Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction, although some of the characters were inspired by historical figures. The details about crime investigation and life in Vienna are based on period sources.
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable information on the folklore and customs of Hungary in A magyar nép hiedelemvilága, Hungarian Folk Beliefs, by Tekla Dömötör, from the 1981 translation by Christopher M. Hann (Corvina Books and the University of Indiana). The lines in italic on page 28 are from this text. The lines in italic on page 22 are from Hungarian Peasant Customs by Károly Viski (Dr George Vajna & Co.). I have also quoted extensively from System der Kriminalistik by Hans Gross, published in 1904. Information about Dora and her family was drawn from Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud (Collier Books) and Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 by Hannah S. Decker (The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.).
A number of people have contributed to this book. At Little, Brown, a particular thank-you to Judy Clain. My appreciation also goes to Betsy Uhrig and Sandy Bontemps.
I’m also thankful for the help of Simon Taylor and Jo Goldsworthy at Transworld Publishers in London.
A special acknowledgement to Susan Bachelder.
I should also like to thank the following for their kind support: Karen Blessen, Marilyn Cooperman, Grazia D’Annunzio, John Dugdale, Mark Epstein, Patricia Halterman, Trevor King, Allison Leopold, Nancy Manter, Lee Mindel, James Perry, Ana Roth, Ann Shakeshaft, Edna and Leo Shields, Lori Shields, Valerie Steele, Sally Wilcox, Jane Wildgoose and Laura Williams. Thanks also to the corporation of Yaddo for their generosity.
Finally, I’m glad to express my profound gratitude to Anne Edelstein.
A resident of New York, Jody Shields is the former Design Editor of the New York Times magazine and a former Contributing Editor of American Vogue and House and Garden. The author of two non-fiction books on fashion, she has also written several screenplays and is a collected artist. The Fig Eater is her first novel.
HE STANDS UP next to the girl’s body. He looks down for a moment, then carefully steps over the narrow boards lying around it. He walks across the grass and joins the three men, waiting like mourners. No one speaks. The body is poised like a still life waiting for a painter.
Now they watch the photographer edge his way over the boards, his equipment balanced on one shoulder. He stops and gently lowers the legs of the tripod into place, then steadies the bulky camera directly above the girl. Without looking up, he snaps his fingers. The men silently move aside, shifting their lanterns as a boy passes between them, moving with a sleepwalker’s strangely certain gait, eyes fixed on the frail pyramid of white powder he carries on a tray.
The boy stands by the photographer, nervously waiting while he adjusts the dials on the camera. The photographer ignores him. He hunches behind the camera and pulls a black cloth over his head. In that secret darkness, the camera lens tightens around the dead girl’s mouth. The photographer mutters something unintelligible, then his hand blindly works its way out from under the cloth. The instant his fingers snap, the boy strikes a match and holds it to the powder on the tray.
A blinding flash lays transparent white light over the girl’s body, her stiff arms and legs, the folds of her dress, transforming her into something eerily poised, a statue fallen on the grass. There’s shadow, a black space carved under her neck, in the angle where her head is bent towards her shoulder, and below one outstretched arm. Her other arm hides her face. The light vanishes, leaving a cloud of odour. Burned sulphur.
The Inspector keeps this harsh image of the girl’s sprawled figure in mind even later, after her body is cut open, becoming curiously tender and liquid.
She lies in the Volksgarten, near the seated stone figure of the Kaiserin Elizabeth. The statue faces a fountain pool in the centre of a bosquet of low flowers, and behind it is a curved wall of bushes over three metres high. The park is a short distance from Spittelberg, Vienna’s notorious district where the Beiseln offer music, drink and women.
The Inspector points at a crumpled piece of white paper or cloth near the girl’s body. Two of the policemen nod and begin to pick up the boards. There’s no haste in their movements, even though it’s getting late. They set a board on top of two rocks to make a walkway over to the cloth. If there are footprints on the ground, the boards will protect them.
During another investigation last year, in the spring of 1909, the Inspector temporarily preserved footprints in the snow at a crime scene by placing a flowerpot over each one. There are other ways to keep prints left in sand, soft dirt or dust.
While the photographer’s boy patiently holds a lantern over his head, the Inspector squats on the boards, close enough to see that the cloth has been roughly smoothed over some small object. A rounded shape. There are flies around it and a sweet, foul odour. He takes tweezers from a leather pouch and pinches a corner of the fabric. It sticks slightly. When he pulls it off, the fabric has a dark smear on the underside, and he has a shock of recognition as he drops it inside an envelope. Someone has murdered a young woman and defecated next to her body.
When the Inspector stands up, he realizes he is sweating. His shirt is damp; his braces are wet stripes over his shoulders. The humid night air has also weighed the girl’s clothes down over her body. It is hot, unusually hot for the end of August.
They prepare to take another picture. Egon, the photographer, drags the tripod over. He sets it up and cranks the camera down and down, stopping it two feet above the soft excrement. One of the men raises a lantern over it so he can see to focus. The Inspector steps back and turns his head away, waiting for the whispered sizzle of the lightning powder as it ignites. In a minute, the lantern’s light is eclipsed by the explosion. Days later, when he looks at the photograph, the grass around the body appears as stiff as if it had been frozen, not burned into the film on the glass plate in the camera by the explosion of light.
