The Hanging Artist

by Jon Steinhagen

  “From a reputable haberdasher nearby,” Beide said. “For two dozen silk handkerchiefs.”

  Franz studied the slip. “Purchased when?” He almost hated to look.

  “Yesterday,” Beide said.

  “Yesterday?” Franz asked, shaking the sales slip as if to force it to confess a lie.

  “As in the day before today,” Beide said. He put a comforting hand on Franz’s shoulder. “You’re doing a splendid job, Franz,” he said, smiling, “and your passionate line of reasoning was inspiring to observe. But I’m afraid we must dig deeper.”

  Franz returned the sales slip to Beide.

  “Yesterday,” he said.

  “I think you’re tired,” Beide said, signaling for Gründlich to depart. “You’ve had a busy day, and you haven’t had a decent meal. In fact, you haven’t had any meal at all, and it’s my fault for not looking out for your well-being.”

  He studied Franz’s vacant expression. “You seem disappointed. Was there something you expected to find but didn’t?”

  Franz opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it.

  Beide conducted him to the electric lift and rang the bell for the operator. The machine whirred to life beneath them and began its rattling journey up the shaft.

  “I’m sending you back to Frau Alt’s,” Beide said. “You’ll have plenty of time before dinner, and I understand she makes an excellent goulash on Friday nights. I’ll be in touch with you later. I think we’re on the right track, or at least we’re on a track that could be parallel to the right track. At any rate, we’re on a track, and we’ve learned so much. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think we would have come so far so quickly without your invaluable help. Now, what do you say to that?”

  “Shit,” said Franz.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  AMONG THE GARBAGE

  KROPOLD’S BOOTS WERE nowhere to be found.

  Of course they weren’t. Nothing was easy.

  And there’s nothing so fragrant as alley garbage on a hot June afternoon.

  Franz knew he had thrown the boots out the window.

  He gave up. Things would be found when and if they wanted to be found.

  That was Franz’s newest outlook on life.

  Unless…

  Unless Gregor, in a snit after Franz had shouted at him, had crabbed down to the alley and taken the boots.

  Just to spite Franz.

  Or spur Franz on to dealing with the evidence of the boots, because something about their discovery and what they told of their dead owner still gnawed at the soft cheese of Franz’s brain.

  Mmm, cheese.

  Stomach a-growl, despite the wet, fetid odor of his surroundings, Franz reentered the hotel and made his way to the lobby and from there out onto the street like any respectable, sane person.

  If only.

  “AS A MATTER of fact, sir, Brahms once stayed with us. A fortnight. A small portion of his ninetieth opus was extensively revised here during that visit. Several measures of the poco allegretto. I was a boy at the time, but I remember him vividly. Particularly the penny candy he would bring for me.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Franz turned at the reply.

  He knew that powerful baritone.

  “Although the Brahms Room is just that,” Fautz said, “merely one room. You were thinking along the lines of…?”

  “A suite,” said Hans Henker. Dressed in his light summer suit, wearing his summer gloves, he sauntered shoulder to shoulder with Fautz as they headed towards the lift.

  “Ah, a suite,” Fautz said, trying to mask his discomfort. “Yes, well, all of the suites are booked up at present, although I’m sure one could be made ready soon.”

  “How many rooms to a suite?” Henker asked.

  “Two. A bedchamber and an anteroom.”

  “I see. Then what I’m looking for is an apartment.”

  “Very good, sir. One is available. I’ll show it to you at once.”

  “Excellent.”

  “How long were you planning to stay with us, sir?”

  Henker smiled his benevolent smile.

  “Indefinitely, perhaps,” Henker said. “I open at Die Feier on Monday; tonight’s my farewell performance at the Traumhalle.”

  “Ah! Die Feier! Well, it’s but a five-minute walk from here.”

  “I know. Tell me, Herr Fautz—this hotel. Why is it named after the mantis?”

  “Ah! I’m afraid the legend is unknown to me, lost over time. The mantis is to be admired, of course. A most useful creature.”

  “Yes,” Henker said. “And very efficient, too, and not choosy at all. It devours whatever it can catch.”

  Franz didn’t hear Fautz’s toadying response, as the conversation was whisked up into the hotel along with the lift.

  Franz left the hotel. He was sick of symbolism.

  And insects.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A GIFT

  FRANZ RETURNED TO Frau Alt’s in a condition he would have embraced three days ago, when he was lying on his deathbed: hot, tired, frustrated, and singularly aromatic after his romp through the Hotel Das Gottesbeterin’s garbage. As he was no longer on his deathbed, he did not embrace his condition. He had missed the lunch, and his thoughts and hopes were focused on the prospect of the goulash dinner.

  He had yet to meet any of his fellow boarders, and perhaps that was a blessing. He had barely been a guest for twenty-four hours, had yet to share a meal with them, or chance upon any of them in the parlor or anywhere else. He was sure the arrival of ‘Monsieur Choucas’ had been announced to them by his landlady, but what would that mean to them? As it was, it meant little enough to him.

