by Anne Perry
He came back to the present candlelit room in Vienna with the daylight fading rapidly beyond the windows, and this quiet couple waiting for him to say something to make sense of his visit here, and their courtesy in receiving both him and Ferdi, and welcoming them on this of all days. Anything but the truth would insult them all, he as much as they, and perhaps Kristian and Hanna as well.
“Did you know Elissa von Leibnitz?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jakob answered. There was profound feeling in his face and in the timbre of his voice, but Monk was unable to read it. Had they resented her, known that their daughter had been picked for the errand that cost her life, rather than Elissa, because Elissa, the Aryan Catholic, was valued more, her life held more important than that of Hanna, the Jewess? Immeasurably worse than that, did they know or guess that she had betrayed their daughter to a pointless death? But he had left himself no way to retreat.
“Did you know that Kristian married her?”
“Yes, I knew that.”
Monk could feel the heat burning his face. He was ashamed for people he had not even known, far less shared acts or judgments with, and yet he felt tarred with the same brush. He was aware of Ferdi next to him and that perhaps he felt the same embarrassment.
“Will you eat with us?” Frau Jakob asked softly, also in English. “The meal is nearly ready.”
Monk was touched, and oddly, he was also afraid. There was a sense of tradition, of belonging, in this quiet room, which attracted him more than he was able to cope with, or to dismiss as irrelevant to him. He wanted to refuse, to make some excuse to come back at another time, but there was no other time. Kristian’s trial would begin any day, or might already have begun, and he was no real step nearer to the truth of who had killed Elissa, or why. Certainly he had nothing to take back to Callandra.
He glanced at Ferdi, then back at Frau Jakob. “Thank you,” he said.
She smiled and excused herself to attend to matters in the kitchen.
The meal was brought in, a slow-cooked stew in a deep, earthenware pot, and served with prayers and thanksgiving, which included the servants, who seemed to join as a matter of custom. Only after that was the conversation resumed. A peace had settled in the room, a sense of timelessness, a continuity of belief which spanned the millennia. Some of these same words must have been spoken over the breaking of bread centuries before the birth of Christ, with the same reverence for the creation of the earth, for the release of a nation from bondage, and above all the same certainty of the God who presided over all things. These people knew who they were and understood their identity. Monk envied them that, and it frightened him. He noticed that Ferdi also was moved by it—and disturbed, because it reached something in him older than conscious thought or teaching.
“What is it that we can do for Kristian, or Elissa?” Herr Jakob asked.
Monk spoke the truth without even considering otherwise. “Elissa was killed . . . murdered . . .” He disregarded their shock. “Kristian has been charged, because he appears to have had motive, and he cannot prove that he was elsewhere. I don’t believe he would have done such a thing, no matter what the provocation, but I have no evidence to put forward in his defense.”
Herr Jakob frowned. “You say ’provocation,’ Herr Monk. What is it that you refer to?”
“She was gambling, and losing far more than he could afford,” Monk answered.
Herr Jakob did not look surprised. “That is sad, and dangerous, but perhaps not impossible to understand in a woman who had known the passion and danger of revolution, and exchanged it for the tranquillity of domestic life.”
“Domestic life should be enough.” Frau Jakob spoke for the first time. “To give of yourself is sufficient for the deepest happiness. There are always those who need. There is the community . . . and of course, no matter what age they are, your children always need you, even if they pretend otherwise.” The sadness was only momentary in her face, the memory of her daughter who was beyond her help.
“Elissa had no children,” Monk explained.
“And she was not one of us,” Herr Jakob added gently. “Perhaps in England they do not have a community like ours.” He turned to Monk. “But I agree with you. I cannot imagine Kristian meaning to harm her.”
The nature of the killing sprang sharply to Monk’s mind. Elissa’s death, at least, could have been accidental, a man who had not realized his own strength. But Sarah Mackeson’s had been a deliberate act of murder. Quickly, he explained it to them, seeing the revulsion and the grief in their faces. He heard Ferdi’s sharply indrawn breath, but did not look at him.
Frau Jakob glanced at her husband.
He shook his head. “Even so,” he said grimly, “I cannot believe it. Not the second woman.”
“What?” Monk demanded, fear biting inside him. “What is it?”
Frau Jakob looked to her husband, and he to her.
“For God’s sake, his life could depend on it!” Monk said with rising panic, knowing he was failing and seeing his last chance slip away. “What do you know?” Was it the betrayal? Had it, after all, not been the secret Father Geissner had believed?
“I cannot see if it will help, and perhaps it will make things worse,” Herr Jakob said at last, his eyes filled with a sorrow that seemed too harsh and too deep for what Monk had told him, even the murder of a woman he might have admired, and the possibility that a man he had most certainly regarded highly could have been responsible.
“I need to know it anyway,” Monk said in the heavy silence. “Tell me.”
Beside him, Ferdi gulped. Herr Jakob sighed. “The history of our race is full of seeking, of homecoming, and of expulsion,” he said, looking not at Monk but at some point in the white linen tablecloth, and some vast arena of the world in his vision. “Again and again we find ourselves strangers in a land that fears us, and in the end hates us. We are permanent exiles. In Egypt, in Babylon, and across the world.”
