Murder for the Bride (13 page)

He cursed softly in German and came toward me. A drunk to be tossed out into the street. I crouched against the wall. He reached carelessly for me. It had to be a lucky shot. I put everything I had into it. I put hate and fury into it. And all the sick distaste for what I had seen, and for the sort of people who watched it. I hit over and down, trying to catch the shelf of the jaw with maximum shock effect. It hit squarely and my arm went numb from knuckles to elbow. He grunted and braced his feet. His reaching arm sagged slowly to his side. He shook his massive head from side to side. I hit him again. It was a little high. He went back a half step, still shaking his head. Then the big arms began to come up. As they reached for me, I braced my shoulders against the wall, brought my knee up to my chest, then stamped out at his belly. It was like stamping against a tree. It drove him back two steps and he braced himself and moved in again, faster than before. It seemed incredible, but he was recovering. I had the hopeless feeling that he couldn’t be stopped with an eight-pound sledge.

As he reached for my face, I slid down into a sitting position, tucked my knees under my chin, and then let fly at his knee. One foot glanced off. My right heel caught the kneecap. Once I heard a horse fall on the ice and give that same sort of soft whistling scream. As he fell he got his hands on my left leg, just above the ankle. My leg suddenly felt as if it had been caught between a boat and a dock. The sudden pain made me feel dizzy. I stamped my right heel at his face three times before his grip slackened. I tore away, rolled over and over, and came up onto my feet, panting.

He was a slow shadow crawling toward me, making a soft scraping sound in the rubble. I moved back and struck against a trash can. I lifted the lid off it by the handle, then turned it so that I grasped it by the edge.
I swung it high with both hands and brought it down on his head so hard that it lifted both my feet off the ground and made the flat metallic sound of a Mexican church bell. He didn’t move again. I tried with shaking hands to put the lid back on the trash can. It was bent so that it wouldn’t fit. I stumbled up the wooden steps. The blue door was ajar. It opened directly into a small room. There was a cot, a hot plate on a wooden shelf, a grass rug, one wicker chair. A door opened into a tiny bathroom with concrete floor. The woman sat on the bed. She lifted her bruised face from her knees as I came in. Her eyes were dull. The mask was on the floor.

I pulled her to her feet. “You can go now. You’ve got a chance to get out of here now.” Blood had soaked through the pale back of her short light jacket. The side of her mouth was swollen and purple. She stumbled down the steps, turned toward the street, and broke into a wavering run, whining as she ran. I left the door open as I searched the room. I didn’t know what I was looking for, or even why I was looking. Maybe he had what Laura had been killed for. I found nothing. No personal papers. Very few clothes. It gave me a crawling feeling to think of searching his unconscious body. I wiped my damp palms on the sides of my thighs.

I pulled the door almost closed and went into the alley and listened. There was no sound, no sign that the people behind the other three doors had heard anything. Possibly they had. And probably they knew better than to investigate any small-hour sound in the dark alley.

The stars overhead looked misty. I looked down at Haussmann. His forehead rested on his right forearm. His left hand was outstretched. I put my foot against his shoulder and shoved roughly. He was completely limp. I went down on one knee and found the side pocket of his jacket. Empty. The pocket on the other side was caught under him. I pulled it free. Also empty. I folded the tail of his jacket up over his waist. I worked a wallet out of his right hip pocket. Just as I had it free, the outstretched left arm swept back like a club and knocked
my legs out from under me. I tried to fall toward him and get my arm around his bull neck.

But he rolled face up and clubbed me alongside the head as I fell. His big arms folded around my chest and his hands locked between my shoulder blades. He laughed low in his throat as he rolled on top of me. I tried to find his eyes and he buried his face against my throat. I hammered at the back of his head, but could get no force in the blows. I grasped for an ear and it slipped out of my sweaty hand. He put his brute strength into the crushing grip around my chest. Blackness was like a bird of night that swooped down at me. I sucked in air and tried to hold it. I felt two ribs go with separate little popping sounds. I could not see or hear or move. He said something cooingly to me in German, and I felt the air being forced out of my lungs, tearing through my throat.

