by Harlan Wolff
“Please, come in and sit down,” she told Carl using the extended, open palm of her hand to lead his eyes to the empty chair opposite where she sat.
Carl sat down and noticed the red eyes behind her glasses suggesting she had been crying. He felt guilty because as soon as he saw her, he wondered what she looked like naked, and hoped it hadn’t been obvious. He didn’t think she would have missed it though; this was clearly no ordinary woman. His research on the Internet had shown her to be a professor of anthropology at the Natural History Museum of Vienna, and he had assumed, by all the Google results of her lecture tours across the globe, she was a highly respected academic in her field. Damn, he thought, I was screwing the wrong sister. Then he felt guilty again and hoped she couldn’t read minds.
“I heard a lot about you,” she told him, “my sister emailed me once in a while.”
“I wondered who it was she was emailing.”
“She told me a lot about you. Do you know what she called you? Her gefallener engel.”
“What’s that?” Carl asked.
“Her fallen angel. She thought it funny you had a German name yet didn’t speak a word of German. My sister spoke German, as well as Russian and English. Are you aware your name means angel in German?”
“I am,” Carl told her, “and I didn’t know she spoke German, but then I didn’t know she was Serbian either. She told me she was Russian.”
“My little sister liked secrets and who would want to be Serbian these days anyway? Your media told the world we were a nation of war criminals.”
“Not my media,” Carl told her.
“Nadia said you were no fool, but she also said you were not as clever as everybody thinks you are. He’s a lost soul living like a gypsy in a strange land, and nobody knows he’s lost, except me, she used to say.”
“Gypsy is about right,” Carl said.
“She was very fond of you Carl. I hope you knew that.”
“She had a funny way of showing it,” Carl replied getting uncomfortable and feeling guilty again. What was it about this woman that made him feel so guilty all the time?
“You knew she was pregnant, she had told you, right?”
“No,” he said leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and putting his palms together prayer-like and balancing his chin on his pointed fingers.
“She was waiting to see if you would ask her to marry you I expect.”
“That’s a bit of a gamble, waiting for a fallen angel to do the right thing,” Carl said.
“You did love her, didn’t you? She was sure you were the one she’d been waiting for.”
“Yes, of course, I did,” he lied fluently, taken aback by the news he had almost been a father. But no sooner had the news been delivered than it was taken away again. He was to be father, at his age? He’d never expected that. The picture of a small boy walking beside him holding his hand flashed in front of him. But Nadia was dead and when he told himself that, the little boy disappeared. He felt fatigued, and he wanted to get up and leave. Carl suddenly needed a drink and the anonymity of a crowded bar, but it was Sunday morning in Vienna, and the bars weren’t open.
“Why did you and your sister leave Serbia?” Carl asked.
“That’s a stupid question. I’ll tell you when instead; it was in 1998.”
“Did you come straight to Vienna?”
“Yes. I got a job at the museum, and Nadia went to university and studied Russian history. We both lived here and shared that bedroom, there’s only the one, you see.”
Carl did some quick arithmetic and decided Maria was a few years older than Nadia, so somewhere around forty. “Nadia never mentioned Vienna. She claimed to be from Saint Petersburg. Why would she do that?” Carl said.
“I told you why, who wanted to be Serbian back then? And as a Russian historian, Saint Petersburg would be the obvious choice.”
“I need you to give me more than that,” Carl persisted.
“She was the youngest and prone to escape into a fantasy world. She liked to tell stories. Everybody in our family was killed, and that’s all I am willing to say on the subject.”
“Did she have any enemies that you can think of?”
“Absolutely! Everybody in the world; including Washington, the EU, and NATO, they all wanted us Serbs dead.”
“Anybody, apart from that?”
“How would I know? You lived with her, not me. You know more about her life in Thailand than I do.”
Unfortunately, Carl knew very little about her. He knew she lied and she was good at lying. He knew she was energetic in bed, but that wasn’t much to go on. He was feeling tired from his flight and wanted to go back to his hotel. He hadn’t come to Vienna to get in an argument with the bereaved sister. He wasn’t sure why he had come, gut instinct perhaps.
“Look, Maria, I didn’t fly all the way here to offend you, but that’s what seems to be happening. Let’s not get off on the wrong foot. I’m very good at what I do, and I’ll get the people that murdered your sister, but right now I have very little to go on. Give me something, anything, and I will find them for you. This is what I do. I know you want that too, so we already have something in common.”
Maria looked at him for a while, then she said, “Yes, I’m sorry, but I’ve been in a horrible mood since I got the news,” then she stood up and walked into the apartment’s only bedroom. She came back with a sheet of paper, which she handed to Carl. Typed on the sheet of paper was a list of addresses.
“I used to send her parcels, gifts from home. These are all the places she lived in Thailand. Will this give you somewhere to start?”
“Yes, thank you. It’s something at least. Are you sure there’s nothing else?”
Maria thought before she spoke again. “I really can’t think of anything, but if I do, I know how to contact you now.”