When the boards surrounding her are removed, the girl looks frailer alone on the ground. They find no objects, no other obvious clues around her. The thick grass masks any footprints. They’ll search the area again tomorrow during the day, when there’s better light.
Invisible in the dark, the Inspector stands on the marble platform next to the Kaiserin Elizabeth’s statue. He’s a tall man and can reach nearly as high as her head. He gently touches the statue’s shoulder. He never would have permitted himself this trespass at any other time, but he’s unsettled by the extraordinary discovery of the girl’s body near the memorial. Kaiserin Elizabeth was the wife of Franz Josef. She was assassinated in 1898, stabbed in the heart by a madman with a blade so wickedly thin it left only a speck of blood on her chemise. It is said her dying words were ‘At last.’
He wonders if there is some connection between the statue and the location of the girl’s body.
In front of him, the men move quietly in the circle of light made by the lanterns, and between their dark figures he can glimpse the whiter shape of the girl. Just beyond the park, the wing of the Imperial Palace is faintly visible. From behind the trees, there’s the occasional, isolated sound of an unseen carriage proceeding around the Ringstrasse.
According to police routine, a sketch is always made before a description of the crime scene is written. Closely trailed by the boy holding a lantern, Egon paces out a rough square around the girl’s body, three hundred and sixty paces, and transfers this measurement on to a graph, drawing the Kaiserin’s monument as a dash, the sign used on survey maps. Without disturbing the dead girl’s hair, he pushes the end of a tape measure into the ground at the crown of her head and measures one and a half metres to the base of the monument. Her right arm is bent over her dark face, so he unspools the tape from her shoulder to the same point. A distance of almost two metres. Finally, he pulls the tape from the left heel of her white canvas boot over to the path, just over one metre. When the sketch is finished, he signs and dates the paper.
Now her body has been remade as the centre point on a graph. Lines radiate from her head, arms and legs as if she were a starfish or a sundial, pinning her exactly in this place at this hour.
Before the dead girl is moved, the Inspector gently removes her pearl earrings. He cuts through the strap of her watch, uncoils it from her wrist, and seals the objects in an isinglass envelope. He asks for more light, and now with two lanterns above him he kneels over her, shifting his weight, balancing himself on one hand. Careful not to touch her, he uses the point of the scissors to delicately manipulate her thin cotton dress. Occasionally he asks for a magnifying glass. His eyes filled with the harsh white of her dress – a dazzling field – he forgets the body under the fabric until he accidentally sets his hand on her bare arm. Although he instantly jerks it away, the impression of her cool skin stays on the palm of his hand, as if he’d touched a liquid. He rubs his hand against his trousers.
He knows the other men noticed his spontaneous reaction. He forces himself to touch her again, to break the spell, pushing her thumb down hard against the ground. It’s slightly stiff, and he estimates she’s been dead at least four hours. The heat makes it hard to calculate, although rigor mortis affects the small muscles first.
He discovers a pale hair under the collar of her dress, and his assistant, Franz, wordlessly holds out an empty glass vial to receive it. No bloodstains are found on her clothing. However, the back of her white dress is stained when they lift her off the ground.
When they flop her on to a stretcher, Egon vomits. The other men look away. The Inspector also ignores him, but he understands his distress. It’s the movement of the body that sickened him, its parody of motion. He orders one of the policemen to stay at the site for the few hours remaining until daybreak.
As soon as it is light, Franz goes over the Kaiserin’s monument, checking for fingerprints. First he dusts the statue with powdered carmine applied with a fine camel-hair brush. The second time he uses charcoal dust. The same fingerprint powders are also applied to the ornamental urns and the marble gateposts at the entrance to the Volksgarten.
Franz reports that all the stone is too rough to hold any impressions.
The afternoon of the same day, the girl’s body is in the morgue at the police station on the Schottenring. The men smoke in the morgue during the autopsy to cover the smell of decay and formalin. The ceiling fan cools the room, but it also sucks up the odour of the cigarettes they exhale over the metal table where she lies. They work in the body’s stink as if it were a shadow.
Franz takes scissors in slow strokes down the sides of her dress and across her shoulders, then lifts it off. He cuts the thick canvas corset from her waist with a heavy knife after slashing through the laces. It probably took her longer to get into the corset, he jokes to the man leaning across the table, a doctor in a white jacket. The older man is as blond as Franz, but his hair is thinning. His pink head hovers over the girl’s discoloured face. The doctor nods without looking up. I think she’s about eighteen years old, he says. The bare room doesn’t hold conversation well.
Her clothing is dissected, the labels removed. Everything was purchased at good Bürger shops, Farnhammer, Maison Spitzer, Ungar & Drecoll in the Kohlmarkt.
