The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  When Wolfgang did not return, Robert decided to walk over to the yard. A body had lain prone in the mist. As he’d bent down to it, he had heard a movement behind him. “I saw a face peeking out from behind a metal door. When I approached, he threw his weight against it. A sign on the door said it was an air-raid shelter. I thought to myself, ‘It’s a cellar, he can’t possibly escape.’ Then I returned to the body. The face was so bloody, I kept on hoping it wasn’t him.”

  He paused, raised a hand to rub his cheek or maybe his neck, then remembered the blood. “Wolfgang had a gun, you know. But he never fired a shot.”

  There was, despite the evasions, a quality of sincerity and honesty about the boy that Frisch found intriguing. He wondered briefly whether such a thing was congenital or acquired, and whether it necessitated habitual truthfulness. But despite these thoughts and the skepticism they implied, he found himself drawn to the boy, whose emotions appeared so simple and unstudied. The image of Anna Beer flashed through his mind: for her the opposite held true. The two, he remembered, had met. Frisch wondered whether Anna had taken to this wonky-eyed boy.

  The detective stood up, rounded the table, perched on its far side, closer to Robert. He paused before he spoke, scrutinized the boy. Robert bore it calmly, stole a second to look around the room as though for the first time.

  “Is this a holding cell?” he asked.

  “An interrogation room.”

  “It has a telephone,” Robert said. “A holding cell would not have a telephone. Nor a desk, I suppose.” He blushed, caught himself in the irrelevance of his thought. “It’s because my father was a policeman. Inspector Teuben. I was told he worked right here, in this building.”

  Having finished his inspection, Robert gazed straight into Frisch’s eyes. “You will tell me now that I have not been forthright in my statement. That I left bits out.”

  “Yes.”

  “What it is, I wasn’t sure how to say it. It’s funny. Two hours ago I told my brother to let everything come out and to hell with our ‘reputation.’ But now …” He swallowed, thought. “Can you tell me something, Herr Inspektor? The man who did it, the one who hid behind the iron door—Is he a Jew?”

  “I have not spoken to him yet.”

  Robert nodded, distracted, continued the trajectory of his thought. “It makes a difference if he is. In terms of motive, I mean. Whether he had the right—” He sighed, and without further ado launched into a summary of the situation. “We were being blackmailed, you see, that is to say my mother was, by my stepfather’s old business partner. But Wolfgang thought it was a fraud and that someone else was sending the letters. He went to that yard tonight to have it out.”

  It took Frisch another thirty minutes of questions to make sense of this announcement. Robert answered willingly and comprehensively. Only one little detail failed to cohere.

  “Why did you not go after him sooner?” he pressed the boy. “You felt uneasy about Wolfgang’s plan. Why not sneak after him right away?”

  “He made me promise to wait.”

  “You mean you were scared.”

  “No,” Robert said, “not the way you mean.”

  “What, then?”

  Robert blushed, wrestled with himself. “I didn’t want to know. I thought Wolfgang was up to something. Something bad. I didn’t want to be there when he did it.”

  “You loved your brother.”

  “Yes. And now he is dead.”

  Frisch sighed, rose from his chair, and informed Robert that he was cleared of all suspicion. “I would like to ask you to wait around for another few hours. There is a waiting room near the entrance.”

  He did not have the heart to tell the boy that it would fall to him to make a formal identification of the body.

  6.

  Frisch turned his attention over to his second suspect. When he entered the neighbouring interrogation room, he was annoyed to find it empty. The duty sergeant knew nothing about it, and it took fifteen minutes of walking around the building and knocking on doors to locate the prisoner on the third floor, in a larger interrogation cell equipped with a long table and a good dozen chairs as though it doubled as a meeting room. Two fellow detectives were present, cups of coffee in their hands. They had, they explained, been dragged out of their beds by the chief himself, though both were on the sick, one with a cold, the other with a “gastric complaint.” They both seemed chipper enough, however. The investigation, in any case, was no longer Frisch’s responsibility, “Sorry to say, old chap.” But since Frisch had inspected the crime scene and had already questioned the boy, he was invited to stay and “work this maggot as a team.” The stated goal, the older of the detectives announced with a belligerent look at the suspect, was to “get a quick confession and be back in bed before ten.” They sat down at the big table with the air of men who had done this a hundred times.

