The Crooked Maid (20 page)

The man grinned a wild grin through his slipping scarf, looked about himself, made sure there was no witness to his blasphemy.

“Suppose then, brother, I am God, and everything obeys if only I go say it. Go on, then, get up, you lazy swine! Go on, Lazarus, get up, get up, let’s warm some soup and play a hand of cards.”

And he laughed and cackled to himself, and in his head it sounded loud and merry.

2.

A noise cut short his laughter. It came from outside the room, the scrape of metal across stone. The man recognized the sound. Someone was trying
to force open the bent metal door at the top of the stairs that led into the cellar. Quickly, picking his way through the littered floor, he crossed the room and peeked out into the corridor.

Daylight filtered down from up above, was joined by the cone of a flashlight that roamed the bottom step. The man watched it with great concentration, fear spreading through his hollow eyes. He had been nervous ever since his encounter with the boys and at once looked for a hiding place. Across from him, on the other side of the corridor that formed a T with the short stairwell, the door stood open on a warren of wooden storage booths, each roughly built from planks of wood, and half of them still packed with wartime junk. If he could but make his way across, it would be an easy thing to disappear; it’d take a dozen men with dogs—and patience—to sift each cubicle for stowaways. But to run across meant to expose himself to the beam of the flashlight and the eyes of its owner. He had no idea who it was that was standing there, watching, breathing, shuffling at the top. Thus transfixed by indecision to a spot halfway between the room at his back and the stairwell ahead—shoulders slumped, chin raised, a quiet heave to his quick breathing—the man with the torn pocket stood bargaining with God. He pledged prayers, fasting, “to return on home”; repented in earnest that he had laid claim to God’s immortal name; ran his hands beseechingly through the stubble of his close-cropped head.

Then, from one moment to the next, whatever sacrifice he offered was accepted. The cone of light twitched, wavered, then withdrew. He moved like a man released from doubt; ran past the stairwell with three silent springs. A glance upwards showed him a stranger in a light summer suit. He had squeezed through the gap and now stood on the landing with his back to the stairs, applying his weight to the bent door, trying to force it open another foot: one shoulder dug into the metal, the face as though buried in the crook of his raised arm; his buttocks quivering with the exertion. The watcher passed the stairs unnoticed, ran into the darkness ahead; he rounded a corner, dropped to his haunches, and listened for the sound of the man’s pursuit.

It did not come at once. The door moaned, gave an inch or two, then wedged its corner into the ground. Footsteps followed, none too fast, stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The beam of the flashlight turned right first, towards the part of the cellar the watcher had picked for a hiding place. It advanced to the door frame, shone its way past the slatted doors of a score of wooden cages, then turned around upon itself and guided the stranger’s feet the other way. All sound stopped once he stepped into the room that held the body; the watcher strained his ears but could not hear.

It was curiosity that made him follow. He did not move for several minutes, wrestled with himself as he had wrestled with the boy; prayed, too, a dozen fleeting benedictions poured into the ear of God; crept forward, step by step, until he stood once again near the bottom of the stairs and looked ahead. The light of the stranger’s torch was no longer moving. He had placed it on the floor some two yards from the body, the beam pointing inward, projecting his shadow onto the wall. The man had sunk to one knee: the hands thrown forward, each movement elongated, flitting darkly across naked brick. There was something held between his fingers that might well have been a knife.

It would have been easy now and prudent for the man with the torn pocket to make good his escape: walk to the top of the stairs and squeeze his way through the half-open door, into the yard and the anonymity of the city. He inched forward instead, eager to see, and exchange the shadow play for the sight of its source, a portly man neither short nor tall, stooping with one knee of his light summer suit pegged down into the cellar’s dirt. His head was turned away from the watcher; his hand armed not with a knife but with a pen, whose capped tip he used to poke at parts of the dead man’s body. The other hand was clapped over his mouth. He turned his profile to the light, and for a moment one could see his eyes, great watery orbs blinking under fleshy lids that looked as though they had been painted onto the fronts of his big spectacles. He pulled them off, produced a handkerchief, crouched squinting, rubbing at their lenses, his
eyes, diminished, looking tender, newborn, in their tight pink pockets. An intuition pricked him, whipped his chin round to the door.