The unidentified girl is now naked, her head propped up on a wooden block. Her eyes are flat and bloodshot, and her tongue partially protrudes between her lips. The upper part of her chest is the same livid colour as her face, and darker blotches stripe the sides of her red neck. The underside of her body is a blurry-edged patchwork of stains. Uncirculated blood has seeped from the veins and settled here, sagging under its own weight, ripening into the deep violet and green of decaying flesh. Over her body, a mirror-lined lampshade reflects these colours in its distorted curve, an obscene chandelier.
‘She’s been strangled?’ Franz asks.
The doctor nods.
The Inspector walks in and stands at the opposite end of the table. He imagines the girl’s body is carved from stone and he looks down on it from a great height. This exercise helps him think about her without emotion.
He watches the doctor wrap a cloth around her head and under her jaw to contain her tongue, close her mouth.
‘How will you treat her skin?’ he asks.
‘I can bleach it. Remove her hair, make cuts on the back and sides of the skull and leave it in running water for twelve hours. That will lighten the greenish colour.’
The Inspector tells him to wait. There must be a less drastic way to make the body presentable. He anticipates a mother or father – or perhaps a close relative, since the dead girl wears no wedding ring – will come to identify her.
Later, the Inspector and Franz smoke cigarettes in the hallway.
‘Thirty years ago, when I was an assistant policeman, I had to take care of the head of a corpse on my own,’ the Inspector says. ‘There was a murder in a remote village, and no refrigeration or ice was available. I put the head in a perforated box and set it in a stream. But first I covered the head with a net to protect it from fish.’
Alone in the morgue, the doctor removes grey sludge and pieces of more solid matter from the dead girl’s stomach, fiercely slopping the liquid into a metal basin.
A few rooms away, Egon dips his sketches of the Volksgarten and the girl’s body into a pan filled with a solution of stearine and collodion. The paper will dry in fifteen minutes without changing colour. The solution protects it from moisture and the dirty hands of the witnesses and jurymen who will handle the papers in court.
Later that day, Egon returns to the Volksgarten. The area he paced off is surrounded by stakes linked with string. The excrement next to the body has been scraped up and replaced by a rock with a number painted on it.
The policeman on duty nods at Egon and idly watches him unpack his equipment. The young man works quickly, with the skilled sleight of hand that comes with long practice. He takes out a small wooden box, a device called a Dikatopter. He doesn’t trust technical devices, although he sometimes straps a pedometer on his boot to measure the distances he paces out, especially on hilly ground.
He stands with his back to the stakes, looking into a black mirror inside the open lid of the Dikatopter. Fine threads are pulled through holes in the mirror, dividing it into fifteen squares. Holding the box in front of him, he moves forward a half step at a time, watching until the path and the Kaiserin’s monument are visible in the web of threads, so he can calculate the position of the girl’s body against these landmarks. He’s pleased with his work, the fugitive images captured in the box like butterflies.
In the bottom of the box, there is a paper divided into a graph identical to the one on the mirror. He draws an outline of the girl’s body on the paper from memory, and the monument and the path exactly as they are reflected in the mirror above his hand in the lid.
Light shines through the holes in the dark mirror, and the pencilled outline of the body is suspended below these bright dots, as if it had been connected from a constellation of stars.
The Inspector didn’t sleep the night the girl’s body was discovered. He stayed at the police station, and went home the following evening.
The first time he describes the girl’s body, his wife, Erzsébet, creates her own image of it. She imagines the men standing around the body as if it were a bonfire, a radiant white pyre, its light shining through their legs as if they were alabaster columns in a temple. The dead girl fallen inside their circle.
Erzsébet asks the girl’s name and age.
‘She’s unidentified. The doctor guesses she’s about eighteen.’
‘Why was she in the Volksgarten?’
‘That is the mystery.’
‘She must have been from Spittelberg. Why else would a girl be in the park at night?’
‘She may have been killed earlier in the evening. Judging by her clothing, I believe she’s from a good family. Her murder would seem to be a misadventure or a crime passionnel.’
‘Have you discovered any suspects?’
‘None yet.’
She nods and doesn’t question him further. She’s satisfied with his limited information since it allows her to produce her own theories. The girl’s body has punched a hole in the safe space that was the park.
Two days after the body was discovered, the Inspector talks about the girl during dinner, although it isn’t his custom to mention the dead at the table. He asks Erzsébet to come to his office tomorrow and bring her paints. This is the first time he’s asked her to help him in this way.
That night, when Erzsébet can’t sleep, she thinks of the nameless girl who has died, whose face she will paint tomorrow. In Hungary, there’s a custom of dressing unmarried young women and girls in white for their funerals, as death transforms them into brides of heaven. The deceased girl is given away by her parents with the same words as a wedding ceremony. Tomorrow, she’ll silently recite an old verse over the girl’s unclaimed body. While I live, I’ll dress in black. When I’m dead, I’ll walk in white.
Franz walks in front of Erzsébet down the hallway in the police station. He lets her enter the morgue ahead of him. The girl’s body is on a table, a cloth covering everything except her head. Her face is still blotchy, the skin as dull and opaque as beeswax, and her eyes have sunk into their sockets. The cloth around her chin has been removed, and her mouth is slightly open. Her long pale hair is tied back with a piece of string.
