The Second Hand

They were wrong about the number of monsters in Zürich that summer, though I did nothing to correct them.

For twenty-four years the newspapers, the doctors, and the magistrates have agreed upon one mind. They have given it motives, appetites, childhood wounds, even a philosophy. Some of what they wrote is not entirely false. Most of it is merely tidy.

There were two of us.

At least, that is what I believed when the heat came, and the city began to smell of fruit left too long in shop windows.

The summer of 1902 bleached Zürich until the stone façades looked porous. At noon the lake shone hard and white. The pavements burned through thin soles. Milk turned before breakfast, dogs slept beneath carts, and flies gathered in butcher shops where the sawdust had gone dark. After sunset the heat remained indoors, pressed between walls and ceilings.

The papers called the murderer Der Zeichner, the Draftsman.

I disliked the name. It suggested a tradesman bent over a board, copying measurements already decided by someone else. Still, the public had seen enough to understand that the bodies were not abandoned. They had been placed.

I taught descriptive geometry at the Federal Polytechnic. My students knew me as Professor Johann Keller. They knew my displeasure when chalk broke in the middle of a construction and the way I paused beside a badly drawn line until its author corrected it. I was not cruel to them. Cruelty wastes time. I preferred precision.

Geometry, as lesser men taught it, described objects in space. I found that definition timid. Geometry decides what may be seen. It flattens depth, separates surfaces, and reveals intersections the eye would otherwise miss.

My first subject was Ulrich Bär, a silk manufacturer whose speeches on Christian duty were frequently reprinted and whose youngest workers could not afford bread from the bakery across from his warehouse.

I seated him in his counting room. His ledgers lay open across the floor, curving toward the desk. Beneath each page I placed a human tooth purchased from a medical supplier near Oerlikon. Bär's mouth was sewn around the key to his strongbox. By morning his tongue had swollen, and the key was no longer visible.

Emil Vögeli of the Zürcher Abendblatt wrote that greed had consumed the instrument of its own confinement. It was a showy sentence. People repeated it anyway.

Anna read the article at breakfast.

She opened the windows each morning before bringing in the coffee. Our apartment in Hottingen faced a quiet street where a chestnut tree grew close to the second floor. Leaves brushed the shutters, and Anna complained about the dust they left on the sill.

She folded the newspaper along the centre column and placed it beside my plate.

“They are calling him an artist now,” she said.

“Vögeli is. The city is repeating him.”

“I suppose that is how cities think.”

She glanced at the engraving beside the article. The artist had rendered the ledgers as a perfect spiral.

“That part is wrong.”

“Most of it is wrong.”

“The teeth. He has drawn them as though they belonged to someone.”

I looked up. “What makes you say they did not?”

Anna reached for the pot. “You said the article was wrong.”

“Not in that detail.”

“Oh.” She poured my coffee. “Then I misunderstood.”

Anna arranged things well. Flowers lasted longer in the vases she chose. A room looked less crowded after she moved a chair. When we had guests, she remembered who disliked cream and who had recently lost a relative. I thought of this as domestic intelligence, useful and largely instinctive. She had no education beyond what was thought proper for a merchant’s daughter.

The second murder attributed to Der Zeichner was not mine.

Dr. Paul Meier was found in his consulting room on a Tuesday afternoon. His certificates had been taken from their frames. In each frame, someone had stretched a square of pale, translucent skin. Six oil lamps stood behind them. When lit, they cast enlarged veins across the walls.

Meier sat facing the display. His eyelids had been removed. Hooks drew his mouth upward, not quite into a smile.

The police first told the papers the material was parchment, then withdrew the statement. The skin came from several bodies and had been scraped, treated with alum, and dried under tension.

Vögeli called it a tribunal of flesh.

I read the account several times. The arrangement of the lamps followed a projection I had demonstrated to my second-year students less than two weeks earlier. It was exact except for one change in the final angle. I drew the construction again.

The alteration was better.

Anna had been slicing apricots at the other end of the table. She stopped when she noticed I had not touched my coffee.

“Is it the skin?”

“What?”

“You look unwell.”

“I am not.”

She looked at the newspaper. “Perhaps it is the light behind it.”

I folded the page before she could see my hand shaking.

“That is a strange distinction.”

“The skin is only there because of the light.”

There was nothing theatrical in the way she said it. Her attention returned to the fruit. A stone slipped from her fingers and rolled beneath the sideboard. She sighed and knelt to find it.

