefree smile, Rita, a flighty and fickle lass, would often break off her conversations with the brothers – who blushed in turn like schoolboys – leave them mid-sentence and run to her room to change into a pair of warm knickers, thick stockings, narrow ski-trousers and two Zakopane jumpers; she never wore a hat since wool irritated her and made her itchy. She then rushed off to the slope with her skis and whizzed down at a crazy speed, her black hair blowing in the wind, leaving behind both the brothers and several other schoolboys and students, who tried in vain to prove equal to this fit young lady. It was almost impossible to catch up with a girl who had been skiing since she was five years old and spent every winter holiday in the Carpathian Mountains.

  Anyone who thought that Rita Popielska was throwing herself into the whirl of wind and snow purely from an atavistic need to burn off her youthful energy would have been mistaken. Her motive was entirely different. She had decided, quite rightly, that the faster the day passed and the more tired she was when she buried herself in her cool, scented sheets in the evenings, the faster her two-week holiday in Worochta would fly by and the quicker she would return to Lwów. And that is where she wanted to be, come what may. Because somebody was waiting for her there. A mysterious man who had passed a letter to her via the train conductor when, wrapped in a thick, quilted dressing gown, she was on her way back from the toilet to the sleeper compartment she shared with her snoring aunt. The conductor had tipped his hat, handed her an envelope smelling of a man’s scent, and told her that a masked youth at Lwów Main Station had requested the favour he was now granting.

  Apart from anything else, Rita was freeing herself of the company of various admirers because she wanted to be alone. She longed to stand among the old spruce and beech trees and for the hundredth time read the letter which had left her in a pleasant state of confusio
n.

  Disconcerting Miss Rita!

  Before I beheld you in a certain forbidden place in Zamarstynów in the company of another young lady and some circus strongmen, I was an entirely different man, a bored and cynical bon vivant who thought he had experienced and seen everything. A man who knew both evil and good in their purest form. In order to prove to you that these are not empty words, I will simply say that I have been sought by the police of three countries, spent time in jail and acquired a great fortune. To counter this I would add that I am highly educated and twenty-seven years of age. At present I do not have to work for a living; I do not have to do anything. An overwhelming sense of boredom had crept into my life. Until that day in January when I saw you. If previously I had known evil and good in their purest form, then now, in your person, I saw the highest beauty. A weak man would write: “I cannot sleep or eat, I dream of one glance from you, one smile of those wonderful lips.” I am not going to write that, I am a strong man, the kind of man who conquers, who can lay the whole world at your feet, and that is why I am going to say something bold and impudent: I dream of the whole of you. Your presence in the drinking-den in Zamarstynów is proof that you, too, are someone who is determined and sneers at society’s concept of decency. Rita! If you could just bring yourself to take a daring step and agree to receive another letter from me (to which I will attach my photograph), stand one Sunday at precisely midday beneath the clock of the Viennese Café on Hetmańska. Every Sunday at midday I will stand close by and watch people pass. I know that one Sunday you will be one of them.

  LWÓW, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17TH, 1937 SIX O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  For some time now Popielski had been a regular customer at the Scotch House café on the corner of Łoziński and Fredro Street and had already managed to accustom the staff to his eccentricities. He never ordered anything other than countless glasses of unsweetened, strong tea since, as he announced the first time he went, he was undergoing a diet which was to cleanse his body of unnecessary toxins. He did not add that these toxins were chiefly of an alcoholic nature, because why should he be on such familiar terms with waiters and waitresses who already demonstrated a considerable lack of deference towards their guests? With every day of his fast he felt the weight fall off him, and his irritation at the entire world rise: irritation at Hanna, whose singing of her morning prayers woke him with increasing frequency when he had only just gone to sleep; at his colleagues in the Investigative Bureau who were too sluggish in their search for people of remarkable ugliness; and at mathematicians, the regulars of the Scotch House, who looked down on him and treated him with a touch of irony.

  He had already managed to meet most of them and find his way around the problems which preoccupied them. However, his erstwhile knowledge of mathematics – acquired in Vienna from the excellent Wielkopolanin, Franciszek Mertens and gruff Wilhelm Wirtinger – had now lost its freshness, and the enthusiastic outbursts of Lwów’s mathematicians over problems which had peculiar and sometimes even poetic names seemed to him nothing less than childish. When Professor Stefan Banach raised his hands – often with a smoking cigarette in each – and fell into raptures about a new contribution to “Steinhaus’ sandwich”, “Mazur’s game” or “Hilbert’s tripod and cube”, Popielski thought he had been transported back to his schooldays when he had played chess with his cousin Leokadia and they had given various moves the names of heroes from books they were reading, which resulted in “Winnetou’s check” and “Kmicic’s gambit”. While Stanisław Ulam, with one leg on a chair and the other on the floor, explained the “densification of singularity” or “supposedly dense spaces”, while Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus and Stefan Kaczmarz poured coffee and sometimes vodka, while each of them voiced their criticism of the latest French paper on octagonal sequences and Stanisław Mazur stunned everyone with his linear methods of summation, the commissioner – perhaps influenced by pangs of hunger – succumbed to ever greater misanthropy and to a deep-seated complex about his misspent opportunities. He remembered happy days in Vienna and the mathematics he had once so loved, and which, because of his health, he had abandoned in favour of philology; lectures and seminars in philology at the University of Vienna were generally held in the evenings, which meant that he had been able to avoid sunlight. He had not, therefore, managed to learn about the complex problems these men were discussing.

