The Silence (15 page)

‘I repeat, madam,’ Gross said, ‘we shall find justice. And meanwhile, Advokat Werthen will keep a protective eye on you.’

‘Oh please,’ she said with real emotion. ‘That would be too good of you.’

Werthen shot Gross a disapproving look, angered that the criminologist offered up his services so lightly.

‘I would be happy to retain you, Advokat,’ she said.

‘My pleasure, entirely,’ Werthen said.

‘Good of you to offer my services,’ Werthen said once they were outside.

Gross shook his head. ‘It won’t do. Pretty young woman like that needs a knight around.’

‘She’s got the whole of the royal army to choose from,’ Werthen protested.

‘Remember her father’s poor heart. Besides, I have a feeling that we may want to remain close to Frau Steinwitz.’

Gross took his leave of Werthen then, in a hurry lest Adele should become suspicious of his whereabouts and business.

‘Clarity ensues,’ Gross offered as a parting comment.

It
was
clear enough, Werthen thought as he made his way home through the late afternoon darkness. They had considered that a possible motive for killing Praetor might be to keep him from making even further allegations, from reaching ever higher in City Hall to uncover corruption. Now this theory had been extended to Councilman Steinwitz, as well.

Even though the councilman’s death had been determined a suicide, Werthen knew such a thing could easily be staged. Gross planned to examine police photographs of the crime scene in the morning. The revelations from Frau Steinwitz opened up an entirely new direction for their investigation.

Werthen crossed the Landesgerichtstrasse and began cutting through back lanes to reach his apartment via the shortest route. As the streets were all narrow and short, this was also the least chilly route, for the wind had come up now and whistled down the wider boulevards, reaching to the bone with its cold.

Walking up the Schmidgasse, he heard footsteps in back of him quickly approaching. He noticed that the street was empty but for him and whoever was in back of him. Turning, he caught a blow to his left cheekbone that sent him sprawling on to the cobbled street. A pair of legs straddled him, and then a boot to the kidneys made him curl like a fetus as other blows rained down upon him.

Suddenly he lashed out with his walking stick, catching his attacker in the knee with the brass globe. The man cried out in pain, and Werthen rolled away, getting to his feet.

His attacker, a hulking man in worker’s clothes, now pulled out a knife from his waistband, and Werthen, his youthful fencing training returning to him automatically, assumed a fighting pose, his walking stick held high like a foil. The man lunged at him, and Werthen parried the thrust with a blow to the man’s middle followed by another to his back as Werthen spun out of knife range.

They squared off once again, the man panting and eyeing him savagely.

‘What is it you want?’ Werthen said to him. ‘What are you after?’ But he knew the man was no common thief.

The man said nothing, but once again lunged for him. This time Werthen brought the brass globe down satisfyingly on the man’s head. It was fortunate for the villain that he was wearing a bowler hat, otherwise he would have been concussed. As it was, he stumbled to one knee for a moment, his hat going askew and showing a thick growth of coal-black hair. Then he righted the hat, let out a scream of rage and rushed at Werthen once again, catching the lawyer off guard, and slashing his overcoat with the knife. The knife tore through fabric with a swishing sound, and Werthen swirled away from his attacker, bringing the stick down upon the man’s back, this time hitting his kidneys.

Voices from down the street caught the man’s attention. Other strollers were approaching and now the hulking man snarled at him in a thick Ottakring worker’s accent:

‘You keep your nose in your own business if you know what’s good for you.’

The man glared at him for a moment, and Werthen noticed that the bridge of his nose had a large lump, as if it had been broken and poorly mended. Then the man ran off with surprising speed for one his size. Werthen knew he would never be able to catch him, not with his bad knee.

The pedestrians, a man and what appeared to be his young son, spied Werthen and his unkempt appearance, took him for a drunk, and crossed the street away from him.

‘I repeat, it is not a profession for a gentleman. Fisticuffs in the street!’

Herr von Werthen had not touched his
Fritattensuppe
, a light broth with thinly cut pieces of crepe in it. Werthen’s mother, seated next to her husband at the Biedermeier dining table, cast her son a commiserating look as she had when he was a child with a bruised knee.

