The Crooked Maid (22 page)

Eva might have said more but ran out of breath and lace to knot. They locked eyes for a moment, too fleetingly to take each other’s measure or to
tally up the score. Then Eva turned without another word and slammed the door on the way out.

3.

The inspector rang while Anna was still in bed. It was eight in the morning; her unconscious strained to incorporate the ringing into dream. She woke at last, pulled on a dressing gown, supposed it must be Neumann come to take another bath. When she opened the door, it took her a moment to place the man’s face: the plump figure with its placid gestures; the thick glasses and the neatly parted hair. It was only when he wished her a “Good morning” with the even drone of his voice that she recalled the scene at the police station. His name, he said, was Frisch. There was no weight in his arm as he shook her hand.

“Have you found him?” she asked, feeling naked without her makeup. “My husband.”

The man frowned, folded one hand into the other. “So he hasn’t come home.”

Gently, in quiet, soothing phrases, he explained to her that the police had found the body of a man whom they had not been able to identify. Would she be so kind as to accompany him to the morgue?

The word startled her. “He is dead then.”

He shook his head, flashed her a helpless smile. “I’m afraid it’s up to you to tell us.”

She excused herself and ran into the bedroom to get dressed.

When she emerged some minutes later, the inspector had let himself into the living room and stood with his head tilted to one side, reading off the titles on their bookshelf. He noticed her presence and straightened.

“It’s a lovely flat you have here, Frau Doktor. Nice and big.”

“Yes,” she said, uncertain whether he was expressing admiration or resentment. His voice was as gentle and even as when he had invited her to identify her husband in the city morgue.

“I brought a car,” he said, walked ahead, and opened the front door. “After you.”

Halfway down the stairwell they ran into the crooked girl. Some part of Anna recognized her at once, or rather her hat, its bright red draining her complexion. The boy’s description had dwelled upon its colour. The girl too looked up in recognition; slowed her step, cast an eye at Anna’s companion, then suddenly whipped past them, almost running up the stairs. From behind, her spine looked painfully twisted; her cotton dress too flimsy to mask its line.

The detective noticed Anna’s interest. “Who was that?”

“Nobody.”

Above them the steps grew fainter, stopped. Anna had no doubt that the girl was headed for their flat. She remained standing with her back to the detective, her chin raised into the stairwell, listening for the ring of her own doorbell.

“Is there something you forgot upstairs?”

“No,” said Anna, turned around. “Let’s go.”

Perhaps she should have confided in the policeman and told him about her husband’s letters, his dogged search for a crippled orphan. But then—none of it mattered, if Anton was dead.

4.

Frisch’s car was parked right outside the building. Anna paid no attention to the route and looked up in surprise when they pulled up in front of a nondescript building at the back of the city hospital, not ten minutes down the road. Somehow she had expected a longer journey. She hastened to get out, then noticed that the detective had not stirred in his seat. He appeared deep in thought. The car door open, the heel of one shoe already placed upon the curb, she looked back at him over one shoulder. His eyes blinked, encased in glass, the lids and lashes amplified in their quick motion. He glanced at her without moving his head: a
tender, watery gaze, red-rimmed and kind. The face beneath the spectacles did not hold the same emotion. When he spoke, it was in the same calm, fluid drone. It was as though he were giving her dictation.

“The man’s body has been severely beaten,” he said. “There are swellings and chemical burns. He has been dead for close to a week. The marks of decay are—unpleasant.” He paused, nodded to her. “Shall we?”

Frisch led her into the building. In the gateway stood a porter’s booth. While Frisch signed them in, Anna found her reflection in its glass; the light-green blouse and auburn hair, her lipstick glowing brightly in her pale and powdered face. She had dressed as though she were on her way to collect her husband at the train station; then on to a picnic in the gardens of Schönbrunn. Behind the glass, the old, pockmarked porter concluded she must be staring at him. He flashed her a grin of yellowed teeth. A half-eaten sausage lay on an open newspaper, looked grey and waxen in the booth’s dim light.

