Helen shrugged; it was just a question.
“Do you speak German?” he asked sharply, finally letting his voice betray some hidden hostility. They had been conversing in English.
“Yes, I speak some German and some French.”
“I don’t care about French. I can speak French perfectly, and yet when I do I am never so misunderstood. Useless language.”
“Herr Anselm,” said Helen, unable to follow Anselm’s sharp verbal turns. She was frustrated by her incapacity and felt like an idiot child. The distress showed in her voice, in her words, “is my visit disturbing you?
“Not at all, my dear,” he replied, suddenly reassuring. “You remind me of someone.”
“Well, do you have any ideas at all why Martin might be investigating the blocks?”
“Your husband, you say? Don’t women keep track of their husbands these days? I never was a husband but that would have been my expectation. To be kept track of, that is.” He looked off into an even further distance, leading Helen’s eyes on another exploration of the room. The reflecting glare of the glass doors bounced back, shutting her irises down stop by stop like an aperture closing in a camera.
“I can’t help you.” Anselm frowned, referring back to Helen’s question. “I am so distant from the art world. The humanities—men like your Herr Ganz—have forgotten about me, and that is how I prefer it. But that’s not to say that I don’t keep my ear to the ground, so to speak, that I don’t know what’s going on.” He seemed unaware that he was contradicting himself. “Perhaps you could go to the library in Munich. Ask there. Or go to Venice. Or go see Stefan Arany at the Semmelweis in Budapest. Yes, go to Budapest, after all, this is their sort of thing. It’s a small museum but very respectable. In fact,” Anselm’s voice was picking up speed, “I could write you an introduction. But don’t mail it expecting a response. No one in Budapest ever replies to letters.” He opened a drawer and chose a crisp sheet of letterhead. Selecting a pen standing in a crystal glass, he started to write. Helen followed the nib gliding along its trail of ink, watched him guide his fingers along a straight path using his thumb to measure the drops to the next line. Without knowing that he was virtually blind she would never have been able to tell by watching him write. He finished the note quickly, blew on it to dry the ink, passed it first in front of his eyes and then to her. It was in Hungarian.
She folded the letter and slid it into her bag. “Thank you. You know, I don’t quite see the point of going to Budapest. I have had no indication that he ever left Vienna.”
“Have you any indication that he stayed in Vienna?”
“No,” she said.
“Well, then, what’s the harm of going?”
“It seems like even more of a wild goose chase then coming to Vienna. He could be anywhere. He could have become tired of this story and moved on to do something else. It wouldn’t be the first time that a journalist had lost interest in something. Here, Vienna, is the last place that anyone has heard from him.”
“If you were your husband, if you were researching this story, I would also suggest that you go to Venice and Padua and then to Bologna.”
“Why Padua? Why Bologna?”
“You would come closer to finding the very foundations of anatomical art. And I would also say go to Greece—to Samos, and to Syria—to Damascus. If you want to understand what motivates a collector, start at the source.”
“Herr Anselm,” interrupted Helen. “Sources and foundations are all very well for scholars, but Martin was just a journalist sniffing out a story. He wouldn’t have gone traipsing around looking for fundamental inspiration. He’d want to find the here and now. Thanks for the suggestions,” she stood up, feeling ungracious and rude, “and for the letter. I’ll go to Budapest and try to meet with Mr Arany, but I’ll not be able to go to Italy or Syria.”
“Ah,” he smiled at her, “you have the mind and the voice of a pragmatist who knows just what to do. I suppose you’d like me to pat you on the head,” he added sarcastically. “Why are you looking for your husband? Have you no personal self-respect? Let him come back to you if he wants to. And didn’t you say you were an art historian? Perhaps you are a decorator? A historian would know how to delve below the surface. Do you want me to give you a primer on how to find Mr Martin Evans, his missing body, his invisible flesh? Go to the post office, get a telephone directory, call the police. Copy his picture from some fuzzy newspaper reunion picnic and paste it to lamp posts around the city with the big headline ‘MISSING.’ Read Miss Christie and walk around with a magnifying glass. I see you have one already.” He picked up the glass from the box and banged its steel rim against the table a couple of times. “Talk to journalists, to hacks, but don’t talk to me, through whom the blood you see on these crumbling charts flows. From me you’ll not get what you’re looking for, you’ll get questions and mazes, contradictions and blemishes, but most of all you’ll get the terrible truths that you need to find a man who not only has an identity on paper but who also has muscle, nerve, tendon, and bone.” The firmness and stillness of his face indicated that he’d finished his tirade.
