A Matter of Breeding: a mystery set in turn-of-the-century Vienna (A Viennese Mystery)

by J Sydney Jones

  Gross, however, had given as good as he got.

  No. Better.

  Gross had eyed the thin reed of a man hunched over papers on his expansive desk, his hair freshly pomaded and a touch of what looked to be rouge at his cheeks to make him appear younger that his sixty years.

  ‘You have the temerity to criticize my crime-solving abilities,’ he all but shouted at Lechner. ‘You who could not detect a murderer at a public hanging.’

  Magistrate Lechner was normally an agitated sort, but this comment only made his natural proclivity worse. He rose from his desk chair, hands planted squarely on the desk in front of him.

  ‘You were always a pompous ass, Gross. Now you are simply a meddling pompous ass.’

  ‘And you, dear Lechner …’ But suddenly insults failed him; however, he recalled Stoker’s damn silly comment from this morning, and said, ‘You have always lived up to your name. That is how you ever achieved the mediocre advancement you now possess.’

  ‘I forbid you to assist in these investigations,’ Lechner thundered.

  Gross smiled. He enjoyed seeing the man in a rage. Perhaps a bit more along the same lines and apoplexy might ensue.

  ‘Last I knew, Magistrate Lechner, this was a free country. A monarchy perhaps, but one that follows the rule of law. As a professor of criminology and as a citizen of Austro-Hungary, I consider it my duty to lend a hand where it is sorely needed.’

  ‘You will at your own peril, Gross.’

  At which point a young uniformed police officer had suddenly appeared in the office, his face pinched with worry.

  ‘Is everything quite all right, sir?’ he said to Magistrate Lechner.

  But Gross gave the other man no chance to speak. ‘Everything is quite all right, sergeant. I was just making my position clear. If your magistrate has any further communication for me, he can reach me at the Hotel Daniel in Hitzendorf.’

  Leaving the Praesidium he felt a glow of satisfaction. His heart was racing, but that was to be expected. He looked at this pocket watch. Still time to make one more visit to the clinic before returning to Hitzendorf for the night.

  Thus, Gross did not reach his hotel until early evening. There he found a telegram awaiting him from the gendarmerie in Bruck on der Mur, home of Ursula Klein’s parents. The police there reported that the Klein family had no idea that their daughter was pregnant, nor who the father of the child might have been. The police also stipulated that the Kleins – fervent members of the local Evangelical congregation – were most definitely not Jewish, neither ethnically nor in terms of religion. Which eliminated the major motive for Hobarty to kill the young woman, Gross told himself as he folded the telegram and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

  This information made him cross, but not so that it took the edge off his appetite. Other guests were filling the dining room and Gross decided to have a fine dinner to top off a rather bizarre day.

  Awaiting the schnitzel he had ordered, he sipped on a Gumpoldskirchen wine.

  ‘Doktor Gross.’

  The familiar voice brought him out of his reverie.

  ‘Stoker. What are you doing back here?’

  ‘I might ask you the same,’ the Irishman said. ‘We thought you would be in Graz with your friend Lechner.’

  Gross merely puffed his lips at the suggestion.

  Stoker quickly explained the coincidence of encountering Werthen’s wife in Piber.

  ‘They seemed to be so happy to meet like that … Well, I felt rather a third wheel. They decided to spend a day or two in that region in a pension the advokat knew. So here I am, back in Hitzendorf. Here we both are. Shall we drink to it?’

  But there was no time for toasts, as at that moment Inspector Thielman entered the dining room of the Hotel Daniel in the company of two stout gendarmerie officers and marched right up to Gross’s table.

  ‘Doktor Gross—’

  ‘Good evening, Thielman. May I offer you a sip of wine?’

  ‘I regret to inform you that I am here on business. Business of a most unpleasant sort.’

  By now all the eyes of the gathered journalists were on their table.

  ‘What is it? Lechner has thrown another fit?’

  ‘It is my duty to inform you, Doktor Gross, that you are under arrest for the murders of Maria Feininger, Annaliese Reiter, and Ursula Klein.’

  ‘This must be a joke,’ Stoker said, attempting to stand, but a beefy hand pushed him back into his chair.

