The Silence vm-3 Read online

Equally unlikely that one would hear a gunshot there, either, Werthen thought.

  Wagner had precious little to add to the tragic tale, but his name usually made good copy. His enemies, and they were legion, might even wonder if he had not pulled the trigger himself. The Viennese loved a scandal and delighted in mixing the names of the famous with such scandals, thereby reducing to their own paltry level whatever great man they selected for the honor.

  As Werthen finished the article, he heard the door open to the outer office. There was a mumble of voices; he thought he recognized one. A tapping came at his door, and Fraulein Metzinger, a scarlet blush spreading into her scalp, looked in.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt. There is a fellow here to see you. He says it is rather urgent.’

  Not a ‘gentleman,’ but a ‘fellow.’ And someone who was able, within instants of meeting her, to embarrass Fraulein Metzinger with some wayward statement or glance. That could be only one person.

  ‘Send Herr Klimt in,’ Werthen said.

  She looked at him with amazement, then backed out of the door, to be replaced momentarily by the bulky frame of the artist Gustav Klimt, attired in an Astrakhan wool coat and matching Cossack-style hat. He hardly looked the part of the bete noire of Viennese painters; rather if one saw him for the first time you might think him to be a jumped-up butcher or baker.

  ‘My lord, Werthen, you have made improvements in this office. That girl’s a wonder. Wherever did you find her?’

  ‘It is nice to see you, too, Klimt.’

  ‘Am I being too lax with my politesse once again? Sorry. I hate formalities. But, if you insist. “Greetings, dear Advokat. How hale you and your lovely wife, Frau Berthe?” Is that better?’

  ‘And daughter,’ Werthen added, going around the desk to shake hands with the artist. His first child, a daughter, had been born on January 19.

  ‘Well, bravo for you, Werthen. A father. A wonderful institution.’

  Klimt should know; for he had fathered numerous children in Vienna by various mistresses.

  ‘Too kind,’ Werthen said. ‘Now what is it brings you here? It can’t be the bill. I understand from Berthe that was finally settled.’

  ‘A sore point, Werthen. Shall we move on to other, brighter topics? In fact, I come bearing blessings for you in the form of yet another commission. If this keeps up, I shall take a proper percentage for my troubles.’

  Indeed Klimt had been responsible for starting Werthen on the road to inquiry agent when the artist himself was accused of murder two years earlier. And last year he had been good enough to send another client Werthen’s way, the young beauty, Alma Schindler.

  ‘Do tell, Klimt.’

  But Klimt had seemingly lost interest in his errand. Instead he was busily surveying the room’s decor: heavy mahogany furniture, green wallpaper, tasteful yet conservative prints of flowers and animals.

  ‘Bit stodgy, don’t you think?’ Klimt said, nodding toward a print of a horse and jockey.

  ‘It’s a lawyer’s office, not a salon,’ Werthen replied.

  ‘What you need are some paintings from our Secession. I could let you hang them here without a fee. Good for you, good for us. Expose your clientele to the new arts. Turn them into connoisseurs.’

  ‘They come to me for reassurance, Klimt, not an introduction to aesthetics.’

  ‘And some of our Werkstatte furniture would do wonders.’

  ‘What commission, Klimt?’

  ‘A Kolo Moser bookshelf, perhaps.’

  ‘The commission, Klimt.’

  ‘Fatherhood does not seem to be favoring you, Werthen. You are damnably testy today. The little bugger keeping you up at night?’

  Werthen shook his head. ‘The “little bugger,” as you so lovingly refer to our Frieda, is a sleeper.’

  ‘Well, something is chewing at your nerves, then. If you were a dog, you’d be snarling.’ Klimt divested himself of coat and hat, looking about for a place to throw them. Werthen took them, and placed them on a straight-back chair by the wall. He pointed Klimt to an upholstered chair near his desk and returned to the other side of it to his own chair. Sitting down, he let out a sigh.

  ‘It’s the parents, if you must know.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Too late, Werthen remembered Klimt’s devotion to his own mother; she was faultless in his eyes. There would be no sympathy, let alone empathy, from Klimt regarding one’s parents. The artist, despite his many affairs and entanglements, still lived with his aged mother, and his sisters. For many Viennese men, such a living arrangement was not a punishment, but a salvation.

