The Strangler's Waltz

by Richard Lord

  Her eyes were open, staring blankly into a further distance that could be shared with no one. As the artist crouched down for an even closer look, he noticed the purple spread of bruises across the throat. He reached out, about to touch her, but then pulled back, suddenly repulsed. No touch was necessary: it was clear to him that the woman was dead.

  Standing up slowly, he continued staring at the face for a full two, maybe three minutes. She was quite attractive, even in this position, this state. Heavily made-up with bright lipstick and alluring eye shadow accentuating the size and shape of her eyes. He then scrutinized her dress, which was rather seductive, slutty almost. He swallowed hard, though his mouth was suddenly dry.

  Shards of impressions started fitting together into a deduction. A dead woman, neck severely bruised; the burly man hurrying from the alleyway, staring at the young man with fear, then pushing him away roughly; the man’s hurried departure. It was pretty obvious: the man had strangled the woman, then fled the scene. Young Adolf Hitler had just witnessed the immediate aftermath of a brutal murder.

  He jerked his head upwards and started looking around. He wasn’t sure what to do. Should he try to find a policeman, or tell whoever he ran into on the street about the grisly discovery he’d just made? But just a few seconds of reflection convinced him that neither option would be wise. He himself could well become a suspect here. And his position as a poor, struggling artist with a reputation for rapid flashes of temper and even a few minor scuffles would possibly make him a prime suspect.

  No, the safest course of action for Hitler would be to follow the lead of that burly bastard and high-tail it out of there as quickly as he could. Hearing footsteps down on Seidengasse, he decided to exit via the other end of the alley. But first he used his foot to push the woman’s body closer to the wall. He wanted to be sure that anyone else who found the body that night would have to be looking for it, or at least walking the full length of the alley.

  He then loped to the Burggasse exit, slowing up only as he neared the corner; no need to draw attention to himself. As he peered down Burggasse, he saw three people, young like him, about fifty meters away. But coming in his direction. He crossed the street, shifted the leather case to his right side, and started walking in the opposite direction from the trio.

  He bent his head downwards and off to the side. That way, even if one of them glanced over, they’d never be able to identify his face later. But they were all too drunk and too absorbed with each other, singing and laughing as they passed him by across the road. He pulled his head back up and, looking down a dark street lit by pale lemon lighting, he tried to imagine what lay ahead. But what had just happened was so disturbing that all he could imagine was that by the time this ended, everything in his life might be thrown totally upside down.

  He picked up his pace.

  Chapter 2

  The body wasn’t officially discovered for another three hours. The unlucky person who found it was a one-armed beggar who had gone to the trash can to scavenge for anything useful he might find there. Seeing the dead woman, he at first just stared, transfixed as much by her beauty as her coldness. Then, as he came out of his trance, he started screaming. And screaming. And he kept on screaming for several minutes until people in the apartment building across the way came down to pummel him for waking them up. Then they joined in on the gruesome discovery.

  When the police arrived, they began their interrogations immediately. It was clearly a case of strangulation, and that’s how they proceeded. As the one who found the body was a one-armed man, they were able to rule him out quickly. The rough estimate made for the time of death would also have diminished any suspicions about the man who had found her. Actually, the second one to have found her, though police were fully ignorant of that key fact.

  * * *

  Back at the hostel for homeless men that had been his temporary home for three years now, Hitler was too shaken to attempt any sleep. The exhaustion that had possessed him earlier, before he ventured down that alley, had pretty much faded. His limbs and neck were still heavy with exhaustion, but his mind was racing. The problem: it was racing in every which-way, with thoughts and emotions scraping into each other as he tried to find a focus on the events back there off Mariangasse.

  He had gone to the commons room just off the entrance when he arrived at the hostel. After just sitting there for a few minutes, trying to pull his thoughts into some kind of cohesive thrust, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few minutes. When he opened his eyes again, he had some sense of emotional balance. Or at least he had an idea that made some sense.

  Pulling out his sketchpad from his leather case, he opened to the first empty page, about three-quarters back in the book.

  And then, slowly, fastidiously, he drew a sketch of the dead woman’s face as it was etched there in his memory. But in his sketch, she wasn’t dead. She was asleep, a seductive smile on her face, as if swept up in a dream of a romantic encounter.

  When he finished the sketch, Hitler sat back and stared at it for a short time. Finally, he smiled. It was if he had redeemed her from being the victim of a murder, had somehow revived her with the skills of his hand. More, this was a real breakthrough for him: he was seen as an artist who could only copy the work of other artists. He had never been successful drawing or painting from real life, not even inanimate objects like bridges or buildings. But here he had produced a wonderful sketch from the image in his own head.

  He stood and paced about the room a bit, taking deep breaths every few steps. Then he sat down again to sketch the face of the man who had stormed out of the alley. He thought he would have much more trouble with this sketch, but he was surprised to discover that it, too, came without much difficulty. When he was finished, Hitler stared at the face with contempt. He hated this face, even though he knew so little about the man behind it.

  When he’d finished both drawings, Hitler was still not ready for sleep, so he slipped the sketchbook back into his case, got up and stumbled out of the homeless center. As often when he was in a jumble of emotions, he would walk around for a while, just in the immediate area, and try to pull the curtain down on the night’s events.

