The Crooked Maid

by Dan Vyleta

  “Personnel files are not for public perusal.”

  “I am his son.”

  “All the same. The law is the law. Besides: a great many files were displaced after the war.”

  The detective shrugged and turned away from him. Robert caught him by the elbow.

  “You worked with him, didn’t you? Please tell me how he died.”

  The man’s face betrayed annoyance, then surprise at Robert’s question. His face was ruddy, the skin shot through with a network of veins. Robert stepped closer yet, into the range of the man’s sour breath.

  “It was an accident. He slipped and bashed in his head. In any case, he was off-duty.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  “It was a long time ago, boy. Bygones, eh?”

  All gentleness left Robert. It fell off him like a burden. He pushed out his chest, crumpled his hands into fists, stood nose to chin with the detective. “I am not a boy, Inspector. I am Robert Seidel, future owner of the Seidel factories. And I just found my brother beaten to death by a thug.”

  He whipped around, walked away, paused briefly by the girl. “I have to go home now, tell his wife.”

  “She’ll be sad,” the girl said. “Everybody will be sad.”

  “They should be,” said Robert. “Wolfgang Seidel was a good man.”

  2.

  Anna reasoned like this: Karel had been lying to her; he would do so again. She had no means to compel him to speak the truth. Frisch did, but Frisch was unavailable. There was little point, then, in seeking out Neumann on her own.

  The situation was entirely different when it came to Gustav Kis.

  She rang his bell. Kis opened at once. He wore a dressing gown and pyjamas, and a look halfway between surprise and gratitude.

  “You wanted to tell me something,” she said, without reacting to his greeting. “Outside the courthouse. When I called you names.” She stepped into the doorway, made it impossible for him to close the door. “Tell me now.”

  He asked her to wait in the hallway for a moment, then ran into his room. She expected a red-faced lover to emerge, a blanket thrown around his naked loins, then realized from the sounds that escaped the room that Kis was simply tidying up. She followed him without waiting for his summons, caught him fluffing up his pillows with repeated slaps of the hand. The room smelled of food and unwashed linen. Anna stepped over to the window and discreetly opened it a crack before sitting down upon the sofa. She patted the place next to her. Kis hesitated, smoothed out the coverlet on the bed, kept his eyes from meeting hers.

  “What was it that you wanted to tell me?” Anna tried again. She was still wearing her hat and coat and gloves. The tension of her smile made her face hurt.

  “There was something strange,” Kis said, “about that man you took along. That Czech.”

  “Karel.”

  “Yes. He seemed to know your husband. At least he acted like he did. But then he asked what camp he had been in, like he didn’t know.”

  She processed this. “Why did he think you would know?” But the answer was obvious. “So you have seen him since the war.”

  “Once. But he told me not to tell you. The Czech. He beat me. My face swelled up like a melon afterwards.”

  “Tell me about Anton. When did he come here?”

  “About ten days before you did.”

  “He wanted to—renew your acquaintance.”

  “He came to talk.”

  “You slept with him.”

  “No. I didn’t. Not for many years.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing. Anton was looking for someone. A crippled girl. He came and he talked and then he went. It was like he’d gone crazy.” His eyes pleaded with her not to push the point.

  She didn’t. Her interest lay elsewhere. “So you told all this to Karel, then figured out he was a crook. And then it took you three whole months until you worked up the courage to waylay me outside the courthouse. You saw my picture in the paper and had a sudden pang of guilt.”

  Kis launched into apology, but she cut him short.

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you know what Anton looks like. Nobody else saw him; only from a distance, in passing, in a stairwell or a crowded street. But you—you were his lover. He came here; you talked to him, studied him, in good light. You’d pick him out amongst a thousand.” She patted the sofa again, more forcefully this time. “Sit, Herr Kis. There is something I need you to look at.”

  She produced the file she had taken from Frisch’s desk.

