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The author is myself under a pen-name...
THINGS FOUND, THINGS CHANGE
by
Martin Tyrsegg
DEDICATION: To those few who, even at this late date and hour, “noch bleiben treu.” To strive against the times assiduously enough puts one in some sense outside time.
TRIGGER WARNING: The following novel contains a number of truly gruesome crime scenes. These, however, are all committed on an individual level. The crime daily in process of commission against Europe’s culture and peoples is collective and far more macabre.
CHAPTER ONE
ALL THAT IS THE CASE
9 DECEMBER
I.
I had just gotten back from my annual visit to Whidbey Island in America. Seeing my old friend Thorsten Hadur there on the 8 December anniversary has become a sort of rite for us both. Here now in Vienna my mood was as sunny as the early winter morning. I stood near the end of Marc Aurel Strasse, admiring the pure strong Romanesque lines of St. Ruprechtskirche. Absolute simplicity of surface and angle effect here a powerful impact down the centuries.
Not for the first time did bittersweet regret well up in me that my early dream of turning architect had come to nothing. My initial education had run down the wrong lines, events had intervened, and---what more to say?---things changed. Things still change.
As for example the little phone in my pocket. It went from dutiful silence at my reverie to an impertinent buzzing. I took it out and started to answer. But before I could get a word out, the caller cut in. “Doktor Wolfe---Hiedel?” My friend Inspektor Jandt’s voice. And it sounded strained.
“This is he. What is it Theo?”
“Where are you? Right now?”
“Looking at Ruprechtskirche. Why?”
“Good, good. Can you hurry over to St. Elisabeth’s? It’s not far---“
“Slow down, Theo.” Anything that rattled the phlegmatic Inspektor Jandt could not be commonplace. But then I knew it could not be commonplace from the simple fact that he called me. “First, which St. Elisabeth’s? The city features several.”
“Elisabeth von Ungarn. Behind St. Stephansdom---“
“I am aware of the location. I have dwelt here a good many years. Now, may I ask why you are calling? Why you need me?”
He ignores---or sidesteps---the question. Puts me instead one of his own. “Hiedel, have you had breakfast?”
“You know I never eat in the morning. It dulls the mind. Now again may I ask---“
“You haven’t. Good. Now, just get over here please. You will see why I asked.” I hear agitated voices in the background, a hasty and muttered “Wiederhoeren” from Jandt, then nothing. I sigh and pocket my phone. That sunny mood of mine? As stated already, things change.
While I wend my way through the labyrinth of narrow Gassen that is Vienna’s Innerestadt, this business of change stays with me. Yes, again, things change. The Inspektor for instance. Up until a few years ago Theo Jandt had been a deceptively grave and forbidding police inspector with a truly marvelous sense of mad-cap humor that reared its head at the most unpredictable of moments.
That had all changed with his divorce three years ago. His wife of a decade had up and run off to California with the assistant military attaché to the American embassy in Budapest. The latter was not only black but a negress in the bad bargain. As in female. Not to mention drug-using and physically abusive. (For while the erstwhile Therese Jandt admitted to these shadows over paradise, she never mentioned that her change of lifestyle had been a mistake.) Left to raise a six year old son by himself, Theo has understandably altered. It is difficult for any unhappily single male over thirty to keep up anything like good humor. Add to that the burden of parenthood and a job with highly irregular hours, and you get change for the worse. The sole good to come of it---and I am here being selfish---is that Theo and I have grown into something resembling friends. A rare experience in my life. And a thing almost unheard of between a police officer and a civilian consultant like myself.
If I did not know where St. Elisabeth’s was, I would be able to find it by the atmosphere alone. The air fairly crackles with something like static electricity as I turn into Milchgasse that will bring me around the church’s rear. Come out into Singerstrasse fronting Stephansplatz, I see a truly impressive collection of official vehicles: ambulances, TV vans, police cruisers, the anonymous black sedans that spell out Serious Official Presence.
Before essaying to cross the cordon of yellow tape and blue uniforms, I look up and regard the structure itself. A spark of my earlier mood returns. But just a spark. Oh, the Gothic style of the edifice is pure enough. Still something has always struck me as slightly out of place about this building precisely HERE. In Vienna, I mean. The red brick walls, framed in white, belong further north. North and east. In places like Danzig or the Baltic dominions where the church’s founding Order flourished. Still as a sign of the essential unity of culture from here all the way there---there and beyond---yes, I suppose St. Elisabeth’s is very much in place here after all.
I am still gawking aloft when I become aware that I am attracting attention. Rightly so. Persons who choose to go sightseeing on the scene of what appears a major crime become suspects by definition. Or what is that ominous English euphemism? They become “persons of interest.”
This person redirects his interest. I walk over to where a beefy and gray-haired senior constable keeps an eye on one very much junior admitting---or refusing admittance--- to various personnel. I have an awkward moment fishing around in my pockets for my consultant’s pass, till suddenly the older officer cracks a smile. “That is all right, Herr Doktor. Inspektor Jandt sent word to let you in.”
“Thank you, thank you very much…Preuner.” Relief floods me. Not only at being thus easily admitted, but also because memory spares me an embarrassing gaffe like not recalling a man’s name. As I start to slip through, this Preuner’s eyes twinkle and he asks (of course), “Did you find it yet?”
Before I can cough up one of my stock replies, the junior constable---clueless but trying to impress with his diligence nonetheless---adds with a frown, “And if you do find anything, don’t touch it! Point it out to one of the detectives.”
Preuner withers the neophyte with a glare. And as I make my way to the entrance proper, I hear him start to lecture the youngster. “The question is a joke, Dummeresel. A joke we have running with the Herr Doktor…”
His voice fades behind me as I enter the hush housed in every Gothic church. Even with at least half dozen detectives, a forensics team somewhat larger, and assorted uniformed officers, the silence of the place remains largely intact.
Not so its atmosphere. While activity congregates up near the altar, even from here by the door, the stench of blood threatens to overcome the incense of centuries. The distance to what I presume must be a body stretches a good twenty meters and the place smells like a butcher’s shop all the same. I begin to appreciate why Inspektor Jandt asked me about breakfast. I am not so often called in on cases that I can trust my stomach under all circumstances.
Theo has spied me and, along with a younger detective, he makes his way down the marble nave. I am fully aware that as a matter of tactics policemen wear crepe-soled shoes. Still there strikes me something faintly supernatural about two fairly large men traversing a stone floor in such a cavernous chamber and not making a sound.
As the two draw near, I am afraid I cannot keep a slight sneer of disgust off my face when I see who it is with Inspektor Jandt. I know I do not so much as pretend to try. Jonas Bihm and I do not like each other, to state the case mildly. The meterosexual Bihm enjoys a certain quiet notoriety for pretending to be homosexual---“gay”---in order to improve his promotability. Detective after four years on the force. Sergeant now after but eighteen months as a detective. For this I despise him. As he hates me for belittling the fact that he IS a (mostly) highly competent investigator.
When he draws into earshot, I nod at the Socialist Left lapel button he sports, “Bihm, nationalize the people, not property.” He glares, but says nothing. He can’t really. Police on duty are prohibited from making political statements. Gay and minority police on duty can do whatever they damned well please IF no one makes a stink about it. Having this in mind, doubtless, Jandt ignores both my remark as well as his underling’s flouting the regulations.
Instead he asks me, “Have you been following the Masane matter, Doktor?” My evident incomprehension is answer enough, and he goes on. “Kalikara Masane, age ten, has been missing for nearly three days.”
“A Ugandan refugee,” Bihm puts in using the same tones as those with which the Hofburg’s servants once uttered, “the Crown Prince.”
“Please, both of you,” Jandt says flatly. “Unless I miss my guess, we have just found the boy.” So saying, he glances up the nave towards the altar.
“You don’t know? And why call me?”
“Wolfengraf, I want you to walk up this aisle and go take a look at what you find near the altar. Until you do that, I do not want to say anything that may influence you.” Jandt, as I noted when he called earlier, is visibly upset. He is holding himself together with an effort. As, I realize, is Bihm. Hence the latter’s disinclination to rise to my baiting.
So, I walk up the nave. The other personnel gathered inside the altar rail part for me as I come near. The white marble floor glistens with copious gore just begun to dry and fade to maroon. As I take in the sight, I fight the urge to gag. Gag all the same.
On the floor is the body of a negroid boy. Dismembered. Only…In my time as a consultant, I have seen other corpses dismembered. Almost without exception, the resulting disarrangement was random. A leg here, an arm there, the trunk cast to one side, and so on. Here…here the arrangement is LOGICAL. That is the only word for it.
The body lies on its back. The legs are placed in correct relation to the trunk. The arms as well. A gap of about twenty centimeters is left between each severed limb and the body. Enough to make clear the amputation. But not enough to disturb the overall structure of the body itself.
No, what disturbs the overall structure is the fact that the head is missing. I turn to a forensics team member whose name eludes me. Or maybe the scrub-suit---haz-mat get-up, or what have you---induces anonymity. Seeing my line of sight and raised eyebrows, he shrugs. “We haven’t found it. We’ve been looking for over an hour. It looks like the perp might have taken it with him.”
