Vienna Secrets lp-4

by Frank Tallis

  Edlinger’s eyes widened. “I would say that Dr. Liebermann’s attitude was disrespectful…” Schmidt and Bishop Waldheim were both nodding. “And threatening. Yes, most definitely. Threatening.”

  Schmidt sighed with relief, and the bishop smiled.

  36

  Mordecai Ben Judah Levi, a distinguished scholar from another Hasidic sect, had written to Barash requesting a favor. In his letter he had explained that he was currently drafting an exegetical work and wished to discuss a particular point of law with special reference to the teachings of Isaac Luria. The zaddik had promptly consented, and his guest had arrived the following evening with a satchel crammed with books and annotated papers. It transpired that the question posed by Levi was not as testing as Barash had expected. Indeed, he was immediately able to provide an exact answer, allowing the two men to indulge in a more far-reaching conversation, a conversation that repeatedly strayed away from the ordinary and embraced the arcane.

  “Are you familiar with the principal means by which demons propagate?” asked the zaddik’s guest.

  The curtains were drawn, and the only light in the room came from a single sputtering candle on the sideboard. A harsh wind had blown in from the east, carrying with it an icy memory of its Carpathian origins. It was curiously expressive, finding in every flue and vent an excuse to wail inconsolably. This disembodied moaning was most appropriate to their subject.

  “I have not made a very detailed study of this area,” said Barash modestly.

  “Onanism,” said the guest. “It is without doubt the principal means of demonic generation. Lilith, the queen of demons, and the familiars in her retinue excite concupiscent desire in men so that they are wont to engage in solitary acts of debauch. The demons do this so that they can make bodies for themselves from the lost seed.” The guest tilted his head, and appeared to be listening intently to the lamentations of the wind. “No man can be complacent, even the virtuous man whose desires are satisfied within the sacred and lawful union of marriage. Lilith is ever eager to trespass in Eve’s dominion. Thus, the Zohar recommends we perform a rite that keeps the demon temptress from the marriage bed. When the husband enters the bedroom, he should think only of holy things and recite the prayer of protection.”

  The zaddik’s guest intoned a verse: Veiled in velvet-are you here?

  Loosened, loosened be your spell

  Go not in and go not out

  Let there be none of you and nothing of your part

  Turn back, turn back, the ocean rages

  Its waves are calling you

  But I cleave the holy part,

  I am wrapped in the sanctity of the King.

  “Then,” he continued, “the wise husband must wind cloth around his own head, and his wife’s head, and sprinkle fresh water on the connubial sheets.”

  Barash was impressed by his guest’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Zohar, and of so many other holy tomes. He was not only familiar with The Book of Creation, The Book Bahir, and The Book of Visions but also numerous lesser works: The Treatise on the Emanations on the Left by Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Cohen and De Arte Kabbalistica by Johannes Reuchlin.

  Barash was flattered that a scholar as renowned as Levi had chosen to consult him. However, as their conversation progressed, he became increasingly uneasy. The point of law that his guest had wished to discuss was easily dispensed with, and he had begun to suspect that the question had been merely a pretext. The scholar seemed to be testing Barash, exploring the extent of his knowledge-and, by implication, his power.

  They spoke for some time about demonic entities-their provenance and exorcism, and rites for protecting the dead. Eventually, however, their talk subsided and the room was filled with only the sound of banging shutters and the mournful cry of the wind. The zaddik’s guest closed his eyes; he might have been sleeping were it not for the slow rise and fall of his right index finger. In due course, the scholar spoke. “The monk and the councillor.” The words seemed to sustain an unnatural presence, like the protracted reverberation that follows the striking of a bell. “We have heard rumors. Your prophecy, scattered earth…”

  So, thought Barash. Now we have it at last.

  “And I hear that your students have been telling, once again, the old stories. The old stories of the Prague ghetto.” The wind created a full-throated, almost human cry of desperation, and the scholar opened his eyes. They glinted in the darkness like mica. “My people want to know what is happening.”

  “Then tell them. Give them answers.”