‘I really think you should report it,’ Berthe said.

Werthen’s account of the attack had not put her off her appetite, he noted. She left not one bit of crepe in her soup bowl. Frau Blatschky brought in the main course,
Wiener Reisfleisch
, a savory concoction of veal, bacon and onion pan fried and blended into cooked rice with a light tomato and paprika sauce. Truth be told, Werthen’s mouth started watering at the aroma of it as Frau Blatschky set it in the middle of the table. Nothing like a bit of a tussle to get the appetite up. Werthen felt as if he could eat the whole bowl of it.

‘Just some drunk looking for trouble,’ he said. There had been no way to conceal the welt on his cheek nor the rent in his coat, otherwise he would not have worried his family with a tale of physical attack on the streets of the capital. Nor did he really believe it was a random outrage.

Berthe helped him to a large serving of the
Reisfleisch.

‘Not good for the family name,’ his father continued to bluster. ‘One would think Doktor Gross would have better sense.’

Werthen had informed them of Gross’s appearance today and of his offer to help in his investigation.

‘Doktor Gross was not there at the time of the attack,’ Berthe reminded her father-in-law. ‘And I think there are more serious consequences to worry about,’ she added sharply. ‘Karl could have been badly injured.’

Herr von Werthen reddened at this rebuke, and Werthen had to jump in quickly to avoid another family ruckus.

‘I am sure no one recognized me,’ he said with irony.

‘Thank the Lord for small favors,’ said Frau von Werthen.

Which remark made Berthe shake her head in despair of ever understanding her in-laws.

In bed later that night, Berthe put her fingertips to the bruise on his cheek.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘It’s nothing, really.’

‘Don’t be so stoic. And please do not insult me in the privacy of our bedroom with that story about a drunk. What really happened?’

‘It seems that Gross and I may have stirred a hornet’s nest this afternoon.’

He quickly explained his earlier activities: the visit to Kraus and then to City Hall, and finally the revelations of Frau Steinwitz.

‘Well, a hornet’s nest it is,’ she agreed. ‘The only question is who at the Rathaus commissioned that ruffian to dissuade you from further investigations.’

‘So sure it was City Hall?’ But he needed no convincing, he just wanted confirmation of his own suspicions.

‘A matter of timing, darling. Your mind is still reeling or you would see that for yourself. It could hardly be Frau Steinwitz, as you had just left her. There was no time – not to mention no reason – for her to set a mastiff on you. No, it had to come from the Rathaus. The only question is, from how high up?’

Eleven

H
e and Adele had a late night at the Hausmanns’, and Gross had taken one too many snifters of Pierre Ferrand ’65. This morning – a brutal and blustery day – he was nonetheless in a buoyant mood as he made his way to the Ninth District, the Alsergrund, for his meeting with Doktor Siegismund Praetor, father of the murdered journalist.

As far as Adele knew, he was busy in the hallowed halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, working on another monograph to be published under his nom de plume, Marcellus Weintraub. He had, to be sure, already published one such article, dealing with stylistic irregularities in the early career of Bruegel, or as the painter called himself then, Brueghel. Gross would probably have to write something about the missing ‘h,’ if only to keep the deception alive with Adele.

Such a thought brought a wry smile to his lips.

He enjoyed this morning’s brisk walk along the Ring, turning off the broad boulevard at Universitätsstrasse and then making his way to Schwarzspanierstrasse, where the elder Praetor had his office. As it turned out, the office was in a building just next to the one – so a bronze plaque at number thirteen told him – where Ludwig van Beethoven had died on Monday, March 26, 1827. Looking at that building with its gabled roofs and crumbling façade, Gross wondered how long before it was torn down to make room for a new block of flats. And good riddance. Gross’s musical tastes had their upward limits with Haydn and Mozart; the excesses of Beethoven rang in his ears like the cacophony of a metal works.

On the other side of this Beethoven death house was a Protestant church which Gross, Catholic that he was, ruefully thought might also be torn down with no great loss.