  ‘Not a joke at all,’ Thielman said. ‘Come with us, Doktor.’

  ‘No handcuffs? One does miss the drama.’

  ‘I told you this was no laughing matter,’ Thielman hissed as Gross rose to join them.

  ‘I am afraid you are going to have to disturb the love birds, Stoker. I may be in need of Werthen’s most able legal abilities.’

  ‘This is insane,’ Stoker said as Gross was marched out of the dining room.

  No sooner was the party out of the room than the journalists all made a dash for the telegraph and phones at the nearby railroad station, already composing the headline as they ran: ‘Noted Criminalist Arrested in Vampire Murders!’

  Thirteen

  The lovebirds, as Gross called them, were at the farmstead of the Pichler family, former clients of Werthen’s from his time as a criminal lawyer in Graz.

  Little had changed at the farmstead. The mother, Hannah, was still the solid anchor of the family, dressed in her perennial dirndl and apron and ministering to the wood-burning stove which still refused to draw properly, producing the occasional choking black fug of smoke. The father, Peter, had gotten smaller – if that were possible – over the last number of years since Werthen had seen him. Smaller and thinner, but no less hard working and laconic. And Eddie, their second child (their first, a daughter, had died of typhus just before her sixteenth birthday) was, at twenty-five, still the simple soul he had been when Werthen had defended him at the district court as a twelve-year-old.

  Werthen did not tell Berthe of the charges, only that Eddie, an adolescent at the time, had been wrongfully charged.

  ‘My first courtroom victory,’ Werthen joked.

  He had come for solace, for a sanctuary. After being separated from Berthe the past few days, Werthen suddenly saw how they were growing apart as a result of the miscarriage; a small family tragedy was dividing rather than uniting them. Each was coping with the loss individually. And it should not be like this, Werthen suddenly realized when he saw his wife on the street in Piber.

  He would not let it be that way any longer.

  So, the Pichlers.

  Werthen had stayed at their farmstead at the foot of the Gössauer Alps over many vacations from his time in Graz. The enthusiasm of the clan always proved a palliative to him, cleansing him of the evil memories experienced in the courtroom.

  Perhaps it would do the same for him and Berthe.

  Upon arrival, they sat in the smoky kitchen with Frau Pichler drinking cup after cup of strong coffee – Frau Pichler’s one vice – while the men tended the herd of milk cows.

  ‘We didn’t even know you married,’ she said as she poured yet another cup of the industrial strength brew, ignoring Berthe’s restraining upraised hand by the cup.

  ‘Yes, I guarantee we are married,’ Werthen said with a chuckle. It felt good to make small talk again. ‘And a beautiful young daughter to boot.’

  Frau Pichler made a great show of looking about the cluttered kitchen for said child. ‘But where is the little one, then?’

  ‘Her grandparents are looking after her,’ Berthe said.

  ‘Not the high and mighty von Werthens?’ the frau said, making Werthen smile.

  Berthe realized by this comment just how close her husband had been to this woman and her family, sharing such intimate feelings about his parents.

  ‘You’re not one of those progressive young women, are you?’ Frau Pichler said as she added another alder log to the stove. The afternoon had turned chilly; grey clouds were c
oming in from the west, over the alps.

  ‘I am proud to say she is,’ Werthen answered for her, taking his wife’s hand in his and making her blush for the first time in years.

  Frau Pichler nodded at this. ‘Good for you, then. A woman’s got to be her own person, too. Not just the good housewife.’

  Berthe wondered at this sentiment from a woman who appeared to be the über housewife, but she said nothing.

  ‘But you didn’t come here to listen to me prattle on. Why did you come?’

  ‘It’s been too long—’ Werthen began, but Frau Pichler interrupted.

  ‘Nonsense. Don’t tell me you’ve come to renew old friendships. You’re always welcome, Karl, of course. But there’s something else. I can sense it.’ She fixed Berthe with a penetrating gaze, no longer the good housewife, but now a shrewd judge of character. ‘What’s the problem, child?’ she asked Berthe.

  And now they both opened to the older woman, telling her of the loss of the baby. She listened to them impatiently, turning her empty coffee cup.

