The Fig Eater Page 15

  “The wisdom of women. She is Juno as well as the goddess Diana. A perplexing card. You communicate silence and secrecy. You have a secret, Fräulein?”

  He studies her face and waits for her answer.

  Without lifting her eyes from la Papesse, Rosza gropes around the table for cigarettes. Wally notices the strong aura of the woman’s perfume, a darkly pungent scent, perhaps musk.

  “A girl in the family I lived with was murdered in August.”

  “The girl that was found in the Volksgarten?”

  Rosza nods, lighting a cigarette without looking at them.

  “We were the dearest of friends, like sisters. Her name was Dora. She went out alone one night.”

  “How terrible for you,” Wally murmurs. “Did you sense something was going to happen to her?”

  “Yes. It was strange. I was working for another family at the time. But I remember it was a stifling hot evening. Something wasn’t right.”

  “Where were you that night?”

  Wally instantly regrets her question. She’s forgotten to be hidden, to be slow. Rosza looks at her sharply. To soothe her, to go backwards, Wally makes sympathetic noises.

  “I was with Herr Zellenka, a friend of mine. I’m surprised the police haven’t talked to me. It makes me nervous. I keep expecting them.” Rosza laughs uneasily. “Fortunately, I have no information to give them. I’m perfectly innocent.”

  Wally examines her cards, pretending to be preoccupied. “But Dora wouldn’t go to the Volksgarten alone. She must have met someone there?”

  “I can’t imagine who it might have been. She would have told me if it was important.” Rosza’s face is impassive. She doesn’t look up from her cards.

  Egon suggests Dora might have had a secret rendezvous with a handsome Hungarian officer. An elopement. Rosza shakes her head.

  Across the room, a ragged boy shuffles from table to table, pulling aside his coat to display the photographs in the waistband of his trousers. Some of the men dismiss him without looking up from their newspapers. Others casually leaf through the pictures of nude and partially nude women while the waiting boy fidgets.

  Egon begins to deal the cards for tarok, going clockwise.

  They proceed with their game. Six cards are turned face down on the table, a stack called the widow or le chien. They play without further conversation. Wally notices that Egon furtively studies Rosza’s face, as if he were puzzled. He seems to have dismissed the negative fortune she predicted for him.

  Rosza coolly ignores him. She is a surprisingly aggressive player, and her strategy is impossible to anticipate. She wins with her last trick, Pagat, the lowest trump. On the earliest tarot decks, Pagat, the juggler, was the arbiter of fortune. Over time, he was transformed into a Mountebank.

  Rosza smiles at them for the first time. “Do you know there’s an expression about tarok? Riuscir come il Fante ô Matto de tarrocchi. It means to be the knave of tarok, good for nothing.”

  She settles her shawl around her shoulders and stands up slowly; perhaps her skirt is caught on something. Egon eagerly offers to see her home, but she insists on leaving alone, hurrying to catch the last tram, the car marked by a blue light.

  After she’s gone, Egon gathers up the cards. “Perhaps you should have drawn the same card as Rosza.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a secret, too. You knew Dora but didn’t choose to mention it to her.”

  Wally says nothing.

  “Do as you like,” he says. “You can trust me not to tell her.”

  Wally is so anxious to see Erszébet that she arrives early at the Café Schrangl, a low building on the Graben near the Dreifaltigkeitssäule, a monument commemorating the cessation of the plague.

  Since a woman without an escort isn’t welcome at Café Schrangl, Wally walks up and down the Graben, looking in shop windows. She stops in front of number thirteen, the Knize men’s store. The windows are filled with expensive neckties laid out in circles, flat as playing cards.

  She follows the street until it turns and meets the Stephansdom. She admires the Bischofstor on the north side of the building, an elaborate Gothic portal that is the entrance for women.

  When Erszébet arrives at the door of the café, breathlessly late, they go straight to a table inside. Wally waits impatiently for the waiter to take their order and leave.

  “Rosza has confirmed Herr K.’s — or Herr Zellenka’s — alibi for the night of the murder. They were together. Of course, she didn’t really understand the significance of what she’d said. I didn’t let her know I wanted the information. I was very roundabout, that’s the English word for it.”

