The Empty Mirror (7 page)

“Or chooses not to,” Werthen added.

“Or chooses not to,” Meindl allowed. “Which amounts to the same thing.”

“You assume Herr Klimt was the girl’s only ‘friend’?” Gross suddenly asked. “Have you spoken to her roommate?”

“Surely these murders presume someone with more strength than a mere slip of a girl,” Meindl replied.

Gross grimaced and shook his head as if disappointed in his former apprentice. Werthen, however, understood what he intended.

“He means that Klimt has told us that Fräulein Landtauer sent a message to cancel their sitting the night she was murdered. She said that she had to take care of her sick roommate. Klimt knew it was a lie, though, for he saw the very roommate leaving his premises after delivering the note. That Fräulein Landtauer felt it necessary to concoct a lie with which to cancel her appointment with Klimt implies a guilty conscience. Perhaps she was seeing another man that evening?”

“That is obviously another matter that needs to be gone into,” Meindl said with a sigh. “I understand that the investigators visited the girl’s residence, but found nothing untoward.”

Meindl sighed, releasing the pince-nez and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Understand my position. I am not in charge of this case, but I do care about the reputation of the Vienna constabulary. I contacted you this morning, Professor Doktor Gross, as I knew of your interest in the case.” A beat, then a grudging nod to Werthen. “And of yours, counselor. I am willing to share with you what we have thus far discovered if it will help to prevent any future embarrassment. Such assistance, must, of course, be in the strictest confidence.”

“Of course, Meindl,” Gross said.

Ever the careerist, thought Werthen. Meindl was in self-preservation mode. Though Klimt was a painter, he still had some powerful friends. Half the society women in Vienna were said to have sat for him, and in their altogether. These women clearly had persuasive powers over their husbands, for Klimt had also won prize public commissions, creating a series of controversial paintings for the new university entrance, among others. The criminal police surely did not know whom they had in custody; they were thrashing about madly looking for some kind of scapegoat, some success, however temporary.

Meindl, however,
was
aware of the stature of the man they had in custody, Werthen knew. Heads might roll over this arrest, and his would not be among them if Meindl could help it. If
Gross, using information supplied by Meindl, could solve the case, proving Klimt innocent, then Meindl would surely take the credit. Then again, if Klimt was actually proven the guilty party, Meindl’s machinations might well go unnoticed, as he had pledged Gross and Werthen to secrecy. Either way he won. No wonder the man had risen so far in the Presidium, Werthen thought. He knew exactly how to maneuver through the system. Such talent would not go unnoticed by a man such as Prince Grunenthal when searching for protégés.

“There is something none of us is mentioning,” Gross said.

“And that would be?” Meindl asked.

“The drained blood, the severed noses,” Gross prompted.

Meindl replaced his pince-nez. “Yes. One of our inspectors was examining that angle as well. Running down any leads there might be on extremist Jewish groups.”

Werthen shifted uneasily in his seat, feeling his blood rise.

“There’s not much in that avenue of thought, however,” Meindl quickly added.

Gross had the temerity to look disappointed, Werthen noticed.

“There is something that did turn up in that context, though,” Meindl said, consulting the file on the desk in front of him. “One of the few connections we were able to come up with between the victims. Two of them had employed the services of a local nerve doctor of Jewish heritage.”

He passed a piece of paper to Gross, who handed it to Werthen. He read the name and address: Doktor Sigmund Freud, Berggasse 19.

But first they had a more urgent visit to make. Liesel Landtauer rented a room from a Frau Iloshnya in Vienna’s Third District. Uchatiusgasse was a long and undistinguished street, not far from the Landstrasse
Stadtbahn
station. It was named after one of those curious nineteenth-century autodidacts, Baron Freiherr
Franz von Uchatius, an inventor and military man who once ran the Vienna Arsenal. Among his inventions was a primitive projector for moving pictures that predated the American Edison’s by fifty years. He gained military renown and a general’s rank for his invention of steel bronze that proved effective in casting military weapons. However, when one of the cannon cast from this metal exploded while being demonstrated to the emperor, Uchatius took the Viennese way out and killed himself.

