Funeral in Blue (23 page)

He finally drifted off to sleep with a firmer plan in mind, and did not waken until it was broad daylight. He was extremely hungry.

With much nodding and smiling, his hostess gave him an excellent breakfast with rather more rich, sweet pastry than he cared for, but the best coffee he had ever tasted. Repeating
Danke schön
over and over, he smiled back, and then set out with a freshly scrubbed and very eager Ferdi, who had spent all evening and a good part of the night reading accounts of the ’48 rising. He was full of a jumble of facts and stories that had gathered the patina and exaggeration of legend already. He relayed them with great enthusiasm as they walked along the street side by side towards the magnificence of the Parliament and the gardens beyond, now winter bare.

“It actually sort of began in the middle of March,” Ferdi told him. “There was an uprising in Hungary already, and it spread here. Of course, Hungary is vast, you know? About six or seven times as big as Austria. All the nobles and senior clergy were due to meet in the Landhaus. That’s on the Herrengasse.” He pointed ahead of them. “That’s over there. I can take you if you want. Anyway, it seems they were asking for all sorts of reforms, particularly freedom of the press and to get rid of Prince Metternich. Students, artisans, and workers, mostly, forced their way into the building. About one o’clock a whole lot of Italian grenadiers shot into the crowd and killed thirty or more ordinary people—I mean, they weren’t criminals or the very poor, or lunatics like the French revolutionaries were in ’89, last century.”

He stared at Monk as they came to the Auerstrasse and were obliged to wait several moments for a break in the traffic to cross.

“That was the really big one,” he went on. “Ours was over within the year.” He smiled almost apologetically. “Pretty much everything is back as it was. Of course, Prince Metternich is gone, but he was seventy-four anyway, and he’d been around since before Waterloo!” His voice rose in incredulity as if he could barely grasp anyone having been alive so long.

Monk hid a smile.

“Then the barricades went up all over the city,” Ferdi went on, matching his stride to Monk’s. “But it was killing the people that really drove them to send Metternich into exile.” A flash of pity lit his young face. “I suppose that’s a bit hard, when you’re that old. Anyway,” he resumed, “in May they drove the whole court out of Vienna, Emperor Ferdinand and everyone. They all went to Innsbruck. Actually, you know, there was trouble just about everywhere that year.” He checked to make sure Monk was listening. “In Milan and Venice, too, which gave us a lot of bother. They are ours as well, even though they’re Italian. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Monk answered, remembering his own trip to Venice, and how the proud Venetians had hated the Austrian yoke on their shoulders. “Yes, I did know.”

“We’ve sort of got the German Empire to the northwest, and the Russian Empire to the northeast, and us in the middle,” Ferdi went on, increasing his pace to keep up with Monk’s longer legs. “Anyway, in May they formed a committee of public safety—sounds just like the French, doesn’t it? But we didn’t have a guillotine, and we didn’t kill many people at all.”

Monk was not certain if that was pride or a slight sense of anticlimax.

“You must have killed some,” he responded.

Ferdi nodded. “Oh, we did! We made rather a good job of it, actually, in October. They hanged the war minister, Count Baillat de Latour—from a lamppost. The mob did. Then they forced the government and the Parliament to go to Olmutz, which is in Moravia—that’s north of here, in Hungary.” He heaved a great sigh. “But it all came to nothing. The aristocracy and the middle classes—which is us, I suppose—supported Field Marshal Prince Windischgrätz, and it was all put down. I expect that was when your friends were very brave, and did whatever it was you need to find out about.”

“Yes,” Monk agreed, looking about him at the busy, prosperous streets with their magnificent architecture, and trying to imagine Kristian here, and Elissa, battling for reform of such a vast, seemingly untouchable force of government. He had seen in every direction the superb facades of the state and government buildings, the mansions and theaters, museums, opera houses and galleries. What fire of reform had burned inside them that they dared attempt to overthrow such power? They must have cared passionately, more than most people care about anything. Where would you ever begin to shake the foundations of such monolithic control?

He could see in Ferdi’s young face that something of it had caught him also.

“I need to find the people on my list,” he said aloud. “The people who were there then, and knew my friends.”