Helen sat back down. “Why Padua?”
“Because Vesalius taught there for many years.”
“What does Vesalius in particular have to do with all of this?”
Anselm frowned again, grabbed his lower lip, and rolled it around between his thumb and index finger. “Nothing,” he said, “nothing at all.” If he hadn’t suddenly changed his mind about revealing these “terrible truths” then he’d certainly postponed the moment. He turned his attention back to the box still lying open on his desk.
“Now, what else do you have in here.” He slid the booklet back into place. Helen noticed that it was the right way round and oriented the same way it had been originally. “Your finger?” he asked waggishly, waving the bone about; his abrupt mood swing left Helen adrift and a bit unhinged. Like the train conductor many days before, he tried it out against his own. “Do you know who this belongs to?” he asked.
“No, no,” said Helen. “Do you?”
“Oh yes, I do have an idea. It’s just a guess but if I’m correct I really ought to be angry, very angry. Exhuming the past. Yes, ought to be very angry. Been jewelry shopping, have you?” he said, pointing to the ring. Helen suspected that Anselm was trying to make up for his outburst with what was probably uncharacteristic joviality. He flipped quickly through the rest of the stuff, ignoring the dog tag, running his hands across the engraving of the tooth extraction, and wincing with disgust at the feel of the butt. “Yes, we all know that Rosa smokes too much. Must we be reminded of it at all turns?” He picked up the butt and tossed it into the garbage can beside his desk. Helen was about to protest but realized that it really was disgusting: it had left a yellowed ashy stain on both pages.
He slammed the lid shut and pushed the box back towards her. “Yes, lovely, now call on me in a couple of days, and let me know how you’re getting on.”
CHAPTER 8
VESALIUS
Vesalius, always Vesalius,” the fluid name coiled around Helen’s mind, interweaving itself through her other thoughts. During the long walk back, marked by detours to shops, carried along by crowds, down peculiar little streets, through the deepening cold and intruding dusk. She always came back to Vesalius. The hotel, at last, and its falsely welcome glow of warmth and light, the mat at the entrance dotted with crusts of dirty snow stamped off of boots and not yet melted.
Speculation about Vesalius was replaced by a preoccupation with Friedrich Anselm. Old men were unknown territory for Helen. For that matter, so were young men. All men. But she felt that she knew Herr Anselm already and knew him well. He was like a familiar book one finds in an old book shop, a book that had once been on an oftencontemplated shelf in someone’s home, in some library: often held, often opened, but never read—the contents, foreign territory; but never mind, the thing itself, an old friend. She felt so comfortable in his presence, yet on g
uard, afraid that—like the book—once read, once revealed, he would betray that intimacy by telling her something? Or nothing? Which would be worse? He had welcomed her in to his house, showed her his remarkable collection, shared his blindness with her, flaunted his independence from its sightless grip. She feared that his intellect was illusory, that his words spun a magic that deceived her. Seduced her. She feared this—to be seduced by illusion—but she refused to admit it. When he had helped her off with her coat, she had nearly leaned against him, the way a child will lean against a trusted parent. Not collapsed, just leaned. But neither, really, and just in time. And a good thing, she smiled to herself, thinking of his frailness, the bones almost visible, barely covered by thin skin. Her own build, not much heftier, was saddled with the vestiges of a phantom girth, seemingly immense.
Had he ever been anyone’s lover? Had he ever been anyone’s father? He couldn’t have only been a scholar. At least he hadn’t mistaken her for Rosa like that idiot Ehrlach. But then, he couldn’t see, could he?
The next morning, hoping to get her Vesalius print back, Helen telephoned Herr Ganz again. She spoke to his secretary, who suggested she come in and meet with the director the following morning, leaving Helen with a free day. She called the Semmelweis, and although she was told that the director was away for three weeks, made an appointment with him anyway for the day immediately following his return. In the meantime, she ‘d find something to do, she told herself.