  Am I simply an ingrate, or are my parents more difficult than most? Werthen wondered. Estranged since his marriage to Berthe, whom they felt was socially beneath the Werthens, his parents had come back into his orbit once they learned of the advent of a grandchild. This was as it should be, and Werthen was initially happy for the reconciliation. They had taken a suite of rooms for the winter in the Hotel zur Josefstadt in the Langegasse, close to his flat in the Josefstadterstrasse, and were often visitors to Werthen and Berthe.

  But from his initial joy at having his parents back in his life, Werthen had begun to dread their visits.

  ‘You’ll put the wet nurses of the empire out of work, at this rate,’ his father joked having learned that Berthe had decided to breastfeed her child herself. ‘Simple division of labor.’

  And his mother engaged in endless wrangling with Werthen’s housekeeper and cook, Frau Blatschky, over the proper foods to prepare for a young mother. Frau Blatschky, happy that Berthe’s interminable morning sickness was done with, relished the preparation of all the richest food in the Austrian culinary canon, for a feeding mother should be able to indulge herself.

  ‘All that lovely mother’s milk does not come from eating crusts,’ Frau Blatschky intoned, as if Berthe had hitherto been subsisting on a convict’s diet.

  Werthen’s mother, however, was worried lest her daughter-in-law lose her shapely figure. A mere week after the birth she said to Berthe with sweet insouciance, ‘You don’t want Karlchen to be harnessed to a dray horse, now do you, dear?’

  Werthen hoped — he had long given up on praying — that his parents would finally pack their bags and go back to their estate in Upper Austria. Reconciliation be damned; he wanted his domestic peace once again.

  ‘Werthen? Are you quite all right?’

  Klimt’s voice brought him out of his thoughts. ‘Sorry, Klimt. Forget I mentioned the parents. As you say, put it down to lack of sleep.’

  Klimt rubbed a thick hand through his short, disheveled hair. ‘It’s a case of missing persons. Well, one missing person.’

  Werthen, accustomed to the painter’s extreme egoism and narcissism, was not caught amiss by this seeming non sequitur.

  ‘That’s not really my line,’ he said.

  ‘Nonsense, Werthen,’ Klimt spluttered. ‘Anything is your line as long as it has to do with private inquiries. And this is very private, I assure you. My patron, Karl Wittgenstein-’

  ‘He’s gone missing?’

  ‘His oldest son and heir.’

  Werthen nodded judiciously at this information. Karl Wittgenstein, the powerful industrialist, dubbed the Carnegie of Austria, was indeed a commission of worth. The man was one of the wealthiest in the empire if not in all of Europe, and had recently retired, turning his interests to art. Among his other projects, he had helped fund Klimt’s exhibition hall, the Secession.

  ‘I thought you might be interested,’ Klimt went on. ‘The young man’s name is Hans. Just turned twenty-three. He’s been missing for the better part of a week.’

  ‘What do the police say?’

  Klimt leaned back in his chair. ‘I don’t suppose that wonderful young woman out there might find a cup of coffee for me?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose she will. I can offer you a slivowitz, though.’

  Klimt grinned like a fellow conspirator. ‘The cold, you know. One could do with a bit of
lubrication.’

  Werthen kept a bottle of ten-year-old plum brandy in a massive sideboard that took up one wall of his office. Moving to the sideboard, he secured the bottle and two glasses. To be polite, he poured himself one, too, though it was far too early for such indulgences.

  ‘Your good health,’ he said, handing one of the shot-size crystal glasses to Klimt, who did not bother with preliminary sniffs or appreciation. Remaining seated, he downed the fiery liquor in one swift gulp.

  Klimt handed back the empty glass. ‘No police involved. Herr Wittgenstein is rather prickly about publicity, you see. He has had a bellyful of it lately regarding his monopolies in steel and iron. Besides, he tells me he believes the boy is simply off on a lark. It’s the wife, you see, who is worried.’

  ‘A week is a longish lark,’ Werthen said, resuming his seat. ‘I assume there has been no note, no communication asking for ransom.’

  ‘None.’

  ‘A family of such wealth, kidnapping cannot be ruled out.’

  ‘But a week and no note. .’

