The Quiet Twin (29 page)

Beer looked at Yuu. It was the first time he had seen the man up close. He was intrigued by his skin, its colour and texture, acne scars dimpling his cheeks and giving them the appearance of mottled wood. The sparse beard contrasted starkly with the fullness of his hair, unevenly cut and shaven above the ears so as to show a strip of stubbled scalp. The eyes were foreign and rather becoming, the elegance of a single-folded lid. Yuu’s brow was bony, prominent, and his whole figure exuded an air of firmness and strength. Beer judged him the sort of fat man whose weight sits in the bones. He might starve, but would never grow thin.

Yuu for his part studied Beer with close attention and was struck above all by the symmetry of the doctor’s features. He wondered idly whether he was the sort of man with whom women fell in love. Other than that he seemed to him a study in pent-up emotion, leaking lightly from the eyes. Yuu was a scholar of the trumpet, and of men. Beer was the kind of man he liked. He carried secrets. Both men removed their hats in greeting. The doctor spoke first.

‘You sent me a note, Herr Yuu,’ he said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.

‘Yes.’

‘I went to the hospital as you suggested. They told me a man left an unconscious girl in the waiting room two days ago and then ran off. One of the nurses said she remembered he was foreign. When pressed, she indicated there was a slant to his eyes.’

Yuu nodded, his hat in his hands. ‘Is the girl well? There was blood on her clothing, and on her face.’

Beer ran a hand through his hair, an elegant gesture, and somehow effeminate.

‘She ran away. Woke up, screamed, and wouldn’t give her name. They had administered a sedative and were inclined to think her stupid. She was transferred – for observation – and then she ran off. An institution at the edge of town. She was not wearing any shoes.’

‘I see.’

‘Tell me what happened, Herr Yuu. She’s all alone and her father is dead.’

Yuu related his story. He had been practising the trumpet, he said, sitting by the window and playing scales. One couldn’t see an awful lot from up here, but the one thing that one could not help but see was the bedroom window of Herr Grotter. The angle was steep, and through the half-drawn curtains all one could make out was the floor near the window and one corner of the bed. The day was overcast, Yuu’s spirits depressed, and he’d registered almost in passing that Herr Grotter was in the bedroom and was lying next to the bed in such a manner that only his feet were visible. Yuu thought nothing much of it. The man was a known drinker and may have rolled out of bed, senseless, sleeping off the liquor. He’d paused in his practice and eaten some boiled potatoes.

When Yuu reclaimed the chair by the window and was about to attend to some further exercises, he saw the little girl, Anneliese, cross the yard. His eyes followed her quite mechanically, and found once again her father’s feet. Only now it struck Yuu that the feet – the shoes – were wet and perhaps bloody. He hesitated until he saw the feet move, jerkily, as though someone was trying to move the body or wake up the man. There was something so unnatural about the movement that he concluded at once that it must be the girl, either pressing against the bedroom door, or against the body itself. He might have remained where he was in sudden horror had not the rain come pouring down just then. It released him and he ran downstairs and through the door into the back wing. The girl came flying towards him in the hallway and quite simply passed out. He bent down to her, found her bloody, and feared she had injured herself. In his initial panic he rang a doorbell on the ground level but received no response. He was about to ring another when he came to realise what the situation might look like. To leave her lying in the dirty hallway seemed unconscionable, and so, not knowing what else to do, he carried the girl into the yard instead, into the steady rain. Had he seen anyone out in the yard, he would have explained everything at once, but there was nobody about, and given the proximity of the hospital he thought it best to bring her there. By the time he arrived, the blood had washed off her face. She was still unconscious but looked otherwise fine. Yuu left her slumped on a bench in the hospital corridor and returned home to his trumpet. He had been wondering what had happened to her ever since.

Beer listened to the man’s high, accented voice with some misgivings. For all its idiosyncrasies of intonation, it had the fluency of an actor’s. Beer had never heard a foreigner speak the language as well as this, and that alone spoke against him somehow. And yet his story might be no more than the truth.

‘Why not come to me?’ he asked, when Yuu had finished and sat smoothing the crease of his trousers above the thighs. ‘When you found her passed out.’

‘I thought-you were a doc-tor on-ly for the head.’

