The Fig Eater Read online

  When Erszébet smelled the disinfectant, the scent of the girl on his hands, she suddenly wished to possess her. To understand the puzzle of how her life led to her death. To know her. When she first heard the girl had died in the park, there was something — a needle prick of menace, a cruel loneliness — that was familiar. It felt true as a memory. This recognition startled her.

  At that moment, Erszébet began her study of the murder. She assumed ownership of this second young woman whom fate had delivered to her. It was a private act, a secret pursuit that excluded her husband.

  Months later, she will think of her actions as a dream that she witnessed but couldn’t interpret or claim.

  Tonight her husband has news about the investigation.

  “We’ve found the girl’s family,” he says. “Her father, Philipp, came to the morgue and identified her. I told him she had been strangled as gently as I could.”

  “What is the girl’s name?”

  “Dora.”

  Without looking at him, she whispers the word. “Dora.” She asks how he prepared the girl’s body for viewing.

  “I hid her bruised neck with a piece of fabric. I’m certain the paint you put on her face was a comfort to him, even if he didn’t detect it.”

  He doesn’t mention the unpleasant secrets he kept from her and Dora’s father. The tiny spots that bled inside the girl’s mouth. The fractured bone in her neck. An area of skin filled with red-brown-violet blood under her skirts. The material the wax pulled from under her fingernails, flakes of dried skin and dirt. Nothing he could identify.

  When the Inspector examined the dead girl’s watch, he found a minute dark smear on the crystal. To preserve the stain, he pressed a moist square of filter paper against it, waited a moment, then transferred the paper to a sheet of glass painted with gum arabic. When a sliver of the stain was immersed in a saucer of bezidene reagent, the opaque whitish liquid sluggishly turned blue, which indicated the presence of blood.

  If he were lucky, further tests might identify the blood type. It had been only seven years since the professor at the Institute of Hygiene in Greifswald discovered that human blood could be distinguished from animal blood. However, not all magistrates would admit this as evidence in a murder trial.

  After the clothing was stripped from Dora’s body in the morgue, each garment was dropped into a separate paper bag. Franz glued them shut. Her clothing wasn’t mentioned again until the Inspector handed Franz one of the thick paper bags in his office.

  “Is this Dora’s dress?”

  The Inspector nods and walks across the room to get his walking stick. Puzzled, Franz watches as he comes back and stands in front of him, holding the stick like a club over his shoulder.

  Now Franz, I want you to hold the bag steady in front of you, he says. Hold it away from your body. Hold it out a little farther. Don’t move. He swings the walking stick and strikes the bag. He hits it again and again until the bag is creased and battered. Smiling, he thanks Franz and asks if he felt like William Tell’s son. Franz’s face fills with color; he has a blond’s easy blush.

  Mystified, he helps the Inspector spread huge sheets of white paper over the carpet. They cut the bag open and gently lift out Dora’s dress, each of them holding a sleeve, as if they’re dancing with a scarecrow.

  “Shake the dress over the paper. Carefully.”

  Dust, threads, and tiny particles twirl and drift from the dress down onto the papers, a miniature windstorm. The Inspector kneels and gently folds up the papers, then slips them into a large envelope and seals it.

  Franz raises his eyebrows. “Sir?”

  “I’m collecting dust. It will reveal Dora’s history while she wore the dress. Where she went, if she sat on a bench or the grass. If her skirt brushed against the roses in the Volksgarten. We’ll scrape her boots later.”

  The Inspector used the same technique on a jacket found at another crime scene. A chemical examiner analyzed the dust harvested from the garment and identified it as finely pulverized wood, so it must have belonged to a carpenter or a sawmill worker. The Inspector requested a more detailed report. The second investigation showed gelatin and powdered glue mixed with the sawdust. The Inspector reasoned the jacket must have belonged to a joiner, and he was later proven right.

