Funeral in Blue

by Anne Perry

  “Of course,” the aide said soberly. “Please convey my condolences to the family.”

  “Of course,” Monk muttered, picking up his case and going out into the distinctly chilly night air, aware of the sharp east wind like a slap on his skin.

  He was up and breakfasted early the next morning, and was waiting, his temper already raw, when a fair-haired youth of no more than fourteen or fifteen approached him in the magnificent marble lobby of the hotel. He was slender, and his face had a freshly scrubbed look, probably occasioned by the weather outside. He looked more like a schoolboy than a servant on an errand.

  “Mr. Monk?” he asked with a certain eagerness which instantly confirmed Monk’s impression. He had probably come from the embassy to say that his father, or brother, could assist Monk in the afternoon, or worse still, tomorrow.

  Monk answered him rather curtly. “Yes? Have you a message for me?”

  “Not exactly, sir.” His blue eyes were bright but he maintained his self-possession. “My name is Ferdinand Gerhardt, sir. The British ambassador is my uncle. I believe you would like someone to guide you around Vienna and interpret for you on occasion. I should be glad to offer my services.” He stood to attention, polite, eager, a curious mixture of English schoolboy and young Austrian aristocrat. He did not quite click his heels.

  Monk was furious. They had sent him a child, as if he wished to while away a week or so seeing the sights. It would be inexcusable to be rude, but he could not waste either time or Callandra’s money in evasion.

  “I am not sure what you were told,” he said with as much good grace as he could manage. “But I am not here on holiday. A woman has been murdered in London, and I am seeking information about her past here in Vienna, and friends of hers who may be able to lead me to the truth of what happened. If I fail, an innocent man may be hanged, and soon.”

  The boy’s eyes widened, but he did his best to maintain the sort of calm his imagination told him was dignified. “I’m very sorry, sir. That sounds a terrible thing. Where would you like to begin?”

  “How old are you?” Monk said, trying to conceal his mounting anger and sense of desperation.

  A couple of very pretty women walked past them, giving them a curious glance.

  Ferdinand stood very straight. “Fifteen, sir,” he said softly. “But I speak excellent English. I can translate anything you wish. And I know Vienna very well.” There was a definite touch of pink in his cheeks.

  Monk had no memory whatever of having been fifteen. He was embarrassed and angry, and he had no idea where to begin. “The events I need to enquire about took place when you were two years old!” he said between clenched teeth. “Which is going to limit your abilities considerably, no matter how excellent your English.”

  Ferdinand was embarrassed also, but he did not give up easily. He had been handed an adult job to do, and he intended to discharge it with honor. His eyes did not waver from Monk’s, even though Monk’s were distinctly challenging and unhappy. “What year exactly, sir?”

  “Eighteen forty-eight,” Monk replied. “I expect you learned about it in school.” It was not a question, simply a rather tart observation.

  “Actually, not very much,” Ferdinand admitted with a slight tightening of his lips. “Everybody says something different. I’d jolly well like to know the truth! Or rather more of it, anyway.” He glanced around at the marble-faced hotel lobby where a small group of well-dressed gentlemen had come in and were talking. Two ladies seated on well-upholstered chairs exchanged a piece of entertaining gossip, bending towards each other very slightly to bridge the gap between them created by the billowing of their skirts.

  “Are you going to stay in Vienna for a while?” Ferdinand asked. “If you are, maybe you’d be better to find rooms over in the Josefstadt, or somewhere like that. Cheaper, too. That’s where people sit around in cafés and talk about ideas and . . . and plan sedition. At least, so I’ve heard,” he added quickly.

  There was no better alternative offering, except wandering around alone, unable to understand more than a few words, so with as much gratitude as he could assume, Monk accepted. He checked out of his room, settled the bill, and with his case in his hand, followed Ferdinand down the steps of the hotel and into the busy street of a strange city with very little idea of what to do or where to begin in what was looking like an increasingly hopeless task.