I resume my scrutiny, looking closer at each body part. It only takes a few moments to realize that what I had taken for bare floor spots between blood splashes are not. Each body part has been tagged. A length of thin wire holds a paper tag to each severed limb, to the trunk, and yes. To the lopped off little penis as well.
My eyes are no longer perfect and I have to lean in close after putting on my reading glasses. The first thing I note is that each tag is hand-lettered in elegant Fraktur script. Black ink on white paper. German language. In apparent order, the tags run:
The right arm: “1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
The left arm: “1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being ALL the facts.”
The trunk: “1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case and also all that is not the case.”
The right leg: “1. 13 The facts in logical space are the world.”
The left leg: “1.2 The world divides into facts.”
The penis: “1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.”
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A first even in my experience (which has sometimes been exaggerated by those who do not know me properly. In many cases, at all) Without stopping to ponder, I move on. As Jandt hinted, the only way to take in a crime scene is to do so before opinions begin to hatch. “Don’t think, look!” There, you see? The fact I am already framing my impressions in Wittgenstein’s words is itself no good sign.
I look to where should be the head. As expected, the unattached white tag here reads, “1. The world is all that is the case.” The very beginning of the Tractatus. My eyes are drawn far more by what lies alongside it? Alongside? I turn to the anonymous forensics technician again. He shakes his head. “There must have been a draft from the door. When we came in, the tag was lying atop the paper. Don’t worry. I have a photograph of it.”
“What is your name, please?”
“Ehrler, Herr Doktor. Heinz Ehrler.”
“Good work, Ehrler. I will inform Inspektor Jandt.”
“Than you, Herr Doktor.”
Which leaves me feeling embarrassed. Ashamed of myself. I have had to learn the hard way how to deal with people. And it has cost. Dearly, and not only myself. To what end? A little honest praise would scarcely have left me out of pocket.
I force myself to look back at the other paper. An A4 sheet onto which a circle has been drawn. One nearly fifteen centimeters in diameter. Two secants pass through the figure’s center, dividing it into four equal quadrants. These have been colored yellow, green, black, and red. Somewhat superfluously, I think, Hebrew letters under the circle spell out “Malkuth.”
While I was conducting my examination, Jandt and Bihm returned to the communion rail. Though neither kneels, the eyes of each are as eager as any maiden at her first Communion. (Listen to me! Do maidens even go to Communion any longer?) “Well?” asks the Inspektor when I am slow to speak.
“Strange. Damned strange,” I begin.
“We knew THAT already!” Bihm spits.
I smile with what I hope is infuriating indulgence. “I was not going to stop with that. First, out of the welter of intriguing leads and misleads, is the matter of the missing head. In its place, the killer left the symbol of the Sefira Malkuth. I doubt that was accidental or done from ignorance. In Qabalistic tradition, Malkuth is the Sefira of the genitals, not the head. By his choice of placement, I would guess that our killer intends to signify some inversion of the wonted order.”
“Do you think the tie-in with the Qabalah is significant?” Jandt asks.
“Yes and no. Doubtless the killer sets a great deal by it. But knowledge---knowledge, half-knowledge, and sheer fantasizing about---the Qabalah are so common nowadays, that that information alone will provide too many trails to reliably suggest a killer. As Marx himself suggested, the entire West is Judaized.” At this Bihm jerks as if prodded with a hot poker. Various personnel continue with their work too casually to mean anything other than that my faux pas has been duly noted and filed.
Except for the Inspektor who remains a police officer, not a social justice warrior. “And those numbered tags?”
“From Witthenstein’s Tractatus.”
“I know that. What do you think the link is?”
“Off the top of my head, I cannot possible imagine. It might be significant that the entire first chapter has exactly as many propositions as pieces the body was cut up into. Or maybe that is just an unhappy accident of human anatomy. As for the content of the propositions and their bearing on the case…again it were too early to say.”
Bihm cannot contain himself any longer.“You do not find it ‘significant,’ Herr Doktor, that the killer employs both Jewish mysticism AND a book by one of the world’s pre-eminent Jewish philosophers?”
“What is your aim here, Bihm? To bait me into Jew-baiting? Wouldn’t you say apprehending the killer is at least as important as advancing some DIE agenda?”
“Actually, Herr Doktor, in the long run---“
“In the long run,” Jandt interrupts Bihm, “we’ll both be cashiered if we fail to make progress in this matter of the killing. Towards that end, I very much want to hear what Dr. Wolfengraf has to say further about his impressions.”
“As I have been stumbling towards saying all along, Inspektor, my impressions are just that. Something like a photo album one picks up in the train station: are these pictures random, a group of friends, a family, a photographer’s portfolio? At the moment, what we have is what seems to be dead African boy in a Catholic Church, left here by a killer with a penchant for both the Qabalah AND Anglo-American philosophy.”
“So what is your next move?” Jandt asks.
“To look into the question none of us has asked yet. Why HERE? I do not mean Vienna. I mean this precise church.”
“That is exactly what I am afraid of. I, myself. The police commissioner. The mayor of Vienna. The Bundespräsident himself. All have telephoned me within the past hour. When the papers get hold of this…” He makes a sour face and shrugs.
“I am afraid I do not follow.” Sometimes I overlook the most obvious things.
“The church!” Sergeant Bihm explodes. “The name of the church!”
“St. Elisabeth of Hungary?”
“Its other name, the Church of the Teutonic Order! Even you---ESPECIALLY you---must know what the media could do with that. The tie in between a race murder today and a military order founded on racism!”
I suppose I could try to point out that no one yet knows whether this is a race murder, a sex killing or an occult oblation. Or that the Teutonic Knights were no more (and no less) racist than, well than just about EVERY people’s warriors down through history. But that way lieth reason. Which, for all that facts fill up logical space, wins damned few arguments. Instead I try emotions.
“Bihm, did it ever occur to you that I agree with you? At least on some things?”
He stops and eyes me with suspicion. For which I cannot blame him. “What do you mean?”
“For one thing, I do not blame the Jews for the West’s ills. At least not completely. As Aleksandr Slavros the Russian writes, what good can you say about a people that LETS itself be corrupted? A people that ADOPTS all the evils it claims to reject? For that is what the West has done and persists in doing. Or, again, a little while ago I spoke ill of the missing boy’s people. And I meant every word of it. But, look at ourselves. Colonizers carried plagues to Africa and elsewhere: alcohol, syphilis, and worst of all money mania. What those native peoples lost was better than what we gave. The best thing anyone can say about White Aryans is that they have been culpably naïve in cultural adoption.”(1)
Bihm is looking away from me, running one hand over the back of his too-perfect hair style. “OK…OK. We do have a killer to find.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Jandt puts in. For a Detective Inspektor, he does have a fine tuned sense of when to stand aside from his subordinates’ squabbles. Especially when one---myself---isn’t exactly a subordinate at all. “Come on. Let’s discuss what is our next move.” He leads the way down the nave.
Bihm makes what I imagine what might be an honest effort to be friendly. “Do either of you remember the Miews case in Germany some years back?”
“No,” I lie. “What was it?”
“Back around 2004, 2005 one Armin Miews ran a persona ad soliciting a hookup for cannibalism. And he found a taker! Some other guy was actually turned on by the idea of being eaten. Literally eaten. Name of Brandes. So Miews and Brandes shared a snack of the latter’s penis as the latter bled out.”
“And why do you bring this up now, Bihm?” Jandt asks wearily, though the time is still well short of noon.
“I was trying to recall any case weirder that the one we same to have at hand.”
Weirder? One might start with Bihm’s disturbing level of recall about what ought to be the most repellent of matters. I do not wish, however, to disturb the fragile working-peace between us.
Theo labors under no such scruples. “After hearing you recite that, Jonas, I would say yes. Your fascination with the matter. As a species we are seriously disordered.” While I might argue for the truth that “mankind’ represents multiple species, I let the Inspektor’s remark stand. And, as we emerge into the street, a Balenciaga billboard puts exclamation point to Theo’s contention. A female toddler aged perhaps four holds up teddy bear sporting a black-leather bondage ensemble.(2)
My good resolutions, which have been at high simmer for some long moments boil over. But before I can open my mouth to scald with superheated steam, Bihm exclaims, “Look!”
We follow his pointing finger and do. Across the street, not twenty meters distant, a club’s marquee: WORLD. As in all that is the case.
More to come tomorrow...
More to come tomorrow...
II.
Making our way to the corner’s street crossing, I nearly bump into a scurrying official. One Müller, I think, of the Bureau of Bundessicher-something-or-other. Spying my face, his arm jerks and the hand comes out of his pocket before he catches himself. He stammers, embarrassed, “He—Herr Doktor! Did you find it yet?”
“When I do, you will know,” I assure him.
Bihm, presuming on our newly declared truce, asks, “Why does everyone always ask you that? Find what?”
Jandt strides on and answers for me back over his shoulder, “Der Graal.”
“The Grail!? There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“I’m not,” the Inspektor says placidly.
