HELGA ANDERLE is the editor of the first international women crime writers anthology and has been vice president of the AIEP (the international association of crime writers) since 1993. She worked for international organizations, as well as in journalism, before becoming a writer. Anderle has been published in literary magazines and anthologies from Australia to Mexico. She lives in Vienna, Austria, with her family.
Helga Anderle
Translated from the German by Tobe Levin
Snot dangled from the chestnut vendor’s nose. In suspense, I waited for the man to sniffle or wipe it away with his sleeve. Too late! The drop had grown, lost its grip, and sailed through the air, landing on the crisp slices of potato sizzling on the grill. The cook shoveled them into a paper horn, sprinkled salt over them, and, before I could open my mouth, the innocent customer ahead of me had already imbibed a hearty portion. I let the change I’d already counted out tinkle back into my pocket and turned away, disgusted. My craving for french fries had vanished. Normally I would have smiled about the little scene, but at the moment I had no sense of humor, thinking only about viruses and flu.
It was ten-twenty, Saturday evening, typical November weather: everything so gray-on-gray that you couldn’t even groove on your own depression. A night that seemed made for the long overdue physical tune-up: sauna, massage, new polish on fingers and toes, cucumber slices on forehead and cheeks, maybe even the crossword puzzle from Zeit magazine—and then straight into the sack for beauty sleep before midnight, done without for God knows how long. Instead, I found myself hanging out on a drafty street corner for twenty minutes, my feet killing me, waiting for some shit photographer. Supposedly, intelligent reporters exist, but I’ve never met one. At our paper we have such duds that I even let a machine make my passport photos. I hoped they weren’t dumping someone like Fiwonka on me, the worst of the bunch. Just looking at him gave me the creeps! Battle fatigues, military boots, headband, three-day beard, and the collected gold of Montezuma on his hairy macho chest. Matching his outfit he drove around in an open Land Rover even with the mercury hitting minus, like he thought Vienna was somewhere in the jungles of ’Nam. You could just barf. Not that I’d rather have Molny a.k.a. the vacuum cleaner. What magic he performs at press buffets! Before you know it the canapés, cake, sandwiches, anything edible vanishes into his cellophane-lined suit pockets. It doesn’t matter that he’s already as fat as a sumo wrestler and earns three times as much as I do in my third year as an editor with a union contract.
It really burns my ass the way those bozos pocket the cash for click-clicking a little, while we writers eat our brains out on the brink of starvation. Not to mention the fact that a female doesn’t have an easy time of it, up against the chauvinist pigs in the press room. Far and wide not a shimmer of light. Okay, the old farts are full of little stories from the good ole days of typesetting, can be as charming as Maurice Chevalier. In reality they are as misogynistic as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer put together and on the whole thoroughly convinced that the progress of women means the end of the newspaper business.
Still, they’re twenty-four karats compared to the younger stars in their cashmere pullovers and designer jeans. A real nest of vipers. Inflated egomaniacs for whom women don’t even exist, or only as annoying competitors. They stop at nothing to cut you off from a story or steal it from under your nose. Like right now. At the editorial meeting, no sooner did they let my theme, “For Women, Fear Stalks the Subway,” melt on their tongues than they were already storming the boss: Wouldn’t it be too bad to let such a good story get fucked up by a woman? Wouldn’t it be better if a man did it, dressed of course in dame’s clothes and a wig…? But even though the boss usually goes along with the boys’ craziest ideas, this time it was too much even for him. Their heads snapped into their shells as he thundered at them, and I left the meeting a good head taller. The story was mine. Mine alone.
Ten-thirty p.m. Where the hell was this idiot photographer? To be absolutely sure we wouldn’t miss each other, I had printed the information with a red marker and handed the message to the photo chief myself: PLACE: SCHWEDENPLATZ SUBWAY STATION—EXIT ROTENTURM STREET. TIME: 10 P.M. As I was marching back and forth impatiently, a man suddenly ambled in my direction. A monotone little guy in a camel’s hair coat, a velvet propeller under his chin. His bangs made him look like a prematurely aged Viennese choirboy. “Excuse me, madam, but I’ve been observing you for quite some time. I guess you’ve been waiting for your escort? Would you care to spend the rest of the evening together?” he said with a stupid grin. Where had he dug up that line from? A Harlequin romance? Grouchy as I was, this was all I needed.
