Woman of the Dead

by Bernhard Aichner

  • • •

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “I feel happy in my tummy.”

  “Happy?”

  “Yes, I feel all happy.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw Papa.”

  “You did what?”

  “He’s fine, Mama. He was on his motorcycle and he smiled at me. And he waved, Mama.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, Mama, and he said you mustn’t be sad.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  • • •

  He has been dead for so long now. The last time they touched, the last time they shared a smile, feels so far in the past. Blum would have loved to see what Nela saw. She would have loved to spare her daughter everything. Because there are murderers out there, murderers who ruin everything. Blum drinks, and cuddles her children. It is a beautiful autumn night, the sky is clear, everything is simple. They have struck and now Blum is striking back because there’s nothing else to be done, nothing that will bring Mark back to her. She will find the other men, but for now she will go to sleep with her children.

  • • •

  The next morning Karl takes over as usual. Reza asks Blum what her plans are. Blum says nothing but smiles at him, just as Mark smiled at Nela. Don’t worry about me, Reza. I’ll be back. I can look after myself, you can count on that. Thank you, Reza. Blum gets on the motorcycle, rides down the drive and out into the street on her way to Kitzbühel. She knows her plan will probably get her nowhere, but she carries it out all the same. It was a flash of inspiration. She saw that menu and wondered what it was doing there. A menu from a restaurant in Kitzbühel, lying on the desk of a priest in Innsbruck. Why would he have taken it with him? Why would a priest steal a menu? Or did the priest know the restaurateur so well he could take it with him? It’s fifty-four kilometers to the restaurant in Kitzbühel, Puch’s Place. She is going to act on her hunch.

  • • •

  On the outskirts of Kitzbühel, near the woods, the rich have conjured up so many buildings: vacation homes, second apartments, and this restaurant, which has been awarded Michelin stars. The restaurant is quite small, it seats forty. Blum asks about the chef. Everyone knows who she’s looking for, everyone knows the cook off the television: Bertl Puch. It’s an excellent restaurant, an unassuming exterior but obviously of high quality and very expensive. It is lunchtime, but the customers wear evening dresses and suits. Blum has always hated Kitzbühel, that mecca of the rich, that seat of money and power. These people stick together, stuffing themselves with weisswurst and caviar. They are among their own, apart from the common herd.

  • • •

  Blum is asked to leave; the waiter points out the dress code. But Blum stands her ground. She has nothing to lose, she wants to know whether she is on the right track; she intends to find out whether the chef and the photographer knew each other. And the chef and the priest. She undresses in full view of the room, removing her leather jacket, trousers, boots. She takes high heels out of her bag. The customers look at her long legs, her bare feet, and then she is transformed like a swan, standing there in a flowery summer dress. She stows her leathers away in her rucksack. The waiter stares at her, wide-eyed. Gritting his teeth, he agrees that she can stay, and shows her to a table. Blum sits down.

  • • •

  She feels ill at ease; she hates pretentious restaurants. But she is here for Dunya. She orders and tries to strike up a conversation with the waiter. He is very discreet and ignores Blum’s questions about the owner. When will Bertl Puch be back? Did Herbert Jaunig come here often? She receives no answer during the starter or the next course. But then, suddenly, the woman at the next table joins her. She is exactly the sort of gossip Blum was hoping to meet. All sorts of information is served up with the third course. My name is Kordula Heidmann, says the woman. She is in her midfifties, clearly as rich as Croesus. Blum pricks up her ears and takes in the woman’s remodeled face, her clothes, her designer handbag, a watch that must have cost a fortune. Everything about her stinks of money. She comes here quite often, she says, whispering that she can tell Blum more. And she does, with relish. Blum is the highlight of her day. She scrutinizes the exotic beauty in the flowery summer dress with curiosity. Kordula Heidmann holds forth without asking why Blum is taking such an interest in Bertl Puch. Blum glances at her plate: chocolate-coated duck breast on whole wheat bread. She cuts up her duck breast while Kordula Heidmann tells her all about Bertl Puch. And Herbert Jaunig.

