The Fig Eater Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Excerpt from Hungarian Folk Beliefs by Tekla Dömötör, translated by Christopher M. Hamm. Copyright © 1981 by Tekla Dömötör. Coedition Corvina–Indiana University Press, 1982. Reprinted by permission of Corvina Books, Budapest.

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2001 by Jody Shields and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  THE FIG EATER. Copyright © 2000 by Jody Shields. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2177-3

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Little, Brown and Company.

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook edition: March 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  International acclaim for Jody Shields’s

  The Fig Eater

  “Suspenseful. . . . A chilling tale of detection, betrayal, and failed ratiocination. . . . Ms. Shields gives the reader a palpable sense of fin-de-siècle Vienna. . . . In turning Dora’s story into a murder mystery, she has managed to write a gripping psychological thriller while capturing the nervous mood of a city preoccupied, like one of its most famous residents, with sex and death.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  “An elegant, intricately crafted puzzle that fairly bursts with history, personalities, and sensory details as well as suspense.”

  —Glenda Winders, San Diego Union–Tribune

  “Vivid. . . . A beautifully written book. . . . The Fig Eater takes readers, with mesmerizing clarity, to Vienna in 1910. . . . Ms. Shields flashes dazzling stereopticon slides of a city floating between opposites: the fading nineteenth century and the bustling twentieth, the analytical male point of view and the intuitive female, the scientific and the superstitious. Ms. Shields has a powerful gift for poetic and painterly imagery. Her startling scenes, rich in metaphor, linger long in memory.”

  —Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

  “A lushly developed entertainment. . . .The Fig Eater is cleverly written.”

  —Edna Stumpf, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The Fig Eater adroitly mines the fertile tension between morality and passion that provided such rich material for Freud himself. . . . Rather than tantalizing readers with the usual proliferation of suspects and red herrings, Shields sustains our interest by delving deep into the minds of her detective-protagonists. . . . What makes this novel compelling is its eerily atmospheric depiction of Vienna and its account of the cunning machinations its female detectives must enact to pursue their covert investigation. . . . The Fig Eater is one of those novels whose aura stays with you even after the details of its plot are forgotten.”

  —Leslie Haynsworth, Denver Post

  “Shields evokes the beautiful but decaying Vienna of the last days of the Habsburgs with a rich, sophisticated structure as simple and complex as the labyrinthine Ringstrasses the characters traverse in their quest for the solution. I’m looking forward to recommending this to my customers.”

  —Susan Avery, Ariel Booksellers, New Paltz, New York, Book Sense 76

  “A story of obsession, superstition, and sexual secrets. . . . The Fig Eater is an atmospheric period piece in the tradition of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. . . . A vivid portrait of coffeehouse society in turn-of-the-century Vienna, as well as the sinister and sordid underbelly of a seemingly civilized society.”

  —Kathleen Parrish, Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “Shields’s debut work works — mostly because her cool, precise narrative style lets readers supply their own flourishes to the story.”

  —Isobel Montgomery, Guardian (UK)

  “We are carried along by the book’s magnificent, elegant creepiness. Shields paints a gorgeous portrait of turn-of-the-century Vienna. . . . Even after Dora’s murder is solved, we can’t escape the feeling that what Erszébet was really investigating was human nature.”

  —Melanie Rehak, Harper’s Bazaar

  “As a thriller, The Fig Eater works expertly well, with an intelligence and care that make it a pleasure to read.”

  —Lesley McDowell, Herald (Glasgow)

  “Immensely engaging. . . . With a feeling similar to Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, the brief snapshots of scenes and moods tease readers into wanting more. This absorbing book is practically impossible to put down.”

  —Christine Pappas, Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal Star

  “A hypnotic, voluptuous mystery that not only envelops the reader in turn-of-the-century Vienna but creates a powerful central character — the police inspector’s mysterious wife.”

  —More

  “An atmospheric thriller. . . . Shields’s Vienna is a wonderfully realized creation.”

  —Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “While the whodunit plot is first-rate, readers who aren’t fans of the mystery genre will still enjoy this tale. . . . Miramax was smart to pick up the movie rights; this book has the potential to be a beautiful, suspenseful film.”

  —Rebecca May, Lebanon Co. Weekender

  “Shields’s knowledge of period Vienna is quite astounding. She offers detailed botanical descriptions, depicts the era’s rage for curious tuberculosis treatments, and conjures opulent visions of the Viennese carnival season. ‘Your investigation is like the telling of a dream,’ the inspector’s wife tells him one night as they lie together in bed. Such, as well, is Shields’s poetic book.”

  —Nancy Lemann, Mirabella

  “A stylish murder mystery. . . . Shields’s contribution is to transpose Dora’s story into a pop genre, a thriller, and to give a cinematic immediacy to the sentiments that color the popular response to her today — anti-Freudianism, anti-Austrianism, and the desire to rehabilitate women’s intuition.”

