[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  “We can’t simply hang about here,” Berthe said. “Come on up while I put my things away. I can make you a cup of coffee.”

  The suggestion startled Werthen; he had never been in a young lady’s rooms unchaperoned. Despite his best efforts at keeping such surprise off his face, Berthe felt his discomfort.

  “Don’t worry, counselor. I won’t try and seduce you.”

  She took his hand and led him past the scandalized glances of the Portier. Berthe’s suite of rooms were simply and elegantly furnished with Jugendstil pieces. She made coffee as he looked at the Japanese wood-block prints on her wall and glanced at the writings of Karl Marx and John Ruskin in her bookcase. She served coffee in an earthenware jug and they talked for at least an hour.

  As he was leaving, she leaned toward him perceptibly. He took her in his arms and kissed her warm lips. She smelled like fresh linen and a new day.

  After that, they had been apart little. And now, here they sat in the sunshine of the outdoor café on the corner of Graben and Kärntnerstrasse.

  Berthe and he were freshly returned from his parents at Hohelände, where they had announced their engagement.

  Werthen’s sparrowlike mother could only say, “Really, Karlschen, you do surprise one.” At the same time, his father thundered at him, “Engaged! Why, man, you haven’t known the girl a pair of weeks. I’ll be damned.”

  To be honest, no little part of his initial attraction to Berthe had been the inappropriateness of the liaison. The Habsburg heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, was also creating a stir at court with a similar romance. Sent to woo one of the several eligible daughters of the Archduchess Isabel, Franz Ferdinand had instead fallen in love with the archduchess’s lady-in-waiting, Sophie Chotek, daughter of a Bohemian baron. Franz Ferdinand was said to be prepared to accept a morganatic marriage, which would mean that none of his children would be heir to the throne. The emperor was believed to have uttered an uncharacteristic obscenity when presented the news. The militaristic and bellicose Franz Ferdinand was the last man in the world Werthen would have credited with such romantic notions.

  And so here he was, sitting in the September sunshine of Vienna, with his own Sophie.

  Their tea came and Werthen and Berthe settled down to conversation again. She thought that perhaps they had been too precipitate, announcing their engagement as they had done. He thought not.

  “A spring wedding would be quite fine, don’t you think?” he said breezily. It was not that he was not taking this seriously. Rather it was all such good fun.

  “And you haven’t even met my father yet.” Her mother died when Berthe was ten.

  “I am sure he will approve.”

  “Don’t be so positive,” she said, squeezing lemon into her tea. “Papa doesn’t think much of Christian converts.”

  Herr Meisner, it appeared, was as stubbornly Jewish as the Werthens were passionately assimilationist. His daughter had, happily, like Werthen, given up on religion as a divisive and somewhat antiquated institution.

  “Registry marriages are quite the fashion now,” Werthen added brightly, dismissing the matter of parental approval. “You will still love me in the spring, won’t you?”

  She shook her head in mock disapproval. “Try to be serious for just one moment.”

  Suddenly from the street there arose a stir. A young boy was selling what appeared to be a special edition of the Neue Freie Presse, and passersby were swooping the papers out of his hands as quickly as he could produce a new one from his shoulder bag. Their waiter spoke to one of those who had just procured a paper. Werthen could see the waiter’s shoulders slump, as if struck a powerful blow. He put his hand to his face, muttering, “It can’t be.”

  “Karl?” Berthe said, grabbing his hand. “Is it war?”

  Werthen called to the waiter, who came to their table.

  “Please excuse the emotion. This is a terrible day.”

  “What is it?” Werthen said.

  “Our empress is dead. Assassinated in Geneva!”

  ELEVEN

  The state funeral was a week later. The entire city was draped in black, and even the weather contributed to the gloom; after weeks of sunny skies, the day dawned chill and cloudy. By noon storm clouds had gathered, threatening to rain at any moment. Black umbrellas added to the funereal bleakness.