  ‘Yes, to be sure.’ Werthen did not mention other possibilities swirling in his mind. Not only were the Wittgensteins one of the wealthiest in the empire, but they were also the most prominent Jewish family, assimilated or not. Perhaps some anti-Semite had a hand in the disappearance. There was any number of possibilities. Interesting, however, that the father should think the son had simply run off for a final fling.

  ‘Has the son gone missing before?’

  ‘That, my friend,’ said Klimt as he rose from the chair, ‘is something you must ask Herr Wittgenstein. He has reserved a ten o’clock appointment for you. Meanwhile, I have a lady waiting for me at my studio.’

  Werthen raised an eyebrow.

  Klimt shook his head at this. ‘She’s fat and fifty, but the family is well endowed.’ Klimt laughed. ‘I shall make her look like a sylph. No one will recognize her. And please don’t be late. Herr Wittgenstein keeps the wurst on my table. The Alleegasse, just behind Karlskirche.’

  Redundant information, as everyone in Vienna knew the location of the Palais Wittgenstein.

  Three

  Werthen let Fraulein Metzinger know he would be out most of the morning and perhaps the rest of the day. He had no scheduled appointments at the office today; Klimt’s timing could not have been more perfect.

  The snow had let up now, but the world was muffled in its whiteness. Soon enough it would melt and be a filthy nuisance, but for now Vienna was transformed into a winter wonderland. A number of truant children were out in the Volksgarten, sledding along the pathways on discarded planks of wood to the great disapproval of older pedestrians. Werthen did not bother trying to find a Fiaker, but instead cut through the park on foot on his way around the Ringstrasse to the Alleegasse. As he walked, he tried to sort out his questions for Herr Wittgenstein. He knew the importance of confronting a man of such power with his own assured plan of attack.

  Along with most other Viennese, Werthen was well aware of the importance of Karl Wittgenstein. Born in 1847, the industrialist was, like Werthen, just two generations removed from the land and from his Jewish roots. His father had run a successful dry goods business and converted to Protestantism. Instead of following the family route into business, Karl Wittgenstein became a draughtsman and an engineer and went to work for the Teplitz steel-rolling mill in Bohemia. By a mixture of hard work, overweening ambition, and a willingness to take huge risks, Wittgenstein built an empire from this humble beginning. Five years after starting work as a lowly draughtsman for the Teplitz Rolling Mill, Wittgenstein was running that business. He sold train rails to the Russians during the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, making a huge war profit for his company, and staged another coup by gaining sole European rights to a revolutionary steel manufacturing process. With these rights in hand, he leveraged other businesses, acquiring the Bohemian Mining Company and then the Prague Iron Company, creating a vertical monopoly in steel production in the Czech regions of the Austrian Empire. He repeated this success in the German regions with purchase of the Alpine Mining Company, and at the same time established the first rail cartel in Austria. It seemed to many that Wittgenstein had a finger in every economic pie in the empire, with seats on the boards of powerful corporations, including the Creditanstalt, the most powerful bank in the monarchy.

  Then, in 1898, amid a firestorm of criticism over his shoddy treatment of workers, his monopolistic practices, and his attempts to artificially drive up the price of his steel stocks, Wittgenstein stepped down from the directorship. He became a patron of the arts, but knowledgeable observers knew that he still had a strong hand in the day-to-day operations of his far-flung industrial empire. His home at Alleegasse 16 had become one of the foremost salons in Vienna. Johannes Brahms premiered his late clarinet quintets here; Klimt and other members of the Secession first presented their work to the public in the immense rooms of that city palace. Through marriage, the Wittgensteins were connected with lawyers, doctors, industrialists, and ministers. Herr Wittgenstein could obtain a visa, an introduction to a general, medical advice, or an inside tip on investments with a simple telephone call.

  At the same time, because of his cut-throat business practices, there were plenty of people who might want to harm Wittgenstein in some way. There were other businessmen whom he had driven into bankruptcy; angry shareholders of those competing businesses; workers seeking redress for long hours, low wages, and dangerous working conditions; socialist-anarchists who wanted to make an example of this ruthless American-style capitalist; consumers incensed at his monopoly pricing. All these in addition to a garden-variety kidnapper after money or a crazed anti-Semite. The list was long, Werthen knew.

