Free The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta Page B

from you.”
    Again she acquiesced; drank tea; spoke through its steam. “You have a maid.”
    He nodded.
    “They say the two of them, your father and your brother, they both—” She broke off. “It happens in the best families, you know.”
    He thought this over, neither incredulous nor outraged, his brow creased, as though working on his homework. Halfway through his thought his eyes once again found the half slice of buttered bread. He noticed her noticing, and blushed.
    “Well, now,” she said, reached out a chubby hand. “I suppose we can share.”
    They ate in silence.
    Ten minutes later she led him out past the front desk, where the telephone was ringing.
    “I’m Robert,” he said in parting, and as though suddenly grown shy. “You’ve been very kind—”
    “Sissi,” she said. “Like the empress.”
    She picked up the receiver and through the lead-shot pattern of the clinic’s windows watched him leave: his head bowed, his collar turned up against the early evening air, the white face thoughtful under the mop of dark hair. Then he turned up the driveway and was lost from sight.
    When Robert approached his parents’ villa some twenty minutes later, he for a second time that day exchanged glances with the vagrant in the red scarf.
    3.
    The man was gone before Robert could place him. The boy had walked as he had earlier, on his way from the station: his attention turned inward, placing foot before foot. It was only the man’s movement that alerted Robert to the stranger’s presence, the furtive haste with which he turned tail. He had been standing in the shadow of a mound of cobbles piled up on the side of the street across from the villa’s garden gate, or rather had squatted, the skirts of his greatcoat trailing in the street. His shoulders and hair were wet from the day’s rain. When he heard Robert approach, he rose and turned, stared timidly across the space dividing them, then quickly slipped through a gap in their neighbour’s garden wall. Robert was left with the impression of a thin man, eyes still as buttons sewn onto his face. It occurred to him to follow, but when he stuck his head through the garden wall across, he caught no trace of the stranger and reluctantly turned back towards the house. What stayed with him as he climbed the steps to the front door were the soft, rich coils of the man’s lambswool scarf.
    Robert had no key, but he found the door ajar, leaned shut upon its bolt, either from oversight or in anticipation of his return. As he closed it behind himself, his mother’s head emerged in the doorway to the drawing room at the other end of the hall. He saw nothing of her but the sagging,bloated chin and the dark wave of her loosened hair. A black lace collar cut in half her throat; beneath it she was lost in shadow.
    Robert ran over to her, wishing to tell her about his visit, the grimy, dark windings of the clinic. But what came out instead was this, somehow too lightly, like schoolyard gossip traded in the dorm:
    “There is a man watching the house.”
    She started, stared at him, the face puffy and devoid of any definite expression.
    “I went to the hospital, Mother. Herr Seidel isn’t well.”
    Again she started, as though frightened by a noise, and again her face failed to register emotion. Slowly, thoughtfully, she trained her dull eyes on his face and at the same time withdrew into the room.
    “Robert,” she said, faintly yet warmly. “You’ve come home!”
    Into the silence that followed, his stomach ejected a long, low grumble, grieving over its missed lunch.
    Robert mounted the stairs and returned to his room.
    4.
    She was still wearing the hat. There it perched, upon her crown, its crimson clashing with the spark of copper the lamplight teased from her thick hair. The angle was getting more rakish by the hour, the left eye in the shadow of its down-turned brim. She sat on his windowsill, her nose stuck in the pages of a book. On top of the desk, amongst