The Judge and His Hangman Read online

Gastmann scrutinized the inspector’s face.

  “I never thought of this possibility,” he said. “I’ll have to be careful.”

  The inspector said nothing.

  “You may be more dangerous than I realized, old man,” Gastmann said pensively from his corner.

  The car stopped. They had reached the train station.

  “This is the last time I’ll be talking to you, Barlach,” Gastmann said. “The next time I’ll kill you. Assuming you survive your operation.”

  “You’re wrong,” Barlach said, looking old as he stood shivering on the square in the early morning light. “You won’t kill me. I am the only one who knows you, so I’m the only one who can judge you. I have judged you, Gastmann, I have sentenced you to death. You will not survive this day. The executioner I have chosen will come to you today. He will kill you, because, by God, this is something that simply has to be done.”

  Gastmann flinched and stared at the old man in astonishment. But Barlach walked into the station with his hands buried in his coat pockets. Without turning around, he walked into the dark building, which was gradually filling up with people.

  “You fool!” Gastmann suddenly shouted after the inspector, so loudly that several passersby turned around. “Fool!” But Barlach was no longer visible.

  18

  The gradually, steadily rising day was clear and powerful. The sun, a perfect ball, cast hard and long shad- ows, which became shorter the higher it rolled. The city lay there, a white shell, sucking up the light, swallowing it into her narrow streets in order to spew it out after nightfall as thousands of lights, a monster perpetually busy with spawning and poisoning and burying an ever-growing quantity of new human beings. The radiance of the morning grew by the minute, a shining shield above the diminishing echoes of the church bells. Tschanz waited for an hour, looking pale in the light that was reflected from the walls. Restlessly he walked to and fro beneath the arcades in front of the cathedral, looking up at the gargoyles from time to time, demons that stared at the sunlit pavement with savage, contorted expressions. Finally the portals opened, releasing a vast stream of people who had come to hear Luthi, the famous preacher, in person, but Tschanz immediately saw her white raincoat. Anna walked up to him. She said she was glad to see him and gave him her hand. They walked up the Kesslergasse, surrounded by a swarm of churchgoers, old and young: here a professor, there a baker’s wife in her Sunday finery, two students with a girl, several dozen officials, teachers, all of them clean, all of them washed, all of them hungry, all of them looking forward to a sumptuous Sunday meal. They reached the Kasinoplatz, crossed it, and went down into the Marzili. They stopped on the bridge.

  “Fräulein Anna,” Tschanz said, “today I’m going to catch Ulrich’s murderer.”

  “Do you know who he is?” she asked, surprised.

  He looked at her. She stood before him, pale and slim. “I believe I do,” he said. “Once I’ve caught him, will you be …” He hesitated. “Will you be for me what you were for your deceased fiancé?”

  Anna did not answer immediately. She pulled her coat more tightly around her as if she were cold. A slight breeze disturbed her blond hair. Then she said:

  “We’ve agreed on that.”

  They shook hands, and Anna walked on to the other shore. He looked after her. Her white coat gleamed among the birch trees, disappeared among other pedestrians, reemerged, and finally vanished. Then he went to the train station, where he had left his car. He drove to Ligerz. It was almost noon when he got there, for he drove slowly, stopping occasionally to walk in the fields and smoke before returning to the car and driving on. In Ligerz he parked in front of the station. Then he climbed the steps leading up to the church. He was calm now. The lake was deep blue, the vines had lost their leaves, and the earth between them was brown and loose. But Tschanz saw none of these things. He climbed at a steady and regular pace, without turning back and without pausing. The path led steeply uphill, framed by white walls, past vineyard after vineyard. Tschanz kept climbing, calmly, slowly, steadily, his right hand in the pocket of his coat. From time to time lizards crossed his path. Buzzards rose into the sky, the land trembled under the blazing sun as if it were summer. He climbed on and on, relentlessly, unremittingly. Later he left the vineyards and slipped into the forest. It was cooler there. The Jura cliffs shone stark and white between the tree trunks. He climbed higher and higher, always at the same pace, until he reached the fields. This was farming and pasture land; the path rose more gently. He walked past a cemetery, a rectangle bordered by a gray wall, with a wide-open gate. Black-clad women walked on the paths, a bent old man stood watching the stranger as he marched past with his right hand in his coat pocket.