“You shave, I suppose? Then it wouldn’t hurt if you looked in the mirror occasionally,” I hissed at him. Choirboy came back more quickly than I expected. “Oh yeah? Well, you’re not exactly Miss Universe yourself,” he snapped, insulted, before beating his retreat. The Egyptian selling newspapers, who’d been watching the incident, tossed me a smile of encouragement and gave the choirboy the finger. A good feeling, that at least the Third World was on my side. Ten forty-five p.m. I’d better just take a look at the other subway exits instead of maybe getting a bladder infection from all this stupid waiting around in the cold.
Spotting myself in a showcase window, I paused. Milkmustache was right. For Miss Universe I wouldn’t have a prayer, but still, I liked what I saw: short, mussed-up, curly brown hair, an intelligent face, with only the region around the mouth a little stormy. Slim figure, bombshell of an outfit, black leather jacket, black jeans, gray turtleneck and low boots with half-high heels. An attractive appearance, all things considered. I only wished I’d put on my long johns.
Subway #1 had just spit out a wave of young people. The Grossfeld high rises with Saturday night fever. Floridsdorf John Travoltas in the finest clothes on their way to the bunny shoot in city discos or the Bermuda Triangle. I went around them and took the escalator in the direction of Laurenzerberg. In summer I liked the area. Wherever you looked, street musicians were performing, and a colorful mix of natives and tourists idled past filled-up benches. The Copa Cagrana rolled out entire clans in all shades of fresh sunburn who stood in line for ice cream at Molin. In the distance, the silhouette of Wienerwald, blue-black, framed by a washed-out yellow shimmer. Colorful neon on the roofs of office buildings edged the Danube Canal, in between the Gothic filigrained peak of the Maria am Gestade lower. The canal exuded an odor as if Vienna were on the sea.
My photographer was leaning, perfectly calmly, on the counter of the hot dog stand and was just washing down the rest of a Langos with a Schnapps. Catching sight of me, he straightened up on the double. His breath made my stomach turn. “Allow me,” Nemeth Lajos said, and pressed his dripping-with-garlic-fat lips against the back of my hand. I should have anticipated this. It was typical Lajos or, better yet, typically Hungarian. Not even two world wars and forty years of goulash communism could extirpate their royal equestrian manners from the Magyars. Lajos, the Schnaps Faucet—this could even get good! Once a top-notch photographer whose shots of the 1956 Hungarian revolution even appeared in Life magazine, he was now a case for Alcoholics Anonymous, only good enough to earn his pittance in the darkroom.
Lajos’s motivation for shooting my report was just about zero. Only one thing worried him: “Can’t be late or my wife mean!” I was tempted to release the Xanthippe in me and show him how mean I could get. But instead of taking it out on him for making me wait, I stifled it. I still needed him.
Riding down the escalator I tried to get him into the mood of my story. The subway, spooky corridors, confusing long walks. Dark, sinister corners. Soul-lonely women in these horror story labyrinths, accompanied only by fear panting at their backs and the echo of their rushing steps. To be honest, even I was always a little uncomfortable taking the subway home at night. In this situation it did not help much knowing the statistics according to which subways produced more suicides than murders, and far more women were attacked, mugged, and raped on the open streets. I had already collected so much material on the topic, my story would get a lot of attention. The only thing I needed now were a couple of authentic quotes and some smashing photographs.
I’d talked myself up to a high pitch, but Lajos just shrugged his shoulders. “Lady, just say me what photos you want and I make.”
