Requiem in Vienna: A Viennese Mystery (Viennese Mysteries) Read online

  REQUIEM IN VIENNA

  ALSO BY J. SYDNEY JONES

  The Empty Mirror (2009)

  Hitler in Vienna (2002)

  Frankie (1997)

  Viennawalks (1994)

  The Hero Game (1992)

  Time of the Wolf (1990)

  Tramping in Europe (1984)

  Vienna Inside-Out (1979)

  Bike & Hike (1977)

  REQUIEM

  IN VIENNA

  A Viennese Mystery

  J. SYDNEY JONES

  Minotaur Books

  A Thomas Dunne Book

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  REQUIEM IN VIENNA. Copyright © 2010 by J. Sydney Jones. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, J. Sydney.

  Requiem in Vienna / J. Sydney Jones.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Thomas Dunne book for Minotaur Books”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-0-312-38390-9

  1. Mahler, Gustav, 1860–1911—Fiction. 2. Opera—Austria—Vienna—Fiction. 3. Gross, Hans, 1847–1915—Fiction. 4. Criminologists—Fiction. 5. Vienna (Austria)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O62553R47 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2009034527

  First Edition: January 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the sibs, Gwen and Lowell

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, thanks go out to the usual suspects. To Alexandra Machinist, for being the kind of supportive yet straight-talking agent every writer hopes for. To Peter Joseph, an editor of sagacity and wit and steadfast co-conspirator in the Viennese Mystery series. To Hector DeJean, publicity manager extraordinaire, whose personal enthusiasm and tireless efforts are greatly appreciated. To Margaret Smith, an editorial assistant who is always on top of things and always there with an answer. A round of thanks also to the art department, copy editors, and production folks for their creative labors on behalf of this book. And, to my wife, Kelly, and son, Evan, who have lived a good deal of time with these characters in our midst and who, like good hosts, have always been polite to them, a final thanks for your patience and love.

  REQUIEM IN VIENNA

  PROLOGUE

  Observers afterward noted nothing different about the day. Just another typical rehearsal under the new Court Opera Director Gustav Mahler. “The drill sergeant,” the singers called him.

  They were preparing for a performance of Lohengrin and Mahler was particularly fussy about Wagner. A Jew—though he had converted to Christianity before being offered his new position—Mahler walked on Tiffany eggs whenever preparing for one of the Master of Bayreuth’s works, for Wagner was still the darling of the German nationalist press. Upset one of those critics with a single note out of place, a slight misstep in staging, and Mahler would bear the brunt of their “What can you expect from a Jew” level of criticism.

  So, today, hectoring, hectoring. And there would be a good eight hours of it if the Herr Director’s usual routine was followed.

  The object of his strident complaints this morning was Fräulein Margarethe Kaspar, a young mezzo from the back of beyond in the Austrian region of the Waldviertel, the most unlikely place for a singer to hail from. A pig farmer was more likely the product of that region; a slightly moon-faced, inbred specimen of the human race. Not a soprano at Vienna’s Court Opera!

  Yet here she was, Fräulein Kaspar from Krumau (not even an inhabitant of the so-called city of Zwettl!) in full regalia for her role as one of the four pages in Wagner’s adaptation of the medieval German romance. Her heavily rouged lips were trembling; she was near tears.

  “You’re singing like you’re calling in the pigs for slops,” Mahler shouted at her. “Please do not make me regret my decision to sign you.”

  It was later reported that at that point the poor girl broke into the tears that had been accumulating, waiting for egress; that her otherwise creamy complexion turned a quite unattractive blotchy, mottled red at the cheeks, and she cupped her rather tiny hands over her face in shame.

  “My God, woman,” Mahler thundered on. “Do compose yourself. This a profession, you know. If you haven’t the skin for it, go back to your rustic simplicity and the local boys with their thick hands.”

  This last was said with Mahler standing not a hand’s length from the young girl, yet his comments carried to the last row of the balcony.

  A sudden hush went over the entire cast; even the cacophonous tuning of the orchestra in the pit and last-minute backstage hammerings were stilled. This was too much, and even Mahler seemed to realize he had overstepped the bounds of propriety.

  He drew closer and wrapped a protective arm around the girl—who was rumored to be his mistress, of course. She was of no great size; still, she stood half a head over the diminutive director, who was five feet and four inches in his scuffed leather boots.

  “There, there, Grethe.” He patted her shoulder, attempting rather unconvincingly to console the young girl. “I am sorry to shout at you so. But the high C must be hit, not simply approached. Essential, quite essential.”

  Then he left her, still sobbing, turning back to the rest of the opera chorus.

  “What are you all gaping at? Back to work.” He clapped his hands, an insistent schoolmaster.

  At that very instant came a shout from behind the partially curtained stage.

  “Watch out!”

  It was too late, however, for the heavy asbestos fire curtain, its hem filled with lead weights, came crashing down. It hurtled onto the unfortunate Fräulein Kaspar, who was still weeping into her cupped hands. The curtain narrowly missed Mahler, who dove out of the way.

