Requiem in Vienna: A Viennese Mystery (Viennese Mysteries) Page 8

  “Witness, that is, to the death of Fräulein Kaspar,” Gross said importantly.

  But Werthen simply nodded. “Yes, of course. From his position, Gunther most probably had a perfect view of who might have been in the rigging, who, indeed, might have let the fire curtain loose.”

  Gross nodded appreciatively. “Well done, Werthen. I believe you are truly becoming a master of criminal investigation.”

  “Which means,” Werthen went on, ignoring him, “that our villain is now intent in concealing his earlier attempts. If that is so, a further implication is clear. He intends to strike again. Mahler is in grave danger.”

  It was so like men to charge ahead, leaving the women to take care of such silly and mundane things as making sure a legal practice runs smoothly. Berthe held regard for Dr. Gross, but at the same time wished that he had chosen another moment to make his appearance. She and Karl were just beginning to work as a sort of team in this investigation lark. Now, however, the great criminologist was on the scene, and Karl was once again tagging after him like a puppy.

  And here she was, stuck in the office making sure bills were paid and appointments kept.

  She wondered if this was the beginning of what they called the slippery slope. After all, she had her own career as an educator and writer. Since her marriage, however, she had written but one article—on the Austrian peace movement and its female leaders. She had also reduced her time with the settlement house in Ottakring. Modeled on the English settlement movement begun by Mary Ward, the Vienna Settlement house reached out to the underprivileged children of the city, offering education and specialized play centers. She had helped guide the settlement, opening it to children with disabilities and using the center at night to host cultural opportunities for the working-class parents of Ottakring.

  Yet this work, too, had suffered since her marriage. She now spent fewer hours at the Settlement, the better to help out at Karl’s law firm. Her clients were not suffering, however, for she had recruited talented volunteers. Yet she missed her children. Missed her independent accomplishments.

  Karl had not requested such sacrifices. Far from it. He praised her endlessly for her achievements. Yet she felt that somehow she needed to contribute to their life together, that they could not forever live parallel lives.

  Enough of the self-pity, she told herself, filing the last of the paperwork on the von Bülow probate.

  Thank God for Ungar, she thought. Dr. Wilfried Ungar, Karl’s assistant at the firm. Arrogant the young man might be, but he had been a mainstay for the firm, especially with Karl’s injury last year, and then with the new direction her husband had decided to take in both criminal law and investigations.

  A light tap sounded at the doorjamb. The door was open.

  “Yes?”

  Dr. Ungar stepped into the room. “If I am not interrupting,” he said.

  “No, not at all,” she said. “Please do come in.”

  He attempted to look older than his twenty-eight years by wearing pince-nez and a mustache that turned up at the ends. His light gray suit fitted him well, not too ostentatious, not too humble. Guaranteed to put his clients at ease. His hair was already thinning; he combed it from one side to conceal this.

  He sat in the client’s chair across the desk from her in Karl’s office. She did not like the look on his face; Ungar appeared to be attending a funeral.

  “What is it?”

  “I regret to inform you, Frau Meisner, that I can no longer practice my profession at this firm.”

  “But why ever not?”

  “It’s the new sign, you see.”

  “Sign? What sign?”

  “ ‘Advokat Karl Werthen: Wills and Trusts, Criminal Law, Private Inquiries.’ ”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “That sign.”

  “The criminal law I could tolerate. After all, Herr Werthen is a practiced hand at those from his days in Graz. But inquiries? Madam, do I look like a private inspector? I can no longer hold my head up amongst my peers. I find it necessary, in short, madam, to search for a position at a more respectable legal firm.”

  She was torn between an urge to slap the insolent young man and to get on her knees and beg him to stay.

  “I am sorry to hear that,” she said, settling for the middle way.

  He put up a hand as if to halt her supplications, though she had made no such overture.

  “I assure you, madam, I shall not be dissuaded from my decision. I have written Herr Werthen the same. I felt it incumbent upon my own integrity, however, to apprise you of my decision personally.”

  “That is good of you, Dr. Ungar.”

