The Fig Eater

by Jody Sheilds

  “What was the reason for this social occasion?”

  “We were discussing my boy. We recently lost our only daughter. She died of tuberculosis in August.”

  The Inspector nods briefly to express sympathy, then asks for the specific time and place where he met Fräulein Rosza.

  Zellenka stares down at his desk. “We met at the Grand Café. Then we drove through the Prater. I wasn’t home until after midnight.”

  “You’re certain of the hour?”

  His eyes meet the Inspector’s. “I remember it was very hot, even that late at night.”

  The Inspector asks for Rosza’s address.

  “I don’t have her address. I believe she’s gone to a new position.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since that evening?”

  He emphatically shakes his head, and then readily agrees the Inspector should talk to his wife. He’ll arrange a time with her soon — yes, tomorrow. “May I ask you a question about Dora?”

  “What is it?”

  “Did she suffer much?”

  “I have reason to believe death was swift.”

  “That’s a mercy.”

  Zellenka coaxes the letter opener a fraction of an inch across his desk, a ploy the Inspector recognizes as stalling.

  “Was Dora disfigured when you found her? How did she look?” He doesn’t raise his head.

  “Why would this information interest you?” He tries to decipher the intention behind the man’s soft words.

  “I knew Dora for years. Since she was a girl. I don’t like to think . . . you know, you’re haunted by thoughts.”

  The wistful look he gives the Inspector is the first genuine expression Zellenka has made.

  They walk through the hall to the front door. The sound of their footsteps reminds the Inspector he’d like to scrape the bottom of Zellenka’s boots, see if anything matches the dirt in the Volksgarten.

  When they stand at the door, the Inspector notices the heightened color in his face, a faint pink discoloration, a sign the interview has rattled him.

  To clear his head, he walks back to the police station. The late October light dulls even the hard color of the buildings painted the same shade as the Schönbrunn Palace, “Maria Theresa yellow.”

  Recently, the Inspector has observed Erszébet’s aura of preoccupation. Something clings to her. Several times he found her most elaborate hat on the small table in the entrance hall, where she’d taken it off in front of the mirror. A sign she’d been out of the house. Where were you this afternoon? I was just shopping, she said, barely answering his question and walked away from him into the kitchen. After that incident, he never found her hat on the table again.

  A few weeks ago, he was certain he’d glimpsed Erszébet in front of the Malteserkirche at midday, talking to an unfamiliar young woman in a scarlet cloak. He noticed his wife first, her shoulders wrapped in the long black fox boa he’d given her. By the time the driver had stopped and he had run back along the street, both women had vanished into the heavy traffic on the Kärntner Strasse. He was strangely relieved to find they were gone.

  He wonders if his solicitude for his wife is connected to the girl’s murder. Two uncertainties. As often as he and Franz have plotted theories, there are no obvious suspects in the crime. Murder is usually committed by someone who knew the victim. He’s diagnosed Dora’s mother as a hysteric, a woman with an abnormal state of mind, prone to strange behavior. Hysterics have been known to injure themselves or do violence to others. A famous psychoanalytic doctor in Vienna has even written about a hysterical woman with a severe case of zoöpsia, animal hallucinations.

  But it seems unlikely that Dora’s mother would be able to drag her daughter’s body to the Volksgarten. Unless she had help. Her husband? Son? An unknown party? Both Dora’s parents appear to have sound alibis, although confirmed only by each other.

  The excrement found next to Dora’s body puzzles him. It doesn’t fit the crime. Perhaps that was the killer’s intention, since the murder itself is straightforward. The error in the situation. The perversity of the murderer’s act disconcerts him. He wonders why the girl’s body wasn’t defiled. For once, he is at a loss as to how to proceed with a piece of evidence.

  Sometimes he believes the pure state of a corpse is contaminated by the mechanics of investigation. Debris scattered on the path of a labyrinth.

  The physical remains of the crime, its hypothetical reconstruction, his scribbled impressions of witnesses and suspects, can mysteriously become opaque, unfamiliar. Like souvenir postcards of a journey, which gradually replace the true visual memory of the experience.

