I'm No Monster Page 9

  That summer, there was a fire at the Seestern, and the hotel was badly damaged. Josef was suspected of setting fire to the house where he and his family had spent every summer since 1973 in the hope of pulling off an insurance fraud. He was arrested and questioned and spent a night in jail.

  The police had good reason to suspect Fritzl of arson, because they had discovered a can of gasoline next to the kitchen stove. This was his fourth arrest, and it revealed a disturbing pattern: exhibitionism, attempted rape, rape, attempted arson. Back in 1973 Josef had been suspected of another arson attempt on the Seestern. When the prosecutors threw this second case out for lack of evidence, Josef went about collecting the money from the insurance firm. If Josef had intended this second attempt to net him a handsome pot of insurance money, it was a very badly thought-out scam; he was underin- sured and the house he subsequently built on the site of the Seestern was much smaller than the original. Burning down the house was either a premeditated but poorly executed plan or one of the “spontaneous” and destructive acts that Josef would perpetuate throughout his life. His extramarital “sexual experiences” in Ghana had been “unplanned.” The attacks on three women in Linz had been “spontaneous.” According to Josef.

  To set it apart from other drive-in restaurants, the management of the Rosenberg required the waitresses to wear the Dirndl. This, the female counterpart to Lederhosen, had come back into vogue, along with other important symbols of Austrian culture—its dialect, its cuisine—when the postwar occupation ended in 1955 and Austrians began to express their rediscovered sense of national identity in a fierce attachment to tradition.

  The hospitality business in Austria had adopted the Dirndl as the standard uniform for female employees. Its ruffled skirts and velvet bodice were an emblem of Gemütlichkeit, a concept fundamental to the Austrian way of life. The word translates literally as “coziness,” but its meaning is at once broader and more subtle. Gemütlichkeit is harmony and warmth: a pleasant evening spent in genial surroundings, all disagreeable thoughts left at the door.

  Elisabeth wore her Dirndl with great pride and dignity. This elaborate arrangement—a white frilly blouse, worn under a red velvet bodice drawn in tightly at the waist and set off by a red apron wrapped around a full skirt of thick green wool—was her first-ever uniform and represented a step into the unknown territory of adulthood and independence. And although her hours were sometimes grueling and her lodgings in Waldegg cramped and basic—a shoebox really—she now became hopeful. She appreciated her freedom. And her loyalty to the place was best illustrated by the fact that she chose to remain in her quarters in Waldegg, not just on weeknights, but on her days off and on weekends. It was incomprehensible to her fellow trainees, who could not understand why she would not prefer to return home to Amstetten, where, by all accounts, her family had a large house in the center of town. The college, with its remoteness and strict rules on relations between male and female apprentices—even flirting was grounds for expulsion—was often described by those who lived there as “a prison.” But for Elisabeth her shoebox in Waldegg was the very opposite. For one thing, it had a lock on the door.

  And she made friends. She had met and befriended Brigitte Wan derer at the Rosenberg. Brigitte was a “troubled girl,” according to those who knew her, with problems at home. The two girls became confidantes. There were other friends. Behind her father’s back Elisabeth began a relationship of sorts with seventeen-year-old Andreas Kruzik, a trainee sous-chef. They would meet during her lunch break, but at first they were so nervous in each other’s company—Elisabeth was “serious and introverted,” according to Andreas—that any conversation was impossible. They managed only to stutter awkwardly about teachers and lessons. But eventually Andreas plucked up the courage to ask Elisabeth out. Things between them intensified. A boyfriend: It was a minor achievement. She was moving forward.

  In one of the roundabout conversations that Brigitte and Elisabeth were likely to have in the Rosenberg in those days, Elisabeth had plucked up the courage to tell her friend about her father. It had been the first time she had breathed a word to anybody about what was happening at home, and she had been relieved when Brigitte’s response had been sympathetic. And when Elisabeth had returned to the house in Ybbsstrasse after those two months away in Waldegg, and when her father had once again begun to creep into her room, she and Brigitte had started dreaming of leaving Amstetten altogether. Christmas was coming and the two girls concocted a plan. It involved taking the train to Vienna and never coming back.

