“And then, of course, there’s the surname.”
“And relationship.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s evidence,” a third one said.
“Inexplicable evidence,” said the first.
“It’s been preserved?” asked a fourth.
“Yes.”
“And the man?”
“Sleeping.”
“Guarded?”
“Until we decide otherwise.”
“Will he cooperate?”
“He is rather a recalcitrant individual.”
“Is that a yes or no?”
“Neither. It remains to be seen, depending on our decision.”
There was silence in the room.
Ten people turned to the eleventh.
“And what,” the first one said, “is your recommendation, Inspector Beide?”
CHAPTER FORTY
A MURDEROUS INTERRUPTION
“YOU PEOPLE WORK fast,” the officer said, twirling the card in his hand, white side, then black side, then white side, and so on. “I suppose you won’t give me a straight answer if I ask the ICPC’s interest in this?”
Franz plucked the card from the officer’s hand. “What’s your name, officer?” he asked.
“Bamborger.”
“Bamborger what?”
“Just Bamborger.”
Franz raised an eyebrow in what he hoped was an imperious manner.
“Oh,” Bamborger said. “Bamborger, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Should I salute?”
“No.”
Two tired-looking men in white coats transferred the woman’s corpse onto a litter and covered it with a sheet. Julia Dierkop and two of her cousins huddled in the corner of the apartment, Julia speaking to an officer who was writing down everything she said. The other two women sat together on the sofa, their hands folded in their laps, watching their sister’s removal with all the dispassion they could muster.
“Now then, Bamborger,” Franz said, surveying the suite’s parlor with a cold, controlling gaze, “what do we have here? And don’t say ‘a dead body,’ because I can see that. I’m asking the nature of the case. Suicide? Murder?”
“Difficult to say, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know the answer to that.”
Franz remained standing in the doorway, hoping his presence would not be noticed by Julia. “I’m not asking you to solve anything,” he said. “I want to know what’s known. The facts. You have the facts, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well? Out with them!”
Bamborger nodded to Julia. “The lady there says she came back to this apartment and went straight to her bedroom, which she shares with… um, I think it’s the lady on the right.”
“The right as one sits on the sofa, or the right as we’re looking at them?” When it became clear Bamborger was struggling to figure it out, Franz barreled on. “All right, we’ll skip that for the moment,” he said. “What then?”
“She changed into her, um, nocturnal attire, sir, and felt the need to, um, pass water, sir…”
“Speak plainly, for God’s sake,” Franz said. “We’ll get through this so much faster if you do.”
Bamborger brightened at the suggestion. “Very good, Inspector,” he said. “As the bathroom on this floor is at the end of the hallway, she would have to leave the apartment to visit it, and she couldn’t find her slippers. She went to the second bedroom to borrow…”
“Why didn’t she borrow her roommate’s slippers?” Franz asked.
“She said her feet are too small.”
“Go on.”
“She went into the other bedroom and noticed one of the beds was unoccupied, that of the deceased.”
“And?”
“She found a pair of slippers that fit, left the apartment, and went to the toilet.”
“Skip to her return from the toilet.”
“When she returned to the apartment, she noticed the deceased sprawled on the floor.”
“She hadn’t noticed before?”
“Apparently not, sir.”
“But when she noticed this time…”
“She screamed.”
“And what is the name of the deceased?”
“Lisy Dierkop, sir. Of the famous Dierkop Sisters.”
The Dierkop Sisters were anything but famous, but Bamborger had possibly been bullied into believing so by the surviving members of the four-woman-trio.
An elderly, unkempt man carrying a shabby medical bag nodded to the white-coated men and joined Franz and Bamborger at the door.
“One side, gentlemen,” he said, and the white-coated men carried the litter with the covered Lisy Dierkop out of the apartment. None of the women so much as sniffled.
“What’s the good word, doctor?” Bamborger asked, yawning.
“Murder,” the doctor said. He was practically all beard and spectacles.
“How was she killed?” Franz asked.
The beard and spectacles glanced at him, then at Bamborger. “Who’s this?” he asked.
Bamborger mouthed “ICPC,” and the old doctor nodded.
“Poisoned,” he said. “Prussic acid. She reeked of it. Stuff smells like bitter almonds. Skin turns red. Had all the signs. Not a fun way to go.”
“How did she…?” Franz began, but he was interrupted by the officer who had been speaking to Julia, who now joined them, showing them a brandy bottle with perhaps a half-inch of liquor remaining.
“Drank this,” the officer said.
“How did she not notice the smell of the acid?” Franz asked.
“Because there is no odor,” the doctor said. “It smells like brandy. Cheap brandy, too.”
Franz stopped himself from asking one of the stupidest questions in the universe; unfortunately, Bamborger asked it anyway.
“Could she have only swallowed the poisoned part of the brandy, unpoisoned part behind?”
The doctor and the officer, disgusted, turned away from him.
“It couldn’t have been suicide, either,” Franz said, “if there’s no evidence of poison in the brandy and we are certain this is all she drank—unless she took the poison in some other form immediately before she drank the brandy.”
