[VM01] The Empty Mirror

by J Sydney Jones

  Finally, Gross looked up from his barely touched meal. “Do you recall, Werthen, what I had to say of the empress’s death just following her funeral? That is, when I dined with you and the estimable Fräulein Meisner?”

  “I do very well.” Werthen laid down his fork and knife between bites. “You commented unfavorably upon the idea of some form of conspiracy being at the center of the deaths of both Empress Elisabeth and her son nine years before.”

  “Yes. In fact I said I believed that ‘what we have here is not high intrigue but low and very sad comedy’”

  Gross paused and Werthen took another bite of the omelet, enjoying the taste of the black mushrooms included in the hearty concoction. He chewed slowly, thoroughly.

  “Have you now changed your opinion?”

  “The ironies,” Gross muttered. Then louder: “The blasted ironies.”

  A well-heeled couple sitting at the table behind Gross looked up from their soup disapprovingly.

  “Calm yourself, Gross. What ironies are we talking of?”

  “They begin, dear Werthen, with the empress’s visit to Geneva itself, well-known nest of many revolutionaries of as many stripes. She was of course advised away from the city unless she had made certain security precautions. But traveling under her useless pseudonym of Countess Hohenembs-useless because her face was too well-known to afford her any anonymity-she had only a small retinue. These included her lady-in-waiting, Countess Sztaray; her private secretary, Dr. Eugene Kromar; her English reader, Mr. Barker; her chamberlain, General Beszewiczy; and a bevy of other aides and attendants that made up her court. She had come to Geneva to see the Baron and Baroness Adolphe de Rothschild, who live in the nearby château of Pregny.”

  Gross had obviously collected this information from the various papers he had been poring through all afternoon, and though Werthen was fully aware of such particulars, he let the criminologist continue, for thinking aloud was one of his methods of arriving at new connections. Werthen did, however, take the time to tip a finger at the waiter and order a dessert of Palatschinken with chocolate drippings and nuts, and an eiswein to accompany it.

  “In the event,” Gross continued, after declining dessert for himself, “the empress visited the baroness on the ninth and came to Geneva that same day, putting up at the Hotel Beau-Rivage. The following day she purchased a player piano and rolls of music at Baker’s, on the rue Bonivard. You see, Werthen, though she was little at home in Vienna, she never forgot her husband. That final gift was intended for him. At any rate, by one thirty-five that afternoon, the empress was on her way from her hotel, the Beau-Rivage, and walking along the Quai du Mont-Blanc toward the steamer Geneva, which would take her back to her Swiss base in Territet, at the other end of Lake Geneva. She had, so the French papers reported, sent her entourage by train ahead of her as she had a horror of processions. Thus, only a valet from the hotel, carrying the empress’s cloak and traveling case, and the Countess Sztaray were accompanying her as they passed the Brunswick monument on their way to the steamer. Both the valet and the countess were walking ahead, for the empress enjoyed walking on her own, taking in the lovely view of the lake afforded from the quay. And it was there and then that the man struck.”

  Gross paused as the waiter delivered the Palatschinken and dessert wine for Werthen. Gross eyed the chocolate-coated crepes greedily and sighed in resignation. “Herr Ober, please bring another portion of that delight.”

  Werthen was waiting for the story to continue, and Gross mistook this for good manners. “Do begin, Werthen. No need to wait for me and risk letting the chocolate sauce go cold.”

  “You were saying, Gross,” Werthen prompted.

  “Yes. Just past the Brunswick monument, Luccheni made his move. Another irony, for that man had come to Geneva to kill not our empress, but Philippe, Duke of Orléans, whom he had missed by a day. The Corriere has Luccheni simply sitting bereft on a bench along the Quai du Mont-Blanc, when the empress happened by.”

  Werthen considered this as the waiter brought Gross’s dessert. The next few minutes were taken up with an appreciation of the palatschinken. Gross closed his eyes as he ate small bites, moving the dessert about in his mouth as if it were a fine wine.

