The Keeper of Hands (38 page)

Schmidt had turned on the gas light in the bathroom and it made the scene even more garish, the water in the bathtub a brilliant crimson against the whiteness of the porcelain and the alabaster of Forstl’s skin. At least he assumed it was Forstl’s corpse he was staring at. The wrists rested languorously on the edges of the tub, ribboned gashes were apparent on each. A cutthroat razor had been left on the tiled floor by the bathtub, to give it the appearance of having fallen from the dead man’s hand.

‘So you were just in the process of tying up further loose ends when I interrupted you,’ Gross said, taking his eyes from the body.

‘Indeed.’ Schmidt smiled at him. ‘And you know, your arrival is the most fortuitous event I could wish for.’

Schmidt pointed at him with the stiff little finger of his left hand, a flicker in his eye.

‘Take your clothes off.’

Forstl’s apartment was only minutes away, close to the baroque Palais Schönborn, which housed the supreme district court. He had taken part in trials there. Its gardens were now open to the public; Frieda often went there to play.

Werthen occupied his mind with these quotidian matters rather than face his fears about Gross. If Forstl was not at the Bureau this morning, that meant it was highly probable he was at his apartment. Would he be armed? Would his accomplice perhaps be with him? What had kept the man from his post at the Bureau? Should they look for a member of the constabulary on foot patrol and explain their fears?

To continue with these endless questions would sap him of courage, he knew. Thus, as they approached the apartment building in question, he told the women to get behind him and blindly charged up the stairs, quite unaware of Inspector Drechsler and two constabulary officers hiding behind a row of metal garbage bins deeper in the entrance.

He was up to the mezzanine before he heard Drechsler’s voice calling to him.

‘Werthen. Stop, man. You’ll spoil everything.’

‘Werthen?’ Schmidt said, turning his ear to the shouting coming from the stairwell. ‘Would that be your ally, Advokat Werthen, come to the rescue? And then whose is the other voice?’

Schmidt lifted the pistol level to Gross’s eye, his forefinger tense on the trigger.

‘You have arranged quite a little party, haven’t you, Doktor Gross?’

Gross took a deep breath. He would not beg. That was beneath him.

The man’s finger began to squeeze the trigger. Gross felt sweat roll down his spine.

Then Schmidt emitted a barking laugh and lowered the gun.

‘This has been fun, Doktor Gross. We must do it again some time. Now into the wardrobe with you.’

Gross stood there dumbly for a moment.

‘Now,’ Schmidt hissed.

Gross did as he was told. He climbed into the cramped space, amid a welter of uniforms, and stumbled over a pair of knee-high boots. As he caught himself, the door swung to behind him and he heard the key turning in the lock. His hand fumbled into one of the boots and felt paper folded over on itself several times. He grasped this in a reflex action. From outside, came the sound of footsteps moving away. He thought he heard wood sliding on wood, but could not be sure. Then came a crash, which sounded like the apartment door flying open.

‘Gross! Are you here?’

He let out a deep sigh. Werthen. His dear friend.

‘In here!’ he shouted. Then he was sorry he had done so, for it gave him no time to change.

‘Where’s the key?’

Drechsler’s voice.

‘The hell with the key. Kick the blasted thing in.’

Werthen at his most intemperate, Gross thought.

‘Move back from the door if you can,’ Werthen yelled. Then a rather massive boot was thrust through the thin paneling of the door, a constabulary boot by the look of it, and Gross was even more mortified.

The door was soon torn from its hinges and Gross blinked at the daylight, for another of the team had opened the drapes.

‘Gross!’ Werthen stood wide-eyed in shock, gaping at the criminologist who was dressed in a green-silk evening gown.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ Drechsler muttered, running a hand through his thinning hair.

Two constables stood behind them, smirking at the sight.

To complete his mortification, Werthen’s wife and secretary then entered the apartment.

Berthe took one look at Gross, tricked out in one of Forstl’s evening gowns, smiled and said, ‘You must introduce me to your dressmaker, Doktor Gross.’

S
chmidt had gotten away, out of the bathroom window and across the neighboring roofs. There was no sign of him by the time they had figured out his escape route.