  “You may call me Ferdi, if you don’t mind, sir,” the boy said, watching carefully as if Monk had been not only a stranger in the city but one lacking in the ordinary skills of survival, such as watching for traffic before crossing the road, or paying attention so as not to become separated from his guide and thus getting lost. Perhaps he had younger brothers or sisters and was occasionally put in charge of them. With a considerable effort, Monk schooled himself to be amused rather than angry.

  Most of the morning was taken up in finding a more suitable accommodation in a very small guest house in the less-expensive quarter, where it seemed students and artists lived. “Revolutionaries,” Ferdi informed Monk in a discreet manner, making sure he was not overheard.

  “Are you hungry?” Monk asked him.

  “Yes sir!” Ferdi responded instantly, then looked uncomfortable. Perhaps a gentleman did not so readily admit to such needs, but it was too late to take it back. “But of course I can wait a while, if you prefer to ask questions first,” he added.

  “No, we’ll eat,” Monk said unhappily. This whole thing was abortive. He had made Callandra believe he could learn something of use when it was beyond his capabilities even to ask for a slice of bread or a cup of tea—or, as it was far more likely to be, coffee.

  “Very good,” Ferdi said cheerfully. “I suppose you have some money?” he added as an afterthought. “I’m afraid I haven’t much.”

  “Yes, I have plenty,” Monk said without relish. “I think it is perfectly fair that the least I do is offer you dinner.”

  Ferdi duly found a small café, and with his mouth full of excellent steak, he asked Monk who, precisely, it was that he was looking for.

  “A man named Max Niemann,” Monk replied, also with his mouth full. “But I need to learn as much as possible about him before he is aware that I am looking for him.” He had decided to trust Ferdi with a reasonable portion of the truth. He had very little to lose. “It is possible that it was he who killed the woman in London.” Then, seeing Ferdi’s face, he realized that he had no right whatever to endanger him, even slightly. Perhaps his parents would prefer that he did not even know about such subjects as murder. Although that consideration was rather late. “If you are to help me, you must do exactly what I say,” he said sternly. “If I allow any harm to come to you, I daresay the Viennese police will throw me in prison and I shall never find my way out.”

  “That would be very unfortunate,” Ferdi agreed gravely. “I gather what we are about to do is a trifle dangerous.”

  It was completely idiotic. Monk was foundering out of his depth and trying very hard not to let despair drown him.

  Ferdi looked keen and attentive. “What would you like me to ask someone, sir? What is it you really need to know, other than who killed this poor lady?”

  There was nothing to lose. “Say that I am an English novelist, writing a book about the uprising in ’48,” he began, the ideas forming in his head as he spoke. “Ask for as many firsthand stories as you can find. The names I am concerned with are Max Niemann, Kristian Beck and Elissa von Leibnitz.”

  “Absolutely!” Ferdi said fervently, his eyes bright with admiration.

  The rest of that day was largely a matter of asking people tentatively and being more or less dismissed. By the time Monk went to bed in his new lodgings, saying thank-you in some approximation of German, he felt lost and inadequate. He lay in the dark, acutely conscious that Hester was not beside him. She was in London, trusting that he would bring back weapons of truth to defend Kristian. And Kristian would be lying awake in a narrow prison cot. Was he also trus
ting Monk to find some element which would be a key to make sense of tragedy? Or did he know it already, and trusted with just as much passion that Monk would wander pointlessly around a strange city where all speech was a jumble of noise, everybody else was rushing about their business, or strolling in fashionable idleness, but belonging, understanding?

  Damn them! He would seek out the past! He would find it, whether it meant anything or not. If nothing else, Max Niemann would be able to tell him about Kristian as he had been then. But before he approached him, he would hear the same stories from other people, so he could judge the truth of Niemann’s account. What he needed was another member of that group from sixteen years ago, from Kristian’s list.

  He finally drifted off to sleep with a firmer plan in mind, and did not waken until it was broad daylight. He was extremely hungry.