  “A guilty pleasure,” he said, wiping his lips with the damask napkin, then patting his ample midsection. “Adele would surely not approve. But where were we?”

  “Luccheni on the bench on the Quai du Mont-Blanc,” Werthen said.

  “Exactly. Thus, whether by accident or design, Luccheni was on the quay at the exact moment the empress passed on her way to the steamer. It seems he moved to her quickly, as if he perhaps were an autograph seeker. However, drawing near, he struck her a blow that sent the empress to her knees. The countess and valet turned just as the man ran away. They thought he was a thief, trying to steal the empress’s watch, which she wore as a broach. The countess helped the empress to her feet, and she was apparently unhurt, but somewhat shaken. She told the countess that it was nothing, and that they must hurry or miss the boat. They proceeded to the steamer, where the empress finally collapsed, and where-in the privacy of their stateroom-the countess discovered a wound over the empress’s left bosom. It was a small hole emitting a trickle of blood. By this time the steamer had already left shore and there was no doctor aboard to assist them. Appraised of the situation and the importance of the passenger, the captain turned the steamer around and returned to port, where the empress was taken on an improvised stretcher fashioned out of sailcloth and six oars back to her former suite at the Hotel Beau-Rivage. There a Doktor Golay was summoned, but there was nothing he could do. I have seen the autopsy report. The puncture wound penetrated to a depth of eight and a half centimeters, entering just above the fourth rib and breaking it with the violence of the blow. It then passed through the pericardium and struck the left ventricle of the heart. Initially, the blood released internally only, into the pericardium, and slowly enough so that the empress at first thought there was little injury to her person. But by the time she had returned to the hotel, the blood was soaking her dress. She died at ten minutes after two.”

  The two sat in silence for a time, as if honoring the memory of the dead empress. Werthen was hardly a royalist and had in fact been critical of the life the empress had led, shunning her responsibilities at court and to her husband. However, her tragic death had brought out a latent and surprising loyalty to the crown in him.

  Gross continued, “Immediately following the empress’s stabbing, a cry and alarm had arisen. Two cabmen and a boatman gave chase to Luccheni as he hurried down the nearby rue des Alpes. An electrician named Saint Martin was coming from the opposite direction and heard the shouts. When he saw Luccheni running pell-mell toward him, he simply put out his hands and caught the man. Assisted by the cabbies and the boatman, he took the struggling Luccheni to the nearest policeman and handed him over.

  “But why didn’t Luccheni strike out at this Saint Martin?” Werthen asked, pushing aside the dessert, half-eaten. The part he had eaten was so rich that it was sure to keep him awake for hours.

  “Apt question, Werthen. From Le Monde I gathered the particulars of the weapon. It was a simple file that had been ground to a needle-sharp point and fitted with a wooden handle. A homemade weapon. But Luccheni did not have it on his person when apprehended. It was found the following morning by the concierge of rue des Alpes 3 in the entrance to that house. Luccheni apparently disposed of his weapon as he was running from the scene.”

  Gross paused, and it was not to eat his dessert, Werthen noted.

  The lawyer thought for a moment. “Odd behavior for the man.”

  Gross beamed at him. “How so?”

  “Well, it seems Luccheni had made no escape plan. He runs willy-nilly down a side street straight into the arms of an electrician. Had he wanted to effect an escape, he would have had a carriage waiting, wouldn’t he? Or at least have committed the deed in the crush at the steamer entrance, where he could perhaps b
ecome lost in the crowd.”

  “Assuming that it was a plan, Werthen, and not a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

  Werthen waited a moment, then continued, “However, Luccheni’s presence in Vienna outside Herr Frosch’s apartment house when the empress was visiting is significant. I think we can assume this assassination was planned. In that case, the fact that Luccheni had made no escape contingency implies that he wanted to be caught, or was not afraid of being caught. You see his smiling face on every front page, ecstatic at being the center of attention for once in his miserable life.”

  “You mentioned odd behavior,” Gross prompted, as if to get the lawyer back on track.

