The Minotaur's Head

by Marek Krajewski, Danusia Stok, Danusia Stok

Genres: Gothic; Historical Mysteries; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

The fourth Eberhard Mock investigation - Mock tracks a killer with a murderous taste for human flesh.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

“I know of a Greek labyrinth that is just one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well.”

From “Death and the Compass”, Jorge Luis Borges, 1942

Dawn was breaking over Stary Rynek. A pink glow poured between the miserable huts in which peasant women had begun to arrange their pots of borshch and pierogi. It settled on the milk churns drawn from Ester Firsch’s dairy on a two-wheeled cart by a Jewish trader, and spread across the visors of caps perched on the heads of rogues who stood in gateways, unable to decide whether to go to bed or wait for the opening of the nearby drinking-den, where a tankard of beer would satisfy their burning, alcoholic thirst. The flush of first light settled on the dresses of two girls, who, having had no clients that night, returned in silence from their posts on Mostki and disappeared through gateways on Mikołajska and Smerekowa streets, where each rented a bed screened off in a shabby room. The rosy light shone straight into the eyes of men briskly making their way to the Baczewski vodka factory on Wysoki Zamek, but they ignored it; they fixed their gaze on the cobbled street and quickened their steps, causing the bags of bread and onions to rustle in their hands. None of the street urchins or workers in Lwów admired pink-fingered Eos as she sculpted the triangular roofs of the Sisters of Mercy Hospital; nobody wondered at the cyclical phenomena of nature; nobody analysed the subtle changes of light or nuances of colour.

Deputy Commissioner Franciszek Pirożek, like his fellow countrymen, was a long way from Homeric rapture. As he drove along Kazimierzowska in a brand-new police Chevrolet, he carefully observed the inhabitants of this working district, looking for signs of any particular unrest, and kept an eye out for groups of people engrossed in lively discussion, or huddled together threateningly, armed with tools. People who might want to lynch a criminal off their own backs. He had not yet sighted anyone suspicious, either on Kopernik or Legionów. Nor did he see them now. Gradually he relaxed and his sighs of relief grew louder. There were no harbingers of riots whatsoever. “What luck,” he thought as he passed the Wielki Theatre and parked outside the pharmacy at Żółkiewska 4, “that the horror was discovered by the pharmacist, a sensible rationalist who didn’t go ranting about in the yard, yelling and waking everyone in the vicinity.”

Pirożek climbed out of the car and cast his eyes around. His throat constricted. The sight of a police constable outside the pharmacy had not gone unnoticed by the locals, who stood around and pondered loudly – even quite impudently – over the presence so early in the morning of a guardian of the law at this particular spot. The latter, on the other hand, glared at them from beneath the visor of his hat and every now and then slapped his hand against the truncheon at his leg. Police officers did not command respect in the area. There had been times when they had been obliged to walk in the middle of the road to avoid being dragged into a gateway and beaten up. The constable from Police Station III was happy to see Pirożek, therefore; he saluted and let him through into the pharmacy. The deputy commissioner knew where to go and made his way behind a counter on which stood an antiquated telephone. He crossed the dark hallway, tripped over a chest containing rusty apothecary scales and entered the kitchen at the back of the apartment occupied by the pharmacist and his family.

While the pharmacist, Mr Adolf Aschkenazy, had behaved very calmly, just as Pirożek had anticipated, his wife had not a single drop of cold blood running through her veins. She sat at the table, pressed her slender fingers into the curlers which hugged her skull like a ski hat and wailed loudly, shaking her head. With his arm around her, her husband held to her lips a glass of what must have been a valerian infusion, judging by the smell. A kettle bopped up and down on the stove. Steam covered the windows, making it impossible for the gawper, whom the constable outside had not managed to chase away, to pry. The air was stifling. Pirożek removed his hat and wiped his brow. Mrs Aschkenazy stared at him with horror, as if she were seeing the devil rather than this rosy-cheeked, corpulent official who generally inspired trust. Pirożek muttered his greetings and mentally recreated the telephone conversation he had held with Mr Aschkenazy half an hour earlier. The apothecary had recounted everything very calmly and in detail. Pirożek, therefore, did not have to ask him the same questions now, in the presence of his terrified wife and with the nosy-parker still glued to the window.

“Which way out into the yard?” asked Pirożek.

“Through the hall and down to the end,” Mrs Aschkenazy replied unexpectedly.

Pirożek, not stopping to think about the woman’s sudden animation, returned to the dark hall. A loud snoring came from the next room. “Must be children,” he thought. “Their sleep is always so heavy, even death going rampant doesn’t stir them.”