It seems that all the cold in the room presses down against the still face, bitterly sculpting her profile, making it sharper than it had been in life. For a moment the total passivity of the body seems peculiar to Erzsébet, until she remembers the girl is dead.
That’s all Erzsébet notices before she turns and presses a handkerchief to her nose. Later, the odour in the room will sometimes return to her, an unbidden ghost, the smell of decay. This morning, she prepared for painting by heavily dousing herself with perfume, touching the bottle’s glass stopper to her wrists and the fleshy nape of her neck. Her hair was secured in its upswept coil with extra pins.
Now she strokes red, yellow and brown pigments into a thick smear of white lead paint on her palette until it turns a pale flesh colour. Venetian pink. She adds linseed oil and soap so it will adhere better to the cold surface of the girl’s skin.
She asks Franz to loosen the cloth from around the girl’s neck. First she paints the darkest parts of her face, around the mouth and nostrils, stopping her hand just before she blends the paint into the dead face with her finger.
She’s been working on the body for nearly an hour when a man walks in carrying a bowl filled with a white paste. He casually sets the bowl down on the girl’s stomach. Remembering Erzsébet is in the room, he courteously moves it to the table.
‘I’m Dr Pollen. Have you finished?’
She nods and steps aside. He begins to vigorously knead the thick mixture in the bowl.
‘This is my own modelling formula. Ten parts white wax and two parts Venetian turpentine melted together. I add potato starch to make it sticky.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘You could say I re-create the crime in a positive fashion. I can make what’s absent. Someone shoots a gun into a wall, my modelling wax goes in the hole. Then I pull out an impression of the bullet’s passage.’
She asks if the same technique works for bodies.
‘Yes, but I use cigarette papers. When they’re wet, they’re so fine they pick up the smallest impression, even a knife scratch on skin. To fill deeper holes, like stab wounds, I glue something slightly heavier on top of the cigarette papers. Toilet paper works best.’
He digs around under the cloth and pulls out the girl’s hand. Because her hands had been so tightly clenched, a small incision had been made at the base of each finger to loosen it for fingerprinting. Now he easily bends back a damaged finger, sticks a little ball of wax over the cold fingertip, and begins to work it down.
‘I’ve made waxes of ear wounds, missing teeth. Even the stump of a tongue that had been bitten off. Mice love this mixture. I keep all my wax models inside a glass cabinet to keep them from being eaten.’
He curls his hand around the girl’s finger to warm it, then continues to pinch the soft wax up to her second joint.
Erzsébet is unable to move away or even avert her eyes. She stares at his hands, engaged in their task as routinely as if he were writing a letter.
‘Why are you copying her fingers?’
‘I’m not making a copy. First I cleaned under her nails with a bit of paper. The wax just picks up anything left under there. Hair, dust, a thread. Sometimes there’s nothing but their own skin. Or dried blood, if the victim fought their attacker. I suspect that’s what I’ll find here, since she probably struggled to pry the murderer’s hands off. See, she has scratches down both sides of her neck.’
His fingers press the wax too firmly and it bulges over the girl’s knuckle. Finished with her hands, he sticks a finger into her mouth, careful not to disturb the paint on her lips. With his other hand, he delicately presses a wad of wax over her teeth.
Erzsébet didn’t realize she’d made any gesture, but suddenly Franz is next to her, guiding her into the next room. The light wavers, and there’s a round buzzing pressure in her head just before she abruptly sits down.
Egon quickly moves his equipment into the morgue to photograph the girl. Someone draped fabric over the block under her head and the metal table to disguise it, and he calculates how his camera can disguise her immobility.
Later, Erzsébet visualizes the strange fragments in the doctor’s cabinet, objects as mysterious and dumb as fossils, reverse images of damage done to a body. There’s a delicate X shape, moulded from a double knife wound in a man’s chest. A whitish tube, thick as a finger, cast from the passage made by a bullet into someone’s back. A rough, V-shaped wedge documents a stick’s impact in the muscles of an arm. These are the soft interiors of bodies turned inside out, turned solid.
She’s familiar with the wax charms and effigies that work magic at a distance. Gypsies twist wax or unfermented, uncooked dough into tiny figures and stamp them with incomprehensible markings, aids made to win love or wreak revenge, for good or ill. To make the spell more powerful, nail parings, pubic hair, menstrual blood, urine and perspiration are kneaded into the soft mixture. At one time, the lives of the French kings had been endangered by these vols models. In Germany, Atzmann figures were used as evidence in witchcraft trials.
When she was a child, she remembers, a girl burned a scrap of her own dress, which was saturated with her sweat. The ashes were secretly fed to a boy whose love she hoped to win.
Erzsébet knew the boy. When he unknowingly ate the ashes, she watched his face convulse with astonishment and disgust as he realized what had been done to him, what was the bitter taste in his mouth.
THREE NIGHTS HAVE passed since the girl was discovered in the Volksgarten. The Inspector and Franz prepare to take her photograph to the park to see if anyone recognizes her, can give them a name.