Monk held his patience with difficulty. It was the passion of feeling that stilled his interruption rather than any regard for the words.
“We have been strangers in Europe for more than a thousand years,” Jakob went on. “And still we are strangers today, hated by many, even behind their smiling faces and their courtesy. We have lost some of our people to the fear, the exclusion, the unspoken dislike.”
Frau Jakob leaned forward a little as if to interrupt.
“I know,” he said, looking at her and shaking his head a little. “Herr Monk does not want a lesson in our history, but it is necessary to understand.” He turned to Monk. “You see, many families have changed their names, their way of life, even abandoned the knowledge of our fathers and embraced the Catholic faith, sometimes in order to survive, at other times simply to be accepted, to give their children a better chance.”
In spite of himself, Monk understood that, even if he did not admire it.
Jakob saw that in his eyes, and nodded. “The Baruch family was one such.”
“Baruch?” Monk repeated, not knowing what he meant.
“Almost three generations ago,” Jakob said.
Suddenly, Monk had a terrible premonition what Jakob was going to say.
Jakob saw it in his eyes. “Yes,” he said softly. “They changed their name to Beck, and became Roman Catholic.”
Monk was stunned. It was almost too difficult to believe, and yet not for an instant could he doubt it. It was monstrous, farcical, and it all made a hideous sense. It was a denial of identity, of birthright, of the faith that had endured for thousands of years, given up not for a change of conviction but for survival, to accommodate their persecutors and become one of them.
And yet had he been in the same circumstances, with a wife and children to protect, honesty told him he could not swear he would have acted differently. For oneself . . . perhaps . . . but for the parent who had grown old and frightened, desperately vulnerable, for the child who trusted you and for whom you had to make the decisions, with life
or death as a result . . . that was different.
One question beat in his brain above all others. “Did Kristian know?” he demanded.
“No,” Jakob said with a rueful smile. “Elissa knew. Hanna was the one who told her. She had a friend whose grandfather was a rabbi, and interested in all the old records. I think she wanted Elissa to know that it was she who was the one who did not belong, not Hanna. But no one told Kristian. Elissa protected him more than once. She was a remarkable woman. I am very sorry indeed to hear that she is dead . . . still more that it was the result of murder, not accident. But I do not believe that Kristian would do such a thing.”
Monk took a deep breath. Hanna’s family did not know of the betrayal. His throat was suddenly tight with relief and his next words were hoarse. “Not even if she told him this now, without warning, perhaps to heighten the obligation to her?”
Jakob’s face darkened. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I think not. But people do strange things when they are deeply distressed, out of the character we know, even that they know of themselves. I hope not.”
Monk stayed a little longer, enjoying the comfort and the strange, alien certainty of the room with its millennia-old rituals and memories of history which was to him only faint, from old Bible stories. It was like a step outside the daily world into another reality. He envied Herr Jakob his belief, dearly as it had been bought. Then, at about nine o’clock, he thanked them and he and Ferdi excused themselves. Tomorrow, Monk must face Max Niemann.
Outside in the street, it was freezing. The pavements glistened with a film of ice in the pools of light from the street lamps. Monk glanced sideways at Ferdi and saw the emotion raw in him. In a few hours he had been hurled through a torrent of passion and loss beyond anything his life had prepared him for, and seen it in a people he had been taught to despise. It had been installed in him that they were different, in some indescribably way less. And he had been touched by their dignity and their pain more deeply than he could control. Even if he could not have put it into such simple words, he was inwardly aware that their culture was the fount of his own. It stirred a knowledge in him too fundamental to be ignored.
Monk wanted to comfort him, assure him. But more than that, he wanted Ferdi to remember what he felt this moment as they walked, heads down in the darkened street, feeling the ice of the wind on their faces. He wanted him never to deny it within himself, or bend or turn it to suit society. It would be yet another betrayal. He had not the excuse of ignorance anymore.
He remained silent because he did not know what to say.
By the time Monk was face-to-face with Max Niemann at last, he had decided exactly what he was going to ask him. He already knew a great deal about Niemann, his heroism during the uprising, his love for Elissa, and how generously he had reacted when she married Kristian instead. From his outward behavior it was not difficult to believe he had largely got over his own passion for her and it had resolved into a genuine friendship for both Elissa and Kristian. He had never married, but that could have been due to a number of reasons. It was not so long ago that Monk himself had been quite sure that he would never marry, or if he did it would be someone quite unlike Hester. He had been certain he wanted a gentle, feminine woman who would comfort him, yield to him, admire his strength and be blind to his weaknesses. That memory prompted in him a wry laughter now. How little he had known himself. How desperately lonely that would have made him, like a man staring into a looking glass, and seeing only his own reflection.
But then he did know himself little, only five years, and those were strands worked out by deduction and sharp, sometimes ugly, flashes of disconnected memory.
He followed Max Niemann from his work as he strolled along the Canovagasse towards the open stretch of the Karlsplatz. It was not an ideal place for the conversation he needed to have, but he could not afford to wait any longer. In London, the trial might already have started. It was that urgency which impelled him to approach Max Niemann in the café where he sat listening to the chatter, and the clink of glasses.