  Pictures of the Empress Elisabeth, dear Sisi to the Viennese, appeared in every shop window. The populace was in mourning for the empress, who, truth be told, had been absent more than present in her capital city. “The wandering empress,” some journalists had taken to calling her. She had built a villa on the Greek island of Corfu but quickly tired of it. A brilliant horsewoman, she roamed Europe and the British Isles in search of hunts. Declared the most beautiful woman in the world, Sisi was, it seemed to Werthen, also the saddest. A cousin of mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, she probably inherited some of that regent’s tainted blood. Sensitive and somewhat unstable, she could not suffer the court intrigues or pomp in Vienna. Her absences made Emperor Franz Josef a straw widower, but the empress had seen to his well-being, arranging the society of a Burgtheater actress, Katharina Schratt, to entertain him in her stead. With the death of her son, Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889, Elisabeth had completely forgone even the pretense of her imperial duties. She had not even returned to Vienna for the emperor’s jubilee celebrations earlier in the summer.

  And now her ceaseless wanderings were over, for she had been killed by the anarchist Luigi Luccheni in Geneva, struck low by a sharpened file. Luccheni was in custody in Switzerland, elated with the celebrity that had suddenly attached itself to him. Had he not killed an empress? Had he not sent shock waves around the world with the telegraphed news of her death? Had he not brought all of Vienna and Austria to a weeping halt by his singular blow?

  What a world we live in, Werthen thought, when such a guttersnipe and lowlife as the uneducated, illegitimate stonecutter Luccheni could affect world events.

  Ever since hearing the name of the assassin, Werthen had been puzzled as well as outraged. He was sure he had heard or read the name “Luccheni” somewhere recently. It was infuriating; the memory teased him, but would not come. Finally he had to force himself to stop trying to retrieve it. Perhaps he would remember without trying.

  The Saturday of the funeral, Werthen had been invited by Klimt to view the cortege from the balcony windows of the new Hotel Krantz on the Neuer Markt, across from the small and severely plain Capuchin Church. In the crypt of this church, the Habsburgs had been buried for several centuries. Klimt was not actually the host for this viewing assemblage, but was a guest himself of a notable foreign visitor to Vienna, the American writer Mark Twain. As the hotel would be the new home for Twain during the winter months, Herr Krantz had invited him and his family and friends to watch the procession from what could be termed loge seats.

  Klimt had made the writer’s acquaintance just the week before, when Twain visited the Secession. They had hit it off-Twain had apparently mistaken Klimt for one of the workmen, and the painter had taken that as a compliment-and the result was an invitation to Klimt and a friend. With Emilie Flöge laid up with a cold, Klimt had been good enough to include Werthen as this friend.

  Small enough recompense, Werthen figured, as the painter had yet to pay his legal bill.

  Werthen met Klimt outside the hotel at noon. The square was already flooded with citizenry braving the occasional shower. They went up to the hotel mezzanine, a glassed-in portico overlooking Neuer Markt. Beneath was a sea of bowlers, black-feathered hats, and umbrellas. Klimt led Werthen to the American, who was holding his own court from an easy chair at one end of the room. Numerous other notables were gathered here, as well, Werthen noticed, including the writer Arthur Schnitzler, the peace activist Baroness Bertha Kinsky von Suttner, the Countess Misa Wydenbruck-Esterházy, and the musicians Theodor Leschetizky and Ossip Gabrilowitsch.

  Twain was attired in his customary white suit and did not bother to stand when Klim
t introduced Werthen. He merely waved a cigar at the lawyer to acknowledge his presence and confined his comments to Klimt, speaking a rather bizarre mixture of German and Yankee English. Werthen, who had studied English from a British tutor, was flummoxed by the expression “polecat,” which Twain employed to describe the assassin, Luccheni. Klimt smiled and nodded his head at Twain’s outburst, but as they left their host to take up a position at a window, Klimt muttered, “Couldn’t understand a word the man was saying.”

