Requiem in Vienna (30 page)

T
he next morning, Werthen left Gross, Herr Meisner, and Berthe huddled over the musical notation on the anonymous letter, attempting to break its possible code. He went to the office, and Tor was already there, working fastidiously on a handwritten copy of a will for the von Tuma family patriarch. Werthen had given Tor a key his second week on the job, so dependable and trustworthy had he proved himself to be.

After this case is over, Werthen thought, I must see to adjusting the man’s salary. The law office could not afford to lose someone as valuable as Tor to the competition.

Tor was never a talkative sort; this morning they shared only a brief
guten morgen.

Once in his inner office, Werthen began sorting paperwork into urgent and less urgent piles, culling those that could be handled by Tor and those that must be seen to himself.

His morning work was disturbed, however, when he heard the outer office door open and then a mumble of voices. Tor knocked and poked his head inside.

“A gentleman to see you, Advokat. From the police.” Tor looked almost fearful as he uttered this last word.

He ushered in Detective Inspector Drechsler, who appeared to be in a hurry.

“Advokat,” he said by way of greeting.

Tor closed the door slowly behind him.

”What can I do for you, Inspector? I hope it is not about that break-in.”

“No, no,” Drechsler said importantly. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I might find Doktor Gross with you.”

“He’s at the apartment. May I be of assistance?” Werthen motioned to a chair, but Drechsler shook his head.

“ I just wanted to let you chaps know that our little night watch effort has finally borne fruit.”

“Night watch?”

“Herr Gunther’s killer, remember? He was seen by one lady of the night leaving the premises, and we had hoped to find another who could provide a better description.”

“Right. Sorry. Success, you say?”

“My sergeant finally found another young woman whose territory is closer to the Hofburg, and she distinctly remembers the man in question.”

“How can she be so sure?” Werthen asked. “After all, it was . . . how long ago?”

“About three weeks ago. And she can be sure. It was the very night one customer tipped her five kronen. That stuck in her mind, as did the face of our man.”

Werthen felt a frisson of expectation. “She gave a description?”

Drechsler paused a moment. “Well, actually nothing too exact. A bit above medium height, stocky build. It was the eyes she remembered most. Said they looked like they could suck you into the depths. I did not bother to query which depths she might be referring to.”

Drechsler chuckled at his attempted quip, but Werthen remained silent.

“At any rate,” the policeman continued, “he scared her so much
she didn’t bother continuing her sales pitch to him. But she says she could identify him if she ever saw him again.”

“Did she mention any other characteristics?” Werthen asked. “Facial hair, a beard, mustache. Anything?”

Another pause from Drechsler. “Sorry. I’ll have my man interview her again. Mousy little creature. Mitzi Paulus. What men could see in her I don’t know. Lives in a miserable little garret in the Kohlmarkt.”

“Have you presented her with a rogues’ gallery of our suspects? I am sure we can obtain some photographs from the Hofoper.”

“We are onto that now, Advokat. However, it is not the easiest thing getting photographs of men who are not known criminals. We’re working through the newspapers and the Hofoper. It takes time.”

“Bravo to you, Drechsler. I will let Gross know of your information. We are making headway. I feel it.”

“Tell that to Meindl. He was outraged we released Schreier. Said he’d have my liver for breakfast. Puffed up little adder he is.”

Werthen agreed entirely with this final description. Drechsler then made his adieus and was shown out by Tor, who appeared at the office door just at the appropriate moment.

Werthen made his way later that morning to the Hofoper. It was time to speak with Arnold Rosé and in the interval of rehearsals seemed the most opportune time and place to do it.

Coming onto the opera from the rear, that is from the Inner City side of the building, he was reminded again of the scandal and tragedies that accompanied the difficult birth of that august institution. The Hofoper was expert at spawning tragedy not only on its stage.

The architects, August von Siccardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, were both close friends and colleagues, well respected in Vienna before the competition for the opera house. In 1860, when
the competition was announced, they submitted their plan, per regulations, anonymously, with only a motto to identify whose it was. In their case, they chose a saying that would later have ominous overtones: “
Fait ce que dois, advienne que pourra,”
“Do what you must, come what may.”