  Possessed by this state of doubt, he will reexamine everything taken from the corpse and the crime scene. He needs to handle things, as if touching wood for luck. Once, while he was studying the objects retrieved from Dora’s body on a table, Erszébet had quietly slipped into the room unnoticed. When he looked up and met her eyes, he was swept with a peculiar shame.

  Wally returns to visit Dora’s mother. She immediately embraces Wally at the door. Caught by surprise, Wally can’t help stiffening at the woman’s touch.

  “It’s good of you to come.”

  “Thank you. It is my great pleasure to see you again.”

  Wally speaks with a formality, a politeness she doesn’t have in English.

  “I thought we could sit outside for a moment, while it’s still warm.”

  She follows Dora’s mother through the house and out the door in the back.

  There’s a high wall around the garden, obscured by thick trees. It hasn’t been cold enough for frost, but the leaves have lost the clear brilliance of their summer color. They’re a shade less than green, pivoting to yellow.

  They settle themselves on an ornate bench and sit with their shoulders touching, the afternoon sun striping their bodies and the ground in front of them. Dora’s mother unfurls a parasol to keep the light off her face.

  “You must be lonely here, so far from England.”

  This is the first personal comment she’s made about Wally, and it startles her. She shuts down the fraction of memory and homesickness that emerges.

  “No. I have a dear friend here. A woman from Hungary.”

  “Yes? Who is she? You must bring her here to have Jause one afternoon. The days are so long for me now.”

  Wally changes the subject. “I work as a governess. The family I live with went to the spa at Bad Ischl. The mother and children have an infection of the lungs. Tuberculosis, I think, although they were afraid to say so.”

  The older woman leans forward. “My husband thinks our son, Otto, has tuberculosis, but I don’t believe it. Otto never complained about being ill, not like Dora. My husband insisted on sending him away after Dora died.”

  “Where is Otto?”

  “He’s at the Kinderklinik, a hospital for tubercular children. I hope they’ll allow him to come home soon.”

  Now she’s content to sit for a while, unmindful of Wally’s fidgeting inattention. When she occasionally wipes her eyes or falls into a staring silence, Wally glances furtively around the garden, looking for the fig tree.

  After a time, Wally suggests they walk around the grounds. She waves Wally off the bench. You’re young, you go have a look around, she says. My old bones only want to carry me to the grave. I don’t walk anymore.

  Wally pulls her hand out of her muff and presses it into the woman’s hands as if it were a bouquet. She walks toward the foliage she glimpsed in the back of the garden; perhaps there are fruit trees. Her eyes also caught the precise glint of glass, a greenhouse.

  Five steps inside the greenhouse, Wally unbuttons her cloak; the air is hot and intimate, the sky blinding gray above the roof. The intense light shrinks her pupils to pinpoints, and it takes a moment for the layout of the greenhouse to register. There are three glass walls and a fourth side of whitewashed brick. Dwarf citron, pear, and plum trees are trained against the wall in a straight line, their branches spread fla
t against the wall, like a mural. There is no fig tree here.

  A smell of rotted manure and earth. And something else. A rose climbs up a metal column in the center of the greenhouse, its spiked branches artificially arched, its buds forced into flower.

  She pushes her way through leaves so thick the stone walkway is barely visible below them. This is like a labyrinth, she thinks. She’s claustrophobic, manipulated by this place. Nothing moves. Even time and light seem suspended here.

  Up close, the roses are silver pink. She tries to pick one, but the stem is green and stubborn, its thorns pull against her sleeve, there’s a tearing sound in her ears until she rips the rose free. Other thorns catch the edge of her cloak. She feels panic threaded into her body. Her breath comes in stitches.

  She tears petals off the rose until her body stops shaking.

  Dora’s mother is still waiting for her on the bench. She must have read something on Wally’s face, for she grasps the girl’s hands as soon as she sits down. She strokes her arm.