Then a well-dressed man comes to the police station to report his daughter is missing. Without questioning him, the Inspector leads him into the morgue.
The body lies on a table in front of them, covered with a cloth. The Inspector gently unveils the girl, nesting the cloth around her head, exposing her painted face. The man stares at the floor. His body doesn’t immediately betray him with any gesture, either fear or anger. Only when he steps away from the body does the man look up. The Inspector can tell he’s studying the cloth around the girl’s neck, obviously confused about where to rest his eyes. Since hers won’t look back.
‘Do you recognize her, sir?’
‘Yes. Her name is Dora.’ He can hardly answer. He closes his eyes.
‘Is she your daughter?’
The man nods and blinks. He has full whiskers on the sides of his face, muttonchops in the style of the elderly Emperor Franz Josef, although he is probably forty years younger. His fingers nervously touch his nose and stroke his whiskers. The Inspector doesn’t take his eyes off him, even when he turns his face away. It is necessary that he observe the motions of the man’s grief. He never anticipates that a stranger’s expression of sorrow will surprise him. He is surprised that he continues to find these intimate encounters so unsettling. Pliny the Younger is a comfort during these encounters, and he recites his words like a prayer. Est dolendi modus, non est timendi. Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none.
Erzsébet had recently returned to Vienna after spending the hottest weeks of the summer in Hungary, on her family’s estate. During her visit, two of the servants had been stricken with cholera and died in a few hours. A laundress, a young unmarried woman, was also infected, and Erzsébet insisted she would nurse her back to health.
The girl was quarantined in a wing of the house in a bedroom stripped of most of its furniture and carpeting. A dozen sheets soaked in a solution of carbolic were hung in the room. The odour of the disinfectant was strongest just after midday, when the bedroom was stifling. Because of the heat, Erzsébet stripped off all her clothes except for her chemise and petticoat. In this intimate undress, she felt light, free, on equal terms with the sick girl.
Erzsébet watched her patient night and day, only occasionally relieved by two nuns. The girl was delirious, heavily dosed with opium. When it appeared she was recovering, Erzsébet fed her a spoonful of sour milk every quarter of an hour. She watched the clock, holding a glass of milk in her hand. Even when the hungry girl moaned in protest, the dosage couldn’t be exceeded or she would die.
Erzsébet had no contact with the outside world except for the nuns. They gently reminded her to eat. Although she was never afraid she would become sick, after three weeks Erzsébet’s eyes began to play tricks on her. The numbers on the face of the clock became meaningless. The hours of the day were distinguished only by the intensity of the sun on the layers of fabric hanging up in the room. Once, the nuns opened the windows and a breeze swept the sheets so that when Erzsébet entered, it seemed the entire room was in motion. She imagined she was on a ship with her mute companion and the sheets that surrounded them were ghostly sails. She was cradled in this white space, wordless silence, and the smell of the girl’s sick body.
One night, she soothed the girl with a familiar healing incantation, reciting it over and over. Let bone go to bone, marrow to marrow, vein to vein, tendon to tendon, blood to blood.
When the laundress died suddenly, Erzsébet walked out of the room. The hallway, the stairs, the rest of the house shocked her, its profusion of colour and furniture, and she stumbled outdoors into a field. She remembered sitting down in grass. She must have fallen asleep, for when she opened her eyes, she was enveloped by a blackness as total as the whiteness of the sickroom.
When Erzsébet saw the dead girl wrapped in sheets in the morgue, she felt as if time had slipped and this was her patient, returned to her. She was cold Lazarus.
It is still light outside when the Inspector comes home to find Erzsébet in the kitchen, dropping csipetke into a pan of boiling water to cook. He sets his hands on her shoulders, and she shakes her head and moves away, smelling the disinfectant on him. Without a word, he goes to wash his hands, having carried the odour of the dead girl’s body across the city to her.
When Erzsébet smelled the disinfectant, the scent of the girl on his hands, she suddenly wished to possess her. To understand the puzzle of how her life led to her death. To know her. When she first heard the girl had died in the park, there was something – a needle prick of menace, a cruel loneliness – that was familiar. It felt true as a memory. This recognition startled her.
At that moment, Erzsébet began her study of the murder. She assumed ownership of this second young woman whom fate had delivered to her. It was a private act, a secret pursuit that excluded her husband.
Months later, she will think of her actions as a dream that she witnessed but couldn’t interpret or claim.
Tonight her husband has news about the investigation.
‘We’ve found the girl’s family,’ he says. ‘Her father, Philipp, came to the morgue and identified her. I told him she had been strangled as gently as I could.’
‘What is the girl’s name?’
‘Dora.’
Without looking at him, she whispers the word. ‘Dora.’ She asks how he prepared the girl’s body for viewing.
‘I hid her bruised neck with a piece of fabric. I’m certain the paint you put on her face was a comfort to him, even if he didn’t detect it.’
He doesn’t mention the unpleasant secrets he kept from her and Dora’s father. The tiny spots that bled inside the girl’s mouth. The fractured bone in her neck. An area of skin filled with red-brown-violet blood under her skirts. The material the wax pulled from under her fingernails, flakes of dried skin and dirt. Nothing he could identify.
