The Quiet Twin

by Dan Vyleta

  He retrieved a number of loose pages from his jacket pocket, unfolded them.

  ‘Anton Beer, thirty-four. Denomination: Catholic. Six semesters of law, before switching to medicine. Summa cum laude. Three years in Germany, it says here, before we became Germany, that is. Hannover and Düsseldorf, a stint in Berlin. In-depth studies of the Haarmann and Denken cases – you had to go north to find a murder you liked, it seems; our own were too boring for you. A paper on Kürten and dog slaughter. Ground-breaking, in the Professor’s words. Wife in Switzerland, taking the waters. Either she or you were screwing someone else, I suppose. Voluntary resignation at the hospital. A lot of praise there, though your political outlook is described as “backward”; a humanist, I am told, even somewhat to the left. The words of a jealous colleague, perhaps – short man, cheeks like a pig, the sort of man that’s always sweating. What else? The Chief of Police calls me personally last night, tells me to involve you, no holds barred, and can I kiss his ring while I’m at it? You know’ – he stopped himself, took a sip of the coffee, his thin lips looking very red against the china – ‘if I wrote all this up in a report, you’d make a lovely suspect.’

  Beer sat quietly throughout the man’s speech, observed his impertinence, the lack of movement while he spoke. The man did not shift in his chair, nor move his arms; did not gesture or rush his words but simply sat, with his flat little eyes, the papers spread out on the desk before him. When he raised the coffee cup, the liquid inside barely quivered; he returned it to the saucer without a sound.

  ‘Well, Dr Beer, I see you’ve studied the files. What’s the verdict?’

  Beer sighed, shook his head. ‘I’m hardly competent to comment on police matters.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the detective, and a smile broke on his drawn-on mouth. ‘The Professor warned me that you were a coward. Circumspect. That was his word. “He must be pushed to get involved.” A fair assessment, would you say?’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘He passed on his notes; writing as a Zellenwart, that is. He even has a little file. “Anton and Gudrun Beer.” Nothing much in it, I’m sad to say.’

  He picked through the papers in front of him, located a torn-off sheet on which he had scribbled three or four comments.

  ‘ “Humanist in internal emigration. No suspicious activities. Receives visitors all times of day and night. Not unusual for a doctor. Works in self-imposed obscurity.” A little vague, don’t you think? What sort of visitors, of what sex, how many, when? I mean if we are going to spy on you, we should do it properly. The problem with a man like Speckstein is that he’s a creature of the Empire. He’s in the Party, of course – since ‘37, or so he claims – but not of the times. Even the name, Speckstein. Sounds Jewish, don’t you think? It can’t be, of course, not for five generations, but then again, you never know. And that niece of his! A neurotic, I understand. Father a country lawyer, married a Czech girl, beneath himself. A romantic. That may explain it. The neurosis, I mean. Slavic blood and too much poetry. Or don’t you hold with race science, Dr Beer?’

  Beer sat through all this, wondering how much more it would take to push him from irritation to rage. He was not a man much prone to anger, but here he was, something dreadful rising in his chest. He drank some coffee, held it in his mouth as long as he could, then launched into a summary of the files.

  ‘Four murders, Herr Teuben. The first victim male, twenty-two, member of the SS and recently arrived from Linz. Found leaning against an oak tree in Josefstadt, stabbed through the eye with an oblong, pointy object such as a fencing sword or bayonet. Right-handed assailant, a single clean thrust, and a very shoddy autopsy report. The blade penetrated deep into the frontal lobe and left a mark on the interior wall of the left parietal bone. No other signs of trauma. No wife, no enemies, though a witness mentions gambling debts.

  ‘Second victim, electrical engineer, forty-one, active in the Labour Front. Suspected homosexual. Blunt-force trauma to head, torso and lower body. One arm broken, heavy bruising down one shin. Also an irregular stab wound just above the pubic bone, some glass splinters found during autopsy. The body was found in some bushes near the hospital gardens, probably dragged there from a nearby location. Had his wallet in his pocket, twenty marks and change, and a folded picture postcard of a parakeet.

