The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “Rolls.” The woman gave a nervous smile, looked from him to Anna and back at the man, trying to decipher their relation. “And some rye bread.”

  “Mrs. Coburn,” said Anna sourly, “meet Karel Neumann. Karel Neumann, Frau Coburn. Herr Neumann is friend with my husband. They were Kriegsgefangene, prisoners, together.”

  “A pleasure,” said the journalist.

  “Ja,” said the giant. “Bik pleasure. Brink caffee?” He aimed his razor at her shopping bags.

  “No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I thought there would be—”

  “No caffee, no ham, no preserve,” said the giant. “No egg.” He made a face, at once mournful and hungry. “Like camp.”

  The journalist laughed at his expression, then stopped when he bent his brow into a frown. “I’ll go get them. I have coffee in my room. Butter, eggs, some cheese. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “It isn’t—” Anna struggled for the English word. “—required.”

  “I’ll only be a minute.” Mrs. Coburn shoved her bags into Anna’s hands, turned on her squat-heeled leather pumps, and clattered down the stairs.

  Once again Anna was alone with Neumann. She switched back into German. “What a colossal swine you are.”

  He grinned at colossal. “At least we’ll get breakfast. I bet you she’s got real coffee.”

  He winked, ran the razor down the final rectangle of foam, then walked in even steps over to the toilet and locked himself in. A whistle sounded, then the clang of his belt buckle hitting the tiles. She stood outside the door as though waiting in line. He seemed to take an age.

  “Suppose,” she said into the passing of the minutes, afraid that Mrs. Coburn would return. “Suppose you are lying to me. Suppose you don’t know my husband at all and only stole his key. His name is on the books, the stationery. You had all morning to figure it out.”

  The door stood mute, then opened a crack, his head poking out, the rest of him still sitting on the toilet. “Your name is Gudrun. Gudrun Anna.”

  “So?”

  “You left him. Before the war. He was working at a hospital but then he quit.”

  “Did he tell you why I left him?”

  He hesitated, sought out her eyes, his face a study of calculation. “There was a man—” he said, then broke off, stared at her through the gap in the door.

  “You are guessing.”

  “A lover.”

  “Get out of here. Before she comes back.” She started pulling open the door. He let her, sat unabashed in the light of the hallway, his trousers piled around his ankles.

  “There was a man,” he repeated. “But he wasn’t your lover.”

  She froze. His German, when he put his mind to it, was perfect, with barely a trace of an accent. Only occasionally, from clownishness she supposed, or from some strange caprice, did he drop an article or mangle an ending; stretch a vowel to some comic Slavic length.

  “He was his,” he finished, then smiled, as though absolving her from all fault. “Life’s a fucker, eh?”

  She refused to be cowed. “And you?” she asked. “Are you and Anton—”

  His smile vanished, the cheeks colouring in sudden fury. “Nothing like that. We are comrades—”

  “Take your shit,” she said, banged shut the door. “Breakfast is coming. And you better wash your hands.”

  3.

  They had breakfast together. Frau Coburn (“Sophie,” she whispered while they were setting the table, “please!”) had brought butter, eggs, cheese, and what passed in those days for honey; a half pound of real coffee, some slices of Hungarian salami, an earthenware jar of jam. The Czech sat down first, still in his vest, watched them arrange the tablecloth and plates. He held his cup out when the coffee was brought through from the kitchen and smacked his lips as he sipped at the hot brew. They put the bread into a wicker basket and he tore open a fresh roll, then plucked and ate the dough from its centre before slapping butter on both halves.

  “Is shame,” he complained between bites, “no ham, no smoke Zunge.”

  “Zunge?”

  “Tongue,” Anna explained. “He eats like a pig.”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, not without admiration. “What an appetite he has! A big man like that, he could probably eat a horse. Mehr Kaffee, ja? Wait, I’ll run and put on the kettle.”

