The Empty Mirror: A Viennese Mystery - Hardcover

J. Sydney Jones is the author of twelve books, including the nonfiction Hitler in Vienna, 1907--1913, the guides Viennawalks and Vienna Inside-Out, and the suspense novel Time of the Wolf. In 1968 he was a student in Vienna and later returned to live there for almost two decades. He currently lives near Santa Cruz, California.

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 here 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 in...