  He climbed the endless stairs to the third landing and his snug quarters, overwhelmed with despair. He reviewed all he had seen and heard that day, and his gross mismanagement of all of it: he was fairly certain that Beide had summarily dismissed him from the case without saying as much, and why would he not? Kafka had thus far proved to be as capable a detective as he was a… what?

  What was he? A pensioned insurance investigator? A writer? A lover?

  He was none of those things, although he had, at various points in time, been all of those things. His failure at all of them—and at so much more, if he had the energy to enumerate the entire list—had culminated in his final failure to even die properly.

  Leo Kropold, he reflected, had died properly, at least.

  What did he mean by ‘properly’?

  Well, Leo Kropold wasn’t about to come back to life. Nor was ‘Immerplatz Inge,’ or Hermann Herbort, or any of the so-called victims stretching back to Ulla Salich. Had Kropold been responsible for all their deaths? Beide had thought it possible, but Beide had also been convinced that Hans Henker, The Hanging Artist, had been responsible, too, with even less to go on—other than a gut feeling.

  Franz’s current gut feeling was hunger. And a little nausea: the sight of two dead bodies in less than six hours was more than any self-respecting stomach could handle, even without grotesque additions of Kropold’s twisted, blackened, strangulated face, and Inge’s practically noseless, disease-ravaged face…

  Her face.

  There was the link.

  Leo Kropold and Inge Hersch.

  She had shown the advanced stages of syphilis.

  He had been taking bichloride of mercury.

  Both had died on the same night.

  Had Kropold contracted the disease from Inge?

  Had he killed Inge, and then killed himself?

  Timing.

  What had been the timing of Kropold’s visit to the Traumhalle, his return to the Hotel Das Gottesbeterin, Inge’s death, Kropold’s suicide?

  These were the questions he should have been asking Beide and the grim officers, or the mismatched duo at the morgue.

  It was now that he wished that people’s penchant for appearing out of thin air could be relied upon. He wanted Beide, male or female or both, to be sitting on t
he top landing, waiting for him. He’d have been happy enough even to find Gregor chewing on a spoiled bratwurst or expired rodent.

  What he did find when he opened his door was a sparkling set of wine goblets neatly arranged on a glittering tray on his bed.

  MATHILDE HENKER LAY the Morocco-bound edition of Goethe’s The Tragedy of Young Werther she hadn’t truly been reading on her lap and attempted to straighten herself in her seat, although she didn’t know why, since she hadn’t been able to straighten herself for years. What was the long-forgotten thrill that had so nearly penetrated her useless spine? Breathless anticipation? Hope?

  A visitor?

  Of course it was a visitor. She had planned this, and whatever she planned always played out to her satisfaction.

  “You may enter,” she called.

  The door opened, and Monsieur Choucas entered.

  He was every bit as handsome and earnest as Frau Alt had said. Too severe and stiff to be Parisian, but as Mathilde hadn’t been to France since the war, she no longer had a reliable frame of reference. Perhaps everyone the world over had become severe and stiff since the war. She could believe that.

  He was stammering something.

  “—too great a—a gesture—gift—to a stranger—”

  Could she smile? She tried. Her face nearly cracked off.

  And yet he did not recoil at her hideousness.

  He could be blind.

  But then how could he have read her note?

  “I apologize for receiving you so informally, monsieur,” she said when he had run out of phrases. She gestured to her misshapen body. “The spring has long gone from my step, and even with the aid of those”—she nodded to the two canes within reach—“it would take me the rest of the afternoon to get across the room to open the door.”

  What was going through the man’s mind as he stood before her, long and lean and flushed to his eyebrows? She could not tell, but she noted, with surprise, that he did not avert his eyes from her.

  “It took me a moment to comprehend what you meant when you referred to my ‘little accident’ this morning,” he said. “And then I remembered.”

  “To have your livelihood reduced to a pile of broken, useless glass at a stroke must have been heart-rending, monsieur,” she said. “I do beg your pardon; would you be more comfortable if we conversed in French?”

  The monsieur assured her that not one word of French need be spoken. “Only one, perhaps,” he added, “and that, of course, is merci.”

  While his manner was as casual as a flagpole, his shy charm, at least, was evident.

  As for her own manners, she had forgotten them; but then, she had forgotten nearly everything warm and human over the years. She invited him to sit. He protested that he did not wish to prolong his intrusion, and she told him his intrusion was not an intrusion at all, but a welcome ray of sunshine on…

  …on an already sunny afternoon?

  He then did something no man had done in her presence for such a long time. He laughed.

  Had she been funny?

  She had become an expert at sarcasm, yes, and irony, but humor?

  No, it was no mistake. He had found humor in the way she had awkwardly backtracked on the miserable cliché she had embarked upon.

  “Oh, please do sit,” she said. “Unless I’m keeping you from something? Like those beautiful goblets?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, taking a chair. She noted how he perched on it rather than sat on it, not unlike a hungry but patient bird. Perhaps that was how he came by his surname: Choucas. Jackdaw.

  “I do hope they’re suited to your purpose,” she said, closing the book in her lap.

  “They surpass it,” he said. “I’m almost afraid to touch them, they’re so delicate, so beautiful.”

