by Joseph Hone
‘Herr Doktor Fischer. How nice to see you.’ He spoke in English then, as if in deference to Klaus’s guests, whom he had already tactfully surmised came from those parts. He didn’t glance at our passports as we filled in the reservation cards. Such vulger modern identities, he seemed to suggest, were hardly necessary in these charmed circles – to which, through Klaus, we had already achieved automatic entry. A retainer took our bags upstairs.
The bath in my room was as big as a tomb, circled in dark mahogany, and the double bed was curtained away, Indian-fashion, by thin muslin drapes from the rest of what was a drawing and not a bedroom at all, with a tapestry along one wall, Louis Quinze armchairs, a rosewood escritoire and long double shuttered windows which gave out over the formal gardens at the back – a dark wilderness now in the shadows, with odd shafts of light from the rooms beneath illuminating impossibly contorted baroque statues and other more classic busts which ran down a gravel path towards what looked like a huge greenhouse at the far end of the gardens. There was a vague, clotted smell of flowers riding up on the air when I opened the windows, a perfume baked all day long and cooled now, a faint sweetness in the night. I was surprised to see a telephone by my bed. It seemed entirely out of place. Rachel and Madeleine had rooms immediately next to mine, with Klaus a little further down the corridor.
I didn’t bother going in to see Rachel this time and, since she no longer had her flute with her, there was no music. But I could hear someone talking to her, through the open window, half an hour later, when I’d had a bath and was just going downstairs for dinner. Leaning out I could just distinguish Klaus’s voice. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ I heard him say. Their voices came right up to the open window now and I stepped back. Klaus spoke again. ‘There – you can just see one of the statues. They form a semi-circle. Spring, I think that one is. He’s supposed to have written The Four Seasons here.’ I hated Klaus mildly then.
Downstairs over dinner Klaus was even more informative. ‘We can, of course, go to the police, and tell them about the phone call tomorrow night. But why not deal with it ourselves? We can even record it here. I can make arrangements. Chances are the Viennese police may have your names. But remember, in any case, you came out here to offer these Yugoslavs a financial deal yourselves. So why not leave it that way?’ He sipped the light, chilled wine – a Grizinger from the Wienerwald. ‘The concert we’re giving tomorrow night – it’s over there, in the Belvedere gardens.’ Klaus pointed beyond our own garden outside the dining-room and up to the left. ‘All this central part round here is really just one big garden. Schwarzenberg, Belvedere, the Botanic: it’s extraordinary –’
‘I wonder how far away we are from Reisnerstrasse,’ I asked, tactlessly.
‘Reisnerstrasse?’ Madeleine asked. Her face was happy in the candlelight. Klaus had been good for her too.
‘Where that woman Maria lived, who wrote the book.’
‘Did she? How do you know that?’
‘From an old address book of Lindsay’s I found up in the attics at Glenalyth. Didn’t I tell you?’
‘No.’ Madeleine was less happy now. ‘I didn’t know –’
‘Oh, yes. 32 Reisnerstrasse. And of course, as I say, I think Maria was, in fact, Eleanor.’
‘What’s the point – even if she was? It can’t help now. It’s nothing to do with this Yugoslav and the phone call –’
‘This is where Lindsay and Eleanor lived, you know. Forty-five years ago – here, in Vienna. Right here.’ I felt the others were betraying their memory. There was silence. Rachel toyed with her food.
‘I still don’t see,’ Madeleine said at last. I had become an unwelcome outsider at the feast.
‘They shot all the workers,’ I said with bitter enthusiasm. ‘They used mortars and howitzers, killed them in all their fine new model estates, the Karl Marx Hof and so on, on the outskirts of the city. Lindsay was here at the legation; Eleanor came out and joined him. They lived here together, in 1934. Willis told us that Lindsay knew this Maria von Karlinberg, that she was a socialist journalist, daughter of some great Hapsburg family here. Well, I don’t think she was; she was Eleanor. Isn’t that all worth finding out about?’
‘No,’ Rachel said firmly.
‘Why?’ Madeleine asked me more sensibly.
‘Because I think it has something to do with why Lindsay disappeared.’
