by Dan Vyleta
The fingers in his palm were cold and hurt him with their pressure. It was very different from how she’d held on to him the previous night. Beer pulled himself free, took the glass of brandy from his desk and placed it into Zuzka’s hands.
‘Here, drink this. And sit down on the couch. Now tell me what is going on.’
Slowly, by increments, he got the story out of her. She told him how she had gone across the yard that afternoon to talk to the man they had observed; how she’d offered him medicine for his sick wife (‘Medicine?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Colloidal silver,’ she told him, as though expecting he would praise her for the wisdom of her choice); how she had been turned away, rather rudely, but seen enough to notice a body lying at the back of his flat. So she had decided to return, had broken in, in fact, and found a woman there; had thought her dead until she’d opened her eyes. (‘Did she say anything?’
‘Nothing at all. Her back looks like she’s been whipped.’) He refilled her glass and listened to her description of the injuries; the green of the woman’s eyes; the image in some smut magazine she had found lying around on the floor. Even now, in her agitation, she was wresting poetry from those moments of fear, spoke more than she had to, paused for effect. She was less effusive when he pressed her for answers on some matters of fact.
‘How did you get the keys?’ he asked her just now: earned a shrug, a sip of the brandy, the whispered insistence that they ‘must go right away’.
‘But where did you get them?’ he asked anew, unwilling to let the matter drop.
‘The janitor,’ Zuzka told him. ‘I asked for them in my uncle’s name.’
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Does your uncle know?’
‘What do you think, Dr Beer?’
‘And Anneliese? How did she end up in the flat?’
‘I don’t know. I left her to stand guard, and then there she was, all of a sudden, staring at me across the room. Just look what she is doing now.’
Anneliese had been quiet through their exchange, and, turning around, Beer found her, feet planted on the leather of his chair, in a low stoop over his desk. She was holding a photograph, had raised it right up to her nose. For just a moment he wanted to shout at her, tell her to get her dirty shoes off his leather, and impress on her that she was meddling with highly sensitive information. Then he saw the sadness on her face, mingling with the strain of whatever had happened across the yard. He stepped up to her gently, giving her time to feel his presence by her side, then took hold of her by the waist, and gently stood her back on the ground, the photograph still in her hands. Her eyes rose, found his.
‘They take photographs of the dead,’ she complained softly and looked to him for confirmation.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They do.’
‘That’s nasty,’ she said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was referring to the practice or to the images themselves, four human corpses and a dog. She was holding a print of Walter, her thumbs careful to avoid the shape of the prone beast, as though touching it would hurt his soul.
‘Will you put it back?’ he asked her gently.
‘Yes,’ she said, sliding the photo on to his desk. ‘It doesn’t belong to me.’
He reached down to touch the crown of her head, smoothed her hair. ‘We must go now,’ he told her. ‘I need to have a look at the woman you found.’
‘She is beautiful,’ said Lieschen. ‘And ugly. Her back is.’
She reached behind herself clumsily, her twisted spine limiting her range of motion, pointing to her shoulder and the bony ridge of hip.
Behind them, Zuzka rose, placed the glass upon the desk, then walked briskly to the door. Beer followed her along with the child once he had retrieved his doctor’s bag. They walked down the stairs, not speaking, passed Frau Novak, who eyed them with preemptive hostility. The yard was almost dark. Beer headed for the back wing first, guiding Anneliese by the shoulder.
‘You go up now,’ he told the child. ‘You have had enough excitement for one evening.’
To his surprise she did not argue, turned instead to embrace Zuzka’s legs in a clumsy hug, then did the same to his own.
He stopped her before she could run off.
‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone what you saw. Fräulein Speckstein would get into trouble, you see, and we don’t want that.’
The child nodded, gestured for him to lean closer, then whispered in his ear.
‘Zuzka,’ she said. ‘She said I can call her Zuzka.’
‘That’s nice,’ he whispered back.
‘I’m sure it’s all right if you do, too.’
She curtsied, then smiled, then ran off into the house and tore up the stairs with a broken, jagged gallop. They watched her go, then walked over to the side wing, hoping the neighbours had better things to do than stare out into the yard.
