[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  Gross shook his head vigorously, as if this tawdry fact added to the tragedy. “No, my friends,” he said, eyeing Werthen and then Berthe, “I am afraid what we have here is not high intrigue but low and very sad comedy.”

  TWELVE

  Gross did not bear inactivity well. Werthen had assumed this to be the case before; now that they were sharing the same roof, he perforce had to experience it firsthand.

  On the Monday following the state funeral, Gross made a return visit to his beloved Brueghel room at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Werthen, who had resumed his law practice after his return from Upper Austria, met him for lunch after a busy morning preparing the trust of Baron von Geistl. They attended the Burgtheater that evening, seeing Girardi play in Johann Nestroy’s Lumpacivagabundus, a satirical comedy that fitted the actor’s talents perfectly. Gross, however, was not amused, Werthen noted.

  Nestroy had made the leap from Volkstheater to the more prestigious Burgtheater because of longevity; the play had premiered in 1833 and had confused the Habsburg censors enough so that its subtle social criticism had been overlooked even to the present day. The play chronicled the fortunes and misfortunes of Leim, a joiner, Zwirn, a tailor, and Knieriem, a cobbler, all framed by a series of supernatural events, primary of which was their holding communally a winning lottery number.

  Nestroy, not only a playwright but also a skilled actor, assumed the role of Knieriem 258 times, or so tonight’s program explained. Girardi had taken on this part now for himself and performed it with great aplomb. Yet Gross could seemingly find nothing to like in the farce. Each time the audience broke into laughter, Gross scowled at the stage. He squirmed in his seat at every turn of the plot, as the three journeymen pondered how to use the money miraculously won from their shared lottery ticket. Instead of bettering themselves, Zwirn and Knieriem squandered their magical winnings and remained, at the end of the play, firmly-one might say defiantly-outside the orbit of bourgeois life. Only Leim used his winnings wisely, marrying his longtime sweetheart and setting up a productive business.

  “Absolute piffle,” Gross pronounced after the houselights went up following the third act. “Why they should be showing such revolutionary and demoralizing prattle at the noble Burgtheater is beyond me.”

  “Oh, come now, Gross,” Werthen replied as they made their way up the aisle to the coat check in the lobby. “You sound like an old reactionary. I found it extremely clever.”

  “Clever,” Gross spluttered. “So when you and your Fräulein Berthe marry and begin having children, I suppose you will want your offspring to ape such dissolute behavior. I think not, Werthen. Speaking from personal experience, one must be ever vigilant when it comes to one’s children.”

  Werthen made no reply to this. Gross was of course referring to the troubled history between himself and his gifted son, Otto. Where Gross senior was all business and practicalities, young Otto had a playful spirit, never one to take life too seriously. Indeed, even as an adolescent Otto traveled in somewhat louche society, and this more than anything else troubled his father. Young Otto made friends of artistic bohemians and had himself become a free thinker in matters of sex and marriage. Gross even mentioned experimentation with drugs. Although Otto seemed to have straightened himself out and was now successfully pursuing medical studies,son and father were still oil and water. It was a mark of Gross’s disturbed equilibrium that he would mention Otto at all, even tangentially. Gross was, to put it simply, bored stiff.

  The next morning they spent a painfully quiet breakfast together before Werthen departed for the office. Walking to the suite of rooms he rented in Habsburgergasse in the First District, Werthen wondered if perhaps it had been a mistake inviting Gross to stay. He was turning churlish and bearish; even fair-minded and forgiving Berthe was making herself scarce, not really caring to be around the man in such moods.

  That night, however, Werthen recalled that he had received a piece of mail for the criminologist, forwarded from his former address at the Hotel Bristol. Frau Blatschky had prepared a marvelous Zwiebelrostbraten for dinner, which they accompanied with a bottle of Bordeaux that Werthen had taken great pains in choosing at his wine merchant’s on the way home.

  Gross seemed to brighten as he opened and read the letter Werthen produced for him.

