[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

He glanced automatically at the clock. Too early even for Gross, he thought.

  “A woman.” She said it with faint disapproval. Had she approved, the visitor would have been labeled a “lady.”

  He could not imagine who it might be. Shaking his head, he said, “Send her in, Frau Blatschky.”

  A woman entered the room in a graceful sweep of fabric and sinew, all youth and beauty, her skin alabaster, almost translucent. Her hair was done up in a fashionable frizz bound by a lavender scarf.

  “Herr Werthen. Finally.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

  “May I be of service, Fräulein?”

  Suddenly he recognized her from the Klimt paintings. “Fräulein Flöge.”

  She nodded at his recognition.

  “That will be all, Frau Blatschky.”

  The housekeeper gave a final disapproving glance, then pulled the doors shut behind her with extra force.

  “Gustl has been arrested,” the woman, clearly in distress, blurted out. “They came for him at his apartment and took him away like a common criminal in front of his mother and sisters. You must help, Advokat Werthen.”

  He was astounded and for a moment quite speechless. Then he recovered his wits and his lawyer’s bedside manner.

  “We will get him out,” Werthen reassured her. “After all, the police could have no case against him.”

  “You mean his alibi, Fräulein Plötzl.”

  Werthen tried to hide his further surprise.

  “Please, counselor. Gustl’s affairs are an open secret to all of Vienna.”

  “He was trying to protect you,” Werthen said, relieved that he would not have to battle Klimt’s misplaced sense of propriety.

  “But he cannot know that I know.” Her voice might have been no more than a whisper, but it breathed determination.

  “I don’t think you understand, Fräulein Flöge. Herr Klimt has been arrested for murder. His life may depend on an alibi.”

  “And I do not think you understand, Herr Werthen. A man is a man. His word must mean something or he is nothing. We all know that Gustl is less than perfect. It is just that he doesn’t realize that. I for one will not take that away from him. Surely the police cannot believe he is a mad killer. We will take our chances, thank you very much.”

  “We?”

  She merely looked at him, her alabaster skin bearing a faint skein of glisten over the lips. She was hard as nails, but also playing a game. A risky game, a gambler’s game.

  “It is Gustl’s decision. I am here to ask you not to try and convince him otherwise.”

  “Does his mother know of his …”

  “Infidelities?” she offered. “Of course. But not of his bastard child.”

  She said the word with a harshness that spoke volumes about her true feelings.

  “She is a weak woman. Her heart. News of such a thing might-no, surely would-cause her harm. It is Gustl’s decision, Advokat Werthen. We must both honor that.”

  “The fools,” said Gross, seated in a straight-back chair in the office of Inspektor Meindl at the Police Presidium overlooking the plane trees of Schottenring. “They’re playing to the press. What evidence could they have against him?”

  “My position exactly,” said Meindl, a diminutive man, even smaller than Werthen remembered. He sat behind an expanse of cherrywood, nestled in an immense armchair that looked as if it might have done service to a medieval potentate, all of which made the man seem even smaller than he was. On the wall behind him was the usual photographic portrait of the emperor, muttonchopped and scowling; next to it was a smaller portrait in oils. This depicted a noble-looking head topped by a shock of white hair. Just at the bottom of the frame the artist had hinted at the vast chestful of medals that the man wore. Werthen knew who this man was immediately, for he was almost as recognizable as the emperor himself: Prince Grunenthal, the éminence grise behind Franz Josef. That the picture was in oils suggested to Werthen that the prince might well be Meindl’s sponsor, which would account for the man’s meteoric rise in Vienna.

  “That there is the possibility of some mistake is why I welcome this visit.” Meindl smiled at Gross, ignoring Werthen.

  Today he is on our side, Werthen thought. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

  Meindl was clean-shaven and pink-cheeked and wore a pair of the newly invented spring-bridge, tortoiseshell pince-nez. “I strongly advised against a too precipitate arrest. But the criminal police are, as you note, Doktor Gross, under the gun as well as understaffed. The citizens want results. They demand results. And your Herr Klimt seemingly presents an easy target. An outsider, someone who flaunts bohemian behavior, who insists on leaving the official art league to set up his own gallery. All artists are a bit unstable then, are they not?”