Bamborger was awed by the suggestion. His partner made a hasty note in his notebook. The doctor, however, shrugged. “I’ll cut her open, see what’s sloshing around inside,” he said, a little too loudly. The Dierkop sisters could be observed to stir in the background, while Julia choked a sob. The police hurried the doctor down the hall as Franz went in to Julia.
She wound up in his arms. The sofa-bound Dierkop Sisters gasped.
“Monsieur, this is beyond hell,” Julia said, and Franz disengaged from her in as gentlemanly a manner as he could. She cast a glance at the women. “These are my cousins, Flora and Katharina,” she said.
“We had no idea she drank,” Flora said in a defensive, schoolmarmish clip.
“We certainly wouldn’t have allowed such a thing,” Katharina said in the same tone, an octave lower. She was evidently the mezzo of the quartet.
“We never thought to look in the bookcase,” Flora said.
“Those aren’t even our books,” Katharina said.
“They came with the room.”
“This is a furnished apartment.”
“Lisy never smelled of alcohol.”
“And never showed any signs of inebriation.”
“I can’t help but think that this is all a mistake.”
“It certainly is an imposition.”
The sisters had somehow gone back to talking to each other, forgetting Franz and Julia.
“We can’t cancel our booking,” Flora said.
“Heavens no. Nor should we,” Katharina said.
“We need a second soprano.”
“Without question. You’ll have to sing lead until we find one.”
“I don’t know the me
lodies.”
“Incredible!”
“Don’t look at me like that. You’ve always been just as wrapped up in your harmonies as I.”
“Well, fortunately we won’t have to revise our billing.”
“Yes. Perhaps in future we can shorten it to ‘The Three Dierkops’ and have done with it.”
“Why not just ‘The Dierkops’? That way it won’t matter if we have three or four or more on the stage.”
“Never more than four, the money’s stretched out enough as it is.”
“A non-Dierkop should, by rights, receive a smaller percentage.”
“Yes. Hand me that pad and pencil, I want to work this out…”
Julia led Franz out of the apartment and into the hallway, shutting the door on her cousins. With the departure of Lisy, the white-coated men, the doctor, and the officers, the house had begun ringing with the slamming of doors as the residents satisfied their curiosity and returned to their beds.
“I feel absolutely dreadful about this,” Julia said. She had been shocked into sobriety, and Franz pitied her.
“It’s a tragedy,” he said, unable to think of anything more original to say.
“And to think,” Julia said, “only an hour ago I was complaining about her.”
“You were?”
“Well, not Lisy specifically. Them, in general.” She cocked her head at the closed door.
“How do you mean?”
“Before you arrived. When I was drinking the brandy I’d brought to your room. I had been miserable about the way they treat me, the grueling rehearsals, the prudishness. Oh, they were kind enough, monsieur, I suppose, but…”
“Where’d you get the brandy?”
“Beg pardon?”
“The brandy you brought to my room.”
Julia blushed. “I bought it,” she said. “Some time ago. For my own use, if ever the occasion warranted.”
“Your cousin, then, must not have known you had it.”
“No, otherwise it would have been gone by now. Poor Lisy. We really had no idea she was a souse, monsieur. I’ll never stop blaming myself.”
“Why should you blame yourself in the first place?”
Her eyes misted over. “Because,” she said, “of my shameful thoughts. Oh, it’s too much to consider, monsieur. To think that at the very same time I was drinking brandy and thinking those selfish things poor Lisy was in here drinking her own poisoned brandy, as if I somehow willed her to die.”
“I’m sure you did no such thing,” Franz said. “The coincidence is just your fancy, and for all you know she could have perished before you ever lifted the glass to your lips. The correlation is superficial. Don’t torture yourself with this foolish talk.”
She thanked him, although he knew not for what, and he bid her good-night. As the door closed behind her, he shook his head at the notions people will sometimes entertain.
Of course, there was a certain irony (if it indeed was irony) that Julia had been drinking from a goblet once owned by a member of a family historically known for poisoning. The Borgias, if their spirits lingered in the ether, would have been pleased, albeit frustrated that the victim had been nowhere near the actual goblet. Still, poison was poison, and perhaps their otherworldly influence wished to favor a long-suffering woman by bumping off—
Franz sharply drew in his breath, provoking the first coughing fit he’d experienced in days.
He tried to stifle the coughing so as not to disturb the house any further, but the suppression only aggravated the fit. He clutched the newel post of the stairs to the upper floor and fought to steady himself.
Once under control—with tiny stars swimming before his eyes—he climbed the stairs to the Henker suite. He knocked, but no answer came, so he tried the door, hoping Mathilde Henker hadn’t locked the door after he’d abruptly left her to investigate the last scream nearly two hours earlier, but his hope wasn’t met. No light came from behind the doors. All was quiet.
