by Rick Blechta
Cemetery of the Nameless
Rick Blechta
Fondly dedicated to my son, Karel,
who travelled with me to Vienna
and promptly fell under her spell.
Alle die sich hier
gesellen.
Trieb Verzweiflung in
der Wellen
Kalten Schafl.
Drum die Kreuze, die da
ragen,
Wie das Kreuz das sie
getragen,
...Namenlos.
For they sleep here together,
Those the tides have swept in
quietly and alone.
The crosses that here stand,
Like those which they bore,
Are without names.
– Count Wickenburg
Have you ever desired something so much that you would do almost anything to get it? I was like that once. Maybe the universe has been set up in such a way that the wrath of the gods is immediately brought down on the head of anyone who does this. I wanted, and brother, did I get! I can’t tell you how sorry I am.
—Victoria Morgan
Prologue
Angrily swiping at a trickle of sweat dripping down his forehead, Hans Drost knew the thick coating of dust and cobwebs covering his face was only being smeared more, but he preferred that to stinging eyes. Why had he ever agreed to help that crone, Frau Hübner?
The overweight, sixty-eight-year-old man straightened up, slowly stretching the kinks from his back. Even with the temperature of the early Viennese spring hugging only ten degrees Celsius outside, the disused attic was turning into a sweatbox.
Like all old, unrenovated buildings, this one had become stuffed to the rafters with piles of worthless, forgotten junk—and he’d been stupid enough to agree to help clean it out. Help? Hah! Frau Hübner had left to run “errands” several hours earlier, conveniently leaving Hans to do all the work by himself.
He lifted yet another wooden box, carrying it to the stairs. With each step down, the temperature dropped by a degree or two, and at the bottom, Hans gratefully sucked in a cool lungful of air.
That’s more like it, he thought. I’ll drag out going through this box as long as I can. Maybe I won’t have to go back upstairs again today. Next week, I’ll make some excuse why I can't return to finish the job.
Setting the box down on the folding table, Hans began halfheartedly thumbing through the papers it contained. Towards the bottom, he came to a crumbling, faded gray folio tied shut by what had once probably been a bright red ribbon. Written on the cover in a spindly hand, a faded 1826 could just be made out. Lifting the bundle from the box, he carefully placed it on the table. Struggling with the knot in the ribbon, Hans inevitably tugged too hard, and it tore free.
“Scheisse!” he muttered, flinging the ratty piece of cloth to the floor.
Taking off his wire-rim glasses, the old man found a relatively clean spot at the bottom of his undershirt and proceeded to wipe away the worst of the dust. Replacing them on the end of his nose, he bent close to examine the first page of the folio. There, in the same hand as the date on the cover, he found what looked to be household accounts. To anyone who’d seen documents of this type, it was nothing special: so much spent for butter, so much for flour, so much for the servants. Picking up another sheet, something caught Hans’s eye.
Halfway down the second column were the initials L v B. Opposite was the amount this person had paid for a case of Moselle wine on January 28th. A trickle of sweat again slid down his forehead, but Hans didn’t even notice as he examined the papers more closely. Beside numerous entries throughout the year, he found the same three initials. Then, lifting some more papers from the folio, he found something curious indeed: sheets of music manuscript covered with notes done in a vigorous, undisciplined hand. An orchestral score. His long fingers trembled as Hans picked up the page and carried it over to the window, where the light was better.
Half an hour later, Hans felt so shaky he could barely stand. The contents of the box had been carefully separated into three stacks. The largest contained only household records for a person who had inhabited Frau Hübner’s building a hundred and fifty years earlier, accounts, business documents and such, and other than being curiosities of a bygone age, they didn’t hold much value. A slightly smaller stack was loose papers from a household ledger from an even earlier time, written in an entirely different hand, and they were for a different building altogether: the Schwarzspanierhaus, which once stood just outside the old city walls on the far side of the First District from where Hans now stood. These were more interesting due to all the entries with those three initials.
It was the smallest stack that transfixed Hans’s gaze, and even though he’d only studied the manuscript for a short time, he felt certain beyond a doubt. It seemed unbelievable, but he had to trust his eyes and the feeling that penetrated to the very core of his being.
The old man had stumbled upon a find unparalleled in the history of music. A thousand pounds of gold couldn’t approach the value of that unassuming pile of aged paper.
Hans gently caressed the top sheet. Nobody knew of the treasure which lay forgotten in the attic for all those years. A thought crossed his mind—a sly, evil thought. Hans, straightening up in dismay, banished it at once, but it came sneaking back almost immediately.
Frau Hübner had told him, “Throw everything into the garbage! It is of no use to me!” Would she mind if Hans kept this one small thing? Didn’t she have more money than she knew what to do with anyway?
He knew he should tell her, show her what had sat above the room she’d slept in for the past seventy years. Yes! She had not imagined anything like this. How could anyone have known?
Then Hans thought of his own miserable apartment, the ancient stereo, his collection of worn-out recordings and the broken-down piano on which he gave lessons to supplement the paltry income from his job in the shoe department of the C&A store on Mariahilfer Street. Even combined, they couldn’t pay in a lifetime what Hans would realize for a tenth of this extraordinary discovery.