  Work on the cellar at 40 Ybbsstrasse had begun in 1978 and never really stopped. Whenever Paul called the Fritzls, Josef was busy down in the cellar, rummaging around, doing whatever was involved in creating storage space for the tools and building supplies that were now spilling out from his garage. Rosemarie would answer the phone and say, “He’s in the cellar.” Or, “He’s downstairs again.” Or, “He can’t come to the phone....” Josef’s preoccupation with the cellar had become a running joke between the two men. “He’s in the cellar” stood in for “Er hat ein Vogel,” “He’s a nutter,” although Paul respected his friend as one of the sanest men he knew.

  The cellar wasn’t under the old house. Josef had studied the architectural plans of the old house, which clearly showed that it had been built cellarless; the house, according to the plans, sat directly on top of an impenetrable slab. So it made sense, instead, to build a cellar under the apartment block.

  He had made sure to set the concrete foundations of the apartment block several metres into the earth, which meant that its supporting walls rose up from well beneath ground level, with large, room-sized hollows in between them. A perfect space, Josef Fritzl had successfully argued in his application for planning permission, to convert into a cellar. The whole space was so vast and his plans so intricate that what he was now in the process of constructing under the extension could more accurately be described as a warren of interlocking chambers, an orderly labyrinth, a burrow. There were seven rooms in total, each with a specific purpose: rooms to store tools and building materials in; rooms in which Josef would build a workshop; plus a room where he would install the furnace that would heat the entire building.

  To get to the new cellar meant first passing through the front door of number 40 and down the corridor, past the entrance to the old house, beside which was a locked door to which only Josef Fritzl possessed the keys. Behind this door was a flight of stairs that led down belowground level to a second door, which was also locked. This was the entrance to the cellar.

  In excavating and refining the space to his requirements, Josef followed almost to the letter the plans, neatly drawn in red and green ink, which he had submitted to the council. He started with “the terrazzo,” the rather grand title he had given to the cellar’s dimly lit and L-shaped antechamber with its three doors, all with locks. One door led to a small, rectangular room where he installed the furnace; the second to the Abstellraum, a storage room; and the third door to the Ersatzteillager, where he intended to keep spare parts. Traveling counterclockwise from the Ersatzteillager, one came first to another storage room, then to the workshop, the cellar’s nucleus, where Josef built a shelf unit against the wall for paint cans, plastic gloves, pliers, and piping, and which he used as a second office. His workshop was an intensely private space: Much like the office he had built upstairs, it was off-limits to the rest of the family. Now there were two areas at number 40 that Josef could claim as entirely his own, two secret compartments containing different aspects of his life and reflecting the strict delineation of his roles: father, husband, engineer, builder. In the cellar he could be both at home and separate; contained as well as shut off. Seven rooms. Every time he was down there he felt exhilarated, as if he were moving toward something. He did not know what.

  Whereas he tinkered obsessively with the cellar, the new extension that squatted above it had been completed some time around 1980, when Elisabeth was fourteen, and he had wasted no time i
nstalling tenants, turning it into a money-making machine. The current crop was handpicked by him. Periodically an advertisement would appear in the local newspapers, and an assortment of students, stragglers, and part-time workers would appear at number 40 looking for accommodation.

  Josef preferred his tenants to be strays and nomads, the jobless or homeless, those living on sickness benefit—all plucked deliberately from the sidelines of life. The majority had their rent paid by the state, which was a guaranteed payer, and their stays in Ybbsstrasse were dependably fleeting, sometimes lasting as little as three months. On their way to somewhere else or on their way to nowhere, it didn’t matter to Josef. At any given time there could be up to thirty people living in the apartments at the back of the house. There were twelve buzzers on the front door and only one marked “Fritzl.” Always there were people passing in and out of the house. The flotsam and jetsam of life on the edge, too preoccupied with their own problems to notice much else.

