[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  “Yes, I was with her last night. Her and the boy. Now you see why I can never use them as an alibi. The shock would kill poor Mutti. I told her I was working late on a commission and would sleep in the studio last night. And Emilie … well, she, too, would be devastated, humiliated.”

  “And what if the police charge you with this young woman’s death? How far are you willing to risk your neck for the sake of propriety?”

  Klimt set the cup down on the silk carpet and slumped back in his chair. “Might it come to that?”

  “I don’t know. But we should plan for all eventualities. These Prater murders are begging for resolution.”

  Klimt shook his head. “I couldn’t do it. Not to Mother … But you believe me, don’t you, Werthen? I’m not the killing type.”

  Werthen nodded, but without enthusiasm, remembering how he and Klimt had first begun their association: The painter had been arrested and charged with assault and battery.

  “What is your friend’s name, Klimt? I may need to talk to her.”

  “My God, you, too? Is everyone turning against me?”

  The painter thrust himself out of the chair again, almost knocking over the cup of coffee, and began pacing up and down the room.

  “Relax, Klimt. A formality. I am a lawyer, a trained skeptic.”

  “Plötzl. There. I said it. Anna Plötzl, 231 Ottakringerstrasse, apartment 29A.”

  “Good,” Werthen said, leaving his chair and crossing to the cherrywood writing desk, which also served as his breakfast table. There he pulled out a pen and notepad from the top drawer to write down the information.

  “I assume you have more serviceable alibis for the other nights in question?”

  Klimt looked at him blankly. “What other nights?”

  “Of the other Prater murders, Klimt. If the homicide of Fräulein Landtauer is similar to those others, then you are either guilty of them all, or guilty of none, right?”

  A light seemed to go on behind Klimt’s eyes. “Right,” he said eagerly.

  “Then…?” Werthen prodded.

  “I’m thinking. What were the dates?”

  Like much of the rest of Vienna, Werthen had those dates fixed in his mind. “The night and early-morning hours of June fifteenth, June thirtieth, July fifteenth, and August second.”

  Klimt screwed up his mouth in thought. “You actually expect me to recall what I was doing months ago? Is it really necessary?”

  “Do you keep a diary or journal?”

  Klimt shook his head, suddenly crestfallen.

  “Never mind, Klimt. We’ll deal with that later. For now, I advise you to stay away from your studio until the constabulary has left. It will only make you angry, and we do not need any altercations with the police. I assume they showed you a warrant?”

  “They waved some legal-looking document in my face, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Go home, Klimt. Take a nap. Tell your mother you’re coming down with the grippe.”

  “There’s work to do at the Secession. We have our first exhibition next month, and the builders are still hammering away.”

  “That’s fine. Go to the gallery then. But stay away from your studio until I find out what is going on.”

  Klimt looked relieved. “I knew you would take care of things, Werthen. You’re a prince of a man. And they say lawyers have no souls.”

  A half hour later Werthen, looking tall, lean, and fit in a linen suit and brown derby, stepped out into the bright sunlight of Josefstädterstrasse. He began whistling a tune from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. It was very unlike him to whistle, and from an operetta at that, but he could not help himself.

  He felt buoyant and alive. This Klimt business had done it. It was so clear to him now. For the past six years he had been suffering a sort of long-term malaise, having given up the adrenaline excitements of criminal law.

  Last night’s talk with Gross had begun this realization: It made him see-by comparison to Gross-how boring and stifling his life had become.

  Gross’s 1893 publication, Criminal Investigations, had made his name in Europe and America; this very year would see publication of a companion volume, Criminal Psychology. He had also just started a monthly journal, Archive of Criminalistics. In demand everywhere, Gross was visiting Vienna for a few days on his way to his new posting as the first chair of criminology in all the Habsburg realms, at the University of Czernowitz in Bukovina.

