[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  She half-curtsied and left the room.

  “Come on, man. No time to lose.” Gross was actually rubbing his hands at the prospect.

  “What brings you here at this hour, Gross?”

  Then he saw the mischievous grin on the man’s face.

  “There hasn’t been another one?”

  “No, not at all. I’m up at this ungodly hour to take you to the flower show.”

  Werthen was momentarily taken aback. Irony was not among the weapons he expected in Gross’s intellectual arsenal.

  “Yes, there’s been another one,” Gross said. “On with your coat, man, while the scene is still relatively unspoiled.”

  “But how…? No, let me guess, Meindl.”

  Gross nodded. “He gave me a friendly call this morning at my hotel. Now off before someone steps all over my crime scene.”

  Werthen gathered hat, gloves, and change purse, then followed the big man as he rushed down the flights of stairs, ignoring the lift.

  Gross had kept his Fiaker, a closed brougham carriage drawn by two gray mares, waiting outside. Climbing into it, they flew down the Josefstädterstrasse, weaving in and out of traffic with a jounce and jar that made Werthen grip his hat. Then to the mighty Ringstrasse itself and thence toward the canal. As they were crossing over the canal onto Praterstrasse, Werthen finally spoke.

  “So it was found in the Prater again?”

  “Precisely. And this time we’re ahead of the plodders. As I said, a fresh crime scene if we make haste.”

  Gross hammered on the roof with the silver tip of the cane he affected today. He shouted out the window, “Ten kreuzer drink money for you, my good man, if we take less than ten more minutes.”

  At which there was a snapping of the reins as the driver redoubled his already prodigious efforts, and Werthen was thrust back against his seat as the horses picked up their gait to a near gallop. Looking out the window, he could see the surprised, bulging eyes and open mouths of early shoppers on the streets as their Fiaker sped along the cobbled Praterstrasse, an occasional blue spark flying up as they crossed tramlines.

  “An elderly soul this time, I am told,” Gross said as he applied white knuckles to the leather stabilizer straps by his window. “Otherwise the same modus operands’

  Gross looked pleased with himself at the use of the Latin. “What I like to term our murderer’s preferred method of killing. We shall see presently with what degree of exactitude this method has been followed.”

  Gross pulled out what looked to be a leather mail pouch from under his seat. He opened the flap on the bag and began checking the contents, and Werthen couldn’t help but look in as well. Writing paper, envelopes, blotting paper, a map of the city, pens and pencils bristling like quills on a porcupine, a bottle of ink, a measuring tape, a compass and a pair of drafting compasses, pedometer, bottle of plaster of paris, sealing wax, glass tubes, candles, soap, magnifying glass, gum arabic, and a large railroad watch.

  “Going on safari, Gross?”

  The criminologist ignored the remark, checking the seal on the bottle of plaster for freshness. Satisfied, he closed the flap once again and kept the bag on his lap, like a train passenger ready for the station.

  “It’s my crime-scene bag,” he said finally.

  They were soon in the precincts of the park itself, clattering under the giant Ferris wheel. Presently they followed a lane leading away from the amusement arcades, and Werthen looked out at the shimmering green of the early-morning trees.

  “There! Over there!” Gross suddenly shouted, pointing with his cane out the right-hand side of the carriage to a group of men backlit by the rising sun, standing in a copse of trees some fifty meters from the roadside. Four horses were reined to a tall chestnut tree. They twitched their ears at the approach of the Fiaker. Next to the horses, a pair of police bicycles lay in a heap of metal and tires, their owners having obviously dismounted in haste.

  “Thank providence it was a temperate night.”

  Werthen, with experience in such matters, understood the implication, but made no response.

  “The body temperature, man,” Gross blurted out, as if lecturing to an excessively dim student. “We must know how long he has been dead, yet chill air will cool the body down more quickly than normal upon death.”

  Werthen let the outburst go. Gross was never a kind or polite man when on the hunt.

  “At least our friend Klimt has an alibi for last night that he can broadcast to the world,” Gross added. “He was sitting in the Vienna jail.”

