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

  “Is he gone now? Do people finally understand?”

  Gross, well versed in psychology, did not miss a beat.

  “Yes,” he said. “All is as it should be.”

  Wolf seemed almost to brighten at this statement, wrapping his arms around his knees and pulling them under his chin. He began rocking on the bed.

  “At last,” he uttered.

  It was almost more than Werthen could bear to see the man so reduced. This was the great torchbearer of Richard Wagner, composer of the Möriker Lieder, the Eichendorff Lieder, the Goethe Lieder, the Italian Serenade, and the opera Der Corregidor, all noted for their depth of feeling, for their groundbreaking tonality. And now he was but a shell of a man.

  “They can perform my opera. Now that I am director.”

  His mind was obviously still on the Mahler dispute, Werthen thought, which was, he realized guiltily, to their advantage.

  “Yes,” Gross agreed. “At long last.”

  “He is a devil, you know.” His voice rose to almost a cry with the word “devil.” Wolf turned to stare directly at Werthen rather than Gross.

  The words chilled the lawyer, but he summoned a response.

  “In what way?”

  “He stole my idea for a libretto. Oh, yes, stole it word for word. And I was not the only one. No. The other. The genius. The devil stole from him, too. And he ended his days here. Just like me. Oh, he is a devil, to be sure.”

  “Mahler?” Gross said. “Is he the devil?”

  Suddenly Wolf threw himself off the bed, crashing into one of the walls headfirst and opening a deep gash on his forehead. Blood streamed down his skeletal face and he began laughing hysterically.

  Werthen raced to the door, opened it, and called for an attendant. Heavy boots pounded along the corridor. Two burly men in long white smocks came bursting into the room, grabbed Wolf by the arms, and slammed him down on the bed. The biggest applied pressure with his knee on the composer’s frail chest to restrain him.

  “Is that quite necessary?” Werthen said.

  The other attendant glared at him. “You two should leave now. You’ve created enough trouble.”

  Gross took Werthen’s arm. “Come. The man is right.”

  True to his word, Gross left Werthen and Berthe alone for lunch, taking himself off to a local gasthaus. As it was Frau Blatschky’s free half day, husband and wife found themselves alone for once, and Werthen quickly told Berthe why he had reacted to the joyful news of her pregnancy with less than elation.

  She took him in her arms. “Karl, Karl. Such a bright man to be so silly.”

  And she led him down the hallway to their bedroom. He was amazed and somewhat bemused to see her begin to disrobe.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Before Frau Blatschky returns and is scandalized.”

  He joined her in the bed, holding her gently in his arms like a fragile doll. Then she rolled onto her back, pulling Werthen on top.

  “I’m pregnant, not sick,” Berthe said, pressing down on the small of his back with her cool hands. “I won’t break.” She wrapped her legs around his, digging into the backs of his thighs with her heels and lifting into him.

  He soon forgot to be a gentleman, lost in the movement of his hips.

  Later they lay tangled under the thin cotton summer comforter, her head nestled into his left shoulder.

  “You didn’t really imagine men and women stopped wanting one another for nine months, did you?”

  He hadn’t thought about it. It was not something his parents ever talked about, not something one learned at school.

  Now she lifted herself up on her elbow to look him directly in the eye.

  “Never be so stupid again,” she said fiercely. “Talk to me. Believe in me. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “I am just amazed that stodgy Dr. Gross was the one to make the suggestion,” she said as she dished two omelets onto plates for their late lunch.

  “He did not exactly say ‘bed your wife.’ Rather it was ‘take her in your arms’ or something to that effect.”

  As they repaired to the dining room, they heard the metal clack of the mail slot on their door. The second post.

  Werthen placed the dishes on the table and went to the foyer to collect the mail. He examined the letters, placing bills and business communications on the hall table for later perusal. One had no return address and was thus less easily categorized. He took it with him back to the dining room.

  Berthe had begun without him, looking somewhat abashed as he entered.

  “I’m famished. Sorry. Omelets are about the only food I can abide these days.”