  The curtain hit the stage with a fearful crashing, after which there was a moment of stunned silence. Only the black patent leather shoes of the fallen soprano were to be seen from under the curtain. Then came shouted voices from the stagehands behind the curtain, one carried above the others: “She’s dead. By God, the little songbird’s dead and gone.”

  ONE

  Tuesday, June 6, 1899

  Vienna, Austria

  Werthen refused to walk to the cemetery. He would show his respect to the dead by his presence at the grave site, but his damaged right knee, the result of a duel, kept him from making the two-mile pilgrimage by foot from the center of Vienna out to the Central Cemetery in Simmering, the recently incorporated Eleventh District, as hundreds of other dignitaries were doing.

  A duel! My Lord, how blithely it played through his mind, but how improbable it would have seemed mere months before. As foreign to him as Swahili; as much an aberration to his staid existence as polite parlor conversation would be to a bushman.

  A duel of words perhaps, verbal pyrotechnics before an easily amused judge; that had been his métier. But not a duel to the death; not the too-intimate warmth of an opponent’s back against his before beginning the mandatory fifteen paces. Not the cold feel of metal in his hand from a pistol. Not such an eccentricity for Karl Werthen, advokat superior of wills and trusts!

  But he had done it, and done it well enough to explode his opponent’s cranium like a smashed pumpk
in, spilling crimson blood and pinkish gray brains onto the green lawns of the Prater one chilly autumn morning. It had been a life-and-death struggle to rid himself, his friends, and his beloved wife Berthe of a man who quite simply wanted to kill them all one fine day.

  Werthen shook the evil memory of that brutal killing out of his mind, taking up position as closely as he could to the freshly dug grave site in Group 32A, plot number 27, just between the final resting places of Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms. In operation for only a quarter of century, the Central Cemetery was already filling up. Five hundred acres, and soon the place would be a high-rent district, Werthen mused. Half the size of Zürich, as the Viennese quipped, and twice the fun.

  Here at Group 32A were all the notables of musical history: those that had died since the cemetery’s opening in 1875, such as Brahms and Anton Bruckner, and those dead from an earlier epoch—Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert—their remains dug up and reinterred here in the 1880s. Missing, of course, were Papa Haydn, buried in Eisenstadt, and Mozart, and who knew where that poor wretch’s bones were.

  No final resting place for Werthen in this group. No, his bones would molder in the Jewish plot near Gate 1.

  Werthen had been dutifully at his office in the Habsburgergasse this morning when the crowds of mourners thronging the nearby Episcopalian Church had reminded him that this was the great one’s funeral. What the hell, he had thought. An outing. A show of respect for a true master. He told his assistant, Doktor Wilfried Ungar, that he would be back after lunch, and left before the priggish young man could make a comment. Ungar was the sort to flaunt his double degree in law and economics; even his intimates called him Doktor Doktor Ungar. Werthen could not complain, however. The junior lawyer had kept his firm going for the last few months with Werthen’s extended healing from his dueling injury and his subsequent reconsideration of what he wanted to do with his life. Lying in his recovery bed, he had felt like an adolescent again, facing the great questions of career and the meaning of life. A bullet in the flesh focuses one’s mind wonderfully on what is most important in life. Actually, there had not been a lot of soul-searching involved: he’d begun his career in criminal law before turning to the more benign field of wills and trusts; he knew now he must return to his first calling in one form or another.

  The crowds of mourners were only now reaching the cemetery after their long walk. Their route had been marked by gas streetlamps burning at midday. Businesses and schools had closed in order that the populace might pay their last respects as the funeral cortege passed by, the hearse drawn by four gray Lippizaners and accompanied by eight carriages full of flowers through the crowd-choked streets of Vienna.

  It was unseasonably warm for early June. Werthen’s black serge suit soaked in the sun’s rays like a sponge. Sweat formed at his tight starched collar. He could imagine how uncomfortable those pilgrims were who had made the journey on foot; bad enough for him after a pleasant fiaker ride. Every able-bodied official, artist, musician, intellectual, and even a critic or two, had trudged along behind the coaches.

  The sight of the funeral cortege approaching down the long lanes of the Central Cemetery reminded him of another funeral just last September; that of the Empress Elisabeth, so cruelly assassinated in Geneva. He felt a twinge in his knee at the thought, for her death and the wound were inextricably linked.

  He brought his mind back to today’s events. People were jostling about him now, trying to get a good position to see the proceedings at graveside. An old and very diminutive gentleman who clearly had not made the trip on foot now crowded directly in front of Werthen, his rather unorthodox and impossibly high top hat completely blocking the lawyer’s view.

  Pinned in on both sides with newly arrived mourners, Werthen had no choice but to tap the old man on the shoulder.

  A red face punctuated by a heavily veined nose turned to confront him.

  “Sorry. Perhaps you could remove your hat so I could see.”

  “Nonsense,” the man spluttered and turned back to the grave.