  As a landlord Josef liked to take a backseat. He didn’t like to interfere or come across as heavy-handed, but if something displeased him that was more than Rosemarie could handle—it was always Rosemarie who would apologetically amble forth from the kitchen to ask whether so-and-so could please turn down their stereo—he would let them know soon enough by changing the locks. And that would be it. There were rules: nobody in the garden, no pets, no photographs even. Firm but fair, friendly but never intimate. Moving into the extension at the back of the Fritzl house, big as that family was, never signified the beginning of any sort of friendship.

  Like their predecessors, in the time when Maria was the landlady, the tenants had no access to the garden, although many of their windows looked out onto it. And they could see that their landlord was obsessed with that cellar, given he worked on it like a madman. He’d built the whole thing with his own two hands. He would constantly be lugging things in and out of the cellar, and what was supposed to be the garden was rapidly turning into a building site. Bags of concrete, a cement mixer, saws, electrical equipment, paint brushes, pliers, planks of wood, spare bits of metal, pipes, and tubes were constantly being carried in and out of the cellar or in and out of the house by Josef.

  By the beginning of 1983 Josef felt that the cellar might be nearing completion. Already he had called the planning inspectors from the council to give it a final inspection. His mood was good. And it would be amid this atmosphere of general satisfaction and contentment with his life that, one morning, Rosemarie asked him whether he had seen Elisabeth. Rosemarie hadn’t seen her come in the night before; nor had anybody else.

  Elisabeth, his daughter, was gone.

  Elisabeth and Brigitte left for Vienna on an afternoon train on January 28, sleeping rough on the benches of the main station, the Westbahnhof, the first night, before a friend of a friend offered to put them up in his apartment in Donaustadt, a lacklustre, blue-collar patchwork of tenements and new housing just north of where the Danube flows through the city.

  Two teenage girls with no aim except to stay away from home; happy to be in Vienna for the simple reason that Vienna was not Amstetten, and big enough, they thought, to absorb two vagrant girls into its heart without attracting the attention of the authorities. At sixteen they were old enough and just about qualified enough to find jobs, and they viewed this—their great break for freedom—as the beginning of a marvelous adventure without end. The first heady days were spent in celebratory mood: parties, alcohol, cigarettes, even coy experiments with cannabis—a delightful release, a new beginning, all thoughts of home behind them.

  On the fourth day another member of the Fritzl household took the late-afternoon train from Amstetten to Vienna and arrived toward early evening at the Westbahnhof. Harald Fritzl, Elisabeth’s eldest and favourite brother, had been sent by his father to look for her, and his instincts led him straight to the Westgürtel. Along this stretch of the six-lane highway between the train station and the University Hospital, the sidewalks, shabby and forlorn in the daytime, glittered with the multicoloured lights of brothels and sex shops at night. Harald went around with a photograph, as he’d seen them do on the detective shows, and when Elisabeth failed to crop up he headed farther east, to the Prater, Vienna’s sprawling main park. Here pimps and prostitutes of a lower order than those who hung about on the Westgürtel did business among the chestnut trees and makeshift bars that cluster around the Riesenrad, the giant Ferris wheel known worldwide from the Orson Welles film The Third Man. But nobody had seen or recognized Elisabeth there, either, so Harald returned home to Amstetten in disgrace.

  It now fell to Elisabeth’s father to call the police. This he did on day five of her disappearance, explaining to the officer—in the same concerned, fatherly tone of voice he would employ one day many years in the future in the intensive care unit of Amstetten Hospital—that his daughter’s whereabouts were of particularly grave concern to her family, considering her sheltered upbringing and innocence. The police, understanding from Josef Fritzl that here was a girl who was more than usually susceptible to injury in a predatory city like Vienna, moved swiftly, sending out the alarm to the authorities across the country and alerting the media. By the beginning of February all of the regional papers carried a picture of Elisabeth with the headline “Have you seen this girl?”

