The Execution of Justice Read online

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  (c) Fredi Lienhard, private detective: Same age as I. Gaunt, black-haired, a man of conspicuous taciturnity and short sentences. Only child of divorced parents. As a high school student he was suspected of having murdered his mother along with her lover, they were both naked in Mama’s bedroom, stretched out nice and proper, she on the bed, the lover, her psychiatrist, from Küsnacht, in front of it, like a throw rug. Lienhard was called out of his final exams; he was just about to translate a passage of Tacitus when the police nabbed him; his situation looked hopeless, he was the sole suspect, only he had been in the house on the night of the murder, although, according to his testimony, he had spent it peacefully on the top floor in his teenage pad stuffed with the classics and zoology books. It was his additional bad luck to have just turned eighteen, so that he ended up not in the clutches of the juvenile authorities but in the considerably less merciful clutches of Jämmerlin. The interrogations, during his custody and later before the jury, were carried out with some rigor, too, with Jämmerlin assaulting the high school boy with every trick in the book, but Lienhard held up magnificently, an absolute master; the solid evidence suddenly turned out to contain serious contradictions, and finally there was no choice but to acquit him; there weren’t even legal dodges enough to place him under a guardian. Jämmerlin raged, suffered his first nervous breakdown, attempted several appeals, vain ones however, to the Supreme Court to have the case reopened—all the more eagerly since Lienhard began to take his revenge. The suspect had come into money, mad sums; his divorced father had been rich as Croesus and bequeathed it all to him, and then there was the capital from his well-financed mother, so that the dough rolled in, gushed in, flew in from all sides, piled up, added up, multiplied, squared, cubed; he stashed away one inheritance after another within a very short space of time—grandparents, aunts, uncles, as well as any heirs they might have had, shoved hastily off, thronged their way, so to speak, into eternity; it was as if heaven and hell were employing their full lethal resources in order to bless Lienhard with the world’s wealth, and blessed he was. Having just been released from Jämmerlin’s domain and not yet twenty years old, he emerged a multimillionaire. It was fabulous, involving more luck than brains, though there was plenty of the latter. For he proceeded to attack the prosecutor by means as systematic as they were simple: He never left his side. Jämmerlin could not go anywhere without crossing paths with Lienhard. At every summation before a jury, there would be Lienhard’s face grinning at him from somewhere in the room. If he was dining at a restaurant, Lienhard would be at the next table. He was always close at hand. Wherever Jämmerlin took up residence, Lienhard would be living next door, if Jämmerlin angrily moved to a rented apartment, suddenly there was Lienhard rooming above him. Jämmerlin was at the end of his tether. The sight of Lienhard was unbearable. Several times he came close to throwing himself at him, to using violence, and once he even bought himself a revolver. He moved from one street to another, from one neighborhood to another, from Hinterbergstrasse to C. F. Meyer Strasse, from Wollishofen to Schwamendingen; finally, leaving civilization behind, he built himself a chalet on Katzenschwanzstrasse, near Witikon, and when someone started building on the next lot, Jämmerlin smelled a rat. It turned out that the builder was the vice-president of a bank, but he was only temporarily pacified. And rightly so, for the next spring, as he stood in his shirt-sleeves watering his new lawn, there beside the freshly painted garden fence stood Lienhard waving jovially his way, acting as if they were old acquaintances (which in fact they were), and introducing himself as the new neighbor. The bank vice-president had been a straw man. Jämmerlin staggered back toward his house, barely making it to the porch. Second nervous breakdown, plus heart attack. The doctors wavered—madhouse or hospital? Jämmerlin lay at home in bed, immobile, waxen, was presumed finished. But he was tough. He pulled himself together, though the inner man was a shambles. As far as Lienhard went, silent surrender. The two continued to live side by side. At the edge of the woods. With a view of Witikon. Jämmerlin did not dare budge again. All the more so since he was also powerless against another one of Lienhard’s activities. Lienhard had become a private detective, doing business on a grand scale. He had rented space in one of the sumptuous office buildings on Talacker, took a whole floor, you floated from one room to another. Behind modern office desks sat several weighty gentlemen with close-cropped hair, old athletes, though beer-bellied now, contentedly smoking cigars, and former police officers that he had bought up—the financial terms Lienhard could offer appreciably surpassed anything the city might pay. But it was not their being hired that annoyed Jämmerlin, business was business, no complaint could be raised there, unfortunately. What tormented him was quite different acquisitions. You could not miss the fact that these elegant rooms on Talacker were often rife with the very elements of society that Jämmerlin had once brought to judgment, with former convicts and toughs, who, switching over to honest work, were now employed as experts in their field. Lienhard’s “criminal division” also had great success in our city, despite the horrendous fees he was accustomed to charging and the juicy expense accounts he toted up, because Lienhard’s Private Inquiries, as it was officially called, delivered proof of the infidelity or innocence of suspected spouses, came up with fathers when they chose not to place themselves automatically at the mothers’ disposal, provided information, both private and industrial, had people watched, followed, dug up, made discreet arrangements—and was used by people in the prosecutor’s office to frustrate some of Jämmerlin’s plans, to deliver counterevidence, even to come up with new evidence altogether. Many a trial took a happy and unexpected turn in the accused’s favor thanks to Lienhard’s office; moreover, lawyers would meet secretly here on Talacker, Lienhard was a brilliant host, even political opponents exchanged business cards at his place.

