The Keeper of Hands (27 page)

Gross and Werthen pulled straight-backed leather-seated chairs to the desk. Schnitzler had obviously been at work when they arrived; manuscript pages littered the desk.

‘A new play?’ Werthen asked.

‘A novel, actually. I’ve been attempting it for years. Perhaps I should just content myself with theater pieces and short stories. Olga . . . That is Fräulein Gussman, my fiancée, advises as much.’

Werthen noticed that Schnitzler now referred to Fräulein Gussman as his intended. She must be a powerful young woman, indeed.

‘I’m sure you must follow your own instincts in this, Herr Schnitzler,’ Gross said. ‘Only an artist knows an artist’s mind. Wouldn’t you agree?’

Gross was being rather fulsome, Werthen thought. Normally he berated bohemia for self-indulgence. Science was for him – besides the work of his beloved Brueghel the Elder, of course – the only true art. But in fact Gross was simply employing his own interviewing technique for witnesses who do not wish to speak the truth, as set down in his book
Criminal Investigation
: ‘You must take the witness entirely out of the circumstances and ask something which he does not anticipate.’

There was a time in Werthen’s life when that work was his bible.

‘I do agree, Herr Doktor Gross. It is good to see a man of practicalities such as yourself in tune with the artist’s psyche.’

Gross smiled blandly at this and accepted the cup of coffee Schnitzler poured for him as well as a not insignificant slice of the
Gugelhupf
. Werthen took the coffee but not the cake.

‘So, gentlemen, what may I do for you?’ Schnitzler said once they had taken initial sips.

Gross set his cup down. ‘You can tell us the truth about Fräulein Mitzi.’

This made Schnitzler sit up straight in his chair. ‘But I have. What more is there to tell? It is not a pretty picture I have painted of myself.’

‘But it is the picture Vienna knows you by,’ Gross said. ‘The roué who takes the virginity of the sweet young thing and then casts her aside when she falls in love with him. The subject of so many of your theater pieces.’

Schnitzler turned from Gross to Werthen. ‘Advokat, what is your colleague getting at? I have been honest with you. Painfully so.’

‘I think not, Herr Schnitzler,’ Werthen replied. ‘I think that perhaps you have been protecting your reputation as a debauchee and rake. We have reason to believe that Fräulein Mitzi was not quite the sweet young innocent you portray her as.’

‘What does it matter? The girl is dead.’

‘It matters in terms of a range of suspects,’ Gross answered. ‘And of motive. We need to know who stood to benefit from her death.’

‘I did not kill her.’

‘We are not accusing you, Herr Schnitzler,’ Gross said calmly. ‘But we must have the truth from you about the young woman.’

Schnitzler tapped his right forefinger on the desktop as if transmitting Morse code.

‘Alright,’ he said finally. ‘The truth. But this must not reach Olga’s ears.’

Neither Gross nor Werthen assured him of this. Another moment of silence ensued.

Schnitzler let out an exasperated sigh. Then began to tell them about Mitzi.

‘She brought nothing but trouble. A regular little vixen. We met in the park, as I told you. She appeared to be such a sweet young thing. And acted the part as well – until I got her in bed. It was obvious she had been with a man before. She told me it was her uncle who had done it, who had ruined her. And I felt sorry for her. But then she threatened to go to Olga, to tell her of our affair. She demanded I marry her. Her! A common little thing from the country. I finally had to buy her off. Not cheap, either, I can tell you. But anything to get her out of my life.’

‘Then she was not cast out on the streets penniless after leaving you?’ Werthen said.

‘On the contrary. She could well afford lodgings after depleting my savings. You know what she told me when she finally left? She laughed at me and said that she had chosen the name Mitzi—’

‘I thought you had given her that pet name,’ Werthen said.

Schnitzler shook his head. ‘That’s what I told you. To save face. In fact, she had studied me and learned that I had affairs with two women named Mitzi in the past. One of them my great love.’ He sighed again.

Werthen knew the story. The Mitzi he was talking about had had a child, stillborn, by Schnitzler, and then died from sepsis.

‘She used me. Played me for a fool. She was only ever in it for the money, I am sure.’

‘Then why go to the Bower?’ Gross asked.

‘Search me,’ Schnitzler said. ‘But there must have been money involved.’

‘And you discovered her there later?’ Werthen asked.

