The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta

Author:Dan Vyleta
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Two

1.

Anna left the courthouse by a side entrance and immediately crossed the road to escape the huddle of spectators who had gathered on the pavement, where they stood smoking, exchanging impressions. The trial would not resume for two full hours. Sophie had declined Anna’s invitation to lunch: she had, the journalist said, some notes to type up. There was time to go home, but Anna felt herself drawn to one of the cafés just a short way up the road, in the immediate vicinity of the city hospital. She chose a table by the window and had not yet ordered when she saw the plump, myopic figure of Detective Frisch walk past outside, his daughter in tow. Anna had noticed them at the trial, and now found herself rapping a knuckle against the window and waving them in. Frisch looked up, pale eyes startled in their thick-lensed frames. His daughter spoke to him, obviously displeased by the invitation, and was pulling him along. A second rap encouraged Frisch’s resistance to the girl’s hurry. He entered the café. In an inversion of gender roles Anna stood to shake his hand.

“How do you do, Detective? Please, you must join me.” She pointed at the chairs across the table.

The detective demurred, forgot to return her hand, his fingers moist in her palm. “We only came in to say good day. This is Gertrud. Trudi, Frau Anna Beer.”

It was reassuring to hear his voice, that slow, pedantic drone, unruffled despite his clammy hand.

“I did not know you had remained in town. Has your husband—”

She shook her head, smiled from coquettish habit, then nipped her lip as though to punish it. “There has been no news. Nor of Neumann—the Czech, you remember, the drunk. I have petitioned the Soviet authorities for information. Frau Coburn has a friend in diplomatic circles. It’s all very hopeless. There was another lead, some vagrant this girl told me about, who she thought—But he too seems to have quite disappeared. If I don’t hear within the next month or so, I’ll be off …”

She shrugged, rescued her hand from his grasp, gestured God knew where; to Paris, she supposed, which she seemed to locate just behind the entrance to the hospital. In his pedantic manner Frisch followed the gesture, looked over at the row of squat old buildings with their yellow, flaking paint.

“He used to work right there, you know. My husband. We would meet here, in this café, for lunch. He liked the pickled herring. Imagine living with a man who smelled of raw onion half the time.”

She paused, detected the falsehood in her story, remembered Anton’s habit of brushing his teeth when he came home from work. He had been nothing if not fastidious.

“But this is silly, our standing around like this. Please, Herr Frisch, sit. I beg you.”

While the detective was still making up his mind, looking at his daughter as though to solicit her permission, Robert Seidel passed the café. He was walking without looking, hands buried in his trouser pockets, chewing on a cheek.

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