  All this as preamble. Our meeting that morning took place directly in front of the Select, shortly after ten; Friedli had finally departed, and I too had got up with the intention of mailing the letter to Kohler, though admittedly I was no longer quite so firm in my resolve, and up came Lienhard, or more precisely, up drove Lienhard. In a Porsche. He stopped. He knew me from my student days, had studied law himself, though only for one semester, had at one time made me an offer to join up with him, but I had declined.

  “Lawyer,” he said, without looking at me from the wheel of his open Porsche, “something for me?”

  “Possibly,” I answered.

  “Climb in,” he ordered.

  I obeyed.

  “Fast car,” I observed.

  “Five thousand,” Lienhard remarked, meaning that he’d be willing to sell the Porsche for that amount. He owned a lot of cars; sometimes it seemed as if he drove a different one every day.

  Then I told him about my meeting with old Kohler. Lienhard drove along the lake, as was his custom—he transacted his more important deals in his car. “No witnesses,” he once explained. He drove at a steady speed, careful to a fault, and listened attentively. When I had finished, he came to a stop. In Uetikon. In front of a telephone booth.

  “Lucrative,” he declared. “Investigation?”

  I nodded. “If I accept.”

  He entered the telephone booth, and when he returned he suggested, “His daughter’s at home.”

  Then we drove to Weinbergstrasse, parked in front of Kohler’s villa.

  “Go on in,” Lienhard ordered.

  I pulled up short. “I’m supposed to accept the job?”

  “Of course.”

  “Too obscure,” I offered for his consideration.

  He lit a cigarette. “If you don’t take the job, someone else will,” he replied, and it was as if he had delivered an oration.

  I got out. Next to the large entrance, a shiny yellow public mailbox was attached to the wrought-iron fence. As a warning. My rejection letter was still in my pocket. I knew what my duty was. But why should I turn down Kohler’s offer, really, why play the man of ch
aracter? I needed the money, that was that! It wasn’t lying in the streets, some opportunity had to come along, and here it was. I had to cut a figure if I wanted to be a successful lawyer. Friedli, the architect, was right, and I wanted to be successful. And besides, Kohler’s job was essentially quite harmless, more a scientific undertaking, he could afford such extravagances.

  “You want five thousand for the Porsche?”

  “Four,” Lienhard answered.

  “Generous of you.”

  “Depends on whether you hire me.”

  “You don’t need the business.”

  “Would be fun.”

  “First I want to talk with Kohler’s daughter,” I said.

  “I’ll wait,” Lienhard answered.

  Deposition for the Prosecutor: It can no longer be avoided. I must now take up the subject of my first meeting with Hélène. A painful task, to be dared with caution—yet unavoidable. Even if private matters have to be discussed. Finally, for you will read it with interest and make your underlinings. You: quite right, it’s you I mean, Prosecutor Joachim Feuser. Just go ahead and wince yourself awake. Why not get personal here; as Jämmerlin’s successor you’ll be the second person to read these lines, right after the commandant—are in fact reading them right now—while at the moment I am having one hell of a good time—presumably in both senses of that phrase—greeting you, as it were, from the world beyond. To be frank: You are a pedantic member of your species, even if in contradistinction to our dear departed Jämmerlin you pretend to be so very progressive and run off to all those psychological conferences. You love supporting documents. As per regulation, you’ve just visited me at the morgue, in your pale raincoat, your hat courteously in your hand and your countenance officially somber. The suicide was done with dispatch, that you must admit, but I’ve also done a workmanlike job with Kohler, it does look so impressive, the two of us side by side. But now to return from your present, which lies in the future for me, to my own present, which is your past. How time overlaps. Got it? Suppose not. At best, annoyed. I’ve prepared things so carefully.