He had not had enough time with Mathilde, although he couldn’t say exactly what more time might have yielded. And now, with the ridiculous notion of Julia’s rattling around in his brain and clanging like the Borgia goblets would have done had he only played them, Franz couldn’t fathom what he wanted to discover from her in the first place. Did he want to share his new theory with her, regardless of how foolish it sounded? Did he want to tell her that her priceless Borgia glasses might have poisoned an innocent woman?
Franz coughed, took his handkerchief from his pocket and, out of habit, spat into it.
No blood.
He went down the stairs to the landing and saw Gregor sitting outside his room.
“I have good news and bad news,” Gregor said.
“What’s the good news?” Franz asked, clearing his throat.
“The files arrived.”
“That’s fine, although God only knows when I’m going to get the chance to read through all of them.”
“No worries, I’ve nearly gone through the lot,” Gregor said.
“You have?”
“If you only knew the mounds of paperwork I had to work through in my days as a salesman,” Gregor said. “Of course, you do know, I suppose.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“I still have some more good news.”
“Yes?”
“The automobile you requested has been delivered. It’s waiting outside.”
“Well, I didn’t think it’d be waiting in the dining room, Gregor. Anything else?”
“It stopped raining.”
“Splendid.”
“And now the bad news,” Gregor said.
“Here it comes,” Franz said.
Gregor pointed to the steamer trunk outside the door, a trunk that looked very familiar to—
“I’ve been kicked out?” Franz asked.
“That woman was muttering something about artists as her bull of a husband lugged your things out of the room.”
“But it’s four in the morning!”
“It’s actually twenty minutes to five. If you want the exact time…”
“No, I don’t want the exact time,” Franz said. “Frau Alt could have at least had the common decency to have faced me with the news; after all, I paid good money…”
“You don’t want to go in there anyway,” Gregor said. “She practically gassed the place with Black Flag. You’d suffocate. Oddly enough, I don’t mind the stuff. So much for insect repellant, eh?”
“Is that the only bad news? It seems there should be more.”
“I’ll let you see the automobile for yourself.”
Franz looked at the trunk and the pile of his things. He’d a good mind to leave it all sitting there. What, after all, did he really need? He was starting over in life, wasn’t he?
It was the first time the thought occurred to him, and it made him break into a cold sweat.
It hadn’t been much of a new life since Wednesday, had it? While he admitted it had certainly been a great deal different from his ‘old’ life, had it been promising? Rejuvenating? Encouraging? Had it filled him with the beauty and promise of life, or with a renewed fascination for the world and humanity?
Not really.
It had been littered with death.
Populated with people who not only kept secrets, but actually appeared to personify them, embody them, and act as if those secrets were the only things ruling their lives.
It had been populated with people who were one thing, then another, or both at the same time. It had been impossible to know the truth of them.
It had been mostly illogical, and what little logic he had encountered led to conclusions too terrible to face.
It had been filled with glimpses of human misery. It had been filled with intimations of lust, greed, envy, revenge, and desperation.
It had shown him a dark void where monstrous, unseen beings swarmed around him, watched him, and closed in on him.
It had given him Gregor.
; It had baffled him.
In short, this new life was much the same as his old life, differing only in that the privately held beliefs he held about humanity had now become flesh and word and deed.
But he suspected he was not going to be given much of a choice between the two.
He sighed.
“Help me with this,” he said to Gregor, and the two of them struggled down two flights of stairs with the trunk between them.
Once outside Frau Alt’s, the gradually vanishing moonlight and the promise of dawn illuminated an odd-looking machine on wheels stationed at the curb. Franz dropped his end of the trunk, which caused Gregor, who had been ill-advisedly maneuvering backwards, to lose his grip and fall. He teetered on his great round shell, every leg waving in the air.
“That’s Beide’s idea of an automobile?” Franz asked.
“Help,” said Gregor.
It was certainly a machine with four wheels: a Daimler Tourer, which must have cut quite a sporty figure on the streets of Vienna fifteen years prior. What was left of its sky blue paint did nothing to offset the great patches of rust that speckled the machine like a teenager’s complexion. The tires were thin and brown with wear. The seats of the two-seater were swollen with mildew. The canopy top had been patched so often it resembled a quilt stitched together by a madwoman.
“It’s fifteen kilometers to Schwechat,” Franz said. “We won’t make it down the block.”
“It’s a beautiful car,” Gregor said, rocking back and forth in an effort to right himself. “Built to last. Worm gears, shaft drive… they don’t make them like that anymore. Help me up, will you?”
“Where’s the driver?” Franz asked as he assisted Gregor.
“What driver?”
“That thing didn’t arrive by itself, did it? Where’s my driver?”
“I don’t know. Did you ask for one?”
“I asked Beide to send me an automobile. I didn’t think I had to spell out anything further.”
“Well, you got what you asked for,” Gregor said. “Let’s get your trunk strapped to the back and get on our way.”
As Gregor helped him with the trunk, Franz said, “I’ve some bad news of my own.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I’ve never driven an automobile.”
The Hanging Artist Page 25