When Helen arrived at the Josephinum she discovered a museum surrounded by police cars and ambulances, the winter air heavy with panic and concern. A cordon had been erected around the entrance; the police were not allowing anyone into the grounds. She stood around for a short while, stamping her feet, rubbing her hands, in the company of a few other hardy bystanders, but finally gave up and went to find a cafe from which she could get a cup of coffee and telephone the director’s office. She was again put through to the secretary, whose smothered, breaking voice had the damp muteness of someone who had been crying. She repeated her name several times to the distraught man, but it wasn’t until she mentioned the Vesalius woodcut that he recalled who she was. The dam in his throat broke, and his news hit Helen like a malevolent wave. The director had been murdered the night before, his body left in the museum, stumbled upon only that morning. Stunned, she pleaded for details. The secretary idiotically repeated the word wax, over and over, nothing else. She asked if she could come by sometime that afternoon, to talk to him, to at least pick up her print. She knew this was insensitive, but the director had been her only real link to information. By the time she hung up she still wasn’t sure if the secretary realized that she intended to come, but decided to hazard the chance that he would see her anyway.
Her coffee had cooled into an expensive puddle of lukewarm brown milk when she remembered it sitting on the table next to her. She drank it anyway, barely noticing the coagulating skin of cream forming along the rim of the cup, scarcely registering the waste of heat. Death wasn’t such a stranger to Helen’s life; other people, closer people, had died. She had only met Ganz once, so his death meant nothing personal to her. But it was hard all the same, in a foreign city where the few people you know make up your entire world, even if only for a short while. And he was, as she had observed when she met with him, so normal, so steady. His death removed the only vestiges of sanity that she had been able to secure since that dreadful morning with Rosa on the train. Draining the last of the coffee, she spooned the dregs of unmelted sugar crystals into her mouth.
Three o’clock found her back at the museum. Most of the police cars were gone, the blockade removed, but the door was shut and locked. She rang the bell and waited impatiently for someone to come. A guard finally opened the door a sliver and peered out. She motioned to him to open it wider; he shook his head. She pulled out her notebook, flapping it meaninglessly in front of his eyes. He asked her what she wanted, eventually letting her talk her way into the building. As he led her up the stairs to the director’s office, she could see a large group of people clustered in one of the display rooms, near where a figure had been knocked over and smashed.
The secretary’s office was a scene of chaos, stuffed full of police officers. Any pretense of answering the telephone had been abandoned—it was left to ring unceasingly—the clamoring peals echoing all the way down the hall. Papers were strewn about, giving the many uniformed men crowded into the tiny room no choice but to tread on them. Filing cabinets hung open, their contents disgorged like the entrails of slaughtered animals; framed drawings had been knocked off the wall, the glass shattered, the drawings ripped out and left as litter amongst the other papers; bookcases had been overturned, the helpless books torn at the spines, left gasping where they had fallen.
Helen squeezed into the maelstrom, catching a glimpse of Ganz’s office through the open door. The destruction within was, if possible, even worse. She stood open-mouthed, struggling to make sense of the vandalism, when one of the men noticed her and tried to maneuver her out the door. She wrenched her arm away from his grasp and called out to the secretary, unable to remember his name, making a fool of herself trying to get him to turn around. When he finally pivoted in her direction, more in a response to the frenzy surrounding him, than as an answering gesture, she could see that her impression of his distress was correct; his eyes were red and swollen, he looked like he himself wanted to die. He told the man to leave her be and turned his back. She retreated to the corner to be the unnoticed witness of this requiem to an inexplicable shambles.
While she stood slumped against the wall, she thought about her mother and her aunt and what they’d make of her involvement in such a scene. She hadn’t been bothered by their phantom appearances for several days; they must have been frightened off by Rosa. Rosa had ousted them. Rosa, the vanquisher of stray guilts. Great, thought Helen. I exchange two annoying old dears for a foul wreck; two nagging consciences for a weak-kneed dance with evil. Evil. Where did that word pop out of? Since when had she regarded Rosa as evil? Malicious, deranged, disturbing, but evil? Helen felt foolish cataloguing Rosa’s iniquities: she broke into hotel rooms (although she fully admitted this); she was a liar (or was this just an assumption? No, she’d lied about the door chain); she had manipulated Helen (but maybe this was Helen’s fault); she looked soiled, unwashed (since when did squeamishness justify sanctimonious judgments, anyway?).
