The Keeper of Hands (35 page)

‘I am glad to hear he can help somehow,’ Frau Moos said. ‘He has been desolate since my brother . . .’ She broke off, and soon was in tears.

‘There, there, my dear lady,’ Platt said, putting a protective arm around her and smiling at Werthen’s look of astonishment. ‘The lady’s going to need a protector after her husband is gone,’ Platt said
sotto voce
to Werthen. ‘And that big farm to run all by herself. She’ll need a man about the place.’

It was country logic, even though it seemed cold-blooded to Werthen.

He was about to comment, but thought better of it. Instead he asked, ‘Do you remember another visitor from the city a few days after I was there? Herr Moos mentioned a perfume salesman.’

Frau Moos was dabbing her eyes, and managed a nod of assent.

‘Aw that fellow,’ Platt said. ‘Told him Jakob would give him what for.’

‘You gave him a ride from the station?’

‘That I did. Not so much gave as, you know, got paid. Like with you. City man, city manners. Except that he claimed he was from the country, just like me. Well, who knows, maybe he was once.’

‘Can you describe him?’ Gross asked.

Platt looked at Frau Moos and they both shrugged. ‘Wore a city suit,’ Platt said, ‘but it had a good deal of wear to it, I can say that much. Small, compact sort of fellow. Didn’t seem the salesman type.’

‘He tried to give me perfume, to cheer me up,’ Frau Moos added.

‘He knew about your loss?’ Werthen asked.

She nodded.

‘I told him,’ Platt said. ‘Thought he was from the city like you, come to talk about the matter.’

‘And the perfume?’ Gross said. ‘Can either of you remember the name?’

Frau Moos looked suddenly sheepish.

‘Frau Moos?’ Gross said, with an edge to his voice.

She opened her handbag and pulled out a small sample bottle.

‘I managed to put it in my apron before Jakob discovered the man. He would never allow me to wear perfume. I just wanted to see what it was like.’

Gross took the bottle and looked at the name on it: Heisl Parfumerie. Their address was also on the bottle, in Vienna’s fourteenth district.

Gross made a note of this, then handed the bottle back to Frau Moos.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You keep it. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. And if it can lead to Traudl’s killer . . .’

Gross nodded. ‘Most wise.’

As they left, Platt winked in Werthen’s direction.

I
t turned out the Heisl Parfumerie was in the telephone book, and it took only a few minutes calling from the nearest post office to verify that Heisl did not employ a salesman who had recently visited Buchberg. Indeed their only field man, Herr Theobald Vogel, was currently laid up with a summer cold that,
Gott sei dank
, was apparently not developing into pneumonia.

The telephonist on the other end was the chatty type, and Werthen was also able to ascertain that Herr Vogel’s sample case had gone missing only a few months earlier.

Two minutes later, after learning that the secretary’s brother had also once lost a suitcase on the Budapest express and that her nephew Wilhelm survived pneumonia last winter, Werthen was able to hang up the earpiece and open the door to the small, stuffy phone booth. Gross had meanwhile busied himself reading the customs regulations for shipping parcels to Serbia and Montenegro, on a nearby wall. He would, Werthen reflected, no doubt be able to quote from that material several months later. The man had a dome for a head, but still Werthen wondered where he found the space in his brain to store such information.

Werthen simply shook his head at Gross when the criminologist turned to face him.

‘Looks like our man stole a samples case.’

Our man
.
There was no way of knowing who this man might be. Forstl himself? A minion of Forstl’s? Somebody completely unconnected with Forstl? Nor of knowing of what deeds he was culpable.

As if reading his mind – and sometimes Werthen thought him capable of such a trick – Gross made a dismissive grunt.

‘Our mystery man. What do we really know? Let’s walk briskly and cogitate. I need a flow of blood through my body.’

Gross set off at a breakneck speed through the midday crush of pedestrians. Werthen struggled to keep up with him, as he was courteous enough not to barge through people; instead he sidestepped here and went into the gutter there, in an effort to keep up with his friend. Meanwhile, Gross, eyes forward and a determined set to his jaw, sailed through the pedestrians like a battleship on patrol.

Werthen suddenly realized that Gross was heading back to the Volksgarten. They crossed the Ring at the Parliament and entered the park. Gross sat down at one end of a bench, Werthen at the other.

