The Crooked Maid Read Online Free

of course.” Her voice turned mocking. “You think I shouldn’t?”
    The boy did not answer. He was busy with a different thought.
    “How did you find out?” he asked. “Did you find a letter? Or perhaps you came home one afternoon and they—”
    He flushed, gestured, fell silent: a boy like a puppy, clumsy, foolish, a constant quiver to his tail. It was an effort to summon the anger required by propriety.
    “You’re being a boor,” she said. “You would do well to remember that you are no longer in the schoolyard, or the dormitory.”
    He bit his lip and launched into apology. She cut him short. She had told the story before, always with the same omissions.
    “I followed him. I suspected, and I followed him. He entered a building and went up to a flat. I waited twenty minutes then rang at the door.” She paused, mimed the gesture, one slender finger pressing down on the bell.
    “You saw her?”
    “Yes.”
    He stared at her, gaily, simply, without malice, yearning to learn and not to judge, the down on his lip twitching with excitement.
    “Was she very beautiful?”
    In her mind’s eye she relived the scene, saw the door swing open and a young man standing there, dressed in his shirt sleeves and trousers, a silvercross around his neck. He wasn’t painted or perfumed or even particularly clean. One of his buttons was undone.
    She’d pretended she had mistaken the door.
    “Beautiful?” she answered at last. “It’s hard for me to judge. I should not have thought so, no. It wasn’t how I expected. A woman in garters. That’s what I had pictured. Someone who’d thrown on a dressing gown just before she opened the door. Charming, pretty, a sort of gentleman’s whore. But I see that I shock you.”
    The boy had indeed blushed a deep crimson, but he quickly composed himself and shook his head.
    “No. It’s how I pictured her myself just now. I mean, something like that. Not that I know about …”
    “Garters? Or whores?”
    “Neither,” the boy managed, and fell silent.
    Outside, dawn broke as they rolled into the station.
    He carried her bags for her. Once on the platform she was surprised by the crowd of men, women, and children that spilled out of the second- and third-class compartments. It was as though, all of a sudden, they had entered the bustle of the city. Some tired relatives stood freezing near the barrier gates. They had waited all night to greet the husbands, wives, sons, and daughters now threading down the platform. Above them gaped the bombed-out roof.
    A porter approached her, loaded her things onto a cart. The boy walked by her side, scanning the faces in the crowd. There was nobody there to welcome either one of them, just the morning light and the broken cobbles of Vienna. Out on the street a taxi driver accosted them and the boy insisted she should take it. They pressed hands briefly, and the boy bowed as though he wished to kiss the back of her hand (the tennis racket that stuck out of his knapsack nearly whacked her on the head). In the end his courage left him and he let go of her, mumbling that it had been a “deep pleasure.”
    Through the rear window of the taxi she watched him turn away fromher to gather up his luggage. Behind the boy a vagrant shuffled, restless in his Wehrmacht coat, and a child sat selling nuts and berries from a handdrawn cart. At length the woman too turned, ahead to where her husband would be waiting in whatever might be left of their apartment.
    “You come from abroad?” the driver asked, studying her clothes across one burly shoulder.
    “Just drive,” she said, and dug in her handbag for makeup and mirror, intending to paint new life upon her fading lips.

Two
    1.
    As they disembarked from the train and left the station, there stood amongst the crowd a man neither tall nor particularly short, and self-effacing of manner, if wrapped somewhat conspicuously in a dyed army coat and a red woollen scarf of better quality than the rest of his