‘Yes. Just as I told you. That part was the truth. But I stayed away.’

‘Yet you told your friend Altenberg about this sweet young thing,’ Werthen pressed. ‘Weren’t you afraid she would do the same to him?’

‘No, no. Peter is, well . . . Peter does not get involved with women in the same way. Besides, she threatened to disclose our affair if I did not send her a nice steady regular. Peter fitted that description, and I assumed he would enjoy her schoolgirl act.’

‘So you see, Herr Schnitzler, how important it is we have a true picture of the victim,’ Gross said.

‘I don’t understand . . .’

‘Motive,’ said Gross, in his prosecuting magistrate’s voice. ‘You’ve got heaps of motive. There must be others, as well.’

‘I swear that I did not—’ And then he stopped himself. ‘If anybody had motive it would be that uncle of hers.’

‘We have reason to believe that Father Hieronymus was also badly used by her.’

‘I see,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘That would make sense. In that case, I think I might have made an error. I should never have let those two go.’

‘Prokop and Meier, you mean?’

Schnitzler nodded at Werthen. ‘I assumed that after two weeks the danger had passed. But . . .’ He trailed off, looking towards the ceiling as if computing a maths problem. ‘If they had still been in my employ, the man would never have got in to see me. When you rang, I thought he’d come back.’

‘That who had come back?’ said Werthen.

‘The father. Mitzi’s father. The man was insane with grief. Cook let him in unsuspectingly. He came here accusing me of ruining his daughter. Seemed truly out of his mind.’

‘And what error did you make, Schnitzler?’ Werthen demanded. ‘What did you tell him?’ But he had already guessed the answer.

‘That he had the wrong man. It was the uncle he should be accosting, not me. The uncle who took her virginity.’

‘Jesus,’ Werthen said. ‘How long ago was this?’

Schnitzler shook his head. ‘An hour ago, maybe more. But at the time I thought that was the case. It was an honest mistake.’

‘Was he armed?’ Gross asked.

‘He was menacing. Crazy.’

‘We’ve got to get to the uncle,’ Werthen said.

As they quickly made their way to the door, Schnitzler called out to them, ‘An honest mistake.’

They were in luck; a fiaker drove by just as they came out of the apartment house. Werthen flagged it down, gave the driver the address, and promised a healthy tip if he could get them there as fast as possible. With Werthen’s usual fiaker driver, Bachmann, at the reins, it had taken forty-five minutes to reach the parish church of St Johann near the Meidlinger Haupstrasse. This cabbie accomplished the journey in thirty, with Werthen and Gross holding on to leather grips with tightly clenched fists and bobbing back and forth on the seat as the horse’s hooves sparked on the cobbles and the carriage rattled along.

Arriving at the church, Werthen gave the man a crown and did not bother waiting for change. Both he and Gross ran past the church and through the graveyard to the small hunting lodge at the back that served as the rectory. They had not spoken during the journey, but now Gross, in between deep breaths, said, ‘I hope for that man’s sake we are not too late.’

It was not clear which man he meant; for both it would indeed be a tragedy.

Reaching the rectory, Werthen had just gripped the brass hand-shaped knocker when the front door flew open. It was the aged housekeeper and her eyes looked wild.

‘Oh, murder, murder! Please, you must help.’

She grabbed Werthen’s arm and he could hear voices shouting from down the long hallway. He raced to the door of the study, Gross behind him. As they reached it, they heard a harsh scream and then a crash of furniture. Throwing open the door, Werthen saw Herr Moos, Mitzi’s father. In his hand was the poker from the ceramic stove, held by the tip; the heavy brass handle at the other end was smeared in blood. His face was a mask of rage and he was about to strike again at the body at his feet, but the overturned chair was in his way, allowing Werthen the opportunity to grab the man’s arm. But Moos was enraged, and his strength was magnified by it. He threw Werthen off like a child, and he fell back and over the desk.

As he picked himself up, he saw that Gross had now tried to grab the man, but he too was tossed aside like a rag doll. Neither he nor Gross was armed. He therefore looked for a weapon, and grabbed a chair by the desk, noticing as he did so the crumpled body of Father Hieronymus at Moos’s feet, the man’s thinning ash-blond hair a tangle of blood. There was no time to think. Moos was swinging the poker, for a second time, handle first, at the priest’s head. Werthen parried the thrust with the chair, knocking the poker out of Moos’s hand. The housekeeper stood screaming helplessly in the doorway.

