The Judge and His Hangman Read online

  “There’s no need to any more,” Barlach said, “now that we’ve found a clue.”

  Lutz extinguished his cigarette. “There never was any need.”

  Barlach said nothing, and Lutz, who would have welcomed an argument, peered through the window again. The rain had begun to subside. They had already reached the avenue leading to Schlosshalden Cemetery; the gray, rain-soaked walls were pushing into view behind steaming tree trunks. Blatter drove into the courtyard and stopped. They got out of the car, opened their umbrellas, and walked through the rows of graves. They did not have to search for long. The gravestones and crosses receded; it seemed they had entered a construction site. The earth was riddled with freshly dug graves, and each grave was covered with planks. The moisture from the wet grass penetrated their mud-caked shoes. In the middle of this cleared space, surrounded by all those still tenantless graves, at the bottom of which the rain had collected in dirty puddles, among improvised wooden crosses and mounds of earth covered with heaps of rapidly rotting flowers and wreaths, a group of people was standing around a grave. The coffin had not been lowered yet. The priest was reading from the Bible. Beside him, shivering in a ludicrous work suit that resembled a frock coat, holding up an umbrella for both the priest and himself, the gravedigger was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Barlach and Lutz stopped next to the grave. The older man heard someone crying. It was Frau Schönler’s rotund, shapeless form in the ceaseless rain, and next to her stood Tschanz, without an umbrella, in a coat with the collar turned up and the belt hanging loose, a stiff black hat on his head. Next to him a girl, pale, hatless, blond hair dripping down in long strands. It occurred to Barlach that this must be Anna. Tschanz bowed, Lutz nodded, the inspector stood motionless and impassive. He looked across at the others standing around the grave, policemen, all of them, all of them out of uniform, all wearing the same raincoats, the same stiff black hats, holding their umbrellas like sabers, a group of sentries blown in from some unearthly place to watch over the dead, unreal in their earnestness. And behind them, hastily summoned from all over town and assembled in serried ranks, the municipal band in their black and red uniforms, desperately trying to protect their yellow instruments under their coats. And so they all stood around the coffin, a wooden box without a wreath, without flowers, but nevertheless the only warm and sheltering thing in this relentlessly regular pouring and dripping without foreseeable end. The priest had stopped talking a long time ago. No one noticed. There was only the rain, nothing else existed. The priest coughed. Once. Then several times. Thereupon the bassoons, French horns, cornets, trombones, and tubas blared forth in a proud and stately wail, yellow flashes of light in the floods of rain; but then they, too, subsided, faltered, gave up. Everyone crept back under umbrellas and coats. The rain was falling more and more strongly, shoes sank into the mud, rivers flowed into the empty grave. Lutz bowed and stepped forward. He looked at the wet coffin and bowed again.

  “Men,” he said somewhere in the rain, almost inaudible through the veils of water, “Men, our comrade Schmied is no more.”

  Suddenly he was interrupted by a wild, raucous song:

  “The devil goes round,

  the devil goes round,

  he beats the people into the ground!”

  Two men in black frock coats came staggering across the cemetery. Without umbrellas or overcoats, they were at the mercy of the rain. Their clothes clung to their limbs. Both wore top hats from which water streamed into their faces. They were carrying an enormous laurel wreath with a ribbon that trailed in the mud. They were huge, brutal men, butchers in evening wear, drunk to the gills, constantly on the verge of keeling over, but since they never stumbled at the same time, each of them managed to hold himself up by the laurel wreath that rose and fell between them like a ship in distress. Now they launched into a new song:

  “The miller’s wife, ’er ’usband is dead,

  And she is alive, alive,

  She married the miller’s apprentice instead,

  And she is alive, alive.”

  They ran up to the group of mourners and threw themselves into their midst, right between Frau Schönler and Tschanz. No one hindered them, everyone stood as if petrified, and already they were staggering off through the wet grass, leaning upon and clinging to each other, falling over grave mounds, knocking down crosses. Their singsong died away in the rain, and everything was covered up again.

