The Keeper of Hands (5 page)

But where would the young woman have kept it? The room afforded a distinct lack of privacy, furnished as it was by two metal-framed beds, the deal table, one straight-backed chair, and a pair of wardrobes along one wall. According to Frau Mutzenbacher, all of Mitzi’s things had been left untouched in her wardrobe.

Werthen opened the curtains on the room’s one window in a vain attempt to allow in more light, for the glass was hard upon the building next door. A bit of dull daylight came into the room. Instead, he turned up the lamp on the table, and then went to the wardrobe across from the foot of Mitzi’s bed. Here he found the tools of her trade: several blue schoolgirl uniforms with high starched white collars hung on the left side of the wardrobe, with embroidered crests on the left chest to enhance the fantasy for aged voyeurs. Suddenly the awful truth of Mitzi’s life and death struck Werthen. No longer was this a second-hand death. The pitiful reality of these school uniforms touched him in a way an autopsy report could not. He was surprised to find his eyes misting as his thoughts went to his own daughter, Frieda. How did a young woman come to this?

Mitzi had to have a history, but according to both Fanny and Frau Mutzenbacher the girl was a blank slate as far as her past was concerned. According to them, Mitzi never offered the least piece of information about her parents, where she came of age, any of it.

On the other side of the wardrobe hung what was presumably Mitzi’s off-duty clothing: an assortment of risqué low-slung evening wear mixed with domestic dresses in black and gray of the distinctly conservative nature a housekeeper might possess. It was as if Mitzi were herself cleaved into two separate lives. Hats, some with feathers, some with veils, lay on the top shelf of the wardrobe. Werthen stood on tiptoe to make sure there was nothing else of interest on the shelf. In the end he had to fetch the one wooden chair in the room to examine the top of the wardrobe, but his efforts were rewarded with a thin layer of dust and nothing more. There were very few areas in this Spartan room that would function as hiding places had Mitzi been keeping a diary or anything else of a personal nature. Werthen examined the back of the wardrobe as well, but found nothing.

He was about to give up when he noticed that there was a space under the wardrobe, as it stood on four rounded feet. Crouching, he was rewarded with a bit of dust, nothing more. Yet something was amiss here. It took him a moment to see what it was. The front of the wardrobe stood on two feet, one at each corner. However, at the back there appeared to be three. On more careful inspection he saw that the one in the middle was not rounded like the others, but was in fact more rectangular and was not made of wood. In fact, once he maneuvered the wardrobe out from the wall, he could see that this object was covered in dark oilcloth. It was wedged rather tightly under the rear frame of the clothes-press, and when he finally retrieved it and began unwrapping the cloth he discovered a Bible.

Not the sort of thing one expects to find in the room of a prostitute.

He opened the flyleaf and found nothing. If it had been a family Bible, then it might have provided a lead to Mitzi’s true identity. This Bible was an 1860 edition; nothing to learn from it.

Inspecting the book, he noticed a bit of paper sticking out of one of the pages. He opened the Bible at this page – the Old Testament,
Joshua: 2
–
and found a beige envelope with no address. He opened it and discovered what appeared to be a brief letter, with the date
12.4.1901
written at the top. But beyond that, he could not read a word. It was in some foreign language he could not make out at all. He scanned the letter again, looking for anything familiar, and found the phrase ‘
Nök Hieronymus
’ repeated a couple of times.

Hieronymus. A name that he could make out, yet one hardly in use in the modern world.

There was what also appeared to be a salutation: ‘
Löfik Mot & Fat
.’ Mother and father?

Some of the words seemed to have a Latin base to them; others to be Germanic or even English in origin. He could make nothing of this note other than that it appeared to break off in mid-sentence.

Perhaps it was at this point that Fanny interrupted her room-mate and Mitzi never had the chance to complete the note. He folded it and put it back in the envelope, and then returned the envelope to its original place in the Bible.

‘What have you got there?’

It was Siegfried, standing at the door.

‘Looks like a Bible.’

‘It is,’ Werthen said. ‘I don’t remember calling for you.’

‘The Madam says you are to stop and see her before leaving. Something about a retaining fee.’ He nodded at the Bible. ‘Doesn’t surprise me she had one of those hidden some place. She wasn’t what she seemed, our little Mitzi.’