  ‘Third victim, a young woman, subject to sexual assault, found naked in a factory yard near the Jörgerbad swimming baths. Death by asphyxiation with some sort of strap. Several abdominal wounds, caused by a small knife, post-mortem. The girl was sixteen, wore a BDM uniform; father apolitical, a drug-store clerk, mother a housewife with an older brother who’s been a Party member since 1931.

  ‘Fourth victim, a university student of law, twenty-four years of age. Found stabbed in an alley near the Gürtel, not half a kilometre from here. Six wounds, in the chest and neck, a four-inch blade, swung from below and from the side. Punctured carotid artery. Additional facial wounds caused by a blunt object, probably a boot. Member of the Teutonia fraternity prior to Gleichschaltung; Party application pending. A Hernals boy, upwardly mobile; the father an engine mechanic, deceased; the mother rents to lodgers.

  ‘And the dog, of course. Cut up pretty bad, no known political affiliation. If you want my professional opinion, Detective Teuben, I think these are all totally unconnected. A spree of violence at the start of the war.’

  He did not mention the curious pattern in which the girl’s clothes had been distributed, nor the white stain visible on the law student’s sleeve; did not dwell on the details of the dog’s wounds; crossed his arms instead to gesture he was done with it all, then pulled out his watch and checked the time.

  Teuben studied him, smiled, drank coffee, sat still.

  ‘An excellent summary,’ he said at last, the eyes as flat as when he had called Beer a coward. ‘It has the merit of being accurate. I am not sure it will please the Professor, however. Nor the Chief of Police.’

  Beer stood up, spilling coffee as he did so, walked to the window. ‘I heard there has been a more recent murder. Another woman found dead. Perhaps there is a connection there, I don’t know. Speckstein hasn’t given me the file. I will have to ask you to leave now, I’m afraid. I have another patient coming in a few minutes.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Frau Langenkopf. Afraid of open water. Can’t tell whether you’re screwing her or just robbing her blind, but she’ll have to wait. No point interrupting a conversation among men.’

  7

  Teuben refused to leave. There was to him a self-assurance that Beer had never before encountered: he took the liberty of always speaking the truth. For ten minutes or so he was content to sit in silence, then asked the doctor to see whether he had some beer in his larder, and some rolls left over from breakfast. Beer tried to ignore the request, remained standing at the window, staring out into the yard. Through the branches of the chestnut tree he saw Anneliese, playing alone in the rain, her hair and face wet, and showing no sign of going in out of the cold. Frau Langenkopf arrived, and was displeased when Beer announced they would have to reschedule.

  ‘I had a setback,’ she complained, and begged the doctor to admit her.

  ‘I cannot,’ he found himself saying. ‘I have the police in the house.’

  The phrase chased her away without further ado.

  When he returned to the study, Teuben was standing at the window in the same position Beer had recently abandoned and had lit himself a cigarette. A piece of notepaper was in his hands. He did not mention Anneliese in the yard, but simply repeated his request for ‘a bite to eat, if you please, and something to wash it down’.

  ‘What more do you want from me?’ Beer flared up, but Teuben ignored him, went out into the corridor, made use of the doctor’s telephone.

  ‘A man will be over with the missing file,’ he told Beer once he had hung up. ‘The second dead girl. Did I mention we have a suspect in custody? He has a pretty good alibi for some of the dates in question. Might be difficult to m
ake all the murders stick.’ He shrugged, reclaimed his seat in Beer’s study. ‘I really am starving, you know.’

  Beer relented and went into the kitchen to butter some rolls. His hands were shaking and twice he dropped the knife.

  When he returned to the room this time around, carrying a tray with beer, cold cuts and Kaiser rolls, Teuben was gone. He hastened back out into the corridor, still holding the tray, and saw at once that the door to the bedroom was open. Running now, one of the bottles overturning and spilling across the rolls and ham, he entered the room. Teuben was standing at its centre. The curtains were drawn, Eva lying in the semi-dark, eyes closed, her shoulders turned to them, the wounds hidden at her back. Her bare arms looked very thin jutting out from the white fabric of her nightgown, her head sunk deep into the pillow and disclosed only by its brush of hair. The dark fabric of the blanket, its lip sitting just above her waist, set off the pallor of silk and skin. Teuben was about to step closer, but Beer got in his way, and used the tray to push him backwards, towards the door. To his relief, the detective allowed himself to be steered out, and even closed the door.