  “They were together the entire evening? You’re certain she was telling the truth?”

  “That’s what she said. Why would she lie to me? There’s no reason.”

  Erszébet heard what Wally said, but she wonders how carefully the girl listened to Rosza. It isn’t a young person’s skill.

  “But how did Rosza seem when she told you her alibi?”

  Wally shrugs. Seem? Does that mean she wasn’t telling the truth? Rosza did have a wariness about her. Her impression of the woman was set by their first encounters, as she followed her, watched her in the Volksgarten. Rosza as quarry. She remembers her inscrutable face as she read Egon’s character with the tarot cards. Wally sensed her hidden pleasure in revealing his misfortune, like the sharp glint of a gold thread in a piece of embroidery.

  And what about Otto, Erszébet asks. Did Rosza have any useful information about him? Why he was sent away so quickly?

  “I didn’t ask her about Otto,” Wally says stiffly. “She would have been suspicious. How would I have known Dora had a brother when Rosza didn’t mention him?”

  Though Erszébet nods reassuringly, Wally feels as if she’s failed her somehow.

  The waiter brings more coffee, a second Kapuziner for Erszébet, and a Böhmische dalken pastry with plum jam.

  Erszébet proposes they immediately proceed to the Kinderklinik, where Otto is being treated. The tubercular children under Professor Piquet’s care live on top of the building, even sleeping outdoors with only a canvas roof overhead and a single extra blanket on their beds. Piquet believes exposure to the cold builds the body’s resistance to tuberculosis. He prescribes no medicines.

  They get off the tram at Währinger Strasse and walk through an undistinguished neighborhood. The Kinderklinik is an imposing building, eight stories high, and Wally and Erszébet can just see the tips of the trees on the roof from where they stand on the sidewalk.

  They had previously rehearsed their imposture. Erszébet snugs her furs up around her neck and face, so she’ll be unrecognizable. Wally copies her, wrapping her thin scarf over her chin.

  Inside the Kinderklinik, Erszébet introduces herself as Otto’s mother to the receptionist, a harried woman with thick round glasses. She is clearly irritated at the urgency of Erszébet’s concern for her sick son. Without glancing up or stopping her pencil, she says they must wait to speak with a doctor before seeing Otto. This is an infectious place, she mutters. I have a cough myself. You can’t just walk in.

  Erszébet motions Wally over to a chair, and when a nurse and a mother with a crying baby crowd around the desk, they quickly slip out of the room.

  In the hallway, Erszébet produces a handkerchief and sets her face with a grief-stricken expression as protection against anyone’s asking why she’s in the building. Wally nervously tries a door, and it opens on a white room furnished with a bed and a table. The next two rooms are identical, a strange contrast to the luxurious carpet and ornate wallpaper in the hallway. Wally is puzzled. She’d pictured rows of cots filled with coughing children. The Kinderklinik seems deserted, a castle of empty boxes.

  Erszébet walks briskly ahead. “Let’s find the roof. The children must be there.”

  They pass through double doors into a dark staircase. Cold air envelops them as they climb the stairs.

  As t
hey step out onto the roof, a huge gust lifts their skirts and Wally’s hat, sending it rolling across the floor, a round black shape. She runs after it. When she stands up, triumphantly holding the recaptured hat, she stares straight at a group of trees, their bare branches hung with silver stars and half-moons twisting crazily in the wind, strangely festive. The children are here.

  Behind the trees, a wall of white canvas strains against the wind. They approach it cautiously, a huge blank shape that is eerily out of place, like a section of a drawing left unfinished. There’s a door in the center of the canvas, knotted with rope at two corners. Wally unfastens the ties and steps into a maze of white tunnels.

  Erszébet follows Wally into a corridor. They move slowly, arms outstretched, protecting themselves from walls that might suddenly become animated shrouds, wrapping them in a suffocating embrace.

  The first corridor leads them into a large space crowded with rows of children’s beds, an identical blanket folded over each mattress. As if sleepwalking, they make their way between the beds.

