Only if she could see through her hands, which were currently clamped over her eyes.
Rain beat against the window. It was probably already leaking in.
“Terrified of”—she hiccupped—“thunder and lightning.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Franz said, replacing the goblet, “and probably a million other things.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Rats, for instance. Mice.”
“Horrible.”
Franz raised his voice for Gregor’s benefit.
“Spiders. Bugs. Insects of any kind.”
Gregor said, “Gotcha,” and shoved himself under the bed.
“The very worst,” Julia said, swaying, eyes closed.
“Don’t close your eyes,” Franz said. “It will only worsen your giddiness.”
Julia opened her eyes.
Just in time to see Gregor, now a reasonable two inches long, scramble from underneath the bed.
“How’s this?” Gregor asked in a tiny voice.
The occupants of the rooming house heard the first blood-curdling scream of the night.
“HOW IS IT you can manifest yourself as a normal-sized insect but not when you’re the size of an ottoman?” Franz asked after Julia had fled from the room, leaving the door wide open.
“It’s what you wanted,” Gregor answered, back to his normal unsettling size.
Franz let that pass.
“I take it you’re no longer angry with me?” Gregor asked.
“I wasn’t angry in the first place, I… never mind, I haven’t got time,” Franz said, picking up the tray of priceless goblets as gingerly as if he were hoisting a case of nitroglycerin.
“Where are you going with those?”
“Upstairs. And you’re not coming with me.”
“So you are still angry with me.”
“Gregor, shut up. And stick around; I’m going to need you tonight. There’s work to be done.”
Franz walked slowly to the door, mindful of his burden.
“What sort of work?”
“Can’t talk,” Franz said. “Must concentrate.”
He hadn’t set both feet on the landing when he was confronted by the towering Frau Alt adorned in yards of rose-colored nightwear.
“What was that scream, monsieur?” she asked.
“It was a scream, madame.”
“I know it was a scream, monsieur. But whose?”
“Not mine.”
Frau Alt barely suppressed her exasperation. “It came from your room,” she said.
“Your hearing is excellent, madame. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“There was a woman in your room, monsieur.”
“Pure speculation, madame. It might have been the howling of the wind. Now, if you don’t mind…”
“Which of our female guests was it, monsieur?”
“It was I, madame. When I become affrighted by the sight of vermin, I become a countertenor. Now, if you could let me pass…”
“Vermin, monsieur?” Frau Alt’s indignation soared past her nightcap. “In my rooming house? Impossible! This edifice is highly regarded as the cleanest of its kind in the whole of—”
The occupants of the rooming house were treated to the second blood-curdling scream of the night.
“ENJOYING YOURSELF, ARE you?” Franz asked Gregor as he met him outside the doors to the Henker suite.
“It’s useful, no?” Gregor asked. “I could do without the running, however.”
“What’s she doing? Has she fainted?”
Gregor peered down the staircase.
“Her husband’s there,” he said, “wielding a sledgehammer. She’s telling him to get the bleach… and the carbolic… and the pesticide… Look, hurry up with what you’re doing, I’m done for if they have all that stuff in the house.”
Franz shifted the tray of goblets. They became heavier the longer he held them.
“Knock on this door,” he said. “I daren’t put these down.”
“Why?”
“Just knock!”
Gregor knocked.
“Hansel?” asked Mathilde from within.
“It’s Monsieur Choucas, Mademoiselle,” Franz said. “I apologize for the late hour, but I must see you.”
“One moment, monsieur.”
Franz whispered to Gregor, “I’m expecting a great many files tonight from Inspector Beide. When they arrive… don’t eat them.”
“May I read them?”
“If you must.”
“Yes, sir.” Gregor scampered down the stairs.
Franz waited for Mathilde to open the door.
And waited.
And waited.
One moment became fifty.
At last, the door was opened, and Franz entered, the delicate, antique collection of glass humming ever so slightly in his arms.
MATHILDE HENKER SAT, unmoving, in the chair nearest the door. The knuckles of both gnarled hands, each clutching a cane with such force as to threaten cracking, flared white. Outside, the raging storm continued to do its raging while Franz continued to stand in the cold room with the Borgia glassware in his hands. His arms ached. He had been with her for nearly five minutes.
“I knew you weren’t French,” Mathilde said.
“Thank you for having the grace to not expose me,” Franz said.
“How would I have benefited from that?” she said. “The question is, why you are telling me now?”
“May I put these down? They’re very heavy.”
She waved him to the dining room. He carried the glasses into the dark room and waited for a lightning strike to illuminate the table.
“You didn’t answer my question, Herr Kafka,” she called after him. She heard the ornamental tray land on the table with a slight tinkling sound. He returned to the parlor.
“Because your brother has been detained,” he said.
She showed no surprise at this.
“Detained?” she asked. “By whom?”
“The Viennese police, from what I can gather. The men did not introduce themselves, only commanded him to go with them.”
“Which he did, of course.”