  He sat and joined her, setting the envelope next to his plate. He had a bad feeling, for it was not usual for a letter to arrive without a return address.

  “Are you going to open it or admire it?”

  She was quite lively after their lovemaking, he noted. And her appetite had picked up.

  “Perhaps we should take a siesta more often.”

  But this did not embarrass her nor dampen her high spirits.

  “In the back there is a portion called the flap,” she said. “It is customary to tear that.”

  He did as he was told, digging out a single piece of paper from the envelope. He could tell by the feel of it that the paper was cheap stuff, coarse and without a finish. Opening it he was confronted with a short message written in what appeared to be a schoolboy scrawl of printing. The bottom half of the letter held a musical notation. He placed the missive on the table between them.

  “Strange,” Berthe muttered between bites of her meal.

  Werthen quickly perused it, then read it a second time just to be certain.

  “More than strange,” he said. “Downright bizarre. If this is true . . .”

  “If this is true,” Gross said later that afternoon upon returning to the flat, “then we have a case of historic dimensions on our hands.”

  “The disguised handwriting might lend credence to it,” Werthen observed.

  “True,” Gross said. “The writer did take the time to disguise his or her handwriting. Which attests to one of two things: either he has an extremely unique handwriting that would give him away, or his handwriting is known to us, individually or collectively.”

  “A practical joke,” Berthe said. “Someone has gotten word of our investigation and is having fun at our expense.”

  Neither Gross nor Werthen responded to this.

  Gross read the letter out loud again:

  “Dear Advokat Werthen,

  You and your friends should take a wider worldview. Herr Mahler is not and has not been the only composer under threat in Vienna. Others have died for their profligacy. Other so-called great musicians. Need I name names? But I do not want to give too much away. Where would be the fun in that? Just know, that I have struck before and I shall strike again for the sake of art!”

  “What do you make of the musical notation?” Werthen asked.

  “I am no musician,” Gross said, holding the paper up to the light, searching in vain for any telltale manufacturing marks.

  “May I?” Berthe held out her hand, took the letter, and led the way into the small music room she had created out of an unused maid’s quarters. There was just enough space for an upright piano. She sat at the keyboard, the letter in front of her, and played the notes once, then twice.

  “Familiar somehow,” she said. “Almost like the melody from a late Beethoven quartet. But I think it’s an original melody line. I think the person who wrote the letter also wrote this fragment.”

  “Curious,” Gross said.

  “Other composers,” Werthen mused. “Well, we have had a rash of deaths lately. Strauss earlier this month.”

  “Brahms two years ago,” added Berthe.

  “And Bruckner died the year before that.” Werthen shook his head. “But they all died natural deaths.”

  “This way lies madness,” Gross muttered. “Are we to question every musical dea
th of the last decade? Rubbish.”

  But Werthen knew that Gross’s interest had been well and truly piqued.

  NINE

  Over the course of the next day, Gross became increasingly consumed with the possibility that Vienna had a madman in its midst who was, one by one, killing the great musicians of the age. All day Sunday he paced his room, for unseasonable rain kept him inside. Berthe and Werthen could clearly hear the rhythmic steps, a maddening tattoo that finally drove them out into the rain, umbrellas in hand.

  On their walk they made no mention of the mysterious letter. Instead they enjoyed the fresh smells of the city in the rain, strolling along the Ringstrasse with the plane trees dripping onto their black umbrellas. A few other intrepid walkers had come out as well, but the city, usually quiet on Sundays, was doubly so today.

  Back at the flat Gross had finally left the precincts of his room. Now, clothed in a silk dressing gown over his trousers, white shirt, tie, and waistcoat, he was ensconced in the sitting room, sprawled out on the leather couch like a pasha.

  “Where have you two been?” he said as they entered the room. “It is imperative that we talk of the new direction our investigation is headed.” With this he rose from the couch and began pacing the sitting room.

  “Gross—” Werthen began but was immediately interrupted.

