“It wasn’t from lack of trying,” she said. “We girls were always asking her to join us for this and that.”
“Fraulein Stach was most circumspect,” Gauss said to Franz, with a wink.
“But she didn’t join you?” Franz asked.
“Not once.”
“Perhaps she didn’t enjoy the social whirl most commonly afforded the young,” Franz said. “Dining with friends, the dance hall, the cinema, the theater… ”
“In truth,” Fraulein Ascher said, “she consented to go out with us the one time, and I assume it was only because the evening was to be in her honor.”
“Her honor?”
“She had taken this position earlier in the week, and the rest of us thought it would be nice to treat her to an evening out by way of celebration. Dinner, then the variety hall.”
“But in the end, she decided not to join you.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“The lot of you went anyway?”
“Yes, and it’s just as well she didn’t join us, the food was awful and there was a horrible act at the variety hall, a man who hanged himself. It was perfectly dreadful.”
“It caused a bit of a sensation for a bit,” Gauss added. “Tasteless trick, I understand.”
“You think Fraulein Stach would not have enjoyed this—um—professional suicide?” Franz asked.
“Certainly not,” Fraulein Ascher said.
“And you found it dreadful, too. You said so yourself, just now.”
“After he hanged himself, of course. Disgusting.”
“But before he hanged himself?”
“Well, we all thought it was silly, that he was a comedian or something. He asked for a volunteer, I went up.”
“Did you?”
“I just said I did.”
“A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will do, Fraulein,” Gauss said. He looked to Franz for approval.
“We’re not in court, Herr Gauss,” Franz said.
“Why are you interested in that wretched man?” asked Fraulein Ascher. She had ceased writing in her notebook.
“I’m not,” Franz said. “I was just remarking on your fascinating experience at the theater the night Ulla Stach died.”
“How do you know it was that night?” she asked.
“Was it?”
She hesitated. “It was, in fact.”
“Thank you.”
“IT WAS A falling out, that’s all,” said Liesl Franke, up to her arms in soapsuds and dishes. Her three daughters sat about the kitchen slowly doing various chores, all of them trying very hard not to look at Franz. “I don’t remember what caused it. These things happen in families. Is it very important?”
“One never knows,” Franz said. “It might have affected him in some acute manner. Internally, I mean.”
“You mean like his heart?” Liesl asked.
“His conscience,” Franz said.
“Manny never had the brains to have much of a conscience,” she said.
The eldest girl looked up, then down.
“Was he a drinker?” Franz asked. “Perhaps he said something rash that caused the rift. While he was in his cups.”
“Never touched a drop in his life. That I knew of.”
“Was there reason to doubt?”
Liesl shrugged, and beckoned the eldest girl to the sink to begin drying the dishes.
“People do lots of queer things and keep them secret,” Liesl said, turning to Franz and drying her red hands on her apron. “Even when they’re your own flesh and blood.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Franz said.
A dish clattered in the sink.
“Careful,” the mother said to the daughter.
The daughter gave the mother a dark look, and was careful.
“May I congratulate you on your well-behaved children?” Franz asked. “My own are devils.”
“You’ve children, sir?”
“Three,” Franz said. “The same number as you. Unless there are others around I’ve yet to meet?”
“This is the lot,” the woman said. “They can be devils at times, too.”
“Perhaps mine are just too young to be very mindful just yet.”
“How old are they?”
“The eldest is six, the twins are four. All boys.”
The woman nodded in satisfaction. “That’s boys for you. Girls are a bit different.” She nodded to each as she dashed off their ages. “Ten, twelve, and fifteen. Of course, they get older, different problems come up.”
Another look from the eldest, who had been washing the same dish for well over a minute.
“You still call him Manny,” Franz said, startling the mother. “You retained some affection for him, then, even after whatever caused him to stop seeing you and your family?”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she said. “He was over here regularly, every Sunday for dinner, and of course birthday parties and Christmas. Once a year he’d join us for a bit of fun at the variety hall.”
“And, of course, all of that stopped two years ago.”
“Yes.”
“The parties, the trip to the theater…”
“Oh, our lives went on as before,” she said. “We just didn’t include him, is all.”
“So you’ll be going to the theater again this year?” Franz said. “That’s delightful. A family outing…”
“We’ve already been,” the eldest girl said.
“Nobody asked you,” the mother said.
“It’s all right,” Franz said.
“Lovely time,” the middle girl said.
“Great fright at the end,” the youngest girl said, smiling. “Man went and hanged himself!”
The middle girl nodded. “Great treat, that.”
“A man hanged himself?” Franz asked.
Liesl Franke gave him her first smile of the morning. “Magician,” she said. “Tacky, really. The girls had a great laugh because I went up there when he asked for somebody to search him. Stupid, really.”
The younger girls giggled.
“Manny would’ve loved it,” the mother said.
“Do you miss your uncle?” Franz asked the youngest.
The eldest girl ran from the room.
The mother had stopped smiling.