  But nothing about the interrogation proved routine. At first it was thought that the man was dumb, or imbecilic. He would not answer a single question. But then, perhaps an hour into the interrogation, with the two detectives alternately yelling or cooing at him, feeding him schnapps and cups of malt coffee, he all at once began to emit a rapid series of words, albeit in a hoarse and barely audible voice. When he was made to speak up (some twenty minutes were spent cajoling him towards this end), it turned out the words were in some foreign tongue that none of them spoke. It was tentatively identified as Russian. A discussion ensued in which the elder detective argued that the man should be turned over to the Soviet authorities immediately, while his colleague wanted an interpreter—“one of ours, an Austrian”—to be fetched, though it was unclear from where. After some inquiries it turned out that the cousin of one of the uniformed policemen on duty had spent three years in a Soviet camp and had had a girl there, “almost a sort of wife,” and consequently spoke the language “better than German.” They sent a car around to his house and brought back the man, who looked as careworn and emaciated as their prisoner. The two men sat across from each other and exchanged a quiet greeting.

  “Get the fuck on with it,” the older detective told the interpreter. “We haven’t got all night.”

  But even with the interpreter present, progress was minimal. For the longest time the man refused to give his name. A half-hour of questions finally produced a single, halting, “Israel, formerly Jacob,” from which it was inferred he was Jewish, though a quick examination, performed with a crudeness that filled Frisch with shame, informed them he was uncircumcised and bore no concentration camp tattoo. He did not answer the question what he was doing in the basement; nor would he name his nationality, his place of birth, his whereabouts during the war. When asked his age, the prisoner held up a combination of fingers indicating he was either thirty-seven or thirty-eight (his vacillation on the issue was itself frustrating), though he looked twenty years older. He smelled like a badger. It was impossible to sit with him without opening the door.

  The only question he answered consistently, albeit with a voice so light it seemed to wither in the air, was whether or not he had this evening killed the man identified as Wolfgang Seidel.

  “Nyet.”

  It was beginning to look as if they’d have little use for the interpreter.

  They confronted “Israel” with the contents of his pockets. He studied the letter, the telegram, and the photo with a certain tenderness, but declined to give an explanation. The younger detective leaned forward at this point, grabbed their prisoner by the shirt front, and delivered three quick slaps to his left cheek.

  “Ask him again,” he told the interpreter.

  The prisoner bore it calmly, one cheek burning red.

  The desk sergeant entered. The detective let go of the prisoner and whipped around, converting frustration into anger. “What is it, you fool?”

  The young sergeant apologized profusely and asked Frisch for a word. “Your daughter keeps calling,” he explained, still in earshot of the door.

  Frisch pulled
him along until they had rounded a corner. “Is there something wrong?” he asked in his calm manner.

  “She asks when you’ll come home.”

  “I’ll be a while.”

  “She says she is frightened.” The young man’s eyes pleaded with Frisch on his daughter’s behalf. “She is home all alone and cannot sleep. She says she thought about going to the neighbours’, but they’re off visiting relatives in the country.”

  Frisch sighed. “Very well. Send a car to pick her up. Here, I’ll give you my key. Make sure they lock the door. I don’t have an office here, but she can wait with you, can’t she? In the waiting room?”

  “Of course.” The man was so pleased, he seemed ready to run back to his desk. Then he remembered something. “Someone else called. A woman.” He searched his pockets as though expecting to turn up a note but didn’t. “I believe it was a social call.”