Frisch led her into a corridor on their left, then on down the stairs. There was parquet flooring even in the basement, its wood dirty and grooved from the passing of gurneys. A man in a crumpled lab coat greeted them and introduced himself as the chief pathologist; bowed from the waist to plant a kiss on her hand; then ushered her into a room with a delicate push upon her waist. He was tall, handsome, his accent pronounced and musical; the hands and face tanned despite a life spent in the cellars of a morgue. They marched her to a high metal table with a solemnity that reminded her of walking down the aisle towards the altar: each of them holding on to one elbow, lest she run away.

“In your own time, Frau Beer.”

The pathologist flashed her a wry little smile then withdrew half a step. As she peeled back the well-starched sheet (and how many times had it been washed?), the two men behind her launched into a quiet conversation. She listened to them, distractedly, as she uncovered the corpse’s face.

“Have there been any developments?”

“We had a close look at the dental work. A steel bridge across the upper right molars. Soviet workmanship.”

“So he was a POW in Russia.”

“Unless he is Russian. Was, rather. Inspector Höfel called this morning. He thinks he was killed upstairs then dragged into the basement. A butcher’s shop, though really just an empty shell; they were doing renovations. The workmen remember a bloodstain.”

“When?”

“Six, seven days, maybe more. There’s three of them and they don’t agree. Like all witnesses.”

“How about the eye?”

“Ah, the eye. Quite a mystery, actually. Exquisite workmanship. We haven’t been able to determine its provenance. I checked with the standard suppliers of prosthetics, but their eyes are nothing like this. I put it back in, thinking it might help with identification.”

The eye was the only human thing about the face that Anna had uncovered. In many ways there was no face at all. There was a mouth, of course, but the teeth behind the lips were broken, the jawbone cracked; they’d had to tie it with a ribbon to the skull. What remained of the face was displaced and swollen. Forehead and cheeks were naked flesh. Something had burned away the skin. The left brow and left cheekbone had risen like dough and fused over a swollen hole. On the other side, under an eyebrow split at the centre by a small vertical scar, sat the prosthetic eye. It looked outsized in its shrunk socket, the only thing of definite dimension in the pulpy mess of lesioned flesh.

Anna held her breath and kept staring at the eye. It was very intricately worked, the iris structured into layers, clear amber grains embedded in three shades of blue, each a snowflake pattern radiating from the pupil’s central well. In the bright light of the morgue the eye’s milky glass had turned transparent, become infused with something like an inner glow. A root system of capillaries spread from the depths of it: tender, light-pink tendrils fanning out towards the surface and the light. The lid that clung to its outer edges gave it a frame of amber lashes, each gently curving outwards, away from the glass. It was a lovely, human eye, alive with
an intelligence intrinsic to its design. The dead man watched her coldly, without judgment.

She forced herself to ignore his scrutiny and concentrate instead on the line and shade of the man’s hair. It emerged from out the swollen skull as though each hair had been planted there by hand. Was it possible that Anton had greyed, his hair receded, quite this much? The scalp looked mottled between the thinning tufts, as though covered by some rash. She inspected the ears, found one to be blackened, the other waxen, fragile, incomplete, its rim chewed away into an undulating line. A coarse black hair stuck out of the moulded cartilage ridge near its centre (Anton would have known its anatomical name). It was ugly even in the context of the corpse, a slander on her husband’s sense of dignity, so much of which resided in his being perfectly turned out.

If this was, in fact, her husband.

She tried to picture him, compare him to the thing spread out before her on the table, but found she remembered only Anton’s photo, his features sharply drawn in black-and-white. The pathologist, as though sensing her indecision, stepped closer and quietly began to pull down the sheet, inch by inch. Like the face, the body was a mess: white, chalky planes rising into blackened peaks at those points where the body must have rested on the ground; the sewn-up flaps of surgical incision; sparse body hair looking stuck into the waxy skin. Anton’s chest had been broader, she found herself thinking, but perhaps the memory had become adulterated by some other lover’s frame. They passed the belly button, the lower abdomen. The whole area beneath the rib cage looked sunk, scooped out, criss-crossed with stitches.