“Let’s just think of this as payment for the work you’ve done here today,” Hans said to himself as he finally made the inevitable decision.
Carefully placing the fragile papers back into the empty folio, he picked up the satchel that contained the remains of his meagre lunch and placed the folio between two opera scores he’d borrowed from a friend that morning.
The only problem lay in finding the right purchaser. Until then, he mustn’t let anyone know what he had. A chance word, a slip of the tongue and a thief—or perhaps the government itself—would steal this precious thing away. The right purchaser… Hans chuckled happily. He knew just the person to approach: knowledgeable, discreet, a collector and best of all, very wealthy. Hans used to tune the man’s piano before he’d been fired ignominiously. Now, he’d finally get some measure of revenge for that embarrassment. The man would do anything to own this precious manuscript.
Later, as he walked down the echoing stairway to the ground floor, tightly clutching the satchel which contained the manuscript, visions of the wonderful things he would buy danced through Hans’s mind, so that he could barely keep from laughing out loud.
The dirty smears on his face had long been forgotten, because from that hot, dusty attic, Hans had resurrected all his dreams— and then some.
***
It has been said that to those who are in love, the Danube is blue. Starlight sparkles in its waves, and there is music in the movement of its water. The cynical (or those who have never been in love) say the Danube is muddy brown, and quite often smells. To the practical young man and his seven-months-pregnant wife slowly walking along the sho
re that late March evening, the Danube was something in between.
On this part of the river, at the edge of the Simmering industrial area in the southwest corner of Vienna, rocks had been piled along both shores as protection against erosion from floods. Rundown shacks on stilts used by fishermen dotted the shore among the scraggly trees, proof that the river was prone to overrunning its banks. Nearby, a few old factories and wrecks of factories lined the old Alberner Hafen backwater. In the grey light of an overcast day, everything looked shabby and rough, and even though the tips of the trees swelled green with growth ready to burst forth, the weather had remained stubbornly cold during the past week. Winter still seemed too uncomfortably close to unbutton your coat—even a little.
The couple had come down to this far corner of Austria’s capital, the place where they’d fallen in love, in order to enjoy a modest meal at the nearby Gasthaus Namenlosen, then stroll through the park extending along the river, part meadow, part ancient trees. In the warmer weather it would be crowded with picnicking families, but on this inhospitable day, the couple had it all to themselves as they calmly discussed their future.
They were on their way back up the road to catch the bus into the downtown when they saw it.
Later, even though both were still quite shaken, when the police inspector found time to take their statements, they managed to speak with detachment about their grisly discovery.
“I noticed something bobbing in the water just by those rocks there,” the young man said. “I thought at first that it was floating garbage.”
“That’s right,” his pretty wife agreed. “I commented to Friedrich that it was a shame people didn’t respect the river more.”
“By that time, we were almost directly above it, so I went down the rocks to the shore to remove it from the water. That’s when I saw that it was a body.” He shuddered at the memory. “Inge went back to the Gasthaus to call the authorities while I kept watch.”
The grim discovery made by the young couple hadn’t seemed particularly horrific to the two policemen who’d first responded to the call. After all, wasn’t the small, nearby graveyard hidden behind some rundown grain elevators noted simply on local maps as Friedhof der Namenlosen, Cemetery of the Nameless? That name had not been given by whim or chance.
Several times a year, bodies dumped in the Danube somewhere upstream became caught in the backwater below where the old Danube Canal returns to the main channel of its parent river. Sometimes it was an accidental death. Maybe a suicide. In this case, the cause of death was more sinister.
Any of these bodies which couldn’t be identified eventually got buried in the small, lonely cemetery tucked back among the nearby trees, to spend the time until Judgment Day under a small, black metal cross with a white porcelain disc at the center. On this disc was merely a number.
The bodies could be pretty gruesome if the carrion feeders, either fish or fowl, had gotten their turn at the remains, or if decomposition was far advanced. The Gendarmerie referred to these specimens somewhat ghoulishly as “angeschwappte”, referring to the bloating that occurs after several days in the water.
But this body hadn’t been in the river long. What had sharpened the interest of the Viennese police had been the neat bullet hole in the back of the head. The exit wound wasn’t quite so neat, but that had been the whole idea. One couldn’t easily identify a body when it had very little face left. Whoever had done the deed had taken care of the fingerprints, too. The end of each finger had been neatly severed at the last joint. Routine DNA samples would be taken and stored, but unless someone filed a missing person’s report, there would be little chance of making any progress. Often, the people who might have cared were too frightened to come forward.
And another cross would be added to the Cemetery of the Nameless.
***
Three weeks of sporadic work didn’t get the Viennese police any closer to the identity of the person whose body they’d fished from the Danube. In the vain hope that some clue might be forthcoming, Inspektor Richard Gottfried, with all of his one month’s experience in the position, had been dispatched to attend the (hopefully, from his viewpoint) brief interment service at the Cemetery of the Nameless in order to see if anyone turned up, in much the same way police the world over attend funerals whenever homicide has been the cause of death.
