“It’s OK,” she said. “No need to worry. It’s Sunday, after all. I don’t have anything else going on.”
Yes, he thought, it’s Sunday. I don’t have anything else going on, either. “I’m sorry,” he said as he opened up the station.
“No problem,” she said. “I was a bit early. It’s a habit of mine. I always get up early, even on Sunday when I don’t have to go to the café.”
“Yes,” he said, rolling his eyes a little. “Sunday. Right.”
She laughed. “You poor thing. I’m sure you must have had better things to do.”
“Oh, you know . . .”
A little later they were sitting in the forensic team’s office. The officer booted up the computer, and they could begin piecing together the composite of Gertrud’s visitor.
She took her time. She had only seen him twice, so it took a while. But that was necessary sometimes. Make the eyes bigger, then smaller, then something in between. Hairline, brow, mouth, nose, chin. Gradually an image formed, a face. Again and again she trawled her memory to see whether it was correct, whether the face on the screen matched the one in her head. Eventually, finally, she was done.
She leaned back, looking slightly exhausted.
“I could use a coffee,” she said.
Arthur jumped up. “Of course! I’m sorry. I’ll nip over to the machine.”
On his return he noticed immediately that something was different, that she was different. Tense. Wide-awake. And deeply shocked. She was staring at the composite in her hand, which the officer had printed out for her.
“What’s the matter?” asked Arthur in alarm as he put the mug of coffee down in front of her. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Yes,” she said, looking up. “A ghost. I am actually seeing a ghost.”
Arthur sat on the edge of the desk. “A ghost? Here in this picture? What do you mean?”
“This is Tonio,” she said. “Oh my God, it’s Tonio. How could I not have noticed? I can’t believe I only just realized it!”
Arthur felt his skin beginning to crawl, the hairs on his neck standing a little on end, his heart beating faster. Lord, how he loved moments like this in his job!
“Who’s Tonio?” he asked cautiously. Not too quick, he thought. Give her time, don’t overwhelm her, let her gather her thoughts.
“Tonio.” She hesitated and took a deep breath. “Tonio was the love of Hanna’s life.”
He whistled softly through his teeth. This was getting better with every moment. “Hanna? You mean Hanna Umlauf?”
“Yes,” she said. “Hanna Umlauf.”
“You know Hanna Umlauf, too?”
“Yes, I know Hanna Umlauf, too. Of course I know Hanna. But I haven’t seen her for years. Not since the tragedy back then.”
“OK,” Arthur said, raising his hands to calm her. “Slowly now. From the beginning. I need more details.”
She told him, slowly. From the beginning, in minute detail. Everything she knew. It was not as much as Arthur had hoped, but it was more than a little. You could say they were a few steps closer to an answer.
When the café owner had gone, Arthur sat there on his chair, shaking his head a little and smiling as the sweet feeling of knowledge flowed through him. I have to call them, he thought. I have to tell them. They’ll want to know all the details. He took his cell phone and pressed the quick-dial button. Karolina answered immediately.
“Oh! Karo! It’s you! I must have dialed the wrong number. OK, so I’ll tell you first. A breakthrough!”
“What?” she asked. “What are you talking about? A breakthrough? Do you mean breakdown? You? That’d be nothing new, my little crazy!”
She laughed. He heard the affection in her voice and pictured her before him, stretching with a mysterious smile in the September sunshine. Alone. Without him. He immediately longed to be with her. Yet it wasn’t as bad as it was before. At last he had made a breakthrough.
“No, I’m not having a breakdown! A breakthrough—me! Just imagine, my love, I’ve made the breakthrough!” He immediately qualified his words. “Well, maybe.” Then he continued, on a roll, “I love you, honey, you know that, don’t you?” He went even further, because it seemed so easy to say, the words somehow tumbling out of their own accord. “Will you marry me?”
As soon as the words were out, he realized what he had said, and that the ball was now in Karolina’s court, and that, if she said no, he would look like the biggest idiot north or south of the equator. But he was anyways. Who but a complete madman, who but the biggest idiot north or south of the equator would in all seriousness ask the woman he loved to marry him over the phone?