  He came to the Scotch House at lunchtime, sat alone and in mournful silence by the curtain at the front door, and carefully observed those who entered. He knew the murderer would be well acquainted with his appearance from the newspapers, and so he waited for fear to register in one of the faces. This occurred only once, but in a face which was not ugly, unfortunately, and besides, it belonged to a woman; it was the face of a prostitute who had once painfully ridiculed the commissioner’s post-alcoholic impotence. So Popielski sat there, dreadfully bored. He did not read the newspapers, nor even did he set out a game of chess for fear that one of the mathematical geniuses should want to play with him, and thereby bring him immediate and inevitable defeat.

  Something he noticed on the first day undermined a common Lwówian myth which he himself had also believed, namely that these scholars wrote on tablecloths. This was not so – the mathematicians used their indelible pencils to blacken either the marble surfaces of tables or the pages of a special book which could always be found with the cloakroom attendant. This observation disappointed Popielski a great deal because the myth had, after all, been one of the pillars to support his reasoning that the gorilla-faced man who had written on a tablecloth at the Eldorado Restaurant in Kattowitz was a mathematician from Lwów. However, he quickly pulled himself together after this momentary setback and began his carefully planned investigation.

  For the first four days he observed the mathematicians and kept demanding that the waiter give him their names. For a little variety he doggedly summed up the investigation to date, analysing for the thousandth time the circumstances in which he and Mock had found Klementyna Nowoziemska murdered, and talking to a woman of easy virtue who, at his request, came to the café in order to judge the ugliness of a man “from a woman’s perspective”.

  When after a week he had got to know the luminaries and pretenders to the upper reaches of mathematics, and to his regret had not found any of them strikingly ugly, he started to look for those among them who stood out for having a linguistic imagination rich enough to invent the ingenious fictitious name of Hugo Dionizy von Banach. With this in mind he abandoned his undercover operation and held long and boring conversations with the scholars on the basis of which he formed a reliable opinion as to the wealth of their vocabulary and linguistic constructions. After another four days he identified a main suspect whom, however, he had quickly to erase from his list. This was Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus, a man who used exquisite Polish language, full of unusual and highly apposite word play. Firstly, he was not ugly, and secondly, it was hard to imagine that the murderer would make use of a pseudonym comprised of two of his own names.

  When Popielski had crossed out all the Scotch House regulars from his list of suspects, he began to question them individually about “ugly” colleagues or students. Which is when things got going.

  “In what sense ‘ugly’?” asked Meier Eidelheit.

  “I know, Commissioner, the relationship that plane geometry has to the aesthetic or artistic representation of space in works by the Italian masters,” Kazimierz Bartel fell to thinking. “And from there I deduce what is beautiful. But when speaking of ugliness I would have to adopt a converse reasoning.”

  When Popielski tried to narrow down these speculations by comparing the man he was seeking to an ape, the men to whom he spoke drew him into deep waters of abstraction.

  “Can the noun ‘ape’ be definable by a finite number of words?” asked Mark Kac, growing dispirited.

  “My dear sir,” said Leon Chwistek, sprawled at the table, “I can define ugliness only as a lack of beauty. And beauty I see in art which
has shaken off the insupportable burden of imitating nature. Consequently, a picture of an ape and one of Venus de Milo are equally ugly because both are elements of nature; however, there is no beauty in artistic representations of nature.”

  After three weeks Popielski gave up his diet and resolved to leave the Scotch House, never to return. The famous café had led him nowhere. What he had planned for the days that followed was even less absorbing: he was to attend the next few meetings of the Lwów circle of the Polish Mathematical Society and look for the Minotaur there. There were not many such meetings: one in March, one in April, two in May and one in June. But how to continue tracking down the beast in the meantime? He was conscious of the terrible vacuum he would be feeling the following day, when he returned to his office at the Investigative Bureau. He wanted to push as far away as possible the thought of his furious colleagues wandering about Lwów, asking after “ugly” people and laying themselves open to ridicule. He could not bear to think of Marian Zubik, who would be asking him about the progress of the investigation. He decided to deaden all this with alcohol. End of diet, he told himself. After a few vodkas he set out the chessboard and, in a flush of courage, decided to challenge one of the conversing mathematicians to a game. He approached their table, but they did not so much as glance at him. They were too busy debating the existence of machines which could give an automatic response if a quantity of inert matter was introduced into their environment.

  Popielski gave up, sat down alone to some chess puzzles from the Deutsche Schachzeitung, to which the Scotch House subscribed, and ordered yet another glass of vodka. He missed Mock. He would gladly have played him. But Eberhard was not there.