Eleanor Rigby (23 page)

I rode down to the lobby in the elevator—a
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
brass job that did everything but boil water and make tea. As I rode, I considered the conversation that was to come, and I felt somehow unarmed. Herr Bayer must surely have done his research on me. Did he know about Jeremy? He seemed like he’d know everything. I knew almost nothing. But we each had what the other needed, or that was my impression.

Down in the lobby, the hotel continued to be a dream. I remembered seven years back, watching daytime TV with Jeremy, and how, whenever somebody won a trip to France or someplace European, their hotel was always described as “sumptuous.” This place
was
sumptuous. No surface was without lace, carved pearwood, bevelled mirrors, dark, oily paintings, thick fabrics, or whipped cream and a cherry. It was the opposite of my German jail cell. I felt alien, but when I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I thought,
Oh, there’s an Austrian person
—but then of course it was me being unfamiliar with my new short haircut and my new, non-radioactive outfit.

I felt like me, but not me. I suppose it’s why we like travelling; it’s why cults target airports, why train stations sell the flags of all nations. Travel dissolves you. It makes you need to rebuild yourself, forces you to remember where you’re from.

“Miss Dunn?”

I turned around to see a man my age, average height, a beard and moustache, and slightly old-fashioned clothes. “Herr Bayer …”

We shook hands. “Please, the restaurant is this way, shall we go?”

He escorted me by the elbow, which nobody had ever done for me before. The gesture was corny yet reassuring. He reminded me of a cab driver I once met in Seattle, a bearded grump who said he was once Director of Theoretical Astrophysics at Kiev University.

The head waiter didn’t look at me, but since I was escorted by a man, we didn’t even break our pace and went directly to a table. By myself, I would have read the day’s paper three times before being smuggled to the rearmost table.

We sat down.

“It is a pleasure finally to meet, Miss Dunn.”

“Likewise.” Heavy white napkins were unfurled on our laps. “It’s nice to visit the city where the subconscious was invented.”

He looked at me darkly. “Miss Dunn, the subconscious was not
invented.
It was
discovered.
”

“Oh. Sorry. I hadn’t given it much thought. I’ve always thought we had our day-to-day personality and then we also have this big rat’s nest inside of us called our subconscious.”

“What makes you think of it as a rat’s nest?”

“Well, if our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn’t have to bury it down deep inside ourselves. It’d be just another feature on our face, like our nose.” I could see Herr Bayer thought I might be joking, but I wasn’t. “People talk about our subconscious like it’s the South Pole and it required vast amounts of technology and determination to finally reach the place. How do we know there aren’t five or six hidden layers of personality? Or sixty-two?”

“I think maybe four.”

“What would you call them?”

“Miss Dunn, you already know that—your public self, your private self and your secret self.”

“That’s only three.”

“The fourth is the dark self—the one that drives the car; the one that has the map; the one that is greedy or trusting or filled with hate. It’s so strong it defies speaking.”

Menus were given to us, and I snapped out of what felt like a trance. “How did we get here so quickly?”

“I think you were driving the car, Miss Dunn.” He smiled, then ordered mineral water for us. A beautiful basket of bread appeared, with butter.

To compensate for such an off-kilter start, I prattled on about how beautiful Vienna was, and recounted, quite boringly, everything I’d seen that afternoon. In response he said, “You’ve a touch of sun on your face.”

After my afternoon walk, my cheeks had the nice, slightly pulled-tight feel to them. “Oh. I suppose.” I added, “But the sun is overrated, you know.”

“Why is that, Miss Dunn?”

“Here you have this vast globe of flaring plasma that can be seen from trillions of light years away, and yet all it has circling it is a dozen or so rocks. You’d think something that cosmic would have a bit more going for it.”

“Your way of looking at the universe is unique, Miss Dunn.”

“I try to be realistic about things.”

“The menu here is excellent.”

“It’s in German, Herr Bayer. Could you order for me?”

“Please, call me Rainer. And yes, I will. Are you allergic to anything?”

“No. But I have trouble with any meat whose name also describes what the meat used to do before it became meat.”

