The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  When he finally stepped out into the yard, he was unprepared to find it empty.

  7.

  Relief flooded Wolfgang, was immediately replaced by anger, then by a feeling of cunning as he realized he might have arrived at the location first. He whirled around, making sure there was nobody behind him; scrutinized the piles of rubble that had been the back building, trying to assess whether a man might be hiding amongst them. At his back he noticed a bent metal door leading to a cellar. Wolfgang approached it, then thought better of it and pretended to lose interest.

  On his second circuit of the yard he noticed a piece of brick wall—more than a foot across, the inside still covered with wallpaper—that lay on the ground by itself and had evidently been dragged there from one of the mounds. He crouched down to it, found it marked with chalk glowing strangely in the moon-soaked mist. It said SEIDEL, just the one word, large capital letters. Wolfgang pushed the slab aside, and beneath it found a shallow hollow where two courtyard cobbles had been pried loose. A dirty sheet of paper spelled out HERE.

  Without the slightest hesitation Wolfgang deposited the envelope within this hollow, replaced the slab, and hurried to the gateway. Everything was all abundantly clear to him—almost as though someone had explained it to him. Rothmann (No, not Rothmann; the stranger, the crook, the man who is trying to rip us off!) was hiding behind the cellar door. There was no way he would risk someone else coming along and finding the marked slab of wall. No, he was there, right behind the door, eyes fastened on the yard, listening for Wolfgang’s footsteps, waiting for him to leave. Wolfgang obliged him and made a point of walking loudly—stamping his feet almost—until he had nearly reached the street. Then he lowered himself to the ground, lay down on the icy cobbles in the gateway, and crawled back seven or eight yards until his face was less than a foot from the threshold to the yard. The gun was out again, his fingers growing stiff around its grip.

  He did not have to wait very long. After six or seven minutes there came a scrape as the cellar door dug itself into the courtyard floor. A moment later a figure stepped out into the yard and bent down to the marked slab. The moon-fed half-light distorted his proportions: from Wolfgang’s vantage point, peering at him through the sodden mist, the man retrieving the envelope looked as big and rough-hewn as a tree.

  Carefully, the gun in his fist, Wolfgang got up off the ground and stepped into the yard. The man did not notice him until Wolfgang was three feet from his broad back.

  When Robert entered the yard, not ten minutes later, he found a mauled and bleeding body lying in the dirt.

  It took an awful lot of shouting to alert the police.

  Four

  1.

  Sophie did not feel the first drop form, was unaware of it until it hit the water, spread red skirts into the foam. A second followed, hit her drawn-up knee, splattered upon impact. She felt with her hands, came away bloody, then sat calmly, her attention on the droplets’ passage. First a quick dash from nostril to upper lip, where they sat, beaded, and swelled, clinging to the thin ledge where two types of skin collide. A moment later, bloodswollen past endurance, the drop would break; would choose a passage left or right, drawing half of a moustache onto her features, then chase on down, past the precipice of jawbone, launch itself into thin air. A quarter heartbeat later—reverting in an instant from trickle back to tear—it would hit her breast, her knee, the white ceramic of the tub. Sophie did nothing to stem the flow; sat, arms hugging bony knees, and watched the cooling water turn from soapy grey to pink.

  Somebody—a fellow lodger—knocked on the door, first gently then with increasing force, made speeches in loud German on the code of conduct pertaining to shared bathrooms. She understood not half of it, but the tone was long familiar. It seemed the language was made for this: the judicious venting of rational outrage for the benefit of those whom one knew to be listening out of sight. The water was quite icy now, and Sophie got out, reached for the towel, pulled the plug. She dressed quickly, still without answering the banging on the door, bundled up her dirty underwear and the old stockings, combed her hair. When she stepped out, the fat man outside watched her with embarrassment that only regressed into hostility when she was five steps down the hallway.

  “About time!” he shouted after her.