  “What answers?”

  “The answers that you know to be true, in your heart.”

  A sudden draft extinguished the candle, and they were plunged into total darkness. Barash could hear the scholar breathing: fast and shallow.

  “Did you make it?” Levi asked, his voice no more than a whisper.

  “No.”

  “Then who? Who among us today has the strength?”

  “I don’t know,” Barash replied. “But surely, whoever it is, he will soon reveal himself.”

  37

  From the journal of Dr. Max Liebermann

  Today I saw Clara, the woman I once loved. Or perhaps I should say the woman whom I thought I once loved. The woman who by now would have been my wife, had I not broken off our engagement. It is a strange consideration. Marriage. She looked stunning, coming out of the Imperial in the company of a handsome lieutenant. I had heard rumors, of course. They say she met him at a sanatorium in the Tyrol where her father had sent her to convalesce. I had always derived consolation from this news. It served to assuage my guilt. I couldn’t be held responsible for ruining her life. Indeed, she might find true love with her lieutenant, and be patently much happier than she ever would have been with me. I wished her well, because if she found happiness in the arms of her handsome lieutenant, then my judgment would be vindicated. There, you see? It was for the best, after all.

  So why is it, I wonder, that when I saw them together today I felt so ungenerous, so empty of goodwill? They stepped out of the Imperial, and the lieutenant hailed a cab. Clara was smiling. She was wearing a long fur coat with a matching hat and looked like a Russian princess. A cab pulled up, and the lieutenant helped her inside. As she ascended the step, he held her gloved fingers in one hand, and pressed the small of her back with the other. It was casual contact, accomplished with careless, practiced ease. He was used to touching her, and she was used to being touched. As the cab rolled off, I saw them kiss. A merging of shadows in the frame of a small window, glanced a moment before the curtain swished across to protect her honor.

  It left me feeling excluded and horribly alone: standing on a corner, a revenant, or less-a voyeur-blinking into a gritty, chill wind. I remembered kissing her: the desire, the wanting. She was, and remains, a very beautiful woman. She was not right for me, and I was not right for her. I know that. I knew that then and I know that now. Even so, when I go to bed this evening, I will be going to bed alone. What have I replaced marriage with? An obsession. A fetish. The pursuit of a woman whose inaccessibility is equaled only by that of the stars. I am no different from some of Krafft-Ebing’s cases. Excepting, perhaps, that their erotic lives are more satisfactory than mine! At least they have real outlets, whereas I appear to have none at all.

  Amelia Lydgate was my patient. Her hysterical symptoms arose from a sexual trauma, the unwelcome advances of a man in whose household and care her parents had thought she would be safe. Miss Lydgate has now placed her trust in me. If I attempt to become intimate with her, will this not re-create elements of the very situation that made her ill? I wonder, what correspondent memories would a passionate embrace arouse in her mind? Schelling, stealing into her room at night and attempting to force himself upon her? The mattress tilting as he crawled over the bed, the suffocating weight of his body? How can I make my feelings known to such a woman, knowing as I do what she has experienced?

  38

  Rabbi Seligman awoke and saw his wife’s
face looming over him. He had dozed off while reading in an armchair next to the fire.

  “Wake up!” She shook his shoulder. “Wake up. Kusiel is here.”

  “Kusiel?”

  “Yes, Kusiel. He says it’s urgent.”

  The rabbi got up from the chair and shuffled out into the hall, where he found the old caretaker.

  “It’s happening again,” said Kusiel. “You must come.”

  Seligman signaled that Kusiel should lower his voice. Taking his coat from the hall stand, he called out to his wife, saying that he wouldn’t be long. The two men stepped out into the night and walked the short distance to the synagogue. The Alois Gasse Temple was dark, except for the eternal light that danced in front of the golden edifice of the ark. Kusiel lit a paraffin lamp.

  “It’s been terrible. It’s like something’s being tortured up there.”

  The old man rolled his eyes.

  Seligman listened. All that he could hear was his own pulse hammering in his ears.

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  “Wait… and you will.”

