The Execution of Justice by John E. Woods

Author:John E. Woods [John E. Woods]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Second Address to the Prosecutor: The more I write, the more improbable my report becomes. I putter away mightily at being literary, even attempt a poetic tone, record the weather conditions, attempt to be geographically accurate, check my city map, all of it just because you, Herr Prosecutor Joachim Feuser (please forgive the dead man in the morgue for speaking to you personally again), are fond of things literary, things poetic, and in general regard yourself as man of the muses, as you love to mention on every possible and impossible occasion, even before juries, and thus, without my literary trimmings, just might fling my manuscript into some corner. But my report remains a cliché. Despite the poesy. So sorry. I feel like the author of a trashy novel: me the fanatic for justice, Lienhard the Sherlock Holmes on the River Limmat, and Daphne Müller the Messalina of the Gold Coast, as the right bank of our lake is called. The statue with the sturdy breasts and the indecent pose, which I overlooked at Mock’s while admiring the living Daphne as a statue, that sensuous female made of painted plaster of Paris (not to mention the genuine one) has with the passage of time become more lively in my memory than the girl who appears in my report. Of course it’s immaterial whether, and if so, how often, she slept with Lienhard—who didn’t she sleep with?—but people’s inner motives and processes are after all essential to my report—how things come about in this convoluted world and why. If the external event is correct, the interior motive can be guessed at, even if it can’t be nailed down with certainty; if the external facts are incorrect, if intercourse occurred and it is not registered, or if one mentions it when it did not occur, one hovers in a vacuum, in the void. As is the case here. How did Lienhard discover the secret of the “false” Monika Steiermann? By sleeping with her? Then a great many people would have known it. Did she love him? Then she wouldn’t have told him. Was she afraid? Possibly. And as far as Benno goes, was Lienhard bent on suspecting him from the beginning? Was Daphne the reason? I ask these questions because people have laid the blame for Daphne’s death at my door—I shouldn’t have gone to see the genuine Monika Steiermann. But Daphne had asked me to. I had to pursue a possible lead. I had accepted the job and the advance of fifteen thousand francs, even though I believed in the impossibility of the possibility—and still believe in it, for there is no doubt that Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler murdered Winter. That it could have been someone else is only a possibility, but one that means nothing; the fiction that I had to posit for my search, the fiction that Kohler was not the murderer, necessarily implied the possibility of neglected facts coming to light. For the rest, I have to write the

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