For several days I believed Vögeli had arranged Meier. His language had been too exact. I visited him at the Abendblatt offices and found him among tobacco smoke, proofs, and sketches of the consulting room.

“You teach perspective,” he said.

“Among other things.”

“Then you must have an opinion about the murderer.”

“You assume he wants one.”

Vögeli smiled. “He has chosen the newspapers as his gallery.”

“Perhaps you chose them for him.”

When I left, he called after me that all artists eventually became careless because admiration made them impatient. It sounded prepared.

Another body was found while he was in Basel. A magistrate sat at his table among wax heads made in the likenesses of men he had condemned after accepting bribes. His own face lay on the final plate. Later came a music teacher bound to an instrument that could no longer make sound. There were other scenes, too, but the books have preserved them, and I have no wish to inventory what I did not do.

The city spoke of escalation. I saw a conversation taking shape, though I could not tell whether I had been invited into it or merely overheard.

My work at the Polytechnic improved. I slept less and lectured without notes. Professor Heinrich Tobler told me after one class that I seemed younger.

“Anna said much the same thing.”

“When did you see Anna?”

“At the faculty supper last week.”

I had forgotten the supper.

That evening, while we played chess, Anna sacrificed her queen. I told her the move was wasteful.

“I thought you would say that.”

“You could have won already.”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you not?”

She moved a pawn and glanced toward the window, where a child was crying in the street.

“You were enjoying the game. It seemed rude to end it.”

The move opened a line to my king that I had not noticed.

I searched among men. Frei was methodical but lacked imagination. Tobler left instruments out of place. Vögeli wanted too badly to be admired. I considered physicians, architects, undertakers, students, a modeller of anatomical waxes near the university. Anna brought coffee while I crossed out their names.

Dr. Conrad Suter forced me to answer. In a public lecture he described Der Zeichner as a sexually humiliated man seeking mastery over bodies that had rejected him. He used the word impotence six times, and the audience laughed at the sixth.

Three evenings later they found him in my lecture theatre. His face had been sealed beneath a plaster copy of itself, his mouth and nostrils filled with wax. On the board I had written that interpretation was also an instrument of torture.

Anna clipped the report and added it to the drawer where she kept the others.

“You kept the words,” she said.

“They were mine.”

She smoothed the clipping. “The others were yours too.”

“Not all of them.”

Anna’s hand remained on the paper. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I am tired.”

She placed the clipping inside the drawer and asked whether I wanted supper in the study. Her voice held no curiosity. That absence troubled me more than a question would have.

Three nights later, the rival replied.

A priest was found kneeling in the Grossmünster vestry. His forearms had been opened and the bones removed. Wooden reliquaries had been inserted into the sleeves of flesh. One contained a child’s braid. The other held seven tongues in spirits, each tied to a strip of paper bearing a girl’s name.

On the wall someone had written, in soot and rendered fat, that silence was also speech.

I was sick in the basin beside my desk.

It was not the tongues. Mine had been a stiff sentence, pleased with its own cleverness. The other was shorter and left no place for me to improve it.

Anna found me sitting on the floor.

She brought a cloth and knelt beside the basin. “Shall I fetch the doctor?”

“No.”

“You have been ill twice this week.”

“I said no.”

She washed the basin without looking at me.

After a while she said, “You do not really want them to catch him.”

“Of course I do.”

“I thought perhaps you wanted another answer.”

I watched her wring out the cloth. “Who told you there was an answer?”

“No one. You have been waiting for something.”

“He understands me.”

Anna sat back on her heels. There was fatigue in her face, and something like relief.

“Yes,” she said. “I think he does.”

The final work of the rival belonged to Elise Brunner, widow of a silk merchant.

She was discovered in her locked bedroom lying upon a mattress through which strips of her husband’s portrait had been woven. A bridal veil covered her, stitched from receipts, medical statements, and letters written by women whom Brunner had paid to remain silent about her husband.

Her abdomen had been opened and filled with white roses. The stems emerged between her ribs and spread across the bed. The room had been closed through the hottest part of the day. By the time Frei arrived, the flowers had softened and begun to bend. Their petals clung to the blood.

Brunner’s wedding ring had been placed behind her left eye. On the mirror, one word had been written in fat.

Devotion.

I stood beyond the police cordon with the crowd. Nothing could be seen from the street, but the smell descended from the open window. Roses, offal, damp cloth, the sourness of the people pressed around me.

The veil disturbed me more than the body.

The papers reported that its stitches formed an unusual repeating pattern. Vögeli treated it as another flourish. Frei apparently thought it decorative.

