The Fig Eater Read online

  He discovers a pale hair under the collar of her dress, and his assistant, Franz, wordlessly holds out an empty glass vial to receive it. No bloodstains are found on her clothing. However, the back of her white dress is stained when they lift her off the ground.

  When they flop her onto a stretcher, Egon vomits. The other men look away. The Inspector also ignores him, but he understands his distress. It’s the movement of the body that sickened him, its parody of motion. He orders one of the policemen to stay at the site for the few hours remaining until daybreak.

  As soon as it is light, Franz goes over the kaiserin’s monument, checking for fingerprints. First he dusts the statue with powdered carmine applied with a fine camel-hair brush. The second time he uses charcoal dust. The same fingerprint powders are also applied to the ornamental urns and the marble gateposts at the entrance to the Volksgarten.

  Franz reports that all the stone is too rough to hold any impressions.

  The afternoon of the same day, the girl’s body is in the morgue at the police station on the Schottenring. The men smoke in the morgue during the autopsy to cover the smell of decay and formalin. The ceiling fan cools the room, but it also sucks up the odor of the cigarettes they exhale over the metal table where she lies. They work in the body’s stink as if it were a shadow.

  Franz takes scissors in slow strokes down the sides of her dress and across her shoulders, then lifts it off. He cuts the thick canvas corset from her waist with a heavy knife after slashing through the laces. It probably took her longer to get into the corset, he jokes to the man leaning across the table, a doctor in a white jacket. The older man is as blond as Franz, but his hair is thinning. His pink head hovers over the girl’s discolored face. The doctor nods without looking up. I think she’s about eighteen years old, he says. The bare room doesn’t hold conversation well.

  Her clothing is dissected, the labels removed. Everything was purchased at good Bürger shops, Farnhammer, Maison Spitzer, Ungar & Drecoll in the Kohlmarkt.

  The unidentified girl is now naked, her head propped up on a wooden block. Her eyes are flat and bloodshot, and her tongue partially protrudes between her lips. The upper part of her chest is the same livid color as her face, and darker blotches stripe the sides of her red neck. The underside of her body is a blurry-edged patchwork of stains. Uncirculated blood has seeped from the veins and settled here, sagging under its own weight, ripening into the deep violet and green of decaying flesh. Over her body, a mirror-lined lamp shade reflects these colors in its distorted curve, an obscene chandelier.

  “She’s been strangled?” Franz asks.

  The doctor nods.

  The Inspector walks in and stands at the opposite end of the table. He imagines the girl’s body is carved from stone and he looks down on it from a great height. This exercise helps him think about her without emotion.

  He watches the doctor wrap a cloth around her head and under her jaw to contain her tongue, close her mouth.

  “How will you fix her skin?” he asks.

  “I can bleach it. Remove her hair, make cuts on the back and sides of the skull and leave it in running water for twelve hours. That will lighten the greenish color.”

  The Inspector tells him to wait. There must be a less drastic way to make the body presentable. He anticipates a mother or father — or perhaps a close relative, since the dead girl wears no wedding ring — will come to identify her.

  Later, the Inspector and Franz smoke cigarettes in the hallway.

  “Thirty years ago, when I was an assistant policeman, I had to take care of the head of a corpse on my own,” the Inspector says. “There was a murder in a remote village, and no refrigeration or ice was available. I put the head in a perforated box and set it in a stream. But first I covered the head with a net to protect it from fish.”

  Alone in the morgue, the doctor removes gray sludge and pieces of more solid matter from the dead girl’s stomach, fiercely slopping the liquid into a metal basin.

  A few rooms away, Egon dips his sketches of the Volksgarten and the girl’s body into a pan filled with a solution of stearine and collodion. The paper will dry in fifteen minutes without changing color. The solution protects it from moisture and the dirty hands of the witnesses and jurymen who will handle the papers in court.

  Later that day, Egon returns to the Volksgarten. The area he paced off is surrounded by stakes linked with string. The excrement next to the body has been scraped up and replaced by a rock with a number painted on it.