Werthen, a student of his adopted city, was tempted to regale Gross with his own fund of knowledge, but doubted the criminologist would be amused. Instead, he followed Gross to number 13, where the building concierge was busy mopping the hallway. Inquiring directions of her, they were sent to the third floor, to apartment 39. Gross, who was claustrophobic, ignored the elevator in service and took the stairs, huffing mightily by the time they reached the third floor.

Gross bore an official letter from the Police Presidium, given him by Meindl, that convinced the landlady, Frau Iloshnya, to let them into Liesel’s room.

“Her roommate, Helga, was so shaken that she left for her parents’ in Lower Austria,” the lady explained. “She cleared out all her things. Otherwise, the room is the same as poor Liesel left it before her …”

“Yes, quite,” Gross consoled her with a timid patting on her upper arm.

“She was a good girl, no matter what the papers are saying.”

The tabloids had already picked up the story of Klimt’s arrest. The afternoon editions hit the streets early, with headlines declaring a
LOVERS’ QUARREL GONE BAD
and
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
. The latter paper juxtaposed a photograph of the bearlike and rather demonic-looking Klimt against his sketch of Liesel for his painting
Nuda Veritas
. A newspaper artist had clothed the parts of the body that might offend the good Viennese burghers.

“I am sure she was,” Werthen told her.

“Anything I can do to help convict the man,” she said. “Anything.”

As far as Frau Iloshnya knew, Werthen and Gross were on police business, not attempting to prove Klimt’s innocence.

She led them to a small room at the back of the apartment, giving out onto a light shaft. The room was dark in midafternoon. Looking out the window, you could just catch sight of one green branch of a chestnut tree in the courtyard of the apartment building. The room contained two single beds with iron bedsteads; crucifixes hung over the beds. A wardrobe was against the wall opposite the foot of each bed; the door to the one closest to the entrance stood slightly ajar. Gross opened it and discovered it empty.

“Helga’s,” Frau Iloshnya said. “I don’t think she is coming back. She was quite distressed.”

As Gross busied himself with a minute examination of the contents of the second wardrobe-the police had already made a cursory inspection and come up with nothing-Werthen tried to keep the attention of the Frau.

“We would appreciate any information you might have about Liesel. Do you know if she had many friends?”

The woman shook her head so vehemently that a strand of white hair dislodged from the bun she wore in back and dangled over her forehead.

“She and Helga stuck together,” she said. “Both worked at the same carpet factory.”

Gross, overhearing this, shot Werthen a skeptical look. They knew that Liesel had quit this job soon after arriving in Vienna. For the past six months she had made a living as an artist’s model, working primarily for Klimt. Gross’s look alerted Werthen to take anything the landlady had to offer with a grain of sand. She clearly did not know her tenant.

“No men in her life? She was by all accounts an attractive young woman.”

“She was a decent girl,” Frau Iloshnya all but shouted.

Gross had climbed atop the one chair in the room and was busily inspecting the top of the wardrobe now, Werthen noted.

“I did not mean to imply otherwise,
gnädige Frau
. But there is nothing improper, per se, dear lady, about having a gentleman caller.”

“Not under my roof, I assure you,” she said huffily.

To hell with it, Werthen told himself. He would get nothing but trouble from this old bat.

He took her arm and gently but firmly led her to the door. “Thank you so much for your help,” he said, moving her out of the room. “We will leave everything as we found it.”

She looked surprised, then annoyed, and was about to protest.

“We can let ourselves out,” Werthen quickly added, and closed the bedroom door in her face.

“I think we might have something here, Werthen,” Gross said, his arm reaching far back on the top of the wardrobe. He nodded as his probing hand touched something, then he produced what appeared to be a packet of letters tied with a red ribbon. He blew on the letters, but no dust came off. He climbed down and sat on the bed.

“Perhaps our Liesel has left us a clue.” He unwrapped the packet and opened one letter after another, scanning the contents quickly, until he came to the last letter.

“Aah. Now matters become more interesting.”

He handed the letter to Werthen, who read it quickly, nodding at Gross. “This does put a new wrinkle in things, I warrant.”

“Perhaps it is time to pay a visit to the theater,” Gross said, a twinkle in his eye.