  ‘Who is she?’ he asked, a semblance of life waking in his flat, dark eyes.

  ‘Who do you think?’ said Beer. ‘A lady friend.’

  ‘I thought for a moment she was dead.’

  ‘Sleeping draught. She was – not feeling well this morning. I told her to stay in bed.’

  Teuben looked at him, the ghost of a smile on his red lips. ‘It didn’t say that in the file,’ he muttered to himself, as though amused at the hidden depths of man. ‘But the hair –’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Cut off.’

  ‘She wears wigs. It’s what she does.’ Beer pursed his lips, astonished by the fluency of his lies. It was as though he had prepared them long ago, and now found them ready at his beck and call. ‘I rather like it.’

  ‘She’s a prostitute?’

  Beer shook his head.

  ‘A widow. I spilled the beer. Why don’t we go into the kitchen and get another? And then I will assist your investigation in any way possible.’

  Teuben seemed to consider this: stood a foot from the door, eyes fixed on its grain, thinking it through, one arm outstretched as though getting ready to re-enter the room.

  ‘I will need a name,’ he said at last.

  Beer had one ready. ‘Evelyn Huber. Please, I’d prefer if nobody was to know. My reputation –’

  Teuben waved him off, walked ahead of him to the kitchen, located a jar of sour gherkins and another one of pickled fish and placed them both on the table.

  ‘Let’s forget it for now, Dr Beer,’ he said, sticking his hairy hand down the brine to retrieve a cut of herring. ‘A secret among friends. Good for morale.’

  He gestured for a bottle of beer, then drank from it without waiting for a glass.

  ‘Kreuzwirt should be here presently. My assistant. Bringing us the file.’

  Beer nodded, sat down across from him, and watched him lick the brine juice from his fingers.

  When Teuben finally left, an hour and a half later, Dr Beer sat down next to a newly repositioned Eva Frei, picked up a book he had glanced through the previous night, and slowly, his heart heavy and feeling as though dyspeptic, began reading out to her the Hippocratic oath, of whose precise wording he had wished to remind himself.

  ‘ “Every house to which I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, steering clear of all ill-doing and all seduction, and especially of the pleasures of love, with women or with men, be they free or be they slaves.”’

  He looked up wearily and thought of Teuben. ‘But what a liar you have made out of me.’

  Eva heard it, moved her eyes, and winked.

  That evening Zuzka called on Anton Beer, insisting that ‘Otto had given her permission’ and stayed for an hour, talking to Eva; and the next day, around lunchtime, the laundry boy dropped by, his long horse-face sullen when Beer asked him where the hell he had been.

  It felt nice to put on a fresh shirt.