Yuu put a finger to his temple, the people’s gesture for a madman. Again the fluency of his response grated on Beer; it reminded him of himself, lying to Teuben. There was nothing else he wished to ask, and yet he found himself reluctant to leave, looked around himself, found his gaze reflected in the mirrors. Yuu watched Beer watch himself and stretched his lips into an insinuating smile.

‘I-know who kill-ed the dog,’ he said without preamble, leaning forward on his bed.

‘So do I,’ answered Beer. ‘You saw it?’

‘Yes.’

He listened to the man’s account in silence. It helped confirm what he had surmised.

‘Why did you not tell the police what you saw, Herr Yuu?’

The fat man wagged his head from side to side, as though shaking water from his ears.

‘For the same rea-son I did not tell any-one about the girl. No-need to get caught-up in thes-e things. Not as a for-ei-gner. The police learn every-thing any-way. Soon-er or la-ter.’

‘Not everything,’ said Beer. ‘Some secrets live right under their noses.’

He paused, weary, cast his eyes down on the table. ‘Play something for me,’ he added, pointing to the trumpet. ‘Something quiet.’

Yuu nodded, and gestured for Beer to pass him the case. He watched Beer eagerly while he attached the mouthpiece, then warmed it in one fist. ‘It-is an an-cient instru-ment. Did you-know the Egyp-tians played?’

‘Please,’ said Beer. ‘No lecture on the trumpet. Just play.’

And Yuu did, strains of Händel rising from his horn. Beer listened for a quarter of an hour, unmoved, unmoving, fingers folded in his lap, then suddenly leapt up and ran out of the room without uttering a word. Yuu looked after him, still playing, double-tonguing arpeggios to the rhythm of his receding steps.

Chapter 6

As Beer sat listening to Yuu’s playing, a strange agitation took hold of him. The numb restraint that had helped Beer through the day dropped away from him and was replaced by a manic sort of energy, inarticulate and hostile to all thought. He ran out, possessed by the need to be by Eva’s side, then faltered before he reached the door to his bedroom that was now her sick chamber. Beer dived into his study instead, found his desk littered with photos, dead bodies staring up at him, heads and limbs outlined by blood. He poured a brandy, sat smoking with the snifter in his hand. A fleck of cigarette ash fell into the glass, hung suspended in the liquid. He sent a finger to its rescue, watched the laws of optics break it at the knuckle, the liquor burning on his skin. A noise startled him: he pushed back the chair, ran into the corridor, stood dog-like, his head cocked to one side, limbs unmoving, in the stillness of the hunt. It was not the first time he’d thought he could hear Eva shift within her room. She had woken him, two nights ago, and he had lain there on the couch, fully expecting her to float into the room, his wife’s lace gown too large for her and tripping up her little feet. Angry now, elated by this sudden clarity of anger, he stormed into her room. The open door threw a shaft of light across the bed. It found the outline of her buttocks and her upper thighs, stiff under the whiteness of the sheet. Deflated, unwilling to abandon his suspicion, he scanned the features of the bedding. Her pillow seemed more crumpled to him than he had left it, the folds around her feet more pronounced and as though recently disturbed. He pounced, dug out her foot, held on to it in search of warmth brought on by recent movement. How often, he wondered, had Otto stood like this, one foot between his angry hands, begging her to be a fraud, or stuck a needle through the surface of her skin just to see if she might flinch? He moved around to the side of the bed, found her face, her green eyes open to his stare.

‘Are you awake?’ he asked, too loud for the room.

She waited a heartbeat before she winked: from tiredness, or from flirtation, or because her sickness had long hollowed her into a cretinous shell.

‘I saw Teuben today. The detective.’

She closed her eyes.

‘He wants a date.’

The phrase appalled him. He wished to see her cry, a sob to rend her listless chest, but all she did was lie there, breathing, eyeballs roaming under her thin lids. She gave no reaction when he dropped his face into the scraggy, inch-long stumps of unwashed hair and rooted around for a place to press his lips. He thought he loved her, but even this seemed false to him, devoid of focus and desire, and he quickly stood to turn her and to change her diaper, his movements gentle, absent, disconnected from his rage.

