The people Eleanor would not save she still watched over until their bodies succumbed to the sickness that marched through their minds. Those people whispered their sins to her too, sweeping the filth from their souls into hers.
“Some people are diseased long before sickness takes hold of the flesh,” she said. “With them, it’s right to turn a blind eye.”
When a body had been healed or was stilled by death, Eleanor stripped the bed and then swept the floor.
It was soothing to see everyday life continue after illness, trauma, or death.
“These too are part of life, but we pretend they won’t happen until our luck runs out or fate takes hold.”
Eleanor had been training Maud to take over healing, but Maud wasn’t strong like her, she told her grandmother. She wanted to turn a blind eye to all of it.
“Sooner or later you won’t be able to do that,” Eleanor said, and didn’t speak to Maud again until she whispered her own sins in her granddaughter’s ear.
Maud sat forward in her chair.
“There was no place to sit in the little room downstairs, so we were stuck outside, on that bench. I told Christian we were going to miss the train to Vienna and he ignored me for hours after that.”
There was a window in the room where Maud and the officer sat. Later she watched another officer at the front desk stand up and press at his hair when Christopher Albrecht arrived. She recognized him from a photograph in Christian’s wallet. Albrecht’s face was red, and for a moment she wondered if this man who talked about collapsing economies might be collapsing himself, but he strode forward in the way powerful people did, aware of and enjoying the fact that others watched them in a guarded, almost frightened way.
“There are some people it is best not to cross,” Eleanor had said before she died.
Yes, Maud thought, watching Albrecht advance, there are.
He wore a pale gray suit, and when he got to the room, Maud noticed the teal-blue loafers on his feet. His fingernails shone. Although he extended his hand to the officer, he didn’t take his eyes off Maud.
“What do we know?” he said, sitting in a chair, facing them.
Maud looked away, watching a cleaning woman sweep the hall floor. The sound of corn bristles along the wooden boards was soothing. She knew she should focus on the two men, but the way the woman’s arms moved the broom, just enough to gather the dirt, back and forth, back and forth... she wanted to sleep, but Christopher Albrecht tapped his fingers faster and faster on the table until she looked back at him.
The room that she and Christian had in Zurich was at the end of a hall with tattered blue carpeting. He liked the stark furnishings — a bed, table, and two straight-backed chairs — because they reminded him of boarding school in England, before his father had enough of Labour politics and emigrated to Canada. Even the lumpy mattress welcomed him to sleep when he was done with Maud, while she stayed awake, trying to tamp down the fear that threatened to choke her.
He had become obsessed with sex, relentless in pushing her to accept his advances at strange moments and in strange places. This trip had unleashed something in him, something that he seemed to keep harnessed at home, although there had been moments back there that the harness loosened and she felt herself shift from excitement to fear. The loosening of what had made him seem gentle and kind made her realize how badly she’d failed at judging him, and this frightened her more than anything.
In the room next to theirs was a man from Hamburg who introduced himself as Gerhardt. His breath was sour as he leaned close to Maud when he sat down next to her.
The waitress scowled, struggling to fit breakfast on the table, and Maud thought she saw Gerhardt’s fingers brush against the woman’s skirt before shaking Christian’s hand.
“He used to make dirty movies,” Christian said later, squeezing Maud’s elbow as they headed out for the day. “Inviting girls back to his apartment and then going at it.”
Maud pulled her arm away.
“It’s only sex, for Christ’s sake. If they all wanted to, what’s the problem?”
“I can’t see women wanting to, with him. He makes my skin crawl.”
“Well, my uncle liked what he did well enough. He told me he used to get Gerhardt to make movies with him, before the Internet made it so easy to find whatever you wanted. You can see some of the movies online now, although he isn’t too happy about that, since he became interested in politics.”
Maud felt her stomach lurch.
“These dark places on the Internet keep all the sins now. They never disappear.”
“Why is he here?” she said.
Christian smiled. “I guess to enjoy himself, like me.”
Christopher Albrecht watched, waiting for a confession or at least an acknowledgment that she hadn’t watched out for his nephew, who had brought her here and paid for everything.
Well, she had paid too, and that payment was becoming horribly clear as she pieced the fragments together: the sunset reflecting on something metal over by the window in their room, the sudden feeling that her legs would not hold her up any longer, plastic glasses on the bedside table, hands, too many hands, on her arms, fingers undoing the buttons of her sweater, sour breath.
She closed her eyes.
“What happened?” Christopher Albrecht repeated, and when she looked at him she wanted to shout, You know what happened, but instead said again, “He drowned in the lake.”
“But how can that be all you know? Didn’t you see him hanging on to the gate?”
“I had passed out,” she said and was certain then, from the same eagerness in his eyes that she had seen in Christian’s yesterday at breakfast, that he knew everything that had happened to her. He’d already seen it.
“Passed out,” he said.
“Yes, passed out.”
In the hall, the sweeping had stopped. The cleaning woman sank against the wall and sighed, although it might have been Maud herself sighing.
Her shoulders ached. She rubbed at the base of her throat, trying to erase the spot they couldn’t stop looking at.
“It was a mistake,” Christian had said before she got up off the bench to throw up.
“What was a mistake?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.
“When I came to I had to piece together what happened,” she said.
“And you have now pieced things together,” Christopher Albrecht said.
“Yes, I have.” Maud stroked the scratches on her hand. “I pieced things together,” she said and stood up, looking at the officer. “I’d like to call my embassy now.”
The officer nodded.
“This is not finished,” Christopher Albrecht said, but uncertainty had crept into his voice.
Maud turned away.
In the hall, the cleaning woman took Maud’s arm and drew her close, whispering in her ear.
Maud nodded and followed the officer down the hall.
The sweeping began again, drowning out Christian’s whispering, his mouth so dry he could hardly speak, begging her for help as she’d loosened his fingers from the gate. By the time she picked up the phone to call the embassy, she couldn’t hear him anymore. He’d quietly floated away.
Reed Johnson
Open House
from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
Today her father’s name is Ismail, and he will be second cousin to a Saudi prince. Her name, the one she picked out for herself earlier that morning at the breakfast table as they read over the real-estate circulars, is Scheherazade. She likes the sound it makes. Her real name is Nino, plain Nino, and she is twelve years old, dark-haired, and wears flecked nail polish and low-top canvas sneakers that she’s decorated with a blue ballpoint pen.