“Who’s there?” he said, squinting square into the flashlight’s beam. He rushed to place the glasses back on his nose, their lenses turning into pools of hard, flat light; then bent to pick the flashlight off the ground, the handkerchief still wrapped around his fingers. Halfway up, the metal tube escaped his cotton-slickened grasp. It fell, ejected cap and batteries, which spun and rolled along the floor, following the subtle tilt of the foundations. By the time the stranger’s eyes had adjusted to the murky dark and he had taken his query—“Who’s there? Who’s there?”—into the corridor, the watcher had long scaled the steps and pushed his skinny body through the gap into the sunlight.

Beneath him, underground, the stranger returned to the corpse and completed his search of its few pockets. He found nothing apart from a box of matches stuck together by a viscous mass of old black blood.

3.

This was how they found the body: Nepomuk Frisch, the detective to whom Anna Beer had made her report regarding her missing husband, had a ten-year-old daughter by the name of Gertrud, who was universally known as Trudi. Trudi Frisch had been sick these past few weeks from a respiratory disease to which the doctors had been hesitant to attach a name. She had been feeling better of late, and because she was bored, and because her condition was no longer judged contagious, she had, despite the prescription that she must not leave her bed, been allowed a small number of visitors, as long as these came singly, behaved, and did not stay longer than an hour at a time. It came as no surprise to her father, who was perceptive and involved in his daughter’s emotional life to a degree few fathers were, that the principal visitor was a boy called Karlchen, the youngest son of an artisan family, a shy and somewhat weepy lad with whom she went to school. Karlchen and Trudi were lovers of sorts: some
weeks ago they had exchanged a careful, snotty kiss and agreed to marry one another when they came of age. All that remained was to fix the desired number of offspring.

Frisch had had a firm talk with Trudi prior to admitting Karlchen to her bedside. He extracted the promise that there would be no further kissing until she was better, explaining to his daughter that despite the doctor’s assessment he was concerned that she might pass on her disease. Trudi agreed willingly and informed Karlchen at once that he was in mortal danger from her lips, but might, if he so wished, take the risk of holding her hand. Frisch left the two children with Karlchen sitting on a stool by Trudi’s bedside, tilting his body away from her face and clutching her hand across the maximum distance their two arms would afford.

When the boy left an hour later and displayed some signs of agitation, Frisch was inclined to blame it on the boy’s fear of contagion. But Trudi too looked flushed and agitated when he looked in on her, as though she were fretting over some momentous thought. There had been no time to question her that day (Frisch was attending his regular
Skat
round and left Trudi in the care of a neighbour), and besides, he preferred to have Trudi sort through her thoughts by herself.

The next evening he noticed that she remained in a state of nervous tension and was obviously working her way towards some kind of confession. Frisch made a point of sitting with her, telling her about his day at the station, the new litter of puppies the city had acquired for police training, and the odd phone call he had received from the Soviet authority regarding one of Vienna’s many missing men. He was in the habit of sharing his work concerns with his daughter, much as he had done with his late wife. That evening he took his time over his report, hoping that his show of candour would inspire her own.

She lay there listening to his words with childish solemnity, asked some questions about the phone call (Were they speaking Russian? If they weren’t, how did he know who was calling? And why were they so interested in some “sigh-key-olly-gist” anyway—was it because Stalin was sick?),
then waved him closer, grabbed the fleshy part of her cheek between index finger and thumb, gave it a thoughtful little yank, and told him that Karlchen had a secret that she mustn’t tell.

“What sort of secret?”

She hesitated, pulled once again at her cheek, a characteristic gesture that she shared with her dead mother. A cough rose in her, light at first then turning into the wet spasm of her disease. He wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, noted the colour of the phlegm, a light yellow, less violent a shade than it had been only a week before.

“You must promise,” she said, “that you won’t tell.”

He thought before he answered. “Is it the sort of secret one tells the police?”

She nodded.

“I can promise to keep Karlchen out of it.”

He saw she did not like his answer.

“He won’t even know that you told.”

She wrinkled her brow. “I’ll tell him,” she said after some thought. “It isn’t fair otherwise.”

