The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion Read online

  Barlach thoughtfully looked into his friend’s appalled face, the noble, wrinkled face of a doctor who had never dealt lightly with his patients and yet knew nothing about human nature. Then he said, “Do you still smoke your ‘Little Rose of Sumatra,’ Samuel? It would be nice if you offered me one. I imagine lighting one after my boring oatmeal gruel would be a very pleasant experience.”

  THE DISMISSAL

  But before lunch was served, the sick man, who had been reading and rereading an article by Emmenberger on the function of the pancreas, received his first visit since the operation. It was the “boss” who came into the sickroom around eleven and sat down by the old man’s bed, without taking off his coat, holding his hat in his hand, and looking vaguely embarrassed. Barlach knew exactly what this visit was about, and the boss knew exactly how things were going for the inspector.

  “Well, Inspector,” Lutz began, “how are you? There were times when it seemed we had to expect the worst.”

  “I’m coming along,” Barlach replied, folding his hands behind his neck.

  “What are you reading?” Lutz asked, looking for an opportunity to avoid the real purpose of his visit. “My, my, Barlach, medical journals!”

  The old man was not embarrassed. “It reads like a thriller,” he said. “When you’re sick, you want to widen your horizons, so you look around for new fields.”

  Lutz wanted to know how long Barlach was required to remain in bed.

  “Two months,” the inspector replied. “Two more months they expect me to lie here.”

  Now the boss could no longer evade the issue. “The age limit …” It took him an effort to get the words out. “The age limit, Inspector, you understand, I don’t see how we can get around it, we have regulations.”

  “I understand,” the sick man replied. His face betrayed no emotion.

  “There’s no getting around it,” said Lutz. “You need rest and recreation, Inspector, that’s what it boils down to.”

  “That and modern scientific criminology, where you find your criminal like a labeled pot of jam,” added the old man by way of correction and inquired who would be his successor.

  “Rothlisberger,” the boss replied. “He’s already substituting for you.”

  Barlach nodded. “Rothlisberger. He’s got five children, he’ll be pleased with the pay-raise,” he said. “Starting with the New Year?”

  “Starting with the New Year.”

  “Till Friday then,” Barlach said, “and from then on, I’ll be an ex-detective inspector. No more public service, not in Turkey and not in Bern. I’m glad that’s over, not because I’ll have more time to read Molière and Balzac—though that would be very worthwhile, to be sure—but mainly because, as I see it, there is something very wrong with the way the world is run. I know what goes on. People are always the same, whether they go to the Haga Sophia on Sundays or to the Bern Cathedral. They let the big scoundrels go and lock up the little ones. And there’s a whole heap of crimes no one pays any attention to, because they are more esthetic than those blatant murders that get written up in the newspapers, but it all amounts to the same if you care to take a close look and exercise a little imagination. Imagination, that’s it! There’s many a decent businessman whose lack of imagination permits him to close some crooked deal between cocktails and lunch without ever realizing that he has committed a crime, and neither does anyone else, because imagination is in very short supply. It’s carelessness that makes the world a bad place, and from the looks of it, we’re going to hell out of sheer carelessness. Next to this threat, Stalin and all the other Josephs look harmless. Public service—for an old bloodhound like me, that’s not the right hunting ground any longer. Too much pettiness, too much snooping. But the real prey, the big beasts, the ones most worth hunting because they most deserve it—they’re officially off limits, like animals in a zoo.”

  Doctor Lucius Lutz’s face dropped as he heard this oration; he found it embarrassing, and actually he thought it improper not to protest against such a vicious philosophy. But on second thought, the old man was sick and about to retire with a pension, thank God. “I have to go now,” he said, swallowing his anger. “I’m scheduled to meet with the welfare department at eleven thirty.”

  “The welfare department. They, too, have more dealings with the police than with the department of finance, there’s something wrong with that,” the inspector remarked. Lutz was already expecting the worst, but to his relief, Barlach was aiming at something else. “You could do me a favor, now that I’m sick and no longer useful.”