  He reached Prèles, walked past the Bear Inn and directed his steps toward Lamboing. The air over the high plateau was motionless and clear. All things, even those in the far distance, stood out with extreme clarity. Only the ridge of the Chasseral was covered with snow, everything else was a brilliant light brown interspersed here and there with white walls and red roofs and black bands of farmland. Steadily, Tschanz walked on; the sun was shining on his back, casting his shadow ahead of him. The road dipped, he was approaching the sawmill, now the sun was at his side. He marched without thinking, without seeing, impelled by one purpose, possessed by one passion. A dog barked somewhere, came up to him, sniffed at his feet, and ran away. Tschanz walked on, always on the right-hand side of the street, always at the same pace, toward the house that was now rising up from the brown landscape, framed by bare poplars. Tschanz left the road and walked through the fields. His shoes sank into the warm earth of an unploughed field; he walked on. Then he reached the gate. It was open; Tschanz went through it. In the courtyard stood an American car. Tschanz payed it no attention. He went to the front door. It, too, was open. Tschanz stepped into an entrance hall, opened a second door, and walked into a hall that comprised the whole ground floor. Tschanz stopped. Glaring light fell through the windows facing him. In front of him, not five paces away, stood Gastmann. Next to him his gigantic servants, immobile and menacing, two butchers. All three were wearing coats. Towering heaps of valises stood by their sides. They were about to leave.

  Tschanz stood still.

  “So it’s you,” Gastmann said, looking with slight surprise at the calm, pale face of the policeman and at the open door behind him.

  Then he started to laugh. “So that’s what the old man meant! Not bad, not bad at all!”

  Gastmann’s eyes were wide open, and Tschanz saw them light up with a flash of ghostly mirth.

  Calmly, without saying a word, almost slowly, one of the butchers pulled a pistol out of his pocket and fired. Tschanz felt a blow against his left shoulder, pulled his right hand out of his pocket and threw himself to the side. Then he fired three shots point blank into Gastmann’s laughter, which died away slowly as if in an infinite void.

  19

  Informed by a telephone call from Tschanz, Charnel sped over from Lamboing, Clenin rushed in from Twann, and the crime squad from Biel. Tschanz was found bleeding near the three corpses. A second shot had hit him in the left forearm. The gun battle must have been brief, but each of the three dead men had found time to fire. A gun was found on each of them. One of the servants was still holding his weapon in a tight grip. Tschanz was unable to follow what happened after Charnel’s arrival. He fainted twice while the doctor from Neuveville bandaged his wounds; however, his injuries turned out to be harmless. Some villagers came later, peasants, workers, women. The courtyard was so crowded that the police had to bar the entrance. One young woman managed to push her way into the hall and threw herself screaming onto Gastmann’s body. It was the waitress, Charnel’s fiancée. He stood by, red with anger. Then Tschanz was carried to the car through the throng of retreating peasants.

  “There they are, all three of them,” Lutz said the next morning, with a gesture indicating the corpses, but his voice did not sound triumphant; it sounded sad and tired.
br />   Von Schwendi nodded, dismayed. The colonel had driven to Biel with Lutz on his client’s instructions. They had come into the room where the bodies lay. A slanting shaft of light fell through a small barred window. The two men stood there in their coats and felt cold. Lutz had red eyes. He had spent the whole night reading Gastmann’s journals, which were written in shorthand and difficult to decipher.

  Lutz buried his hands deeper in his pockets. “That’s how we are, von Schwendi,” he began again, almost softly. “We’re so scared of each other that we set up armed camps called states. We surround ourselves with guards of all sorts, with policemen, with soldiers, with public opinion; what good does it do?” Lutz twisted his face into a grimace, his eyes bulged, and he laughed. It came out as a hollow, goatish bleat in the cold, barren room. “A single dunce at the head of a world power, Councillor, and we’ll be carried off by the floods. One Gastmann, and already our cordons are cut through, our outposts outflanked.”

