The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  Fejn closed the book with a thump and smiled a smile that left no doubt that he had just scored a point in the contest that was afoot, and that each little point brought him closer to victory.

  The next moment the smile had vanished and, with the air of a man turning up his shirt sleeves to get started at long last on the task at hand, he once again turned to the boy.

  6.

  Prosecutor (gravely, signalling to boy and jurors alike the seriousness of his intentions): “To business, then. Where were you, Karl Theodor Heinrich Landauer, on the afternoon of June 25 of this year?”

  Boy: “I was playing in the little park on ——gasse.”

  Prosecutor: “The park on ——gasse. That’s across from the shirt factory, isn’t it?”

  Boy: “Yes. But it’s bombed out.”

  Prosecutor: “So it is. Were you alone?”

  Boy: “Yes, alone. Franzl was there at first, or rather we were across the road, looking for bullet casings in the rubble. But he kept teasing me, so in the end I ran off and played by myself.”

  Prosecutor: “And what game were you playing, all by yourself?”

  Boy: “Marbles.”

  Prosecutor: “Marbles, hm. Were you throwing them or what?”

  Boy (shaking his head): “No, I was just playing. Separating the colours. Making piles.”

  Prosecutor: “And then?”

  Boy: “A man came and sat down on the bench.”

  Prosecutor: “What time was that? When the man came?”

  Boy: “Two.”

  Prosecutor (thoughtfully, with an exaggerated sternness): “Two o’clock? How do you know? You don’t own a watch, do you? No, I should imagine not, you are a little too young.”

  Boy (unfazed now, convinced he can account for himself): “The bell had just rung.”

  Prosecutor: “What bell?”

  Boy: “Maria Treu. It rings on the hour.”

  Prosecutor: “You are sure?”

  Boy: “Yes.”

  Prosecutor: “How can you be so sure? It could have been some other church. Announcing a funeral perhaps. Or a wedding.”

  Boy: “There’s no other church nearby. Apart from St. Francis. But St. Francis got bombed. Besides, they don’t sound alike.”

  Prosecutor (nodding, as though grudgingly convinced by overwhelming evidence): “Very well, then, two o’clock. So a man comes, sits down. What is his aspect?”

  Boy: “His what?”

  Prosecutor: “What does he look like? Is he a clerk who has nipped out to read the paper? A drunk? A cavalier in a top hat?”

  Boy (thinking about it): “He was tired. He sort of plonked down.” (Titters in the audience.) “And he wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

  Prosecutor: “How far away were you when he, as you put it, plonked down? Ten steps? Fifteen?” (He steps out from behind the prosecutor’s bench and walks away from the boy, moving ten steps down the aisle.)

  Boy: “Not that far.”

  Prosecutor: “How far, then? Tell me when to stop.” (Approaches again, in a slow, formal manner, almost a march. The boy does not stop him until he is three steps from his chair.)

  Prosecutor (miming a whistle, without making any actual sound): “This close, then. How about you? Did you walk up to him?”

  Boy (nodding, biting his lip): “Yes.”

  Prosecutor: “Why? You didn’t know him from Adam. Why approach him?”

  Boy (looking up at him, suspicious, as though sensing a breach of trust): “He wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

  Prosecutor: “Come, now. Surely you have seen men without shoes before.”

  Boy (after a pause): “There used to be many.” (A wave of his hand serves to indicate the past.) “Not so many now.” (Another pause.) “The thing was, his feet were bleeding.”

  Prosecutor (quietly, so as not to interrupt the boy’s rhythm or the spell his shy little voice has begun to weave in the courtroom): “So what did you say?”

  Boy: “I asked him, ‘Does it hurt?’”

  Prosecutor: “And?”

  Boy: “He didn’t answer. So I left him alone. But then he’s beckoning to me, asking me to sit down beside him.”

  Prosecutor: “And you did? That was brave.”

  Boy (flushing): “I was curious.”

  Prosecutor: “What did he do then?”

  Boy: “He started whispering, only quite loudly, right in my ear. ‘You better remember this,’ he says. ‘They will want to hear about it. The police.’ And then he smiled.” (He demonstrates the smile, thin-lipped, lopsided, fleeting. Perhaps he is, at precisely this moment, just as afraid as the man he describes.)