“Moody, that one,” she said to Franz. “Something you’ve got to look forward to, the older your children get. Of course, you have boys. Boys are always different.”
“YOU SAY THERE’S insurance involved, Herr Kafka?” Frau Kramski asked.
“An old policy,” Franz said. The woman sparkled in jewelry and fairly floated in her expensive dress. Franz wondered if he should make up an exorbitant figure to see how far he could push her. He chose to wait.
“And Josef’s the beneficiary?”
“Indeed.”
“Poor dear Walter,” she said. “Such a good, kind, generous man.” Franz felt the thickness of the insincerity. She switched to a shrewder manner. “I’m surprised you didn’t arrange to meet with my husband at his office.”
“This was the address we had,” Franz said. “And as it’s Saturday…”
“Oh, he works the half-day, same as everyone else,” she said. “That’s Josef. What’s good enough for the workers is good enough for him.”
Franz surveyed the opulent room.
“Do his workers live as well as this?” he asked.
She laughed. “I should hope not,” she said. “Would you like me to telephone him? I’m sure he could be here in twenty minutes, fifteen if he hurries.”
“I wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing him.”
“I’m sure it’s no inconvenience. Not when it comes to money. I mean, money from dear sweet generous Walter. Although it surprises me that the insurance money won’t go to Edith.”
“Edith?”
“His wife.”
“Ah.” Franz had to think about that one. “Well, as I said, this is an old insurance policy,” he said, “which he probably took out before he was
married. Either that or it was supplemental to one he made out to his wife.”
“Don’t you know?”
“Perhaps hers was with another company.”
“I see,” said Frau Kramski. “Well, I always knew Josef would come up in the world. This is his year, no? What with the business and now this money… how much did you say it was?”
“I’m glad to know your husband is finally fortunate. Was he not so before?”
She picked at her teeth with a lacquered nail. “He’d have been more fortunate had he possessed a little more gumption, Herr Kafka,” she said. “He’s always been one to wait for things.”
“And you believe the opposite.”
“I’ve always believed in ambition.”
“And you wanted your husband to be ambitious.”
“I think any woman wants that of her husband.”
“I wonder if mine wants that of me?” Franz said.
“I’m sure she does,” Frau Kramski said.
“I’m loath to admit it, Frau Kramski, but I’m a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true,” Franz said. “I’ve never been much of a go-getter, as the boys at the office say. I’ve always been content to find a situation and remain comfortable. I’m certainly not one for parties, or making connections. I can’t stand the cinema, because it gives me a headache. And opera is three hours of screeching I could do without. And as for the theater…”
“I adore it,” she said. “So much fun, although there isn’t much locally. The variety changes every fortnight.”
“Does your husband join you for that?” Franz asked, sitting forward.
“Heavens, no,” she said. “He says it embarrasses him. I don’t know what he means by that. Possibly because I love getting involved. If there’s a sing-along, I give it all I’ve got, first note to last. If there’s someone who says he can identify objects while wearing a blindfold, I’m the first to offer up a bracelet. Not too long ago I helped a man hang himself.”
“A suicide?” Franz asked. Frau Krasmski laughed a laugh as big as her sitting room.
“Of course not!” she said. “Well, in a way, yes, I suppose it was. But it was all a trick, you see. The man was all right in the end, although you wouldn’t know it from the way the act ended.”
“How did you help him?”
“Oh, he wanted a volunteer to come up and check the rope for something or other. You know, just someone from the audience who could come up and say there was ‘nothing up his sleeve,’ or whatever those magicians say.”
“And was there anything up his sleeve?” Franz asked.
“Only his arm,” said the woman.
“THIS IS SAD news,” Georg Gauss said. “How awful for Leo. He has a great-uncle in Bern; perhaps that’s why he said he was from there, although he wasn’t. Never even been there, from what I know. My goodness, the boy had never been anywhere at all.”
“Never?” Franz asked.
Georg Gauss was everything his lawyer cousin wasn’t: quiet and modest. He had taken the news of Leo Kropold’s death with a measure of introspection.
“He made one very short trip to Vienna late last year,” Gauss said. “Shortly after his father’s death. Perhaps it was Leo’s way of… breaking out, I guess you’d call it. I can give you his great-uncle’s address, if you think it proper. I think it’s unkindly to let poor Leo sit on ice any longer than necessary—unless you want me to identify the body?”
“Would you?” Franz said.
“Of course, of course,” the little man said, nodding. “I can make the trip.”
“You are very kind,” Franz said.
“Not at all,” Gauss said. “I always felt sorry for the boy. Here I am calling him a boy when he was a man, wasn’t he? His father always treated him as a boy. As a hired boy, in fact. They had that farm, and that’s all life meant for Leo’s father, you know. I say he treated Leo like a hired boy—that was my impression. They’d come into town every so often for things they needed, or a delivery of feed or whatever it was, and he’s have Leo there with the wagon, hauling and loading, barking orders at him…”
“In this day and age?” asked Franz. “There are trucks now, and—”
“That was old Kropold,” Gauss said. “The century never turned for him. He did everything the way his father had done, and he kept his son under his outmoded thumb all those years.”
