[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  “I have, of course, heard of your work, Herr Doktor Gross,” the baroness said after introductions were made.

  The light was so poor in the room that Werthen could not make out her features clearly; he imagined that was the intention. Gossip had it that she had aged horribly after the death of her daughter and banishment from society.

  “That pleases me, Baroness,” Gross said with courtly grace. “I must apologize for our unannounced visit. I explained to Advokat Werthen that such behavior was not quite au fait, but he would not be convinced. My sincere apologies on his behalf.”

  Werthen rolled his eyes at Gross.

  The baroness cast Werthen a reproachful look, then turned again to Gross.

  “This must be a matter of some urgency, then,” she said. Clearly her curiosity had been piqued.

  “It is, Baroness. But to you, it may prove also a somewhat painful one. You see, my colleague and I are writing a review of police procedures in the tragic affair at Mayerling.”

  An audible sigh came from her at the mention of that name.

  “It will be published in my journal, the Archive of Criminalistics. A professional organ, you understand, read by criminologists around the world. We hope to put all gossip to rest regarding the death of your daughter and the crown prince. To that end, we require your assistance.”

  “My baby.” A sniffle came from the dusk surrounding the baroness. “So misunderstood.”

  “That is exactly why we have come to you, dear Baroness,” Gross continued. “We hope to clear up any misunderstandings regarding your daughter. It is my contention that she was, in fact, an innocent victim. That she was merely at the wrong place at the wrong time. Far from being part of a romantic suicide pact, young Marie was, sadly, an accidental casualty of other machinations. I believe we can prove this if we had the opportunity to view the remains.”

  Gross left his pronouncement dangling without further explanation. Werthen assumed the woman would, after having time to collect herself, welcome any attempt to clear her daughter’s name and gladly sign an exhumation form for the body.

  “That is quite impossible,” the baroness said, standing suddenly. “Do you know how long I have lived in exile from society? Almost a decade. And only now are things beginning to thaw. I received an invitation from the Princess Metternich for a soiree just last week. Perhaps my tragic loneliness is coming to an end. And you wish me to jeopardize that by opening up all those old wounds?”

  Werthen was surprised but not amazed. He had dealt with people for too many years to be amazed anymore. The baroness was more concerned with her social standing than clearing the name of her dead daughter, which meant that they had to attempt a different approach now.

  “Perhaps it is time to inform the good lady,” the lawyer suddenly said.

  Gross had the good sense to display no wonderment at this. “I will leave that up to you, Advokat Werthen.”

  “Baroness,” Werthen began, “I must tell you that our investigation has been commissioned by the highest powers.”

  “You mean-,” the baroness began, but Werthen cut her off.

  “We are not at liberty to mention our sponsor, but rest assured that our mission has been sanctioned at the highest level of the court. Your cooperation in this matter would not go unnoticed.”

  “But you should have said so earlier. It is my patriotic duty to aid you in this. Of course I can see that. Please, please, get to the bottom of all this. Tell the world that my dear Marie was an innocent.”

  “A simple note, Baroness, with your signature,” Werthen said. “That should suffice.”

  “Anything. Anything. And please let your … sponsor know my deepest devotion to the House of Habsburg.”

  Werthen did not respond. Writing materials were gathered and a note penned to the abbot of the Heiligenkreuz Monastery, where Marie Vetsera was buried.

  As if in a cheap melodrama, lightning and thunder greeted them that evening at the Heiligenkreuz Monastery. The abbot, a feminine-looking soul in his brown robe and tonsured head, took the Baroness Helene Vetsera’s note in his plump fingers and sucked his teeth.

  “Most unusual,” he said after reading it.

  “The lady wishes her daughter’s body exhumed,” Gross said. “We have brought along workmen”-he nodded at Klimt’s crew, gathered, hats in hand, in the reception hall-“a notary”- another nod, to Werthen-“and a medical doctor”-a final nod, at Krafft-Ebing, who had had to leave his schnitzel half-eaten at his apartment to join the group.

