by Magnus Flyte
EIGHTEEN
If there was one thing that Vienna loved more than pastries and balls, it was funerals. The Lion of Vienna was being given what was known locally as a schöne Leiche, or “beautiful corpse.” City fathers, members of the music world, religious leaders, nobles from the houses of Esterházy and Von Thurn und Taxis in full regalia, and thousands of distraught fans lined the streets as the black carriage (its glass sides revealing a stylish black Secession-style casket) pulled by four black horses with black plumes and driven by a coachman in a black top hat made its mournful way from St. Stephen’s Cathedral across the center of the city and out Simmeringer Hauptstrasse to the city’s massive Central Cemetery. And the flowers!
“Gerhard gets the Rose Parade and Nina gets a discount urn with a smiley face on it?” asked Sarah as they abandoned the famous #71 tram (“Took the 71,” Sarah had learned, was a Viennese euphemism along the lines of “kicked the bucket”). She and Alessandro made their way on foot the remaining half mile to the cemetery, all traffic hopelessly snarled.
Nina’s father had refused to leave the farm and come to Vienna to claim his errant daughter’s remains, and since Nina had expressed a wish to one of her friends that she be cremated, Alessandro and a few of her friends at the university had passed the hat to pay for the arrangements. Sarah had tracked down a number for Heinrich von Hohenlohe and left him several messages, asking if he would like to contribute to the funeral for Nina, or at least attend it. He had finally returned her calls, saying he was sorry that Nina was dead but had no intention of mourning the loss of someone who was, as he put it, “two-timing” him.
“I can’t say I really blame him,” Alessandro had said. Having met Nina on the first day of classes, Alessandro found himself in the odd position of being her oldest acquaintance in Vienna, and as an “adult” the task of choosing the urn had somehow fallen to him, a responsibility he had quickly off-loaded to Sarah. She had been a little taken aback by the selection of urns offered at the funeral home. She had been shown one shaped like a Sacher torte, one that was a replica of a soccer ball, and a clear jar where the remains could be admired like potpourri. Sarah had chosen a basic black cube, but apparently there was some mix-up, because when she got home and removed the urn containing the ashes from the cardboard box, it was the smiley face. It was highly possible, she thought, that it wasn’t Nina at all inside the box, but someone’s beloved dachshund.
At least, she thought, the urn wasn’t emblazoned with the image of Empress Sissi. Bad enough that poor Nina’s greatest fame was being linked to the insipid empress by a strange historical parallel.
For Mayerling Redux! screamed the headlines of one of Vienna’s sensationalist papers. In 1889 the beloved son of Empress Sissi and Emperor Franz Joseph had died in an apparent murder-suicide at the family’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. Crown Prince Rudolf was thirty, a married man with a child, and his lover a pretty baroness of only seventeen. Beyond the scandal, the incident was considered to be one of the factors precipitating World War I. At the time the Hapsburgs were able to cover up many details and even convince the church to allow their son to be buried in the Imperial Crypt.
In contrast, the double death/suicide of Nina Fischer and Gerhard Schmitt at Theater an der Wien was being treated with absolutely no discretion by anyone, it seemed, and had been picked up by some foreign papers. Nina’s life story, from goat girl to tattooed and pierced grad student in nanobiology, was combed over and her powers of seduction assessed. Apparently one of her roommates was part of a local coven of witches and had brought Nina to at least one “moot,” or gathering, which made great press, including a British photo-essay headlined The Lion, the Witch and Their Wardrobes. Gerhard’s romantic liaisons and musical career were chronicled, his colleagues interviewed.
Two people remained silent. Frau Schmitt remained barricaded in the couple’s Innere Stadt apartment, refusing all interviews. And Frau Doktor Bettina Müller, given merely passing reference in the press as Nina’s mentor at the university, was described as “out of town” and “unreachable for comment.”
Sarah herself had narrowly managed to avoid fame as the first to discover the bodies. After interviewing her and the stagehands and releasing them, the Polizei had apparently locked down all official details of the case, and fortunately no photos or grisly details had been leaked to any tabloids.