  Below the hotel, soldiers, dressed in dazzling uniforms, cleared the Neuer Markt, pushing the crowds back to the sidewalks and forming a cordon around the entire square. Slowly the square filled again, but now not with civilians but with naval and army officers in dress uniforms and gleaming gilt helmets. Fifty Austrian generals wore bright green plumes and pale blue tunics, while other officers wore red, gold, and white uniforms, creating an immense palette of colors in contrast to the black drabness of the normal citizens who had lately stood there. Suddenly the storm clouds parted, and shafts of sunlight filled the square, illuminating the sea of color in such a flash of light that Werthen had to squint his eyes. Near the door to the church itself two groups took up position: one was the purple-robed Knights of Malta, and the other the red-clad Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Werthen, who had thought to bring his opera glasses with him, identified the latter by the insignia of the small figure of a pendant sheep’s fleece or skin in gold hanging from the neck of each of these iron-rigid men. He knew the figure represented the mythical fleece that Jason and the Argonauts sought, symbolizing the high ideals of the knights of the order, primary among them the preservation of the Catholic Church.

  The military officers filled the square, leaving only a narrow path for carriages to come and go, delivering their aristocratic cargo at the church steps. First to arrive were the Habsburg archdukes and archduchesses, then the German kaiser, the kings of Saxony, Serbia, and Romania, and the regent of Bavaria. These were followed by over two hundred court personages and high nobility, who would be allowed to enter the church. After a full hour of such carriage traffic, a procession of priests arrived, bearing the crucifix, their golden robes touched with white lace. Finally the church was filled, but there was still a half hour to wait before the arrival of the hearse. Werthen passed the time by playing his opera glasses over the faces of those who had found space on the sidewalks of the square. He stopped when one face came dramatically into focus: Dr. Hanns Gross.

  Werthen excitedly pointed out the criminologist to Klimt, who insisted they bring him up in the hotel to view the rest of the procession. Werthen began to object, noting it was hardly their place to do the inviting, but Klimt was out the door before he could finish. Werthen followed the painter’s progress as he made his way around the perimeter of the crowd and finally reached Gross, who looked pleasantly surprised, then followed Klimt’s raised hand as he pointed to the Hotel Krantz. He, too, seemed reluctant to intrude, but Klimt literally dragged him for a few paces to indicate his seriousness.

  By the time Klimt returned with Gross, the church bells of Vienna had already begun sounding, marking the imminent arrival of the black, baroque hearse drawn by eight gray Lipizzaners and carrying the body of the Empress Elisabeth. Wherever one was in the Habsburg realms this afternoon-from Innsbruck in the west to Budapest and beyond to Transylvania in the east, and from Prague in the north to Sarajevo in the south-he or she would not be out of earshot of the bells, Werthen knew, for over ten thousand churches were now pealing their bells in unison.

  As the bells continued to sound, Werthen could discern the thrumming of hooves on cobble. At precisely twelve minutes after four a body of cavalry rode into the square, four abreast, clearing a way for the funeral cortege. After the cavalry came a group of lancers, dressed in blue and gold, followed by a mourning coach drawn by six horses, bearing the emperor himself, aided by his daughters Marie Valerie and Gisela. As he descended, the old man looked bowed and broken by this final-one hoped-calamity in his long life. He had withstood assassination attempts, a troubled marriage to the aloof Elisabeth, and the tragic deaths of his brother, Maximilian, in Mexico, and his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, dead by his own hand in 1889.

  Reportedly, when given the news of Sisi’s death, Franz Josef had finally broken down, crying out, “Am I to be spared nothing?”

  Franz Josef entered the church before the arrival of the huge black hearse, each of its eight Lipizzaners plumed with black ostrich feathers. The hearse was surrounded by outriders in black with white wigs, and by a tall, white-haired man dressed in the same bloodred cloak as the Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece at the door of the church. This was Franz Josef’s aide Prince Grunenthal, the man who was probably Inspektor Meindl’s powerful sponsor in Vienna. The last of a long line of his family who had served Habsburg emperors over the centuries, Grunenthal was perhaps as old as the emperor, but seemed years younger, his body erect and proud as he preceded the coffin to the steps of the church. There, according to ritual, he knocked on the door. Werthen focused on the aged prince with his opera glasses. He knew what was being said by heart, as did every schoolboy in Austria.

  With the first knock, a friar inside the church would demand, “Who is it?”

  Then Grunenthal would answer, “Her Most Serene Imperial and Royal Highness, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary.”

  “We know her not.”

  The door would remain closed until Grunenthal again knocked.

  “Who is there?”

  “The Empress Elisabeth.”

  “We know her not.”

