The Crooked Maid (49 page)

“You want to know how it ended?” Karel asked, mournful now. “I broke his face and drowned him in a puddle. Then I went through his pockets and took all his money.” He displayed the bloodied wad.

The man shook his head in parting, heaved a sigh. “Aye, my friend. It’s a shitty way to go.”

2.

Anna arranged matters quite simply. The concierge at the hotel would ring a bell when Neumann returned and then arm himself with a crowbar. She had taken a room on the first floor, right across from the stairs. She would open the door and ask him in. If he tried to run, her man would shatter his shins on the way down. Anna had paid him enough to trust he’d do as he was told.

As it turned out, the crowbar proved redundant. She heard the bell downstairs and opened her door. Karel saw her the moment he had mounted the last step. He was dressed in a shirt that was two sizes too small for him, and sodden. His face and hands were filthy. He looked as if he’d been in a fight.

“In here,” she said. “I’ve money. I will pay you for the truth.”

He trundled in without hesitation: head bowed, shoulders hunched, reeking of booze. She yelled down to the concierge for coffee. He brought it holding his crowbar in his other hand. She wanted Karel to see it, but the big Czech barely raised his head.

Cigarettes got his attention. She lit his and passed it over with an outstretched arm. She did not wish to step too close to him.

“You are supposed to be in Russia.”

A weak smile, the rest of his face hiding behind a puff of smoke. “I have returned.”

“Talk, you bastard. They saw you being arrested. In a bar; the night we went to the morgue. Two men in leather coats. Frisch showed me the witness statements. But it’s all lies, isn’t it?”

Karel winced, looked over, scraped blood out of a swollen ear. “Ah, my arrest. I heard about it quite by chance. Much later, in a drunk tank, in Graz. They’d found me passed out in a church pew.” He opened wide his arms, as if to say,
The things we do when we get tipsy
.

She didn’t do him the favour of smiling.

“Well, the copper there read it out to me. I thought it was a warrant at first; thought my goose was cooked. But what it said was ‘Notification.’ From Vienna, Police Headquarters. To all stations in the land, et cetera. The language they use for those things! He had to read it twice before either of us understood. ‘Suspected in Soviet custody; sought for interview by Vienna police’; ‘Sightings to be reported to responsible unit, see paragraph four.’” Karel shook his head and shrugged. “Once he had made some sense of it, he was all for sending me back to Vienna, under guard. He even made a phone call to someone, puffing out his chest and reporting that ‘a subject
answering to the description of so-and-so is in custody in X, awaiting transportation’—all sorts of phrases like that, all the time winking at me while I sat handcuffed to my chair. But they told him to forward the ‘relevant paperwork’ first, for ‘assessment.’ Well, that took the enthusiasm right out of my little constable. Paperwork wasn’t his métier. Before long, I’d convinced him to let matters drop. For a fee, naturally. Sometimes I think the whole world is corrupt.”

He sighed, mock-weary. “The truth is, I went drinking. After our trip to the morgue. At the bar I chanced on some acquaintances of mine. Army buddies, fallen on hard times, living on their wits. Crooks, if you will. They told me they were heading to the British zone, to Graz. Laxer rules, allegedly, easy ration cards. Plus they had stolen some jewellery. They thought I might know a fence. As matter of fact, I did. So I went with them. I meant to let you know, but then it sort of slipped my mind. I was embarrassed, I suppose. The thing is, I made up a little story about Beer and the Russkies, but once Sophie started making phone calls, it took on a life of its own. It seemed like a good moment to leave.”

Anna listened to all this in silence, then shook her head. “It all sounds plausible, I suppose. You got cold feet and ran. Only, you’re skipping over what got you so rattled.” She paused, found her legs grown weak, dropped into a chair. “You know, I only figured it out tonight. The way you looked at Anton’s corpse. Shocked and surprised. Total disbelief. I might have had my suspicions but for that look. It was so real.” She lit another cigarette, ignored his entreaty to pass him the pack. “But it wasn’t the body that shocked you. It was the eye. You hadn’t known about the eye. Which means you can’t have spent very much time with him. Not very much time at all.

“But how well you improvised! You said, ‘It’s his eye, but not his body.’ Clever. You figured the police would know about the eye. Somebody else would have seen it. Or it would be in his files. You might even have thought that we were testing you: for all you knew, he’d had that eye since before the war. So you came up with a solution: his eye, not his body. And ran away as quickly as you could.