  “I know that tone of voice,” the criminologist said, stopping midstep. “You are now going to attempt to bring me back down to earth. That is the sensible Karl Werthen speaking. I am much too familiar with that modulation.”

  “Obviously somebody needs to reintroduce you to reality,” Werthen said. “How can you have been so convinced by a solitary anonymous letter?”

  “It speaks of the crime of the ages.”

  “Is fame all that important to you?” Werthen said, amazed at the admission. “One would think you had quite enough notoriety already.”

  “It is not a matter of fame, my dear Werthen. You totally misread me. No. It is the hideousness of the crimes. To deprive the world of the wonders of such music, and all for what? A moment of pique? What does the blighter mean by ‘profligacy’? His or theirs?”

  “But, Gross, surely you have considered the obvious. That the letter is false in content and intent.”

  “To be sure,” he said, waving the suggestion away as if swatting at a mildly irritating fly. “It could of course be, as your lady-wife suggests, a mere practical joke. Perhaps one of our interviewees from the Hofoper or elsewhere became perturbed with our questions and wished to cause us a bit of discomfort with a leg-pull. Or perhaps one of our interviewees is the culprit and feels our investigation is coming rather too close for comfort. Thus a ruse, as it were.”

  “And there is always the possibility of some unbalanced correspondent,” Berthe offered. “Someone whose feeling of self-importance is enhanced by such inventions. Someone better off in an asylum.”

  “Or perhaps somebody who already is in an asylum,” Gross said pointedly, as if suggesting Hugo Wolf could have somehow gotten this missive sent. “And yes, I have considered these possibilities. I am not a fool, after all.”

  Werthen agreed with that self-evaluation. However, he was not buying Gross’s explanation for his interest.

  “I had not realized you were such a lover of modern music, Gross. I thought that Haydn demarked the limits of musical achievement for you.”

  Gross shot him a venomous look, and returned to his pacing, hands clasped behind his back. Werthen had had a law professor at the University of Vienna who assumed this exact posture when lecturing, pacing back and forth behind the lectern, making the floorboards creak as a punctuation to his monotone voice.

  “It is impossible to speak with you if you insist on this continual moving about,” Werthen finally said.

  “I need an appetite for lunch. Frau Blatschky informs me she will be serving her excellent palatschinken, and promises a drizzle of chocolate sauce.”

  So they left Gross to his “exercise” and later met for lunch, the men at least doing justice to Frau Blatschky’s delicate crêpes stuffed with apricot jam and served with a bright and sparkling Moselle.

  Over coffee they were finally able to discuss the new developments. The food had a palliative effect on Gross.

  “I admit,” he said, “to being somewhat bedazzled by the possible enormity of such a proposition. That someone is killing off the great musicians of Vienna is an event, yes, that grabs the imagination. I would be less than candid were I not to admit to certain baser impulses. Were I . . . we to solve such a crime, then my criminalistic principles would become known worldwide and virtually overnight. I suppose that such a motivation in part spurs me on. However, let me quickly add, that such a crime, if true, also fires my desire for justice, for retribution. That such a black-guard could perpetrate these crimes and not be held accountable. Well, that is unthinkable, for then we might as well be living in the deepest jungle despite our civilized trappings.”

  There was no response necessary to this little speech. It had the ring of truth, for Gross had always been concerned as much for the pursuit of justice as he had been for celebrity.

  “Am I absolutely convinced by this anonymous letter?” Gross said. “No. Of course not. Do I believe that it is possible? Yes. Is it a direction worthy of investigation? Again, yes. To discount it out of hand would be a matter of criminal negligence in my opinion.”

  “I would imagine then,” Berthe said, “that we should begin with the death of Johann Strauss. The most recent, the easiest to investigate.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Gross said, tipping his coffee cup toward her.

  The next morning, Werthen and Gross acted upon this suggestion.

  For Werthen it was as if the case were coming full turn, as it had all begun with the funeral of Johann Strauss. Was that only a few short weeks before? So much had passed between then and now that it seemed months had gone by.

