The Silence (5 page)

‘You had better not let Father catch you reading such things,’ she said, as if she had read Werthen’s mind and wished to prove him wrong. ‘This gentleman is here to inquire after Hans.’

She made introductions, and Rudi rose from his couch long enough to shake hands limply, exchange names, and then resume his sickbed.

‘Must forgive me, Advokat. It’s bronchitis.’ He coughed theatrically.

‘I thought you told Meier it was grippe,’ Hermine said in a brittle voice.

He waved a delicate hand at the objection. ‘An illness of some sort. You may not want to get too close.’ Then to Werthen, ‘How do you propose to track your man, counselor?’

‘I was hoping you could be of assistance in that.’

‘Me?’ Rudi took great delight in this, cackling until an actual coughing fit overcame him. His sister went to his side, pounding him on the back with enough force to make the young man wince.

‘Jesus, Mining. Never go into nursing. I am not a lump of dough to be pummeled.’

‘Do you have any information that might help Advokat Werthen?’ She said this with not the slightest trace of humor or goodwill.

‘I am afraid I am not my brother’s keeper, Herr Werthen,’ he said, his voice trailing away in a languishing tone.

Thereafter Werthen quickly ascertained that there was little information to be gotten from Rudi. He was much too immersed in his own human drama to notice what was happening with his older brother.

‘I told you so,’ Fräulein Wittgenstein said as she closed the door behind them. ‘Hans kept to himself.’ A beat. ‘Keeps to himself,’ she corrected.

Of the younger brothers, Werthen was only able to speak with Ludwig, for Paul was at a piano lesson with the well-known blind composer and pianist, Joseph Labor. Ludwig, or Luki, was in his room on the same floor – all the children had their own rooms, spacious enough for sleeping and work space. The somewhat chubby youngster was dressed in a navy suit and short pants and was busy at a woodworking table when Werthen and Hermine entered.

‘About finished?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes,’ the ten-year-old bubbled. ‘And it is going to work, you’ll see.’

‘I am sure it will.’ His older sister beamed at him. Then to Werthen, ‘He’s making an exact copy of a Singer sewing machine. In wood.’

‘A
working
copy,’ the boy emphasized.

There was a tapping at the door. Meier was standing outside the room when Hermine opened the door.

‘There you are, Fräulein,’ the servant said, sounding relieved. ‘It’s your mother. She’s been asking for you. I think she needs more drops.’

Hermine Wittgenstein seemed upset by this at first, but quickly covered her irritation.

‘I will be back shortly, Advokat. And Luki, see if you can help this gentleman track down your wandering brother Hans.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Ludwig said earnestly to her retreating back.

‘You’re an engineer, then,’ Werthen said once the sister was gone.

‘Like my father,’ the boy said. ‘The others play music. I build. Well, that’s not exactly true. Gretl is quite pitiful at the piano. Mother is always telling her how she has no sense of rhythm at all.’

‘No instruments for you, then?’ Werthen took a liking to the boy, obviously intelligent but not obnoxiously precocious.

‘I play around with the violin, but no, not really. Not like Hans or Paul. They have real talent. Hans could play the violin and piano when he was still a toddler. By four he was composing. Me, I could still barely speak when I was four.’

He stated this astounding fact with a real sense of pride.

‘Maybe you did not have anything to say.’

Ludwig smiled brightly. ‘That’s exactly what Mining says. Father calls her a brick. What do you think, Advokat?’

‘Solid as the Parthenon.’

‘Yes.’ The boy affixed one last piece of wood to his model, and then wound up a spring. Soon the contraption was humming along like an actual sewing machine.

‘See. I told you. A
working
model.’

‘Can you help me at all about your brother?’

Ludwig looked up from his masterpiece and shook his head. ‘I wish I could. I miss him.’ The spring wore down and the machine stopped.

‘Did he ever mention having a room somewhere?’

‘His room is here,’ the young boy said. ‘He was a child prodigy, you know. Another Mozart. All the teachers said so. But Father wants him to go into the business. Father usually gets his way.’