She led him up with good composure; found the right key almost at once; locked the door behind them. It was only when they reached the doorway to the second room that she hesitated.
‘In there?’ he asked, then walked briskly ahead. Zuzka followed him. He took his bearings, the shadows so deep he could barely make out the woman upon the bed; looked over at the curtains, gauging how much light they would block. There were three or four layers, some of them heavy brocade. It was unlikely that anything would seep through.
‘Close the door,’ he said. ‘I want to switch on the lamp.’
She followed orders like a good nurse, then winced when cold electric light filled the room. There wasn’t much there beyond the cot and a dresser, just crumpled-up towels littering the floor. He stepped over to the cot and drew up the lone chair; felt Zuzka’s breath on his neck and barked at her to give him some room. Only then did he put a hand upon his patient.
She did not flinch.
He began his examination. From habit, he started talking, asking questions first, then announcing what he was about to do. The woman did not react, though her lids stood wide open, eyeballs travelling to scan his face. She was in her early twenties, malnourished, her skin so dry in parts it had formed into clusters of scales. She was also astonishingly beautiful, pale and delicate, so thin as to be nearly androgynous, small pink nipples rising out of the suggestion of breasts. Only her hips flared, wide and womanly, forked downwards into a pair of long and skinny legs. Slowly, lifting her thighs and the small of her back, he rolled her on to her belly, studied the wounds that were scattered across the white plain of back. He counted three deep sores, one of them open to the bone, the black smudge of dead tissue filling much of the crater. A number of smaller ulcers could be found on elbows, neck and heels; the skin livid there but dry. The woman was wet, had emptied her bladder, a puddle running down the rubber sheet. The smell that rose from her was frightful.
Beer stood up, leaving her on her belly for the moment, walked to the door and switched off the light. The sink was located in the front room. He found a towel, wet one half of it, then returned to his patient, Zuzka watching him with dark, brooding eyes. He wondered briefly what she made of all this, his professional gestures enacted upon another. There was a question written in her face, but she gave no voice to it. She simply closed the door behind him, turned on the light.
Beer knelt and began to clean the patient, starting with the feet and working upwards. He wiped her skin with the wet end of the towel first, then rubbed her dry with the other. When he had got as far as the lower thighs, he felt Zuzka kneel beside him. She reached for the towel, tried to take it off his hands.
‘Let me,’ she said.
‘I can manage,’ he murmured.
‘It’s not a job for a man.’
He wanted to protest, tell her he was a doctor, and married, but kneeling there above the cleft of the woman’s buttocks, he did not find the words.
‘Be careful with the sores,’ he said instead. ‘They are prone to infection.’
He left the room briefly to wash his hands in the sink.
When he retur
ned, he slid the chair over to sit near the woman’s head, then bent forward until he was in her line of sight.
‘I don’t know whether you can hear me,’ he said, repeating words he had already spoken a half-dozen times, ‘but I’m a doctor. My name is Beer. With your permission, I will have a look at your teeth now.’
The drop of one lid was her only reaction. He took it to indicate assent, lifted her head slightly, stuck two fingers through her dry and perfect lips, and ran them through the curve of both gums. Next he forced open the jaw as wide as he could and moved his body out of the light: stared down her throat like a peasant buying a horse.
‘He brushes your teeth, then,’ he said to himself, too softly for either woman to hear. He laid her head back, arranged the pillow for comfort, waited for Zuzka to finish cleaning her up. She took her time: went out to rinse the towel once, switching off the lamp while the door stood open, thus leaving him in darkness, then found a clean shirt in the closet and used it to pat her dry a final time. Beer lit a cigarette and started pacing the room.
‘What now?’ asked Zuzka when she was finally done; coughed a little when a breath of smoke caught her in the face.
‘You must return the keys before they are missed. And make up an excuse why you are late for dinner.’
‘What do I say?’
‘To the janitor? What were you planning on saying?’
She frowned, then shrugged, wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘That it was all a big mistake. A misunderstanding. Something like that.’
‘Say that then. And remind him that he had no business giving you the keys. I don’t think he likes your uncle much. He might be inclined to forget about the whole thing.’
