The Crooked Maid (42 page)

After the war the PPK’s popularity was further buoyed by Ian Fleming’s decision to equip his fictional secret service agent with the weapon. There have been other famous users. Hitler shot himself through the right temple with his Walther PPK, serial number 803157, at three-thirty on the afternoon of April 30, 1945. Fourteen years previously Hitler’s niece, some say his lover, Angela “Geli” Raubal had committed suicide by shooting herself through the chest and lung with another Walther, also belonging to Hitler. It reputedly took her seventeen hours to die.

In June 1967 a West German plainclothes officer by the name of Karl-Heinz Kurras killed Benno Ohnesorg, a student who had participated in a Berlin demonstration against the visiting Shah of Iran, by shooting him in the back of the head with his Walther PPK. During his criminal investigation and trial Kurras insisted he had acted in self-defence and described having been assaulted by a throng of armed demonstrators. Of the eighty-three witnesses heard in court, the only one to confirm this account was a fellow police officer’s wife who lived in the building in whose yard the shooting had taken place. She did not come forward until shortly before the trial, claiming
that the officer in charge of the investigation had omitted to question her on this point. The statement of a nine-year-old boy who had watched the shooting from his kitchen window and described a deliberate, almost execution-style killing was treated as unreliable on grounds of his age. The criminal trial acquitted Kurras due to lack of evidence of wrongdoing.

It was not until 2009 that Kurras was discovered to have served as an informant for the East German Ministry for Security, MfS, more popularly known as the Stasi. Internal communications within the MfS reveal bafflement with regard to Kurras’s motive for the shooting. He was involved in a later, separate investigation, in which he threatened his Czech maid at gunpoint, trying to force a false witness statement regarding the beating of a press photographer. It is not known whether the gun used in this second incident was also a Walther.

Chekhov said that if you introduce a gun in Act One, it has to go off in Act Three.

He does not tell us what happens if you introduce it in Act Three.

Three

1.

Hunched and freezing, the man with the red scarf was sitting down in his cellar in a parallelogram of pale November light, threading black thread through the eye of a needle. The parallelogram kept moving, renegotiating its angles, taking orders from the sun. He followed it doggedly, inch for inch and foot for foot, then swapped it for its twin when the patch of light was beginning to reach the wall. He had neither a work table nor a chair and had placed a flat wooden board across his knees; worked in a soldier’s squat, for hours at a time. The man had done his best to clean the little cellar windows, but even so the light was streaky, criss-crossed by smudges of projected grime. The bird in his hands felt as cold and stiff as a frozen glove.

It was perfectly preserved. There was no bullet hole or cut; the carcass bristling with a seamless coat of jet-black feathers. Each time he slipped a hand inside, it bulged and came to life, a lopsided bird with soaring wings he had just finished wiring into shape. When he withdrew the hand, the bird deflated, became an empty sack whose only point of real solidity was the cleaned and reinserted skull. He had been working on the carcass for two weeks. Very soon now he would stuff it, sew it up.

It was not easy working with a bird. One had to take care not to damage the feathers or tear the delicate skin. He stopped intermittently, warmed his fingers and hands. They had been different before the years of forced labour: thinner, more supple, better suited to such delicate work. Even so,
each of his movements was gentle, almost regretful, implied an apology for the crudeness of the act. Had he been stroking a kitten, or bandaging a wounded child, he could not have moved with greater circumspection. He was, at present, trying to ease a split marble into the scooped-out socket of an eye.

It had begun with a long incision and the patient peeling of skin from flesh. The skin had to be scraped free of fat then cured with sodium borate; the skull excised and rid of everything but bone. Then came the patient building of the armature. He had found no clay and had decided on a wire structure that he wrapped in layer upon layer of rags and straw until the body of a bird took shape between his hands, supple enough to simulate the soft contours of life.