  “Gladly,” promised Lutz.

  “You see, sir, I need some information. I’m curious by nature, so, for my own private amusement, and to pass the time while I lie here, I’ve been playing around with criminological puzzles. An old cat can’t give up chasing mice. In this issue of Life I found a picture of a concentration camp doctor from Stutthof, the name is Nehle. Try to find out, if you don’t mind, whether he’s still in jail or what became of him. There’s an international service for these cases, and it’s been free of charge since the SS was declared a criminal organization.”

  Lutz wrote everything down.

  “I’ll have my office check into it,” he promised, surprised by the old man’s whimsical request. Then he got up to leave.

  “Goodbye, and get well,” he said, shaking the inspector’s hand. “You’ll have the information by tonight. Then you can puzzle away to your heart’s content. Blatter is here, too, he wants to say hello. I’ll wait outside in the car.”

  Blatter came in, and Lutz disappeared.

  “Hello, Blatter,” Barlach said to the corpulent policeman, who had often been his driver. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “So am I,” said Blatter. “We miss you, Inspector. We miss you everywhere.”

  “Well, Blatter, now Rothlisberger will take my place, and I imagine he’ll change the tune,” replied the old man.

  “Too bad,” said the policeman. “But don’t put me on record. I’m sure Rothlisberger will be all right. What’s important is that you get better!”

  “Blatter, do you know that old bookstore down at the Aare river, the one that belongs to the Jew with the white beard, Feitelbach?”

  Blatter nodded. “You mean the one with the stamps in the window, always the same ones?”

  “That’s the one. Go there this afternoon and tell Feitelbach to send me Gulliver’s Travels. It’s the last service I’ll ask of you.”

  “The book with the dwarves and the giants?” the policeman wondered.

  Barlach laughed. “You see, Blatter, I just love fairy tales!”

  Something in this laugh struck the policeman as uncanny; but he didn’t dare to ask.

  THE HUT

  That same Wednesday evening, a subordinate of Lutz’s called. Hungertobel was sitting at his friend’s bedside. He had ordered a cup of coffee, for he had an operation coming up; he wanted to take this opportunity to spend some time with his friend. Now the telephone rang, interrupting their conversation.

  Barlach picked up the receiver, said hello, and listened intently. After a while he said, “That’s good, Favre. Now just send me the material,” and hung up. “Nehle is dead,” he said then.

  “Thank God!” Hungertobel exclaimed. “We should celebrate that.” And he lit up a “Little Rose of Sumatra.” “Let’s hope the nurse doesn’t barge in.”

  “She didn’t much like it at noon,” Barlach noted. “But I said you had allowed it. She said that was typical.”

  “When did Nehle die?” asked the doctor.

  “In forty-five, on the tenth of August. He killed himself in a Hamburg hotel, apparently with poison,” the inspector replied.

  “You see,” Hungertobel nodded, “that takes care of whatever was left of your suspicion.”

  Barlach blinked at the rings and spirals of smoke his friend puffed into the air with evident pleasure. “Nothing is harder to drown than a good suspicion,” he finally replied. “It just keeps
coming up again.”

  “You are incorrigible,” laughed Hungertobel, who now regarded the whole affair as a harmless joke.

  “A detective’s prime virtue,” retorted the old man. Then he asked, “Samuel, were you and Emmenberger friends?”

  “No, we weren’t,” said Hungertobel, “and as far as I know, he wasn’t close to anyone who went to school with him. I’ve been thinking a lot about that incident with the picture in Life, Hans, and I want to tell you how I came to think that this SS-monster could have been Emmenberger; I’m sure you’ve given that some thought yourself. There’s not much to see in the picture, so there must be a reason for my mistake besides a certain resemblance, which I’m sure really exists. It’s a story I had put out of my mind, not just because it happened a long time ago, but mainly because it was so terrible; and one tends to forget, or wants to forget, things one finds deeply offensive. I was once present, Hans, when Emmenberger performed an operation without anesthesia, and this was for me like a scene that could happen in hell, if there is such a place.”

