The Execution of Justice Read online

  I parked beside the front gate. The chalet next door had to be Jämmerlin’s. I had read that he was turning sixty today, which explained all the cars on a street that would normally be empty. He was having a garden party. Stüssi-Leupin was just driving up. Monika Steiermann followed me in her black pajamas up the steep stairs, cursing. Stüssi-Leupin had got out of his car and was looking over at us, apparently amused. Jämmerlin’s disapproving face popped up over the hedge.

  “Here,” Steiermann said and handed me a key. I opened the front door, let Steiermann in ahead of me. The front door led immediately into the living space. A modern room with antique furniture. Through an open door you could see into a bedroom with a comfortable bed. She sat down on a divan, looking up at a Picasso above an antique chest. “He painted me.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She regarded me, amused. “And now I remember where I know you from,” she said. “From Mock’s. I played a statue for you.”

  “It’s possible,” I replied.

  “You were terribly frightened,” she recalled. Then she asked, “Didn’t you like what you saw that day, is that why you’ve forgotten me?”

  “Oh, sure I did, sure,” I admitted. “I liked it a lot.”

  “So then you haven’t forgotten me.”

  “Not entirely,” I admitted.

  She laughed. “Well then, since you remember.” She stood up and took off the pajamas, stood there stark naked, brazen and exciting, indifferent—that was more than apparent—to the dreadful thrashing Benno had given her. She walked up to the large window, from which you could see across to Jämmerlin’s. The guests assembled there stared our way, Jämmerlin with binoculars, beside him Stüssi-Leupin, who waved. Monika assumed the pose of the statue that Mock had made of her, Stüssi-Leupin applauded, Jämmerlin raised a menacing fist.

  “Many thanks for rescuing me,” Steiermann said, still holding her pose so her audience could view her, her back toward me.

  “A coincidence,” I replied. “Lienhard asked me to do it.”

  “I’m always getting beaten up,” she said wistfully. “First by Benno and then by Cuxhafen. And the others have always beaten me up too.” She turned toward me again.

  “Well, that’s a basis for rapprochement,” I said. “Your right eye’s swelling shut too.”

  “So what?”

  “Should I scare up a wet compress?” I asked.

  “Bull,” she said, “but you’ll find cognac and glasses in the cupboard.”

  I opened an old Engadine cupboard and found what she asked for, poured it.

  “You’ve been here often, I take it?” I asked.

  “A few times. I guess I’m a real whore,” she declared, with some bitterness and some bewilderment, and yet grandly.

  I laughed. “They get treated better.”

  She emptied her glass of cognac and then said, “Now I’m going to have a hot bath.”

  She limped into the bedroom. Vanished. I heard water running, curses. Then she came back, demanded another cognac.

  I poured it. “Are you sure that’s good for you, Monika?”

  “Nonsense,” she replied. “I’ve got the constitution of a horse.” Then she limped away again.

  When I entered the bathroom, she was lying in the tub and soaping up. “Burns like hell,” she said.

  I sat down on the rim of the tub. Her face darkened.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do?” she asked, and when I didn’t, answered, “I’m going to hang it up. Hang it up.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I am not Monika Steiermann,” she explained nonchalantly. I stared at her in astonishment.

  “I am not Monika Steiermann,” she repeated, and then said calmly: “I’m only leading the life of Monika Steiermann. My father was Professor Winter.”

  Silence. I didn’t know what to think of this.

  “And your mother?” I asked and knew as soon as I had that it was a stupid question. What did I care about her mother.

  It made no difference to her. “A teacher,” she answered, “in the Emme Valley. Winter dumped her. He was always dumping teachers.”

  She noted this without animosity.

  “My name’s Daphne. Daphne Müller.” Then she laughed. “Nobody ought to have a name like that.”

  “If you’re not Monika Steiermann, then who is Monika Steiermann?” I asked in confusion. “Does she even exist?”

  “Ask Lüdewitz,” she replied.

  Then she pulled up short. “Is this an interrogation?” she asked.