  • • •

  “Unfortunately the chef isn’t here.”

  “Where is he, do you know? I’d have liked to meet him so much. He’s the talk of all the Tyrol.”

  “All the Tyrol? All Austria, you mean. He’s such a talented man, everything he touches turns to gold. You’ve no idea how lucky we are to have him here.”

  “You are indeed.”

  “At the moment he’s filming the new season of his cooking show in Vienna. He’s a busy man, and still so young. What a wonderful example his career sets! You really have to take your hat off to him. People come from all over the country to enjoy his cuisine. The dishes are just spectacular, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, spectacular, you’re quite right.”

  “You should see what he can do with quail eggs. And the lamb, you’ve never eaten such tender lamb.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Of course, go ahead!”

  “Father Jaunig—Herbert Jaunig. Did you know him?”

  “Oh, yes. What a tragedy. And such a delightful man. He loved food, he was a real gourmet. All the regulars here were horrified by the news. You can’t imagine how terrible I felt when I heard it.”

  “You were a friend of his?”

  “Oh, no, but I often sat close to him, watching him.”

  “Watching him do what?”

  “Eating lunch or dinner. He was a good man, Father Jaunig.”

  “Indeed he was.”

  “He used to sit over there, always the same table. It was a pleasure to see him enjoying a meal.”

  “Did he come on his own?”

  “Usually. I once tried to sit with him, but he was deep in prayer. He said he took every opportunity to pray for us. What a fine man. Beheaded! I still can’t believe it.”

  “It does sound bizarre.”

  “Who would do a thing like that? Only a monster, an animal.”

  “Suppose Father Jaunig deserved it?”

  “For God’s sake, what makes you say a thing like that? Never! No one deserves to die that way. What could that good man have done to justify such a dreadful murder? I’ll tell you something, there’s a sick mind behind all this.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Of course I’m right.”

  “And what about Herr Puch?”

  “How do you mean, what about him?”

  “Well, he and Jaunig knew each other.”

  “Knew each other? Those two were bosom buddies. Inseparable! It was a really wonderful relationship between two men.”

  “Friendships like that are rare.”

  “This whole business has upset Bertl dreadfully. He’s devastated.”

  “I suppose they’d known each other for a long time, had they?”

  “I think they met in the Ötztal.”

  “The Ötztal?”

  “Yes, Bertl was a chef there before he opened this restaurant. At the Hotel Annenhof, a simple little place. Good plain cooking, hardly Michelin-starred. And suddenly his career took off. Bertl became a superstar in just five years.”

  “Wow!”

  “There isn’t a better restaurant in Kitzbühel.”

  “From a provincial hotel to gourmet heaven. I expect you know all the regulars here, don’t you?”

  “Well, not every single one, but as I said, anyone who’s anyone comes here. The top people, if you see what I mean, from the president of Austria to Arnold Schwarzenegger. T
hey all eat here.”

  “Does the name Edwin Schönborn mean anything to you?”

  “The photographer—of course. He’s also a regular.”

  “And another friend of Bertl?”

  “Bertl knows everyone. And everyone wants to be his friend. You know how it is. Wine tastes best in famous company.”

  “Well, here’s to your very good health.”

  • • •

  Blum wipes her mouth. She thinks of her children’s Lego pieces, brick on top of brick. Whenever she reaches for one it fits. Schönborn. Jaunig. Puch. Dunya did everything she could. She told Mark and Blum what mattered. Dunya didn’t know their names or faces but Blum has managed to track them down. Two of them, and soon she’ll have the third.