  Kis did as he was bidden, preserving a yard of distance between them, accepted the file. He dropped it when he saw the first of the pictures. The photos slipped out and formed a collage upon his carpet. Most of them were close-ups of individual wounds and body parts; with a little effort, Anna mused, one might be able to assemble a life-sized corpse. She stopped Kis when he hastily attempted to stuff the photos back into the file; lowered herself onto her knees next to him and with gloved fingers spread the pictures apart.

  “This man was found some months ago,” she said very calmly. “He had been murdered in the cellar of an abandoned factory yard. There was a suspicion that it might be Anton.” She turned her head to study Kis’s face: pale, sweaty, distressed by the gore. “I want your opinion. Is it him?”

  He took his time, fixating on the prosthetic eye, which had been photographed both in its socket and separately, lying in a metal bowl, the camera’s flash shining through it, illuminating the twisting line of the optical nerve, crisp and as though ink-drawn in the fine-grained black and white. Kis stared at it a full minute, seemingly unable to make sense of it.

  “It’s made from glass,” she explained, and felt relief flood her. “You are surprised. So it isn’t him. Anton hasn’t lost an eye.”

  Kis did not respond. He shuffled the photos, discarded the face shots: there was little there recalling human features. The rest of the stack he pressed into his chest. It took Anna a while to understand he was crying.

  “He kept looking at me funny. One eye screwed into the wall. I thought he’d gone crazy. How was I to know?—It looked so real.”

  Blood left her head, her hands and feet; she felt sick, unbalanced. “It is him?” she asked, helplessly. “How do you know? There are other one-eyed men. It doesn’t mean—”

  Kis looked over at her, almost in anger. “Here,” he said, throwing down the topmost picture. It was a close-up of the upper left part of the dead man’s torso. The bruises stood out in a dark shade of grey.

  “His shoulder?” she asked, not comprehending.

  “There!” Kis said with renewed vehemence, and pointed. “The three moles. Forming a triangle.”

  She found the mark he was talking about but did not recognize it. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s Anton,” Kis said. “I used to kiss him there, three kisses, one for each mole.”

  He burst into tears. She watched him cry. After some minutes she reached out a hand, touched his shoulder, then his face. His skin felt waxen through the leather of her glove.

  Kis produced a handkerchief, blew his nose; cast a grateful look in her direction. When he tried to take hold of her hand, she shook him loose. She did so gently, stayed close to him, kneeling on the floor, their heads together like conspirators.

  “Did he talk about me?” she asked him quietly. “Before the war.”

  “Never.”

  She felt her face freeze into a mask. Kis saw it too.

  “All he said was that he felt bad about the lies. He told me again and again. ‘I live a life of deception,’ he said. He felt guilty before you.”

  “I loved him,” she said, as though Kis had accused her of doing otherwise. It felt natural to use the past tense.

  She rose from the floor, sat back down on the couch. Her eyes returned to the autopsy photos. The realization hit her that Anton had been murdered. There had to be a murderer. She remembered the stain on her living room wall; r
emembered scrubbing it, looking for a bullet hole.

  “I must use your telephone.”

  Kis pointed her to the corridor.

  She called the police headquarters and asked for Frisch. She got the same desk sergeant as before.

  “He is not to be disturbed.”

  She hung up.

  “What now?” asked Kis.

  “I’ll go see Neumann,” she decided, despite her earlier assessment that it would be futile. “Do you have a gun, Herr Kis?”

  “A gun?” Kis asked. “Why would I have a gun?”

  He tried to hug her as she left. When she looked back up in the glum light of the stairwell, there was such sorrow in his face that she wished she had let him.

  3.

  Robert took a taxi home. He paid the driver without tipping, walked up to the door, let himself in. His mother was sitting in the dark of the drawing room. The only reason he noticed her at all was because she was brushing her hair. The brush’s silver caught the lamp he had lit in the hallway.

  He walked up to her, waited until his eyes had adjusted.