The muddy yard was built up on three sides and cut off from the street by an iron fence, access to which was guarded by police constables. Around it stood dilapidated two-storey buildings with internal galleries. Luckily, most of the inhabitants were asleep. Only on the first floor was there a grey-haired woman sitting on a stool, not taking her eyes off police inspector Józef Dułapa as he stood near the privy smoking a cigarette. I went out to answer nature’s call, Pirożek recreated Aschkenazy’s telephone account in his mind, and found something terrible in the – privy.

“Good morning, Commissioner, sir,” said Dułapa, crushing the cigarette beneath his shoe.

“What are you doing, Dułapa!” yelled Pirożek, making the old woman in the gallery jump. “This is a crime scene! Spit on the fag and put it in your pocket! Don’t erase the evidence, damn it!”

“Yes, sir!” answered Dułapa, and bent to look for the cigarette butt at his feet.

“Where is it?” Pirożek felt distaste on saying this. He should not have referred to a deceased human being as “it”. “Well, where’s the body?” he corrected himself. “You haven’t moved him, by any chance? Point to where and give me a torch!”

“In the toilet. And be careful, Commissioner. There are guts all over the place,” whispered the worried inspector, and as he handed over the torch he added even more quietly, “No offence, Commissioner, sir, but it’s awful. Just the thing for Commissioner Popielski.”

Pirożek was not offended. He ran his eyes carefully over the damp black earth so as not to disturb any footprints. Then he stepped over to the toilet and opened the door. The stench took his breath away. The sight he beheld in the pink light of dawn blurred his clarity of vision. Out of the corner of his eye, the commissioner saw the old woman lean out heavily over the balustrade in an attempt to peer into the darkness of the privy. He slammed the door.

“Dułapa,” he said, drawing rotten air into his lungs, “get that old woman off the gallery.”

The police officer adjusted the fastening constricting his collar and made towards the stairs with a stern expression.

“Come along now, old dear,” he shouted to the woman, “inside with you, but now!”

“Can’t even relieve meself!” screamed the woman, but obediently she disappeared into her lodgings, leaving the stool prudently in the gallery.

Pirożek opened the door again and illuminated the pale mass lying in the privy. The child’s body was contorted as if someone had tried to force its head under its knee. The hair on its skull was sparse and curly, the skin on its cheekbone distended with swelling. Guts lay strewn around on the threshold, their slippery surface covered with irregular rivulets of blood. The entire body was covered in lesions. The deputy commissioner felt as though his gullet had become a plug which blocked all breath. He leaned against the open door. Never before had he seen anything like it. A sick child, scabby, broken limbs. It did not look older than three. He pulled himself upright, spat and looked at the body once more. These were not scabs, they were puncture wounds.

Pirożek slammed the privy door. Dułapa watched him with interest and unease. From a distance, from the direction of Gródecka Street, they heard the jingle of the first tram. A beautiful May day was dawning over Lwów.

“You’re right, Dułapa,” Deputy Commissioner Pirożek announced very slowly, “this case is just right for Popielski.”

Leokadia Tchorznicka stepped out onto the balcony of her apartment at 3 Kraszewski and gazed a while at a small corner of the Jesuit Gardens. She did so every day because she adored the invigorating certainty that nothing changed in the neighbourhood and everything was in its rightful place: the chestnut trees, the oaks, Agenor Gołuchowski’s statue and the vase depicting allegories of life. That day, however, something was different from the weeks that had gone before; the chestnut trees had blossomed, and students in their final year at the nearby Jan Długosz Gymnasium had appeared. Looking down from the first floor, she watched several young men in school uniform as they walked up the street, cigarette in hand, carrying books bound with a belt beneath their arms and avidly arguing about the relationship – as Leokadia understood it – between tangents and sines. She recalled her own final school exams forty years earlier and the happy years which followed, studying French philology at Jan Kazimierz University where, as one of only four young ladies in the department, she had been constantly surrounded by admirers. She now rested her elbows on the duvet hanging over the balustrade, turned her face to the sun and welcomed the memories of secondary school and her student years. A lorry carrying scrap iron thundered past beneath the balcony. This was something unexpected and Leokadia hated anything unforeseen. When the unforeseen occurred, she reproached herself for having no imagination.

