[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  Werthen tugged his arm free.

  “If you truly love her,” Gross said, “protect her by keeping her in the dark. Do not make her another target.”

  Werthen felt his shoulders slump. Gross was right, of course. He watched as she opened the apartment door and stormed out.

  He did love her. But could he ever convince her of that again?

  They spent the rest of the day mapping out their next steps. Werthen forced himself to take his mind off Berthe and concentrate on the urgent matter at hand. He hoped there would be time to repair the damage to their relationship when all of this nightmare was settled. Berthe was a sensible girl; surely she would understand that it had all been for the best. For now, he knew he could not afford divided loyalties. His primary duty at the moment was to solve these murders and to bring the killer and his controller to justice.

  Their first order of business, as Gross had pointed out, was to work back through the evidence against Binder and reexamine the facts concerning the other deaths.

  “You have, I believe, been keeping ajournai of our investigation, is that correct, Werthen?”

  “I have indeed.”

  “Thorough?”

  “As much as I could make it.”

  “I would like to take a look at that, if you do not mind. It may open some new avenue of inquiry for us.”

  “But of course.”

  Werthen fetched the journal from his desk. He had written up his notes every morning and was able to present Gross with a very readable account of matters.

  “Impressive,” Gross muttered as he leafed through the leather-bound notebook.

  The criminologist holed himself up in his bedroom after lunch, reading Werthen’s account. Meanwhile Werthen attempted to outline a course of action for the investigation of a new suspect, the heir apparent. One could not simply interview Franz Ferdinand, he assumed. Or perhaps, posing as a journalist, one could gain access to the Lower Belvedere. But of course, this was absurd, he suddenly realized. If Franz Ferdinand was the power behind all these killings, then he would also be aware of the identity of Gross and Werthen. After all, he would have been the one to order the attempt on their lives. So Werthen could thus hardly beard the man in his own den; he might very well not leave such a meeting alive. Still, part of him wanted to confront the archduke, and to look into his eyes to see if he was really the mastermind behind all this human misery.

  Failing a direct approach to the heir apparent, Werthen began trying to develop an indirect approach. Through one of his ministers, perhaps, or his servants. However, he had only begun such considerations when Gross came storming out of his bedroom.

  “My God, Werthen, how could I have been so foolish? Do I not have ears? Do I not know how to listen to witnesses? You have it here in black and white. The solution to how these people were seemingly whisked away with no one seeing a thing.”

  “And what would that be?” Werthen was skeptical; after all, he had written the notes himself and had not noticed any such solution.

  “You recall our interview with Frau Novotny? She of the pair of watchful eyes on the Paniglgasse?”

  Werthen nodded, recalling the old woman who seemed to know the goings-on of all the inhabitants on her street. “She saw Frosch passing her window about seven thirty the night he was murdered.”

  “Exactly,” Gross said, collapsing into one of the chairs by the fire, now reduced to glowing ash. “And do you recall what else the good woman told us?”

  “Inconsequential titbits. Neighborhood gossip. Nothing to do with our case.”

  Gross was beaming his well-fed-cat smile.

  “Well, what did she say, Gross?”

  “According to your account-I assume you did not make up such dialogue on the spot?”

  Werthen bristled at the suggestion. “I recorded speech as closely as I could to the original, taking notes as we went along.”

  “And right you were to do so, Werthen. This is your record of Frau Novotny’s answer to my question as to whether there were any carriages parked in Paniglgasse the night of Frosch’s murder.” Gross cleared his throat and read,” ‘There’s always a carriage or two. This isn’t Ottakring, after all. We’ve got a respectable neighborhood here. Sort of place that the municipality keeps up. They was out that evening even, fixing the sewers.’”

  “The carriages, is that it?” Werthen said. “Should we question the lady further about those carriages she saw?”

  “Not the carriages, Werthen. Something so usual that it escaped even our attention at the time.”

  “The sewer workers!”