  “Well, that is an interesting turn of events,” he uttered as he set the letter down next to his plate. He filled his glass half full of the wine, which had not yet had time to breathe, and threw it back as if it were American whiskey.

  “What is it, Gross?”

  “The autopsy report on Herr Frosch, the last victim in the Prater murders. Not that it matters much now. His neck was broken, just as we all assumed at the time.”

  “Doesn’t sound so interesting to me,” Werthen said, pouring himself a glass of the wine and swirling it in his goblet.

  “The interesting part is that the man was at death’s door when he was killed. Dying of cancer, so it appears.”

  “Hmm.” Werthen eyed the deep ruby glints of the wine, the “legs” forming at the lip of his glass. “Wonder if he knew?”

  “That, my dear friend, I hope to determine. Tomorrow.”

  Werthen was about to denigrate the idea. After all, the case was closed. What did it matter if the man knew he was dying or not? Idle curiosity had made Werthen posit the question, but suddenly he was happy he had. He held his tongue. No sense in discouraging Gross. Any activity was better than none.

  They spent the rest of the evening in pleasant conversation.

  In the morning Werthen inquired of Frau Blatschky if their guest had risen yet. Werthen was due at the office earlier than usual and did not want to wait for breakfast.

  “Oh, yes, sir. The Herr Doktor was up with the birds and had his coffee and kipfel an hour earlier than usual. I believe he has already departed.”

  The news came as something of a relief for Werthen, who could now unfold the morning Neue Freie Presse and read in peace. He wondered if he should get back in the habit of writing his stories before beginning his workday; if he should bother writing them at all anymore. However, for the time being, he was content enough just sipping his coffee and scanning the paper for large chunks of white space, which would indicate a story that had been censored. This was a national sport in Austria. People would then spend the rest of the day trying to discover the juicy bits that had been cut out of the newspapers.

  At five that afternoon, just as Werthen was preparing to close up for the day, Gross telephoned him, his voice vibrant and excited once again. It was a pleasure to hear that tone.

  Gross invited him for a drink at the Café Central on Herrengasse, the home of Vienna’s literati since the scandalous demolition of the Café Griensteidl the year before. With the building of a bank on the site of the Griensteidl, the literary world of Vienna, including Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Hermann Bahr, and Felix Salten, had migrated to the nearby Central. Werthen was somewhat amused by Gross’s choice of venue, but happily agreed to meet him there in half an hour.

  Gross was occupying a corner table by the time Werthen arrived and was nursing a viertel of white wine. Werthen ordered the same and joined his friend, surveying the other tables for anyone he knew. Only the young Hofmannsthal, sporting a wispy mustache, and his older mentor, the bohemian and sandal-wearing Altenberg, were in attendance today.

  “You’re looking awfully pleased with yourself, Gross,” Werthen said as he took a chair. “What’ve you been up to?”

  “It has been an intriguing day, my dear Werthen. Most intriguing.”

  As he sipped his wine, Gross explained to Werthen that he had first gone to Frau Frosch on the Gusshausstrasse to ascertain whether her husband knew of his illness, and to find the name of his doctor. In the event, however, the Frau had other news for Gross.

  “She told me that she had been contemplating getting in touch with me,” Gross noted. “I am happy to say that my earlier efforts in winnin
g her trust thus paid off. With the assassination of the empress, Frau Frosch felt she was no longer under an obligation of secrecy.”

  Gross paused dramatically, seeing that he had caught Werthen’s attention.

  “Herr Frosch had a distinguished visitor in June,” Gross finally continued. “The empress herself came to talk to him. According to Frau Frosch, they were in consultation for over an hour in his study, and when she left, she was extremely distraught. The empress made Frau Frosch pledge herself to secrecy. No one was to know of her visit to Herr Frosch.”

  “Whatever were they talking about, Gross?”

  “Herr Frosch did not confide in his wife, but she does recall him talking of his memoirs at about this same time, and how he was finally going to tell the full truth about the Mayerling tragedy.”

