The Strangler's Waltz

by Richard Lord

  “From Moravia. A small town. You’ve probably never heard of it, being the educated and sophisticated gent you obviously are.”

  That answer was enough for Stebbel. He then asked how much. She came back with the standard lines: “Ten kroners. Is that too much?”

  “No … not at all,” he replied, and a short time later they were in her room. Stebbel had removed his hat and his jacket, then stepped to the side and watched her undress. She had removed her shoes and her flimsy dress. She sat on the bed and started to slip off her stockings, when something suddenly happened to Stebbel. He felt faint, slightly nauseous even. He took a few deep breaths, closed his eyes and leaned against the door.

  “Are you alright?” she asked. Turning to look at her, he realized that most of his lust had disappeared. He could probably work at it and get some of that lust back, but it would be a foolish exercise to have sex with this girl. And a foolish exercise was not what he was looking for that evening.

  He told the woman that he was suddenly feeling unwell. Something he had eaten earlier in the evening, he told her. He then pulled out the ten kroners. He insisted that she take the whole amount they had agreed on and apologized that he couldn’t enjoy her charms. He then added that he really wanted to enjoy her, but he just wasn’t up to it.

  She shrugged and took the money. It appeared that men getting to her room and then realizing they were unable to perform was not that unusual an occurrence for her. And she did not seem to be too unhappy that she had not been able to sustain his lust, even as she undressed.

  Stebbel grabbed his coat and hat, apologized again. But by that point, she had already pulled her dress back on and was easing her foot into one of the shoes. Stebbel wanted to say something else, a strong exit line, but nothing came to him, so he simply opened the door and stepped out, closing the door hard behind him.

  He started down the steps, moving as quickly as he safely could. He passed two other couples going up the steps to fulfill their transactions; all four stared at this figure trying to squeeze by. He smiled and tried to gesture that everything was all right, he just needed to get out and get some fresh air.

  As soon as he hit the street, he realized that he really had needed fresh air. He crossed the narrow street, stopped and just sucked in deep breaths for the next thirty seconds. Then he headed off.

  He walked for the next fifteen minutes, not even sure where exactly he was walking. Not knowing what he wanted, he stared at the faces of the many girls he passed, the men who had come looking for their quick dip of sex, the louche types leaning against walls and staring back at him with suspicion. Those latter were probably pimps, but tonight Stebbel couldn’t give a damn what their business was, just as long as they left him alone.

  After a few streets, the faces, the bodies, the hazy lights, the whining doors opening and closing … everything became distorted. He felt that this nocturnal journey had turned into a hallucinatory excursion. Every person he passed, every sound he heard, every smell – it all seemed like a series of hallucinations.

  Finally, he found himself on the Mariahilferstrasse. He hailed a cab and climbed in. He started to give his address and then caught himself; he didn’t want to be dropped off right in front of his building. He told the driver to let him off at a pub a few streets from his place.

  He decided to buy a bottle of cheap wine to take away, then walk back from there. The vintage Bordeaux waiting for him back at his flat was too elegant for his present mood. He wanted something coarse and unfocused to fit his demeanor. And if it made him really sick, so much the better.

  As he shuffled home from the pub, Stebbel was feeling even more despondent than when the evening began. As he approached his building, he saw what seemed at first to be another hallucination: there was a young priest standing guard near the front door. To increase the hallucinatory effect, as he came a little closer, the priest trotted down the steps towards him and called out, “Are you Inspector Julian Stebbel?”

  Stebbel hesitated for a moment. What was this all about? Did his guardian angel, repulsed by his visit to the whores’ quarter, fly over to his local church and inform on him? Had this priest been sent out to force a confession of his sin? After all, he had sinned in thought and word; he only failed in the action segment.

  Stebbel saw no way out of this strange situation other than telling the truth.

  “Yes, I am Julian Stebbel. And why do you ask?”

  The young priest first raised his eyes towards Heaven and whispered a short prayer of thanks. He then explained the reason for his mission: he was sent by his superior, a Father Wenzel, to find Stebbel and bring him to the Holy Savior Hospital as quickly as possible. But he had been sent over two hours ago and been waiting most of that time at his current post.

  And why was he needed at the Holy Savior Hospital, Stebbel asked. A man, a man in critical condition, needed to see him. He had some confession he needed to make, and that confession had to be made to Stebbel. And only Stebbel.

  Even though Stebbel was still dubious, even suspicious, he agreed to go. But first, he said, he had to go up to his place, drop off the bottle of wine and pick up something. “Of course,” replied the priest, a nervous smile twisting his face.

  As the anxious priest trotted towards the corner hoping to find a taxi, Stebbel hurried up the steps to his second-floor apartment. He turned on the gaslight, stuck the wine bottle into the umbrella stand next to the door and headed for the study. There, he went to his desk, pulled out his keys and unlocked the middle drawer, where he kept his personal revolver.

  He pulled out the revolver and checked the barrel. Fully loaded. He also clicked off the safety. If this was a trap, if he was heading into an ambush, he would make sure that those waiting for him would get a big surprise of their own.

