The Quiet Twin (26 page)

‘You aren’t working?’ she asked him quietly when he drew level, taking care not to step any closer. It was to her as though the entire yard was staring at them: had hushed, stood straining, ears cocked for his reply. Otto stopped and shot her a glance.

‘They closed the club. Something about the paperwork. The owner’s been arrested.’

His features reflected deep confusion.

She wished that she could touch him then, just as Beer had touched her a few minutes ago, reach over, hold his hand. They sat like that sometimes, up in his room – tenderly, she thought, his palm in hers – though in his face there often ruled a bug-eyed anger. He shrugged, resumed his journey, then was brusquely stopped by a hand that grabbed his collar and pulled him off balance so that he stumbled to one knee. The hand was large and it was hairy. It was Teuben’s.

If the crowd had seemed hushed to her before, it fell silent now, intent upon this scene of sudden action. The silence spread in quick concentric circles at whose centre fell the pebble that was Teuben’s hand. Only towards the back did the fairground atmosphere continue, were coarse jokes shouted, ditties sung, did people talk to trade the gossip. A ring formed around the four men, Teuben, Otto, Beer and Speckstein. Zuzka found herself in the foot or so of empty space that separated spectators and spectacle, the only one amongst the watchers who knew herself to be exposed. From high above a trumpet sounded, high-pitched, human, like a baby’s wail, then was quickly scattered by the wind. All eyes were on Teuben.

‘Who are you, my friend?’ he growled, aware of the audience, enjoying it. ‘I’ve seen you before. You live here?’

Otto nodded, pointed over to the door to the side wing. He seemed to have immediately understood that the man belonged to the police: did not struggle against the hand upon his coat, kept his eyes away from him, fastened on the ground. It came to Zuzka that he had been arrested before.

‘But how is it that I know you?’

‘I’m a performer,’ Otto muttered. ‘At the Kasperl Club. Perhaps –’

Teuben pulled Otto closer yet, stared down into his face, then dropped his eyes further to his chest and legs, the jet-black clothing of his trade.

‘Well, I’ll be damned. You’re the mime.’

Otto nodded.

‘I saw your show two weeks back. Magnificent. I laughed so hard, I nearly bust a gut.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

The detective’s hand remained on his lapel. ‘But what an extraordinary face.’

He turned to Beer and Speckstein, swinging Otto around with him and adjusting his hand which came to sit behind his captive’s neck.

‘It seems you have an artist living in your midst, Professor. Have you seen his show? No? You should, it’s magnificent.’

He paused, licked his lips, shot a gaze across the crowd.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, Professor. You should have him at that party of yours that the Chief of Police keeps talking about. Some entertainment for the guests. After dinner. Raise the spirits a little.’

Speckstein looked at him embarrassed, gathered all his dignity.

‘I’m afraid there won’t be a party. It might not be safe, given recent events.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Teuben, speaking louder than was necessary. ‘We must keep up the Germanic spirit. Stoic in the face of danger, chin out and
marsch
. Tell you what, Herr Professor, I will see to the security myself. Just leave it to me; I’ll blend in with the guests and nobody’ll be the wiser. Dr Beer is coming, too, I presume – your esteemed colleague? Yes? Wonderful. And a bit of cabaret to go with the dessert. How about it, Herr –?’ (and here he snapped his fingers at the mime).

‘Frei.’

‘Herr Frei. Are you free on Saturday night? For a private performance, I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it’s all settled. What do you say, Professor? A little entertainment for your guests, and Beer and I to make sure nothing untoward is going on. Or are you worried that it’ll be too vulgar? High and low, it’s all a nonsense of the past. There is no such thing as class – only Germans! Go on, Comrade
Zellenwart
, it’ll be a blast.’

Speckstein excused himself soon after, struggling for dignity. He grabbed Zuzka’s wrist and dragged her after him, and was quickly followed by Frau Vesalius whom he ordered to draw a bath and bring his pipe. Teuben and Beer returned to the scene of the killing. The crowd in the yard dispersed after another hour, when it started to drizzle.