  First, Matters Historical, Architectural, Philosophical: The important events in one’s interior life demand a precise framework. In a historical sense as well. And so I’ve gathered precise information about Kohler’s villa. I even did some research in the main library. The building turned out to be the former residence of Nikodemus Molch. Nikodemus Molch, a thinker at the dawn of the twentieth century, bearded like Moses, a European of uncertain ancestry and uncertain nationality (according to one source, the illegitimate son of Alexander III and an Australian songstress; according to another, in reality one Jakob Hager from Burgdorf, a high school teacher previously convicted of sexual assaults on children), ran a free academy financed by rich widows and aesthetically inclined colonels, corresponded with the aged Tolstoy, with the middle-aged Rabindranath Tagore, and the young Klages, planned a movement of cosmic renewal, proclaimed a vegetarian world government, whose decree unfortunately no one obeyed (the First World War, Hitler—although a vegetarian—the Second World War, the whole subsequent mess in fact would have been avoided!), published magazines, dealing partly with the occult, partly with highbrow pornography, wrote mystery plays, converted to Buddhism, and later ended up, though involved in countless bankruptcy and paternity suits and with warrants out for his arrest, as the secretary to the Dalai Lama, reputedly, since several of our fellow countrymen, members of a film team, claimed to have recognized him as the piano player in a Shanghai bar in the thirties.

  The Site of the Villa: For a lawyer who came from a poor background, or better, from no background at all, a lawyer who had just decided to dare the breakneck leap (quoting Friedli) into a more pleasant life, the path from Lienhard’s Porsche to the front door of Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler’s residence proved quite stimulating; it led through a park. Nature herself was redolent of wealth. The flora was anything but shabby. The trees downright majestic, still in summer glory. Nor did the foehn wind make itself noticeable; even in that regard some sort of agreement must have been reached with the appropriate authorities—many things are possible for the rich. (For nonlocals: by “foehn,” we mean a climatic condition in our city that fosters headaches, suicides, adulteries, traffic accidents, and acts of violence.) You walked along a carefully laid-out and weeded gravel path. It was not in any sense a modern park. Laid out more in the old, soigné fashion. Ingeniously trimmed hedges and bushes. Moss-covered statues. Naked, bearded gods with youthful rear ends and calves. Quiet ponds. A pompous pair of peafowl. And yet this park lay in the midst of the city; a single square yard had to be worth astronomical sums. Streetcars thundered all round it, cars sped around it, traffic surged, raged, ting-a-linged and honked like an ocean against the venerable golden-tipped wrought-iron fence, and yet in Kohler’s park silence reigned. Presumably the sound waves had been forbidden entry. Only a few birds could be heard.

  The House Itself: In reality it had once been a horror, an architectural sink of iniquity designed by the occidental thinker himself. How the canton deputy had managed to make something human, something liveable of it remains one of his secrets. Apparently, cupolas, turrets, oriels, putti, and zodiacal beasts galore (Nikodemus Molch also dabbled in astrology) had been pulled down, the chaos peeled away to reveal a much cozier villa—still heavily gabled, but entwined now with wild grape, ivy, honeysuckle, and roses—large and roomy, and the interior offered me the same effect when, with a last glance at the Porsche, visible only as a red dot, I entered. The architects had done a clever piece of work, knocked down walls, laid wall-to-wall carpet, etc., everything looked comfortable and light. Antique furniture, all of it priceless, famous impressionists on the walls, and later I saw Old Dutch masters (a maid led the way). I was left to wait in the deputy’s study. The room was spacious, gilded by the sun. Through the open French doors you could walk directly into the park; the two windows flanking the door went almost to the costly parquet floor. A giant desk, deep leather armchairs, no pictures on the walls here, just books to the ceiling, every one of them a volume on mathematics or natural science, a considerable library, but in rather strange contrast to the billiard table. This was set back in a broad alcove. Three balls still lay on its green surface, and on the alcove wall was a collection of cues. A great many old ones, with inscriptions. One cue had belonged to Honoré de Balzac, another to Gottfried Keller, another to General Dufour, one to Bismarck, and there was even one said to have been Napoleon’s. I looked about me in some embarrassment. The old Dr.h.c.’s presence could be felt everywhere, I felt as if at any moment he might come in from the park, as if I could hear his laugh, feel his attentive gaze brush over me.