  With much nodding and smiling, his hostess gave him an excellent breakfast with rather more rich, sweet pastry than he cared for, but the best coffee he had ever tasted. Repeating Danke schön over and over, he smiled back, and then set out with a freshly scrubbed and very eager Ferdi, who had spent all evening and a good part of the night reading accounts of the ’48 rising. He was full of a jumble of facts and stories that had gathered the patina and exaggeration of legend already. He relayed them with great enthusiasm as they walked along the street side by side towards the magnificence of the Parliament and the gardens beyond, now winter bare.

  “It actually sort of began in the middle of March,” Ferdi told him. “There was an uprising in Hungary already, and it spread here. Of course, Hungary is vast, you know? About six or seven times as big as Austria. All the nobles and senior clergy were due to meet in the Landhaus. That’s on the Herrengasse.” He pointed ahead of them. “That’s over there. I can take you if you want. Anyway, it seems they were asking for all sorts of reforms, particularly freedom of the press and to get rid of Prince Metternich. Students, artisans, and workers, mostly, forced their way into the building. About one o’clock a whole lot of Italian grenadiers shot into the crowd and killed thirty or more ordinary people—I mean, they weren’t criminals or the very poor, or lunatics like the French revolutionaries were in ’89, last century.”

  He stared at Monk as they came to the Auerstrasse and were obliged to wait several moments for a break in the traffic to cross.

  “That was the really big one,” he went on. “Ours was over within the year.” He smiled almost apologetically. “Pretty much everything is back as it was. Of course, Prince Metternich is gone, but he was seventy-four anyway, and he’d been around since before Waterloo!” His voice rose in incredulity as if he could barely grasp anyone having been alive so long.

  Monk hid a smile.

  “Then the barricades went up all over the city,” Ferdi went on, matching his stride to Monk’s. “But it was killing the people that really drove them to send Metternich into exile.” A flash of pity lit his young face. “I suppose that’s a bit hard, when you’re that old. Anyway,” he resumed, “in May they drove the whole court out of Vienna, Emperor Ferdinand and everyone. They all went to Innsbruck. Actually, you know, there was trouble just about everywhere that year.” He checked to make sure Monk was listening. “In Milan and Venice, too, which gave us a lot of bother. They are ours as well, even though they’re Italian. Did you know that?”

  “Yes,” Monk answered, remembering his own trip to Venice, and how the proud Venetians had hated the Austrian yoke on their shoulders. “Yes, I did know.”

  “We’ve sort of got the German Empire to the northwest, and the Russian Empire to the northeast, and us in the middle,” Ferdi went on, increasing his pace to keep up with Monk’s longer legs. “Anyway, in May they formed a committee of public safety—sounds just like the French, doesn’t it? But we didn’t have a guillotine, and we didn’t kill many people at all.”

  Monk was not certain if that was pride or a slight sense of anticlimax.

  “You must have killed some,” he responded.

  Ferdi nodded. “Oh, we did! We made rather a good job of it, actually, in October. They hanged the war minister, Count Baillat de Latour—from a lamppost. The mob did. Then they forced the government and the Parliament to go to Olmutz, which is in Moravia—that’s north of here, in Hungary.” He heaved a great sigh. “But it all came to nothing. The aristocracy and the middle classes—which is us, I suppose—supported Field Marshal Prince Windischgrätz, and it was all put down. I expect that was when your friends were very brave, and did whatever it was you need to find out about.”

  “Yes,” Monk agreed, looking about him at the busy, prosperous streets with their magnificent architecture, and trying to imagine Kristian here, and Elissa, battling for reform of such a vast, seemingly untouchable force of government. He had seen in every direction the superb facades of the state and government buildings, the mansions and theaters, museums, opera houses and galleries. What fire of reform had burned inside them that they dared attempt to overthrow such power? They must have cared passionately, more than most people care about anything. Where would you ever begin to shake the foundations of such monolithic control?