  The policeman on duty nods at Egon and idly watches him unpack his equipment. The young man works quickly, with the skilled sleight of hand that comes with long practice. He takes out a small wooden box, a device called a Dikatopter. He doesn’t trust technical devices, although he sometimes straps a pedometer on his boot to measure the distances he paces out, especially on hilly ground.

  He stands with his back to the stakes, looking into a black mirror inside the open lid of the Dikatopter. Fine threads are pulled through holes in the mirror, dividing it into fifteen squares. Holding the box in front of him, he moves forward a half step at a time, watching until the path and the kaiserin’s monument are visible in the web of threads, so he can calculate the position of the girl’s body against these landmarks. He’s pleased with his work, the fugitive images captured in the box like butterflies.

  In the bottom of the box, there is a paper divided into a graph identical to the one on the mirror. He draws an outline of the girl’s body on the paper from memory, and the monument and the path exactly as they are reflected in the mirror above his hand in the lid.

  Light shines through the holes in the dark mirror, and the penciled outline of the body is suspended below these bright dots, as if it had been connected from a constellation of stars.

  The Inspector didn’t sleep the night the girl’s body was discovered. He stayed at the police station, and went home the following evening.

  The first time he describes the girl’s body, his wife, Erszébet, creates her own image of it. She imagines the men standing around the body as if it were a bonfire, a radiant white pyre, its light shining through their legs as if they were alabaster columns in a temple. The dead girl fallen inside their circle.

  Erszébet asks the girl’s name and age.

  “She’s unidentified. The doctor guesses she’s about eighteen.”

  “Why was she in the Volksgarten?”

  “That is the mystery.”

  “She must have been from Spittelberg. Why else would a girl be in the park at night?”

  “She may have been killed earlier in the evening. Judging by her clothing, I believe she’s from a good family. Her murder would seem to be a misadventure or a crime passionnel.”

  “Have you discovered any suspects?”

  “None yet.”

  She nods and doesn’t question him further. She’s satisfied with his limited information since it allows her to produce her own theories. The girl’s body has punched a hole in the safe space that was the park.

  Two days after the body was discovered, the Inspector talks about the girl during dinner, although it isn’t his custom to mention the dead at the table. He asks Erszébet to come to his office tomorrow and bring her paints. This is the first time he’s asked her to help him in this way.

  That night, when Erszébet can’t sleep, she thinks of the nameless girl who has died, whose face she will paint tomorrow. In Hungary, there’s a custom of dressing unmarried young women and girls in white for their funerals, as death transforms them into brides of heaven. The deceased girl is given away by her parents with the same words as a wedding ceremony. Tomorrow, she’ll silently recite an old verse over the girl’s unclaimed body. While I live, I’ll dress in black. When I’m dead, I’ll walk in white.

  Franz walks in front of Erszébet down the hallway in the police station. He lets her enter the morgue ahead of him. The girl’s body is on a table, a cloth covering everything except her head. Her face is still blotchy, the
skin as dull and opaque as beeswax, and her eyes have sunk into their sockets. The cloth around her chin has been removed, and her mouth is slightly open. Her long pale hair is tied back with a piece of string.

  It seems that all the cold in the room presses down against the still face, bitterly sculpting her profile, making it sharper than it had been in life. For a moment the total passivity of the body seems peculiar to Erszébet, until she remembers the girl is dead.

  That’s all Erszébet notices before she turns and presses a handkerchief to her nose. Later, the odor in the room will sometimes return to her, an unbidden ghost, the smell of decay. This morning, she prepared for painting by heavily dousing herself with perfume, touching the bottle’s glass stopper to her wrists and the fleshy nape of her neck. Her hair was secured in its upswept coil with extra pins.

  Now she strokes red, yellow, and brown pigments into a thick smear of white lead paint on her palette until it turns a pale flesh color. Venetian pink. She adds linseed oil and soap so it will adhere better to the cold surface of the girl’s skin.