“You like Karlchen a great deal, don’t you?”

“His sister died,” she said. “He told me about it, and I said about Mother.”

“Yes,” said Frisch, running his fingers through her knotty hair. “You like him a great deal.”

They smiled and hugged (though he noticed she took care not to kiss him lest he catch her disease). And then Trudi told him the story of how Karlchen, his brother Franzl, and their friend, “fat” Adalbert Steinbeisser, had found a dead man in a basement with his fingers spread “like a trod-on spider, only white.” Frisch listened, nodded, and wished Trudi a good night.

Since he had promised Trudi to keep Karlchen out of it, he tracked down Steinbeisser instead, who in any case was three years older and would serve as a more reliable witness. He waited for him outside his
apartment building the following afternoon, having found his parents’ address in the central registry office, then stepped up to the moon-faced boy as he came running out the courtyard gate and, flashing his police badge, requested a word.

In a few quick words (Frisch had invited the boy to sit on the step, then stood towering over him), and without making any direct reference to Karlchen or the body, the inspector informed Steinbeisser that the police “had long had their eye on him” and “knew what he was up to.” The boy burst into tears almost at once and confessed a whole series of small crimes, including his ongoing surveillance of the girls’ changing room at the nearby gymnasium. It took some prodding, however, to wrest from him the secret of the dead body, and indeed he seemed puzzled that the police would be interested in something that had, upon investigation, turned out to be an embarrassing mistake. While it was true, he said, wiping furiously at his tears, that his dog Rüdiger had broken his leash while they were out amongst the ruins looking for bullet casings and had led him to a cellar where Rüdiger had circled and barked at something that looked like the arm of a human corpse sticking out from a pile of old newspapers, it had turned out that the arm belonged to nobody more exciting than a live vagrant. With the help of a map Steinbeisser was able to identify the house in whose cellar the incident had taken place; he also gave up his accomplices without the slightest compunction, correcting Frisch’s spelling of their last name when the inspector produced a notepad to scribble down the information with an officious air.

There was work to be done in the office that afternoon, and so Frisch postponed his visit to the cellar to the following morning. Unwilling to make it an official matter before he’d had a look for himself, but at the same time strangely confident that the story Karlchen had told Trudi was accurate in all its details, he took the Number Two tram early the next day; disembarked, it became clear, a stop too early, and walked some fifteen minutes until he found the house he was looking for. The door to the basement was stuck; he fought with it for a considerable length of time
and was annoyed to lose a coat button as he squeezed his girth through the too-narrow gap.

Down in the cellar, kneeling next to the corpse and trying in vain to establish the cause of death, he had felt for a moment as though he was being observed. On consideration he’d dismissed the notion, retraced his steps up the staircase, and returned to the street to look for a telephone. He found one at last some five blocks away, in a corner pharmacy whose owner grudgingly admitted to owning a line. Twenty minutes later he was back at the cellar door, lighting a cigarette, and waiting for the forensic technician to arrive.

4.

It was a shoddy sort of operation. The duty sergeant from the local police station and the forensic technician Frisch requested from headquarters arrived within a half-hour of one another but hadn’t thought to bring along the police photographer, who had to be roused with a separate phone call. Some French NCOs showed up at the scene, ostensibly sent there to observe proceedings, and immediately started on a game of cards. Frisch’s own deputy drove up in the station’s motor car, was sent away in search of coffee, came back some twenty minutes later with two cups of a cold, foul brew that they resorted to pouring down the gutter. The photographer arrived at last but had forgotten his flash; some hard words were exchanged before one of the uniformed policemen was dispatched to fetch it. A crowd gathered in the courtyard, ignored the orders to disperse: ragged, hungry-looking men and women who kept their distance from the police and awaited patiently the sight of the corpse. Frisch tried to approach some of these watchers and canvass them for information but was met by shaking heads and grunted assertions that they knew “nothing whatsoever” about “it.” Already the certainty seemed to have taken hold amongst the crowd that what had taken place was a murder. A bum with a new red scarf tied high over his face scuttled away when the inspector
approached him, then stood rubbing his hands as though he were warming them above a fire in one corner of the yard, staring at Frisch across the distance.