  “What is this place?”

  Erszébet shakes her head and keeps walking.

  They stop at the entrance of a large dining room filled with small tables and chairs. As Wally moves closer, she sees that leaves and powdery crumbs of snow cover the empty plates, an abandoned banquet, a fairy feast. Wally imagines she’s been transported like Alice in Wonderland. I’m through the looking glass, she thinks. She says nothing to Erszébet, since Alice isn’t a character familiar to her. Erszébet has her own goblins, the táltos, cunning folk, and the szépasszony, the fair ladies, demonical female spirits whose very name is taboo.

  They move silently through other corridors, passing empty rooms.

  The wind is continuous, moving the walls, pressing the canvas against their faces and their long skirts, as if to tangle them into a waltz. Wally flails against the fabric, against its claustrophobic blankness.

  She remembers being similarly unnerved by a yew maze at Somerleyton as a child. The same heavy silence, a strange quality of waiting, of blank suspense. Her mother and father had walked ahead of her into the maze and vanished around a corner. Lost, she began to cry. Where are you? they called, their laughing voices floating over the hedge. Then there was no noise but her sobbing. I’ll tell you how to get out, her father shouted. Stop crying and listen. Put your right hand on the hedge. Now walk forward. Never take your hand off the hedge and you’ll find your way through.

  Remembering his instructions, Wally touches the canvas with her right hand.

  Erszébet is a black shape in front of her.

  Faint voices come from somewhere in the distance. Children singing.

  A small child runs around the corner headlong into Erszébet’s skirt, then falls backward, landing hard on the ground. He starts to cough violently.

  Suddenly a woman in a white uniform appears and picks up the gasping boy. She hoists him over her shoulder and glares at them.

  “No one is allowed on the roof.”

  “But my son is here.”

  Erszébet passionately argues with the woman while Wally sidles around them. The boy gravely watches her over the woman’s shoulder. He coughs up a splot of blood and it runs down the back of her blouse, but by then Wally is already past them, running, losing all sense of direction. She turns a corner. What she sees makes her stop moving.

  Under the open sky, rows of silent children sit at school desks, their backs to her. At the front of the room, a thin man gestures at a blackboard, his breath hanging white in the air. Snow shows where it’s blown across the children’s dark coats.

  She senses Erszébet is now standing behind her. The man waves his hand at them, not unfriendly. The children obediently bend their heads to their books as he walks across the room.

  “Good afternoon, ladies, I’m Professor Piquet. How can I help you?” His expression is guarded, his cold voice at odds with his friendly greeting. His lips purse above his neatly pointed beard. He stands very close to them, his body blocking them from the room.

  Erszébet says she must speak with one of the children about an urgent family matter. In private.

  Wally steps to the side, frantically scanning the children’s heads, searching for the boy. “Otto, are you there?” she shouts.

  A piece of paper spirals to the floor beneath a boy’s desk. Wally takes it as a signal.

  The man moves in front of Erszébet.

  “The children may not be interrupted, even for a moment. This is part of their treatment. You must leave now.”

  When Erszébet lowers her head, his hand clutches her arm. She pulls away, her eyes locked on his face. Perhaps it’s a trick of the light in this shadowless space, but it seems Erszébet’s silhouette grows blacker, her movements deft and quick. You have my boy here. Her voice loud and shrill.

  He hesitates, then grabs her wrist.

  Erszébet shoves him hard against the wall.

  He grunts, then soundlessly falls backward onto the canvas, which tears loose from its scaffolding and folds over on top of him, gentle as a wing.

  A week later, the Inspector comes home unexpectedly early for lunch. He opens the door of the study and finds Erszébet sitting at the desk. Startled, she looks up, and her hand strikes a glass vial that rolls off the desk and shatters on the floor. As if an enchantment is suddenly broken, the fig from Dora’s stomach is transformed into a brown lump, glittering with glass. The sickly odor of formalin fills the room, and they wait without moving, like actors in a play standing in terrible silence onstage, expecting news of a catastrophe.