  “I am not to be disturbed,” Frisch told him, hoping against hope that it had been Anna Beer.

  7.

  Frisch sped back to the interrogation room. The door was half open, the man’s body odour noticeable even in the corridor. Frisch stopped and listened to them talk.

  “What did he say now?”

  “He’s a philosopher, I suppose. He says, ‘God is a spider, we are stuck in his web.’ He says, ‘I am the ghost of the past.’ He says, ‘A crow can fly even if it’s dead.’ I’m not sure what it means.”

  “It means he is crazy. We’ll shop him to the Soviets and be done with the fucker.”

  The assistant chief of police appeared in the hallway stifling a yawn. He had stopped by before to inquire about their progress; now he walked past Frisch without acknowledging his salute and leaned his head through the door.

  “God, he smells ripe,” he said. “Any news?”

  “He’s a ghost from the past.”

  “Of the past.”

  “You see what we are up against.”

  The assistant chief nodded. “Very well, then. Ready his papers and get him out of here. We are charging him with murder but releasing him to the Soviet authorities on grounds of his nationality, et cetera. Have Heinzl help you with the forms, he’s good with that sort of thing.” Without entering the room, he extended his arm and shook both the detectives’ hands. “I congratulate you. Another case solved.”

  The men grinned and lit cigarettes.

  “Are you doing the paperwork now?” Frisch asked, when the assistant chief was gone.

  “Nah. It’ll keep for the morning. Fancy a nightcap?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” Frisch said. “But I can stay and keep an eye on him if you like. I have some paperwork of my own to finish up.”

  The detectives left. When the interpreter attempted to follow suit, Frisch arrested him by the elbow. “Stay another hour. We aren’t quite done here.”

  The man acquiesced.

  They transferred the prisoner to a new interrogation room two floors down. This time Frisch took care to close and lock the door.

  Five

  1.

  The desk sergeant was only a few years older than Robert. He sat behind his desk in an attitude that alternated between a cheerful awareness of his exalted position in life—here he was, barely old enough to shave, a telephone in front of him, manning the front desk at police headquarters during the graveyard shift—and spells of abject boredom, during which he leaned back and went hunting for zits on his cheeks and scrawny neck. Robert’s presence in the adjacent waiting room did not seem to incommode him. They had exchanged a greeting when Robert first arrived more than an hour earlier, and since then shared the occasional look of boys too socially inexperienced to decide on an appropriate topic of conversation. Robert wore a distracted and somewhat tragic air that made an approach all the more difficult. Now, though, as the sergeant unwrapped a sandwich he had brought from home and carefully folded the greaseproof paper into an improvised plate, a subject at once innocent and topical presented itself to him.

  “Would you like a bite?” he asked, waving the sandwich in the air. “My mother made it. Real salami. And butter, too. And here are some radishes on the side.” He ignored Robert’s sullen shake of the head, broke the sandwich down the middle, and passed half of it over. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer,” he added. “You are Robert Seidel, aren’t you? I’ve seen your picture in the papers. During the trial. ‘Brother of the accused.’ The paper said your father was a policeman.”

  Robert listened to his prattle with a certain amount of annoyance, holding the sandwich at arm’s length despite his sudden appetite. Then a new thought dawned in him, indifferent to his grief. He took a first bite and turned around to face the young sergeant.

  “I always wanted to come here someday. When I was at school. I used to dream about it. How I’d come here and ask about my father.”

  The young man smiled, passed over a radish and a salt shaker. “His name was Teuben, right? Before my time, naturally. But I can see if someone can look up the file.”

  “Could you really?” Robert munched his salted radish.

  The desk sergeant gave an enthusiastic nod. “You wait here. I’ll ask Lieutenant Mayer. He’s got the key to the archives. One of the nice ones, Mayer is. If someone comes while I’m away—well, there is a bell. But anyway, I won’t be a minute.”

  He ran off still chewing on a bite.