Drechsler arranged for all the train stations to be watched, but Werthen was almost certain they would not catch him. Austrian borders were porous to say the least. Besides the railways, there were any number of ways for Schmidt to flee. River barges plied the Danube to its furthest reaches; the man could hire a pony trap or even an automobile; simplest of all, he could simply walk across the border at any of thousands of places.

The inspector was the one to explain to Werthen that Gross had organized the trap for Forstl and his controller. Now in possession of photographic identification of Forstl, that morning Drechsler had been directed by Gross to await the man’s return to his flat, stirred from the Bureau by Werthen’s anonymous telephone message. He was to wait also for the arrival of another man – the controller whom Forstl would, it was hoped, summon as a result of Werthen’s message. If no other person came within ten minutes of Forstl’s arrival, then Drechsler and his men were to enter the apartment.

They had, of course, no way of knowing that both Forstl and Schmidt were already inside the flat when Gross arrived.

Werthen for his part was rather shocked to discover that the corpse in the bathtub – the same man smartly decked out in a captain’s uniform in the photo in Drechsler’s possession – was the military man he had so often seen in the morning walking along the Josefstädterstrasse towards the Inner City. Once again, Werthen was struck by the notion that Vienna was not a city at all, but rather a series of villages where no one was really anonymous.

Gross said little during the rest of the day, acting alternately like a chastised child and a Nietzschean
Übermensch
who did not deign to converse with mere mortals. Not even the fact that he had recovered the missing mobilization plans, hidden in Forstl’s boot in the wardrobe, mollified him. Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself had called to congratulate Gross, but the criminologist had uttered a barely audible response.

‘He obviously meant to make it look as if Forstl murdered you, his lover, and then took his own life,’ Werthen offered at one point, hoping to make things better.

This was met by a gruff growl from Gross.

Berthe also tried to bury the hatchet, sincerely apologizing to Gross for her ironic comment about the dress he was wearing. He simply ignored her.

In the end, Frau Blatschky was the one to bring him round, cooking his favorite beef with onions, followed by a dessert of
Palatschinken,
crêpes stuffed with walnut paste and with a drizzling of chocolate sauce on top.

To celebrate and hasten his recovery, Werthen brought out a Château Margaux he had been saving for a special occasion.

She awoke with a start in the night and knew she was not alone. Suddenly a hand clamped over her mouth.

‘There is just one thing I want to know,’ the man called Schmidt said. ‘And please do not attempt to scream or I will be forced to smother you with your own eiderdown.’

He could see her eyes, wide and white, in the gloom. ‘Nod if you understand.’

She gave a brisk nod, not easily accomplished with his hand clamped over her mouth.

‘I will take my hand away then. I mean you no harm. I have only come for information. Do you understand?’

Another nod, less panicked this time.

He took his hand away and she seemed to regain her composure, pulling the eiderdown up over her nightgown primly, as if she had not sold the body beneath those covers to legions.

‘Who are you?’ Frau Mutzenbacher demanded, her voice low but firm.

‘Call me Schmidt.’

‘Well, Herr Schmidt, what do you mean by breaking into my room this way? In fact, how did you get in here at all?’

‘I am the one asking the questions. Time is short. I have come about your brother.’

‘Siegfried?’

‘Do you have others?’

She glared at Schmidt. ‘What about him? I have no idea where he is off to.’

Schmidt slowly shook his head. ‘That may suffice with the constabulary, but not with me. I leave no loose ends, and I think you know quite well where he is.’

‘What concern is it of yours?’

The movement was so swift, she did not even see the knife until it was held only a centimetre or two from her left eye.

‘I am the one asking the questions. Is that clear?’

She struggled with her fear, but finally gave in to it. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Where is Siegfried?’

She paused, and the knife moved perceptibly closer to her eye. ‘Do you want a matching scar for the one on the other side of your face?’

‘He is dead.’

Schmidt said nothing in reply.

‘Dead,’ she whispered again.

‘How?’

Another pause, and now there was a minute flick of the blade, a stinging sensation on her cheek, and she felt a warm trickle flow downward along her neck.

‘I . . . I killed him.’

