They were expected, and shown into a drawing room of rather daunting proportions. A marble floor was covered in fine carpets; embroidered silk cushions adorned the large sofas placed parallel to each other in front of a massive fireplace whose mantel appeared to be in the Venetian-Moorish style. Crystal chandeliers overhead caught and refracted the sun’s rays from the large east-facing windows; lozenges of red, blue, and yellow light danced around the ceiling and walls.
Frau Strauss’s private secretary bad been reached by phone this morning, and Werthen had explained that he and his colleague were eager to discuss her late husband’s relationship with the Hofoper director, Gustav Mahler. The very mention of the name Prince Montenuovo as their sponsor in this endeavor had silenced any further questions from the secretary. Now, shown into this overtly ostentatious room, they imagined that Adele Strauss had also been impressed.
“Please, gentlemen, sit.” The voice came from a small, mousy-looking woman who suddenly swept into the room from a side door. Adorned in black from head to foot, she moved with a certain elegance, her silk skirts making a sound like wind through autumn leaves.
She waved at the sofa near which they were standing, while she sat opposite them.
“It was good of you to see us on such short notice, Frau Strauss,” Werthen said. They had agreed that he would lead this interview.
“Not at all,” she said, sitting primly on the edge of the sofa like a bird about to take flight. “I must admit, however, that your purpose quite eludes me. Schani, I mean Johann, had very little to do with Herr Mahler. I believe they exchanged polite letters last year when Mahler conducted Die Fledermaus at the Hofoper. They were also briefly in contact in May when Johann conducted the overture to that operetta at the Hofoper. But they were hardly intimates.”
“Herr Mahler is a great fan of your husband’s work,” Werthen said. “He is desirous of making a tribute to him.” It was the story they had agreed upon, though Werthen still found it a rather limp entrée. However, they could hardly come to Frau Strauss and ask her if she suspected foul play in her husband’s death.
“What an extraordinary statement,” she said, her voice filled with pique. “After what Mahler said about my Johann’s Aschenbrödel.”
“I was unaware of any comments, Frau Strauss,” Werthen said. She looked at both of them in surprise. “Emissaries of Herr Mahler and you do not know that he rejected out of hand a performance of my husband’s final and perhaps greatest work? A ballet, dealing with the story of Cinderella. Johann wrote the last notes to it on his deathbed. It was a labor of love for him, and it cost him dearly to focus on music at such a time. His mind was much troubled in his final days, but he stayed with music until the very end. His final words, in fact, were from the popular song, “Brüderlein fein,” written by his old music teacher Joseph Drechsler: ‘es muss geschieden sein,’ it is time to part. Such agony it cost dear Johann to continue with his ballet up to the last minute of his life, and Herr Mahler has the nerve to refer to this final labor as an assemblage of ‘asthmatic melodies.’ ”
Werthen raised his eyebrows at the term. It sounded only too much like Mahler, tactless when it came to his artistic judgments.
“We are not exactly direct emissaries of Herr Mahler,” Werthen quickly put in, making it up as he went along. “Rather, I should have explained, the Hofoper direction has sent us to determine a fitting tribute.”
This seemed to mollify her; she let out a sigh. “Well, you know now what I find a fitting tribute. A performance of Aschenbrödel. Though I assume my dear husband’s conducting of Die Fledermaus was meant as a sort of honor. A tragedy, as it turned out.”
“How so?” Gross now asked.
She turned her attention to him. She appeared to like Gross’s demeanor better, for her pinched mouth relaxed somewhat. Werthen let the criminologist now take the lead.
“Well, that is where he caught his chill, isn’t it? Whit Monday, May 22. I told him not to go to that chilly old barn of an opera house, for the weather had turned quite inclement as it can in late spring. Or at the very least, I demanded that he wear long underwear. But Johann would not hear of such blasphemy. He was a very vain man; he wanted to cut a trim and dashing figure in his tailcoat. But it was then and there that his health was destroyed. The chill turned into pneumonia and carried him off not two weeks later.”