And this is precisely what happened now. She started, quickly returned inside and closed the balcony door. The last thing she wanted was for her cousin Edward Popielski, with whom she had lived for twenty years, to wake at that moment. Throughout all those years the only arguments between them had concerned her cousin being woken suddenly – whether by a draught banging a poorly shut window against the frame, a door-to-door salesman stridently touting his wares in the yard, or the maid singing her prayers too loudly in the kitchen. All such events could violently disrupt the sleep of a man who went to bed at five in the morning and did not generally rise before one in the afternoon. Leokadia anxiously approached the door to her cousin’s bedroom, the windows of which gave out onto the yard as did those of his daughter Rita’s room and that of the kitchen. She listened carefully for a moment to see whether the dreadful clatter of old iron a few moments earlier had had the result she had feared. Indeed it had. Her cousin was no longer asleep and was standing at the front door holding the telephone receiver. “I shouldn’t have replaced the receiver,” she reproached herself, “but what was I supposed to do when headquarters kept ringing Edward from six in the morning? He’d have woken up in the end and been unbearable.”

Popielski was now standing in the hall staring at the receiver in silence, as if he saw a real person there. All of a sudden he raised his voice. She quickly retreated to the kitchen and closed the door behind her so as not to eavesdrop. Her discretion, however, was pointless. Popielski shouted down the hallway and she heard every word.

“Don’t you understand Polish, sir?” She knew now that he was speaking to his boss, the head of the investigative department. “Did I not make myself clear? I refuse to take on this investigation and I refuse to give the reasons for my decision! That’s all I have to say to you, sir!”

Leokadia heard the rattle of the receiver being slammed down, the creaking of the living-room floorboards beneath her cousin’s feet, and then the characteristic sound of a telephone dial turning. “He’s making a phone call,” she thought. “Maybe he wants to apologise to that Zubik.” His voice was far quieter now. She sighed with relief. She did not like him arguing with his superiors. He never wanted to tell her the reason for their quarrel; it lodged within him like a splinter, making him swell and redden with pent up anger. It might end in another attack. “If only he could overcome the block for once,” she thought, “and confide in me the secret of his relationship with that boorish chief … that would help!” Why didn’t he want to talk about these conflicts when he didn’t hold any secrets from her regarding even the most confidential of investigations? He knew she would remain as silent as the grave.

From the larder she brought the gingerbread biscuits she had purchased at Zalewski’s that morning, then put some freshly ground coffee beans into a jug and poured boiling water over them. A floorboard creaked and the curtains rustled. “He’s stopped talking, gone into the living-room, drawn the curtains against the sunlight and is now, no doubt, sitting beneath the clock with a cigarette and newspaper,” she thought as she placed the dishes on a tray.

Nearly all her suppositions proved correct – except about the newspaper which still lay on the little table in the hall. The thick green curtains were drawn in the parlour and the chandelier set in the moulding of the ceiling lit. Popielski sat in an armchair beneath the grandfather clock and flicked ash from his cigarette into a shell-shaped ashtray. He wore a pair of thick felt trousers, leather house slippers gleaming with polish, and a cherry-coloured morning jacket with black velvet lapels. Traces of shaving soap were visible on his bald head, as was one small cut. A closely trimmed, blackened moustache and beard encircled his lips.

“Good morning, Edward,” Leokadia smiled and placed the tray on the table. “I must have been on the balcony when you got up and shaved. Zubik phoned, you jumped at the sound of the ringing and cut your head. Is that right?”

“You ought to work with me in the police.” The words were not, this time, accompanied by his customary smile. “Is Hanna not here today?”

Leokadia sat down at the table, poured the coffee and waited for him to join her at their usual breakfast ritual: “primum makagigi, deinde serdelki”, which meant that first he ate biscuits with his coffee, then sausages, horseradish, rolls and butter, and washed these down with tea. But he did not sit at the table and instead continued to smoke his cigarette, the butt of which he had wedged into an amber cigarette holder.

“Don’t smoke like that on an empty stomach. Put it out, sit down and have some breakfast. Besides, it’s Tuesday today.”

“I do not understand” – the cigarette holder knocked against the shell ashtray – “the connection between the two.”

By the slowness with which he spoke, Leokadia saw he was in a very bad mood.

“There isn’t one,” she said. “Today is Tuesday and it’s Hanna’s day off. I simply answered your question.”

Popielski set down the ashtray on the little table beneath the clock. He walked around the dining table and came to a sudden halt behind her. Holding her by the temples, he kissed Leokadia on the head, partially dishevelling her carefully styled hair.

“Sorry about my rotten mood,” he said and sat down at the table. “The day started badly. Zubik phoned and …”

“You refused to lead the investigation into the case of the boy people say was ritually murdered by Jews?” she asked, not expecting a reply.

“How do you know?” he retorted and swallowed a bite of gingerbread.

