The Third Place Read online

  ‘I shall accompany you, of course,’ Gross said importantly.

  ‘I don’t need my hand held.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not for your sake, Werthen. But we must ensure our investigations on behalf of the emperor are kept out of it.’

  ‘And I cannot be trusted to keep my mouth shut, is that it?’

  Gross shrugged in response.

  ‘Not encouraging, Gross. Nor helpful.’

  ‘It’s all right, Karl,’ Berthe said. She was seated on the leather couch next to him in the sitting room at their Josefstädterstrasse apartment. Gross sat opposite them in an armchair. ‘Inspector Drechsler won’t turn you in. I imagine he is merely feeling some pique at not being included in the initial investigation, especially so now that it seems to have grown to two murders.’

  She was right, Werthen suddenly realized. Not about Drechsler necessarily, but about the murder of Herr Karl. There were two murders to investigate and clearly they were connected. He’d been so concerned about possible legal consequences of withholding vital information from the police that he had not given a thought to what the death of Herr Falk meant for the investigation of Herr Karl’s murder. The head waiter’s murderer must have felt threatened. Somehow he, or she, had discovered that the killing was witnessed. Falk, the lone witness, had to die. What the murderer had not known, however, was that Falk could not identify the perpetrator, not even the gender of the killer.

  But how had this information gotten out? Only he and Herr Otto knew. Falk swore he had not told his wife. Had Herr Otto told his wife, Falk’s aunt? Had hers been the loose tongue?

  And then Werthen realized he had also told his wife.

  ‘Yes,’ Gross intoned. ‘It does put a different slant on things, this second murder. This is beginning to catch my interest.’

  ‘I am so pleased for you, Gross.’

  ‘Sarcasm, my dear Werthen, does not become you. I merely wished to acknowledge the importance that this is taking on. It is unfortunate that both our talents are required by a higher authority.’

  Neither spoke for a moment. Werthen still felt guilty that he had not shared the information about the bullet casings they had unearthed. He did not want Berthe worrying about him and knowing that an assassination attempt on the emperor was being arranged by Serbia, and that he and Gross were the ones duty bound to prevent it would do just that. Verdammt. It was worrying enough for him.

  Berthe looked from Gross to her husband. ‘Are you waiting for a volunteer? I should think Inspector Drechsler capable of handling the matter. After all,’ she said directly to Werthen now, ‘you only took it on because Falk was afraid of being implicated. You’ve done much of the early leg work. Drechsler can surely carry on with your notes in hand.’

  Werthen nodded, but without much conviction.

  ‘I feel somehow responsible for Falk’s death,’ he said. ‘And I am sure Herr Otto blames me, but he is being too much of a gentleman to say so. However, if I had continued with the investigation, Herr Falk might still be alive today.’

  ‘Turnips and pocket watches, Werthen. No good comes of traveling down the road of what-ifs.’

  Then, to Berthe: ‘And you, Frau Meisner, sorely underestimate your talents. Look at the Lipizzaner matter.’

  Yes, she thought, and look at me the other day, humiliated by that frightful Dumbroski woman.

  ‘What is it you would have me do, Gross?’ she asked.

  ‘Gross is right,’ Werthen said. ‘You do not give yourself enough credit for good work. And it would make me feel less of a shirker. Perhaps you could just monitor matters. See if Drechsler follows through with the threads of the investigation. Who knows what priority Meindl will give these murders? The victims are not wealthy industrialists or members of the aristocracy, after all.’

  ‘Well,’ Berthe said, ‘if you put it like that …’

  ‘Marvelous,’ Gross boomed. ‘That is settled then. Gather your papers, Werthen. We’ll go to deal with matters at the Praesidium.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘I do not care to listen to your lies, Herr Schmidt, or whatever your name is. I am finished with that business,’ she said to him the next morning over coffee.

  ‘As I am also, I assure you,’ Klavan said. He paused a moment, then smiled as he addressed her, ‘My dear Princess Dumbroski.’

  ‘Don’t ruin things for me here, I warn you. I have a new life.’

  ‘You can never really leave the old life behind, Lisette.’