I could kick myself, he thought. I could really kick myself. Why doesn’t she say something? He started to tremble because she said nothing. She simply said nothing.
But then she spoke. “Yes, why not?”
She said, Yes, why not?
When he heard the words and heard the smile in her voice as she said them, he was delighted and began to shout for joy.
Later, he would say he felt like a giant at that moment, bigger than ever before, as though he were in a film. Arthur, he thought, raising a silent glass to himself, Arthur, you really have a way with women!
Then he finally called Oberwieser. She didn’t reply.
26
Franza met Dorothee Brendler at the hotel in which she was now staying.
They walked through the park immediately adjacent to the hotel, stopping regularly, pausing in the conversation to gather their thoughts.
“Can you just tell me about your daughter, Frau Brendler?” Franza said, and Dorothee nodded.
“My daughter. Yes. I actually had two. Somehow there were suddenly two and . . . I know this sounds awful, but that was when all our troubles started.”
She nodded, lowered herself down onto a park bench and shooed away the pigeons begging for food.
“Do you know the feeling when you know or suspect something’s going badly wrong, but you’re completely helpless, unable to do anything?”
Franza nodded. Yes, she knew that feeling. She thought of her son, Ben, and Marie, the girl he’d loved, who had died.
“My daughter, Gertrud,” Dorothee began. “She’s . . . she was a wonderful young woman with plenty of opportunities ahead of her. But she . . . she hadn’t made anything of them for a long time.”
“Your husband’s already told us that—”
“He has? I thought as much. So you already know a lot. But maybe it’s oversimplifying to reduce it to that.” Dorothee shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know.”
A group of small children walked past, led by a teacher, another bringing up the rear. The children were holding hands and waddling along like ducklings. Lost in thought, Dorothee watched them go. “Is life still simple when you’re that young?”
Franza shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you think so? Doesn’t every age have its worries?”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
Franza’s cell phone rang. She ignored it.
“You know,” said Frau Brendler, “I was so pleased when the two of them had finally finished high school. I thought it would all be over then, that covert wrangling, which they never did openly. They carried it on in secret all those years, a constant fight, in which Gertrud was always the underdog. I thought, now at last they can go their own separate ways. One will study in this city, and the other somewhere else, and they can finally live their own lives. But no.”
She shook her head and gave a brief, bitter laugh.
“When Hanna announced that she wanted to go to Munich to study photography, Gertrud said right away she would go with her. She was going to study law in Munich, and they could share an apartment.”
She shook her head as though she still could not believe it, before continuing.
“I remember thinking I wasn’t hearing her right. Hanna also seemed amazed, but she nodded and said, ‘If that’s what you want.’ Later I took Gertru
d to one side, begging her, ‘Gertrud, please don’t do it! Start living your own life!’ But she looked at me like I was a complete stranger, and gave me a real dressing-down. What did I mean by that? Start living her own life? That was what she was doing, and it was her business. Why was I interfering? We should be happy she was helping us save money—this way we only needed to pay for one apartment. There was no point arguing.”
“So they went to Munich.”
Dorothee nodded. “Yes, they went to Munich together and shared an apartment, while I constantly asked myself why. Why was she doing that? Why wouldn’t she let Hanna go?” She shook her head, incredulity in her eyes. “I took me an eternity to notice. I was blind. I probably didn’t want to see it.”
Silence. More head shaking. Franza began to suspect something.
“She was . . . in love?”
Dorothee was silent a little longer. “Yes, she was in love, my little girl.”
Franza nodded cautiously. “With Hanna.”
Peace in the park; the cooing of the pigeons; muted, far-distant voices; a soft singsong; a cyclist passing by.
“With Hanna. Yes. With Hanna.”
Dorothee’s voice revealed the cautious sadness of a woman who had seen something coming but could do nothing to prevent it.
“You don’t happen to have a cigarette?”
“Yes, yes, I do.” Franza rummaged in her purse. There were two.
