The Crooked Maid (44 page)

Perhaps it’s a sort of trick
, it came to him.
Robert’s waiting back there so he can wash his hands of things. Afterwards, he will be grateful
.

He pictured Robert’s face mouthing the word “atone” and felt his own face freeze into a sneer. And anyway, what if the stranger attacked him first? If he tore open the envelope, saw there was no money inside, then launched himself at Wolfgang? It’d be self-defence. Even Robert would not be able to object.

The main thing is
, Wolfgang reminded himself,
I mustn’t tell Father
.

He had, at that moment, quite forgotten that his father was dead. An enormous thought seemed to be growing in him, just beyond the threshold
of consciousness; he groped for it in irritation, the way a man gropes for the light switch in the dark. Abruptly he began wishing he had brought a knife.

With a knife, I could kill him in silence
.

He remembered a friend of his instructing him, a fellow police officer, sitting in their tea kitchen over some sandwiches and making small talk. “Aim for the throat or face,” he’d said. “A thick coat will deflect your blade.” Stolzfuss—that had been his name; a lad so skinny it was impossible to picture him in a fight. The next moment Stolzfuss was forgotten, and the thought of killing someone seemed nothing short of preposterous.

The war is over after all
.

What Wolfgang would do was this: he would smile at the stranger and talk to him quite openly, the way Robert did, holding nothing back.

“You’re a crook,” Wolfgang would say. “Go on, tell the world all the secrets you like, it won’t make any difference. Just do this, friend: wait a week. So I can get my money and leave. Look here, I’ll give you ten thousand. A week from Monday. Ten grand for waiting one little week. That’s not bad, friend, is it now? So let’s shake on it and go have a drink. I know a darling little place nearby. There’s a waitress there, oho! And besides, I’ll pay, for the booze and for the girls too, if the mood takes you. My little brother’s given me some spending money. We can have a right little orgy.”

But even as he was thinking this, his hand once again moved back into his pocket and wrapped itself around the butt of his gun. He remembered the interrogations he had performed, their simple brutality, the frightened faces of the prisoners and the calm assurance of his superior sitting next to him, giving orders.

If it’s to be done, it’s best done quickly, at once, before he even opens his mouth
.

He pictured it, the man in the yard, going down after a quick blow (with the butt, the butt, there need be no noise!), then realized that he was picturing Rothmann just as he’d been, a fat, genial man with long, curling eyelashes that gave a special warmth to his eyes. It took an effort to remind himself that the man he would meet was an imposter.

All the better
, he thought.
I won’t know him. It’ll be easier that way
.

But again he stopped in his tracks, shoved the gun back in his pocket. Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had taken too much of his stepmother’s drug. He wished he had brought along some brandy, something to wet his throat.

When he finally stepped out into the yard, he was unprepared to find it empty.

7.

Relief flooded Wolfgang, was immediately replaced by anger, then by a feeling of cunning as he realized he might have arrived at the location first. He whirled around, making sure there was nobody behind him; scrutinized the piles of rubble that had been the back building, trying to assess whether a man might be hiding amongst them. At his back he noticed a bent metal door leading to a cellar. Wolfgang approached it, then thought better of it and pretended to lose interest.

On his second circuit of the yard he noticed a piece of brick wall—more than a foot across, the inside still covered with wallpaper—that lay on the ground by itself and had evidently been dragged there from one of the mounds. He crouched down to it, found it marked with chalk glowing strangely in the moon-soaked mist. It said
SEIDEL
, just the one word, large capital letters. Wolfgang pushed the slab aside, and beneath it found a shallow hollow where two courtyard cobbles had been pried loose. A dirty sheet of paper spelled out
HERE
.