  She asks Franz to loosen the cloth from around the girl’s neck. First she paints the darkest parts of her face, around the mouth and nostrils, stopping her hand just before she blends the paint into the dead face with her finger.

  She’s been working on the body for nearly an hour when a man walks in carrying a bowl filled with a white paste. He casually sets the bowl down on the girl’s stomach. Remembering Erszébet is in the room, he courteously moves it to the table.

  “I’m Doctor Pollen. Have you finished?”

  She nods and steps aside. He begins to vigorously knead the thick mixture in the bowl.

  “This is my own modeling formula. Ten parts white wax and two parts Venetian turpentine melted together. I add potato starch to make it sticky.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “You could say I re-create the crime in a positive fashion. I can make what’s absent. Someone shoots a gun into a wall, my modeling wax goes in the hole. Then I pull out an impression of the bullet’s passage.”

  She asks if the same technique works for bodies.

  “Yes, but I use cigarette papers. When they’re wet, they’re so fine they pick up the smallest impression, even a knife scratch on skin. To fill deeper holes, like stab wounds, I glue something slightly heavier on top of the cigarette papers. Toilet paper works best.”

  He digs around under the cloth and pulls out the girl’s hand. Because her hands had been so tightly clenched, a small incision had been made at the base of each finger to loosen it for fingerprinting. Now he easily bends back a damaged finger, sticks a little ball of wax over the cold fingertip, and begins to work it down.

  “I’ve made waxes of ear wounds, missing teeth. Even the stump of a tongue that had been bitten off. Mice love this mixture. I keep all my wax models inside a glass cabinet to keep them from being eaten.”

  He curls his hand around the girl’s finger to warm it, then continues to pinch the soft wax up to her second joint.

  Erszébet is unable to move away or even avert her eyes. She stares at his hands, engaged in their task as routinely as if he were writing a letter.

  “Why are you copying her fingers?”

  “I’m not making a copy. First I cleaned under her nails with a bit of paper. The wax just picks up anything left under there. Hair, dust, a thread. Sometimes there’s nothing but their own skin. Or dried blood, if the victim fought their attacker. I suspect that’s what I’ll find here, since she probably struggled to pry the murderer’s hands off. See, she has scratches down both sides of her neck.”

  His fingers press the wax too firmly and it bulges over the girl’s knuckle. Finished with her hands, he sticks a finger into her mouth, careful not to disturb the paint on her lips. With his other hand, he delicately presses a wad of wax over her teeth.

  Erszébet didn’t realize she’d made any gesture, but suddenly Franz is next to her, guiding her into the next room. The light wavers, and there’s a round buzzing pressure in her head just before she abruptly sits down.

  Egon quickly moves his equipment into the morgue to photograph the girl. Someone draped fabric over the block under her head and the metal table to disguise it, and he calculates how his camera can disguise her immobility.

  Later, Erszébet visualizes the strange fragments in the doctor’s cabinet, objects as mysterious and dumb as fossils, reverse images of damage done to a body. There’s a delicate X shape, molded from a double knife wound in a man’s chest. A whitish tube, thick as a finger, cast from the passage made by a bullet into someone’s back. A rough, V-shaped wedge documents a stick’s impact in the muscles of an arm. These are the soft interiors of bodies turned inside out, turned solid.

  She’s familiar with the wax charms and effigies that work magic at a distance. Gypsies twist wax or unfermented, uncooked dough into tiny figures and stamp them with incomprehensible markings, aids made to win love or wreak revenge, for good or ill. To make the spell more powerful, nail parings, pubic hair, menstrual blood, urine, and perspiration are kneaded into the soft mixture. At one time, the lives of the French kings had been endangered by these vols models. In Germany, Atzmann figures were used as evidence in witchcraft trials.

  When she was a child, she remembers a girl burned a scrap of her own dress, which was saturated with her sweat. The ashes were secretly fed to a boy whose love she hoped to win.

  Erszébet knew the boy. When he unknowingly ate the ashes, she watched his face convulse with astonishment and disgust as he realized what had been done to him, what was the bitter taste in his mouth.