“Shoot the escalator from a frog’s point of view, that’ll turn ’em on!” I suggested. Getting him down on his knees beaded his brow with sweat, and getting him back on his feet again was even harder. I had to relieve him of all his equipment. “Okay, now let’s shoot the exit from the number-one with all the kids landing,” I panted, propelling him forward. I stopped a young woman, stylish as Madame Pompadour, all gold and glitter, with ten-centimeter stiletto heels. “Do you feel secure at night in the subway?” I asked her, holding the microphone up to her mouth. She chewed absently on a strand of hair and you could easily see how hard things were ticking between her temples.
“I dunno. I don’t usually go out by myself. My boyfriend’s always with me.” As though ordered he shot out of nowhere, placing himself at a protective angle to the blonde. “Ain’t you got no sense, what you telling them bitches all your business, them filthy reporters,” he said, pulling his goldpiece away. In the meantime it was already 11:15 p.m. and as we got out at Karlsplatz, the opera had just ended. Women in floor-length minks and patent leather shoes, with hairdos that reminded me of the roof construction of post-modern Hollein houses, streamed through the passage. Almost all were hanging on the arm of a Hofrat.* Finally I found a woman traveling by herself. Mid-forties, lawyer’s wife type, cultivated Schönbrunn German. “Am I afraid? And how! Vienna has already become pure Chicago!” she babbled old FPO** campaign slogans. “With all this foreign rabble around, a woman can hardly step out of the house! If I hadn’t inherited the opera subscription from my aunt, you can be certain I wouldn’t be going out alone!” I nodded, full of understanding, thanked her for the words, and pulled Lajos back before he made a grab for the lawyer’s wife’s hand.
Despite the late hour, there was a lot going on in the opera station. Beside the usual night owls and junkies, a group of Italian tourists was singing “Avanti popolo” at the tops of their voices and behaving as though at a Unità festival. The clochards were hunkering in their usual places and let the booze circle around. Two of them were already leaning against each other, fast asleep, in a puddle of red wine. The drunks didn’t look exactly trustworthy, but a woman would really have nothing to fear from them. At most they’d bug you for a smoke or a couple of schillings.
Lajos stopped for a minute to put in a new film. Just as he was at it, all hell broke loose in the station below, as if the Sioux were on the warpath. How could I have forgotten the Rapid vs. Austria soccer game! Riots were as sure to break out afterward as the amen to follow a prayer, and I congratulated myself on already being on the spot. As the enthusiastic kids started heaving at each other, the frightened passengers tried to evade the legs, fists with iron rings, and cherry bombs. I managed just in time to duck behind a pillar; the beer can hurtling like a rocket missed me by a hair. In Lajos the spirit of revolution was apparently awakened. The automatic button on his camera clicked nonstop. Finally! This was something for the front page. The young stars probably boring themselves to death at the Motto just then would turn green from envy.
Above the shouting and tumult you could suddenly hear whistles and then the heavy tramp of hobnailed boots. A special police unit equipped with nightsticks, helmets, and Plexiglas shields stormed down the stairs. While the first comers began indiscriminately beating anything they got their hands on, the crowd dispersed, fleeing in panicky haste. “Let’s get out of here!” I cried, dragging Lajos away from the war zone. Once we were at street level again he marched straight toward the hot dog stand across from the Secession. “Madam, pulease, I could do with a barack!” “Okay, a little high wouldn’t hurt me either,” I said and let Lajos order. The stuff burned like hell but had a calming effect. I suppose it dulled the nerves. And before I could intervene, Lajos had ordered another round.
I let him drink a third schnapps before driving him back to the subway station to take stock of the damage. The boys had done a thorough job of it. The quai looked like after a bomb attack. The ground was strewn with glass splinters, shreds of clothing and paper, beer bottles, football caps. There was even one nearly new Reebok under the rubble. On the only announcement board still standing, someone had sprayed a swastika. Idiots, I thought, your honored Führer would have sent you delinquents straight into a labor camp.
