by M. J. Rose
“I can’t give you that information until the suspect has been arraigned,” Detective Branch said.
“He deserves the worst punishment you can mete out. This man was responsible for several atrocious crimes.”
Lucian was riveted by the compassion that flared in Malachai’s black eyes, so sincere, no one would ever suspect this important renowned psychologist and scion of a prestigious old New York family was capable of ordering anyone’s death.
Branch, who was in his late fifties and had the physique of someone with a desk job, put his hands on the table and gave himself a boost up. “Let me show you out, Mr. Samuels.”
On the other side of the mirror Douglas Comley also rose. “You’d better not be wrong about this, Mr. Painter Man. I’m supposed to be shutting you down in ten days, not approving additional funding. I’m going out on a limb for you. Again.”
“How often has that proved a mistake?” Lucian asked.
“But you’ve always had something for me in exchange. Something…dare I call it evidence?”
“I know this man. I’ve watched him and listened to him for months. Malachai won’t be able to resist the promise of tracking down a second memory tool.”
“He won’t? Or you won’t?” Comley asked skeptically.
There was no time to protest. Malachai had his walking papers and would be leaving the building soon, and wherever Malachai went, Lucian followed. At least for the next ten days. And right now hopefully that meant getting on a plane and flying to Vienna.
Chapter 20
Vienna, Austria
Saturday, April 26th—3:03 p.m.
“You must be exhausted. Let me drop you off at your hotel,” Sebastian suggested when they were back on the street.
“I can’t imagine that I’d be able to go to sleep. I think I’ll just walk around for a while.”
“When was the last time you had something to eat?” He pointed to the café up ahead that she’d noticed when they’d parked earlier.
“Thanks, but you’ve done enough. I can’t take up any more of your time.”
“Your father would never forgive me if I let you go off alone on your first day in Vienna. Let me at least buy you a cup of coffee. It will do you good.”
The idea of coffee did appeal to her and the truth was Meer was far too anxious to go back to an empty hotel room.
As they walked to the corner, Sebastian described the café society of Vienna, keeping up a steady monologue she was sure he offered as a distraction. “Everyone has a café they frequent either near their home or their office. It’s a daily routine. One is almost expected to sit at a table and linger for hours over a single cup of coffee and a piece of strudel.”
Sebastian held open the door and Meer stepped inside Café Hawelka. Immediately the fragrant atmosphere enveloped her. It was a scene from another century. Waiters in black frockcoats with white aprons bustled about carrying silver trays, reflecting ad infinitum in the large wall mirrors that expanded the small space. The heavy rust velvet drapes with white lace half curtains underneath gave the room a sense of both intimacy and opulence.
Once they were seated at a marble-topped table, Meer looked around at the reddish-brown ceiling and smoke-stained walls. Taking it all in, she felt wistful for an era she never knew.
“What would you like?” Sebastian asked.
“An espresso.”
“Nothing to eat? Well, at least we have to order Mrs. Hawelka’s homemade Buchteln. They are wonderful little jam-filled pastries, and you need to eat something.”
“You’re doing a very good impersonation of my father.”
Sebastian smiled and nodded toward the waiter, who came over and took their order in a very officious manner.
“He’s very formal,” she noted after he left.
“All the waiters are. They go to school and train for years before they earn the title of ‘Herr Ober,’ ‘Mr. Waiter,’” Sebastian explained. “There are actually twenty-seven hand motions required to prepare the tray correctly with the glass of water, coffee, sugar, napkin, spoon, etcetera.”
Meer’s fingers brushed the velvet upholstery. “How old is this café?”
“Usually there’s a history and a list of luminaries who frequented each café on the back of the menu.” He reached for it and read out loud: “There’s been a café or bar operating at this address since the 1780s.”
While he read, the waiter returned with the coffee, glasses of water and cookies, making a show of dressing the table with the refreshments. Sebastian thanked him and then continued where he’d left off with the history of the café. Sipping her coffee, Meer listened while she watched the patrons interacting and the waiters moving around the room almost like male dancers in a ballet. Snippets of conversation filled the air but instead of the foreign language reminding her she was an outsider—a stranger far from home—it was welcoming.
“There’s a timelessness about this place,” she said when Sebastian finished. “Not just this café, everything about Vienna.”
“I travel a lot with my work and Vienna is special that way. Maybe it’s that the love of music, theater, art and philosophy remain alive here in ways it hasn’t in other cities.”
“Listening to you, I feel like I’m back at school.”
Sebastian raised his eyebrows. “Compliment or criticism?”
“Compliment,” she said a little uncomfortably. What was it about him that confused her? “You mentioned work, what do you do?” she asked, trying to find some neutral ground.
“I am the principal oboe for the Vienna Philharmonic.”
He was a musician? Before she responded, Sebastian voiced exactly what she was thinking.
“Your father told me you played piano and were going to be a composer before you left Juilliard. He said you haven’t written music in years.”
“Is there anything he didn’t tell you?” She backed her chair away and stood up. “You know, I think I’m going to take a walk. Thank you for everything you did today. Can I pay you for the coffee before I go?” She opened her bag.