Prejudices in order, Gross entered the door of house number fifteen, itself a baroque structure, but one kept in much better condition than its neighboring buildings. An odd place to have one’s office, he thought, even if it were just consulting rooms. For surgeries, Doktor Praetor would employ the nearby General Hospital with its three thousand beds.

The doctor’s rooms were on the top floor of the three-story edifice, and Gross climbed the circular stairs with ease. A highly polished brass plaque on a white-lacquered door identified the consulting rooms and told visitors to show themselves in. Gross did so, and the door opened on to a ballroom-sized waiting room filled with the fragrance of a bouquet of yellow and brick-red hothouse chrysanthemums atop a large, oval rosewood table in the middle of the room. Comfortable armchairs ringed the room, but none of them were occupied, for – as he had told Gross earlier on the telephone – Praetor did not have office hours today.

A small door at the far end of the room opened as Gross entered the waiting area, and out stepped a small, neatly dressed man with the reddest cheeks Gross had ever seen.

‘Doktor Gross?’ the man asked.

‘Doktor Praetor,’ Gross responded. ‘Good of you to make time for me.’

The doctor merely nodded by way of reply, and then turned leading the way for Gross to the inner rooms.

Gross was surprised at the extent of Doktor Praetor’s suite of rooms in the old baroque house. There had been some clever partitioning of space under the rafters. Praetor’s office was in one corner of the building; paned windows gave off on to a quiet inner
Hof
with a large, though bare, linden tree spreading its branches almost to the height of the panes. It would afford, Gross decided, a pleasant green view in the spring, reminiscent of his own office in Czernowitz.

‘Again, it was good of you to see me, Herr Doktor,’ Gross said, taking an offered chair. They did not sit at Praetor’s desk, but instead at an informal Biedermeier grouping nearer the window. Another display of yellow mums adorned the small table between them.

‘Nonsense. It is I who thank you for taking interest in this. The police surely are not.’

‘They have their own theories, of course.’ Gross quickly sized up the man: tailor-cut three piece suit in fawn brown, clean shaven, hair thinning on top and two silvery wings of hair on the side brushed neatly back. No-nonsense, logical, pragmatic.

‘By which you tactfully suggest they subscribe to homosexual jealousy gone berserk. No need to worry about sparing my feelings, Doktor Gross. I have lost my son. I have no need for platitudes, only vengeance. Measured vengeance, to be sure. Legal vengeance. But I want to see the person who killed my lovely Ricus brought to justice. That is my only concern now.’

There was a slight trembling in Praetor’s voice as he said this, but his gray-blue eyes remained steely cold as they fixed on Gross.

‘We will do everything we can to find the perpetrator,’ Gross assured him. ‘But to that end I need to ask you for more information.’

‘Anything.’

‘From what Advokat Werthen tells me, you and your son were close.’

‘Yes. Very. He was, aside from my profession, my whole life. You see, my wife, God rest her soul, died not long after Ricus was born. I raised him, I watched him form as a young man. It is very hard to lose a child.’

Gross, momentarily thinking of his own son, Otto, and their eternally strained relationship, quickly moved on.

‘Devastating, I am sure. Did he confide in you?’

‘I believe he did. Though I have no way of knowing what he did
not
tell me.’

‘He seemed to be happy, content?’

‘Yes. Very. His work was progressing. Writing was extremely important for him. He took it seriously. He viewed himself as society’s watchdog.’

‘And his own social life?’ Gross said.

‘By which you mean possible lovers.’

Gross arched his eyebrows in assent.

‘I only know that he had recently met someone whom he felt to be important in his life. Ricus did not share the intimate details of his life, nor did I inquire further. It was enough to know that my boy was happy. And, I believe, in love.’

He said this last without the least hint of irony, Gross noted. Doktor Praetor was, he decided, as much a critical scientist about his son as he might be in the diagnosis of a patient. He was, in short, exactly the sort of witness Gross respected.

‘No talk of where the two might have met? Any indication at all about the man’s identity?’

Doktor Praetor squinted at him. ‘The
man’s
identity? I do not recall saying that Ricus was in love with a man.’