The Crooked Maid (45 page)

“It’s the flu,” he apologized. “We are short of hands. Are you a—lady friend?”

Anna left the question unanswered, requested the number of headquarters, called there. This time the call was promptly answered. Yes, Frisch had signed in for duty and in all likelihood “was present in the building.” A man was dispatched to track him down. Anna had to wait several minutes for his return, only to be told that Frisch was “not available at the moment.” The voice did not offer to take a message. It didn’t matter. Anna had none to give. She hung up, picked up the file with the autopsy photos, turned to the girl.

“Tell your father that I will return these tomorrow.”

The child nodded gravely, her eyes on Anna, not the file.

“What is it?” Anna said, stopped by this queer stare.

“Father explained it all to me,” the girl said, chin raised, proud, as though expecting Anna’s anger and determined not to flinch. “How he is hungry, in that other way. You could let him, you know. Just a little. It wouldn’t cost you anything.”

“Go to bed,” said Anna Beer. She only made sense of the words after she’d run out of the house. Perhaps the girl was right, at that. It cost you something, feeding that appetite, but, all things considered, not so very much.

She rode the tram to the city centre, then walked ten minutes to the flat of Gustav Kis.

4.

It started as a routine disturbance. A police patrol was fetched by an elderly man who “just happened to be passing” and had overheard “somebody shouting.” On arrival the situation looked to the officers like the aftermath of a run-of-the-mill fight: one man beaten on the ground, another, a youth, sitting next to him, shouting, crying, his hands smeared with blood. It called for an ambulance and an arrest; a night in the drunk tank, most typically, then a glum confession in the morning.

The first complication manifested itself in the fact that the man was dead. Not that it changed anything of substance, but their procedure was expected to be more thorough in cases of homicide, more diligently “by the book.” Then there was the matter of the gun. It was lying in the dirt not far from the corpse. It was entirely possible that somewhere in the bloodied face there hid a bullet hole. A shooting might point to premeditated murder. Add to this the boy (for really, he wasn’t much more than a boy, eighteen if he was a day, soft down on his lip like there’d been on the lips of those Italian girls one of the officers had occasion to study during the war): amongst his hysterical declarations, his insistence that they search “the cellar, at once,” he divulged his name and with it the possibility of scandal. The two officers had a brief conference that resulted in one of them leaving the yard to locate the nearest public telephone. He walked the better part of a mile until he did; dug for some coins and called headquarters. Headquarters, in turn, called Inspector Frisch. Frisch had been sitting at home in his bathtub at the time, doing a crossword and yelling instructions at Trudi to boil another kettle of water. He dressed at once.

When Frisch arrived at the scene, his initial preoccupation was to figure out why he’d been called. While it was true that a good many senior officers were off sick, this wasn’t his district and he hadn’t been part of the
central investigative unit for several years. As soon as he got out of the car and recognized the building, he formed the theory that some clever clerk had noticed he’d filed a report some months ago on another body that had been found on these premises. Or perhaps some of his colleagues had been reluctant to become embroiled in a case that involved a Seidel. There were several amongst them who had reason to be shy of the press.

At the scene everything seemed under control. He tried to make a positive identification himself, but the hard light of his electric torch revealed features too mud- and blood-smeared to interpret. The nose had been broken and hung somehow loose; the teeth caved in and covered in grit. The boy, meanwhile, kept shouting and had to be restrained by one of the officers. He had long been cuffed. Frisch, still crouching near the body, listened to his shrill accusations then ordered his driver to keep a watch on “the suspect” while his two colleagues searched the cellar rooms. They looked at him in confusion until he pointed out to them the bent metal door.

“The cellar,” he said. “I’ve been down there before.”

The two officers entered cautiously, truncheons out, then re-emerged after a few minutes holding between them a shabby man dressed in a torn greatcoat and a red woollen scarf. One of the officers also carried out a brown canvas sack.

“You won’t believe what’s in here!” he called to Frisch, but Frisch gestured for him to be silent.

“Leave it for the station,” he said. “And get the police photographer here. We want full documentation.”

