The Crooked Maid (50 page)

“As soon as I passed a bakery, I remembered the wallet. I discarded it, everything apart from the money; threw it in a gutter. God, that cup of coffee tasted good; ersatz of course, but even so. I had five rolls and bought some schnapps from a
Tabak
. By lunchtime, I felt right as rain. It was only when evening rolled around that I started thinking about Beer. That final rustle of his breath. If it hadn’t been for that, I could have buried the whole
affair. As it was, it sat on my conscience. No, not my conscience, exactly. I just carried it around. It grew heavier with every hour.

“All that night I wandered around town. Aimless, drinking, muttering to myself. You see, I wasn’t sure what to do. Even if I’d wanted to, I’d never have found that yard again. Still, the thought persisted.
Perhaps he wasn’t dead
. Wasn’t it possible, perhaps, that I had overestimated the state of his injuries? That he had woken after a few hours and gathered himself up. With a broken leg, to be sure, and a head like a wasps’ nest, but alive. He was a doctor, after all; he would know what to do. I had visions of him with a little bandage around his leg: sitting in his easy chair, stuffing a pipe. So what if he’d tried to kiss me, stroked my hair? Who was to say the two of us could not be friends?

“By the time the next night rolled around, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I returned to the neighbourhood of Beer’s flat. I thought I would just take a peek. From outside, I could tell which windows were his. A light was on. God, if you could only imagine how happy I was about that light. I was sure we had turned it off when we left. I remembered it distinctly. The thing I forgot about, though, was that you were expected home. I drank myself stupid, plucking up my courage, then made it up the stairs.

“Out on the landing, doubt snuck back into my heart. ‘What if he’s angry?’ I thought. ‘For all you know, he’s after revenge.’ So I bypassed the bell. Dug his keys out of my pocket, opened the door. Better not give him time to prepare. I would walk in and tell him I was sorry. Of course, it took me time to fit the fucking key. You’d think I was trying to thread a needle: stood hunched over, eye at the lock, swaying and jamming the key into the knob.

“You know the rest. I rolled in, you were sleeping on the couch. I was well in the bag already; the shock of it gave me the rest. Come morning I had made my peace with it. I’d got used to the weight, or thrown it. A flexible conscience, mine. You questioned me, and it made sense all of a sudden. Beer was a queer. You had left him over an affair of his. Then
Sophie entered the picture, and you both showered me in money. I had no reason to move on. Not until they found the body.”

He paused, seemed about to say something else, then fell silent, his head dropping into his hands, more from tiredness than remorse. Anna watched all this and smoked her cigarette down to the butt.

“You are lying,” she said. She said it coolly, without pathos, as though testing a theory out loud. It was too early yet for her to assess what she felt about Karel’s revelation. “You went out with him, lured him to a quiet yard, and killed him for his money. Then you came back to rob the flat.”

Karel did not answer her, sat without moving, no emotion showing on his face. After some time she found the need to speak again.

“And tonight?” she asked, her eyes on his blood- and mud-stained hands, the bruises rising on his head and face. “Did you go out and murder someone else?”

He winced, started shaking. It took her some seconds to realize she had hit the mark. Her shock was genuine.

“You did, didn’t you?”

He shook his head, though not in denial. “I went back to that yard,” he said. “The strange thing is, I did not recognize it until tonight. I picked it out because the cellar door had no lock. Other than that, a yard like a hundred others. Mud and war rubble, and an old air-raid shelter underneath the main building. It never even crossed my mind that it might be the same.

“But when I was crouching there, behind the cellar door, it came back to me. I even heard something down in the darkness below me. The rustle of a man’s breathing. Anton Beer come back to haunt me. And yet I sat and waited, despite his breathing at my back. Almost like a brave man.

“I should have waited longer after he’d dropped off the parcel; long enough to make sure he was gone. But the breathing got to me at last. I needed air.” He shrugged: enormous shoulders heaving under the weight of fate.

“Whom did you—” she began asking, confused by his account, then stopped herself. She had no intention of administering justice. Let each bury their own.

