The Empty Mirror Read online

  ALSO BY J. SYDNEY JONES

  Hitler in Vienna (2002)

  Frankie (1997)

  Viennawalks (1994)

  The Hero Game (1992)

  Time of the Wolf (1990)

  Tramping in Europe (1984)

  Vienna Inside-Out (1979)

  Bike & Hike (1977)

  THE

  EMPTY MIRROR

  A Viennese Mystery

  J. SYDNEY JONES

  MINOTAUR BOOKS

  A Thomas Dunne Book

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  THE EMPTY MIRROR. Copyright (c) 2009 by J. Sydney Jones. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Jones, J. Sydney

  The empty mirror / J. Sydney Jones.-1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-38389-3

  1. Murder-Fiction. 2. Klimt, Gustav, 1862-1918-Fiction. 3. Serial

  murder investigation-Austria-Vienna-Fiction. 4. Criminologists-Fiction.

  5. Vienna (Austria)-Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O62553E47   2009

  813′.6-dc22

  2008029825

  ISBN 978-0-312-60753-1 (trade paperback)

  First Minotaur Books Paperback Edition: January 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my wonderful wife, Kelly Mei Mei Yuen, soul mate and love of my life, who makes it all worthwhile, and to our four-year-old son, Evan, who generously granted me breaks from our playtime to write this book

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks first go to Alexandra Machinist, an agent of wit, intelligence, grit, insight, determination, and loyalty. You are a writer’s dream come true. Also a round of applause to Peter Joseph, an editor whose enthusiasm for this project was palpable in every query and edit. Additionally, Peter’s able assistant, Lorrie McCann has earned this author’s best regards for her efficiency and good humor. The stellar and thorough copy editing of Steve Boldt, under the very able direction of production editor Bob Berkel, proves once again the importance of the old adage that the devil is in the details. My book-savvy daughter, Tess Jones, also added encouragement in the early stages of this project as did writing buddy supreme, Allen Appel. Finally, thank you Thomas Dunne, gentleman publisher, for seeing the promise and potential in this work.

  PART ONE

  Real hate has only three sources: pain, jealousy, or love.

  —Dr. Hanns Gross, Criminal Psychology

  PROLOGUE

  She hurried along the darkened, cobbled streets, angry and full of self-recrimination. If she hadn’t missed the last tram; if Girardi had invited her to his pied-à-terre instead of pleading early rehearsals; if she had only taken her friend Mitzi’s advice to drop that pompous little jellyfish of an actor and sleep with Klimt instead. So many ifs.

  A man tipped his hat to her at the corner of Kärntnerstrasse and Graben. “How much?” he asked.

  Couldn’t blame him really; not many respectable girls out alone this late, and half the whores in Vienna plied their trade at that intersection. But it unnerved her, being mistaken for a prostitute, and she turned into a jumble of unfamiliar, darkened lanes behind Stephansdom before she had intended to, eager to get to her lodgings in the Third District.

  Now there was nobody about; as quiet in Vienna at ten thirty as it was in her little village in Vorarlberg. She felt a sudden shiver of fear. The newspapers were full of reports about a mad killer on the loose in Vienna, about bodies dumped in the Prater amusement park. Another shiver rattled her body.

  She picked up her pace and took her mind off such thoughts by remembering what she had achieved so far in her young life. The muddy streets of her village in Vorarlberg seemed like another world. It had taken her three years to steal enough pfennigs from her father’s wage packets to finally buy a third-class ticket to the capital, escaping said father and his black moods. She never looked back, seizing her opportunity like a life raft, and she had made it. Lover to the most famous actor in Vienna, model to the most famous painter. But if her papa ever saw one of her portraits … Not much danger of that, though; never took his nose out of his beer.

