Thomas Ochiltree (3 page)

Why him?
von Falkenburg kept asking himself. Why was
he
to be destroyed?

No matter from which side he approached the question, it remained insoluble. The documents that so utterly incriminated him were clearly the result of very considerable, very painstaking labor. Who would want to undertake that labor in order to shatter the life of an obscure army captain?

Von Falkenburg realized that he would never know the answer to that question, but he could not leave it alone. He told himself that he would give his life to know the names and motives of his persecutors, but then realized with a start that he would have to give his life anyway, without getting anything in return except protection from a disgrace as unmerited as it would be terrible.

The cab was rolling through the Praterstern now, with its bizarre Roman-style monument to Austria-Hungary’s great naval hero, Admiral Teggerthoff, who had routed the Italians at Lissa. Now the Prater amusement park was on his right. Night had quite fallen, and the gimcrack booths and the Great Wheel were ablaze with light. Von Falkenburg hated amusement parks, but some of the girls he had known had loved them: Annie, for instance. He remembered the condescension – good natured, but condescension nevertheless – which he had felt when she had begged him to take her to the Prater, and the way she had hugged him when he had agreed to do so. That had been before he really knew her, when she was just another little shop assistant he had bedded. He was sorry about that condescension now, even though he had hardly remembered it when she was alive.

Annie was dead, and that made her almost a sister. But that was an absurd thought. Annie did not exist. Nor did Endrödy. Nor would he, soon.

But he was sorry that he had not understood her better; had not understood that the pride she had felt at being seen with him in the Prater was not the pride of a shop girl being seen with an officer from a smart regiment, but the pride of a woman at being seen with the man she loved.

The Prater was behind them now, and von Falkenburg put his thoughts of Annie behind him with a shudder. After all, it was cold. And the dead do not make very good company.

The harness brasses jingled musically, and the hooves of the horse fell on the cobblestones like a steady rain. The city had been pretty well left behind. Ahead was darkness, broken only by a few streetlights, and the headlamp of an approaching streetcar. It rattled by, its interior glowing a soft yellow, its seats empty.

“The Rudolfsbrücke, Captain.”

The great bridge was more brightly lit that the street leading to it, but its upper girders were still lost in the gloom.

“Stop here.”

Von Falkenburg got out.

“Shall I wait?”

“No.”

The cabby shrugged his shoulders, then turned the cab and headed off, while von Falkenburg stared out over the bridge. Beneath it, deep, wide and powerful, flowed the silent Danube on its way to the sea. This was not the branch known as the Danube Canal that ran along one side of the Inner City and that most foreigners thought of as the Danube. This was the great river itself, and though the wind blew through his tunic, von Falkenburg drew comfort from the Danube’s strength.

He heard the blast of a steam whistle behind him, and crossed over to the downstream side of the bridge. One of the big paddle steamers was getting ready to cast off for Budapest. Her decks sparkled with lights, and through the windows of her varnished superstructure von Falkenburg glimpsed the comforts she offered. Tomorrow morning her passengers would awake in their soft bunks, go into the dining saloon for breakfast, and later watch the Budapest waterfront slide by. Tonight there would be music and wine, dancing and love. Von Falkenburg had once taken a steamer down the Danube with a woman. He gripped the iron railing with helpless rage and despair.

The steamer cast off and pulled away from the landing stage, the soft churning of her paddle wheels breaking the stillness of the night. She headed downstream, and von Falkenburg watched her go, feeling more utterly alone than he ever had in his life.

He crossed back over to the upstream side of the bridge so that the lights of the steamer would not distract him. He had an important decision to make. He had to decide whether to live or die.

