by Richard Lord
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about that.”
Dörfner took this answer as his invitation to poke into the questioning. “You can’t or you won’t?”
“In my case, the two meld into one. I’m quite sorry, gentlemen, but anything that Frau von Klettenburg told me during our therapy sessions must remain tightly locked secrets.”
“Excuse me?”
Freud offered a wincing smile as he shook his head. “Anything that might have been said is protected under the rules of patient-doctor confidentiality.”
Dörfner was not about to accept that easy way out. “Ja, ja, that’s all quite wonderful, admirable even, but here we’re talking about the vicious murder of a thirty-one-year-old woman. You can’t tell me that your ‘rules of confidentiality’ hold up in a situation like that.”
“I can and I will tell you that the rules hold no matter what the circumstances. As this unfortunate lady’s doctor, I’m like a priest bound by the seal of confession.”
Dörfner’s face twisted into a scowl. “Doctor Freud, you’re a Jew, aren’t you?”
“That’s correct.”
“So how do you dare compare yourself to a priest?” Freud’s left hand lifted off the arm of the chair momentarily, but he rested it back there almost immediately.
“As has often been said, and frequently written, we psychiatrists are doctors to the soul. So the comparison is not, I don’t think, inappropriate. As your priests work to heal and save the souls of their flock, we try to do the same with our patients.”
Still, Dörfner would not retreat. “Fine. So while you were busy saving her soul, you couldn’t help save her life. Now I think you owe it to her to tell us everything you know that might help us catch her killer. And if you don’t cooperate, we’ll get a pile of subpoenas thrown at you that will force you to testify.”
Freud drew a sigh, as if he were instructing a not-so-bright medical student. “I think you’ll find that every court in the country will support me on this. Patient-doctor confidentiality is a highly protected principle.” He then turned his gaze away from Dörfner to Stebbel. He seemed to intuit that Stebbel was the one more likely to sympathize with this, that there was a connection between the two of them.
His instincts were, as usual, spot on. Stebbel stared at Freud for a few moments, then turned to his partner. “I believe Doktor Freud is right on this point. As much as we might regret it, that patient-doctor covenant keeps him from telling us something that might help us move this case forward.”
Freud nodded in gratitude. But Stebbel then played the last card in his hand. “Is there anything that you can tell us, Herr Doktor? Anything that doesn’t fall under your medical seal of confession?”
“All I can tell you is that Frau von Klettenburg was a lovely woman, in temperament as well as outward appearance. I was deeply struck by her death. As I imagine almost everyone who knew her was.”
Stebbel picked up the loose string in that sentence immediately. “Almost everyone?”
“Again, I have hit the borders of what I am allowed to share with you, gentlemen. I truly regret that I can’t tell you any more. But you must realize the nature of my medical practice. A very special kind of practice. If I did give away any of the secrets Frau von Klettenburg revealed to me, the word would spread quickly. You know the power of gossip in a city like Vienna. If I told you any of the things my unfortunate patient told me, I would be finished. No patient would ever again trust me. I’d have to close up my practice in six months – at most. Because absolute trust, gentlemen, is the life’s sap of my profession.”
It was clear that the interview had stumbled into a dead end. There was no sense in prolonging the tussle of wills. The three men in the room concluded with the same kind of anodyne, amiable phrases they had begun the session with. The inspectors’ hope – that they had found a source who could give them a key to solving the case – was left sprawled on the floor, a cracked shell. They’d have to find some other way to start to bore into the mystery of Frau von Klettenburg’s murder.
* * *
A short time later, Stebbel was parked at his desk, noting down in the casebook the details of the futile interview they’d just conducted. Dörfner glanced over his shoulder to see what he was writing.
“You know, I don’t really trust those people. Not at all.”
Stebbel did not look up, as he did not want his partner to see the sour expression on his face. He was sure this was an anti-Semitic remark. And he had never told Dörfner that his own grandmother – a woman he adored as a child – was Jewish.
“And by those people, you mean the …?”
“Scientists.”
This time, Stebbel did look up. “You don’t trust scientists?”
“Some of them, sure. People like Dr. Gressler, or that Ehrlich guy who cured syphilis, the people who invent automobiles, electric lights, airplanes. But this Freud guy: no. Definitely not. His kind of scientist, they’re just …”
“Psychiatrists.”
“Ja, that’s the name. I don’t know, I just don’t trust them. They’re going into places science shouldn’t go. You know what I mean: digging into the minds of people, their souls. It’s just not natural.”
“Isn’t that something like what we do? When we’re trying to ferret out criminals? We burrow into their minds, their souls. Try to understand all those dark places.”
“Ja, maybe. But that’s different. We’re trying to catch bad guys. People like this Doktor Freud, he’s just doing it for … research. And he’s looking into something that should stay private. It’s perverse, you know. Anyway, I just don’t trust what he’s doing or why he’s doing it.” Stebbel couldn’t think of any better response than a shrug.
Halfway to his side of their shared desk, Dörfner turned and added one note. “And as you know, Herr Colleague, in our profession, distrust can be an essential weapon.”