  “You mean Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide?”

  “Was there another tragedy played out there?”

  Really, Gross could be insufferable when he was in his cogitating frame of mind, but Werthen let it go. This was still better than depression by inactivity.

  “But what could he know?” Werthen wondered aloud. The Mayerling tragedy had rocked the court and all of Austria in January of 1889. Rudolf, heir to the throne of Franz Josef, supposedly despondent at being kept out of responsible situations in the military and government, had turned to drugs and drink. Perhaps he had inherited some of the Wittelsbach instability from his mother. There had even been talk of the young prince suffering from incurable syphilis. At any rate, one snowy night he had taken the life of his young mistress, Marie Vetsera, then shot himself.

  “It turns out that Herr Frosch was in service to the crown prince himself, as a personal valet. He was at Rudolf’s hunting lodge in Mayerling the very night of the deaths.”

  “But we found no evidence of such memoirs,” Werthen said, recalling their patient search of Herr Frosch’s papers following his death. “We concluded it was all hot air on his part.”

  “Something important brought Empress Elisabeth to see Frosch after all these years,” Gross said. “Something was said behind closed doors, according to Frau Frosch, to shake the empress so that she needed a brandy to bring the color back to her cheeks before leaving.”

  Neither said anything for a few moments, then Gross continued, “Frau Frosch, by the way, knew nothing of her husband’s terminal condition, but she was able to supply me with the name of his doctor. I visited that gentleman this afternoon, and he verified that Frosch was aware of the seriousness of his cancer. That would seem to add verity to the tale of Frosch being willing to share certain secrets with the empress.”

  “You mean that he no longer had anything to lose?” Werthen was quick to reply.

  “Exactly. Let us surmise that his silence about certain incidents had been purchased or otherwise won-”

  “By threats?”

  Gross shrugged at the suggestion. “Perhaps. But facing death anyway, perhaps he decided he had no reason to hold his tongue any longer.”

  “I see your point. This is intriguing to be sure.”

  “It becomes even more intriguing once one looks at the date of the empress’s visit. June twelfth.”

  Gross said this with a nourish, as if pulling a final rabbit out of a hat, but it took Werthen a moment to figure out why this date should be so important.

  “You mean that the Prater murders began just a few days later?”

  “The body of the washerwoman, Maria Müller, was found on June fifteenth,” Gross concurred.

  “You’re saying the murders were somehow connected to what Frosch knew about the Mayerling tragedy? That seems a bit of speculative fancy.”

  “I am surmising nothing, merely stating certain facts. Herr Frosch was the sixth victim in that string of murders. Yet he is the first for whom we can now find a possible motive. Such motive being that he was going to release damaging information about the death of Crown Prince Rudolf. If Rudolf’s death was not a suicide, then those responsible would not want such information made public. This is instructive, I believe.”

  Werthen’s head began to spin with possibilities. If Rudolf had not killed himself, then who had murdered him? And why?

  The crown prince had been known as a firebrand and a liberal. He had written surreptitiously for Moritz Szeps’s liberal Wiener Tageblatt for several years before his death; his articles criticized the do-nothing aristocracy and the foreign policy of his father that favored alliances with Germany and Russia. Rudolf was also known to consort with powerful Magyars in Budapest seeking Hungarian independence, and to court the French for secret treaties, both of which would have been treasonable activities. The crown prince had, in fact, numerous enemies at court, in the diplomatic corps of the Ballhausplatz, and in the military. Even the new heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, could be said to have a motive for Rudolf’s death. It had, after all, cleared the way for him to become emperor upon the death of Franz Josef.