Rosa hadn’t said anything about Ganz. She thought back to where she’d first encountered his name. It was from a message slip in Martin’s box at the newspaper. Did Rosa know Ganz? She seemed to know everyone in this game.
It wasn’t until hours later when the office was cleared of men and equipment that Helen emerged, rigid yet shaky, out into the center of the room. She stood beside the secretary, who was deeply rooted to his desk, and asked him what had happened. Her faltering German, so subdued, so innocent, caught him off guard, and he began to explain, telling her the chain of events, as if she were a young child and he, the teller of fairy stories. She was becoming accustomed to feeling like a child.
Ganz, it appeared, had been murdered the night before. He had apparently been working late, the cleaning staff had already finished for the night, the lone night shift guard was eating his dinner somewhere in another wing. The poor guard was as sick at heart as the secretary himself. He had already resigned. No one knew yet whether or not the murderer had been in the building during opening hours, staying on, hiding out of sight after closing. Not, after all, an impossible thing to do in an institution like the Josephinum. No one knew whether or not Ganz was acquainted with the murderer. No one knew if robbery was the motivation, but from appearances it seemed highly likely. The death, however—
“The death,” moaned the secretary. “A man shouldn’t die such a death.”
“Tell me how it happened,” Helen encouraged him gently.
“They don’t know exactly, yet. Do I want to know the little truths when they find out?” he asked himself as an
aside. “However it was that he died, he was found covered in wax and propped up as one of the displays.”
“Covered in wax?” Helen shivered; she had imagined him as a wax effigy. “Do you mean that someone had smeared wax on him?”
“No, he was covered in wax as if he had been dropped into a vat.” The secretary broke down. “It’s too, too terrible. No one deserves such a fate, least of all him.”
Helen’s mind raced wildly. “But there aren’t any vats of wax in this building, are there? You don’t make wax effigies here?”
“No, they must have somehow moved him and then brought him back. It seems so unlikely. The guard has already resigned,” he repeated, this time a little less regretfully.
Helen looked around at the ruins of the office and asked, “Can I help you put things back in order? Have you noticed if anything is missing?”
The secretary looked at her coldly, some of the fever in his eyes drained, leaving behind a frigid barrier. “You are thinking no doubt of your precious woodcut.”
“Not at all,” she objected. “I mean, I meant to ask at some time, but for now, I am thinking only of you and the museum and the disaster this represents.” This was laying it on a bit thickly, but she had to break through that wall.
The secretary softened. “I have no idea if anything is missing,” he said. “And thank you for your offer, but it is best if I work alone; only then I will be able to tell if something has been stolen. I will call you,” he added, “if I discover your woodcut.”
“Well, I should go then and not take up any more of your time.” Helen drifted towards the door, scattering paper as she went. “I’ll be in Vienna for the next three weeks, but I’ll be difficult to get a hold of. May I call you in a couple of days? To see how you are doing?” The secretary nodded. She left.
In two days, without fully knowing how or why, Helen was completely installed in Friedrich Anselm’s house, cataloguing his latest acquisitions, and furthering her pursuit of Martin. After she had left the museum she had attempted to call Anselm, to ask him if he had heard of Ganz’s death. Not finding his number in the phone book, she asked the hotel receptionist to try for her, but he too could find nothing. He explained that many older Viennese were not subscribers to the telephone service, and that perhaps it was the case for Herr Anselm. So she found herself knocking at his door, being invited in again, discussing Ganz and revealing that she had almost three weeks to wait before she could see the director of the Budapest museum. Anselm had unequivocally welcomed her into his house. She could be valuable, she could stay for nothing in exchange for her work, she could pursue her husband. She was confused by his offer—it sounded reasonable and practical—but it was ridiculous that he would invite a complete stranger to come live in his home. Unless. Helen couldn’t dismiss the nagging possibilities. Unless he shared Helen’s sense of familiarity.
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