  “Everything passes,

  everything goes!”

  was the last that was heard of them. Only the wreath remained. They had dropped it onto the coffin. Written in running black letters on the muddied ribbon were the words: “To our dear Dr. Prantl.”

  But just as the people around the grave had recovered from their shock and were about to voice their indignation, and as the municipal band burst into another desperate wail in an effort to reclaim the solemnity of the occasion, the wind and the rain started whipping about with such rampant fury that everyone fled, leaving only the gravediggers, black scarecrows in the howling torrent, to finally lower the coffin into the grave.

  11

  When Barlach was back in the car with his boss, and Blatter was weaving his way through fleeing policemen and musicians, Lutz finally gave vent to his anger:

  “Unbelievable, this Gastmann!”

  “I don’t understand,” the old man said.

  “Schmied frequented Gastmann’s house under the name of Prantl.”

  “In that case we’ve been given a warning,” Barlach replied, but asked nothing further. They were driving toward Muristalden, where Lutz lived. This is the right moment, Lutz thought. Now I’ll tell the old man about Gastmann, and why he must be left alone. But again he remained silent. He got out at the Burgernziel, leaving Barlach in the car.

  “Shall I drive you into the city, Inspector?” asked the policeman behind the wheel.

  “No, drive me home, Blatter.”

  Blatter drove faster now. The storm had relaxed, and suddenly, by the Muristalden, Barlach found himself steeped in blinding light: the sun broke through the clouds, disappeared, came out again, and was caught up in a rollicking chase of mists and clouds, huge bulging mounds that came racing in from the West to pile up in front of the mountains, casting wild shadows across the city that lay spread out by the river between forests and hills like a body devoid of will and resistance. Barlach’s tired hand stroked his wet coat, his narrowed eyes glittered as he avidly drank in the spectacle: the world was beautiful. Blatter stopped. Barlach thanked him and got out of the car. It was no longer raining, only the wind was left, the wet, cold wind. The old man stood waiting for Blatter to turn the heavy car around, and waved once more as the policeman drove off. Then he stepped up to the edge of the Aare river. The water was high and dirty brown. A rusty old baby carriage came swimming along, branches, a small fir tree, and then, dancing, a little paper boat. Barlach watched the river for a long time, he loved it. Then he went through the garden and into the house.

  Barlach changed his shoes before entering the hall. At the door to his study, he stopped. Behind the desk sat a man who was leafing through Schmied’s dossier. His right hand was toying with Barlach’s Turkish knife.

  “So it’s you,” said the old man.

  “Yes, it’s me,” said the other.

  Barlach closed the door and sat down in his armchair facing the desk. Silently he watched as the other calmly turned the pages in Schmied’s folder, an almost peasant-like figure, calm and withdrawn, deep-set eyes in a bony but round face, short-cropped hair.

  “So you call yourself Gastmann now,” the old man finally said.

  The other pulled out a pipe, stuffed it without taking his eyes off Barlach, lit it, and, tapping the folder with his index finger, replied:

  “You’ve been well aware of that for a while. It was you who set that boy at my heels. These notes are yours.”

  Then he closed the folder again. Barlach glanced at the desk. There was his gun, with the butt turne
d toward him, all he had to do was reach out. Then he said:

  “I’ll never stop hunting you. Some day I’ll succeed in proving your crimes.”

  “You’ll have to hurry up, Barlach,” the other replied. “You don’t have much time. The doctors give you another year if you let them operate on you now.”

  “You’re right,” said the old man. “One more year. And I can’t let them operate now. I have to live up to this challenge. It’s my last chance.”

  “Your last,” confirmed the other, and then they both sat silently facing each other for a long time.

