The Crooked Maid (41 page)

He giggled, took a swig, passed the bottle over to Robert. He demurred.

“Not to your taste, eh? How about this?” He reached under the pillow behind his back, produced a small brown apothecary bottle with a handkerchief stuffed down the neck in lieu of a stopper. “Mama’s little pick-me-up. Have you ever tried it?”

Robert shook his head. “Did you steal it?”

“Steal? No, no, she gave it to me. Like giving a child a treat. Perhaps she thinks it’ll give me courage. It might at that.” He pulled out the hanky with a little flourish, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand. “Go on, little brother. Let me corrupt you just a bit.”

Robert hesitated. “What do you do with it?”

“Take a pinch, rub it into your gums. That’s it. Like eating powdered sugar. Only bitter. It works right away, doesn’t it? Sends a buzzing down your pecker.” He laughed. “Ah, yes, Mama and I had a nice little chat today. Real cozy it was.”

Robert, energized, his senses crawling, took another pinch of powder. “What did you talk about?”

“Rothmann, Arnim Rothmann. The fat man. You don’t remember him? Hm. And here I thought you would.” Wolfgang sat up, took a pull on the liquor bottle, waved Robert closer yet. “A story, then. A family yarn. Best story there is.”

He burped happily, closed his eyes to collect himself, held on to Robert’s
shoulder. “Once upon a time there was a businessman, an Austrian by the name of Seidel, who invested all his money in a factory run by a fat Jew. God knows what they were making exactly, radio parts, transistors, who cares. The factory did well, in any case. The Jew wanted to expand. But for this he needed money: capital. He was a convert, our Jew, went to church every Sunday. Which is where he knew Seidel from. They got talking one afternoon, in the back pew. You can picture them sitting there, haggling. Conducting their business, with the blessing of the Lord.

“Things proceeded quickly. The Austrian, Seidel, well, he wasn’t daft. He knew a good thing when he saw it. He put in all his money, everything save for some bonds, and before the month was out, he’d become the Jew’s junior partner. This was in 1931 or ’32: early days. They worked side by side and made one another rich.

“Now the thing to remember is that up to this point the Seidels had been small fry. Upstarts, that’s the word; their money so new it put a blush on their cheeks. Grandpa, you see, was a shopkeeper. Came from the country and started selling hosiery. A crude man, but clever all the same. He made a small fortune somehow before the Great War and then held on to it when everyone else lost theirs. Mean as they come: he saved up every penny he ever made. Might be there was a little Jew in him too.

“In any case, the factory flourished, and Dad grew rich. Buried the old shopkeeper, started going to a better church. We moved into a flat in the first district; he bought himself a nice tweed suit. Then ’38 rolled around. The Reich paid us a visit and decided to stay. And here something interesting happened. On that day—the day the army walked in, when all those people lined the streets, clapping, hailing Hitler—well, on that very day, it wasn’t even clear what was really happening yet, some hooligan stepped up to fat Jew and knocked his hat off his head. It was nothing worse than that, but it happened in his own factory. One of his engineers. They got into an argument, right on the shop floor, and the man knocked his hat off.

“Rothmann took it as a sign of the times.

“Now the Jew proved to have vision. Prescient, that’s what he was, like a Gypsy woman with her cards. That very day, he came to Father and made him another business proposition. He’d sell the factory to him, all of it, for a very modest price. There was a condition, of course. Any time he wanted to, Rothmann could buy it right back. Oh, it was more complicated than that, they drew up a whole contract, but that was the gist of it. They signed the papers and that was that. Seidel was the sole owner.

“It didn’t stop there, either. Two weeks later, the Jew came back and sold father his house. Same conditions, same outcome, he even sold the furniture. Rothmann and family moved into more modest lodgings. We moved in here and everyone sent flowers. Only my mother did not join the celebrations. She was already sick, a hundred pounds going on eighty, thin as a stick.

“Now at the time, all this seemed crazy, or at any rate premature. Then the wave of Aryanizations hit all across Austria and Jewish businesses were being sold off for a pittance, whether they wanted to or not. And all at once Rothmann looked like a genius, let me tell you. He had Aryanized before the season—but on his conditions. We, meanwhile, lived like kings. We buried my mother six months after the move.