  For all her admiration for the former soldier’s frame and masculine relish, the journalist proved adept at pumping him for information. Within a few minutes, using Anna as an interpreter when her faulty German could no longer be rescued by his threadbare English, she had established that Neumann had been a junior officer in the infantry and met Beer only in the camp; that he was single, from the Bohemian town of Liberec, also known as Reichenberg, “depending who talk, you see,” but had spent some years in Vienna before the war; and that he had last seen the doctor “the day before yesterday,” when they had gone drinking together and might have had “one glass too viel.” At Anna’s brisk correction that her husband did not drink, he merely raised his eyebrows, then reached out a giant paw and laid it on the journalist’s hand, as though it was she who needed comforting.

  “The war,” he said. “We drink, we forget. Leningrad, Stalingrad, the camps.” The next moment he had returned his hands to the task of scooping artificial honey onto a slice of dark rye bread.

  Slowly, using the same careful, leading questions, the journalist turned her attention to Anna Beer; learned the date when she had left Austria and probed the cause of her and her husband’s pre-war rift (“a marital misunderstanding”); then pressed for some facts about the source of Anna’s income through the years in Switzerland and France. Throughout this questioning the journalist would repeat every answer she received in a crisp, abbreviated form, as though she were mentally composing a dispatch. She looked small and scrawny at the table, her thin arms stretching to assemble food upon her plate which she then forgot to eat. Her lipstick was a deep carmine red, a shade too dark for her wan skin.

  About herself, Sophie Coburn told them only that she was American, from New York, and that her husband had been a Canadian RCAF officer who’d been shot down during the war. She was working for a Toronto paper, strictly on a freelance basis. She did not explain why she was living in a shared apartment with a half-dozen lodgers rather than a private flat or a hotel. There was no reason to believe it was for want of money. Her wristwatch was of solid gold.

  “I’ve been here for six months,” she said. “When all the pictures came out”—she left it to them to decide which pictures she was referring to—“well, I just had to go see for myself. I write lifestyle pieces, and I take photographs. Only now my camera has been stolen.” She sighed dramatically, laughed, proposed a course of action. “We need to find your husband, Anna. We should call the hospitals first, I suppose. Does your phone work? No? Then you must come down and use mine. The landlady will snoop around, but never mind, I’ll chase her away. If he’s not taken ill, then I’m afraid you’ll have to go to the police. Domestic, I suppose, since he is an Austrian subject.”

  Anna heard it, studied her in wonder: that ill-assembled, mobile face, whose expression so often seemed at odds with the substance of her words. The woman’s hands were groomed and nervous; there was always one more query tripping from her carmine lips. It used to be one had to crush insects to produce that shade.

  “How was it,” Frau Coburn asked, and tapped Neumann’s wrist with one small finger, “your life in the camps? Difficult, I suppose. Schwierig in Lager, Herr Neumann?”

  He took a bite before he answered, washed it down with coffee, held his arm out for another cup. “Schwierig? Yes, at first. Ruhr, Fleckfieber.”

  He looked to Anna, who obliged with a translation. “Dysentery and typhus.” It was strange, the words one learned, listening to the BBC.

  Neumann carried on. “Later,” he said, “thing not so bad. Beer likes guards.”

  “What he means is, the guards liked B—my husband,” Anna explained. “I suppose
he would have treated them.”

  “What was he, a surgeon?

  “A psychiatrist.” A note of pride crept into Anna’s voice. “He was highly respected in the field. But then he left the hospital to start a general practice. He worked right in this flat.”

  “That’s unusual, isn’t it? A specialist withdrawing into general practice?”

  Anna took a moment before she answered. Her face was smiling, bland. “There was a disagreement about policy. After the Anschluss. The annexment, or however you say it.” She rose from the table. “If you will excuse me. I need to take a bath and change.”

  Sophie Coburn left shortly afterwards; rushed the dishes to the kitchen, then began packing up the food before she decided against it and simply placed it all in the kitchen cupboard “in case you get hungry later on.”

  “You will come and use the telephone,” she told Anna as she saw her off at the door.

  “After my bath.”

  “I’ll see you later then. Goodbye. A pleasure meeting you, Herr Neumann.”