When the Inspector examined the dead girl’s watch, he found a minute dark smear on the crystal. To preserve the stain, he pressed a moist square of filter paper against it, waited a moment, then transferred the paper to a sheet of glass painted with gum arabic. When a sliver of the stain was immersed in a saucer of bezidene reagent, the opaque whitish liquid sluggishly turned blue, which indicated the presence of blood.
If he were lucky, further tests might identify the blood type. It had been only seven years since the professor at the Institute of Hygiene in Greifswald discovered that human blood could be distinguished from animal blood. However, not all magistrates would admit this as evidence in a murder trial.
After the clothing was stripped from Dora’s body in the morgue, each garment was dropped into a separate paper bag. Franz glued them shut. Her clothing wasn’t mentioned again until the Inspector handed Franz one of the thick paper bags in his office.
‘Is this Dora’s dress?’
The Inspector nods and walks across the room to get his walking stick. Puzzled, Franz watches as he comes back and stands in front of him, holding the stick like a club over his shoulder.
Now Franz, I want you to hold the bag steady in front of you, he says. Hold it away from your body. Hold it out a little farther. Don’t move. He swings the walking stick and strikes the bag. He hits it again and again until the bag is creased and battered. Smiling, he thanks Franz and asks if he felt like William Tell’s son. Franz’s face fills with colour; he has a blond’s easy blush.
Mystified, he helps the Inspector spread huge sheets of white paper over the carpet. They cut the bag open and gently lift out Dora’s dress, each of them holding a sleeve, as if they’re dancing with a scarecrow.
‘Shake the dress over the paper. Carefully.’
Dust, threads and tiny particles twirl and drift from the dress down on to the papers, a miniature wind-storm. The Inspector kneels and gently folds up the papers, then slips them into a large envelope and seals it.
Franz raises his eyebrows. ‘Sir?’
‘I’m collecting dust. It will reveal Dora’s history while she wore the dress. Where she went, if she sat on a bench or the grass. If her skirt brushed against the roses in the Volksgarten. We’ll scrape her boots later.’
The Inspector used the same technique on a jacket found at another crime scene. A chemical examiner analysed the dust harvested from the garment and identified it as finely pulverized wood, so it must have belonged to a carpenter or a sawmill worker. The Inspector requested a more detailed report. The second investigation showed gelatin and powdered glue mixed with the sawdust. The Inspector reasoned the jacket must have belonged to a joiner, and he was later proved right.
In 1898, the Inspector had travelled by train to Czernowitz, to attend the lectures of Professor Hans Gross, the author of a number of books including System der Kriminalistik, the first psychological study of crime. Gross was also an associate of the renowned German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, director of the public asylum in Graz.
It was Gross’s theory that a crime was a scientific problem, an organization of facts committed by criminals who were morally shipwrecked. Solving a crime required the Investigating Officer to determine the error in the situation. In his published works, Gross covered such topics as ‘The Self-Mutilation of Hysterical Criminals’, ‘Arson and Homesickness’ and ‘Experimental Contributions on the Fauna of Corpses’.
At the Inspector’s request, Franz continually memorizes paragraphs from Kriminalistik. The younger man recognizes this discipline as an important part of his training. Today the lesson from the book concerns the characteristics of an Investigating Officer.
Tact – that faculty which nothing can replace – to light instinctively upon the best way to set to work, is a natural gift. Whosoever does not possess it will never make an Investigating Officer, though he be endowed a hundredfold with all the other necessary qualities; with the best intentions in the world, he will stumble against everything without discovering anything; he will intimidate the witness who wishes to give him important intelligence; he will excite the babbler to babble still more; he will encourage the impudent, confuse the timid, and let the right moment slip past.
Egon unpacks his camera in the Volksgarten, in the same place where Dora’s body was found. He works quickly; it is almost dusk. At this hour, there are no sightseers or children in this secluded corner of the park.
Tonight he works without artificial light, since the image he wants to capture is too delicate.
He hopes the picture will reveal something magical, intangible, hidden from the eye. As an artist holds a mirror up to a portrait to find its unsuspected faults, which become obvious when the painted image is reversed. He hastily unscrews the camera tripod, tiptilting the legs into the grass. Three short poles lengthened, made even. In secret, he’d marked the spot where Dora’s body lay, hammering small sticks so deeply into the ground they’re invisible. He presses his fingers into the grass, feeling for these guides, like broken teeth.
Now he aims the crossed lines of his lens between these sticks. Grass is the image on the glass plate, tight, tiny spears pinched into focus. He pulls the black cloth off his head and squats next to the camera, positioning himself so he can see what its glass eye sees, fixing his eyes on the ground. He waits, anticipating the dead girl will materialize. The grass will change colour blade by blade, gradually transforming itself into her image, as a photograph develops in a tray. Or perhaps her last breath still hangs in the air, a ghostly vapour that can be captured in the same way a photograph freezes an invisible motion into a visible blur. A postmortem clue. Message in a bottle.
