[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  Thankfully Gross seemed to have no interest in knowing if sexual violation had been part of the crime. Instead he returned to the head, lifting the onionskin eyelids to peer into the lifeless pupils, then turned his attention to the corpse’s neck.

  “Just so,” Gross muttered to himself. “You might want to take a look at this, Werthen. The killer’s signature.”

  Gross adjusted the woman’s head-careful to unseat the severed nose first-exposing the carotid artery on her neck. There, midway up the neck, was a small, clean cut that went through flesh and yellow fat and sinew.

  Werthen swallowed hard, nodding.

  “I assume this incision was made,” Gross said, “after she was dead.” He readjusted the head, but it flopped over to the left.

  “That is, after he broke her neck,” Gross continued. “Just like the other four victims. The second cervical vertebra has been cracked like a walnut. The cause of death.” Gross replaced the nose. “And this bit, too. Noses cut with a single clean swipe and then left somewhere on their persons.”

  Werthen swallowed again. This was not the adventure it had seemed just a couple of hours ago. But at the same time the resemblance of this victim to his fiancée made the case all the more urgent. He would find the murderer of this poor girl, a proof of his love for Mary.

  “If she was already dead, why the incision?” Gross asked, but it was rhetorical. He waved his hands over the whiteness of the corpse.

  “To drain the blood,” Gross answered his own question. “All five of them were squeezed as dry as a shirt on laundry day.”

  Werthen made no reply. He only wanted fresh air now.

  Gross replaced the sheet. Slowly he slipped his coat back on, donned his hat, then looked at Werthen with cold, clear eyes: “The work of a madman, you surmised last night. Do you still believe that?”

  Werthen managed to find his voice. “Who else could do such a thing?”

  Again Gross caught him in his penetrating gaze. “There may be other explanations, my dear Werthen.”

  As they left the autopsy room, the pathologist had moved on to a new corpse.

  Gross cut away quite happily at the sausage on his plate, then piled a miniature dripping haystack of sauerkraut atop it before plunging the heavily laden fork into his mouth. Werthen sipped at his glass of mineral water and tried to gain appetite by watching the lunchtime crowd around him in the Gasthaus, but it was not working. A schnitzel sat on the plate in front of him as lifeless as the corpse on the marble slab.

  Their trip to the morgue had made Gross late for luncheon at the Bristol, and the criminologist had insisted on a heavy lunch. Thus, Werthen had taken him to the Schöner Beisl, a pretty little restaurant tucked into a side street not far from the university; the sort of place he normally loved, so full of bustle and hearty cooking smells coming from the kitchen. But he could not get the dead girl out of his mind. The way she had blended with Mary, as if his fiancée were trying to reach out to him from the grave, to speak to him through another’s death.

  “Not hungry, Werthen?”

  “A stomach for such sights takes some developing,” he responded.

  Gross, whose ample midriff had forced him to unbutton his coat before sitting, was deaf to double entendre. He merely tucked into the Burenwurst with renewed vigor.

  After lunch, they strolled through the newly completed Rathaus Park, smoking after-lunch cigars and admiring the spray of the fountains. They could hardly discuss the matter in the crowded confines of the Gasthaus, but full of wurst and a digestive schnapps, Gross was all volubility.

  “Now you have seen,” he said. “This latest victim fits exactly the pattern of the other killings. Which means either your painter friend is guilty of all of them or none.”

  “He is not my painter friend,” Werthen said. “He is a client. And I concur. Highly unlikely that he is the killer.”

  “We still have a line of inquiry regarding that. The mistress in Ottakring, I believe it was.”

  Werthen nodded.

  “A bit of a postprandial walk would be in order, I think,” Gross said. “And as the stomach does its work, perhaps our brains can also be enterprising. Now that you have seen, do you have any theories beyond that of a madman at work?”

  “The letting of the blood,” Werthen said suddenly. “There is a strange resonance in that.”

  Gross cut his eyes at his companion. “Yes?”

  “I seem to remember one of your cases. Was it in Pölnau?”

