The Execution of Justice Read online

  “But you are, in point of fact, the murderer, and that makes your fiction quite meaningless,” I declared.

  “That’s the only thing that gives it meaning,” Kohler answered. “You’re not supposed to investigate reality at all—our good old Knulpe is doing that—but rather one of the possibilities behind the reality. You see, my dear Spät, we know very well what reality is, that’s why I’m in here weaving baskets, but we hardly know what possibility is. Possibility is something almost limitless, while reality is set within strictest limits, since, after all, only one of all those possibilities can become reality. Reality is only an exception to the rule of possibility, and can therefore be thought of quite differently too. From which follows that we must rethink reality in order to forge ahead into possibility.”

  I laughed. “A remarkable train of thought, Herr Kohler.”

  “One gets to pondering lots of things in these parts,” he said. “You see, Herr Spät, it often happens during the night, when I’m gazing at stars between the bars in the windows, that I start thinking about how reality might look if, instead of me, someone else had been the murderer. Who would that other person be? I want you to answer those questions for me. I’ll pay you a fee of thirty thousand, fifteen thousand in advance.”

  I said nothing.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Sounds like a pact with the devil,” I answered.

  “I’m not demanding your soul.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  “You’re risking nothing.”

  “Possibly. But I don’t see the point of this whole business.”

  He shook his head, laughed.

  “It’s enough that I see the point. All the rest is no worry of yours. I’m asking nothing of you except that you agree to a proposal that breaks no law and that I need for my research into possibility. I will, needless to say, cover all your expenses. Get in touch with a private detective, Lienhard would be best, pay him whatever he wants, there’s money enough, proceed in any fashion you like.”

  I turned this strange proposal over in my mind again. I didn’t like it; I could smell a trap but was unable to discover what it was.

  “And why have you turned to me, of all people?” I asked.

  “Because you don’t know anything about billiards,” he answered unruffled.

  And with that I made my decision.

  “Herr Kohler,” I replied, “this job is too fuzzy for me.”

  “Let my daughter know your definite answer,” Kohler said and stood up.

  “There’s nothing for me to think further about, I’m turning you down,” I said and stood up myself.

  Kohler gazed at me calmly, beaming, happy, rosy.

  “You’ll take on this job of mine, my young friend,” he said. “I know you better than you know yourself. An opportunity is an opportunity, and you need it. That’s all I wanted to say to you. And now, Möser, let’s go weave baskets.”

  They departed, arm in arm, I swear, and I was glad to leave this abode of perfect happiness. In haste. Took to my heels. Determined to keep my distance from all this, never to see Kohler again.

  Then I agreed after all. True, I was of a mind to break it off the next morning. I felt my reputation as a lawyer was at stake, even though I had no reputation, but Kohler’s proposal was pointless, a bagatelle, beneath the dignity of my profession, simply a foolish way to earn some money and jettison my pride. In those days, I wanted to get through this world neat and clean, yearned for real trials, for the chance to help people. I wrote a letter to the canton deputy informing him yet again of my decision. The matter was finished as far as I was concerned. With the letter in my pocket, I left my room on Freiestrasse, as I did every morning, at nine on the dot, with the intention of going first, as was my custom, to the Select, then later to my studio (the garret on Spiegelgasse), later still to the quay. I greeted my landlady at the door, squinted into the sunlight over toward the mailbox beside the grocery, a few steps, ridiculously few, but since life often functions like a trashy novel, that very morning—that sultry, oppressive workaday morning, ever so typical for our city—between nine and ten, as noted, I met, one right after the other: (a) old man Knulpe, (b) Friedli, the architect, (c) Lienhard, the private detective.