Without the slightest hesitation Wolfgang deposited the envelope within this hollow, replaced the slab, and hurried to the gateway. Everything was all abundantly clear to him—almost as though someone had explained it to him. Rothmann
(No, not Rothmann; the stranger, the crook, the man who is trying to rip us off!)
was hiding behind the cellar door. There was no way he would risk someone else coming along and finding the marked slab of wall. No, he was there, right behind the door, eyes fastened
on the yard, listening for Wolfgang’s footsteps, waiting for him to leave. Wolfgang obliged him and made a point of walking loudly—stamping his feet almost—until he had nearly reached the street. Then he lowered himself to the ground, lay down on the icy cobbles in the gateway, and crawled back seven or eight yards until his face was less than a foot from the threshold to the yard. The gun was out again, his fingers growing stiff around its grip.

He did not have to wait very long. After six or seven minutes there came a scrape as the cellar door dug itself into the courtyard floor. A moment later a figure stepped out into the yard and bent down to the marked slab. The moon-fed half-light distorted his proportions: from Wolfgang’s vantage point, peering at him through the sodden mist, the man retrieving the envelope looked as big and rough-hewn as a tree.

Carefully, the gun in his fist, Wolfgang got up off the ground and stepped into the yard. The man did not notice him until Wolfgang was three feet from his broad back.

When Robert entered the yard, not ten minutes later, he found a mauled and bleeding body lying in the dirt.

It took an awful lot of shouting to alert the police.

Four

1.

Sophie did not feel the first drop form, was unaware of it until it hit the water, spread red skirts into the foam. A second followed, hit her drawn-up knee, splattered upon impact. She felt with her hands, came away bloody, then sat calmly, her attention on the droplets’ passage. First a quick dash from nostril to upper lip, where they sat, beaded, and swelled, clinging to the thin ledge where two types of skin collide. A moment later, bloodswollen past endurance, the drop would break; would choose a passage left or right, drawing half of a moustache onto her features, then chase on down, past the precipice of jawbone, launch itself into thin air. A quarter heartbeat later—reverting in an instant from trickle back to tear—it would hit her breast, her knee, the white ceramic of the tub. Sophie did nothing to stem the flow; sat, arms hugging bony knees, and watched the cooling water turn from soapy grey to pink.

Somebody—a fellow lodger—knocked on the door, first gently then with increasing force, made speeches in loud German on the code of conduct pertaining to shared bathrooms. She understood not half of it, but the tone was long familiar. It seemed the language was made for this: the judicious venting of rational outrage for the benefit of those whom one knew to be listening out of sight. The water was quite icy now, and Sophie got out, reached for the towel, pulled the plug. She dressed quickly, still without answering the banging on the door, bundled up her dirty underwear and the old stockings, combed her hair. When she stepped out, the
fat man outside watched her with embarrassment that only regressed into hostility when she was five steps down the hallway.

“About time!” he shouted after her.

She did not answer, dropped off her dirties in her room, then left the flat and ran up to see Anna. There remained, on the side of her chin, a faint tear-track of blood. The bathtub, too, was ringed by a fine pink waterline that gave her neighbours further reason for gossip and complaint.

2.

She did not wait for Anna to lead her into the kitchen to make her confession. It came out in the corridor, in mid-step, while Anna was still closing the door.

“Karel is back in Vienna,” she said. “He’s been here for weeks.”

She described, too quickly perhaps for Anna to follow all her English, how she had paid people to look for him in bars, and how she had traced him from one shabby hotel to another, always asking for a “giant,” always arriving a day or two too late.

“Tonight, I finally caught up with him. Only I was late again. He’d left on some errand, or to go drinking, I don’t know.”

Anna listened to her and felt a coldness rise in her that it took her a moment to identify as anger. “You should have told me earlier. Frisch needs to question Karel. He escaped the Russians. He will know where Anton is.” She pushed past Sophie and fetched her coat.

“There are no Russians. He made them up.”

Anna froze, one sleeve dropping from her fingers, flopping empty by her side.

“I knew it months ago. The moment I started asking him questions. It just didn’t add up—the names and dates, it all kept changing every time he told the story, and when I pressed him, he just asked for money, to meet a ‘contact’ he’d picked up in some bar.” Sophie paused, awaited a verdict.