I let Lajos finish shooting his film. “So now we’ve had enough, that’s it for today. Thanks, you did a good job,” I told him, hiding hands in my pockets. Thoughtfully I watched the sad figure disappear in the direction of the opera. If the pictures came out well, I’d pull Schnaps Faucet out of the darkroom again. Sure, you had to tell him every little thing, but I clearly preferred to give orders myself than to be commandeered by the other Leica princes.
The pressure on my bladder that I’d carried around for quite a while already had now entirely run out of patience. Despite my dislike of public toilets, I had no choice. I poked around in my pocketbook for change, threw in the coin, and pressed the handle with my elbow. Most of the graffiti I already knew. Only two made it worth my effort to copy them down for my collection. I had just clicked my ballpoint when I heard a noise. It sounded like a groan and came from the next stall. In a flash I remembered the hook stalker, the one who picked his victims from the toilet stalls. Sure, I was scared, but my curiosity got the better of me. Slowly I pushed against the door, which had only been pulled to. Luckily no ax met my effort. On the floor, a girl sat throwing up in the basin. Manuela! I almost didn’t recognize her, she looked so awful. Sticky hair, torn clothes, her face corpse white and peppered with fresh scratches, the eyes deeply sunken and without expression. Manuela. It must have been a full five years ago that I’d seen her last. An average pretty girl from the country with the glow of a Valium tablet and the usual kid’s hope of a movie career under her perm. Exactly the type which, when left to itself, would be sure to slide downhill. For a little while I took an interest in her. It was pretty stressful since she didn’t care about anything other than movies and race car drivers. Then I was doing this volunteer’s job, but hot with ambition, I soon had enough of baby-sitting the country’s innocents. Manuela had stopped heaving by now. It smelled beastly in the toilet.
“Manuela, it’s me, Anna, do you remember me? Are you sick? Do you need help?”
“Anna?” she echoed, and then in slow motion raised her head to look at me with a gaze so mournful, it cut me through and through. I asked myself what I should do with her. To start with, nothing better occurred to me than to pull her out of the stall. But as I tried to lift her, my hand grasped something sticky, moist: her T-shirt was full of blood. Horrified, I let her go. “What happened? Are you wounded? Wait! I’ll get the police!”
Manuela’s arms zoomed out like tentacles and choked my legs. “No, no! Not the cops … I just killed one!”
“You did what?”
“I stabbed the fucking pig.” The words came out so muffled that I thought maybe I hadn’t heard them right.
I leaned down, took hold of her collar and shook. Manuela’s head rocked rhythmically, as though hanging by a thread. “If you don’t believe me, then look for yourself. Outside … in front of the dairy … in the bushes.”
I was suddenly dizzy, slowly sliding down the wall to the floor. Damn it! Now, of all times, my blood pressure had to act up on me! Blindly I scrounged around in my shoulder bag, looking for my medicine. Following directions exactly I let twenty drops splash on my tongue and waited for them to take effect. Still a little unsteady, I tottered up and went out.
The park, now empty, smelled of moist shrubbery. The fog made pale lanterns of the lights. The tranquillity was spooky. Apart from occasional traffic noises, I heard only my own panicky heartbeat. To the left of the path, under the nearly bald bushes, something was lying. The lawn whispered under my feet and dry twigs whipped my face as I moved forward, slowly, bent over. Toward the figure lying inert on the ground. Manuela hadn’t lied. She had killed an officer. His hat hung askew over his face, the uniform had been pierced by the dead shrubs, a knife plunged up to its handle in the middle of his chest. Don’t play Mother Teresa, don’t touch it, get out of here, my internal voice was warning me. But instead of listening and running, my legs did their own thing and waltzed the dumbest person in all of Vienna and its suburbs back into the subway hall.
Manuela was still sitting exactly as I had left her. I tore a few sheets of toilet paper from the roll, wet them under the faucet, and wiped the worst dirt from her face. Passively, she let me do it. Then I buttoned up her coat and helped her to her feet. A half an hour later a taxi had delivered us to my apartment.