  *

  (a) Old man Knulpe: He caught me at the mailbox. I was just about to drop in my rejection letter when he moved in ahead of me with a whole bundle of letters, which he carefully dropped in one after the other. As always, the old man was accompanied by his wife. Professor Carl Knulpe was almost six foot six, emaciated, nothing, it seemed, but skin and bones, like Simon Berger, the preacher, and Nicholas of Flüe, but without the beard, unkempt, dirty, wearing a cape, summer and winter, topped by a beret. His spouse was equally tall, equally emaciated, equally unkempt and dirty, and also wore, year round, a cape and a beret, so that many people took her not for his wife but for his twin brother. Both were eminent in their field, both sociologists. Yet however inseparable they were in daily life, they were archenemies in science, doing nasty battle with each other in journals; he was a great Liberal of the old school (Capitalism, the Intellectual Adventure, Francke, 1938), she an impassioned Marxist, known under the name Moses Staehelin (Marxist Humanism in This World, Europa Publishers, 1939), and both were equally branded by political developments: Carl Knulpe was denied a visa for the US, Moses Staehelin for the USSR; he had made stern pronouncements about “instinctively Marxist tendencies” in the United States, she even more merciless ones about the “petit bourgeois betrayal” of the Soviet Union. Had. Unfortunately the pluperfect is necessary: two weeks ago, a truck belonging to Stürzeler Demolition made purée of them both; he was buried, she cremated, a stipulation in the will that caused considerable difficulty with the funeral.

  “Good day,” I said, calling attention to myself, the letter to Kohler in hand. Professor Carl Knulpe did not return the greeting, only squinted leerily down at me through his dusty rimless glasses, and his wife (wearing the same sort of glasses) said nothing either.

  “I don’t know exactly if you still remember me, Herr Professor,” I said somewhat crestfallen.

  “Course, course I do,” Knulpe answered. “Remember. Studied law and knocked about in my sociology classes. Look a little like a professional student. Pass your exams?”

  “Long ago, Herr Professor.”

  “Now a lawyer?”

  “Yes indeed, Herr Professor.”

  “Good work, good work. Socialist, right?”

  “Sort of, Herr Professor.”

  “A valiant slave of the capitalists, right?” Carl Knulpe’s wife asked.

  “Sort of, Frau Professor.”

  “Take it have something on your mind,” Carl Knulpe observed.

  “Indeed I do, Herr Professor.”

  “Walk with us,” she said. I accompanied the two of them. We walked toward Pfauen Square, I still hadn’t dropped the letter in the box—my monumental forgetfulness—but there were lots of mailboxes yet.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I visited Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler, Herr Professor. In prison.”

  “I see, I see. Our merry murderer, merry as a cricket. Ah yes, he summoned you to him as well?”

  “Exactly.”

  First one would ask a question, then the other.

  “Is he still as happy as ever?”

  “And how!”

  “Still simply beaming?”

  “Sure is.”

  We passed another mailbox. Actually I intended to stop there and drop my letter in, but the Knulpes kept on moving, quite unobservant and taking great hasty strides. I had to jog to keep up with them.

  “Kohler told me you’ve accepted a rather peculiar commission, Herr Professor,” I said.

  “Peculiar? In what way peculiar?”

  “Herr Professor! Cross your heart: For Kohler to have someone research the consequences of the murder he committed is really as crazy as can be. Here the fellow commits a murder in broad daylight, with no moti
ve, bold as brass, and then commissions a sociological study of the crime, under the pretext of plumbing the depths of reality.”

  “And they shall be plumbed, young man. Fathom upon fathom.”

  “But there must be something behind it! Some devilry or other!” I shouted.

  The Knulpes halted. I was panting. He wiped his rimless glasses, moved close to me so that I had to look up at him, he down at me. He put his glasses back on, his eyes glowered. His wife, too, glowering at me with outrage, had edged close to her spouse and so to me as well.

  “Science is behind it, young man, only science. For the first time it will be possible to investigate the results of a murder in bourgeois society with methodical thoroughness, to treat it exhaustively. Thanks to our princely murderer. A tremendous opportunity! Connections begin to emerge! Connections of family, profession, politics, finance, culture. Not at all surprising. Everything in this world, and in our beloved city as well, is connected, everyone leans on someone else, advances someone else’s cause, and when one falls, others go tumbling as well, and thus many have tumbled. Am in the midst of my account of the consequences at our beloved alma mater. And that’s only the beginning.”

