The Crooked Maid (31 page)

Unperturbed, Eva went through the cupboards. There was a drawer to which only she had the key. She took out the bundle she had come for, put it ready by the door; reached back into the drawer for a tin, spooned corned beef onto salt crackers. In the quiet of the kitchen her chewing sounded very loud. She wondered sometimes what Frau Seidel ate; most of the cupboards were empty of food. Not that she cared if the woman lived or starved.

“What is it?” she asked at last, curious despite herself. “Still looking for ghosts?”

“I saw him,” the older woman replied after a pause. “I saw him clear as day. He’s out there somewhere.”

Eva failed to mask her interest. “You saw him tonight?”

She received a grunt in reply.

“I’m surprised you haven’t got a shotgun there. Ready to pick him off.”

The shadow shifted, pressed something to her bosom. For a glum moment Eva considered whether she had accidentally hit the mark. Surely the woman was not as crazy as that.

“The moon’s too bright,” Frau Seidel said presently, though she remained standing at the window. “He won’t come back.”

She turned around at last, saw the half-eaten plate of crackers, reached for it then stopped her hand.

“Go ahead,” muttered Eva. “Have it. I’m done.”

She walked away, stopped, watched Frau Seidel stuff her face.

“The trial took an interesting turn today. Robert told me. Wolfgang’s sure to be convicted.”

Frau Seidel grunted, chewed.

“You know,” Eva carried on, “I didn’t understand at first. For the longest time I thought that all you wanted was for Wolfgang to get off and come home. But that’s nonsense. He’s not your blood, after all. Better if Robert gets it all. The factory, I mean.”

Frau Seidel moved a hand. At first Eva thought she was shaking her fist at her, or making an obscene gesture. But she was just chasing a cracker that had got stuck to her teeth.

“He says he’ll testify, Wolfgang does. He told Robert to tell you. That he wants to ‘make a clean breast of things.’” Eva paused. “Of course, it mightn’t get to that. They called me as a witness, you see. Tomorrow afternoon.”

“What will you say?” It came out muffled, soggy, between fingers, shards of cracker flying through the dark. Then: “There’s money.”

Eva snorted. “Yes, I suppose there is. And a berth to Ecuador. Or the Argentines. I imagine you’ve already packed my suitcase. How much will you pay me? No, tell me, I want to know what I’m worth.” She waited, received no response, Frau Seidel hiding behind mastication. “You know what I want,” Eva added at last.

“You can’t have him.”

“We’ve had this conversation. And look whose bed I’ll be sleeping in tonight.”

Eva picked up the bundle, left the kitchen, and the house, without another word. Outside, in the pale light of the waning moon, a ghost made water in the thorny shelter of the hedge.

3.

It was a cold night, cloudy, each inhalation thick with rotting leaves. Still buttoning her coat, Eva hurried down the hill. She had timed it well: the tram arrived as she approached the stop. She found a seat, watched the people around her. There was a fat-faced boy who was holding his dog by its collar; his knees bright red where he’d scraped them and had them
daubed with iodine. A drunk hung in the leather handles that were fastened at regular intervals to the ceiling; he had threaded his wrists through their hoops, lost his footing in every bend, then pulled himself upright in the straights. A GI in uniform climbed on two stops down the road; he found her face, smiled, then caught sight of her hump; grimaced and passed her a cigarette in consolation. She found some matches in her pocket and lit it at once; spat smoke at her reflection in the glass. For the whole of the journey she never once glanced back at the tram compartment behind.

She changed trams when she reached the Gürtel, then got off and walked the last few hundred yards. It was one of the city’s least salubrious areas, home to hookers, pimps, drunks, and vagrants. Outside a public house there stood a crowd of men watching two adolescents fight. They might have been sixteen years old: knives out, one arm cut and blood-slick from bicep to the bone-grip in his palm. She pushed straight through the crowd, ignored the stares of the men. Her back offered her protection: if her face drew them to her, her hump chased them off.

