Ten Heller After Ten

The fog had come down in the night and had not lifted. It lay in the Kirchengasse at the height of the first-floor windows, and under it the cobbles were wet and black, though no rain had fallen. The street lamps were still burning, each in a yellow ball of its own, because nobody had yet come round to put them out.

It was a Friday in November, and not yet seven. The constable's message had reached the district station while I was taking my coat off: a man dead in the piano workshop in the Kirchengasse, the master of it, and — the desk sergeant had written the words down exactly — a piano is lying on him. I put the coat on again and walked. At that hour the seventh district belongs to the bakers' carts and the coal wagons, and I met nothing else between the station and the church.

The house was one of the tall rented houses of the quarter, five floors of grey plaster going up into the fog. On the ground floor, facing the street, was a shop window, and I stopped in front of it. Behind the glass stood four or five upright pianos under dust sheets, pale shapes like the furniture of a house shut up for the summer, and across the glass ran a line of gilt letters: F. Rieger · Klavierbauer. Piano maker. There was no light in the shop at all.

The only light was beside it. Next to the shop window the house had its street gate, a double door high enough for a loaded cart, with one leaf standing open; and inside the gateway, low down on the left, a single small window showed yellow through the fog.

A constable stood in front of the open leaf, stamping his feet. The gate had been opened at six, he said, as it was every morning. He had been fetched off his beat a little after midnight, had seen a piano fallen on a man, and had sent for the police surgeon at first light; it was the surgeon who had told him to send for us. I asked who was inside. The doctor, he said, and the young fellow who found him, and the women upstairs.

I went in under the arch, towards the yellow window.