I put water on for tea, spiked it with a little rum, and while we were drinking, Manuela started to talk. In a monotone, incoherently, as though delirious with fever. As I was able to piece it together, she had known the cop for quite some time. They had a kind of exchange business going: sex for dope. It worked well for a while until he started passing her diluted stuff or placebos. But for tonight he’d promised her something special, and she’d fallen for it. “I couldn’t wait for him to get off me and give me the stuff. But he didn’t have nothin’. The bastard came up with empty hands. I was mad as hell and started to holler … and then he hit me. Left, right, one punch after the other. Then my mind just blew and next thing I know, he’s lying there full of blood.” I got a blanket and wrapped it around her. Manuela had fallen asleep sitting up. What would happen to her now? If she gave herself up and confessed, maybe they’d be lenient because of the circumstances. But who would believe a junkie like her? And me, what about me? I was dog-tired. Maybe in bed I’d think of something. But I couldn’t fall asleep and stared the whole night, eyes wide, into the darkness. Only when I heard the garbage trucks clatter the next morning did a solution occur to me. Manuela would have to leave Vienna immediately, the best thing would be back to her mother. If I remember correctly she was a nurse. Maybe she’d manage to get her daughter into therapy.
Manuela was still sleeping as I got up and put water on for coffee. In my clothes, and with her hair washed, she looked pretty respectable again. She nodded to everything I suggested and padded after me like a zombie. At the station I bought her ticket and put her on the train. “Promise me, no, swear to me, that you’ll call me the minute you get home. I’ll talk everything over with your mother.” She sat there not saying a word, her arms around her raised knees, rocking her body back and forth. “You’ll see, it’ll all work out,” I told her, saying good-bye and wishing I could believe it myself.
If Manuela’s telling the truth, that the others don’t know anything about their colleague’s shit, then she’d be free of suspicion, since any one of an infinite number of junkies or whoever could have done it. I’d wiped the knife; hopefully there weren’t any other clues. As the train pulled out, I ran a few steps with it. Depressed, I went straight to the office. There I was, entirely by accident having stumbled upon an exclusive story, almost witnessing it myself, and what do I do? Destroy evidence, cover up for the murderer, and help her make her getaway. No journalist in even half her right mind would have done such a thing.
With my head on my arms, I stared at the flickering screen. The cursor blinked hypnotically and demanded the subway report. At some point the night chief stuck his head in at the door. “I guess you know your ninety lines have got to be at the copy editor’s by eight at the latest.” Damn it. With everything going on in my head, how was I supposed to concentrate!
I went to the ladies’ room and threw cold water on my face, but it didn’t do much good against the chaos in my head. If they caught Manuela and pressured her, I’d be in a real pickle. In my mind’s eye the headlines formed: JOURNALIST, ACCOMPLICE IN A COP MURDER! Then I could just pack my bags, I’d be out of job and maybe even land in prison. But what else could I have done? Gotten the hell out of there and let the girl take care of herself? In despair I kept looking at the clock. Manuela must have reached home a long time ago. Why hadn’t she called? I tried myself, but nobody answered. It was already nine when I reached Manuela’s mother, who had night duty in a hospital. “How Manuela is? I have no idea. Why are you asking? Coming to me? No thank you. I’m happy if she doesn’t show her face around here. She’s a hopeless case … I don’t give a damn!” It wouldn’t do any good to explain anything to the woman. No misunderstanding that her daughter’s fate was a matter of absolute indifference to her. So I merely asked her to promise to phone me as soon as she heard anything from Manuela. It was already midnight when I got home and could listen to the answering machine. A message had come from Manuela’s mother. I called back immediately. They had found her daughter. With a needle in her arm. Overdose. “Maybe that’s the best solution,” she said, sounding relieved. I felt my mouth flood with gall. Damned coldhearted, the loving mommy … But who gave me the right to judge her? Maybe it really was all for the best. Manuela had been freed from her troubles and no one could hurt her anymore, not the cops, not fucking life.
I gave her a minute of silence. The minute was not yet up when a new story came to me. The boys could just eat their hearts out.