  —Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review

  “A very unusual murder mystery — elegant and cerebral. . . . The pace of the writing is swift. . . . The Fig Eater works as a historical whodunit. But it’s also entertaining as a complex game played with Freud’s work.”

  —Scott McLemee, Newsday

  “Shields paints an intricate picture of early 1900s Vienna, filled with dark secrets, shocking medical practices, and tons of suspense.”

  —Reader’s Edge

  “A glorious maze. . . . Sometimes gruesome and highly mysterious, The Fig Eater is an exciting new brand of detective story.”

  —Jessica Berry, Spectator (UK)

  “What if not psychoanalysis but another of our modern secular religions, criminology, were brought to bear on the mystery of Dora? That’s the premise of Jody Shields’s hypnotic first novel, and she pulls off the switch with impressive elan. . . . The novel abounds with sensual pleasures. . . . Shields expands our way of seeing.”

  —M
aria Russo, Salon.com

  “A dark, seductive novel. . . . An addictive and sinister read.”

  —Scotland on Sunday (Edinburgh)

  “An unusual and intriguing tale. . . . The Fig Eater resounds with vitality. . . . The layered mystery is revealed slowly, with Shields’s evocative prose exploring the crossroads of scientific and superstitious belief.”

  —Adam Woog, Seattle Times

  “Evocative. . . . The dance between [the Inspector and his wife] as they pursue their separate inquiries is as intriguing as the murder mystery itself.”

  —David Tarrant, Dallas Morning News

  “A stylish literary thriller . . . artful and evocative. . . . Shields’s Vienna is rich in the texture of corruption.”

  —Lisa Appignanesi, Independent (UK)

  “Suspenseful, atmospheric, and highly intelligent: Jody Shields focuses a brilliant light on the murky world of imperial Vienna and Freud’s famous patient Dora. There is a sense of intellectual daring such as, in a different way, we find in Freud’s case studies.”

  —D. M. Thomas, author of The White Hotel

  “Hypnotic in effect. . . . Certainly it’s one of the most original historical novels we’ve read lately.”

  —Denver Post

  “Astonishingly original and vivid. . . . One of the chief attractions of The Fig Eater is the laconic and elegant style. . . . Understanding and judging the motives of the characters is, with brilliant effectiveness, left to the reader.”

  —Charles Palliser, The Good Book Guide

  “Every word in The Fig Eater is a brush stroke, every brush stroke reveals a detail, every detail reveals a color, a light, a shadowy image of the story. . . . Shields offers fascinating portraits of turn-of-the-century prejudices toward women and minorities, as well as a frightening look at the de rigueur but deadly medical treatments used for syphilis and tuberculosis. Those fascinated by botany, early photography, and all things Viennese will find The Fig Eater hypnotically entrancing. . . . It rushes to a savage, bizarre conclusion that’s well worth the wait.”

  —Carol Memmott, USA Today

  The Fig Eater

  A Novel

  JODY SHIELDS

  For Kathleen Bishop

  Richard Jay Kohn

  John Owen Ward

  But an Investigating Officer must never and under no circumstances allow himself to follow the paths along which he is pushed, be it designedly or accidentally, by the various witnesses. Apart from the fact that the reconstitution of the crime for oneself is the only effective method, it is the only interesting one, the only one that stimulates the inquirer and keeps him awake at his work.

  —HANS GROSS,

  System der Kriminalistik, 1904

  The Fig Eater

  CHAPTER 1

  He stands up next to the girl’s body. He looks down for a moment, then carefully steps over the narrow boards lying around it. He walks across the grass and joins the three men, waiting like mourners. No one speaks. The body is poised like a still life waiting for a painter.

  Now they watch the photographer edge his way over the boards, his equipment balanced on one shoulder. He stops and gently lowers the legs of the tripod into place, then steadies the bulky camera directly above the girl. Without looking up, he snaps his fingers. The men silently move aside, shifting their lanterns as a boy passes between them, moving with a sleepwalker’s strangely certain gait, eyes fixed on the frail pyramid of white powder he carries on a tray.

  The boy stands by the photographer, nervously waiting while he adjusts the dials on the camera. The photographer ignores him. He hunches behind the camera and pulls a black cloth over his head. In that secret darkness, the camera lens tightens around the dead girl’s mouth. The photographer mutters something unintelligible, then his hand blindly works its way out from under the cloth. The instant his fingers snap, the boy strikes a match and holds it to the powder on the tray.

  A blinding flash lays transparent white light over the girl’s body, her stiff arms and legs, the folds of her dress, transforming her into something eerily poised, a statue fallen on the grass. There’s shadow, a black space carved under her neck, in the angle where her head is bent toward her shoulder, and below one outstretched arm. Her other arm hides her face. The light vanishes, leaving a cloud of odor. Burned sulphur.

  The Inspector keeps this harsh image of the girl’s sprawled figure in mind even later, after her body is cut open, becoming curiously tender and liquid.

