The Hanging Artist

by Jon Steinhagen

  “Nothing I could do about it,” a voice said beside him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE ILLUSIVE DETECTIVE

  BEIDE CRADLED HIS jaw and prodded his teeth with his tongue.

  “Nothing loose,” he said. “You didn’t have to hit me.”

  Franz nursed his left hand. The blow, he felt, had possibly caused him more pain than Beide.

  “If you’d behave like a normal, considerate person and not sneak up on me all the time,” Franz said, “that wouldn’t happen.”

  “That was quite a punch.”

  “I’ve had a very trying evening. Where are you taking Henker?”

  “I’m not taking him anywhere.”

  “Quibble, quibble, quibble,” Franz said, his fright hardening to anger. “You know exactly what I mean, and I’m sick of you toying with me. Verbally and otherwise.”

  Beide took his hand away from his face and revealed that she had morphed into her feminine persona. Franz didn’t even blink.

  “Those aren’t my men,” Beide said.

  “Who are they, then?”

  “The police.”

  “They think Henker murdered Kropold? It’s absurd. Although there is a great deal that is absurd about all of this, so I guess that’s not saying much.”

  “They want to question him,” Beide said. “Why not let them?”

  “Because it’s a waste of time.”

  “It’s their time to waste, Franz.”

  Franz grunted and walked onstage.

  “Where are you going?” Beide called after him.

  “To stand where there’s light,” Franz said, “such as it is. Come out where I can see you clearly.”

  Beide joined him at the ghost light. Franz took a careful look at her face.

  “If it leaves a bruise, I apologize,” he said.

  “Apology accepted. It’s your own fault, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “Them taking Henker.”

  “How is it my fault?”

  Beide took off her cap and removed a folded piece of paper from its crown. “Your remarks this afternoon about the note you found in Kropold’s suit.” She passed the note to him, although he recalled it even before he read it: Thank you Hanging Artist.

  “What about my remarks?” Franz asked.

  “We’re not the only ones who are processing all of the information, you know,” Beide said. “We have to share what we find with the local police.”

  “Then why do you have the note?”

  “It’s a copy.”

  “Again—what have my remarks got to do with Henker’s arrest?”

  “He hasn’t been arrested. He’s merely wanted for questioning.”

  Franz returned the note to her. “It’s because I said something about the grammar of the thing, isn’t it?” he asked. “Let me guess—they think Henker wrote the note because ‘Thank you Hanging Artist’ could be Henker’s way of thanking Kropold for being such an excellent agent.”

  “Agent?” Beide asked.

  “Yes,” Franz said. “You’ve certainly considered the possibility. Henker was the mastermind, but his alibis have been fairly airtight—he couldn’t have been at any of the crime scenes at the times the murders occurred. Which suggests an associate. A henchman. Leo Kropold.”

  “Go on,” Beide said.

  “If, for some reason, it’s true that Henker was in league with Kropold, how did they meet? Why did Kropold cooperate? And why did Henker get rid of him?”

  “Perhaps his killing spree has come to an end.”

  Franz showed him the tin collar. “Do you think that’s likely?”

  Beide smiled and opened her tunic at the neck, revealing a tin collar snug against the flesh of her soft neck. “One can only hope,” she said.

  “But you think otherwise,” Franz said.

  “Must we talk here?” Beide asked. “This is hardly the most congenial of places to discuss this.”

  “There isn’t a congenial place in all of Vienna,” Franz said as Beide buttoned her tunic. “And we talk here and now, because you have a habit of slipping away.”

  “Very well.”

  “Which—again—I don’t understand. You came to me, inspector. You begged me to solve these crimes. You were dead certain Henker was the killer…”

  “We were very interested in Henker,” she said. “I don’t mean to interrupt and correct you, but it’s a fine point.”

  “Have I proved that Henker couldn’t be the killer?”

  “You haven’t proved anything. But you’ve been experiencing things that neither I nor anyone else in an official capacity could have experienced.”

  “You want proof?”

  “Of course we want proof. I wish you wouldn’t be so angry about it.”

  “I’m not angry!”

  “You are; you look ready to explode.”

  “Because I’m not a damned detective!” Franz said, exploding. “But I’ve gamely gone along, trying to be a detective, and all I find is more questions, more confusion, more darkness! And you’ve been no help at all! You beleaguer me into spending my convalescence here in Vienna chasing around clues that don’t mean anything, while you pop in and out of places like a magic lantern slide!”

  “This afternoon, I suspected I was getting in your way,” Beide said, placing a hand on Franz’s arm. Franz noticed again the scent of oranges on her person, the same he had smelled at the hotel, when Beide was his male self. “I decided to step back for a while,” Beide continued, “because I know you are not a professional detective, a trained investigator, and I felt that my constant presence was curbing your… well, I realized I should have given you a free hand from the very start. So you could learn whatever you could learn in your own, unique, Franz Kafka fashion. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “I want to go home,” Franz said. “But I said I’d help you, and I do what I say. What do you need to put an end to these crimes?”