  CHAPTER 8

  The inspector sends Franz, two assistants, and four boys from the office to search the grounds of the Volksgarten again. The leaves on the trees have fallen, so the branches are sharply outlined in black, like ironwork keeping the sky back. The dense underbrush around the site where Dora’s body was found has thinned out. The atmosphere in the park is tense, a landscape waiting for snow.

  They divide the site into squares and mark it off with stakes and ropes. Franz asks the searchers to remove their gloves and work bare-handed in the cold, so their examination will be absolutely precise. Without complaint, they pick through the leaves and part the grasses in each square, their fingers quickly cooling, thin flesh taking on the temperature of the air.

  They work their way across the area near the Kaiserin Elizabeth statue and discover nothing of significance. Then one of the boys notices a bundle stuck in the cleft of a huge tree, a dark shape like a strange nest. He climbs the tree and carefully retrieves the thing.

  When the bundle of fabric is unwrapped and unrolled on a table at the police station, it is recognizable as a woman’s cloak, its geometric pattern recast into pale, indistinct shapes by its exposure to the weather. The lining is unscathed.

  The Inspector oversees the process of turning the garment into evidence. Under his watchful eyes, Franz carefully examines the cloak, his face crimson. He slowly dips his fingers into the pockets, afraid something terrible — Dora’s missing thumb — might be inside. Both pockets are empty. He’s relieved, but he feels guilty, as if his search was somehow a trespass.

  The Inspector makes a note to contact Dora’s mother, anticipating the cloak had belonged to her daughter. Poor girl, her clothing stuffed in a tree. At least the garment was better preserved in the air than under the ground, where it would have rotted.

  Franz found no bloodstains on the cloak, just a few small tears. There are blond hairs caught inside the collar, and a label embroidered with a stylized rose and the words Paul Poiret, rue Pasquier 37, Paris. He removes the label with a razor and places it in an envelope. The hairs are folded into a sheet of paper. They will be examined by a microscopist for a match with Dora’s hair and scalp. While someone measures the cloak, Franz writes an account of the garment. He has trouble describing its appearance, the geometric pattern melted into stains.

  When the Inspector isn’t watching, he leans close to the garment, hoping to s
ense a clue, the smell of a woman or her perfume, or a dent left by her neck in the velvet, like a ghostly handprint.

  The Inspector paces when he reads aloud or tells a longer-than-usual story. Without looking down, he always steps precisely over the same procession of geometric flowers on the carpet. He reads well, a sonorous voice proceeding back and forth. Franz always associates these extemporaneous lectures with movement. He is accustomed to his supervisor’s habits and is familiar with his path. He cherishes these periods of instruction.

  An impartial observer does not exist, the Inspector reminds Franz. Witnesses are devious. Not from any evil intention, but emotions will always distort a witness’s impression.

  You’ll find the best discussion of witnesses in here, he continues, taking Kriminalistik from its special place in the drawer of his desk. He paces in front of the window, reading aloud from the chapter on “Examination of Witnesses and Accused.”

  It must not be forgotten that a witness, at the moment of being an actual spectator of the occurrence, or at the time of reporting it, is frequently in a state of agitation and overexcitement which leads him to slide easily from one conclusion to another. Once these inductions are in full swing, it is difficult to say where they will stop; and if this is the case with impressions arising under normal conditions, the reality is enormously accentuated when things have strongly struck the sensation and especially that of sight.

  He stops pacing and closes the book. “So you see how a witness can cause confusion? A witness can tell his account in good faith and not realize he’s lying. Better to always have two witnesses, so you can compare their stories. Sometimes even two witnesses aren’t enough. I have a true story to illustrate my point.”

  The coffin of Mary, Queen of Scots was opened in 1830. They found two ax marks on her body, one on the nape of her neck and a second stroke that removed her head. The queen was executed before a crowd of people, and there were numerous eyewitness accounts. Here is the mystery. Every witness claimed they saw her head fall with a single stroke of the ax. Isn’t that strange? The first blow was erased from their memory as fast as the ax fell. The witnesses were all in a state of shock.