  “There is,” Barlach answered quietly. “So there was a time when Emmenberger did something like that?”

  “You see,” the doctor said, “there was no other way at the time, and the poor bastard who had to go through that operation is still alive. If you see him, he’ll swear by all the saints that Emmenberger’s the devil incarnate, and that is unfair, because without Emmenberger, he would be dead. But frankly, I can understand him. It was horrible.”

  “How did it happen?” Barlach asked with intense interest.

  Hungertobel drained his cup of coffee. Then he had to light his “Little Rose” again. “It wasn’t exactly a feat of magic, to tell you the truth. Our profession is just like any other, there’s no magic about it. All he needed was a pocketknife and some courage, and of course knowledge of human anatomy. But who among us young students had the necessary presence of mind?

  “There were about five of us, all medical students, climbing up from Kien Valley into the Blümlisalp massif; I don’t recall where we were heading, I’ve never been a great mountain climber, and I’m an even worse geographer. It must have been around 1908, in July. It was a hot summer, I remember that clearly. We spent the night in an Alpine hut. It’s strange, how this hut stayed with me through all the years. Sometimes it comes up in my dreams and I wake up bathed in sweat; but that’s never connected to thoughts about what took place there. I’m sure it was like any other hut in the Alps that’s left vacant through the winter, and the sense of horror attached to it comes from my imagination. The reason I think so is that I always see it overgrown with damp moss, and that’s not like a real Alpine hut, it seems to me. Did you ever hear of a ‘knacker’s hut’? A knacker, that’s someone who turns worn-out farm animals into fertilizer. Anyway, I’ve come across this word, ‘knacker’s hut,’ and I always imagined its looking like this particular hut. There were fir trees standing around it, there was a well near the door. And the wood of this hut wasn’t black, it was sort of white and rotten, with funguses growing in all the cracks, but that may have been added by my imagination. So many years lie between now and then, there’s no way to tell where the dream ends and the reality begins. But I still remember clearly an inexplicable fear that befell me as we approached this hut. We were crossing a stony pasture that wasn’t in use that summer. There was a depression in the meadow, and that’s where the hut stood. I’m convinced we all felt this fear, with the possible exception of Emmenberger. We all stopped talking. The sun set before we had reached the hut, and that sudden evening atmosphere had something ghastly about it, because for what seemed an unbearably long time, a strange, deep-red light hung over that huge, empty world of ice and stone, tinting our faces and hands, a deathly sort of illumination. I imagine that’s the kind of light you’d see on a planet that’s farther away from the sun than our own. So we rushed into the hut as if some awful thing was chasing us. It wasn’t hard, getting in; the door was unlocked. We’d already been told in the Kien Valley that you could sleep over in this hut. The inside was pathetic, nothing but a few cots. But in the pale light we noticed some straw under the roof. A black, crooked ladder led up there, all covered with last year’s dirt and dung. Emmenberger fetched water from the well outside, with a strange haste, as if he knew what was about to happen. Which is of course impossible. Then we made a fire on the primitive stove. There was a pot there. And then, in that peculiar mood of dread and fatigue that we all seemed unable to shake off, one of us had a near-fatal accident. It was a fat boy from Lucerne, the son of an innkeeper, who was studying medicine like the rest of us—nobody quite knew why, and the year after that, he dropped out of school to take over the family business. Anyway, this rather awkward fellow started climbing up to the loft to bring down some straw, when the ladder collapsed and he hit his throat against a protruding beam, so hard and at such an unfortunate angle that he just lay there moaning. At first we thought he had broken something, but then he started to gasp for breath. We carried him outside and put him on a bench, and there he lay in that terrible light from a sun that had already set, a weird sandy red, refracted from the piled-up clouds overhead. The injured boy was a truly frightening sight to behold. His neck was very swollen, and there were bloody abrasions on it. He was holding his head back, his larynx was jumping fitfully. We noted with horror that his face was getting darker and darker, almost black in that infernal glow on the horizon, and his wide-open eyes were shining like