  The silence unfurled like a bolt of cloth, accumulating in suffocating, heavy folds. It was unyielding and contained within its emptiness a foretaste of oblivion.

  “Perhaps you have been working too hard,” said Seligman. “You might have fallen asleep and had a dream.”

  “There is something here, Rabbi. Something unnatural.”

  Kusiel’s expression was resolute.

  Time passed, and Seligman allowed himself to feel less anxious. Perhaps the old man really had imagined the noises after all. The hammering in Seligman’s ears slowed. He was just about to say I’m going home when there was a sound that trapped the words in his throat: a deep, loud groaning. The quality of the vocalization suggested not so much torment-as Kusiel’s reference to torture had suggested-but rather rage or anger. There was something brutal about its depth and fury, like the bellow of a taunted bull.

  The whites of Kusiel’s rheumy eyes glinted in the darkness.

  “It’s upstairs, Rabbi. Come. You must confront it.”

  Seligman’s legs were weak with fear. Was it possible? Had some demonic entity found a home in his synagogue? No! He was letting the old caretaker’s credulous talk get to him. There would be a rational explanation. He took the paraffin lamp from Kusiel and climbed the stairs to the balcony.

  When they reached their destination, there was a loud thud: the floorboards shook.

  “It’s coming from behind there,” said Kusiel, pointing to an old door.

  The two men looked at each other, amazement mirrored in both their faces.

  “Impossible,” whispered Seligman.

  “It hasn’t been opened in years,” said the old man. “Your predecessor lost the key.”

  “Was there anything in there?”

  “No. It’s just an empty attic space.”

  Lumbering steps and another bellow: impatient stamping. The cacophony conjured a picture of something mythic and bovine in the rabbi’s mind. Seligman moved closer to the door. He reached out and clasped the handle, but as he did so, whatever was on the other side crashed against the woodwork. Seligman released his grip as if he had been electrified, and sprang back. He steadied himself by grasping the balcony rail, his legs shaking.

  “I am g-going,” he stammered.

  “Shouldn’t you do something first?” pleaded Kusiel.

  “No,” said Rabbi Seligman. “I’m calling the police!”

  39

  Liebermann spent the entire morning seeing patients. He was on his way back to his office with a number of case files under his arm when his friend and colleague Stefan Kanner stopped him in the corridor.

  “Ah, Maxim, I’d buy you lunch, but I very much doubt you’ll be free to accept my kind offer.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There’s someone waiting for you.”

  “Who?”

  “A policeman,” said Kanner, adopting a comic expression. “But you can still get away, of course. We can leave by the back entrance, have a leisurely schnitzel in Josefstadt, and be at the Westbahnhof by two. You’ll be in good time for the Munich train, and I’d recommend changing at Paris for London. They’ll never find you!”

  Liebermann smiled and walked on.

  When he arrived at his office, a constable was waiting outside. The young man looked very conspicuous in the bare hospital corridor.

  “Dr. Liebermann?”

  “Yes.”

  “Constable Mader, sir. I was sent here by Detective Inspector Rheinhardt of the security office.”

  Liebermann assumed that the constable was the bringer of bad news.

  “Has there been another murder?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “Inspector Rheinhardt would like you to join him in Leopoldstadt.”

  “But why? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s happened, as such…” The constable took off his spiked helmet and brushed his hair back. “More like… something’s been found.”

  “What’s been found?”

  “Well, it’s…” The constable shrugged, apparently lost for words. “I think you’d better see for yourself, sir.”

  Two carriages were already parked outside the Alois Gasse Temple and a policeman was standing by the entrance. A group of onlookers had gathered on the sidewalk close by.

  “Make way, please,” Constable Mader called out. “Make way for the doctor.”

  “Has someone been hurt?” asked one of the crowd.

  “He says someone’s been hurt,” cried another.

  “Move back.”

  “Let them through.”

  “He’s brought a doctor.”