Their plan for a monumental new opera house to replace the old one nearby was cheered initially by the press who claimed that the architects
composed
the plans rather than designed them. The planned exterior was imposing enough; the interior with its lavish central stairway, salons and main auditorium decorated with statuary and paintings by some of the finest artists in the empire, would put the Royal Court Opera in a class by itself, the newspapers declared.

This honeymoon was short-lived. As construction began the following year, delays and cost overruns ensued. Worse, the level of the newly created Ringstrasse ended up becoming several meters higher than originally planned. Thus, by the time the Court Opera finally was nearing completion in 1868, its entrance on the Ringstrasse was, in fact, below street level.

The press, eager for headlines, began calling the new building the sunken chest and an “architectural Königgrätz,” after the 1866 defeat of Austrian troops by Prussia. When the emperor himself casually remarked to an aide that the entrance was indeed low, tragedy à la Viennois resulted. Unable to bear such criticism, van der Nüll hanged himself in April of 1868; his friend Siccardsburg died two months later, of a “broken heart,” the same scurrilous press reported. Neither lived to see completion of the building they had “composed.” In the event, the public learned to live with a partially subterranean entrance, and the emperor, chastened by this experience, confined himself from that time on to the polite phrase, “It was very nice; it pleased me very much,” whenever asked for his judgment about a public event.

Werthen entered the side doors and made his way to the auditorium where Richter, filling in for Mahler, was just finishing
morning rehearsals for
Tannhäuser.
The third violin chair had, Werthen noticed, been filled. A bearded, middle-aged gentleman had taken the deceased Herr Gunther’s position in the orchestra. Rosé, seeing Werthen, nodded, and they sat together in red plush chairs on the main floor as the rest of the orchestra went off for their midmorning coffee.

“It was good of you to see me. Do you want something to eat or drink as we talk?” Werthen asked.

“I eat sparingly,” the tall, elegant violinist said. “I assume you want to talk about these attacks on Gustav.”

“Attacks?”

“Please, Advokat Werthen. Justi and I do not have secrets from each other. Not a string of accidents, but a concerted effort to kill Mahler. And to answer your as yet unasked question, no, it is not I. Whether or not Gustav chooses to write his sister out of his will if we marry is of little matter to me.”

“And your position in the orchestra?”

“This is not a parallel case to my brother’s. Unlike him, I have real power in Vienna’s musical world. I have a secure position, one that cannot be taken from me out of domestic spite. Austrian bureaucracy, for all its failings, does at least guarantee one security in his job.”

“Actually, I did not come to accuse you or even to vet you,” Werthen said. “Rather I want to know more about Herr Mahler’s past.”

“You think the person who wants to kill him has an old grudge?”

“It is a possibility. What do you know about Hans Rott, for example?”

Rosé showed no surprise at the name. “That he is dead and could not be the one to have attacked Gustav.”

“I realize that, as well, Herr Rosé. What I would like to know is something about their relationship.”

“Gustav and Rott? There is not much to say. Gustav thought,
mistakenly so, I believe, that Rott was the most talented of our generation.”

“Do you know his music?”

Rosé cast Werthen a baleful look. “Not all that again.”

“All what?”

“That Gustav stole the man’s music after he died in the asylum. Nonsense. Utter nonsense.”

“How so?”

“You’ve only to listen to the compositions of both to hear that.”

“Have you?”

Rosé looked suddenly discomfited. “Not in decades. I believe I heard part of one of Rott’s early symphonies. So many years ago.”

“Then how can you call it nonsense that Herr Mahler might have borrowed from Rott’s work?”

“Because it is not in Gustav’s nature to cheat. He is, if anything, too pure for this world. He is too hard on himself. And thus on others.”

Werthen pushed on. “Were they friends?”

“We were all chums of a sort back then. But those were student days. Rott was not the sort of young man to actually have friends. He had commitments instead. When his father died—his mother had already died years earlier—Rott was only eighteen. Suddenly the weight of the world was cast upon his shoulders. It unhinged him, I am sure.”

“What weight? You mean having to make his own way as a teenager?”

Rosé nodded. “And that of his younger brother. He had to make a living for both of them, and had to keep the brother out of trouble, as well. ”

“What was this brother’s name?”

