The Hanging Artist

by Jon Steinhagen

  “And here you are, you ingenious person, paying me a friendly visit for no comprehensible reason despite my continuous questions, toying with me. Get to the point, man! You’re here to arrest me for these crimes! Do it, already!”

  Beide didn’t smile, nor did he express any emotion other than what could be interpreted as a mild pang of sympathy.

  Beide said, “You make a strong case for yourself as mad killer, Herr Kafka. In fact, I’d venture to say that you would find some relief in learning you are the prime suspect, despite what I’ve told you about The Hanging Artist. But as I’ve already said, you are not. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you that relief.”

  He paused. He approached Franz, his kind smile returned.

  “What I can offer you,” he said, “is a job.”

  “A job?” Franz asked.

  “A very important job. In fact, it’s almost a plea.”

  “A plea?”

  “I beg you,” Beide said, “to solve these crimes.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A TRANSFORMATION

  FRANZ ASKED BEIDE to repeat the last sentence, and he obliged.

  “It’s my fault for not demanding you reveal who put you up to this,” Franz said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Beide asked.

  “It’s an enormous joke,” Franz said. “I sensed it from the start, from your entrance. Who’s the author of this prank? Lowy? Brod? Weltsch? It can’t be Werfel; I don’t think he has a sense of humor.”

  “This isn’t a prank, Franz,” Beide said.

  “I haven’t given you leave to be familiar with me,” Franz said.

  “Herr Kafka, no one is pulling your leg,” Beide said, the sparkle in his eyes fading. There was a cloud there, and Franz found the change disturbing. “I’m deadly serious,” the inspector said. “If my manner has led to believe otherwise, I apologize.”

  “All right,” Franz said. “Then by whose authority do you deputize me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve taken you at your word, thus far, that you are an inspector, but in whose employ? The Viennese police?”

  Beide became sheepish and fumbled with the ends of his cape.

  “We’re not as straightforward as that,” he said, in such a fashion as to indicate he hoped the subject was closed, but Franz persisted.

  “I’m not saying another word until you tell me under whose agency you conduct your investigations.”

  Beide raised his head. “The ICPC,” he said.

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Franz said.

  “We’re new,” Beide said. “Formed just last year. The International Criminal Police Commission.”

  Franz squinted hard at Beide. He had no reason to believe this man, this boy. He strung a lot of impressive words together, but they were just words, not realities.

  “And these crimes,” Franz said, “are considered international crimes?”

  “They have the potential,” Beide said.

  Franz snorted. “A facile answer,” he said.

  “Yes,” Beide said, “and vague, I know, but that’s how it must be at present.”

  Franz rose and went to the window. He glanced at Gregor, whose expression was, as ever, inscrutable. In fairness, the creaure truly couldn’t be said to have a face. Franz could make nothing of the empty onyx orbs he assumed were Gregor’s eyes. He considered speaking to him, if for no other reason to have Beide think him a madman.

  Gregor, however, wasn’t going to play along. He shrugged, and moved to the further corner of the room, behind Beide, where he busied himself with an inspection of the floorboards.

  Franz turned his gaze out the window, looked up and down the street—a young man on a bicycle, two girls carrying bread, an old woman poking around in a trash barrel—and envied anyone living a nice, quite, rational life that morning.

  “What about the victims?” Franz asked. “Are any of them connected to Henker?”

  Beide shook his head. “Not a one,” he said.

  “And none of them knew Henker, or he them?”

  “Again,” Beide said, “no.”

  “Then what you are saying is that aside from this man Henker playing around with a rope—in public!—during the period when these murders occurred, you have absolutely no reason to be hounding him, let alone suspecting him of the murders. Had any of the victims even seen Henker’s act, either at the Traumhalle or back in Schwechat?”

  “None—”

  “See?”

  “—until last night.”

  Gregor stirred in the corner. Franz faced Beide.

  “Last night?” he asked.

  “The twenty-third victim, here in Vienna,” Beide said. “Hermann Herbort. A bank cashier. Twenty-seven years old. Found in the street, under a streetlamp. He had been to the Traumhalle last night, in the company of friends. He had stayed for the entire show. He had seen The Hanging Artist.”

  Franz thought about this. Twenty-three strangers, and none of them theatregoers, apparently. Until last night.

  Franz said, “I’ve never been a detective.”

  “That’s not true. Your duties at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute—”

  “—had nothing to do with crime. I investigated and assessed compensation for personal injury to industrial workers—”

  “You see? You were an investigator!”

  “Inspector…”

  “True, not the sort of investigator trained to deal with homicides and such, but an investigator nonetheless.”

  “Stop.”

  Franz wanted to face him, but it would only encourage the conversation to continue. Franz thought it all ridiculous, joke or not, and wanted it to end.

  There was silence for a moment, then the sound of Beide rising from his chair. “May I have some of this water?” Beide asked. “All this talking…”

  Franz heard Beide pour himself a glass of water and drink.

