The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta Page B

shout and go tearing through the rooms, the knife blade flat against one haunch. She mastered the impulse; turned soundlessly and tiptoed on. Her feet were sweating: the itch of salt along her wounds. When she passed the hallway mirror, she was surprised by the mask of courage she saw etched into her face; pearl earrings glowing in both lobes.
    She found him shaving in front of the bathroom mirror. The door stood wide open. He had taken off his coat and shirt and was standing there in a cotton vest, threadbare and filthy, lather on his cheeks and throat. On his feet were his soldier’s boots, enormous, muddy, spreading dirt upon the patterned tiles. A cigarette lay balanced on the edge of the sink, the ash long and curling, its thread of smoke alert to the shaver’s every move. The cigarette’s smell mingled with the aroma of his lather. The whole bathroom reeked of man.
    She could see his face quite clearly in the mirror, the giant jaw and bony cheekbones, a dark ring of lashes around each eye. As for him, he appeared not to notice her at all: his attention was poured into his task. She stood undecided for a moment, watched him shave. Just then he was working the cutthroat’s blade along a length of leather strap that he had suspended from a hook. Perhaps it was his belt. His forearms were enormous, so muscular as to look swollen, with a thick cord of vein running from elbow to wrist. Beneath the vest his ribs wrote great wide arches into its much-boiled cotton. Tufts of hair collected on the topsof his shoulders, charged up the sunburned line of his strong neck. He was like a man carved from a block of wood: coarse, unyielding, riddled with knots. Each time the blade touched his skin, the sound of scraping carried through the room.
    It occurred to her that it might be better to conduct their interview through a closed door. All it would take was for her to pull the key out of the keyhole; slam shut the heavy door; insert the key back from the outside, lock him in. She gauged the distance between them, wondered how fast he would move. Then she caught his eye in one corner of the soap-flecked mirror. He was watching her. Perhaps he had been watching all along.
    It was he who spoke first. “What’s that, then?” he asked. “You step on glass or something?”
    His voice was deep and playful, hard to place. There was something odd about his intonation. She waited until she was sure of her own voice, watched him raise the blade and cut a path of skin into the soap and bristle of his throat.
    “Who are you?” she asked.
    He turned his waist and shoulders, not the feet, gave the ghost of a bow. “Neumann, Karel, pleased to meet.”
    His cutthroat rose in the space between them, its handle lost in one enormous fist.
    Alarmed, unthinking, she too revealed her knife, then let it droop from her thin wrist. He followed the gesture with a laugh.
    “No question about it. Yours is bigger than mine.” His eyes sank down, from knife to thigh, on to her naked feet. “Or did you cut yourself shaving?”
    “Who are you?” she repeated. “What are you doing here?”
    He shrugged, turned back to the mirror. “Looking for Beer.”
    Again she noted his accent, faint and playful, the open vowels of a Slav.
    “You are his wife.” He opened his eyes comically, made a whistle from his soap-framed lips. “Enchanting.”
    “Talk, before I kick you out.”
    “In my undershirt?” He grinned, winked, went on with his shaving. “We are friends. Beer and I. We met out there.” He tilted his head, indicating a direction, as likely east as any other. “Five years in Russian spa. Lots of fresh air.”
    “And you were what?” she asked, grateful for her anger. “His camp guard?”
    He looked up, puzzled, then laughed. “His camp guard! Very funny. You mean because of accent. No, no, we were prisoners together.”
    “You are Austrian?”
    “Czech,” he answered. “Ethnic German. With Austrian passport.” He made a gesture