“The first drag,” Dorothee said quickly, blowing smoke from her mouth and nose. “It’s always the first drag that gets to you.”
Franza nodded. Not only the first, she thought and lit her own. They smoked, watching the billows swirling and vanishing into the air.
“You know,” Dorothee said, “my Gertrud liked to care for people, even from childhood. First she took care of her dolls, and when Hanna came she took care of her. But Hanna only needed Gertrud’s concern for a short while before she knew exactly where she was going and effortlessly overtook her.”
Dorothee took a deep pull on the cigarette and continued. “Gertrud didn’t notice it, not for a long time—the fact that we had a winner, someone who won everything, always. Someone who had only lost one thing in her life, and that was her mother. And then she’d decided she wouldn’t ever lose anything again.” She shook her head. “No, that’s nonsense of course. Amateur psychology!” She laughed bitterly. “I sometimes wondered whether Gertrud hated Hanna because everything came so easily to her, even her father’s love, but . . . I don’t know.”
Dorothee paused for thought, and then said, “I’m making it sound as though Hanna was a horrible person, but she wasn’t—on the contrary. On the contrary.”
Dorothee fell silent. Franza sensed her helplessness.
“At some stage,” Dorothee continued, “Gertrud’s feelings . . . changed. And then she simply couldn’t let go of her.”
Franza nodded, drew on her cigarette, blew the smoke out, waited. Nothing. Dorothee seemed sunk into silence. Franza asked cautiously, “What about Hanna?”
The woman raised her eyes, looked at Franza, and continued thinking, miles away.
“I don’t know,” she said eventually. “I really don’t know. I never dared to ask. Not Gertrud, not Hanna. Perhaps she knew about Gertrud’s feelings, or at least suspected. Perhaps not. Perhaps she even returned the feelings in some way. Perhaps not. Perhaps she simply allowed it to happen, tolerated it. Out of helplessness, out of . . . I don’t know. The same way she simply accepted lots of things over the years. Probably out of gratitude toward us, because of a guilty conscience. But that would have been totally unfounded. We loved her. Even if it was . . . conflicting. Not easy. No. Of course she had a lot to thank us for. And then all our misfortune began with her.”
Conflicting, Franza thought. Yes, that’s a good word: conflicting.
“I know it sounds awful,” Dorothee said, hiding her head in her hands.
“No, not awful. Just honest. Tell me more. Try to remember.”
“Yes,” Dorothee said. “Yes . . .”
27
Backthenbackthenbackthen . . . down the years . . . back . . .
“You look so beautiful.” Gertrud looked at Hanna in amazement. “So beautiful.”
Hanna laughed. “Oh, you’re crazy! Me? Beautiful?”
“Yes,” Gertrud said. “Yes, you are.”
She reached out a hand and stroked Hanna’s hair. Hanna flinched.
“Don’t look at me like that, Gertrud! I don’t like it.”
She took a rapid step back, listened to the stillness, the pain she suspected Gertrud was feeling, and snapped the short thread of their togetherness. She turned. Turned on her heel like a spinning top with flapping arms and legs, and tore down the slope toward the river, with Gertrud . . . behind her, behind her, always behind Hanna.
“I’m an eagle,” Hanna cried, laughing, running, flying. “Who is the wind’s bride to carry me aloft?”
I will, Gertrud thought. I will, let me be the one . . . But she knew, knew with absolute certainty . . .
The river was still cold. It had rained a lot that year, with the temperatures well below the average, but the meadows were lush and green, and flecks of sunlight dappled their edges. Hanna jumped into the water, yelling and laughing to outsmart the cold.
“In the crimson waters the nettle banks sink deeper into the deeps!”
That was why Gertrud loved her—the way she yelled her word-paintings as she shook her wet hair like a dog and chased up and down the riverbank.
Gertrud loved Hanna because of her lightheartedness, her carefree nature, her courage, her generosity of spirit, and above all—above all she loved her because she had everything Gertrud lacked.