  “Perhaps they will make your music all the more sweeter,” she said, but quickly added, “I don’t mean to imply that your music isn’t already as sweet as it can be.”

  He had been angling for a glimpse at the title of the book in her lap. “Young Werther,” he said. “You admire Goethe?”

  She passed a gnarled hand over the volume. “I often wonder,” she said, “if I admire the author, or if I admire the author’s work.”

  He showed interest in the remark. “Are you not of the opinion that a writer and their work are one and the same?”

  She admired his use of pronouns. “I am not,” she said. “When I read Werther, I don’t for one moment think that Herr Goethe is he. Werther exists as words on a page. Goethe existed. Existed as you or I are existing right this moment. Goethe was merely responsible for dipping his pen into his ink and putting Werther on the paper. They cannot be one and the same, because one created the other.”

  “And yet it is said that God and Man are the same, even though one created the other.”

  Oh. That was warmth she felt. A brief flare of warmth, or at least something resembling her memory of warmth.

  “Ours is too short an acquaintance to voyage into a discussion of God and Man,” she said. “As for Goethe, I can’t say I admire him because I didn’t know him personally. He was a bit before my time, no matter how old I look.”

  He cocked his head at her again, and said, “I would put you at thirty-one.”

  Mathilde thought only the French could be so brazen and yet so winning at the same time. “Thirty-two,” she said, “although it’s just as impolitic for a young woman to confess her true age as it is for a young man to guess it.”

  It was the first time he looked away from her. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I didn’t mean to… that is, I’m not always… that is to say, when it comes to social graces…”

  “I’m teasing you,” she said, and he returned her gaze.

  The conversation lapsed. Then, suddenly:

  “I’ll be forty-one next month,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. “I would have guessed younger.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  More uncomfortable silence.

  “That’s a very fine copy you have,” he said.

  “It’s an early edition,” she said.

  “It must be rare.”

  “Rare enough.”

  “Passed down from generation to generation?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. She held the book out to him, and he took it. “It’s a part of our collection,” she said. “We have a passion for rare and beautiful things.”

  “When you say ‘our,’ to whom do you refer?” he asked.

  “My brother and me, of course,” she said. “Forgive me, I thought everyone knew him by now. But you’ve only just arrived, haven’t you? My brother’s name is Hans. I call him Hansel. Makes him sound like a little boy, doesn’t it? It keeps him in line. He’s certainly not a little boy. He and I are the same age.”

  “The same age?” he asked. “But… are you, then…?”

  “I wonder how you’re going to finish that sentence.”

  Franz blushed. “I don’t know why my first thought was that you were born so close together. Month-wise. Oh, I don’t know what I mean. You’re twins.”

  “Yes. Although it would be possible to be, say, ten months apart.”

  Eager to steer clear of any further misinterpretation of the senior Henkers’ reproductive history, Franz said, “You call him Hansel… does he call you Gretel?”

  “He tried, once. I corrected his error. He won’t again. I prefer Tillie as a nickname, if one must go around giving people nicknames.”

  “Tillie.”

  “For Mathilde.”

  “A very pleasant, comforting name.”

  “Which? Tillie? Or Mathilde?”

  “Both.”

  She looked at him. She raised her eyebrows. He was slow to get the hint.

  “Oh,” he said. “Mine is…”

  “Yes?”

  “Francois.”

  “I thought you’d forgotten it, the way you paused.”

  “I had.”

  She laughed.

  “No,
truly,” he said. “I’d forgotten it.”

  “How can anyone forget their name?”

  “I don’t think of myself that often.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. She also didn’t know what to make of his physical attitude; he seemed both desirous to stay and eager to leave at the same time.

  “May I offer you some refreshment?” she asked.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to overstay my welcome,” he said. “And as it’s near the dinner hour…”

  “Then it’s the perfect time for an aperitif,” she said.

  “Well…”

  “You wouldn’t insult me by refusing my hospitality, would you, monsieur?”

  “No, no, of course not, but—”

  “Good.”

  “—you’ve already given me so much. Too much.”

  “I have?”

  “The goblets.”

  “Well, I could have hardly given you the entire set one goblet at a time. Unless you perform one-note songs. Now, let’s not be so deferential to each other and have a drink. You’ll find a decanter of Schwabach Goldwasser and some glasses on the sideboard in the next room. I’m a gracious hostess, but not a terribly mobile one; if I served you myself, dinner would be long over by the time I made it to the sideboard and back, and as these canes occupy my hands, carrying any sort of liquid is a challenge.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” he said, and went into the next room.

  She heard the delicate clink of the crystal stopper as he poured the drinks. Should she ask him for music, too? The late Caruso on the gramophone? Would that be making too much of the Frenchman’s visit?

  A sharp pain prevented her from any further pleasantries. She struggled to alleviate it by shifting her weight, stifling a cry as she attempted to haul herself into a sitting position. Sadly, her desperate, awkward movements caused the cushion supporting to dislodge itself and slide to the floor along with the book from her lap. Without support, the pain in her back became excruciating, and she drew in her breath sharply before emitting a wholly unladylike gasp.

  Monsieur Choucas returned with the liqueur at that moment, saw her discomfort, and immediately set down the glasses.