So I went around the corner. I suppose I assumed she would change her mind about the money when she saw it in the bag. There’s something about the sight of hard cash that always makes people think in a different way. That has always been my own experience, anyway. And naturally I assumed Vera would be no different. That she would change her mind because she would see the money and listen to me and let herself be persuaded. And if that failed I would be stern with her and tell her she had to take Gruen’s money. How could she fail to do what she was told when, in the bedroom, she had been so willingly submissive?
The shop faced the back of Vienna University’s Institute of Chemistry. The sign above the window read “Vera Messmann. Salon for Made-to-Measure Corselettes, Bodices, Girdles, and Brassieres.” The window contained a female tailor’s dummy wearing a pink silk corset and matching brassiere. Beside it was a show-card featuring a line drawing of a girl wearing a different ensemble. She had a bow in her hair and, but for her lack of glasses, she reminded me a little of Vera. A little bell tinkled above my head as I opened the door. There was a simple, glass-topped counter no bigger than a card table and, next to this, another anonymous girdled female trunk. In the back, a ceiling light was burning dimly near a heavily draped changing cubicle. In front of this sanctum sanctorum stood a French chair, as if someone might sit there and, with seignorial satisfaction, watch his lover or mistress appear from behind the curtain wearing some well-engineered undergarment. Who said I didn’t have a vivid imagination?
“Vera?” I called. “Vera, it’s me, Bernie. Why didn’t you show up at the bank?”
Idly, I drew open a narrow drawer to reveal a dozen or so black brassieres pressed together like slaves on a ship bound for the plantations in the West Indies. I picked one up and felt the wires in it hard underneath my fingers, thinking that it looked and felt like the harness for early and ill-advised attempt at human flight.
“Vera? I waited at the bank for half an hour. Did you forget, or did you just change your mind?”
The thing was, I hardly wanted to go blundering into the back of the shop and find some well-fed Vienna housewife wearing just her knickers. I tugged open another drawer and picked out an item of vaguely aqueductian shape that, eventually, I identified as being a garter belt. Another minute passed. A woman peered in the window and looked taken aback to see me standing there with something lacy suspended from my fingers, like a cat’s cradle. I put the undergarment down and advanced, boldly, into the back of the shop, thinking perhaps Vera was upstairs, if an upstairs there was.
“Vera?”
Then I saw it and my heart missed a beat. Protruding from under the drawn curtain of the changing cubicle was a woman’s stockinged foot. It was without a shoe. I took hold of the curtain, paused for a moment, bracing myself for what I knew I was about to find. And then I drew it aside. It was Vera and she was dead. The nylon stocking that had killed her was still wrapped tight around her neck like a near-invisible snake. I let out a long sigh and closed my eyes for a moment. After a minute or two I stopped behaving like a normal human being and started to think like a detective. I went back to the door and locked it, just in case. The last thing I wanted now was for one of Vera’s customers to walk in on me while I examined her dead body. Then I returned to the changing cubicle, drew the curtain behind me and knelt beside her corpse to make sure she really was dead. But her skin was quite cold and my fingers felt nothing when I pushed them underneath the twist in the stocking and against her jugular vein. She had been dead for several hours. There was dried blood in her nostrils and in her gums, and on the side of her face. And lots of scratches and finger marks around her chin and near the tie in the stocking. Her eyes were closed. I’d seen drunks look worse who were still alive. Her hair was a mess and her glasses lay broken on the floor. The changing cubicle chair had been knocked over and the mirror on the wall had a large crack in it. It was obvious that she had put up quite a struggle before yielding her life. It was a conclusion that I underlined when I lifted her hands and saw the bruises on her knuckles. It looked as if she had managed to punch her attacker. Perhaps several times.
I stood up, glanced around the floor, saw a cigarette end and picked it up. It was a Lucky, which wasn’t at all Lucky for me. There was an ashtray full of them back in my hotel room. I put the cigarette end in my pocket. There was enough circumstantial evidence against me already without giving the police a present of more. She and I had had sex the night before. I hadn’t been wearing a condom. Vera had said it was safe, which was another reason she had been keen to go to bed with me. A postmortem would find my blood type.
I looked around for Vera’s handbag, hoping to find her door key so that I might let myself into her apartment and reclaim my business card. But her bag was gone. I wondered if the murderer had taken it. Probably the same man who had let himself into her apartment the previous night. I cursed myself for having taken the key off the cord. But for that I could have let myself in. Doubtless the police would find my card. And doubtless the neighbor who had seen me returning to her apartment wearing just my trousers and carrying a hockey stick would be able to give the police a good description. That would tally with the description from the woman who had seen me through Vera’s shop window just a few minutes earlier. There was no doubt about it. I was in a tight spot.
I switched the light out and went around the shop polishing everything I had touched with a pair of knickers. My fingerprints would be all over her apartment of course, but I saw no sense in leaving them at the scene of the crime. I opened the front door, cleaned the door handle, closed it, locked up again, and then drew down the blinds on the door and the display window. With any luck it might be a day or two before her body was found.
A back door led into a courtyard. I turned up the collar of my coat, pulled the brim of my hat about my eyes, picked up the holdall containing Vera’s money, and stepped quietly outside. It was getting dark now and I kept to the center of the courtyard, away from lighted windows and an early patch of moonlight. At the opposite end of the courtyard I passed down an alley and opened a door that led onto the street that intersected with Wasagasse. This was Horlgasse and, for some reason, this seemed to mean something to me. Horlgasse. Horlgasse.