But Sarah could not get the gruesome picture out of her head: the two bodies entwined on the platform, the gun still in Gerhard’s hand. There had been a lot of blood and . . . bits of brain, too.
She had seen Nina that very morning . . . so alive. Sarah remembered the way Nina had said, “I seem to attract protectors,” and laughed. Sarah parsed their conversation in the lab over and over in her head, but could not fathom how, only hours later, Nina could be lying dead in front of her.
Nina and Gerhard. It was hard to wrap her head around. Some of Nina’s friends offered theories: Nina was always on the hunt for a father figure (see Heinrich), was attracted to difficult geniuses (see Bettina), and was known to be sexually adventurous (“Not so much, really,” said Alessandro).
But why had Gerhard killed her and then killed himself? Surprisingly, this seemed to be the least mysterious part of the case for everyone else. Perhaps because Vienna had long held the odd title of Europe’s suicide capital, and there was no shame in taking this method out of complicated problems, love triangles, or even just apathy. Indeed, she was told that the police never released information on the means and method of the deaths by suicide . . . too many people would copycat.
At the police station, answering questions about why she’d happened to be backstage in Theater an der Wien, Sarah had debated mentioning that Bettina Müller was the obvious connection between Gerhard and Nina. If the police forced Bettina to return to Vienna for questioning, Sarah might be able to corner her. But if Bettina was tied up in a police investigation, would she be willing or able to help Pols? In the end she did give them Bettina’s name—she felt she owed that to Nina. But the policewoman interviewing Sarah had merely nodded and said Frau Doktor Müller was being “very cooperative.”
That was particularly galling, since she was being anything but with Sarah.
Frankly, Sarah was ready to go home. Renato had called to say his tiger stripes had faded, and his seborrheic dermatitis had returned. He had made discreet inquiries of a curator in the British Museum, but the galleon had been thoroughly cleaned before being put back on display. Alessandro had not been able to determine the drug’s ingredients from its effects on Renato and Sarah, which was disappointing, and seemed to mark the end of that lead. The only good news was that Renato and Thomas were happily dating.
Bettina wasn’t answering any texts. Sarah had not found her laptop, and half the people she could ask about it were dead. The computer could be anywhere. She felt like the woman was yanking her chain. If Sarah had to start over in the search for someone who could help Pols, then the sooner she began the better. As soon as Nina was taken care of, she would leave.
Sarah had gone with Alessandro to a kind of memorial for Nina with her offbeat assortment of friends at her Leopoldstadt apartment. Girls and boys alike wore raccoon eyeliner that ran in rivulets down their faces. Alessandro had made black squid ink pasta. Today all Nina’s friends were meeting up to scatter her ashes. Lili, the Wiccan roommate, said they wanted to do it in the Central Cemetery on the day of Gerhard’s funeral, as a sort of romantic gesture to unite the lovers. Without any official permission, of course. Fortunately, the place was so enormous—nearly six hundred acres—it would be easy to find a quiet corner. Alessandro wanted to attend the ceremony, and afterward they were joining Marie-Franz for a farewell drink. Then Sarah was getting on a train back to Prague.
So here she and Alessandro were, at the funeral of Gerhard Schmitt, following friends, family, and hordes of black-clad chamber orchestra subscribers who, to what Sarah imagined would be the maintenance man’s horror, had brought an enormous
pride of stuffed lions to pile on the Kapellmeister’s grave.
They made their way along the cemetery’s leafy alleys past elaborately carved and inscribed grave after grave. It was beautiful but oppressive. The man at the funeral home had told them that being buried alive was such a common fear among the Viennese that for a long time people had asked to be interred with a string around their finger that ran all the way to the cemetery guard’s HQ, so if they woke up they could ring for assistance.
“Did it ever happen?” she had asked.
“Oh, all the time. Because of decomposition, you see. The hand would move and the bells would ring. So eventually the night watchmen just ignored it.”
Sarah had spent the previous evening with heart-stopping dream after dream of waking up in her own coffin. It wasn’t much of a break from round white rooms.