‘So,’ Gross said, his voice sounding hearty after their energizing walk. ‘Any thoughts?’

Werthen shared Gross’s logic. The mystery man was either Forstl himself or someone working with him, or someone who had no connection with Forstl and the Bureau. Gross merely raised an eyebrow and murmured to himself.

‘I suppose you have it figured out?’

‘Just about,’ Gross said with no little pride. ‘Forstl is clearly our major suspect.’

‘But you told Berthe—’

‘I know what I told your lady wife, and what you also suggested. But we can’t let the ladies steal the game from us, can we?’

‘Surely not,’ Werthen said. ‘The empire would fall, the sun fail to rise.’

‘Sarcasm is the poor man’s substitute for humor, Werthen. Let us consider the facts. Captain Forstl appears to be at the center of a web of intrigue. The Bureau mounts a trap for Baron von Suttner in order to compromise his wife, and Forstl seems to be in charge of it; he establishes a spy in a brothel in order to discredit a high-level member of the Foreign Office. What else is the Captain up to? Murder most foul.’

He said this last loud enough to disturb a thin little lady knitting on a nearby bench. At the sound of the word ‘murder,’ she rose, tugged the leash of the white poodle sleeping at her feet, and moved to another bench, distant from the one occupied by Gross and Werthen.

The criminologist was oblivious to this disturbance. ‘Not that he sullied his own hands with such things. No, clearly he did not.’

‘So we are looking for his minion, as I suggested. But how can you be so sure?’

‘Really, Werthen, your powers of deduction are failing you today. Do you forget that we have a series of similar murders throughout Central Europe? Captain Forstl was presumably not abroad when most of these murders took place. Easy enough to check, at any rate. Ergo, there is another man, who specializes in killing.’

‘And what is his connection to Forstl? A hired killer?’

‘An assassin, yes. Someone trained to take lives, someone cold and calculating enough to gain entrance to your office and plant a bomb. But, as we know, he is not infallible. An assassin, yes, but not one for hire to the general public. No, Werthen, I think we are dealing with an agent. An agent eager to cover any trail that might lead to Forstl. Which would explain Doktor Schnitzel’s death. Let’s say the barracks rumors about Forstl and Schnitzel were true, and perhaps the young doctor came looking for a “loan” to help set up his practice.’

‘Extortion?’

‘Yes, that’s better, Werthen. So, after the misstep with Schnitzler, Schnitzel was disposed of. Just as Fräulein Mitzi and Fanny were before. Let us say the love-struck Mitzi wanted to end her work for Forstl—’

‘Or more likely wanted more money,’ Werthen interrupted.

‘Quite,’ Gross said without enthusiasm, ‘or that she planned to run off with von Ebersdorf. We may never know the exact reason. And Fräulein Fanny perhaps knew of the arrangement and, following the death of Mitzi, wanted a gratuity to forget it. Again, a possible trail to Forstl is dealt with in the harshest manner. I understand why Schnitzel had to be silenced: he was potentially an embarrassment for an officer, a career ender, in fact. But the Bower operation? One imagines that was sanctioned by the Bureau, a chance to get one up on their rivals at the Foreign Office. So I ask myself, what trail was being covered up with the deaths of those two young women?’

‘Perhaps it was not a sanctioned operation,’ Werthen said.

‘Ah, yes, Werthen. It is good to see you in fine fettle once again. See what a brisk walk can do for that piece of muscle between your ears? Not sanctioned, then. And what else about Forstl is not sanctioned?’

‘You mean . . .’

‘He was a double agent? Yes, that possibility comes to mind. Our Captain Forstl may be in the pay of a foreign power.’

‘In which case the killer, the assassin, could be controlling Forstl, not simply working for him. He was able to hold the man’s homosexuality over him, force him to work for a foreign government.’ Werthen was growing excited at the implications.

‘My God!’ He suddenly remembered their last meeting with the Archduke and the troubling rumor about a possible Russian double agent at work in the Bureau.

Gross was smiling at Werthen’s realization. ‘Yes, Werthen, I assume you recall our conversation with Franz Ferdinand.’

‘We have to stop him.’

‘My dear friend, all we have so far is conjecture. Highly competent and intelligent conjecture, but merely a theory nonetheless. What we need is an experiment to test our theory.’

