The Quiet Twin (6 page)

Her hunger sated, she looked under the sink to see how many bottles there were left. Her father got angry when they ran out, and it was her responsibility to look after supplies. She counted one bottle of schnapps, and five of beer; three fingers’ worth of Hungarian wine. It would do, but she’d have to run and buy some more tomorrow after school from the fat, smiling vendor across from the church. The money and ration coupons were in the drawer in the hallway commode. She fetched them over to the kitchen table and counted out how much it would cost, set two pennies aside for a coil of liquorice and three boiled sweets. Her chores completed, she ran into the bedroom where she slept all by herself. Her wooden catapult was there, and the little teddy she called Kaiser San for reasons even she could no longer explain. She curled up with him underneath her blankets, made a cave for herself and her little friend. There she lay and pondered, got into an anger with herself.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ she said out loud and pressed the teddy to her chest.

‘It was only because he said that I was clever,’ she explained to Kaiser San.

‘It wasn’t a lie though, and nothing you have to tell the priest. It was more like bragging because I don’t really know. But Frau Vesalius said it was Shine-a-man for sure.’

She fell silent then, happy she had been able to explain herself, if only to a teddy who she knew herself was not quite real. Nonetheless, she took him along when some minutes later she got up again and opened the door to her father’s bedroom. The room was dusty, smelled of cigarettes and dirty laundry. She wasn’t allowed to clean in there, and felt illicit now, clambering through a pile of dirty clothes and crumpled papers. The bed was as large as she remembered it, the cotton sheet sweat-stained only on one side. The other side was very smooth: was dusty too, it must be said, but devoid of any imprint, as though the mattress here was good as new. At the top of the sheet lay an unused pillow stuffed into a cotton case the girl could not remember having ever been changed.

But she wasn’t there to stroke her mother’s linen, though she touched it briefly, with a timid sort of haste, as though reaching out to pet an unknown dog. Then she fell to her knees before her father’s dresser. Here, under the button gaze of Kaiser San, she opened the drawers, one by one, and ran a careful hand through their contents, a book, some socks, an album of photos. She found it at last tucked into his undershirts, took it out and opened the blade: remembered him holding it, clutching his midriff, its point drawing a dimple in his pale and hairy skin.

‘He wouldn’t,’ she whispered to the teddy. ‘Surely, he wouldn’t.

‘He never ever would.’

When Kaiser San didn’t answer her, she took him into her hands and pushed a finger in the hole where the stitching had come loose at the base of his neck, dropping his head forward, into a perpetual loll. ‘He looks hunchbacked,’ her father had told her, not drunk enough yet not to know what he was saying. She folded the blade back into the grip, then pushed the knife in through the hole until it had quite disappeared. Satisfied, having squeezed the teddy for evidence of the lump, she tucked him under one arm, closed all the drawers, and tiptoed out the room.

It was a quarter past seven. Her father wouldn’t be back for another half-hour. A radio voice drifted in from the window, angry and insistent, and she passed the time in front of the mirror, timing her lips to speak along with the bark. There were gestures to go with that voice, and a rectangle of black moustache: a boy had shown her (furtively, behind a tree) in the schoolyard after class, hands curled into fists and shouting nonsense at the sky. She tried it now, her back bent like her teddy’s, a dollop of shoe polish smelly underneath her nose, and fell into giggles when she thought she had got it right. She would show her father later, and there would be laughter, along with the booze.

Two

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Großmann met his victims in the area around Andreasplatz, in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain. Many of them were women travelling alone; not all were professional prostitutes. The neighbours saw these women go into his flat; none of them seemed to stay very long, though it was hard to say when exactly each had left. In the witness reports, compiled after Großmann’s arrest, some suggested they had seen him with as many as fifty different companions. He offered them lodgings, and food. It was a part of town well acquainted with the idea of trading shelter for the pleasures of the bed. No one will have been surprised by the attendant noises. They heard nothing as straightforward as a plea for help.