  Prosecutor: “And then what did he say?”

  Boy: “‘I’ve done my old man.’ Just that. He said it twice. And then he raised his eyebrow.”

  Prosecutor: “What did you think he meant by that phrase?”

  Boy (without hesitation): “That he killed his pa.”

  A murmur goes through the courtroom. Somebody coughs, and a woman’s voice is heard, quiet yet piercing: “Of course he did.”

  7.

  Dr. Fejn turned away from the boy, head bowed, as though deep in thought. There was to the moment an enormous theatrical tension. The drama had to be played out. There was not a soul in the audience who wished to hurry it along.

  “Is he here?” he asked quietly, but received no immediate answer. “Stand up, look around. Do you see the man who talked to you on the park bench on the twenty-fifth of June and told you that he murdered his own father?”

  Shyly, hesitantly, the boy stood up from his chair and turned around. Indeed it seemed that Karlchen had not noticed the defendant until this moment, though he was sitting not four steps from the boy, albeit to one side and at a right angle, facing the prosecutor rather than the witness. Wolfgang sat with his head bowed, too tall for his chair with its little desk, and as though folded up underneath. He did not look at the boy right away. Only after some moments, feeling his gaze on him, and without moving his head, did he raise his eyes and acknowledge him, in a way that was not in the least unfriendly but, on the contrary, almost light-hearted, as if with a wink. The boy had enough of a sense of the drama of the occasion to stretch out a hand and point.

  “It’s him,” he said quietly.

  “You are certain.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many marbles did you have? The day in the park? You said you were making piles. You must have counted them.”

  “Forty-three. Twenty-one red, eighteen blue, and four green.”

  “And how many do you have now?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “You lost two?”

  “I got three new ones, and gave five to a friend.”

  “That must be someone very special.”

  The boy raised his chin, his eyes found the little girl who had willed him to speech. Dr. Fejn followed his gaze and made sure the jurors did too.

  “I see. The prosecution rests its case.”

  8.

  The defence lawyer was given the word. He stood up, took a moment to smooth out his clothing, and then did an odd little movement in which he rolled from heels to toes, as though stretching out his feet and calves. It was hard to say whether the movement was calculated or habitual, but it did have the effect of shifting attention away from the events that had just transpired and onto this prim little man. With the permission of the presiding judge Dr. Ratenkolb too stepped out from behind his desk and took half a step towards the boy. For a full minute or more he stood, taking the boy’s measure, somewhat sneeringly, it must be said, and with evident distaste, as though studying a stain on the wall.

  “‘I’ve done my old man,’” he echoed at last, in a flat, pedantic voice that served to bring out the theatrical absurdity of the phrase. “I suppose you go to see a lot of pictures.”

  The boy did not react, sat there, wide-eyed, staring up at the lawyer. It must have occurred to him that he was facing an adversary and was now under direct attack. But the
re was nothing in his young arsenal that could have informed his defence.

  “What was the weather like?” Dr. Ratenkolb asked, moving away from his witness and speaking as though to the jury.

  The boy was struck dumb. His earlier fear seemed to have rushed back on him.

  “Come, now. Was it sunny, perhaps? A warm day?”

  The boy nodded, then realized the man could not see him. He tried to answer, whispered a spit-wet “Yes,” looked over to Trudi for help.

  “Yes? Then how is it that the meteorological institute recorded showers for that afternoon and precisely at two o’clock? You said it was two, did you not? You heard the ringing of Maria Treu?”

  He sneered, turned, transfixed the boy. Karlchen’s voice was very small.

  “The rain came later. It was sunny. And then later it rained.”

  “Later? Is that when you met the other man? The one who told you he’d killed his wife, and ten blooming Americans besides?”

  He went on in this manner for some more minutes, discrediting one by one all the points to which the boy had testified. The lawyer’s sneering manner was disliked by the audience and the jurors, yet all the same his words sowed doubt where before there had been certainty, and the boy’s assertions appeared in a new light, uncertain, tentative, adulterated by fantasy. No sooner had the boy been dismissed than the court was adjourned.

