The Crooked Maid (23 page)

Anna brushed past her, unlocked her door, swung it open, and gestured her inside. “I’m Anna Beer,” she said, once the girl had cleared the threshold. “How do you do?”

The girl ignored the greeting, looked around. Her feet carried her down the central corridor. At every doorway she paused, looked inside, in her eyes a look of solemn reverie. When she approached the bedroom, Anna thought of stopping her, then watched impassively as the girl entered the room and came to a halt before the unmade bed. There reigned in Anna a quiet anger already mixed with resignation. The anger, she realized, was directed at Anton. When she spoke, it lent to her voice a clipped formality.

“You have been here before,” she said to the girl. “You lived across from here, in the building’s rear wing. Anneliese Grotter. At first I did not remember, but then it came to me. A little girl with a sailor’s collar buttoned to her dress. Your father dropped you when you were a toddler, broke your back.”

The girl looked over to her, proud and impassive, then turned back towards the bed.

“I asked around about you,” said Anna. “A lady upstairs told me you
two were friends:
‘the doctor and his little girl.’
And then your father died and you disappeared. Social services must have picked you up.

“Tell me something,” Anna continued, stepped up behind her, reached an arm past the girl’s shoulder, and pointed to the photo of the young woman that hung above the bed. “Who the hell is that?”

This time the girl did react: rounded the bed as though to escape Anna’s proximity, then turned, her voice bellicose and small. “You’ll never understand it all. You weren’t here.” But she herself looked spooked by the haziness of the past.

“If you are not here to help, get out.”

The girl held her ground. “Where’s Anton?”

“Anton’s dead,” said Anna, and felt a single tear spring from her eye. She blinked and made sure no others followed. “Damn you, you brat. Anton’s dead.”

The girl watched the tear run down her face, from cheekbone to nose and on, to the painted curve of Anna’s upper lip. In her own features insolence gave way to consternation. She started shaking her head long before she spoke.

“That’s impossible.”

And just like that, a trace of hope joined the anger in Anna’s voice. “Impossible? Why?”

“Robert has seen him. He’s been at the house.” She paused, riffled the pages of her book as though looking for a passage, then pressed it shut with an odd defiance and—as though wishing to rid herself of its temptation—threw it quickly on the bed. “A man in a red scarf. He has been hanging about all week.”

Anna frowned, recalled Robert’s account of his homecoming. A mysterious stranger holding vigil outside the house. It wasn’t much to build one’s hopes on.

“Did you speak to him?”

The girl shook her head. “No. I waited. All day yesterday. He didn’t
come.” She paused, sucked in her lower lip. “Can it really be that he’s dead?”

“The police showed me a body. It’s disfigured. I could not tell …” Anna trailed off, watched in wonder as relief transformed the hunchback’s features. Moved, trying to transfer some of this faith into her own heart, Anna reached out and touched the girl’s hair with the back of one hand. “He was looking for you, you know. Writing to orphanages, all across the country. He was inquiring about an Anneliese Grotter. But you had given them a false name.”

The girl dodged the caress, crossing her arms across her chest and retreating almost to the window. “They found out in the end,” she said. “Someone double-checked my papers. But by then I was fifteen and had gone into service.”

“With the Seidels.”

“How do you know that?”

“Robert,” Anna said. “Robert was here and told me.”

The girl flinched at her use of Robert’s name, then pulled herself up to her full height. “He kissed you,” she whispered. “He confessed.”

Peeved, their connection ruptured, the girl who called herself Eva marched out of the room and down the corridor, heading for the apartment door. It was only when she had opened it that it occurred to her that there might be more to say.

“What now?” she asked.

“You go on home and talk to this watcher. If you can find him. I will return to the morgue. There is somebody who may be able to help with identification. One way or the other.”

The girl nodded, ran down the stairs without another word. Anna called after her as she took the first bend. “He abandoned me too, you know.”

The girl did not appear to hear. Perhaps her voice had not carried.

Back in the bedroom Anna discovered that Eva had forgotten her book. She picked it up, thumbed through its pages, and was intrigued to find
amongst
Young Werther’s Sorrows
a passport photo of a younger Eva, aged twelve or thirteen, with long fair hair and a stalk of neck very thin and brittle. It was an institutional picture, loveless and sterile, and yet there was a warmth to the young face that the girl had since mislaid.