Carl Großmann was a butcher by training. He ran a sausage stand at the train station, always had meat. There were only three murders with which he could be charged; a body found still bloody in his bed. One can picture the detective, peeling back the sodden sheet, cringing at the way it stuck to her cold skin. Großmann’s judges had no time to reach a verdict. He hanged himself in his cell on the 5th of July 1922. All this happened in Berlin: far from Vienna, where no comparable figure has ever been tried.

Chapter 1

It was a quarter to ten. She called earlier on this, the second night, and called more fully dressed, in a starched house dress and woollen shawl, her fake pearls sitting dull upon the fabric.

‘Frau Vesalius,’ he greeted her, noting her eyes, her mocking smile, the abject tone that framed her response.

‘Dr Beer. If you please.’ Her hand pointed downwards, into the ill-lit shaft of the hallway stairs. ‘So sorry to impose.’

She turned around without waiting for an answer, and shuffled forward to the head of the stairs.

There was no need for him to fetch his doctor’s bag. It had lain packed by the door the past two hours, and he had bent to retrieve it no sooner than he heard the ring: had worked the deadbolt with its handle hanging heavy from his wrist. All evening he had hurried himself, had taken a hasty dinner, followed by a hasty bath, impatient for the call that he knew would come. He’d gone to town especially to make sure he would not be disturbed, then felt the hours yawn before him like a valley that had to be traversed. He had tried reading, had fetched down a volume of a medical journal that had long called him to its study and sat down, legs crossed before him, on his favourite armchair by the corner lamp. It was little use. All he managed to do was spill tea on its learned pages, and later, having changed his beverage, a half-snifter of brandy. It was hard to tell why the girl’s prospective summons excited him so. Any onlooker might have thought he had fallen in love like some grammar-school oaf, his notebook full of maudlin verse. The very thought was absurd. All it was, he reassured himself, was that he savoured a mystery. Beer’s life had been dull since his wife had left and he had quit the hospital. He had lost contact with a good many friends; some had filed requests to join the Party.

They walked as they had the previous evening, the housekeeper leading the way with a ponderous rheumatic step until he brushed past and took the lead. Once in the flat, he turned to the right quite automatically, and was flustered when he saw the girl emerge from her room. She was still in her day clothes, though the blouse hung dishevelled from the waistband of her skirt and gaped at throat and chest. Perhaps she had fallen asleep wearing it; had emerged now for a glass of water, or to empty her bladder. When she caught sight of Beer, she stopped in her tracks and raised her hands to her hair, as though to search it for forgotten curlers. She had not known he would be fetched.

‘This way, if you please,’ mumbled Vesalius, and gave his sleeve a firm little tug. ‘The Professor begs a word.’

Surprised, compelled, Beer turned his back on the girl. Vesalius led him to the left, deeper into the flat, to a set of double doors that separated the rooms overlooking the main street from the rest of the apartment. Her hand shot up to knock, a flow of rapid little raps that hammered home her delicacy of temperament. Then, not waiting for an answer, she pulled open the door, grabbed the doctor’s arm and pushed him through the foot-wide gap, shutting the door on his heel. Her grip, he noticed, was extraordinarily strong; it stung him through the layers of his coat and shirt. He stood for a moment, rubbing his arm, and surveyed his surroundings.

He was alone. The room was large and well appointed, dimly lit by a six-point chandelier, each limb crested by a yellow, timid bulb. There was a grand piano on his left, and a dining table to its side; a cluster of armchairs underneath a row of windows, closed against the autumn night. Books filled the walls behind him, stood on cherry-wood shelves that rose high towards the twelve-foot ceiling, some four or five hundred volumes by his instinctive guess. He recognised some of the medical literature, long rows of clothbound periodicals alongside the classics of anatomy and aetiology, Benedikt and Koch, Näcke’s
Atlas of the Brain
. There was little in the room that pointed to its owner’s present occupation. A print of Dürer’s
Rhinoceros
hung gilt-framed from the picture rail not far from the settees; underneath it, a serving table with an assortment of crystal flasks, their contents’ amber accentuated by a candle.

