Rosa (23 page)

“And no one else has seen it?”

Sascha looked almost hurt by the question. “No, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar.
No one.”

“Good.” Hoffner crooked his head to the side so as to take a look at the book in the boy’s hand.
The Count of Monte Cristo.
Hoffner was liking this boy more and more. “Planning an escape,” Hoffner said with a smile.

For the first time, Sascha let his shoulders drop. He smiled, and shook his head. “No, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar.
”

Hoffner pulled a coin from his pocket and, taking Sascha’s hand, placed it in the boy’s open palm. “Our secret.” Before Sascha could say a word, Hoffner was nodding him down the corridor.

Hoffner’s mood changed the moment he started reading:

WOUTERS DEAD STOP HANGED HIMSELF TWO DAYS AGO STOP STRANGE BEHAVIOR AS OF FIVE MONTHS AGO STOP NO BATHING CUTTING HAIR STOP PUT IN ISOLATION THREE MONTHS AGO STOP AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS STOP

Hoffner read the note several times to make sure he had missed nothing. “No bathing, cutting hair.” He stepped into the wire room.

The man behind the desk was just finishing off a wire. “Yes, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar,
” he said without looking up. “You’ve something for me to send?”

“A reply,” said Hoffner; he handed the original to the man.

The man examined it. “To Bruges?”

“Yes.”

The man took out a pen and paper. “Go ahead.”

“Two words,” said Hoffner. “‘Shave him.’”

THREE

SIX

P
aul Wouters had been destined for Sint-Walburga as early as 1898. His mother, having no way to support or handle the already troubling three-year-old, had given him over to her dead husband’s mother, Anne, to raise. It was, perhaps, not the wisest choice given that the recently deceased Jacob Wouters had committed suicide after a short life in which he had been unable to reach beyond the traumas of his own childhood with Anne. That his bride decided to take her own life three weeks after Jacob’s death pretty well set the table for young Paul.

Anne Wouters was a woman of uncommon cruelty. Whatever love she might have felt for her son, Jacob—and there really was none to speak of—had long since dried up by the time her grandson, Paul, was thrust into her life. By then, she had come to believe that the wretchedness of her existence granted her the right to compound that of the boy. Not that she was aware of her malevolence—the most accomplished never are—but she could never have denied the singular pleasure she took at seeing him, hour after hour, slouched over a bobbin and thread. To her mind, it was justice at its most pure.

Before he was five, Paul was taught the art of lace-making; it was the only skill Anne knew, and would have made for an ideal living, filled with camaraderie and pride, had Anne not given birth to Jacob out of wedlock. At the time, there had been rumors of rape—even Anne had let herself believe them for a while—but the truth was that she had simply been foolish. And so went her life: her sin kept her forever from the inner circles; her skill kept her alive. For, whatever else she might have been, Anne Wouters was, without question, a virtuoso with lace. Everyone in Bruges knew it, and it was why the most intricate patterns always found their way to her tiny attic room at the Meckel Godshuizen, one of the more decrepit almshouses in town. At night, and on the sly, women—unable to match her artistry at the mills—would bring their pieces to her and pay her a tenth of what she deserved, all the while telling her that she was damned lucky to be getting any work at all. She would keep her eyes lowered, her head bowed, as they described the meshes they themselves could never achieve, and her teeth would grow sharp from the silent grinding.

When Paul was old enough to handle the pins himself, she put him to work, and for fifteen hours a day they sat in silence, manipulating the thread. He was unusually small, and though his fingers were nimble, they were often overmatched by the tools. Each missed stroke earned him a deep scraping of those tiny hands with a sharp bristle: there were mornings when the blood would still be tacky on his knuckles as he got back to work. Worse was when she fell short of her quota; then she would tie him to a chair and beat him with a strop. She liked the upper back. It was where the bone was closest to the skin.

