Free I Was Jack Mortimer (Pushkin Collection) by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

firm for six hours, and which had endured the car journey through the city with the dead man on board, the sinking of the body, and the desperate risk of adopting Mortimer’s identity, finally snapped the moment when there was nothing else to do but wait for the next morning.
    First of all, however, he tried to suppress his anxiety. He walked slowly up to the painting, looked at it and fingered the frame, causing it to sway slightly. He lifted it away from the wall and let it fall back with a slight clatter. He even knelt on the sofa to examine it in more detail.
    A large body of cavalry and foot soldiers clad in clothes of antiquity were marching through dark clouds of smoke. The baroque motif of a white charger with a swanlike neck and a huge crupper pointing towards the foreground caught his attention in particular. Staring fixedly—to block out all other thoughts—at the shooting, stabbing and the general mêlée portrayed in the painting, he pulled off his overcoat and threw it aside. He was feeling unbearably hot. He gulped two or three times, as if to swallow something that had become lodged in his throat. The black, piercing, mouselike eyes of the rider, looking over his shoulder, on the pirouetting white charger, stared out at him penetratingly from the small, weather-beaten face; also, when he got up from the sofa and stepped back, they appeared to follow him everywhere, and he had the feeling he was suffocating in this over-richly decorated, but relatively small room. Everything was eerily silent; the plush carpets absorbed every sound. He drew his hand once again over his forehead, went back to the salon, but then, after a quick look round, returned immediately to the bedroom, from there went to the bathroom, and found himself once again in the hallway. However, he didn’t stay there but walked, or rather ran, again into the salon andbedroom, into the bathroom and hallway, and repeated this mad circuit three or four times, each time faster and faster; the furniture and lights swam in front of his eyes, forming a swirling pattern, until he tripped over the edge of a rug and fell with a crash.
    He remained lying there utterly still for a few moments, then turned over with a groan, let his head drop back, and stared wide-eyed about the room as if unaware of what had happened.
    Lying on his back, it seemed as if something had snapped inside him, for he suddenly felt easier and also felt the coolness of the floor doing him good. He now perceived everything with unusual clarity, probably on account of his posture, each object making a greater and more powerful impression upon him than before.
    The room was sumptuously decorated, mainly in the First Empire style, though in other styles as well, and all around him he could see highly polished furniture, caryatides adorned with lights, and wallpaper reaching up to the ceiling. A greenish bronze chandelier with three tiers of light bulbs swayed overhead, and the wooden ceiling was divided into uniform diamond-shaped figures, each displaying a fantastic, lavishly painted, gilt and silvered coat of arms. Leopards, eagles and lilies intertwined to form an overbearing ornamentation that would have been more appropriate as a feature in a funeral parlour.
    Still shaking slightly, he stood up and walked over to thebedroom as if to recommence his tour, interrupted by the fall, but halted at the door. The room was done out in wine-red velvet, and over the bed hung a gold-coloured silk baldachin. On the bedcover a gold-embroidered pomegranate pattern shimmered in the dim light of two pendant lamps which, like at a catafalque, shone either side of the bed—Mortimer’s bed. He could easily imagine the outstretched form of the murdered man in the shadow of the baldachin.
    The anxiety, which to some extent had abated with the fall, now surged back; it rose, as it were, from the floor up to his knees, gobbling up his whole body, and began, in a probing and insidious manner, to go for