  ‘Don’t call me that. Never call me that again.’

  ‘But we had some times, didn’t we? Remember the French field marshal? The German war minister?’

  It was as if she relented for moment, remembering those sweet victories, those powerful men brought to their rickety knees by a little tart from Trieste posing as a virginal prospect for the nunnery or a daughter of an impoverished duke willing to sell her tender flesh to save her poor father and his estates.

  The stories had changed from man to man, but in each she had been the untouched, unsullied virgin sexually debased by an aged roué, who also happened to have access to sensitive information regarding his country’s military formations, battle plans and mobilization schemes.

  Klavan had been her handler in those escapades, unwillingly at first, for he felt like a pimp working such entrapments. However, he soon learned to share Lisette’s malicious sense of pride in ruining the lives of these pitiful old men who had gladly ruined – as they supposed – the frail sweet flower offered them. How shocking and degrading for them it had been to discover their old man fantasies had been faithfully recorded in photographs secretly taken at their assignations.

  Confronted with the images of their own perversity, each had blustered and spluttered at first. But threatened with scandal and social ruin, each had eventually capitulated, and served up the morsels of secret information St Petersburg required.

  All but Count Bartczak in Warsaw. He had taken the ‘honorable’ way out, leaving his body hanging from the rafters of his mansion for wife and grown-up children to discover instead of providing information on the border defenses.

  Lisette Orzov was her name, of unknown or at least unremarkable birth, picked out of a Trieste brothel by a local Russian agent for certain horizontal skills she exhibited. It helped that she appeared to have a preference for those of her own sex, for old man fantasies tended to be in that direction as well. Promised a way out of the brothel, Lisette was only too eager to take the chance, Klavan remembered.

  There was something in Lisette’s eagerness to blot out her personal history that reminded Klavan of his own journey, becoming an agent for the tsar. For her it was her parents selling her to a brothel-keeper at age fourteen. For Klavan it was a career as a concert violinist destroyed by the jealousy of other wealthy students at the music academy in St Petersburg. He was a scholarship student, sponsored by a wealthy patron from near his village by the Baltic who’d heard the youth playing at a local church. But the privileged sons of the upper class at the academy couldn’t stand the idea of a poor little son of amber fishers outstripping them in their lessons. One day they had cornered him and broke both his little fingers, ruining his possibilities of playing anything but a gun or knife. He looked down at his ruined hands, at the little fingers which had healed wrong and still jutted out from his hands at an awkward angle. And it was a gun or knife that these hands had subsequently learned to master, as his patron had recommended him thereafter to a very different sort of academy: the tsar’s training school of secret agents.

  Klavan had jumped at the chance, just as Lisette had at her opportunity for escape.

  Her voice brought him back from these evil thoughts. ‘In future I am Princess Dumbroski if you desire to stay under this roof. And you perhaps are a long-lost cousin, a black sheep sort of cousin. Agreed?’

  He nodded with a smile.

  ‘That is settled, then,’ she said. ‘Now I shall take myself off to fencing practice. And I meant what I said about not sp
oiling this new life for me. I do not wish to know the nature of your mission in Vienna. I simply do not want it brought to my doorstep.’

  ‘I shall be most discreet, rest assured, Princess Dumbroski.’

  But he said this as an implicit threat; his discretion would come at the price of a place to stay and regroup.

  She fixed him with a steely gaze, then turned on her heel like a martinet and was gone.

  Good old Lisette, he thought after she had left him to the fresh rolls and pot of coffee. True to form, she had not even bothered to ask him how he was able to track her to Vienna, nor to attempt an explanation of her new-found wealth. He, however, had heard it all from Monsieur Philipot in Brussels, for it was a minor member of the royal house of Belgium who was Lisette’s unwitting benefactor.

  According to Philipot, after last working with Klavan – this was before his debacle in Vienna – Lisette had decided to cut out the middle man. She no longer waited for a target chosen by St Petersburg, but went hunting on her own, picking a minor, though not impoverished, member of the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, third cousin to the Count of Flanders. Laurent II was younger than her other targets had been, yet he was still a man of certain appetites and fantasies.