Suddenly the young boy looked intently at Werthen: ‘I do not think Vati will demand my assistance in the company, do you, Advokat Werthen?’ And then, without waiting for an answer, ‘You really must find him. Hans is the best of us. He is special. And different. In
many
ways.’

Hermine Wittgenstein returned at that moment, reminding Luki it was time for his Latin lesson. The boy rolled his eyes, demonstrated his model for her, and then was off to the schoolroom.

Leaving the boy’s room, Werthen had Fräulein Wittgenstein give him the business address and phone number of brother Kurt, as well as a description of the missing man: about five foot ten inches and one hundred and fifty pounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, clean shaven and close-cropped hair, which had recently become the mode for the artistic types. They descended the main staircase and after much prodding, Hermine went to a sitting room and removed a framed photograph from an end table. It was a recent photograph of Hans, decked out in summer white linen, from a family portrait taken the previous August at their Neuwaldeggergasse villa. Back row, third from the right.

Hans was most definitely not a carbon copy of his bullish father; instead, he had the ascetic look of a monk on his face. He was staring off into the distance as the other members of the family were saying ‘
bitte
’ into the camera.

‘I would like the photograph returned when you are finished,’ Fräulein Wittgenstein said without emotion. Then, as Werthen was about to leave, ‘I suppose you will need it at the city morgue. For identification purposes.’

‘It hasn’t come to that yet,’ he said. A half-lie. ‘It helps to have visual identification when interviewing people. A name means little to people, a face much more.’

Then, after a quick salutation from Fräulein Hermine and an admonition to please find her brother ‘for mother’s sake,’ Werthen was on his way.

Out on the street, it had warmed even more and the snow had almost completely melted, making for a slushy and quite miserable walk. As he picked his way along the sidewalk he thought of the youngest brother, Ludwig, and his final comment about his brother Hans being different in
many
ways.

It was a strange comment, Werthen thought, and piqued his curiosity about the missing Wittgenstein. After not speaking for the first four years of his life, young Ludwig obviously picked his words carefully.

So Hans was not simply different because of his musical skill and dreams, his desire to be an artist in a family of business people. Different how?

Five

W
erthen was unsure of his next move. There were several avenues of investigation open to him. As Fräulein Wittgenstein suggested, he would need to check at the city morgue in the cellar of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, Vienna’s General Hospital, to find a likely candidate for the corpse of Hans Wittgenstein, possible victim of an accident, suicide, or homicide. Or he could pay a visit to the Wittgenstein office on Kolowatring to speak with brother Kurt. A third possibility was a meeting with the director of the Theresianum.

According to Herr Wittgenstein, Hans had fallen into bad company at that exclusive school. If he had made friendships, they would carry on throughout his life, for that was the way of the exclusive Theresianum. Its alumni continued to use the familiar
du
form with one another, even if one had become a minor bureaucrat and the other a Finance Minister. Though Hans had not graduated, he
had
spent two years at the place, long enough to forge friendships that lasted. Long enough perhaps to have a friend who might give Hans Wittgenstein a refuge, a home away from home.

As he was only a block or two away from the Theresianum, Werthen decided to start there. He headed down the Alleegasse, away from the center of the city for one block, and then turned on to Taubstummengasse to its intersection with the busy Favoritenstrasse, where he turned right. He walked about a hundred meters along the immense three-story classicist front of the old Favorita to its main entrance. The Favorita was a former imperial summer palace converted in 1746 into a school. Werthen knew that the Jesuits were at first put in charge of the pedagogy, later to be replaced by the other Catholic teaching order, the Piaristen, the Pious Ones. Reforms in the 1850s put the educational system under state control and for the most part replaced clerics with professors, each trained in an area of specialization.

As he entered the portals of the school, a priest in black cassock with a cincture or sash around the waist scurried through the entrance past him, books hugged to his chest. Werthen had not seen him on the street; it was as if the priest had appeared out of nowhere and was headed like the rabbit in Alice’s tale to some mysterious destination. The black cassock always gave Werthen a faint chill, just as did the long
payot
or side locks of the Hasidic Jews one saw in the Second District. Both so strange to the secular Werthen, bespeaking a life not just foreign, but otherworldly.