He laughed then. Not a real laugh, though, she registered. A sort of bitter chuckle.

‘You’re a real one, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Too bad we meet so late. We have much in common.’

He staunched her cut with the corner of the eiderdown.

This sudden concern scared Frau Mutzenbacher more than his threats with the knife.

‘Tell me about it. He was your brother,’ Schmidt said, ‘but you killed him. Why?’

‘He was going to bring ruin on this house. All my years of hard work, all my plans for retirement to Carinthia. They were going up in smoke because he killed this von Ebersdorf fellow. He was insane with jealousy.’

She felt tears coming to her eyes, remembering the deed. So easy. Siegfried had come running to her, begging for help, telling her how he had poisoned von Ebersdorf because he thought the Count had killed Mitzi. But she couldn’t risk his being caught, could she? She gave him brandy to calm him; brandy laced with poison. He died quickly. She wrapped him in a rug, struggled to stuff his body into a storage trunk, and then hired a removal firm to transport the trunk to her little place in Carinthia before it began to stink. She followed several days later, a quick trip to bury the body.

‘There’s more, isn’t there?’

It was as if he could see inside her very soul.

‘Yes,’ she said with a kind of ice-cold hatred. ‘He deserved to die. He had an affair with my little Mitzi. The only person I ever loved, and he’d wanted to take her away from me. He could not keep his hands off her. My prize. My dearest.’

She had not cried in years, not since she was five and lost her virginity to a
bettgeher,
a man who rented bed space in her parents’ meager flat in Ottakring. She had vowed after that incident never to cry again, never to weep but to get revenge.

But now she wept. She was not sure for whom.

When she finally regained self-control, the room was empty. The man called Schmidt had left as quietly as he had come.

T
he pleasant, rhythmic thwack of tennis balls filled the air. Fräulein Metzinger sat under the shade of the lone elm, refusing to join in, reminding Werthen none too gently that the vulcanized rubber used in the manufacture of these balls may have cost some African in the Belgian Congo his hand. Frau Ignatz, seated under the tree next to Fräulein Metzinger, clucked her agreement.

Other than that comment, the day had passed rather happily, Werthen thought.

Now, by the third week of July, the grass had grown nicely and Werthen was finding real satisfaction in tending it, watering the lawn by hand and mowing it with the special mower his father had given him. In fact, the last few weeks he had left town early on Friday to give himself and the family as much time as possible at the farmhouse in Laab im Walde. Werthen was also rediscovering the joy he had found as a boy in playing tennis; not the competitive part of it, but simply the joy of striking the ball well, feeling the racquet strings brush up and over the ball, and then watching the white orb spin over the net. Everything about lawn tennis was suddenly pleasing to Werthen: the greenness of the grass, the deep brown of the maple racquet, the pure whiteness of the ball.

‘That was clearly out,’ Gross said. He was acting as umpire and his wife, Adele, was assisting him on line calls. They were both taking the contest very seriously.

Werthen was teaming with Frau Juliani, the widow whom Berthe’s father, Herr Meisner, was seeing. She hardly acted the role of demure widow, though; an outspoken and energetic little woman, to Werthen’s surprise and delight she possessed a rather deft backhand. On the other side of the net, they faced the mixed-doubles team of Herr Meisner and Baroness von Suttner. Berthe had mysteriously bowed out of the game at the last minute, saying she needed a lie-down, which was quite unlike her.

‘I’m not too sure of that call, Doktor Gross,’ Herr von Werthen said from his sidelines seat. Werthen’s father and mother were also in attendance, and Emile von Werthen seemed in fine spirits today – much better than on his previous visit to the farmhouse, when it had rained the entire weekend. He had been able to go butterfly-hunting this morning, even deigning to take Frieda along with him part of the time.

‘Fine little lepidopterist she’ll make,’ he’d said upon returning, a touch of pride in his voice. Frieda now sat upon her grandfather’s lap, as he questioned Gross’s call.

Gross bristled at the suggestion that he could be wrong, but a placating touch by Adele made him resist the temptation to indulge in argument or condescension.

‘Yes, well, it was on the far side of the court. I suppose you had a better view of it over there.’