The Crooked Maid Read Online Free Page B

taxi for another moment, then shouldered his knapsack, picked up his satchel by its worn leather handle, wedged the hat box between his elbow and his hip, and—ignoring the cabbies who accosted him within twenty steps of the station (though he had plenty of money and could have afforded the ride)—started walking. He walked north at first, following the long bend of the Gürtel, then west towards Vienna’s more affluent suburbs, keeping in sight a stretch of tram tracks but making no move to climb aboard a tram.
    Throughout his long march, the boy paid little attention to his surroundings but rather walked with a fast, driving, almost mechanical step. What absorbed his attention so thoroughly, displacing all his pent-up curiosity for a city that, only yesterday, he had been impatient to see, was the thought of the woman who had shared his compartment, cruel mouth screwed into a smile. He thought of the things he might have said to her; invented touches, brushes, a chaste kiss in the darkness of the shorted-out train. Her name was Beer, Gudrun Anna. He’d found a name tag on her luggage when she’d left the compartment to use the lavatory; had pulled out a scrap of paper and made a note of her address. He thought about her husband too, whom he pictured as somehow very tall; witnessed their first handshake across the dusty threshold of their stagnant flat, tentativeand awkward, until the husband grabbed her waist and crushed her into the double fold of his embrace. So vivid was this vision of the estranged couple’s reunion that, if challenged to do so, Robert could have described the shade of the husband’s eye (a flinty blue) and the crease made by his hand in the silken blouse at his wife’s slender back.
    And then his thoughts abandoned husband and wife, still locked in their embrace, and raced ahead instead, to Herr Seidel’s accident and his mother’s letter, her dark hints of “conspiracy,” the long lists of all her ailments, the blandly tender phrases with which she had instructed him to “stay away” even as she complained about her isolation and the family’s ruin. There was something in the letter’s tone, in its omissions and sudden shifts of topic, that had fed a feeling—long grown into conviction—that there was something odd, fishy, and, so to speak, out of joint going on at the house, and that his mother was, if not precisely suffering, then at any rate besieged, and consequently in need of his help. “The important thing,” he told himself, repeating a maxim he had culled from an English spy novel, “is to keep one’s eyes peeled and one’s powder dry.” But despite this—as he called it—“detective resolution” and the attendant weight of responsibility, he found himself humming, alive with the expectation of “pressing Mother to his breast” (he’d written just such a phrase into his diary). It would have taken a good ear—and imagination—to pick out from these distracted notes the opening bars of “Cherokee.”
    So absorbed was Robert in these thoughts that he did not notice entering the old neighbourhood, nor passing the familiar park in which he had played as a child and which now lay denuded of trees. It was only in his own street, walking up the hill past the densely clustered villas, that he finally came to his senses. Robert looked up and, heedless still of the weight of his knapsack that was cutting into his shoulders and of the awkward ridge of the hat box that was biting into his hip, he ran the final few yards to the house.
    It might have been six-thirty or seven in the morning: a warm and humid summer’s day, sparrows chirping in the garden pine. The ornate metal gate opened under his probing hand, revealed a short flight of steps overgrownby moss and weeds. At their top, a pair of marble pillars flanked the villa’s double doors, the brass knocker green and stiff. He knocked tentatively at first, then with some force; turned, found the doorbell, sent a