  “It was over forty years ago that we first met,” the other began again. “I’m sure you remember. It was in some tumbledown Jewish tavern in the Bosporus. There was a shapeless yellow Swiss cheese of a moon dangling between the clouds, we could see it through the rotting rafters. You, Barlach, were a young Swiss police specialist hired by the Turks to institute some sort of reform, and I—well, I was what I still am, a globetrotter, an adventurer, avid to live this one life that I have and to learn all there is to learn about this mysterious and singular planet. We loved each other at first sight, sitting there among dirty Greeks and Jews in their caftans. But when those infernal liquors we poured down our gullets, those fermented juices of God knows what sort of dates and those flaming seas from the cornfields of Odessa, when all that started boiling up inside us, making our eyes burn like glowing embers through the Turkish night, our talk started heating up. Oh, I love to think of that hour that set us both on our courses!”

  He laughed.

  The old man sat and watched him in silence.

  “You have one more year to live,” the other continued, “and for forty years you’ve given me a tough chase. That is the upshot. What did we talk about, Barlach, in the rot of that bar in a suburb called Tophane, swathed in Turkish cigarette smoke? Your thesis was that human imperfection—the fact that we can never predict with certainty how others will act, and that furthermore we have no way of calculating the ways chance interferes in our plans—guarantees that most crimes will perforce be detected. To commit a crime, you said, is an act of stupidity, because you can’t operate with people as if they were chessmen. Against this I contended, more for the sake of argument than out of conviction, that it’s precisely this incalculable, chaotic element in human relations that makes it possible to commit crimes that cannot be detected, and that for this reason the majority of crimes are not only not punished, but are simply not known, because, in effect, they are perfectly hidden.

  “And as we kept arguing, seduced by those infernal fires the Jew kept pouring into our glasses, and even more by our own exuberant youth, we ended up making a bet, and it happened just as the moon was sinking behind Asia Minor, a wager which we defiantly pinned to the sky, very much like the kind of horrible joke that offends against everything sacred and yet holds out such a devilish appeal, such a wicked temptation of the spirit by the spirit, that we cannot suppress it.”

  “You’re right,” the old man calmly said, “that’s when we made that bet.”

  “You didn’t think I would go through with it,” laughed the other, “the way we woke up in that desolate bar the next morning, you on a rotting bench and I under a table that was still soaked with liquor.”

  “I didn’t think,” Barlach replied, “that anyone would be capable of going through with it.” They were silent.

  “Lead us not into temptation,” the other began again. “You were always such a good boy, your probity was never in danger of being tempted, but I was tempted by your probity. I kept my bold vow to commit a crime in your presence without your being able to prove that I did it.”

  “Three days later,” the old man said softly, immersed in his memories, “we were crossing the Mahmoud Bridge with a German merchant, and you pushed him into the water in front of my eyes.”

  “Yes, the poor fellow couldn’t swim, and your own natatory skills were so modest that after your failed attempt to rescue him they had to drag you half drowned from the dirty waters of the Golden Horn,” the other replied, unperturbed. “The murder took place on a brilliant Turkish summer day, with a pleasant breeze blowing in from the sea, on a crowded bridge in full view of amorous couples from the European colony, Muslims, and local beggars, and yet you could not prove my guilt. You had me arrested, in vain. Interrogations, hour after hour, useless. The court believed my version, that the merchant had committed suicide.”

  “You were able to prove that he was on the brink of bankruptcy and had tried, unsuccessfully, to save himself by committing a fraud,” the old man admitted, bitterly, paler than usual.

  “I chose my victim carefully, my friend,” laughed the other.

  “And so you became a criminal,” said the inspector.

  The other toyed absently with the Turkish knife.

  “I can’t very well deny that I am something like a criminal,” he finally said in a casual manner. “I became better and better at it, and you got better and better at your criminology: but I was always one step ahead of you, and you have never been able to catch up. I kept looming up in your career like some gray apparition, I couldn’t resist the temptation to commit crimes right under your nose, each one bolder, wilder, and more outrageous than the last, and time after time you were unable to prove them. You could defeat fools, but I defeated you.”

