Requiem in Vienna (21 page)

“And there was no carriage waiting for him, no
fiaker
?” Gross asked.

“She reports that he left on foot. Headed down the Herrengasse toward the Hofburg and not in her direction.”

“Can she be more specific about the time than the ‘wee’ hours?” Werthen asked.

Drechsler shrugged to the lawyer. “She remembers the bell of the Minoriten Church going two, but was unsure how long that was before she saw the man.”

“So somewhere between two and three in the morning?” Gross said.

“That would seem reasonable,” Drechsler said.

Werthen was about to make the obvious conclusion when Gross spoke up, quite literally taking the words out of his mouth.

“And I suppose you have this same bright young sergeant investigating the nighttime scene along the farther stretches of Herrengasse in the hopes of finding another witness?”

Drechsler smiled. “It is a pleasure working with you, Dr. Gross. One need not overexplain.”

Gross nodded at the compliment.

“And one other thing,” Drechsler said. “He’s not a man to cross.”

“Meindl, you mean?” Werthen said.

Drechsler nodded. “He doesn’t much like you.”

“That was made abundantly apparent,” Werthen replied.

“He is hoping you make a misstep in this investigation. That he can somehow destroy your career, your reputation.”

Werthen took this in, wondering why Drechsler would be so candid.

“And he thinks you’re a bag of gas,” Drechsler said to Gross.

This brought the red to Gross’s cheeks, but he said nothing.

“You are being rather frank, Detective Inspector,” Werthen said.

“Truth is, I don’t like the man. He knows bugger all about policing. His fancy friends secured him his position on the Praesidium. He treats his men like retrieving dogs, takes all the credit for any convictions and none of the blame for those cases we cannot close.”

“And you think you would be a better choice as inspector of the Police Praesidium,” Gross said.

“Even my aunt Gretl would be,” Drechsler said. “But they’ll never pick a man like me. I didn’t go to the university, don’t have the right friends. No, I’m not that kind of ambitious, but I would like to see a better man as my boss.”

“I believe, Detective Inspector,” Gross said, “that is a wish shared by others, as well.”

“Well, maybe we can help each other, then,” Drechsler said, somewhat ambiguously, and left, turning into the First District, headed toward Freyung.

Werthen and Gross strolled along the Ring.

“I really wouldn’t mind a spot to eat,” Gross finally said.

But before looking for a likely restaurant, Werthen had to know.

“Drechsler was quite candid with us. But you did not reciprocate. You made no mention of our anonymous letter or of a possible link to Mahler’s past.”

“Is that a question?” Gross asked.

“I suppose so.”

“My answer then is that neither did you.”

“I am sure you were not waiting for my lead in the matter.”

“Actually I was, my dear Werthen. This is, after all, as you are wont to remind me, your case. Ergo, your decision whom to take into your confidence.”

“I am not sure it was a conscious decision. I just—”

“Exactly,” Gross said. “You went by instincts, by feelings. And they are perfectly sound. At this point in our new investigations,
the fewer people who know the better. So, how about that plate of wurst?”

Werthen looked around him, remembering a
gemütlich
locale nearby just off the Ring. He led Gross to the Black Swann, an inn near the Rathaus that had just the sort of rustic ambience Gross enjoyed.

Once seated snugly in a solid oak corner booth, Gross ordered his plate of sliced wurst with onions, and Werthen settled for a midmorning glass of slivowitz and a
kleine braune.

“There are too many trails to follow,” Werthen said as he watched Gross dig into the food.

“In which case it is recommended that the wise investigator narrow his options to a more manageable amount,” Gross said, through his final bites. “I recommend that, for the time being, we put Herr Mahler on the back burner.” He patted his oily lips with a linen napkin. “To use a culinary metaphor.”

“Berthe will be disappointed,” Werthen said. “She has developed the lead to Mahler’s past quite extensively, especially with the information yesterday from Frau Adler.”

“Such information has lingered for decades,” Gross said. “It can wait a few more days or weeks while we investigate the deaths of Brahms and Bruckner. Just as my return to Czernowitz can be delayed. After all, the term is over and Adele is still in Paris.”