  “Aah.” Gross sniffed appreciatively. “You surprise me, Werthen. You’ve been keeping up with my career.”

  “Well, yes. I suppose that is one way to look at it. However, as I recall, the murders were all over the papers at the time. One could hardly ignore the affair.”

  “Remember the particulars?” Gross asked.

  “Two-or was it three victims?-in the small Bohemian district near the village of Pölnau. Each of them strangled and drained of blood. There were those who immediately labeled the murders ritual crimes. Yourself among them, if I recall rightly.”

  “Presented with certain facts, one is dutybound not to discount them simply because they might be uncomfortable.”

  “Jewish ritual killings, in fact,” Werthen continued.

  “I am not an anti-Semite, Werthen. After all, look at our friendship as proof of that.”

  “Oh, but then I’m so very assimilated. I recall you saying that my surname sounds absolutely Aryan and my fair complexion and height also lend to the confusion.”

  “Well, they damn well do,” Gross spluttered.

  “What was it you once called me? ‘The Golden Boy,’ I believe. As if Jews have to be some grotesque physical caricature of the hunched and grasping moneylender. Well, we Werthens try to blend,” Werthen said flippantly.

  He recalled with no little vehemence his father’s insistence on his son’s learning the ways of a gentleman, which meant endless hours on horseback over the hills of Upper Austria, agonizing sessions with a fencing master, and entire weeks in the fall and spring lost from his studies in order to tramp over hill and dale in search of chamois and wild boar. Against his will, young Werthen had been turned into a fine physical specimen and a crack shot, yet he always longed for a life of the mind.

  “It was the grandfather’s choice of surnames,” Werthen added. “That of his former employer, in point of fact. There have been no religious Jews in the Werthen clan for decades. Just good Protestants.”

  Gross, a Catholic, made no comment, and they walked on in silence for a time, watching the antics of a long-haired dachshund that had escaped its leash and now ran rings around its parasol-wielding mistress.

  Werthen and Gross had developed their bantering manner from long association in Graz. After losing an early case to the prosecutor-cum-criminologist, Werthen had become a disciple. He sought Gross out privately after the trial and told him what a fine job he had done and how he wished to learn from his copious experience. Gross for his part had been flattered and took Werthen under his wing. The young lawyer had become a frequent visitor in the charming flat that Frau Adele Gross so expertly managed in Graz’s inner city.

  In between generations of the family, as it were, Werthen became a confidant to their troubled young son, Otto, who was thirteen years Werthen’s junior; Hanns Gross was seventeen Werthen’s senior. Werthen thus acted as their go-between in the difficult age and helped guide the young boy intellectually before the boy reached his majority.

  Gross had been grateful for Werthen’s intercession, for Otto and father Hanns did not have a comfortable relationship. So wise about the psychology of the criminal, Gross was seemingly ignorant of the proper way to conduct human affairs. Hanns Gross was far too imbued with the military rigor of his forefathers to appreciate the extreme sensitivity and perhaps neurasthenia of young Otto. Werthen, on the other hand, was only too familiar with such a life lived on nerves, for his own younger brother, Max, had been consumed by such hypersensitivity. Max had ended
his life in a most Austrian manner, shooting himself at the grave of his beloved muse, the playwright Grillparzer. Werthen was determined such a fate not be Otto’s. He was pleased to learn the younger Gross was now in his final year of medical school.

  Such history served to bond Gross and Werthen. Where others saw the blustery criminologist as merely pompous, Werthen had an appreciation for his weaknesses.

  The yapping of the boisterous long-haired dachshund brought the lawyer’s attention back to the here and now.

  “I do hope, Gross, that you are not making a similar hypothesis about these killings,” Werthen finally said, turning away from the canine amusement. “The Pölnau affair was not your brightest hour. In fact, if memory serves me right, the murders were found to be the result of local jealousies, and the blood was drained to divert suspicion from the postmaster, the actual killer.”