  Von Schwendi realized it would be best to bring the examining magistrate back down to earth, but he didn’t quite know how. “Exactly,” he finally said. “Our circles are shamelessly exploited by all sorts of people. It’s embarrassing, highly embarrassing.”

  “No one had any idea,” Lutz said reassuringly.

  “And Schmied?” asked the national councillor, glad to have found the key word.

  “We found a folder in Gastmann’s possession that had belonged to Schmied. It contained information about Gastmann’s life and conjectures about his crimes. Schmied was trying to apprehend Gastmann. He did this on his own private recognizance. An error for which he had to pay with his life; for we have proof that Schmied’s murder was ordered by Gastmann: Schmied had to have been killed with the same weapon one of the servants was holding when Tschanz shot him. The examination of the weapon confirmed this immediately. The motive for the murder is also clear: Gastmann was afraid of being exposed by Schmied. Schmied should have confided in us. But he was young and ambitious.”

  Barlach came into the morgue. When Lutz saw the old man, he became melancholy and buried his hands in his pockets. “Well, Inspector,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “it’s nice that we’re meeting here. You have come back in time from your vacation, and I, too, have rushed over here with my state councillor and arrived in good time, as you see. There are the dead, served up for our delectation. We have had our quarrels, Barlach, many times. I was in favor of a super-sophisticated police force with all the latest paraphernalia, including the atom bomb if I could have had my way, and you, Inspector, wanted something more human, a sort of rural gendarmerie stocked with good-natured grandfathers. Let’s bury the hatchet. We were both wrong. Tschanz refuted us by the very unscientific but straightforward use of his revolver. I don’t want to know the details. Very well, it was self-defense, we have to believe him, and why shouldn’t we. The catch was worth it, the men he shot deserved a thousand deaths, as they say, and if scientific method had prevailed, we would now be poking around in foreign affairs. I will have to promote Tschanz; while you and I, I’m afraid, are left looking like fools. The Schmied case is closed.”

  Lutz lowered his head, bewildered by the old man’s enigmatic silence, and felt his proud posture collapsing into that of a proper, conscientious official. He cleared his throat and, noticing von Schwendi’s embarrassment, blushed. Slowly, then, accompanied by the colonel, he walked out of the room and into the darkness of the hallway, leaving Barlach alone. The bodies lay on stretchers and were covered with black cloths. The plaster was peeling off the bare, gray walls. Barlach went to the middle stretcher and uncovered the body. It was Gastmann. Barlach bent over him slightly, holding the black cloth in his left hand. Silently he gazed into the waxen face of the dead man. There was still an amused expression on his lips. But his eyes were set even more deeply than in life, and there was no longer anything terrible lurking in those depths. Thus they met for the last time, the hunter and his prey, who now lay dead at his feet. Barlach sensed that both their lives were at an end now, and once again he looked back on the labyrinthine paths of their mysteriously intertwined lives. Now there remained nothing between them but the immensity of death, a judge whose verdict is silence. Barlach still stood slightly bent, and the pale light of the cell flickered and played equally on Barlach’s face and hands and Gastmann’s body, meant for both, created for both, reconciling them both. The silence of death sank down upon him, crept into him, but it gave him no peace as it had to the other man. The dead are always right. Slowly Barlach covered Gastmann’s face with the cloth. This was the last time he would see him; from now on his enemy belonged to the grave. A single thought had obsessed him for years: to destroy the man who now lay at his feet in the cool gray room, covered with falling plaster as if with fine flakes of snow; and now there was nothing left for the old man but to wearily cover his enemy’s face, and humbly beg for forgetfulness, the only mercy that can soothe a heart consumed by a raging fire.

  20

  That same evening, at eight o’clock sharp, Tschanz arrived at the old man’s house in the Altenberg district. Barlach had urgently asked him to come at that hour. To his surprise, a young maid in a white apron opened the door, and as he stepped into the hallway, he heard the sounds of boiling water and roasting fat and the clatter of dishes. The maid removed the coat from his shoulders. His left arm was in a sling, but he had been able to come in his own car. The maid opened the door to the dining room, and Tschanz stopped in his tracks: the table was festively set for two people. Candles were burning in a candelabrum, and Barlach was sitting in an armchair at one end of the table, softly lit by the reddish light of the flames, the very image of imperturbable calm.