Unwilling to wait for any of his superiors to have second thoughts and pass the case to his colleagues, Frisch had the two suspects put into his car. The boy kept shouting accusations at the other man and had to be cautioned several times. After some minutes he settled down and sat more quietly, his head turned to the man and scrutinizing his features. It was clear enough that they knew one another; and yet the boy did not seem to know the stranger’s name.

At the station, before transferring them to adjacent interrogation rooms, Frisch made a search of their pockets. The Seidel boy had nothing on him other than his wallet and some verses of Rilke copied out on a scrap of paper that he kept in his breast pocket. The man in the red scarf had straw in his trouser pocket and two sewing needles struck through the cuff of his worn shirt. There was a hole at the right side of his coat where the pocket had been torn out. In his left coat pocket they found three items. The first was a torn letter from a Linz orphanage concerning the whereabouts of one Anneliese Grotter. The text made mention of an attached passport photo, now missing. The second item was a crumpled telegram giving details of a train schedule, including its arrival in Vienna. It had been sent by Anna Beer. The third item was a photo of Anna Beer in her mid-twenties, looking radiant in a light, shoulder-free gown. There were neither a wallet nor any personal papers. The man had, as far as Frisch could tell, not a penny to his name.

“Are you Anton Beer?” he asked him, examining the photo.

The man did not respond.

The way his eyes moved, they both had to be real.

5.

They questioned the boy first. He had calmed down since arriving at the station, asked to wash his hands. Frisch considered the request, then calmly refused.

“Later,” he said. It seemed to him that it was harder to lie with blood on one’s palms. “Tell me what happened.”

“I’ll try not to make stains,” the boy said, sat down on the chair he had been offered, and, leaning forward, folded his hands carefully into the gap between his knees. “Can you tell me—is he really dead?”

“You know he is.”

The boy nodded gravely. “We must tell Poldi. His wife.”

“All in good time. Please, start at the beginning. What were you doing in that yard?”

The boy told his story. There were obvious omissions. His brother had gone to the yard to “meet somebody.” It was “a matter of money.” Wolfgang had asked him to wait for his return in a doorway not far from the factory yard. The boy had waited, “five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes,” frozen through to the bone. “There was no noise, you see, no sound at all, and he’d made me promise I’d wait,” he said, seeking out Frisch’s eyes. “I thought, ‘If there’s a row, there is sure to be some noise.’”

When Wolfgang did not return, Robert decided to walk over to the yard. A body had lain prone in the mist. As he’d bent down to it, he had heard a movement behind him. “I saw a face peeking out from behind a metal door. When I approached, he threw his weight against it. A sign on the door said it was an air-raid shelter. I thought to myself, ‘It’s a cellar, he can’t possibly escape.’ Then I returned to the body. The face was so bloody, I kept on hoping it wasn’t him.”

He paused, raised a hand to rub his cheek or maybe his neck, then remembered the blood. “Wolfgang had a gun, you know. But he never fired a shot.”

There was, despite the evasions, a quality of sincerity and honesty about the boy that Frisch found intriguing. He wondered briefly whether such a thing was congenital or acquired, and whether it necessitated habitual truthfulness. But despite these thoughts and the skepticism they implied, he found himself drawn to the boy, whose emotions appeared so simple and unstudied. The image of Anna Beer flashed through his mind: for her the opposite held true. The two, he remembered, had met. Frisch wondered whether Anna had taken to this wonky-eyed boy.

The detective stood up, rounded the table, perched on its far side, closer to Robert. He paused before he spoke, scrutinized the boy. Robert bore it calmly, stole a second to look around the room as though for the first time.

“Is this a holding cell?” he asked.

“An interrogation room.”

“It has a telephone,” Robert said. “A holding cell would not have a
telephone. Nor a desk, I suppose.” He blushed, caught himself in the irrelevance of his thought. “It’s because my father was a policeman. Inspector Teuben. I was told he worked right here, in this building.”

Having finished his inspection, Robert gazed straight into Frisch’s eyes. “You will tell me now that I have not been forthright in my statement. That I left bits out.”

“Yes.”

“What it is, I wasn’t sure how to say it. It’s funny. Two hours ago I told my brother to let everything come out and to hell with our ‘reputation.’ But now …” He swallowed, thought. “Can you tell me something, Herr Inspektor? The man who did it, the one who hid behind the iron door—Is he a Jew?”

