“What did you say?”
He laughed and dipped the croissant into the jam. “Hey, what are you thinking about?” He leaned closer, and she could smell jungle, freshness, him.
“Here,” he said, “tastes good,” and stuffed the pastry in her mouth. The jam smeared all over her mouth, dripped, and she tasted apricot on croissant, followed by Port’s tongue. She swallowed, choked, and had to cough. He laughed quietly and said, “You made a mess, Frau Inspector!” but didn’t let go of her.
Shit, she thought. What’s going on here? What am I getting myself into?
“So,” Port said finally, leaning back. “The girl. I got talking to her once. She’d seen me onstage. She hated the production, but not me.” He smiled mischievously.
Franza nodded. Yes, she thought, I can imagine. She put the teacup back on the table. When I leave, she thought, I’ll go buy a coffeemaker.
Port was still grinning with the memory of his pampered vanity and stayed quiet for a while. Franza let him be. She knew from experience that it was better not to interrupt people when they paused, lost in memories. She knew he would continue soon. And so he did, after clearing his throat.
“During our conversation it became clear that she’d seen every single production of ours over the last year. She knew the parts and the plays well. She knew all about us actors, about the directors, the producers and—the most impressive part—she knew how to gauge us all very accurately. She had an eye for people and things.”
I believe that, Franza thought, but at once sensed her own pettiness and felt bad, very bad. She’s dead, for God’s sake. Put things back into perspective, you idiot!
“Did she have money?” she asked. “I mean, so many shows. That can’t be cheap.”
“Standing room. Dirt cheap. But of course you wouldn’t know that.”
He grinned and reached for her. She nodded. “Yes,” she said pointedly, “I know. You want to be admired.” He grinned.
“What else do you know about her?” she asked, taking refuge in her job.
He thought for a while and shook his head slowly. “Nothing, I’m afraid.”
“What did she do for work? A fellow actor, maybe? Since she knew so much about theater.”
“No. I don’t think so. Even though she was obsessed with theater, it wasn’t her line of work. I would’ve known.”
“Did she come alone?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t watching her all the time, after all. She was just a regular, not a complete stranger. You know what it’s like, someone walks past you every now and again and at some point you give each other a nod, sometimes you exchange a few words, but that’s all.”
“And you’re sure you can’t remember her name?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t really have anything to do with her. I’m not even sure I ever knew her name. So many people give you their names, and they all expect you to remember. Do you know how exhausting that is?”
“Think anyway!”
He narrowed his eyes a little and sipped his tea, which had now become cold. “No, I’m sorry,” he said and stood up. In the doorway to the kitchen he suddenly stopped, then turned around.
“Marie,” he said, and seemed deep in thought. “Yes, Marie. Yes, I think that’s it. Marie. That was her name. Marie. It had something light about it. I remember thinking that it suited her. Marie. Yes. Exactly.”
He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. Shortly after, he reappeared again.
“There was something sad about her,” he said. “And something bright. And it wasn’t yet clear which would outweigh the other. Nothing about her was decided yet.”
Later, after Franza left, she thought of his words. Now, it was decided.
20
Franza entered the office she shared with Felix, sat down at her desk, and looked at Felix. He was on the phone. “Her name is Marie,” she said, interrupting his conversation.
He looked up, stared at her briefly, barked into the receiver that he’d call back later, and hung up. “What?”
“Our dead girl,” Franza said, realizing she was enjoying the surprise effect as much as Port had. “I’ve got her name. It’s Marie.”
“OK,” Felix said, “now slowly, and from the beginning. Did Borger find the name scratched into her skin?”
Franza gave him a withering look and told him what she knew without giving any details about her source. When she was done, Felix leaned back in his chair, relieved.
“Well,” he said, “that’s something. We’ll get there. Coffee?”
“Yes. I’d love some.”
And then everything happened very fast. The phone on Felix’s desk rang, and for some reason they knew immediately it was important. Felix turned on the speakerphone.
It was Robert. He’d been answering the phones. “Her name is Gleichenbach, Marie Gleichenbach. Her mother called. She recognized her in the paper.”
21
They didn’t talk much on the drive, which took them out of town to a small remote suburb. Franza thought of the caller, and tried to imagine what the woman must have felt like picking up the paper and looking into the dead face of her daughter. Unimaginable. She started to retch, but she swallowed it back, and the moment passed.
They pulled out into traffic on the A9 toward Berlin, and drove past the rest area where the girl—whose name at least they now knew—had received the injuries leading to her death. They took the next exit and followed a country road, past cornfields swaying in the wind like yellow waves in a yellow ocean. Finally they passed through a small wood and into the village where Marie’s mother lived. It was afternoon when they arrived. The sun was hot, and it felt like there would be a thunderstorm.
Franza thought of the Danube and how nice it would be to lie in the shadows of the bushes, cooling off in the water from time to time.
“Yes,” Felix said, as if he’d read her mind. “I’d rather be having a cool swim and a cold beer, too.”