She nodded, still thoughtful, arms locked in their double embrace.
‘What about her? Has he–’ She lowered her voice. ‘Raped her?’
He shook his head, started to answer, then thought better of it. ‘She needs help,’ he said. ‘I will stay here and talk to the young man who lives here. See what this is all about.’
She waited for more, but he fell silent, let her figure it out. At last it dawned on her that she wouldn’t be privy to his diagnosis. Some colour returned to her cheeks.
‘He’s a clown,’ she said, sulkily.
‘A what?’
‘He paints his face white, and puts on black clothing.’
‘A mime,’ said Beer.
‘Yes, that’s the word. An angry sort of man. He killed the dog. He might try to kill you.’
‘Return the keys,’ he said, soothingly. ‘If you like we can talk tomorrow. It’s a Saturday. I can drop in after lunch.’
She switched the light off in a huff and ran out into the front room. There was no need to tell her not to lock him in. She simply threw the door shut behind her, then could be heard making a ruckus down the stairs.
Beer chuckled to himself and sat down near the woman with the green eyes.
‘Forgive her manners,’ he said to her, reaching down to brush some lint from her hair. ‘She’s temperamental, and young.’
He was answered only by a flutter of eyelids. It would have been churlish to see in it anything other than a smile.
Three
Friedrich – ‘Fritz’ – Haarmann worked with a partner. They had met, he later testified, at the Hannover railway station. It is unclear whether Haarmann approached Hans Grans, or whether it was the young man who actively offered his services; certainly he had worked as a prostitute before. A friendship sprang up from these inauspicious circumstances. Within a matter of weeks, the two men began to share lodgings. Once Grans had become aware of Haarmann’s activities, he agreed to supply him with a string of men straight from the trains: young, handsome strays who were new to the city. Afterwards, he received their clothes in payment. There is no evidence that he partook in the murders, despite Haarmann’s sworn statement to the contrary. Both men were executed in the spring of 1925.
During the investigation and trial, much was made of Haarmann’s physicality, his long fingers and soft hands, the full moon of his face. Court records describe him alternately as strong, masculine, and coarse; then as pliant, soft-bodied, feminine. He liked to smoke cigars and enjoyed baking; during conversation he would keep licking his lips. His homosexuality was well known to the police.
After Haarmann had killed his victims by means of throttling them while simultaneously biting through their Adam’s apples, he cut open the abdominal cavity to remove the intestines into a bucket. The organs would follow. Denuding the bones was, by his own testimony, sickening work. He kept the flesh in a wax-cloth bag, and spent many hours soaking up and scrubbing away the blood. Those remains which had no commercial value he threw down the toilet or dumped in the river.
In the years prior to his arrest, Haarmann had worked as a police spy. A psychiatric examination, performed early in his life, concluded that he was ‘eighty per cent incapable of gainful employment’ on grounds of ‘congenital feeble-mindedness’. Haarmann distinguished himself during his military service. His father was an engine-driver. He married in 1900: a ‘large, pretty girl’ named Erna Loewert. When the first of the skulls was discovered, by a group of children playing by the river, the authorities suspected that they originated from the Göttingen anatomical institute. Close to six hundred boys and young men were reported missing in the Hannover area during the early 1920s. Haarmann was sentenced for twenty-four counts of murder. He blinked a lot. His moustache was a light shade of brown. He wiggled his bottom. He died at the age of forty-six.
1
Anton Beer settled in for the wait. He turned off the light, opened the curtains, gave his eyes time to adjust to the spare glow of the moon. His feet hurt from an afternoon of house visits, and he wondered how he would while away the hours. There were two chairs in total, one in each room. He tested both of them for comfort, found them unsatisfactory. They were cheap, barren things, badly put together. One wobbled, the other had a nail protruding through the seat, threatening to snag his trousers. He returned his attentions to his patient, cleaned, as best he could, the wounds upon her back, whispered to her about the therapies he was planning to attempt. There was time, he thought, to return to his quarters and fetch rubbing alcohol, prepare an antiseptic; pick up a cushion, some reading matter for himself. But he was afraid to leave the woman; afraid, too, that the door would bang shut behind him, or that one of the neighbours would discover it open, and run to the janitor. He found himself stuck here, stooped over this silent woman and searching for ways to excise her dead flesh.