  “I don’t like the greenhouse, either. I prefer to be outside. My daughter would sit here sometimes. You remind me of her.”

  It’s colder now; the bench is in shadow. Accustomed to the older woman’s silences, Wally waits.

  “Dora didn’t want to celebrate her last birthday. I imagine she told you? She refused a Schmuckkästchen, an expensive jewel case, from a man, a close friend of the family. He’d already given her several pieces of jewelry. Then she stopped wearing jewelry altogether.”

  Wally slides her arm away. Dora’s mother keeps talking.

  “My daughter had the same dream several times. Our house was on fire, and I wanted to save my jewel case, but my husband wouldn’t let me. He said he’d rather save our children.”

  “Was that when she stopped wearing jewelry?”

  “No. It was earlier.” Dora’s mother stares straight ahead into the garden. “It was when she threatened to kill herself. Of course she didn’t mean it. Thank God my husband found her letter. I only tell you this because she’s dead. She never shamed our family. She was a good girl.”

  “But why would Dora wish to die? It seems extraordinary.”

  “She was always sick. Headaches, the female troubles we all suffer from. But she could bear those ailments, as I do. No, she wrote the suicide letter to frighten her father. She didn’t wish to die. She was angry with him. If only he’d been more attentive. I always told him to listen to her, but when he’s in a mood it does no good to talk. Eh, he must live with himself. And Dora was as stubborn as he is.”

  Wanting her daughter to be remembered, she makes a scrapbook from her words. She shakes her head and gropes for a handkerchief in her bodice.

  Wally wishes she could share or soothe her grief, but she feels only impatience. Still needing information, she tries to reenter the conversation.

  “But who was Dora going to meet that night in the Volksgarten? You must know.”

  The older woman looks up, confused, her wet eyes trying to focus, as if she’d been asleep. She wipes her cheeks and clutches Wally’s hand. She can’t speak.

  Wally promised herself she’d leave the minute Dora’s mother started crying, since she’ll learn nothing else from her. She can’t bear to be touched like this. She pulls her hand away and abruptly stands up. Yes, yes, maybe tomorrow, she promises to come back.

  Busy with her handkerchief, Dora’s mother barely waves farewell as Wally leaves her.

  Inside, the house is quiet. Wally considers searching through Dora’s possessions, walking into her room’s terrible stillness before she remembers the girl’s mother has locked the door. Down a hallway she finds the kitchen, where a woman is bent over a table, her arms covered with flour, a white kerchief over her head. She doesn’t look up but continues vigorously kneading something in a large bowl. There are smells of cinnamon, of cardamom. The room is very hot, heated by the Dortenpfanne stove against one wall.

  “Excuse me.”

  The woman’s big hands meet in the bottom of the bowl. She turns the dough over once, then expertly flips it onto the table. She picks up the soft mass, slaps and punches it between her hands into a shape. Wally pinches a piece of dough and sets it on her tongue. It’s cold and salty sweet. She smiles at the cook.

  “My mother used to bake something like this for me, back in England. Makes me homesick.”

  “You should taste my Buchteln. They’re baked with cheese and fruit, some almonds. Light as a cloud. You’re too thin. You could do with one of my desserts.”

  “I can imagine how good they must be. Have you worked here long?”

  The woman explains she’s a Mehlspeisköchin, a baker specializing in desserts. She moves from house to house, preparing her specialties. She’s worked here for over two years, maybe three. Wally persuades her to meet later at a Kaffeehaus. Yes, she’d love to know more about Buchteln.

  As part of his training, Franz has examined weapons and their effects. In Kriminalistik, he discovered, “In wounds caused by cutting instruments, the form of the wound rarely corresponds to the true form of the weapon.”

  He also made a study of a bullet’s impact in various surfaces and learned that gunshot through glass produces the most interesting results. A high-velocity bullet leaves a clean, perfectly round opening in a pane of glass. A bullet fired from close range and a poor shot from a bad weapon both create a mushy, splintered hole. When fired into glass at medium velocity, a gunshot creates an intricate web of cracks radiating out from a central point. Franz has carefully drawn and labeled each of these examples on paper.