Her heart stopped again for a moment at the sight of Beethoven’s name emblazoned in Gothic letters across an obelisk. I’m here, Luigi. She was reminded for a moment of visiting her father’s grave at the cemetery. A slab of stone—no matter how pretty—was not the right tribute for greatness. Sarah lifted her head and looked at the sky, as she had done at her father’s infinitely more modest burial site. We look to the heavens, she thought. Even when we don’t believe there’s anything up there but space. But at least space is infinite.
There was a whole musical neighborhood in the cemetery, and Gerhard was fortunate enough to have earned a spot not too, too far from the cool kids’ lunch table. It was amusing, at least, to imagine Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms shooting spitballs at each other for all eternity. Sarah spotted Gluck, Czerny, Schoenberg, three Strausses, and the more recently interred Austrian superstar Falco, famous for “Rock Me Amadeus” and “Der Kommissar.”
For the actual burial rites, Gerhard’s inner circle was protected from the crowds by velvet ropes. A long motorcade awaited the luminaries for when the service was over. Sarah, Alessandro, and Nina’s half dozen tattooed and pierced friends paid their respects to the Lion and then moved away from the crowds to a private glade behind some large family crypts.
“Maybe each of us say something about Nina?” Alessandro suggested as they formed an awkward circle around the urn. Some of the girls were still in their teens, Sarah guessed, and this was probably the first time someone close to them had died.
Sarah hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what she would like her own funeral to be, but she imagined good music, brief, spontaneous tributes, not too morbid, preferably funny. It would be nice to be the impetus for some we’re-still-alive sex in the parking lot of the funeral home.
“We could chant her spirit to the afterlife,” said a short girl with a spiky green haircut whom Sarah knew only by her nickname of Rabbit.
The Wiccan Lili, swathed in black velvet, who had been weeping nearly continuously, brightened. “I think she would like that.”
“I brought a drum,” said a lean whippet of a boy, pulling a small bongo from his backpack.
“Is pagan thing?” Alessandro whispered nervously to Sarah, surreptitiously crossing himself as they all lay down on the grass on their backs, heads surrounding the urn, hands joined to form a circle. The boy began to drum.
Sarah, looking up at the cloudless, crisp blue sky above them, was expecting something silly about the Goddess welcoming Nina to her secret circle, but instead Rabbit simply began repeating Nina’s name slowly over and over, in rhythm with the drum.
“Nina Nina Nina . . .” They all closed their eyes and picked up the chant. At first Sarah’s musically trained mind focused abstractly on the sounds alone and the cadence. The chanting forced you to breathe in rhythm, like during yoga, or sprinting. The drummer increased his tempo, and the chanting kept pace. Sarah felt a strange sensation—as if she were floating, like the woman in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze at the Secession, floating above the world, but still connected to it. It was impossible to distinguish her own voice from the others’, her own self from the grass, the earth, the trees, the sky. She told herself the euphoria was merely oxygen deprivation from the chanting, but there was something quite lovely and final in the moment when the drumming ceased, the voices, too, and she opened her eyes in silence to see a lone bird silhouetted against the sky, flying away.
Maybe Nina had gotten a better send-off than Gerhard after all.
• • •
“Changes in cerebral blood flow during chanting are fascinating,” said Marie-Franz in the kitchen of her sleek and modern apartment later. Alessandro had told Sarah that it wasn’t very common for the Viennese to invite someone to their home, so it was quite an honor. The place was decorated with an incredible assortment of African artifacts gathered during her travels, many of which she said were gifts from shamans she had observed as part of her studies. “It’s been well researched using tomography scans. When you deactivate the left posterior parietal lobe, you have the sensation of floating, the transcendence of the physical self. During group chanting, people’s heart rates sync up, but even more so if the people know and love each other. It’s astounding.”
Astounding had been discovering Gerhard Schmitt’s wife draped across Marie-Franz’s couch, still wearing a fur coat.