“It’s almost funny. I talked to Kis tonight. You’ll remember him, you two had a little heart-to-heart. Well, Kis recognized the body at a glance, a constellation of moles, for Christ’s sake, on the back of Anton’s shoulder. But even he didn’t notice the eye.” She shook her head. “It’s too well made.”

She tried to take another puff, found her hand shaking, ashes spilling on her lap. “Do you know what I think, Karel? You killed him. You killed my husband and then covered it up.”

Karel did not answer. He looked behind himself. He might have been gauging the distance to the door.

“Just tell me,” she said. It almost sounded like a plea. “You can cut and run afterwards. There’s an ashtray on the table over there. You can use it to beat my skull in and jump out the window. It’s isn’t ten feet to the pavement. You’ll be gone in no time.”

Her eyes brimmed up. She wiped at them, furious, almost blinding herself with the cigarette.

“What did he ever do to you?”

Karel settled back into his seat.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

3.

They sat smoking. When the pack ran out, she stood up, walked past Karel, shouted down to the concierge to bring up another. Karel talked. He only paused when the door opened, then resumed, mid-sentence, as soon as the concierge had left. For the first time since Anna had met him, all traces of the buffoon had left him. It was as though she were listening to another man entirely.

“I served in the Sixth Army, infantry. ‘Flag-Junker-Exempted.’ A shitty rank; one white V on my sleeve, and my breeches full of crabs. The only man in the unit with a made-to-measure uniform: I did not run to standard size.

“I was taken prisoner at Stalingrad. They marched us eastward, then loaded us on a train. A succession of camps, first near Uglich, then Smolensk, then all the way out to Turinsk. At Camp 221, I got diphtheria and almost died. A guard broke my ribs in 197 and locked me in an unheated closet for three days. And in 314, in Asbest, I fucked a Russian nurse and paid her with a plate of gruel. She was starving too. In April 1948, I finally got word I would be freed. But it took another six weeks. We had a lovely spring out in the Urals; a bloom of wildflowers, as far as the eye could see.

“I met Beer on the transport home. We were shut up in the same compartment, sitting on the same dirty floor. He had a friend with him; they had done years at the same camp. A fellow doctor, from Hamburg, judging by the accent, his hair as red as a flame. They were talking through half the night. I knew not a soul in the compartment and spent my time listening in.

“The thing is, I had heard of Beer before. There were stories going around about an Austrian doctor who had made friends with his camp commander. His personal physician, people said, for ailments of the soul. Head-shrinker stuff. There were some who said it was a little more saucy than that.” He flicked ash. “Prison wouldn’t be prison without stories of bum-fucking making the rounds.

“In any case, they talked, Beer and his Hamburg friend. About the camp, about home. He talked about you, and he talked about Lieschen. ‘A crippled girl,’ he said, ‘a little darling.’ He’d looked after her in ’39. Then the system took her in its care. Beer had sworn to find her. His friend wished him good luck.

“At the border they got separated. Hamburg went north, Beer headed south. Beer made his friend memorize his address. I memorized it too:
——gasse
19. We rode the train together all the way to Vienna and never once exchanged so much as a word.

“When I got here, I forgot all about the good doctor. I was busy getting drunk. Girls, too. Four whole years, Frau Beer. It’s a long time to go without.

“One afternoon, I ran out of money. Needless to say I was still drunk. I remembered Beer’s address, walked through the front door of the building, slipped on the stairs, and banged the back of my head against the wall. There was a good bit of blood. I passed out on the landing.

“Next thing I know, Beer is there, looking down at me. He’d just come home, had a sheaf of letters in his hand. ‘Comrade,’ I say, ‘we were on the same train, we shat in the same bucket.’ He got me to my feet and took me into his flat.

“We sat in his study. I chose the floor: I was too dirty for his chairs. My head was bleeding. It bled on the wallpaper. Comrade Beer was too busy reading his letters to notice. He had changed since I’d last seen him, and not for the better. There’d been a sense of peace to him back on the train. Now his nerves were frayed. I recognized the symptoms. It’s tough leaving the camp. A city full of people. And that strange sense of freedom: decisions waiting to be made. He told me you were coming back to him.