“By the time your mother came into the house, we’d got used to it all. You won’t remember how pleased she was with herself: one day she was the maid in a nice, perky uniform, the next she was bossing around her own. It’s funny, all that energy Father had spent on leaving the shopkeeper in him behind. But the moment he’d made it, entered the first circles—cigars, cognac, a private booth at the opera—he went and married a bit of rough. She learned fast, your mother did, transformed herself into a lady. Only, when she wanted something, the fishwife would come peeking out.

“Those were glory times in any case; we never had so many servants. Life would have been grand, if it hadn’t been for that Jew. Every other day he’d come for dinner, sometimes with his whole family in tow. Father practically fawned on him. It was, ‘Try this cigar, Herr Rothmann, I had it sent from
overseas,’ and, ‘Take the good chair, Herr Rothmann, here, by the fire, it’s chilly out,’ ‘Such a delight to see you, you must come back soon,’ on and on—and me already in the police! It was then your mother and I started discussing Party business over dinner. Good God, we had such fun.

“One time, early on—I remember it like it was yesterday—Rothmann leaned over to your mother, very discreetly, mind, speaking under his breath, and instructed her how to hold the fork, ‘in a good household.’ You should have seen her blanch. I swear, she signed her soul over to the Party and cheered Rothmann’s entire race to the gas chambers just for that ‘in a good household.’ Not that he was wrong, mind. Your mother handled cutlery like she was digging a latrine.

“Then they stopped coming, the Rothmanns. ‘To forestall unwanted attention.’ Oh, he was a grandiose bastard, Rothmann was. Fat as a barrel, always a sweet in his pocket for you and me. I’m surprised you don’t remember. But then, there were a lot of people who came and went. We ran a busy house back then.

“But in the end, even a clever Jew like Rothmann made a mistake. He left it too late to leave the country. He wanted to, kept on talking about London and New York, how he had business connections there. But the wife wouldn’t go without her parents, and her parents refused.

“Next thing you know, well, history took its course. They got rounded up and shipped out of town.” Wolfgang waved, as though seeing off a departing train, then leaned back and took another swig. “After that, nothing. Until now.”

“He’s come back.”

Wolfgang grinned. “He sent us a letter. And how nicely it’s written. You’d swear Fontane wrote it, or maybe Kleist. Says he has been watching us all along.”

“The man with the red scarf. He wants everything back.”

“Actually, he just wants money. A mere trifle, really. Ours is a modest Jew.” He ran a hand through his stubble, gave Robert a sideways glance. “Your mother’s not too happy about it, though. We had a little meeting,
she and I. Down in the drawing room, real cozy. She closed the door after us, turned the key, then started right in. What a beast that man is, a Jew-swine, a usurer, you know the phrases. I listened to it, she worked herself into a right lather, and then I said, poking fun, like, ‘I see you don’t want to pay.’ That stung her, she went red and started to lecture me. ‘It’s not about the money,’ she said. I laughed. ‘You’re still fighting the war?’ I asked. ‘Is that it? You want to win?’ She got angrier yet and started shouting at me in earnest. The words she came out with! Right out of the gutter. I pretended I’d taken offence (really, it isn’t nice to be shouted at), I rose and walked to the door.

“She stopped me, of course, and all of a sudden she was soft like butter. She took hold of my sleeve and tugged me over to the armchair, gentle, though, making sure I didn’t bump my legs. She tugged me down into the seat, sat down on the footstool, just by my side, and as she was talking, she stroked my jacket like she was testing the quality of the fabric, only tender, tender. And how she crooned! ‘Wolfie,’ she crooned (and when is the last time she called me that!), ‘Wolfie, remember when you came home that day, wearing your uniform for the first time. Your father pretended not to notice, but I—Remember how we drank jenever together, glass after glass, toasting your new position, I got tipsy real quick, but you kept on pouring, one arm around my shoulder …’

“And the funny thing, Robert, was that I did remember and felt moved. It rose before my eyes, jenever and all. Of course I knew she was just buttering me up—it was crude after all, very crude—but all the same, my eyes welled up and I was grateful to her. She sensed my change of mood and, still sitting there on the footstool, stroking my jacket sleeve, she started humming the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and telling me how her first husband, your father, had been fond of whistling it, but somehow with feeling—it’s absurd, laughable, and yet I got all soft inside. I even let her hold my hand.