“Alright,” Carl said, “so that’s that then.”
“How long are you in Vienna for?” Maria asked.
“Not long, I will book a flight back as soon as I’ve had some sleep,” Carl told her as he got up to leave.
“She always believed in you Carl, I hope she was right about you.”
“So do I,” he said as he went out the door.
He heard Maria sobbing as he closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER 18
“The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.”
– Woody Allen
Carl woke up in a strange bed, and it took him a while to remember he was in Vienna staying at the Hotel De France. His watch told him it was midnight. His body ached all over, and he wanted to go back to sleep, but his brain said it was going to take the five hours sleep and it was time to get up. Jetlag following a hangover was never a good idea. Something kept bothering him about the meeting with Maria, but he couldn’t work out what it was. Carl got out of bed, put his clothes on, and left the hotel to see if he could walk off the fog in his head.
The cold entered his bones as he strolled through Vienna in the direction of the visible steeple of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral. It was a brisk twenty-minute walk in the night air, but his mood improved as he passed the Vienna Opera House and entered the old square that was the city centre. It was late, but he was pleased to see there was still plenty of noise and activity in the square. Passing the casino on his right, he spotted a lively bar inside a lane. Carl could always find a half decent bar, no matter where he was.
The sign said, Loosbar American Bar, and it was Carl’s kind of place; small, cosy, but busy enough to feel anonymous in. It was warm too, and he needed some warmth. He squeezed up to the bar and ordered a Johnny Walker Black and soda. He paid for the drink and settled in for a while to put the events of the day in order. He felt he wasn’t getting anywhere, and that he still didn’t have a starting point. He needed something for his investigation to be built on. Sure, Carl had a suspect, but he didn’t have a motive, and without a motive, the investigation was dead in the water. Wh
at he knew about the victim could be written on the back of a postage stamp, and he hadn’t learned anything new by coming to Vienna. Nothing he couldn’t have got from a phone call.
The whisky warmed him and got him thinking less about the case and more about his own situation. Why was he going back to Bangkok anyway? He was out now, and could just keep on going. How long was it since he’d been back to London? Too long, that was for sure. Why not just go? What sort of life did he have after all these years? In and out of trouble, nothing to show for it, no home, no wife, no kids, not even a dog, and no prospects. The country he called home regularly reminded him he wasn’t welcome there. Long ago, Carl had fancied a cottage in the Cotswolds, and why the hell not? Other people did it. Somewhere near a country pub with a log fire perhaps, and real ale on tap; something better than serving life in the Bangkok Hilton.
His thoughts were disturbed by an Austrian man beside him trying too hard to impress a pair of slightly dumpy young American girls with mid-West accents. The Austrian was rakish and had the clothes and mannerisms of an aristocrat past his sell-by date. There was a bottle of Dom Perignon in an ice bucket on the bar, and he took the bottle out of the bucket, wrapped a napkin around it, and topped up the sparkling champagne flutes every time anyone took a sip. Carl assumed he was there every night, in the same corner, preying on American tourists in search of life experiences to warm them up in the winters, and comfort them when they got old. “Have I ever told you about the aristocrat I shagged in Vienna,” kind of stories. One thing was obvious: this aristocrat in Loosbar was getting laid more often than a private detective in Bangkok. Carl smiled to himself and ordered another drink. He was beginning to like this bar.
“Do you know why we Austrians are the cleverest people in the world?” the aristocrat asked his companions.
“No,” replied the girl with freckles, closest to him as she sipped from her glass and laughed because the bubbles tickled her nose.
“Because we have made the whole world believe that Beethoven was Austrian and that Hitler was German.” Having delivered his tired old punchline, he looked around as if waiting for the entire bar to burst into applause. The two girls didn’t clap, but they both giggled at his wickedness, revealing the promise of their own. The old aristocrat, seeing the champagne was working, started to move in for the kill. At least one of the girls was going to end up in the aristocrat’s bed. Carl had a feeling it might even be two. Clever Austrian bastard, Carl thought.
Carl took a sip from his glass of whisky and smiled because the Austrian joke had made him realise what had been bothering him about his meeting with Maria. He had been so absorbed in his need to find a reason why Nadia had lied to him about being Russian that he had missed everything else. He hadn’t noticed something had been wrong right under his nose, but he’d got it now. It was time to stop thinking like the boyfriend and start thinking like a detective again. He had booked a flight back to Bangkok Monday afternoon, which gave him plenty of time to see Maria again, and he had some questions he needed her to answer before he left Vienna.
CHAPTER 19
“I don’t mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it’s got my name on it.”