  ‘Laurent II is said to be a great admirer of the Austrian, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,’ Monsieur Philipot had told him with a sly smile. Philipot knew about the scheme because Lisette had come to him to hire a photographer who would not ask too many questions. The subsequent photo gallery she had produced for the astonished Laurent had obviously been scandalous enough that he had put up little resistance to Lisette’s demands for money, selling off some of the family shares in the Congo Free State to finance this payoff.

  ‘She’s set up quite nicely, now,’ Monsieur Philipot had gone on to tell Klavan. ‘Calls herself Princess Dumbroski, from what I hear, and fancies herself a fashion setter in Vienna.’

  Such gossip had meant little to Klavan at the time, but as with most information, he filed it away in his mind for possible future use.

  The future had arrived more quickly than Klavan had planned.

  As Klavan ate his breakfast, he took stock of his situation now that Dimitrov was no longer available. He suddenly realized it was Palm Sunday, just a week until Easter. Only four days from Maundy Thursday.

  He had his work cut out for him. And suddenly, after recalling the painful incident at the music academy, after seeing once again the glee on the face of the wealthy bullies who had ruined his life, he was filled with a new urgency, even an eagerness for the job. It would be his own personal revenge on the world of wealth and privilege. After all, what did he have to look forward to but a life on the run, a life of servitude to people like Monsieur Philipot or Apis, men too greedy or cowardly to do their own dirty work? It was suddenly as if all this were preordained. The mission to Vienna, scene of his previous disgrace; the death of Dimitrov whom he must now replace.

  Four days to go.

  He would be ready.

  Police Praesidium Inspector Meindl was in fine form today. It was their bad luck that Drechsler had felt compelled to telephone his superior; usually Meindl could be counted on to be at his favorite café on a Sunday afternoon, sharing a friendly game of Tarock with a group that included an assistant to the interior minister and two deputies to the parliament.

  Instead, he sat behind his massive cherrywood desk at the Police Praesidium, dressed neatly as ever in finely tailored English tweeds, sporting the usual tortoiseshell pince-nez and so diminutive looking that he seemed like a marionette rather than a canny navigator of Vienna’s corridors of power, which in fact he was. Behind the pince-nez Meindl’s brown eyes glared at Werthen and Gross.

  ‘Obstruction of justice, I call it,’ Meindl said in his high, nasal voice, strongly modulate with an acquired upper-class Schönbrunn accent. ‘Withholding vital evidence in a murder investigation.’

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ Werthen was quick to point out, ‘there was no murder investigation. The death of Herr Karl was put down as an accident by the police.’

  Meindl’s normally rosy cheeks grew brighter at this comment. ‘And had you apprised us of this Herr Falk’s confession, there would surely have been such an investigation.’

  ‘Information, not confession,’ Werthen said. He could feel Gross’s eyes on him, for it was usually Gross who did the bear-baiting of the preening Meindl. Werthen was beginning to enjoy himself.

  ‘No legal semantics today, Advokat. And you, Gross – with your background in the law one would hope for more.’

  ‘Actually,’ Werthen replied, ‘Doktor Gross had nothing to do with the Falk matter. I took that on entirely on my own. I, of course, had every intention of notifying the police once I ascertained the verity of his assertions.’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ Meindl said with a degree of sarcasm. ‘That is why it has taken almost two weeks for you to provide us with your notes. Not to mention the death of another man. Had you come to us in a timely fashion—’

  ‘Quite,’ Werthen interrupted Meindl. ‘That is something I shall have to live with. However, other events intervened.’

  Meindl looked from Werthen to Gross with ill-concealed contempt. ‘And what other events are we talking about? More obstruction of justice? And what are you doing in Vienna, Doktor Gross, if not helping Advokat Werthen in one of his meddling investigations? One would assume your students in Czernowitz need your professorial attentions.’

  ‘The University of Prague, as of this year,’ Gross was happy to correct the inspector. ‘And for your information, I am in Vienna at the request of a higher authority.’