The colonel had told him that his choices were suicide, or trial and conviction followed by the firing squad or life imprisonment, but the sight of the steamer suggest a third one: flight. Even if he had to walk back to the Prater to get a cab, in an hour or two he could be at either the West or the South Station, from which a mahogany-paneled
Wagon-Lits
sleeping car could carry him anywhere in Europe. Von Falkenburg imagined the warm blankets pulled up under his chin, and the determined pounding of the wheels and sway of the car as it bore him into the night, and far from his troubles, but he knew that it was a choice he would not make. To flee in such a manner would be to admit guilt, to ratify the monstrous accusation, to live for the rest of his life with the knowledge that through cowardice he had allowed his name to be fouled by a lie, for if he fled he would doubtless be tried and convicted
in absentia.
That would be the real dishonor: the dishonor of knowing himself a coward. Endrödy had spoken of this, and von Falkenburg now understood what he had meant.

So it was suicide or standing trial. Standing trial and being convicted. Von Falkenburg thought again of the documents that he had been shown. No court-martial on earth could fail to convict on the basis of such evidence. And if he were alive after eight o’clock tomorrow morning he would be under close arrest. That would mean that obtaining proof that he had been framed – which von Falkenburg regarded as hopeless anyway – would be in the hands of an indifferent, pettifogging lawyer.

But if he stood trial, at least he would have made his stand. He would have proclaimed his innocence to the world, and even though the world did not believe it, when the cell door shut behind him,
he
would know that he was there rather than in a Paris hotel because he had chosen the hopeless defense of his family’s name over the cowardly safety of flight. Publicly broken to the ranks, standing before a firing squad or cast among common criminals of the lowest sort and exposed to their contempt, he would know that his real, inner honor was safe.

Or would he? The colonel had spoken not merely with brutal frankness, but with accuracy, of what his conviction would mean for the two people in the world closest to him: his mother and his sister.

The Barons von Falkenburg were an ancient family, one which had served the Habsburgs since the latter first acquired Austria centuries before. But it was a service that had profited the von Falkenburgs little, and it was hard to tell who had ruined the family more: those of its members who had dissipated the fortune in extravagant living, or those who had dedicated themselves so thoroughly to the Emperor’s service as to have no time to supervise what was left.

Everything was now mortgaged, and although it was still possible to pay the interest while providing a dowry for von Falkenburg’s sister, reasonable comfort for her and her mother in one wing of the ancestral house, and a supplement to his army pay which von Falkenburg’s mother insist on his drawing “to maintain the family’s honor,” even a small shock would bring down the whole delicately-poised structure of debt. A trial would mean the utter ruin of the family. His mother and sister would be reduced to penury, as well as being subject to the contempt that always attaches to the family of a traitor. And that to buy him a life of imprisonment, or a death far more shameful than the one which the colonel had offered him.

Von Falkenburg knew the goodness and generosity of his mother and sister, knew their love for him, knew that they would willingly sacrifice everything for him. And he found himself shuddering at the thought that he might even consider accepting such generosity.

His courage was the only thing shielding them, his courage to do what was, after all, the only possible thing: to trade his death for a suppression of the charges against him.

And there was yet another argument in favor of that course, and one that he was surprised to find the most imperious of all: his responsibility towards all the von Falkenburgs who had gone before to preserve the honor of the family.

He had always regarded himself as something of a rationalist and skeptic as far as the whole aristocratic-military cult of honor was concerned. Suddenly, he was surprised to find that perhaps because that cult was irrational, it was beyond the attack of reason. His father, who had lost his life in a duel and who would still be alive if it had not been for those “outmoded notions,” would never learn of his son’s decision. Neither would his grandfather, who died for his Emperor at the ill-fated battle of Königgrätz. Nor would his great-grandfather, who had helped topple Napoleon by leading a desperate cavalry charge against the French at Leipzig. Nor would any of the other Barons von Falkenburg. All were now just bones or corpses in the family vault. Yet he knew that he simply
could not
betray their heritage.

