The Crooked Maid (48 page)

“It gave me a fright at first,” Timofey said, “but then I found beauty in it. There were such colours to the iris. I took it out and cleaned it off; held it up into the sun. Patterns on the floor. Whoever made it was an artist.”

“‘Patterns on the floor,’” Frisch repeated. “You are an educated man, Timofey. Do you speak English perhaps? French?”

“French.”

“So you can read our alphabet. Of course you can. The telegram listed a date and a time. A train schedule: somebody’s time of arrival. You understood it at once.”

“Yes.”

“And decided to be there to meet the train.”

“Yes.”

“When did it come in?”

“That very evening. The fifth of July. Nine fifty-five. From Paris.”

“Nine fifty-five. So you had all day. Tell me what you did.”

“I tried on my new scarf. I’d never in my life felt wool so soft.”

Timofey omitted the gutting of the body and had to be prodded; then, in a quiet, timid voice, described a procedure so barbaric Frisch felt sick. “Why?” he asked, but received no answer, was whisked to the train station instead and matters metaphysical.

“The train was late. People waited all night. A close summer night. Some rain at dawn. At last the train arrived. I recognized her from the photo. She looked older but just as fine. A strong woman, a hardness to her chin.”

“You followed her home?”

Timofey shook his head. “She took a taxi. I had no means to follow.”

“Then what?”

“There was a boy there too. He came with the woman. He set off walking. I followed and he led me to a house. The second photo—the photo I lost—it showed a girl. She lived there. I saw her and came back the next day. The boy chased me off for a while, but I always returned.” He made a face, too sly for a madman. “It is good to find a home.”

Frisch asked more details about the girl, enough to identify her as Anneliese Grotter. “What was your interest in her?” he pressed Timofey.

The man pondered it. “The dead man had left her to me. An obligation.” He crossed himself, studied Frisch’s face. “Have you ever felt the hand of God, Herr Commissar? It taps you lightly, on the shoulder. You barely feel it, but all the same it almost shatters your bones.”

“My colleagues were right about you, Timofey. You’re a philosopher.”

“I understand, Herr Commissar. You object. You don’t like God. Not here, in your station house. You’d rather have psychology. A motivation. Very well. Let’s say this, then: she was just like my sister had been when we were young. An angry girl. Suffering. Alone.” Timofey paused, chanced a question. “Was the dead man her father?”

“Beer? Not so far as I know. He received the photo in response to an inquiry. From an orphanage. It appears he was looking for her.” He eyed the prisoner. “You never spoke to the girl?”

A smile, only his second. “I don’t speak.”

“Yes, of course.
You’re the ghost of the past
.” Frisch paused, leaned forward. “Tell me why you gutted Beer.”

The Russian grew embarrassed. “He was in my cellar. He would soon start to smell. Impossible to bury him there: concrete floors. Too dangerous to carry him out, and too heavy to carry very far. Besides—” He rewrapped his scarf. “I needed someone to talk to.”

“So you stuffed him?”

“Not ‘stuffed.’ I’d have had to skin him, build a skeleton from wire or wood. It’d take weeks. So I tried my hand at embalming. I removed the intestines, thinking they would rot first, then injected him with aluminium salts, trying to push out the blood. I foraged for chemicals and made arsenic soap. In taxidermy, it keeps away the flies.” He shook his head, regretful. “He rotted anyway. It was impossible to drain him properly. One would need some sort of pump. Soon the skin was crawling, despite the arsenic. I brushed off dead maggots by the thousands.”

“Then what?”

“I thought I’d have to get rid of him. Cut him to pieces perhaps. Bury him, bit by bit. Then you found him. And took him away.”

“You saw me?”

A nod.

“I solved your problem.”

“But took away my friend.”

“So you were alone again. Walking the city. Keeping an eye on the girl.” Frisch polished his lenses. “Until tonight. Tell me what happened.”

The Russian shrugged, pointy shoulders rising in his threadbare shirt. The cup in front of him was empty.

“I heard noises in the yard. I was working, finishing the stitching.” He pointed to the bird. “It did not sound like a fight. There was no screaming.
A series of dull blows, like someone was beating their carpet. When I looked out the door, one man was dead in the mud.”

“And the other?”

