[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  “So we have mutual insurance?” Gross said.

  “I should hope so.”

  “Why not simply proceed then?” Werthen blurted out. “Accuse us. Create another smoke screen.”

  “Were I a younger man, I might. But all games must come to an end. I find this is perhaps the optimum result. A draw rather than outright victory.”

  “It is no game!” Werthen felt himself go red in the face; the heat went down to his stomach. If he had a gun with him, he would have shot the man like the sick animal he was. “You and your creature have butchered innocent citizens.”

  “Werthen,” Gross cautioned.

  “No, no,” Grunenthal said. “Your colleague is right. This is no game, though it must be played with the cunning of a chess master and the courage of an equestrian. We are talking about nothing less than the survival of the Habsburg Empire.”

  Werthen was about to comment again, but Gross placed a hand on his arm in restraint.

  “You see me as a monster,” Prince Grunenthal went on, “but I see myself as the protector of this country and all she stands for. I have made difficult decisions, heart-wrenching decisions, but they have all been in the service of Austria and the greater good.”

  For a moment, Prince Grunenthal sat still, staring off to some distant horizon or thought, as if unaware of their presence.

  “It all began with Rudolf, did it not?” Gross prompted.

  Grunenthal’s gaze was jerked back to Gross and the present. “Rudolf. The crown prince, yes. Such a promising boy. So much native intelligence. But his tutors, especially Latour, corrupted him. Turned him into an archliberal. And he was impatient. So impatient. He should never have become involved with the Hungarians. They convinced the boy to accept the crown of Hungary. The crown. Preposterous. As if he would be king, usurping his father’s role. Far too Shakespearean for my tastes.”

  “And he had to die for that.”

  “Had to? No. But it was decided. There are fifty-one of us. All knights dedicated to the preservation of the Church and the empire. I am the chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece. It was my duty to bring the matter to the others. Knights have a right to trial by their fellows for charges of treason, and that was what Rudolf had committed by accepting the Hungarians’ offer. It was they found him guilty. I was then responsible for carrying out the sentence.”

  “‘They,’” Gross said. “The emperor is also a knight of the Golden Fleece. Was the verdict unanimous?”

  Grunenthal shook his head. “All but that weakling cousin,Franz Ferdinand. We gave the crown prince the option of killing himself. He was to repair to his hunting lodge at Mayerling to do the deed. After all, the romantic youth talked often enough about suicide to his various lovers, but in the end he could not do it. Instead he found solace in one of those lovers, the Vetsera girl. It was found necessary to carry out judgment by other means.”

  “The Rollo Commandos stormed the place and assassinated him, brutally killing the Vetsera girl.”

  “That did not go exactly as planned. Where humans are involved, there is always human fallibility.”

  “In effect, you staged the double suicide.”

  Again, Grunenthal shrugged with his palms spread upward as if these were events beyond his control. Werthen felt that the prince actually believed that he himself was a victim: of his duty, his honor, his ties to the emperor.

  “And after the initial furor died down, there were no more complications for almost a decade,” Gross said.

  “There is no need to lead me like a donkey, sir,” Prince Grunenthal said. “I am only too happy to discuss this with a man of your erudition, Professor Gross. Indeed, this next part should interest you no end…. Yes, for nine years there was no difficulty regarding the unfortunate business at Mayerling. Many of the principals had died or had been convinced that silence was the best course. Then Herr Frosch, the crown prince’s valet, discovered he was dying of cancer and that he had nothing more to gain or to lose with his silence. He wrote to the empress. We monitor … monitored her mail, you see. It was clear from the letter we intercepted that we had, in fact, missed an earlier communiqué outlining Frosch’s allegations vis-à-vis the death of her son-”

  “He knew the truth?” Gross asked.

  “Enough to piece the rest together. We had paid him a significant pension in hopes of maintaining his secrecy. Thus, when it was discovered that he was going to bring his information to a public forum, certain calculations needed to be made.”

  “About Frosch or the empress?”

  “I regret to say both. As the American humorist Mark Twain, our distinguished guest at the moment, might say, ‘The cat was out of the bag.’ It was my duty to put it back in again, a task which could not be achieved without injury to someone.”