  “You asked for a lawyer. I’m a lawyer.”

  “I’ll let you know when I need you,” she suddenly replied, thinking hard, turning almost hostile.

  Lienhard appeared. I hadn’t heard him come in. He was simply there all of a sudden. He tamped down one of his Dunhills. “Satisfied, Spät?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “Satisfied, Daphne?” he asked.

  “So so,” she answered.

  “I brought you some clothes,” he said.

  “I’ve got Benno’s pajamas,” she asserted.

  Outside an ambulance was howling our way.

  “Jämmerlin must have had another heart attack,” said Lienhard dryly. “I gave him sixty roses.”

  “And he saw me naked.” She laughed.

  “That’s nothing new for you,” he suggested.

  “How do you know who Daphne is, Lienhard?” I asked.

  “You just stumble on that sort of thing. Sometimes,” he answered and set fire to his Dunhill. “Where can I take you from here, Fräulein Müller?”

  “To Ascona.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “Good businessman,” she declared approvingly.

  “Goes on the expense account,” Lienhard said. “He pays that.” He pointed at me. “He’s gained some priceless information.”

  “I have another job for him,” Daphne said.

  “Well?” Lienhard asked.

  Her right eye, not swollen quite shut yet, sparkled, and she passed her left hand through her cinnabar red hair.

  “He’s to inform the genuine Monika Steiermann, that lesbian nanny goat, that I don’t want to see her again. If she gets it from a lawyer, it’s official.”

  Lienhard laughed. “Girl, there’s going to be scandal you can’t even imagine.”

  “What do I care,” she said.

  Lienhard’s Dunhill just wouldn’t burn right in the steamy bathroom. He relit it.

  “Spät,” he suggested, “don’t get mixed up in this. That’s my advice.”

  “You’ve already got me mixed up in it,” I answered.

  “That’s true too,” Lienhard said and laughed, and then to Daphne he said, “Climb out.”

  “You’ve turned into a real orator,” I declared to Lienhard and left.

  Later, on Zeltweg, I gave Lüdewitz a call. He ranted. I knew too much. He was chagrined. And that’s how my visit to the real Monika Steiermann came about.

