The Cure is Murder -Chapter 6

He’d asked me when my parents had emigrated. What was his name? Schmidt. Axel Schmidt. He´d asked if I were Jewish. No. I´d said, thinking I´d be safe. But it looked like they were really setting about getting rid of all the foreigners, even Brexit returnees, and people like me. The traitors! But there was a murder to solve, so why was he going off at a tangent? You never knew anymore. That young chancellor had got thrown out of the government and was off to bigger and better things since his friend Ivanka had now become the pretender to the Constitutional Throne of Amerika that her daddy had set up with the blessing of Congress. A sort of post-Franco spin. And the Austrian Interior Minister had a similar thing proclaimed – a sort of joint Austro-Hungarian monarchy with him and old Orban calling the shots. Those two, though didn’t have long to go, but the problems they caused in the meantime would take a while to fix, if ever. And heaven help us. The devil you know and all that. Talk about back to the future. And what about Oskar? I tried to think of the few conversations I´d had with him. Apart from the scar, you’d never have thought him a Burschenschafter.

***

When I got back from the interrogation, Trude grabbed me and I told her what had happened.
“Trude, what do you think?”
“About what?
“Whom.”
“Oskar?”
“Do you think he was a Burschenschafter?”
Trude looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “You never know these days.”
“But he did have a scar on his cheek.”
“So does my brother.”
“You mean, your brother is one?”
“Of course not!”
“And the scar?”
“Mucking about. Boys will be boys.”
Yeah. People kept saying that. “Maybe they shouldn´t.”
“Don’t say that aloud. Not these days.”
“But remember when we came. Oskar was already there.”
“He was a good-looking man. The other two, or at least one of them …”
“You mean Beate?”
“She seemed quite taken.”
“She did try her best.”
“He was nice to us all.”
“You had a soft spot for him?”
“Not really. He was nice enough, but the food.”
“Food?”
“Remember when we went through our favourite dishes..
“And you said oysters…,” Trude said.
I nodded. “And he cringed.”
“He was a Knödel man after all. How many Austrians really like oysters?”
“They don’t know the best. Sydney rock. Hmm.”
“ But he was nice to you, despite that.”
“He warned me,” I said.
“Something about foreigners?”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Beate and Ellie were going on about him, saying he liked them.”
“What do you mean by ‘them’?”
“Well, you.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t just say oh. Tell me.”
“Well, we did get talking. Did you know he lived in Australia?”