An indictment for murder: Karoline Streicher is accused of having poisoned her whole family: her husband, her children, her aunt, and a woman who was their lodger. Only one of her victims, her oldest son Hermann, survives. In 1938, Karoline Streicher is sentenced to death and executed.
Sixty years later Hermann Streicher breaks his silence. He confesses to Marie Hovath, a journalist who is researching this long-past murder case, that his mother was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. In vain, Marie tries to extricate herself from this apparent madman. Like his mother, he is someone who knows how to delude and beguile people. He promises her the truth, the whole truth.
Against the political and social background of Austrofascism, “Angel’s Venom” tells a story of hate, jealously, and lethal revenge, the story of an extreme relationship between a mother and her son.
Karoline Streicher was afraid of rats, mice, and all those agile rodents that prowled around in the pantries, barns, and stalls. In fact, she went into a panic at the sight of them. Whether or not her hysterical breakdown during pretrial detention was simulated, she suffered from excessive fears that were impervious to reason. Gudrun found great pleasure in stirring them up. This was her revenge, just as sweet each time Karoline’s lips began to tremble and she searched the corners of the room for those loathsome creatures.
“They’ve started gnawing at the linoleum in the kitchen,” Gudrun would tell her, for example, off-handedly at breakfast, and she could be sure that the last bite would stick in her throat and she wouldn’t want to eat anymore. Or she found the sack of flour in the pantry raided by rats, or their droppings in the kitchen sideboard and a long whisker by the butter dish. “We’ve got to get new supplies from Kohn,” she said, “those vermin are getting out of control again, it’s a shame how fast our stores got used up. Next time we’ll have to ask him whether he knows of a more effective pest control agent, so we can get rid of the problem once and for all.”
“Do you think that’s even possible?” Karoline asked anxiously.
“I’ll go see him afterward.”
Isaak Kohn had a drugstore in the Galitzinstrasse, at the end of our allotment garden colony. He sold soap, shaving cream, bicarbonate of soda, and hair tonic along with all kinds of other little items that made life easier, and which the Streicher family was increasingly unable to afford. I often accompanied Karoline to the drugstore. On the façade next to the entrance hung an enamel sign that I looked at many times with delight. On a white background, a word was painted in blue letters. The word was “Thallium,” which I knew long before I learned to read. From above there hung sausages, smoked meat, and sides of bacon, and behind them fields of grain swayed in the summer breeze. Over the letters, which angled upward, little rodents, the mice and rats, were trying to get to the goodies, without ever reaching their goal. The thallium prevented them, it paralyzed their limbs and made them fall down. So they tumbled from the tallest letters into the depths, joining their brothers and sisters who had already met the same fate down among the ears of grain: death. “Thallium granules, thallium paste, effective in pantry, home, and field” was the advertising slogan. The sign had the good cheer and innocence of a children’s book illustration, a friendly invitation that didn’t make anyone think of death, but whetted the appetite and pointed out the fresh blood sausages and the fat country bacon and the beauty of the ripe grain crop.
“We can’t cope with the vermin anymore,” Karoline agitatedly told the druggist, who came from the storeroom in cloud of mixed smells, petroleum, chlorine, and spirits after hearing the shop doorbell
Advertising sign for the rat poison Thallium
“At your service, madam,” Kohn greeted her amiably. “It would be laughable if we weren’t able to take care of that. If the granules aren’t working, it’s time to turn to the paste.” He took a blue and white tube from under the counter with the same lettering as on the advertising sign. “Just be very careful not to let this get down the wrong throat.” With his scrawny index finger, the old druggist pointed at me. “That could end badly for a little nipper like that.”
“At your service, madam,” Kohn greeted her amiably. “It would be laughable if we weren’t able to take care of that. If the granules aren’t working, it’s time to turn to the paste.” He took a blue and white tube from under the counter with the same lettering as on the advertising sign. “Just be very careful not to let this get down the wrong throat.” With his scrawny index finger, the old druggist pointed at me. “That could end badly for a little nipper like that.”
If it turned out that way, I read in Karoline’s expression, I’d finally have my peace and quiet. Then she turned her back to me. “Give me twelve tubes,” she requested. Kohn didn’t question her. These days big orders didn’t happen too often. He did doubt—as he said later, as a chief witness for the prosecution at Karoline’s trial—that there could be so many rats in the allotment garden. But it wasn’t up to him to set rules for his customers. Even if she put it off a long time, Karoline eventually did pay her bill. He wrapped up the twelve tubes in white packing paper, wrote the 36 groschen they cost in the book of outstanding accounts, and wished Karoline good luck. Many months passed before he saw her again. Not until Ingeborg had been born, soon after which the rats came back into their lives.
