The Crooked Maid (11 page)

At long last the man wished the child a good day and hung the receiver on its cradle (she could hear the telltale click). A moment later he emerged, walked up behind the sergeant, read the form over his shoulder. He was a plump man of middling height; wore his trousers high upon his waist, had white, soft hands. The hair was neatly parted, the face dominated by a pair of steel-framed glasses that gave an eerie prominence to his watery eyes and light, soft lashes. It was hard to guess his age. He might have been no more than thirty-five or forty but had the movements of an older man.
A watch chain hung in a fastidious arc between waistcoat pocket and buttonhole. He was not wearing a uniform.

“You misspelled ‘prisoner of war,’” he said laconically. Again she noted his voice, pedantic and muffled. Perhaps he had a cold. “Never mind, Haselböck, just cross it out by hand.”

He shifted his eyes to Anna. His lenses were so thick they gave the impression his eyes had been worked into the glass: when he took off the spectacles, she mused, the eyes too would peel off and leave behind the long blank of his face. His words were polite, even gentle, but he wasted no time on a greeting.

“Your husband is missing, Frau Beer. Have you called the hospitals?”

“Yes. This morning.”

“Can you name them? The hospitals you called.”

“I suppose.”

“Please do.”

She counted them off, watched him blink with every mention of a name and commit them to his memory.

“Very good,” he said, though it was unclear to her what exactly he was lauding, her thoroughness in calling all the major infirmaries or her ability to recall them all at will. “How about his family?”

“His parents are dead. His brother moved abroad. Before the war. I don’t know whether he’s alive. They weren’t close.”

“Friends?”

Anna shrugged, licked her lips. “How would I know? I have not seen him in—” She stopped, embarrassed, grew angry at her embarrassment. “He expected me back. I sent him a wire. Surely he would have left a note if he was going to be away.”

The detective nodded, ran a palm over his hair along the path of his neat parting. “So he has no reason to be out of town.” He bent forward again, studied the form. “He’s a doctor, I see. What specialization?”

“Psychiatry and neurology. But he ran a general practice the past few years. Before he was conscripted.”

“Quite. He wasn’t a member of the SS by any chance?” His smile was innocent, avuncular; the eyes bloated, drowning in their seas of glass.

Anna frowned. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s routine, really. Certain people—people with qualifications, scientists, experts—they are being ‘requisitioned,’ if you see what I mean. Largely in the Soviet sector. People who have special knowledge, or have conducted research of a classified nature.” He paused, slipped his hands into his pockets. “In one of the camps, say. Or at some special facility. Others make themselves scarce of their own accord. There are trials going on for war crimes, you see, and—”

“It isn’t like that,” she interrupted, gratified by the flush of loyalty that rose to her throat and cheeks. “Anton is … a good man. And now your sergeant tells me I will find him in the morgue.”

The detective merely nodded. He had the good grace not to ask her why they had been living apart, she and this good man of hers.

“Anything else we should know? People he might have socialized with, places he liked? Any personal habits we should be aware of?”

The question startled her. She shook her head, rose to leave. “There was blood on the wall,” she said abruptly. “A little patch.”

“Blood?”

“In the study.” She described the size and position of the stain.

“It’s probably nothing. He tripped and bumped his head. All the same, I should like to take a look.”

“Too late,” she said. “I washed it off.”

The detective looked at her quizzically, then nodded. “Very well, Frau Beer. We will be in touch if we hear anything.”

She pressed his hand—dry, weightless, without pressure—and left with the vague impression that it was she who was under investigation, or, in any case, had been disbelieved. Anna had boarded a tram by the time it occurred to her that she had not even learned the detective’s name.

5.

She headed east, into the inner city rather than back to the apartment, crossed without incident into the international zone, and was amused when, stepping off the tram, she saw her first patrol roll past in a military jeep, four men in the respective uniforms of their nations, the Russian blond and ruddy, the Frenchman with a pencil moustache, the American and the Brit both smoking, laughing, distinguishable above all by the differing quality of their teeth. They were so perfect, so unhurried, they might have been heading to a photo shoot for
Life
magazine. The Russian even had the good grace to turn and stare after her with his hungry peasant’s eyes; had it been the Frenchman, he might have blown her a kiss. She smiled despite herself, straightened her hat, and headed into the warren of streets behind the Stock Exchange.