  “You are late,” she said.

  “Wolfie is dead. Beaten to death.”

  She looked up, surprise on her face, then calculation. He understood at once that she fretted over the blackmailer. There was in her features no hint of sorrow.

  “You are a monster,” he said. “I told the police everything.”

  She paled, reached out a hand like a beggar asking for money. “You look just like your father when you’re angry.”

  “I asked about him at the station. I’m beginning to think that he was a monster too.” He brushed off her hand and cast around for something else to say. “I must tell Poldi.”

  The moment he turned, he heard naked feet run away from him. She must have been listening to their conversation from the stairs. He ran after her into the unlighted house. Two floors up Poldi slammed her bedroom door. He heard the key; the sound of her breathing through the wood.

  Robert knocked. “Poldi!” he called. “Please.”

  “Go away!”

  “It’s about Wolfgang,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He fell to his knees, spoke to the gap at the foot of the door. “He told me to wait. He made me promise. And then, I didn’t hear a thing. Things would have been different if only I had heard. But there wasn’t a sound.

  “Poldi,” he said, “Wolfie’s dead. Please open the door.”

  She did not answer for the longest time. They sat, each on their side of the door, listening to the other’s breathing.

  “I killed the crows,” she said at last, sorrow, malice in her voice. “So he could sleep. I thought he’d be tired, coming home from jail. They was makin’ ever such a ruckus. Nobody told me they was pets.

  “You went out together,” she added, all in the same breath, “but it’s only you that’s come back home.”

  Robert stood up and left before she could say anything else.

  4.

  Before resuming his interrogation of the man with the red scarf, Frisch excused himself and briefly left the room. When he returned, he was carrying the potato sack the officers had found in the cellar. He placed it on the table with exaggerated care and sat down. The interpreter was chainsmoking cigarettes. Frisch looked from one face to the other. Emaciation made the two men look like brothers.

  He reached into the sack and pulled out its contents. The interpreter flinched, but the prisoner looked over with a hint of fondness.

  “It’s very lifelike,” Frisch said. “The eyes, the cock of the head, the angle of the wings.” He stroked the bird, turned it over in his hands, waited for the interpreter to catch up with his words. “Did you do this? Stuff the crow?”

  The man hesitated, then gave a cautious nod.

  “It’s good work. What’s inside? I thought one used sand or perhaps clay. But it feels too light.”

  The man tried to answer. It took him a while. It appeared that he had become so used to speaking only in his head that actually shaping the words took a conscious effort. He sat there as though trying to vomit the words, his hollow cheeks flushing with embarrassment. At long last he produced two little words that the interpreter rendered as “straw” and “wire.”

  “You bend the wire into shape? To build an armature?”

  A nod.

  “I see. You skin the bird, scrape off all the flesh, slip the skin over the armature. And then you sew it up here.” Frisch dug amongst the feathers on the bird’s underside, exposing the stitching, and earned another nod. “Is that what you do professionally? Taxidermy?”

  Again that timid ritual, in which words had to be first mouthed then given volume, as though these two aspects of spoken language were governed by entirely separate faculties. “Ljubitel.”

  “He says, ‘Amateur.’ I suppose he means he does it as a hobby.”

  Frisch blinked. Pale lids fluttered in thick glasses. “We found a dead body. A few months ago. Someone had removed the intestines, then sewed it back shut. I wonder whether the stitching is similar. I can call the pathologist and ask him to take a look.” He paused. “You seem to have borrowed the dead man’s coat.”

  The moment the interpreter had rendered Frisch’s words, the man grew pale. Twice he started to respond but stopped himself: thin hands flapping in the air in agitation.

  Frisch watched him without moving. “Tell me something,” he said. “Are you Jewish?”

  He received no answer.

  “No, I didn’t think you were. Nor is Israel your name. A private joke, I suppose. ‘Israel formerly Jacob.’ From Genesis: the man who wrestled with God. Is that who you are?”