Three

1.

Sophie and Karel had yet to leave her room. They had been woken, entangled on her tiny bed, by the ringing of the hallway phone. One of their neighbours had answered it, had knocked on their door, Sophie sleepy, trying to formulate an answer through her yawn. Before she’d had time to find her voice, Karel had gently pressed her back into the pillow and covered her mouth with his. When making love, he liked to lift her out from under his great frame and settle her astride himself, her small, mobile face alive with thoughts and sounds and pleasure, until all expression yielded to an aimless dance of tics and twitches, the mouth a thin-lipped oval breathing oh-oh-oh.

Afterwards she covered herself quickly: slipped into her underwear, then pulled a dressing gown round her shoulders. This discomfort at her nudity never failed to amuse him, and he watched her efforts while sprawling on the too-small bed, rubbing dry his sticky thighs with the heel of his great hand. The other hand cast around for smokes and matches. He smoked without stirring: the cigarette wedged into a gap between his lower teeth and jutting upwards from his heavy jaw. Every four or five drags a wag of his chin would rid its tip of ashes. They landed on the bedding or the floor, or sometimes scattered in the hair upon his chest. Once in a while he burned himself; sat up and chased the ember with a spit-wet finger. The sheet beneath him was riddled with a dozen tiny, black-rimmed holes.

At nine or thereabouts Sophie left the room to make breakfast, returned
from the communal kitchen with coffee and two buttered rolls. As she turned her back and settled the mugs on her small, much-cluttered table, he grabbed her round the waist and through the silk of her fine dressing gown buried his face inside her butt. She fell on top of him, laughed then struggled, grew angry when he pinned her wrists above her head; then drifted from reproach to pleasure, the muscles of her face now frantically aflutter, a swarm of moths trapped under glass. The moths dispersed and he released her; watched her scramble back into her knickers; picked up the coffee, complained that it was cold. She smiled and buttoned up her blouse.

“Who do you think it was who called this morning?” she asked when she was dressed, running a brush through her bobbed hair. “It might have been important.”

The big man shrugged. “They call again.”

They spoke in English. He understood one word out of every three.

“Yes, I suppose they will.”

She sat down on the chair, bit into a roll, and washed it down with lukewarm coffee, then read through the half-written page that stuck out of her newly acquired typewriter. The paragraph seemed to displease her: her lips tightened, and two parallel lines formed on the bridge of her nose. Karel had become adept at reading her face and quickly began to dress.

“I’m stuck,” she complained, watched him tuck his manhood into his trousers. Karel Neumann did not hold with underwear. “There’s too much information missing.”

“Information,” he said. “Yes, yes.”

“I can’t write the story if I don’t learn more. I have a nice piece here on camp life, but it’s all been done before. Beer is an inmate; he catches the eye of the major running the camp; they strike up a friendship of sorts. That’s a nice angle. He becomes the major’s psychiatrist. That’s also good—a prison guard with problems. But what exactly was he suffering from, this major?”

“Suffer?”

“Yes. The nature of his illness. Major Sherapov.” She tapped a finger against the side of her head.

Karel nodded. “Right, right. He crazy.”

“Yes, but what was it? Some form of shell shock? Neurosis, anxiety? Anxiety would be good—the pressures of running a camp. See, the way I look at it, there are two sides to this story. Two protagonists. On the one side there is the doctor who walks over to his commander’s barracks every morning and tends to his enemy’s mind. A righteous man, acting from a sense of duty to the Hippocratic oath. And then, on the other side there is his jailor, who is breaking down. A modern man: trapped in the rat race, alienated from his labour. There’s not a reader who won’t identify with that.”

Karel nodded, picked through her words, latched onto one of the few he understood. “Rat,” he said. “Yes, yes. Much rat. In the beginning we sometimes hunt. Like in Remarque. You read Remarque?” He thought about it, translated the title. “
In West Nothing New
.”

“
All Quiet on the Western Front
. But what I am saying, Karel, is I need the medical file. Sherapov’s medical file.”