  She thought of Klimt as she hurried along. He had eyes that penetrated. That bloke could look at you so he made you feel naked, even when you already were. As if he saw inside you. Cold his studio was. Made her all goose bumpy. But when she complained, he told her that was the way he wanted her; made her nipples perk right up did the cold, just the way he needed for his paintings. Clever old dog that Klimt. Call me Gustl, he said. And no funny business, though she knew he wanted her.

  Suddenly she realized she’d become lost. Wasn’t sure which way was which in the narrow and dark lanes. She saw a pulsing glow of light to her left and took that street. The light came from a canvas tent over a manhole cover; men working. That seemed safe. She followed the glowing light, but as she passed the manhole, she found nobody about. Must be working below. She shuddered at the thought. A terrible life working in the sewers.

  “Fräulein.”

  She spun around at the sound of the man’s voice. Then, seeing who it was, she smiled in relief.

  “Oh. Hello.”

  Those were her last words.

  ONE

  Wednesday, August 17, 1898-Vienna

  Damn that Gross, he thought as he sat restlessly in front of his untouched breakfast, a blank sheet of folio staring at him reproachfully from the desktop.

  Advokat Karl Werthen was at loose ends this morning. The lawyer usually reserved the breakfast hour for writing. To date he had published five short stories, tales of “interrupted lives,” as he liked to describe them.

  Today, however, he had appetite neither for Frau Blatschky’s excellent coffee nor for the antics of his foppish protagonist, Maxim, and the mysterious woman in the checkered mask he had met at the Washerwoman’s Ball. And it was all the fault of his former colleague from Graz, the esteemed criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross, with whom Werthen had had dinner and a subsequent conversation last night. By his very presence, Gross had made Werthen realize that such scribblings were a poor substitute for real action and adventure. Werthen suddenly saw his literary ambitions for what they were: vain attempts at adding spice into his otherwise stodgy life. After all, his creations were far from art; merely clever little stories of amorous boulevardiers which the young ear-nose-and-throat man Dr. Arthur Schnitzler wrote much better, anyway.

  Damn that Gross.

  He should not be too hard on the criminologist, though, for truth be told this was not the first time in the last six years-since giving up criminal law in Graz to establish himself as one of Vienna’s top men in wills and trusts-that Karl Werthen had wondered if he had made the right decision. Had he been too rash in his decision, too self-sacrificing?

  He was distracted from these morose thoughts by a ruckus in the hall outside his sitting room, followed by an urgent rapping at the white double doors.

  He glanced automatically over his shoulder to the Sevres clock on the marble mantel. Too early for the first post.

  “Yes?”

  The door opened slowly. Frau Blatschky, red-faced, peered around it, then stepped timidly into the room, chapped hands digging into the pockets of her freshly starched apron.

  “A man her
e to talk with you, Herr Doktor,” she began.

  He was about to remind her of his sacred breakfast hour when the door behind her was thrust more widely open and a thick, stocky man burst into the room. His short hair was disheveled, his beard in need of a trim, and he wore a violently magenta caftan that hung down to his sandaled feet.

  “Werthen!” the man thundered, his working-class Viennese accent clear even in this two-syllable pronouncement. “I must see you, man.”

  “I believe you are doing so, Klimt,” Werthen answered calmly, smiling at Frau Blatschky to indicate she might withdraw.

  “I told him you were at breakfast,” she murmured, pursing her lips. Werthen nodded at her, smiling more broadly to let her know it was not her fault. “That is fine, Frau Blatschky. You may go.”

  As she left, she cast the intruder, the noted and notorious artist Gustav Klimt, the look an exasperated mother might give a delinquent son.

  “The damned constabulary,” Klimt bellowed as the door closed. “They’re making a mess of my studio. You must come.”

  “Hold on, Klimt. Why would the constabulary be at your studio? A moral’s charge perhaps?” Werthen decided he would take out his peckish mood on the obviously distraught artist. “One too many nude society ladies adorning your canvases?”

