The Strangler's Waltz
Page 26
Rautz then dismissed the group. The inspectors finished gathering up their things and started heading out the door. Rautz threaded his way back against the stream going out the door and approached Dörfner and Stebbel. He discreetly asked them to stay just a few minutes after all the others had left.
When it was just the three of them in the room, Rautz began the extra briefing with his telling nod.
“I know that the two of you had more to do with Herr von Klettenburg than anyone else in this team. You probably got to know him a bit, certainly more than me or any of these other fellows.
“I just wanted to say that you shouldn’t blame yourselves for his death. Nobody can say you didn’t do everything you could to solve that case as quickly as possible. I think you made his pain a little more bearable for awhile, and then … Well, who knows how the human soul operates.”
“Jawohl, Herr Inspector.” Dörfner stood and Stebbel was about to when Rautz extended his hand to stay them for another few minutes.
“There’s something else I wanted to share with you two. Nobody else in the division knows this, and I don’t want you to ever tell anyone else.” The two junior inspectors looked puzzled.
“I mentioned that no suicide note has been found. That’s true, there was nothing quite like that. But there was one note discovered near the Geheimrat’s body. It was an anonymous note, crumpled up, lying where he must have dropped it. Or thrown it.
“It seems whoever wrote that note accused the Geheimrat of having an affair. But not any normal, healthy affair …” He shook his head as if he didn’t know how to say this.
“It was a … sexual relationship with … a young man. Worse, this young man was apparently a Russian, and even worse than that, he was apparently a spy for the Russian secret service.” He took a swallow of sour breath. “Very messy, very messy.
“Now whoever wrote this letter said he was intending to bring his evidence to some of the scandal sheets in the city and ruin the Geheimrat’s reputation completely. That may have been the real motive for his suicide, I don’t know.” He tapped his chin three times, each tap a mea culpa for how little he knew. “But we do have that note.”
“The main reason I’m sharing this with you is that I want you two to take care of this. After all, you were the ones who handled the Frau von Klettenburg murder, and eventually solved it. I’ll see that you get the note, but you make sure that no one else ever sees it. We don’t want to tarnish the reputation of this fine man, especially now that he can no longer defend himself.”
The two inspectors said they would take care of the matter completely.
“I knew I could rely on you. Oh, one other thing: the gun that von Klettenburg used to kill himself … it was a Steyr-Hahn M11.”
Dörfner sniffed. “The one we use.”
“That’s right; standard issue. And this one had a serial number suggesting it may have once belonged to the Vienna constabulary.” He looked around, just to be clear there was no one else there, maybe lurking outside the doorway.
“Now, I want you to be very discreet about this. Very. Snoop around, see if any firearms have gone missing recently. But don’t make a big thing about it, just see what you can find.
“The most important thing: wrap this up neatly. At the moment, it all has a nice, neat narrative to it. A murder, grief, the murder gets solved, the grief doesn’t go away, and then a suicide. Very neat, just the way I like things. See if you can keep it that way.”
Rautz then dismissed Dörfner and Stebbel, thanked them again for all their fine work and walked out just ahead of them.
As they headed back to their office, Stebbel was silent, his eyes focused straight ahead. Finally, Dörfner broke the silence.
“Funny thing there, that von Klettenburg would use one of our pistols to do himself in.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“You know … they can’t be too easy to get, those police pistols.”
He and Stebbel turned to face each other fully. After ten very long seconds of gauging each other, Dörfner nodded. “It only proves once again those rich bastards can get anything they want. Tja, everything’s easier for them.” He gave Stebbel a wink. “Come on, let’s go for a drink. I’m inviting you.”
“It’s only 10:05.”
“Who cares? It’s a lovely morning, and I think we have something to celebrate. Besides, I always like to have a nice drink with my dessert. And I would say we were just served dessert.”
He tapped Stebbel on the shoulder to underscore that last remark. The two then nodded to each other like full partners and headed for the paternoster. It had never looked so inviting as on that beautiful June morning.
Read more in the Vienna Noir Quartet
Volume Two of the Vienna Noir Quartet takes place in early 1919. Having lost not only the First World War but also its once sprawling empire, Austria has been reduced to a small, land-locked country and Vienna has lost over half of its population. The blow to the national psyche is immense.
But at the Vienna Police Force, Inspectors Dörfner and Stebbel are still the most respected investigators on the force, relied on to solve the city’s most difficult cases. It’s not long before they are thrown into a case that is quite baffling and challenges even their highly respected skills.
A man is found in the Vienna Woods, his throat slashed in a deliberate and strange design. Inspector Stebbel recalls a similar design on the throat of a murder victim several months before. Does Vienna have another serial murderer on its hands, this one a connoisseur of artistic throat slashings? More important: were the victims chosen at random, or were they targeted? And if the latter, why were they targeted?
As Dörfner and Stebbel pursue the few leads they have, they find themselves drawn ever deeper into the labyrinths of Vienna’s occult underworld. Were the two murders, and those that soon follow, just a part of some bizarre occult ritual, or is there some even more sinister rationale behind them?
Sigmund Freud is again called upon to lend his expertise to the investigations, and key appearances are also made by such Viennese notables as F.A. Hayek, Gustav Mahler and Arthur Schnitzler. As we discover, Vienna’s importance as a political capital may have greatly diminished by 1919, but its status as a world cultural and intellectual capital is as strong as ever.
About the Author
Richard Lord is the author or co-author of over 20 published books. His first full-length books were non-fiction titles, including the highly successful Culture Shock! Germany and the less successful Success in Business – Germany. He entered the field of non-fiction short stories with Insider’s Frankfurt.
For the last six years, he has been concentrating more and more on fiction, especially crime fiction. His short stories have appeared in five anthologies as well as in the now defunct Amazon Shorts program. One of his short stories, “The Lost History of Shadows”, was adapted as a mini-series for Singapore’s Mediacorp television. This followed the adaptation of his earlier story, “A Perfect Exit”, as a one-hour TV film.
Lord also has a solid track record as a playwright, with over a dozen professional productions of his one-act and full-length plays. Two of his plays were broadcast as radio plays by BBC World Service; the second of these, The Boys At City Hall … was a BBC Highlight of the Month.
Having lived in Germany for well over a decade, Lord developed a fascination for Central European culture that infuses The Strangler’s Waltz. It is projected as the first volume in The Vienna Noir Quartet, a four-book series of crime fiction set in Vienna from pre-World War I to the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany.
Copyright
First published in digital form in 2013 by Monsoon Books
ISBN (ebook): 978-981-4423-37-3
Copyright©Richard Lord, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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