‘What
was
she like?’ Werthen asked, suddenly realizing that he had been antagonizing a possible source of information.

Siegfried’s eyes squinted at the question.

‘The more I know about her the more it aids the investigation,’ Werthen said, trying to reassure the lanky man.

‘They’re just whores to you.’

‘Not if you tell me otherwise.’

The squint slowly relaxed. ‘What’s in it for you?’

‘It’s my job. I like to do it well.’

Siegfried drew closer. ‘She wasn’t a whore. Not up here.’ He tapped a dart-like forefinger against his temple.

‘Where did she come from?’

‘Christ knows. Fanny picked her up off the street. The Madam took a shine to her right away. We all did. She wasn’t like the others. She cared about people. Really cared.’

Werthen could see emotion cross the tall man’s face like the shadow of a fast-moving cloud in the Alps.

‘Were you a personal friend?’

Siegfried crossed his arms over his chest, scowling at the question. ‘See what I mean? They’re all whores to you.’

‘I meant a friend, not a lover.’

A jaw muscle twitched. Siegfried rubbed his nose between thumb and forefinger. ‘I guess you could call us that. We talked.’

‘About religion?’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, no! I gave up fairy tales when I was a kid growing up in Ottakring.’

‘About what then?’

He cast his face downward. Snorted through his nose.

‘It’s in the strictest confidence,’ Werthen said.

‘Food, that’s what we talked about,’ Siegfried said, raising his face and looking defiant. ‘I always wanted to be a cook, but never had the chance. Too busy surviving day to day. So here I get to finally do it. I make the coffee in the morning, fetch the fresh rolls from the bakery down the street, and do a sit-down lunch for the whole house. And not some bit of boiled sausage and cabbage, neither. Proper food from a cookbook. Mitzi, she appreciated the meals. Told me so, told me they reminded her of her mother’s home cooking.’

‘Did she talk about her mother, her parents?’

He shook his head. ‘No, just that once. Then she shut up about them. I got the feeling she wouldn’t want them to know what she was up to here.’

‘When you came in, you said it didn’t surprise you that Mitzi had a Bible. Why?’

‘Well, she just seemed that kind of girl. You know? Proper.’

It seemed to be Siegfried’s favorite word; a strange choice for the major-domo of one of Vienna’s most famous bordellos.

‘Do you have any idea who would want to kill Mitzi?’

Siegfried bit his lower lip, shaking his head. But his eyes squinted in suspicion.

Frau Mutzenbacher received him once again in her sitting room. Now, the curtains were drawn open and dusty daylight poured in. She was still ensconced in her chair. She nodded at a slip of paper on a side table near her. Werthen picked it up; it was a cheque for one thousand kronen drawn on the Austrian Länderbank.

‘Sufficient, I assume, to begin?’ she said.

He nodded, placing the cheque in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was more than some laborers made in a year. The Bower was obviously doing well for itself.

‘Did my brother fill you in on the doings of our little establishment?’

He was confused for a moment. ‘You mean Siegfried?’

‘Yes. Always was a chatty little monger, Siggy. Could talk the teeth out of a hen. Looks like you found something.’

She nodded at the Bible he was carrying.

‘It was hidden under the wardrobe. I checked just now with Fanny and she said it does not belong to her.’

She was silent for a time, then let out a sigh.

‘I didn’t know Mitzi was religious.’

‘Did she speak another language?’

‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason,’ he said, deciding not to mention the note he discovered in the Bible until he could get it translated.

Only now, with the daylight coming into the room, did Werthen notice some photographs on the side table near her. One, in a silver frame, showed a young girl with eager, innocent features, holding a stuffed bunny. Another, framed in black lacquered wood, appeared to be a photo taken at a graveside with various mourners. The photographer caught Frau Mutzenbacher just releasing a handful of blossoms on to an ornate coffin still suspended over an empty grave.

She saw his glance. ‘That was her.’ She picked up the silver frame. ‘Had an outing at the Wurstelprater, we did. Played all the silly games and even went on the Ferris wheel. She won that bunny at the ring toss. Slept with it every night, just like a child.’

She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and brushed dust from the glass, replacing the photo on the table.