  “But again, I shall not be dissuaded from my course of action. Were the sign, however, to be abridged . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, now giving vent to pique, “that is a shame. But we shall have to somehow struggle on without you. When will your last day be?”

  His pince-nez became disarranged at this, she was pleased to notice.

  ______

  Seated in the Café Museum, which the firebrand architect Adolf Loos had just designed, Werthen and Gross were finally having an interview with the young journalist, Karl Kraus, attempting to pick his brain of any gossip relevant to Gustav Mahler.

  The establishment they were seated in was nicknamed the “Café Nihilism” by one journalistic wag, for the interior embodied Loos’s renunciation of ornamentation for modern, unadorned design. Strips of brass running across the vaulted ceiling were the sole pieces of near ornamentation, but these actually served to cover the electric wires. Bare lightbulbs hung from these brass railings overhead. Light green walls were set in contrast to the red bentwood chairs, which Loos himself had designed.

  Gross looked uncomfortable in the minimalist surroundings, opting in personal taste for potted palms and caryatids supporting interior columns. Werthen, however, felt quite at home in this modern ambience.

  “Of course you realize that journalism is the goiter of the world,” Kraus said with affable conviction.

  What is one to do with such a comment, Werthen thought, other than nod one’s head sagely in agreement? It was Kraus’s specialty, the aphorism that shocked.

  A “goiter” industry or not, journalism was still the profession Kraus partook of. Satirist and self-appointed policeman in charge of patrolling sloppy language, bad grammar, poor word choice, and the misplaced comma, Kraus despised the languorous and breezy long newspaper essay, the feuilleton, with which many newspapers filled the bottom of their front pages.

  “To write a feuilleton is to curl locks on a bald head,” Kraus continued. “But the public likes such curls better than a lion’s mane of thought.” He smiled at this quip, thin lips revealing crooked teeth.

  So young to be so full of himself, Werthen thought, but nodded in appreciation at the saying which, he imagined, he would soon be reading in the pages of the thrice-monthly The Torch. A slight man with a curly head of hair and tiny oval wire-rim glasses that reflected the overhead lights, Kraus dressed like a banker. One of nine children of a Bohemian Jew who had made his money in paper bags, Kraus lived on a family allowance that allowed him to poke fun at everyone in the pages of his journal.

  Werthen had been trying for the last half hour to steer the conversation to its destination—Mahler and his possible enemies—but Kraus was having none of it.

  “Herr Kraus,” Gross finally interrupted. “I have no doubt of your intellectual qualities, nor of your wide and eclectic group of acquaintances, but can we please return to the point in hand?”

  Kraus sat up in his chair as if his manufacturer father had upbraided him at dinner.

  “I apologize, gentlemen. My pet peeves, you know.”

  Despite his slightness of bearing, Kraus had a fine speaking voice. He had tried for a career as an actor as a younger man, but stage fright had intervened. He was said to be experimenting with a new form of entertainment, however, much like the American, Mark Twain, and his famous one-person shows. At fashion
able salons, Kraus was already entertaining the cognoscenti with his interpretations of Shakespeare and with readings from his own writings. Another of his aphorisms Werthen had heard: “When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”

  “And yes, I believe I can aid you in your inquiries. I do not overstate the case, I think, to say that I am a focal point in the city. Vienna is an onion. We see that in the ring upon ring nature of the very city planning. The noble Inner City encircled by the Ringstrasse; the middle-class suburbs ringed by the Gürtel boulevard; and then the poorer outer districts where the workers live their forgotten, neglected lives.”

  Gross was about to interrupt again, but Werthen tapped his foot under the table, sensing that Kraus was finally coming to the point.

  “I am part of this great smelly onion, gentlemen, perhaps even at the very heart of it. I hear things as a publisher. People write to me, stop me on the street to share secrets, leave messages with the herr ober at my favorite coffeehouses. I also hear things through my intellectual contacts. A few friends and I have a regular table at the Café Central where we meet weekly to discuss—well, to discuss the world in the crucible that is Vienna. These friends in turn belong to other circles, to that of Freud, or Schnitzler, or Klimt, or Loos, Victor Adler, Mach. Even, and most important for you two, Mahler.”