  “When you’ve finished, you may go, Inspector,” Franz said. “As you’ve admitted you have no official business with me—that is, you don’t wish to arrest me, or question me—you may go. I’m very sorry to have heard about the atrocities that have been visited upon these poor people, and I thank you for making me aware of them, but… well, we’ve nothing more to say to each other. Good day.”

  “Please have the kindness to hear me out,” Beide said, in a fresh tone that made Franz think there was a new person in the room. “Don’t turn around just yet, please,” Beide continued, sensing Franz’s change in attitude. “Let me say what I have to say, and then you may face me.

  “Is it so difficult to see yourself as an instrument of justice, Herr Kafka? I know that’s a grandiose way of putting it, but let’s start with grandiose and work our way to practical. Is it so difficult to learn of someone or something completely dedicated to evil and still insist you’ve no interest whatsoever of stopping it? Because that’s what solving a crime means; to me, at least, and possibly to others… possibly to you, too, if it weren’t for fear.

  “Fear of coming face to face with evil and not being able to stop it—that’s one fear. There’s also the fear of assuming someone else’s pain, certainly the victim’s, but mainly the survivors’, those who are innocent and desperately searching for answers themselves. It’s an awful thing to ask of anyone, that they shoulder the burden of finding the answers.

  “And there mayn’t be any answers, you’ll say. But there are. They mayn’t be the answers we want to find, and they mayn’t be answers we can understand, or want to understand. But there are always answers. A man, a woman—perhaps even a child, if we can’t plunge in and do everything we can to stop this—a human being is strung up, hanged by the neck until dead. Someone did that. And someone took away the rope, or ropes. Those ropes may be gone, destroyed, burned… but the executioner is still at large. The executioner is meting out some sort of twisted justice, or simply killing for the pleasure of killing; either way, too many people have died, and I see no justification fo
r that. These crimes must be stopped. The executioner must be caught.

  “And someone has asked for your help to do it. It doesn’t matter if that person was me or a whole fleet of police officers, or the Emperor, or one of the victim’s sweethearts or spouses or children. Someone has reached out to you and asked you to step in, to look, to listen, to think, to see what we cannot.

  “Because you, Franz—and forgive me for being familiar, but I mean it in kinship—you, Franz, can see things differently from other people and, in that manner, understand them, and empathize. It’s all a matter of how you look at life; and you have tried many ways, over and over, to look at life in such a way that it offers you comfort, not misery.”

  A pause. In a softer voice: “Because you are a miracle, Franz Kafka. You have succeeded in doing, in real life, what this Hanging Artist, through illusion, does at every performance. You have cheated Death. You have been resurrected. You are Lazarus.”

  Franz heard the door open.

  “You may face me now,” Beide said.

  Franz turned.

  There was no doubt about it. Inspector Beide had definitely become a woman.

  Franz couldn’t think of anything to say.

  It wasn’t that Beide had made a drastic change in appearance: the clothes were the same, the manner, the face, the eyes…

  …but Inspector Beide was now a woman.

  She smiled. “There’s an answer for this, too,” she said, indicating herself. “I, personally, don’t know the answer, but I’ve come to live with it, and maybe someday I will have the answer, although I’m not actively pursuing it. I am who I am, whatever I am, whichever I am.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Franz said.

  “About my request?” Beide asked.

  “About any of it,” Franz said. He slowly sat in the chair Beide had vacated.

  “I’m going to give you until this evening to think about it,” Beide said, putting on her hat and gloves. “I’d love to give you more time, but there’s always a shortage of time, isn’t there? Too much has passed already, and for all we know there’s another unsuspecting person being hauled up to a makeshift gallows as we speak.”

  Franz grimaced.

  “I’m sorry I had to put it that way,” Beide said.

  “It’s all right, I understand,” Franz said. “What will happen if I decide to remain uninvolved, Inspector?”

  “Any number of things,” Beide said. “I can’t say I know for certain what, exactly, will happen—to you or me or any number of people.”

  “What would happen to me?”

  “I just said I don’t know.”

  “But something could happen to me. That’s the intimation. What could happen to me?”

  “Please, don’t press me, I said that knowledge is beyond my scope of certainty.”

  “Then what is within your so-called scope?”

  “The killings will continue, of course. And you’ll have to live with the knowledge that you could have helped, when asked, but decided against it, and that might cause you to think that those future lives were in your hands…that you could have done something if it hadn’t been for your fear.”

  “My fear?”

  “Of being that instrument of justice to which I referred. It’s an awfully big responsibility.”

  “And if I agree to investigate this for you?”

  “Not for me, Franz, not personally.”

  “You know what I mean. What happens if I agree to make a go of it, to try to make sense of all of it?”

  Beide smiled. It was an authentic, winning smile. “I’ll tell you when you do,” she said, and left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  Franz let out his breath, closed his eyes, and bowed his head.

  “Gregor,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I need a drink.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE REAL WORLD

  FRANZ REGRETTED THE beer as soon as he tasted it; regardless, he swallowed the mouthful.