Which, Werthen assumed, was Gross’s way of requesting further lodgings so that he could continue with the investigation. Werthen did not bother responding to that comment. Instead he asked, “And how do you mean to go about that investigation?”

“Well, an obvious starting point would be your friend, Herr Kraus. He seems to know all the chitchat that passes for news in this fair city.”

“What sort of ‘ponderables’ are we speaking of?” Karl Kraus asked later that day.

They were seated in the office of
Die Fackel
at Maximiliantstrasse 13, one street in from the Ring and just across from the Hofoper. Kraus was thus at the very geographical center of Vienna culture. Despite the imposing address, the journalist operated out of a cramped and cluttered corner office, which contained a small desk and a battered leather sofa along one wall that was currently filled with back copies of the
Wiener Zeitung
,
Neue Freie Presse
,
Fremdenblatt
,
Wiener Mode
, and the
Deutsche Zeitung.
Werthen and Gross occupied two rather unstable straight-back chairs. In front of them, Kraus’s desk was a mess of paper. He wrote the entire content of his magazine himself and in longhand, a tight scrawl as Werthen could observe on the pages of foolscap strewn about the desktop.

“Ponderables such as the nature of Bruckner’s and Brahms’s deaths.” Gross smiled at Kraus insouciantly.

“My, but you two are heading for heavy water.”

“In what way?” asked Gross.

Now it was Kraus’s turn to return an innocent smile. “Why not include the death of dear Herr Strauss, as well?” he asked. “We make such business of death in Vienna.”

“Is that what you are working on now?” Werthen asked.

“For my late June issue,” Kraus said, tapping the page in front of him. “The ‘Mercantile Mourning of Johann Strauss.’ Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? His death has given rise to a flood of new productions in every theater in the land. Even the amusement park in the Prater has joined it with a ‘Venice in Vienna Death Celebration.’ I assume they will have some dark-haired southerner crooning Strauss melodies from a gondola afloat on one of those ludicrously artificial canals. Tastelessness knows no bounds.”

“We have already made certain inquiries regarding Herr Strauss,” Gross allowed. “Good of you to advise it, though. Herr Brahms and Herr Bruckner will suffice for now, thank you.”

Kraus was a quick study, Werthen knew. No need to explain things to him; no sense in trying to obfuscate the matter, either,
for he was sure to understand the implications of their new inquiries.

“Well,” Kraus began, leaning back in his chair, “I am sure you are aware of the basic facts. Bruckner died on October 11, 1896. He was seventy-two, had just moved into a small apartment in the Upper Belvedere Palace, and was trying furiously to finish the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. He had been in poor health for several years, but it was still quite a shock when his housekeeper discovered his body. Of course he never married. He died quite alone.”

“Was there a will?” Gross asked.

Kraus cast a bemused glanced at the criminologist. This query evidently confirmed Kraus’s suspicions about their line of questioning.

“Oh, yes. Everything proper and aboveboard there. Signed it in 1893, leaving all his autograph manuscripts to the imperial library. Other than that, there was little of worth to bequeath. He had a rough road, did poor Bruckner.”

“His support of Wagner cost him dearly,” Werthen said.

“Yes,” Kraus allowed. “That surely set the musical establishment against him. Hanslick and his minions. They called his music wild and incomprehensible.”

By whom he meant Eduard Hanslick, doyen of Vienna’s music critics and a staunch enemy of the music of Wagner and any other proponent of the new music.

“ ‘Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.’ I believe that is a fair recitation of Hanslick’s central thesis,” Kraus said, pleased with himself. “Thus, Romanticism with its emphasis on feelings was his sworn enemy. Wagner’s dramatics and use of music to further such drama fell afoul of the critic’s theories. But Wagner got back at Hanslick, you know, with the buffoonish and pedantic critic Beckmesser in
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Wagner had wanted to call the
character Hans Lick, but his lawyers changed his mind for him. Of course, Wagner was not the only target of Hanslick’s barbs. Bruckner, who supported Wagner, and who committed the great sin of deviating from the classical mode also became anathema. Hanslick went so far as to block performances of Bruckner’s music and to use all his influence to keep that simple country organist even from teaching. But in that respect, Hanslick was not totally successful. Though Hanslick managed to prevent him from being appointed a professor at the University of Vienna, Bruckner did teach organ and counterpoint at the conservatory. I believe your friend Mahler was a student and early devotee, as was Hugo Wolf, another special target for Hanslick’s critical venom.”