  He cast them another of his tight-lipped, reptilian smiles, eyes flashing behind his tiny spectacles.

  “The long and short of it, Herr Kraus?” Gross said, losing patience now.

  “Dr. Gross, I am sure you could not bear the long version. Apoplexy might result.”

  “The short of it then,” Gross said.

  “The list is extensive,” Kraus said. “Off the top of my head, I can think of several possibilities. It is too bad you exempt women . . .”

  Werthen had taken Kraus into their confidence enough to explain the broad outlines of the possible threat to Mahler. Would this threat find its way into print in Kraus’s journal? Kraus had given his word of honor that it would not, but Werthen would put no money on that.

  “. . . For I personally know Gerta Rheingold would delight in Mahler’s demise.”

  “The Mozart soprano at the Hofoper?” Werthen said.

  “Yes, and her complaint is really quite delightful. At rehearsal last month for The Magic Flute, she was made to sing the lines, ‘Die, horrid monster!’ thirty times in succession, as Mahler was unsatisfied with her performance. Finally, she simply shrieked the lines at Mahler himself, bringing the entire rehearsal to a standstill. But then, she is a woman. However, today’s modern, liberated woman should, I feel, be included in one’s list of possible miscreants. Yet what is a liberated woman, but a fish that has fought its way to shore.”

  Another witticism that would soon spice the pages of The Torch, Werthen thought.

  “Perhaps we can turn to the male candidates?” Gross prompted, looking awfully uncomfortable in the delicate contours of his bentwood chair. His coffee had long since been finished, the spoon upended in the cup.

  “Well, I should question Herr Hans Richter, if I were you. He was one of the conductors under the former director, Jahn, and had reason to suspect that he himself would be named successor. Then Mahler arrives, a usurper to his crown, as it were. Touchy business, that. Leitner, of course, figures highly on such a list.”

  “Why so?” Werthen asked.

  “He was an early supporter when Mahler first arrived from Hamburg. But Mahler has proved to be his own man. He will not allow Leitner to have the final say on finances, on hiring and firing policies, or any of the day-to-day management policies of the Court Opera. Mahler has gone over Leitner’s head several times to Prince Montenuovo to get his own way. Then, of course, there is the stage manager, that Blauer chap. Cut from rough cloth. Mahler and he do not get along; opposite sides of the coin. Blauer makes no secret of the fact that Mahler’s staging demands are too ambitious. Mahler is, in fact, a follower of Appia’s principles, you know,” Kraus said, indicating the Swiss pioneer in stage design. “A stickler for realism, three-dimensionality, and authentic lighting. While our friends behind the curtain at the Hofoper are quite content to continue with the scenic principles and traditions of long centuries.”

  “But would either of those complaints, Leitner’s or Blauer’s, be of such magnitude as to—”

  “Warrant killing Mahler?” Kraus finished for Werthen. “Not in a sane society. But the theater is not sane; Vienna is not sane.”

  “You see the enemies as only within the Court Opera?” Gross asked, keeping the focus.

  “What is it you criminologists say?” Kraus looked into the vaulted ceiling as if searching for the answer there. “Motive and opportunity. The second is strong for these men. But there are, of course, others who might have fewer opportunities. Eberhard Hassler, the music critic for the Deutsches Volksblatt, has been an outspoken critic of Mahler. His critique is largely based on the fact that Mahler is of Jewish origin. Hassler is a rabid anti-Semite; he thinks Mahler is destroying the Viennese musical tradition with his ‘oriental’ theories, whatever that may mean. Motive, but perhaps little opportunity. And one other that comes immediately to mind. The head of the claque, Peter Schreier, has screamed foul play that Mahler has banned him and his cohort from performances. Mahler wants no undue applause to break the momentum of his conducting. But Schreier and his friends make their living from their applause, paid for by well-established and younger singers alike. Schreier, as he wrote in a letter he hoped I would publish, believes the matter is a ‘life-and-death affair.’ I should say there is motive there, and perhaps, knowing his access to the stage, opportunity, as well.”