  His gaze was amused and alert as he continued: “So that’s how we lived our lives. Yours was spent in humble subordination, in police stations and musty offices, climbing the ladder of your modest achievements one rung at a time, waging war against petty forgers and thieves, poor bastards who never learned to stand up straight, a couple of pathetic murderers at best, while I ran the whole gamut of life, from the deepest obscurity, lost in the thicket of desolate cities, to the spotlight of an illustrious position, covered with medals, doing good for the sheer hell of it, and when it so pleased me, committing evil and loving it. What an adventure! Your deepest desire was to ruin my life, and mine, to spite you by living my life as I did. Truly, that one night chained us together forever!”

  The man behind Barlach’s desk clapped his hands together; it was one single, cruel slap. “Now we’ve arrived at the end of our careers,” he cried. “You’ve come back half defeated to your dear old Bern, a sleepy, innocuous town where no one can distinguish the living from the dead, and I’ve come back to Lamboing, this too on the spur of a whim: it’s nice to round things off, because, you see, it’s in this godforsaken village that some woman long since dead gave birth to me, without much thought and very little sense, which is why I stole away one rainy night when I was thirteen years old. So here we are again. Give it up, my friend, it’s pointless. Death does not wait.”

  And now, with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand, he threw the knife. It grazed Barlach’s cheek and plunged deep into the armchair. The old man did not move. The other laughed.

  “So you think I killed Schmied?”

  “It’s my job to investigate this case,” replied the inspector.

  The other stood up and took the dossier.

  “I’m taking this with me.”

  “One day I’ll succeed in proving your crimes,” Barlach said for the second time. “And this is my last chance.”

  “Inside this briefcase is the scanty evidence Schmied collected for you in Lamboing. Without it you’re lost. You don’t have any copies or photostats, I know you.”

  “No, I don’t,” the old man admitted.

  “How about using the gun to stop me?” the other asked with a smile.

  “You took out the cartridges,” Barlach replied, stone faced.

  “That’s right,” said the other, patting him on the shoulder. Then he walked past the old man, the door opened and closed, a second door opened and closed outside. Barlach was still sitting in his armchair, leaning his cheek against the cold blade of the knife. But suddenly he seized the gun and opened it. It was loaded. He jumped up, ran into the vestibule, tore open the front door, gun in
hand:

  The street was empty.

  Then came the pain, the overwhelming, monstrous, stabbing pain, a sun rising inside him, it threw him onto the couch, convulsed him, scalded and shook him with feverish heat. The old man crawled on his hands and knees like an animal, threw himself on the ground, dragged himself across the rug, and finally lay still somewhere in his room between the chairs, covered with cold sweat. “What is man?” he moaned softly. “What is man?”

  12

  But he recovered. After the attack, he felt an unusual sensation: complete freedom from pain. He heated some wine and drank it in small, careful sips. That was all he ate or drank. He didn’t refrain, however, from taking his customary walk though the city and across the Bundesterrasse. He was still half unconscious, but the air was so pure, as if washed by the storm, that he felt himself reviving with each step.

  When Lutz saw Barlach come into his office, he noticed nothing; perhaps he was too preoccupied with his own bad conscience. He decided to tell Barlach about his talk with von Schwendi right away, instead of waiting till the end of the day. For this purpose, he assumed a cold impersonal stance, puffing out his chest like the general in Traffelet’s picture above him, and briefed the old man in a clipped and curt telegram style. But to his boundless surprise, the inspector raised no objection. He was in complete agreement: pending instructions from the federal government, the investigation should be limited to an examination of Schmied’s life. Lutz was so surprised that he gave up his pose and became chatty and affable.

  “Naturally I’ve found out some things about Gastmann,” he said, “and I know enough about him to be certain that he couldn’t possibly be the killer.”

  “Of course,” the old man said.

  Lutz, who had received some new data from Biel during his lunch hour, put on an air of assurance.