  “So he is to be tried for being an artist?” Werthen said. “Absurd. I see no real evidence.”

  “There is the matter of the bloody rag found in his studio,” Meindl replied, still focusing on Gross.

  “A bloody rag does not a crime scene make,” Gross noted. “We are still several years away from determining whether such blood is even human in origin.”

  “Klimt says it is his cat’s,” Werthen added. “The cat in question got in a fight recently. It lost.”

  Meindl pursed his lips. “Then why was the rag hidden?”

  “Hardly hidden,” Werthen protested, finally getting Meindl’s direct attention. “It was among a bag of rags Klimt uses to clean his brushes. And if it was actually the blood from the unfortunate Fräulein Landtauer, don’t you think he would have destroyed it?”

  “Absolutely,” Gross concurred. “If anything, one would think the presence of the bloody rag proves the man’s innocence. He has nothing to hide.”

  “Perhaps it was his bizarre form of a memento of the victim.” Meindl smiled with thin, saurian lips.

  “I assume you are familiar with my writings on blood, Meindl?” Gross said. “The difference between venous and arterial blood splattering? Were Klimt to have opened a victim’s artery in his studio, even a dead victim, there would have been a clear splatter pattern. The human body holds five liters of blood more or less, and much of that would have found its way onto the walls and floor of his studio. Quite a cleanup job, yet your men found no other traces of blood besides this rag.”

  Meindl nodded. “I was not saying I agreed with the criminal police, simply that there are questions that require answers.”

  “We can produce the corpse of the animal,” Werthen said, advancing the attack. He had had a hurried consultation with the painter in his cell at the Landesgericht prison before coming to this meeting with Meindl. Klimt had obviously been distraught, but still cogent enough to dismiss the charges against him.

  “Klimt says he buried it under the apricot tree in the studio garden,” Werthen added.

  “Which proves nothing,” Meindl replied sharply. “Herr Klimt could be more clever than any of us give him credit for. Perhaps this is all a feint, a ruse.”

  “I thought you said you advised against his arrest,” Werthen said.

  “At this juncture, yes. But we may well find further evidence. To be fair, this murder is the only one with loose ends vis-à-vis the people who knew the victim. In the other cases wives or husbands could all account for their whereabouts at the time of the murder. In Fräulein Landtauer’s case, however, the man closest to her, Herr Klimt, cannot account for his whereabouts.”

  “Or chooses not to,” Werthen added.

  “Or chooses not to,” Meindl allowed. “Which amounts to the same thing.”

  “You assume Herr Klimt was the girl’s only ‘friend’?” Gross suddenly asked. “Have you spoken to her roommate?”

  “Surely these murders presume someone with more strength than a mere slip of a girl,” Meindl replied.

  Gross grimaced and shook his head as if disappointed in his former apprentice. Werthen, however, understood what he intended.

  “He means that Klimt has told us that Frä
ulein Landtauer sent a message to cancel their sitting the night she was murdered. She said that she had to take care of her sick roommate. Klimt knew it was a lie, though, for he saw the very roommate leaving his premises after delivering the note. That Fräulein Landtauer felt it necessary to concoct a lie with which to cancel her appointment with Klimt implies a guilty conscience. Perhaps she was seeing another man that evening?”

  “That is obviously another matter that needs to be gone into,” Meindl said with a sigh. “I understand that the investigators visited the girl’s residence, but found nothing untoward.”

  Meindl sighed, releasing the pince-nez and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Understand my position. I am not in charge of this case, but I do care about the reputation of the Vienna constabulary. I contacted you this morning, Professor Doktor Gross, as I knew of your interest in the case.” A beat, then a grudging nod to Werthen. “And of yours, counselor. I am willing to share with you what we have thus far discovered if it will help to prevent any future embarrassment. Such assistance, must, of course, be in the strictest confidence.”

  “Of course, Meindl,” Gross said.

