A lightning bolt.

     In the past, Farnsteiner would never have let slip that he carried such a tattoo. I had never seen him sweat like this either, taking off his coat and baring his Viking toughness to the cold air.

     Tight-lipped, with a melancholy no one could account for, he now orders me to go in.

     At noon the call came through about the third victim, the one that ended the yearly run of murders in Mannheim. There is something profane and divine in it all.

     At headquarters, colleagues were already theorising about the modus operandi, either the work of a sect or, at the very least, a lone zealot. Our own haunt. Four years of systematic pogroms had earned him a select anthology of nicknames, a palliative to soothe the mediocrity of our department. It was no pogrom in the strict sense; we used the word out of cowardice and prurient fascination, because it saved us from facing what lay beneath.

     There is something in the haberdashery’s appearance that seems made to breed the most fully formed kinds of dread. Weariness has scored Farnsteiner’s features; he unholsters his gun, which is incongruous when one considers criminal psychology. No less incongruous, to my mind, is how much time we have given Madame Gertrude. There are orthodoxies that cannot abide superstition, and science and religion are two of them. I admit the clairvoyant’s ability surpasses my prejudice by a wide margin. Yet I have placed little faith in the inferences she makes.

     In the Monadology, Leibniz argues that all things in the universe are tightly interrelated, from the most rudimentary species up to the divine. In other words, the execution of an idea is not a matter of space alone; somehow it draws in time too, reaching beyond human physical austerity into the cosmos’s incomprehensible expanse. A catastrophe often depends on some arbitrary incident with endless consequences; perhaps a dove crossing the Rhine inspired the Reichstag fire. What secret logic could ever justify a perpetrator of genocide?

     It is Farnsteiner’s eloquent Parabellum that rouses me from my reverie, indicating the adjoining room. He drags a thick hand over his brow. The quarters are cramped, the ventilation meagre. By torchlight he reveals a mouldy cellar whose far end is cut away by the dimness, as if the darkness stopped at a slash.

     We descend.

​

*

​

The first attack, four years ago, remains vivid in my mind.

     Chief Inspector Heinz clipped the hours with an incandescent dispute, at first centred on Götterdämmerung. The phone jarred us awake from that fragile gaiety. An anonymous woman’s voice informed us that a body had been found in the vicinity of Augustaanlage. Farnsteiner came out of his office immediately and set the enquiry in motion.

     He was reputed to exist only in periodic appearances. Nothing beyond what duty required. The victim had died by strangulation. His name was Benjamin Albalak. He was Jewish. He was a gynaecologist who practised medicine with a kind of piety a few streets from the scene. A generous soul, he freely helped impoverished women in labour.

     In the beginning we assumed it was no more than the usual gang scuffle. We were utterly wrong. There was never a trail: the call invariably came late, from numbers that could not exist or from silent phone boxes, and by the time we got there it was already over.

     Over the following days of that first year, anonymous notices of two more murders flooded the agency’s inbox. My fears were not misplaced; once again the victims were Jewish, Heinrich Bejakar and Evelyn Camhi. It was easy to foresee the pattern that linked them.

     For the psychopath, the alphabetical sequence had been a symbolic mode of extermination for more than a century.

     That, together with the execution date, left me with a suspicion I dared not voice. In our line of work, certain patterns are best confirmed before they are spoken.

     A year passed before I could verify it. The following August, when the respected rabbi of the Othmarschen synagogue, Gunnar Martin Dubrowski, was murdered while visiting our city—where he had been invited to officiate at a ceremony—I confirmed the hidden chain behind the motive: the correspondence with the Hebrew lunar calendar, which reckoned the date as the Ninth of Av. It was a baleful date for anyone of the Talmudic tradition, since it evoked bitter convergences in their history: the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar; the sacking of the Second Temple by Titus; the Spanish expulsion of 1492.

     Consensus has settled on three ceremonies. One killing for each, that was how our scourge worked. History has proved that the most refined form of opprobrium is not to affront the individual, but to affront the memory of his forebears. Perhaps the Romans did much the same when, after quelling Simon Bar Kokhba’s rebellion, they rechristened Judea as Palestine, paying tribute to the Philistines, sworn foes of the Hebrews.

​

*

​

Two days earlier, we found David Jacobi dead, a knife in his throat.

     We had previously made use of Gertrude’s gift under Heinz’s instructions, his intelligence readily corrupted by what he preferred to label miscellaneous activities. As for me, my only excuse is the pointless display of the evidence, the ritual of diligence. Who ever said this was not thin ice.

     “You will need to bring me some garment or possession of the deceased. Then we shall see.”

     So I did. Gertrude was short, neurotic, and profoundly Catholic. The languid scent of incense saturated the room. It was common among soothsayers to ascribe esoteric properties to incense. The skull on the bureau did not seem any less of a stereotype to me, nor did the patristic volumes arranged along the room. When Brandt and I returned, she took Jacobi’s shirt and began to scrutinise it. Then she slipped into a trance.

     Brandt, bored beyond patience, lit a cigarette and jammed it between his lips to conceal the mockery splitting his face.

     “Yes, I can see it. It is a cobbled alley. The cold is sharp, and the place is dark, terribly dark. He is terrified of the shadows.”

     We did not utter a word to break her outburst; we merely shared an awkward sense of solidarity. We waited patiently for her to come round.

     “Gentlemen, you would do well to be very cautious with the man you are after. I can sense it, his soul is black as a moonless night. You are laughing, are you? In time you will concede the point… Yes, he will strike again.”

     Fritz Brandt, a devotee of police procedure, moved straight to it and pressed the medium for particulars about the murderer.