  His thoughts kept swirling – but always coming back to the dead woman, of course. He thought of other dead people he had seen: mainly his mother and his father. But those cases were very different. His mother had died of cancer after almost a year of excruciating suffering. “A merciful release” some of the neighbors, even his own relatives, had called it. But for Hitler, whose mother had been the fixed center of his life for so long, this sentiment was taken as a near personal attack on him.

  His father had died suddenly. Out for a morning walk, he had dropped into a favorite inn for a glass of wine and died of a lung hemorrhage before the wine he ordered could be brought to the table. Hitler had not seen his father dead until the wake, and although he had despised the man for most of his youth, right up until the day of his death, as he stared down at the corpse in the open coffin, a veil draped over the lid, what he saw was a pitiful man who had killed himself with daily overdoses of bile. Adolf, still a teenager then, had cried bitterly at seeing his once feared father reduced to a cold corpse.

  But this woman in the alley was so much different. For one thing, she was so much younger, perhaps not much older than Hitler himself. And though he had always found a kind of hidden beauty in his mother, the woman in the alley was beautiful in an overt, even ostentatious way. He closed his eyes as he thought of that face again, trying through brash will to blank it out. But it remained, so he opened his eyes and continued walking down the lane, hoping to wear himself out fully and then collapse into sleep.

  Chapter 3

  The police detail first called to the scene to investigate were junior officers assigned to night operations: the “red-eyed pulleys”, as they were called. They had carried out all the sweep-up work, but were replaced by full investigators early the next morning.

  The Vie
nnese police force in those twilight years of the Habsburg monarchy had its own pet names for the various levels of police work. Every member of the force knew these terms and used them on a daily basis.

  The scuffed-boots police who made street arrests and pulled in obvious or ostentatious criminals were called “hooks”. “Pulleys” were those cops who did the preliminary work on more complicated cases, such as murder scenes, while “loupes” was the name for full-rank inspectors. That term came from the jeweler’s loupe, the thumb-sized magnification device jewelers used to detect fine details. Not surprisingly, the “loupes” commanded the most respect among fellow officers.

  (Those were not the only nicknames in the department; although they were unaware of it, senior officers who carried out most of their work from behind desks were called “the seat farts” by members of the other three groups below them.)

  Because of several peculiarities surrounding this case, two of the more respected loupes in the Vienna force were assigned to the case: Karl-Heinz Dörfner and Julian Stebbel. Though both were seasoned veterans of the police force, they’d only been together as a team for half a year. And neither one was altogether happy about being paired with the other as an investigative team.

  But the district commander had decided that it was a good pairing. The strengths of Dörfner complemented the strengths of Stebbel and vice-versa. Which also meant that the strengths of one made up for shortcomings in the other. Commander Willhof himself thought it was one of his more inspired pairings. Of course, Willhof was eased into retirement a short time after pairing up the two.

  It would be another half-century before the phrase “good cop-bad cop” came into use, but that was the principle operating behind this pairing. Karl-Heinz Dörfner was bigger and more physical in many ways than his more experienced partner; he could be intimidating without even trying.

  Julian Stebbel was shrewder and better able to trick people into revealing what they didn’t necessarily want to reveal. Accordingly, Dörfner took the lead in questioning suspects or recalcitrant witnesses who were easily cowed; Stebbel stepped in when a witness needed to be wooed, a suspect needed the surgeon’s-scalpel form of interrogation rather than the iron-fist method.

  Dörfner was actually from a small town in Steiermark known for its resentment of most of what the modern world offered. But young Karl-Heinz quickly outgrew his affection for small-town life and those small-town minds that fit snugly on the dismal side of life’s horizons. Stationed in Vienna as a young soldier, he remained in the metropolis after his compulsory military service had ended.

  Because of a respiratory problem, Julian Stebbel had missed military service. A native of Innsbruck, Stebbel had completed his secondary education at a respected classical education Gymnasium in his home town before moving to the imperial capital, where he had slogged through two years at the University of Vienna before deciding to sample a career in law enforcement.

  Their differing backgrounds were reflected in their personalities: as a rule, Stebbel spoke quietly and at a measured pace, as if testing each word before he let it out. Dörfner, in contrast, usually spoke at a rapid tempo; some might even say his speech too often ran a few steps ahead of his thinking. Julian Stebbel was clearly one of those who might say that.

  Chapter 4

  Adolf Hitler rose early the next morning, something not at all typical of him. Other long-term residents of the Meldemannstrasse men’s hostel knew there was definitely something wrong with their Adi. For one thing, he was lock-lipped quiet. You wouldn’t want to say that Hitler was unusually quiet that morning. Hitler being quiet went far beyond the borders of unusual; it was more like mind-boggling. This was the fellow who had a strong opinion on just about any topic and was more than willing to share it with just about anyone. That trait had earned him the nickname of “the Linzer Lip” from his fellow residents.