“I’m an eagle,” cried Hanna into the red gold of the setting sun, spreading her arms wide. “Where’s the wind’s bride to carry me aloft?”
To love someone, Gertrud wrote in her red book during one of those glowing, hot summer nights that first year in Munich. To love someone from the very first moment. To belong to someone from the very first moment. I have found the courage to let myself be touched by the facts, the realities. I have at last become immersed in love, at last—in love and in life and in light.
The weather stayed hot and dry all summer long, but Gertrud rarely left the apartment. She only ventured out onto the streets and squares with Hanna, to explore the city in the twilight when it seemed golden and transparent.
In the mornings, after Hanna had left the house, Gertrud would slip into the bathroom, close her eyes and smell her. Only traces of her scent remained, but she breathed them in. I will follow my beloved to the end of days.
In Hanna’s room she opened all the cupboards, boxes, drawers—touching nothing, only looking, driven to see, again and again, how, who, what . . .
Sometimes Hanna had left notes lying on her desk—On someone’s trail. Since Gertrud had suddenly gotten on her trail, it shocked her, awakening guilt. Lying on the bed, she couldn’t get the phrase out of her head. Hanna, get on my trail . . .
“Don’t get burned,” she begged herself. “Don’t get smothered. Remember nothing is certain.”
But it had already happened. If there had been a photo from those days, it would have shown how insubstantial Gertrud was.
28
A cell phone rang. A sudden ringtone, jolting Franza from her listening. It was the second time. Arthur again. It must be urgent.
“Excuse me, Frau Brendler,” she said, “but I have to take this call.”
She stood and moved a few steps away.
“I’m getting married,” Arthur said.
Franza’s eyes widened. “What? Have you gone mad?”
“Because I’m getting married?” he asked, sounding a little hurt.
She rolled her eyes. “Arthur, I’m really pleased you’re getting married. Really. It’s wonderful. But if that’s why you’re calling . . .”
“Oh,” he said. “Of course not.”
“Oh, get to the point, Arthur
!”
“OK,” he said. “Sorry. The point, right. Ask Frau Brendler about Tonio.”
Franza hung up. Fine, she thought. Tonio. Let’s give it a go.
“Tonio,” she said. “Tell me about Tonio.”
Dorothee Brendler looked up in surprise, shook her head. “Where did that come from . . . ?”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell me.”
“Tonio,” Dorothee murmured, staring at the gravel at her feet. “He appeared out of the blue. A grown man. Almost thirty. Not a boy anymore, he’d made a life for himself. He came for Hanna.”
29
It was at a small bar near the university called Renate’s Inn. The place opened at noon and closed late at night. It was a students’ haunt. Vasco, Renate’s boyfriend, whom she had brought with her back from Spain, baked little cakes that were incredibly popular. They served Guinness, cola, water, and not much else, but the bar ran as if on well-oiled wheels, perhaps because of its simplicity. Its patrons said they played the best music ever. That was Vasco’s department. At night he played whatever he felt like. Sometimes they brought in live bands, and people could dance if they wanted, or simply listen.
Hanna and Gertrud went there often. And then so did Tonio. One day he was sitting by the counter. Hanna entered the room, and Tonio saw her straightaway. And then she saw him. That was it.
The next evening he appeared again, and the next, and the third. As soon as Hanna arrived, the agitation vanished from his body. On the third evening Hanna began to dance, something she had never done before. She grabbed Gertrud’s hand and dragged her onto the dance floor with her. Tonio sat at the bar, watching the girls, watching Hanna with penetrating eyes, a small grin on his lips. Hanna noticed and began to flirt with him over Gertrud’s shoulder, coolly, with only her eyes and a tiny twitch of her mouth. Gertrud felt the change, turned, saw Tonio, and her heart stopped for a fraction of a second.
So I’ve lost Hanna, she thought. It hurt—really hurt.
“Hanna, is it?” said Tonio when he discovered her name and wound a strand of her red hair around his finger, raising it to touch his nose, his mouth.
Raven Sisters (Franza Oberwieser Book 2) Page 12