  “Sit down, Tschanz,” the old man called out to his guest, pointing at a second armchair that had been pulled up to the table. Tschanz sat down, stunned.

  “I didn’t know I was coming to dinner,” he finally said.

  “We have to celebrate your victory,” the old man quietly replied, pushing the candelabrum a little to the side so that they could look each other fully in the face. Then he clapped his hands. The door opened, and a stately, rotund woman brought in a tray overflowing with sardines, lobster, a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, and peas garnished with mountains of mayonnaise and eggs, and dishes with cold chicken, slices of cold roast, and salmon. Barlach helped himself to everything. Tschanz watched the man with the ailing stomach assemble a portion fit for a giant, and was so baffled he merely asked for a little potato salad.

  “What shall we drink?” Barlach asked. “Ligerzer?”

  “Ligerzer’s fine with me,” Tschanz replied as if dreaming. The maid came and filled their glasses. Barlach started to eat, helped himself to some bread, devoured the salmon, the sardines, the flesh of the red lobsters, the chicken, the salads, the mayonnaise, and the cold roast, clapped his hands, and asked for a second serving. Tschanz, who was still picking at his potato salad, looked petrified. Barlach called for a third glass of white wine.

  “Let’s have the pâtés and the red Neuenberger,” he called out. The plates were changed. Barlach requested three pâtés, filled with goose liver, pork, and truffles.

  “But you’re sick, Inspector,” Tschanz finally said, hesitantly.

  “Not today, Tschanz, not today. This is a day for celebration. I’ve finally nailed Schmied’s killer!”

  He drained his second glass of red wine and started on his third pâté, eating without pause, stuffing himself with the world’s good food, crushing each mouthful between his jaws like a demon attempting to still an unappeasable hunger. His body cast a shadow on the wall, twice his size, and the powerful movements of his arms and lowered head resembled the triumphal dance of an African chieftain. Appalled, Tschanz watched the terminally sick man’s ghastly performance. He sat without moving, and was no longer eating or so much as touching his food. Nor did he once raise his glass to his lips. Barlach ordered veal cutlets, rice, French fries, green salad, and champagne. Ts
chanz was trembling.

  “You’re pretending,” he said, with a choked voice. “You aren’t sick at all!”

  Barlach didn’t answer immediately. At first he laughed, then he occupied himself with the salad, savoring each leaf, one by one. Tschanz did not dare ask the gruesome old man his question again.

  “Yes, Tschanz,” Barlach finally said, and his eyes flashed wildly, “I’ve been pretending. I was never sick.” And he shoved a piece of veal into his mouth and continued eating, incessantly, insatiably.

  And now Tschanz realized that he had walked into a cunningly prepared trap, and that the door was just now falling shut behind him. Cold sweat burst from his pores. Horror gripped him like a pair of mighty arms. His realization came too late, there was no way out.

  “You know, Inspector,” he said softly.

  “Yes, Tschanz, I know,” Barlach said calmly and firmly, without raising his voice, as though commenting on a matter of indifference. “You are Schmied’s murderer.” Then he reached for his glass of champagne and emptied it in one draft.

  “I always had the feeling that you knew,” Tschanz said almost inaudibly.

  The old man’s face remained expressionless. Nothing seemed to interest him more than this meal; relentlessly, he heaped a second mound of rice on his plate, poured gravy over it, topped it with a veal cutlet. Once again Tschanz tried to find an escape, a defense against this fiendish eater.

  “The bullet came from the gun they found on the servant,” he stated defiantly. But his voice sounded disheartened.

  Barlach’s narrowed eyes glittered with contempt. “Nonsense, Tschanz. You know perfectly well that that was your gun, and that you put it in the dead man’s hand. Your only cover was the fact that Gastmann was found to be a criminal.”

  “You’ll never be able to prove this,” Tschanz desperately exclaimed.