The problem throughout was materials. The wire had been easiest, cut at some risk from a bit of wall atop an American compound. Rags and thread he had found after long searching amongst the discarded things in the cellar. He stole the straw by the fistful from a horse stable in Ottakring. There were chemicals he needed, including camphor, arsenic, and potassium carbonate. Some he owned from previous forages, some he stole afresh from a pharmacy on the Gürtel whose back-door hinges he unscrewed in the depth of night, having spent the afternoon observing the shop and making sure its owners did not keep a dog. The eyes were a challenge all their own, and for days he could not think of a solution. In the end he bargained—silently, by gestures—with a child for marbles and paid with a toy horse made from sewn-together rags and straw. He took the marbles home, split and shaped them with a chisel, wedged them in the scraped-out sockets, replaced the skull in the skin, then sewed the eyeholes into place around each artificial lens. The results pleased him, each eye a swirl of midnight blue and red.

He stroked the crow’s feathers, rose, and stretched his back. The armature lay ready on a pile of papers. He might finish tonight.

He decided to take a break first and go out looking for the girl. He did so every day, walked a circle of streets he associated with her presence. For
the first time since finding her, he had lost sight of her. She had dropped the bird for him to find and had not returned to the house. It was impossible, thought the man with the red scarf, not to see the hand of God in this.

He sat alone sometimes, wrapped in his blankets, wondering whether it was time now to go home.

2.

The phone rang six times before she picked up. He gave his name before she had time to finish her greeting. Her response was conventional, the voice free of excitement.

“Hello, Inspector Frisch. What a surprise. How can I be of service?”

Frisch had long learned to hide his awkwardness behind the drone of his voice. “Good evening, Frau Doktor Beer. I just wanted to make sure the line works. I called before and there was no answer. So I thought I’d try you at night.”

“That is kind of you. Well, it works. Thank you again for having it reconnected—I should really have sent a card.” Her pause was well judged to draw out the fact of his impertinence. “Was there anything else, Inspector?”

“No. That is to say, perhaps. I requested another look at your husband’s file. His investigative file, I mean; a record of all our activities. I wanted to see whether we ever followed up on all the dental records. Concerning the body in the morgue.”

“And?”

“It seems that we tried. But we failed to track down any records for your husband. The dentist he frequented prior to the war left the country. Address unknown. Still, there may be other avenues—”

“Very good. Do call if you find something concrete. That would be very kind.”

“Of course, Frau Doktor Beer. Will you be staying in Vienna, then?”

“Only until I have packed up the apartment. A few weeks, I imagine. I
will make sure to pass on my forwarding address. Good night, Inspector.”

She hung up. Frisch stayed on the line another moment, listening into the void, then caught himself and followed suit. When he turned, Trudi was standing next to his desk. She was looking at him with something too childish yet to be called contempt. Embarrassed, Frisch took off his spectacles and polished the lenses on his sleeve.

“She does not want to talk to you.”

“No, Trudi. She does not.”

“But you’ll keep on calling her.”

He smiled at the pithiness of her summary: the sad smile of a man used to acknowledging the facts. “Perhaps. You are too young to understand.”

“I understand,” she said. “You miss Mama. I miss her too.”

He winced at this assessment, took her by the hand, led her over to the kitchen. They sat down to have dinner.

“This is something different,” he told her as he was slicing the bread. “A different sort of missing.” He paused again, put the bread into a basket, fetched the cold cuts from the larder. “It’s like you grow a second stomach. When you turn into an adult. You try to forget about it, but when you go to bed at night, it growls.”

Trudi processed this. “You want to eat her,” she summarized.

He laughed. “Yes, I suppose I do. The way you dream of eating chocolate. You can live without, but …”

They had dinner. When they were done and she stood doing the dishes, her feet on a stepping stool so she could reach, he unlocked the hallway cupboard and removed a little bar for her. It was British, still wrapped in tinfoil.

“Here,” he said. “This way, at least one of us gets their sweet.”

She unwrapped the chocolate, bit off a square, lips and teeth staining brown. “She won’t let you, will she?” Trudi asked, chewing.

“Not in a million years,” said the detective, sat down at his desk, and read his way once more through Anton Beer’s slender file.

3.