  She did not answer, dropped off her dirties in her room, then left the flat and ran up to see Anna. There remained, on the side of her chin, a faint tear-track of blood. The bathtub, too, was ringed by a fine pink waterline that gave her neighbours further reason for gossip and complaint.

  2.

  She did not wait for Anna to lead her into the kitchen to make her confession. It came out in the corridor, in mid-step, while Anna was still closing the door.

  “Karel is back in Vienna,” she said. “He’s been here for weeks.”

  She described, too quickly perhaps for Anna to follow all her English, how she had paid people to look for him in bars, and how she had traced him from one shabby hotel to another, always asking for a “giant,” always arriving a day or two too late.

  “Tonight, I finally caught up with him. Only I was late again. He’d left on some errand, or to go drinking, I don’t know.”

  Anna listened to her and felt a coldness rise in her that it took her a moment to identify as anger. “You should have told me earlier. Frisch needs to question Karel. He escaped the Russians. He will know where Anton is.” She pushed past Sophie and fetched her coat.

  “There are no Russians. He made them up.”

  Anna froze, one sleeve dropping from her fingers, flopping empty by her side.

  “I knew it months ago. The moment I started asking him questions. It just didn’t add up—the names and dates, it all kept changing every time he told the story, and when I pressed him, he just asked for money, to meet a ‘contact’ he’d picked up in some bar.” Sophie paused, awaited a verdict.

  Anna did her the favour. Her limited English lent a fitting crudeness to her words. “You kept silent because you enjoyed fucking him? Or because you wanted to write your article?”

  “Don’t pretend you’re surprised, Anna. You must have suspected it too.” Sophie looked at her, expectant, but was granted no pardon, no sharing of her guilt. When she carried on, there was genuine wonder in her voice. “All this time I thought you knew. That you held on to the Russians as a sort of insurance against the simplest of explanations. That your husband simply left you.”

  If Sophie was aware of the hurtful nature of her words, she did not show it. She was absorbed in her own justifications. “I went along with Karel’s story because I thought there was a chance there was some truth to it, mixed up with his lies. And then, when I started calling the embassies, it did push some buttons. When that body disappeared, and Karel himself went missing—well, I thought, maybe I had done him an injustice. Maybe he had embellished a little here and there, but the core of it—But he is back and didn’t bother to come see me—”

  Anna had heard enough. “We must tell the police. Karel knows something. He knew about Anton’s secret. And he had a key to the flat.” She finished putting on her coat, tied a scarf around her neck. “Where do I find him?”

  Sophie gave her the address of the hotel. “He’s got a new girl,” she added hoarsely, her restless features reaching for defiance. “At least I think she is his girl. I was there today and wanted to ask her, whether they—But how do you ask a question like that?” She swallowed, relocated her feelings of betrayal underneath her confusion. “You can’t miss her. The one from the trial. She’s bent like a miner. How can a man take up with someone like—” She stopped herself, hurried after Anna, who had stepped out onto the landing. “I’ll come with you.”

  Anna shook her head. “Go home,” she said in German. “To Toronto, or New York, or wherever it is you belong. Nobody wants you here.”

  Without locking the door, she ran down the stairs and out onto the street, looking for a cab. By the time she finally found one, three blocks from th
e house, she had changed her mind about her destination, dug in her purse, and found an address that had been pressed on her weeks ago by a would-be suitor.

  “Fifteenth district,” she said to the cabbie. “Make it quick.”

  3.

  Anna found the name on the doorbell; she had to ring several times before she was let in. Frisch lived in the back wing of a Union building built in the 1920s, its murals of working men untouched by the war. It was not he but his daughter who opened the door. Anna had no memory of her name.

  “Good evening,” she said formally, looking down at the child. “I wish to speak to your father.”

  “He had to go out,” the girl said. “To work.”

  Anna turned to leave.

  “You can call him if you like. We have a telephone.”

  “That would be most kind.”