“Why Vienna?”
“Why Vienna what?”
“Why did Leo go to Vienna last year? Why there and not anywhere else?”
“It’s a city, sir,” Gauss said. “Less than an hour away, but as unlike that remote, lonely farm as a stone is to an apple. He’d never seen it. He’d never seen anything.”
“How long was he in Vienna?”
“Only a few days.”
“Did he stay with anyone? A friend?”
“He hadn’t any friends. I don’t know who he stayed with. Possibly he put up at a hotel or a boarding house or something like that. I don’t know that he knew anything about how to travel, what to do and what to avoid.”
“He came back, though.”
Gauss nodded. “Yes, he came back,” he said. “We went the winter without him emerging at all, except to see Doctor Eustace.”
“Was he ill?”
“You’d have to ask Doctor Eustace. But I don’t think so. Leo came to see Doctor Eustace once a year, of course, just to be looked over… No, he didn’t, at that! Doctor Eustace used to drive out to the farm. Leo’s father believed a medical man should make house calls and earn his fee. Maybe Leo came to see Doctor Eustace of his own accord, save him a trip, make up for all the hassle his father put him through those years with the drive out there…”
“And that was the last time you saw him in town?”
Gauss scratched his chin. “The last time I saw him,” he said. “But for a little while there were others who said they’d seen him at the inn, at the tavern, at the variety hall, even the cinema… it all must have been overwhelming for the boy. There I go again, ‘boy.’ I don’t know what was the reason, although I can guess.”
“What’s your guess?”
“He’d been to the city, seen things. Seen there was much more to life than getting up before dawn and going to bed at sundown. More to life than haying and plowing and everything else—more to life than chores. When his father died, he dared to step away from his father’s land, even though it had become his. And my guess is Leo liked living the faster-paced life. I understand he particularly liked the variety hall, went there nearly every night for a while.”
“And then he sold the farm,” Franz said.
Gauss got up from his desk and went to a cabinet, where he opened a drawer, leafed through some documents, selected one, and showed it to Franz.
“Said he’d take anything he could get for it,” Gauss said. “I told him it was valuable land, asked him didn’t he want to keep it for his children?”
“He had children?” Franz asked.
“No, but he was young enough that he could’ve found himself a woman and gotten on to the children side of things.”
“What did he say to your suggestion, Herr Gauss?”
“Nothing, at first. He laughed. A good long laugh. Then he said he was pretty sure he’d never have children.”
Franz looked at the signature on the document. It wasn’t a signature at all, but the name LEOPOLD DIETER KROPOLD in the same block letters as Leo had used in his journal and on the note he had left behind.
“And the farm?” Franz asked, handing the paper back to Gauss.
“Fastest sale I ever handled,” Gauss said, refiling the document in the cabinet. “There’s been a few companies have wanted that land for years, even before the war. Factories, you know. Sold it to the highest bidder.”
“Much money?”
Gauss’s eyes went wide. “Let’s just say that Leo Kropold was suddenly a very wealthy man.”
�
��And then he disappeared.”
Gauss sat behind his desk. “Yes,” he said. “A month ago.”
“He left no forwarding address? Not to you? Or his bank? Friends?”
“No bank, no friends. Old Kropold kept his money on his property; I expect Leo just assumed that’s what you did—get your money in cash and keep it where you can get at it.”
Gauss wiped his eyes. “Look at that,” he said, regarding his wet hand. “Now why in the world should I be upset about that boy?”
“You’re a kind man,” Franz said. “You saw a young man bear the brunt of a hard-headed father for all those years, and now that you learn that the young man has come to a cruel and senseless end…”
Franz found that he couldn’t complete the thought.
He coughed, a hard cough that tore his throat as it blasted forth.
He waited. There would be at least four more until he’d have to stand up.
But the other four never came.
He swallowed, begged Gauss’s pardon, and took a deep breath.
GREGOR WAS STILL underneath the exhausted Daimler when Franz came out of the land agent’s office, an array of spanners of various sizes within reach.
“Herr Kafka,” said a voice.
Franz saw Beide standing beside a sleek black limousine, a door open.
“I’m sorry to curtail your investigations,” Beide said, “but I must get you back to Vienna.”
“What’s happened now?” Franz asked.
“There’s been another incident.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Another murder?”
“Nearly.”
Franz felt hot and tired. The night storms had cleared to a hot, humid day. His legs felt like lead, and he found he couldn’t muster the strength to get into the automobile.
“What do you mean, ‘nearly’?” he asked.
“The man survived,” Beide said. “I think you need to meet him.”
“But I know who’s been doing the killings,” Franz whispered.
“Who, Franz?”
“We have,” Franz said.
“Catch him!” Beide yelled, and Franz felt arms around him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Hanging Artist Page 27