She sniffed at this, digging out a silk handkerchief from her left sleeve and dabbing at her nose.
Werthen, like the rest of Vienna, of course knew of this tragic ending. Now he suddenly saw it as yet another connection between the Hofoper and death. But one could hardly search for a culprit in that. No one could plan for the death of another by catching a chill.
Suddenly she turned her gaze back to Werthen. “I believe you mentioned that you are a lawyer. Is that so?”
Werthen nodded.
“Perhaps you can advise me about something.”
“I am sure your usual counsel provides excellent advice.”
“They are a bunch of old women. And this is something novel, something revolutionary I am proposing. Currently the copyright for musical works is only thirty years. I find that grossly unfair. I want to have a law written that would extend that period to fifty years. After all, I am a young woman, and with most of my husband’s estate going to the Society of Music, I shall have to live off the royalties from his compositions.”
Werthen looked at this small woman with something like respect. She was made of steel at the core, he realized, to be so concerned about such matters this soon after her husband’s death. Perhaps that explained her mysterious absence at the funeral in the Zentralfriedhof: she had no need of such public displays. She was the widow; she would carry on the name of Strauss into the new century. It was her duty. Werthen had little doubt that she would outstrip even Cosima Wagner in creating a cult of genius around her dead husband.
“We could discuss this matter further if you continue to be interested,” he said.
“Naturally I shall remain interested. Perhaps you can leave your professional card.”
She rose, indicating that the interview, for her purposes, was completed.
“You can tell the prince then about my wishes.”
“Yes, of course,” Gross said with real earnestness in his voice.
Again she cast the burly criminologist a look that could only be called approving.
“One thing still puzzles me,” she said, as she proffered her delicate hand to be kissed.
“And what might that be, dear lady,” Gross said, bending over the hand and making a discreet smacking noise a centimeter above the flesh.
“How there could have been such a mix-up. I assume it occurred in the prince’s very office. And I must admit, gentlemen, I also assumed that was why you had come today. To explain.”
“Explain what?” Gross asked.
“How such an invitation could be sent by accident. Johann was already at death’s door; then came the summons from the Hofburg. Johann got up out of his sickbed, would not be deterred. And off he went only to discover that no one at the Hofburg had summoned him. Returning home, he took to his bed, never more to rise.”
“You are saying the your husband received a summons from the Hofburg, perhaps from Prince Montenuovo’s very office, in the midst of his final illness.” Gross said. “But when he arrived at the Hofburg, he discovered that no one had sent for him. That in fact, such a missive was erroneous?”
She nodded.
“Do you still have this letter?”
“No. I am afraid Johann burned it in disgust after returning home. But that letter killed him as surely as if someone had pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger.”
Once outside, Werthen and Gross could only shake their heads.
“So, it could be true after all,” Werthen said. “Strauss’s death could be considered murder, if indeed somebody falsified a letter from the Hofburg with the purpose of drawing a very sick man out of his bed. After a
ll, no one refuses an invitation from the emperor.”
“Yes,” Gross said, beginning to walk to the major thoroughfare where they could more easily hail a passing fiaker. “That is my understanding, as well. There was, however, another point of interest to be gained from our interview.”
Werthen thought back to the conversation. “The connection to the Hofoper? But no one can plan for another to catch a chill.”
Gross shook his head. “No. Something else Frau Strauss mentioned. Her husband’s last words: ‘es muss geschieden sein.’ Couldn’t they just have easily been, ‘es muss die Geschiedene sein’?”
Werthen stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at his colleague.
“By God, Gross, I think you might have something there. Not, ‘we must be parted,’ but ‘it must be the ex-wife.’ Meaning his second wife, Lili. Did he suspect her of sending him the false summons from the Hofburg? She might be up for such maliciousness, for from what I hear she has not done well after the divorce from Strauss, and she holds him responsible for her plight.”
