by Rick Blechta
He stepped forward from the gloom of a doorway and inclined his head briefly. “At your service.”
In his hand he had a rather impressive automatic with an equally impressive silencer, and from the way he held it, you could tell that he knew how to use it quite well. How much else hadn’t we known about this guy?
“How did you follow me here? I didn’t see anyone!” I exclaimed.
“You did not see the ones you were not meant to see, Herr Lukesh.
My people have always been with you since you arrived in Vienna.”
“You can’t possibly think you’re going to get away with anything, Schatzader. This is a public building, and besides, I’ve told people what I’m doing. You’re going to get caught one way or the other, so give up.”
He laughed, and I then noticed my two companions didn’t share my assurance. “Should I tell him or will you? You see, my dear, overconfident fool, the Schönbrunn closes at half past four in the winter months, and it is now well past that time. Everyone except for two guards have gone home for the day. One is here and sadly, I don’t think the other will be bothering us. No, I assure you that we are enough alone at present for my purposes.”
“What about the people who live upstairs?”
“The residents cannot come down here and are two floors away in any event.”
“There are alarms.”
“Have you noticed any alarms back here? That is because there is nothing worth stealing in this part of the Schönnbrunn... usually! Tonight is different, though, isn’t it, my dear?”
Gertrud stepped out of the gloom behind her husband.
Something in her eyes told me that she was equally at home with murder. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
She smiled in that same sensuous way I remembered from our meeting. Gertrud got off on this.
“I guess it makes no difference if you know now, since you will soon be joining poor Rudolph and that little bitch of a maid,” she said. “Yes, Heinrich and I killed the baron, but the maid was mine alone. They were both so stupid! Baron Rudolph told me exactly what he was going to do to your wife, and it was obvious he’d drugged her when we met him in the hall. I knew all about that drug and its effects. It was as if he was begging us to kill him! Later, the stupid maid contacted me to say that she had a video tape of what we’d done. I could have it for one million American dollars. Little fool. The night I met with her, your wife so kindly walked into the apartment and put her head in the noose for us a second time. And then the gallant husband showed up. I should thank both of you. It couldn’t have been better if we’d planned it!”
Thekla had been far more scheming than we’d imagined. She’d contacted everyone she could possibly make money from and had been playing all sides against the middle. Tory would get the manuscript, and Gertrud would get the tape made in the bedroom (the other, presumably made in the garden, was of little importance to her) but that triumph would be short-lived when I received another copy of the same tape. Very neat—until it all began to unravel. The lovely Gertrud had bitten back. I wondered what she’d felt like when she’d found the second set of tapes that night, the ones meant for me. I’ll bet old Gerty had crowed over that! What she didn’t know yet was that Thekla had hidden a third set (my bet was they were the originals) at the Schönbrunn, as insurance. In the end, it did no good.
The really sad thing is that Thekla would have been revenged if I’d been quicker on the draw and asked Tory the right combination of questions a lot sooner, or if I’d bothered to tell someone what I’d figured out instead of galloping over here so I could save the day singlehanded. Could have, should have. Bitter tasting words in my mouth.
On a command in German from her husband, Gertrud patted down Ertmann and the guard for weapons. Ertmann had none, and she quickly took Hauser’s stun gun.
“But you still can’t get away with it,” I told Schatzader.
“Get away with what? Your deaths? I assure you we can. I may have to testify at your poor widow’s trial, but what of that? I will have my reward! The Beethoven manuscript will be mine.”
“But you won’t be able to let anyone know you have it.”
He shrugged. “Having it is enough. I may give it to the national library after my death so it will not be lost forever, but who knows?” He motioned to his wife. “My dear, why don’t you remove Herr Lukesh’s prize from the faience?”
Even though she was wearing jeans, she looked at the floor in distaste before kneeling. Imagine her surprise when she felt the video cassettes on top of the plastic bag containing the score. There followed a very unladylike stream of German invective.
“Today is indeed my very lucky day, Herr Lukesh!” Schatzader said, looking over one of the tapes. “Clever girl, Thekla! A double, double cross. To think how close we came to disaster. It is good that you killed her, my dear.” He motioned to us with his gun. “Come, my friends, we will go up to the attic now.”
I didn’t move. “How do you think you’re going to be able to get away with this? Are you mad?”
“Quite the contrary. Having Ertmann, the head of the Observationsgruppe—you were hoping I did not know who you were, didn’t you?—so obligingly here has made my job far simpler. Don’t you know that he showed up as you were stealing the video tape of Baron Rudolph’s attack on your wife? You forced him into the freight elevator, took him up to the attics where you killed him the same way you killed Thekla. However, there was a struggle and you died as well. So unfortunate!”
“What about the guard?” I asked, indicating Hauser.
“Oh, you killed him as soon as you had no more need of his help, didn’t you?”
While Schatzader had been speaking, Gertrud had quietly moved behind Hauser, and as her husband finished speaking, she simply reached forward with a wicked-looking knife in her hand and calmly slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood cascaded from the wound like a burst dam, and Hauser collapsed to his knees with a horrible gurgling sound before pitching forward onto his face. I fought down a wave of nausea. Even Ertmann seemed affected.