* * *
That next evening after he’d been lightly raked over by Dörfner and Stebbel, Freud sat in his study poring over the pages of the file on “Stella 3”. He read carefully, and with every page that grabbed his special attention, he’d pluck the page out of the file and lay it to the side, though in the same order it appeared in the file. Next to this sheath was a sturdy manila envelope, big enough to hold the whole file if necessary. But Doktor Freud was not planning to slip in all of those pages, only the most pertinent ones.
“Stella 3” was his case name for Anneliese von Klettenburg. The pages he was removing were those which revealed much of the inner workings of her psyche, as well as information about her personal life that Freud felt could not be shared with anyone else – even if they were investigators looking into her murder.
It was easier for Freud to choose pages he needed to take out than those which could remain in the official file. For instance, he decided he could keep in those passages where Frau von Klettenburg talked about her headaches – their intensity, duration, how they sometimes got so bad she would start pounding the sides of her head with her fists, as if she could drive out the pain that way.
He also decided he could leave in those sections where she spoke about her physical appearance, especially her fears that her physical attractiveness was slowly ebbing away as she started moving into her thirties. This was ridiculous, Freud thought: she was still the kind of woman other women in Vienna would grow envious of at a simple glance, while men would continue desiring her for years to come.
Still, she spoke about putting on weight, finding streaks of grey hair, lines appearing under her eyes and the ridges forming between her nose and mouth. Such excessive fears were nothing that a society dame like Frau von Klettenburg would ever wish to share with too many people, but it was nothing that could ruin her reputation, have people in her class shun her if it were known. Probably every other wealthy woman in Europe who had entered her thirties and was moving on to her forties had similar anxieties.
The problem was that the fairly innocuous
passages were often on the same page as something quite embarrassing. And so they had to be taken out, along with the pages where the darkest journeys into the lady’s psyche were described in startling detail.
After Freud had gathered all the pages he did not wish to be seen, he eased them into the large brown envelope. When they were all nicely fitted in, the envelope bulged like a New Year’s Day carp.
He then took tape and sealed the envelope tightly. Taking up the scissors, he cut off the extra lapels of tape and placed them neatly into the wastebasket on the left side of the desk. At the top of the envelope, he wrote, in a very careful hand, “Stella, for later”.
He then rose and called out to Lena, the kitchen maid, to tell her that she could now serve his hot chocolate. When she arrived minutes later toting a tray, he handed her the envelope.
“Lena, Doktor Marklin will be coming by soon to pick up some correspondence. Put this envelope in there with the other articles. When he arrives, could you please hand it to him and tell him that I will see him tomorrow. And be sure to extend my deepest gratitude to him for picking this up.”
“Certainly, Herr Doktor.”
He then turned and took a sip of the chocolate. “Delicious, Lena. You are a true artist when it comes to making chocolate.”
After Lena left, Freud sat back and ruminated as he sipped his chocolate. Marklin was someone he could trust thoroughly. He would take care of those sections that had to remain private. Should the police find some way that they could order Freud to hand over his file on the murdered woman, all they’d be able to find there would be anxieties over headaches, grey hairs and sneaky wrinkles.
One day, he promised himself, he would definitely write an account of his work with Frau von Klettenburg and have it published. Giving her a false name, of course. Hers was doubtlessly one of the more fascinating cases he had dealt with in recent years. And what made that case all the more interesting is that some of the darker bits in her story may well have led directly to her murder.
Freud gave a slight wince: it was truly a shame that he could never share these darker bits with the police. But they had their own uses of dark truths; he himself had a professional duty to keep such dark truths safely in the dark.
Chapter 14
The von Klettenburg murder case was looking more and more like a permanent dead end – something the Viennese police had quite a few of in those last years of the Habsburg dynasty. A popular witticism in many European capitals was that if you really needed to commit a terrible crime, try to do it in Vienna; your chances of getting caught there were not all that good.
At the end of a day where the only visible progress involved shifting papers from one desk to another, or from a desk to a file, the two investigators decided to wrap things up. Dörfner headed off to a popular wine tavern, while Stebbel returned home and sat at his dining table with a glass of brandy to keep him company.
Stebbel’s home was a rather spacious, elegant flat in the Währing District, considered a plum area for the mid-level bourgeoisie. One major advantage of this apartment, in Stebbel’s view, was that it was situated a comfortable distance from both police headquarters and the general noise and clutter of downtown. As such, it let him think of the apartment as a refuge.
Such a residence was, in fact, something that a regular police inspector with only six years in that post couldn’t even hope to afford. But Stebbel had inherited the property from an uncle and aunt, a childless couple that had long considered the young Julian almost like their own son.
Shortly after he married, Julian and his wife Irina moved in and the flat underwent a wall-to-wall renovation. Irina insisted that almost all the furniture and trinkets the aunt and uncle had left Julian be removed and replaced with more fashionable furnishings and fixtures. (Stebbel subsequently spent a few years paying for all of this.) The dining table, a classic beauty, was one of the few items to survive the renovation campaign. Which is perhaps why it remained one of Julian’s favorite places in the apartment.
