The Crooked Maid (27 page)

The second group, on the other hand, were uniformly young men, many of them well turned out, with hale and pleasant faces. They were, as a group, broadly sympathetic to Wolfgang and in sympathy with one another; indeed many of them seemed to know one other and exchanged looks, sometimes handshakes, albeit in a strangely guarded, even furtive manner that ran counter to their general mood, which was confident and cheerful. It did not take much imagination to picture them dressed in uniforms; in the right sort of setting they would have made quite a dashing impression.

In addition to these two there was a third, more varied group, less committed in their sympathies, that treated the trial quite openly as a form
of entertainment. These more casual spectators often took great care over their toilette and came dressed as though going to church or even the opera. The majority were women. They tended to come early and secure the first few rows. A number wore jewellery and a handful brought their lorgnettes so as to better study the scene before them. There was, amongst this group, a lot of whispering and coughing, and the occasional request, not always voiced politely, to remove a wide-brimmed hat that was blocking the view.

Chiefly these young and well-to-do women seemed interested in the accused and often focused their attention solely on him, though he sat with his back to the audience and could, at best, only be studied in quarter profile. Anna could well understand their interest. Wolfgang had surprised her on his first appearance: was handsome, tall, and long-limbed, given to moods, and at times appeared bored; was hostile and scowling during one witness statement then boyish and distracted during the next, digging around in his pockets or nervously playing with a deck of cards under the little desk behind which he had been placed.

This last detail—the card playing—was, Anna observed, noticed by more than one juror. Their reaction was hard to read: some seemed to judge him a frivolous young man, and hence guilty; others looked on with greater charity and rather seemed to wish they had a deck of cards to play with too. As far as the general disposition of the jurors was concerned, the older and less educated amongst them, along with the stout banker’s widow who was the sole representative of her sex, seemed to incline towards Wolfgang and to take an almost paternal interest in him; while two or three of the younger men, who looked, at times, as if they would not mind doing away with their own fathers given half the chance, were consequently amongst the most judgmental of those in attendance and seemed to already have consigned Wolfgang to the gallows. It was, Anna would reflect in the evenings, a mystery how any sort of verdict was to be distilled from all these disparate elements and impressions.

5.

At the point the boy was called in, a new and unprecedented sense of suspense hung over the room. The cause for this excitement was as follows: Earlier that morning a string of policemen had been questioned about the defendant’s confession. This confession had already been the subject of several newspaper reports and was generally regarded as unassailable proof of the defendant’s guilt, especially since the defendant had not withdrawn it but simply insisted “that it did not count for a thing.”

But strange to say, that was precisely how things turned out. According to the arresting officers the accused had made an oral confession no sooner had he been picked up by the authorities for shuffling around the city with bare, bloody feet and behaving like a drunk. He had, they said, “spilled the beans at once,” which is to say even before they arrived at the station; had insisted on his guilt with particular vehemence and in “colourful language”; beaten his breast, cried, threatened to kill himself, and generally made quite a spectacle of himself. The confession had then been typed up “straight away” and allegedly been signed. But precisely this document now appeared to have been “misplaced.” No trace of it could be found either in the investigative file or at the station house itself. A carbon copy existed and was produced but proved to be unsigned. The overall impression was that the original had also never been signed, and that, assuming a confession had been made at all, it had only been made orally, and that by the time the document had been presented to the defendant (the carbon was dated two days after the incident) he had refused to sign. It was at this point that the prosecution called Karlchen as their next witness.

The initial impression made by the boy was a negative one. He looked small, distracted, even neurasthenic; was fidgeting in his seat and craning his neck around its backrest; kept scanning the audience as though he were expecting one of the spectators to come forward and help him out of his predicament, and staring at a young crippled man whom he seemed to regard with enmity and fear. While many in the audience felt a certain sympathy for the boy, few were inclined to consider him a reliable
witness. The thought must have occurred to the prosecutor, who, after all the judge’s questions had been met with what now seemed like an obstinate silence, rose, smoothed down his robes, and begged the judge’s permission to “have a go” himself.