“He wore a red scarf, Beer did, the night we went carousing. I laughed at him, but he said he’d caught a chill. A soldier’s coat, dyed, and a red scarf worn like a muffler. ‘I’ve been cold since ’41,’ he said. He hid his face and went boozing with me.” Karel looked up, puzzled and worn out. “You know, all that night, I really thought he was my friend.”

4.

They smoked their way through the second pack of cigarettes. She sat there, picking through his story; pictured it—Anton’s fingers in Karel’s hair—got Kis entangled in the thought, and herself too, the brittle memory of Anton holding her, stroking her head in the tender minutes after consummation.

“Do you hate them?” She forced the word. “Queers.”

He waved it away. “Not especially. I got angry. That’s all.”

She nodded sombrely and considered the thought that she had lost her husband without reason. Just like all those other widows of the war.

Karel stirred. He rose slowly, not wishing to startle her. They had been talking by the light of a table lamp, and the single light source, shining upwards, emphasized the crude ridges of his cheekbones and brow.

“What do I do now?” he asked.

She did not hesitate. “Go. I never want to see you again.”

“You won’t call the police.”

“There is no point.”

Still he hesitated. “I have Eva here with me.” He gestured behind. “What do I tell her?”

Anna winced at his appeal and refused an answer. He carried on all the same.

“Maybe she’ll want to go back. To Robert. He doesn’t know that—It was his brother whom I—”

She surprised herself with the force of her response. “Take her away. The boy deserves better.”

Karel seemed relieved by this assessment. When he opened the door, he found Eva halfway down the corridor. She looked at him blandly, her face composed.

“The night porter said you had returned.”

It was impossible to tell whether she had been approaching the door or retreating from it. She did not seem to notice the figure of Anna sitting behind him; at any rate she did not acknowledge her presence.

“Do you have the money?”

“Some of it,” he said, and pulled from his pocket the soiled wad of bills. “But we have to run.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m sick of waiting.”

He tried to place a hand on her shoulder as they climbed the stairs, but she shook him off.

She had never liked for anyone to touch her hump.

Part Three

When the Würzburg opthamologist Heinrich Adelmann first contacted Ludwig Müller-Uri, the young glass-blower was barely twenty-one. This was in 1832. It was a doll that prompted Adelmann’s letter, of Sonneberg manufactory, that had curiously lifelike eyes. Eye prosthetics were primitive devices then, and French. A select number of Paris artisans manufactured them as painted shells made of thin-walled, lead-darkened glass. These eyes were transitory objects: once inserted, the lacrimal fluid corroded the lead, roughening their surface; after a matter of months—sometimes mere weeks—the prosthetics caused such irritation they could no longer be worn
.

Müller-Uri devoted many years to the task of manufacturing the perfect artificial eye. He replaced the lead first with milk glass then with cryolite, producing a more durable prosthetic whose subtle shade imitated the spongy white texture of the sclera. Not content with the look of a painted iris, he designed a way of producing its star-shaped, crystalline structures from tiny rods of coloured glass that were woven into the eye’s surface. A specially designed melting process permitted him to suggest a soft, bleeding transition of sclera and cornea. It was left to his nephew, Friedrich Adolf Müller-Uri, to design the “reform” eye, a prosthetic shape much bulkier than the traditional “shell” or “bowl” eye, looking like a thick-walled, scooped-out semi-sphere, designed to fill the socket in patients where the entire eyeball had been lost
.

Demand for all types of prosthetics spiked in the aftermath of the two world wars, though the political and material vagaries of those years left their mark on this, as on any other, industry. The Otto Bock Company, for instance, based in Duderstadt but manufacturing most of its wares in the medieval Thuringian market town of Königsee, provided a score of Great War veterans with leg and arm prostheses but saw its factory and materials confiscated by the Soviet occupational authorities, disrupting production for a number of years. Many World War II amputees flocked to Giessen, where two companies, under the names of Bergler & Rieder and Thöt & Co., sold a variety of made-to-measure prosthetic products. Müller-Uri’s factory in Lauscha, meanwhile, continues to produce cryolite eyes to this very day; and a nearby toy manufacturer still sews looks of demure devotion into the faces of its dolls and teddies and stuffed dogs
.