To her surprise she got an appointment almost at once. Sophie approached her usual contact at the U.S. embassy, begged them to ring the representative of the Soviet military administration, and within the hour was issued a pass to cross over to the Soviet sector and speak to a secretary of the news and propaganda division. He was bald, bearded, in his thirties; a cordial man with wire-rim glasses. His office, in the second district, was located in a spacious mezzanine apartment that appeared to have been requisitioned from a hunter. Deer heads lined much of the walls, along with more exotic trophies. In the wood-panelled study she sat between the pelts of two spread-eagled bears.

The man’s English was excellent, his manner affable. “So we are colleagues,” he said, having spent several minutes studying her press credentials with great care. “But what is a pretty little thing like you doing writing articles?”

She blushed and watched him pour tea from a samovar.

“Please,” he said, “don’t stand on formalities. Just tell me what I can do for you.”

“I—I have come for information. It’s all a little delicate. I made inquiries before, you see, of the Soviet authorities. And now I am worried that my questions may have led to—But really, I’m at a loss where to begin.”

“Just start at the beginning,” he encouraged her. “There’s no need to rush.”

It was not long before the whole story spilled out of her. The man listened attentively, took notes, but rejected her suggestion that her earlier inquiries about Beer’s disappearance might have led to the disappearance of a corpse from the city morgue and the arrest of Beer’s friend.

“You must not believe everything you hear, my dear,” he said. “About Soviet security organs and the like. We are the freest nation in the world. Soon we will have no need for a police force at all.” He smiled with considerable warmth. “And besides, when
they
strike”—he let his eyes dart around the room and left it to her to give content to this
they
—“well,
it’s like a storm cutting through a barley field. It takes what it wants, and afterwards, not a sign: just clean, fresh air.”

He rose, escorted her to the door, brushed her hip with his hand as he saw her out. “I wonder whether you would like to have dinner some evening? Or go to the opera, perhaps? I can get hold of tickets. Well, think about it. In any case, it’s been a pleasure, Frau Coburn, a real pleasure.” He had sent for a car and stood there on the pavement, watching her drive off.

The car took her to the border of the American district, where she transferred to a tram. She was halfway to her apartment building when she got out, changed over to a cab, and headed instead to the hotels and flophouses of the Gürtel, resumed her dogged search for Karel Neumann and the woman with whom he was said to have taken up.

4.

Eva watched him get ready. There wasn’t much to do: he owned no clothes other than the ones he was wearing, owned no coat and no scarf, nor even a hat he might have drawn into his brow to mask his features. In fact he made a point of washing his face and shaving. He seemed to believe that blackmail was one of those tasks best performed clean.

It was not clear to her at which point over the past two weeks Karel had given up on finding the man who might be Rothmann and had decided on impersonating him instead. Perhaps he had been planning it all along. When he suggested it to Eva, she had accepted the idea at once. It was much simpler that way. They tracked down a typewriter in a pawnshop. She composed the letters herself, the words shaping themselves into phrases as though she had done this all her life. It seemed frightfully easy, all of a sudden, this getting rich.

At length Karel seemed satisfied with his shave; wiped the soap off his chin, dried off, then tucked the cutthroat in his pocket rather than returning it to the sink. She noticed it and frowned.

“Why are you taking a knife?”

“Just in case.”

“You won’t need it,” she said with peculiar emphasis. “You won’t be having any trouble. She’ll send Robert. She doesn’t trust the other one.”

He looked at her for some moments, dug in his pocket, threw the cutthroat onto the bed. “You know,” he said, “it’s not too late. You can still go back.” He reached out a hand as though to touch her, then thought better of it. “Forget about the crows. So the boy didn’t stand up to his mother. She won’t live forever, you know.”

She shook her head. “It’s not about the crows.”

“Oh, I understand. You’re upset. He doesn’t love you enough.” He shrugged as though to say it was hard to meet her standards. “Or maybe you have this fantasy, buried deep in your heart. That you will go to America with all this money and then ten years down the road you’ll return, almost a princess, take a taxi to his house and ring the bell?” He searched her face, found only spite and irritation. “Tell me, Lieschen. Were you always this sour?”