  “Solid proof that someone did them.”

  “Like Henker? Kropold? What would you consider solid proof?”

  “The murder weapon.”

  “Which is a rope of some sort.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think it might be Henker’s performance rope, the silken noose.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Logically? No.”

  “No?”

  “Have you ever seen it except when Henker uses it during his performance?”

  “I told you—we can’t account for it outside this theater. Henker doesn’t carry it on his person, and we’ve searched the theater.”

  “How well?”

  Beide bristled. “We are experts, Herr Kafka. We searched extraordinarily well.”

  “Come.”

  Franz led her backstage to a bank of levers just beyond the stage left exit. “Do you have a torch?” he asked.

  Beide unclipped her torch from her belt and switched it on.

  “Shine it here,” Franz said, indicating the levers. “One of these ought to do the trick.”

  She obliged, and Franz pulled a lever. An amber special shone down from above.

  He pulled another. A white light, aimed at the backdrop, blinked on from the other side of the stage.

  He pulled another. Nothing.

  “The hell with this,” he said, and threw every lever and switch on the board.

  The theater filled with light.

  “This way,” he said, leading Beide around the many curtains to the backstage area and up the spiral staircase to the dressing rooms. “Remind me to tell you about my experiences up these stairs,” Franz said as they clanged up the steps. “They’ll turn your hair bone white.”

  “Tell me now,” Beide said.

  “No time,” Franz said. He opened the door to Henker’s dressing room and turned on the light.

  “Nothing,” Beide said. “We’ve been through this room once already, Franz.”

  “It’s not an empty room.”

  “Ther
e’s nothing in here except what we see.”

  “And what do we see?”

  “A sink. A table. A mirror. A chair. There are no hiding places, nowhere one could conceal a bread crumb, let alone a length of rope. We’ve looked.”

  Franz approached the chair. It was shabby and old, something dragged down from an attic or up from a cellar. The dark wood was thick, the seat smooth, and wide enough for two people sitting together hip to hip. The table was its twin, solid and ancient. It was no more than a table; no drawers on either side.

  “Henker arrives at the theater at the beginning of every performance,” Franz said, “and sits here until it’s time for him to perform. Why?”

  “There could be a million answers to that,” Beide said. “What are you getting at?”

  “How closely did you or your officers inspect the furniture in this room?”

  “As closely as we are now: we saw a table, we saw a chair.”

  Franz knelt in front of the chair and ran his thumbs under the edge of the seat.

  “It has to be something fairly simple, given its age,” he said.

  He pushed the seat, and it came loose.

  He and Beide could see, then, that the seat doubled as a lid.

  “My god,” Beide said. “Not even locked. And there are no hinges to give it away.”

  “They are within, and all of a piece,” Franz said, “for that very reason: concealment. This is craftsmanship from a long-forgotten age, Inspector.”

  He raised the seat.

  They gazed upon a rotting pile of material, slimy with age, reeking of the centuries. The material was coiled in such a way as to suggest what it had once, long ago, been.

  A silken rope.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  WORDS

  “THERE’S NO WAY Henker or anyone killed anybody with that mess,” Beide said. “And there’s also no way he uses it during his act. It’d crumble to pieces.”

  The seat of the chair had, at one point, originated as a chest lined with velvet, which had also rotted over time, and this accounted for the apparent thickness of the chair and its solidity: its crude construction masked subtle workmanship.

  Franz picked up the rope as gently as he could manage.

  “It holds together,” he said. He weighed it in his hands. “It’s extremely fragile, yet it remains in one piece.”

  “But it won’t for long, not if you keep handling it,” Beide said.

  Franz laid it to rest again on its ancient velvet bedding.

  “How old do we think it is?” Beide asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Franz said. “But it’s very old. A hundred years? Two hundred? I’m no expert. The Henkers, however, seem to specialize in old and rare artifacts. The sister gifted me a set of Borgia wine glasses.”

  Beide whistled. “Genuine?”

  Franz shrugged. “Again—I wouldn’t know.”

  “What did you do to deserve such a gift?”

  “Nothing, Inspector.”

  “There’s writing on the lid,” Beide said. “Look.”

  A legend had been carved on the underside of the lid, in simple, blocky letters; the letters themselves bore enough traces of a reddish paint to stand out in relief.

  “Shine that torch on it,” Franz said, and Beide illuminated the writing.

  “It’s Latin,” Beide said.

  “It’s not Latin,” Franz said. “I know Latin, and this isn’t it.”

  “Is it German?”

  Franz cocked his head and squinted at it. “It resembles German, but…”

  “Can you read it?”

  Franz sounded out what he read to the best of his limited ability.

  “Swer an rehte güete

  wendet sîn gemüete,

  dem volget sælde und êre.

  “Er hat den lop erworben,

  ist im der lip erstorben,

  so lebet doch iemer sin name

  er ist lasterlîcher schame

  Iemer vil gar erwert,

  der noch nâch sînem site vert.”