  When he re-emerged, Stebbel saw that the priest had not only found a taxi, but that the taxi was waiting right out front for him, its engine grumbling, its driver looking irritable.

  As Stebbel climbed into the back seat, he found the young cleric even more nervous than before. He seemed to be whispering a prayer as they drove off. His superior must be a pretty tough fellow, Stebbel thought.

  In the taxi, the priest – who finally identified himself as Father Alois Meller – told Stebbel everything he knew about the call to the hospital. But “everything” didn’t amount to much. All he seemed to know was that a certain gentleman had suffered a serious accident, was close to death, and he needed to talk to Stebbel about something. No clue as to what that something was. Stebbel remained in a thick, swirling fog.

  Chapter 46

  When they finally reached the hospital, the priest rushed to the reception desk and made some inquiry. Half a minute later, he turned, grabbed Stebbel by the arm and pulled him towards the paternoster.

  “It’s Room 424,” he said. “That’s fourth floor, you turn to the right when we get off and then all the way down to the end of the corridor.” He breathed heavily. “And by the grace of God, I hope we’re not too late.”

  When Stebbel arrived at Room 424, he found a gangly priest with a pinched face waiting near the door. The priest nodded and addressed him.

  “Are you Inspector Stebbel?”

  “That’s right, Father. And you are …?”

  “Father Andreas Wenzel. I just heard his confession and gave him absolution. But he’s still not completely healed. Healed spiritually, I mean. He still insists on making a further confession. To you.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’ve been told.” But the inspector was no less perplexed than before. Before he could ask why this patient insisted on seeing him, the priest gave a pained smile and opened the door for the visitor.

  As Stebbel was about to enter, the priest laid a hand on the crook of his arm. “Oh, his name is Oswald Zingler. He says you may have heard his name before.” Stebbel shook his head, then stepped around the priest and into the room.

  Inside, Stebbel found the patient, Herr Zingler, staring at the ceiling
from the slump of his bed and generally looking terrible. He didn’t seem to be aware of Stebbel until the inspector took a seat right at the bedside. Zingler then turned and found a smile somewhere.

  “You’re Inspector Stebbel, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.” He gazed at the heavy bandaging across the chest. “You’ve been wounded.”

  The patient gave what started out as a laugh before it caved into a cough and then a gasp. Finally, he managed to speak. “Yes, self-inflicted. With a gun. I aimed it at my heart, but apparently I missed and only managed to pierce a lung.”

  He stopped to take two gulps of breath. “They don’t tell you how difficult it is to shoot yourself in the chest. You’d think it would be very easy, but it’s not, is it?”

  “I don’t really have any experience to speak of.”

  “Well, it’s not. Now I’m in terrible pain. Terrible. It was a foolish mistake. I should have jumped off a high roof. Next time, that’s what I’ll do. Anyone you know who wants to kill himself, tell them that’s what he should do. The roof.”

  “Yes, I will.” He took a slow, long breath. “You wanted to see me, Herr Zingler? To make a confession?”

  “Yes, I need to do this in order to die in anything close to peace.”

  “Anything I can do to help you. But I don’t really – ”

  “I was responsible for those deaths. The five young women, beginning with Frau von Klettenburg. That was my doing.”

  Stebbel now thought this poor man was fully delusional and wondered why he had been called here in the middle of the night to deal with him. Just another sad, troubled mind confessing to some crimes he didn’t commit.

  “No, I think you’re innocent. We found the killer. He’s paid in full for his crimes.” And just to be sure, Stebbel took another look at the man’s hands. Although they were now clenched and feeble, he didn’t think they were ever capable of those brutal murders that he himself had viewed the end results of.

  “No, I don’t mean that I actually committed the crimes. Brunner did that; that’s clear. But I was responsible. I was the one who contacted him … who paid him … who told him what to do.”

  Suddenly, this confession rolled back into the realm of the vaguely possible. Stebbel leaned forward, his ears perked up.

  “You … you paid Brunner to kill these women? Why?”

  “My client paid me to do it. He was the one behind it all. All five of those souls are ultimately on his conscience.”

  “And your client was …?”

  “The Geheimrat. Geheimrat von Klettenburg.”

  Stebbel was stunned. “Is this true?”

  “Yes, yes; so terribly true. He ordered the death of the first four women. And then the last one, the student, we were both responsible in a way for her death.” He suddenly started breathing heavily and seemed to pull away from the conversation.

  “Please, please – I need some more explanation. Why would von Klettenburg want all these women dead?”

  “It was all because of his wife. She had gone too far. Truly.”

  “Too far?”

  “He didn’t mind her affairs when it was kept discreet, when it was within the bounds of decency. But then she started seeking adventure … excitement … danger. And that made it dangerous for the Geheimrat. And then … well, it all came to a head with Leopold Scherling.”

  That name sounded familiar to Stebbel, but he couldn’t make an immediate placement. He quickly gestured for Zingler to continue with his recital.

  “Yes, Scherling was one of her lovers. And he played all her very dangerous games with her. He’d meet her on the streets, she’d take him to a hotel, he’d pay her money, they would … you know. And then he would pretend to beat her and steal the money back.”

  “This was their game?”