“Now get moving!” Schatzader said, indicating the direction with the barrel of his gun.
Instantly, pandemonium erupted from every corner as whistles blew, doors opened and police streamed in from all sides. Ertmann in the meantime, taking advantage of the confusion, had hurled himself sideways, knocking Schatzader to the ground. The gun was jolted from his hand and slid across the floor right to the feet of—I raised my eyes and nearly crossed them in disbelief. Müller!
The police quickly subdued the Schatzaders, and two cops bent over the wounded guard. Müller barked something at them and one turned, shaking his head.
Müller, looking every inch the Oberstleutnant, strode over to me. “Still playing by your own rules, eh, Herr Lukesh? See what it has caused? A brave man has been killed because of you!”
I could only think of one suitable answer. “Do you know what your problem is, Müller? You say the stupidest things, and you’re too much of a fucking dumbass to realize it.”
I think he actually would have belted me if Ertmann hadn’t stepped between. “Come, Herr Lukesh! We have a small errand to run, ja? And you, Müller, I have given you your glory. The guard’s death is unfortunate, but you know as well as I that it was nobody’s fault but hers.”
We all looked to where he was pointing. Gertrud Schatzader, hands already cuffed behind her, glared at us venomously. A cop stepped forward and handed the video cassettes and manuscript to Müller.
Glaring at the pompous ass, I said, “You’ll find one of those cassettes shows that the murder case against my wife is not as clear cut as you think.” I turned to Gertrud. “You told Tory to stab him, didn’t you, or did you actually have to hold her hand so that she could? In the condition she was in, Tory probably would have dropped the damn thing. It wasn’t much of a risk. You knew that drug would affect her memory.”
Ertmann stepped behind me and started to cut the rope around my wrists. “It i
s actually quite fortunate that Hauser tied you up, my friend. When Schatzader appeared, you looked as if you were planning to try something heroic, bound hands or no.” He looked over at Hauser. “Then, I am afraid it would have been you there on the floor with the guard.”
I rubbed my wrists to get the circulation going again, then reached out and snatched the plastic bag from Müller. “The tapes you can keep. I really have no interest in seeing what’s on them, but I’m taking this with me!”
I started off down the corridor.
Behind me, Ertmann said something to Müller in German then >rushed to catch up with me. “You really are the most extraordinary man, my friend, most extraordinary.”
“Yeah, well, I’d rather be given the opportunity to be ordinary for awhile.” I stopped and looked at him. “You know what else, Herr Ertmann? I cannot begin to tell you the awful things that went through my mind when I came to and found you standing there. Why didn’t you let me know that you were following me, too?”
“I was afraid that you would not have acted naturally. Besides, would it have made a difference? You would have still gone on your way like a bull in a shop that sells china. We knew you were being followed, and my people were following the followers. I had told the unfortunate Hauser to contact me immediately if someone came here again asking questions. If there was something to be found here, I didn’t want it being whisked out from under our very noses! It is a good thing I spoke to him, the poor man, or you might have been alone in that corridor with Schatzader and his wife. Müller was right about that. Hauser was indeed a hero. But, my friend, you too are right about Müller. I do not know why he held his men back quite so long.”
“I don’t know how he kept all of them quiet. He must have brought half the Vienna police force with him! And I say you’re a total bastard for stringing me along the way you did.”
Ertmann laughed uproariously and shook his head.“You Americans! Still, I would much rather be a ‘bastard’ than a ‘fucking dumbass’.”
***
Even after looking at her for about the hundredth time, I still couldn’t believe that Tory was actually sitting across the hotel room from me, propped up on a mass of pillows on the bed in our new hotel room. Next to her on the bedside table was a glass of bubbly she hadn’t touched. Ertmann, Schultz, Seidelmann and I had made serious inroads into the two bottles I’d ordered from room service, with plans already afoot to order another.
It had taken a surprisingly long time to get Tory sprung from the jail. Ertmann had sworn that Müller wouldn’t have stooped so low as to hold up her release, but I wasn’t so sure. Fortunately, word hadn’t yet leaked out about what had happened at the Schönbrunn (probably because Müller was trying to figure out what to tell the media), so there was only one lowly photographer covering the police beat on hand to snap what became a Pulitzer prize-winning shot of a weary-looking Tory leaving the Polizei Präsidium with Schultz holding her up on one side and me on the other. It was the amazed expressions on the cops in the background which gave the picture its instant notoriety. Brother, did they look shocked!
We watched Müller’s news conference later in the evening, and to hear him tell it, he’d sorted out the whole mess himself. Ertmann and I agreed that the only thing important to us was the end result, and if Müller wanted to gloss over the truth, that was fine with us. There was some footage of the Schatzaders being lead out of the police station for a trip to their waiting jail cells. The best part was the swelling on the side of the old goat’s face where his face had hit the floor when Ertmann had knocked him over, and the fact that the lovely Gertrud had broken a heel off her shoe. It’s pretty hard to look glamorous when your shoes make it impossible to walk evenly. Tory cackled like a hen when she saw it.