  “Yes. If my suppositions are correct, then why would he throw the file away? Why not use it one more time, on the police for example, whom he sees as instruments of class oppression? And why, once apprehended, did he refuse to speak?”

  “Ah, you have been reading the accounts as well,” Gross said. “That bit comes from the Zurich Post, I believe.”

  Werthen ignored this. “These facts do not seem to fit together somehow. On the one hand Luccheni is proud of his crime. On the other, he tries to cover it up.”

  Gross nodded his head slowly. “Excellent, Werthen. Exactly what I was thinking. We must make a note of that as well. We shall have a busy time in Geneva, my friend.”

  After dinner, they retired to their separate sleeping compartments. Just as Werthen feared, the rich dessert kept him awake for hours as the train hurtled through the night. Usually the gentle rocking of the cars, the clacking of the wheels over the points, and the mournful sound of the whistle as the train approached crossings were a soporific for him.

  Tonight, though, he lay sleepless in his narrow bed and tried reading for a time. Werthen liked to practice his English by reading British authors-he avoided American writers, such as Twain, as they tended too much to the surface of things. Instead, he had taken Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles along for this trip, but the plight of the poor village girl paled by comparison to the real-life incidents he was investigating. He finally placed the book in the net rack overhead.

  Every time he closed his eyes, the myriad of facts and events flooded his hooded vision. He saw the shorn nose of Liesel Landtauer and the exploded brains of Herr Binder. His mind’s eye witnessed the assassination of Empress Elisabeth and took him into the candlelit rooms of Crown Prince Rudolf at Mayerling. Was there a connection between all these, or were his and Gross’s imaginations working overtime? Were the gruesome Prater murders simply a cover-up for the killing of Frosch, and was that in turn linked to the death of the empress? Even to that of the Crown Prince almost a decade previously?

  He finally fell asleep deep in the night. He awoke with a start as a conductor outside his window announced their arrival in Zurich. Werthen struggled out of bed and pulled the curtain aside on his window. Few passengers were debarking or entraining this time of night. Glancing up and down the platform, he caught the eye of a tall, gaunt man who was staring at his compartment. The man had a scar running from the corner of his mouth up to the left temple. He saw Werthen looking at him, but did not avert his eyes. If anything, he fixed him with an even closer and almost savage glare. Werthen instinctively dropped the curtain. Then, a moment later, he lifted it again, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

  He nodded off again soon after the train departed the Zurich Hautpbahnhof and slept dreamlessly for a time, until the words Mark Twain had uttered at Empress Elisabeth’s funeral came unbidden to mind:

  But of course they’ve got the wrong man in Switzerland. Or the right one for the wrong reason. It’s all to do with the Hungarians. First Rudolf and now his mother.

  FIFTEEN

  Werthen was in a nasty mood by the time they reached Geneva at half past six in the morning. He did not even bother counting how many hours he had slept; that would only make him feel more exhausted. He resolved, not for the first time in his life, to refrain from rich desserts in the future.

  His last bit of sleep had been disturbed by dreams of himself and Gross being pursued by the tall, thin man with the scarred face, whom he had seen on the platform last night in Zurich. Or at least, whom he thought he had seen. He had, after all, just woken from a sound sleep before peering out of the curtain.

  Perhaps he had allowed his imagination to get the better of him, thinking that the man was staring at him, when he could just as well have been staring at the conductor beneath his window, waiting for the ail-aboard call.

  All the same, as he and Gross detrained, he kept his eyes open for any sight of this mysterious fellow passenger, but failed to see anyone vaguely resembling the man.

  “What are you looking for, Werthen?” Gross said.

  Werthen shook himself out of his sleep-deprived paranoia.

  “A porter, of course, Gross. Unless you would care to camel these bags yourself?”

  But of course Gross had already secured the services of an able-bodied porter, who now quite efficiently stacked their luggage upon a small cart and followed them down the long platform.

  Werthen had given little thought to their schedule once in Geneva, other than that they would interview Luccheni. Now, as they came out of the cavernous train station into the early morning sun just climbing above the rooftops to the east, he was surprised when Gross announced to a carriage driver their destination:

  “Hotel Beau-Rivage, my good man.”

