William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

There was a loud banging at the door and he heard Traudl go to answer it. For a second he imagined it might be Wolfram, drunk, come to carry him off to the bordellos of Spittelberg.

Traudl appeared at the dining-room door, flushed and trembling.

“Madame,” she said in a small voice. “It’s the police.”

Frau K’s face pinched itself into a rictus of disgust at this violation of her pension’s probity and marched out into the hall. Plischke burrowed in his mouth with a toothpick, searching for shreds of Tafelspitz . Lysander looked at him — that imperturbability was a bit too swiftly donned. What have you been up to, Josef Plischke?

Frau K reappeared in the doorway.

“They wish to see you, Herr Rief.”

Lysander made the instant assumption and felt the shock in his gut. His mother. Dead? Fatally ill? He felt sick and threw down his napkin.

There were three policemen in the hall. Grey uniforms, black leather belts. Shiny, peaked, badged helmets with flat tops. One man wore a short cape and it was he who saluted and introduced himself as Inspector Strolz.

“You are Herr Lysander Rief?”

“Yes. What’s happening? Is there some kind of problem?”

“I’m afraid so.” Strolz smiled, apologetically. “You are under arrest.”

Lysander heard Frau K’s shocked gasp from the door to the dining room behind him.

“This is completely ridiculous. What are you arresting me for?”

“Rape.”

Lysander thought for a second that he might fall over. “This is absurd. There’s obviously been some kind of mistake —”

“Please come with us. There will be no need for handcuffs if you do exactly as we say.”

“May I collect a few possessions from my room?”

“Of course.”

Lysander went to his room, his brain a babbling confusion of supposition and counter-supposition. He stood there frozen — Strolz watching him from the doorway — trying to think what he might need. His overcoat, his hat, his wallet. His notebook? No. He suddenly felt very fearful and alone and had an idea. He rummaged in his desk drawer, finding what he was looking for.

He went back into the hall, avoiding Frau K’s eye, and asked Strolz if he could be permitted to say a word to his friend, Herr Barth.

“As quickly as possible.”

Strolz stood behind him as Lysander knocked on Herr Barth’s door and heard him say, “One minute,” then, “Come in.”

Lysander realized that for all the months they had been living next door to each other this was only the second time he had been in Herr Barth’s tiny bedroom. He saw the piled, tottering towers of sheet music, the music stand with his damp woollen combinations draped over it to dry, the huge double bass in its container in the corner by the sagging bed with its embroidered coverlet.

“Did I hear the word ‘police’, Herr Rief? They’re not after me, are they?”

“No, no. I’m the one who’s been arrested — it’s a ghastly mistake — but I have to go with them. Could you contact this person and say I’ve been arrested? I’d be most grateful. They’ll know what to do.”

He handed over Alwyn Munro’s card. “He’s at the British Embassy.”

Herr Barth took it, beaming at this deliverance.

“Count on me, Herr Rief. First thing in the morning.” He glanced over Lysander’s shoulder, spotting Strolz standing there a few paces back, and lowered his voice. “They are fools, ignorant fools, the police. Just be extremely polite, that’s all they understand. They’ll be impressed. You’ll be fine.”

Lysander went back into the hall where he saw that the front door was now open. Frau K stood by it, hands clenched together, a look of pure hatred in her eyes directed at the man who had brought this disgrace on her establishment.

“It’s all a terrible mistake,” Lysander said as he walked past her, followed by the three policemen. “I’ve done nothing. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

But something in him told him he wouldn’t and he knew also that, had there been no witnesses present, Frau K would have spat in his face.

The policemen took him downstairs to a police van parked at the junction with Mariahilfer Strasse. They opened rear doors and he clambered in. Through the small paneless barred window cut in one side he watched the snowy vistas of Vienna roll by — the opera house, the Hofburg palace, the Hofburg Theatre — all the monuments of this old/new city flashing by like something in a stereoscope — until they arrived at the Polizeidirektion on the Schottenring.

The van turned off the Schottenring and drove through a giant archway into a central courtyard and the huge wooden doors swung — slowly, soundlessly — shut behind it. Lysander was led into the building and along a wide passageway to an interview room. There was a smell of disinfectant in the air and the empty corridors were disconcertingly full of the sound of footsteps echoing from elsewhere in the building, as if the place were populated by the ghosts of prisoners past forever being marched to and from their cells.

Lysander took his seat and faced impassive, efficient Inspector Strolz across a desk. Strolz took down his details, writing in a thick ledger with a dipping-pen and inkpot like a Victorian clerk. Lysander sat there in his overcoat, hat on his knee, trying to keep his mounting sense of outrage — accompanied by flickering undertones of panic — under control. When he was formally charged he decided the time had come to ask a few salient questions.

“Whom, exactly, am I meant to have raped?”

Strolz consulted his notebook.

“Fräulein Esther Bull. On or around the third of September, last year, 1913.”

“That’s completely impossible.” He was thinking back. The third of September had to be that first time, that first day he went to the barn. “It’s impossible because…” he continued, unable to keep the tremor of offence, of injustice, out of his voice, “because Fräulein Bull and I have been engaged in…” He paused. “We have been lovers for four months. In these circumstances I don’t understand how she can accuse me of rape. Don’t you see, inspector? You don’t ‘rape’ someone and then enjoy a love affair — a warm, passionate, affectionate love affair — with the victim, subsequently, for many months thereafter. It defies logic and justice.”

Strolz took this in, nodding. “Be that as it may, this information has no relevance here and now, Herr Rief. In a courtroom it may carry more weight.”

“But why would she come up with this rape story?”

“Fräulein Bull is four months pregnant. She alleges that she was raped by you that day, September the third. That was the day the child was conceived, apparently.”

Lysander sat there, wordless, deeply shocked. Conceived? He had seen Hettie a week ago and she’d said nothing…Four months pregnant? What was going on?

“If you bring Miss Bull here,” he finally managed to speak. “Then everything will be sorted out. This farce, this farrago will —”

“Unfortunately that won’t be possible. Furthermore, the charge against you is a joint one, brought by Fräulein Bull and her common-law husband…” Strolz looked at his notebook again. “Herr Udo Hoff. In fact it was Herr Hoff who contacted the police.” He closed the ledger and stood up. “You’ll be taken to a magistrate’s court tomorrow for the formal arraignment — so tonight you’ll be our guest. Do you have everything you need? Cigarettes? May I have some coffee sent down?”

Lysander was escorted to his cell down a flight of stairs to the semi-basement area of the building. The door was locked behind him. There was a glassed-in electric bulb recessed in the ceiling, a wooden bed with a straw mattress and a blanket, a sink with a single tap and a tin chamber pot with a hinged lid. In the exterior wall there was a small, high, barred window. Through a slotted vent in the door a voice informed him that the light would be turned off in ten minutes.