  “Yet I maintain that it is our duty as examining officers to investigate wherever the evidence and clues lead us.”

  “Even if it leads to anti-Semitism?”

  “It is said the Jews use human blood for their unleavened bread, matzo, at Passover,” Gross replied with his Socratic voice, as if trying to incite debate.

  Werthen stopped dead in his tracks. “You can’t be serious! Ritual murders? But this is almost the twentieth century. Pure poppycock.”

  “The bodies were found in the Prater,” Gross said. “The Jewish district.”

  “You can’t actually believe this. I may be assimilated, but I’m still a Jew and I find such theorizing highly offensive.”

  “I am examining the case,” Gross said evenly. “I take nothing on trust. Science is my guide, not superstition. What I know is that there have been five victims thus far, two male and now three female victims. Ages disparate, from eighteen to fifty-three, as was their social standing, from middle and lower-middle class to upper class. To date the only common thread we have in all the murders is the method of killing, the draining of the blood after death, the severed noses, and the location where the bodies were found. I deduce, therefore, that we are looking for someone, most probably a man, who is strong enough to break people’s necks and handy enough with a knife or other very sharp instrument to make similar incisions of the carotid. That is what I know thus far, Werthen.”

  “But why the disfigurement of the nose? How could that be linked with some ritual slayings?”

  Gross merely smiled at him.

  “I see.” Werthen nodded. “A reverse signature of sorts, is that your theory?”

  “Excellent, Werthen. You really do have a first-class deductive mind. You should never have given up criminal law. That is exactly my line of thought. What is the expression? As plain as the nose on your face.’”

  Gross waited for an appreciative smile from Werthen for his pun, but got none.

  “After all, what is the one caricature we associate with the Jew but his hooked nose? Thus, to cut off the noses of Aryans would be some kind of sadistic revenge. In fact, a Jewish signature.”

  “I hope you’re playing devil’s advocate.”

  Another shrug from the portly criminologist. “I merely state one possible avenue of investigation.”

  “And I assure you, Gross, that Klimt is neither Jewish nor an anti-Semite.”

  “Neither, as it turned out, was the perpetrator of the Pölnau murders,” Gross said with a wry smile on his lips. “As you so eagerly reminded me. But it proved an effective diversion from the truth for a time.”

  As Werthen made no reply to this, Gross plunged on, “I see a myriad of difficulties in this case, my friend. Speed is of the utmost importance. France may be renowned for its affaire Dreyfus, but I assure you Austria has its own homegrown fanatics in that sphere, many who hail from my own region of Styria,” Gross said. “There are Schönerer and his German nationalists; even your newly installed and esteemed mayor, Karl Lueger, and his famous dictum, ‘I decide who’s a Jew.’ If the details of these deaths were reported in the papers, it would take no time for such anti-Semites to turn them into ritual murders. Jew killings. With a mayor who spreads hatred of Jews from the political pulpit, there is no telling what might come of it all. Pogroms. Who knows?”

  Werthen still made no reply. He did, however, take exception to Gross’s description of Lueger as “esteemed.” The man whom the lower-middle classes loved to call Handsome Karl was in fact a mountebank, ready to play to the masses with his brand of anti-Semitism. That the mayor, thrice denied confirmation by the emperor because of such beliefs, had initiated a cradle-to-grave form of municipal socialism hardly made up for such demagoguery

  “So you see, Werthen,” Gross blustered on, “we may be working under the gun here. I need to solve these murders before the public gets wind of them. Before some enterprising newspaperman ferrets out the information and publishes a story in the foreign press.”

  “Actually, what you need to do, Gross, and what I hoped to convince you to do, is prove my client innocent of this latest outrage,” Werthen said.

  “Well, it comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?” Gross stopped dramatically. “Either he is innocent of the fifth murder, or your good client is in fact guilty of all five murders. That is the only way he could know the killer’s signature method.”