Anna had used the same pattern to repair the lining of my wedding coat.

That evening there were white roses on our table. Anna said she had bought them because the apartment looked bare.

I asked where she had learned the stitch.

“My mother.”

“Did she use it on veils?”

Anna’s expression changed only slightly. “What veil?”

I told her.

She removed the vase and carried it to the window.

“I have used that stitch on many things.”

“Such as?”

“Your coat. A curtain in my father’s house. Two pillowcases. I do not keep a list.”

The answer was ordinary enough to be cruel.

For the first time, I began to watch her without knowing what I expected. Not blood or instruments. Those would have relieved me. I watched how long she paused before speaking, which doors she closed, whether she read the evening paper before handing it to me.

Suspicion repeatedly approached her and slipped elsewhere. Someone might have seen the coat. Anna might have mentioned the stitch at a supper. A servant might have copied it. I considered tradesmen, women who had worked for her parents, Tobler, Vögeli again. My mind found a dozen ways into the house and none of them passed through my wife.

Vögeli then published a column suggesting that the changes in Der Zeichner’s methods might indicate more than one hand. He proposed collaboration, rivalry, or imitation. The article was cautious, which made it dangerous.

I invited him to the Polytechnic after midnight.

At dawn they found him suspended in the great drawing room among layers of tracing paper. Lamps projected his own sentences across his body. I removed his tongue and passed it through the rollers of a small printing press until it became a dark sheet. Upon it I printed his final question.

Who speaks for the dead?

The lines of the room converged upon his left eye. It was my most deliberate work, and I believed it would end the conversation because no answer could follow without diminishing itself.

I returned home after the storm. Rainwater ran along the gutters, and the first tram passed almost empty, its windows dim in the morning light.

Anna had prepared breakfast.

There was no blood, and that frightened me.

One candle burned beside a bowl of cherries. The other had been left unlit. A fruit had been opened around its stone and closed again. The napkin beside my plate repeated the angle of Meier’s lamps. A strip of newspaper had been woven through the linen in the pattern from my wedding coat. The chair at the head of the table stood empty.

White roses rested near the window, wrapped in paper.

Nothing in the room was evidence. Any object could have been moved, any resemblance dismissed. Taken together, however, they formed something I knew more intimately than proof.

Anna sat opposite me in the pale blue dress she wore on Sundays. Her hair was not yet pinned.

I asked how long she had been awake.

“Not long.”

“Did you go out last night?”

“No.”

She glanced at my wet coat. “You did.”

I sat down.

For months I had imagined a professor, a physician, a journalist, some man who required recognition as urgently as I did. I had given the rival a male body before I had given him a face.

Anna pushed the sugar bowl toward me.

“You were happier,” she said.

I asked what she meant.

“Since all this began. You came home. You spoke at dinner. You noticed me again.”

She did not say she had killed anyone. Her voice was tired, almost practical, as though we were discussing household accounts.

“When he began,” she added.

She left the word between us.

I wanted her to confess plainly enough that I could hate her without uncertainty. Instead she turned my cup so the handle faced my right hand.

“Why?” I asked.

Anna looked at me for a long time.

Then someone knocked at the outer door below.

She lowered her eyes. “You came home.”

The police found my instruments at the Polytechnic and Vögeli hanging in the drawing room. Among my papers were sketches of every scene attributed to Der Zeichner.

Three of them I had never seen before.

I examined those pages until Frei took them from me. The pressure of the pencil, the construction lines, even the small backward hook with which I completed the numeral seven were mine.

I did not remember drawing them.

Perhaps Anna had copied my hand so completely that even I could not distinguish us. Perhaps there had never been a second hand. The table might have been only a table, her silence the fear of a wife who had discovered what slept beside her. It is possible I divided myself because one monster seemed too ordinary, and then placed the better half in her.

I could have told them her name.

To do so, I would have had to admit that the finest scenes were not mine, that the intelligence I had dismissed as domestic had surpassed me while pouring my coffee and mending my clothes.

Or I would have had to admit there was no rival at all, that every correction came from me, and that I had accused Anna because madness seemed less humiliating when mistaken for love.

So I said nothing.

Anna visits every Thursday. She tells me about the lake, the new buildings, the trams, and the electric lamps that have made the streets brighter than I remember. Sometimes she brings a newspaper but never opens it. We speak about Tobler, who is dead, and the chestnut tree outside the apartment, cut down after a storm.

She never mentions the summer.

Before she leaves, she places her palm against the glass.

I keep my hands in my lap.

In the reflection, they touch.