“I heard. And even if I hadn’t I’d have guessed … You always sit beneath the clock, smoke and read the paper before breakfast. Today you didn’t. Slowo and its supplement are lying there untouched. Either you were so overwrought you didn’t want to read or you knew what was on the front page. I deduced the latter.”

“True,” he answered glumly and did not, as he usually did, praise her correct reasoning.

“Why did you refuse Zubik? You know you can be dismissed for it. But above all, do you want the criminal to go unpunished?”

Such an insinuation would, in normal circumstances, have made Popielski explode with anger. “How dare you suspect me of such a thing?” he would have yelled. Now, however, he said nothing and his jaw moved rhythmically as he ate.

“Zubik asked me the same thing,” he said unhurriedly once he had swallowed, “and that’s when I raised my voice at him.”

“But I’m not Zubik!” Leokadia’s slender form stirred suddenly. “And you can tell me everything …”

“You’re not Zubik,” he interrupted her, “and that’s why I’m not going to raise my voice at you.”

She knew that she was not going to learn anything from him as usual. She drank her coffee and got up to go to the kitchen to heat some sausages for him. Popielski leaped up too, grabbed her by the wrist and sat her down again.

“I’d tell you everything, Lodzia, but it’s a terribly long story.” He inserted a new cigarette into his holder.

With joy she thought this meant the end of his reluctance to talk, and that she was about to learn everything.

“I’d tell you everything but I don’t know where to start … It’s to do with the case of the Minotaur.”

“So start ab ovo.” Leokadia was tense with curiosity. “Best to start with that Silesian city and thick-set Silesian you call your friend, whom I never really liked …”

“Yes …” he said pensively. “That’s where it all started.”

Fireworks welcoming in the New Year exploded above the Municipal Theatre as a shaking droschka drew up outside the impressive tenement marked Zwingerplatz 1, in which Abwehr Captain Eberhard Mock lived along with his wife Karen, their German sheepdog Argos and a couple of ancient servants, Adalbert and Martha Goczoll. The droschka shook for two reasons. Firstly, it was being jostled by a gusty wind which vigorously lashed it with snow, and secondly, after a party at the Silesian Museum of Fine Art that was awash with champagne, Mock was filled with an indefatigable male force which he was attempting to relieve in transit, not even waiting to find himself alone in the bedroom with his wife. Caring little about the frost, or about Karen’s weak protests and the cabby’s garrulousness, he was trying to penetrate the layers wrapped around his wife’s body. The results of his efforts were feeble, however, and merely ended with the cabby, who was used to such frolicking in his cab, becoming discreetly silent.

“We’ve arrived, Ebi, calm down.” Karen delicately pushed her panting husband away.

“Good,” Mock muttered, evidently pleased, and he held out a tenmark note to the cabby. “And this is for picking us up punctually.” He added another two marks.

Climbing out of the droschka, they were caught in the cold flurries of a wind which had picked up outside the Guildhall and whisked up dry snow from the pavement. The force of the wind was so strong it tore Mock’s top hat from his head and the white silk scarf from his neck. Both pieces of attire swirled in the gusts then parted ways, the top hat hopping along the tram tracks towards the Hotel Monopol while the scarf stuck to the window of Fahrig’s Café. Half-blinded, Mock decided to retrieve the scarf first, as it had been a Christmas present from Karen. He rushed towards the café window gesticulating to his wife to shelter from the blizzard. A second later he was pinning the scarf to the window pane and looking around for his hat. Karen stood in the gateway.

“Go to the bedroom and wait for me there!” he shouted, tying the scarf in a knot.

Karen did not move. Shielding his eyes, Mock made his way towards the brightly lit hotel from which steam and the majestic rhythm of a Vienna waltz burst forth. He strained his eyes for the hat but could not see it anywhere. He imagined it rolling along the pavement becoming soiled with horse manure, and the image annoyed him greatly. He stood still, looking around; his eyes came to rest on Karen standing in the gateway. “Why in God’s name doesn’t she go indoors?” he thought. “Is the caretaker drunk, has he fallen asleep? Well, I’ll go and wake him up alright!” Gazing at her helpless, huddled figure, he felt disinclined towards bedroom frolics. He opened his mouth and swallowed several flakes of snow. His tongue, parched from an excess of alcohol and cigars, felt like a rough, unplaned block. There was only one thing he wanted: a large, cool jug of lemonade. He turned on his heels and made towards his tenement, leaving his top hat prey to cabby horses.