     “This tragedy was committed with a bladed weapon,” said Gertrude.

     A thick blue vein stood out along Brandt’s temple. It did not take us long to grasp how illogical the situation was.

     “I am terribly sorry I have been unable to assist you further. The vision was blurred, and the night contributed to it. Perhaps we shall have better fortune next time.”

     I handed her a banknote; Brandt turned his back and left without a word. As we returned, my companion reproached the captain for his ingenuous habit of indulging every fabrication. He boasted of the Teutonic gift for dialectic. He invoked Hegel and Spengler. I said that Germany was indebted to mysticism for a hidden triumph or two, and that Hitler himself took counsel from astrologers. In a tone of boundless contempt, he observed that the fervour of power can corrode the highest form of thought; that defending nonsense is to renounce causality. I was far from disagreeing with him, yet it is well known that a creed is tempered only in contradiction.

​

*

​

The night’s chill stiffens my bones. I restated to Farnsteiner my intention to suspend proceedings and step out for a coffee. I know exactly what working with him entails, and still something in me will not accept that we should bring the search to an end here. Brandt had been assigned another case. Wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, and without answering me, Farnsteiner asks me to shift the wine rack a little. A miasmal stench drifts up from the cabinet.

​

*

​

When we reached headquarters, Heinz, turning to Brandt, demanded the results of our enquiry. Brandt answered that there was nothing to report. I handled the particulars, since it was clear my companion had no intention of cooperating in the least. Meanwhile, Oberländer was looking up the K section of Mannheim’s directory of Jewish families online. The handful of Jews still in Germany lived with the dread of renewed chauvinism, a dread not far from reality.

     Obesity and hypertension compelled the captain to move slowly; two months earlier, during his transfer, he had already suffered a heart attack in Westphalia. He frowned and then uttered a drawn out imprecation.

     Farnsteiner went over the list with an odd, almost pedantic precision.

     Yesterday was the bleakest day. Powerless, we waited for the fateful call that would announce the second victim. By then the deed would already have been done. That, compounded by the scrutiny of a grotesque volume of records, overwhelmed us with a sensation bordering on agony. When the telephone blared, none of us were surprised that, on the other end, the cold voice of an unknown gave the wretch’s location.

     Like a patient receiving a terrible verdict, we felt a kind of resigned relief. The office sank into silence.

     I scanned for Brandt, so we could head to the new address together. He wrote up a report while stubbing out his ninth cigarette. He told me Farnsteiner had assigned him to another task, the kidnapping of the Bergner boy, which had also been left unresolved.

     The morning papers were shattering the police’s reputation.

     The distance, haunted by Gothic churches, Baroque abbeys, and implausible castles, stitched together a nagging foreboding. Behind the wheel, Farnsteiner brooded on a course of action. I glimpsed the Rhine and remembered that time is a river.

     Bird droppings anointed the windscreen.

     Margarite Kreskis’s battered purse might serve as the required catalyst for Madame Gertrude’s gift; it was seven o’clock when I rapped the metal knocker shaped like a dragon’s head. A thick cigar hampered her speech.

     “I was quite certain you would return.”

     A cold tremor ran through my spine. It would be difficult to speak of the fluctuations of consciousness I experienced; let it suffice that I reconstruct, in the interest of proper discernment, the actions that bear upon the crime.

​

*

​

We stepped into the sitting room. The last thing Gertrude said still rings in my mind. What was she getting at when she said the cosmos is not arranged to tolerate neglect? Two things torment the spirit—intrigue and silence. Farnsteiner might very well be made of those two things. He does not so much as flinch at the reek of a dead rat.

     The cellar’s dampness magnifies the cold, and I hear Gertrude again, hiding among the trees, she said, she could not see him.

     Now and then I sensed a grimace in Heinz that gave away his fascination with the miscellaneous activities. Most of all when he made me describe my interviews with Gertrude. It occurred to me that our bungling and his prurient appetite, taken together, gave the press far too much to work with.

     Gertrude had said she was screaming, but it was useless. There was no one around. She described a bandstand, and a runnel that spilled murky water.

     Back at headquarters, my colleagues were debating, in a grotesque and jeering mood, who would be the next body. I rebuked them for it. Someone remarked that humanity is monstrous the moment one descends from Mount Horeb. Someone else said it made sense for me to be anxious, given that my mother’s surname was Leoy. My mother used to say the name came from Sephardic Jews who fled Spain. I never fully credited her. Now I think of that old sepia photograph: her grandfather in a tallit.

     It was absurd to consider it. That degree of method left no room for audacity in the criminal. I was, after all, a police officer. I heard her again in my head: now she could see it clearly, and there was a profound resentment in his eyes.

​

*

​

It unsettled me not to know precisely what his gaze meant; I let out an exasperated yawn. I was tired of everything to do with the supernatural. I ask Farnsteiner to lower his weapon. He ignores me, as ever.

     Gertrude had said there was something in him, something supernatural.

     I could not help thinking of the relation between science and the esoteric, almost the same as that between reason and perception; perhaps perception comes first. I once met a yogi in Ludhiana who claimed, as he walked over live embers, that every habit is a distraction, that fire burns because we have decided to believe it burns. Centuries of scientific conclaves have brought us to the irrevocable conclusion that our perception of the world is imperfect; that discord grants the divine a certain jurisdiction. Can the intellect comprehend what lies beyond the physical?

     I have, at times, entertained clumsiness as a possibility; there is no greater clumsiness than trying to interpret the geometry of a god.

     Gertrude said there was a sign. She could not grasp what it meant. An old Scandinavian character, she believed; a rune, or perhaps an S in the traditional alphabet. Perhaps…

     “A lightning bolt!”