A far-off voice said a single harsh word. Haussmann’s muscles went slack. As I sucked in the air I felt the thin grate of the broken rib ends. I felt him go tense, and then his enormous weight was suddenly gone as he rolled away.

I heard him scramble through the rubble, knocking against the trash cans. I sat up. Enough light came through the crack of the blue door so that I could see the small fat man in a shabby suit who stood with the knife blade held directly in front of his belly, the point toward Haussmann.

The little fat man spoke in German. He took a few steps forward out of the light, into the shadows. I crawled to the steps and reached up and pushed the door back with my fingertips. I turned. I saw Haussmann reach the alley wall. With a tremendous effort he pulled himself up onto his one good leg. With his shoulders against the wall he put both hands out, palm upward.

“Nein!”
he said shrilly.

The little fat man marched slowly forward. He spoke softly. He stood an arm’s length from Haussmann.

“Nein! Ach, lieber Gott …”

The fat man swung the knife in low, ripped upward and backed quickly away. The knife no longer picked
up highlights. Haussmann bent from the waist. He pressed his hands hard against himself. When it looked as though Haussmann would fall forward onto his face, the little man stopped the forward movement by placing his left hand against the top of Haussmann’s head. He reached underneath Haussmann’s face and pulled the knife quickly across the full throat, jumping back in the same movement to let Haussmann fall unimpeded. He bent over and wiped the knife, first one side and then the other, in two long strokes, across the broad expanse of shoulders.

He turned and stared at me. “Too quick,” he said softly.

“I’m glad you came along when you did.”

Suddenly he staggered again, I caught him. He leaned heavily against me and I got him up the steps into the room. I kicked the door shut and got him onto the cot. He lay on his back. The knife had fallen. It lay across the abandoned mask.

I found a jelly glass and got water from the bathroom tap. He had fumbled two pills out of his pocket. He put them in his mouth. A lot of water went on the front of his clothes, but enough went into his mouth to help get the pills down. He lay back. His color was ghastly. Slowly it improved and his breathing steadied.

He smiled at me. It was an oddly sweet smile. Very shy, very apologetic.

“You’ve got to get away from here,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I should be running right now. But I want to know who you are, and why you did that.”

“A very simple story. And an unpretty one. My name doesn’t matter. Anyway, I was not representing myself. I was representing thousands of others who also knew Herr Haussmann in—the old days. Graduates of Belsen, and Buchenwald, and Dachau. Herr Haussmann was Gestapo chief in my home city, Gummersbach, in the Rhineland. He recruited many of us for the camps. He and his whore. It was enough that you had something he wished. A bit of land. A shop. A painting. A daughter. He could make you confess. I had all four things he
wanted. Land, a shop, a Tintoretto, and a daughter. That filth took all of them. I confessed to being a traitor. My wife died in Belsen. But I lived. Somehow. I came here. And two weeks ago, on the street, in this country, in this city, walking in freedom, I saw Haussmann and his whore. Her hair had been dyed, but I knew her. My life is nearly over anyway. Bad heart damage from the years in the camps, from the forced labor. What would you do, my friend?”

“Did you kill the woman?”

“No. It would have been nice to kill her. But I do not even know if I could have brought myself to do it. Someone … killed her. I believe unpleasantly. This Haussmann I followed. I lost him. I gave up my work, everything, to find him again. Today I found this place. That is why I came back with a knife. I am glad it is done. But it was too quick. I meant it to be a lasting thing, for him to die slowly.”

“What did you have against the woman?”

He sat up slowly. “Against her? I shall never forget. She came to call on us at our home. Oh, so very sweet. Twenty minutes after she left, the cars came. They searched our home. In the cushions of the chair where she had sat they found the little printed thing, the thing that made a lewd joke of Adolf. It was enough. The three of us, we were taken at once to her lover at the Gestapo headquarters of Gummersbach. There we were separated. I never saw my daughter again. I saw my wife once, though, beyond the wire at Belsen. That is what I have against the woman—that she smiled and talked and made a social visit to us, and in that way killed us.”

My face felt as though Haussmann’s blow had torn half of it away. I said, “You’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“It doesn’t seem important.”