As he presses the shutter release in his hand, the lens opens and closes so slowly his heartbeat seems to expand, connected to the camera. An audible click.
There are spiritualist mediums in Paris and London who can call forth the dead during seances. He’s seen harsh pictures of a female medium, her head thrown back in a trance, eyes vacant. The dead hovered behind her as a white light, a disembodied hand, and a sexless figure in translucent rags. In other photographs, invisible spirits that made their presence known as a cold breeze were documented as the blurred motion of a curtain, and the indistinct line of a woman’s skirt. He sensed the photographer who took these pictures was uneasy, didn’t know where to fix the camera, unable to anticipate which object might suddenly become possessed by a spirit.
From experience, Egon knows that rooms, houses, certain places in the landscape, retain an insidious presence if they have been the setting for a violent crime. Objects and clothing too. He’s seen clothing taken from a murder victim shape itself into a mute gesture as surely as it stank with blood. The night he photographed Dora’s body in the Volksgarten, the wind suddenly blew her thin skirt across her legs, even though he was certain he’d set a weight on the fabric to hold it down. Her clothing was blurred in several of his photographs. He was unnerved.
Once during a police search, a drowned body had risen from a lake exactly where he was looking. Believing he’d willed the corpse to surface before his eyes, he was so shaken he forgot to trip the camera shutter. Another time, he photographed a document – a suspected forgery – by gaslight. The finished picture showed two different values of ink, the original grey and the false black, which appeared similar to the naked eye. See, nothing can hide from the camera, he told the Inspector. This is just another type of ghost.
It is darker now. Twilight turns the trees and shrubbery around him hazy, and the same grey clouds his camera lens. He anxiously scans the ground, waiting, watching. Nothing. He swears the grass has a different quality where his lens is focused on it.
He puts the black cloth over his head and bends over behind the camera. The glass plate reflects a rectangle of grass, an upside-down image. A pair of white boots overhung with a skirt walk into the bottom of the picture frame.
‘Move out of the picture, please.’ His shout is muffled by the cloth.
The skirt and feet float away. He cranks a knob on the side of the camera. In one motion, he plucks the cloth off his head, stands up and squeezes the shutter release. There’s a gratifying mechanical noise. Click.
A woman, a stout Viennese matron, watches him from a few feet away. She swings a closed parasol until the younger woman next to her gently stops its movement with her hand. She quietly says something to her; he can’t understand her words. He nods at them, politely dismissive. He expects them to courteously vanish. They probably came to the Volksgarten to stare at the site where the girl’s body was found. A murder in Vienna is a rare and extraordinary event. When photographing other locations for the police, he has often worked in front of a whispering crowd, his presence sometimes the only perceptible proof of the crime.
The younger woman walks towards him. Her silhouette is ungainly; her clothing is oddly cut. Perhaps foreign. The veil of her straw hat is carelessly pulled back over the brim, exposing her face and her dark hair. She frowns at him.
‘Why are you photographing the grass?’
‘I’m documenting the site. Don’t walk there, Fräulein. It’s bad luck. Someone died on that spot.’
‘We know all about it.’
Her accent is English. An Austrian girl wouldn’t start a conversation with a stranger. She steps around the place where the girl’s body had lain and stops next to his camera. He moves to guard it, the black cloth hanging off his shoulder.
‘We wanted to see this place. What it was like. Erzsébet can sense things,’ the girl says, gesturing at the older woman waiting impassively behind her. ‘Are you here on official business?’
‘I work for myself.’
He ducks back under the cloth to close the lens. It’s no use working if women are around. He makes a strange figure, like a child hiding, his head and shoulders covered by the dark cloth, his two thick legs and the camera’s three thin legs underneath. He asks if she was a friend of the dead girl who had been found there.
‘Yes, I knew her. I’d rather come here than visit her in the cemetery. My name is Wally.’
Wally lies. We could have been friends, she thinks. No, I consider myself her friend, since I’m trying to help her.
Irritated, Egon quickly unlocks the metal hinges of the tripod. The gleaming wooden legs snap together smoothly; it’s an expensive instrument, French made. She senses his pride in the camera. It makes him seem older, even though his fair hair has been ridiculously mussed by his encounter with the camera cloth.
‘You must be shocked about what happened to your friend. You aren’t afraid to come here?’ he asks.
She shrugs. ‘Afraid? Afraid of what? There’s nothing frightening here in the park. Nothing waits here. It isn’t haunted.’
The three of them walk through the Volksgarten, passing the Temple of Theseus and a pavilion where hundreds of couples waltz to a military band on some afternoons. Typically, the programme includes Schöne Edi by Strauss.
They decide to have coffee in the pavilion. Egon moves awkwardly across the room, manoeuvring his satchel and the tripod around the tables and chairs. He sits between Erzsébet and Wally, his equipment occupying the empty chair at their table like a fourth guest. Both women smoke furiously, sharing Egyptian cigarettes, barely touching their Indianerkrapfen cake.
In this light, he’s startled by the colour of the older woman’s eyes, a fierce and icy pale blue that gives her face a peculiar fragility, as if there is glass, not bone, beneath her skin. Erzsébet makes him uncomfortable. She kindly asks what sort of pictures he takes.