  Theories about the crown prince’s death had abounded at the time, in part the fault of the clumsy handling of the matter by the then prime minister, Count Taaffe, who had wanted to employ Habsburg censorship to control the tragedy. The official version had, at first, laid the cause of Rudolf’s death to a heart attack, and no mention was made of the unfortunate young Vetsera woman, who accompanied Rudolf in death. Taaffe had, however, quickly discovered the limits of censorship, for the foreign press got wind of the double shooting, and wild story followed wild story: The Hungarians assassinated him because he betrayed their plot; the French killed him for fear he would tell of their secret negotiations; a local hunting guide had shot him for seducing the man’s wife; he was killed in a duel over the honor of a young Auersperg princess. Finally, it had to be made public in Austria that the crown prince had killed his young lover and then himself, but some still blamed a Magyar or French plot, even an assassination by the prime minister.

  Such thoughts were, for Werthen, an open door to unhealthy and unwarranted suspicions, what Krafft-Ebing and other psychologists termed paranoia.

  In fact, Gross was getting too far ahead of himself, making too rapid a connection between Frosch’s position as former valet to Rudolf and his death last August. Werthen decided to temper such thoughts with sober reality.

  “You forget, Gross, that Binder confessed to those crimes. There was no motive other than the wretched nightmares playing in the mind of a man diseased with syphilis.”

  “Such was the official version, yes.”

  “The version you subscribed to, as well,” Werthen reminded him.

  But Gross ignored this statement. “I recall a comment at the time of Frosch’s death. Something along the lines that Frau Frosch, who had clearly been beaten by her husband, had sufficient motive to want him dead. That in fact perhaps the other deaths were committed only to cover up the real one, that of Herr Frosch. I made that statement with no small amount of levity. However, it may be a theory we now need to reexamine in light of new evidence.”

  “Surely you cannot be suggesting we reopen the Prater murders?”

  Gross merely raised eyebrows at Werthen.

  “You cannot seriously believe that those other unfortunates were killed simply to divert attention from the death of Frosch?” Werthen went on. “Besides, if Frosch were the intended victim all along and the other five only used to cover up the true crime, then why risk exposure by waiting over two months to do him in?”

  “That, my dear Werthen, is something to be taken into consideration as we proceed.”

  But Werthen did not fully attend to this reply. Instead, he was now struck with a more serious consideration, one he was sure Gross had already thought of.

  “But following these admittedly wild conjectures on your part…

  “Follow on,” Gross encouraged.

  “That would lead one to wonder about the death of the empress, as well. If Frosch were killed because of something he knew about the death of Crown Prince Rudolf, then was Empress Elisabeth’s death connected to
that of the former valet to her son? Was she killed because of what Frosch disclosed to her?”

  Gross smiled contentedly. “Fine reasoning, Werthen.”

  “Outlandish reasoning. The anarchist Luccheni committed that crime.” And suddenly it was there, popping into his mind unbidden.

  “What’s the matter, Werthen? You look as though you’d seen a ghost.”

  “The man’s name. That feckless Luccheni. I knew I had seen it somewhere before. Gross, remember the watch list we secured from Meindl? That of anarchists and other terrorists the police were keeping a watch on this summer?”

  “Luccheni was on that list?”

  “I’d swear I read his name there. ‘Luccheni, Luigi, stonecutter.’ He was in Vienna this summer. My god, Gross, could Luccheni have committed all the Prater murders? But what of Binder, then?”

  “We are, it seems to me, Werthen, in the strangely unique situation of having too many guilty parties.”

  “This is all supposition, Gross.”

  “And supposition it will remain unless we investigate further, my friend.”

  Werthen knew what Gross was implicitly asking of him, and it took him no longer than an instant to answer.

  “Then let us begin, Gross. Herr Ober” Werthen called to the headwaiter. “Another round of wine here.”

  As they left the Café Central an hour later, neither Gross nor Werthen was aware of the figure sitting in the covered carriage across the street. He sat in the shadows and watched the pair as they made their way down the Herrengasse.

  Not now, he thought. Too public.

  So the swimmers had, as he earlier feared, floundered onto something. Amateurs with the luck of amateurs.

  Their luck, however, was running out.