  Second Address to the Prosecutor: The more I write, the more improbable my report becomes. I putter away mightily at being literary, even attempt a poetic tone, record the weather conditions, attempt to be geographically accurate, check my city map, all of it just because you, Herr Prosecutor Joachim Feuser (please forgive the dead man in the morgue for speaking to you personally again), are fond of things literary, things poetic, and in general regard yourself as man of the muses, as you love to mention on every possible and impossible occasion, even before juries, and thus, without my literary trimmings, just might fling my manuscript into some corner. But my report remains a cliché. Despite the poesy. So sorry. I feel like the author of a trashy novel: me the fanatic for justice, Lienhard the Sherlock Holmes on the River Limmat, and Daphne Müller the Messalina of the Gold Coast, as the right bank of our lake is called. The statue with the sturdy breasts and the indecent pose, which I overlooked at Mock’s while admiring the living Daphne as a statue, that sensuous female made of
painted plaster of Paris (not to mention the genuine one) has with the passage of time become more lively in my memory than the girl who appears in my report. Of course it’s immaterial whether, and if so, how often, she slept with Lienhard—who didn’t she sleep with?—but people’s inner motives and processes are after all essential to my report—how things come about in this convoluted world and why. If the external event is correct, the interior motive can be guessed at, even if it can’t be nailed down with certainty; if the external facts are incorrect, if intercourse occurred and it is not registered, or if one mentions it when it did not occur, one hovers in a vacuum, in the void. As is the case here. How did Lienhard discover the secret of the “false” Monika Steiermann? By sleeping with her? Then a great many people would have known it. Did she love him? Then she wouldn’t have told him. Was she afraid? Possibly. And as far as Benno goes, was Lienhard bent on suspecting him from the beginning? Was Daphne the reason? I ask these questions because people have laid the blame for Daphne’s death at my door—I shouldn’t have gone to see the genuine Monika Steiermann. But Daphne had asked me to. I had to pursue a possible lead. I had accepted the job and the advance of fifteen thousand francs, even though I believed in the impossibility of the possibility—and still believe in it, for there is no doubt that Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler murdered Winter. That it could have been someone else is only a possibility, but one that means nothing; the fiction that I had to posit for my search, the fiction that Kohler was not the murderer, necessarily implied the possibility of neglected facts coming to light. For the rest, I have to write the truth, stick to the truth, and yet: What is the truth behind the truth? I stand before guesswork, grope about. What is correct? What is exaggeration? What’s been tampered with? What’s been hushed up? Which things should I doubt? Which believe? Is there anything true, certain, definite, behind these events, behind these Kohlers, Steiermanns, Stüssi-Leupins, Lienhards, Hélènes, Bennos, etc., who have crossed my path, anything true, certain, definite, real, behind this city of ours, behind this country of ours? Isn’t all this irredeemably encapsulated, hopelessly excluded from the laws and motives that keep the rest of the world moving and breathing, isn’t this just a provincial Central European backwater, isn’t all this unreal—all that lives, loves, guzzles, swindles, scrambles and fusses here, goes on breeding and organizing? What do we still represent? What do we still stand for? Is there one kernel of sense, one grain of meaning in the whole kit and caboodle I’m describing? But perhaps the answer to the question lies lurking behind it all, perhaps it will unexpectedly break out of each conceivable human situation and constellation, like an assault from an ambush. The answer will be the judgment spoken upon us, and the carrying out of that judgment, the truth. I want to believe that. Passionately and steadfastly. Not for the sake of the exquisite society in which I vegetate, not for the sake of these intolerable relics that surround me, but for the sake of justice, for the love of which I act, must act, in the hope of preserving my last scrap of humanity (what I am writing here is of solemn, lofty, holy pathos and high seriousness with organ accompaniment, but I won’t cross it out, won’t make corrections, and why should I, why make any attempt at style—I am guided not by literary ambitions but by homicidal intent, and by the way: not drunk, Herr Prosecutor, you err, not drunk, but sober, stone-cold sober, fatally sober). Therefore I have no other choice (to your health, Herr Prosecutor!) but to drink, to whore, to report, to register my doubts, to punctuate with question marks, and to wait, to wait, until truth reveals itself, until that cruel goddess unveils herself (getting literary after all, makes me want to vomit). That will not happen on these pages, the truth is not a formula that can be jotted down, it lies outside every attempt at speech, outside all poesy, only when justice bursts upon us, only when justice carries out its own eternal execution of justice, will it take effect, only then will we surmise it. Truth will be when one day I stand before Dr.h.c. Kohler, eye to eye, when I effect justice and execute its judgment. Then there will come a moment, a beat of the heart, a lightning bolt of eternity, one long second lashing out in a shot, when truth flashes forth, the truth that’s melting away now as I think about it, that seems hardly more than a bizarre and evil fairy tale. Just as my visit to the “genuine” Steiermann seems to have been: more dream than reality, more legend than fact.