  A jagged line lit the sky outside, followed by a roaring clap of thunder. Rain pelted the roof.

  “This is all too reminiscent of that awful night she was brought here.” The abbot shook his head, handing the note back to Gross. “We had to wait several hours to bury her, for the ground was flooded.”

  Gross ignored this remark, anxious to get down to business.“Do you have an outbuilding where we might conduct an examination?”

  While Krafft-Ebing changed into his examination clothing, Klimt and his men saw to the slogging work of digging up the coffin from the unmarked grave in the monastery cemetery. Werthen held a lantern as the men put their backs into it, the rain falling steadily now. The abbot, draped in a cloak and with an umbrella held over his head by one of the novitiates, kept up a steady stream of chatter as the men dug. By the time the first spade struck wood, Werthen had been informed about the miserable conditions on the night of the burial, the last-minute permission by the bishop to allow for the burial of a suicide on consecrated ground (for though the official police report noted that the crown prince had shot her, her death was deemed part of a suicide pact). The abbot had also told him of the distressed state of the girl’s uncles, who had accompanied the corpse to Heiligenkreuz that stormy night in 1889.

  The digging continued for ten more minutes until Klimt and his men were finally able to slide a rope under the coffin and begin hoisting it out of the moist, clay earth. Werthen was relieved to see that it was a simple wooden coffin. That meant that it would not be airtight, that air and insects would have done their job. With an airtight coffin, the corpse was likely to still be in putrefied liquefaction. Also, from what the abbot had said, the body had obviously been buried in haste and not been embalmed.

  Werthen followed the men as they manhandled the coffin up a slippery slope, their way led by dim lantern light. They finally reached the small stone toolshed that had been set up for the exhumation. Gross was waiting with Krafft-Ebing, both of them in white gowns, rubber gloves, and surgical masks. A crude examination table had been made out of a spare door and two saw-horses. Krafft-Ebing directed the men to this table, and they set the coffin atop it.

  Gross took up a crowbar and began opening the lid, the nails squealing as they were dislodged. It took several minutes to loosen the lid, and when it was finally opened, a rush of foul air filled the room, quite overwhelming Werthen and the others. Two of the toughs Klimt had hired had to rush outside to be sick. So much for Werthen’s theories about the coffin not being airtight. He slung an arm over his mouth and nose, breathing in the wet wool of his overcoat.

  “It’s all right now,” Krafft-Ebing said. “Just accumulated gases escaping from the coffin. The corpse itself has quite decomposed.”

  Werthen and the others slowly took arms away from mouths to discover the psychologist was right. The door to the outbuilding had been left open, and fresh air now rushed in. Werthen dangled his lantern over the coffin, as did Gross, while Krafft-Ebing got down to forensic work. The pitiful girl’s frock was still draped on the skeletal remains. A strand of golden hair was visible here and there.

  Krafft-Ebing muttered unintelligibly into his surgical mask as he examined the corpse, nodding his head occasionally as if agreeing with himself. Suddenly a loud “Hmmm” from him and a shake of the head.

  He stood upright, pulling his mask down. “Most odd,” he said. “There are no traces of a perforating bullet wound to the cranium as the police reports had it.
Rather, the cranial cavity shows signs of extreme trauma.”

  Gross was instantly captivated by this pronouncement, but Werthen, with less experience in forensic medicine, was unsure what this meant until Gross offered an explanation:

  “Consistent with a beating, perhaps?”

  Krafft-Ebing nodded. “I should say so. She was either struck with a large blunt instrument repeatedly, or alternately her head was battered against such a blunt object.”

  “As in a bedpost, for example?” Gross said.

  “So she was not shot?” Werthen finally found his voice.

  “Decidedly not,” Krafft-Ebing said. “And I must tell you, having known the crown prince, I cannot believe he would have been capable of such a deed.”

  More lightning lit up the sky dramatically outside the small building, and when the thunder came, it was followed close upon by a bellowing voice.