  Meindl clapped his hands in glee, fixing Werthen now in his glare. ‘Hah. This would be the mysterious investigation you refused to share with Detective Inspector Drechsler, I suppose.’

  ‘The very one,’ Werthen allowed.

  Meindl slapped his right hand down forcibly on the desktop. ‘There will be no secrets from the Police Praesidium. Is that understood?’

  Werthen and Gross merely looked back at the inspector calmly. They could hear Drechsler clearing his throat, seated in back of them.

  Their ensuing silence made Meindl raise his voice another notch. ‘If you two do not want to find yourself behind bars, I demand to know what diverted your attention from the murder of this waiter.’

  ‘Head waiter, in point of fact.’ Werthen could not help himself.

  ‘Do not toy with me, gentlemen. You don’t want me for an enemy.’

  But we already have you as one, Werthen thought, though he decided silence was a better option at the moment.

  ‘Meindl,’ Gross said pleasingly, leaving off any titles in a collegial manner, ‘we have no intention of angering you. It is simply that we have been sworn to secrecy in this matter. I can, however, share with you a missive that empowers us in said investigation.’

  Gross brought the letter from Montenuovo out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the desk in front of Meindl. The inspector looked with suspicion from Gross to the letter then finally unfolded the paper, smoothing it carefully on the leather desk pad, and slowly read it, his thin lips moving with each word.

  Finishing, Meindl held the letter up to the light from his window as if searching for signs of forgery.

  ‘You can call the prince if you are unsure,’ Gross said. ‘Werthen here bears a similar letter of commission. We are at work on a case of the highest importance to the empire. That is, unfortunately, all that we are allowed to say of the matter.’

  Meindl shoved the letter back across the desk at Gross as if it were a bad smell.

  ‘Which still does not excuse your actions, Advokat. I assume you have brought all pertinent information so that we may initiate a systematic investigation into these deaths?’

  ‘That is correct, Inspector,’ Werthen said, though he was damned if he was going to turn over his notebook. ‘Records of any witness I may have spoken to and any possible motives and suspects in the case. I am afraid I did not
get very far, only to ascertain that Herr Karl, the first man killed, was running a bit of a fiddle on the side, extracting money from workers and vendors alike.’

  ‘And this second death,’ Meindl said. ‘Another waiter.’

  Drechsler spoke up now. ‘The under waiter at the same establishment, sir.’

  ‘Well there’s motive for you,’ Meindl said brightly. ‘Hadn’t thought of that, had you, Advokat? Kill the boss to get his job. Then contrition sets in, the man can’t live with himself and commits suicide.’

  Another clearing of the throat from Drechsler. ‘Not a suicide, sir. Chap’s neck was broken, according to the medical examiner.’

  ‘He could have broken it diving into the canal. Hit a bridge brace.’

  ‘No water in the lungs, sir,’ Drechsler replied. ‘Herr Falk had his neck broken before being thrown into the canal. It was murder.’

  ‘Well,’ Meindl said, trying to salvage some respect, ‘I am glad we have cleared that up. And now, you two, remember what I said.’

  Werthen and Gross exchanged glances. What had Meindl said? But neither uttered a word as they got up and left the Police Praesidium to its hit-and-miss investigation.

  They were cutting it close: their appointment with Montenuovo was at one in the afternoon and they finished their business with Meindl at twelve-thirty. Gross did not bother consulting Werthen’s wishes about walking or finding a fiaker. Instead, once out of the main door of the police headquarters, he set off at a furious pace toward the Ring, and Werthen was again left to catch up as best he could. Today was one of those days – with the renewal of raw, cold winter weather – when his left knee was acting up. Wounded in a duel in his first case as a private inquiries agent, his knee had a way of painfully reminding him of that earlier escapade. Every step was an agony and the wind whipped snow flurries in his face.

  Finally he called out to the criminologist, ‘Gross! For pity’s sake, slow down.’

  Gross turned abruptly, waiting for him. As Werthen approached, Gross smiled.

  ‘Serves you right,’ he said, ‘for taking away my fun with Meindl. Now let’s hop to it. Don’t want to keep the prince waiting.’