  Monika Steiermann II: Mon Repos is on the edge of our city, set in such a gigantic and overgrown park that the villa has long since become almost invisible; only in winter can you painstakingly surmise, over toward Wagnerbühl, a few indistinct walls and a gable through the tangled branches of old trees. Very few people can still recall social gatherings at Mon Repos. Even the “genuine” Monika’s father and grandfather had given their parties and celebrated their anniversaries at country homes on Lake Zug and Lake Geneva, spending time in our city only to work (they were the personification of industrialist drudgery), they did their celebrating elsewhere, and the ladies, if they did visit our city, resided at the Dolder, at the Baur au Lac, or indeed at the Breitingerhof. Mon Repos became more and more a legend, especially after one morning when three burglars, who had traveled here from Germany, were found lying beaten to a pulp at the gate leading to the park of the Steiermann villa; the police had no comment. Lüdewitz had intervened. Except for Daphne, whom people regarded as Monika Steiermann, no one appeared to spend any time in the house, deliveries had to be left in an empty garage beside the gate to the park, and yet the grocery orders were sizable. Daphne herself never invited anyone to the villa; she had an additional apartment on Aurorastrasse. I had taken a couple of painkillers while driving to Wagnerstutzweg. The upended weather had upended yet again; the lake looked like a ditch, so near was the far shore. Four in the afternoon. I stopped at the entrance to the park. The gate was unlocked. I walked into the park, unsure of myself, the pills were still working. The gravel path led uphill, with a wooden step now and then, but it was not at all as steep as I had expected—Stutz, after all, means a steep incline. The park was uncared-for, the paths hadn’t been weeded, the fountains were overgrown with moss, junglelike patches were scattered here and there, and all of it populated by scads of plaster gnomes. They were placed not as separate individuals but in groups, in clans—brainless, with white beards, pink, smiling, idiotic, some were even sitting in the trees, fastened there like birds on the branches; then came still larger gnomes, grimmer, more malicious, and female ones too, bigger than the males, eerie gnome women with large heads. I felt followed, encircled, walked faster and faster until, coming out of a sharp curve around a mighty old ash tree, I was abruptly intercepted. It was as if I had slammed up against iron, but I was unable to get a good look at the person I was bouncing up against. I was turned around, apparently by a bodyguard, who more carried than walked me the rest of the way to the villa. At the front door stood a second bodyguard, a fellow so massive he seemed to fill the door frame, who took me over and shoved me inside, first through a vestibule, then through a hall with a crackling fireplace—what looked like a whole tree trunk was burning in it—and finally into a drawing room, or, if you will, a den. I was dropped into a leather armchair. I looked up, dazed. My arms and back hurt. Both bodyguards were sitting across from me in bulky leather armchairs. They were bald. Their faces were like clay. Slant-eyed, cheekbones like fists. They were impeccably dressed, dark blue suits of pure silk, as if this were the middle of summer, white silk ties, but with shoes like the ones weight lifters wear. Though they weren’t especially tall, the effect was of two colossuses. I nodded to them. Their faces remained expressionless. I looked about me. The wainscoted walls were hung and pasted full of photographs, so many that the dark brown paneling was almost papered over with them; and with the strange kind of fright that accompanies such a discovery, I realized that the same person was pictured over and over again: Dr. Benno; and only then did I spot, against the barred window of a niche in the opposite wall, Mock’s salacious masterpiece of sculpture, the naked “false” Steiermann, Daphne, but now in
bronze, with both hands lifting her breasts like weights. Just as I noticed it, the double door across from it opened and a third bald-headed bodyguard—even more massive, even more silken than the two in their leather armchairs—entered carrying a wrinkled and misshapen creature the size of a four-year-old child. Draping the tiny crippled body was a grotesque black dress with a plunging neckline, and a sparkling sapphire.

  “I am Monika Steiermann,” the creature said.

  I stood up. “I’m Spät, the lawyer.”

  “I see, I see, a lawyer,” the tiny creature with the ponderous head replied. The weirdest thing was the voice. It was as if another person’s voice were coming from this freak. It was the voice of a woman. “What do you want of me?”

  The bodyguard, with the creature in his arms, stood there immobile.

  “Monika—”

  “Frau Steiermann,” the creature corrected me, and then tugged at its dress. “Dior. Chic, don’t you think?” In its voice was cool, haughty mockery.

  “Frau Steiermann, Daphne does not want to return here to you ever again.”

  “And you’re to inform me of that?” the creature asked.

  “I was asked to inform you,” I answered.

  There was no guessing how the creature took the message.

  “Whiskey?” it asked.

  “Love some.”

  Without the creature’s giving any signal, the double door behind me opened and a fourth bald-headed bodyguard brought in scotch and ice.

  “Straight?” it asked.

  “On the rocks.”

  The fourth bodyguard served me, stayed on. The first two had stood up now too.