  “Just what the Hades do you think you are doing?”

  The voice belonged to a tall, dark gentleman standing in the doorway. Werthen immediately recognized him from his brash mustaches and the lively checked pattern of his topcoat. Alexander Baltazzi, uncle of the slain Marie. King of the Turf, as he was known in Vienna, for his racehorses that seemed to take every race.

  “Baron Baltazzi-,” Werthen began, but the tall, angry-looking man cut him off.

  “Close that coffin at once. My sister rescinds her permission. At once, do you hear? You have cruelly misled her.”

  No one made a move. Instead, Gross calmly said, “Our work here is done. Would you care to know the results?”

  “Out,” Baltazzi shouted. “This matter is closed. The past is the past.”

  “She was murdered, Herr Baron,” Gross said. “If that matters to you. Not a suicide, but a homicide.”

  “Enough!” Baltazzi drew a pistol from his jacket pocket, but one of the toughs immediately knocked it from his hand with a well-placed boot.

  “Did you hear me?” Gross asked. “A homicide. Your niece was murdered, and not by the crown prince.”

  The man looked at Gross with sudden loathing. “You presume to tell me news of my niece? It was I who brought her here to be secretly buried. I who stuck a broom handle between her dress and body to hold her body upright as we left Mayerling so that any curious onlooker would be none the wiser. I who helped personally to dig the hole you just took her from. And you presume to tell me of her death? Enough now, I say. Our family has suffered enough. We have finally regained some of our lost influence, and not you or anybody else will put that at risk.”

  Gross nodded his head at Klimt, and the men put the lid on the coffin once more, then lifted it to rebury it. Baltazzi followed them silently on their task. He said not another word as the dirt was filled in once again. Then he returned to his waiting carriage and left the monastery.

  “The man is a cad,” Werthen said as they sped back toward Vienna in their carriage. Krafft-Ebing had come in his own brougham and had left first; Werthen and Gross had followed with Klimt and his men in the last carriage.

  “Don’t be so quick to judge, Werthen,” Gross said with sudden, and for him, uncommon empathy. “It must have been a harrowing experience burying his niece. The full force of the House of Habsburg came to bear upon him. I imagine I would want to put it behind me, too.”

  The rain had let up, but the roads were wet. Their driver was taking it slowly. Werthen, poking his head out at one point, could no longer see the lantern on the rear of Krafft-Ebing’s carriage.

  “So what do we do now, Gross?” Werthen finally said. “If Marie Vetsera’s death was a homicide instead of suicide, does that not suggest at least that the crown prince was also murdered? Shouldn’t we take this new evidence to the father? To Kaiser Franz Josef himself?”

  But there was no time for a response. From in back of them came the crack of a tree splitting at its trunk. Werthen looked out in the gloom and thought he saw the tree blocking the roadway in back of them. Klimt and his men were on the other side. He was about to tell the coachman to turn around and help them clear the tree, but suddenly the man gave the horses the whip, and Werthen and Gross were jolted back against their leather seats.

  “Slow down, man,” Werthen shouted. “We’re losing the others.”

  The carriage jolted off the main road now and down a dirt and mud trail.

  “I believe that is the man’s intention,” Gross said, pulling his pistol from his coat pocket and nodding for Werthen to do the same.

  Before they had a chance to ready themselves, however, the carriage suddenly braked, the horses snorting. The doors new open on both sides, and Werthen only managed the barest glimpse of his attacker as a strong hand was clamped over his nose and mouth, the noxious odor of chloroform overcoming him. As he slipped into blackness, he saw again the scar on the man’s face. Then nothing.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The woman walking ahead of him looked familiar. She wore a slate blue dress with a small bustle and a waist cut severely enough to create an hourglass effect. It was the Empress Elisabeth, Werthen was sure. He wanted to run to her, to tell her to beware. But before he could do so, the woman turned. It was his fiancée, Berthe Meisner, and seeing him, she smiled. Her bodice was undone, and her left breast dangled out of the dress, pendulous and soft.