  Strauss’s palais was located in the Fourth District, at Igelgasse 4, where his widow Adele still lived. Vienna’s Waltz King had been a complicated man, Werthen knew. The disseminator of music that some called terribly sweet and others sweetly terrible, Strauss was not an overtly happy man. His first marriage, to a former opera singer, Henriette Treffz-Chalupetzky, whom Strauss called his Jetty, had been a turning point in his life. The mistress of the banker Baron Todesco when Strauss met her, Jetty was seven years his senior and the mother of seven illegitimate children. Their unlikely liaison was solemnized by marriage in 1862, a ceremony performed at St. Stephen’s. Setting up house in the Second District, Jetty dispatched her children to their various fathers and thenceforth took the career of Johann Strauss as her primary mission in life. She proved to be the perfect manager, secretary, and Hausfrau, pushing the tune-master Strauss to write operettas. Indeed, Strauss, soon after the marriage, began envisioning the waltz nor merely as a dance, but as the kernel of great symphonic works. The first of his popular operettas, Die Fledermaus, appeared in 1874. He would compose more than a dozen more as well as an opera, Ritter Pasman.

  Jetty died in 1878 of a stroke, and Strauss, never one to be alone, married just fifty days later, but this time disastrously. Angelica “Lili” Dittrich was twenty-five years Strauss’s junior and another singer. She had cultivated Strauss in hopes of winning an appointment to the Theater an der Wien. Strauss, however, had been looking not for a mentoring relationship, but for a bit of dalliance with a younger woman. The two had begun their affair well before Jetty’s death. Thus, the lonely and newly widowed Strauss naturally turned to her. Married at the Karlskirche, the couple moved into the palais on Igelgasse; the building had been drawn to plans suggested and inspired by Jetty.

  It was not a happy marriage. Lili carried on an affair with the director of the Theater an der Wien, an open secret in Vienna at the time, which caused Strauss great anguish. She finally ran off with the director after four years of turbulent marriage to Strauss (and was in turn deserted by the director not long aft
er), and it was said she was now living in Berlin, operating a hat shop, living on the edge of poverty, and taking every opportunity to disparage her former husband in the press.

  Not long after the breakup of this marriage, Strauss met Adele Deutsch Strauss, thirty-one years his junior, and the widow of a banker, also named Strauss. It was as if their union was meant to be. The two quickly found solace in each other, and with Adele’s support, Strauss once again got back on his feet creatively, turning out masterpieces such as the operetta Der Zigeunerbaron. Marriage to her in Vienna, however, was impossible, as the Catholic Church did not recognize his divorce nor did it offer the sanctity of marriage to those who had thus ended their marriages.

  Strauss and Adele simply lived together for a time, until they desperately desired to have their union legalized. To do so, Strauss renounced his Austrian citizenship, took up residence in Saxony-Coburg for a time to gain citizenship where divorce was legal, and also gave up his Catholic faith for Protestantism, which allowed for the marriage of divorced people. It must be said, that such a conversion should not have been all that difficult for Strauss, for he was Jewish by origin, Catholicism an assumed trapping to allow the family upward mobility in the empire. In 1887 Strauss and Adele were finally married and thereafter returned to Vienna. Adele proved to be as able a manager as Jetty had been, and the last years of Strauss’s life had been productive and content. Indeed, Adele had demonstrated herself so able in the administration of Strauss’s affairs that some were already referring to her as “Cosima in waltztime,” comparing her to the aggressively proprietary widow of Richard Wagner.

  As their fiaker turned off the busy Wiedner Hauptstrasse onto the more elegantly quiet Igelgasse, Werthen found himself actually looking forward to their interview with the widow. One thing he hoped to discover was why she had not attended the funeral of her husband, something that had caused quite a scandal at the time.

  Drawing up to the door of Igelgasse 4, an imposing building with a façade of Schönbrunn yellow decorated with a plentiful number of caryatids, Gross was first out of the cab. As usual, he left such mundane matters as the payment of the driver to Werthen. Today, however, this did not irk the lawyer as it usually did.