Paul’s future life could easily have been attributed to the torture of his eight years with Anne. His choice that one night, when he had grown just tall enough to wrest the bristle from her hand and strike it repeatedly into her throat until her neck snapped and the blood spilled out in a pulsating streamlet, would have seemed the reasonable response to an unbearable situation were it not for the fact that Paul Wouters was not a victim of his circumstances. No doctor was needed to explain his horrifying condition. No, the real reason for his behavior was that Paul had been psychotic from his very inception: he had simply needed time to grow into it. Some are born evil, and Paul Wouters was one of the lucky few whose madness was no by-product of his setting. His father, Jacob, had learned to embrace his self-loathing; his mother had eventually succumbed to her self-pity; even his grandmother Anne could look to the world’s viciousness for her own. But Paul needed none of that. He felt no vindication, no joy in his killing. He killed because he could.

He was not, however, the man now lying naked on a slab at Sint-Walburga. In all fairness to the attendants, they had shaved part of the body yesterday afternoon: the top bit of his skull, so that the doctors could cut through and retrieve the brain. The doctors had been certain that the cause of Wouters’s mania would appear to them in the guise of some malformed lobe or conduit. The brain, however—now in a jar of formaldehyde on the shelf—had proved to be in perfect condition. The chief neurologist’s only response had been to utter the words “How very odd,” over and over again.

Yesterday’s disappointment, however, paled in comparison with this evening’s shock. Van Acker stared in disbelief as the thick locks of hair fell to the floor and revealed a face not at all similar to that of Paul Wouters. The shape and coloring of the narrow little body, on the other hand, were close enough to the contours van Acker remembered.

“You’re sure?” said Fichte, keeping his handkerchief over his nose as the attendants continued to scissor through the hair.

Van Acker shot him a frustrated, if tired, glance. “Yes, Herr
Kriminal-Kommissar.
I’m sure.”

Wisely, Fichte chose not to answer.

Van Acker turned to the gathering of officials who had accompanied the two policemen to the asylum’s laboratory; he knew he was dealing with idiots. He spoke in French: “You mean to tell me that none of you saw an iota of difference in the man’s appearance, his attitude, his behavior?” Fichte might not have understood a word, but he knew that van Acker was taking his frustrations out on the people who could least help him. Worse, the doctors actually seemed to be pleased to have discovered that they had been dealing with the wrong brain: still hope for the lobe theory, after all. “That seems almost impossible to me,” van Acker continued. “Who were the morons who were supposed to be looking after him?”

The Superintendent spoke up: “There’s no need for that sort of language, Inspector. Clearly, a mistake has been made—”

“A mistake?” said van Acker, amazed at the man’s audacity. “What you have here, Monsieur, is nothing less than criminal. Men don’t simply trade places, and, I might be wrong here”—his words were laced with ridicule—“but who do you imagine would have volunteered for that role? I don’t think Mr. Wouters knew anyone who was eager to step in for a few weeks while he took the air. Do you?”

Everyone in the room remained silent. For a moment, van Acker looked at Fichte; he then turned away and began to shake his head. It was clear that he was more than a little embarrassed to have had a Berlin detective inspector witnessing this scene. Had Fichte been a bit more poised in his newfound position, he might have known what to say; instead, he stood there like everyone else.

Van Acker switched gears. For Fichte’s benefit—though probably more out of spite—he spoke in German: “I want a photograph taken of this man; I want every entry log you have for the past five months—who came, who went; I want guard rotations, doctor rotations—any rotation that had to do with our friend Wouters. And anything that might have happened out of the ordinary. The smallest thing. A misconnected telephone call. You have the records. I want to know about them.”

No one moved. Van Acker glanced sharply at the Superintendent, and the man realized he had no choice. He nodded to his colleagues, and the other men started for the door.

Fichte waited until most of the men were out in the hall before turning to van Acker. “The
Kriminal-Kommissar
would have done the exact same thing,” said Fichte. Realizing he might just have given the game away, Fichte quickly added, “Nikolai, I mean. Hoffner. You work the same way.”

For the first time in nearly three hours, van Acker’s jaw slackened. There might even have been the hint of a grin in his eyes. “You’re not a detective inspector, are you, Herr Fichte?”

Surprisingly, Fichte’s answer was no less forthright. “Not yet, Monsieur
Le Chef Inspecteur.
No.”