  The bodies peeled away, creating a narrow channel. Liebermann felt like Moses parting the Red Sea, an ironic “identification” given his near-constitutional skepticism. He ascended the stone stairs and, passing through a small vestibule, entered the main sanctuary. He stopped for a moment and viewed his surroundings. He was reminded of his childhood, going to the Stadttempel with his father and being bored to tears by the interminable prayers. He looked at the ark-with its gilded, intricate carvings-and experienced the same simmering resentment that he’d known as a child. Barash’s words sounded in his mind, distant but precisely remembered: Perhaps if you had troubled to take a greater interest in your own origins, in the traditions and history of your people, then you would not be wasting your efforts talking to me now. You would have at least some inkling of what these murders might mean.

  Nonsense, thought Liebermann. Utter nonsense.

  Still, Liebermann could credit the zaddik with being right about one thing: he did think Barash was a lunatic, and had said so in the report he had prepared for Rheinhardt. The zaddik’s account of metoposcopy was equal in absurdity to anything he had heard issuing from the mouth of a patient with dementia praecox.

  Constable Mader coughed to attract Liebermann’s attention and gestured toward a staircase.

  “Inspector Rheinhardt is waiting upstairs.”

  “Of course,” said Liebermann, a little embarrassed that his abstractedness might have been mistaken for reverence.

  They began to climb the wooden steps but had to stop to let a photographer pass on his way down.

  “Extraordinary,” muttered the photographer. “Quite extraordinary.”

  A youthful assistant followed, carrying a tripod on his shoulders. Liebermann thought that the boy’s expression looked somewhat confused, but also a little fearful.

  The stairs delivered Liebermann and Constable Mader to a balcony.

  A door stood ajar, and through the opening Liebermann could see Rheinhardt and Haussmann. The younger man was kneeling on the floor, collecting samples of dust, while the older was twirling his mustache and looking up at the ceiling. When Rheinhardt heard Liebermann arrive, he turned, acknowledging his friend’s presence by raising his eyebrows. Like that of the photographer’s assista
nt, his expression was troubled.

  Liebermann stepped across the threshold and found himself, if not in another world, then certainly in another century.

  The room was windowless except for a small dirt-streaked skylight, and the walls were entirely lined with shelves. Each of these shelves was crammed with a gallimaufry of items: stoppered bottles, dishes, leather-bound books, scrolls, statuettes, rubber tubes, retorts, and several examples of obsolete scientific equipment. It was almost too much to take in. Among the general clutter, Liebermann saw an eighteenth-century shagreen single-draw telescope, a rusting astrolabe, and what appeared to be a very primitive electric battery. Paper labels had been gummed to the bottles and inscribed in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Liebermann walked the length of the nearest wall, pausing to inspect some of the labels, and deciphering the writing where possible.

  Phosphorus, antimony, cinnabar, sulfur, oil of vitriol…

  A workbench was littered with astrological charts and mathematical tables. An ancient calculating cylinder (made from three interlocked metal rings) and a pair of compasses had been employed as paperweights to keep a length of rolled parchment flat. It looked like an old horoscope. Against a background of fading concentric wheels and nebulous patches of moldy discoloration were planetary symbols, newly executed in bright red ink.

  The floor had been decorated with a large esoteric design. It consisted of ten painted circles arranged in an approximate diamond shape and connected to one another by thick lines. Some of the circles were more interconnected than others. Thus, the central circle possessed eight lines of connection, whereas those occupying the extremities of the diamond had only three. Every circle and every thick line was marked with a letter (or several letters) from the Hebrew alphabet.

  Liebermann’s attention was captured by a row of large glass jars on the opposite side of the room. Floating in a pale yellow liquid were several body parts-eyes, heart, fingers, and spleen-and included in this macabre collection was a small creature in a state of advanced decomposition. Liebermann drew closer. The skull and rib cage were visible beneath remnants of decaying flesh, and thin threads of hair floated up from the exposed beige-ivory crown. Lower down, the spine sank into a pocket of tarnished silver scales that tapered before expanding outward again as a ribbed fish tail. It was utterly grotesque. The young doctor snorted in disgust.