  Werthen had already made this connection himself. If in fact this victim’s wounds matched the others, that should be proof positive that Klimt was innocent of the Landtauer killing, and that they were all the result of the same killer.

  Gross was out of the carriage even before it had stopped, his bulky frame stumbling along on impossibly small feet until he caught his balance. He headed straight for the group of men gathered by the chestnut tree, crime-scene bag in hand.

  Werthen got out and was headed for the group as well until the cabbie behind him called out, “Say there, Herr Doktor. I’ll be needing my tip.”

  Werthen looked back at the red-nosed driver, and to the fast-departing back of Gross, then grudgingly dug into the change purse he had happily remembered to take with him. Ten kreuzers the damned fool Gross had promised, Werthen remembered. He found a coin and slapped it into the man’s outstretched palm.

  “And my regular fare, as well. That’ll be another twenty-five.”

  “But that’s outrageous!” Werthen thundered.

  The man, however, kept his hand out, looking Werthen steadily in the eye.

  Finally he dug into the change purse again and handed over the correct change.

  “God preserve you,” the insolent cabbie said, tipping his hat. “Should I wait?”

  Now he asks, Werthen thought, and was about to explode again, but thought better of it. They would need transport back.

  “Please,” he said with an ironic lilt, then headed to the crime scene only to find Gross down on hands and knees, the onlookers wearing expressions of alternate amusement and amazement.

  Gross made an occasional humming sound, at which point he would pull out the magnifying glass from his leather bag, inspect the ground, then, employing tweezers, pick up some nearly invisible bits and plop them into one of the envelopes from the same bag.

  Werthen had the irresistible desire to start laughing as he watched the oh-so-meticulous Gross crawling about the earth, heedless of the brown stains he was making at his knees. Yet the body propped against the trunk of the tree choked off any possibility of laughter.

  The victim was perhaps sixty, his head dangling severely to the right, towel-stiff gray hair combed tightly to his scalp. He was dressed in Trachten that recalled the hunting lodge-gray wool with loden-green piping and stag-horn buttons.

  The dead man’s eyes were open, peering out, frozen in wide-eyed alarm. His skin was as white as alabaster-white as that of the young Landtauer girl in the morgue. And where his nose should have been was a gaping hole that gave his face a porcine appearance.

  Gross suddenly and angrily exhaled as he got to his feet.

  “Who’s been mucking about here?” He looked at the six men gathered together apart from Werthen.

  Two of them were constables, and they coughed a laugh away, then went red. The four others were dressed in military uniform-brown tunics with bright scarlet piping, field caps on their heads with bills polished to purple-black perfection. They kept their eyes on the ground in front of their boots.

  Gross wore an air of authority, and none of these questioned his right to be examining the scene, let alone gathering evidence. Finally the taller of the two constables answered Gross’s question: “We had to ascertain the gentleman was dead.” He wiped at a runny nose with the sleeve of his blue woolen jacket. “It’s regulations.”

  Gross shook his head. “And is it also regulations that you provide a guided
tour of the scene? There are at least six sets of footprints here all jumbled together. If you do not wish to be directing school traffic in Bukovina, I suggest you explain.”

  One of the army officers stood stiffly to attention, saluting Gross. “It’s our fault, sir. We thought the gentleman might need help. It was first light, so we had no way to see he was beyond the need.”

  Red splotches were on this young officer’s cheeks, making him look as if he were fresh from the country, foreign to the uniform he wore. Werthen glanced at the soldier’s hands: They looked to be more comfortable grappling a plow than wielding the sword he wore at his side.

  Gross gave the four soldiers a long, cool look. “And what, may I ask, brought you out here at such an unholy hour of the morning?”

  This sent eyes to the ground once again and prompted the tall gendarme to jump in.

  “We’re looking into that, Herr Doktor. The four gentlemen here merely found the body. There was no one about at the time, as they have told me. No one at all. So they do not figure into it, if you see what I mean.”

  “Hmm,” Gross muttered, thrusting his magnifying glass once again into the depths of his leather case. He strode over to the corpse now, knowing there was no longer any reason to be careful in the surrounding area-nothing to be found here but the footprints of soldiers and gendarmes, which most likely obscured those of the perpetrator of this latest outrage. Gross bent over the body, performing the same investigation with the head and neck as he had with the unfortunate Fräulein Landtauer.

