The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta

you, Herr Neumann.”
    “Yes, yes, goot-bye.”
    They stood next to each other, the Czech in his vest and Anna in her still-bloody blouse, and watched the journalist descend. Neumann turned to Anna after she had closed the door. His hips swung out, first right then left, as he mimed Mrs. Coburn’s walk.
    “A bit of a crumpet, eh? Pint-sized, no chest, but a crumpet all the same.”
    Anna suppressed a smile. “Time for you to leave, Herr Neumann.”
    He looked disappointed, stared down at her from his great height. “Do you have cigarettes? Money?”
    She cast around for her purse, found it on the bedroom floor, gave him a pack of Gauloises and twenty shillings in coins. He flipped one into the air, caught it in his giant palm. Two steps brought him to the front door. He’d laced his boots and put on a dirty shirt; the woollen greatcoat slung over one arm.
    “I’ll make inquiries,” he said grandiosely. “About Anton.”
    She heard the words and realized that chances were she would not seehim again. He’d drink up the shillings, sleep it off under a bridge. And after that: the road. It was clear to her he had no home.
    “What did you do before the war?” she asked him. “For work, I mean?”
    “Tram driver. Plumber. Trapeze artist.”
    She laughed. “That’s quite a list.”
    He joined in her laugh, then stopped; raised some thoughtful fingers, scratched his head. “Or maybe I was physicist. Working on bomb. In secret lab in Kutná Hora.” He painted a mushroom into the air between them, his hands parting to make space for its rich bloom.
    “You’re a buffoon, Karel Neumann.”
    “Yes,” he nodded. “That’s what it was. Buffoon. Was all right, only now it’s back to being a bum.”
    He took a bow as they shook hands. She locked the door once he had left. Two hours later, with lunchtime approaching, she descended the stairs to avail herself of the telephone in what used to be an old professor’s flat and which now housed amongst its many lodgers an American widow hunting for copy amongst the city’s broken brick.
    4.
    “Baer, with an ae ?”
    “With a double e . Anton.”
    “Anton. Any middle names?”
    “Leopold Joseph.”
    “Leopold Joseph. Very good. Denomination? Catholic, I suppose.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Catholic, then. And he was last seen when?”
    “I’ve already told you: I’m not entirely sure. Two or three days ago. I only returned to Vienna yesterday. But I met a friend of my husband’s, a fellow prisoner of war, who—”
    “I’m afraid that doesn’t fit on the form. There is only enough space for a number, see. Two days, then, or three?”
    “Three.”
    “There we go: three days. I suppose I could have written ‘seventy-two hours.’ But never mind, it’s too late for that; three days it is. It’s not very long, is it?”
    “Are you telling me that I shouldn’t worry?”
    “Worry? I wouldn’t like to say. I suppose you never know.”
    “How will you find him? Once you are finished with the form, I mean. What’s the procedure?”
    “Procedure? Well. I suppose I will check in with the morgue. Most of them turn up, you know. In the end.”
    “Dead?”
    “No, no. Drunk.”
    The man was exasperating: slow, colourless, and stupid, with the insolent habit of passivity; accustomed to complaint; long-suffering, long-suffered, his hands and face a yellowed grey, nicotine stained deep into his teeth. They were sitting in the cramped little police station responsible for her part of the district; he, boxed in behind a table and typewriter, an ashtray overflowing by his elbow; she, across from him, catching the draft from the window, on a narrow stool long worn of its varnish. She had answered the sergeant’s flow of questions twice now, once at the front desk, where he had greeted her with gloomy indifference and asked her to kindly state her business, then here at the table, where each of her answers found an echo in the clatter of the typewriter at whose keys he