“Or coffee,” Franza said. “Iced coffee.” And she thought of the coffeemaker she bought when she’d left Port’s. It was sitting on the backseat, still in its box.
The house came into view. It stood a little outside the village in the middle of a yard full of tall trees. They parked the car, rang the doorbell, and a woman appeared, standing silently in the doorway. Franza guessed she was about forty, with brown eyes and dark, shoulder-length hair, curling at the ends. An older version of Marie.
“Frau Gleichenbach?”
She nodded.
“Police,” Franza said, trying to sound as gentle as possible. “I’m Detective Oberwieser, and this is my colleague Detective Herz. We’re here because of your daughter, Marie.”
The woman nodded, turned around, and walked straight through the house into the garden, to a group of chairs standing in the shadow of a chestnut tree. She sat down, gestured vaguely to two chairs, and Franza and Felix took a seat.
“Yes,” she said, her voice trailing off into the trees. “I know why you’re here.”
Franza realized she hadn’t offered her condolences and said all the things one says in a situation like this. “Frau Gleichenbach,” she began, “I’m so sorry, but . . .”
She didn’t get any further. The woman suddenly turned to the detectives and said, “I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know anything.”
Her eyes flashed, and she drummed her fingers nervously on the arm of her chair. Felix ignored her irritation, cleared his throat, and asked the first question. “You didn’t report Marie missing. Why not?”
“I wasn’t missing her.”
Franza and Felix were surprised but didn’t let it show.
“You weren’t? Didn’t it seem strange to you when she didn’t come home two nights ago, or the night after, or last night? Didn’t you wonder why? Weren’t you concerned? She wasn’t found far from here. She must’ve been on her way to you. On her way home. Or wasn’t she?”
The woman sat slumped in her chair, her face a white,
vacant mask. When she tried to speak, her voice broke into a woeful moan. The detectives remained silent, waiting. She pulled herself together again.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think she was on her way here. I can’t imagine it. She’s been gone for a long time; she left us a long time ago. We never knew where she was. One day here, the next day somewhere else. She never stayed anywhere for long. Especially not here. Especially not with us.”
She fell silent. After a while she continued. “I don’t know what it was with her, why she was like that. Why it had to end this way.”
Silence again. Suddenly she got up. “Come,” she said. “Come with me.”
They followed her back into the house and up a flight of stairs. She opened a door. A girl’s room, very neat and tidy, with posters on the walls and books on the shelves. Curtains billowed in the open windows.
The woman walked up to them, wrapping herself into the fragrant fabric.
“I’ve just washed them,” she whispered, “and hung them back up right away. This morning, after I saw the newspaper. And I opened the windows so it would be nice and fresh for her. Airy.”
Her voice broke again. “Come!” she whispered finally and motioned to Franza to come closer. “Please come, smell them. Isn’t it wonderful?”
Franza walked over and touched the woman’s arm gently. “Yes,” she said, “it is. You’re right, Frau Gleichenbach. It really is wonderful.” She took her hands and held them tightly. “Would you like to tell me your story, Frau Gleichenbach? Yours and Marie’s? I’d like to hear it.”
The woman nodded, and Franza sensed her relaxing a little. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That story. Mine and Marie’s. I thought it was over.”
22
Marie. Seven. Curly hair. Bundle of energy. Loved pasta and toast with Nutella. Went to school, liked her teacher, enjoyed learning, math, books. A bundle of energy.
At seven. But not since then—not for a long time.
23
“We didn’t report him to the police,” the woman said. “He was her grandfather, after all. He loved her, just differently.”
She didn’t know what he had done to Marie. Marie never said anything, and neither had the grandfather. But one day she came home from her grandparents and everything had changed. She had changed.
When Marie turned seven her mother began working in an office full-time and so she sent Marie to her grandparents’ after school. She could do her homework there, and her grandparents fed her, played with her, and took her on short trips. It was a huge relief for everyone.
But then Marie began to change, became timid and fearful, cried at night, didn’t laugh anymore.
At the time, her mother had thought maybe that’s just how children got as they grew older. She thought maybe she was just imagining it. And then she blocked it out. Work was good; there was plenty to do. She didn’t have much time, and in the evenings she was tired.
Then her sister-in-law came to visit, and when she heard that Marie was at her grandfather’s every day . . .
She went to the grandparents’ house, fuming. They could hear the shouting out on the street.
Then she took Marie aside and asked questions. Gently. Cautiously. But Marie didn’t say anything.
Her husband said his sister was hysterical, always had been. They shouldn’t pay any attention to her accusations.
The sister-in-law went back to England, where she lived, but before she left she had pulled Marie’s mother aside and pleaded with her, “Don’t let her go back there! Promise me you won’t let her go back there!”
She had promised and didn’t let Marie return, but it was too late. Nothing went back to the way it was before.