  Gross thrust himself out of the chair and began pacing about the room. “You see, Werthen, that is how the killer could make his victims disappear.”

  “By taking them into the sewers.”

  Like a small child at a birthday party, Gross clapped his hands in excitement.

  “You are onto something here, Gross,” Werthen said, suddenly infected by the criminologist’s enthusiasm. “Beneath this city is a positive rabbit warren of tunnels connecting cellars and sewers, all left over from the days of the Turkish sieges. For someone with knowledge of the system, such pathways provide an excellent means of traveling unseen through the city, or rather, under the city.”

  “We must check with the public works department first thing in the morning,” Gross said. “We can ascertain if there was actually a crew at work the night of August twenty-second. If not,it is safe to assume that our new theory is workable. That in fact the killer assumed the guise of a sewer worker and was thus able to ensnare his victims without anyone noticing.”

  “What about the other murders?” Werthen suggested. “Perhaps someone saw sewer workers near the scene.”

  “Yes,” Gross reluctantly said. “Tedious, however. With Frosch, we could trace his footsteps from home. The other victims present a more difficult problem. One does not know where they were taken. A safe assumption is that our killer simply set up his little trap-a tent over an open manhole cover-and waited for the next likely person. Evening and late-night hours would have been the easiest, of course, with fewer possible witnesses. That he so brazenly operated in the early evening with Herr Frosch is further indication that the former valet to Crown Prince Rudolf was the intended victim all along. The killer did not have the luxury of choosing his time and place with Frosch. Rather, he had to fit his crime to the victim’s schedule.”

  Werthen, despite his enthusiasm, decided to play devil’s advocate.

  “That does not rule out Binder, however. He could have impersonated a sewer worker, chloroformed his victims, and then carried them through the sewers to where he had left his firm’s carriage. Then he took them back to his garden hut to perform his grisly surgery and thence to the Prater to dump the corpses.”

  “Plausible,” Gross allowed, sitting again. “Which means that we need to focus very closely on Herr Binder now. Before, we examined him with an eye to proving his guilt. Now we will do the opposite. We are looking for any reason to pronounce the man innocent.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Their first bit of business was easily dispensed with next morning. A visit to the public works department on Schottenring quickly provided what they were looking for. Posing as a leaseholder on properties in Paniglgasse, Gross and his attorney, Werthen, were shown maintenance schedules and emergency-repair records from the past year and for the year to come. For the evening of August 22, 1898, there was no record of any repair crew working on the street.

  “And this is the only bureau which keeps such records?” Gross inquired of the clerk, a pimply youth who looked as if he had still not completed his Matura.

  “Well, of course it is,” the truculent clerk said with the hauteur of the born civil servant. “I would have told you otherwise, wouldn’t I?”

  Gross was about to give the insolent youth a tongue-lashing, but Werthen wisely led him away and out of the office. There was no need to make a scene that could possibly lead to more public knowled
ge of the new direction their investigation was headed.

  They carried umbrellas this morning, along with their pistols.The rain had stopped, but the streets were still glistening with yesterday’s drenching.

  The next stop, close by, would take more finesse. They needed to examine the suicide note Herr Binder had left behind and test it against other script that he had surely written. Gross remembered the order book the man had carried with him.

  They entered the Police Presidium and, after speaking to the reception sergeant, were shown up to Inspektor Meindl’s office.

  “This is becoming a habit,” the inspector joked when seeing the pair. But his wary gaze denied his bluff good humor. Werthen wondered if higher powers had not, perhaps, got to the man.

  His suspicions were proven correct when Meindl, presented with Gross’s tale of further articles for his Archive of Criminalistics, simply threw his hands in the air and told them point-blank there was nothing more he could do for them.

  “But why ever not, man?” Gross pleaded.

  “It is just not on, Professor Gross. This must come to an end.”

  “What must? Our collégial relationship?”

