The Black Obelisk Read Online Free PDF Page A

investigations—"
    Eduard turns quickly and rushes off. We wait till he is some distance away. Then Willy's great body begins to quiver with soundless laughter. Renée de la Tour smiles gently. Her eyes are sparkling.
    "Willy," I say, "I'm a superficial sort of fellow and therefore this has been one of the finest moments of my young life—but now tell us what's going on!"
    Willy, shaking with silent merriment, points to Renée, " Excusez, Mademoiselle ," I say. " Je me —"
    Willy's laughter redoubles at my French. "Tell him, Lotte," he bursts out.
    "What?" Renée asks with a gentle smile in a soft, growling bass.
    We stare at her. "She is an artist," Willy gasps. "A duettist. She sings duets. Do you understand now?"
    "No."
    "She sings duets. But alone. One verse high, one low. One soprano and one bass."
    A great light dawns. "But the bass—?" I ask.
    "Talent!" Willy explains. "And then of course practice. You must hear her sometime when she does a spat between husband and wife. Lotte is fabulous."
    We agree. The goulash appears. Eduard sneaks around at a distance watching our table. His mistake is that he always wants to find out why something happens. That spoils his poetry and makes him distrustful in life. At the moment he is brooding over the mysterious bass voice. He doesn't know what lies ahead of him. Georg Kroll, a cavalier of the old school, has invited Renée de la Tour and Willy to be his guests to celebrate our victory. Later, in payment for our excellent goulash, he will hand the infuriated Eduard four bits of paper whose combined worth today would hardly buy a couple of soup bones.
    It is early evening. I am sitting beside the window in my room over the office. The house is low, angular, and old. Like this Whole part of the street, it once belonged to the church that stands in the square at the foot. Priests and church officials used to live in it; but for sixty years it has belonged to Kroll and Sons. The property consists of two low houses joined by an arched entryway; in the second lives Knopf, the retired sergeant major, with his wife and three daughters. Then comes the beautiful old garden with our array of tombstones, and behind that at the left a kind of two-story wooden coach house on the ground floor of which Kurt Bach, our sculptor, has his workroom. He models mourning lions and mounting eagles for our war memorials and he draws the inscriptions on the tombstones which are later chipped out by the masons. In his free time he plays the guitar and wanders and dreams of the gold medals which at some future date will be awarded to the renowned Kurt Bach. He is thirty-two years old.
    The upper floor of the coach house is rented to the coffin-maker Wilke. Wilke is an emaciated man, and nobody knows whether he has a family or not. Our relations with him are friendly, resting on mutual advantage. When we have a brand-new corpse not yet provided with a coffin, we recommend Wilke or tip him off; he does the same for us when he knows of a body that has not yet been snapped up by our competitors' hyenas; for the battle for the dead is bitter and is fought tooth and nail. Oskar Fuchs, the traveler for Holl-mann and Klotz, even resorts to the use of onions. Before going into a house where there is a corpse, he gets out a couple of cut onions and smells them until his eyes are full of tears—then he marches in, proves his sympathy for the dear departed, and tries to make a sale. For this reason he is called Weeping Oskar. It's a strange fact that if the survivors had only paid half as much attention to many of the departed when they were still alive as they do when it no longer matters, then the corpses would most certainly have foregone the most expensive mausoleum—but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
    Silently the street fills with the transparent smoke of twilight. There is already a light in Lisa's room, but this time the curtains are drawn, a sign that the horse