Obviously not all the priests had been replaced at the Theresianum.

The weather may have warmed up, but still it was chill enough to necessitate a coat. This priest seemed, however, in too much of a hurry to bother with such earthly necessities as winter apparel. Even his head was bare, his long hair ruffled in the morning breeze.

A sudden sweet smell of water was carried on the breeze, and made Werthen involuntarily smile as he proceeded through the gateway to the inevitable
Portier
’s booth. Through the other end of the arched entryway, Werthen saw rolling lawns under a mantle of melting snow and more ochre buildings, all part of the former summer estate. A flagpole in the central lawn bore a flag with a Habsburg eagle hanging at half-mast.

‘You have an appointment, sir?’ the aged
Portier
asked Werthen, bringing him out of his momentary reverie.

Werthen turned toward the old man, looking at a face covered with age spots, at eyes rheumy and squinting.

‘I would like to speak with the director.’

The old man squinted even harder. He was wearing a blue uniform with red piping and brass buttons with a high rough collar. A patch of eczema showed under his Adam’s apple.

‘No appointment?’

‘No,’ Werthen said, quickly improvising. ‘But I was hoping to make an endowment to the school. You do take endowments, no?’

This got the fellow hopping. He peered out of his glass cage and saw a young apple-cheeked student hurrying to class.

‘You there, Trautman,’ he called out to the blue-uniformed student through his window.

The boy stopped and turned reluctantly toward the
Portier.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘Go see the headmaster. Tell him we have a visitor who wishes to make an endowment.’

‘But I have Greek seminar now.’

‘Do as I say, Trautman. Time for Greek later. An endowment, remember.’

The boy turned on his heels and headed to a staircase just past the old man’s lodge.

It took the youth only a few minutes to deliver the message and return in a clatter of footsteps down the stone stairs and over the cobbled entryway.

‘Master says to send the gentleman up,’ he said through gasps of breath.

The
Portier
nodded at the boy, who did not move for a moment.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, boy? Off with you. You’ve got lessons. And don’t be late again.’

The old man was such an exact replica of the
Portier
at Werthen’s
Gymnasium
that it took him back to his own school days. Koller was that man’s name, and as he always reeked of garlic from his favored type of wurst, everyone called him
Knoblauch.

‘Herr Doktor von Dohani is waiting, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Werthen said, shaking off the memory. ‘The staircase here, I assume?’

He indicated the one that the boy Trautman had used.

‘Top of the stairs, to your left,’ the
Portier
said.

‘Tell me,’ Werthen said on sudden impulse. ‘Do they have a
Spitzname
for you?’

‘This is the Theresianum, sir. Nicknames are for the other academies.’

‘To be sure,’ Werthen said, trying to conjure what the students here might be calling him. ‘Old Spotty’ came to mind, or ‘Weepy,’ perhaps.

On his way up the stairs Werthen tried to determine how he was going to explain his ruse to the disappointed Herr Doktor von Dohani. In the event, it was not necessary, for the director, a portly man with a halo of ginger hair and nose as purple as a plum, seemed to mistake Werthen for one of his students’ fathers.

Werthen courteously explained as he sat in a leather club chair rather out of place with the rococo decoration of the office. Von Dohani sat opposite him, a slice of shiny ivory skin showing beneath his gray serge trousers. Werthen introduced himself and his legal profession. ‘It’s about the Wittgenstein boy.’

‘Wittgenstein,’ the director repeated, peering up at the gilt work on the white ceiling in an attempt at recollection. ‘I know the name, of course, but I am not aware we have one of the children as a student here.’

‘Had,’ Werthen said. ‘I was hoping you might be able to direct me to a prefect who knew him when he was here, about three years ago. Hans Wittgenstein is the name.’

‘Well, I am not quite sure I recall that name. I was here three years ago, of course. But we have so many boys.’