  Ever the careerist, thought Werthen. Meindl was in self-preservation mode. Though Klimt was a painter, he still had some powerful friends. Half the society women in Vienna were said to have sat for him, and in their altogether. These women clearly had persuasive powers over their husbands, for Klimt had also won prize public commissions, creating a series of controversial paintings for the new university entrance, among others. The criminal police surely did not know whom they had in custody; they were thrashing about madly looking for some kind of scapegoat, some success, however temporary.

  Meindl, however, was aware of the stature of the man they had in custody, Werthen knew. Heads might roll over this arrest, and his would not be among them if Meindl could help it. If Gross, using information supplied by Meindl, could solve the case, proving Klimt innocent, then Meindl would surely take the credit. Then again, if Klimt was actually proven the guilty party, Meindl’s machinations might well go unnoticed, as he had pledged Gross and Werthen to secrecy. Either way he won. No wonder the man had risen so far in the Presidium, Werthen thought. He knew exactly how to maneuver through the system. Such talent would not go unnoticed by a man such as Prince Grunenthal when searching for protégés.

  “There is something none of us is mentioning,” Gross said.

  “And that would be?” Meindl asked.

  “The drained blood, the severed noses,” Gross prompted.

  Meindl replaced his pince-nez. “Yes. One of our inspectors was examining that angle as well. Running down any leads there might be on extremist Jewish groups.”

  Werthen shifted uneasily in his seat, feeling his blood rise.

  “There’s not much in that avenue of thought, however,” Meindl quickly added.

  Gross had the temerity to look disappointed, Werthen noticed.

  “There is something that did turn up in that context, though,” Meindl said, consulting the file on the desk in front of him. “One of the few connections we were able to come up with between the victims. Two of them had employed the services of a local nerve doctor of Jewish heritage.”

  He passed a piece of paper to Gross, who handed it to Werthen. He read the name and address: Doktor Sigmund Freud, Berggasse 19.

  But first they had a more urgent visit to make. Liesel Landtauer rented a room from a Frau Iloshnya in Vienna’s Third District. Uchatiusgasse was a long and undistinguished street, not far from the Landstrasse Stadtbahn station. It was named after one of those curious nineteenth-century autodidacts, Baron Freiherr Franz von Uchatius, an inventor and military man who once ran the Vienna Arsenal. Among his inventions was a primitive projector for moving pictures that predated the American Edison’s by fifty years. He gained military renown and a general’s rank for his invention of steel bronze that proved effective in casting military weapons. However, when one of the cannon cast from this metal exploded while being demonstrated to the emperor, Uchatius took the Viennese way out and killed himself.

  Werthen, a student of his adopted city, was tempted to regale Gross with his own fund of knowledge, but doubted the criminologist would be amused. Instead, he followed Gross to number 13, where the building concierge was busy mopping the hallway. Inquiring directions of her, they were sent to the third floor, to apartment 39. Gross, who was claustrophobic, ignored the elevator in service and took the stairs, huffing mightily by the time they reached the third floor.

  Gross bore an official letter from the Police Presidium, given him by Meindl, that convinced the landlady, Frau Iloshnya, to let them into Liesel’s room.

  “Her roommate, Helga, was so shaken that she left for her parents’ in Lower Austria,” the lady explained. “She cleared out all her things. Otherwise, the room is the same as poor Liesel left it before her …”

  “Yes, quite,” Gross consoled her with a timid patting on her upper arm.

  “She was a good girl, no matter what the papers are saying.”

  The tabloids had already picked up the story of Klimt’s arrest. The afternoon editions hit the streets early, with headlines declaring a LOVERS’ QUARREL GONE BAD and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. The latter paper juxtaposed a photograph of the bearlike and rather demonic-looking Klimt against his sketch of Liesel for his painting Nuda Veritas. A newspaper artist had clothed the parts of the body that might offend the good Viennese burghers.

  “I am sure she was,” Werthen told her.

  “Anything I can do to help convict the man,” she said. “Anything.”

  As far as Frau Iloshnya knew, Werthen and Gross were on police business, not attempting to prove Klimt’s innocence.

  She led them to a small room at the back of the apartment, giving out onto a light shaft. The room was dark in midafternoon. Looking out the window, you could just catch sight of one green branch of a chestnut tree in the courtyard of the apartment building. The room contained two single beds with iron bedsteads; crucifixes hung over the beds. A wardrobe was against the wall opposite the foot of each bed; the door to the one closest to the entrance stood slightly ajar. Gross opened it and discovered it empty.