  The mayor had now arrived. Werthen strained to see around the shiny black hat as Karl Lueger, already a Viennese legend for his good looks as much as for his demagoguery, scrambled atop a makeshift platform. Werthen had a momentary impulse to squash the damnable stovepipe in front of him, for he wanted to get a good look at the mayor as he spoke. He could hardly understand his fascination with this Jew-baiting mayor, but there it was: Werthen like most of Vienna had been mesmerized with the man’s oratorical skill, his magnetism and charisma. Since taking office, Lueger, to his credit, had toned down his rhetoric, no longer blaming the Jews of the empire for every woe. He had initiated urban renewal projects, saw to the regulation of the Danube Canal and the completion of the Stadtbahn, the interurban rail, and initiated a form of welfarism for the citizens of the capital.

  A hush fell over the gathered crowd as the mayor prepared to speak. At the same moment, Werthen, peering around the black column of hat in front of him, caught the eye of his old friend and client, the painter Gustav Klimt, standing on the opposite side of the grave from him. Klimt gave him a wink.

  The painter, no giant himself—as broad as he was tall—towered over the man who stood next to him. Werthen recognized this smaller man as the director of the Hofoper, or Court Opera, Gustav Mahler, the youngest man to ever take the helm there, just thirty-seven when he arrived in Vienna two years earlier. They must have made the journey together on foot; Klimt, an eager walker, looked none the worse for wear. As he gazed at the pair of men, Werthen wondered when Klimt was ever going to pay his long overdue bill. Werthen now looked for the family members close by the graveside, but there were only distant members in attendance. Conspicuously missing was the man’s widow, Adele, and his brother, Eduard. Werthen found that decidedly odd.

  “My friends,” Mayor Lueger began in booming tones guaranteed to reach the last rows, “we are gathered here today for a most solemn occasion. On the long mourning journey to this final resting place for our beloved maestro, thousands upon thousands gathered to bid a final farewell. Those Viennese citizens who took time off from their work, schools, and homes feel in their hearts the same as we all do who are gathered here—a heavy and heart-wrenching sadness at the loss of such a great man.”

  Werthen’s attention was distracted from the speech by a thin wraith of a man who was attempting the impossible: to insert himself between Werthen and the old man with the top hat.

  “. . . to be honored by his beloved city, buried between two other masters of music, Schubert and his beloved friend, Brahms. . . .”

  He caught bits and pieces of the speech, focusing instead on the thin man who now edged effortlessly in front of him.

  “. . . We Viennese promise here on his grave never to forget this man or his music. . . .”

  Werthen quickly saw the reason for the man’s crowding. The fellow was obviously waiting for a high point in the speech to make his move.

  “And so I say to you, my dear friends, that so long as a Viennese lives, he will never forget you, dear maestro. We have chosen your final resting place here amidst the greatest composers the world has ever known. We testify therewith, that whenever Vienna is spoken of, then also will come the name Johann Strauss. We take leave of you now, dear Waltz King, leaving you to make your way on your final voyage, promising to forever keep the flame of your triumphant spirit alive in our hearts and souls.”

  At this there was general applause, despite the solemn occasion, and it was then the thin man struck.

  Werthen was familiar with the technique from his early days defending such miscreants. The man’s wiry hand slipped neatly into the old man’s jacket pocket, deftly extracting a change purse of alarming proportions. As the gathered mourners continued to applaud Mayor Lueger’s speech, to be replaced on the platform by the director of the Vienna Friends of Music, the ghostlike creature in front of Werthen proceeded to edge away.

  “Not so fast,” Werthen said, grabbing the man�
�s neck in a vicelike grip. The man’s head turned to him, startled eyes glared at him.

  “What do you want?” the man fairly hissed at him.

  “Hand over the money or it’s the Liesel for you.”

  The nickname for the city’s main prison did the trick; the man dropped the bag of coins and Werthen released his grip. The wraith melted away into the crowds. All of this transpired with such speed that those around him had been unaware of the altercation.

  Werthen bent to pick up the old man’s purse. As he stood upright again, the old man turned, saw the purse in his hand, and began shouting.

  “Thief! Thief! The bounder is stealing my purse.”

  Before Werthen could attempt an explanation, he was quickly pinioned at either arm by the men around him and hustled to the back of the crowd. The old man trundled along behind him making occasional outbursts. At the edge of the crowd, a gendarme in blue jacket and red pants clamped a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  “Now, then,” the gendarme said. “What’s all this about?”

  Werthen spent the next fifteen minutes explaining what had happened, interrupted repeatedly by the blustery old man.

  “And where is this pickpocket now?” the policeman asked.

  But Werthen could not spot the man among the crowd of mourners. He’d most likely made a run for it after hearing the commotion.

  “I assure you, Officer, I do not come to funerals on the off chance of picking some man’s pocket. I am a lawyer, after all, an officer of the court.”

  The crowds of people were beginning to trail away from the grave site now. Workers were busy unloading the flowers from the coaches, making hillocks of the heavily scented blooms. Other workers were spading dirt onto the coffin; the official gravestone would not be erected until later.