Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/494

 Young Götz easily blackmailed Burkl out of many small sums, during several years. Then Götz died. But unfortunately the intimacy had been known, or strongly suspected, by a barber named Wölfl. After Götz was dead, Wölfl and his wife began the most elaborate, audacious and prolonged series of extortions which can be conceived, against the unlucky and frightened Bürkl. First, Wölfl claimed to have letters from Bürkl to the dead boy, Götz. He claimed that a whole set of his—Wölfl's—acquaintances "knew all about" what had passed between Bürkl and young Götz, and meant to make trouble. These parties Wölfl kindly undertook to "keep quiet", to "buy off," and so on—at the plundered Burkl's-expense. Such persons were fictions—the "Mrs. Harris" sort of creations of Wölfl and wife. The parties were said to live in America and elsewhere; to be on the point of coming to Munich to prosecute Bürkl. Their letters were concocted by Wölfl and his wife, and the timorous Bürkl never saw any post-marked envelopes for these precious communications. The Wölfls grew rich. Their uneducated wastefulness was talked of, in their quarter of Munich. Their wealth was all at the cost of the miserable Bürkl! Automobiles, jewels and tine clothes, bank-interests, prodigal and foolish squanderings, transatlantic journeys,—all entered into the mystery of the parvenu Wölfl ménage. The sums demanded and received from Bürkl ranged upward and upward; from first a few dozen Marks, to hundreds—and to thousands and tens of thousands. Josephine Sarvi, a pseud'o-betrothed for the dead Götz, was presented. She also received a large sum, as hush-money for "what Götz had told her"—a complete fiction. At last the despairing Bürkl who—in spite of his large wealth—saw ruin facing him if the matter did not end, with a belated courage put it before the court. The two Wölfl were arrested and tried. (See, the "Münchener Nachrichten" and other journals, for January 23, et seq., 1908.) The amount that the blackmailers had "got out of" of Bürkl approximated the almost incredible sum of five