  In 1898, the Inspector had traveled by train to Czernowitz, to attend the lectures of Professor Hans Gross, the author of a number of books, including System der Kriminalistik, the first psychological study of crime. Gross was also an associate of the renowned German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, director of the public insane asylum in Graz.

  It was Gross’s theory that a crime was a scientific problem, an organization of facts committed by criminals who were morally shipwrecked. Solving a crime required the Investigating Officer to determine the error in the situation. In his published works, Gross covered such topics as “The Self-Mutilation of Hysterical Criminals,” “Arson and Homesickness,” and “Experimental Contributions on the Fauna of Corpses.”

  At the Inspector’s request, Franz continually memorizes paragraphs from Kriminalistik. The younger man recognizes this discipline as an important part of his training. Today the lesson from the book concerns the characteristics of an Investigating Officer.

  Tact — that faculty which nothing can replace — to light instinctively upon the best way to set to work, is a natural gift. Whosoever does not possess it will never make an Investigating Officer, though he be endowed a hundredfold with all the other necessary qualities; with the best intentions in the world, he will stumble against everything without discovering anything; he will intimidate the witness who wishes to give him important intelligence; he will excite the babbler to babble still more; he will encourage the impudent, confuse the timid, and let the right moment slip past.

  Egon unpacks his camera in the Volksgarten, in the same place where Dora’s body was found. He works quickly; it is almost dusk. At this hour, there are no sightseers or children in this secluded corner of the park.

  Tonight he works without artificial light, since the image he wants to capture is too delicate.

  He hopes the picture will reveal something magical, intangible, hidden from the eye. As an artist holds a mirror up to a portrait to find its unsuspected faults, which become obvious when the painted image is reversed. He hastily unscrews the camera tripod, tip-tilting the legs into the grass. Three short poles lengthened, made even. In secret, he’d marked the spot where Dora’s body lay, hammering small sticks so deeply into the ground they’re invisible. He presses his fingers into the grass, feeling for these guides, like broken teeth.

  Now he aims the crossed lines of his lens between these sticks. Grass is the image on the glass plate, tight, tiny spears pinched into focus. He pulls the black cloth off his head and squats next to the camera, positioning himself so he can see what its glass eye sees, fixing his eyes on the ground. He waits, anticipating the dead girl will materialize. The grass will change color blade by blade, gradually transforming itself into her image, as a photograph develops in a tray. Or perhaps her last breath still hangs in the air, a ghostly vapor that can be captured in the same way a photograph freezes an invisible motion into a visible blur. A postmortem clue. Message in a bottle.

  As he presses the shutter release in his hand, the lens opens and closes so slowly his heartbeat seems to expand, connected to the camera. An audible click.

  There are spiritualist mediums in Paris and London who can call forth the dead during séances. He’s seen harsh pictures of a female medium, her head thrown back in a trance, eyes vacant. The dead hovered behind her as a white light, a disembodied hand, and a sexless figure in translucent rags. In other photographs, invisible spirits that made their presence known as a cold breeze were documented as the blurred motion of a curtain, and the indistinct line of a woman’s skirt. He sensed the photographer who took these pictures was uneasy, didn’t know where to fix the camera, unable to anticipate which object might suddenly become pos
sessed by a spirit.

  From experience, Egon knows that rooms, houses, certain places in the landscape, retain an insidious presence if they have been the setting for a violent crime. Objects and clothing too. He’s seen clothing taken from a murder victim shape itself into a mute gesture as surely as it stank with blood. The night he photographed Dora’s body in the Volksgarten, the wind suddenly blew her thin skirt across her legs, even though he was certain he’d set a weight on the fabric to hold it down. Her clothing was blurred in several of his photographs. He was unnerved.

  Once during a police search, a drowned body had risen from a lake exactly where he was looking. Believing he’d willed the corpse to surface before his eyes, he was so shaken he forgot to trip the camera shutter. Another time, he photographed a document — a suspected forgery — by gaslight. The finished picture showed two different values of ink, the original gray and the false black, which appeared similar to the naked eye. See, nothing can hide from the camera, he told the Inspector. This is just another type of ghost.