  “Aha! Just as I thought.” He waved to Werthen to come over.

  “You see?” Gross jabbed his finger at a sliver-thin incision over the victim’s carotid. “Our man’s signature,” he whispered. “And the same slight feathering of the flesh as found on the Landtauer girl. Our man is still using the serrulate scalpel.”

  The soldiers looked on curiously, and Gross finally told the gendarmes to take the men’s names and see them off to their barracks.

  Thereupon Gross continued a cursory investigation of the corpse. In one of the man’s clenched fists, they found the other part of the signature: the tip of the amputated nose. Gross searched the man’s pockets, but seemingly found nothing, though Werthen’s attention was distracted for a moment watching the policemen taking down names. The four army officers were gesticulating, making a mild protest, but, it appeared, finally and reluctantly provided their identities.

  Gross’s work was over. He picked a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and patted at his filthy knees.

  “You decided not to question the soldiers personally?” Werthen said.

  Gross now dampened the handkerchief with the tip of his tongue and scrubbed more vigorously at the stains on his knees, with little success.

  “The gendarmes have the names. The police will investigate them, though I doubt they will tie them to the murders.” He finally gave up with the stains and stuffed the filthy handkerchief into a voluminous coat pocket. “But what the devil were they doing out here? Ending the night with a romp in nature?”

  Werthen touched the tip of his own nose as if sharing a secret. “Dueling, old fellow. The Prater’s a favorite meeting ground. All illegal, of course, though they happen almost daily. Those young men, the officers-they’d be drubbed out of the army if they refused a challenge. But just as surely will they face demotion now they’ve been caught at it. Why, even our former prime minister, Count Badeni, felt it incumbent to call out a German Nationalist deputy of the Reichsrat last year. Pistols at twenty paces.”

  “Barbaric,” Gross spluttered. “Has no one told them it is almost the twentieth century?”

  But Gross was no longer interested in duels or in his own indignation. He signaled to the waiting cabbie and they climbed into the Fiaker.

  “I blame that British blighter, you know,” Gross said as he settled back in his seat and once again deposited his crime-scene bag on the floorboards.

  Werthen’s face showed his perplexity.

  “Doyle,” Gross continued. “I believe that is the fellow’s name. Writes the most fantastic incidents, but insists on using my methods for his main character-this Holmes fellow. That’s why the air of general amusement back there.” He nodded in the direction of the two constables at the scene.

  Werthen had not thought Gross noticed their amusement.

  “Confound the man. He obviously read my early articles for criminal investigators. Made a complete laughingstock of me among my fellow professionals. As if I am the one pilfering the great Sherlock Holmes’s techniques and not vice versa.”

  From the Fiaker window they watched as an ambulance drew up to the crime scene and white-coated medics got out. Gross sighed, whether at this sight or at his feud with Arthur Conan Doyle, Werthen could not discern.

  “So, any surmises, Werthen?” Gross gave the roof a tap with his walking stick and the Fiaker lurched forward.

  “As you say, the same modus operandi.”

  “Beyond that? Any observations?”

  “He’d obviously been killed elsewhere.”

  Gross smiled. “Why do you say so?”

  “Too tidy. No blood about.”

  Gross nodded. “Just as with the others.” He fixed Werthen with a penetrating gaze. “Which tells us much, I should say. Our perpetrator may be a man of means. He has the privacy in which to drain his victims’ blood. Privacy implies space, and space the wherewithal to afford it. I doubt seriously that such a process would be conducted out of doors. Too risky. Ergo, some indoor space is at his disposal. And some form of transport. Perhaps he kills wherever he has the opportunity, but then he must convey the body to the bloodletting rooms, further transport them to the Prater, and also be able to dispose of quantities of blood.”

  “Maybe he lives nearby?” Werthen suggested.

  Gross thought for a moment. “Possible, though not essential. The Prater is a secluded area in which to deposit the victims; it has the further resonance of being located in the Second District, the largely Jewish Second District, as you yourself noted.”