Later, the back wing was reopened, the door to the victim’s flat sealed with a wax stamp. It was the night of the 31st of October 1939. When Zuzka sat down on her bed, still wearing all her clothes and shivering from her hour in the cold, her body failed her and she found herself unable to move either of her legs.

Chapter 6

Beer told Eva. He sat on her bed, had rolled her on to her left side, held on to an arm and was massaging its muscles, all the while talking, catching her eye. She blinked now and then, moistened her gaze. He took it for a sign she understood. It was late, almost morning; the doctor looking haggard and worn.

‘So he marched me over to that house of death,’ he told her. ‘No, that’s not true. It wasn’t Teuben who was marching me. I wanted to go, the moment we stepped out into the yard and saw the crowd there, craning their necks. I was just the same as them – I wanted to see first hand. And then I wondered, what if something had happened to Anneliese? Her father was a drunk, you know; she watched him from the window every day. Sometimes, a man like that, he doesn’t need a reason, love will do it the same as hate. For violence, I mean: to do the girl harm. I was afraid of what we might find.’

He broke off, licked his lips, fingers kneading Eva’s skin.

‘On the way up the stairs, I kept calling her name. We were both of us running, Teuben in the lead. He turned once and told me to shut the hell up. Up on the landing, he grabbed hold of my arm. I wasn’t sure then, was he steadying me, or holding me back? We entered like that, walking arm in arm.

‘The door was wide open, the front hallway trampled with fresh mud. You’d think they’d know better, respect the crime scene, but they had barged right in, first the neighbour who had found the corpse – a war vet by the name of Kopp: he was sitting in the hallway on a chair, a leg and a half stretched out in front of him, answering the same questions over and over for different men – then the policeman whom he’d fetched from down the street, wet and surly on his beat. Three leather soles and the rubber peg of a crutch: they had come in together, trailing in mud, and had found a second neighbour who had chanced upon the open door, his hands deep in the dead man’s pocket – looking for his passport, he said, which he read is what you do. The policeman left the two in charge while he went to find a telephone. What else was he to do? Nobody was to enter the flat while he was away.

‘The door hadn’t been forced. That’s the first thing I noticed: that the door hadn’t been forced. I used to study these sorts of things, you know, when I was still half a boy, and anatomy bored me. Kept a copy of Gross’s
Handbook of Criminal Science
by my bedside, read it whenever I could. That’s before I discovered psychiatry. It seemed more elegant than blood-splatter patterns and bullet trajectories, more suited to the type of man I sought to be. I took a fancy to the criminal mind. It led me to Hannover and Düsseldorf, and from there into Teuben’s arms. I should have studied ophthalmology, but then that’s not a young man’s choice.

‘The lock, in any case, had been picked or opened with a key, sometime between four o’clock and six, in the stretch of time when Kopp had left the building to wet his whistle in a bar. He passed a closed door on the way down; found it open on his return. There was some blood near the entrance, looking old, I thought – days old, not hours – though at this point I wasn’t yet sure: two or three smudges just about halfway up the wall. We followed them into the flat, Teuben walking me along, telling everyone I was an expert, which I suppose is somewhat true. The kitchen was a clutter, the table overturned, broken bottles on the floor, and a jack-knife in the sink, five inches long, with a two-tone handle made of horn like you can buy in any old
Tabak
. It was lying on a pile of unwashed dishes. Someone must have picked it up, then thrown it back quite recently. On the topmost plate there was a broken crust of dried-in blood.

‘The man himself was in the bedroom. From the way he was lying it was clear he had been moved. The body was stiff, bent at the waist, its hands pressing a crumpled-up jacket to the belly, black now, sodden, made of wool. I guessed it had been twenty, thirty, forty hours at the most: a body old enough to play host to flies, yet young enough to remain locked in
rigor mortis
, lying in the charnel smell of rotting blood. The strange thing was that something about him – the stubble, the lips, the greasy, thick hair – still clung to the memory of life; he was pale and he was dead, and he wanted a cigarette. That, and he looked like his daughter, the same sort of bones. Teuben laughed when I tried to close his lids.