“Such as …”

“Such as liver. Or kidney.”

“Go on.”

“’Hi—before I was sautéed in onions, I spent my life refining impurities from a cow’s bloodstream.’”

“I see what you mean.”

“I include sweetbreads and tripe on that list.”

“What is a sweetbread?”

“A thymus gland.”

“Tripe?”

“Stomach.”

“Okay. Why don’t we have Wiener schnitzel for dinner? When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

Romans. He’d quickly gotten to the point. “Rainer, you want to discuss our business right away?”

“No. No—I didn’t intend for that coincidence. But the fact that you came all this way on the basis of a few phone calls and a jpeg is tantalizing.”

“I think I need to eat.”

“Of course. And you must tell me about your German prison adventure.”

“Where to begin?”

“Let’s begin when you first found the piece of fuel from the Soviet satellite.”

“Very well. It was a week ago Thursday—”

My story took us right through dinner, and I pride myself that it wasn’t the least bit dull. I felt cosmopolitan. I thought that this must be how Leslie feels every day of her life, how beautiful people must go through existence, their every word a pastry for the starved. Rainer had also done his homework. He knew about William and his company, and he was able to help me decode the strange first six hours in Frankfurt during which there seemed to be no logic in what people were and weren’t asking me.

We were near the end of our schnitzels when I realized we were running out of time to discuss Klaus Kertesz. Rainer saw this in my face and said, “It’s perhaps better if we wait until tomorrow to discuss our official business, Miss Dunn.”

“Liz.” I was glad he felt this too. I was bagged.

“Liz. Come down to our police station and we can work more efficiently. Can you wait until then?”

“Of course.”

The rest of the dinner was spent discussing Vienna. Throughout it all, Rainer was the perfect host, and not once did he make me feel I was torturing him with my presence.

Around eleven, we said good night in the lobby. I would come to the station the next morning at eleven.

Just before leaving, Rainer asked me, “Liz—do you ever buy lottery tickets?”

“What a strange question. Why, are you selling them?”

“No. I’m curious. Do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And why not?”

“Nobody’s ever asked me that, but I have a definite opinion on the matter. Imagine, Rainer, if I’d bought a ticket and then had all of the numbers except for one. A failure that large I couldn’t begin to imagine. Why open your door to that kind of grief, let alone pay money to have it happen to you?”

“There we have it. Good night, Liz.”

“Good night, Rainer.”

I am beyond pooped.

And
, the hotel left cookies by my bedside.

Good night.

*    *    *

Rainer’s office was drab in a generic bureaucratic way that even curlicued Vienna was powerless to change. It had nicotine-stained panelled walls in blue and grey and green. The office’s cubicles were partitioned by filmy glass panes. The absence of fabric-panelled wall partitions and empty team-speak pep posters saved the precinct from resembling Landover Communication Systems. And cigarette smoke. Now that I think about it, it’s not just the all-pervasiveness of cookies in Vienna that’s weird, it’s the pervasiveness of cigarettes. It’s like seeing spittoons on every corner. What next—scarlet letters?

I also caused a small sensation when I entered Rainer’s office, along the lines of,
Die Frau who upgefucked the entire Frankfurt Flugplatz vier days ago.

“Liz, please. In here.” Rainer motioned me in. On his desk was a coffee and, yes, another cookie.

“Rainer, what is it with Vienna and cookies?”

“What do you mean?”

“Everywhere I go here, people are giving me cookies. Is it something you people do to loosen the subconscious or something?”

“Liz, a small amount of sugar is surely good for the release of ideas and memories.”

“So it’s a plot, then.”

“A plot?”

I could see that staff members were pretending not to gawk at me from outside the windows.

“Ignore my colleagues,” said Rainer. “You are a celebrity. We do not see them often.” From a desk drawer he pulled a cheap, legal-seeming black vinyl photo album, but he appeared reluctant to open it.

“Is that for me to look at?” I asked.

“Yes. But not yet.” He lit a cigarette and said, “Liz, last night was social, and a very enjoyable evening, but we chose not to probe into the matter of Rome, and of Herr Kertesz.”

“That was polite of you. Thank you. Yes, it was a nice evening.”