  “Yes, yes, goot-bye.”

  They stood next to each other, the Czech in his vest and Anna in her still-bloody blouse, and watched the journalist descend. Neumann turned to Anna after she had closed the door. His hips swung out, first right then left, as he mimed Mrs. Coburn’s walk.

  “A bit of a crumpet, eh? Pint-sized, no chest, but a crumpet all the same.”

  Anna suppressed a smile. “Time for you to leave, Herr Neumann.”

  He looked disappointed, stared down at her from his great height. “Do you have cigarettes? Money?”

  She cast around for her purse, found it on the bedroom floor, gave him a pack of Gauloises and twenty shillings in coins. He flipped one into the air, caught it in his giant palm. Two steps brought him to the front door. He’d laced his boots and put on a dirty shirt; the woollen greatcoat slung over one arm.

  “I’ll make inquiries,” he said grandiosely. “About Anton.”

  She heard the words and realized that chances were she would not see him again. He’d drink up the shillings, sleep it off under a bridge. And after that: the road. It was clear to her he had no home.

  “What did you do before the war?” she asked him. “For work, I mean?”

  “Tram driver. Plumber. Trapeze artist.”

  She laughed. “That’s quite a list.”

  He joined in her laugh, then stopped; raised some thoughtful fingers, scratched his head. “Or maybe I was physicist. Working on bomb. In secret lab in Kutná Hora.” He painted a mushroom into the air between them, his hands parting to make space for its rich bloom.

  “You’re a buffoon, Karel Neumann.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “That’s what it was. Buffoon. Was all right, only now it’s back to being a bum.”

  He took a bow as they shook hands. She locked the door once he had left. Two hours later, with lunchtime approaching, she descended the stairs to avail herself of the telephone in what used to be an old professor’s flat and which now housed amongst its many lodgers an American widow hunting for copy amongst the city’s broken brick.

  4.

  “Baer, with an ae?”

  “With a double e. Anton.”

  “Anton. Any middle names?”

  “Leopold Joseph.”

  “Leopold Joseph. Very good. Denomination? Catholic, I suppose.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Catholic, then. And he was last seen when?”

  “I’ve already told you: I’m not entirely sure. Two or three days ago. I only returned to Vienna yesterday. But I met a friend of my husband’s, a fellow prisoner of war, who—”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t fit on the form. There is only enough space for a number, see. Two days, then, or three?”

  “Three.”

  “There we go: three days. I suppose I could have written ‘seventy-two hours.’ But never mind, it’s too late for that; three days it is. It’s not very long, is it?”

  “Are you telling me that I shouldn’t worry?”

  “Worry? I wouldn’t like to say. I suppose you never know.”

  “How will you find him? Once you are finished with the form, I mean. What’s the procedure?”

  “Procedure? Well. I suppose I will check in with the morgue. Most of them turn up, you know. In the end.”

  “Dead?”

  “No, no. Drunk.”

  The man was exasperating: slow, colourless, and stupid, with the insolent habit of passivity; accustomed to complaint; long-suffering, long-suffered, his hands and face a yellowed grey, nicotine stained deep into his teeth. They were sitting in the cramped little police station responsible for her part of the district; he, boxed in behind a table and typewriter, an ashtray overflowing by his elbow; she, across from him, catching the draft from the window, on a narrow stool long worn of its varnish. She had answered the sergeant’s flow of questions twice now, once at the front desk, where he had greeted her with gloomy indifference and asked her to kindly state her business, then here at the table, where each of her answers found an echo in the clatter of the typewriter at whose keys he stabbed with rigid fingers as though poking out a row of eyes. Occasionally he’d stop and swear, re-prime the paper, cross out some letters, and correct the word. Whenever he completed an entry, he would look up and grin at her, retrieve his cigarette, indulge in a long, much-savoured drag. They had been at it for some twenty minutes. There was no end in sight.

