Phantoms of Breslau Read Free Page B

Mock went down the stairs to his Uncle Eduard’s old butcher shop.
    “Chamomile and hot milk. Gets drunk, so he gets what’s coming to him,” came the voice of his father from overhead; he had remedies for all his son’s ailments.
    Eberhard heard a hard hammering on the windowsill. “Must be that moron Dosche with his foul dog,” he thought. “That mongrel’s going to be shitting all over the polished stairs again while Dosche and my father play chess all day.”
    The scrambled eggs and chives made him gag like a hair stuck in his throat. “Chamomile and hot milk. He knocks it back, always knocking it back.” Mock turned and went back up the stairs. His head appeared above the floor. The sill rattled again. His father was at the window, hopping on one foot; on his other hung a darned sock.
    “Can you not understand, Father,” yelled Eberhard, “that chamomile and milk don’t bloody well work on me? I don’t have a problem falling asleep, it’s the dreaming!”
    Willibald Mock stared at his son, understanding nothing. The torso above the hatch. Clenched fists. Hangover gushing in his head like the sea. Chamomile and hot milk. The father grew pale and did not say a word.
    “And tell that shitty chessplayer, Dosche, not to come here with his mongrel and not to thump on the windowsill so hard, or he’ll be sorry.”
    Eberhard’s legs were now in the room too. Without looking at his father, he went to the basin, knelt beside it, removed his bowler hat and poured a few ladles of water over his wavy hair. He heard his father’s voice through the stream of water that gushed over his ears: “It’s not Dosche hammering on the sill, it’s somebody for you.”
    Eberhard leaned towards the old man and slipped the sock over his foot.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1919
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
    Kurt Smolorz had not been working under Mock in Vice Department IIIb of Breslau’s Police Praesidium for long. He had landed there straight off the streets of Kleinburg, where he had walked the beat without knowing why; in truth, this beautiful villa district adjacent to South Park had about as much in common with crime as Constable Smolorz had with poetry. Yet on one warm day in 1918, it was precisely there that some dangerous criminals, sought by all the police in Europe, had crossed the constable’s path. And it was a happy day for him. Criminal Assistant Mock had been doing a routine check in a plush house of ill repute on Akazienallee. He had a habit of combining pleasure with work. After checking the income ledger and the health records, and when he had quizzed the madam about her more eccentric clients, he had begun to look around for his favourite lady who, as it turned out, was busy, along with two other employees, pleasuring two – and here the madam sighed – very rich gentlemen.
    Intrigued by the configuration of two to three, Mock had peeped through a concealed window into the so-called pink room and received a shock. He had run out into the street and immediately bumped into thered-headed constable, who was clanging his sword threateningly and tugging at the collar of a rascal he had apprehended a moment earlier for firing a catapult at passing droschkas. On Mock’s orders, Constable Smolorz had punished the rascal with a hefty clout and let him go. Then, together with Mock, he had burst into the pink room of Madame Blaschke’s establishment and – rubbing his eyes in astonishment at such a complicated arrangement of bodies as he had never seen before – arrested the two men, who had turned out to be none other than Kurt Wirth and his mute bodyguard Hans Zupitza, pioneers of European coercion and extortion. That day a great deal changed in the lives of the protagonists of this event, and they all became permanently linked: Wirth collaborated with Mock and was rewarded when the latter turned a blind eye to his extortion of smugglers who floated arms from Austria, coffee from Turkey and tobacco