  “Beg your pardon, a car.”

  I pulled them both to safety. In their excitement the Knulpes had wandered from the sidewalk into the street, and a taxi had to slam on its brakes. It was overfilled, an old lady with a hat full of artificial flowers banged against the windshield, the driver yelled out his window, very crudely. The Knulpes didn’t even blanch.

  “Totally immaterial,” he said, “statistically irrelevant whether we get run over or not. Only the task, only science, counts.”

  But Frau Professor Knulpe was of a different opinion. “It would have been a pity in my case,” she maintained.

  The taxi pulled away. Knulpe returned to the topic of his sociological researches.

  “Murder is murder, to be sure, but for a scientist it is a phenomenon to be investigated like any other. Up to now, people have limited themselves to determining the causes, motives, background, milieu; my task is to plunge into the consequences. And let me say this: A blessing for our alma mater, a blessing for the whole university, this murder was, one would like to commit murder oneself, so to speak. Yes, of course, regrettable taken by itself, a crime like that, but through the unexpected gap that Winter left behind, fresh air, a fresh spirit, comes streaming in. Amazing, what all becomes clear, our dear departed Winter was sand in the gears, a backward element, as Shakespeare said: ‘the Winter of our discontent,’ but I intend neither to malign nor make fun of him, will, rather, simply present, deliver the facts, young man, facts and nothing more.”

  We had arrived at Pfauen Square.

  “Godspeed, my good attorney,” the Knulpes said and took their leave. “Have an appointment with an important person from the Federal Institute of Technology,” he added. “Have to research that terrain now, Winter’s influence on the education commission is a chapter to itself, have got wind of scandals. Rosy prospects.” At the entrance to the restaurant they turned around again, raised fingers. “Think scientifically, young man, think scientifically. You’ve still to learn that. Even an attorney must learn it, my good man,” Frau Professor Knulpe, alias Moses Staehelin, said.

  They disappeared, and I still had not mailed my letter.

  (b) Friedli, the architect: Shortly afterward, sat next to him briefly at the Select, the letter still in my pocket. Select: Café, people sit out in front, and sit and sit, have been sitting there for ages, since time immemorial, or at least since millions of years ago, when brontosaurs waded their way downriver. I knew Friedli from my Stüssi-Leupin days; his real-estate speculations ran into trouble now and again, but nothing could slow him down, he was and still is the avalanche of fat that sweeps our city clean, so that in the gaps he leaves behind, new office buildings, condos, apartments, can rise, except that they cost more, with fat rents to match. The natural catastrophe at close range: In his fifties, an enormous bulge of sweating lard, the eyes stuck in somewhere, small and glistening, the nose tiny, the ears too, everything else gigantic, self-made man, a child of Langstrasse (my old lady, dear Spät, hired out as a laundress, my old man drank himself to death, I even poured a bottle of beer into his grave at the burial). Not only a patron of cycling rallies, without whose special purses there would be no six-day races, where he sits enthroned in the stadium, wolfing down countless local sausage specialties, but also a patron of music, thanks to whom our Tonhalle orchestra and our opera house are saved from sinking into absolute mediocrity; who lured Klemperer, Bruno Walter, even Karajan himself, to conduct for us, and who is now advancing Mondschein’s career, so that despite his having disfigured our city with his new and renovated buildings, he at least transfigures it again with a little fine art.

  He recognized me at once. The warm foehn winds, as noted, were blowing that morning, making everyone feel right at home, lamed and bewitched by our flabby climate, they sat squeezed together; I was glued up against Friedli, who was in the best of moods, dunking one croissant after another in his café au lait, in a glut of lip-smacking, slurping excess, the coffee running in brown streaks down his silk tie and white shirt.

  The source of his joy was a death notice in our world-famous local paper. As the result of a tragic accident, it had pleased God to call unto Himself “our never-to-be-forgotten husband, father, son, brother, uncle, son-in-law, and brother-in-law, Otto Erich Kugler. His life was purest love.”

  “An enemy of yours?” I asked.

  “A friend.”

  I offered my condolences.