Neither Werthen nor Gross knew that Berthe and her friends were at that very moment undertaking such an experiment.

They had left Frau Ignatz with the
Portier
who looked after the building while they broke into Captain Forstl’s apartment.

The scheme had been hatched quite spontaneously, the result of a casual comment and the conjoining of forces as if in a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of planets. First had come the visit of Frau Ignatz, whom Erika Metzinger had brought with her that morning. With the law office in ruins, Erika was working in Werthen’s study until they could find new quarters. Erika, forever protecting strays of one sort or another, had now taken Frau Ignatz under her wing, for the poor woman was still grieving for her brother so cruelly killed in the bomb blast intended for Werthen, Berthe and Gross.

No sooner had Frau Ignatz been offered a cup of tea and was ensconced in a comfortable chair than Frau Blatschky announced another visitor. Berthe was pleased to see Frau von Suttner ushered into the sitting room. It turned out that the peace advocate had come to town to talk with her publisher about a new edition of
Lay Down Your Arms,
but in the event he had suddenly been taken ill and her trip was for naught.

‘And then I thought, why not pay Frau Meisner a call and thank her once again for a job so well done. I must apologize for barging in like this unannounced. You must think me an awful bore.’ She smiled in Frau Ignatz’s direction.

‘Not at all,’ Berthe said with real sincerity. ‘You are always welcome here, Frau von Suttner.’

They sat chatting for several minutes, reviewing the latest Viennese gossip and news. Frau Ignatz was not saying a peep, but taking it all in like a schoolgirl on an outing. At one point Berthe thought she actually caught an impish gleam in her eye when Frau von Suttner railed at that ‘idiot Schönerer’ and his ‘Away from Rome’ movement.

She was referring to Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the anti-Semitic, pan-German and anti-Catholic member of parliament who advocated that true Germans leave the Catholic church and convert to Protestantism. Twenty-one members of his nationalistic far-right party had recently gained seats in Parliament, and he and his political ideas were enjoying a resurgence in the newspapers.

‘His poor sister,’ Frau von Suttner added.

Berthe nodded. She too knew Alexandrine von Schönerer, the politician’s younger sister and since 1889 director of the Theater an der Wien, one of the grand old theaters of the city
.

Alexandrine was embarrassed by her brother’s primitive political ideas and took every opportunity to distance herself from his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism.

Erika came into the sitting room, a brief in hand. ‘Do you know where your husband has put the Wildganz file?’ she asked and then noticed Frau von Suttner. ‘I am sorry. I thought you were alone.’

Greetings were made, and the conversation ultimately got round to the reason for Erika working out of the Werthen flat.

‘You mean the explosion that was written about in all the papers was at your office?’ Frau von Suttner exclaimed once the full story had been divulged.

At the mention of the bomb, Frau Ignatz uttered a high keening sound that reminded Berthe of the pitiful noise she had once heard a baby elephant make at the Schönbrunn Zoo after its mother had died.

Berthe did not want to be so cruel as to explain to Frau von Suttner in front of Frau Ignatz about her brother Oskar. She glanced at Erika for assistance, but did not require it, for Frau Ignatz herself made the matter clear.

‘My brother was killed in the blast,’ she said. ‘And if I ever get the killer in my hands, I will rip his eyes out.’

The matter of fact manner in which she uttered this threat sent a
frisson
through Berthe, but she knew she would feel the same if someone harmed Karl or Frieda.

‘That day may not be so very far away,’ Berthe said. And then to the barrage of questions this statement elicited, Berthe explained the course their investigation was taking and how one man’s name kept cropping up – even as the person responsible for Baron von Suttner’s attempted entrapment.

They had still not received a photograph that Inspector Drechsler had promised to send them to confirm Captain Forstl’s identity; and Berthe was anxious to show it to Frau Ignatz as soon as it arrived to ascertain whether he was the man the
Portier
had seen in the stairwell at Habsburgergasse the night before the blast. But whether directly or indirectly responsible for the bombing, Captain Forstl was responsible for a host of evil deeds. Of this, Berthe was sure.

‘I would like to put him under the lens the way he has done to others,’ she almost casually remarked.

This comment brought a moment of silence to the room as the women looked from one to the other. Erika was the first to react.