Two hours later, restless, Dr Anton Beer left his flat and headed out to town. ‘Life is short,’ he said to Eva, as he turned his back on her and stooped to retrieve his hat that had fallen from his fingers.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll be back soon.’

On the way down, midway between the third and second floor, he stopped at the large window that looked out on to the yard there, and was surprised to find Otto’s painted face staring back at him through the chill and rainy night. The greasepaint surprised him. It had been his impression that the mime was out of work. Nor was he sure why he would stand there, playing idly with his knife. The tip of his cigarette flared red as Otto inhaled. Beer turned and continued on his way.

Chapter 7

Otto took a last drag, then threw the butt out into the yard. He drew the curtains, turned to the mirror, raised the knife. He’d held it like this when he had killed the man, his left fist dug into his jacket: underhand, the grip reversed so that the edge would point up into the wound; his right thumb pressing hard into its base, splitting the skin, his own blood trickling down on to the handle.

It was just as well the knife was blunt.

He swung the knife on a trajectory that started level with his hip, then curved inwards and up: mimed the impact while his left hand reached to grapple with his unseen foe, fingers curled around the collar of his coat. Up ahead, in the gleaming square of the soap-flecked mirror, his movement made a pretty picture, balletic and savage all at once. Otto repeated the motion three or four times until he was sure of its effect: the weight of the slumping body pulling down the drooping blade. It was thus that he had killed his man.

He supposed that one might kill a dog in a manner much the same.

He practised it: raised his left elbow instead of reaching forward with his hand, to protect his throat from its approaching jaws; slipped down to one knee, adjusted the angle of the blade and cut low into the plain where haunch flows into belly. The furry triangle of its retracted cock near snagged the knife as he cut across. Walter. He’d been a boxer, a neighbour had told him, stood hip-high to his master. He tore upwards until the ribcage caught the ripping blade, then dragged the carcass to one side by its hind legs; bent to wipe his hands upon the matted fur. When he rose again to face the mirror he could almost hear the crowd’s applause. His face was a plaster cast of apathy. Otto folded up the knife, placed it on the sink, then sat down on his bed and lit another cigarette. His stomach was grumbling; he had neither food nor beer.

A magazine distracted him. It had always been like this for him: one thought flicking to replace the next, oil-slick with its urgency and bloated with emotion – Otto Frei, eternal citizen of the now. He snatched the magazine from the heap upon the floor. Dried-in beer had crinkled its pages, made them brittle, a corner coming loose in his impatient hand. For a moment he sat entranced – brow knit, spine rolled forward into itself – by the half-page advertisement for a body cream that guaranteed the rapid swelling of the breasts (there was a drawing there, of a long-haired woman standing in profile, her black sweater rising like a leavened clump of dough); then he threw it aside, leapt from the bed, and planted a handstand between washstand and door. Upside down, face flushed beneath its mask of white, he wondered whether Zuzka would come. Since the closing of the club, she had called on him thrice: obliged him to draw the curtains, then threatened she would scream should he approach. She’d watched him, touched him, told him he stank; had raised her skirt once, to rearrange a garter, drinking in his stare. She said she knew now how a woman might please a man using only her mouth; wrinkled her nose then, in deep disgust. On two occasions they had kissed. His hands had searched her body and had felt her break away; his spit wet on her chin.

‘I mustn’t get pregnant,’ she’d said.

And: ‘Tell me how you killed Walter.’

Always her conversation returned to this, the death of the dog, and then to Eva, whose broken body she thought he had sought to avenge. When she had shown him the article outlining Speckstein’s trial, he had read it first with fear, then with a sly sort of excitement. He knew the story: it had struck him a blow when he was a mere child. Their father had talked of it, a mute, crying Eva listening in. She had still been able to move back then, hobbled along dragging her left leg, one arm dead and falling stiffly from its shoulder. It had been six months since the attack, and they’d had hopes she would recover, though none that she’d agree again to earn the family’s bread. For a week or two they’d followed the trial and their father had kept cuttings in the cabinet drawer. After Speckstein’s acquittal in court and his subsequent resignation from his post at the university, the newspapers’ interest faded, as did Otto’s. He was learning to breathe fire then, and to vanish a canary by collapsing its cage and quickly replacing the dead bird with its mate. It was the year he had started to smoke.