The events, when they became known, stunned the world’s media almost to silence, but sadly only for about five seconds. Then they were forced to backtrack on almost everything they’d been saying. Looked good on them.
Tory’s mom and dad had cried when she called them up to tell them the news. It had been tough for them.
The woman herself looked over at me. Smiling, I raised my glass, and she returned a wan smile of her own as she raised hers. I was about to ask if she was hungry when the phone rang.
I simply detoured to the phone. The desk had been told only to let through calls from two people.
“Oscar?” The voice coming out of the phone sounded scratchy and faint.
“Roderick! I’ve got some absolutely stunning news.”
“So do we. That’s why I’m calling!”
“Your voice sounds like it’s coming from the moon. Where the hell are you?”
“Moscow. You’ll have to speak up. I can hardly hear you. Damn Russian phones!”
“What in God’s name are you doing there? I thought you and Elen were in Bonn!”
Roderick chuckled. “Research. Actually, we got here via Berlin! It’s incredible how much the materials on Beethoven’s life have got scattered around the globe. Just be thankful that we didn’t have to go on to the States. That was our next stop.”
“You mean you’ve found something?”
I could hear Elen’s excited voice in the background. “Tell him! Don’t keep the poor man waiting.”
“Tell me what, Roderick?”
“Elen wants me to tell you that we’ve found it: solid evidence that Beethoven wrote that concerto.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Elen was right about the sketch books. Trouble is, the originals have wound up in this library and that, and in no logical order, either. We checked all the materials in Bonn at the Beethovenhaus and drew a blank. You really have to go right to the source materials, of course—or a photostatic copy at the very least. You can’t get what we needed from a document which some so-called scholar has picked over and analyzed. Here. I’ll let Elen tell you herself. She’s just about ready to climb down the phone line, anyway.”
Elen indeed sounded giddy. “Rocky! I can’t believe that we actually found it! I think there are only about two or three of the sketchbooks from Beethoven’s last years left that we haven’t thumbed through.
“This one, some scholars think, dates from early 1826, but others argued it was from earlier, and it isn’t widely known, since it was thought to have nothing of value in it. They’d found it puzzling and figured it was some ideas which Beethoven discarded or never got around to using, but one of the first things in it is definitely the theme for the opening of that gorgeous slow section. In another spot, we found about three variations of that amazing opening run. The last version is almost note-for-note what we’ve heard Tory play.” “It’s quite completely worked out,” Roderick’s voice interrupted, sounding as if he were speaking into the phone while Elen held on to it. “A couple of other spots in the sketch book include other melodies from the work, even some of the accompaniment.”
“That’s really great, you guys,” I said. “You’ve done some really terrific work.”
Elen said, “The least you could do is sound more excited about it, then. Is anything wrong?”
“Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but what you’ve accomplished is pretty much irrelevant. Oh, it’s useful historical information to have of course, but it’s not really needed any more...”
“Why not?” they said in unison.
“Because I’m sitting here looking at the goddamn manuscript right now!”
Back in Moscow, whichever of them was holding the phone dropped it.
How did we manage to uncover the truth when the entire Vienna Gendarmerie couldn’t? Well, we stumbled around in the dark a great deal and hoped desperately that the criminals were dumber than we were—kind of like a regular police force does...”
—Roderick Whitchurch
Chapter 33
ROCKY
Tory was incredibly angry with me for what I’d done to Roderick and Elen on the phone. I put it down to a release of excess tension, but I could only stand there
laughing while she pummelled me ineffectually with both hands and gave me a good cursing out.
Eventually, we remembered our friends back in Moscow and put the receiver at our end back on the phone. They rang again, and Tory spent the next ten minutes in a tearful reunion.
I walked over to where Seidelmann was sitting and quietly asked him, “Is this usual behaviour?”
“Your wife still has a number of issues,” the good doctor replied, looking at me steadily. “This would have been an ordeal for anyone, of course, but it has been far more difficult for Tory due to her temperament. It will take time for her to assimilate it all, and she may never be quite the way she was before. Who knows? It is up to her, and time, to heal these wounds—and they are deep, my friend. They are deep.”
***
When everyone had left, I pulled up a chair beside Tory, who was sitting, staring out at the lights of Vienna.
“Some champagne, love?” I asked, holding the bottle.
She shook her head. “If I even smell it, I’m back in that horrible garden with Baron Rudolph.” She smiled crookedly. “Never thought I’d live to say it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to drink champagne again.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Oh, this and that.” We both sat quietly looking out the window awhile, before she added, “So your friend Ertmann advised you not to see what was on that video.”
“You heard?”
Tory reached out and twined her fingers in mine. “Rocky dear, I don’t pee that loudly.”
Ertmann had stayed behind at the Polizei Präsidium after Schultz and Tory and I had left for the hotel. He wanted to be present for the preliminary questioning of the Schatzaders. He had learned only a little before he left, but it was enough. He’d also seen parts of the video tapes. Shortly after he’d arrived at our hotel room, Tory had excused herself to visit the bathroom, and I’d taken advantage of her absence to ask him what they showed.
“I would not recommend you ever view either video, but they show enough for our purposes. It is no wonder that Frau Schatzader was willing to kill for it. She will go to jail for many years.”
