Vienna Blood (16 page)

From his vantage, the venerable could look through the body of the Temple toward the entrance. Two great bronze doors were flanked by Corinthian pillars, denominated J and B for Jachin and Boaz—evoking the two columns built by Hiram at the gates of the Temple of Solomon. Above these was a relief equilateral triangle, from within which a single all-seeing eye coldly contemplated the empty pews. On the east wall a mural awaited completion. When finished, it would show the Ark of the Covenant, and Jacob's ladder ascending toward the Hebrew symbol Yod.
There is no rush,
he thought
. We still have plenty of time to prepare. …

The venerable raised himself from the chair and walked down the center aisle. Stopping to turn off the gas lamps, he slowly made his way toward the entrance. He pushed one of the bronze doors open and took one of two oil lamps that were hanging from hooks in the wall. The vestibule was relatively small, with two adjoining staircases: one
ascending, the other descending. The venerable took the stairs going down—a tight spiral of stone wedges that sank deep into the earth. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he found himself in another antechamber, illuminated by light that was spilling from a half-open door.

“Ah, still here, brother?” the venerable called out.

“Yes,” came the reply. “Still here.”

The venerable pushed the door, which emitted a loud creaking. It opened by degrees to reveal a rectangular room, considerably smaller than the Temple. The walls were almost totally obscured by bookcases, although much of the shelving was unfilled. In the middle of the room were several crates. Two of them were empty and the third contained a collection of leather-bound volumes. A man—seated at a desk nearby—was leaning over and lifting books from the half-full crate, examining them, and carefully entering their details in a large register.

“All of them have arrived safely?” asked the venerable.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good.” The venerable looked down at his pocket watch. “It's getting late, brother. You should go home.”

The librarian lifted his head, placed his pen on the table, and stretched his arms. “It's the last crate. I may as well finish.”

The venerable smiled and approached the desk. He picked up the book that the librarian was in the process of recording, and examined the spine. It read
: Journal für Freymaurer, 1784–1786, Volume IV.

“Do we have all twelve volumes?” asked the venerable.

“Of course,” said the librarian.

“Excellent,” said the venerable, stroking the binding. “All of the
Truth and Unity
papers. It will be an invaluable addition to our collection.”

The librarian picked up his pen again and began to scratch another
entry into his register. The venerable was about to leave, but was momentarily distracted by a book lying open and facedown on the desk. He picked it up and glanced at a mezzotint illustration. Beneath the picture was a caption:
Schaffer's design reproducing Schikaneder's staging.
The illustration showed a snake cut into three sections.

Part Two

28

R
HEINHARDT DID NOT FEEL
comfortable in the morgue. Even when its hollow emptiness was enlivened by the sound of human voices it remained a forbidding, misanthropic place. For the umpteenth time he curled his finger into the fob pocket of his vest and tugged the chain. The hands on the watch face had hardly moved.

Where is he?

Suspended from the ceiling was an electric light. Its beam was directed by means of a low conical shade onto sheets, the topography of which suggested a recumbent human form. Beyond this concise column of illumination was an impenetrable expanse of darkness.

The cold was excruciating but Rheinhardt had given up blowing into his locked fingers. He had accepted that the nagging ache in his joints would in due course become a singing pain. Thereafter, he could only hope for the unsatisfactory solace of an anesthetic numbness.

The dense silence—so compressed that it had become tintinnabulary—was ringing in Rheinhardt's ears. He began to whistle a jaunty spirit-rallying tune of his own devising. When he reached the end of the second phrase, the caesura was filled by a long, protracted groan. Disconcertingly, it came from nearby. The faint yet disturbing rise and fall of the mortuary sheets confirmed that it was the corpse who had produced this mournful sound.

Rheinhardt was gripped by a paralyzing jolt of fear. His head pulsed and his heart knocked against the wall of his chest.

Is he still alive?

Impossible!

Rheinhardt ripped the uppermost cover off, revealing the face of a man in his fifties. It was a broad Slavic face, with high cheekbones and swept-back greasy hair. The blue lips were parted. Rheinhardt nervously placed the palm of his hand over the corpse's mouth but felt nothing.

