by Dan Vyleta
Its aim, it seemed, was to fire the disc past the opponents’ paddle and across the open edge of table while protecting one’s own edge from similar infringement. To this purpose they would aim the disc first at one corner, then the other; would shoot it off the wooden boundary at the sides in complicated angles, or slow the pace to a soft, quiet slide only to double it in the next flick of the wrist. There was great speed to the game, and it necessitated strength along with much skill. The doctor should have thought it ill-suited to a crippled girl.
The child stood perched on a crate, for elevation, or so he assumed. She was a skinny little thing with long blonde pigtails, her feet in gym slippers, their canvas uppers as dirty as her legs. He had seen her before, and now recognised her by the crooked run of her shoulders. The bones of her spine were visible through her skin and the buttoned back of her flimsy dress. Its colour was purple. She had placed her sailor’s collar on a pile of lumber not far from her, presumably to keep it from getting sweaty.
Her position on the box was awkward, tilted, one shoulder thrust forward and her ribcage wedged into the wood of the table. He watched her play and realised with some surprise that she was very good at the game, with quick hands and a quick eye, her pigtails dancing every time she moved the puck.
Even so, she could not help losing.
Across from her stood the old man, a tall, massive figure, unshaven and dressed down to his shirtsleeves and suspenders, a blond man gone grey with his years, the eyebrows bushy around the blue of his stare. He was big-boned and athletic apart from a paunch that hung from his belt like someone had tied it there, a bulging parcel pert with gristle and booze. An open beer bottle stood by his feet. He, too, was very good at the game, slower of hand, perhaps, but astute in reading the movements of the wooden disc, and with great strength in his bony wrist. He flicked the puck across the table, flicked it harder and harder every time, until, finally, it outraced the girl’s defences and shot right across the room into the bare brick of the wall. Then he reached down, picked up the bottle from off the floor, and took a long swig, while the child climbed down from the top of her box, laboriously, and ran to retrieve the wayward disc.
Neither of them so much as glanced at the visitor.
Beer watched them exchange five more points. They were, all of them, won by the janitor, and it made Beer angry, the old man’s lack of kindness as he sent the child scrambling into dirty basement corners or hit her squarely, once in the chest and once on the arm, with enough force to raise on her bicep an angry little welt. The doctor had made up his mind to intervene, or in any case interrupt the game and suggest a gentler mode of play, when the girl finally won a point of her own. Frowning, her lips sucked in in concentration, she shot from wrist and elbow and managed to squeeze the puck between paddle and left-side border just as the old man was closing the gap. He touched the disc but could not prevent its slipping over the edge. It fell on the floor and spun like a dropped penny; clipped the glass of the beer bottle, recoiled, and rolled off into the pile of lumber. The point was greeted by the child with a jubilant, misshapen dance: right there, on top of the box, she stuck out a hip and raised both hands above her head, spun and cackled as the janitor got down on his knees and started digging for the disc amongst the narrow planks of wood, cursing underneath his breath. When he finally stood up, his hands and knees were covered with dirt. He picked up the bottle, took another swig, blue eyes sharp under his brows. His hair was cropped like a convict’s.
‘Twelve-one,’ he murmured to the girl, the lips never moving, the words oddly slurred. ‘Best take a break and see what the gentleman wants. How can I help you, Dr Beer?’
This sudden shift in attention flustered the doctor, as both man and girl turned to stare at him with great intensity. It took him a moment to recall his answer.
‘It’s my fuse,’ he said at last and took his hat into his hands, though he knew it would have done better remaining on his head. ‘The front-corridor light. The fuse keeps blowing. I’ve had to change it three times over, and today it blew again.’
‘I have complained before,’ he added when the janitor neither moved nor professed sympathy, the implements of his game still in his hands. ‘Something has to be done.’
‘I will put it on the list,’ said the old man, not to him but to the space that hung between them, unbridged, unbridgeable, yards of cold air. He produced neither pen nor paper.