  • • •

  Dunya told her what the cook did to them, how he fattened them up. I have to feed my little piggies well, he always said. Only the best was put through the openings in the cages, good food, good meat, only the best for the pigs he was fattening. Dunya had told her how he inspected them, weighed them, made them get undressed every time he went down to the cellar. It’s important to check on their health, he would say. He weighed them and kept records. And he made sure they did exercises to stay fit. But good food is the most important thing, it’s no fun fucking a starving deer, he would add, hitting them with his belt when they wouldn’t eat any more. They ate tournedos with goose liver pâté from plastic bowls, their hands tied behind their backs. They stuffed themselves with coquilles St. Jacques in champagne sauce. They were kept like animals and slept on hay, often pissing themselves because they couldn’t get to the toilet in time. Gourmet cooking and the smell of piss. Pearls before swine, said the clown. All the same, the cook insisted on a balanced diet. We must feed our little piggies well, he said. We must muck out the filthy swine, said the clown. And the priest washed them with a garden hose, the water hitting them full force on their faces and on their wounds. They had to strip naked. They had to clean out their cages, scrub the floor. They had to do everything they were told, for years on end. With sweetbreads and escargot.

  • • •

  Blum pays her bill and leaves. She wants to get out of this place, she doesn’t want to hear any more or replay the scenes from that cellar. At first she couldn’t believe that people were kept in cages, waiting to be fed. She must find Youn, she can’t let another person die. Not one of the good ones, no, please no. Someone must talk.

  • • •

  Blum is on her motorcycle again, riding fast along the highway back to her life, back to the villa and her little world, which is intact even though Mark is dead. It is intact because she is free, because she can do whatever she wants. No one is stopping her, no one will dissuade her from cutting up Bertl Puch. She wants to know what he is like. She wants to fill in the blanks and get to know this man who casts a spell over everyone he meets. Who beat the three people in the cellar with his belt, masturbating as he did so. Bertl Puch is on her TV screen, on YouTube, that busy little chef with the broad grin and the Tyrolean dialect who has risen to stratospheric heights. The nation’s darling, the man with the beaming smile who makes every housewife think she can change the world with a spoon. She will track him down and find out whether he really is as she imagines him. Blum will talk to him and then she will kill him. Soon.

  There, on the second floor of a building on Neubaugasse, in Vienna’s District Seven, is a small apartment looking onto the street. The lock is no problem; Mark showed her what to do years ago. They had locked themselves out, but he managed to open the door in a couple of minutes. It’s child’s play, he said. Bertl Puch is on his way to the TV station and will be busy all day. Studio One has been booked for the week to film his cooking show. Blum waited outside the TV station for him yesterday, followed him, sat in the same bar as he did, drinking a beer, and observed him at play. He was a popular man, and looked just as innocent as his friends. None of them would believe what she knew. When he paid and left, Blum followed him. She sat in the same U-Bahn car. He traveled six stops, then another ten minutes on foot. He opened the front door of his building and disappeared inside. A light went on. From the street, Blum saw his silhouette in a second-floor window. Bertl Puch was at home in his Viennese apartment, the star chef was about to go to bed. Twenty minutes later the light went off. Blum stayed where she was a little longer, then went to collect her car. She waited until a parking spot was free with a good view of the front door, then lay down in the back of the car and set her alarm. She slept until five in the morning and then moved to the front seat. She waited until he left the building. Bertl Puch was on his way to work.

  An elderly woman let herself into the building. Blum walked in behind her, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She smiled at the old lady, who smiled back before going through a door on the ground floor. There was no nameplate on the door, just a lock. A screwdriver, a piece of wood, and a hammer were all it took. Only a faint knocking sound could be heard, and then the door opens and closes behind her. Blum is in his apartment with plastic covers over her shoes, a plastic hood on her head, and gloves. Mark always used to tell her how stupid criminals were, how many clues they left at the scene of the crime: hair, sweat, skin, fingerprints. Blum will do everything by the book. Nothing she leaves in the apartment must betray a search, for evidence, for videos.

  • • •

  The laptop isn’t password protected. It is on the coffee table, flanked by potato chips and two empty beer cans. Everything is untidy, there are smears of grease on the computer screen. Blum turns it on. How stupid he is, how very careless. In spite of the chaos of his apartment, Bertl Puch’s computer is tidy, the files are neatly arranged. Blum spots what she is looking for at once, the letters cry out to her. Pig-breeding, they say. Pig-breeding.