Within ten steps the city absorbed her. She had been born here, knew the streets and intersections, the flights of steps that connected the different levels of the city. As she walked and stared, familiarity began to wrestle with suspicion. It was as though her childhood city had been snatched and then replaced by its near copy: at every corner the relish of homecoming soured by the sudden fear she had been duped.

For all that, the changes were less dramatic than she had imagined, the bombs’ incisions more precise. The northern part of the inner city had not been subject to direct attack and had only been hit by strays. Most of the rubble had been cleared. There were buildings, upper storeys, that were missing. Her eyes stared up at gaps into which her mind would paint a row of windows; a stuccoed gable perched atop a brass-shod door. Here and there torn walls had been patched: dull, artless plaster clinging like a canker to ornate facades. Men and women walked the streets, hungry, threadbare, dressed in shabby clothes; blind to the pockmarked beauty of a capital whose empire had been mislaid.

She hurried on, aware of the stares of passersby who looked with envy at her well-cut clothes and Parisian boots; lit a cigarette, smiled at some more soldiers; approached the street she had sought out. The house, she
saw, was still standing; was untouched, in fact, save for some bullet holes that marked the plaster, the front door open and letting in the air. Inside, in the entrance hall that connected the door to the inner courtyard, there stooped a cleaner dragging her mop along the floor. Anna nodded in greeting, ran her eyes over the names on the postboxes, then walked up the main staircase to the second floor. She had been here only once, agitated, angry, bent on confronting the subject of her husband’s indiscretion, then had balked when faced with his young lover, whose gestures had been oh so subtly fey. His name was Kis, Gustav Kis: a handwritten sign above the bell. The sign was old and dirty, a pre-war stopgap that had never been replaced. Anna wondered whether the same could be said of her husband’s relation to the man.

She lingered on the landing; didn’t reach for the bell and kept her distance from the door, soaking in the noises of the house. Anna had not planned to come here. It was only when the detective had asked about her husband’s friends and habits that the thought had risen in her and at once transformed into a necessary duty. All the same it sickened her: the thought of confronting again that pudgy, youthful face, the cheeks still flushed from her husband’s kisses. She had only the vaguest sense of the nature of Anton’s attachment to this man and to his circles, and a vital need not to delve into its details.

A cough sounded in the stairwell below, the cleaner spitting phlegm into her hanky. As though in response, the door swung open at the far end of the landing. A head poked through, stared at her with a pre-emptive hostility much favoured by the Viennese. It was a young woman in a housecoat, a dozen curlers in her hair. She took in Anna’s clothing with derision and actually snorted when her gaze reached her boots. It occurred to Anna that she had been standing at her spy hole for some time.

“What do you want?” the woman asked, in the overly loud, overly emphatic German reserved for use on foreigners.

Anna forced her lips into a smile. “Nothing.”

“So what are you standing around for?”

“I used to live here. That is to say, a relative of mine. Some time ago.”

The lie did not appease the woman. Instead her mouth formed a scowl. “Oh yes? Who?”

Anna too dropped her smile. “What does it matter to you?”

At the first sign that Anna might approach her, the woman slammed the door. A moment later she opened it again, no wider than a crack, shook her fist through the gap and yelled at her in red-faced fury: “There’s nothing for you here. All over and done with. Legal, too. So don’t come knocking here, from America or wherever. Don’t think I won’t call the police.” She slammed the door again, sent its bang ringing through the stairwell.

Perplexed, a little embarrassed, and in no mood now to speak to Kis, Anna abandoned the landing and walked down the stairs. In the front hallway the cleaning lady stood leaning against the wall, the mop thrown headfirst into its bucket, her haggard face wrapped in a dirty head scarf, exhausted, malnourished; the eyes meek and wet. Anna stopped, dug in her handbag, offered her a cigarette. The woman took it but refused to have it lit; slipped it in a pocket instead.