Come up close to the club’s marquee, we see that the name there is actually a little more complex than simply the World. More complex and a great deal more intriguing. For, near at hand, the whole reads: “around the WORLD is all that is the case.” We look at each other, the Graal forgotten. “It was no well-ordered mind that authored that,” Jandt observes. “Perverse sex paired with analytic philosophy.”
We pass a glassed-in hoarding by the entrance promising “Male and Trans Pole Dancers,” plus “Nude Amateur Review.” Inside though, even our hetero-pulses quicken. On the wall facing the door, in day-glo colors is painted the Qabalah’s Tree of Life. As depicted by tradition, save that Kether at the top is a leering male face, garishly made-up and with negroid features despite the Sefira’s white color. That and Malkuth at the bottom is depicted not as a circle but an elongated penis with yellow, green, red, and black stripes. “Behold the new Adam?” I suggest facetiously and Bihm gives me a disapproving look.
Initial excitement yields to mild confusion as we take in the rest of the décor. On the wall to the left are a tastefully executed set of the Elder Futhark’s runes, artfully interspersed with the coiling foliage of traditional Nordic wood carving. On the right, the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Though something seems a little off about these. Oh the Renaissance iconography is consummately drawn and correctly colored…It takes me a few long moments before I realize what is wrong. There are only twenty-one cards. The Fool---key to the whole---is missing. Before I can ponder this, Bihm interrupts. “Here, Herr Doktor, what is this?”
He is looking behind us. I turn and view the wall in which the entrance is set. Indeed. Covering this surface is what looks to be the entire Enochian Great Table, in all its parti-colored, intricate detail. “John Dee’s tablets for Enochian magic,” I inform my companions. This entire establishment is on the order of an occult smorgasbord.”
“Eclectic, like our killer,” the Inspektor drily notes. He looks up scanning the ceiling. Bihm and I follow his lead. Nothing. Gray expanse and invisible when the room’s strobes or other lighting paraphenalia are turned on. Noting our puzzlement, Jandt says, “I was checking for symbolic logic. It seems to be about the only form of arcane semiotics wanting. All in all, this is curious ambience for what gives itself out as a gay bar.”
“A CLOSED gay bar,” a voice booms from across the dance floor. “Club does not open until noon.” Looking that direction, we spot a strapping bartender type apparently restocking supplies. He wears a black leather vest, gold chains, and the usual Rorschach gallery of mismatched tattoos. Call me old fashioned, but I feel the cornflower eye-shadow, magenta blush, and screaming candy apple-red lipstick undercut the otherwise macho message of his attire.
Still, the wall behind the bar reassures me as to the bar’s gay street-cred. Photoshopped nudes of various straight male celebrities adorn the area, most of them festooned with what are meant to appear to be autographs. I am no follower of popular culture, but even I recognize most of the persons depicted. Brad Pitt sodomizes a grinning Justin Trudeau, while alongside that footballer Ronaldo plays catamite to a younger George Clooney. And not letting the boys have all the fun Cher (presumably still alive) takes a black rubber dildo to a simpering James Dean. Meanwhile, I am finding my sarcasm a thin defense against growing queasiness. The aphorist spoke true. “Democracy means freedom to degrade yourself in any fashion so long as it does not interfere with your neighbor’s degradation.”
Theo’s voice snaps me back to matters at hand. “We are here on police business.”
“Our licenses are all in order.” The barman says this just a little too quickly.
“Who said anything about licenses? Would you like me to check?” Jandt has him now. “We need to speak with the manager. The owner, if possible.”
The beefy queen sets down the bottles he was dusting, a little cowed but his lips done up in an insouciant scarlet pucker like an inflamed hemorrhoid. “I will see if she is in.” He disappears into the back. Before I have time to deliver any snide observations, or Bihm to register any protests at his boss’ manner, the messenger is back. “She will see you. Door at the end of the hall.”
As we turn down a shag-carpeted corridor straight out of the 70’s, I whisper to Theo. “So fast. Almost like she was listening right around the corner.” And, indeed, the space tingles faintly like someone had just been standing here. Someone? No…something else. But before I can analyze just what, my two companions have passed on before me and I must hurry to catch them up. The Inspektor raps on the door after his wonted manner: lightly enough to be civil; authoritative enough not to be ignored. Inside, a throaty woman’s voice calls, “Herein.”
Theo gives just the faintest hint of a bow. “I am Inspektor Jandt of the Bundespolizei. This is my colleague, Sergeant Bihm, and Herr Doktor Wolfengraf, a consultant. May we ask you some questions?”
“You just have,” she tries hard for nonchalance and leaves one slipper mired in agitation.
“We are not here to play word games,” Jandt reminds her.
“Indeed? What else is there EXCEPT language games?”
Have you ever noticed? When a highly anxious person attempts to purr, she rattles? Aesthetics aside, this lady has just broken the first rule of badinage with the authorities: never piss off your interlocutor.
The Inspektor steps very close to her, his standing knees almost touching hers seated. “It is a rule of law that one identify oneself to the police. It is one of etiquette that one stands to receive guests. Stands and shakes hands.” He says this with menacing cold precision.
I had almost expected her to make some riposte alluding to “rule-following behavior.” Instead she blinks and swallows hard. Stands and shakes the hand Jandt offers. “Clovis Sayn, this club’s owner and manageress.” She follows and shakes Bihm’s as well.
But when she takes my hand, her arm jerks as if given an electric shock. Eyes widen in terror. I clutch her hand the more tightly. It won’t do to have any displays here. I know what she feels. The first time…after. The first time this happened to me, it was the same. Not every man or woman who walks the streets is a man or woman. Not after the accustomed fashion at any rate. This, her difference, is what I felt in the hall she had just vacated a moment ago.
I let Clovis sink back into her desk chair. Take the opportunity to observe her. Not as a police functionary or however you describe my status. I might not be a man by normal standards. Still a man remains a man. And this Fräulein Seyn merits a second look. Aged about thirty, she is only a little shorter than myself. Perhaps seven or eight centimeters. Her legs are slim and comely. Hair a dark brown, slightly curly, and shoulder length. The neck, while thin, is not attractive. The chin too strong for a woman. Whence, then, my fascination?
There the eyes. I cannot say for certain whether they are hazel, exotic green, or just some shade of brown. Intensity outstrips color. From moment to moment, though, the message behind the intensity seems to shift. The fear of a moment ago gives way to that feral in this. The eyes of a cornered feline, an abused child, or a shell-shocked soldier. They attract by repelling. And she is most definitely avoiding my gaze this moment.
She is also speaking. “So please tell me, Inspektor. What is the reason for this already slightly intrusive visit?” She somehow seems to have recovered the poise that has been missing since we entered.
“It is for me to ask the questions,” Jandt begins stiffly, then suddenly pretends to yield with a stern uncle’s semi-smile. “However, your query is reasonable. There was a body found this morning. In the church across the way. Certain evidence there points to some connection with the name of this establishment.”
“’Certain evidence’? What precisely?”
“I am not at liberty or inclined to divulge that information.”
“Then how am I supposed to establish my non-involvement?”
At a glance from Theo, Bihm answers. “What brings us here is that a written scrap of evidence seemed to refer to the name of this establishment.”
“Surely even a semi-literate policeman must realize that ‘world’ IS a common term.”
“The reference was rather more specific, containing nearly half of your club’s name.”
“A quotation from a well-known book, I am assuming. A book written by a native son of this city as well.”
Bihm does not give up easily. “All easily explained, yes. However, given the PROXIMITY of your place of business to the crime scene, even you must admit the apparent link is worth looking into.”
“I admit nothing,” Clovis counters. “What’s in a word, a name?”
“What indeed?” I pounce at last. “Look at YOUR name. Clovis?”
“---was the name of a Merovingian king of France. Is that a crime?”
“The name is derived from ‘Clodovica,’” I counter. “A Latin rendering of ‘Ludwig.’ And ‘Seyn’? In 1808 Napoleon had promulgated an edict that all persons in his dominions, including Jews, adopt an inheritable surname. The Viennese philosopher’s ancestors at that time were in the service of the Seyn-Wittgenstein family. They adopted the latter half of the appellation.”
Clovis’ eyes lock onto mine. “And how about if I analyzed YOUR name, ‘Herr Doktor’ Hiedl Wolfengraf!?”
I have to fight against being thrown back into my chair. A few moments ago, this woman knew nothing of what she was. And now she has grasped what I am. And…who?”
Or has she? The vindictive blaze has gone out of her eyes. The note of triumph died out of her tone. “I…mean…is my name… I mean is a mere coincidence about my name and some ‘evidence’ you have a crime on my part?” She seems, for this moment anyhow, genuinely perplexed, confused even.
“Of course not,” Theo reassures her. “Still, you must admit that the physical proximity of your club to the evidence hinted at is striking. And now, with what Dr. Wolfengraf has revealed about your name…”
“I told you, Inspektor: a coincidence.”
“Truly? Fräulein, please be advised, it is very much my business to discredit most ‘coincidences.’ So I must ask: is Clovis Sayn your birth name?”
“And I must ask, no demand. I must demand, Inspektor Jandt that you and your companions leave my establishment. You are welcome to return when and IF you obtain proper authorization. Be advised, too, I have friends with no small influence.”
