“Yes?” Liebermann prompted.
“Quickening sensations.”
Liebermann put his pen down. Frau Poppmeier looked perfectly sane, but what if she wasn’t? What if everything she had said was an elaborate delusional fantasy? It certainly sounded that way. The young woman detected the change in his expression: the narrowing of his eyes, the setting of his jaw, both suggesting suspicion and doubt.
“Herr Doctor,” Frau Poppmeier continued, “I think you must be well aware of what these symptoms mean.”
Liebermann involuntarily glanced at the woman’s belly.
“What did Dr. Felbiger say?”
“What you are probably thinking but cannot say for fear of sounding foolish. My predicament exactly!” She threw her hands up in a desperate appeal to the heavens. “But yes, you are quite right. My husband appears to have gotten himself pregnant.”
59
“Does the namE Jeheil Sachs mean anything to you?” asked Rheinhardt.
Anna Katzer was wearing a crisp white blouse and a pink skirt. She straightened her back, frowned, and said, “Yes, unfortunately it does.”
Rheinhardt flicked his notebook open.
“How did you become acquainted?”
Anna’s frown became more pronounced.
“I wouldn’t call Herr Sachs an acquaintance, Inspector.”
“Why not? Didn’t you pay him a visit last week?”
Anna was evidently surprised. “Who told you that? He hasn’t made a complaint, has he?”
“No,” said Rheinhardt calmly. “No, he hasn’t.”
Anna scowled.
“Well, Fraulein Katzer?” Rheinhardt asked. “Why did you go to see Herr Sachs?”
“Inspector, do you know the new warmestube in Spittelberg?”
“Yes.”
“On Wednesday, a Galician woman named Kadia Pinski fainted there. A doctor was called, and he discovered that she had been badly injured. She was a prostitute, and the man she named as her attacker was also her procurer-Jeheil Sachs.” Anna paused and secured one of her hairpins. “Apparently Fraulein Pinski had wanted to end her association with Herr Sachs, and he had responded by violating her person in the cruelest way imaginable. You see, Inspector…” She touched her neck and looked away. “Fraulein Pinski’s injuries were internal, and had been inflicted with the handle of a brush.” Rheinhardt winced. “Had she not received medical attention, she most probably would have died.”
“Where is she now?”
“Recovering in the hospital. We were able to make arrangements for her care.”
“We?”
“Myself and my dear friend Olga Mandl. As you can imagine, Inspector, we were horrified-and we resolved to pay Herr Sachs a visit in order to issue him with a warning, before he assaulted some other poor wretch.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“We did, but Fraulein Pinski was too frightened to make a statement. Besides, as I am sure you are aware, Inspector, the police are disinclined to assist women of her nationality and profession.”
Anna looked directly at Rheinhardt. She was tacitly challenging him to deny her allegation. He couldn’t: What she had said was perfectly true. Rheinhardt sighed, the exhalation carrying his next question. “What did you say to Herr Sachs?”
“I can’t remember exactly,” Anna replied. “We told him that we knew what he had done, that we had a doctor’s report, that we would be taking things further…”
“And how did he react?”
“At first he wasn’t very much bothered. He was clearly confident that the police wouldn’t be interested. He admitted introducing Fraulein Pinski to some soldiers, so that she could have, as he called it, ‘a good time,’ but denied everything else. He became angry only when we refused to leave.”
“What did he do?”
“He shouted and pushed me out of the way.”
Rheinhardt tilted his head quizzically.
“I was holding his door open,” Anna explained. “He had to get me out of the way to close it.”
Rheinhardt made some notes.
“It was a foolish thing that you did, you and your friend-going into Spittelberg to rile a man like Sachs. You could have been hurt as a consequence. What did you hope to achieve?”
“We thought we might scare him,” said Anna.
Rheinhardt had to make a conscious effort not to laugh out loud.
“Inspector,” Anna asked, “why are you here, asking me these questions? Is Herr Sachs involved in one of your cases?”
“Yes,” said Rheinhardt. “You could say that.” He squeezed one of the horns of his mustache between his thumb and forefinger, twisting it to sharpen the point. “Apart from the police-and the doctors who are taking care of Fraulein Pinski-have you spoken to anyone else about Sachs?”
“My parents and…”
Rheinhardt detected a certain hesitancy.
“Yes?”
“Another friend.”
Her voice had softened.
“What is your friend’s name?”
“Gabriel. Gabriel Kusevitsky.”
Rheinhardt looked up. “And where might I find this gentleman?”
60
Herr Poppmeier was a dapper man in his early thirties. His hair was a fair reddish-brown color and was parted in the center. He looked quite young for his age, almost cherubic, and his mustache-which was also fair and meticulously combed-did little to mitigate a first impression of immaturity. His clothes were finely tailored, and his tiepin (a flamboyant coral reef of colored stones) looked conspicuously expensive. He was in the habit of constantly making small adjustments to his cuffs, and his use of cologne was so liberal that he had been preceded by a cloud of blossomy fragrances long before his actual arrival.
“Were you a happy child?” Liebermann asked.
“Happy enough… I got on well with my mother and father.”
“And your brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t have any.”
“An only child…”
“Yes. I’m sure my mother and father wanted more children, but there must have been a problem. I used to see my cousins occasionally-but not very often.” He blinked and pushed out his lower lip. “Is this relevant?”
The tone of the question was confused rather than belligerent.
“What were they like, your mother and father?”
“They were very loving, but also rather anxious. I suppose this was because I was their only child. They tended to mollycoddle me. If I so much as sneezed, they would keep me home from school. Of course, I was delighted with their behavior at the time, but I grew to regret it in adult life.”
“Did you enjoy school?”
“Not much. I’ve never been very academic, and the school I went to was a grim place: whitewashed walls and hard benches that made your bones ache. The teachers were awful, strict disciplinarians-and petty. They used to cover the windows in the summer so that we wouldn’t be distracted, and we had only one break, ten minutes, standing like miserable wretches in a stuffy hall.”
“If your parents were so concerned about your welfare, why didn’t they send you to a better school?”
“There wasn’t a better school. It was supposed to be the best in our neighborhood.”
Liebermann nodded sympathetically. He asked Herr Poppmeier more questions about his childhood, and formed a picture in his mind of a rather lonely, unhappy boy, somewhat stifled by his overprotective parents.
“You said that your mother and father wanted more children…”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“My mother and father used to tell me that I was going to have a little brother or sister… but he or she never arrived. I imagine that my mother was getting”-he hesitated and winced-“pregnant.” Then, knitting his brow, he persevered with his unfinished sentence: “And while in the first flush of excitement, they would share their good news with me. But my mother must have miscarried.”