  The Inspector has promised to take him to Graz to see a special display of windows. In the criminal museum, rows of windows are hung as if they were fine paintings, and each one has a bullet hole through its center. A card affixed to the frame describes the type of bullet that pierced the glass, the name of the weapon, the distance from which it was fired, the angle, and the weather conditions.

  Franz knows that if menaced by a gun, he must cover his heart with one arm.

  The Inspector stoops over the desk in his office. The blinds are rolled up to the top of the windows, so light floods the paper directly in front of him. He leans closer, and without lifting his eyes, lays his hand on a pair of tweezers and then plucks nearly invisible particles off the paper and places them in a watch glass.

  From across the room, Franz can tell by the way the Inspector’s shoulders are positioned that he’s holding his breath. He watches him work in silence, afraid if he unleashes any words he’ll disturb him.

  The Inspector has taken Franz under his wing. He tutors him, carefully asking his opinion before giving his own to help him hone his skills. He encourages him to be more “womanish,” to observe relationships between people, to offer neutral comfort, to read silence and gesture, to ask questions in such a way that the person who answers will reveal information beyond words. “Let each witness tell you what they want to say. The more they protest and claim something is an unimportant matter, the closer you must watch and listen.”

  The Inspector believes listening is one of the most important abilities an Investigating Officer can possess. He frequently quotes the philosopher Plutarch, who instructed men to listen in silence, without asking questions, and thoughtfully consider what they’d heard afterward. This will develop an internal voice of reason.

  Franz finds the Inspector’s remarks perfectly clear and completely mysterious.

  They make a habit of walking the few streets from the police station to the Maria-Theresien Brücke where it spans the Donaukanal. The Inspector will demand that Franz make the wildest speculations, share his most fanciful theories about a case. Just say whatever comes into your mind. Don’t think about it, he tells him. At first, Franz could only blush and shake his head when the Inspector tried to coax some silly theory out of him. Franz didn’t understand what he wanted. Tell me what to say, he’d plead, confused.

  All I can tell you, the Inspector would say, is that randomnes
s and listening will reveal the truth.

  Franz admires the Inspector and he’s relieved these exercises are private between the two of them. Gradually, this type of conversation during their walks together acquires the easy camaraderie of a game. However, Franz is still so young that he wants to be correct. He can’t leap into the uncertainty of guesswork.

  Moving slowly, as if in a dream, a group of gardeners pushes a spindly metal tower on wheels down an avenue of lime trees, the Park Allee. The tower is constructed of thin bars bolted into ladderlike steps, a bizarre ziggurat twenty feet tall that would seem to be made for an electrical purpose or a telegraph station. The tower sways slightly as its wheels move soundlessly over the grass, which is cut to the evenness of velvet.

  The trees facing each other along the avenue are clipped into a single, perfectly flat surface, uniform as books on a shelf. The backside of the trees is untrimmed, the branches wild and unkempt.

  The tower comes to a trembling halt in front of a tree, and two men clamber up its steps. When they reach the top, they shout and wave their arms, motioning to be moved closer to the tree. From where she stands across the fountain in Schönbrunn Park, Erszébet is unable to distinguish their words. The tower is gently pushed forward, and the weight of the men makes it rock back and forth, as slowly as if it were underwater. The men unhook shears from their belts and begin to trim the trees. On the ground, the gardeners leisurely gather the fallen leaves and branches, correcting the great untidiness dropped on the smooth grass.

  The Palmenhaus is a squat glass building surrounded by sharply pointed topiaries, diagonally across from the Park Allee. It’s silent inside, a tropical landscape that lacks birdsong. The quiet and the extravagant greenery make Erszébet uneasy. When she first walked in, she’d noticed other strange signs, too. On one of the palms, Stenia pallida, tiny wooden splints like matchsticks are tied alongside each fragile waxy flower to keep it from breaking, the handiwork of the meticulous Palmenhaus gardeners.