  “Yes; she had all these very sick fantasies, and she needed men who would help her live out these fantasies. She sought them out, actually.”

  “I see.”

  “But even that sort of sickness would not have been too much for the Geheimrat. But then … then Scherling decided that he could profit from this. He was in serious debt, you see, his business was about to go bankrupt.”

  Suddenly, the name snapped into place for Stebbel. “Yes, I remember the case now.”

  “So he came up with this plan to get a lot of money and save his business. He contacted Herr von Klettenburg and blackmailed him. He said that if he didn’t meet his demands, he would expose the whole sordid game Frau von Klettenburg was playing. With him and several others.

  “Of course, the Geheimrat was outraged … and worried. He then came to me and asked me to arrange the murder of his wife. He wanted her removed so that she couldn’t … disgrace him and his respected name any further.”

  Everything was now starting to come together for Stebbel. “And then the two of you decided to kill Scherling as well …”

  Zingler nodded. “He was a very stupid man, Scherling. No wonder his business went under. After her death, he came to see the Geheimrat and actually raised his blackmail demand. Can you imagine that?

  “He had figured out that her murder was no chance occurrence. He realized that she’d been killed because of that threat to the von Klettenburg world her secret fantasies had caused. He told the Geheimrat that if he didn’t pay his demand – an outrageous sum, actually – he would go to the police, to you probably, and tell them everything he knew. That same evening, he joined Frau von Klettenburg in eternity.”

  “Brunner smashed him in the head and then tossed him into the Danube. Staged it to look like a suicide.”

  “Exactly.”

  Stebbel took several deep breaths. Though he’d been a policeman for over six years, he was shocked by the audacity, the ruthlessness of the whole thing. While he’d had suspicions, right from the start, about the depth of von Klettenburg’s grief, he never imagined that he would be capable of such a thing. But there was still a huge gap in the explanation.

  “Alright, I see his motive for wanting to get rid of his wife and her greedy playmate, but what about the other four girls? Why did they have to die?”

  Zingler took a deep breath. “That may be the thing I feel absolutely worst about. After we had taken care of Frau von Klettenburg and Scherling, the Geheimrat started to get worried. The police – you and your people, in fact – started putting so much energy into the case.

  “He reckoned that if you were looking only at her death, you might eventually chance upon his motives and follow the bloody threads back to him. I … I agreed with him that this was very possible. So then we discussed what we could do to keep you away.

  “We started planning out diversionary tactics. Things to really pull you off the right path. And we decided that the safest way to keep you far from the truth was to make you think that Frau von Klettenburg was not a specific target. We wanted to make it look like a random killing, part of a string of random murders of young women. As Herr von Klettenburg put it, ‘They will be like a row of lovely pearls on a string.’

  “When we had a second murder, and then a third, maybe a fourth, it would look like they were all unfortunate victims of a sick killer. Our own Jack the Ripper, isn’t that what the newspapers called it? So instead of a finger pointing directly back at the Geheimrat from his wife’s dead body, she would seem to be the first unfortunate victim of that random killer.”

  “So you instructed Brunner to go out and find some more victims.”

  “Yes. I feel so terrible. We let him go after whoever he could find. It didn’t matter; all we needed was follow-up victims. But we did … we did insist that those victims should be streetwalkers.”

  “Why?”

  Zingler started to give a heavy shrug, but the pain in his chest was so sharp that he stopped the gesture halfway through. “Well, they were only whores. We didn’t think it would be as bad as killing decent women.” Stebbel turned away slightly and winced at this. And for the first time during this confession, he felt the urge
to strangle Zingler himself.

  “But … but after the third one, we started to feel bad, even if they were whores. At least I did. Herr von Klettenburg seemed to be more … objective about the whole thing. The important thing: we did order Brunner to stop the killings for a while. We said we all needed to take a pause to see how our strategy was working and how we should proceed from there.”

  “And Fräulein Grettin?”

  “That was Brunner working entirely on his own. Entirely. The three of us sat down together right after that. The next day, in fact. And you know something – that was the first time Herr von Klettenburg sat face-to-face with Brunner since the evening we first talked about removing Frau von Klettenburg.

  “We were very upset with Brunner. First of all, he had gone and killed another girl after we had insisted that he take a pause. And second, the victim was a complete innocent, a university student. We were disgusted and … He received quite a tongue-lashing from the Geheimrat, let me tell you.”

  “That must have been devastating for him.”

  “The frightening thing was, he sat there and started defending why he had killed that fifth girl. And … and there was something like joy in his face, in his voice as he talked about it.

  “As he spoke, his hands – the instruments of these murders – those hands started dancing around in the air, tracing the method he had used to kill the girl. It was like a … a strangler’s waltz.”

  Zingler stopped and Stebbel looked over to see if he was all right. Now, for the first, he saw tears rolling out of the man’s eyes. “He seemed to enjoy it. He seemed to find pleasure in the act of murdering a completely innocent stranger. And …”

  “Yes?”

  “And he told us that he had to top Jack the Ripper. He needed to kill at least one more so that he could become more famous than the Ripper.”

  “So you decided to halt his attempt at eternal fame by tipping off the police to where he would be that evening we caught up with him?”