  More silence as they jostled over the cobbled Praterstrasse. Activity had picked up since their earlier trip along the street. Shops had opened. Pedestrians bustled along the wide sidewalks, shopping baskets in hand. Normal life out there, Werthen thought. Blissfully ignorant of the most recent atrocity being committed in their fair city.

  “As for this victim’s identity?” Gross suddenly said.

  Werthen shook his head. “I’m hardly a mind reader. Not that there was a sentient mind left in that poor man. Don’t tell me you’ve figured out his identity from what we saw there?”

  Gross shrugged. “Obviously an ex-civil servant. Perhaps even from the royal household. A faithful-retainer type. Clear as daylight.”

  Werthen was astounded. “How could you tell that?”

  A sheepish grin. “The man was carrying a pensioner’s card.”

  Werthen slouched back in his seat, pulled out a Gross Glockner cigar, bit off the end, and spit it out the window of the cab, then lit it with his flint lighter.

  “Brilliant,” Werthen muttered as he watched blue smoke from his cigar being sucked out the Fiaker window.

  “I suppose this completes our investigation then, Werthen?”

  Gross was right, Werthen suddenly realized. The police would have to release Klimt now, and since Klimt was his client, his investigation into these horrible crimes should also come to an end. He was surprised to find himself disappointed. He had just gotten his teeth into this thing, and there was the Landtauer girl and her uncommon resemblance to his Mary.

  “I suppose it does,” he said reluctantly. “And I assume you’ll be off for Czernowitz now.”

  Gross sighed. “Yes. I suppose so.”

  But neither of them believed it.

  Gross waited for the police to notify Frau Frosch of her husband’s death and to conduct their initial interview before visiting her himself.

  “I want to ingratia
te myself to the good lady, Werthen,” he explained later that afternoon, as they approached her apartment building at Gusshausstrasse 12 in Vienna’s Fourth District, just behind Karlskirche. “One does not, however, ingratiate oneself by bringing bad, nay, tragic news. I leave that for the police. It is true that they might unwittingly plant information and knowledge in the woman’s brain which she later feeds back to us as her own. That is, however, the chance I take in such matters. Life is a trade-off, is it not?”

  When the apartment door was answered, Werthen thought the woman must be a servant, or perhaps a friend. There were no red-rimmed eyes, no sniffles of a sorrowful widow.

  “Is Frau Frosch at home, please?” Gross asked. He obviously thought the same.

  “I am Frau Frosch,” the lady calmly answered. “Who might you be?”

  “We are assisting in the investigation,” Gross said, once more producing his letter from Meindl, by now rather the worse for wear.

  “The police were already here this morning,” she said, staring at them both levelly as if measuring them for suits.

  “They were,” Gross allowed. “But if you wouldn’t mind a few more questions, dear lady? I know it must seem an imposition in this time of grief, but from my extensive studies in criminalistics, I have determined that the first twenty-four hours after a crime are the most crucial.”

  Her expression did not change. “I expect you’ll want to come in, then?”

  “If at all convenient, gnädige Frau,” Gross said with what Werthen thought excessive oiliness.

  Her apartment was appointed in the epitome of middle-class decorum. Everything was as it should be; that is, as someone reading Salonblatt magazine about the lives of the upper class and nobles thought it should be. There was not a wilted flower, a fleck of dust, a rumpled runner, anywhere to be seen. The apartment had the unlived-in feeling of a fanatical housekeeper. It was the antithesis of the Plötzl flat in Ottakring. Even Werthen was put off by such tidiness. Though fastidious, Werthen needed a bit of domestic mess to make him feel comfortable.

  But this was not to be found at Frau Frosch’s. Instead, they were led through an entry to a sitting room that was a scene out of a Makart canvas, a heavily curtained and draped space filled with massive alt deutsch furnishings popular twenty years before, but which now felt stuffy and overbearing. Every table was covered with brocade or tapestry; murky oil paintings filled the walls floor to ceiling; a sideboard of impressive dimensions menaced from one corner; a Kachelofen or tiled heating stove glistened in another.