“I threw myself on Marie-Franz’s mercy,” Frau Schmitt had called out when they came in. “I couldn’t bear to be with any of those horrible sycophants. God! Or all those dreadful public officials. What a ridiculous charade! Marie-Franz, can you make me another one of those lovely drinks?”
So Sarah had left Alessandro to comfort the widow and accompanied Marie-Franz to the kitchen, where the professor was mixing a Viennese specialty of Aperol and Prosecco.
“We shouldn’t mention that we knew Nina, right?” Sarah whispered. “Or Bettina?”
“I don’t know. Most importantly, we should get some food in her, I think.”
But when they returned to the living room, Sarah had only gotten out a “Frau Schmitt, I’m so—” before the widow interrupted.
“Please God, don’t say you’re sorry. And call me Adele. I saw you with her at the ball. The little Nina. She was a friend of yours?”
“An acquaintance, yes. We were friendly.”
“Then it’s me who should be saying I am sorry.” Adele downed her drink. “And I am. In fact, every tear I’ve shed has been for her.”
“You are very compassionate,” murmured Marie-Franz.
“Oh, you know,” said Adele. “I don’t have to pretend in front of you. My husband was a monster. That poor girl . . .” She began to weep.
Marie-Franz moved to the sofa and put an arm around her. The widow leaned into the much taller woman gratefully for a moment, and then stood up abruptly, pulling a cigarette out of her bag. Alessandro lit it and she patted him on the arm, still crying.
“It could have been anyone,” she said. “My husband had many women. I will be honest with you, I had thought of killing him myself. Now I only feel pity. Even for Bettina Müller, I feel only sorry for her. You are shocked by this?”
“Surprised,” admitted Sarah. So the rumors of an affair were true.
“When my brother’s little boy was so ill, cancer, Bettina worked with his doctors. That’s how Gerhard and I got to know her. She worked around the clock to use the boy’s own cells to create an antibody against the cancer. She warned us it was dangerous, and for a while we thought we would lose him, but last spring he turned thirteen. I truly believe she’s a miracle worker. How could I hate such a woman?”
As Adele sang the praises of her late husband’s mistress, Sarah wondered if she was giving up too soon.
“She said she would help a friend of mine, but she’s being incredibly strange about it.”
“That’s Bettina all over,” said Adele. “Suffers from terrible paranoias and persecution complexes. It’s that thing, you know, like the man in—what’s that film, A Beautiful Mind? The geniuses, they always have some mental hiccups. And she is probably saying she will not help you?”
Sarah n
odded.
“She always says that, but it is to fill the time while she is thinking about the cure. She does not want to disappoint. There is a saying that ‘Vienna is a city of people who have missed their vocation,’ but I can assure you Bettina is not one of them.”
Sarah absorbed this. “Someone stole Bettina’s laptop a few days ago,” said Sarah. “She says she needs what’s on it to help my friend. Did you or your husband find it? Or—?”
The widow looked at Sarah and began to cry again, large tears that rolled down her cheeks. “No,” she said. “I know nothing of this. But I will search the apartment when I get home.” She took Sarah’s hands in hers. “I do not want your little friend to die. We have had enough death. Enough pain. It is time to find room in our hearts for love. Let us drink to love.”
As Sarah raised her glass, Alessandro leaned in. “We should leave now to grab your bag and make the train,” he whispered. “You ready to go?”
She was still pondering this question when they got back to Alessandro’s apartment and found someone waiting for them.
“Darling,” said Nico. “What on earth have you been up to?”
NINETEEN
Café Bräunerhof was doing a lively business. The whole city was buzzing with talk of the recent death of the Kapellmeister and Nina. Not that Nina was being talked about so much. She was just “das süsse Mädel”—“the sweet girl”—of an important, wealthy man. Who really cared about her? The girl had no family, and what little she had didn’t want to claim her.
Heinrich nodded to a few members of the city’s industrial elite, who were poring over the Financial Times, Il Sole 24 Ore, and the Wall Street Journal. He bit into a Punschkrapfen. His brother would be meeting him soon. They would talk, and they would talk about family, as they always did.
