Suddenly it was night. Gurdweill peeped through a little window, which was actually more like a round hole the size of the circumference of an ordinary glass, into a brightly lit room. He looked through the peephole with one eye (there was no room for both), standing on tiptoe, because the hole was higher than he was. It cost him a great effort, but he did it nevertheless, because he knew that he was the sole witness and if he didn’t see everything the deed would remain shrouded in darkness. Inside the room a man stood bending over a long, smooth bench (Gurdweill fixed this detail in his memory, since it seemed to him of the utmost importance). The man was standing with his back to him, but Gurdweill knew very well who he was. ‘He thinks,’ the thought crossed his mind, ‘that if he hides his face I won’t know who he is! But I know very well: it’s our tall doorman! He won’t hide from me!’ The doorman was standing bent over the bench, on which another man was lying, and hitting his skull rhythmically and deliberately with a stone, as if executing some procedure that demanded great precision. The man lying on the bench — although Gurdweill could not see his face, he knew it was his brother-in-law Freddy — jerked his legs as if he wanted to kick the doorman, but the latter was standing at his head and also holding Freddy firmly with his other hand, so that his victim could neither free himself nor reach him with his kicks. In the meantime the doorman went on hitting him, and in the end Freddy lay still with his long legs stretched out in front of him. Gurdweill knew that he was now dead. And so it was. The doorman drew himself up to his full height and threw the stone into a corner. Then he rubbed his hands together two or three times as if well pleased with what he had done, buttoned up his coat, and lit a cigarette. Gurdweill glanced at Freddy. The man was obviously dead, although there were no signs of blood or wounds on his face. ‘The wounds are internal,’ he explained to himself, ‘because he killed him with a flat stone, which is the same as strangling’ — and now he had to hurry in case the murderer escaped. Despite his terrible exhaustion he got onto the tram with Franzi Mitteldorfer, and within minutes he found himself standing in front of the police commissioner, who was sitting at a black-covered table and looking at him through a pair of opera glasses. Gurdweill opened his mouth to tell him about the murder, when suddenly heavy iron cables began coming out of his mouth and falling in a pile at his feet, and with them a spurt of blood. He was unable to close his mouth or to utter a sound. An inhuman fear seized hold of him as he realised that these cables would be his undoing. Ah, if only he could speak and prove the justice of his case! He tried to make signs with his hands, but they too refused to obey him. Besides, he knew that signs were useless; he had to speak, to speak! And he began to pull the cables out of his mouth, hoping that they would soon come to an end and allow him to speak. His hands were full of blood, but the cables kept on coming. There was a huge pile of cables surrounding him like a wall. Suddenly the commissioner threw the opera glasses down with a melodramatic gesture like that of a bad actor, and leaped to his feet.