“Right-oh!” Ferdi answered, blushing with happiness and enthusiasm, striding out even more rapidly so Monk was now obliged to lengthen his own step to keep up. “Have you got money for a carriage?”

That afternoon they saw streets where the barricades had been, even chips out of stone walls where bullets had struck and ricocheted. They had supper in one of the cafés in which young men and women had sat huddled over the same tables, planning revolution by candlelight, a new world of liberty on the horizon, or mourned the loss of friends, perhaps in silence but for the rain on the windows and the occasional tramp of passing feet on the pavement outside.

Monk and Ferdi ate soup and bread in silence, each lost in thoughts which might have been surprisingly similar. Monk wondered about the bond between people who shared the hope and the sacrifice of such times. Could anything that came in the pedestrian life afterwards break such a bonding? Could anyone who had not been in that danger and hope enter into the circle or be anything but an onlooker?

In the flickering candlelight, with the murmur of conversation at the little tables around them, it could have been thirteen years ago. Ferdi’s young face, flushed and lit golden by the candle in an upright wine bottle, could have been one of theirs. The smells of coffee and pastry and wet clothes from the rain outside would be the same, the water streaking the windows, wavering the reflecting street lamps, and as the door opened and closed, the splash of water, the brief hiss of carriage wheels. Except that the dreams were gone, the air was no longer one of excitement, danger and sacrifice; it was comfortable, rigidly set prosperity and law in the old way, with the old rules and the old exclusions. The powerful were still powerful, and the poor were still voiceless.

In spite of the defeat, Monk envied Kristian and Max their past. He had no memory of belonging, of being part of a great drive for his own people, any cause fought for or even believed in. He had no idea if he had ever cared about an issue passionately enough to fight for it, die for it, enough to bond him to others in that friendship that is the deepest trust, and goes through life and death in a unity greater than common birth and blood, education or ambition, and makes you one of a whole that outlasts all its parts.

The closest he had ever come to that was fighting a cause for justice, with Hester, and then with Oliver Rathbone and Callandra. That was the same feeling, the will to succeed because it mattered beyond individual pain or cost, exhaustion or pride. It was a kind of love that enlarged them all.

How could it possibly be that Kristian or Max Niemann could have murdered Elissa, no matter how she had changed in the years since?

He pushed his empty cup away and stood up. “Tomorrow we must find people who fought in May, and in October,” he said as Ferdi stood up, too. “The ones on my list. I can’t wait any longer. Begin asking. Say it is for anything you like, but find them.”

The first successful conversation was stilted because it was translated with great enthusiasm by Ferdi, but of necessity went backwards and forwards far more slowly than it would have had Monk understood a word of German.

“What days!” the old man said, sipping appreciatively at the wine Monk had bought for them, although he insisted on water for Ferdi, to the boy’s disgust. “Yes, of course I remember them. Wasn’t so long ago, although it seems like it now. Except for the dead, you’d think they never happened.”

“Did you know many of the people?” Ferdi asked eagerly. He had no need to pretend his ardor; it shone in his eyes and quivered in the edge to his voice.

“Of course I did! Knew lots of them. Saw the best—those that lived through it, and those that didn’t.” He reeled off half a dozen names. “Max Niemann, Kristian Beck, Hanna Jakob, Ernst Stifter, Elissa von Leibnitz. Never forget her. Most beautiful woman in Vienna, she was. Like a dream, a flame in the darkness of those days. As much courage as any man . . . more!”

Ferdi’s eyes shone. He was leaning forward, lips parted.

Monk tried to look skeptical, but he had seen Allardyce’s painting of her, and he knew what the old man meant. It was not a perfection of form, or even a delicacy of feature, it was the passion inside her, the force of her vision, which made her unique. She had had the power to carry others into her dreams.

The old man was frowning at him. He spoke to Ferdi, and Ferdi smiled at Monk. “He says I’m to tell you that if you don’t believe him, you should go and ask others. Shall I tell him you’d like to do that?”

“Yes,” Monk agreed quickly. “Ask him about Niemann and Beck, but don’t sound too keen.” He must find something relevant to the personal passions and envies, more than a history lesson, however ardent.