‘And that is from the funeral?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Gave her the best farewell I could. She would have liked that.’

‘May I?’ he asked. She handed him the funeral photograph. Werthen looked closely at the graveyard scene, at each of the mourners in turn.

‘You recognize somebody there?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps.’

‘You’re a close one, especially as I’m paying.’

‘You will receive regular reports from me,’ he said handing her the photograph.

She placed it carefully back in the same position on the side table.

‘Mitzi’s body was found on May Day,’ he said. ‘Which means she must have been . . .’ He hesitated for a moment, not knowing how strong Frau Mutzenbacher was, despite her crusty façade.

‘Murdered,’ she said. ‘Say it, man. Damn it all, say the word.’

‘She must have been murdered the night before. What was she doing out that evening? Was it her day off? Did she have an appointment?’

‘That is a mystery to me. The first I knew she was gone was when Siegfried told me she had missed an appointment with a valued customer.’

‘Did she have regular days off?’

‘I don’t run a prison, Advokat. My girls are free to come and go as they like, in
their
time.’

‘And April 30 was not Mitzi’s day off?’

She shook her head. ‘Never missed a shift before that day. Always working, even if she felt sick. Her days off came close together every month. Same as for all my girls.’

It took Werthen a moment to register this. Of course. No work when the girls were menstruating.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘You find him, Advokat. Find the man who killed my Mitzi.’

Her voice broke on the girl’s name.

‘Now please leave.’

W
erthen took a list of names away with him, but did not expect much from it. As Frau Mutzenbacher herself had noted, it was highly unlikely Mitzi’s customers would use their real names. But a quick perusal of the list once he was outside on the street showed him he was wrong. One of the customers had actually scrawled his real name: Richard Engländer. A joke, perhaps? Few in Vienna knew him by that name.

Werthen had recognized him from the funeral photo and from Fanny’s description of the unusual customer who wore sandals and had flowing moustaches.

The impressionist coffee-house poet Engländer had, like Salten, eschewed his Jewish roots and taken a pseudonym, Peter Altenberg. He had also recently become a Catholic, if Werthen remembered rightly. Son of a prosperous Viennese businessman, the young Altenberg managed to avoid the family business when a psychiatrist declared the excitable youth medically unfit for employment.

Altenberg’s prose poems and vignettes – he called them extracts from life – caught the flavor of Vienna on the fly: faces at a coffee-house, a bear act at the Ronacher theater, a mouse on the loose in a hotel, and girls. He wrote reams of paeans to the female sex – usually the younger end of the spectrum. These works celebrated pubescent girls not yet affected by male lust; they spoke of shop girls, prostitutes, actresses, maids, nannies, even young frustrated middle-class wives with elderly husbands. A new work of his was out this very year –
What the Day Brings Me,
a collection of fifty-five such impressionistic concoctions.

Werthen was not one of Altenberg’s champions, though his friend Karl Kraus was. It was Kraus, in fact, who had first got Altenberg published with the premier German publisher, Fischer Verlag.

Werthen found Altenberg’s musings self-indulgent; he agreed with the grammar-school teacher who declared the youthful Altenberg a ‘genius without abilities’. Altenberg was a showman, Werthen thought. His strange clothing – sandals and flowing cloaks – and his generally bohemian lifestyle, living out of hotels, spending his days at the Café Central, drinking away the nights in the company of other writers and painters, was no substitute for writerly talent.

As Werthen turned away from the Danube Canal and followed Rotenturmstrasse back to the centre of the First District, he thought of some of the apocryphal tales surrounding Altenberg. One of his favorites – and what was said about Altenberg was always better than what Altenberg said himself – was the story of how he failed his
Matura
. Taking the all-important exam to graduate from the exclusive Akademisches Gymnasium, Altenberg had supplied a one-word response to an essay question on the importance of the New World. ‘Potatoes’ was Altenberg’s laconic reply.

The examiners were not amused.

Soon Werthen passed the Stephansplatz, with the cathedral to his left. He resisted the impulse to dash into the cool darkness for a moment of solitude in the pews. It was a pleasure he had too long neglected, but he knew Altenberg’s daily routine and wanted to talk with him before he left for the Café Central – his office and home away from home.