“It is, my friend, another avenue of thought, to be sure,” Gross said.
Meanwhile, Berthe had spent the morning at the Settlement house in Ottakring, her first visit there in too long. The house was closing up for the rest of June, July, and August and she helped store books and writing utensils for the upcoming autumn term.
She was not alone in her endeavors. Frau Emma Adler was also helping out today. Theirs was not a coincidental meeting: Berthe knew that Emma was scheduled for today at the Settlement house, and thought she would be a likely source to query regarding those who knew Mahler during his student days in Vienna. For if Berthe remembered correctly, Emma’s husband had been a friend to Mahler at the time.
Emma, the daughter of a Jewish railway engineer, met a young physician, Victor Adler, son of a well-to-do businessman from Prague. They married in 1878 and had a son together, Friedrich, the following year. After several more years of practicing medicine, Adler had given it up altogether to follow his true calling, International Socialism. He was at the very heart of the Austrian socialist movement, had been instrumental in inaugurating the first of the May Day parades for workers, and he had put his considerable personal fortune behind Die Arbeiter Zeitung.
Berthe and Emma had met at the offices of the leftist newspaper, for Emma worked there as journalist and translator, while Berthe had placed numerous freelance articles with the paper. Emma was a handsome woman sixteen years Berthe’s senior, and had served as a model for more than one painter, rather famously for a picture of the Virgin Mary for the altar of a church at Attersee, a lakeland resort where the Adlers vacationed. Emma loved to tell the humorous tale of how, when the finished painting was finally placed on the altar, one old rustic from the village was heard complaining: “But that’s the Adler woman, not the Mother of God at all!” Two years later the church burned to the ground after being struck by lightning and the only thing saved from it was this painting, which had since become a sort of holy relic for the villagers, prayed to for miraculous intercession.
But there was nothing miraculous or fabulist about Emma. She was one of the most profoundly down-to-earth women Berthe knew.
“We have missed your contributions of late,” Emma said, after they had caught up on recent news and Berthe had shared the glad tidings of her pregnancy. They continued packing school primers into a wooden crate as they conversed.
“I’ve been helping out at Karl’s office more,” Berthe said.
“Not at the expense of your own career, I hope.”
“It’s not like that,” Berthe assured her, yet she was not so certain herself. “It’s not all paperwork. Karl has branched out into criminal law again and investigations.”
“So we gathered.” Emma made no further explanation, but Berthe assumed that she had somehow gotten word of Karl’s investigations the previous year into the serial killings in Vienna. “Any wonderful case at the moment?”
Berthe had hoped for just such curiosity in her old friend.
“Mahler,” Emma whispered once Berthe had finished her explanations. “Such an odd wee man.”
“Yes, isn’t he? You were friends of his once, as I recall.”
“Victor was. I only met him a few times. But Victor was full of tales about Mahler.” Emma smiled. “Of course this was donkey’s years ago, when we were all young and bohemian. It was about the time Victor and I first met, in 1878. He had established the Vegetarian Society—we were all great advocates of Wagner and his claim that vegetarianism could save the world. We wanted so desperately to save the world then, by the most direct means available.” She shook her head, dusting the back of one book before placing it in the crate. “We’ve since learned that the world is a bit more complicated than that. Sometimes it doesn’t even want saving. Impertinent world.” She laughed lightly.
“I was hoping you or Victor could tell me about Mahler’s friends from that time.”
“Ah, collecting a lot of suspects from his past?” Emma said. “But there’s really not much to tell. They would meet at a miserable dingy little cellar restaurant at the corner of Wallnerstrasse and Fahnengasse . . . the Ramharter. Yes, that was the name. Lord, I have not thought of that dim cold place in years. I accompanied Victor to a few unappetizing dinners there, but it was quickly obvious that those oh-so-advanced males did not want a woman in attendance. Yet it was there I first met Mahler. He was sporting a beard in those days, a big, furry mess of a thing. He must have thought it made him look older than his age. He was only eighteen, nineteen at the time. But already so full of himself.”