  “Something wrong?” the innkeeper asked. He was a large, florid man who parted his remaining twenty strands of hair in the middle of his shiny head. Franz forced a smile. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. Lying, lying, lying, thought Franz. My doctor wouldn’t have ordered any such thing.

  And where, exactly, had Dr. Hoffmann been this entire time? Never once in the past forty-eight hours had the man made an appearance to check on Franz’s condition, not even to register displeasure at being robbed of the opportunity to pull the sheet over his lifeless face, had it come to that.

  In fact, Franz and Gregor had experienced no difficulties whatsoever in leaving the sanatorium in quest of refreshment. The door of his room—previously unfriendly to Franz, before Beide’s appearance—had opened with ease, and the third floor corridor had been absent of traffic. Empty, too, had been the electric lift, no sign of the pimply youth who acted as its attendant. Franz and Gregor had spent a moment or two trying to figure out the mechanics of the thing before opting to travel by stairway. They felt for certain they would eventually meet another living soul, and they did, two: an elderly gentleman in a bath chair, being piloted by a severe woman wearing pince nez. “Good afternoon,” Franz had said to them, Gregor close at his heels. The elderly man had not replied, vacant stare fixed at the other end of the reception hall. The woman, however, had given Franz a severe look and said, “If you insist,” without breaking stride.

  Gregor had directed him to the nearest inn, and together they had rehashed Beide’s visit and subsequent plea.

  “Not so much as a word about how I’m to proceed,” Franz had said, no longer conscious of whether or not the citizens of Kierling would or would not see Gregor, who managed to keep pace with him in an ungainly seesawing fashion.

  “Haven’t you ever read any detective novels?” Gregor had asked.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Well, you needn’t say it in that tone. I’ve not asked you if you’ve ever eaten a turd sandwich. Detective stories are splendid entertainment. I used to read them on long train journeys when I was a salesman. Of course, I can’t remember the plots of any of them, but I remember being entertained at the time I was reading them.”

  “Even if I had read any, I imagine there’s a big difference between the detection done in books and inquiries made in real life.”

  “Ah! Then you concede this is real life!”

  “I haven’t decided one way or the other on that score,” Franz said, enjoying the heat of the day and the strength of the air, and then enjoying his newfound enjoyment of such things. “All I’ve decided is that whatever kind of life this is, I’m stuck with it, and I’m living it. Am I crowding you?” It had been the third time Gregor had bumped into him.

  “Sorry, it isn’t the easiest thing in the world for me to walk along like a normal person, since I’m not. So you’ve decided to accept the case?”

  “I haven’t decided any such thing!” Franz said, but they had arrived at the inn, and Gregor had disappeared.

  The innkeeper watched Franz drain his glass. “Another?” he asked.

  “A glass of water, please.”

  The innkeeper gave him a glass of water, and then drew another glass of beer. He took a raw egg from the bowl on the bar, cracked it, emptied its contents into the beer, and shoved it at Franz. “You look like you could use beefing up,” he said. “Get you a sandwich?”

  Franz turned down the offer and looked at the other men at the bar, all of whom were busy talking to one another without any regard as to what the other was saying.

  Franz sipped his eggy beer and chanced a conversation with the innkeeper.

  “Dreadful about the people in Vienna,” he said.

  “Which ones?” the innkeeper asked, wiping a spot that didn’t need wiping.

  “The murders,” Franz said.

  “Which ones?”

  Franz felt he was already failing at being a detective.

  “The hangings,” he
said. “I mean the stranglings. The stranglings that look like hangings.”

  “Oh,” the innkeeper said, “those. Serves them right, is what I say.” He began filling three steins while a bored-looking barmaid waited.

  “Why do you say that?” Franz asked.

  “All of them killed like that, well, it stands to reason.”

  “Explain.”

  The innkeeper eyed him. He slid the steins to the barmaid, who collected them with one hand and trundled off to a table. The innkeeper leaned into Franz.

  “Those people were either somewhere they shouldn’t have been,” he said, “or messing around with people they shouldn’t have been messing around. That’s an unhealthy way to die, is what I’m saying, and if someone’s got to go to such lengths to get these people killed, well then, they had it coming.”

  Franz tried to understand him. “Are you saying,” Franz said, “that those poor people brought this on themselves?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” the innkeeper said.

  “So they all deserved to die.”

  “How do I know?”

  “You just said.”

  “I didn’t say any such thing. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. I didn’t know them.”

  “But don’t you think it strange that they all died in the same manner?”

  “Not really. Look how many people are killed by streetcars.”

  “Yes, but…” Franz really didn’t know what to say to that. He wished Gregor hadn’t chosen this moment to make himself invisible. Unless he’d simply not come in.

  “It’s people being careless,” the innkeeper said, “plain and simple.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Franz said. “A streetcar is a machine, it’s operated by a human being, and a streetcar accident—”

  “Same with a rope,” said the innkeeper.

  “But it’s more likely a person will walk in front of a streetcar than get a noose around their neck.”