‘But he was taken by these Yugoslavs – as revenge for what’s supposed to have happened on the border with all those Croats just after the war. That’s what you said.’
‘Yes. But I’m not convinced. I can’t see, for example, how they got Lindsay all the way down from Glenalyth to Vienna – over the channel and across half a dozen borders. How do you do that? You can’t drug a man for that long. Had we thought of that?’ I looked round the table.
‘He’s not here at all – is that what you mean?’
‘No. Not necessarily.’ But I had suggested an element of doubt and they were not pleased with that. ‘I just think that while we’re here in Vienna, waiting for this call… Well, I’ll go round there myself tomorrow and see. You never know …’ I left the uncertain future hanging in the warm air.
Klaus broke the unease. ‘Well, why not?’ he said. He raised his glass. ‘If Peter believes it …’
I suspected that Klaus was encouraging me to do something which the others found unpleasant, that I might the more alienate myself from them, to his advantage.
‘Reisnerstrasse is an old street,’ he went on, ‘full of Hapsburg apartments, just round the corner. One of my music professors lived there. Runs from the Heumarkt to Renn Weg – past the British Embassy in fact, half-way along. Go round by Schwarzenberg Platz, and you can’t miss it.’
Madeleine sighed. She shooked her head. ‘I don’t know what you expect to find,’ she said. ‘Forty-five years later. Even if Eleanor did live there …’
‘He expects to find trouble,’ Rachel said shortly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not trouble. If anything, only the truth.’
‘You talk like a third-rate lawyer. Lindsay isn’t on trial, you know,’ Rachel said.
‘No,’ I lied – for that, to my mind, was exactly the case.
I slept uneasily that night and had a guilty dream in which, loving Rachel, naked in some great ornately gilded bed, I tried to strangle her. It seemed such a classically obvious dream, in this city of Freud, that I smiled when I woke and remembered it next morning, opening the big windows and looking out on the twisted statuary, the gardens ablaze already in the white summer light.
The women didn’t come down for breakfast. But Klaus was already in the dining-room, reading through a musical score, so I had to join him over the fresh orange juice, coffee and pastries. I was surprised by his warmth towards me. He sympathised over my rebuff the previous night – and with my problems generally in helping the family.
‘They’re not easy people to do things for – or to live with.’ His face fell as though he genuinely regretted his failure with Rachel. ‘It was good of you to take on the …’ he paused. ‘Their cause,’ he added at last. Klaus lived amidst an all-enveloping caul of drama. Almost every aspect of life was like great music to him, I felt. It had to be shaped and phrased carefully and then given out fortissimo. And I sensed that he enjoyed – even thrived on – the drama that had unexpectedly come to him through us. The whole business with Lindsay was something of an opera for him, the libretto being created there and then, right in front of him, and he was giving it music, conducting it already in his mind’s eye.
Klaus drained his coffee and stood up. ‘I’ll arrange for Karl Hauptmann, our recording engineer, to come round and fix up a tape machine in Madeleine’s room for tonight. I won’t be here. So I’ll leave it with you. All right?’
We shook hands, rather formally. I liked him a little better now. Perhaps, I thought, the truth wasn’t so important after all.
*
Reisnerstrasse wasn’t too far: round the edge of the g
reat Platz, splitting with noise and fire that morning, and then into the broad Renn Weg that led south out of the city. My street was a few hundred yards up this boulevard to the left. But it was a long street and number 32 seemed to be right down at the end, so that I was sweating when I got to the great arched doorway of the tall, grimed nineteenth-century apartment block. Coaches had entered a covered forecourt here in better days, picking up their robed and jewelled charges for a night at the Opera. But now, when I turned the huge handle, the great doors creaked with untended age and I was confronted with gloom and decay. Inside was a tall, vaulted space, lit only with a few beams of dusty sunlight coming from a window high up in a back wall. The plaster was damp and cracked on either side – where two doors gave onto stairways and a row of metal mail boxes stood against the far end.
I walked over and looked at the names in the little slots – some of them barely visible in the gloom. There was no Von Karlinberg. I had hardly suspected such luck. I was just about to leave, giving the names a last glance. And then I saw the firm capital lettering. I lit a match to make sure. It said simply RABERNAK – an apartment on the fourth floor.