‘I will deal with it when it’s your turn.’
‘Very well.’
‘Is there anything else you want?’
And yes there was, but he’d forgotten all the phrases he had meant to use, careful little questions that revealed nothing of himself or his interests, they had come to mind quite naturally on his way down the stairs. Now they were nowhere to be found.
Beer stood and thought and turned his hat in his hands.
The girl helped him, unexpectedly. She climbed down from the crate and studied him with great seriousness. Her movements were awkward, shambling, the head fused to her shoulders in a manner that gave to her figure a perpetual lilt. He had heard it said that she’d been dropped as an infant, dropped from a height that is, and spent nine months in a cast.
‘You were with Zuzka last night,’ she said. ‘I saw you. It was quite late. You were standing by the window.’
She said it quite simply, as a statement of fact, but he blushed nonetheless before that name – ‘Zuzka’ – and the familiarity it implied. He felt the janitor’s gaze upon him, curious now, one of his wrists rising to rub at his jawbone, then higher up, along the ear.
‘A patient call,’ the doctor explained more to him than to the girl, too hastily perhaps, his own voice pedantic in his ears. ‘She has been unwell.’
‘Speckstein’s niece? Aye, I’ve heard such a thing.’ The janitor let go of the paddle he was holding, simply tossed it on the floor, and scratched himself properly now, at the chin and above the ear. The doctor wondered whether it was possible he carried lice.
‘She seemed upset about her uncle’s dog,’ Beer said. ‘Apparently it has been killed.’
‘Killed? Gutted, more like.’
The little girl heard the old man’s answer and followed it with a gesture, oddly assured, as though she had practised it before. She made a spoon of her right hand and scooped deliberately at her midriff, from sternum to pubis, then dumped the contents in a pile by her feet. Standing before him like this, her chin almost on one shoulder, she looked even smaller than during her game, more fragile. Her eyes were turned downwards now, on the invisible offal she had spilled across the floor. Beer felt his own eyes fasten there and removed them with a jerk; straightened up to face the janitor.
‘And this happened in his apartment? A burglar?’
‘No, no. It was found in the yard across.’
‘He kept his dog in the yard?’
‘Why don’t you go on and have a seat, Herr Doktor.’
And so they sat down. The janitor gestured for him to draw up one of the wooden folding chairs that stood piled against the far wall, and brought another, more comfortable chair from the back room for himself. They sat face to face across five yards of concrete, the girl kneeling down between them, gathering the dress around her like a tent.
‘Here,’ the old man grunted and got up again to find a piece of cardboard to slide under her knees. She thanked him very seriously, then resumed her position, spindly arms wrapped across the hollow of her chest. The janitor waited until she had settled herself, then looked up at Beer, those old eyes piercing underneath their brows.
‘So what is it you want to know, Herr Doktor?’
‘Nothing,’ said Beer, ‘nothing at all, only it seems strange, does it not, a dead dog in the yard across. Did he keep it there?’
The old man shook his head. ‘No, he kept it in the yard right here. For the past few weeks, that is. Before that, he had it up in the flat.’
‘Why the change?’
‘That’s what the poli
ce wanted to know.’
‘He got the police involved? How extraordinary.’
‘Yes. Though really, it was the police that came to him. See, there was some fellow got himself killed, the very same night. Knife in the throat, I heard. Not the first one neither.’
‘And so they came to Speckstein.’
‘Aye. Some genius down at the Wachstube came up with the idea that this was why he put the dog out there, in the empty yard. As bait.’ He snorted at the idea, then spat high across one shoulder. Both Beer and the girl watched the lump of phlegm land.
‘And what do you say?’
‘I think it’s because the dog started pissing itself wherever it stood. Pissed in the stairwell half the time. I had to scrub the stairs down with bleach.’
‘He should have had it put down.’