“What on earth do you think you're doing, Rheinhardt?”

The inspector jumped. “Oh, Professor Mathias.”

The pathologist shuffled in and took off his hat and coat. “What's the matter? You look like you've seen a ghost!”

“He groaned,” said Rheinhardt, gesturing toward the body. “I swear it. He
groaned
—like this.” Rheinhardt produced a plaintive moan.

“It's the gases, Inspector—the compounds released as the bacteria get to work on his last meal. They rise up and stimulate the voice box.”

Mathias hung up his coat and hat and took an apron down from a row of pegs. After slipping the top loop over his head, the old man tied the dangling side cords behind his back and shuffled over to the table.

“Good evening, sir,” he addressed the corpse. “And who—might I ask—do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

“His name is Evzen Vanek,” Rheinhardt replied.

“A Czech?”

“Yes. He was carrying his papers. He sold chickens at the meat market.”

“Where was he found?”

“Near the Ruprechtskirche.”

“New to Vienna?”

“Arrived two months ago.”

“Ah, Evzen.” The professor brushed the man's hair with his fingers.
“You should have stayed at home. …
Was not our citadel long undermined/Already by the Realm of Night?”
The professor, his rheumy eyes bulging behind thick lenses, looked up at Rheinhardt. “Well, Inspector?”

“I don't know.”

“It was Schiller, Rheinhardt. ‘Melancholy.’ That should have been child's play!”

Mathias tutted and hobbled over to his cart, where he began a ritual with which Rheinhardt was all too familiar. The professor rolled up his shirtsleeves and proceeded to arrange and rearrange his instruments. A scoop was transferred from the bottom to the top shelf, via the second and third. A clamp was demoted. The largest drill was raised, examined, and then put back in exactly the same place.

“He was stabbed in the chest,” said Rheinhardt.

“Shhh!” Mathias pushed a vertical palm toward Rheinhardt as though repelling the interruption. He contemplated his array of instruments, and carefully placed a chisel next to a line of scalpels. “There we are,” he said—as if the elusive solution to a long-standing problem had suddenly presented itself. Turning to Rheinhardt, he added, “What was that you said?”

“He was stabbed in the chest.”

The professor turned the sheets back, revealing the upper half of the body. Vanek's shirt was dark, but the bloodstains were clearly visible. A vent showed where the blade had entered. The acrid smell of ammonia rose from the corpse's nether regions.

Mathias tried to undo the top button but the task was impossible. It was embedded in a crust of congealed blood. The old man inspected the gritty stains on his fingertips and lifted a giant pair of scissors from the cart. With workaday efficiency he cut the shirt from collar to hem
and pulled the stiff cloth away. Two strips of chest hair were removed in the process. Rheinhardt averted his gaze. The sight and sound of the depilation was quite nauseating.

“Was he married?” asked Mathias.

“No.”

“Then let us thank God for small mercies,” said the pathologist.

Beneath the uncompromising light Vanek's wound was vivid: an angry red ellipse caked with a granular black excrescence.

Without looking back at the cart, Mathias reached out and snatched a magnifying glass from the second shelf. He leaned over the corpse and peered through the wide steel hoop.

“Interesting …,” he muttered. “Very interesting. Could you please step back a little, Inspector—you're stealing my precious light.” Reinhardt complied with the pathologist's request. “A stab wound— of course,” continued Mathias, “but somewhat irregular. The blade of a knife—properly so called—has a back and one cutting edge. The weapon used upon this gentleman had
two
cutting edges.”

“A sword?”

“Patience, Rheinhardt:
festina lente.
”

The old man carefully insinuated his fingers into the wound— a maneuver that was accomplished with the knowing sensitivity of a young lover. He closed his eyes and seemed to be entering a necromantic trance. Mathias swayed gently and mumbled to himself. In the sharp electric light, his exhalations became rolling white clouds that gathered over the corpse. He was like a medium, belching ectoplasm. Between each breath the old man's mumbling was disturbed by his asthmatic lungs, which produced an eerie harmonium-like accompaniment as the freezing air tormented his constricted bronchi.