It was discourteous, at the least, to pull up a chair opposite a man who was obviously intent upon being alone, but there was no alternative.
“Excuse me,” he said in English. “I know you are Max Niemann, and I need to speak to you on a matter which cannot wait for a proper introduction.”
Niemann looked only momentarily startled, his face set in lines of mild irritation.
Before he could protest, Monk went on. “My name is William Monk. I saw you in London at the funeral of Elissa Beck, but you may not remember me. I am a friend of Kristian’s, and it is in his interest that I am here.”
He saw Niemann’s expression ease a little.
“Did you know that Kristian has been charged with the murder, and is due to stand—” He stopped. It was apparent from Niemann’s wide eyes and slack mouth that he had not known, and that the news distressed him profoundly. “I’m sorry to tell you so abruptly,” Monk apologized. “I don’t believe it can be true, but there seems to be no other explanation for which there is any evidence, and I hoped I might find something here. Perhaps an enemy from the days of the uprising.”
A look of irony and grief crossed Niemann’s face. “Who waited thirteen years?” he said incredulously. “Why?”
A waiter came by, and Monk asked Niemann’s permission, then ordered coffee with cream and chocolate in it, and Niemann ordered a second coffee with hot milk.
“Of course we had quarrels then, loves and hates like any other group of people. But they were all over in hours. There were far bigger issues to care about.” His eyes were bright, his brow furrowed a little. The noises of crockery and voices around him seemed far away. “It was passionate, life and death, but it was political. We were fighting for freedom from Hapsburg tyranny, laws that crushed people and prevented us from having any say in our own destiny. The petty things were forgotten. We didn’t wait to murder our enemies in London thirteen years later; we shot them openly at the time.” He smiled, and his eyes were bright. “If there was anything on earth Elissa hated it was a hypocrite, anyone, man or woman, who pretended to be what they were not. It was the whole charade of the court, the double standards, that drew her into the revolution in the first place.”
“Do you believe Kristian could have killed Elissa, even unintentionally, in a quarrel that got out of control?” Monk asked bluntly.
Niemann appeared to consider it. “No,” he said at length. “If you had asked me if he would have during the uprising, if she had betrayed us, I might have thought so, but he would not have lied, and he would not have killed the second woman, the artists’ model.” He looked directly at Monk without a shadow across his face. There was no guard in him, no withholding of the deeper, more terrible secret. He had used the word betrayed quite easily, because as far as he knew it had no meaning in connection with Elissa.
Monk hated the knowledge that he would have to tell him, and see the disbelief, the anger, the denial, and at last the acceptance.
“You know him well.” Monk made it half a statement, half a question.
Niemann looked up. “Yes, we fought side by side. But you know that.”
“People change sometimes, over years, or all at once because of some event—for example, the death of someone they are close to.” He watched Niemann’s face.
Niemann fiddled with his coffee cup, turning it around and around in his fingers. “Kristian changed after Hanna Jakob’s death,” he said at last. “I don’t know why. He never spoke about it. But he was quieter, much more . . . solitary, as if he needed to consider his beliefs more deeply. Something changed in his ability to lead. Decisions became more difficult for him. He grieved more over our losses. I don’t think after that he could have killed someone, even if he or she was a liability to the cause. He would have hesitated, looked for another way . . . possibly even lost the moment.”
“And you didn’t know why?” Monk said, compelled to press again to see if Nieman
n had any idea of the betrayal, or if all he knew was the subtle guilt in Kristian, the perception of his own bigotry which troubled him ever after that.
“No,” Niemann answered. “He couldn’t talk about it. I never knew what it was.”
“Do you think Elissa knew?” The question was a double irony.
Niemann thought for quite some time, then eventually answered with sadness edged in his voice. “No. I think she wanted to, and was afraid of it. I don’t think she asked him.”
Monk leaned forward a little over the table. “You went to London three times this last year. Each time you saw Elissa, but not Kristian. You did not even let him know you were in England. What happened to your friendship that you would do that?”
Niemann looked up at him, then away. “How did you know that?”
“Are you saying it is untrue?” Monk challenged.
“No.” There was weariness in Niemann’s voice, and a slump to his shoulders. “No, I did not tell Kristian because I did not want him to know. Elissa wrote to me. She was badly in debt and she knew Kristian had no more money to give her. She needed help. I went and did what I could for her, paid her debts. They were not so very great, and I have done well.” He smiled very slightly. “I did not tell Kristian. Sometimes the best way to help a friend is not to let him know that you have seen that he needs help.”
He looked up from his cup. “But surely it was the artist who killed her? What was his name . . . Allardyce? He was utterly in love with her, you know. Sarah Mackeson must have known it, and she had enough imagination to fear that Elissa would supplant her not only in Allardyce’s affections, but more importantly, on canvas, and she would be without the means of support. She must have been frightened and jealous. What if she killed Elissa? She was a stronger and heavier woman. And when Allardyce came home he found Elissa’s body and knew what had happened, and in his own rage and grief, he killed Sarah.”