  A large, florid man in his early-fifties with a pencil mustache and a fringe of graying hair around a bald pate, Gross had been animated last night over dinner as he regaled Werthen with his latest cases. Then he had surprised Werthen with the news that he had seen the corpse of the fourth of the Prater victims, a favor arranged by a former assistant of his from Graz, Inspektor Meindl, who was now quite high up in Vienna’s Police Presidium.

  Gross could not tell Werthen of the horrible wounds inflicted on the body, for he had been sworn to secrecy by Inspektor Meindl. “Morbid” was the only comment the criminologist would permit himself regarding the disfigurements.

  Werthen knew the importance of such secrecy: When the killer was finally brought to justice, only he would be able to confess to the exact nature and methodology of his crimes. Still, Werthen had been amazed to find himself disappointed at being denied such insider information; astounded to realize he was taking an interest in such matters again.

  And now, Klimt’s visit reconfirmed that he had only been marking time the last six years. He needed the adventure of criminal law in his life. And the hell with what the Werthens-Maman and Papa-expected from their firstborn.

  A lark, he told himself. He would take a vacation from his stodgy law practice.

  Indeed, he had already done so, having closed his office for the August holidays last week. He was due at the family estate in Upper Austria in several days, but until then, why not a bit of adventure?

  Coming to Klimt’s building, he entered the massive street door and went into the courtyard, an oasis of greenery in the midst of the city. Klimt’s studio stood in the garden that lay in back of the main building, and Werthen could quickly see that the police were done with their searches, but that a burly officer was still stationed outside the door of the studio. Werthen tipped his hat at the officer, his mass of reddish brown hair catching highlights from the sun. The man nodded his thick head curtly, sweating in his heavy blue serge uniform.

  “Something gone amiss here, Officer?”

  “Painter chap.” The policeman jerked his head backward toward the studio. “Never know what they might get up to.”

  “Indeed not,” Werthen agreed. “A rare strange breed, the lot of them.”

  But Werthen could get nothing more out of the taciturn policeman, so he went back to the street and headed toward the center of the city, whistling as he walked jauntily along, tipping his hat to female passersby, making way for a large pram at the corner of Landtauergasse, buying a single red carnation for his buttonhole at the florist shop at the Landesgerichtstrasse intersection.

  Yes, by damn, he was beginning to feel alive again. And what a fortunate coincidence that his old colleague Gross was in town to initiate his awakening. Or was it coincidence at all? More like fate? He chuckled at the notion. Fate was something he had not contemplated in many years.

  Now, still whistling, Werthen was headed toward Gross’s hotel, for the criminologist would surely be as interested as Werthen himself in this new development.

  Gustav Klimt, the běte noire of Viennese painting, a possible suspect in the Prater murders!

  TWO

  Gross was not at his hotel-the Bristol on the elegant Ringstrasse. The concierge indicated to Werthen that the great Herr Doktor had inquired as to directions to the Kunsthistorisches Museum this morning before departing and was not expected back until luncheon at twelve thirty.

  Though the day was heating up, Werthen decided to walk. The plane trees planted along the new Ringstrasse had finally reached a height to provide shade
for strollers on the broad sidewalk. He knew where to go once he reached the museum. The Brueghel room was to the right at the top of the grand marble staircase. Overhead, parts of the foyer ceiling had been painted by Klimt before he had given up the classical style.

  Gross stood apart from the groups of visitors who were conscientiously listening to museum guides running through their usual anecdotes about the Flemish painter. The criminologist, Werthen knew, could add a tale or two to their repertoire, for he was an ardent student of Brueghel’s. Under the name Marcellus Weintraub, Gross had published a much quoted monograph on stylistic irregularities in the early paintings of the Flemish master, but kept such artistic passions from the light of day. It would not do for an examining magistrate to be too closely aligned with the subjective arts, he had told Werthen on the one occasion the topic of his avocation had come up.

  Now here Gross was, all six feet and one inches of the man, examining at close range the human comedy as seen in Brueghel’s Children’s Games.

  Werthen approached his old friend from the back and was about to tap his broad shoulder when Gross, without turning, said, “Don’t mince about, Werthen. Is this coincidence or have you sought me out?”