I was dizzy for a moment when I stood up. But dizzy from excitement as much as anything. I’d found something better than Von Karlinberg. This must have been Zlatko Rabernak, the Zagreb antique dealer, or his family. Kovačič had told me: Zlatko had had a shop in Zagreb – Zlatko Rabernak, who’d collected musical boxes and given so many of them to Eleanor, who had taken Eleanor away from Lindsay that spring in Zagreb when the cherry blossom had fallen like snow in the park above the city.
I decided to take a chance there and then. It said RABERNAK: somebody, at least, of that family still lived there. And so I climbed the shallow-stepped wooden stairway, past great mirrors at each landing, badly foxed around the edges, seeing myself each time framed in the decaying gilt as I rose upwards in my summer suit, an avenging angel or a fool – I couldn’t say which.
On the fourth floor I rang a bell which pinged cheaply right behind the door, so that I jumped badly. It was opened almost at once by a fresh-faced young woman, large-boned and wide-eyed with a very toothy smile, like some Coke ad from an old National Geographic magazine. She was in a dressing-gown and smelt of soap, with her hair all twirled up in a towel. I sensed she was American. She was.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ A pleasant southern drawl. I was in luck. I hadn’t expected my kitchen German to get me too far.
‘Forgive me, Mr or Mrs Rabernak?’ I explained my business briefly, tactfully. ‘We were friends of the Rabernak family – years ago. We were just passing through Vienna …’
‘Well come in then. I’m Clare. I just have a room with Mrs Rabernak. There’s only one. Mr Rabernak died years ago, I think. Mrs Irena Rabernak. She’s nearly eighty – and not up yet. But I’ll tell her. She likes to meet old friends. Come on in.’
The hall was dark, panelled in plaster with gilt bas-reliefs and there was a huge portrait of what looked like the old Emperor Franz-Josef himself along the back wall.
‘I’m studying at the conservatory here,’ Clare said brightly as we walked across a thick carpet. The hall smelt of shampoo. Through an open doorway I saw a bathroom, still steaming with a line of smalls drying on a string.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘That’s nice. There’s a concert here tomorrow night we hope to get to: at the Belvedere Gardens.’
‘Yes, the Bavarian State. Klaus Fischer. We couldn’t get tickets. We’re going to have a night at the opera instead.’
‘Opera – at this time of year?’
‘Yes. They do a few of the popular Viennese ones – for the annual Festival of Vienna. Die Fledermaus – that sort of thing.’
She had led me into a large, heavily furnished salon looking out over the street. The walls and shelves were filled with turn-of-the-century ornaments, chocolate-box portraits, old plate photographs and many potted plants. The big double windows were closed against the vague sounds of the street below and the heavy velvet curtains, running down all the way to the floor from gilded rods right up against the ceiling, added to the sense of being in an almost soundless, brown-coloured aquarium. It was a little Hapsburg museum with its bits and pieces from the Belle Epoque and earlier scattered everywhere – an inkstand shaped like a water-lily pond on a huge black dark desk; a small mirror behind where a langorous, half-clad maiden formed one side of the pewter-coloured frame, her arm leaning round over the top, dangling a bunch of grapes over the glass. The place reeked of certainty and a belief, at least, in long-settled virtue. Freud and Hitler had never been to this city; even the Crown Prince hadn’t begun to dilly-dally with popinjay Mary Vetsera up in the Hofburg.
The only modern thing in the room was a vulgar chrome tea trolley in the middle, with silver saucers of old paper-wrapped chocolates on the bottom shelf, with an empty cocktail ice bowl and a dusty, quarter-filled red Martini bottle on top. Clare left me and I could hear voices in some distant room. I picked up one of the chocolates from the trolley. It collapsed in my fingers.
It was quite some time before Mrs Rabernak arrived. She was a small, fine-faced, slightly nervous woman with straggly grey hair, but dressed in a smart red trouser-suit and neat pearl necklace, so that she didn’t immediately look her age at all. She was well made up – her mouth so much so that it formed a startling red gash right across her face. Only her hands properly revealed the years: arthritic and bony, the thin fingers weighed down with old rings, which tended to slip, so that she nursed them all the while with the other hand, moving them up and down nervously, like beads on an abacus.