  Throughout this long stutter of an interrogation Anna was distracted by a sound drifting through the propped-open door at the back of the office: the quiet drone of a voice, strangely muffled, as though coming through a pillow, and at the same time slow, methodical, and patient, the speaker first offering consolation, then asking precise, gently worded questions and pausing to listen with a strange air of solemnity. As the man in front of her kept stabbing away at his typewriter, Anna found herself increasingly drawn to the sound of this voice, even bending forward a little on her stool the better to make out the words. Slowly an image formed in her mind of a man sitting in an office, or else leaning, half perched, on his desk, and speaking with that quiet assurance, never correcting himself or finding himself lost for words, as though he were reading a part from a script. Anna could not hear the other half of the conversation and concluded that the man must be on the telephone. But this too struck her as peculiar, because the more she heard of the man’s voice, the more she became convinced that he was speaking to a child, perhaps even quite a young child; that this child was in pain, or at any rate weepy; and that the man’s aim was to draw the child into a conversation about ordinary things and thus distract its attention from its hurt or fear. Just now he was asking the child what it thought about police horses (were they better than cars? what colour was best?), then quickly moved on to dogs. “German shepherds?” the voice said thoughtfully. “Why, yes, they are good dogs. How about schnauzers, though? The large kind? Yes, you may be right, they tend to be naughty. Though I knew a schnauzer once that dragged a man out of the river. He was drowning, you see—Oh, no, he didn’t jump. I suppose he just slipped and fell. The dog, in any case….” And so on, telling the whole of the little story in that quiet, solemn, droning voice that would have suited a lecture hall, or a pulpit.

  At long last the man wished the child a good day and hung the receiver on its cradle (she could hear the telltale click). A moment later he emerged, walked up behind the sergeant, read the form over his shoulder. He was a plump man of middling height; wore his trousers high upon his waist, had white, soft hands. The hair was neatly parted, the face dominated by a pair of steel-framed glasses that gave an eerie prominence to his watery eyes and light, soft lashes. It was hard to guess his age. He might have been no more than thirty-five or forty but had the movements of an older man. A watch chain hung in a fastidious arc between waistcoat pocket and buttonhole. He was not wearing a uniform.

  “You misspelled ‘prisoner of war,’” he said laconically. Again she noted his voice, p
edantic and muffled. Perhaps he had a cold. “Never mind, Haselböck, just cross it out by hand.”

  He shifted his eyes to Anna. His lenses were so thick they gave the impression his eyes had been worked into the glass: when he took off the spectacles, she mused, the eyes too would peel off and leave behind the long blank of his face. His words were polite, even gentle, but he wasted no time on a greeting.

  “Your husband is missing, Frau Beer. Have you called the hospitals?”

  “Yes. This morning.”

  “Can you name them? The hospitals you called.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Please do.”

  She counted them off, watched him blink with every mention of a name and commit them to his memory.

  “Very good,” he said, though it was unclear to her what exactly he was lauding, her thoroughness in calling all the major infirmaries or her ability to recall them all at will. “How about his family?”

  “His parents are dead. His brother moved abroad. Before the war. I don’t know whether he’s alive. They weren’t close.”

  “Friends?”

  Anna shrugged, licked her lips. “How would I know? I have not seen him in—” She stopped, embarrassed, grew angry at her embarrassment. “He expected me back. I sent him a wire. Surely he would have left a note if he was going to be away.”

  The detective nodded, ran a palm over his hair along the path of his neat parting. “So he has no reason to be out of town.” He bent forward again, studied the form. “He’s a doctor, I see. What specialization?”

  “Psychiatry and neurology. But he ran a general practice the past few years. Before he was conscripted.”

  “Quite. He wasn’t a member of the SS by any chance?” His smile was innocent, avuncular; the eyes bloated, drowning in their seas of glass.

  Anna frowned. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s routine, really. Certain people—people with qualifications, scientists, experts—they are being ‘requisitioned,’ if you see what I mean. Largely in the Soviet sector. People who have special knowledge, or have conducted research of a classified nature.” He paused, slipped his hands into his pockets. “In one of the camps, say. Or at some special facility. Others make themselves scarce of their own accord. There are trials going on for war crimes, you see, and—”