“Without so much as turning a hair.”
She smirked. “Of course not,” she said. “He knows he’s safe.”
“Safe? From what?”
She fixed the sternest of stares on him. “First tell me what you want of us.”
“I want nothing.”
“You ingratiated yourself to us. Why?”
“May I sit?”
“No.”
Franz clasped his hands behind his back. “Very well,” he said, “but let me remind you that I did no such thing. I took a room—closet, really—in this house only yesterday; Thursday, if you wish to be precise, because it’s now a few hours into Saturday. I had not approached you or your brother. It was you who sent me the Borgia glasses, which led to my meeting your brother, which led to his invitation to accompany him to the theater tonight, which led to my presence when he was taken away. I didn’t engineer any of that.”
“But you have an interest in him. What is it?”
“I am a writer, Fraulein.”
“So you said. I won’t say something so fatuous as ‘I’ve never heard of you,’ because I know the world is full of writers of whom I haven’t heard. Regardless, I’ll have to take you at your word.”
“Then to be completely forthcoming with you, I offer this further honesty: I am a pensioned investigator of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute who, at one time or another, wrote some things that were published. That makes me a writer.”
“And what does being a writer have to do with my brother?”
“He has been causing a sensation,” Franz said, knowing full well he was about to launch into a fabrication despite wanting to be entirely honest and open with the woman. “A sensation who is also a mystery. What better subject for the writer who, finding himself in middle age and without any success in fiction, so desper
ately wants to make a name for himself among his fellow scribblers?”
Mathilde let a succession of growling rolls of thunder fill the time between Franz’s speech and her response. Her face, as much as it could, softened.
“Please be seated,” she said, and was taken aback when Franz sat next to her on the sofa. She was unaccustomed to any man except her brother being in such close proximity, but she did not rebuke him. She looked into Franz’s unwavering, intense gaze and sensed a fellow wounded soul. It was the eyes, she said to herself, the eyes that told the truth of a person.
“You want his biography,” she said.
“You’ve already supplied many enticing details,” he said. “But I know there’s so much more to learn, and if I could only be assured of exclusive access…”
“…Your fortune would be made?” she asked. “You are brazen, sir. And foolish. Had you continued to masquerade as a French player of wine glasses, I might have gone along with you, just for the sake of your company and… never mind. But now that I know your true goal, well… I don’t care how honest you are, I’d be ignorant to be complicit in your exploitation of my brother. Particularly when you will no doubt make much of the murders that have been associated with him these past few months. You’d have no problem obtaining a publisher with sensational literature like that. Well, Hans had nothing to do with any of those people. You, like the police, will come upon a dead end if you insist on following that tack.”
“As they are now, as we speak. Presumably.”
“Hans has nothing to fear. They’ll release him, as they always do, no matter how cunning they think their questions. He can’t be tripped up.”
“I believe you, Fraulein, but the police—”
“Are unimaginative. From beginning to end, first murder to last, Hans knew none of those people, from Ulla Stach to Leo Kropold.”
Franz sat back against the hard cushions. Rain pelted the windows in waves.
“The last reported murder was Inge Hersch’s,” he said. “How did you learn of Leo Kropold’s death?”
“The newspapers, obviously,” Mathilde said, reaching for her canes. “I read several each day. One can’t live on a steady diet of Goethe. They help pass the time. Of course, one has to read about all of the horrors in the world and the great cruelties people commit against each other when one relies on newspapers.”
“But Kropold’s death hasn’t been in the news,” Franz said. “Not yet, at least.”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”
“I’m not. And even if it were, it would have been described as a suicide.”
“Then why are the police questioning Hans about his death?”
“The question is, Fraulein, how you knew his name and why you assumed he was murdered?”
“Dear me, Herr Kafka, your questions! Are you working for the police?”
But Franz’s reply was interrupted by the third scream of the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THREE PRIVATE ROOMS
A SMALL, WINDOWLESS room. A single lamp suspended from the ceiling. One table. Two chairs. One gloved gentleman. One ungloved and perturbed, the third of his profession, so far, to share the room with the gloved gentleman.
“Then why is your name on this note?” Nagel asked.
“It isn’t,” Henker said.
“It says ‘Hanging Artist’ clear as day.”
“Which isn’t my name.”
“It’s the name you use when you perform.”
“It isn’t.”
“Don’t try to be tricky with me.”
“I’m not. I’m helping you to see, to understanding. ‘The Hanging Artist’ is just something it says on the bills out front and in the newspapers. It never says—nor has it ever said—‘Hans Henker, The Hanging Artist.’ It’s a pure theatrical construct, a leftover from my first engagement, created by a person I’ve never met.”
“You refer to yourself as The Hanging Artist during your act.”
“You were asking about this note the late Herr Kropold allegedly wrote and left behind,” Henker said, and Nagel marveled again at the man’s smooth and easy manner, “not about my act. I’ve already told you I have no idea why this man would have referred to a Hanging Artist in writing.”