Ferdi ignored the warning with great dignity. He turned to the old man, and Monk was obliged to listen to a quarter of an hour of animated conversation, mostly from the old man, but with Ferdi putting in increasingly excited questions. Ferdi kept glancing at Monk, willing him not to interrupt.

As soon as they were outside again in the rain and the shifting pattern of gas lamps, the wind sharp-edged and cold in their faces, Ferdi began. “Max Niemann was one of the heroes,” he said excitedly. “He came out for the reforms straightaway, not like some people, who waited to see the chances of success or what their friends or family would think of them.”

They came to the corner of the street and a carriage swished by, spraying mud and water. Monk leaped backwards but Ferdi was too absorbed in his story to notice. He was wet up to the knees, and oblivious of it. As soon as the street was clear, he set out across the roadway and Monk hastened to keep up with him.

“He was brave as well,” Ferdi went on. “He was right out there on the barricades when the real fighting began. So was Elissa von Leibnitz. He told me one story of how when the fighting was really awful in October, after they’d hanged the minister and the army just charged in, several young men were shot and fell in the street. She took a gun herself and went out, shouting and waving, firing the gun at the soldiers. She knew how to and she wasn’t scared. All by herself, she drove them back until others could crawl out and get the wounded men back behind the barricades.”

“Where was Kristian?” Monk asked. “Or Max?”

“Max was one of the ones hurt,” Ferdi replied, glancing sideways to make sure Monk was keeping up with him in the dark. “Kristian was trying to stop a man from bleeding to death from a terrible wound. He had one hand holding a pad on the man’s shoulder, and he was shouting to Elissa to stop, or someone to help her, and waving his other arm.”

“But Elissa wasn’t hurt?”

“Apparently not. There was one woman called Hanna who was with them. She went right out in front, too. She was one of those who dragged the wounded men back. And she used to carry messages, too, right through where the army had taken the city back, to where their own revolutionaries were cut off at the far side. And carry messages to their allies in the government as well.”

“Can we speak to her?” Monk asked eagerly. It would be a firsthand account from another person who knew them well. She might have noticed more of relationships, the undercurrents of envy or passion between Kristian and Max.

“I asked,” Ferdi agreed, his face suddenly very sober. “But he thinks she is one of those killed in the uprising. He told me roughly where Max Niemann still lives. He’s very respectable now. The government hasn’t forgotten which side he was on when it mattered, and they just can’t afford to punish everybody, or it would all get out of hand again. Too many people think highly of Herr Niemann.” He waved his hands excitedly. “But that’s not all. It seems that your friend Herr Beck was a pretty good hero too, a real fighter. Not only brave, but pretty clever, a sort of natural leader. He had the courage to face the enemy down. Could read people rather well, and knew when to call a bluff, and just how far to go. He was tougher than Niemann, and prepared to take the risks.”

“Are you sure?” It did not sound like the man Monk had seen. Surely Ferdi had it the wrong way around. “Beck is a doctor.”

“Well, he could have it wrong, I suppose, but he seemed absolutely sure.”

Monk did not argue. His feet ached and he was exhausted. He felt cold through to the bone, and it was still more than a mile back to his room in the Josefstadt. Before he could even think of that he must make certain he found a carriage to take Ferdi safely home. This was the boy’s city, but Monk still felt responsible for him. “We’ll start again tomorrow,” he said decisively. “Speak to some more of the people on the list.”

“Right!” Ferdi agreed. “We’re not finding anything very helpful . . . are we?” He looked anxiously at Monk.

Monk had his own feelings. “Not yet. But we will. Perhaps tomorrow.”

Ferdi was prompt in the morning, and with renewed zeal they planned where to continue their search. This time they found a charming woman who must have been in her twenties thirteen years ago, and now was comfortably plump and prosperous.

“Of course I knew Kristian,” she said with a smile as she admitted them to her sitting room and offered them a choice of three kinds of coffee, and melting, delicious cake, even though it was barely half past ten in the morning. “And Max. What a lovely man!”

“Kristian?” Monk asked quickly, by now catching from Ferdi a large part of the sense of the conversation. “Is she speaking of Kristian?”