  He could see in Ferdi’s young face that something of it had caught him also.

  “I need to find the people on my list,” he said aloud. “The people who were there then, and knew my friends.”

  “Right-oh!” Ferdi answered, blushing with happiness and enthusiasm, striding out even more rapidly so Monk was now obliged to lengthen his own step to keep up. “Have you got money for a carriage?”

  That afternoon they saw streets where the barricades had been, even chips out of stone walls where bullets had struck and ricocheted. They had supper in one of the cafés in which young men and women had sat huddled over the same tables, planning revolution by candlelight, a new world of liberty on the horizon, or mourned the loss of friends, perhaps in silence but for the rain on the windows and the occasional tramp of passing feet on the pavement outside.

  Monk and Ferdi ate soup and bread in silence, each lost in thoughts which might have been surprisingly similar. Monk wondered about the bond between people who shared the hope and the sacrifice of such times. Could anything that came in the pedestrian life afterwards break such a bonding? Could anyone who had not been in that danger and hope enter into the circle or be anything but an onlooker?

  In the flickering candlelight, with the murmur of conversation at the little tables around them, it could have been thirteen years ago. Ferdi’s young face, flushed and lit golden by the candle in an upright wine bottle, could have been one of theirs. The smells of coffee and pastry and wet clothes from the rain outside would be the same, the water streaking the windows, wavering the reflecting street lamps, and as the door opened and closed, the splash of water, the brief hiss of carriage wheels. Except that the dreams were gone, the air was no longer one of excitement, danger and sacrifice; it was comfortable, rigidly set prosperity and law in the old way, with the old rules and the old exclusions. The powerful were still powerful, and the poor were still voiceless.

  In spite of the defeat, Monk envied Kristian and Max their past. He had no memory of belonging, of being part of a great drive for his own people, any cause fought for or even believed in. He had no idea if he had ever cared about an issue passionately enough to fight for it, die for it, enough to bond him to others in that friendship that is the deepest trust, and goes through life and death in a unity greater than common birth and blood, education or ambition, and makes you one of a whole that outlasts all its parts.

  The closest he had ever come to that was fighting a cause for justice, with Hester, and then with Oliver Rathbone and Callandra. That was the same feeling, the will to succeed because it mattered beyond individual pain or cost, exhaustion or pride. It was a kind of love that enlarged them all.

  How could it possibly be that Kristian or Max Niemann could have murdered Elissa, no matter how she had changed in the years since?

  He pushed his empty cup away and stood up. “Tom
orrow we must find people who fought in May, and in October,” he said as Ferdi stood up, too. “The ones on my list. I can’t wait any longer. Begin asking. Say it is for anything you like, but find them.”

  The first successful conversation was stilted because it was translated with great enthusiasm by Ferdi, but of necessity went backwards and forwards far more slowly than it would have had Monk understood a word of German.

  “What days!” the old man said, sipping appreciatively at the wine Monk had bought for them, although he insisted on water for Ferdi, to the boy’s disgust. “Yes, of course I remember them. Wasn’t so long ago, although it seems like it now. Except for the dead, you’d think they never happened.”

  “Did you know many of the people?” Ferdi asked eagerly. He had no need to pretend his ardor; it shone in his eyes and quivered in the edge to his voice.

  “Of course I did! Knew lots of them. Saw the best—those that lived through it, and those that didn’t.” He reeled off half a dozen names. “Max Niemann, Kristian Beck, Hanna Jakob, Ernst Stifter, Elissa von Leibnitz. Never forget her. Most beautiful woman in Vienna, she was. Like a dream, a flame in the darkness of those days. As much courage as any man . . . more!”

  Ferdi’s eyes shone. He was leaning forward, lips parted.

  Monk tried to look skeptical, but he had seen Allardyce’s painting of her, and he knew what the old man meant. It was not a perfection of form, or even a delicacy of feature, it was the passion inside her, the force of her vision, which made her unique. She had had the power to carry others into her dreams.