‘Ah, Dr Beer. I did not hear your knock. Very kind of you to come at this late hour.’

His host emerged from a door on his left and stood framed by the brighter lights behind him. He made a gesture to follow him into what turned out to be his study; took position not far from his desk, stood upright, shoulders squared and hands raised before him, as though steadying a lectern. He was an old man, gone seventy, bald on top, the face framed by an old-fashioned beard; still had his teeth, yellowed and somehow wet, as though covered by a film of mucus; ears bushy with the steel-wool bristles of old age. Speckstein was dressed formally in woollen trousers, jacket and waistcoat, the tie double-knotted in the English manner, his wire-framed glasses enlarging a pair of kindly eyes; the shoes worn and sensible, signs of fraying at his trouser cuffs and elbows. When he spoke, he had an old-fashioned Viennese musicality that brought back to Beer the Professor’s lectures at the university: the patient fluency with which he had explained his points, the voice making quiet music out of ‘
mons veneris
’, ‘
vulva
’, ‘
pe-ri-ne-um
’ and hardly a giggle from the rows of young men to whom these designations remained mythical, signposts to secrets their hands had brushed in the dim light of some strumpet’s abode. This was before the anatomy room stripped the female body of its mystery: queues of half-grown men, taking cuttings from a womb, their awkwardness now drowned in Latin. Speckstein had no longer been around to watch them then. He had sat in court, defending his honour against some ‘beastly accusation’ as the papers quoted him as saying, defended it in vain as it turned out, and was lost to the profession. It had taken the
Anschluss
to suggest a change of fortunes.

‘Please, Doctor. Make yourself comfortable.’

The old man turned around for a moment to close the room’s sole window, shutting them off from the noise of the street. It afforded Beer time to look around. The room was much like Speckstein’s living room, furnished in the tasteful pomp of an empire now defunct. There were more bookshelves here, a long-case clock, and a gynaecological chair of the type that had been popular in the 1890s: green upholstered leather and ebony leg-rests to assist the parting of the knees; the headrest shiny from long years of use. The desk was strewn with notebooks and clothbound files, the bronze head of Mozart weighing down a sheaf of notes. There was a Chinese vase, chipped at the rim, and a tasteful charcoal nude; Speckstein’s portrait, arm in arm with his mama. Behind them, from the hook on the half-closed door, hung his uniform, like the shadow of another man. Beer found a chair standing near the wall and pulled it into the centre of the room before sitting down. His host, he noticed, remained on his feet.

‘A drink, perhaps. Brandy, or a glass of wine?’ Speckstein gestured towards his living room, then dropped his arm when Beer shook his head.

‘My apologies. You must be wondering what all this is about.’ He sighed good-naturedly, smiled, clasped his hands behind his back. ‘I understand you have been seeing to my niece’s ailment.’

‘Your housekeeper called for me late last night.’

‘Yes, quite right. And your diagnosis?’

Beer shifted in his seat, looked up at the smiling man.

‘I have not come to any definite conclusions.’

Speckstein nodded, raised his hands before his chest, as though soothing an upset child.

‘You can speak quite openly, I assure you, Dr Beer. Do you think she’s play-acting? I tried to examine her myself, you know, but she would not stop screaming until I left the room.’

‘It’s hard to tell,’ Beer answered after a momentary silence, unsure whether he was committing a breach of confidence. ‘Your niece strikes me as the sort of person for whom the real and the fantastical converge. I doubt she is malicious, if that’s what you are asking.’

Speckstein nodded, wet his lips. ‘I believe it puts her under some strain. Living in my house, that is. Her father thinks me an opportunist, and a pervert.’ He smiled at the last phrase, ruefully, but not without a depth of feeling, the smile crumbling into a mask of old pain.

‘You know, of course, what I am talking about.’

Beer shrugged, embarrassed for the old man. Nonetheless he found himself pressing the point. ‘Why did he send her to you then? Her father, I mean?’