  She followed the girl into the small, cramped apartment. It smelled of boiled cauliflower and cigarettes. A coconut runner stretched from entrance to study. A look in the kitchen revealed a heap of dirty dishes; Frisch’s socks drying on the radiator, lined up in a messy row.

  Frisch’s desk, by contrast, was remarkably tidy. Next to the telephone there lay two thin paper files, the first entitled Anton Beer. The second was not labelled. The little girl—Gertraut? Gerlinde?—dialed for her, passed her the receiver, then stood by the desk, watching her closely.

  Ignoring her stare, wedging the receiver between shoulder and cheek, Anna opened both files. The first contained her “missing persons” statement about Anton, along with a list of witnesses interviewed. It appeared Frisch had done a second round of interviews about a month after his initial investigation that aimed to establish whether her husband “wore a glass eye.” His verdict read that “with considerable likelihood” Anton did. “Several of the witnesses had not been aware of the eye but mention an odd sort of character to his gaze. I attribute their uncertainty to the quality of the prosthetic.” The unlabelled file contained police photographs of “unidentified body No. 48 VII 2,” along with the pathologist’s autopsy notes. She hastily closed it again, unwilling to revisit her trip to the morgue, and uncomfortably aware of the stare of the child by her side. The phone on the other end of the line, meanwhile, kept on ringing. Somewhere at the back of her mind she’d been counting the rings.

  The duty sergeant at the local station picked up after the twenty-first, sounding sleepy. He promised to “have a look,” and returned after some minutes informing her that Frisch was not at his regular desk; he had been called out to stand in for a colleague at headquarters.

  “It’s the flu,” he apologized. “We are short of hands. Are you a—lady friend?”

  Anna left the question unanswered, requested the number of headquarters, called there. This time the call was promptly answered. Yes, Frisch had signed in for duty and in all likelihood “was present in the building.” A man was dispatched to track him down. Anna had to wait several minutes for his return, only to be told that Frisch was “not available at the moment.” The voice did not offer to take a message. It didn’t matter. Anna had none to give. She hung up, picked up the file with the autopsy photos, turned to the girl.

  “Tell your father that I will return these tomorrow.”

  The child nodded gravely, her eyes on Anna, not the file.

  “What is it?” Anna said, stopped by this queer stare.

  “Father explained it all to me,” the girl said, chin raised, proud, as though expecting Anna’s anger and determined not to flinch. “How he is hungry, in that other way. You could let him, you know. Just a little. It wouldn’t cost you anything.”

  “Go to bed,” said Anna Beer. She only made sense of the words after she’d run out of the house. Perhaps the girl was right, at that. It cost you something, feeding that appetite, but, all things considered, not so very much.

  She rode the tram to the city centre, then walked ten minutes to the flat of Gustav Kis.

  4.

  It started as a routine disturbance. A police patrol was fetched by an elderly man who “just happened to be passing” and had overheard “somebody shouting.” On arrival the situation looked to the officers like the aftermath of a run-of-the-mill fight: one man beaten on the ground, another, a youth, sitting next to him, shouting, crying, his hands smeared with blood. It called for an ambulance and an arrest; a night in the drunk tank, most typically, then a glum confession in the morning.

  The first complication manifested itself in the fact that the man was dead. Not that it changed anything of substance, but their procedure was expected to be more thorough in cases of homicide, more diligently “by the book.” Then there was the matter of the gun. It was lying in the dirt not far from the corpse. It was entirely possible that somewhere in the bloodied face there hid a bullet hole. A shooting might point to premeditated murder. Add to this the boy (for really, he wasn’t much more than a boy, eighteen if he was a day, soft down on his lip like there’d been on the lips of those Italian girls one of the officers had occasion to study during the war): amongst his hysterical declarations, his insistence that they search “the cellar, at once,” he divulged his name and with it the possibility of scandal. The two officers had a brief conference that resulted in one of them leaving the yard to locate the nearest public telephone. He walked the better part of a mile until he did; dug for some coins and called headquarters. Headquarters, in turn, called Inspector Frisch. Frisch had been sitting at home in his bathtub at the time, doing a crossword and yelling instructions at Trudi to boil another kettle of water. He dressed at once.