  The Vision: And then something remarkable happened, something ghostly, really. All at once, I understood the canton deputy. Unexpectedly. The insight more or less attacked me. I suddenly guessed the motive for his actions. I caught its scent from the expensive furniture, from the books, from the billiard table. I detected it in the combination of strictest logic and play that had left its mark on this room. I had forced my way into his lair, and now I saw it clearly. Kohler had not murdered because he was a player of games. He was not a risk-taker. The stakes did not lure him. What lured him was the game itself, the rolling of the balls, the calculation and the execution, the possibility each game presented. Good luck meant nothing to him (which was why he could regard himself as perfectly happy, he wasn’t even shamming). He was simply proud of the fact that it lay within his power to choose the rules of the game, loved to follow the unraveling of a necessity that he had himself created—here lay the humor for him. Naturally there were reasons behind all this too. The most sublime instinct for power, perhaps, the mania to play not just with balls but with human beings, the seduction of equating himself with God. Possible. But not important. As a lawyer I have to remain on the surface of things, not sink down into psychology or, worse, plummet into philosophy or theology. By committing a murder, Kohler had begun a new game, that was all. It wa
s now proceeding according to plan. I was nothing more than one of his billiard balls set in motion by his shot. His actions were perfectly logical. He had not given any motive in court because that had been impossible.

  Murderers generally act out of sturdy motives. For hunger or for love. Intellectual motives are rare and then only in some distorted form that has been shaped by politics. Religious motives hardly ever occur and lead directly to the insane asylum. The canton deputy, however, had acted out of a scientific motive. That seems absurd. But he was a thinker. His motives were not concrete but abstract. You had to grab hold of him right there. He loved billiards not as a game for itself but because it served him as a model of reality. As one of its possible simplifications (“model of reality”—I am using a term Mock, the sculptor, loves to use, who spends a lot of his time with physics and little with sculpturing, a muddled loony, whose studio I’ve been visiting often lately—where can you sit and drink after midnight in this country?—with whom conversation is only barely possible on account of his deafness, but who has turned on a good many lights for me). Kohler busied himself with natural science and mathematics for the same reason. They, too, offered him “models of reality.” Except that these models were not enough for him, he had to move on to murder in order to create a new “model.” He was experimenting by using a crime, murder was merely a method. That explained his commission to have Knulpe identify the results of the murder, and that explained as well his grotesque commission to have me find other “possible” murderers. Only now, here in his study, alone with the objects the old man occupied himself with, did I understand the conversation I had had with him in the prison. “The idea is to plumb the depths of reality, to measure exactly what effects one deed has” and “We must rethink reality in order to forge ahead into possibility.” The Dr.h.c. had shown his hand to me, but I had not understood the game he was playing. Only when you took this game seriously did his motive become evident: He had killed in order to observe, murdered in order to examine, the laws upon which human society is based. Had he admitted this motive in court, however, it would have been regarded as nothing more than an evasion. Such a motive was too abstract for our system of justice. But that is simply the way scientific thought is constructed. Its abstract quality is its shield. But suddenly it can break out of its sheltered existence and become dangerous. Unquestionably, something of the sort had happened with Kohler’s experiment: A scientific mind was bent upon murder. By which I mean neither to acquit the deputy nor to attack science. The more intellectual the motive for an act of violence, the more evil it is; the more consciously it is carried out, the less it can be excused. It becomes inhumane. Blasphemous. To that extent, I saw things correctly at that moment, in that regard my vision has been confirmed. It prevented me from admiring Kohler and from ever regarding him as innocent. It helped me to despise him. The certainty that he was the murderer would never leave me from that hour on. It is regrettable, however, that at the time I did not recognize the danger of the game Kohler was continuing to play with my help. I believed that playing along was nothing more than a harmless technical matter, with no consequences. I imagined the game would be played in an empty room, solely in the mind of a blasphemous man. His game had begun with a murder. Why did I not realize at that point that it would inevitably lead to a second murder, to a murder that would have to be committed not by the Dr.h.c. but by us, the representatives of the system of justice with which the old man was playing?