Many would consider this dwelling an ideal place to live, and it was the envy of many of his acquaintances. But Stebbel, who now lived there alone, often felt like a stranger in his own home. He felt as if the main occupants were actually ghosts, and he was just there as a boarder, residing at their pleasure.
Those ghosts were not only his aunt and uncle, but also his wife. In fact, it was only six months after Irina had led the take-no-prisoners renovation program that she herself left.
Yes, it was quite a comfortable, attractive place, and Stebbel had no intention to give it up. But without his wife and drained of any sense of past intimacies, the flat lacked the feel of “home” for him; it was more like a retreat than a place where he felt he truly belonged.
Even so, gazing out of the large living room window into the deep Vienna evening with its sea of lights, he felt glad to be where he was, in this city, this part of that city, and in a world in which he could still make a little bit of sense of everything. Or of most things. And these were important features for a police inspector.
Chapter 15
Exactly ten days after Frau von Klettenburg was murdered, a similar killing took place, only a few streets over from the scene of the earlier crime. This time, the victim definitely was a prostitute, a 19-year-old girl from Galicia who had been selling her wares on the streets of Vienna for the past few months. She, too, had been strangled, the neck streaked with bruises, a few bones broken. The young police officer who had been the first on the scene wrote in his report that “her eyes stared heavenwards, as if confounded at what was happening to her. Maybe imploring the Almighty for some explanation.”
The case was originally assigned to Inspectors Klaussen and Plaschke, two typically sluggish department veterans, but Stebbel and Dörfner asked that they be allowed to take over the investigation. As they argued before Inspector Rautz, the similarities between this case and the von Klettenburg were strong enough that it could well be the same murderer, probably with a similar motive. Rautz quickly agreed with them and switched around the assignments. Stebbel and Dörfner now had a second strangulation on their hands. Again, it involved an attractive woman alone at night, seductively dressed and … Yes; and what else?
This investigation had far fewer complications than the von Klettenburg murder, of course. For one thing, the victim was a prostitute, a profession that always carried a heightened risk in a city like Vienna.
The victim’s family were all back in Galicia and were totally in the dark about what was happening in the diligently dissolute capital of the empire. The young girl, Maria Kolenska, had told the family she had taken a job as a servant in a large house. The work was not hard, she wrote them, and she was earning more now than she ever could have imagined back in her hometown.
Stebbel and Dörfner talked to whatever friends of the victim they could find, along with some of the other girls who didn’t count as friends, but knew Maria because they plied the same trade on the same streets. But nothing the loupes were able to uncover gave them any really useful information. On the third day after undertaking the street interviews, the two slipped into a café near headquarters to go over their options.
“I’m really thinking more and more that our killer was a pimp,” Dörfner said as he sunk his fork into a piece of curd cheese strudel. “He killed this young thing for whatever reason pimps kill their whores. And with Frau von Klettenburg … well, the way she was dressed that evening and everything else, he probably thought that he had chanced upon some exciting new talent and wanted her to join his stable. When she refused, he decided to make his point a little more strongly.”
Stebbel nodded. “It’s also rather likely that she would have said something nasty to him. In her polished accent, too. This would have enraged the brute, and he decided to teach her a lesson.” Dörfner’s mouth was stuffed with strudel, so all he could do was nod energetically.
“Or it could have simply been a matter of mistaken identity. The pimp though
t this was one of his streetwalkers or someone who owed him something, and by the time he’d strangled her, he realized his mistake.”
Dörfner took a large slurp of coffee to wash down the remaining strudel. “You know what – I think it’s time we went to see the Turk.”
Stebbel agreed. “He’s probably the best one to help us out of this corner. But why don’t you go by yourself to see the Turk. You always seem to have a much greater sense of rapport with him.”
Dörfner nodded. “We share a love of fine … conversation.”
Chapter 16
The Turk’s real name was Redizade Bahadir Sakir Efendi. Turkish indeed, but only half Turkish. His mother was French; his parents had met while the mother was on an exotic holiday in Turkey with her sister, an aunt, and an older brother. A whirlwind courtship followed, and then Mademoiselle Louise Lascelle married Redizade Tamur Hoca Efendi in a civil ceremony in Istanbul. Their only child’s stunning good looks were one of the many gifts bestowed on him by his two slightly wealthy parents, who were known as a very handsome couple. His given name was Bahadir, but to the French side of his family, he was simply “Bernard”.
Born in Istanbul, Bahadir spent his early years there and in Paris. At the age of ten, his parents had sent him to an English boarding school, hoping that he would quickly acquire skills in speaking English along with the veneer of an English gentleman. But the main thing that he acquired there – actually mastered – was a penchant for cheating and breaking rules.
He eventually managed to get himself kicked out of the boarding school, but only after he had learned the skills that he would build his later career on.
He then proceeded to engage in a number of business failures in Istanbul and other places. Because of family connections on his Turkish side, a somewhat tarnished Bahadir was finally able to secure a respectable position in the Ottoman Embassy in Vienna. Arriving at the embassy in the early spring of 1909, he almost immediately found his footing. His principle duties at the embassy seemed to be fulfilling a number of nebulous assignments, but these he saw as pretty much side affairs.