“No.” Sebastian took his wallet out, pulled out some bills and put them on the table. “You’ll get lost. I’ll take you.”
“I won’t.” She wasn’t thinking, just trying to escape. “I’ll be fine, I know where I am.”
“You do?”
She was confused by her own words. “We’re on the same street as the auction house and since I know where that is on my map I’ll have a landmark. I’ll be all right, really. You’re not my warden.”
“No, of course not. You’re certainly not in jail.”
But he followed her out into the street anyway. God only knew what her father had asked of Sebastian but clearly she wasn’t going to be able to shake him until she was ready to go back to her hotel room.
He walked with her to the corner and out on the Graben and explained that this same wide avenue had been Vienna’s main shopping street for centuries. Lined with popular boutiques, the array of stores bewildered her. Narrowing her eyes, she tried to see something that wasn’t there.
“You are disappointed? Is it because you have all these stores back in New York?”
“No, it just looks too new.”
“Would you rather walk to see some of the older sights? There are so many. Especially for music aficionados. Mozart’s house, or Beethoven’s. Or Strauss’s or Mahler’s.”
“Beethoven’s house is still standing?”
When she was seven, Meer had been playing in her mother’s antiques store one afternoon after school when an elderly man who spoke with an accent brought in a clock that played Beethoven’s music and she’d fallen in love with that song. But when she started piano lessons, curiously, the only pieces she couldn’t play were Beethoven’s. As soon as her fingers executed more than a few bars of the maestro’s music, her dreads attacked.
“Yes, would you like to see it?”
Suddenly all she wanted to do was get away from this street and all the
shoppers and Sebastian’s kindness and go back to the hotel and sleep. “I would, but not today. I think my jet lag just caught up to me.”
“And the shock, I’m sure. Let me drive you back to the Sacher.”
Chapter 21
Saturday, April 26th—3:36 p.m.
David Yalom walked into the big, splashy, modern hotel where, along with many ISTA members and the press corps, he was registered. Since it was one of the conference hotels he recognized several people as he walked through the bustling lobby toward the elevator bank. He nodded to them but didn’t slow down to invite unwanted conversation. Entering the first empty elevator, he quickly pressed the button to shut the doors so there’d be less of a chance that anyone would get in with him.
Getting off on the fifteenth floor, he checked that the hallway was empty, walked to the staircase, opened the door and listened. When he didn’t hear the sound of footsteps he hurried down to the fourteenth floor where he repeated the exercise of checking the hallway before proceeding to his room. Once more he glanced over his shoulder to check that no one was in the hall, slipped his key into the lock, opened the door and entered his room, pulling out a small gun from his shoulder harness and holding it in front of him as he did a quick inspection of the room.
It was a lucky thing—no, a smart thing since the last thing he had in his life was luck—that he’d arranged to buy the gun from someone other than Hans Wassong. Otherwise it might have been defective. But David had thought through every step of this mission, separating each from the other. This ensured no one had any more information than was absolutely necessary. He’d made a mistake with Wassong—trusting someone who was untrustworthy—but there was no more reason to dwell on that than anything else in his life. Thinking about the past was futile. Memories instigated pain, that was all.
The drapes were half drawn and the light that came through the gauzy under-curtain was enough for what he needed to do but he turned on the bedside lamp anyway. And even though he wasn’t interested in watching it, he clicked the television on and found the all-news channel. Standing by the desk, he called room service, ordered and asked that his meal be rushed. He wasn’t hungry. Didn’t much care about eating anymore. But a car needs gas even if it can’t taste it.
With a yank, David pulled the bedcovers down and roughed up the pillows. He sat down on the edge of the bed but not for long. Opening the minibar he grabbed a bottle of water, twisted off the cap and carefully placed it on the bedside table. After swallowing half the water in one long gulp, he put the bottle beside the cap. Next, he picked up the British thriller novel by David Hewson he’d bought in the airport but not yet read a word of. It had been facedown and open to page 120. Now he turned to page 144 and replaced it, facedown once again.
He made sure that the bathroom was in some semblance of disarray, as if he’d spent time there, and then David sat down on the edge of the bed to wait for the food to arrive.
Fifteen minutes later, he heard the knock, checked through the peephole, put his gun in his waistband, pulled his shirt out to hide it and met the waiter at the door. He signed for the sandwich and soda, added a healthy tip and watched the man leave. David put the tray on the bureau, picked up the ham-and-cheese sandwich and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper. He popped the tab on the soda, poured half of that into a glass, took one gulp, and then another, and wiped his mouth with the napkin.
Next, David called a random number and while it rang said: “This is David Yalom. I’ll be in my room for the next hour and a half if you want to come up. I’ve got some work to do. I won’t leave before hearing from you.”
Finally he changed from his navy sports jacket into a tan windbreaker, making sure to move all the hangers around in the closet, stuffed his green backpack into a red-and-black gym bag, threw the sandwich in, zipped it up and looked around the room, surveying it carefully, before opening the door very slowly and checking the hallway. It was empty.