  By the time he reached the Karlsplatz, the sun had come out and the temperature had suddenly risen at least five degrees. Werthen was almost too warm in his heavy coat as he made his way to the back of the immense Karlskirche and on to the Alleegasse, home to many of the nouveaux riches of the empire. The last generation had seen construction of immense and ponderous city mansions throughout this neighborhood, not just in the Alleegasse, but in the intersecting Schwindgasse, all in the various historicist styles of the Ringstrasse. Here was an aggregation of wealth eager to show itself off. Neo-baroque mingled with neo-classic and renaissance styles. Amidst this milieu of ennobled industrialists was a smattering of town houses belonging to lower princes and even an archduke — though it was said the archduke in question was in attendance there far less frequently than was his mistress.

  As Werthen turned into the Alleegasse he could see, beneath the now melting snow on the cobblestone street, that straw had earlier been spread. As he progressed up the street, he saw that the dried stalks extended for several blocks. It was a Viennese custom to spread straw to muffle the traffic noise for those of wealth, power, and/or prominence who had been taken ill.

  The Palais Wittgenstein was an impressive, if dour town house of two floors, its banks of second-story windows seeming to frown down on the Alleegasse while the bottom floor presented a fortress-like appearance. The facade was at least fifty paces in length. Werthen entered through a pair of heavy oak doors, behind which a Portier was stationed and directed him via a forecourt with an impressive fountain and ample grillwork to an entrance hall huge and imposing. The floor was done in mosaic, the walls in carved paneling. Frescoes also adorned the space as did a statue, which Werthen thought might be the work of the French sculptor August Rodin. He passed through stone arches and went up six marble stairs to glass double doors. There he was met by a liveried servant who led him up the central red-carpeted marble stairway to the second floor and ultimately into Karl Wittgenstein’s study, appointed in the most opulent gilt furnishing Werthen had seen outside a museum. Incongruously, modern paintings hung on the red plush walls, artists from Vienna and Munich, with Klimt prominent among them. On an immense carved walnut desk in the middle of the room were several small sculptures, obviously the work of Rodin. A fire pulsed in
an open porcelain fireplace.

  Wittgenstein sat at the desk, a bear of a man, who seemed even larger once he stood to greet Werthen, offering a crushing handshake. The man’s dark hair was cut short (and perhaps dyed at the temples) and he wore a thick black moustache. He appeared much younger than his fifty-two years, wearing a frock coat, striped silk vest, maroon paisley bow tie under a fresh collar, and sporting spats — the newest fad from America. Werthen could not stop his eyes from traveling to these white canvas shoe coverings; for him they were too similar to the splatterdashes he had worn as a youth to protect his riding boots from mud to be considered high fashion. But fancy young men from Manhattan to Paris were wearing them this season, and it seemed Karl Wittgenstein or his tailor had decided to join the throng. It was hardly a fashion statement Werthen would have credited the man of business with.

  ‘Your good friend Klimt sings your praises,’ Wittgenstein said as he finally released Werthen’s pummeled hand. The man’s voice was deep and booming.

  ‘He is too kind,’ Werthen said, sitting in the pale-blue Louis Quinze chair Wittgenstein waved him toward. The industrialist sat in a matching chair, facing him, and crossed his legs by placing his right ankle over his left knee, American style.

  ‘I suppose he’s filled you in on the commission?’

  ‘He mentioned a missing son.’

  ‘Mein Gott. Hardly missing in the strictest sense. But he hasn’t shown up for work in a week. He’s the manager of mining interests at my Vienna offices on Kolowatring. Lord knows what the boy’s thinking of. Always did have his head in the clouds. Wanted to be a musician of all things.’

  Werthen registered this, but was not yet ready to follow the path of inquiry that comment might lead to.

  Instead, he said, ‘Perhaps we could review the facts. When was it first noticed that your son was missing?’

  ‘Well,’ the big man re-crossed his legs, ‘Poldi, my wife, remarked last Tuesday, I believe it was, that Hans had not taken his dinner with us as is our custom. He is single, you see, and has a suite of rooms here. Then I found out from Prohaska, the second in command at the mining division, that Hans was not there on the Monday, either. No message. Nothing.’ Wittgenstein shook his head. ‘No sense of responsibility.’