She looked at me intently but uncertainly, as though I was someone with whom she had made an important appointment which she had afterwards forgotten about. Clare stood behind her – in a bright, sleeveless summer dress, her pretty, unformed face surrounded by long sheaths of corn-coloured hair which she had now combed out so thoroughly that it shone even in the dull light. They were like a Wyeth painting, standing beside each other, suggesting a relationship not unnatural but unfathomable.
‘Mrs Rabernak – you must excuse me, butting in like this…’ I made my explanations, mentioning the Palais Schwarzenberg Hotel as a bona fide.
She held up a hand. ‘My Englisch,’ she said, ‘is no very good. But Clare,’ she turned to her, smiling. ‘Clare will help.’ We all sat down, huddling round the tea trolley and the dusty Martini bottle in the middle of the huge room.
I had brought both Maria von Karlinberg’s diary and Lindsay’s address book with me. Having explained about looking for this Maria, I showed both of them to Mrs Rabernak. She looked through the diary carefully, turning the pages one by one – then skipping to the middle and stopping over a passage, reading it out in German in a low voice, intently, unaware of us. Her face withdrew into itself, the lines of age splitting the make-up and crinkling about her neck and cheeks as she sucked her breath in. I heard the name ‘Koloman Wallisch’ faintly, derisively, on her lips.
At last she turned back to the front cover, jabbing a finger at it. Then she looked at me oddly. ‘Is not Maria von Karlinberg,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Is an Englischwoman who is living here before the war.’ She turned and spoke to Clare in German. I heard the name ‘Eleanor’ and then ‘Biley’, and I could suddenly hear my heart thumping in the quiet room.
Clare translated. ‘Mrs Rabernak says it was written by a young woman called Eleanor Bally – or Bailey, I think. The Rabernaks had a much larger apartment in this same block then and she lived with them for several months, in –’ Clare turned back. But the old woman had already understood.
‘In nineteen hundred and thirty-four. Before they killed Dollfuss. In those bad times.’ She rattled her rings. She had a confidence now quite lacking before; the bite in her eyes of a gossip suddenly confronted by a juicy scandal.
‘Is this the woman you’ve been looking for?’ Clare asked.
‘Yes. I’m a friend of the family’s. But how did she come to be here?’
I asked the old lady. Again she didn’t seem to understand so I started off in German.
‘No, no, I have understood you,’ she said helpfully. ‘How was she here? I will tell you.’ Her face was tense now, even angry. ‘She was a friend of a cousin of our Rabernaks – here in Wien. A distant cousin.’ She emphasised the distance by waving her arm in the air southwards. ‘The Zagreb Rabernaks of little Zlatko’s’ she said icily.
‘Of course,’ I nodded. ‘He had an antique shop here in Vienna as well.’
‘No,’ Mrs Rabernak said firmly. ‘Zat shop was my husband’s. In Kohlmarkt.’ She spoke in German again to Clare.
‘She says Zlatko Rabernak – these Zagreb Rabernaks – all they ever collected was rubbish. How do you say it? Knick-knacks?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Knick-knacks. Musical boxes?’
Mrs Rabernak nodded her head vigorously. ‘That is it!’ She said happily. ‘Just rubbish, musik boxes.’ Again there was a flow of German addressed to the American girl.
Clare looked at her curiously before translating. ‘She says, well –’ She hesitated. ‘That her father – that’s Mrs Rabernak’s father – was a Minister here under the old regime, with the Emperor –’
‘Minister of Post und Telegraf,’ Mrs Rabernak said very shortly.
‘I see,’ I said, not seeing the relevance at all. ‘And what happened to this Eleanor Bailey?’
Mrs Rabernak put the diary back on the trolley. ‘We do not talk about her,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry –’ I said.
‘It must be that book,’ Clare added.
‘She was a socialist,’ Mrs Rabernak broke in unexpectedly. ‘A communist!’ Then she spoke in German once more.
‘Mrs Rabernak says this woman lived here wrongly – no,’ Clare fiddled for the word. ‘No – under “false colours”? Mrs Rabernak thought she was a woman of –’ Again she searched for the word.