Free Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski Page B

of Anwaldt – a kind-hearted grandfather stroking the head of a fantasizing grandson.
    “Isn’t that enough for you?” A sarcastic smile spread over his lips. “Here I have a madman and epileptic who, as the doctor states, can perform miracles shortly after a fit; no alibi, strange writing in notebooks. If you, having such evidence, continued to look for the murderer, you’d never finish your investigation. But maybe you were equally discerning in Berlin and old von Grappersdorff finally sent you off into the country?”
    “Director, sir, did all this really convince you?”
    Mock consciously gave slow vent to his irritation. He adored the feeling: to control waves of emotion and to give them free reign at any moment.
    “Are you running an investigation or drawing up a psychological profile of my person?” he shouted. But he had played it wrong; he had notscared Anwaldt in the least. Mock did not know that shouting did not work on him. He had heard it all too often in childhood.
    “Sorry,” said the Assistant. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
    “Look, my son,” Mock spread himself comfortably in his chair, toying with his wedding ring and, in his thoughts, constructing his own keen profile of Anwaldt. “If I had such thin skin, I wouldn’t have been able to work for what’s coming up to twenty-five years in the police.” He immediately realized that Anwaldt was pretending to be humble. This intrigued him to such an extent that he decided to join in this subtle game.
    “You didn’t have to apologize. This way you revealed your weakness. I’ll give you some good advice: always hide your own weak points, expose those of others. That way you ensnare others. Do you know what it means, ‘to have something on somebody’ or ‘to hold someone in a vice’? That ‘vice’ might, for example, be gambling; or it might be harmoniously built ephebes; or again, Jewish origins. By tightening that vice, I have triumphed an infinite number of times.”
    “Can you now use my weakness against me? Can you catch me in ‘the grips of anxiety’?”
    “But why should I?”
    Anwaldt ceased being humble. This conversation was giving him a great deal of pleasure. He felt like the representative of a rare scientific discipline, who suddenly meets another demon of the science in a train and is trying not to count the stations passing by inexorably.
    “Why? Because I’ve renewed an investigation which you concluded with such incredible success. (From what I know, the investigation advanced your career prodigiously.) ”
    “Then run the investigation and don’t perform psychological vivisections on me!” Mock had decided to lose his temper a little again.
    Anwaldt fanned himself for a while with a copy of the Breslauer Zeitung . Finally, he risked: “And so I am. Starting with you.”
    Mock’s whole-hearted laughter resounded in the room. Anwaldt timidly chimed in. Forstner was listening at the door – in vain.
    “I like you, son,” Mock finished his tea. “If you have any problems, call me any time, night or day. I’ve got a ‘vice’ for almost everybody in this city.”
    “But not yet one for me?” Anwaldt was putting the elegant visiting card away in his wallet.
    Mock got up, giving the sign that he considered the conversation over. “And that’s why I still like you.”
    BRESLAU, THAT SAME JULY 7TH, 1934
FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
    Apart from the kitchen, Mock’s study was the only room in his five-roomed apartment on Rehdigerplatz 1 to have north-facing windows. Only here was it possible to enjoy a pleasant coolness in the summer. The Director had just finished eating lunch, brought to him from the Grajecka restaurant across the courtyard. He sat at his desk and drank cold Haselbach beer which he had taken from the larder a short while ago. As usual after a meal, he was smoking and reading a book picked at random from his bookshelf. This time he had picked the work of a banned author: The