“Come on. I’ll help you.”

His color still wasn’t right. He compressed his lips and took a firm grasp on my arm. He came to his feet, wavering a bit.

“Steady, now,” I said. “Take it easy.”

Once again he gave me that quick, shy, oddly sweet smile. As the smile faded his eyes dulled. He sucked hard for air and his face slowly darkened. I tried to get him back to the cot, but his knees went slack and he slid out of my hands. It hurt my ribs to pick him up. I was afraid the broken end of one of them would punch into a lung. I got him on the cot. Then I straightened up and looked at him and knew at once that it had been a pointless effort.

I found the light switch and turned out the lights. I swung the door open and stood, listening. The cat screeched again, somewhere close at hand. A car purred by the mouth of the alley. Haussmann was a shapeless shadow near the wall. A siren called into the night, far away, receding. There was a taint of garbage in the air, and mingled with it the steamy smell of blood.

I looked into the darkness and saw a dark-haired Laura sitting in a cluttered European parlor, chatting brightly with the people who feared her. I tried to tell myself that Laura could have done no such thing. But it was no good. Because I could see her. Just as clearly as though I had been there.

I remembered the money. Laura’s money. They say money has no memory. But I knew I could never touch it now. I could find out where to send it. It might do a little good, but it could never undo any of the harm. I walked out of the alley and into night air on the baked street, air like the breath from an animal’s mouth.

J
ill was at her place. I got the outside door open. As I shut it behind me, she swung the wrought-iron door open and came down the hallway toward me. The light was behind her. She wore a loose robe and pajamas.

“At last the wanderer returns from—Dil! What happened? You’re hurt!”

“I ran into a door, they tell me.”

She held tightly to my wrist until I was safely seated in the living room. She said, “You’re cut, too. I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

“What can you do for broken ribs? I seem to have a couple.”

She stared down at me, her head cocked on one side, tapping her chin with a slim finger. She went back through the wrought-iron door to the phone stand, just beyond it. She turned on the hall light and looked at the book, then dialed crisply.

“Jack? Jill Townsend. How about a night call? No, you big wolf, it isn’t for me. A house guest. With broken ribs, and a cut on his face. Yes, he tripped and fell. Thanks, Jack. See you.”

He arrived in twenty minutes. He was a square-faced guy with tinted bifocals and a cheery look. He tapped Jill under the chin and bustled over to me.

“Off with the shirt, my friend.” I got out of it painfully. He had me stretch out on the couch while he tapped and probed. “Nice clean breaks. There may be some cracked ones, too. I pity you in this hot weather.” He took a big wide roll of tape, and he used it generously.

He put his finger over the area where the breaks were. “Deep breath. That’s it. Any pain? Good. It’ll bother you trying to get to sleep.”

He washed the cut on my face with antiseptic solution and applied a small bandage.

“Warm weather to fall off roofs, my friend.”

“Thanks so much for coming over, Jack,” Jill said. “What do we owe you?”

“Ten ought to do it. Want me to bill you?”

I dug out ten and handed it to him. He turned to Jill. “Give him a couple of those sleeping pills of yours, if you’ve got any left, honey. You said he’s a house guest?”

“That’s right.”

Dr. Jack looked hard at me. “Behave, my friend You’re staying with my girl.”

“Want me to tell Josie about this, Jack?”

He winked at her. “I tell her every day. I keep saying, ‘Honey, why don’t you divorce me so I can marry that Townsend wench?’ But she knows a good thing when she’s got it. She won’t let me go, not after getting me all housebroke.”

“Time for a drink, Jack?” Jill asked.

“No. I got to go roll a few pills. If you have trouble, my friend, stop in at the office.”

He bustled out. Jill walked him down the hall to the door. I heard the low murmur of their voices. I worked my way back into the shirt with certain difficulty.

She came back. “Like him? I think he’s very special. How about a nightcap and some more conversation, Dil?”

She brought me Scotch on the rocks. She looked at me. “Dil, something has happened to you tonight. I can see it in your eyes. It’s something that—isn’t pretty to see.”

“I’m considering a resignation from the human race.”