  “You silly man,” she said. “Come to me.”

  He was about to do so when he felt hot breath in his face. The sour smell of the breath finally awoke him.

  “Werthen, are you all right?”

  He opened his eyes and stared into the face of Hanns Gross. Werthen had experienced the same sense of shock as a young boy sleeping rough under the stars for the first time with his older cousins. In the morning they had been awakened by a herd of cows that had wandered into the field; the humid, chlorophyll breath of one of the beasts had greeted him upon waking.

  He tried to sit up, but felt suddenly nauseous. He looked at Gross and realized the criminologist was dressed only in his underclothes. Peeling back the comforter covering him, Werthen discovered he was also undressed.

  “Where are we, Gross?” he finally managed to ask, looking around the sumptuously appointed room, Flemish tapestries on the high walls, crystal chandeliers on the ceiling, mahogany and rosewood furniture.

  “Well, I am hardly the best one to ask regarding such questions, as I am a relative stranger to your city. But I should hazard to say we are in a bedroom of the Lower Belvedere.”

  “What?” Werthen leaped out of what was a four-poster bed and almost fell over. Dizziness overcame him, but breathing deeply several times, he felt better. They had obviously been dosed several times with chloroform for his head to feel so badly today. And Gross’s breath announced that the criminologist had been sick sometime in the night.

  Werthen went to the window and pulled back brocade drapes. Sure enough, several stories beneath him was the sweep of gardens and graveled walking paths laid out in the grand manner of Versailles leading up to the elegant expanse of the Upper Belvedere, a summer retreat for Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had commissioned the famous baroque architect Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt to construct both it and the building they were obviously standing in now, the Lower Belvedere.

  The headquarters of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

  That thought sent Werthen’s mind racing, no longer leisurely taking in the pleasant view.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Gross.”

  “That does not seem to be a problem,” the criminologist said. “Though it would be a long drop out of this window, the bedroom door is unlocked.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  Just then the door in question opened and liveried servants delivered a tray with breakfast coffee and rolls as well as their clothes, freshly laundered and pressed. The sight of these two servants in blue-and-gold uniforms, periwigs, and long stockings was so startling that, for the moment, both Gross and Werthen lost a sense of urgency to escape. Surely they could not be meant harm with unlocked do
ors and gussied-up servants delivering coffee. Or was this all intended to lull them, or worse yet, as a final meal before execution?

  Werthen quickly dressed, ready to make a run for it. His pistol was not with the clothes, and he assumed Gross’s had been confiscated, as well. But they had returned his silver-tipped walking stick with the hidden sword. They would not be defenseless. Then he noticed that Gross, still in his undervest and long underwear, had made himself comfortable in a Louis XV chair and was sipping coffee from fine porcelain.

  “That may be drugged, Gross.”

  “I highly doubt it, my friend. There are so many other and more economical means of controlling us. Sit. There is no hurry. We shall see what our host intends.”

  Confound the man, Werthen thought, feeling out of sorts and none too eager to test his tender insides with coffee. Finally, however, the rich aroma of the blend won him over, and he joined Gross for a light repast, after which Gross leisurely dressed.

  They did not have long to wait, for the same servants, accompanied this time by a pair of armed guards, came for them.

  “Would you please come with us, gentlemen?” one of the guards requested.

  “Where are you taking us?” Werthen queried.

  “You will soon see.” The guard swept his arm to the door.

  Werthen and Gross followed the servants and were in turn followed by the guards as they made their way down a carpeted hallway and to a magnificent main stairway. However, they did not take these stairs, but instead continued on to the opposite wing to a smaller servants’ staircase that led them down narrow flights of steps to a back entrance to the palace. Outside, the fresh air began to revive Werthen. Last night’s rain had left the air clear and sweet-smelling; the sun shone brightly in their faces. The servants stopped and bowed to them, then departed.