  “Come now,” Meindl spluttered. “You know what I am speaking of. You two seem to have a bee in your bonnet. Attempting to make all manner of absurd connections between the Prater murders and other matters of, shall we say, more global import.”

  Neither Gross nor Werthen rose to this bait.

  “You must understand,” Meindl insisted. “The case is closed. We have more important things to spend our time on. I am sure you both do, as well.”

  More silence from Gross and Werthen.

  “It is simply out of the question.”

  The ticking of a standard clock on the wall behind them was the only sound.

  “Enough!” Meindl finally blurted out. “But this is positively the last request. Understood?”

  “But of course, my friend,” Gross said.

  Ten minutes later they were in possession of Binder’s suicide note, neatly preserved in a vellum envelope, and the salesman’s order and appointment book, with a white tag glued to it, bearing the case number A14. Unlike the police log concerning Luccheni, which pertained to a still active case, the evidence against Binder was from a closed file. Thus Meindl allowed them to take the documents with them with a final and pained caveat: “Tell no one about this!”

  “To work,” Gross said to Werthen as they left the Police Presidium and hurried along the Ring back to the lawyer’s fiat.

  Gross had devoted much of his first book, Criminal Investigations, to a careful study of handwriting analysis.

  “The principles are relatively simple,” he told Werthen as he set the two samples of Binder’s handwriting on the desk in the lawyer’s study. “We are trying to ascertain if Herr Binder’s suicide note was either a forgery or a message written under duress. To do so, we need a copy of his actual handwriting.” At this, Gross tapped the oilskin-covered order and appointment book. “What we are looking for are both structural, graphical differences in the writing;-a letter ‘g’ for example with a swooping tail in one and a very truncated one in the other-and also content differences-perhaps Herr Binder had the unfortunate habit of misspelling certain words or enjoyed certain locutions overmuch. We must therefore submit both these specimens to the closest possible scrutiny.”

  Werthen felt he was sitting in one of Gross’s as-yet-nonexistent classrooms and was being offered a lecture in Basic Criminology. Without explanation, Gross suddenly left the study, only to return several minutes later with both a magnifying glass and microscope in hand.

  “It is amazing, Werthen, what a person’s handwriting reveals. That of learned men, for example, is often almost illegible,though the individual letters bear a striking resemblance to print, with which they are so much in contact. The chicken scrawl of the physician I believe we are all familiar with, written in haste as befits a busy and urgent schedule. Or there is the rapid, light, uniform, and always legible script of the tradesman, as that of our Herr Binder. Writing, you see, is not simply done with the hand, but also with the brain. It is a representation of the whole man or woman. We have only to divine the various aspects of it, to study over and over various hands, to see patterns revealed.”

  Opening the dead man’s order and appointment book, Gross was immediately pleased.

  “You see what I say about the uniform and legible script of the tradesman, Werthen? Even these notes written for himself portray Herr Binder as an organized sort, fastidious even.”

  Gross picked up his magnifying glass, examining the script in the order book, then moving to the suicide letter, making quick deliberations.

  “Interesting. There is indeed a wealth of detail to be discovered in these two documents.” He took the magnifying glass away from his eye. “I shall be at it most of the day. I do not want to bore you.”

  “You mean you want me to leave. Gross, you forget whose apartment this is.”

  “Some things are best done in solitude, my friend.”

  “You are hopeless, Gross. How your good wife ever puts up with you, I’ll never know.”

  But Gross was not listening. He had already put the suicide note under the microscope.

  Dispossessed of his study, Werthen decided to go for a walk. The day had brightened and the wet streets of the morning had dried. He kept a sharp eye out for anybody following him, but doubted the killer would dare to make a move against him in broad daylight.