  “But why the delay?” Gross asked. “Why wait so long to kill Frosch when he was your primary target?”

  The prince smiled like a particularly unpleasant lizard. “Ah, that was indeed a risk, but you see we could not deal with him immediately. That would surely have alerted the empress and perhaps forced her into some rash action. Also, we had to somehow secure the manuscript Frosch told the empress about as well as insure that it was the only copy. We, in fact, entered into negotiations with Herr Frosch in mid-June. I sent my adjutant to the man, posing as a German publisher anxious to purchase any memoirs dealing with Mayerling. Frosch took the bait, but in the event proved a capable negotiator, haggling over terms, promising a time for the handover and then breaking his promise in order to extract an ever-larger price. It seems he wanted to leave a large bequest to have a statue of himself erected in his hometown. Arrogant upstart. Meanwhile, we traced any possible safe-deposit boxes or other secret places he might have where he could sequester a second copy. All of this took time. But by August twenty-second we finally took possession of the material. Thereafter the way was clear to eliminate the man.”

  “And the empress?” Gross said.

  “We received word from abroad that she was attempting to place her own memoirs with a reputable publishing house. We could not allow that to happen.”

  Werthen, who had had a fair amount of experience with heartless killers in his career, was nonetheless amazed and appalled at the sangfroid that Grunenthal displayed as he recounted his twin plans: the killing of Frosch and of the empress. Herr Breitstein, it appeared, had accidentally inspired in the prince the idea of the series of brutal murders to be used as a smoke screen to conceal the killing of Frosch. Several months before the letter from Frosch was intercepted, Breitstein had been among those seeking an audience with the emperor. He wanted to be the purveyor of razors to the court; the matter was handed over to Grunenthal, who met with the man. In small talk, the managing director of Breitstein und Söhne attempted to ingratiate himself and to make himself seem like a humanitarian and model employer, and Grunenthal found out about the illness of Herr Binder, one of the firm’s top salesmen, whom Breitstein was carrying despite his illness.

  “Then when the crisis came over the Frosch letter,” Prince Grunenthal explained, “it all just fell into place. Breitstein with his surgical instruments, and the unfortunate Binder dying of syphilis. I saw a modus operandi to a series of killings that would have the police and perhaps even eminent criminologists scratching their heads in an attempt to understand the symbolic meaning of the wounds, a meaning, which once gleaned, would lead directly to Binder’s door.”

  “I noticed a book on American Indian ethnography among your other volumes,” Gross suddenly said. “It was all about loyalty, was it not? The syphilitic nose was your attempt at misdirecting the investigation, pointing to Binder.”

  Grunenthal smiled as he nodded at Gross.

  Werthen could no longer control himself. “Why kill all those innocents? Why not just make Frosch’s death look like an accident and be done with it?”

  Grunenthal turned to Werthen, fixing him with cold eyes. “In part so as not to make the empress suspicious. However, t
hat, as you see, was unnecessary, for she had her own plans to make the Mayerling secret public.”

  “It won’t wash,” Werthen charged on. “All these senseless murders … abominations.”

  “And in part,” Prince Grunenthal continued calmly despite Werthen’s agitated state, “because of the great game, setting a conundrum for minds such as yours to wrap around. One likes to eschew the commonplace. Arranging an accidental death for Herr Frosch would have been so … so mundane, so tawdry.”

  “Why, you’re mad as a hatter,” Werthen said.

  Suddenly the languid facade Prince Grunenthal had maintained was broken, and they were allowed a glimpse inside the man. His ice-cold gaze chilled Werthen to his very soul, and he knew for certain that they would never be safe as long as Grunenthal lived. The man truly was insane, but still commanded an evil cunning. Perhaps he had always been thus, or perhaps the power he had wielded for decades had ultimately undone him. But the origins of the prince’s mental instability were not Werthen’s concern. What was his concern was that Grunenthal’s depravity would always threaten them and those they loved.

  Gross placed a calming hand on Werthen’s shoulder, then, speaking to Prince Grunenthal, returned the conversation to its former course: “The nose gambit.”