‘Murder! Murder! He’s killed him!’

The screams seemed to finally get through to Moos, who looked quickly from the housekeeper to Werthen and then to the motionless body of his brother-in-law. He let out an animal growl, turned, and ran out of the room, knocking the old housekeeper down on the way out.

Gross followed, but Werthen kneeled by the priest to see if he could help. One look told him that it was hopeless. The skull had not simply been fractured; it was pulverized, a mass of blood and bone shard. The priest’s watery blue eyes stared up at him without focus. Werthen put a finger to the carotid artery; there was no pulse. He closed the eyelids.

Too late. For either of them.

Werthen got to his feet, then made sure the housekeeper was not injured. ‘Do you have a telephone here?’

Her eyes were still round as silver crown pieces.

‘A telephone,’ he said in almost a shout.

A quavering finger pointed back down the hallway. He saw it now in the gloom, on a hall table. He quickly telephoned the gendarmerie’s emergency number and reported the incident, then went to hunt for Gross.

Outside, beyond the church, a small crowd had gathered. Werthen headed towards it. As he approached, he could see the legs of a body sprawled on the sidewalk. No, he thought. Not Gross, too. His heart raced and he could barely breathe as he pushed through the crowd to get to his friend, all the time calling out ‘Gross’.

Then, as he emerged from the throng, he saw Gross standing over the unconscious body of Herr Moos.

‘Ah, Werthen. How good of you to come.’

‘Gross, how were you able to—’

‘Friend Duncan,’ he said. ‘He thought it best not to wait at the scene. I assume you telephoned the police.’

Werthen nodded. ‘They’re on their way.’

They both looked down at Moos, beginning now to stir on the sidewalk.

‘I suggest we bind the fellow before he completely regains consciousness,’ Gross said.

‘Murder! Murder!’

The housekeeper came stumbling across the street, spreading her tale of doom and woe to the shocked crowd.

‘Why bother with the police?’ came a shout from the back of the crowd. ‘We should do him in here and now.’

‘And hang for it yourselves?’ Gross said. ‘Don’t be idiotic. We no longer live in the jungle. That was this man’s error,’ he said, pointing at Moos. ‘Now help us secure him until the police arrive.’

There was grumbling from those gathered, but finally a peddler of household wares produced some strong jute rope from his cart and they bound Moos’s hands and feet.

Five minutes later a motorized police van arrived, followed by an ambulance.

The crowd stayed long enough to see the body of Father Hieronymus wheeled out, the sheet covering him stained red at the head.

Gross shook his head. ‘That one death would have such far-reaching consequences,’ he said, with a note of sadness.

Gross was right, Werthen knew. He only wondered when the repercussions of Mitzi’s death would cease.

‘O
nce again, gentlemen, your meddling has caused untold harm to a police investigation.’

Officious, tiny Meindl, clad today in an impeccably tailored linen three-piece suit in a pale shade of moss green, sat behind his massive desk at the Police Praesidium, his neatly manicured hands clasped over his narrow chest, hissing out the words in the affected Schönbrunn accent of the upper classes. He was making a hash of the job, Werthen knew, and was sure that Gross, seated next to him, could give the man dialect coaching advice, for he had made a long study of such speech patterns as part of his suspect-identification research.

‘That is a bit much,’ Gross said, who had until now sat quietly, listening to the railings of the inspector, his former protégé. ‘Perhaps in the matter of Herr Mutzenbacher we acted somewhat precipitously, but I fail to see how we are at fault in the unfortunate death of Father Hieronymus.’

Meindl adjusted his tortoiseshell pince-nez and shook his head. ‘If you had shared the information of your investigations into the death of this young . . .’ Meindl was searching for the
mot juste
to describe a prostitute.

‘Fräulein Waltraude Moos,’ Inspector Drechsler, seated behind them, offered. ‘Otherwise known as Fräulein Mitzi.’

‘Exactly,’ Meindl said with an appreciative nod his way. ‘Fräulein Moos. In that case we would surely have foreseen the possibilities of such an altercation.’

‘Surely,’ said Gross, with ironic emphasis.

‘I was in the process of handing over the files,’ Werthen said. ‘I spoke with Drechsler about it only yesterday. But there was no time.’

‘Quite. Time is something the good priest ran out of yesterday.’