Director Ernst Bennert of the Psychiatric Hospital slid his hand over his enormous bald skull. He examined his wet palm with care – like a palmist. The mound of Venus was sticky with sweat, tiny drops glistening in the life line. Two flies dug convulsively into a stain left by a glass of sweet tea on the oilcloth. The light of a merciless, setting sun flooded the window of his consulting room.The heat did not seem to trouble the man with a shining black mane who was also sitting there. He turned his chubby face – adorned with a moustache and sprouting stubble – to the sun with evident pleasure. He rubbed his cheek with a hand on which flexed the tattoo of a scorpion. The man looked at Bennert. His eyes, dimmed by the sun’s glare, became suddenly attentive.“We both know, doctor,” he said with a distinct foreign accent, “that you cannot refuse the institution I represent.”Bennert did know. He glanced out of the window and, instead of the once splendid but now ruined tenement house on the corner, saw the icebound panorama of Siberia, frozen rivers, heaps of snow and human limbs protruding from beneath them.