“Walking into the rubble and the mist. Not a man. A shadow. The rubble ten foot high and yet he climbed it, walking straight across the broken side of yard.” He sketched the scene with brittle hands. “When he was gone, I ran out to have a look at the body.”

“And then?”

“The boy showed up. I heard him coming.”

“And hid.”

“Yes.”

Frisch leaned back in his chair and threaded his thumbs through the armholes of his waistcoat. His fingers rolled themselves into pudgy little fists.

“Two murders, Timofey, and a ‘shadow’ vanishing in the mist. I can place you at the scene. Starving, frightened, in need of cash.” Frisch spoke very softly. The threat was in the words themselves. “I’ll never find a better suspect.”

The man folded his hands. “God put me there.” Ten seconds later: “I dreamt once I was God.”

Frisch shook his head, suddenly annoyed. “A tuppenny dream. Every little crook has had it.

“You didn’t kill Seidel too, by any chance?” he carried on. “Perhaps you worked in his factory and wanted revenge. Perhaps it wasn’t the boy who led you to his house; you had been there before.”

Timofey shook his head, more amused than insulted, then paused. “I visited him in hospital. The Father. I knew he owned a factory. I figured he must have used prisoners too.” His brow furrowed, in wonder, not anger. “I thought I’d find an enemy. Someone to hate.”

“So you hate us? Germans, Austrians, whatever it is we are?”

“Only those who held the whip.”

“Well,” said Frisch, taken aback, “it passed through an awful lot of hands.”

The interpreter stood up then, requesting leave to empty his bladder. It occurred to Frisch that the man felt insulted by his assessment. Detective and prisoner sat out his absence in silence.

6.

When the interpreter returned, they backtracked to the subject of the “shadow.”

“Describe him for me,” Frisch said.

The man’s eyes grew shy. “Judas climbing his own gallows.”

“Something less poetic.”

“He was as tall as a giant and as thin as a wraith. His arms out swinging; the shirt soaked and sticking to his skin.”

Frisch pondered this for some moments. “A giant?” he asked. “Two metres, broad shoulders, features as though whittled out of wood?”

“You know him?”

“Yes. Last I heard he was heading to Siberia courtesy of the Soviet state.”

It was only when the man winced that Frisch remembered his likely future. Curiosity distracted him from the matter at hand.

“Why don’t you want to return?” he asked. “You’ll be going home after all. Don’t you have a wife?”

“I do.” Timofey hesitated, went on. “My family were landowners, Commissar. Class enemies. My grandparents were shot. My father spent ten years in a camp. And now I have collaborated with the enemy. ‘Foreign experience.’ It’s very suspicious. I expect I will get shot.”

Frisch glanced at the interpreter, incredulous. “You didn’t collaborate. You were a prisoner of war. You had no choice in the matter.”

Timofey raised both hands in front of him in a gesture halfway between entreaty and shrug. “Real patriots had the decency to die.” His wrists looked so thin it seemed possible to snap off his hands.

“What did you eat all these months?” Frisch asked after a long pause, avoiding his prisoner’s eyes.

“Heaven provides.”

“You mean you stole,” Frisch said softly. “And for a moment there, you had me believing you were innocent.”

It earned him a third smile, the weakest of the bunch. There wouldn’t be any more.

“Let us return to the day you found Anton Beer.”

Frisch proceeded to work his way methodically back over the information, requesting further details about various particulars. Timofey spoke with increasing ease; his answers were frank, witty, consistent. The point came when Frisch realized he was prolonging the interview simply for the sake of speaking: he wished to delay the moment when the man would be taken away, to an unknown fate. At last he ran out of questions. He sent the interpreter away and offered his prisoner a cigarette. But Timofey did not smoke.

“I wonder if they’ll really shoot you,” Frisch said, aware that he was no longer understood. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have arrested you, my friend.”

The man sat, quiet and impassive, then raised a bony hand to his face and mimed taking off his glasses. Frisch obeyed. His prisoner sat very still, looking into the detective’s myopic eyes. He seemed to find something there that reassured him. When Frisch returned the glasses to his face, Timofey had closed his eyes and was humming a melody, low under his breath.

Frisch stood up, called for the guard, and left the interrogation room.

He went straight to his superiors and requested a warrant for one Karel Neumann, vagrant, suspected at large in Greater Vienna.

Six

1.