“I have not spoken to him yet.”

Robert nodded, distracted, continued the trajectory of his thought. “It makes a difference if he is. In terms of motive, I mean. Whether he had the right—” He sighed, and without further ado launched into a summary of the situation. “We were being blackmailed, you see, that is to say my mother was, by my stepfather’s old business partner. But Wolfgang thought it was a fraud and that someone else was sending the letters. He went to that yard tonight to have it out.”

It took Frisch another thirty minutes of questions to make sense of this announcement. Robert answered willingly and comprehensively. Only one little detail failed to cohere.

“Why did you not go after him sooner?” he pressed the boy. “You felt uneasy about Wolfgang’s plan. Why not sneak after him right away?”

“He made me promise to wait.”

“You mean you were scared.”

“No,” Robert said, “not the way you mean.”

“What, then?”

Robert blushed, wrestled with himself. “I didn’t want to know. I thought Wolfgang was up to something. Something bad. I didn’t want to be there when he did it.”

“You loved your brother.”

“Yes. And now he is dead.”

Frisch sighed, rose from his chair, and informed Robert that he was cleared of all suspicion. “I would like to ask you to wait around for another few hours. There is a waiting room near the entrance.”

He did not have the heart to tell the boy that it would fall to him to make a formal identification of the body.

6.

Frisch turned his attention over to his second suspect. When he entered the neighbouring interrogation room, he was annoyed to find it empty. The duty sergeant knew nothing about it, and it took fifteen minutes of walking around the building and knocking on doors to locate the prisoner on the third floor, in a larger interrogation cell equipped with a long table and a good dozen chairs as though it doubled as a meeting room. Two fellow detectives were present, cups of coffee in their hands. They had, they explained, been dragged out of their beds by the chief himself, though both were on the sick, one with a cold, the other with a “gastric complaint.” They both seemed chipper enough, however. The investigation, in any case, was no longer Frisch’s responsibility, “Sorry to say, old chap.” But since Frisch had inspected the crime scene and had already questioned the boy, he was invited to stay and “work this maggot as a team.” The stated goal, the older of the detectives announced with a belligerent look at the suspect, was to “get a quick confession and be back in bed before ten.” They sat down at the big table with the air of men who had done this a hundred times.

But nothing about the interrogation proved routine. At first it was thought that the man was dumb, or imbecilic. He would not answer a single question. But then, perhaps an hour into the interrogation, with the two detectives alternately yelling or cooing at him, feeding him schnapps
and cups of malt coffee, he all at once began to emit a rapid series of words, albeit in a hoarse and barely audible voice. When he was made to speak up (some twenty minutes were spent cajoling him towards this end), it turned out the words were in some foreign tongue that none of them spoke. It was tentatively identified as Russian. A discussion ensued in which the elder detective argued that the man should be turned over to the Soviet authorities immediately, while his colleague wanted an interpreter—“one of ours, an Austrian”—to be fetched, though it was unclear from where. After some inquiries it turned out that the cousin of one of the uniformed policemen on duty had spent three years in a Soviet camp and had had a girl there, “almost a sort of wife,” and consequently spoke the language “better than German.” They sent a car around to his house and brought back the man, who looked as careworn and emaciated as their prisoner. The two men sat across from each other and exchanged a quiet greeting.

“Get the fuck on with it,” the older detective told the interpreter. “We haven’t got all night.”

But even with the interpreter present, progress was minimal. For the longest time the man refused to give his name. A half-hour of questions finally produced a single, halting, “Israel, formerly Jacob,” from which it was inferred he was Jewish, though a quick examination, performed with a crudeness that filled Frisch with shame, informed them he was uncircumcised and bore no concentration camp tattoo. He did not answer the question what he was doing in the basement; nor would he name his nationality, his place of birth, his whereabouts during the war. When asked his age, the prisoner held up a combination of fingers indicating he was either thirty-seven or thirty-eight (his vacillation on the issue was itself frustrating), though he looked twenty years older. He smelled like a badger. It was impossible to sit with him without opening the door.