“Liz, you flew here to meet with me. I can only infer some deep connection between you and Herr Kertesz.”

“Klaus Kertesz? Yes.”

“Can I ask you now—my office is soundproof—to tell me what I need to know about this man—as regards
you?”

What was I to say? This was the moment he’d been waiting for. My arms clenched across my chest, protecting my rib cage. I spotted sky-blue background on the edge of the photo poking out from the vinyl album—the same blue that was on the jpeg of Klaus Kertesz that had started this whole odyssey.

That sliver of blue was all I needed. I began huffing and puffing, quite against my will, an anxiety attack, my first, and I was no better than Scarlet Halley, five miles over Reykjavik. It occurs to me that, like Scarlet on the
747
, and like Jeremy on my condo’s sofa, I’d finally found a place in which I felt secure enough to disintegrate—across from this stubbly Eurocratic man who looked like Václav Havel’s cellmate. Next, I began to blubber in the large, messy way I tried to avoid my entire life. I can think of nothing more repelling than
me
, in tears, making a scene
in public
, demanding attention, even if that was never the purpose of my tears.

After I calmed down, Rainer passed me my cookie and topped up my coffee. “I assumed there was something there. Perhaps you could tell me what happened.”

Boosted by mind-opening sucrose, I told Rainer about Rome, and about Jeremy, and I took almost an hour to do so. Upon finishing, I was wiped out, and Rainer said, “Why don’t I take you to lunch.”

So we walked to a bistro, and he kept the discussion light, which at that moment suited me well. Vienna is a stunning city, a tourist’s dream, but in their numbers the tourists diminished the city’s charm. What would the pious citizens of other centuries have made of the thousands of sweaty, near-naked tourists now buzzing like mites in and out of their cathedrals?

Once we were inside the bistro, Rainer’s mood changed. He said, “Maybe it would have been better if Vienna had been bombed in the war. Everything here is so monstrously old. Sometimes I’m jealous of the Germans—at least
they
were able to create something new.” He paused. “Sorry. What an awful thing to say. But I would very much like to see a UFO land and take half the city with it. Maybe the Chinese will do it someday.” He scanned a menu that he must have seen thousands of times during his career. “We happened to be big and middle-class first. All these people with not enough trouble in their lives creating new ways to create trouble.” He looked out the front window. “Let us eat.”

We ordered lunch—onion soup with Gruyère, salad and steak, pommes frites—and, shortly after, it arrived.

“So,” asked Rainer, “what shall we do about Herr Kertesz?”

“Well, I think I’d like to meet him.”

“I haven’t told you much about him.”

“Even so.”

He ate, said nothing, but I stopped eating and stared at him, and won the match. He said, “I suppose I cannot stop you.”

“No, you can’t. Tell me about him.”

“Very well.”

“Is he in jail?”

“No.”

“Is he a criminal?”

“Not technically. Some petty theft when he was young, but nothing after twenty. If a man steals at twenty-five, he will steal at fifty. So, he is not a criminal. Not that way.”

“How else, then?”

Rainer poured us both some water. “He is what you would call a public nuisance. He is annoying, but technically, legally, he’s doing nothing wrong.”

“What kinds of things?”

“He talks to himself on the street.”

“I’ve
been known to do that. On the phone you said assaults against women. That sounds pretty serious to me. What kind of assaults?”

“Not sexual assaults.”

This wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. “What? Okay—then what kind?”

Rainer didn’t want to say what he said next, but he finally got it out. “Religious assaults.”

“What?”

“It has nothing to do with suggestive clothing or that strain of zealotry. Herr Kertesz selects women—though we have no idea how he selects them—and he decides that they need a … religious education.”

“Is this some kind of Catholic Austrian thing?”

“No. His family is Protestant, but he seems non-denominational.”

“Is he trying to be Charles Manson?”

“No.”

“Is he poor, and scamming for money?”

“Quite the opposite. Herr Kertesz’s family takes good care of him. He is also a dentist and successful.”

“What does he do to the women he—confronts?”

“He follows them around, and he asks them questions.”

“Like …?”