“Well, who the hell else—?” Nagel began.
Henker held up a gloved hand. “Yes, yes, all right,” he said, “I know what you’re getting at, and if it helps you any, I will go along with your assumption that the Hanging Artist to which he referred is me, however—again—the only time I met the man was when he shared the stage with me for approximately four minutes in front of a few hundred people on Thursday night.”
The door to the room opened. Henker could not see who it was.
Nagel walked to the door and listened, for some time, before thanking the unseen visitor.
The door to the room closed.
Nagel returned to The Hanging Artist.
“Where were you between ten and eleven o’clock tonight?” Nagel asked.
“Ten and eleven o’clock tonight hasn’t happened yet,” Henker said. “It’s only two o’clock in the morning.”
Nagel was too tired to bandy any more words with the infuriatingly composed gloved gentleman.
“Please tell me where you were four hours ago,” he said, “up until the time you were brought here.”
“I was at the theater,” Henker said.
“I’VE TOLD YOU a hundred times now, I was at the theater!”
A small, windowless room. A single lamp suspended from the ceiling. One table. Two chairs. One handsome gentleman. One less handsome and perturbed, the second of his profession to share the room with the handsome gentleman.
“You exaggerate,” Habitzel said. “I’ve asked you many times, certainly, but not a hundred. But then I should remember you are an actor, Herr Lowy, and therefore have a tendency towards exaggeration.”
Few things angered Yitzchak more than being called an actor. Even though he was.
“I’m not the one doing the exaggeration,” he said. “Your lot has been exaggerating the realm of logic by keeping me here. I was nowhere near Werdehausen when he was killed.”
“That we know of,” Habitzel said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re holding me on suspicion of a murder I could not have committed. Why?”
“There are many witnesses—”
“I know, I know, who saw me at the Aktorhalle earlier in the evening, so you’ve said. But none of them saw me return.”
“Then you did return!”
“I did not.”
“You just admitted—”
“I said none of the men who saw me earlier saw me again.”
“You didn’t say ‘again,” you said ‘saw me return.’ In other words, you’re saying you did return, but—to your knowledge—no one saw you when you did.”
“I wasn’t saying that at all.”
“Then why did you say you returned?”
Yitzchak experienced a wave of exasperation so profound that he felt he had suddenly become a character in one of Franz’s maddening tales. How could he combat such illogic? It made up its own rules, or followed none to begin with.
“I went to dinner,” he said. “I went to a tobacconist. I went to the Aktorhalle. I went to the theater, the Traumhalle. I went to the station. I boarded the train for Prague. I was on the train until your men extracted me from it. Those are the facts.”
“We are not interested in facts,” Habitzel said. “We are interested in the truth.”
“Then tell me the truth,” Yitzchak said. “Tell me the only reason I’m sitting here is because a handful of men happened to mention that I had a rather heated exchange with certain members of the club, one of whom happened to be Herr Werdehausen.”
“It isn’t the only reason,” Habitzer said.
“What is the other?”
“There are two further reasons.�
�
“Yes?”
“It has been suggested that you had a very good reason for removing Herr Werdehausen from this world.”
Yitzchak laughed. “What, that we were rivals?” he asked. “We weren’t rivals at all. I have my own audience. I am a progressive artist. Christian was a two-bit stock player… There was no genuine rivalry. Others may have said we were rivals, but that is what one does in the theater—imagine rivalries between two popular yet otherwise dissimilar celebrities. There’s nothing to it.”
“The people we spoke to seemed to think otherwise.”
“Well, they’re sheep. What’s the other reason?”
“You’ve yet to tell us the name of the person with whom you dined and later conversed after the performance at the Traumhalle.”
Yitzchak’s mouth nearly got the better of him—he nearly blurted Kafka’s name—but his sense of loyalty prevented him. Franz had given him leave to announce his existence and location to close friends and family in Prague, but did that leave extend to anyone else? The police, for instance? Would his involvement in the hanging murders be compromised if his name was uttered?
“You have some three hundred witnesses to my appearance at the theater,” he said instead. “Ask any one of them, they’ll tell you. After I was onstage, I returned to my seat and remained there until the conclusion of the performance.”
“After which you could have nipped around to the Aktorhalle, murdered Werdehausen, and made it to the station in time to be on the 12:05 to Prague.”
“Is that right?”
“It’s possible.”
Yitzchak admitted to himself that it was indeed possible, but there was no way he would admit as much to Habitzer.
“The name of your post-theater companion, Herr Lowy,” Habitzer said.
“Ignaz Seipel,” Yitzchak said.
“The Chancellor?”
Yitzchak nodded.
“I call him Iggy,” he said. “He’s very fond of the acrobats.”
A LARGE, WINDOWLESS room. Two chandeliers suspended from the ceiling; one enormous round table; eleven chairs, each containing a person.
“It’s similar, yet different,” one said.
“That’s all?” asked another.
The Hanging Artist Page 24