Werthen made the sudden connection: Hanslick had been the man in the top hat obstructing his view at Strauss’s funeral, the one who accused him of picking his pocket.

“I believe we had an informal meeting once,” Werthen blurted out, and then explained the odd circumstances of that meeting.

“Watch yourself, or you will end up skewered in his column one fine day,” Kraus said. “Though he is in semiretirement, he still casts the odd poison dart from time to time. Strange he was at Strauss’s funeral at all. He had no love for the man’s music.”

Gross had sat quietly through this seeming aside, but now interrupted.

“Was there a cause of death mentioned?”

“No, nothing of that sort. Though, as I said, Bruckner had been ill the final years of his life. An odd sort of man. Dressed abominably, like a schoolmaster from the country. Which in fact his father was. All Bruckner really cared about was his music. Playing the organ and composing. Quite helpless in the ways of the big city. There is the very charming story of Bruckner once pressing a tip into the palm of Hans Richter after that man successfully conducted his Fourth Symphony.”

“And Brahms?” Gross prompted.

“That was a bit more straightforward. He died of liver cancer, the same complaint that took his father. That was in April, I believe, two years ago. And if you ask me about
his
will, there you will have a story of human deceit, concupiscence, and greed. In short, Herr Brahms died without a will and that set everyone from his landlady to his music publisher to distant German cousins snarling at one another over the quite substantial wealth the man left. The matter is still working its way through the courts. But then, Advokat Werthen, I assume you would be only too aware of the case. Like something out of Dickens.”

“To be sure,” Werthen said, happy that he had nothing to do with it, for the proceedings were sure to go on for another decade and suck dry the bank accounts of the litigants. “Brahms will certainly make his way into textbook lore as a prime example for writing one’s will in a timely fashion.”

“Brahms, of course, was on the other side of the divide in the War of the Romantics,” Gross said.

Kraus nodded his head emphatically. “He and Hanslick were a pair. Brahms even let him see his compositions before they were performed. Together they conspired to create the musical culture of Vienna. They sat on prize committees, passing judgment on the works of young conservatory musicians. There was one poor unfortunate . . . I forget his name now, but it will come to me. One student, at any rate, said to have real musical genius. Brahms declared that the youth’s composition, a symphony, had simply not been written by him. Too good to be the work of a simple conservatory student. It destroyed the student’s career. He was taken off a train not long after, delirious and babbling on about Brahms having set a bomb on the train. He later died in an asylum.”

Kraus broke off, looking upward to a swath of spiderwebbing hanging from the ceiling like a tattered pennon, seemingly attempting to retrieve the missing name.

“Do you mean a fellow named Rott?” Werthen offered, for
Berthe had informed him of that young man mentioned by Emma Adler.

“That’s the very one,” Kraus said. “Hans Rott. How clever of you, Advokat.”

Werthen nodded at this, somewhat surprised at the mention of the young musician in these two different contexts.

“At any rate,” Kraus continued, “Brahms was not simply or solely a stuffed shirt. He was a great friend of Strauss, did you know that?”

Both Werthen and Gross allowed that they did not.

“Yes, despite Hanslick’s contempt for Strauss’s music, Brahms was a real devotee. He even wrote an inscription on Adele Strauss’s fan. Under the opening notes of the
Blue Danube
he noted, ‘Alas, not by Brahms.’ He had a sense of playfulness. There was all that business about musical coding.”

Kraus looked to them for a sign of recognition, but again Werthen and Gross were quite in the dark as to his references.

“I refer, in the first instance, to the piece he wrote with Schumann, the
F–A–E Sonata
, dedicated to a violinist whose motto was
Frei aber einsam
, free but alone. They used the musical notes of F, A, and E to play with that theme. Brahms later modified that to F–A–F,
frei aber froh
, free but happy. He also included sweet references to the ladies in his life in such codes. Clara Schumann, for example, with musical themes using C and an E-flat standing for S. The same for Adele Strauss, so they say. The A–E-flat combination is everywhere in his later music.”