“The eternal artist,” Berthe said, almost a sigh.
“Eternal bore, more like it. I mean how can you be eighteen, in the bloom of youth and fine health, and be forever going on about a sehnsucht, longing, for death? But the others were little better. There was Hermann Bahr as well, a young rather bovine-looking writer hoping to make his way. Which in fact he has done. And Engelbert Pernerstorfer. You know him, he is still at the center of our socialist movement. At the time, he edited their little paper, Deutsche Wort. Oh, yes. In addition to being socialists and vegetarians, they were all great German nationalists. What a laugh. A gaggle of Jewish intellectuals all cozying up to those anti-Semites. Victor left German nationalism behind when its Jew hatred had become all too obvious. My brothers, Heinrich and Otto, were also part of the group, and the journalist Richard von Kralik. Hugo Wolf sometimes made an appearance, as well, but he was more likely to be found at the Café Griensteidl, where all the young would-be artists of the time gathered. The Café Megalomania, I liked to call it. And then there was that poor boy Rott.”
“Him I do not know,” Berthe said.
“A great tragedy, to be sure. Hans Rott. He was at the conservatory with Mahler and Wolf. A great genius, by all accounts. But he went completely mad in 1880, died in a sanatorium four years later. Such a pity. They all laid it to Brahms.”
“Brahms was responsible for this musician going insane?”
“Clearly he already had the propensity. Victor worked with Freud for a time, you know. He was very interested in psychology. He said young Rott was a fragile sort, full of nervous energy that needed channeling.”
“Sounds rather like my own husband,” Berthe joked.
“And mine. But this young man was walking a tightrope emotionally. Then, when Brahms destroyed his chances for a state fellowship, Rott simply snapped. Riding on a train for a possible position in Alsace, he pulled a revolver on a fellow passenger who was about to light a cigar. Claimed that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite and he was not to strike his match. They disarmed Rott finally, and put him in the Psychiatric Clinic here. And it was all about the damned politics of music, not about Rott’s music at all.”
Berthe began to feel as if she and Emma had been living on different planets for the past years, for she was privy to none of this information.
“I am afraid you need to explain that one.”
“The Wagner-Brahms battle, I mean. You supported one or the other of them as a young musician, and woe unto you if you fell under the control of the opposite camp. Rott, like Mahler and Wolf, was a great lover of Wagner and a disciple of Bruckner at the conservatory. Brahms thought Bruckner was a sham, that his music would be forgotten in a few years. . . . But if your husband is working for Mahler now he should ask him. Or better yet, ask Natalie Bauer-Lechner. I am sure she is still in attendance to her one and only.”
“She is,” Berthe replied. “I didn’t realize you knew her, too.”
“They all met at the conservatory, you see,” Emma said. “And then I met them through Victor and his society. I would hardly say I knew any of them. At any rate, she is a great source of information about those years. Knows where the bodies are hidden. Sometime have her tell you about Mahler’s falling-out with Wolf over an early libretto. The stuff of tragedy and comedy.”
“Wolf went insane, too,” Berthe muttered. “An awful lot of that going about, it seems.”
TEN
Werthen had a strange sense of déjà vu, seated in a chair, along with Gross, in the office of Police Praesidium Inspector Meindl. They had had occasion to deal with this man on their previous case. Werthen noted that there was an oil painting missing from the wall in back of the inspector that had been there on their last visit. Now the mandatory muttonchopped framed visage of the emperor hung alone and lonely where once two portraits had resided. The other portrait had been of a man whom Werthen had killed in a duel, the very man who had threatened him, Berthe, and all those close to him. He took a deep breath at the thought.
They were surprised to discover that the hawk-nosed and gaunt Detective Inspector Bernhard Drechsler had also been invited to this meeting. They had received their summons via telegram first thing this morning.
Requiem in Vienna: A Viennese Mystery (Viennese Mysteries) Page 15