‘Aye, he should’ve. I told him so myself. But he wouldn’t have it. Loved the big brute, past all sense. So he put it in the yard, right there by the tree, on a good length of rope. He would sit with it all through the morning until the sun chased him in. I’m surprised you didn’t see him there.’
‘I hold surgery till after noon.’
‘Well, he was quite a sight. Sitting there in his best suit, on a good chair, too; Frau Vesalius had to carry it up and down for him. A grown man, petting his dog and taking his coffee. Out in the yard! A jacket and tie on him, and cufflinks. It was like he was going to the opera. People would pass and didn’t know what to do. Doff their hats and wish him a good day. The Herr Zellenwart. Some boys took to yelling abuse at him, but he made a list of their parents’ names and that put an end to it.’
‘How extraordinary.’
‘Yes. And then one morning he comes down and the dog’s nowhere to be seen. It was some lad that found him, in the yard across the road. Didn’t call the police, mind, just left it there and showed it off to his friends. Took a whole two days till he heard about it. Speckstein, that is. Frau Vesalius says he went white as a sheet when he finally found his dog. Fell right down on his knees and cradled the bloody thing.’
‘Cradled it? Down on his knees?’
‘Like a babe. Mind, I didn’t see it for myself. Happened sure enough, though. I even had a police detective here, looking sheepish. Said he had never investigated a dog killing before.’
‘How extraordinary,’ Beer said yet again, aware of the repetition, then sat pondering while both the girl and the old man studied him intently. He looked from one to the other, comparing their stares. The girl’s was open, and very serious: it was the face he himself tried to assume when he spoke to a patient about his or her ills. He didn’t think he had ever managed it as well as this, the very picture of good faith, her thoughts a mystery underneath. The old man’s features were less composed. There was amusement there, about the fact that the good doctor seemed so interested in the neighbourhood gossip, as well as wonder, about the ways of the rich; and surliness, too, born of long habit, and resentful now for having been upstaged.
‘And they are sure there is a connection to the murders?’ Beer asked at last. ‘The Fräulein said–’
But at this very moment he was interrupted by a noise behind him and turned to see a man enter the cellar workshop. It was impossible to tell whether the man had just arrived or had been standing outside, in the darkness of the hallway, and chosen this moment to stage his entrance. He was an extraordinary sight, or in any case sick: an emaciated young man, very thin and even somehow physically crumpled, with stringy blond hair and an ill-fitting suit. Beer knew him from his practice. He was a night watchman who lived in one of the garret flats and suffered from chronic bronchitis. Beer had ministered to him twice, both times without accepting payment, and remembered only the man’s anxious talk about his duty: he had refused, both times, to be written sick and had dragged his body over to the warehouse where he sat all night waiting for burglars who never came. Now he gestured to the janitor with jerky agitation, and even walked over to him to whisper urgently into his ear.
The janitor nodded and stood.
‘I’m afraid I have business to attend to,’ he muttered abruptly, then folded up Beer’s chair no sooner had he risen and shaken the man’s dirty, massive hand. ‘A pleasure talking to you, Herr Doktor.’
Beer had no choice then but to walk out, replacing his hat as he climbed the stairs up to the courtyard and the bright October sun.
5
He was barely out when the girl came running up after him. She had retrieved the sailor’s collar and was busy fastening it on, then looked up at him with quiet composure. He’d stopped at the sound of her footsteps behind him and now stood wondering whether she wanted something, a penny or a sweet, and was too shy to ask. Beer went through his coat pockets in search of some money. She followed his movements with open curiosity, then frowned in dismay when he produced his leather wallet. He quickly shoved it back into his pocket and returned his eyes to the misshapen girl in the purple dress.
‘Do you want to see?’ she asked. ‘I know where he was found.’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘The dog you mean? You saw it?’
She nodded earnestly, bending her chest along with her head, and reached stealthily for his hand.
‘It’s right across the road,’ she explained, as though she expected him to be skittish. ‘It will only take a moment.’