“It’s idiotic,” he whispered, leaning over the railing of the bridge. But saying that did not help any more than protesting his innocence to the colonel and Major Becker had helped. Von Falkenburg had been raised in a world where a gentleman’s honor was thought to be more precious than life, and where that was not just an empty phrase, but a principle for which the finest men actually gave their lives, as his father had, as Endrödy had…. That principle had been content to let him play the rationalist, as long as in the meantime it could send roots deep into his soul.

So it was death, then, though he did not want to die. No desire he had ever felt could compare in strength with his overwhelming longing to keep on existing, for there still to be an Ernst von Falkenburg. He swallowed hard and stared desperately at the glittering reflection of the bridge’s lights on the frigid water sliding beneath him. They offered no comfort.

The icy wind that blew up from the Hungarian plains forced von Falkenburg into motion. He walked towards the far end of the great bridge, where the desolate “overflow area” of low-lying marsh waited for the spring flood.

Annie. Endrödy. Now him, von Falkenburg thought as he passed slowly from one pool of dazzling arc light to the other. Annie had said she did not mind having only a few months to live if she could live them with him. At the time he had been touched, but like a spectator at the theater. No one, he realized now, can know what it means to die except those who are dying. And they do not really know either.

If that professor had not pulled him back from in front of the streetcar, he would actually be dead now. Von Falkenburg looked at the massive girders of the bridge, the blinding glare of the arc lights, and the lonely blackness of the Danube. He tried to imagine them still existing on the supposition that he had been run over by the streetcar and was now dead. He did not succeed in the attempt.

The inky waters fascinated him. He felt his muscles tense for a moment as if to propel him over the railing, but he knew that he would not jump. If he was going to play the military honor game, he would play it to the end. Besides, he thought with amused bitterness, he had always wanted to fire his revolver at least once.

With a sudden surge of resolve he decided to shut the mystery of death from his consciousness. He pulled out his watch and looked at it. 9:10 P.M. He had less than eleven hours to live.

But those were eleven hours in which he could sample existence one last time, in which he could put behind him this nightmarish bridge and river. He had come here to make a decision, and the decision was now made.

Suddenly frantic not to waste any more of the precious time remaining to him, von Falkenburg strode as fast as he could back across the seemingly endless bridge. He had dismissed the cab earlier because he had wanted to be completely alone. He earnestly wished the cab back now, but wishing would do him no good. It was an hour’s walk back to the Praterstern, and an hour was far too much time to waste.

Ahead, though, was the end of the line where a streetcar was waiting to head back to the center of town.

Von Falkenburg broke into a run, shouting for the car to wait. That was in flagrant disregard of the regulations regarding the public demeanor of officers of the Austro-Hungarian army, but von Falkenburg did not give a damn.

The conductor looked at him with astonishment as he got aboard, panting for breath. That was also something von Falkenburg could not care less about. Besides, he was at least now in out of the cold.

Thirty minutes later he got off at the Opernring, and walked quickly behind the Opera House to where the Hotel Sacher stood. He wished he had a woman with him, but it would be hard to find a presentable one before the dining room got empty and depressing. The astonishment of streetcar conductors such as he had just witnessed could be amusing, but von Falkenburg had far too many good memories of the Sacher to want to spend his last meal there with some poor embarrassed girl who was blushing at the thought of how out of place she looked. If nothing else, it would not be fair to the girl. If all he could find after dinner was a shop assistant – and that would be fine, for in his experience some of them were a damn sight more charming than duchesses – he could take her to a champagne midnight supper in one of those two-person private dining rooms which his fellow Austrians absurdly insisted on calling
chambres séparées
in what they thought was French. But at present, he wanted to be surrounded by the subtle life of an elegant restaurant, where beneath the impeccable, soft-spoken refinement of the diners, all emotions, from the most deliciously idiotic love to the most implacable hatred, could lurk.

He was hated by someone and had to die on that account. Like someone drowning a dog, von Falkenburg forced the thought back down beneath the surface of his mind. It would never do to balance the pleasures of tonight against the reckoning of tomorrow.

“The captain is dining alone tonight?” the headwaiter asked him with a bow.