  Then would come a third knock upon the door by the golden staff Grunenthal carried for the occasion.

  “Who is there?”

  “Your sister Elisabeth. A poor sinner.”

  At which the doors would, and did, open.

  It could hardly be called a festive air, but after the closing of the church doors upon the coffin, the atmosphere at the Hotel Krantz lightened. The assembled could see nothing more, and now it was time for a bit of socializing.

  Gross explained that he had returned from Czernowitz for the funeral, but also because there was nothing for him to do there.

  “They are still in the process of building my classrooms and laboratories,” he complained. “I would have stayed on in Graz if I’d known such was the case. There will be no classes until the spring semester at this rate.” His wife, Adele, was off visiting a school friend in Paris, waiting for him to get settled before coming to Bukovina.

  “But that is marvelous, Gross,” Werthen said. “You can stay on in Vienna now for a time. There’s a room in my flat at your disposal.”

  “Really, Werthen, too kind of you.” Gross looked as if he meant it, too. “Czernowitz is no world capital, to put it mildly.”

  Klimt took Gross by the arm to introduce him to Twain, but the two were already acquainted, at least by mail. Twain had consulted Gross several years earlier when writing his Tom Sawyer, Detective. Now the two began conversing animatedly, despite Twain’s limited linguistic abilities.

  After the final peeling of bells, indicating the end of the service at the Capuchin Church, sherry was served, and a half hour later, the proceedings were about to end when Twain made a pronouncement in English all of those gathered could understand.

  “But of course they’ve got the wrong man in Switzerland. Or the right one for the wrong reason. It’s all to do with the Hungarians. First Rudolf and now his mother.”

  “What could he have meant?” Werthen asked of Gross when, later that evening, they were settled down to a nice plate of Frau Blatschky’s boiled beef and potatoes, accompanied by a chilled bottle of tart Grüner Veltliner from Gumpoldskirchen.

  Gross, who had taken Werthen up on his invitation and was now occupying the spacious back bedroom, spooned freshly ground horseradish onto his plate. Berthe, joining them for dinner, sat primly at the other end of the table from Werthen, giving him a taste of what married life might be
like. The dining room faced onto the courtyard. It was a trim little room, all in Biedermeier. Two silver candelabra lit the space in warm light.

  “Twain is a man of fiction, never forget that,” Gross somewhat cryptically answered. He offered the horseradish to Berthe with a dramatic flourish, but she politely declined.

  “You mean he makes things up out of whole cloth, Herr Doktor Gross?” she said with a wry smile.

  “Perhaps not whole cloth. But he takes tall tales related to him by the Hungarian nobility a little too literally. They are forever going on about their Magyar freedom, as if they would not in turn oppress every other minority in their realm if given half a chance.”

  “I take it you are not a fan of the dual monarchy,” Berthe said, shooting Werthen a conspiratorial look. Werthen had shared his high and low opinions of Gross with her, noting especially the criminologist’s tendency toward pomposity.

  “I should say not, my good woman,” Gross boomed. “Most idiotic bit of diplomacy Franz Josef ever came up with. Eviscerated the empire. I wouldn’t doubt that Austria will be reduced to a mere shadow of herself in the matter of two decades. But that is neither here nor there. Friend Twain was merely repeating the conspiracy theories so often voiced by the Magyars. To wit, Crown Prince Rudolf was not the victim of suicide nine years ago, but of an assassination by those close to power who had no appetite for his liberal ways or his pro-Magyar views. I assume the same is now being said of his unfortunate mother, who also tended to romanticize the Hungarians.”

  “An intriguing theory,” Werthen said, winking at Berthe. This was going to be jolly good fun, he thought, having Gross as a houseguest and having Berthe to help him poke and prod at the man’s inflated ego.

  “Poppycock,” Gross said, cutting his beef and forking it along with a healthy dose of horseradish into his mouth. He chewed aggressively, then washed down the beef with a draft of wine.

  “The man’s confessed to his crime,” the criminologist continued. “I fear our empress fell victim to a professed anarchist who was not sure of his intended victim until he almost literally ran into Elisabeth on the quays of Geneva. Who could not even afford a proper weapon, but had to grind down a cheap file to make a stiletto.”