Rosé thought for a moment. “Karl, I think it was. Never met him myself, but from what I heard he only wanted to carouse and play the large man with the ladies. There was some story about him, born on the wrong side of the sheets. There were rumors at
the time of a dalliance on the part of the mama with a noble, perhaps even a Habsburg. It escapes me now, but this younger brother couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sixteen at the time. As I say, I never met him, not even at Rott’s funeral. He was conspicuously absent. Not old Bruckner, though. Wept like a baby for Rott, his star pupil.”

There was little more to be learned from Rosé, so Werthen left him to the tuning of his violin. As he was walking up the aisle to the exit, Herr Regierungsrath Leitner joined him.

“I hope you discovered something useful. This business must stop.”

“Yes,” Werthen said. “And thank you again for arranging the interview.”

“Are you any closer to catching the culprit?”

“Close,” Werthen said. “And getting closer every day.”

Werthen was not sure, but it seemed that this remark, more bluff than truth, caused Leitner a spasm of concern. The look passed in an instant, though, to be replaced by his usual neutral countenance.

A yipping and barking erupted from the stage, and Werthen was astonished to see the stage manager, Siegfried Blauer, at the helm of a brace of hunting dogs, tugging this way and that on their leather leashes. In his outmoded muttonchops and with these dogs all about him, he suddenly looked like a younger version of Emperor Franz Josef.

“My God, man,” Blauer boomed at a red-faced gentleman in lederhosen accompanying him. “I thought you said these animals were trained.”

“They are,” the other replied. “For hunting, not necessarily for gallivanting about the stage.”

“Leitner!” Blauer cried out, shielding his eyes from the stage lights to see into the auditorium. “Are you out there? Do you hear? This is insanity. Seventy hunting dogs for the entrance scene? He must be mad.”

Leitner turned to Werthen for a moment. “He means Herr Mahler, I am afraid. It was his wish to have the dogs onstage. He is a great one for theatrical effects.”

“Leitner,” Blauer called out again in his Ottakring drawl. “We need some beasts who can hold their water onstage.”

“Please forgive me, I must see to this.”

“Of course,” Werthen said. “And thank you once again.”

But Leitner was now too engaged in this canine drama to pay him further attention.

“What is the occasion?” Werthen asked that evening upon returning to his flat.

An open bottle of
sekt
—faux champagne—lay in an ice bucket; Gross and Herr Meisner were toasting with long-stemmed glasses. Berthe was joining the toast with what appeared to be mineral water in her glass.

“Ah, Werthen,” Gross said jovially. “There you are. Good that you could make it home in time for the festivities.”

“In honor of what, might I ask?”

Gross beamed a smile at him. “You are the one who makes private inquiries. Tell
me
what this is about.”

“You’ve done it. You broke the code.”

“Not I,” Gross said, somewhat sadly. “No. The laurels go to your esteemed father-in-law.”

“That’s wonderful,” Werthen said. “And what did it say?”

Gross waved his glass of
sekt
like a conductor’s baton. “Not so quickly. First, you must follow in our footsteps to the discovery.”

“Really, Gross,” Werthen spluttered. “We hardly have the time for parlor games.”

“Karl,” Berthe interrupted. “Don’t be such a stick. It is really quite fascinating. Papa, please tell Karl how you broke the code.”

Herr Meisner was only partly joining in the general gaiety, Werthen could tell, eager to keep his daughter happy.

“It is really no great achievement,” he began.

“Nonsense,” said Gross. “I personally exhausted all my cipher knowledge in the task. Numerical codes, alphabet codes, everything from Caesar’s cipher to the Napoleon I system. I was about to tear my hair out, but of course I have little left to tear. Then our most knowledgeable colleague, Herr Meisner, joined the fray.”

Such praise was clearly embarrassing for Herr Meisner, but he managed a bland smile.

“Please, Papa,” Berthe urged.

“Well, it was a bit of a puzzler at first, I must admit. As I said, I have made a study of musical codes. Musicians since the time of Bach have played with secret messages encoded in their compositions. Typically, one uses letter names of the notes to spell out a message. Usually these are the names of friends and associates.”