They walked to the front door like that: she leading him by the hand, a half-step ahead. Up close, he could see the tendons of her neck, straining again the oddity of its placement upon her trunk. It must be a great effort for her, he thought, even to walk straight. One of her shoulders hung much lower than the other, and the torso stood oddly twisted on its own axis. Her pigtails bounced with every step.
Outside, the afternoon sun hung low over the city, drew long shadows on the cobbles. It was a hot day, no wind, the smell of baking in the air. The light caught the building’s yellow plaster, gave grace and volume to its balconies and decorative mouldings. In the road parallel to theirs, a tram rattled past, announcing itself with the ding of its bell; and as though in response a piano sounded high above them, halting, hamstrung Johann Strauss, soon silenced by a music master’s hoarse entreaty to please respect the rhythms of the Waltz. Strauss returned, stuttered, stumbled, found his pace, and a tit dived chirping from some ledge. Beer smiled at all this and thought that he’d not gone out enough, these past weeks and months: that he had avoided the city in daylight, for no good reason, naturally, and only run out on brief errands in the neighbourhood, then taken oddly watchful walks long after dusk. On a day like this it was tempting to think that the city was as it had always been, in love with opera and a cup of Melange, Kaffeehaus gossip about the latest scandal on the stage. At the end of the street a chimney sweep tipped his hat to some schoolgirls: they cackled and blushed, then scattered like deer.
‘The yard in there?’ he asked his little guide, who was dragging him to a squat building somewhat diagonally across from their own. It was some fifty or sixty years older than most other structures in their street, its plaster flaking, the window frames low and plain and rotting with age. At its centre stood a high, narrow gateway – just wide enough to allow passage to a horse-cart or a car – that extended through the depth of the front building and led up to a sheet-metal gate, near six feet high, its dented surface broken only by the square iron grille that surrounded its handle. The girl led him on, from the light of the street into the darkness of this tunnel, its cobbles subtly grooved by the many wheels that had passed. Beyond the gate – visible to Beer on tiptoe – lay a small, rectangular yard, littered with rubbish and enclosed on all sides by two-storey buildings that housed a row of garages and workshops.
‘But that’s Herr Pollak’s auto-repair shop.’
‘Herr Pollak has left,’ the girl told him as she pressed her face against the grate. ‘They’ve been gone since winter. He and Frau Pollak. She used to give me raisin buns.’
‘Left? I didn’t know they were –’ he started to say,
then saw the scrawl of a symbol across the flank of one building, jagged like a scar. It might have been less prominent had the day been overcast; Beer thought it shameless of the season. All of a sudden he wished to hurry on the sun.
‘Things are prettier in the dark,’ he mumbled, and the girl looked up at him as though she agreed. They stood in silence while the chimney sweep passed in the street behind them, black-faced under the warm October sky.
‘The dog was found right over there.’
She stretched one arm through the bars of the gate, then hooked it into an acute angle and pointed to a pile of rubbish to their right. Beer could not see it from his vantage point and bent down next to the girl to peer through the grating.
‘The rain washed away the blood,’ she said.
‘There was a lot of blood?’
The girl shook her head thoughtfully, made to say something, then sucked in her lip and settled on something else.
‘You want to see up close?’
‘We haven’t a key,’ he said, and for a moment he feared she would suggest clambering over the gate. ‘Besides, it’s private property. We mustn’t break the law.’
‘There’s another way,’ she said, and reached up once again to take hold of his hand. ‘Come. There’s nobody round there this time of day.’
Against his better judgement, he let the girl lead him to a small wooden door set in the side of the short tunnel that connected courtyard and street. To his surprise it was unlocked. Inside, a steep, open staircase led up to the second floor, while the corridor bent ahead of them, turning sharply into the building’s wing. There were signs of a recent fire, and a blackened mattress leaned against one wall. Beer remembered no fire but supposed it explained why the yard remained abandoned: its new owners would have to repair the building before business could be resumed.