  “Helga’s,” Frau Iloshnya said. “I don’t think she is coming back. She was quite distressed.”

  As Gross busied himself with a minute examination of the contents of the second wardrobe-the police had already made a cursory inspection and come up with nothing-Werthen tried to keep the attention of the Frau.

  “We would appreciate any information you might have about Liesel. Do you know if she had many friends?”

  The woman shook her head so vehemently that a strand of white hair dislodged from the bun she wore in back and dangled over her forehead.

  “She and Helga stuck together,” she said. “Both worked at the same carpet factory.”

  Gross, overhearing this, shot Werthen a skeptical look. They knew that Liesel had quit this job soon after arriving in Vienna. For the past six months she had made a living as an artist’s model, working primarily for Klimt. Gross’s look alerted Werthen to take anything the landlady had to offer with a grain of sand. She clearly did not know her tenant.

  “No men in her life? She was by all accounts an attractive young woman.”

  “She was a decent girl,” Frau Iloshnya all but shouted.

  Gross had climbed atop the one chair in the room and was busily inspecting the top of the wardrobe now, Werthen noted.

  “I did not mean to imply otherwise, gnädige Frau. But there is nothing improper, per se, dear lady, about having a gentleman caller.”

  “Not under my roof, I assure you,” she said huffily.

  To hell with it, Werthen told himself. He would get nothing but trouble from this old bat.

  He took her arm and gently but firmly led her to the door. “Thank you so much for your help,” he said, moving her out of the room. “We will leave everything as we found it.”

  She looked surprised, then annoyed, and
was about to protest.

  “We can let ourselves out,” Werthen quickly added, and closed the bedroom door in her face.

  “I think we might have something here, Werthen,” Gross said, his arm reaching far back on the top of the wardrobe. He nodded as his probing hand touched something, then he produced what appeared to be a packet of letters tied with a red ribbon. He blew on the letters, but no dust came off. He climbed down and sat on the bed.

  “Perhaps our Liesel has left us a clue.” He unwrapped the packet and opened one letter after another, scanning the contents quickly, until he came to the last letter.

  “Aah. Now matters become more interesting.”

  He handed the letter to Werthen, who read it quickly, nodding at Gross. “This does put a new wrinkle in things, I warrant.”

  “Perhaps it is time to pay a visit to the theater,” Gross said, a twinkle in his eye.

  The Strassenbahn delivered them twenty minutes later at the Burgtheater.

  Werthen was a student of the hypocrisies of late-nineteenth-century Vienna. The building projects of the Ringstrasse had, in particular, informed his short stories, giving a backstory that spoke of sham and artifice. The new ersatz buildings of the Ringstrasse were all gussied up to symbolize their function: neo-Renaissance opera as the home of the arts; neoclassical parliament as a tip of the hat to Greek architecture and the home of democracy; the neo-Gothic Rathaus, symbol of burgher wealth. Here in front of him was the Burgtheater with its lyre-shaped auditorium that was intended to recall the Greek origins of drama. Great on symbols were the Viennese.

  The Burgtheater was one of the most egregious monstrosities of the Ring, Werthen thought. Sixteen years in the building, with continual cost overruns spiraling the initial assessment, the Burgtheater or Court Theater-with decorative ceiling paintings by Klimt, among others-opened in 1888 to great fanfare, with four thousand electric lightbulbs illuminating the exterior. Though even now, a decade later, electrification of the city was still a long way off. The night continued to be illuminated by gas, unlike in other European capitals, where electricity was fast becoming the norm. The lyre shape of the theater created a space, according to an actor and critic for the Neue Freie Presse, that was an “ornamentation-choked mausoleum which makes performing a misery for me as well as for my colleagues.” Speech could not be heard nor actions seen in this performing arts theater. To top it off, the designers had even gotten the symbol wrong: It was not the lyre, but the reed pipe or aulos that symbolized the origins of Greek theater. In the event, the acoustics and the sight lines were not improved until just two years ago.