Van Acker’s grin grew. “Well, at least you’ve put me in good company.”

H
offner reached across the desk for his cup, and checked the clock. He had corralled little Sascha for a second posting to the wire room almost three hours ago, but there was still no word from Fichte. Hoffner took a sip of the coffee, careful not to drip any of it onto the pages that were spread out in front of him.

He had stopped on this particular letter about an hour ago, when the word “relationship” had jumped out at him. The language was as dramatic as ever, but it was a different Luxemburg that Hoffner heard, now having discovered her secret within the shelves.

.         .         .         I know you don’t get much pleasure out of our relationship, what with my scenes that wreck your nerves, my tears, with all these trivia, even my doubts about your love. . . . It’s too painful to think that I invaded your pure, proud, lonely life with my female whims, my unevenness, my helplessness. And what for, damn it, what for? My God, why do I keep harping on it? It is over.         .         .         .

Her despair was not so much for the solitude to come, as for her own fallibility: she felt no remorse, only a relief in the affair’s dissolution. Once again, Hoffner felt a certain kinship with this Rosa, and that, he knew, was dangerous. Victims needed to remain victims. The only mind Hoffner wanted to find his way into was that of the man who had wielded the knife.

Focusing on the page itself, Hoffner traced the imprints of the razorlike creases. The letter—sent to Leo Jogiches in the summer of 1897—had been read over and over, folded and unfolded a hundred times since then, and with an almost pious precision. Rosa’s fear that Jogiches might have laughed at its absurdity, or at its woman’s insecurity, had been completely unfounded. Not only had Jogiches held on to it, he had kept it with him at all times: in a billfold, from what Hoffner could tell. There was an unrefined, crushed leather residue on the sheets—the kind found only on the inside pockets of a man’s wallet—from years of safekeeping. K was evidently well-enough connected to have pried the letter loose from Jogiches’s grip.

Half an hour ago, Hoffner had discovered its companion piece—a second letter to Jogiches with identical creases and residue—written three years earlier, also kept in the billfold, and equally desperate. This time, however, a different kind of frustration dominated:

.         .         .         Totally exhausted by the never-ending Cause, I sat down to catch my breath, I looked back and realized I don’t have a home anywhere. I neither exist nor live as myself. . . . It’s boring, draining. Why should everyone pester me when I give it all I can? It’s a burden—every letter, from you or anyone else, always the same—this issue, that pamphlet, this article or that. Even that I wouldn’t mind if besides, despite it, there was a human being behind it, a soul, an individual. . . . Have you no ideas? No books? No impressions? Nothing to share with me?! . . . Unlike you, I have impressions and ideas all the time, the “Cause” notwithstanding. . . . Now I’d like to ask you the following questions: 1. Is it right to say that in 1848 the French people fought mainly for general elections? 2. Did the Chicago demonstration take place in 1886 or 1887? 3. How many rubles to a dollar? 4. Did the strikes of the gas workers and longshoremen in England break out in 1889 and was it for an eight-hour day? . . . Read my letter carefully, and answer all questions.

Hoffner wondered if Jogiches had kept the letter as a reminder to himself to be diligent in his humanity, or simply because he had enjoyed the adorable shift in tone at its end. Hoffner was guessing it had been a bit of both.

And yet, however charming Rosa’s caprice might have been, it was the care that Jogiches had taken with the letters that told Hoffner the most about his victim. From what he could gather, the romance between the two had come to a bitter end sometime in 1907: there had been accusations of infidelity and threats of violence from him; Luxemburg had purchased a revolver, and had been forced to produce it during one of their more heated arguments. And through it all, Jogiches had continued to subsidize her—her rent, her paper, her ink. Hoffner was not sure which of the two lovers had been the moth and which the flame—he doubted they had known themselves—but it was clear that this had been a relationship incapable of permanent fracture. In fact, Hoffner was learning just how crucial a figure Jogiches had been during the revolution, even if his name had never once appeared alongside Luxemburg’s, Liebknecht’s, or Levi’s. Jogiches had always been the man behind the scenes, the silent partner.