Sergeant Bihm, surprisingly, rises to the occasion. “I take it you mean men whose visits here they do not wish to become public knowledge. That tactic cuts two ways. Those photographs behind the bar, the photoshopped celebrity porn. I am guessing all are copyrighted material. Could you stand up to even ONE lawsuit brought by the copyright holder? To say nothing of the well-known individual whose head was superimposed onto the pornographic image? And what of the forged or purloined autographs?”
Clovis has tears in her eyes, sweat on her brow. Still she manages to sniff, “A matter for civil law, not criminal.”
“Policemen can carry tales as well as make arrests,” the Inspektor takes his turn to purr.
I am only half listening by now, though. For I feel a presence come barreling down the hall. The shag carpet may cover sound. It cannot muffle this much energy. Purely physical---I catch myself. No. The energy is not purely physical. Its carrier tries to PROJECT pure physicality but, there is more to him or it than that.
The door bursts open. A tall, lithe, leonine black man. As nearly perfect a physical specimen as I have seen. “Clovis! Are these men bothering you?” And though I described him as leonine, it is a cobra’s eye that takes in the three of us.
Clovis melts into a miasma of palpable relief. “No, Damba. A small misunderstanding is all. These gentlemen were just leaving.”
“The misunderstanding yet lingers, I am afraid,” the Inspektor interjects. “Our interview was commencing, not concluding.”
Sure of himself, Damba strides over to Clovis and leans over her. From my angle I can see down inside his partly unbuttoned Luigi Borrelli. The Glock stuck inside the inner waistband interests me far less than the tattoo on his chest. Every bar overseer needs armament. No man needs a tattoo. And his choice speaks volumes about its wearer.
I overhear him murmur, “I will handle this, Clo.’”
He turns to us. His earlier aggression upon entering has dissipated. His tone is one of reasonable concern. “Please, gentlemen. No one troubles Clovis while I am here. If you have no warrants or other papers, please go.” Make no mistake though about the shift in tone. If earlier he regarded us with the eye of a coiled cobra, now it is with one of the same serpent only slightly relaxed. At bottom, nothing has changed.
For all his wokery, Bihm can function as a hard-assed policeman when he wants to. “Damba? Is that a first name or a last name?”
“A first name.”
“So what is your last name?”
“Okello.”
“Going by your accent, I would guess you are not Austrian.”
“No, I am not.” One has to admire Damba Okello for not making this easy on Sergeant Bihm.
“Then where are you from?” As one has to admire Bihm for so impeccably keeping his poise.
“Uganda.” The same provenance as the missing and apparently murdered boy. At this, one could hear a pin drop.
But only for a beat. Bihm has already gone on. “Very well then, Dabma Olleko---“
“That is Damba Okello---“
“---I assume your passport is up to date and your visa in order?”
Bihm, sadly, has overplayed his hand. A homosexual African negroid “refugee” enjoys rights in Austria previously only known to Archdukes. Damba snake-smiles. “You three were just leaving, I believe?”
We are nearly in the street before any of us speak. Bihm hisses, half to himself, “I hated having to do that to the man! Shaming him, degrading him---“
“Bihm!” Jandt speaks sharply. “You are a Detective Sergeant, not a United Nations case worker. It is at least possible that one or both of those individuals inside know something about the murder. If you want to exude pity, think of the victim.”
Bihm simply stares. And why not? Every reality of his job flatly contradicts the tenets of his education. And the educated man of today will let the entire world perish before he contravenes---or simply corrects---one jotted tittle of any humanist dogma. As I said years ago, who controls the textbooks controls the state. The state and, sadly, the future for as far as I can see.
As we step out into the street and chill wind I stroke my cheek and ask, “What next, Theo?”
He looks my way and starts to reply. Catches himself and stops. For he sees that I have crossed my left index finger over the thumb as I stroke my cold cheek. The sigyll stands for the Othala rune. Rune peculiar to Wotan whom the Romans assimilated to their god Mercury, the messenger. Indication in the code that Theo and I have worked up through the years: we need to talk privately.
“Here, Jonas” he says, taking a small notebook out of his coat pocket. Scribbles something on a page and tears it out. “I have just thought of something important and the damned cell phones are not secure. Take this to Oberrat Altmann over there.” He points towards a knot of official personnel outside the entrance to St. Elisabeth’s.
The only slightly skeptical Bihm takes the folded paper and strides off. On it are written words to the effect, “Please, thank the bearer effusively for delivering the ‘important tidings.’ Ask him if I had anything else to say or any other nonsense questions that come to mind. Then jot some verbiage on this page and have him deliver it back to me. A thousand thanks, Jandt.”
After the Sergeant has gotten out of earshot, I say to Theo, “You were right to call me in on this. This is no ordinary murder. The occult angle is paramount.”
“Do you think this Clovis Sayn did it?”
“That it is something it is far too early to say. But…no.I do not think so. She is nonetheless involved somehow, I believe. But not as the perpetrator. You saw her just now. When we came in, and later with Damba. She strikes me as someone who has gotten involved with that which she cannot cope.”
“Like my---like Therese?”
After all it had been Therese Jandt’s stumbling around in the occult that first brought Theo and I into contact. My success at extricating her that won me my relative tenure as a frequently resorted-to consultant with the Bundespolizei. “Only obliquely. Our Clovis strikes me a good deal less naïve than was Therese. And, probably, somewhat involved, as hinted. Also…Theo you might as well know. When I shook Clovis’ hand, I could tell. She is…like me.”
“Like you?” Theo knows what I mean, though only in rough outline. Which is one of the reasons why he never asks me about having “found it yet.” He knows the thing sought; not its implications.
“Yes. I doubt whether she knows it, though. At least not fully. Good gods, it took ME how long to piece it together? And after that, how many more years to figure out WHY? My mission, if you will.”
“And you still do not know how, do you?”
“Very little. Almost nothing of that. But, back to the matter at hand, whatever Clovis is, I do not think she is the killer. A killer at all in fact. Though that leaves the question: when she figures out what she is and who…where will she line up? With whom will she side?”
“I might see what you mean. She will have little reason to love you.”
“To put it mildly, Theo. To put it mildly. What concerns me too is her attachment to him.”
“Whom? Damba?”
“Yes. He hides a good deal. I could feel that when he approached her office.”
“That was all an act?”
“He has concern for her, I think. That much is genuine. The question is WHY he is concerned for Clovis. It is difficult to untangle the skein of motives for any love. There is something else that might be highly significant. Did you notice anything about the Tarot cards painted on the wall of the club?”
“Tarot is a matter of which I am totally ignorant.”
“Good. But the cards on the wall should have numbered twenty-two. One, the Fool, was missing.”
“And you think this important?”
“Some authorities, Charles Williams and Alastair Crowley for instance, take the Fool as the most important card in the entire Tarot. A trump of trumps, as it were. For all his limitations, the Fool is the card of daring, new beginnings, spontaneity. The answer to the only philosophical question, ‘Why is there anything at all, rather than Nothing?’ ”
“So the Fool is something like the wild card in the Tarot deck?”
“In a manner of speaking. Or something like Da’ath among the Sephiroth.”
“Like what?”
“There are ten Sephiroth in the Qabalah. Da’ath---knowledge---is a sort of shadowy eleventh that does not properly exist on the one hand; that crops up throughout the entire Tree on the other. Like Wittgestein’s notion of logical form: it can be shown but not nailed down. In any case, back to the Fool. The other esoteric displays in the bar were complete, as near as I could tell. The Tarot alone was not.
“So, why exclude the Fool from the wall’s display?”
“The Fool is tattooed on Damba’s chest.”
I let that sink in. When I divine Theo is about to confess to complete bafflement at it all, I spare him. “I will consult my sources tonight. When something like this, today, happens it sends out ripples everywhere. First, though, I need to see Dr. Hofmann at the Kunsthistorisches. Ask him about the church over there. I doubt very much that there was anything random in its choice as a murder site.”
I see Sergeant Bihm returning with the paper returned to him. “Oberrat Altmann sends his compliments. ‘Not everyone would have thought of that. Smart fellow, that Jandt.’ His exact words.”
The Inspektor pretends to read the Oberrat’s reply. Pockets the inane note. “Come along, Bihm. Time to speak to the press. Hiedl, you’ll want to skip that of course.”
“Of course.” Before we part though, I voice one other question that has been worrying the margins of my mind. “Why is that, I wonder?”
“Why is what?” Bihm turns.
“Why does a perfectly attractive woman like Clovis Sayn want to run a sordid club for homosexual men?”
Bihm eyes Theo who, for some mysterious reason, seems to be finding my question amusing. “Well, I demand? How could the lady let herself get dragged into such a disreputable calling?”
At this, Theo bursts into open laughter and even the politically correct Bhim cannot stifle a snicker. The former recovers first, “’Drag’ is right, Hiedl. Didn’t you see the Adam’s apple on Clovis? That strong chin?”
Bihm is savoring my discomfiture like fine wine, “In short, Herr Doktor, that’s why the lady is a trans.”
OK, OK, very well und Gott verdammt. As many have said of me in the past, never have I understood woman.