Through the chemicals and her fear she finally grew aware of the smell. Still the pathologist continued peeling back the sheet until it had passed the halfway point of the corpse’s thighs. She found him looking at her, his light-boned features a tidy mask of curiosity. Disturbed, she realized that he wanted her to make an identification based on the shape of the man’s sex. Even this part of his body had been mistreated, the left side of the
scrotum a blackened, swollen clump. She looked at the curve of the man’s penis and turned away; pushed a hand over her open mouth, spreading lipstick across her palm.

“The trouble is,” the pathologist whispered in his musical Carinthian, “he lived quite a few hours after he was beaten. The swelling is unusually advanced.”

Anna ran out into the hallway. The air was fresher there. For a moment she stood, leaning heavily against a wall, her diaphragm going through spasms as she heaved up stomach juices into throat and mouth. She found a handkerchief in her pocket and pressed it to her lips until the spasm passed. Despite her discomfort she was acutely aware of her physical surroundings, the scarred parquet floor and dirty yellow walls, scuffed in places where a gurney had been rammed into the plaster. All her upset resided in her body. Her head was remarkably clear.

When she looked back to the door, she saw that Frisch had followed her out into the hallway. There was a kindly look in his outsized eyes. He pointed to a bench some five steps down the corridor and insisted she sit down. After a moment’s hesitation, standing in front of her so that she was forced to face the buttons of his fly, he sat down next to her and folded his hands together over his chest.

“Did you recognize him?” he asked, the voice even and gentle.

She shook her head. “I cannot tell.”

“I see.”

She looked over at him, caught off guard by his tone. “What happens now?”

“The detective who is in charge of the investigation will want to close the case. They will bury the body.” He leaned forward, placed his palms on his knees. “There is a Soviet functionary who keeps calling my office. Never quite gives his full credentials. He says he is taking an interest in your husband’s disappearance.” He smiled somehow sadly, as though trying to reconcile himself to life’s many mysteries. “Is there anybody else who might be able to attempt identification?”

She stared at him blankly.

“How about this Neumann that you mentioned at the station? I tried to locate him, but he does not seem to be registered in Vienna. Surely he would know about the eye.”

“Neumann,” she exclaimed. “But of course! He will be able to—I need a telephone.”

She jumped to her feet, cast around for a phone with sudden impatience. Frisch rose beside her without matching her hurry. He thought it over for a moment then led her to an office down the hall marked
Dr. Kranz
. The door was unlocked, the office a mess of papers and equipment. She dug around in her handbag until she found the scrap of paper on which she had noted down the number for Sophie Coburn’s flat, then picked up the receiver and dialed. The voice that answered was unknown to her.

“Who do you want?”

She forced herself to be polite. “This is Anna Beer speaking. I am looking for Karel Neumann. Frau Coburn’s—relative.” When the voice did not respond, she added, “The big man, a Czech.”

“Wait.”

She heard footsteps lead away from the phone, then the sound of someone knocking on a door. Some seconds later the footsteps returned.

“Nobody there.”

The man hung up before she had time to leave a message. She rushed out of the office, looked back at Frisch. “Don’t bury him. I’ll fetch Neumann.”

Without waiting for an answer, afraid somehow that he would stop her, sabotage her sudden sense of purpose, she ran out of the building. Outside, in the glaring sunshine, it took her a moment to orient herself and locate the nearest tram stop. She walked over and joined the throng of people standing there, waiting for their tram.

5.

When Anna Beer arrived home some twenty minutes later, she found the crooked girl sitting on the steps beside her door, passing the time with a book. Anna had quite forgotten their earlier meeting, and had run up to her flat with the sole intention of washing her face and taking some Aspirin before setting off in search of Neumann. The girl rose as Anna approached her; frowned, took a step forward, then sideways as though to circumvent her, pass her, and go flying down the stairs. Every movement she made was pulled off kilter by the twist that locked her spine. For all that, she was not without the gift of grace: long skittish legs, a little bony at the knee. The book she had been reading hung lightly from her twirling wrist and followed its gyrations. Two of her fingers were shoved into its pages. On her head there perched the hat that did not suit.