“A sabre wound,” he said softly. “A common sabre, not a Turkish one—which has a much more pronounced curvature. The blade was
pushed through the sternum, through the pericardium, and reached the back of the heart.” The professor opened his eyes and withdrew his fingers. They trailed a gory mucoid residue.

“The same as in Spittelberg.” Rheinhardt's voice was flat.

“What?”

“The Spittelberg murders. The women … you said that their wounds were most probably inflicted with a sabre.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

Mathias seemed distracted—unwilling to make eye contact.

“Do you think it was the same weapon?”

“Poor Evzen,” said Mathias, looking up at the Czech's solemn, almost noble mask of repose. The pathologist's movements were now less fluid, and his limbs seemed to have become ossified. He froze in an awkward attitude, as if—by some strange fluke of nature—he had contracted rigor mortis from the corpse.

“Professor Mathias?” Rheinhardt ventured.

“How many more times?” snapped the old man. “Always trying to rush me!”

Mathias's expression slowly changed. The lines of his face created mosaics that shifted to suggest first compassion, then surprise, and finally curiosity.

The pathologist edged up the table and peered more closely at the dead man's face. His head swung over the corpse, and immediately traced a large figure of eight. There was something feral about his sudden agitation—like a forest animal sniffing out a buried winter hoard.

“Professor!” Rheinhardt insisted. “I would be most grateful if—”

“Look there,” Mathias interrupted, completely indifferent to Rheinhardt's rising impatience. “Some slight bruising around the neck.” Then, more quietly, to himself, “But he hasn't been strangled.”

In a louder voice he added, “There is also something wrong with the cervical region. The laryngeal prominence is somewhat distended.”

Rheinhardt did not possess a great deal of medical knowledge but he knew enough to try. “Goiter, perhaps?”

Mathias responded with a disdainful look and returned his attention to the corpse. “Pardon me, sir,” he excused himself, and proceeded to feel under the dead man's stubbly chin. He pressed the throat on both sides and suddenly withdrew his hands as if he had been burned. “Good heavens!”

Not wishing to invite yet another admonishment, Rheinhardt suppressed the urge to ask the professor what he had discovered.

Mathias removed a rubber stop from the cart and handed it to Rheinhardt. Then he pried open Vanek's mouth, an action that produced a loud, liquid “clop.” Holding the maxilla and mandible apart with both hands, Mathias said, “Inspector, could you please wedge the jaw open?”

The dead man's rotting teeth appeared as his lips retracted. Rheinhardt could see the pink roof of his mouth and a pendulous uvula. He did not want his fingers to make contact with the lifeless flesh.

“Come on, Inspector!” huffed Mathias.

As it was the professor's frequent habit to chastise Rheinhardt for being hasty, the Inspector's impulse to make an acerbic comment was almost overwhelming. Fortunately, good sense prevailed, and Rheinhardt obediently pushed the rubber stop between the Czech's teeth.

“Thank you,” said Mathias.

“My pleasure,” said Rheinhardt, producing a profoundly disingenuous smile.

The old man shuffled over to his cart and found some oddly shaped forceps. Then he returned directly to the head of the table and peered down Vanek's throat.

“So …,” he said, producing a puff of condensation. “Let us solve this mystery.”

Mathias inserted the forceps into Vanek's mouth and tutted a few times, seemingly frustrated by the complexity of the action he was trying to perform. After a few abortive attempts, his expression relaxed and he began to withdraw the instrument.

“Extraordinary,” said Mathias, raising the forceps up to the light.

Rheinhardt blinked. He could not have been more surprised. Not even if he had been standing in an exhibition tent on the Prater bearing witness to a particularly impressive piece of prestidigitation. For there, gripped between the closed bills of Professor Mathias's forceps, was a common padlock.

“Well, what do you make of that, Rheinhardt?”

The inspector was speechless.

“I dare say,” continued Mathias, “that the presence of this object might explain the phenomenon you described earlier. Perhaps it allowed the gases to pass more freely past the vocal cords.”

“What on earth does it signify?” Rheinhardt gasped, a note of panic shaking every syllable of his exclamation.

Mathias shook his head. “Of course, if the murderer were deranged enough to secrete one object …”