THINGS FOUND, THINGS CHANGE
by
Martin Tyrsegg
DEDICATION: To those few who, even at this late date and hour, “noch bleiben treu.” To strive against the times assiduously enough puts one in some sense outside time.
TRIGGER WARNING: The following novel contains a number of truly gruesome crime scenes. These, however, are all committed on an individual level. The crime daily in process of commission against Europe’s culture and peoples is collective and far more macabre.
CHAPTER ONE
ALL THAT IS THE CASE
9 DECEMBER
I.
I had just gotten back from my annual visit to Whidbey Island in America. Seeing my old friend Thorsten Hadur there on the 8 December anniversary has become a sort of rite for us both. Here now in Vienna my mood was as sunny as the early winter morning. I stood near the end of Marc Aurel Strasse, admiring the pure strong Romanesque lines of St. Ruprechtskirche. Absolute simplicity of surface and angle effect here a powerful impact down the centuries.
Not for the first time did bittersweet regret well up in me that my early dream of turning architect had come to nothing. My initial education had run down the wrong lines, events had intervened, and---what more to say?---things changed. Things still change.
As for example the little phone in my pocket. It went from dutiful silence at my reverie to an impertinent buzzing. I took it out and started to answer. But before I could get a word out, the caller cut in. “Doktor Wolfe---Hiedel?” My friend Inspektor Jandt’s voice. And it sounded strained.
“This is he. What is it Theo?”
“Where are you? Right now?”
“Looking at Ruprechtskirche. Why?”
“Good, good. Can you hurry over to St. Elisabeth’s? It’s not far---“
“Slow down, Theo.” Anything that rattled the phlegmatic Inspektor Jandt could not be commonplace. But then I knew it could not be commonplace from the simple fact that he called me. “First, which St. Elisabeth’s? The city features several.”
“Elisabeth von Ungarn. Behind St. Stephansdom---“
“I am aware of the location. I have dwelt here a good many years. Now, may I ask why you are calling? Why you need me?”
He ignores---or sidesteps---the question. Puts me instead one of his own. “Hiedel, have you had breakfast?”
“You know I never eat in the morning. It dulls the mind. Now again may I ask---“
“You haven’t. Good. Now, just get over here please. You will see why I asked.” I hear agitated voices in the background, a hasty and muttered “Wiederhoeren” from Jandt, then nothing. I sigh and pocket my phone. That sunny mood of mine? As stated already, things change.
While I wend my way through the labyrinth of narrow Gassen that is Vienna’s Innerestadt, this business of change stays with me. Yes, again, things change. The Inspektor for instance. Up until a few years ago Theo Jandt had been a deceptively grave and forbidding police inspector with a truly marvelous sense of mad-cap humor that reared its head at the most unpredictable of moments.
That had all changed with his divorce three years ago. His wife of a decade had up and run off to California with the assistant military attaché to the American embassy in Budapest. The latter was not only black but a negress in the bad bargain. As in female. Not to mention drug-using and physically abusive. (For while the erstwhile Therese Jandt admitted to these shadows over paradise, she never mentioned that her change of lifestyle had been a mistake.) Left to raise a six year old son by himself, Theo has understandably altered. It is difficult for any unhappily single male over thirty to keep up anything like good humor. Add to that the burden of parenthood and a job with highly irregular hours, and you get change for the worse. The sole good to come of it---and I am here being selfish---is that Theo and I have grown into something resembling friends. A rare experience in my life. And a thing almost unheard of between a police officer and a civilian consultant like myself.
If I did not know where St. Elisabeth’s was, I would be able to find it by the atmosphere alone. The air fairly crackles with something like static electricity as I turn into Milchgasse that will bring me around the church’s rear. Come out into Singerstrasse fronting Stephansplatz, I see a truly impressive collection of official vehicles: ambulances, TV vans, police cruisers, the anonymous black sedans that spell out Serious Official Presence.
Before essaying to cross the cordon of yellow tape and blue uniforms, I look up and regard the structure itself. A spark of my earlier mood returns. But just a spark. Oh, the Gothic style of the edifice is pure enough. Still something has always struck me as slightly out of place about this building precisely HERE. In Vienna, I mean. The red brick walls, framed in white, belong further north. North and east. In places like Danzig or the Baltic dominions where the church’s founding Order flourished. Still as a sign of the essential unity of culture from here all the way there---there and beyond---yes, I suppose St. Elisabeth’s is very much in place here after all.
I am still gawking aloft when I become aware that I am attracting attention. Rightly so. Persons who choose to go sightseeing on the scene of what appears a major crime become suspects by definition. Or what is that ominous English euphemism? They become “persons of interest.”
This person redirects his interest. I walk over to where a beefy and gray-haired senior constable keeps an eye on one very much junior admitting---or refusing admittance--- to various personnel. I have an awkward moment fishing around in my pockets for my consultant’s pass, till suddenly the older officer cracks a smile. “That is all right, Herr Doktor. Inspektor Jandt sent word to let you in.”
“Thank you, thank you very much…Preuner.” Relief floods me. Not only at being thus easily admitted, but also because memory spares me an embarrassing gaffe like not recalling a man’s name. As I start to slip through, this Preuner’s eyes twinkle and he asks (of course), “Did you find it yet?”
Before I can cough up one of my stock replies, the junior constable---clueless but trying to impress with his diligence nonetheless---adds with a frown, “And if you do find anything, don’t touch it! Point it out to one of the detectives.”
Preuner withers the neophyte with a glare. And as I make my way to the entrance proper, I hear him start to lecture the youngster. “The question is a joke, Dummeresel. A joke we have running with the Herr Doktor…”
His voice fades behind me as I enter the hush housed in every Gothic church. Even with at least half dozen detectives, a forensics team somewhat larger, and assorted uniformed officers, the silence of the place remains largely intact.
Not so its atmosphere. While activity congregates up near the altar, even from here by the door, the stench of blood threatens to overcome the incense of centuries. The distance to what I presume must be a body stretches a good twenty meters and the place smells like a butcher’s shop all the same. I begin to appreciate why Inspektor Jandt asked me about breakfast. I am not so often called in on cases that I can trust my stomach under all circumstances.
Theo has spied me and, along with a younger detective, he makes his way down the marble nave. I am fully aware that as a matter of tactics policemen wear crepe-soled shoes. Still there strikes me something faintly supernatural about two fairly large men traversing a stone floor in such a cavernous chamber and not making a sound.
As the two draw near, I am afraid I cannot keep a slight sneer of disgust off my face when I see who it is with Inspektor Jandt. I know I do not so much as pretend to try. Jonas Bihm and I do not like each other, to state the case mildly. The meterosexual Bihm enjoys a certain quiet notoriety for pretending to be homosexual---“gay”---in order to improve his promotability. Detective after four years on the force. Sergeant now after but eighteen months as a detective. For this I despise him. As he hates me for belittling the fact that he IS a (mostly) highly competent investigator.
When he draws into earshot, I nod at the Socialist Left lapel button he sports, “Bihm, nationalize the people, not property.” He glares, but says nothing. He can’t really. Police on duty are prohibited from making political statements. Gay and minority police on duty can do whatever they damned well please IF no one makes a stink about it. Having this in mind, doubtless, Jandt ignores both my remark as well as his underling’s flouting the regulations.
Instead he asks me, “Have you been following the Masane matter, Doktor?” My evident incomprehension is answer enough, and he goes on. “Kalikara Masane, age ten, has been missing for nearly three days.”
“A Ugandan refugee,” Bihm puts in using the same tones as those with which the Hofburg’s servants once uttered, “the Crown Prince.”
“Please, both of you,” Jandt says flatly. “Unless I miss my guess, we have just found the boy.” So saying, he glances up the nave towards the altar.
“You don’t know? And why call me?”
“Wolfengraf, I want you to walk up this aisle and go take a look at what you find near the altar. Until you do that, I do not want to say anything that may influence you.” Jandt, as I noted when he called earlier, is visibly upset. He is holding himself together with an effort. As, I realize, is Bihm. Hence the latter’s disinclination to rise to my baiting.
So, I walk up the nave. The other personnel gathered inside the altar rail part for me as I come near. The white marble floor glistens with copious gore just begun to dry and fade to maroon. As I take in the sight, I fight the urge to gag. Gag all the same.
On the floor is the body of a negroid boy. Dismembered. Only…In my time as a consultant, I have seen other corpses dismembered. Almost without exception, the resulting disarrangement was random. A leg here, an arm there, the trunk cast to one side, and so on. Here…here the arrangement is LOGICAL. That is the only word for it.
The body lies on its back. The legs are placed in correct relation to the trunk. The arms as well. A gap of about twenty centimeters is left between each severed limb and the body. Enough to make clear the amputation. But not enough to disturb the overall structure of the body itself.
No, what disturbs the overall structure is the fact that the head is missing. I turn to a forensics team member whose name eludes me. Or maybe the scrub-suit---haz-mat get-up, or what have you---induces anonymity. Seeing my line of sight and raised eyebrows, he shrugs. “We haven’t found it. We’ve been looking for over an hour. It looks like the perp might have taken it with him.”