The service, held in the small, circular concrete chapel built into the side of a mound at the head of the cemetery, had been perfunctory, since the only people present had been the detective, a morgue assistant who’d brought the body (talked into staying to help by the bribe of a beer at the nearby Gasthaus), two gravediggers and a fat, thoroughly bored priest. No one else came to this forgotten corner of the city to see another unfortunate to his final resting place. A wasted morning.
The young detective looked up sourly as he left the chapel. The branches of the trees surrounding the small graveyard arched high overhead, and whereas in the the warmth of summer they might provide a bit of cooling shade, now, resembling bare fingers, they only made Namenlosen feel even more forlorn and desolate. The bedraggled plants among the graves and the trees would help make certain of that. But mostly it would be the rows of numbered graves, the only remaining memory of those lying beneath who had drowned in the waters of the river.
As he, too, trudged down the dirt road to the Gasthaus for some relief from the biting wind, Gottfried wondered about the person who had come to such a violent end. All the police knew was that the deceased had been around seventy, in reasonable health, and despite the loss of the last joint on each, had possessed astonishingly long fingers.
Catching sight of the Danube still rushing by in its spring flood, despite his mood, Gottfried began to hum “An Der Schönen, Blauen Donau”—despite the colour of its waters.*
* “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”
“Why did I marry her? There was no choice really. It was as if a comet came by, and I grabbed hold of its tail. I don’t think either of us consciously chose the other. It just happened.”
–Oscar “Rocky” Lukesh from an interview in Maclean’s magazine
Chapter 1
ROCKY
“Shit!”
I slammed the phone down with enough force to make my right hand smart, a stupid thing to do, really, considering how much grief it had been giving me over the past four years. A pox on my hot Hungarian temper! As if on cue, my hand began to throb painfully, driving home the reason it had felt so bad in the first place.
My redheaded wife was up to her old tricks again. No, hopefully not those old tricks. I trusted she’d learned her lesson on that score four years previously when our marriage had almost sunk in a sea of acrimony, accusations and bad publicity, brought on by the fact that I’d caught her in the arms of someone else. It hadn’t helped that we’d been on the run at the time from both the cops and a group of thugs determined to end her life—and mine too, if I got in their way. Before the whole thing ended, the body count had reached positively Shakespearean proportions, including three at the most chi-chi concert held in London that season, and broadcast live on the BBC , no less. The talk still hadn’t died down. Probably never would.
Life, though, had more or less settled down since then to something that was generally predictable—not easy when your dearly beloved is Victoria Morgan, violin virtuoso extraordinaire, and at times allaround schizoid. Don’t get me wrong. I love the woman madly. It’s just that sometimes she can be, well...difficult. It’s not that she’s an egomaniac or anything, far from it. There’s not a shred of “I’m Victoria Morgan and you’re not” about her. It’s just that she sees life differently from anyone else I’ve ever met. And you’re hearing that from someone who’s used to dealing with musicians every day of the week. You see, I’m one, too—that is, when my hand’s working the way it’s supposed to.
It had gotten pretty badly busted up at the above-mentioned concert and was currently recovering from the third operation I’d had to undergo in an
attempt to get things back into some semblance of normalcy. I’d found out the hard way that one should never get into a fight when one already has broken bones in his hand, but it had either been that or watch Tory take a bullet from a high-powered rifle at nearly point blank range.
Since I wasn’t able to play properly (and maybe never would again), I’d felt obliged to resign my position as principal trumpet in the Potomac Orchestra in Washington, DC. I would have gone stircrazy in short order if an old school chum hadn’t turned me on to a position at the Faculty of Music at McGill University in Montreal. Teaching trumpet and coaching brass ensembles wasn’t really my thing, but it was far better than brooding over my problems
Besides, I found I really liked living in the largest city in French Canada. To be truthful, it felt more like a European city, something that appealed to me. My French was pretty miserable, but getting better, and I often went for long, solitary walks in the funky neighbourhoods east of the university, or down into Old Montreal, stopping at interesting shops or trying new restaurants. The nightlife was vibrant (not that I club-hopped a lot) and the symphony was very good. My students tried hard, and I’d made a few friends on the faculty, which partially eased the loneliness when Tory was away.
I should have been happier, but even with my teaching, walking and some music arranging I’d been doing, I was left with too much time on my hands to think about the turn my life had taken. I’d always identified myself as a playing musician, and now I couldn’t do that. Then there was my almost constantly absent wife...
For some reason no one could figure out, Tory had taken up with me ten years ago when we were both attending the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. I hadn’t been able to believe my luck at the time. I’m nothing much to look at: big-boned, dark complexion, nine inches taller than Tory’s 5'2" and with the hooked nose typical of many Magyars. Tory was this goddess: wildly long copper-red hair, emerald green eyes, absolutely gorgeous and with more musical ability than anyone else in arguably the best music school in the U.S.