  Gross left Werthen to take care of incidentals such as paying the porter. Once installed in the carriage, Werthen voiced his surprise.

  “You really think it a wise idea to stay at the same hotel as the empress?”

  “But that is exactly why we will stay there, Werthen. There are witnesses to question, the scene to examine. To do otherwise would be unwise and a waste of our time.”

  Werthen did not want to bring up economies. Gross lived on a professor’s salary, which his writings supplemented, of course, but still he was not a rich man. Werthen doubted if his colleague, though able to afford the luxury of the Hotel Bristol in Vienna, understood the elegance and expense of an establishment such as the Beau-Rivage, which catered to royalty.

  “However,” Gross said, after a few moments’ silence, “I would not refuse to be your guest this one time. Knowing your family coffers run deep, of course.”

  “Please,” Werthen said, hardly bothering to disguise his annoyance. “Do be my guest, Gross.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, settling back against the leather seat and smiling quite contentedly.

  The Hotel Beau-Rivage, like many other buildings in Geneva, still bore black bunting, marking the passing of the empress. The large and noble-looking edifice was constructed forty years earlier on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, and each of its lavish rooms afforded marvelous views out onto Lake Geneva. The foyer was immense, with marble columns and tile floors, appointed with the finest furnishings. Fresh flowers were being put in place as they arrived, dozens of bouquets gracing marble-topped and marquetry tables.

  The season was winding down, and Werthen and Gross thus had their choice of rooms. They took adjoining suites on the third floor, facing the lake. This was a luxury that would bite not insignificantly into the supplementary allowance Werthen received annually from his family estate.

  For Gross, the first order of business, after cleaning up and settling into their rooms, was breakfast, which they had in the solarium tea room.

  It was almost eight by the time they finished their coffee-a brew superior even to that of Frau Blatschky, Werthen thought. And the croissants accompanying it had been marvelous. French-speaking Geneva prided itself as being an outpost of French culture in Switzerland, especially for dining.

  Gross appeared to know exactly where he was going as he and Werthen left the hotel and had the doorman get a carriage for them. Gross gave the cabbie an address in the southeastern district of Plainpalais: Boulevard Carl-Vogt 17.

  “Right,” the man answered in French. “Hôt
el de Police it is.”

  They were treated to a miniature tour of the city, as the carriage headed south along the Quai du Mont-Blanc, and across the Pont du Mont-Blanc to the south shore of Lake Geneva. From here they traveled through pleasant residential districts, tree-lined streets interlaced with public gardens and parks, to the Boulevard Carl-Vogt, a block from the banks of the Arve River. The cabbie let them out at an imposing structure from the eighteenth century bearing the official crest of the city over the entrance. This was, as Gross quickly explained, the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire.

  A reception desk was in the massive entry hall; Gross inquired of the young woman working there the office of Monsieur Auberty.

  She looked with interest at this request. “Is he expecting you, gentlemen?”

  “I telegraphed him from Vienna. Professor Gross is my name, and this is my associate, Advokat Werthen. It is in regards to the Luccheni matter.”

  “Of course,” she said. Obviously Luccheni was the most important criminal Geneva had had to deal with in decades, and Auberty was the investigating magistrate in the case. The receptionist, one of the few women working at the Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciaire, as far as Werthen could ascertain, placed a call to the officer in question.

  Five minutes later, a portly man of about sixty limped down the main staircase. What hair he had left at his temples was snow-white and stood out in sharp contrast to the black suit he wore.

  “My dear Gross.” He held out his hand as he approached. “How good to see you after all these years. Frankfurt, was it? I still remember the paper you presented on handwriting analysis. Brilliant.”

  Gross barely had an opportunity to greet the man in return and to introduce Werthen before Auberty ushered them up the stairs and into his second-floor office. Here everything was action. Several male typists, who had obviously recently been posted to the office, all seated at improvised desks, were pounding away at keys. Two other men were working telephones, while a third pored through police files.