  She lies in the Volksgarten, near the seated stone figure of the Kaiserin Elizabeth. The statue faces a fountain pool in the center of a bosquet of low flowers, and behind it is a curved wall of bushes nearly twelve feet high. The park is a short distance from Spittelberg, Vienna’s notorious district where the Beiseln offer music, drink, and women.

  The Inspector points at a crumpled piece of white paper or cloth near the girl’s body. Two of the policemen nod and begin to pick up the boards. There’s no haste in their movements, even though it’s getting late. They set a board on top of two rocks to make a walkway over to the cloth. If there are footprints on the ground, the boards will protect them.

  During another investigation last year, the spring of 1909, the Inspector temporarily preserved footprints in the snow at a crime scene by placing a flowerpot over each one. There are other ways to keep prints left in sand, soft dirt, or dust.

  While the photographer’s boy patiently holds a lantern over his head, the Inspector squats on the boards, close enough to see that the cloth has been roughly smoothed over some small object. A rounded shape. There are flies around it and a sweet, foul odor. He takes tweezers from a leather pouch and pinches a corner of the fabric. It sticks slightly. When he pulls it off, the fabric has a dark smear on the underside, and he has a shock of recognition as he drops it inside an envelope. Someone has murdered a young woman and defecated next to her body.

  When the Inspector stands up, he realizes he is sweating. His shirt is damp; his suspenders are wet stripes over his shoulders. The humid night air has also weighed the girl’s clothes down over her body. It is hot, unusually hot for the end of August.

  They prepare to take another picture. Egon, the photographer, drags the tripod over. He sets it up and cranks the camera down and down, stopping it two feet above the soft excrement. One of the men raises a lantern over it so he can see to focus. The Inspector steps back and turns his head away, waiting for the whispered sizzle of the lightning powder as it ignites. In a minute, the lantern’s light is eclipsed by the explosion. Days later, when he looks at the photograph, the grass around the body appears as stiff as if it had been frozen, not burned into the film on the glass plate in the camera by the explosion of light.

  When the boards surrounding her are removed, the girl looks frailer alone on the ground. They find no objects, no other obvious clues around her. The thick grass masks any footprints. They’ll search the area again tomorrow during the day, when there’s better light.

  Invisible in the dark, the Inspector stands on the marble platform next to the Kaiserin Elizabeth’s statue. He’s a tall man and can reach nearly as high as her head. He gently touches the statue’s shoulder. He never would have permitted himself this trespass at any other time, but he’s unsettled by the extraordinary discovery of the girl’s body near the memorial. Kaiserin Elizabeth was the wife of Franz Josef. She was assassinated in 1898, stabbed in the heart by a madman with a blade so wickedly thin it left only a speck of blood on her chemise. It is said her dying words were “At last.”

  He wonders if there is some connection between the statue and the location of the girl’s body.

  In front of him, the men move quietly in the circle of light made by the lanterns, and between their dark figures, he can glimpse the whiter shape of the girl. Just beyond the park, the wing of the Imperial Palace is faintly visible. From behind the trees, there’s the occasional, isolated sound of an unseen carriage proceeding around the Ringstrasse.

  According to
police routine, a sketch is always made before a description of the crime scene is written. Closely trailed by the boy holding a lantern, Egon paces out a rough square around the girl’s body, three hundred and sixty paces, and transfers this measurement onto a graph, drawing the kaiserin’s monument as a dash, the sign used on survey maps. Without disturbing the dead girl’s hair, he pushes the end of a tape measure into the ground at the crown of her head and measures one and a half meters to the base of the monument. Her right arm is bent over her dark face, so he unspools the tape from her shoulder to the same point. A distance of almost two meters. Finally, he pulls the tape from the left heel of her white canvas boot over to the path, just over one meter. When the sketch is finished, he signs and dates the paper.

  Now her body has been remade as the center point on a graph. Lines radiate from her head, arms, and legs as if she were a starfish or a sundial, pinning her exactly in this place at this hour.

  Before the dead girl is moved, the Inspector gently removes her pearl earrings. He cuts through the strap of her watch, uncoils it from her wrist, and seals the objects in an isinglass envelope. He asks for more light, and now with two lanterns above him, he kneels over her, shifting his weight, balancing himself on one hand. Careful not to touch her, he uses the point of the scissors to delicately manipulate her thin cotton dress. Occasionally he asks for a magnifying glass. His eyes filled with the harsh white of her dress — a dazzling field — he forgets the body under the fabric until he accidentally sets his hand on her bare arm. Although he instantly jerks it away, the impression of her cool skin stays on the palm of his hand, as if he’d touched a liquid. He rubs his hand against his trousers.

  He knows the other men noticed his spontaneous reaction. He forces himself to touch her again, to break the spell, pushing her thumb down hard against the ground. It’s slightly stiff, and he estimates she’s been dead at least four hours. The heat makes it hard to calculate, although rigor mortis affects the small muscles first.