“So we spent a pretty little hour. I wish there’d been tea. And then, at the end, without looking up, without even changing the tone of her voice, she said, ‘Will you get rid of that Jew?’ ‘What will you give me?’ I said,
unruffled, cozy with the moment. ‘One hundred thousand,’ she said. ‘And twenty percent of the factory.’ We shook on it, like the thieves we are.

“You know,” he finished, patting the basement wall, “she’s a little touched, your mama, but the truth is that half the people on this street, they have a Jew walled in their closet. God, how they are hoping the mortar will hold.”

He leaned back, exhausted, took a dash of powder for his pains. Robert sat there very quietly, mulling over his story.

“What does she mean,” he asked at last, his voice very quiet, “‘get rid of him’?”

Wolfgang did not answer at once. “Scare him off, I suppose. She’s decided I’m a good one for the rough stuff. Made a career of it, after all. What’s one more Jew?” He sneered, patted Robert’s leg. “She knows what I want, your mama. Of course, I could wait for my inheritance. There’s a lot more in it than a hundred grand. But, hell, I want out, this minute, go someplace where nobody knows my face.” He paused, looked Robert in the eye. “I’m going to be a father, Robert. I want to raise my child someplace where they won’t point their finger at us every time we climb on the tram. And besides, it’s all nonsense anyway. This letter writer, he isn’t Rothmann. He can’t be. Rothmann’s dead. Father made inquiries, wrote a letter to the authorities. Gassed, they told him. They have some sort of list.

“Your mama doesn’t know. If she did, she wouldn’t give me a penny. Not until the lawyers force her to. But that’ll take weeks, maybe months. Even then, I won’t be able to leave. I’d have to stay to run the factory. It’s one of Father’s stipulations: I’ve seen the will. I’ll have to pay you out and stay.”

“I don’t want the money,” Robert said. “You won’t owe me a dime. If you want, I will run the factory for you.”

“Perhaps you would at that, little brother. But to live all my life in the shadow of your magnanimity —” Wolfgang shook his head. “No, no. First, let me take a look at this crook. See what he has to say.”

7.

They sat in the cellar for another hour. They fetched the bread down and loaded it with jam. Robert sampled the brandy, took more of the drug. Whenever he wanted to turn their conversation back to Rothmann, Wolfgang demurred.

“Tomorrow,” Wolfgang said, his eyes already glassy. “Nothing’s going to happen till then. We’re awaiting ‘instructions.’”

Towards evening, lying shoulder to foot on the narrow cot, Robert bumped his head on something hard.

“What’s that?” he asked, fishing under the blanket.

“Ah,” said Wolfgang, smiling, “it’s something else your mother gave me. She pulled it out of her handbag, wrapped into a dishrag, just as it is now. The way she was holding it, I thought it was a hammer.”

“But what is it?” Robert asked again, undoing the knots.

“That, little brother, is the Viennese Detective Bureau’s standard-issue Walther PPK service pistol your mother has been sleeping with since the autumn of 1939.”

Perhaps it was the drug, but they both started giggling and, for the longest time, were unable to stop.

8.

The Walther Polizei Pistole Kriminal is a blowback-operated semi-automatic pistol developed by Fritz Walther in 1931. With its 83-millimetre barrel and a weight of less than 600 grams, the PPK’s compact size predisposed it for use by plainclothes detectives and undercover agents wishing to carry a concealed weapon. A variety of safety features enhanced its applicability to urban peacekeeping. The double-action/single-action trigger mechanism ensured that the weapon could be confidently handled even if the safety had been disengaged: to fire the initial shot its operator had to overcome a greater trigger pull weight than for the subsequent single-action shots. A fall arrest system prevented any shots from being fired until the trigger was
fully depressed, thus securing the weapon against accidental discharge. Due to its small size the weapon handled best in small and medium-sized hands. Large-handed users wishing for a comfortable position of the small or “pinky” finger had to resort to a special magazine with elongated grip. Like many semi-automatic compact pistols the PPK’s hammer had a tendency to pinch the webbing between the operator’s thumb and trigger finger when the gun was fired, a phenomenon known as “hammer bite.” The problem was addressed by later models built under licence by Smith & Wesson in the U.S.A. through the addition of a so-called beaver tail, an elongation of the upper rear end of the grip. Other than becoming the weapon of choice for detective units across much of Europe, the gun also became standard issue for border patrols both before and after World War II. The PPK was popular amongst German Wehrmacht officers, who acquired it privately and used it as their service handgun. It had the reputation of being a reliable execution weapon.