  “Fools,” Klimt spluttered. “They say I murdered the girl. Imbeciles. She was my lovely Liesel, the best model I’ve ever had. Why would I lay a hand on her?”

  This turned Werthen’s mood from irritable to curious. “Murder?”

  “Haven’t you been listening, man? Liesel Landtauer. Sweet Liesel.”

  “Start at the beginning,” Werthen said, standing now and motioning the painter to one of a pair of Biedermeier armchairs by the fireplace. Klimt eyed the delicate chair warily, but finally thrust his bulk down on the damask cushions. Werthen joined him in the other.

  “Now, what are the police saying has happened?”

  Klimt rubbed thick fingers through his stubbly hair and leaned back in the chair.

  “They found a body this morning. In the Prater.”

  “Not another one?”

  Klimt nodded. “Some lunatic out killing people and dumping their bodies in the Prater, and now they want to go and hang it all on me.”

  Werthen knew all of Vienna was in the thrall of a series of four murders-five now, it appeared-over the past two months. In fact he and his friend Gross had been discussing the crimes just last night. Respectable newspapers, such as the Neue Freie Presse and the Wiener Zeitung, had reported the killings, but did not involve themselves with sordid details or speculation. The more scrofulous press, however, was quick to mention “certain mutilations” of the corpses, leaving the imagination to run riot. These same papers called the perpetrator “Vienna’s Jack the Ripper.” Each of the bodies had been found on the grounds of the Prater amusement park in Vienna’s Second District, in the very shadow of the giant Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, constructed to celebrate Franz Josef’s fiftieth jubilee as emperor.

  Gustav the Ripper? Werthen doubted it. Klimt was capable of a crime of passion, perhaps, knowing the man’s history, but not of the cold and calculated butchering of five innocents. However, the constabulary did not know Klimt as Werthen knew him; they could only follow procedure. And procedure meant they investigated first those people closest to the victim.

  Even as he thought this, Werthen realized he was experiencing a tingling sense of euphoria, becoming caught up in the web of criminal law once again.

  “Obviously they have not charged you, or you would be in custody.”

  “Well, they’re poking their noses around my studio. Asking all sorts of absurd questions about Liesel, whether she posed in the altogether or not. But of course she did, the cretins! How else do you paint a nude? Dab a couple of dubious breasts on a male model like that pansy Michelangelo did?”

  “Calm down, Klimt. What are they accusing you of?”

  “One of the plodders found studies for my Nuda Veritas, my sketch for the first issue of Ver Sacrum last spring. They say it resembles Liesel. Bravo for a fine deduction! It should resemble Liesel. She modeled for it.”

  Werthen remembered the nubile, sweet young thing Klimt had portrayed on the cover of the Secession’s magazine had outraged Viennese respectability. The girl/woman stood there completely naked and apparently completely unconcerned about it. Long tresses partly covered her breasts; she held a mirror in her right hand. Werthen had especially liked the symbolism of that empty mirror. What will modern man see in that looking glass, the searing light of truth, or merely a reflection of his own simpering vanity?

  But he thrust such aesthetic considerations aside for the moment. “Answer my question. Are they accusing you of her murder?”

  Werthen’s tone of voice finally broke through Klimt’s panic. The painter leaned forward in his chair and placed his hands together at their stubby fingertips and played them like a concertina.

  “Well, not exactly. But they’re making an awful mess of things. Werthen, I didn’t even know the other four victims.”

  “Who is this young woman then?”

  “I told you. A model.”

  “But why should the police come to you? Was she your lover?”

  Klimt squashed the concertina, gripping his fingers together now as if in prayer. “She was meant to sit for me last night, but she begged off at the last instant.”

  The artist did not answer his question about the extent of their amorous relationship, Werthen noticed, and once again the lawyer felt a frisson of delight. Though it had been years since he had last questioned an unreliable witness or suspect, he was happy to note that his skills and instinct were still intact.