  Still, having to continually look over one’s shoulder was dismaying. Perhaps the killer would feel frustrated by his failure in Geneva and resort to more direct means: a marksman’s riñe could bring him low from a hundred meters. Werthen’s eyes suddenly went to the windows above him on both sides of the street. A carriage approached from behind him, the horses’ hooves clopping on the cobbles. He tensed, moving closer to the wall of a building in case the assassin might be inside the carriage ready to strike with a thrown knife, a blown poison dart.

  Would he ever be able to enjoy a leisurely walk in his city again? Had he and Gross gotten in over their heads with this affair? Perhaps it was time to turn this investigation over to the professionals. Problem was, if this went as high as the heir apparent, then the professionals could well be complicit. Clearly, they were no longer welcome guests with Inspektor Meindl; had word actually reached him to discourage any further investigation into the Prater murders? More likely, it was simply complacency. Meindl had other fish to fry now; the Prater murders were, for him, a closed case.

  Werthen felt a hand at his left arm and jerked around suddenly, his right hand going to the gun in the inside pocket of his suit coat.

  “Werthen, old man. You look as though you’d seen a ghost. It’s just me. How are you?”

  Werthen quickly covered up his alarm. “Excellent, Klimt. Couldn’t be better.”

  But the painter scowled and did not seem convinced by this. He carried a string shopping bag full of pastries; the neck of a bottle of Inländer rum stuck out between the strings of the bag.

  “Not in the office? Playing hooky, then. Well, come on.” He took Werthen’s free arm. “Just in time to join me for jause.”

  Werthen had not indulged in afternoon tea for years, usually being far too busy for such gemütlich traditions.

  “Why not?” he said. “A fine idea.”

  They were just outside the street entrance to the painter’s courtyard studio, and Klimt led him through the entryway and into the bucolic courtyard. Klimt had created a bit of the wild here in the very heart of urban Vienna, with tall grasses joining flowering bushes and all shaded by two glorious chestnut trees. His ocher-painted studio was on the far side of this wild garden; a large, black-and-white cat was hunting in the grass. Klimt buzzed his lips at the animal, but it ignored him.

  “Cuddles is quite a serious hunter,” Klimt said as he opened the unlocked door to his studio. “Totally ignores me when a mouse is about.”


  Werthen had never been to Klimt’s studio. From gossip, he imagined it to be populated by numerous sylphlike models swanning about in various stages of undress. Instead, a charwoman, squat, about fifty, and badly in need of a bath, was just finishing up washing the floor and chided the painter for bringing company in.

  Klimt ignored her and shoved some charcoal sketches aside on a large central table, then deposited his shopping there. As Klimt lovingly unpacked the pastries, and the cleaning lady huffily departed, Werthen gazed at the work in progress on several easels: portraits of several women whom he knew personally, from the best levels of society. Klimt was a dab hand at giving these matrons an air of mystery and employing gilding, bright floral colors, and strange iconography to make these otherwise quite unremarkable ladies appear downright exotic. Werthen was startled to find the beginnings of what appeared to be another portrait. At least the subject was sitting in the classic pose of a portrait, but she had no clothes on.

  Klimt followed Werthen’s eyes to the work. “Overpainting does the trick. They’ll never know she was in the buff to begin with.”

  “You mean you paint these women in … in …”

  “The nude, Werthen. The nude.” Klimt broke off a bit of Nusstorte and plopped it in his mouth, munching quite happily. “Don’t look so outraged,” Klimt said, now pouring out some of the rum into two cloudy glasses. “It’s not for any prurient reason. Having them nude to begin with gives me a better insight to their soul. It allows me to see their true character and portray them as they should be, not necessarily as they would like to be seen.

  Werthen looked more closely at one of the portraits nearing completion. It was impossible to tell that the painting had begun as a nude.

  “Cheers,” Klimt said, handing him one of the glasses. “You look as though you could use this.”

  Werthen suddenly felt like one of Klimt’s models, stripped bare of artifice. He downed the rum and made his way through part of the Nusstorte and part of a poppy-seed roll. Klimt replenished Werthan’s glass several times as the afternoon wore on.