  Part II

  Marvels

  One

  The patient came to him on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance. He was working as a neurologist in Munich then: it was the early 1890s. The woman was shy at first; shook his hand and took to calling him ‘dear Baron’. She suffered, she explained, from a compulsion to masturbate, and was able to achieve orgasm without any physical stimulation whatsoever, simply by contemplating the ocean or other manifestations of the grandeur of nature. When Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing touched her skin during his routine examination, her sexual climax was near instantaneous. Like Sigmund Freud, the Baron had studied hypnotism in Paris and Nancy; his monograph on the efficacy of suggestion therapy for this and related cases of sexual pathology was received with great interest by clinical psychiatrists across the German-speaking world. By the late 1890s the Baron was best known for his role as expert witness in a string of high-profile court cases. He demonstrated that a frightening proportion of court witnesses suffered from a ‘suggestion-induced falsification of memory’ and had never experienced the events to which they testified in court. Financial independence, the result of his marriage to the daughter of the lacquer-paint manufacturer Gustav Siegle, allowed Schrenck-Notzing to increasingly turn his attentions to the scientific exploration of paranormal phenomena. In the course of 1904 he published a series of articles on the phenomenon of Magdeleine Guipet, the French ‘dream-dancer’, who gave pantomimic interpretations of musical scores while in a state of deep hypnosis. During the half-decade prior to the start of the First World War, the Baron spent several years studying the ‘materialisation phenomena’ of the medium ‘Eva C’ who, in trance, was able to produce a gauze-like, translucent substance from various bodily orifices, most typically her mouth and nostrils. At times this substance, dubbed ‘teleplasm’ by Schrenck-Notzing, would take on the shape of faces, phantoms, ghostly limbs. Eva C endured repeated cavity searches and was asked to perform naked in order to eliminate the possibility that she was merely excreting a substance previously hidden on her form. Unlike her contemporary Mina Crandon, she was never accused of having had her genitalia surgically altered to conceal an additional limb that would account for the various phenomena she was able to produce. Schrenck-Notzing’s resulting monograph is considered one of the classic studies in this field. Amongst his most vociferous critics was the neurologist Mathilde Kemnitz, née Spieß, the later wife of Erich Ludendorff. Dr Ludendorff was a noted feminist and theorist of the Völkisch Movement known for his attacks on Jesuits, Jews and Freemasons. The Baron died in 1929, twelve years before the National Socialist Party prohibited parapsychological research throughout the Reich.

  1

  The boy brought it to school in a box. It was a shoe carton stolen from his mother, three air holes drilled into its lid so that the animal could breathe. The children noticed it at once, and in the short break after the first lesson they crowded around Josef, urging him to show what he had brought.

  ‘My uncle gave him to me,’ the boy announced as he began to raise the lid with great ceremony. ‘He found him in the woods.’

  The lid wasn’t quite off yet when a dark little snout poked through the gap, narrow and triangular, a twitchy black nose at its tip.

  ‘What is it? Let me see, Sepp, let me see!’ cried the boys, jostling for space (the girls had long been pushed aside, stood on tiptoe, looking over the boys’ shoulders). The lid was off, finally, and everyone stared, looking at the woodland creature that lay revealed upon a bed of straw and waiting for some definite reaction, something from one of those boys who were considered boldest and shaped opinion, here in this salon of children of classroom 4B.

  ‘Oh, but it’s only a hedgehog,’ a freckled boy called Gernot pronounced at last. He was much admired for his nonchalance and his deadly aim when spitting pips. ‘How boring!’

  ‘Yes, boring.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is.’


  ‘A hedgehog. Our garden is full of them.’

  The crowd quickly dispersed, not without some curious backward glances at Josef and the hedgehog. Two or three girls stayed behind a little longer, to test the sharpness of its salt-and-pepper spines, then scattered like pigeons when one of them, knock-kneed Petra, whose father drove a Benz, got herself pricked, jumped back dramatically, and started sucking on one finger (though not the one that had touched the hedgehog), unsure as of yet whether to wrinkle her nose in disgust or let fly with some tears. (Some of the other girls liked to call her a cry-baby, though there were others who’d reward her tears with tender hugs and even kisses, in imitation of their mothers.) Josef stayed behind with his box, whispered sweetly to his hedgehog. He was a ‘good sort’, his report card read, ‘not particularly gifted’; the youngest in a family of eight. Before long the teacher returned, and everybody sat down at their desks.

  It wasn’t until the lunch break that Lieschen approached him, slyly as it were, while he was sitting by himself, offering a carrot to the animal with considerable vigour. After two, three pokes the frightened creature had had enough and rolled itself into a ball. Lieschen crouched down next to him, watched him stab the carrot into the wall of spines, the smear of her bruise lending a peculiar whiteness to one eye.

  ‘You’re doing it too hard,’ she said. ‘See how he’s scared.’

  ‘He likes spiders best,’ the boy explained, taking no heed of her advice, and continuing to jam the carrot into the hedgehog’s spines. ‘I go into the cellar to hunt them. You have to take off three or four legs, so they can’t run away from him.’

  Lieschen was silent for a moment, asking herself if she considered this mean. ‘You just rip them out?’

  ‘Yes. Spiders don’t bleed.’