I resume my scrutiny, looking closer at each body part. It only takes a few moments to realize that what I had taken for bare floor spots between blood splashes are not. Each body part has been tagged. A length of thin wire holds a paper tag to each severed limb, to the trunk, and yes. To the lopped off little penis as well.
My eyes are no longer perfect and I have to lean in close after putting on my reading glasses. The first thing I note is that each tag is hand-lettered in elegant Fraktur script. Black ink on white paper. German language. In apparent order, the tags run:
The right arm: “1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
The left arm: “1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being ALL the facts.”
The trunk: “1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case and also all that is not the case.”
The right leg: “1. 13 The facts in logical space are the world.”
The left leg: “1.2 The world divides into facts.”
The penis: “1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.”
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A first even in my experience (which has sometimes been exaggerated by those who do not know me properly. In many cases, at all) Without stopping to ponder, I move on. As Jandt hinted, the only way to take in a crime scene is to do so before opinions begin to hatch. “Don’t think, look!” There, you see? The fact I am already framing my impressions in Wittgenstein’s words is itself no good sign.
I look to where should be the head. As expected, the unattached white tag here reads, “1. The world is all that is the case.” The very beginning of the Tractatus. My eyes are drawn far more by what lies alongside it? Alongside? I turn to the anonymous forensics technician again. He shakes his head. “There must have been a draft from the door. When we came in, the tag was lying atop the paper. Don’t worry. I have a photograph of it.”
“What is your name, please?”
“Ehrler, Herr Doktor. Heinz Ehrler.”
“Good work, Ehrler. I will inform Inspektor Jandt.”
“Than you, Herr Doktor.”
Which leaves me feeling embarrassed. Ashamed of myself. I have had to learn the hard way how to deal with people. And it has cost. Dearly, and not only myself. To what end? A little honest praise would scarcely have left me out of pocket.
I force myself to look back at the other paper. An A4 sheet onto which a circle has been drawn. One nearly fifteen centimeters in diameter. Two secants pass through the figure’s center, dividing it into four equal quadrants. These have been colored yellow, green, black, and red. Somewhat superfluously, I think, Hebrew letters under the circle spell out “Malkuth.”
While I was conducting my examination, Jandt and Bihm returned to the communion rail. Though neither kneels, the eyes of each are as eager as any maiden at her first Communion. (Listen to me! Do maidens even go to Communion any longer?) “Well?” asks the Inspektor when I am slow to speak.
“Strange. Damned strange,” I begin.
“We knew THAT already!” Bihm spits.
I smile with what I hope is infuriating indulgence. “I was not going to stop with that. First, out of the welter of intriguing leads and misleads, is the matter of the missing head. In its place, the killer left the symbol of the Sefira Malkuth. I doubt that was accidental or done from ignorance. In Qabalistic tradition, Malkuth is the Sefira of the genitals, not the head. By his choice of placement, I would guess that our killer intends to signify some inversion of the wonted order.”
“Do you think the tie-in with the Qabalah is significant?” Jandt asks.
“Yes and no. Doubtless the killer sets a great deal by it. But knowledge---knowledge, half-knowledge, and sheer fantasizing about---the Qabalah are so common nowadays, that that information alone will provide too many trails to reliably suggest a killer. As Marx himself suggested, the entire West is Judaized.” At this Bihm jerks as if prodded with a hot poker. Various personnel continue with their work too casually to mean anything other than that my faux pas has been duly noted and filed.
Except for the Inspektor who remains a police officer, not a social justice warrior. “And those numbered tags?”
“From Witthenstein’s Tractatus.”
“I know that. What do you think the link is?”
“Off the top of my head, I cannot possible imagine. It might be significant that the entire first chapter has exactly as many propositions as pieces the body was cut up into. Or maybe that is just an unhappy accident of human anatomy. As for the content of the propositions and their bearing on the case…again it were too early to say.”
Bihm cannot contain himself any longer.“You do not find it ‘significant,’ Herr Doktor, that the killer employs both Jewish mysticism AND a book by one of the world’s pre-eminent Jewish philosophers?”
“What is your aim here, Bihm? To bait me into Jew-baiting? Wouldn’t you say apprehending the killer is at least as important as advancing some DIE agenda?”
“Actually, Herr Doktor, in the long run---“
“In the long run,” Jandt interrupts Bihm, “we’ll both be cashiered if we fail to make progress in this matter of the killing. Towards that end, I very much want to hear what Dr. Wolfengraf has to say further about his impressions.”
“As I have been stumbling towards saying all along, Inspektor, my impressions are just that. Something like a photo album one picks up in the train station: are these pictures random, a group of friends, a family, a photographer’s portfolio? At the moment, what we have is what seems to be dead African boy in a Catholic Church, left here by a killer with a penchant for both the Qabalah AND Anglo-American philosophy.”
“So what is your next move?” Jandt asks.
“To look into the question none of us has asked yet. Why HERE? I do not mean Vienna. I mean this precise church.”
“That is exactly what I am afraid of. I, myself. The police commissioner. The mayor of Vienna. The Bundespräsident himself. All have telephoned me within the past hour. When the papers get hold of this…” He makes a sour face and shrugs.
“I am afraid I do not follow.” Sometimes I overlook the most obvious things.
“The church!” Sergeant Bihm explodes. “The name of the church!”
“St. Elisabeth of Hungary?”
“Its other name, the Church of the Teutonic Order! Even you---ESPECIALLY you---must know what the media could do with that. The tie in between a race murder today and a military order founded on racism!”
I suppose I could try to point out that no one yet knows whether this is a race murder, a sex killing or an occult oblation. Or that the Teutonic Knights were no more (and no less) racist than, well than just about EVERY people’s warriors down through history. But that way lieth reason. Which, for all that facts fill up logical space, wins damned few arguments. Instead I try emotions.
“Bihm, did it ever occur to you that I agree with you? At least on some things?”
He stops and eyes me with suspicion. For which I cannot blame him. “What do you mean?”
“For one thing, I do not blame the Jews for the West’s ills. At least not completely. As Aleksandr Slavros the Russian writes, what good can you say about a people that LETS itself be corrupted? A people that ADOPTS all the evils it claims to reject? For that is what the West has done and persists in doing. Or, again, a little while ago I spoke ill of the missing boy’s people. And I meant every word of it. But, look at ourselves. Colonizers carried plagues to Africa and elsewhere: alcohol, syphilis, and worst of all money mania. What those native peoples lost was better than what we gave. The best thing anyone can say about White Aryans is that they have been culpably naïve in cultural adoption.”(1)
Bihm is looking away from me, running one hand over the back of his too-perfect hair style. “OK…OK. We do have a killer to find.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Jandt puts in. For a Detective Inspektor, he does have a fine tuned sense of when to stand aside from his subordinates’ squabbles. Especially when one---myself---isn’t exactly a subordinate at all. “Come on. Let’s discuss what is our next move.” He leads the way down the nave.
Bihm makes what I imagine what might be an honest effort to be friendly. “Do either of you remember the Miews case in Germany some years back?”
“No,” I lie. “What was it?”
“Back around 2004, 2005 one Armin Miews ran a persona ad soliciting a hookup for cannibalism. And he found a taker! Some other guy was actually turned on by the idea of being eaten. Literally eaten. Name of Brandes. So Miews and Brandes shared a snack of the latter’s penis as the latter bled out.”
“And why do you bring this up now, Bihm?” Jandt asks wearily, though the time is still well short of noon.
“I was trying to recall any case weirder that the one we same to have at hand.”
Weirder? One might start with Bihm’s disturbing level of recall about what ought to be the most repellent of matters. I do not wish, however, to disturb the fragile working-peace between us.
Theo labors under no such scruples. “After hearing you recite that, Jonas, I would say yes. Your fascination with the matter. As a species we are seriously disordered.” While I might argue for the truth that “mankind’ represents multiple species, I let the Inspektor’s remark stand. And, as we emerge into the street, a Balenciaga billboard puts exclamation point to Theo’s contention. A female toddler aged perhaps four holds up teddy bear sporting a black-leather bondage ensemble.(2)
My good resolutions, which have been at high simmer for some long moments boil over. But before I can open my mouth to scald with superheated steam, Bihm exclaims, “Look!”
We follow his pointing finger and do. Across the street, not twenty meters distant, a club’s marquee: WORLD. As in all that is the case.
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II.
Making our way to the corner’s street crossing, I nearly bump into a scurrying official. One Müller, I think, of the Bureau of Bundessicher-something-or-other. Spying my face, his arm jerks and the hand comes out of his pocket before he catches himself. He stammers, embarrassed, “He—Herr Doktor! Did you find it yet?”
“When I do, you will know,” I assure him.
Bihm, presuming on our newly declared truce, asks, “Why does everyone always ask you that? Find what?”
Jandt strides on and answers for me back over his shoulder, “Der Graal.”
“The Grail!? There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“I’m not,” the Inspektor says placidly.