  Two

  1.

  Anna left the courthouse by a side entrance and immediately crossed the road to escape the huddle of spectators who had gathered on the pavement, where they stood smoking, exchanging impressions. The trial would not resume for two full hours. Sophie had declined Anna’s invitation to lunch: she had, the journalist said, some notes to type up. There was time to go home, but Anna felt herself drawn to one of the cafés just a short way up the road, in the immediate vicinity of the city hospital. She chose a table by the window and had not yet ordered when she saw the plump, myopic figure of Detective Frisch walk past outside, his daughter in tow. Anna had noticed them at the trial, and now found herself rapping a knuckle against the window and waving them in. Frisch looked up, pale eyes startled in their thick-lensed frames. His daughter spoke to him, obviously displeased by the invitation, and was pulling him along. A second rap encouraged Frisch’s resistance to the girl’s hurry. He entered the café. In an inversion of gender roles Anna stood to shake his hand.

  “How do you do, Detective? Please, you must join me.” She pointed at the chairs across the table.

  The detective demurred, forgot to return her hand, his fingers moist in her palm. “We only came in to say good day. This is Gertrud. Trudi, Frau Anna Beer.”

  It was reassuring to hear his voice, that slow, pedantic drone, unruffled despite his clammy hand.

  “I did not know you had remained in town. Has your husband—”

  She shook her head, smiled from coquettish habit, then nipped her lip as though to punish it. “There has been no news. Nor of Neumann—the Czech, you remember, the drunk. I have petitioned the Soviet authorities for information. Frau Coburn has a friend in diplomatic circles. It’s all very hopeless. There was another lead, some vagrant this girl told me about, who she thought—But he too seems to have quite disappeared. If I don’t hear within the next month or so, I’ll be off …”

  She shrugged, rescued her hand from his grasp, gestured God knew where; to Paris, she supposed, which she seemed to locate just behind the entrance to the hospital. In his pedantic manner Frisch followed the gesture, looked over at the row of squat old buildings with their yellow, flaking paint.

  “He used to work right there, you know. My husband. We would meet here, in this café, for lunch. He liked the pickled herring. Imagine living with a man who smelled of raw onion half the time.”

  She paused, detected the falsehood in her story, remembered Anton’s habit of brushing his teeth when he came home from work. He had been nothing if not fastidious.

  “But this is silly, our standing around like this. Please, Herr Frisch, sit. I beg you.”

  While the detective was still making up his mind, looking at his daughter as though to solicit her permission, Robert Seidel passed the café. He was walking without looking, hands buried in his trouser pockets, chewing on a cheek. Anna had spent many hours watching him at the trial; only rarely had he met her eye. He sat every day near the front of the courtroom like an island unto himself: the only representative of the defendant’s family. Up close, she noticed he’d grown his hair and had filled in a little in the face. It rather suited him.

  As though alerted by a sixth sense Robert looked up, saw them clustered around the table; recognized her, flushed, and hurried on. There was a curious rhythm to his walk, shoulders moving in counterpoint to his legs. Frisch watched after him, a hint of curiosity in his outsized eyes, and finally resolved to sit, pulling his daughter onto the chair next to him.

  “You know the defendant’s brother, Frau Beer? I noticed you in court and wondered what interest you—”

  “We met on the train,” she smiled. “And it appears your daughter is friends with today’s star witness.” She turned to the child. “He seems a little sweet on you, my dear.”

  The girl did not acknowledge her smile; pulled a face instead. It was hard to pinpoint the cause of her hostility. Anna turned her attention back to the father.

  “In any case, it helps pass the time. The trial, I mean.”

  The waiter came to take their order. At Anna’s insistence the detective agreed to a coffee. His daughter rebuffed her repeated offer of “an ice.” For herself Anna ordered the herring she had just mythologized; did not eat it, but spent a quarter hour stabbing a fork in its cold flesh and combing all the onion to one side. Frisch finished his coffee in two slow, decorous sips, then sat studying her, ignoring his daughter’s glare. After a moment’s hesitation he sent the girl to play outside.

  “You’ll be right out,” Trudi said, more command than question.

  “In two minutes.”