– Debbie Harry
The Natural History Museum was a palatial landmark in the middle of Vienna. Carl was oblivious to the old-world splendour of the sweeping stairways, painted ceiling, and marble arches and statues, as he crossed the entrance hall and walked up to the security desk, “I am here to see Maria Bajic,” he told the uniformed guard. After a phone call, the man on the counter got up and led him across the ornate floor and through a concealed door into a musty corridor. Along the walls of the corridor were thousands of human skulls stacked on shelves. For Maria, the anthropology department must have been a constant reminder of the Balkans, he thought. It reminded Carl of Cambodia and other things he would rather forget. The guard pointed to an office door and walked away. Carl opened the door and entered.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you again,” Maria said from behind her reading glasses, sitting at a modern desk. More skulls decorated the shelves in her office. Carl found the attractive academic surrounded by human bones, surreal and macabre.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” Carl told her as he sat down.
“Not at all,” she replied unconvincingly.
“What’s with all these skulls everywhere?” Carl asked, flapping his hand in their general direction. The human remains were wreaking havoc on his comfortable self-delusion of immortality.
“We have over forty-thousand skulls here at the museum, the largest collection in the world. Do they bother you?”
“No, not at all,” he lied unconvincingly. “They just made me wonder if the Nazis were back.”
“You mustn’t say such things in Vienna, Mr Engel. It is forbidden.”
“I expect it is,” Carl said.
“I’m not sure why you are here, I have nothing to add to what I told you at my apartment,” Maria said, clearly annoyed.
“Unfortunately I don’t believe you,” Carl told her.
“You mean you came to my office to call me a liar?”
“Well that’s the point, isn’t it? That I’m here talking to you at all. That you would let me in.”
“My sister told me you were eccentric, but it appears what she meant was, you are completely insane.”
“Mad perhaps, but not as stupid as you clearly think I am. You need to tell me what you know. I’m the only chance you have of getting justice for Nadia, so you really need to talk to me.”
“I think you should leave. I have already told you everything I know,” Maria said.
“Okay Maria, here it is: every news article you would have seen on your sister’s murder puts me in the frame as, not only the prime suspect, but the only suspect, yet you chose to invite me to your apartment on a quiet Sunday morning and you were happy to meet me there alone. No way that could happen unless you already knew I didn’t murder your sister, and how could you know that? Unless, of course, you know a lot more than you’re telling me, like who might have really done it. So no more lies please, I’m not leaving until you tell me everything you know.”
Maria Bajic’s confidence deflated, and she appeared to have become smaller in her chair. She was nervous and conflicted, and she reminded Carl of her sister, Nadia. Tears squeezed their way out from behind her glasses and ran down her cheeks. “You won’t like what I have to tell you,” she said.
“I want to hear it anyway,” Carl told her.
“Nadia was not what you think, not a nice person, she was a compulsive liar since childhood and couldn’t be trusted.”
“Go on please,” Carl told her.
“We assumed it was just a childhood phase, and never thought somebody might be hurting her, but it turns out she was sexually abused by her uncle for years, and nobody knew. Later, in Vienna, the word around the university was that she was a slut, I think that’s the correct translation – slut.”
“Depends what you mean by slut,” Carl said.
“She would lead men on, sleep with them, and then discard them and make jokes about them behind their backs.”
“I can see how that would make her unpopular,” Carl said.
“Then there was the blackmail.”
“Blackmail?”
“Yes, she would get intimate enough to learn a person’s darkest secret, then use it to blackmail them.”
“For money?” Carl asked.
“Yes, of course, for money.”
“Is that why she left Vienna?” Carl asked.
“Yes, Vienna is not a big city, and so many people hated her. Then, the night she was leaving Vienna, she told me what our uncle had done to her, that it had started when she was six years old. She waited until we were at the airport; said these things, then she walked away.”
Carl was squirming in the chair. This was not what he had expected to hear. He had Nadia down as a drama queen, a bit of a fantasist, sure, but hearing her cast
as a sexual predator and blackmailer by her own sister was a shock. Was the baby really his? Was anything real? Of course, it was. She was a different woman on the island. Nothing like he was hearing from Maria, but perhaps all men are blind when it comes to the women they sleep with.
“That still doesn’t explain how you know I didn’t kill her.”
Maria let out a deep sigh and put her elbows on the desk, resting her chin on her hands.
“I could tell by her emails that she continued her blackmail business in Thailand. Punishing men for what her uncle did. She kept moving on and leaving a mess behind her. When she ran out of lies, and everybody could see her for what she was, she always ran away. Playing the victim to justify her actions only went so far, and when people stopped feeling pity, her situation would become precarious, so she ran. I knew all the signs by then. Uncharacteristically, she reached out and told me she was running away to the South because she said she had made a bad enemy and that her life was in danger. I pleaded with her to come back to Vienna, but she said she would never come back.”
“So, what happened next?”
“She met you.”
“I don’t understand,” Carl told her.
“She felt safe. She said you looked after people and made them feel safe. She said the first night she slept with you she didn’t have nightmares or wake up in the middle of the night. She called you her gefallener engel because she said you were far from perfect, you snored and drank too much, but she still thought of you as her guardian angel. She even said she thought you’d been sent down from heaven to protect her.”
“Some protector.”
“You have to understand she wasn’t entirely well in the head,” Maria said sitting up in her chair and pointing to her temple.