  • • •

  Blum in someone else’s apartment, doing things that would have been unimaginable a couple of months ago. She doesn’t stop to think. She’ll do whatever it takes to find out whether this man really was connected to Mark’s death, to Dunya’s death. Blum crossed a line when she handed Schönborn the bottle, when she put him in those caskets. The line has been crossed, the border is open, there is no barbed wire there now. Blum has burnt Jaunig to death and cut his head off. She thought of Dunya as she did it. She saw those empty eyes in Edwin Schönborn’s photographs. They were monsters: Schönborn and Jaunig and Puch, the chef.

  • • •

  He had filmed the pig-breeding videos on his cell, then saved them to his laptop. Anyone could have found them, could have watched what went on in that cellar. There was no attempt at concealment; it hadn’t occurred to Bertl Puch that someone might steal his laptop and investigate his pig-breeding. He feels safe. He sees no reason to delete those seventeen horror films. They document feeding time, training sessions, and punishments. They feature Dunya, Ilena, and Youn. Dunya was as Blum knew her, but more ravaged, more wounded. She was in the middle of hell and could see no way out. Their faces were devoid of despair, betraying only resignation, a silent cry for release. Silent because they had no strength left, nothing but the wish to die. Dunya said they had longed for death, thought of release all the time, but couldn’t think how to kill themselves. So they had borne the violence and humiliations. Blum endured these brief glimpses into a sick, sick world. The room had been specially prepared. The cages were tiled so the captives could be washed. The dirty zone, the fucking zone, were kept strictly separate. The videos showed feeding time, the kicks and blows they endured while they ate, the lust and rage, the punishment. It was the cook’s project and it amused him. He recorded a voice-over while he filmed the ungrateful little pigs who despised the delicacies from his famous little restaurant. She sees Bertl Puch beating them until they bleed, his belt in one hand, his cell in the other. Punishment was meted out in the dirty zone. Pregnant Ilena lay on the floor, no longer moving. Youn had to eat everything out of the buckets, every last scrap.

  • • •


  Blum sits in Bertl Puch’s apartment and clicks through the videos. In some of them you can see the priest hosing Youn down, washing and tending to him before assaulting him again. She recognizes his stature, his voice. And Schönborn is there too, holding his camera. Blum is 100 percent sure that’s him, in spite of the mask. She has seen him naked, seen his disassembled parts, she knows it’s him. The cellar is a land outside the law, an orgy where everything is allowed and nothing is forbidden. Not even the anesthetizing darts fired from the hunting rifle. The videos show exactly what Dunya described. She was right, there was nowhere to run.

  • • •

  She doesn’t recognize the fourth man. He wears a larger mask than the others and has an ordinary body. The only thing Blum can say for certain is that he isn’t Schönborn’s father. Johannes Schönborn is stronger and weighs about twenty kilos more than the man in the video. He shrieks with glee as he presses the trigger, he yodels, he sings. What Blum sees disturbs her. It is the performance of a madman. A half-naked man doing a victory dance round the fucking area, which is padded and plush velvet. The huntsman is happy to be shooting, he exudes joie de vivre. At the top of his voice, he sings one of the best-known songs in the world, “O sole mio.” There is no lovelier sun. Youn lies on the floor. The huntsman bawls out the song. Ma n’atu sole cchiù bello, oi né. He sings ardently, with passion, almost well. If Blum had heard only his voice, she would have liked him. O sole mio, while he rapes Youn.

  • • •

  The huntsman is singing to the camera. He poses, it is a private performance for the cook. This little video is telling Blum everything she needs to know because his face is shown, just for a moment. She hadn’t expected him to reveal the mystery himself, to remove his mask for two seconds, just as the video is coming to an end. She makes out his eyes, his nose; he is grinning into the camera, basking in the scene. After two seconds, he puts the mask back on. In those two seconds, she sees the rapist, the murderer, the evidence of his guilt. Blum rewinds the tape, watches it again and again, then presses Stop.