  Werthen felt the chill of a goose crossing his grave. He was no longer so certain approaching Gross had been a good idea. Perhaps his own involvement in such an affair was also ill-advised. Two generations it had taken the Werthens to disguise their Jewish roots. Would this investigation link him forever with the Jews? Yet the innocent girl lying on that marble slab had moved him. He had not been prepared for such emotion; it had quite overwhelmed him.

  THREE

  On the long Strassenbahn ride out to Ottakring, Gross regaled Werthen with his trained observational skills.

  “You of course noted the distinguishing characteristic of the pathologist at the morgue, I assume, Werthen.”

  Werthen had been too affected by the smell of death to notice anything about the man other than that he was covered in blood up to his elbows.

  “Can’t say that I did, Gross.” The streetcar passed over the Gürtel, the second ring road delineating the outer districts of the city. Suddenly the housing tracts became bigger, grayer, and dingier; worker tenements thrown up in the past several decades with none of the grace or serendipity of the buildings in the districts between the Ringstrasse and the Gürtel.

  “You sure?” Gross sounded honestly surprised. “Try to reconstruct the room at the morgue, Werthen. Visualize the furniture, the lighting, and then narrow in on the pathologist so concentrated on his work that he did not bother to vet us. Can you not see some very distinguishing characteristic? A hint: It was red.”

  “I’m sure the man does not have blood on his arms at all times, Gross.” Werthen was growing exasperated with this game.

  A pensioner wearing a Tyrolean hat and seated just in front of them turned round and stared at Gross and Werthen with rheumy eyes.

  Gross tipped his derby hat at the inquisitive old man, returning to the subject at hand.

  “No, no, Werthen. A birthmark, not blood. In the shape of a crescent, and located on his left temple in plain sight as we entered.”

  The old man continued to gawp at them as Werthen closed his eyes for a moment, re-creating the autopsy room in his imagination. He saw the pathologist’s hands at work in the viscera of a cadaver, then let his mind work its way upward on the man’s body. Suddenly the telltale birthmark appeared.

  “Why, Gross, you’re right! The man did have a birthmark, and in the shape of a new moon.” Then to the old man, still craning his neck backward: “Would you care to join us?”

  The man faced forward again with a disgusted snort.

  “No reason to be rude, Werthen,” Gross said.

  Werthen raised his eyebrows at this remark, for Gross was usually too oblivious of the feelings of others to even know when he was being rude.

  “At any rate,” Gross
continued, “you should learn to notice such things, Werthen. Take me. I’ve trained myself assiduously in that finest of visual arts: being a reliable witness.”

  Gross gestured with palms outward at Werthen. “The words may seem a contradiction in terms, I know. More times than I care to recall I have had cases fall apart because of witnesses who were too easily influenced by afterthoughts; who wanted notoriety and were willing to say whatever was needed to attain it; who were even color-blind. Did you know that fully five percent of adult males cannot tell red from blue?”

  “Once again, Gross, you impress one with your breadth of knowledge.”

  Gross caught the sarcasm in Werthen’s voice. “Sorry if I’m boring you, old man.” He straightened in his seat next to Werthen. “By the way, the pathologist had no birthmark. Just goes to show you how suggestible we all are.”

  The old man in front of them let out a derisive snort.

  They rode the rest of the way to Anna Plötzl’s apartment in silence.

  She lived at the end of the J line, near the Ottakring cemetery. The tenement at 231 Ottakringerstrasse was the same as five others in the block on both sides of the narrow street: five stories tall and badly in need of sandblasting. The front door was open and no nosy Portier was on duty to check the comings and goings of tenants.

  Inside, the building was dark and cavernous: Three different staircases led to the upper stories. Staircase A was on the left. By the second landing, Werthen realized that the apartment numbering had nothing to do with which floor the apartment was on. Anna Plötzl’s apartment was at the end of the hall on the fifth floor. As they knocked at her door, Werthen made a silent prayer that she would be at home. He had no desire to make a second trip to Ottakring to verify Klimt’s alibi.

  The door was opened on the third knock by a tiny woman who was obviously expecting somebody else. Her smile turned to a frown when she saw them.