‘I photograph landscapes, I take portraits. I do what pleases me. I have my own photography business in a studio near the Graben.’
The women listen politely, but their eyes watch his hands grip the coffee cup. Half of the second and third fingers on his left hand are missing. The little finger on his right hand is also damaged. It has no fingernail, just a snug, dark welt, so the fingertip resembles a narrow flower bud.
He holds both hands out in front of them, very matter-of-fact.
‘My lightning powder blew up when I was taking a photograph. I accidentally left a few grains of powder on the rim of the container. Sulphur and saltpetre, the same powders used for fireworks and bombs. When I screwed the lid on, the jar exploded. I’m lucky I didn’t lose my entire hand.’
He doesn’t mind talking about it. He spreads his mutilated hands on the tabletop.
‘I don’t notice it much any more. Although sometimes the missing parts of the fingers feel as if they’re being pinched. It’s strange, but in my dreams my hands are always whole.’
Wally is fascinated by his damaged fingers. She doesn’t look away, even when he addresses a question to her.
‘Do you visit the park very often?’
‘I’m a governess. The children I take care of come to the park with me nearly every day. They’d be here now, but they’re in the country.’
‘Are you from London?’
‘Yes.’
Erzsébet abruptly changes the subject. ‘Did you ever meet the girl who was murdered?’
He shakes his head, wanting to learn what she knows.
‘Why were you photographing the place where they found her body?’
‘Idle curiosity. What was the girl’s name?’
‘Dora. They said some strange animal may have attacked her.’ Erzsébet watches him as she speaks, but the image she sees is Dora’s face, colourless under the light in the morgue.
‘She was attacked by animals? Surely this is impossible in Vienna.’
His surprised reaction to her news is genuine. He imagines the girl’s ravaged body, the marks left by animals in the soft skin underneath her skirts. He sees this picture in black and white. Sometimes he can visualize images without colour, a strange talent his photography has encouraged. He knows there are people who have never seen a face without its colour.
He smiles at Erzsébet, catching her quick sideways glance at Wally before her eyes meet his. She reassures him that this information about Dora comes from a very good source. Her words don’t dispel his misgivings. He senses something has been held back, as if he’d heard a door slam and then silence, no angry words or footsteps.
The next day he suddenly recognizes the older woman. He remembers her in a white room, wearing a white smock. Erzsébet, the police inspector’s wife. She was in the morgue painting Dora’s face for his photograph. She didn’t seem to recollect meeting him. He wonders about her relationship with her young friend, Wally.
After he left their table in the pavilion, Erzsébet turned to Wally.
‘You did well to lie to him about your friendship with Dora. He’ll be more useful to us if he believes that is our motive.’
The girl is pleased by her praise. ‘I almost lost my nerve. He seems kind.’
‘Don’t tell him too much. He thinks he’s an artist.’
The week after Dora’s body was identified, the Inspector makes an unannounced visit to Dora’s family. They live in Alsergrund, the Ninth District, a respectable section of Vienna.
He finds the house unlocked, although there is no concierge. He studies the stained-glass window set in the door before he cautiously opens it. Inside, his footsteps echo until he stops in front of an elaborate staircase that rises through the centre of the house.
He senses something move. Two legs are visible on the third-floor landing. He cranes his neck and calls up to him.
‘Good day. Is your mother at home?’
At the sound of his voice, the boy runs away. In a moment, he returns to the landing accompanied by a woman. All the Inspector can see are the flounces on the bottom of her long dark skirt next to the child’s legs.
‘I’m the Inspector from police headquarters. May I speak with you? If this is a convenient time?’
She doesn’t answer but descends the stairs, the heavy trim on her dress trembling with each step.
When she sits across from him in the drawing room, he can see the shadows under her eyes and the curved lines beside her mouth, swags of grief. Although she possesses a grave self-sufficiency, her eyes are vague and unfocused. He believes it is terrible to study a stranger’s mourning, but he must let this sentiment go in order to proceed. He looks her in the eye and puts pity out of his mind, everything except how she answers his questions. Sometimes, as an exercise, he’ll focus on the hidden patterns in a painting, squinting to cancel out the images so the hidden dark and light shapes will emerge.
He apologizes again for the necessity of his visit and begins the interview.
No, she says in answer to his first question, she didn’t know Dora had left the house the last night of her life. Why would she have gone out? No, she didn’t know whom she would meet at that hour. Dora had never done it before; yes, she is certain of it.
She is still angry at her daughter, as if she had run away. He knows her anger is a negotiation, a way of making their separation less bitter.
‘But this is unbelievable. You’re certain the body is . . . she is my daughter? There’s no mistake?’
‘Your husband positively identified her, yes.’
‘He told me it was Dora. He didn’t explain to me how she died. She didn’t suffer?’ She clenches her handkerchief.
The Inspector speaks very slowly, giving her time. ‘He didn’t tell you? Then I can reassure you, she died quickly. She looked peaceful when we found her.’ He hands her the isinglass envelope containing Dora’s pearl earrings.