  Grunenthal came back to himself, a small shiver returning the controlled expression to his face. “Yes, that worked quite well to point to Binder in the first instance. But once you began poking into the matter again, uncovering the truth about Binder, then I realized we had to tie up all loose ends. Breitstein had to die, as well. And the picture of me on a shoot at his Styrian estate had to disappear from his office.”

  “Was Sergeant Tod responsible for all those deaths?” Gross demanded.

  “I see you have been talking to the archduke. I cannot imagine from what other quarter you would discover that name. But, yes, Tod has proved a dexterous agent.”

  “He must have also infiltrated the Swiss anarchist cell and learned of Luccheni’s desire to make himself famous by killing some nobility,” Gross said.

  “In fact that was another officer, but once we had an inroad there, I utilized Tod to control the anarchist, to point him in the right direction. Luccheni began following the empress when she made her surprise visit to Vienna last June. Such behavior, once it comes out at his trial, will help to hang him. He was meant to kill the empress in Geneva, but just as with Crown Prince Rudolf, I had a contingency plan. Tod was there to make sure the bumbling fool actually did kill her. In the event, as you know, Luccheni proved incapable of the deed. He became flustered once he knocked the empress down, and Tod had to do the job as he helped to pick her up and apparently dust her off. And that should have put an end to it, except for the curiosity of a criminologist and his attorney friend.”

  Werthen spoke up again: “You say the emperor knew of the fate of his son. Was he also aware of the assassination of his wife? Of the series of senseless murders committed in order to cover up the killing of Herr Frosch?”

  Grunenthal answered this with silence and an expression on his face that gave nothing away.

  Finally he said, “I realize that all of this must shock you two. Perhaps it even revolts you. But keeping an empire together is not child’s play What are the lives of a few inconsequential men and women as compared with that goal?”

  Neither Werthen nor Gross attempted to answer this.

  “So now your suspicions have been confirmed,” Grunenthal went on. “You are part of the secret sharers. I offer you the life of Fräulein Meisner in return for your silence. And I will add a small bonus. You thirst for justice, I am sure. Or is it simple vengeance you desire? Whatever the case maybe, I offer you partial satisfaction. The life of Sergeant Tod shall also be forfeit. Ours is an imperfect world, gentlemen. Partial justice is better than none at all.”

  To which Gross calmly replied, “And how shall all this be effected?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I don’t like it,” Werthen said. “Neither do I,” concurred Herr Meisner. “Far too risky.”

  “The only risk is doing nothing,” Gross insisted. “It will work. You shall see.”

  They were back at Werthen’s fiat, planning their movements for tonight. Grunenthal had arranged an appropriately ironic location for the handover of Berthe Meisner: at the Casa d’Illusion, a house of mirrors in Venice in Vienna, the canal-riddled reproduction of several blocks of the Italian city in Vienna’s Prater. The amusement park had been closed down as a sign of mourning since the assassination of the empress; it would provide a secluded rendezvous.

  Grunenthal had further insisted that Gross and Werthen come alone and unarmed, otherwise Tod would, in the prince’s chillingly euphemistic words, “dispose of his charge.”

  Gross continued, “It is all a matter of psychology, gentlemen. Grunenthal is sure that I and Werthen are completely unable to take the law into our own hands. Remember his final words this afternoon: ‘You are honorable men. You believe in the rule of law. It is not in you to play the role of vigilante.’”

  Werthen also remembered what the prince had said next, And that is the difference between us, gentlemen. I am not afraid to accept such a burden. I am a prince; you are mere citizens.

  “Being honorable implies weakness in his cosmos,” Gross continued. “But that ego of his, his hubris and supreme self-confidence, will be his undoing, for he cannot imagine us having the initiative or pure animal cunning and courage to lay such a trap.

  “And what of Tod?” Werthen asked.

  “Again, it is a matter of psychology. Here is a man who has been trained to kill from the time he was a young adult. He has been dangled on a string like a very puppet. It is only right that he will rebel someday against such perfidy. I will simply give him the reason and opportunity by bringing up the fact that Grunenthal has offered us his head as part of the bargain.”