  It is darker now. Twilight turns the trees and shrubbery around him hazy, and the same gray clouds his camera lens. He anxiously scans the ground, waiting, watching. Nothing. He swears the grass has a different quality where his lens is focused on it.

  He puts the black cloth over his head and bends over behind the camera. The glass plate reflects a rectangle of grass, an upside-down image. A pair of white boots overhung with a skirt walk into the bottom of the picture frame.

  “Get out of the picture.” His shout is muffled by the cloth.

  The skirt and feet float away. He cranks a knob on the side of the camera. In one motion, he plucks the cloth off his head, stands up, and squeezes the shutter release. There’s a gratifying mechanical noise. Click.

  A woman, a stout Viennese matron, watches him from a few feet away. She swings a closed parasol until the younger woman next to her gently stops its movement with her hand. She quietly says something to her; he can’t understand her words. He nods at them, politely dismissive. He expects them to courteously vanish. They probably came to the Volksgarten to stare at the site where the girl’s body was found. A homicide in Vienna is a rare and extraordinary event. When photographing other locations for the police, he has often worked in front of a whispering crowd, his presence sometimes the only perceptible proof of the crime.

  The younger woman walks toward him. Her silhouette is ungainly; her clothing is oddly cut. Perhaps foreign. The veil of her straw hat is carelessly pulled back over the brim, exposing her face and her dark hair. She frowns at him.

  “Why are you photographing the grass?”

  “I’m documenting the site. Don’t walk there, Fräulein. It’s bad luck. Someone died on that spot.”

  “We know all about it.”

  Her accent is English. An Austrian girl wouldn’t start a conversation with a stranger. She steps around the place where the girl’s body had lain and stops next to his camera. He moves to guard it, the black cloth hanging off his shoulder.

  “We wanted to see this place. What it was like. Erszébet can sense things,” the girl says, gesturing at the older woman waiting impassively behind her. “Are you here on official business?”

  “I work for myself.”

  He ducks back under the cloth to close the lens. It’s no use working if women are around. He makes a strange figure, like a child hiding, his head and shoulders covered by the dark cloth, his two thick legs and the camera’s three thin legs underneath. He asks if she was a friend of the dead girl who had been found there.

  “Yes, I knew her. I’d rather come here than visit her in the cemetery. My name is Wally.”

  Wally lies. We could have been friends, she thinks. No, I consider myself her friend, since I’m trying to help her.

  Irritated, Egon quickly unlocks the metal hinges of the tripod. The gleaming wooden legs snap together smoothly; it’s an expensive instrument, French made. She senses his pride in the camera. It makes him seem older, even though his fair hair has been ridiculously mussed by his encounter with the camera cloth.

  “You must be shocked about what happened to your friend. You aren’t afraid to come here?” he asks.

  She shrugs. “Afraid? Afraid of what? There’s nothing frightening here in the park. Nothing waits here. It isn’t haunted.”

  The three of them walk through the Volksgarten, passing the Temple of Theseus and a pavilion where hundreds of couples waltz to a military band on some afternoons. Typically, the program includes Schöne Edi by Strauss.

  They decide to have coffee in the pavilion. Egon moves awkwardly across the room, maneuvering his satchel and the tripod around the tables and chairs. He sits between Erszébet and Wally, his equipment occupying the empty chair at their table like a fourth guest. Both women smoke furiously, sharing Egyptian cigarettes, barely touching their Indianerkrapfen cake.

  In this light, he’s startled by the color of the older woman’s eyes, a fierce and icy pale blue that gives her face a peculiar fragility, as if there is glass, not bone, beneath her skin. Erszébet makes him uncomfortable. She kindly asks what kinds of pictures he takes.

  “I photograph landscapes, I take portraits. I do what pleases me. I have my own photography business in a studio near the Graben.”

  The women listen politely, but their eyes watch his hands grip the coffee cup. Half of the third and fourth fingers on his left hand are missing. The fifth finger on his right hand is also damaged. It has no fingernail, just a snug, dark welt, so the fingertip resembles a narrow flower bud.