  On a typical morning at the Meldemann, a casual comment about the weather could launch the “Linzer Lip” into an impassioned screed. If it was miserably cold that morning, or if the day had started with dark sheets of rain, Hitler would give his take on that occurrence. More than often, he would find some way of dumping the blame for the miserable weather on the glut of Slavs in Vienna, or on some plot stewed by the Freemasons or secret cabals. If none of his Jewish friends at the hostel was around to be offended, he’d also lay an attack on the “Hebrew tribe”.

  But on that morning of April 12, Hitler had little to say about anything. When others greeted him or asked him something, his reply would be two, maybe three words. A few times, he merely shrugged, not having really heard what was said.

  Those who knew him casually were afraid that he had the flu or some other contagious disease. They weren’t really concerned about Hitler; they were more worried about how such a disease could spread quickly in a residence with over 500 men of shaky constitutions.

  Those who knew Hitler better knew that he suffered from a chronic queasy digestive system; this, they suggested, was the cause of his strange demeanor that morning. He’d probably eaten something unhealthy the night before, they said; maybe he’d gone to that filthy Imbiss a few streets over and sampled some of their dubious meats. He’d be better after a few good shits, these guys decided.

  Of course, they were all wrong. But the brittle artist was not about to share a hint of what was really troubling him that morning. He went down to the large dining hall and ordered a cup of tea, which he downed quickly. He then headed back upstairs, threw a few things into his bag, pulled on his overcoat and headed out into the yawning streets of Vienna.

  He had decided to treat himself to breakfast at one of his favorite cafés that morning. Though he hadn’t made the big sales he’d hoped for the day before, he still had enough extra cash from a good two weeks previously that he could afford the mild extravagance.

  He took a table in a far corner of the Café Branntweiners, flagged down a waiter and placed his order. While waiting for his coffee and light breakfast to arrive, he bustled over to the newspaper racks and pulled down four of his regular reads. He first turned to the Neues Wiener Tagblatt and started quickly scanning the headlines. Though he was a ravenous reader of the papers, that morning, he was interested in one story only. Starting at the top, he moved down the page quickly looking for that story. Yes, there it was, in the lower right-hand corner: a neat cube of sentences about the murder. An unidentified woman, the report said, had been found in the alley off Mariangasse, the apparent victim of a fatal assault. No other details were provided.

  The same was true of the other three papers spread across the table. In fact, one of them could only devote a four-line smudge to the incident. Obviously, the story had come in too late to the editorial room. He was sure the afternoon editions would offer more extensive coverage. There he could learn more about the crime that had shaken him more than anything since the death of his mother.

  * * *

  “Hmm. Seems this fellow wasn’t too concerned with good manners or the rules about how to treat ladies. No, indeed. It will be fun to get our hands on this swine and teach him some manners.”

  Dörfner and Stebbel were heading to the police morgue after first making the obligatory stop-off at their section of the Criminal Police Department. As they strode down the sickly green corridor leading to the morgue, Dörfner read from the preliminary report that he’d snatched from the team’s in-tray. Now he read out what he took to be the salient items in the report to Stebbel.

  “Victim was found in a tight-fitting dress with a deep neckline. Victim sported brash scarlet lipstick that had been thickly applied. Victim had heavily rouged cheeks. Eyes were shadowed in violet, with lines drawn from the corners to accentuate their size. She was heavily perfumed.”

  To the police, to most Viennese actually, each of these descriptions was part of a code which, put together, clearly spelled out W-H-O-R-E.

  As Stebbel pushed open the morgue doors for his colleague, Dörfner suggested that their investigation
was already two-thirds wrapped up. All they needed now was to find out why someone had murdered this unlucky streetwalker and who that killer was.

  Doktor Gressler greeted the two inspectors; he knew just whom they had come to see. He led them to box 308 and, with the assistance of a medical student, pulled out the slab with the murdered woman’s body on it.

  The two inspectors stepped as close as they could to the cadaver and looked down, inspecting it closely. All the lavish make-up had been removed. But even without any make-up and with the bluish tint to her skin, they could see that the woman had been quite attractive, practically beautiful. They now wondered what perilous path had brought this lady to this final destination.

  “We estimate the age as perhaps in her late twenties, maybe thirty, no more than that,” Doktor Gressler said in the measured tone of the austere scientist. The two policemen simply nodded.

  “Cause of death?” asked Dörfner.

  “Oh, strangulation, definitely,” answered Gressler. “Autopsy confirmed what the untrained eye would already have guessed. Killer did a thorough job of it too: he broke three bones in the neck.” He leaned forward and pointed. “Here, here and here.”

  Dörfner nodded. “So our killer was powerful?” Dr. Gressler nodded. “Of course; the bastard.”

  Gressler then waved both of the inspectors closer. “Look at the neck bruises. Unusually broad. So that means our killer would have had wide hands. Wide across the palms.”

  Both policemen nodded. Stebbel was fully focused on the victim’s face. “Anything else that’s germane?”

  Gressler nodded. “No significant signs of struggle. That’s strange, considering the nature of the crime.”

  Dörfner untwisted his lips. “Probably means that she knew the bastard.” The doctor started to nod.

  “Or that he surprised her. Had his mitts around her neck and started the choking before she could fight back,” Stebbel interjected.