  Again he received no reaction. Frisch bent forward until his face was very close to his prisoner. His voice was soft. He did not wish to frighten the man.

  “Look here,” he said. “There are two dead men. Both were found in the place where you live. Did you kill them?”

  A shake of the head, at once forlorn and emphatic, silent lips shaping a “nyet.”

  “Then help me figure out who did.”

  The man thought about it. Folded his hands in the attitude of prayer and listened into himself, his lips moving in silent monologue.

  When he finally spoke out loud, it sounded like a question.

  “He wants to know,” the interpreter said, “what will happen to him.”

  Frisch looked him in the eye. “They want to give you to the Soviets.”

  The man trembled when he heard it.

  “You don’t want to go.” Frisch leaned back, sat musing, wiped his brow. “Perhaps I can help you,” he said. “I will if I can.

  “Please,” he added, “all I want is the truth.”

  The man turned his hands to the ceiling: a preacher’s gesture. When he spoke, each word seemed smuggled past the threshold of his own temerity. “I istina sdelaet vas svobodnymi.”

  “The truth shall set you free.”

  Frisch took a risk then. “You are at a police station,” he said. “The opposite tends to happen here.”

  It earned him his first smile.

  5.

  “Please. Give me a name. Something to call you.”

  “Timofey. Son of Ivan, son of Alexei the spice merchant.”

  “Timofey. A Russian name. So you are Russian.”

  “Ukrainian. From Kiev.”

  “Profession?”

  “Chemist.”

  “Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “Christian, then.”

  “Orthodox.”

  “Do you know an Arnim Rothmann?”

  “No.”

  “His wife, his child, any of his relations?”

  “No.”

  “What were you doing in the cellar, Timofey?”

  “Hiding.”

  “From whom?”

  “Your people. My people. The wrath of God.”

  “Is God angry with you?”

  “He must be. Look where I am.”

  Theirs continued to
be a three-way conversation, the interpreter’s voice sandwiched between Frisch’s methodical drone and the prisoner’s halting whisper. He had a pleasant voice, the interpreter did, full-bodied even when it was quiet. His diaphragm moved more than his lips. In time Frisch forgot all about his presence, focused solely on his mark. It soon become obvious that he was highly articulate, and just a little mad.

  They started with generalities. Timofey had been a German prisoner of war. He had served in the artillery and been taken in the fall of ’41 near Orel, then transported westward and used as a slave labourer in a variety of factories. In the confusion of the battle for Vienna he had escaped and hidden from conquered and conqueror alike. It had been easy enough; the city was full of lost souls and there were plenty of corpses from whom to pluck clothes and identification papers. When forced into contact with people, he pretended to be mute. Nobody troubled the walking ghost. He lived in the sewage canals for a while. Eventually he had found an unoccupied basement. He had lived there ever since.

  “By yourself?”

  “With my shadow.”

  “Lonely, I suppose.”

  “Alone.”

  “Alone, then. But one day that changed, didn’t it? You got company.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about that day.”

  The man nodded, took a sip from the cup of coffee Frisch had fetched for him, leaned back in his chair, and, with a theatricality borrowed from some earlier incarnation of his life, gathered his thoughts.

  “There was a rainstorm that night,” he said at length. “I had gone out late in the afternoon. The rain surprised me. I decided to sit it out in a church. A well-attended church: people sleeping on every pew. The rain did not break until dawn. When I returned to my cellar, he was there. The body was still warm. He had lived long enough to bruise.”

  It was the scarf that drew his initial interest, then the warm soldier’s coat. He went through the pockets, found two photos, a telegram, and a letter, but no money or keys. Then he noticed the eye that stayed alive long after the other had gone dull.

  “It gave me a fright at first,” Timofey said, “but then I found beauty in it. There were such colours to the iris. I took it out and cleaned it off; held it up into the sun. Patterns on the floor. Whoever made it was an artist.”