“So,” he said, in a kindly, self-assured voice, “it’s not how you’d expected, eh?”

The boy did not answer.

“More people than you bargained for, I suppose. And those lorgnettes! You must feel like an exhibit.”

Again he received no answer. The prosecutor followed Karlchen’s gaze, adjudged its subject.

“Does that man frighten you?” he asked. “I am sure he does not mean to. All it is, he’s lost an arm and a leg. Well, and a bit of the trunk too, I suppose.” (Laughter in the audience.)

“There now, I believe we have made him blush. Let’s give him a rest, why don’t we? Why don’t you look at me instead? I am not all that frightening, am I? Yes, that’s right, turn your head forward. Can you see those gentlemen to the right? On the rostrum? No, not the judges. Over there, I mean, to your right. Those are the jurors, the men—and the woman—who will be asked to hand down a verdict in this case. You see them? All they want is for you to tell them what you saw on the twenty-fifth of June of this year. Nothing more, nothing less. You will manage that much, won’t you? Of course you will.

“But I see it’s not a good place to start. Well, then. ‘Karl Theodor Heinrich.’ Isn’t that what the judge just called you? That’s a very grown-up name. In fact it’s three very grown-up names. Quite a mouthful, really. I don’t suppose they call you that at home? They don’t, do they? I see you are shaking your head.

“Come, now, won’t you tell the jurors what they call you at home?”

The boy listened to all these explanations and questions with the air of someone gagging on his own breath. His mouth was wide open, his ears were burning red. In his desperation he once again turned to the audience,
shook loose the vision of the crippled man, and at last found what he was looking for. A young girl, witnessing his predicament, had convinced her father to let her clamber onto his lap so as to be more visible and now stood up to attract the boy’s attention. Her face was a pale mask of the most intense concentration; her hands bunched into fists and raised up before her—not as a threat, but rather in entreaty, their knuckles buried deep into her cheeks. It was as though she were willing her little friend to speak. And strange to say, the boy, upon finding her and exchanging that first gaze, calmed down almost at once, turned back to the prosecutor, and answered his question.

“Karlchen,” he said. “They call me Karlchen.”

A sigh went through the audience, of almost physical relief. The prosecutor straightened, took a second to flash a smile of good-natured triumph at the jurors, then bent forward towards the boy.

“Of course they do. They used to call me Julchen, you know. From Julius. I never much cared for it.” He laughed and invited the audience to laugh along. Some spell of tension had been broken. “Well, now, Karlchen. We want to talk about the events of the twenty-fifth of June. But I see you are still a little nervous. Let us start somewhere a little easier, then. To talk ourselves warm, so to speak. It’s what my mother used to say, that the tongue’s a muscle like any other. For instance, can you tell us what you had for breakfast this morning?”

The boy considered it, a little taken aback by the inquiry. “A slice of bread with butter. But I didn’t finish it. Half a boiled egg; I shared mine with Franzl. And some milk.”

“Franzl? That’s your brother, I take it. Did he also eat just one slice of bread?”

“No. He had two. And the rest of mine.”

“How about the way here, then? Did you take the tram?”

But no, the boy had not taken the tram, he had walked with his father. What route had they taken? And how long until they’d arrived? And in the courthouse itself, what had Karlchen noticed? For instance, at the
doorway, did they turn right or did they turn left; and how many staircases did they pass?

The prosecutor kept up this ream of questions for some minutes, while the boy gave increasingly precise, and at times very detailed, answers. The point of the exercise, naturally, was to impress upon the jurors that, far from being the nervous, shifty, dim-witted child they might at first have taken him for, Karlchen was in fact a sharp observer with a good memory, and as such made an excellent witness. The defence lawyer, Dr. Ratenkolb, was consequently none too happy about this line of questioning, and at several points seemed about to object that it was irrelevant, but Anna could see that he feared to alienate both audience and jurors, who were enjoying the interlude. So he sat, frowning at the boy with some severity, and held his peace. At long last, though, Ratenkolb could no longer hide his irritation. He jumped up from his seat and shouted that “this game has gone on long enough” (though he did not, of course, actually shout, but rather spoke in a precise, irritated voice that was as good as shouting, only quieter). Sighing on his chair, the presiding judge agreed and instructed Dr. Fejn to “please move to the matter at hand.”