Anna did her the favour. Her limited English lent a fitting crudeness to
her words. “You kept silent because you enjoyed fucking him? Or because you wanted to write your article?”

“Don’t pretend you’re surprised, Anna. You must have suspected it too.” Sophie looked at her, expectant, but was granted no pardon, no sharing of her guilt. When she carried on, there was genuine wonder in her voice. “All this time I thought you knew. That you held on to the Russians as a sort of insurance against the simplest of explanations. That your husband simply left you.”

If Sophie was aware of the hurtful nature of her words, she did not show it. She was absorbed in her own justifications. “I went along with Karel’s story because I thought there was a chance there was some truth to it, mixed up with his lies. And then, when I started calling the embassies, it did push some buttons. When that body disappeared, and Karel himself went missing—well, I thought, maybe I had done him an injustice. Maybe he had embellished a little here and there, but the core of it—But he is back and didn’t bother to come see me—”

Anna had heard enough. “We must tell the police. Karel knows
something
. He knew about Anton’s secret. And he had a key to the flat.” She finished putting on her coat, tied a scarf around her neck. “Where do I find him?”

Sophie gave her the address of the hotel. “He’s got a new girl,” she added hoarsely, her restless features reaching for defiance. “At least I think she is his girl. I was there today and wanted to ask her, whether they—But how do you ask a question like that?” She swallowed, relocated her feelings of betrayal underneath her confusion. “You can’t miss her. The one from the trial. She’s bent like a miner. How can a man take up with someone like—” She stopped herself, hurried after Anna, who had stepped out onto the landing. “I’ll come with you.”

Anna shook her head. “Go home,” she said in German. “To Toronto, or New York, or wherever it is you belong. Nobody wants you here.”

Without locking the door, she ran down the stairs and out onto the street, looking for a cab. By the time she finally found one, three blocks
from the house, she had changed her mind about her destination, dug in her purse, and found an address that had been pressed on her weeks ago by a would-be suitor.

“Fifteenth district,” she said to the cabbie. “Make it quick.”

3.

Anna found the name on the doorbell; she had to ring several times before she was let in. Frisch lived in the back wing of a Union building built in the 1920s, its murals of working men untouched by the war. It was not he but his daughter who opened the door. Anna had no memory of her name.

“Good evening,” she said formally, looking down at the child. “I wish to speak to your father.”

“He had to go out,” the girl said. “To work.”

Anna turned to leave.

“You can call him if you like. We have a telephone.”

“That would be most kind.”

She followed the girl into the small, cramped apartment. It smelled of boiled cauliflower and cigarettes. A coconut runner stretched from entrance to study. A look in the kitchen revealed a heap of dirty dishes; Frisch’s socks drying on the radiator, lined up in a messy row.

Frisch’s desk, by contrast, was remarkably tidy. Next to the telephone there lay two thin paper files, the first entitled
Anton Beer
. The second was not labelled. The little girl—Gertraut? Gerlinde?—dialed for her, passed her the receiver, then stood by the desk, watching her closely.

Ignoring her stare, wedging the receiver between shoulder and cheek, Anna opened both files. The first contained her “missing persons” statement about Anton, along with a list of witnesses interviewed. It appeared Frisch had done a second round of interviews about a month after his initial investigation that aimed to establish whether her husband “wore a glass eye.” His verdict read that “with considerable likelihood” Anton did.
“Several of the witnesses had not been aware of the eye but mention an odd sort of character to his gaze. I attribute their uncertainty to the quality of the prosthetic.” The unlabelled file contained police photographs of “unidentified body No. 48
VII
2,” along with the pathologist’s autopsy notes. She hastily closed it again, unwilling to revisit her trip to the morgue, and uncomfortably aware of the stare of the child by her side. The phone on the other end of the line, meanwhile, kept on ringing. Somewhere at the back of her mind she’d been counting the rings.

The duty sergeant at the local station picked up after the twenty-first, sounding sleepy. He promised to “have a look,” and returned after some minutes informing her that Frisch was not at his regular desk; he had been called out to stand in for a colleague at headquarters.