  “Liesel sent a message that her roommate was ill and that she had to tend to her,” Klimt continued. “Lord knows why she felt she had to lie to me. Some young suitor, I imagine.”

  “And why is it you think she was lying?” Werthen asked.

  Klimt shrugged. “Simple enough. I was out getting bread, and when I was coming back, I saw the very roommate just leaving my building. She was delivering the note, so she could hardly have been ill enough to require Liesel’s ministrations.”

  Relaxing now, Klimt looked over his shoulder at the two half-moons of flaky Kipferl butter rolls lying untouched on the breakfast tray.

  “You going to eat those?”

  How could the man worry about food at a time like this? Werthen wondered, losing his patience and reserve. “Here, take one.

  He got up, placed a Kipferl on a linen napkin, and handed it to Klimt, who wolfed the roll down, dribbling crumbs onto his beard and caftan.

  “Why so hungry? Did you miss your usual at the Café Tivoli?” Werthen rejoined Klimt in the chairs.

  Werthen knew the painter’s schedule: arising every morning at six to walk a ten-kilometer circuit from his apartment (which he shared with his unmarried sisters and widowed mother) in the Westbahnstrasse out to the Habsburg summer palace of Schönbrunn, and stopping off en route at a café of the old school where he feasted on pots of strong coffee laced with hot chocolate and creamy white peaks of Schlag obers along with fresh rolls piled with mounds of butter and jam. Then back to work at his studio in the Josefstädterstrasse, just doors away from Werthen’s own apartment building.

  Klimt looked sheepish at Werthen’s question.

  “Well, did you miss your breakfast?” Werthen pressed. Noticing Klimt’s reticence, he continued, “You weren’t home at all last night, were you? Is that the problem, then? No alibi?”

  Klimt stood suddenly, the folds of his caftan catching on the arm of the chair and nearly upsetting it. He passed to the window and looked down into the sunlit street four stories below, rattling his fingers on the sill.

  “Too many alibis,” he muttered into the window, then swung around to face Werthen. “But none of them will I use. They’d be the end of my poor mother. And there’s Emilie to consider.”

  By whom he meant Emilie Flöge, Wert
hen knew. She was the younger sister of Klimt’s sister-in-law, a woman more than a decade his junior, with whom he had been carrying on a romance now for several years. After the untimely death of Klimt’s painter brother, Klimt had taken both women under his protective wing. Gossip had it that the satyr Klimt had not so much as kissed the young woman, keeping her instead enshrined as his pure and virginal ideal of womanhood.

  “You must explain, Klimt. I am, after all, your lawyer. Such information stops with me.”

  Klimt sighed, eying the second Kipferl.

  “Please, do be my guest,” Werthen said, but sarcasm was lost on the painter, who gulped this one down as quickly as he had the first.

  “Sure you wouldn’t like some coffee to go with it?”

  “You’re a true friend, Werthen,” Klimt said, again missing the lawyer’s ironic tone. He poured himself a cup from the white Augarten porcelain coffeepot. “No whipped cream about, I suppose?”

  Werthen made no reply, wondering once more why he should have a soft spot for this barbarian. But he knew the answer: because the man drew like an angel.

  “It’s like this,” Klimt said, sitting again, an incongruous pinkie held out delicately as he sipped the coffee. “I have a special friend. She lives in Ottakring.”

  Werthen maintained his silence. He was not going to make this any easier for Klimt by guessing the obvious: a working-class mistress in the suburbs with whom he’d passed the night.

  “She and my young son, as a matter of fact.”

  Werthen could not prevent a surprised arching of his eyebrows.

  “Yes, I was with her last night. Her and the boy. Now you see why I can never use them as an alibi. The shock would kill poor Mutti. I told her I was working late on a commission and would sleep in the studio last night. And Emilie … well, she, too, would be devastated, humiliated.”

  “And what if the police charge you with this young woman’s death? How far are you willing to risk your neck for the sake of propriety?”