The
Strassenbahn
delivered them twenty minutes later at the Burgtheater.

Werthen was a student of the hypocrisies of late-nineteenth-century Vienna. The building projects of the Ringstrasse had, in
particular, informed his short stories, giving a backstory that spoke of sham and artifice. The new ersatz buildings of the Ringstrasse were all gussied up to symbolize their function: neo-Renaissance opera as the home of the arts; neoclassical parliament as a tip of the hat to Greek architecture and the home of democracy; the neo-Gothic Rathaus, symbol of burgher wealth. Here in front of him was the Burgtheater with its lyre-shaped auditorium that was intended to recall the Greek origins of drama. Great on symbols were the Viennese.

The Burgtheater was one of the most egregious monstrosities of the Ring, Werthen thought. Sixteen years in the building, with continual cost overruns spiraling the initial assessment, the Burgtheater or Court Theater-with decorative ceiling paintings by Klimt, among others-opened in 1888 to great fanfare, with four thousand electric lightbulbs illuminating the exterior. Though even now, a decade later, electrification of the city was still a long way off. The night continued to be illuminated by gas, unlike in other European capitals, where electricity was fast becoming the norm. The lyre shape of the theater created a space, according to an actor and critic for the
Neue Freie Presse
, that was an “ornamentation-choked mausoleum which makes performing a misery for me as well as for my colleagues.” Speech could not be heard nor actions seen in this performing arts theater. To top it off, the designers had even gotten the symbol wrong: It was not the lyre, but the reed pipe or
aulos
that symbolized the origins of Greek theater. In the event, the acoustics and the sight lines were not improved until just two years ago.

Werthen put such thoughts aside as he followed Gross wordlessly round to the side stage entrance. Here the criminologist presented his letter from the Police Presidium to a skeptical doorman who’d seen every trick in the book employed to get in the stage door to secure autographs from one of the stars.

“Herr Girardi, if you please,” Gross said to the man. “Official business.”

It didn’t help that their business was with the star of the day. The doorman, muttonchopped and flatulent, annoyed that his afternoon wurst break had been interrupted, squinted hard at the card.

“Be quick about it, man,” Gross said impatiently, employing his hectoring, prosecutorial tone. “If you don’t believe me, you can ring up the Police Presidium. I suppose you do have a telephone here?”

The doorman grunted something unintelligible in their direction, then waved his hand down the hall to the left, obviously indicating the direction of Girardi’s dressing room.

The newspapers, Werthen knew, claimed that Girardi was, next to the emperor himself, perhaps the most famous person in all of Vienna at the moment. However, if you personally asked the man or woman in the street whose autograph they would rather have, you might well find nobility coming in a distant second to the stage. A master of dialect, a fine comedian and actor both in drama and operetta, Girardi was something of a phenomenon. His way of dress had infected the city and even saved him from incarceration in a lunatic asylum. Gossip had it that he and his former wife, a volatile actress, had a fearsome marriage, locked in mutual hatred. She had tried to get rid of him by having a doctor, sight unseen, pronounce her husband insane. When the attendants had come to take him to the asylum, they had mistaken a fan lurking outside the actor’s house for Girardi himself, for the man was dressed exactly like the actor, right down to the signature straw boater. Known as a folk actor for his roles in popular drama and comedy, Girardi was making his debut at the fustier Burg in a Raimund production. This was a special royal presentation for the emperor, family, noble friends, and visiting Prince of Wales from England, as the Burgtheater and other theaters and concert halls of the city were normally closed from July to September.

Girardi had, like a star in the firmament, his own field of gravity. Even Gross, in Graz, had, apparently, heard of “Der Girardi.”

Gross rapped on the star’s door.

A voice from inside called out in French,
“Entrée.”

Gross swung the door open wide revealing what appeared at first sight to be the interior of a glasshouse. Flowers were everywhere, roses popping out of vases, violets and lilies worked into celebratory wreaths, bunches of carnations of every hue, and potted plants as well-elephant ears, ferns, and palms in brass tubs. The perfume of the various flowers hit them like an olfactory hammer and held them in the doorway momentarily.