  He holds both hands out in front of them, very matter-of-fact.

  “My lightning powder blew up when I was taking a photograph. I accidentally left a few grains of powder on the rim of the container. Sulphur and saltpeter, the same powders used for fireworks and bombs. When I screwed the lid on, the jar exploded. I’m lucky I didn’t lose my entire hand.”

  He doesn’t mind talking about it. He spreads his mutilated hands on the tabletop.

  “I don’t notice it much anymore. Although sometimes the missing parts of the fingers feel as if they’re being pinched. It’s strange, but in my dreams my hands are always whole.”

  Wally is fascinated by his damaged fingers. She doesn’t look away, even when he addresses a question to her.

  “Do you visit the park very often?”

  “I’m a governess. The children I take care of come to the park with me nearly every day. They’d be here now, but they’re in the country.”

  “Are you from London?”

  “Yes.”

  Erszébet abruptly changes the subject. “Did you ever meet the girl who was murdered?”

  He shakes his head, wanting to learn what she knows.

  “Why were you photographing the place where they found her body?”

  “Idle curiosity. What was the girl’s name?”

  “Dora. They said some strange animal may have attacked her.” Erszébet watches him as she speaks, but the image she sees is Dora’s face, colorless under the light in the morgue.

  “She was attacked by animals? Surely this is impossible in Vienna.”

  His surprised reaction to her news is genuine. He imagines the girl’s ravaged body, the marks left by animals in the soft skin underneath her skirts. He sees this picture in black-and-white. Sometimes he can visualize images without color, a strange talent his photography has encouraged. He knows there are people who have never seen a face without its color.

  He smiles at Erszébet, catching her quick sideways glance at Wally before her eyes meet his. She reassures him that this information about Dora comes from a very good source. Her words don’t dispell his misgivings. He senses something has been held back, as if he’d heard a door slam and then silence, no angry words or footsteps.

  The next day he suddenly recognizes the older woman. He remembers her in a white room, wearing a white smock. Erszébet, the police inspector’s wife. She was in the morgue painting Dora’s face for his photograph. She did
n’t seem to recollect meeting him. He wonders about her relationship with her young friend, Wally.

  After he left their table in the pavilion, Erszébet turned to Wally.

  “You did well to lie to him about your friendship with Dora. He’ll be more useful to us if he believes that is our motive.”

  The girl is pleased by her praise. “I almost lost my nerve. He seems kind.”

  “Don’t tell him too much. He thinks he’s an artist.”

  The week after Dora’s body was identified, the Inspector makes an unannounced visit to Dora’s family. They live in Alsergrund, the Ninth District, a respectable section of Vienna.

  He finds the house unlocked, although there is no concierge. He studies the stained-glass window set in the door before he cautiously opens it. Inside, his footsteps echo until he stops in front of an elaborate staircase that rises through the center of the house.

  He senses something move. Two legs are visible on the third-floor landing. He cranes his neck and calls up to him.

  “Good day. Is your mother at home?”

  At the sound of his voice, the boy runs away. In a moment, he returns to the landing accompanied by a woman. All the Inspector can see are the flounces on the bottom of her long dark skirt next to the child’s legs.

  “I’m the Inspector from police headquarters. May I speak with you? If this is a convenient time?”

  She doesn’t answer but descends the stairs, the heavy trim on her dress trembling with each step.

  When she sits across from him in the drawing room, he can see the shadows under her eyes and the curved lines beside her mouth, swags of grief. Although she possesses a grave self-sufficiency, her eyes are vague and unfocused. He believes it is terrible to study a stranger’s mourning, but he must let this sentiment go in order to proceed. He looks her in the eye and puts pity out of his mind, everything except how she answers his questions. Sometimes as an exercise, he’ll focus on the hidden patterns in a painting, squinting to cancel out the images so the hidden dark and light shapes will emerge.