  “The same could be said for Hassler,” Gross added. “After all, a music critic surely could gain access to rehearsals.”

  The three sat in silence for a time; all about them was a constant hum of conversation; waiters, attired in tuxedoes, brought trays of coffee and water to customers with elegant, quiet dispatch.

  “The list is indeed long,” Gross finally said. “And these are only the obvious choices. This is a desperate business. I must admit I do not care for the odds against us.”

  SIX

  The next evening Werthen received a call at his flat from Mahler. The composer’s voice sounded strong if not strident; he was seemingly recovered from his latest “accident.” He informed Werthen that he was off in the morning to the village of Altaussee in the western Salzkammergut region for his annual summer holidays. He and his sister, in the company of their friend Natalie, had taken a remote house for six weeks, the Villa Kerry, about a half hour from the village. There Mahler would continue work on his new symphony.

  He spoke eloquently of the rustic wonders of Altaussee and its magical surroundings: the clear, deep blue-black waters of the alpine lake ringed by peaks of the Loser mountain and others; the quiet and hidden charm of the village with its few hundred inhabitants; the excellence of hiking and bicycling paths.

  “Sounds idyllic,” Werthen managed to say between Mahler’s gushing pronouncements.

  “You think so? Yes, I believe you will like it.”

  Werthen waited a moment to make sure he understood.

  “You want me to accompany you?”

  “Not accompany. Shadow, perhaps, would be a better description. Of course there is no spare room at our villa, but in the village there are excellent accommodations at the Hotel am See. I hope you do not mind that I have taken the liberty of booking you a room. One cannot be too cautious about such matters this time of year.”

  “Herr Mahler—” Werthen began.

  Mahler, however, interrupted: “Your two simianlike employees would stand out much too much in such bucolic surroundings, Werthen. No, I believe you will do, if you feel I need personal protection.”

  So Mahler had discovered his bodyguards, Werthen thought. Of course, it had only been a matter of time before he would. But this was news to him that Mahler was moving house for the summer. Perh
aps it was for the best; after all, what could happen to him in the country? Their nameless adversary would be loath to strike in such surroundings, where any outsider would be instantly noticeable.

  “Herr Werthen? Are you still there?”

  Werthen looked over his shoulder and into the sitting room where Berthe sat reading, a splash of gaslight casting a halo of warm orange-yellow light over her face, her lips squeezed tight in concentration. He felt a sudden and overwhelming love for her.

  “Yes.”

  “Shall we see you in the country then?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Excellent,” Mahler said, though with little enthusiasm. “We shall see you tomorrow then.”

  Werthen felt rotten to be leaving Berthe in Vienna, but someone had to find a new junior member for the firm. Berthe assured him that she could see to that, and Gross for his part was quite content to continue their investigation and interviews in Vienna.

  The lawyer suspected Gross was secretly relieved to be on his own with the investigation; there was nothing for it, however, but to follow Mahler to the country. Surely he would not be needed the entire six weeks of the composer’s stay. He intended to take stock of the situation and then return to Vienna at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Werthen boarded the Salzburg express on Thursday with a guilty joy at his upcoming time in the country, for Vienna was stifling under a hazy blue sky and a humidity.

  However, he met with the direct opposite in terms of meteorological conditions once he had set down from the narrow single-gauge train in Altaussee.

  It rained for the next two days. A slow, persistent rain that made the hedgerows of lilac bushes, long since out of bloom, hang like weeping willows.

  Werthen was installed in the Hotel am See, an immense alpine building positively bristling with stag horns and oozing gemütlich touches, such as Tyrolean curtains, foot-thick eiderdown comforters on the beds, and freshly churned butter for the homemade rolls at morning coffee. Were Werthen’s favorite boulevardier character from his short stories, Count Joachim von Hildesheim, to describe the hotel, he would characterize it as “aggressively charming.”