  When Frisch arrived at the scene, his initial preoccupation was to figure out why he’d been called. While it was true that a good many senior officers were off sick, this wasn’t his district and he hadn’t been part of the central investigative unit for several years. As soon as he got out of the car and recognized the building, he formed the theory that some clever clerk had noticed he’d filed a report some months ago on another body that had been found on these premises. Or perhaps some of his colleagues had been reluctant to become embroiled in a case that involved a Seidel. There were several amongst them who had reason to be shy of the press.

  At the scene everything seemed under control. He tried to make a positive identification himself, but the hard light of his electric torch revealed features too mud- and blood-smeared to interpret. The nose had been broken and hung somehow loose; the teeth caved in and covered in grit. The boy, meanwhile, kept shouting and had to be restrained by one of the officers. He had long been cuffed. Frisch, still crouching near the body, listened to his shrill accusations then ordered his driver to keep a watch on “the suspect” while his two colleagues searched the cellar rooms. They looked at him in confusion until he pointed out to them the bent metal door.

  “The cellar,” he said. “I’ve been down there before.”

  The two officers entered cautiously, truncheons out, then re-emerged after a few minutes holding between them a shabby man dressed in a torn greatcoat and a red woollen scarf. One of the officers also carried out a brown canvas sack.

  “You won’t believe what’s in here!” he called to Frisch, but Frisch gestured for him to be silent.

  “Leave it for the station,” he said. “And get the police photographer here. We want full documentation.”

  Unwilling to wait for any of his superiors to have second thoughts and pass the case to his colleagues, Frisch had the two suspects put into his car. The boy kept shouting accusations at the other man and had to be cautioned several times. After some minutes he settled down and sat more quietly, his head turned to the man and scrutinizing his features. It was clear enough that they knew one another; and yet the boy did not seem to know the stranger’s name.

  At the station, before transferring them to adjacent interrogation rooms, Frisch made a search of their pockets. The Seidel boy had nothing on him other than his wallet and some verses of Rilke copied out on a scrap of paper that he kept in his breast pocket. The man in the red sca
rf had straw in his trouser pocket and two sewing needles struck through the cuff of his worn shirt. There was a hole at the right side of his coat where the pocket had been torn out. In his left coat pocket they found three items. The first was a torn letter from a Linz orphanage concerning the whereabouts of one Anneliese Grotter. The text made mention of an attached passport photo, now missing. The second item was a crumpled telegram giving details of a train schedule, including its arrival in Vienna. It had been sent by Anna Beer. The third item was a photo of Anna Beer in her mid-twenties, looking radiant in a light, shoulder-free gown. There were neither a wallet nor any personal papers. The man had, as far as Frisch could tell, not a penny to his name.

  “Are you Anton Beer?” he asked him, examining the photo.

  The man did not respond.

  The way his eyes moved, they both had to be real.

  5.

  They questioned the boy first. He had calmed down since arriving at the station, asked to wash his hands. Frisch considered the request, then calmly refused.

  “Later,” he said. It seemed to him that it was harder to lie with blood on one’s palms. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I’ll try not to make stains,” the boy said, sat down on the chair he had been offered, and, leaning forward, folded his hands carefully into the gap between his knees. “Can you tell me—is he really dead?”

  “You know he is.”

  The boy nodded gravely. “We must tell Poldi. His wife.”

  “All in good time. Please, start at the beginning. What were you doing in that yard?”

  The boy told his story. There were obvious omissions. His brother had gone to the yard to “meet somebody.” It was “a matter of money.” Wolfgang had asked him to wait for his return in a doorway not far from the factory yard. The boy had waited, “five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes,” frozen through to the bone. “There was no noise, you see, no sound at all, and he’d made me promise I’d wait,” he said, seeking out Frisch’s eyes. “I thought, ‘If there’s a row, there is sure to be some noise.’”