To be sure, Sergeant Piotrak believed that he was driving a dead man, that the Inspector, whom he had come across by the stable and the barn, had suddenly had a stroke. But this was not so. True, the Inspector was beginning to die, but he was still alive. How could he, poor Eibenschütz, know that he had been hit on the head with a stone? How could he know that he had been tied to the sleigh with ropes? While he was being taken for dead he was experiencing something quite different:

He was no longer an Inspector of Weights and Measures, he was himself a trader. He had nothing but false weights, a thousand, ten thousand, false weights. He was standing there behind a shop counter, the ten thousand false weights in front of him. The counter could not hold them all. And at any moment the Inspector might come.

Suddenly there was a ring – the door had a bell – and in came the Great Inspector, the greatest of all Inspectors – so it seemed to Eibenschütz. The Great Inspector looked a little like the Jew Mendel Singer, and also a little like Sameschkin. Eibenschütz said: ‘But I know you!’ But the Great Inspector replied: ‘It’s all the same to me. Duty is duty! Now we shall test your weights!’

Good, you can test the weights now, Inspector Eibenschütz said to himself. They are false, but what can I do about it? I am a tradesman, like all the other tradesmen in Zlotogrod. I sell with false weights.

Behind the Great Inspector stood a gendarme with plumed helmet and bayonet and him Eibenschütz did not know at all. But he was afraid of him, his bayonet glittered so. The Great Inspector began to check the weights. Finally he said – and Eibenschütz was extremely surprised: ‘All your weights are false, and yet they are all correct. So we shall not report you! We believe that all your weights are correct. I am the Great Inspector.’

At that moment the gendarme arrived at the Zlotogrod hospital. The Inspector was unloaded, and when the duty doctor arrived he paused for a moment and then said to the gendarme Piotrak: ‘The man is dead! Why have you bothered to bring him here?’

41

So died the Inspector of Weights and Measures, Anselm Eibenschütz; and, as they say, no one cared two hoots about it.

Sergeant Piotrak succeeded in establishing that Jadlowker had killed the Inspector. Kapturak, after he had been arrested, and after a stringent cross-examination, spoke of a grudge Jadlowker had towards Eibenschütz.

By chance, two more so-called cholera victims were caught, namely the pickpocket Kaniuk and the horse-thief Kiewen. Kapturak and Jadlowker had already been held in the Zloczow remand prison for eight days when the great annual event of the Zlotogrod District suddenly occurred. That is, the ice over the Struminka broke and spring began.