two white, wet pebbles in his face. We struggled desperately with cold compresses. In vain. His throat kept swelling internally, he seemed about to choke. At first he had been driven by a feverish restlessness, but now he was becoming apathetic. His breath hissed, he could no longer speak. This much was clear: he was in mortal danger. And we didn’t know what to do. We lacked any sort of experience, and probably knowledge as well. We knew, of course, that an emergency operation might help, but no one dared to think of that. Only Emmenberger understood and didn’t hesitate to act. He carefully examined the boy from Lucerne, disinfected his pocketknife in the boiling water on the stove, and then he performed the cut we call a tracheotomy, which sometimes has to be done in an emergency: you set the knife at a transverse angle above the larynx, between the Adam’s apple and the cricoid cartilage, and make an incision to create an air passage. It wasn’t the operation that was so terrible, Hans, there was no other way to do it, the pocketknife was the right choice. No, the horror was something else, something that took place between those two, in their faces. The injured boy was almost unconscious for lack of air, but still, his eyes were open, in fact wide open, staring, and so he had to be aware of everything that was happening, even though it may have been as in a dream. And when Emmenberger made that incision, my God, Hans, his eyes were wide open then, too, and his face was contorted; it was suddenly as if something devilish was breaking out of those eyes, a sort of tremendous pleasure in hurting someone, or whatever you want to call it. And I was afraid for a moment, maybe just for a second, because that’s all the time it took. But I think I was the only one who felt that; because the others didn’t dare to watch. I also think that most of what I experienced was in my imagination, that the dark hut and the uncanny light of that evening contributed their part to the illusion. The peculiar thing about that incident, though, is that the fellow from Lucerne never spoke to Emmenberger about that operation that saved his life, that he scarcely even thanked him. A lot of people thought ill of him for that. Emmenberger had everyone’s respect after that, he was quite a celebrity. He had a strange career. We thought he would make a big name for himself, but he wasn’t interested. He studied a lot, but without any clear pattern. Physics, mathematics, nothing seemed to satisfy him; he was seen at lectures in philosophy and theology, too. He passed his examinations brilliantly, but never opened a practice of his own. He worked as a substitute—for me, too, once, and I have to admit, my patients were enthusiastic about him, except for a few who didn’t like him. So he led a restless and lone
ly life, until he finally emigrated. He published some strange treatises. One about the justification for astrology, for instance, which is one of the most sophistic things I have ever read. As far as I know, he was virtually impossible to get to know and became a cynical, unreliable character, all the more unpleasant because no one was able to fend off his sarcasm. The only thing that surprised us was how he suddenly changed in Chile, that he did such sober, scientific work there; it must have been the climate, or the surroundings. As soon as he was back in Switzerland, he was the same old Emmenberger again, as if nothing had changed.”

  “I hope you saved the essay on astrology,” Barlach said when Hungertobel had finished.

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” the doctor replied.

  “So that’s the story,” the inspector said thoughtfully.

  “You see,” Hungertobel said, “maybe I’ve spent too much of my life dreaming after all.”

  “Dreams don’t lie,” Barlach replied.

  “Dreams are the biggest liars of all,” Hungertobel said. “But you must excuse me, I have to operate.” And he rose from his chair.

  Barlach gave him his hand. “I hope it’s not a tracheotomy, or whatever you call it.”

  Hungertobel laughed. “A hernia, Hans. I like that better, even though, frankly, it’s more difficult. But now you must rest. There’s nothing you need more than twelve hours of sleep.”

  GULLIVER

  But already around midnight the old man woke up when a soft noise came from the window and cold night air streamed into the room.

  The inspector didn’t turn on the light at once. Instead he wondered what was happening. Finally he guessed that the blinds were being slowly pushed up. The darkness surrounding him was illuminated, the curtains swelled in the half-light, and then he heard the blinds being cautiously lowered. Again the impenetrable darkness of midnight surrounded him, but he sensed that a figure was advancing from the window into the room.