  Gross closed the Moroccan-leather notepad he had been writing in and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “The latter,” Werthen replied as Gross turned reluctantly away from the painting to face him.

  “Adele does insist I stay up on the arts,” Gross said.

  Werthen smiled inwardly. “Is that so, Herr Weintraub?” Gross had obviously forgotten that, prodded by a second after-dinner slivovitz, he had once confided his love of Brueghel to Werthen.

  Gross had the good grace to appear sheepish caught in the lie. But it was a short-lived embarrassment.

  “Get on with it, man. What is so important that you track me down here? Not that I am not pleased to see you again.” Uttered with an air of palpable displeasure.

  Werthen drew him to one corner of the gallery, away from prying ears, and told him of Klimt’s misfortune and of his own commission to clear the painter’s name.

  Gross clapped his large hands together like a hungry man sitting down to dinner. The resulting slapping noise attracted the critical attention of several dowagers among the gallery visitors.

  “Excellent,” he pronounced in a voice loud enough to draw disapproving shushes. He charged on, unaware of his audience. “I assume you are enlisting my help?”

  “If you have the time.”

  “Time!” Gross boomed out, earning him further hushes. “But of course I have the time for a real investigation. I am not due in Bukovina for days yet.”

  Gross bustled out of the gallery headed to the main staircase, Werthen following behind. At the top of the staircase Gross suddenly stopped.

  “How to proceed, eh? That is the question now, isn’t it, Werthen?”

  “Absolutely,” the lawyer agreed.

  “I perceive several lines of inquiry. First, of course, would be to ascertain if our painter chap has alibis for the other four murders.”

  “We are working on that. Klimt, however, keeps no journal.”

  Gross plunged on. “Never mind. Plenty of time for that. Regardless, there is still the question if Herr Klimt is culpable of this latest outrage. A crime passionnel, as our French friends would have it. He kills his model and lover in a jealous rage and then comes out of his violent stupor to discover what he has done. Now he is terrified. The instinct for self-preservation takes control. In order to cover his crime, he dumps the body in the Prater to make it look like the other murders.”

  Werthen found himself nodding; it was, after all, a possibility.

  Gross made a clicking sound with his tongue and wagged a forefinger in Werthen’s face. “There is, however, an easy enough verification of that. Lead me to a telephone, will you, Werthen. I have a call to make.”

  They caught one of the new Stadtbahn, part-underground and part-elevated train, in back of the museum and detrained at the Alserstrasse stop. From there they walked several blocks in the direction of the General Hospital. Gross made no explanations and Werthen was determined not to ask their destination. The streets were full of traffic and strollers, and Werthen’s nose stung from the acrid stench of horse dung. Vienna, Werthen observed not for the first time, was truly a city locked in another time. A handful of automobiles were to be seen-and heard. Mostly traffic was still of the horse-drawn variety; even many of the omnibuses and streetcars were powered by horse.

  Such conservatism was modeled by the emperor himself. No fan of technological progress, Franz Josef had never ridden in an automobile; telephones were scarce in the Habsburg palace, the Hofburg; and imperial secretaries were disallowed the use of the newfangled typewriter. At Franz Josef’s insistence, all correspondence-including his own-was laboriously handwritten.

  Soon they reached the main drive of the hospital grounds. The General Hospital loomed in front of them, as big and gray a building as ever swallowed the hopes of man, Werthen thought. In the background was the squat, sandstone Narrenturm, Fools’ Tower, used until only just three decades before to house the insane in pitifully medieval conditions.

  Gross led the way to a side entrance of the main hospital building and past a gray-uniformed, gray-faced guard who exactly matched his surroundings and who apparently knew the criminologist by sight.

  “Back again, is it, Herr Doktor?” the man asked.

  Gross nodded. “I expect you’ll have a message from Inspektor Meindl from the Police Presidium?”

  “That I do, sir. Fine day for a visit. Cool down there. Like going into a cathedral.”