A tall man with a bowler hat pulled down over his eyes cut briskly across his path. Mock reacted instinctively, dodging an imaginary blow, and squatted to observe his assailant. The latter did not strike, however, but merely extended a hand holding Mock’s his top hat.

“Thank you very much,” said Mock delightedly, taking his headgear. “I’m sorry, I thought you were going to assault me, whereas here you are performing a good deed …”

“It would be a shame to lose such an expensive top hat,” said the stranger.

“Thank you once again.” Mock glanced at Karen who was smiling as she watched the scene. “A healthy New Year!” he said to the man.

“Criminal Secretary Seuffert, assistant for special affairs to Criminal Director Kraus, liaison officer between the Gestapo and the Abwehr.” The man did not reciprocate with good wishes but with an absurd list of his responsibilities, and then held out a business card. “There is an urgent political case, Herr Hauptmann. You have to come with me. On the orders of Colonel von Hardenburg.” He enunciated the name of Mock’s superior with such accuracy and emphasis, as if he were pronouncing the long and technical name of some disease.

Mock shook the snow off his hat, put the hat on his head and looked at Karen. She was no longer smiling.

There was great commotion at the squalid Warsaw Court Hotel, at Antonienstrasse 16. Two uniformed policemen bore a body on a stretcher covered with a grey sheet stamped INSTITUTE OF FORENSIC ANATOMY; next to the receptionist’s lodge Helmut Ehlers, police photographer and fingerprint technician, folded away his tripod; on the stairs raged forensic physician Doctor Siegfried Lasarius as, using one violent gesture after another, he explained to Criminal Assistant Hanslik in a raised voice that he was not in a position to determine a corpse’s ethnic identity unless the corpse was male and Jewish. The only person who remained still, other than to bring a long thin cigarillo to his lips at intervals, was Colonel Rainer von Hardenburg, Chief of the Abwehr Breslau Regional Branch VII, who stood on the landing. Mock noticed that the heads of all the men were graced with a top hat; only on Seuffert’s elongated skull was there a bowler. The receptionist, swaying behind his desk and trying to sober up by constantly moistening his face with water from a basin, was bare-headed. Except for Mock and Seuffert, who had only just arrived, each of those present was holding a tall glass.

“A good thing you’re here, Captain Mock!” von Hardenburg loudly greeted his subordinate, forgoing any New Year’s wishes. “Have a glass of soda water and take a look at the murdered woman’s body. Show him the girl!” he bellowed at the two policemen who, having conquered the stairs, set down the corpse at Mock’s feet.

“This man from Hanover knows me inside out,” Mock reflected. “He knew I’d have a hangover the morning after a New Year’s ball.” Mock walked up to the reception desk on which stood four siphons, held one firmly in his hand and generously squirted some soda water into a glass. He glanced at the receptionist’s bloodshot eyes, then at the siphon bottles, and realized he had overestimated von Hardenburg’s concern. Who at this time on New Year’s Day doesn’t have a hangover? Everyone’s been to some New Year’s ball, and everyone’s been drinking! Everyone except him over there – he ran his eyes over Seuffert with disdain. The scum from the Gestapo only drink water and don’t eat meat, just like their god, that miserable Austrian Feldfebel.†

“I warn you, Captain!” von Hardenburg’s voice electrified the company. “It’s a shocking sight!”

One of the uniformed men threw aside a corner of the sheet and covered his eyes. The other left the hotel together with Seuffert and held up his face to the sky, from whence fell thick flakes of snow. Ehlers turned his back to the stretcher and started packing his equipment into a huge leather case as fast as he could; von Hardenburg lit another cigarillo, while Hanslik’s patent-leather shoes flashed briefly in the light as he ran to the top of the stairs, heels clattering, and hurried away somewhere. Only Doctor Lasarius leaned over the body and with his ever-present cigar butt pointed out various important details. Mock felt as though his tongue was swelling in his mouth as he listened to Lasarius’ deductions.

“It’s not at all difficult, Mock,” – Lasarius indicated the red flesh between the nose and eye with his cigar butt – “to tear away half of somebody’s cheek. A man with a healthy set of teeth can do so with no problem whatsoever. His teeth don’t have to be filed sharp like those of the leopard men in Cameroon. Oh yes, he can do it, no problem whatsoever …”

Mock drank the entire glass of soda water in one go. It did not help. His mouth was full of splinters.

“What you see here” – Lasarius’ cigar wandered towards the vicinity of the girl’s crotch – “are fragments of the girl’s hymen stuck together with blood.”

Mock’s eyes followed the doctor’s unconventional pointer and suddenly felt all the various dishes he had eaten at the New Year’s reception fill his mouth. First ca. . .