  Within minutes of his leaving—Robert had just finished the last of his own sandwich—a uniformed police officer entered the station and made his way to the front desk. He was holding by the hand a little girl of maybe ten or eleven years. Robert recognized her from somewhere but could not immediately place her. The policeman craned his neck, trying to locate whoever was on duty. Robert called out to him.

  “The desk sergeant will be right back.”

  The officer nodded, stood undecided. His charge freed herself from his grip and walked into the waiting room.

  “It’s all right,” she said over one shoulder. “Papa said I should wait here.” She sat down on the bench next to Robert and seconds later swung her feet up, tucked her heels into her bum, showing off thick stockings. “Really, it’ll be all right. I’ve been here before,” she said again.

  The officer shrugged. “I’ll be going, then.”

  “Good night,” she called after him. Then, without the slightest pause or hesitation, she turned to Robert. “I was afraid at home. Stupid. But it was so dark and the pipes were making noises. I know that it’s the pipes. But still I was afraid. It really is stupid.” She seemed wound up, eager to talk. “I’m Trudi.”

  “Robert.”

  “I know,” she said, without explaining her meaning. “Why are you here?”

  “My brother was killed.”

  She gaped. “The one from the trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it a tram accident? There’re a lot of those these days. Papa says it’s because people are deh-jected.”

  Robert closed his eyes. “A man beat him to death. His face—” (he touched his own nose), “it was smashed in. I found him face down in the mud.”

  Saying it returned the moment to his memory. He stared at the hands he had scrubbed in the station toilet: bloody crescents still under his fingernails, the smell of salt radishes clinging to his skin.

  “He just lay there, like a drunk. At first I couldn’t even tell it was him. Everything was so dark, and dirty. And then my mind got stuck on the strangest things. I was down in the mud, squatting on my heels, and even as I began to clean him off, my feet started hurting, all my weight was pushed into the toes. And I figured it was the socks, they were too thick for the shoes, or maybe my feet had grown and I laced them up too tight. I pictured how all my toes were jammed into the tips of my shoes, my dark socks dyeing the skin, leaving little bits of fluff on the sweaty bits in between—And all the while I was cradling his head, right here between my knees, and was spitting on him, too, to clean off his face.” He swallowed, his throat thick with memory.
“And then, just when I realized what a beast I was, holding a dead man and thinking about toes, a shriek came out, right out of my mouth, like someone was reaching in and wringing out my lungs. Next thing I knew, I started shouting in earnest, shouting my head off, forgetting to breathe. But even then, in the midst of all this, I was still thinking, worrying about my socks. It’s as though one person was shouting and another was watching, and neither gave a fig about the other.”

  Robert looked up, startled, realized he was talking to a little girl. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’ll give you dreams.”

  Indeed Trudi had grown pale. Nonetheless she shook her head and did her best to reassure him. “The neighbour said he was handsome. She cut his picture from the paper. During the trial. She said he had a noble face.” Trudi pursed her lips then added, “Your eye droops. You also had a fight?”

  Robert blushed. “A long time ago. At school. It was about my father. This boy kept saying that he was a Nazi—”

  But he fell quiet the moment he noticed the sergeant walking back to his desk; leapt up from the bench. The young officer was in the company of an older colleague dressed in civilian clothing. The two men stopped three feet from the desk and entered into a hushed conversation. Robert caught most of it.

  “Him?” the older man asked. “But he’s tiny. The father was a big old ox. Six foot, fleshy. This one’s a shrimp. The same sort of hair, I suppose. Thick, almost like a wig.”

  Robert quickly bridged the distance that separated him from the two men, making it impossible for them to ignore his presence. “Did you find my father’s file?” he asked, and was surprised by his belligerence.

  The detective and the young sergeant exchanged a look. When their silence became awkward, the latter took it upon himself to answer.

  “He was a well-respected member of the force.”

  The older man snorted, then quickly forced his head into a nod.

  “But the file?” Robert pressed.