The prosecutor, at any rate, was almost done with the preliminary part of his interrogation. He had arrived by now at a summary of Karlchen’s last birthday, or rather at a detailed list of the various and, it must be said, rather shabby presents he had received.

“You are twelve, then,” Fejn finished, not at all ruffled by Dr. Ratenkolb’s complaint, and knowing full well that the number was wrong.

“Ten,” the boy corrected, looking pleased.

“Why, of course. It’s just that you remember everything so well. Do you know who Hans Gross is? No? Well, I suppose he is dead now. He was Europe’s premier authority on crime. Still is—ask any policeman! A good Austrian, incidentally, from Graz. You know what he said about witnesses? He said—” (At this point he took up a book he had lying on his little desk face down to mark the passage in question.) “Here it is: ‘Experience shows that in many situations the most reliable witness of all is a healthy
boy between seven to ten years of age who knows nothing as yet of love and hate, ambition and hypocrisy, nor of the considerations of religion, rank, et cetera.’”

Fejn closed the book with a thump and smiled a smile that left no doubt that he had just scored a point in the contest that was afoot, and that each little point brought him closer to victory.

The next moment the smile had vanished and, with the air of a man turning up his shirt sleeves to get started at long last on the task at hand, he once again turned to the boy.

6.

Prosecutor (gravely, signalling to boy and jurors alike the seriousness of his intentions): “To business, then. Where were you, Karl Theodor Heinrich Landauer, on the afternoon of June 25 of this year?”

Boy: “I was playing in the little park on
——gasse
.”

Prosecutor: “The park on
——gasse
. That’s across from the shirt factory, isn’t it?”

Boy: “Yes. But it’s bombed out.”

Prosecutor: “So it is. Were you alone?”

Boy: “Yes, alone. Franzl was there at first, or rather we were across the road, looking for bullet casings in the rubble. But he kept teasing me, so in the end I ran off and played by myself.”

Prosecutor: “And what game were you playing, all by yourself?”

Boy: “Marbles.”

Prosecutor: “Marbles, hm. Were you throwing them or what?”

Boy (shaking his head): “No, I was just playing. Separating the colours. Making piles.”

Prosecutor: “And then?”

Boy: “A man came and sat down on the bench.”

Prosecutor: “What time was that? When the man came?”

Boy: “Two.”

Prosecutor (thoughtfully, with an exaggerated sternness): “Two o’clock? How do you know? You don’t own a watch, do you? No, I should imagine not, you are a little too young.”

Boy (unfazed now, convinced he can account for himself): “The bell had just rung.”

Prosecutor: “What bell?”

Boy: “Maria Treu. It rings on the hour.”

Prosecutor: “You are sure?”

Boy: “Yes.”

Prosecutor: “How can you be so sure? It could have been some other church. Announcing a funeral perhaps. Or a wedding.”

Boy: “There’s no other church nearby. Apart from St. Francis. But St. Francis got bombed. Besides, they don’t sound alike.”

Prosecutor (nodding, as though grudgingly convinced by overwhelming evidence): “Very well, then, two o’clock. So a man comes, sits down. What is his aspect?”

Boy: “His what?”

Prosecutor: “What does he look like? Is he a clerk who has nipped out to read the paper? A drunk? A cavalier in a top hat?”

Boy (thinking about it): “He was tired. He sort of plonked down.” (Titters in the audience.) “And he wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

Prosecutor: “How far away were you when he, as you put it, plonked down? Ten steps? Fifteen?” (He steps out from behind the prosecutor’s bench and walks away from the boy, moving ten steps down the aisle.)

Boy: “Not that far.”

Prosecutor: “How far, then? Tell me when to stop.” (Approaches again, in a slow, formal manner, almost a march. The boy does not stop him until he is three steps from his chair.)

Prosecutor (miming a whistle, without making any actual sound): “This close, then. How about you? Did you walk up to him?”