  CHAPTER 2

  Three nights have passed since the girl was discovered in the Volksgarten. The Inspector and Franz prepare to take her photograph to the park to see if anyone recognizes her, can give them a name. Then a well-dressed man comes to the police station to report his daughter is missing. Without questioning him, the Inspector leads him into the morgue.

  The body lies on a table in front of them, covered with a cloth. The Inspector gently unveils the girl, nesting the cloth around her head, exposing her painted face. The man stares at the floor. His body doesn’t immediately betray him with any gesture, neither fear nor anger. Only when he steps away from the body does the man look up. The Inspector can tell he’s studying the cloth around the girl’s neck, obviously confused about where to rest his eyes. Since hers won’t look back.

  “Do you recognize her, sir?”

  “Yes. Her name is Dora.” He could hardly answer. He closes his eyes.

  “Is she your daughter?”

  The man nods and blinks. He has full whiskers on the sides of his face, muttonchops in the style of the elderly Emperor Franz Josef, although he is probably forty years younger. His fingers nervously touch his nose and stroke his whiskers. The Inspector doesn’t take his eyes off him, even when he turns his face away. It is necessary that he observe the motions of the man’s grief. He never anticipates that a stranger’s expression of sorrow will surprise him. He is surprised that he continues to find these intimate encounters so unsettling. Pliny the Younger is a comfort during these encounters, and he recites his words like a prayer. Est dolendi modus, non est timendi. Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none.

  Erszébet had recently returned to Vienna after spending the hottest weeks of the summer in Hungary, on her family’s estate. During her visit, two of the servants had been stricken with cholera and died in a few hours. A laundress, a young unmarried woman, was also infected, and Erszébet insisted she would nurse her back to health.

  The girl was quarantined in a wing of the house in a bedroom stripped of most of its furniture and carpeting. A dozen sheets soaked in a solution of carbolic were hung in the room. The odor of the disinfectant was strongest just after midday, when the bedroom was stifling. Because of the heat, Erszébet stripped off all her clothes except for her chemise and petticoat. In this intimate undress, she felt light, free, on equal terms with the
sick girl.

  Erszébet watched her patient night and day, only occasionally relieved by two nuns. The girl was delirious, heavily dosed with opium. When it appeared she was recovering, Erszébet fed her a spoonful of sour milk every quarter of an hour. She watched the clock, holding a glass of milk in her hand. Even when the hungry girl moaned in protest, the dosage couldn’t be exceeded or she would die.

  Erszébet had no contact with the outside world except for the nuns. They gently reminded her to eat. Although she was never afraid she would become sick, after three weeks Erszébet’s eyes began to play tricks on her. The numbers on the face of the clock became meaningless. The hours of the day were distinguished only by the intensity of the sun on the layers of fabric hanging up in the room. Once, the nuns opened the windows, and a breeze swept the sheets so that when Erszébet entered, it seemed the entire room was in motion. She imagined she was on a ship with her mute companion and the sheets that surrounded them were ghostly sails. She was cradled in this white space, wordless silence, and the smell of the girl’s sick body.

  One night, she soothed the girl with a familiar healing incantation, reciting it over and over. Let bone go to bone, marrow to marrow, vein to vein, tendon to tendon, blood to blood.

  When the laundress died suddenly, Erszébet walked out of the room. The hallway, the stairs, the rest of the house shocked her, its profusion of color and furniture, and she stumbled outdoors into a field. She remembered sitting down in grass. She must have fallen asleep, for when she opened her eyes, she was enveloped by a blackness as total as the whiteness of the sickroom.

  When Erszébet saw the dead girl wrapped in sheets in the morgue, she felt as if time had slipped and this was her patient, returned to her. She was cold Lazarus.

  It is still light outside when the Inspector comes home to find Erszébet in the kitchen, dropping csipetke into a pan of boiling water to cook. He sets his hands on her shoulders, and she shakes her head and moves away, smelling the disinfectant on him. Without a word, he goes to wash his hands, having carried the odor of the dead girl’s body across the city to her.