They didn’t report the grandfather to the police. Her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with the police, said it was his father after all, and an old man on top of that. He had one foot in the grave and who knew what his sister had made up—and now it was too late anyway. Not long after that the grandfather did actually die, and they were glad not to have started anything.
Marie was thirteen when her mother saw the cuts for the first time.
Marie had always worn long-sleeved shirts, but on that day it had been so hot she’d rolled up her sleeves.
Her mother had approached her from behind, and Marie didn’t hear her. She stared at those arms, had never seen anything like it before, all those scars, so many scars.
When Marie had noticed her mother behind her, she lost it, became completely hysterical. That night she disappeared for the first time. Just like that.
They didn’t find her for two weeks. At some point the woman had thought Marie was dead. She tried to feel it, but she didn’t feel anything. She blamed herself for Marie’s disappearance. Then they found her and brought her back.
“I can’t remember,” the woman said, “where she’d been.” She tugged at the tablecloth with her long, thin fingers. “I wanted to forget.”
24
They went back into the yard. Felix had brought water and glasses from the kitchen and was standing by the fence, watching the heaving of the yellow ocean, thinking of his children—of his skinny eldest—and how life could rain on your parade whenever it wanted to.
What have we done right, he thought, and what have we done wrong, and will the right be enough?
The women sat at the table, and the quiet voice of Marie’s mother hung in the late afternoon air like a lament.
“Everything went haywire,” Marie’s mother said. “Sometimes she was here; sometimes she wasn’t. When she was here, she went to school; when she wasn’t, she didn’t. We tried everything, but nothing worked. We despaired.”
Social services got involved, the school psychologist—the wheels began to turn. Marie went through numerous institutions, state homes, private housing, charitable shelters, and every now and again was on the streets.
Then there was the last place. “I don’t know,” Marie’s mother said, “what was different there, why she stayed. Maybe enough time had passed, maybe she was old enough, maybe it felt right to her.”
But the fact was, she stayed. Appeared to have found something for herself. Went to therapy, went back to school, stopped the self-mutilation.
“She hardly ever came here,” Marie’s mother said. “So I went there regularly, to that house. Sometimes hiding just to catch a tiny glimpse of her. We opened a bank account for her, transferred money, the inheritance from her grandfather.” She laughed bitterly.
Every now and then Marie would call on the phone. “I’m fine, Mom,” she’d say. “Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
Occasionally—very rarely—she came to visit. The last visit had been the previous year, just before Christmas.
Marie’s mother smiled at the memory, then got up and went back into the house. When she came back she put a piece of paper on the table. A letter-size copy: Marie in black and white, copied in profile.
So this, Franza thought, was Marie without death in her face. Eyes closed, probably to avoid the harsh light of the copier, closed mouth, the corners pulled up a little with the hint of a smile, hair that curled at the ends. On the back of the sheet were a few sentences, scribbled hastily in a moment of joy: I’m going to the university, I’m in love, I’m racing the raindrops. I’ll visit soon.
“This came in the mail yesterday,” Marie’s mother said. “I was so happy. What happened?”
Felix came back to the table and sat down. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “But we’ll find out. That’s for sure. I promise you.”
Franza looked up in surprise. Their eyes met. She raised her eyebrows. Promise? He’s that confident? He nodded, just a tiny nod, barely visible.
Franza stood up. It had gotten late. Twenty after six. “We need a photo,” she said. “Do you think you have one we could borrow?”
The woman nodded, got up, went into the house. While they waited they looked out at the fields. Franza longed for rain.
When they saw the photo, Franza though
t of Port’s pensive gaze when he described Marie. Everything he’d said was true, and she felt this tiny sting again, and just a little . . .
“Thank you very much, Frau Gleichenbach,” she said. “We’ll keep you informed.”
She turned to leave. “Isn’t your husband coming home?” Franza asked.
“No,” Frau Gleichenbach said. “He hasn’t been here for a long time.”
Franza nodded. What’s life worth?
“But shouldn’t someone be with you? Can we leave you on your own?”
“Yes,” Frau Gleichenbach said. “Yes. Of course you can. I know where she is now. And nothing can happen to her anymore.”
25
Franza had bought chopped almonds and gingerbread spices. Now she was standing in her kitchen rolling dough. The first trays had already come out of the oven, and the room smelled of honey and cinnamon and ginger. Max stood in the door and bit into a chocolate-coated gingerbread star.
“Yummy,” he said. “As always.”
She nodded briefly. “Have you heard from Ben?”
“No,” he said. “Why? Are you worried?”
She turned around, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, and shrugged. What’s life worth? “Probably not necessary, is it?”
He came closer, picked some dough from the bowl, and looked at her, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “He’s grown up and has gone away for a few days. That’s what he said. I told you, remember? So what’s the problem?”
She shrugged again, feeling helpless. What was it that Marie’s mother had said? That now she at least knew where her daughter was?
“He’s turned his phone off,” she muttered. “I can’t get hold of him.”
“But he never leaves it on! He’s probably lost it. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Rain Girl Page 6