“That was later, though. First, he got excited about a letter. ‘Lieschen,’ he said. ‘Finally, I found a trace.’ She’d changed her name, apparently. ‘Eva Frey.’ He said it like it answered everything. A smile on his face, rushing to the larder to locate a bottle. ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a glass. ‘We must celebrate.’ It was then he noticed I was bleeding.

“He turned into a doctor. A dab of iodine and a bandage; he patched me up in minutes. ‘Can I kip here for a night?’ I asked. He thought about it. ‘One night,’ he said. ‘My wife’s coming back tomorrow. She wouldn’t understand.’ I thanked him like a good boy and asked did he have some food. We drank and ate until we ran out. He was quite drunk by then. ‘Let’s go out,’ I said. ‘Make a night of it.’ I did not mention I hadn’t any money.

“We hit the bars. You wouldn’t believe how many bars there are. People starving, scrapping over ration cards, but at every corner someone will sell you apple brandy, or some vodka they’ve concocted from some rotten spuds. In any case, we got good and rat-arsed. Worked our way outwards, to the working-class districts, where the booze was cheaper. Beer paid
for everything. ‘Brother,’ he called me. ‘You’re as big as a house.’ We got chased by a Frenchy when he saw us pissing on his jeep. Then the drizzle turned into a proper storm. We ran down a street, hid in a gateway. A door was standing open, and inside was a gutted shop, undergoing renovation. Holes in the plaster, the smell of blocked sewage. But dry. I plonked down on the ground and was soon fast asleep.

“When I woke, Beer’s hand was in my hair. He had a gentle touch. There was very little light: just the glow of the city seeping through the broken windows. All I could see clearly was one eye. And the look in that eye: cold, mechanical, fixed on my own. That, and he was stroking my hair. It scared the living daylights out of me.

“It took me days until I realized what he was doing. The wound on my head: he was tending the wound. The bandage had slipped with the rain. I found blood all down my neck later on. At the time, all that came to me were the rumours from the camp. His face so close, I felt his breath in my mouth.

“You know, it’s funny. There was a lot of that sort of thing in the camps. Men loving men, it’s as common as dirt. I got propositioned once or twice—subtle, mind; a hand on my shoulder, a questioning glance—and said no without raising a stink. But this, it scared me, my guts ran cold. All I wanted was to get away from him.

“I shoved him hard. He fell on his back, his wind knocked right out of him. I leapt up, scared and angry, looked at him in the gloom. If he had said something, or closed his eyes, made a gesture of apology—But all I saw of him was that look, that cold, dispassionate, somehow questioning look, one eye only, the other in shadow. So I kicked him, wishing to knock that look right out of him, kicked him hard in the belly, a soft sound, like kicking a football that is short on air. He rolled, tumbled over, came to rest on his back, the eye unmoved, unmoving, staring up at me with something close to glee. God, how I hated that look. I didn’t know the eye was made of glass.

“I went on kicking him. I kicked him mechanically, my head empty of thought. It was only afterwards that I understood that I was angry.
Have you ever been angry like that? Something takes over, it’s almost like joy. You forget yourself. All there was, was action: the fact of my kicking him. I kicked him good and proper. Stamped on him too, stamped on his face, the hands, the ankles, wanting them to break. I only stopped when nausea took over. I was drunk after all. I went outside to vomit. The rain drenched me. I went back inside and saw what I had done.

“He wasn’t moving; lay on his belly, legs spread, one foot turned against its ankle, pointing up into the room. I thought for sure that he was dead.

“Shame hit me. Not regret, mind, nothing as complex as that, just hot, raw shame, the sort I knew from childhood, when you’ve peed in your bed. I had no thought of running away. What I needed to do was hide him. Nobody must know.

“I bustled about for some minutes, trying to come up with a plan. There was a yard full of rubble outside. And there was a cellar. I dragged him by the turned-up foot; heard his head bounce on the stairs. The cellar was black as a cave. I dragged him into what felt like a room, dropped him. When I was already back at the stairs, he made a sound. Not a cry; something like a sigh. An exhalation: the rustle of leaves. I jumped and ran.

“Out in the yard, going into the gateway, I saw his keys and wallet. They’d dropped out while I was dragging him. I scooped them up without thinking. Hiding the evidence. I ran until I found a patch of grass out by the edge of town. I passed out, woke to a goat eating the soles off my shoes and a boy running, arms spread into wings, making noises like a Stuka. He watched me vomit in a ditch and shot a salvo after me when I picked myself up and walked back into town.