Instead of the elevator he took the stairs but this time down to the tenth floor. There, he used the elevator to go to the hotel’s lower level, which opened to a busy subway stop. You couldn’t get up to a room floor without using your key from inside the elevator, but you could get down and out into the train station. It was a convenience for the businesspeople who frequented the hotel.
The station was busy as usual and David hurried out into the crowd. Chances were if Abdul’s men were watching they were also listening, and the phone call he’d made and the food he’d ordered had bought him enough time to get out of the hotel undetected.
The subway ride involved changing trains at the art deco Karlsplatz station and then taking a second train to the Schwedenplatz station on the other side of town, an area filled with small jazz clubs, inexpensive boutiques and restaurants that nestled up to the river and were always crowded with teenagers and tourists.
Twenty minutes after David left the large first-class hotel where he’d never spent more than two hours at a time since arriving in Vienna, he walked into a rundown one-star pensione. The manager behind the desk, who wore ripped jeans and a dirty white sweater, didn’t look up as the man who was registered as Michael Bergmann walked in, head down and shoulders slumped, and took the small elevator that stank of body odor and garlic up to his room where he would spend another sleepless night.
Chapter 22
Saturday, April 26th—5:35 p.m.
After Meer had checked in and unpacked she’d lain down and tried to relax but she kept remembering Ruth on the floor and how cold the woman’s skin had been. At home whenever she was restless, she walked. So Meer went downstairs, got a map from the concierge, and took off.
The giant Ferris wheel gleamed in the setting sun and the cables that tethered the gondolas looked like fragile gold threads instead of strong steel capable of withstanding thousands of pounds of pressure: the distant landmark was as good a destination as any other.
Vienna, like many other European cities she’d visited, was a medley of architectural styles, occasionally dissonant, often harmonious. A baroque bell-domed Italian-style church peacefully coexisted between two simple Biedermeier town houses next to a fanciful gilt-and-bronze Secessionist apartment building. But now she reached an area identified on the map as Leopoldstadt, which had a more cohesive feel, with narrow cobbled streets and houses, theaters and stores crowded on top of each other. Most of the signage was in German but occasionally she’d see Hebraic letters on a storefront. Even though, like her mother, she wasn’t religious, Judaism was her heritage and the familiar symbols were reassuring.
Suddenly, Meer heard shouting—a woman’s voice and then a man’s—and turned, searching out the noise, but twilight had descended on the street and she couldn’t see anyone in the shadows. Scanning the three- and four-story buildings that leaned into each other, she searched for the open window where the noise might be coming from. One of the buildings drew her attention precisely because it didn’t have any windows. Nondescript except for two columns on either side of the door, it was set back slightly and shrouded in even more obscurity than the others. The shouting resumed and Meer became certain this was its source. As she stood there listening, she felt a chill that came from inside her, not from the night. Shivering overtook her as the air started to shimmer and her surroundings became translucent. Her shoulders tensed and her jaw muscles tightened as a metallic taste filled her mouth. Her spine began to throb. The dreads were back, and with them the music and more memories.
Chapter 23
Vienna, Austria
September 26th, 1814
As the twilight deepened around her, Margaux walked the half block to the nondescript gray building, climbed up the wide steps between the two columns, lifted the doorknocker and let it fall.
The door opened a crack and candlelight from inside the foyer spilled out on the landing as the servant peered into her face with surprise. “I’m sorry, Frau Neidermier, but you can’t come in, it’s against the rules for women to visit,” he said once h
e’d realized who she was.
She walked past him, striding into the anteroom with feigned bravado.
“Can I help you?” he asked, completely unsure of how to handle her forced entry.
“I’d like to see Rudolph Toller,” she said, naming her husband’s business partner, hoping she sounded stronger and braver than she felt. So much depended on the outcome of this meeting.
Staring up at the elaborate domed ceiling Margaux tried to calm her nerves by concentrating on the hundreds of tiny mirrors that twinkled like stars. Caspar had told her there was no more elaborate building in all of Vienna, and she was certain it was true. What a spectacle her husband and his partner had created. What a treasure trove. Tables inlaid with lapis lazuli, carnelian, tiger’s eye, onyx and malachite. Gold fittings and gilt moldings glinted in the firelight. Glazed oil paintings of ancient Egyptian scenes added dimension to the boundaries of the room. And the smell! Burners in all four corners of the room scented the air with the same Cassia incense her husband had given her when he’d come back from his last trip. Being here was like being inside her husband’s mind, seeing through his eyes. Feeling her own eyes brimming, she blinked back tears.
“If Caspar were here now, he’d remind me that it’s a mistake to ever underestimate you,” Toller said as he came out to greet her. “He used to say you were like your homeland’s Mistral—an unrelenting wind. And he was right. You’ve broken all our rules coming here, Margaux. I was going to respond to your letter in time.”
Despite the fact that her husband had trusted Toller enough to include him on his Indian expeditions, the man’s cadaverous countenance frightened her. As he bent down to kiss her hand a whiff of his stale scent reached her nostrils: he smelled as if he were spoiling from the inside out.