‘We might try maggots,’ he whispered to her, bending low so she could see his face. ‘It sounds worse than it is.’
Beer could have sat on the ground, but it seemed undignified in front of a patient.
Once upon a time he had taken well to waiting. Beer thought himself a patient man. It had infuriated his wife, and impressed his professors, the calm placidity of a man of science who understood there were things beyond his control. Now his bladder tugged at him. He did not want to step out and use the hallway toilet and fought to suppress the urge; felt queer at the thought of pissing down a stranger’s sink. He excused himself from the bedside, took to pacing the rooms, found a chamber pot in the near darkness that, once disturbed, grew vivid with the stink of old urine and to which he now found himself compelled to add his own. The noise was loud in his ears, embarrassing; he had made up his mind that the woman next door could hear just fine, that her paralysis stopped at the neck and left unaffected the senses of the head. And yet she couldn’t speak, or felt disinclined to do so; had a cared-for mouth and healthy tongue, pink and narrow like a cat’s. Her toenails had been recently cut. In his brief examination, he had found no evidence of sexual assault.
Having passed his water, Beer straightened, slid the pot back under the bed with a careful push of one foot. There was a bar of soap on the sink, a shaving brush and razor. The basin itself was covered by a film of white grease; the mirror and fixtures rust-eaten and
mouldy. The rag that served as a hand towel bore the parallel lines of a dark stain. Beer stood washing his hands, then took the rag off its hook and walked over to the window, held it high into the moon. The stains looked as though someone had wiped a knife with it: a single movement over a four-inch blade. Even with the better light he could not be certain it was blood.
The sight stirred memories in him, of the photos that lay scattered across his desk, and of other such photos that he had studied in his life; of lectures, heard at the University of Graz, that searched for meaning in the patterns of a smudge. It also worried him: called to mind the dangers of his chosen course of action. In her summary of the day’s events, Zuzka had told him of the stranger’s anger, had used the word a half-dozen times, the tremble of awe lending spice to her story-teller’s voice. And he had seen him, stripped down to his socks, strutting his brash virility across the length of his messy room. If the man chose to attack, Beer would be no match for him. He returned the towel to its hook, and slowly, feeling uneasy about the violation of privacy it implied, began to search the man’s room for a weapon. Beer considered the razor, but found it at once too feeble and too deadly; it would be no help in keeping the man at bay, and might kill him in a single, unlucky stroke. A club would be better, some sort of long stick, but Beer could find nothing with sufficient heft. There was some cooking equipment next to a corner stove, but all of such shabby quality that it seemed to have no weight at all, the frying pan drooping from its handle and the saucepan hammered from a penny-sheet of tin. He moved to the bed, considered the table lamp with its broken, cheesecloth shade; opened the wardrobe to find nothing apart from two cotton vests, stiff with dirt, and a change of underwear so threadbare he could see the glow of his own palm as he ran it through its knit. On a shelf near the washbasin he discovered a parcel wrapped in newspaper that responded to his touch with an odd spongy softness. Disconcerted, his mind still haunted by images of the dissected dead, he carried it to the window; opened it gingerly, a handkerchief wrapped around the tips of his fingers. But all he found was a hunk of smoked fish, the eye staring dark and oily into the moonlit sky. The newspaper itself, four weeks old, was a copy of the Kronen-Zeitung. Its headlines announced the Russian occupation of eastern Poland; the encirclement of Warsaw by the Wehrmacht’s might. The picture of Hitler had been altered by a lead-pencilled squiggle, his moustache grown to resemble Stalin’s Cossack brush. For a moment Beer experienced a rush of sympathy for the fish’s owner, and he felt ashamed of his dogged snooping. Then he shook the thought, and returned the fish; bent low to a box he’d seen stashed near the bed, and pulled a screwdriver from its clutter. It was big and heavy and crude; there was no edge to it, but a flat, rusty head that if need be could be raised to threaten a man’s eyes, or be jammed into the softness of his groin. He weighed it wearily, the oath of his profession falling from his lips.