“You heard us?” Anna asked.

The woman nodded, blew her nose. “She thought you were … you know.”

“What?”

The cleaner dropped her voice. “A Jew, I suppose. Some of the flats here”—she pointed up with her chin—“changed hands after the
Anschluss
.”

Anna considered this. “Is that what’s happening? Are the Jews coming back?”

This time the cleaner shook her head: the knot of her head scarf wagging under the haggard chin. “Not really. They’re all dead.”

“Yes, of course.”

Anna turned to leave, then felt the woman’s hand upon her elbow.

“What did you want up there?”

“Herr Kis,” Anna said, slipped her fingers into her bag to fish for another cigarette. “Does he still live here?”

“His name is on the door, isn’t it?”

“Does he live alone?”

“He has some lodgers. To make rent, I suppose.”

Anna handed over three more cigarettes, then pulled a photo out of her wallet. She had meant to leave it at the police station, then forgotten all about it when she’d met with the sergeant’s litany of questions. “This man,” she said now. “Have you seen him here? Mind, he is a little older now.”

The cleaner looked at her suspiciously. “Can’t say. Who’s he?”

“My husband.”

“Ah,” she said, reassured. “Ran away, eh?”

“Yes. He ran away. He used to know Kis. Before the war.”

“Go up and ask him, then. He may be in. I don’t think he has steady work.”

“Some other time,” said Anna.

Outside, a jeep rolled past, four soldiers smoking, scowling, shielding their eyes against the sun.

6.

Anna Beer did not notice the girl who was sitting on the stairs above her apartment when she returned home that evening, having walked for some hours in the inner city before dining in the restaurant of one of the hotels. She was a young girl, unremarkable if rather pretty, save for a cramped and painful twist that held in lock the shoulders, neck and spine. On her head there perched a red, outlandish hat that did no favours to her complexion.

Had Anna been less tired from her long walk in the city, and less preoccupied with the sense of anticipation that rose in her every time she approached the apartment door (for was it not possible that this time, at long last, she should find her husband home and they would finally go through with their long-deferred greeting and be free to explore what remained of their marriage?), she might have noticed that the girl kept
her face averted as she stepped into her line of sight, then stared after her with ill-masked curiosity. Indeed there was something impatient, unsettled, about the girl. She had been sitting on the stairs for more than an hour, rising periodically to stare out the window at the sagging ruin of the building’s back wing and starting at every step that sounded in the stairwell, and at every voice that carried from below. Periodically she had lit a cigarette and calmed herself by blowing rings into the air above her head before crushing the fag end into the stone of the stairs. There were three such shreds of paper and tobacco dotting the space between her feet.

As soon as Anna had locked up behind herself, the crooked girl crept down from her perch, approached the Beers’ door, and pressed an ear against the wood. She heard muffled steps and, some minutes later, the rush of water from the toilet; no talk, no greeting, nothing that would have pointed to the presence of another person in the flat. Quickly, her face annoyed and hostile, the girl reclaimed her place upon the steps, then dug a book from one of her pockets, a school edition of a classic play. As soon as she started reading, her brow smoothed and an excited, girlish look stole across her features. She looked younger then, unguarded, the lips mouthing scraps of Schiller too ardent not to be picked off the page.

A man’s steps interrupted her. They sounded from below, near the building’s entrance, and threaded their way up; shuffled, then charged, the unsteady zigzag of the drunk. Soon the stairwell spat him out onto the landing beneath her, a scarecrow figure, tall, broad-shouldered, very thin. He pulled out a hand that had lain buried in a pocket, bunched it up into a massive fist; leaned his weight into the door and began to hammer on it with great force. It was only now, with him measured against the door frame, that she realized how big he was, his large head stooping to avoid the lintel. And still the fist went on hammering, driving his drunken agitation into the varnished panel of the door.

The woman answered. She did not open the door but simply called from the other side, telling the man to stop making a racket. She had to
repeat it a number of times before her message sank in. The man lowered his arm.