Karel came to in a public house on the Gürtel. He had not been unconscious exactly, but neither could he have explained how he’d got there. His ears rang. It took him a while to understand the cause was physical. His right ear was blood-clotted and swollen. There was a beer in front of him, and a schnapps glass in his hand. When he set it down, its sides were smeared with blood. None of the other patrons seemed to care. When he rose from the chair, a pain shot through his lung and back. A muddy puddle had formed around his boots. He dug in his pocket and found a sodden bill. The landlord changed it for him, and avoided looking at him for more than a moment.

He left the public house, boarded a tram, pushing his bulk through the throng of those disembarking. The tram was packed: soldiers, drunks, a group of university students, all standing shoulder to shoulder.

Feeling dizzy, his tongue swollen too big for his mouth, Karel groped for the only vacant seat. His hands were shaking, his knuckles hurting; the shirt sleeves blood- and mud-caked to the elbows. An old woman sat next to him. She gave him a sour look that mixed fear and anger; clutched her handbag to her chest. The air oppressed him: sweat, digestive gases, sodden fabrics; the heat of bodies pressed too tight. After two stops he needed out: swam through the crowd with a sort of breaststroke, leapt out onto the street. The dizziness stayed with him. He tried to walk but staggered, scraped his shoulder on a metal grate, roused a nest of rats. Two corners
on, a drunk sat on the pavement, legs spread out before him and holding his head in veiny hands. A bottle was wedged between his thighs.

Slowly, laboriously, Karel slid down next to him. The man did not react. Tiredness overcame him, his back complaining, a hurt deep in his lung.

“Son of a bitch,” he murmured. “He must have cracked my ribs.”

He sat, nauseated, breathing, a drizzle soaking through his clothes. A realization hit him, raised a giggle soon snuffed out by the ensuing pain.

“I just figured it out. The look that woman gave me. The tram was full, and she didn’t want to give up her seat. She knew very well I was an axe murderer—she kept looking at my sleeves—but all the same she wouldn’t give it up.”

His neighbour was unresponsive, lost in deep stupor or in thought.

“Cold night, eh?” Karel said, but again earned no answer. “And look at me, I’m a real mess. The thing is, friend, I just had a fight. In all my life, I never had a fight like that.” He sighed, found himself reliving it. “He came at me from the dark. A gun in his hand, aiming it right at my chest. I thought he was going to shoot and braced for it, balls in my throat, as they say, but he swung it, like it was a club, hit me right in the chest. I slapped it out of his hand, he didn’t even bend for it, kept coming at me. I put a fist in his face. He went down, came up kicking. I shattered his nose. Down he went, got up again, leapt at my legs. I kicked him, right on the ear, he was dizzy now, crawling around, not a sound out his mouth. He was looking for his gun. I got there before him, stamped on his fingers. He sank his teeth into my calf, pulled himself up by my belt; kept flailing with his mangled hand. Shit, he nearly broke my jaw. His thumb bent back and flapping against my throat.”

He fell silent, pondered it all, his head hurting, teeth loose at the back.

“Like a wind-up doll. Always getting up. Even after I broke his leg.”

“How did it end?” the man next to him asked. A high voice: forlorn, wilful, drunk.

Karel shrugged. “I got angry. It’s happened before.”

The stranger was silent long enough to give the impression he had fallen asleep. Then he gave his verdict. “He wanted to die.”

“Bullshit,” said Karel. “Nobody wants to die.” But he grew thoughtful nonetheless. He turned his head and gave his companion a closer look. He was a big man, fifty or older, dressed in a loden coat, wool jacket, and linen shirt. “I have money,” Karel said. “I need a clean shirt.”

The man stripped without the slightest hesitation. Karel handed him his soiled shirt, but the drunk made no move to put it on; sat in the rain, his bare chest slick and covered in grey hairs.

“You will catch your death.”

“What if I do?” the man asked.

Karel looked at him with anguish, bundled him into his jacket and coat. The man did not fight him, endured his manipulations with perfect equanimity, but like a stubborn child refused to thread his arms through the sleeves.

“I tried to jump in the river,” he said, “but I got scared. The water was so dark.”

“Sleep on it,” Karel said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

He dragged him into the shelter of a doorway, lost the clothes en route, gathered them, and once again swaddled the man as best he could.