Come up close to the club’s marquee, we see that the name there is actually a little more complex than simply the World. More complex and a great deal more intriguing. For, near at hand, the whole reads: “around the WORLD is all that is the case.” We look at each other, the Graal forgotten. “It was no well-ordered mind that authored that,” Jandt observes. “Perverse sex paired with analytic philosophy.”
We pass a glassed-in hoarding by the entrance promising “Male and Trans Pole Dancers,” plus “Nude Amateur Review.” Inside though, even our hetero-pulses quicken. On the wall facing the door, in day-glo colors is painted the Qabalah’s Tree of Life. As depicted by tradition, save that Kether at the top is a leering male face, garishly made-up and with negroid features despite the Sefira’s white color. That and Malkuth at the bottom is depicted not as a circle but an elongated penis with yellow, green, red, and black stripes. “Behold the new Adam?” I suggest facetiously and Bihm gives me a disapproving look.
Initial excitement yields to mild confusion as we take in the rest of the décor. On the wall to the left are a tastefully executed set of the Elder Futhark’s runes, artfully interspersed with the coiling foliage of traditional Nordic wood carving. On the right, the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Though something seems a little off about these. Oh the Renaissance iconography is consummately drawn and correctly colored…It takes me a few long moments before I realize what is wrong. There are only twenty-one cards. The Fool---key to the whole---is missing. Before I can ponder this, Bihm interrupts. “Here, Herr Doktor, what is this?”
He is looking behind us. I turn and view the wall in which the entrance is set. Indeed. Covering this surface is what looks to be the entire Enochian Great Table, in all its parti-colored, intricate detail. “John Dee’s tablets for Enochian magic,” I inform my companions. This entire establishment is on the order of an occult smorgasbord.”
“Eclectic, like our killer,” the Inspektor drily notes. He looks up scanning the ceiling. Bihm and I follow his lead. Nothing. Gray expanse and invisible when the room’s strobes or other lighting paraphenalia are turned on. Noting our puzzlement, Jandt says, “I was checking for symbolic logic. It seems to be about the only form of arcane semiotics wanting. All in all, this is curious ambience for what gives itself out as a gay bar.”
“A CLOSED gay bar,” a voice booms from across the dance floor. “Club does not open until noon.” Looking that direction, we spot a strapping bartender type apparently restocking supplies. He wears a black leather vest, gold chains, and the usual Rorschach gallery of mismatched tattoos. Call me old fashioned, but I feel the cornflower eye-shadow, magenta blush, and screaming candy apple-red lipstick undercut the otherwise macho message of his attire.
Still, the wall behind the bar reassures me as to the bar’s gay street-cred. Photoshopped nudes of various straight male celebrities adorn the area, most of them festooned with what are meant to appear to be autographs. I am no follower of popular culture, but even I recognize most of the persons depicted. Brad Pitt sodomizes a grinning Justin Trudeau, while alongside that footballer Ronaldo plays catamite to a younger George Clooney. And not letting the boys have all the fun Cher (presumably still alive) takes a black rubber dildo to a simpering James Dean. Meanwhile, I am finding my sarcasm a thin defense against growing queasiness. The aphorist spoke true. “Democracy means freedom to degrade yourself in any fashion so long as it does not interfere with your neighbor’s degradation.”
Theo’s voice snaps me back to matters at hand. “We are here on police business.”
“Our licenses are all in order.” The barman says this just a little too quickly.
“Who said anything about licenses? Would you like me to check?” Jandt has him now. “We need to speak with the manager. The owner, if possible.”
The beefy queen sets down the bottles he was dusting, a little cowed but his lips done up in an insouciant scarlet pucker like an inflamed hemorrhoid. “I will see if she is in.” He disappears into the back. Before I have time to deliver any snide observations, or Bihm to register any protests at his boss’ manner, the messenger is back. “She will see you. Door at the end of the hall.”
As we turn down a shag-carpeted corridor straight out of the 70’s, I whisper to Theo. “So fast. Almost like she was listening right around the corner.” And, indeed, the space tingles faintly like someone had just been standing here. Someone? No…something else. But before I can analyze just what, my two companions have passed on before me and I must hurry to catch them up. The Inspektor raps on the door after his wonted manner: lightly enough to be civil; authoritative enough not to be ignored. Inside, a throaty woman’s voice calls, “Herein.”
Theo gives just the faintest hint of a bow. “I am Inspektor Jandt of the Bundespolizei. This is my colleague, Sergeant Bihm, and Herr Doktor Wolfengraf, a consultant. May we ask you some questions?”
“You just have,” she tries hard for nonchalance and leaves one slipper mired in agitation.
“We are not here to play word games,” Jandt reminds her.
“Indeed? What else is there EXCEPT language games?”
Have you ever noticed? When a highly anxious person attempts to purr, she rattles? Aesthetics aside, this lady has just broken the first rule of badinage with the authorities: never piss off your interlocutor.
The Inspektor steps very close to her, his standing knees almost touching hers seated. “It is a rule of law that one identify oneself to the police. It is one of etiquette that one stands to receive guests. Stands and shakes hands.” He says this with menacing cold precision.
I had almost expected her to make some riposte alluding to “rule-following behavior.” Instead she blinks and swallows hard. Stands and shakes the hand Jandt offers. “Clovis Sayn, this club’s owner and manageress.” She follows and shakes Bihm’s as well.
But when she takes my hand, her arm jerks as if given an electric shock. Eyes widen in terror. I clutch her hand the more tightly. It won’t do to have any displays here. I know what she feels. The first time…after. The first time this happened to me, it was the same. Not every man or woman who walks the streets is a man or woman. Not after the accustomed fashion at any rate. This, her difference, is what I felt in the hall she had just vacated a moment ago.
I let Clovis sink back into her desk chair. Take the opportunity to observe her. Not as a police functionary or however you describe my status. I might not be a man by normal standards. Still a man remains a man. And this Fräulein Seyn merits a second look. Aged about thirty, she is only a little shorter than myself. Perhaps seven or eight centimeters. Her legs are slim and comely. Hair a dark brown, slightly curly, and shoulder length. The neck, while thin, is not attractive. The chin too strong for a woman. Whence, then, my fascination?
There the eyes. I cannot say for certain whether they are hazel, exotic green, or just some shade of brown. Intensity outstrips color. From moment to moment, though, the message behind the intensity seems to shift. The fear of a moment ago gives way to that feral in this. The eyes of a cornered feline, an abused child, or a shell-shocked soldier. They attract by repelling. And she is most definitely avoiding my gaze this moment.
She is also speaking. “So please tell me, Inspektor. What is the reason for this already slightly intrusive visit?” She somehow seems to have recovered the poise that has been missing since we entered.
“It is for me to ask the questions,” Jandt begins stiffly, then suddenly pretends to yield with a stern uncle’s semi-smile. “However, your query is reasonable. There was a body found this morning. In the church across the way. Certain evidence there points to some connection with the name of this establishment.”
“’Certain evidence’? What precisely?”
“I am not at liberty or inclined to divulge that information.”
“Then how am I supposed to establish my non-involvement?”
At a glance from Theo, Bihm answers. “What brings us here is that a written scrap of evidence seemed to refer to the name of this establishment.”
“Surely even a semi-literate policeman must realize that ‘world’ IS a common term.”
“The reference was rather more specific, containing nearly half of your club’s name.”
“A quotation from a well-known book, I am assuming. A book written by a native son of this city as well.”
Bihm does not give up easily. “All easily explained, yes. However, given the PROXIMITY of your place of business to the crime scene, even you must admit the apparent link is worth looking into.”
“I admit nothing,” Clovis counters. “What’s in a word, a name?”
“What indeed?” I pounce at last. “Look at YOUR name. Clovis?”
“---was the name of a Merovingian king of France. Is that a crime?”
“The name is derived from ‘Clodovica,’” I counter. “A Latin rendering of ‘Ludwig.’ And ‘Seyn’? In 1808 Napoleon had promulgated an edict that all persons in his dominions, including Jews, adopt an inheritable surname. The Viennese philosopher’s ancestors at that time were in the service of the Seyn-Wittgenstein family. They adopted the latter half of the appellation.”
Clovis’ eyes lock onto mine. “And how about if I analyzed YOUR name, ‘Herr Doktor’ Hiedl Wolfengraf!?”
I have to fight against being thrown back into my chair. A few moments ago, this woman knew nothing of what she was. And now she has grasped what I am. And…who?”
Or has she? The vindictive blaze has gone out of her eyes. The note of triumph died out of her tone. “I…mean…is my name… I mean is a mere coincidence about my name and some ‘evidence’ you have a crime on my part?” She seems, for this moment anyhow, genuinely perplexed, confused even.
“Of course not,” Theo reassures her. “Still, you must admit that the physical proximity of your club to the evidence hinted at is striking. And now, with what Dr. Wolfengraf has revealed about your name…”
“I told you, Inspektor: a coincidence.”
“Truly? Fräulein, please be advised, it is very much my business to discredit most ‘coincidences.’ So I must ask: is Clovis Sayn your birth name?”
“And I must ask, no demand. I must demand, Inspektor Jandt that you and your companions leave my establishment. You are welcome to return when and IF you obtain proper authorization. Be advised, too, I have friends with no small influence.”