  Finally she blurted out, ‘Lord, and I thought it was something serious. You know how many children I lost before little Irmgard was born, bless her soul? It’s the way it is. Some babies just are not made right. They don’t go full term. Even after Irmgard I lost another two before Eddie came along. The horse threw you. So get back on the horse. You’re young.’ She focused on Berthe. ‘What are you, maybe twenty-five?’

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ Berthe replied.

  ‘Then you’ve got plenty of years of child-bearing ahead of you if you want.’

  At that moment Eddie and his father returned from the milking and there was more of a reunion as they demanded to know what great things the advokat had been up to. Berthe caught Eddie staring at her with his wide and rather empty eyes. He quickly looked away when she smiled. He was about Berthe’s age, but carried himself like an adolescent. A very large and hulking adolescent. He suddenly put a hand to his head as if suffering from a headache, but no one but she seemed to notice.

  Werthen was enjoying himself, feeling at home once again in the midst of the noisy Pichler family. But now he remembered the last time he had been here, in the summer of 1891 when he had brought his then fiancée, Marie Elisabeth Volker, to stay at the farmstead. It had been a long weekend and Werthen was able to take time away from his busy schedule at court. Mary – for she preferred the English pronunciation of her name – had fit right in, just like Berthe now. But it was that weekend he first noticed her shortness of breath as they hiked an easy level trail at the base of the mountain; that weekend that he first realized Mary was coughing quite a lot. But they had no time for such things; the precious days together were given over to plans for the future: the house they would buy in Graz, the legal practice that Werthen was working night and day to establish, the children they would have. Yet it all was unreal to Werthen at the time; his focus was his work. Mary seemed to understand. Only too late did he discover that the shortness of breath and cough were evidence; a good criminal lawyer should have put these threads of evidence together.

  Mary’s death less than a year later from tuberculosis had been a blow to him; the guilty feelings he experienced had made him move to Vienna and give up criminal law for six years, until Gross had dragged him back into the game. Werthen felt a sudden tear in his eye as the emotions of that time almost a decade ago flooded over him. He realized that his grief for little Bastian was a shared grief for Mary, and that now, miraculously, he knew he could put both of these sorrows behind him.

  Berthe gripped his hand. ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You seem miles away.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I am very all right.’ And he leaned into her, kissing her full on the lips to the immense pleasure of the Pichlers.

  After dinner Eddie took them out in the brisk twilight to the old, original farm building they rented out to hikers and other visitors to the region. As they entered the low front door, Werthen scraped his head on the lintel as he had so many times in the past. He had, in fact, made an unfortunate habit of this every time he had visited, for the old farmhouse was built low. For years it seemed he had a permanent scab at the very top of his head.

  When he’d asked Eddie about the reason for such low ceilings, the lad had only shrugged and said, ‘The old ones must have sat a lot.’

  Eddie wisdom.

  There were fresh sheets on the beds and they were cold to the touch when Werthen and Berthe finally crawled in. She snuggled next to him, pecked him on the cheek, and then sought out his mouth with hers.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Werthen asked her.

  ‘You heard what Frau Pichler said. We have to get back on the horse.’

  Later, in the middle of the night, a series of shrill cries awoke them both. At first Werthen thought it might be a bird cry, but the only night predator in this area was an owl, and this was no owl hoot. Another series of wrenching screams had them up and out of bed, hustling into their clothes. On the way out, Werthen stopped by the wood bin at the door and picked out a heavy branch as a weapon, and then they dashed out into a night illuminated by a three-quarter moon, the earlier clouds now passed. They followed another scream toward the barn that stood between the old farmhouse where they were staying and the newer one. A slanting rectangle of yellow light poured out of the barn’s open door, and as they approached yet another plaintive scream shattered the stillness of the night.

  They reached the door and gazed within the barn, shocked and speechless at what they saw. Lighted in the glare of a series of kerosene lamps hanging from the rafters, the Pichlers – their backs turned to Werthen and Berthe – were dressed head to foot in blood-splattered oil cloth jackets and pants and black rubber boots, each wielded a long blade. Hanging low from a rafter in front of them was a pig, its throat freshly cut, and the blood flowing rapidly into a pail that Peter Pichler held up to the wound. They turned when they heard Werthen and Berthe approach, and smiled like idiots.