  “He will never believe you,” Herr Meisner countered.

  “It is not necessary he believe me, only that he begin to doubt his master. The seed will be sown, the two vipers will turn on each other.”

  “You make it sound far too simple, Gross,” Werthen said. “But there is the life of Berthe in the balance. We cannot forget that.”

  “It is her life I am considering, Werthen,” Gross said, exasperated. “Do you seriously believe that she, or any of us for that matter, will be safe after tonight? That the prince will keep his bargain? No. He will simply wait for the passage of time to blur the import of events. Then he and his minions will seek the perfect opportunity to eliminate us all one by one. Do you want to live the rest of your life looking over your shoulder?”

  Werthen sank down into one of the Biedermeier chairs. Gross was right, but he hated to admit it. One look into the unguarded eyes of Grunenthal this afternoon had been enough to convince him the man was a monster capable of anything. Yet he could not stand the thought of endangering Berthe further by this wild scheme. He simply wanted her back, to hold her and to never let her go again. Suddenly another thought came to mind.

  “Gross,” he said. “Grunenthal never did answer my question this afternoon.”

  “No, he did not,” Gross said, not bothering to ask which one.

  “Did the emperor know of all this bloodshed? Even of his own wife’s assassination?”

  “I believe the more apposite question is, Werthen, whether or not the emperor ordered such bloodshed. Grunenthal, by his own admission, was responsible for organizing the entire sordid affair. It was most definitely his hand at work in the painfully convoluted series of killings that were meant to conceal the deaths of Frosch and the empress.”

  “But?” Werthen said.

  “Yes, the infernal ‘but.’ I suppose we shall never know if Grunenthal was working on his own initiative or was marching to the orders of his emperor. By directing full attention to himself, he may be falling on his sword, just as he would have Sergeant Tod do.”

  “But then eliminating Grunenthal and Tod may no
t eliminate the danger to all of us.”

  “On the contrary,” Gross said. “It is the only way to do so. Once Grunenthal is gone, the emperor, if he actually was involved in these murders, will surely not wish to pursue a losing cause. I have thought long and hard about this, Werthen. Franz Josef, whatever else he may be, is a consummate realist. He knows when to call a truce. If, and that is a big ‘if,’ he was really the person who ordered all these deaths.”

  “I sincerely doubt he did,” Herr Meisner said. “Franz Josef may be the emperor, but he is still a man. He loved that Wittelsbach woman, that is clear. He allowed her the ultimate gift in a marriage: total freedom. Only deep love could allow such a gift from a man who badly needed his empress at home. But this is beside the point. I agree with you, Gross. We must deal with Grunenthal. A man of that twisted a nature, who could concoct such vicious crimes-he will never keep his word.”

  Gross was silent for a moment, then asked, “Werthen?”

  “Yes.” He finally nodded. “I agree also.”

  “Good.” Gross clapped his hands together. “Then we must hurry. First we contact Klimt. There is much to plan for tonight.”

  They were there early. Gross hoped this would give them time to examine the vicinity, to acquaint themselves better with the layout of the park. Venedig in Wien was not the sort of entertainment that any of them regularly indulged in.

  Black flags draped the fun-house concessions. Instead of crowds of Viennese milling about and cheering the strong man, screaming as the demons leaped out of hiding in the grotto ride, or drinking mugs of beer in the garden cafés, the entire Wurstelprater, or amusement park, was eerily still. Not a person was in sight.

  They made their way through the silent streets and over the artificial canal of the Venice-in-Vienna section beyond the foot of the Riesenrad, to the building where Prince Grunenthal had instructed them to meet.

  Werthen was impressed: It was actually as if they were standing on the quai of Venice’s Grand Canal. This elaborate theme park had over a kilometer of canals, and somehow the builders had even managed to get the smell of the water right: a mixture of sweetness and decay. The buildings surrounding the canal had elaborate Venetian facades; their fundaments appeared, in the dim light, to be centuries old rather than just three years, for Venice in Vienna had only been built in 1895.