There was something else that gave her confidence. For the past three months, ever since Robert had brought her the photo of her younger self, she had nurtured the fantasy that the stranger had been watching her. Not the house, not Robert, nor yet his mother, but precisely her. So precious was this hope, and yet so fragile, that she took care never to ascribe to the man his proper name. He was as elusive to her as a dream. No one but Robert had ever seen him, and even Robert had not clapped eyes on the watcher since the night they had wrestled in the mud. There were times, to be sure, when, out running errands, she thought she’d caught a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye. He looked just like Robert had said: a shabby figure in a long red scarf. Initially she had turned at every street corner and tried to catch him out, but had since decided that he had reasons to be shy. In some childish recess of her heart she had long supplied him with a role. He was her guardian angel. Nothing could happen to her. He foresaw the future. He could walk through walls. One touch and he’d uncoil her spine.

Another twenty steps brought her to her destination. She climbed the steps, cleared the threshold without hesitation. It was an establishment somewhere between hotel and flophouse: a half-lit lobby, the air bitter with cold smoke. The concierge raised a greeting hand. He recognized her from previous visits; she did not know whether he took her for a whore. She climbed the naked stairs to the fifth floor, walked the narrow corridor nearly to the end: peeling wallpaper, dark halos scorched by bulbs screwed high into the wall. Seven rooms, some reverberating with the squeak of beds behind their flimsy doors; metronomes of coin-timed love.

The room at whose door Eva stopped was quiet. She knocked and turned the handle with one motion, found the door resistant to her push. She tried again, pushed harder; earned a yelp, the dance of agitated paws, the door flying open on a narrow, dirty room. Two beds stood side by side. One sheltered a sick man covered up with blankets; the other a giant who sat, dwarfing its frame, cradling a yelping three-legged mutt.

“
Grüss Gott
, Anneliese,
ahoj
, and welcome!” said Karel Neumann. “Come in, but be gentle. You almost hacked off tail of my new friend.”

Eva nodded a greeting, and took two steps into the dirty room.

4.

He started talking at once, not even waiting until she had closed the door, dropping articles in his familiar manner, and all the while stroking the little dog, first its back, then, once it had rolled over in his giant hands, its pink and almost furless belly.

“How do you like him? I named him Franz Josef, after emperor. Something about whiskers. He came in this morning, when I was eating breakfast, cold sausage on dry roll. Put his snout right in my crotch, like a right little strumpet. Manager wants to throw him out, give him a good hiding. But why, I ask you, he’s just looking for scraps, just like the rest of us. Got into a fight, see?” He grabbed the dog’s hindquarters and showed her the stump. “A proper Austrian: three paws and an appetite. Until a year ago he
was German, and had a pedigree certificate to prove it. Now he’s a patriot. Applying for damages, for the thrashing he received in war. For all that, he’s good boy, frisky. Gets around just fine. It’s only when he pees he’s in trouble. He has to squat, see, like a girl. If he tries to lift a leg, he lands on his ass.”

Neumann smiled, tossed the dog onto the floor, where it immediately set to licking its tail, then picked up a newspaper that lay crumpled by the side of his bed.

“Have you seen this?” he carried on without transition. “The evening paper. Got it hot off the press. The ink was still wet. The whole thing is about the trial: blow by blow, who said what, and what did the ladies wear. Only, the spelling’s pretty crummy. Look here, they wrote ‘sensationel.’ And every other time, ‘Herr Klein’ becomes ‘Herr Kleun.’ They do better with the pictures. I open the paper not an hour ago, and look who I find, third row from the front? Frau Anna Beer.” He stabbed with one finger at a half-page illustration depicting the courtroom audience. The scene was rendered with draftsman-like precision. “Does her justice, no? A handsome woman. Pretty hat. You think she got it in Paris?”

“How would I know?” Eva replied, irritated, and fingered her own hat as though it had been criticized by comparison.

“Ah, don’t grow angry, Lieschen. Sit, sit.” He pointed to the foot of his dirty bed. “Sit and talk. You brought me food? You’re an angel, you are.”

He unpacked the bundle she had brought and immediately set to demolishing its contents.