  ‘Pork roast tomorrow,’ Frau Pichler said, and her husband and son laughed as if it were the funniest of jokes.

  ‘Sorry we woke you,’ she said. ‘But we had to get this slaughter done before the full moon. The blood moon, you know. Bad luck to do it after.’

  Werthen and Berthe tried to feign interest in the subsequent draining of blood and cleaning of organs, but they were both shaken by the scene and its otherworldly, Bosch-like quality.

  Finally they returned to their beds and clung to each other like small children in a storm. Werthen had been particularly chilled by the professional manner in which Eddie used his blade, seeming to know by instinct where to cut and how deep. It brought back the case that introduced him to the Pichler family in the first place. Eddie had been accused of mutilating animals in the vicinity. But his parents had sworn alibis for him on each occasion when such an incident occurred. They also insisted that the poor young boy had no facility with a knife, that he was, indeed, mortally afraid of the blade. Using their sworn testimony, Werthen had argued successfully for the boy’s innocence.

  It seemed that Eddie had outgrown his fear of knives in the intervening years.

  Or had he?

  It had been a very long day, but before Werthen fell asleep he remembered sitting in the fiaker this morning waiting for Gross and reading the newspapers on the progress of their investigation. The Krafft-Ebing article in Die Presse came to mind and how that psychiatrist warned that sadistic brutality toward domestic or farm animals can serve as a warning sign for later homicidal brutality involving mutilations.

  Had he set a future murderer free? Had he unwittingly saved Eddie from the incarceration that the boy – and the rest of society – in fact needed and deserved? Not a pleasant thought.

  And there was something else, something that Frau Pichler had said, that sat annoyingly at the edge of Werthen’s consciousness. He could not conjure it up, could not tease it forward into his thoughts.

  It would come, he decided. Don
’t force it; it will come. He had a dreamless four hours of sleep until the first crow of the rooster next morning.

  Fourteen

  Werthen and Berthe left in the morning, she back to Vienna to pursue the Lipizzaner investigation there, and he to Hitzendorf, his soul at rest about his connection with Berthe, but his mind in a turmoil over the various pieces of evidence he had gathered the previous day. In Köflach, Berthe caught the morning express into Vienna, while Werthen was forced to again hire a fiaker to drive him the eight or so miles back to the Hotel Daniel in Hitzendorf.

  He arrived in time to find Stoker at breakfast. As he made his way to their table, he felt the eyes of the gathered journalists on him, as if expecting some drama.

  ‘I was just preparing to track you down, Advokat Werthen,’ Stoker said, rising from the ruins of a boiled egg dripping down the side of a Gmundener ceramic egg cup, the orange-yellow of the yolk contrasting with the green swirls of the grüngeflammt pattern. Next to the egg cup lay today’s Grazer Tagblatt with a banner headline that screamed at him: ‘Prominent Criminologist Held in Blood Ritual Murders’.

  Stoker followed Werthen’s gaze. ‘Yes. They arrested Gross last night.’

  ‘Who? They’re insane.’

  ‘It was his old colleague, Thielman, on orders from Magistrate Lechner.’

  ‘I have witnessed professional jealousy, but this is absurd.’

  ‘Agreed, but Thielman had his orders. Your friend Gross seemed to think it quite a lark. Made jokes about handcuffs as they ushered him out.’

  Werthen was astonished. What could Lechner be thinking? The man would become a laughing stock when it was revealed that Gross had nothing to do with these murders. He couldn’t have, in fact, as he was in Czernowitz when they all took place.

  Then a moment of doubt suddenly crept in: Lechner was, as Werthen recalled, the most cautious and fastidious of bureaucrats, always making sure to please those above him, eager to elbow those on his level out of the way, and equally eager to step on fingers and toes of those below him as he made his way up the professional ladder. Yet he was punctilious in such efforts, never challenging those whom he was not certain he could not somehow defeat, always assured they could not come back at him later.