  “I understand some of it, and yet it sounds so unfamiliar,” Beide said.

  “It’s Mittelhochdeutsch,” Franz said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’d stake my life on it.”

  “And how, may I ask, do you know that?”

  “I had been studying the Yiddish language for years before I died,” Franz said absently, his curiosity consumed by the impersonal writing before him. “Middle High German is a sort of precursor to the Judeo-German language. I didn’t learn enough about it other than that. I had hoped, at one time before my illness really took hold, to study the Nibelungenlied, which was written in this language, and…” He trailed off and looked at Beide. “If I’m correct, that makes this piece of furniture at least five hundred years old.”

  “And at most?”

  “Seven or eight hundred years old.”

  “I see. And when, Franz, did you die?”

  Franz got to his feet.

  “When did I die?” he asked. “I didn’t die. As you can see. Why did you ask a ridiculous question like that?”

  “You said you had been studying Yiddish before you died.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  Franz looked around the small room, at the old table, at the rope’s crypt. He looked at himself in the mirror.

  “I have no idea why I said that,” he said, regarding his reflection. “Perhaps because I was so certain my time was up. Up until a few days ago, when I regained my health, while I was still able to speak, my most oft-uttered phrase was, ‘When I’m dead and gone.’ I suppose I haven’t been able to shake that. Yet.” He looked at Beide. “We need to tie some things together, Inspector. I’ll need your unflagging cooperation.”

  “You have it. Which things do you wish to tie together?”

  “Everything. Do you have your notebook?”

  “Of course.”

  Franz took the torch and shone it again on the writing. “Copy down exactly what you see,” he said, “word for word, and the way each line is spaced.”

  Beide retrieved her black book and pencil from the depths of her cape and knelt at the chair to begin her task.

  “I don’t know if it’s possible,” Franz said, watching her work, “but I’d like a translation of that.”

  “And where am I supposed to get it?” Beide asked.

  “One of the universities, I’d assume. A scholar.”

  “That might not be the world’s easiest thing, and even if I could locate one, I don’t know how fast we’ll get results. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know,” Franz said, helping her up when she’d finished, “but I think we should know as much as we can about anything and everything involving ropes and our friend The Hanging Artist, no matter how many centuries are involved.”

  “All right, I’ll see what I can do. It’s now after midnight.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is now officially Saturday. Time flies when you’re trying to solve a mystery, if that’s what we’re doing. What’s next on your agenda?”

  “Get out of this place as fast as we can.”

  “Why?”

  “I hate the theater.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A NOCTURNE

  WE SEE THE man stretch his legs in the first class carriage.

  He feels marvelous.

  He really and truly does.

  He looks forward to four hours of sleep as the train rocks and sways.

  He puts his hat over his eyes and nods off, planning a commission. He knows so many wonderful writers, all friends, all of his mindset; why should he chase after the wretched Viennese hacks?

  No reason at all.

  He hears the door of his compartment slide open.

  A woman clears her throat in a manner that can’t be mistaken for anything other than, “Get your feet off the seat.”

  He removes his feet
from the seat opposite.

  Hearing a cracking noise, he lifts his hat and looks.

  The nun eating walnuts smiles and nods to him.

  The nun with the newspaper sitting opposite her swats her with her newspaper.

  He lets his eyelids slide down and sleeps, awakening when he feels the train slow to a halt.

  As if a giant hand has fronted the locomotive, barring it from further progress.

  He looks out the window at deep purple nothing.

  The severe nun is looking at him, her newspaper folded and creased into a tight unyielding rectangle on her lap.

  The other nun, covered in walnut shells, stares into space.

  “Why have we stopped?” he asks.

  “Because of you,” the severe nun says.

  “I didn’t want the train to stop,” he says.

  “Neither did we,” says the nun.

  The door to the compartment slides open. Two policemen enter. They are followed by a tired-looking man in a long, gray coat, who in turn is followed by the conductor.

  He hears the man in the gray coat say his name. He agrees that it is his name.

  The man in the gray coat says to the other men, “This is our man.”

  WE SEE A young woman, clad only in her woolen nightgown, slide from between the sheets of her narrow bed.

  We hear the snoring of the other young woman in the room from her own narrow bed.

  The young woman leaves the bed chamber, and creeps down the hallway to the parlor.

  We see her glance into another bedroom, and hear one set of snores from a woman in a narrow bed.

  The young woman finds it odd that the other bed is not filled with snores. She discovers it is because the bed is not filled by another young woman.

  We see the young woman tiptoe into the parlor.

  She selects one pocketbook from a row of three beneath the coatrack.

  We see her open the pocketbook; it is full of everything except the one thing she wanted.

  “Which one of you bitches took it?” we hear her whisper.

  We see her wring her hands.

  She turns her head sharply, as if remembering something, then hurries to the one bookcase in the parlor.