  Werthen followed Gross past the guard, finally realizing their destination. The phone call the criminologist had needed to make was obviously to his former colleague Meindl, who had cleared their visit to the morgue. Once inside, Werthen was struck with a smell so spit-and-polish clean that it was downright obscene.

  They took the stairs down, and the temperature dropped with each subterranean step; a natural form of refrigeration, just as the guard said, ABTEILUNG I was the first door they came to on the left.

  “This is it,” Gross said, giving a light rap on the door before entering.

  Inside were two rows of tables topped with marble slabs, each slab with a small trough built around it and a drainage hole at one end. Some tables were empty; their beige marble was scratched and dull from constant scrubbing. Others bore a body atop, covered in thick, off-white muslin. The floor was tiled in pale yellow. A window high up on one wall cast murky, greenish light into the half-basement; away from the window, gas lamps hung from the ceiling at several junctures.

  Bent over one of the slabs, a pathologist was up to his elbows in blood, peering into the stomach cavity of a cadaver. Werthen caught his breath and also a large gulp of the stink filling the room: chemical preservative and human decay. Bile stung the back of his throat, and he quickly averted his eyes from the autopsy in progress.

  “Inspektor Meindl telephoned, I believe,” Gross said to the pathologist, who had not bothered to look up from his work as they entered.

  “Table seven,” the doctor said, his eyes never leaving the corpse he was working on.

  It was the table farthest from the window, and the body under the sheet was smaller than others in the room. Gross, an old hand at the morgue, threw the sheet back without ceremony. A young woman lay before them. Her body, once so vital and fresh and pink, was now absolutely and startlingly white, Werthen observed. There were no obvious signs of violence, though there looked to be a scar upon her nose. Her lips that might have kissed young men were so white as not to be distinguished from the rest of her facial features; nipples meant to suckle children had lost their color as well and were now gray and slack. The only color at all was a splash of auburn hair splayed about her head and another forming a triangle at her groin.

  Werthen felt like a voyeur looking at the unfortunate young woman. Then came a flood of memory.
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  “Mary,” he whispered.

  Werthen was not sure he’d actually spoken the word, but this poor young woman did powerfully remind him of his dead first love. She was about Mary’s age when they were engaged, he reckoned. Then the old familiar sadness crept over him, the loss and grief and guilt for not having been there when she needed him. Working all day and most of the night to establish his name in Graz as a criminal lawyer, he had not even realized how sick she was until the last days of her confinement at the tuberculosis sanatorium in the Semmering Alps. Marie Elisabeth Volker, who loved the Anglicized form of her name, who laughed at Werthen’s seriousness, who tousled his hair and made him feel so very young and alive, who gently chided him for spending more time in the company of cat burglars and safecrackers than he did with his own fiancée.

  Truth be told, neither his parents’ expectations nor his own need for an easier, safer way to make a living had caused him to leave criminal law. No. It had been Mary’s last words to him at the Semmering sanatorium.

  “Poor Karl,” she’d whispered, her cheeks abnormally flushed, her auburn hair splayed out upon the pillow. “Ambition is a fine thing, but you will miss me. Someday you will understand the opportunity we lost.”

  And so, after her death, he had quit criminal law, the one thing he could blame for coming between them. He had gone into the more refined and sanitary field of civil law as a sort of penance. Now, looking at this poor young woman on the slab in front of him, he felt a tightness in his chest. Mary had been right: He did miss her.

  Gross had meanwhile stripped off hat and coat and set to probing the body with his large and rather hairy hands. He pinched the mouth, opening the lips, but was unable to unclench the jaw.

  “Relatively fresh one,” the criminologist said casually. “Rigor mortis has not yet worn off.”

  As he said this, the young woman’s nose suddenly fell off, revealing pink cartilage and two gaping holes. Werthen gasped, but Gross merely sighed and righted the stub of flesh as if it were clay on a modeling statue. He examined with the same sort of dispassion the woman’s ears, hands, feet. The farther down the body Gross moved, the more Werthen felt he must get air.