Der Einbruch

Night’s obsidian hush folds over a Berlin tenement where Harry Jaeger, lank-haired locksmith with soot in his veins, prowls corridors like a famished fox. His mother’s pawn ticket, his father’s war medal, and a single rust-scabbed key orbit his pocket as he plots entry into a banker’s mausoleum of an apartment—an Aladdin’s cave of bearer bonds, foxed letters, and a gramophone that croons Schubert while the city starves. Yet the heist, sketched on butcher paper and rehearsed in the hush of a shuttered cinema, detonates into an oneiric free-fall once the door yields: the banker’s wife, a somnambulant sylph in silk chemise, mistakes Jaeger for her long-lost brother; the banker himself, a cadaverous aesthete, invites the burglar to a candlelit game of chess for the soul of the apartment; a child’s music box spills a lullaby that liquefies time, forcing Jaeger to relive every prior trespass in stuttering montage. Dawn finds the treasury empty, the safe yawning like a bored sphinx, and the locksmith reeling out into the street wearing the banker’s monogrammed slippers—his loot nothing but the echo of his own breath, his punishment the knowledge that the real lock was always the one inside his ribcage.