  Many parties were held in the apartment in Donaustadt, but on the evening of February 18 the stereo was turned up so loud that the neighbours called the police. Had the two duty officers, in their vigilance, not subsequently followed standard procedure to the letter—which was to examine the identity papers of every single person on the premises—it is quite possible that neither Elisabeth nor Brigitte would have ever resurfaced in Amstetten. Instead the two girls were escorted into the back of a squad car, driven to the police station, and thrown into a cell, shared with a man who had been picked up for drunkenness. While one of the officers telephoned the two girls’ parents with the news of their haul—it made him proud to think that they would be returned to the safety of home because of the efficiency of the police—his colleague had turned to Brigitte and whispered an obscene reference about why they had come to Vienna. It was the kind of sly joke that a certain kind of police officer felt entitled to make to a couple of sixteen-year-old strays who he couldn’t imagine had much else in mind on an escapade like this. His face turned ugly when Brigitte replied evenly that if she had wanted to fuck she wouldn’t have needed to come all the way to Vienna.

  It was still dark when a black Mercedes pulled up outside the police station and the figure of a heavily built, tidily dressed, middle-aged man emerged from the car. The man—who failed to mention that, not twelve months earlier, he had himself been the subject of a criminal investigation—thanked the police, expressing, in the confidential tones that are used between adults, a father’s embarrassment at having to collect his own daughter from a police station.

  Before he packed Elisabeth into the car, he said in a voice that was loud enough for Brigitte to hear, “That’s the last time you see each other.” Then he drove Elisabeth down the Westautobahn, through the outskirts of Vienna, through the darkness, toward the safety of Amstetten.

  Twenty-five years later Brigitte would come home from work at the restaurant where she worked in Vienna, turn on the television, and recognize a picture of Elisabeth above a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen that read, “Breaking news.” It was the same picture they had used to report her disappearance in 1983.

  In the instant it took her to turn up the volume, Brigitte would remember that a couple of months after she and Elisabeth had run away to Vienna the two of them had lost touch completely, partly because of the intervention of Elisabeth’s father, who had imposed a fearsome curfew on his errant daughter. She would remember also that she had bumped into Elisabeth one final time on the street in Amstetten, and Elisabeth had instantly brought up the subject of running away again; her father had clearly not been able to control himself. But by that time Brigitte had a boyfrien
d and an okay job, and she felt she had grown out of adventures. And after that Elisabeth seemed to just drift out of her life. She had left town on her own, Brigitte had thought, and possibly fallen on hard times. It was what tended to happen to girls from those kinds of backgrounds; they run away from home only to bump into another kind of trouble, usually the same kind of trouble from which they had hoped to escape. Brigitte had vaguely assumed that Elisabeth had become a prostitute.

  So when she switched on the television that April afternoon and heard what had actually happened to Elisabeth—to Elisabeth, her old friend; the girl she used to call Sissi—she was sick.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Think of Me”

  Even Josef Fritzl had to admit that he had taken on an enormous task in excavating the cellar, but by the middle of 1983 he was beginning to feel convinced that this, his most cherished project, was finally nearing completion. The warren of rooms that had been mere lines on a scrap of paper in the 1970s, when he had first sketched them out for the local council’s approval, had been realized with satisfying precision, and at minimum expense.

  Having wired the cellar for electricity and damp-proofed the concrete underpinning, Josef had carved rectangular vertical openings into the cellar’s interior walls and attached to them doors, and to the doors locks. Next he illuminated each of the seven underground rooms with fluorescent wall lights he had picked up here and there at discount prices. A windowless cellar needed light—this much he was prepared to concede—but he refused to squander money on heating, preferring to work in the cold rather than rely on the wood-fired stove in the boiler room that kept the apartments above so agreeably warm.