  “Just had to go roaring off to Cham and into a tree, good, honest, dear old Kugler,” Friedli explained, beaming, slurping coffee, dunking croissants and eating, “rolling off into life eternal.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

  “You should have seen his Fiat, just a tangle of tin.”

  “Dreadful.”

  “Fate. We all have to die sometime.”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Hell,” he said, “you don’t seem to have any notion what this stroke of fate means for little old me, do you?”

  I didn’t. Massive little old him held me in his friendly gawking gaze.

  “Kugler leaves a widow behind,” he declared, “a splendid female.”

  It suddenly dawned on me. “And now you want to marry this splendid female.”

  Friedli the architect shook that portion of fat where one presumed his head might be. “No, young man, I don’t want to marry the widow, but the wife of her lover. Another female deluxe. Got it? Quite simple: If the lover wants to marry the widow, he’s got to get divorced first, and then I’ll marry his wife.”

  “Social mathematics,” I said.

  “Got it.”

  “But then you’ll have to get divorced too,” I reminded him, in the vague hope of picking up some business.

  “I am. Have been for a week. My fifth divorce.”

  Silence again.

  The waiter brought fresh croissants. A school class crossed the square, girls, several in pigtails, some of them already young women. One bevy halted to look at movie stills. Friedli ogled them.

  “You’re the strange lawyer with an office in a garret on Spiegelgasse, aren’t you?” he asked, watching the girls.

  I had to admit it.

  “It’s nine-thirty,” he observed, grinned and turned back to me. “I don’t want to be indiscreet, I’m really a well-mannered fellow, Spät, but I have the distinct feeling that you’ve not been to your office yet this morning.”

  “You guessed it,” I said, “your distinct feeling is not in error. I’ll make it over there in an hour maybe, or this afternoon sometime.”

  “I see. Maybe this afternoon.” He regarded me thoughtfully. “Dear Spät,” he said, “I spent the morning tromping around a construction site from seven till ten before nine,” he said modestly. “I earn millions. Fine. With my buildings, with my speculations.
Neat and proper. But that takes work, discipline, damn it. I drink like a fish, I admit, but pull myself together again every morning.”

  The colossus of lard laid a paternal arm over my shoulders. “My dear Spät,” he continued gently, all fat gigantic emotion, glistening with the steam rising from his coffee, croissant crumbs on his face and hands, “my dear Spät, I’m going to be straight with you. You’re having some real difficulties getting started, don’t try to pretend with me. And the result: You don’t count as a serious man at all. A lawyer who isn’t sitting behind his desk by nine-thirty is no more than thin air to a reputable business man. I don’t want to press all that hard, you don’t look like a loafer to me, but so far you’ve never been able to get up the nerve for a real breakneck leap into the bustle of life. And do you know why? Because you don’t know how to cut a figure, don’t have the guts or the spine for it. University studies are fine and dandy, but good grades don’t impress anyone but the schoolmasters. A desk isn’t enough, you can sit there on your throne as long as you like, the clients won’t come swarming in. No sir, and why should they? No, my friend, your disappointment is uncalled for. VWs and garrets aren’t just symbols of social poverty but of a certain intellectual poverty also, no offense intended. Honesty and modesty are fine enough, but a lawyer has to step up and make the earth tremble. The first thing you need is a real office suite; you’ll get nowhere with that pigeon cote of yours, nobody is going to come climbing up there behind you. After all, people want to sue, not do feats of athletic derring-do. In a word, it can’t go on like this. I’d like to give you a chance. Come see me at my office tomorrow morning at seven, bring along a mere four thousand, and then we’ll see you get set up in a decent space on Zeltweg.”

  (What followed was a lengthy expatiation upon a gigantic real-estate deal, plus further consumption of croissants and café au lait, the expatiation ironic and sardonic, delivered in the knowledge that in these parts the biggest swindles must be managed, get managed, legally; and then he came around to a Stravinsky festival and a Honegger cycle, and as I got up, he expressed his opinion that the reason the traffic was so chaotic was that our mayor was a pedestrian.)