They had met two weeks previously. She had been out making purchases. Specifically, she had been looking for silk stockings, motivated by an incoherent but vivid desire to show off her legs “when the time came” (she was very careful never once to shape the word “engagement,” let alone “wedding,” even to herself). The search had brought her to a rubblestrewn courtyard in the fifth district. A number of people, not all of them shabbily dressed, stood nonchalantly next to bundles of goods, not all of them illegal; some boys on the lookout near the gate. Neumann was there,
haggling with a man who was leaning on his bicycle with a rucksack worth of produce. She recognized him at once—who else had his frame? As she followed him from vendor to vendor (he seemed to be trying to trade his coat, to no great success), her hand fingered the money she had received from him. It had remained, all those weeks, intact in her pocket, folded in half and made fast to the fabric with a safety pin. She’d had no occasion to break so large a bill.

At length he too noticed her: whirled around, tried to place her, scanned her hump, and started grinning. “Anneliese!” he called, as though greeting an old friend. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Her answer was curt. “Karel Neumann. You’re broke.”

A shrug of the shoulders. “Always. And last time I was handing out the dough like I was growing it.”

They did not appear to bother him, these vagaries of property and loss. Nonetheless the remark placed on her the weight of obligation.

She nearly gave it back. The bill was right there in her fist, she even slipped it out of her pocket. But then she stuck it back onto the pin her fingers had so dexterously undone; dug around the much-washed cotton and produced a number of coins, spread them out along her upstretched palm. He watched all this with peculiar focus, as though aware of the lightning struggle precipitated by his casual remark. For a moment there settled between them a kind of perfect understanding. A quiver ran through her, of shame then anger, but—with a grace she had not suspected in him—he diffused it at once, allowing her to pretend he had not noticed her act of aborted generosity; took the coins, shook them jangling in the cup of his great fist, and spoke.

“I need a drink. Want one?”

She said no; he bought her one anyway, at the shabby public house right on the corner of the dirty yard, the patrons little more than beggars, nursing dirty mugs of homemade schnapps. She had never before sat with a man to drink. No one around her seemed to see anything unusual in the act.

“I haven’t seen you since that day,” she said, uneasy with the situation. “I expected to find you loafing around.”

“So you haven’t heard?” he answered, surprised. “I
disappeared
. The Russians picked me up.” He sounded hesitant, as though he could hardly credit it himself. “Two months of questions, day and night. Then they let me go again. Funny, eh?”

“Did you see Anton?”

The note of hope caught his attention. He shook his head. “They must still have him,” he said curtly, all his usual humour gone out of his voice.

He went on drinking until he had run through all her coins. She sat there watching him, still on her first glass, each sip a caustic burn on tongue and gums. When the money was gone, Karel staggered to his feet with drunken sadness and reached over to shake her hand.

“So long, Lieschen.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Emmy-grate,” he said, drawling out the word as though it were some private joke. “Yah-merika. Or maybe Canada. Wherever they’ll have me. I already have a passport. That is to say, I almost do. I know a man who knows a man …” He gestured vaguely over one shoulder. “I just need the money.”

“You could ask Anna Beer. Does she know you are back?”

He frowned. “I thought about going to her. To her, or to my Sophie. No good, though. There’ll be a thousand questions. And in the end, they’ll go to the police. And once the police get involved …” He shook his head as though to clear some inner fog, turned away from her then swung right back, grabbed for her arm but missed it, his left foot losing its grip on the slick tiling. “Whatever else you may hear,” he whispered to her as he picked himself up, “he loves you, your Anton. He went looking for you. He told me so himself.”

She gave him ten yards’ head start then followed after him, wishing to find out where he lived.

5.

Since that day, she had gone to see him five or six times. From her second visit she’d been bringing him food. Her reason, she told herself, was this: Karel Neumann was her only connection to Anton Beer. He had seen him, talked to him, as recently as four months ago; had told him about Eva. Her own memory of Beer was disconcertingly vague. He had taken her in after her father had died (her mother had left them in her infancy). There had been some others who had helped, but it was the doctor who remained with her. One scene in particular: Beer at the kitchen table, buttering bread. There had been strawberry preserves that morning: an earthenware jar. Eva would have been most distraught had anyone suggested it had been glass. Her childhood had ended a day or two later; there had been a teddy, a hedgehog, and a box of coloured pencils.