One

1.

Frisch came to Anna Beer’s door early the next morning. He brought the news that her husband was dead. She opened the door but did not let him in.

“I know,” she said, fetched the autopsy file from the kitchen table, and handed it over.

“You came to my flat last night,” he said. “Trudi says you were looking for me.”

Her answer was blunt. “I was. But now I don’t need you anymore.”

She closed the door and watched, through the spy hole, how Frisch slipped off his glasses and stood polishing their lenses, his face blank, his eyes blinking as though stinging from the cold.

2.

Robert came two days later. She had hardly left the flat. He was tired, hollow-eyed, inexperienced in grief. She made him tea and listened to his story; omitted to mention that she’d allowed Karel to leave. Robert sat, head bowed, weeping quietly into his cup. After an hour of this she took him lightly by the hand and led him to her bedroom. He only resisted her once, very briefly, when she lifted the shirt she had only half unbuttoned over his head. Afterwards he slept, one hand stretched across the top of her pillow, entangled with her hair. She lay next to him, taking in his
smell, and found it reassured her. When he woke towards nightfall, she was pleased to see he was not ashamed.

“There’s the funeral to see to,” he said from the door, still doing up his trousers.

She nodded gravely, saw him out, then went through her wardrobe in search of her black suit.

3.

Robert returned the next morning, and the morning after that. After a week of this he stayed the nights too, went home only to change his clothes. They talked very little, spent most of the time in bed. Anna found it was good to be held.

“I have to go see the solicitor today,” he announced one morning. “The factory is being written over to my name. Mother has agreed.”

She nodded, considered what he was trying to tell her. “What exactly does it make?” she asked. “That factory of yours?”

He hesitated. “Some part you need for building radios.”

“You don’t know?”

Robert smiled sheepishly, picked up the phone, and called his lawyer, trying to find out.

4.

Nine weeks after Wolfgang’s funeral, Robert proposed.

“I can’t,” she said.

He looked hurt.

“No, really,” she said. “I don’t have a death certificate.”

“It can be arranged,” he said.

She had noticed this in him: a new sense of certainty. It must come from being rich.

“Will you marry me?” he asked again.

“I am too old,” she said, and took him back to bed.

5.

She often sat, stroking his face, his eye, thinking of Anton.

“Tell me about your tussle,” she said.

“It was a boy from Vienna,” he told her. “His father was a Socialist. He said he’d heard about my father. The detective. He said that he was nothing but a Nazi goon.”

She smiled. “So you fought to defend his honour.”

“No. I fought because I feared that it was true. I threw a chair at his head. He ran my face into the wall. For months you could see the stain.”

“You got angry,” she said. “It was almost like a kind of joy.”

“Yes,” he answered, looking at her in surprise. “How do you know?”

“A friend told me that that’s how it feels.”

6.

In February that year Poldi gave birth to her child. There were some minor complications, necessitating a week’s stay at the hospital. Robert took Anna along when he went to visit her bedside.

“Look,” said Poldi, pointing at the baby as though she could not believe it. “It’s a boy. Don’t he look just like his father?”

Anna stroked his chin and affirmed that he did. She wondered absently whether Herr Seidel had carried that same look of pride and expectation when afforded the first glimpse of his son and heir.

7.

Robert proposed again in May. The death certificate had just come through. It came in the post, without explanation, a single sheet of paper, signed and stamped. Robert had arranged it. She did not know how.

“It’s stupid,” she brushed off his proposal. “An infatuation. You lost your lover and now you think you must have a wife.

“I am too old,” she said. That, and her uncle’s maxim, voiced to her cousin when he first came home with a bride: “You don’t have to buy the whole cow if you want a drink of milk.”

“Will you?” he pressed her.

In time it became tiresome to demur.