“Medical file?”

“Yes. A record of his illness. Can your contact provide it? Your contact, Karel: the spy. Can he get it?”

Karel considered this. “Maybe. Expensive.”

“How much?”

He shrugged, and she found her purse, picked through it, gave him three hundred shillings in cash.

“It’s all I can spare. If he wants more—” She paused, grabbed Karel by the wrist. “Tell him I want to meet him. Speak to him in person. Otherwise …” She trailed off.

He looked down at her tiny hand, then picked it up and kissed it. “Okay,” he said. “I go, make arrangement. Back tonight, tomorrow. You wait.”

“I will call my friends at the embassy. See whether they have made progress with the Russians. You are positive Beer is still in Vienna?”

Karel shrugged. “Contact say yes.”

He put on his coat, bent down one more time to kiss Sophie goodbye. “You wait. Write story. Win Pulzer.”

“Pulitzer,” she corrected; hugged him and smiled. “There’s another story I’m after. A court drama. Fascist son attempts to murder his father. I am meeting his lawyer today.”

“Goot, goot,” said Karel, finished the coffee, bolted the roll, and left.

2.

Out on the landing Karel Neumann paused for a moment, trying to make up his mind which way to turn. Perhaps he should visit Anna. He could use a hot bath and it would afford him time to think. On the other hand there was a chance Sophie would look up Anna Beer sometime that morning, and while he trusted himself to be able to account for his presence, it struck him as an unnecessary complication. Sophie might be upset. He liked the little journalist, her earnest energy, the way she stooped over her typewriter, peering through her reading glasses, laboriously shaping every word.

While he was still standing on the landing making his deliberations, a young woman of maybe eighteen years came running down the stairs. He noticed first her skinny legs and knobbly knees, then the extravagant hat that sat perched upon her brow. The hump became obvious only when she passed him and rattled down the next flight of stairs. All at once the memory of their nocturnal encounter came back to him, along with the long, rambling story Robert had told Anna Beer. Without hesitation he followed her, his long strides matching the pace of her run, down the stairs and out into the street. She headed for the tram stop, joined the throng of people standing there, but grew sick of waiting almost at once; turned west and started walking. Karel kept a good ten paces behind her until they reached a quiet stretch on the far side of the Gürtel, then caught up to her and started walking by her side. Within five strides she stopped,
turned around to him, recognition then annoyance passing through her features.

“The drunk,” she said, chin raised, spoiling for a fight. “Piss off.”

“Now, now, Anneliese. No need to get gruff.”

The mention of her name slowed her down a bit, but she fought through it, carried on down the road. They passed a greengrocer’s, a bakery: a queue of women blocking the pavement, ration cards in hand. She rounded them then stopped abruptly, raised a little fist to his nose.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Neumann, Karel, Flag-Junker-Exempted, lately prisoner of war. Beer and I were comrades. His wife has asked me to find him.” He switched into English, adapted a phrase he had heard at the movies. “I’m Bohemian gumshoe,” he said. “Private Czech Dick.” He winked, but she did not react. Perhaps she did not go to the pictures.

Unperturbed, he carried on. “You talked to her just now, didn’t you? Frau Anna Beer? I saw you come down the stairs.”

The girl nodded, squared her shoulders, her anger shifting away from Karel, back to the woman she’d just left.

“Some wife, eh?” Karel commiserated, then added, “Beer never cared for her. But he loved you.”

The words cheered her despite her misgivings: green eyes curious, her features frozen halfway to a smile. It invited him to continue.

“Beer told me about you. Like a lost daughter, he always said, the child he never had. Talked about finding you, helping you out. Can’t count on it, though, now that he’s disappeared. Looks like the Russkies have rounded him up again. Could be years before he gets out.” He lowered his voice, bent forward so that their faces were level. “Not an easy life, if you don’t mind me saying. First the orphanage, then maid to some rich asshole. The son a killer, the wife a bitch, and you in the middle, just trying to get by. Oh, you’re a tough one. Took your knocks and grew smart on them. Underneath, though”—he thumped his chest as though he were speaking about himself, not her—“tender like a soldier’s ass in winter.”