‘Most of the blood was at the midriff, and there was a cut visible through his unbuttoned shirt. For some reason I kept staring at his shoes. They were house shoes – slippers – made from ancient suede, the leather torn and bruised, soft soles bloated with his blood. We laid him on a stretcher, under a sheet, though he would not easily unbend. It was work and we got sweaty, our shirt-fronts stained inside and out. I noticed something then: that Teuben is the sort of man who does not mind handling the dead. Neither do I, but I’m a doctor. Perhaps I am allowed.

‘Another thing I noticed: there was no hedgehog. His box was in the girl’s bedroom, along with the teddy she carries around, its head askew upon the loose-stitched neck, and I even found some paw marks, it had come to the kitchen and trodden in the blood, but the animal, it wasn’t there, I looked under the beds and under the cupboards and asked the police guard had he seen it scuttle about. He told me there were no hedgehogs in the city. I almost called it by its name, Yussuf, like a dog, to see if it would come.

‘And then there were those footprints, amongst the trailed-in dirt: three sets in all, criss-crossing the kitchen in a pattern it took some time to figure out. I made a quick sketch of them, like the
Handbook
says: spread a piece of paper on the kitchen table and copied down and numbered every stain, three policemen craning over me, laughing, I suppose, though one offered me some coloured pencils he carried in his coat, to give some colour to my art. (I took them and thanked him, and marked red all the blood.) The first set of prints belonged to the man’s own slippers, a broad, flat-footed oval, frayed at either side. He got his toes wet first, then slipped in his blood, moved forward and back in no order I could discern. A dancer might have left a trail like that, or a man fighting a ghost. At one point he fell and left his handprints on the ground. From then on he chose to crawl.

‘The second kind of print was of a naked heel, small enough to belong to the child. It trailed away from the bedroom, out the front door. I lost track of it halfway down the stairs: it disappeared in the dirt. I suppose this means she’s alive, and I smiled a moment, crouching low upon the stairs, my dirty fingers picking at the floor. But where, I ask you, can she be without her shoes?

‘The third set, it was fresher than the other two. There was a single print right near the body, of an old and worn-out boot. The blood had dried by then and barely stained this stranger’s sole. Whoever it was, he noticed it and rubbed his boot clean against the bedroom’s door frame, then left no other trace. The print did not belong to either of the neighbours who had discovered the corpse, nor to any of the police – I lined everyone up and looked at their soles just to make sure. Teuben watched me through all this, bemused. His only words to me were this: “Not a word until the autopsy.”

‘And that’s where I was for half the night, in the basement of the city morgue, washing down a sticky corpse, then cutting him open, who was already cut. We got there late, had waited for the crowd to thin out in the yard before we moved the awkward body, still sitting more than lying on the canvas of the stretcher, the sheet with which we covered him kept sliding to his hips. By ten the rain had washed away the curious, and the men carried him down into a waiting car. We followed. I did not want to go, Eva: I’m no pathologist, have always been clumsy with the knife, but he insisted, Teuben did, stood in the room and threw out the assistants, while I smoked and did my bloody work. For every cigarette I smoked, he dug a fresh mint out his pocket; watched me, didn’t speak or move, hummed strains of the
Horst Wessel Lied
. It was three-thirty by the time I finished: cold out, raining, no light in the sky. Teuben took it upon himself to drive me home, him talking, about the Chief of Police and Speckstein and God knows what else. Every time he changed gear, the engine howled, he drives very badly, stalled the car twice.

‘The last thing he said to me, as he pulled up outside and I got out: “Don’t think about moving her,” he said, meaning you, of course, his fingers clamped around my arm. “If you do, I’ll throw you in jail and beat you stupid with a rubber hose.” He gave me a mint then, and sent me on upstairs. The car drove off and I raced up, to clean you, turn you, tell you my woes.’

He rubbed his face, exhausted, searched his pockets for a cigarette, found an empty packet that he crumpled in one fist.