"It's fine. Don't worry. Hello, Lillis."
"You don't have to pay attention to him. He'll sit there and just look. That's his way of saying he likes you. He's not dangerous." She reached over and picking up a piece of the dessert, handed it to him. He took it and let it drop to the floor, his eyes never leaving my face.
I picked it up and handed it to him again. Taking it, he squashed it between his fingers.
"I think he's the most beautiful man I've ever seen."
"I know. If he were normal he'd have a hard time keeping the women away. As it is, when we walk down the street they look at him as if they were dreaming. Excuse me a minute, I'll be right back." She got up and left the room.
He pulled my hand to his face and pushed it against his cheek. Rubbing it up and down with his eyes closed, the gesture reminded me of the way Orlando moved when he was being petted.
"Can you speak?"
Like a fish, he opened and closed his mouth several times before speaking. His words came with the slow, high precision of a little girl's voice.
"Today I'll brew, tomorrow I'll bake.
Soon I'll have the queen's namesake.
Oh, how hard it is to play my game
For Rumpelstiltskin is my name."
Mrs. Benedikt dropped something in the hall as she was returning. Lillis looked fearfully at the door. He had shown me one of his secrets and it seemed he was afraid she would discover it. Only after she was back in the room did I remember I'd heard one of his lines before, in one of my dreams – "How hard it is to play my game."
"Is everything all right? Look how he looks at you! He's not usually that friendly with strangers."
"Does he ever speak, Mrs. Benedikt?"
"Yes, once in a while. He likes it when I read to him. The strange thing is, he has a very good memory sometimes. Especially for fairy tales. His favorite is 'Rumpelstiltskin.' When he's in the mood, he can repeat almost the whole story from beginning to end. Now that I think of it, that's the only one he ever says."
Whether he understood her or not, something in what his mother said seemed to anger him. He got up quickly and repeated what he'd said before. Only this time, the lines were spoken so fast and with such force that they ran together in a kind of high-speed gibberish.
"'TodayI'llbrewtomorrowI'llbake . . .'"
I hadn't realized how small the room really was until he started running around it. He climbed over furniture, hit walls, kept falling down and getting up again. What was he doing? The expression on the woman's face said she didn't know any more than I.
"Lillis, stop!"
"'TodayI'llbrew . . .'"
"Please, stop him!"
I tackled him around the knees and we went down together. He kept kicking his legs and repeating the same lines. On the floor he brought his face up long enough to kiss me on the lips. When I pushed him away he laughed.
"'Is your name Rippenbiest, or Hammelwade, or Schnurbein?'"
"Lillis, stop!"
"'Is your name Kunz? Is your name Hinz? Can your name be Rumpelstiltskin?'"
"Lillis!"
When I got back to the apartment, I saw Maris had done a lot of shifting around to accommodate her growing stash of things there. Although she'd slowly begun bringing her stuff over, she refused to move into my place until after we were married. Nonetheless, I loved seeing her clothes in the closet, her books on the table.
She was working at her computer. Orlando lay asleep on the monitor, his new favorite hangout when it was on and warm.
"Jesus, wait till I tell you what just happened to me."
"Hold it a sec, Walker. Let me finish this. Don't look, either. I'm working on your birthday present." On the screen over her shoulder I saw some brightly colored intersecting lines, but nothing more.
I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. At the sink I happened to look out the window down into the courtyard below. What I saw made me run out of the room for the front door.
"Where are you going?"
"I'll be right back!"
Taking the stairs two at a time, I was at the bottom fast. A few seconds more and I was in the courtyard, looking at the bicycle.
You see them all the time in big American cities: crazy-looking things, with every inch of their surface covered with pennants and flags, streamers and mirrors, that make the bikes shimmer and wave as they fly erratically down La Brea or Madison Avenue, piloted by riders as outlandish as the machines. Vienna has its share of eccentrics, but not this kind. That was another reason why seeing the thing again was such a shock.
Leaning up against the wall, unmoving, it looked pathetically sad and desperate – a real quack's dream of style and speed. But what kind of style? Flags advertising milk, a Vienna soccer team, and an old OVP presidential candidate stuck out from beneath the yellow banana seat. Two cracked rearview mirrors on either side of the handlebars, with stickers of the cartoon characters Asterix and Obelix stuck in their centers, impeded any rear vision they might have offered. The bike itself was painted like a piece of furniture from the Italian design group Memphis. One fender was orange, one blue, the different crossing bars each another vivid, clashing color. The tires had been sprayed silver, even on the bottom.
I had seen it before. So many weeks before, on the night I brought Maris back to Elisabeth's apartment. The night we first slept together. Standing there with my hand resting on the seat, I tried to remember exactly what the man looked like who rode it. All that came to mind were his broken teeth, scraggly beard, and the fact that he'd greeted me as Rednaxela. And his smell! The smell of a man on fire with madness.
"Walker!"
I looked up and saw Maris's distant face hanging out the window of our apartment.
"What are you doing down there?"
"Come down and look at this."
"What's up?"
"Just come."
I turned back to the bike to see if there was a way of deciphering anything important from the hieroglyphics scrawled and glued and stuck on to it. Still looking when Maris arrived, I briefly explained who it belonged to and what that meant. With no further questions, she got down on the other side of the bike and began looking, too.
"Where's the guy who owns it?"
"I wish I knew. That'd make things a lot simpler."
"You think he knows you live here? What's this?"
"An old fountain pen clip. I'm sure he knows. There aren't many bikes like this in Vienna, huh? It's got to be a lot more than Zufall that he parked it in our courtyard."
Frau Noot came through the door with a bag of garbage to dump. Seeing us, she smiled and waddled over.
"What a beautiful bicycle! Did you buy it, Walker? It's very artistic."
"No, it's not mine, Frau Noot."
"We used to do this with our bikes when I was a girl. Don't ask how many years ago that was! We even put cards like this, too. To make it sound like a motorcycle." She bent over and, struggling, pulled something off the back wheel. "Kids never change. What does it say, Maris? I can't read without my glasses."
Handing the white piece of paper over, she folded her arms and waited to hear what her discovery said. "They won't mind I took it off. There's another on the other side."
"I think it's a calling card for a tailor. 'Benedikt and Sons, Schneiderei.'" She looked at me and held it out. "You better look at it."
All that was on the card was their title and an address I already knew on Kochgasse in the Eighth District. I turned the card over and over, hoping there would be more.
"I guess it's time we went over there."
"He's a playful little shit, isn't he?"