Sergeant Bihm, surprisingly, rises to the occasion. “I take it you mean men whose visits here they do not wish to become public knowledge. That tactic cuts two ways. Those photographs behind the bar, the photoshopped celebrity porn. I am guessing all are copyrighted material. Could you stand up to even ONE lawsuit brought by the copyright holder? To say nothing of the well-known individual whose head was superimposed onto the pornographic image? And what of the forged or purloined autographs?”
Clovis has tears in her eyes, sweat on her brow. Still she manages to sniff, “A matter for civil law, not criminal.”
“Policemen can carry tales as well as make arrests,” the Inspektor takes his turn to purr.
I am only half listening by now, though. For I feel a presence come barreling down the hall. The shag carpet may cover sound. It cannot muffle this much energy. Purely physical---I catch myself. No. The energy is not purely physical. Its carrier tries to PROJECT pure physicality but, there is more to him or it than that.
The door bursts open. A tall, lithe, leonine black man. As nearly perfect a physical specimen as I have seen. “Clovis! Are these men bothering you?” And though I described him as leonine, it is a cobra’s eye that takes in the three of us.
Clovis melts into a miasma of palpable relief. “No, Damba. A small misunderstanding is all. These gentlemen were just leaving.”
“The misunderstanding yet lingers, I am afraid,” the Inspektor interjects. “Our interview was commencing, not concluding.”
Sure of himself, Damba strides over to Clovis and leans over her. From my angle I can see down inside his partly unbuttoned Luigi Borrelli. The Glock stuck inside the inner waistband interests me far less than the tattoo on his chest. Every bar overseer needs armament. No man needs a tattoo. And his choice speaks volumes about its wearer.
I overhear him murmur, “I will handle this, Clo.’”
He turns to us. His earlier aggression upon entering has dissipated. His tone is one of reasonable concern. “Please, gentlemen. No one troubles Clovis while I am here. If you have no warrants or other papers, please go.” Make no mistake though about the shift in tone. If earlier he regarded us with the eye of a coiled cobra, now it is with one of the same serpent only slightly relaxed. At bottom, nothing has changed.
For all his wokery, Bihm can function as a hard-assed policeman when he wants to. “Damba? Is that a first name or a last name?”
“A first name.”
“So what is your last name?”
“Okello.”
“Going by your accent, I would guess you are not Austrian.”
“No, I am not.” One has to admire Damba Okello for not making this easy on Sergeant Bihm.
“Then where are you from?” As one has to admire Bihm for so impeccably keeping his poise.
“Uganda.” The same provenance as the missing and apparently murdered boy. At this, one could hear a pin drop.
But only for a beat. Bihm has already gone on. “Very well then, Dabma Olleko---“
“That is Damba Okello---“
“---I assume your passport is up to date and your visa in order?”
Bihm, sadly, has overplayed his hand. A homosexual African negroid “refugee” enjoys rights in Austria previously only known to Archdukes. Damba snake-smiles. “You three were just leaving, I believe?”
We are nearly in the street before any of us speak. Bihm hisses, half to himself, “I hated having to do that to the man! Shaming him, degrading him---“
“Bihm!” Jandt speaks sharply. “You are a Detective Sergeant, not a United Nations case worker. It is at least possible that one or both of those individuals inside know something about the murder. If you want to exude pity, think of the victim.”
Bihm simply stares. And why not? Every reality of his job flatly contradicts the tenets of his education. And the educated man of today will let the entire world perish before he contravenes---or simply corrects---one jotted tittle of any humanist dogma. As I said years ago, who controls the textbooks controls the state. The state and, sadly, the future for as far as I can see.
As we step out into the street and chill wind I stroke my cheek and ask, “What next, Theo?”
He looks my way and starts to reply. Catches himself and stops. For he sees that I have crossed my left index finger over the thumb as I stroke my cold cheek. The sigyll stands for the Othala rune. Rune peculiar to Wotan whom the Romans assimilated to their god Mercury, the messenger. Indication in the code that Theo and I have worked up through the years: we need to talk privately.
“Here, Jonas” he says, taking a small notebook out of his coat pocket. Scribbles something on a page and tears it out. “I have just thought of something important and the damned cell phones are not secure. Take this to Oberrat Altmann over there.” He points towards a knot of official personnel outside the entrance to St. Elisabeth’s.
The only slightly skeptical Bihm takes the folded paper and strides off. On it are written words to the effect, “Please, thank the bearer effusively for delivering the ‘important tidings.’ Ask him if I had anything else to say or any other nonsense questions that come to mind. Then jot some verbiage on this page and have him deliver it back to me. A thousand thanks, Jandt.”
After the Sergeant has gotten out of earshot, I say to Theo, “You were right to call me in on this. This is no ordinary murder. The occult angle is paramount.”
“Do you think this Clovis Sayn did it?”
“That it is something it is far too early to say. But…no.I do not think so. She is nonetheless involved somehow, I believe. But not as the perpetrator. You saw her just now. When we came in, and later with Damba. She strikes me as someone who has gotten involved with that which she cannot cope.”
“Like my---like Therese?”
After all it had been Therese Jandt’s stumbling around in the occult that first brought Theo and I into contact. My success at extricating her that won me my relative tenure as a frequently resorted-to consultant with the Bundespolizei. “Only obliquely. Our Clovis strikes me a good deal less naïve than was Therese. And, probably, somewhat involved, as hinted. Also…Theo you might as well know. When I shook Clovis’ hand, I could tell. She is…like me.”
“Like you?” Theo knows what I mean, though only in rough outline. Which is one of the reasons why he never asks me about having “found it yet.” He knows the thing sought; not its implications.
“Yes. I doubt whether she knows it, though. At least not fully. Good gods, it took ME how long to piece it together? And after that, how many more years to figure out WHY? My mission, if you will.”
“And you still do not know how, do you?”
“Very little. Almost nothing of that. But, back to the matter at hand, whatever Clovis is, I do not think she is the killer. A killer at all in fact. Though that leaves the question: when she figures out what she is and who…where will she line up? With whom will she side?”
“I might see what you mean. She will have little reason to love you.”
“To put it mildly, Theo. To put it mildly. What concerns me too is her attachment to him.”
“Whom? Damba?”
“Yes. He hides a good deal. I could feel that when he approached her office.”
“That was all an act?”
“He has concern for her, I think. That much is genuine. The question is WHY he is concerned for Clovis. It is difficult to untangle the skein of motives for any love. There is something else that might be highly significant. Did you notice anything about the Tarot cards painted on the wall of the club?”
“Tarot is a matter of which I am totally ignorant.”
“Good. But the cards on the wall should have numbered twenty-two. One, the Fool, was missing.”
“And you think this important?”
“Some authorities, Charles Williams and Alastair Crowley for instance, take the Fool as the most important card in the entire Tarot. A trump of trumps, as it were. For all his limitations, the Fool is the card of daring, new beginnings, spontaneity. The answer to the only philosophical question, ‘Why is there anything at all, rather than Nothing?’ ”
“So the Fool is something like the wild card in the Tarot deck?”
“In a manner of speaking. Or something like Da’ath among the Sephiroth.”
“Like what?”
“There are ten Sephiroth in the Qabalah. Da’ath---knowledge---is a sort of shadowy eleventh that does not properly exist on the one hand; that crops up throughout the entire Tree on the other. Like Wittgestein’s notion of logical form: it can be shown but not nailed down. In any case, back to the Fool. The other esoteric displays in the bar were complete, as near as I could tell. The Tarot alone was not.
“So, why exclude the Fool from the wall’s display?”
“The Fool is tattooed on Damba’s chest.”
I let that sink in. When I divine Theo is about to confess to complete bafflement at it all, I spare him. “I will consult my sources tonight. When something like this, today, happens it sends out ripples everywhere. First, though, I need to see Dr. Hofmann at the Kunsthistorisches. Ask him about the church over there. I doubt very much that there was anything random in its choice as a murder site.”
I see Sergeant Bihm returning with the paper returned to him. “Oberrat Altmann sends his compliments. ‘Not everyone would have thought of that. Smart fellow, that Jandt.’ His exact words.”
The Inspektor pretends to read the Oberrat’s reply. Pockets the inane note. “Come along, Bihm. Time to speak to the press. Hiedl, you’ll want to skip that of course.”
“Of course.” Before we part though, I voice one other question that has been worrying the margins of my mind. “Why is that, I wonder?”
“Why is what?” Bihm turns.
“Why does a perfectly attractive woman like Clovis Sayn want to run a sordid club for homosexual men?”
Bihm eyes Theo who, for some mysterious reason, seems to be finding my question amusing. “Well, I demand? How could the lady let herself get dragged into such a disreputable calling?”
At this, Theo bursts into open laughter and even the politically correct Bhim cannot stifle a snicker. The former recovers first, “’Drag’ is right, Hiedl. Didn’t you see the Adam’s apple on Clovis? That strong chin?”
Bihm is savoring my discomfiture like fine wine, “In short, Herr Doktor, that’s why the lady is a trans.”
OK, OK, very well und Gott verdammt. As many have said of me in the past, never have I understood woman.
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