  She nodded and ran out.

  Anna grew tired of poking at capers. She pushed the plate to one side, lit a cigarette. “There is something you wish to say?” she asked.

  He nodded but did not speak at once, had placed his hands side by side on the table. “We never followed up on the blood. In your apartment, I mean. You said there was a patch of blood. You washed it off, you said.”

  “So?”

  Again it took him several moments to speak. She wondered whether he was composing his thoughts or if this was an interrogation method that had long hardened into habit. The waiter approached then immediately withdrew, sensing their change of mood.

  “I investigated a case some months ago. A man was found dead in his apartment. Poisoned, as it turned out. A prisoner of war; he hadn’t been back for much more than six weeks. His wife was very pretty. An interesting woman, proud and lively, with a beautiful smile. She’s never admitted to the crime.”

  She laughed, smoke flying out of mouth and nostrils. “You suspect me, then?”

  He dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “Of course not.”

  It was as though she had missed the point of his little story.

  “Are you going to,” he asked her gently. “Be all right on your own? Until your husband returns, I mean.”

  She looked at him and wondered when she had last been propositioned with such kindness. He saw her glance and at once understood; took off his glasses, revealing a pale face and pale, naked eyes.

  “I’ve always been ugly,” he said.

  Spontaneously, touched by his tone—calm, punctilious, devoid of self-pity—she lent forward, plucked his hand off the table, and planted a kiss on its back.

  “You’re a good man.” She did not know what she meant by the phrase. He smelled surprisingly pleasant, of aftershave and dried-in sweat.

  When she leaned back in her chair, the girl was there, storming to the table.

  “We must go,” she said. “Karlchen will be waiting
.”

  “Yes, of course.” Frisch rose.

  “You are not going back to the trial, Detective? From what I hear, this afternoon might turn out to be rather interesting. At least Frau Coburn thinks so.”

  He shook his head, offered his hand in parting. “You will let me know,” he said, “when you have news from your husband?”

  Anna thought it good of him that he did not say “if.”

  2.

  When the trial resumed early that afternoon, the court spent the first hour or so on the examination of a string of witnesses who had all seen Wolfgang on the day of his father’s fall. They could do little more than corroborate that the defendant had been in such and such a place at such and such a time; had been disorientated, swaying and ranting; and had not been wearing shoes. On the whole these witnesses lent credibility to Karlchen’s statement, though the defence lawyer, Ratenkolb, managed to draw from one witness, a paperhanger’s apprentice, the stubborn avowal that he had seen Wolfgang “precisely at two” at a spot a good mile from the little park Karlchen had indicated. Moreover, all the witnesses readily admitted that the physical and mental state of the defendant had been consistent with his being drunk. Indeed they had been fully convinced at the time that there was nothing at all the matter with Wolfgang—other than being “lit like a howitzer,” as the paperhanger’s apprentice put it—and had only changed their minds after they’d read the newspaper coverage of the murder. By a quarter to three, therefore, it was felt that the entire case hinged on the statement made by a nervous little boy who might have heard nothing more implicating than a drunk’s sodden grumble about an oppressive and, truth be told, rather niggardly father.

  At this point the trial arrived at a critical juncture. The question everyone was asking themselves was whether the judge would allow witnesses unrelated to the incident itself who would, in the prosecutor’s words, establish “not only a pattern of violence” in the defendant’s actions, “but positively identify the murder as his handiwork.” The defence lawyer had argued that since the defendant had, after all, “only one father,” no past act, violent or not, could help shed light on what was, last he had checked, an accusation of parricide. He’d spoken vehemently against a “trial by character,” which he intimated was unworthy of a civilized state that had, dare he allude to it, only so recently shed the “mantle of tyranny” (the phrase caused some debate: did it imply, for instance, that tyranny had never been more than a superficial aspect of Austria’s political landscape?). In any case it had become known amongst the public (though the devil knows how: in judicial terms, Anna later heard, it was utter nonsense) that this question had been debated not only in the courtroom itself—where it occupied some few minutes—but more hotly and exhaustively “behind closed doors”; and that the panel of judges had decided to withhold its final judgment on the matter until the first of these witnesses was called.