I walked southwest, onto Roosevelt Platz. A church stood in the middle of the square. The Votive Church. It had been built in gratitude to God for the preservation of the young Emperor Franz Josef’s life following an assassination attempt. I had half an idea that Roosevelt Platz had once been Göring Platz. It had been a while since I had thought of Göring. Briefly, back in 1936, he had been a client of mine. But Horlgasse hadn’t finished jostling with my brain cells.
Horlgasse. Horlgasse.
And then I remembered. Horlgasse. That was the address I had been given for Britta Warzok. The same address I had found indented on the notepad in Major Jacobs’s Buick. I took out my notebook and checked the street number. I had been planning to visit Britta Warzok’s given address as soon as Gruen’s business was concluded, but now seemed as good a time as any. Not least because I was asking myself if the contiguity of these two addresses—Britta Warzok and Vera Messmann—was simply a coincidence? Or more than simple coincidence? A
meaningful
coincidence, perhaps. Jung had a fancy word for this, which I might have remembered had not the circumstances of the coincidence pushed everything else from my mind. I might also have remembered that not every meaningful coincidence is a positive one.
I turned around and walked east along Horlgasse. It took me just two minutes to find number forty-two. It was situated just before the tram line, where Horlgasse merged with Turkenstrasse, and overlooking Schlick Platz. The Vienna Police Academy was only fifty yards away. I found myself facing yet another baroque portal. A couple of Atlantes were standing in for columns to support an entablature garlanded with boughs of ivy. A small door cut into the main door stood open. I went inside and stood opposite some letterboxes. There were only three apartments in the building, one on each floor. Appearing on the box belonging to the top apartment was the name “Warzok.” It was bulging with post that hadn’t been collected in several days, but I went up anyway.
I climbed the stairs. The door was open. I pushed it wide and poked my head into the unlit hallway. The place felt cold. Too cold for the comfort of anyone living there.
“Frau Warzok?” I called out. “Are you there?”
It was a big apartment with triple-height ceilings and double-height windows. One of these was open. Something unpleasant pricked my nostrils and the back of my throat. Something stale and rotten. I took out a handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth and discovered that I was holding the knickers I’d used to wipe my fingerprints from Vera Messmann’s shop. But it hardly seemed to matter. I advanced into the apartment telling myself first that no one could be about, that no one could have stood the cold or that smell for very long. Then I told myself that someone must have opened the window, and recently, too. I walked over to the open window and looked out onto Schlick Platz as a tram went by, clanging like a fire alarm. I took a deep breath of fresh air and headed back into the shadows, to where the smell seemed to get worse. Then the lights went on and I spun around on my heel to find myself facing two men. They were both holding guns. And the guns were both pointed at me.
THIRTY-THREE
Neither man was very big, and, but for their guns, I might easily have pushed them aside like a pair of small swing doors. They looked a little more intelligent than the average gun-toting thug, although unremarkably so. Theirs were the kind of faces that resisted immediate description, like a field of grass or a gravel path. You had to look at them hard to fix them in your mind. I was looking hard. I look hard at anyone who points a gun at me. But this didn’t stop me from putting my hands up. That’s just good manners when a firearm comes into the room.
“What’s your name, Fritz? And what are you doing here?”
The one who spoke first had tried to affect a stern tone, like he was trying to forget some education and breeding for the sake of the effect it might have on me. He had gray-white hair and a beard and mustache that were arranged in a perfect heptagon around his mouth, and which lent his soft-skinned face some much-needed masculinity. Behind his light-framed glasses his eyes were wide, with too much white around his yellow-brown irises, as if he was uncertain of what he was doing. He wore a dark suit, a short leather coat, and a little trilby that made him look as if he were planning to balance a tray of bread on his head.
“Dr. Eric Gruen,” I said. Whatever the crime Eric Gruen had committed, with only Eric Gruen’s passport in my pocket I had no other choice but to say I was him. Besides, from what Medgyessy had told me, it was the Allied police who were after Gruen, not the Austrian police. And these were Austrian policemen, I was certain of that. They were both carrying the same gun—a shiny new Mauser automatic, the kind they gave to all the cops on Vienna’s denazified police force.
“Papers,” said the second cop.
Slowly, I put my hand in my pocket. The two cops didn’t look like they had much more policing experience between them than a scoutmaster. And I didn’t want to get shot because some new bug cop was nervous. I handed over Gruen’s passport carefully, and put my hands up again.
“I’m a friend of Frau Warzok’s,” I said, and sniffed the air. It wasn’t just the room that smelled. It was the whole situation. If the cops were there then something bad had happened. “Look here, is she all right? Where is she?”
The second cop was still looking at the passport. I wasn’t worried that he would think it wasn’t me so much as that he would be abreast of whatever it was that Gruen was supposed to have done.
“It says here that you’re from Vienna,” he said. “You don’t sound like you’re from Vienna.” He was wearing the same outfit as his colleague, only without the baker’s hat. A smile was stapled to the opposite cheek from the way his nose was angled. He probably thought it made him look wry or even skeptical, but it just came off oblique and distorted. All of his recessive genes seemed to have concentrated where his chin ought to have been. And the hairline on his high forehead matched the line of a long S-shaped scar. He handed the passport back to me as he spoke.
“Before the war, I lived in Berlin for ten years,” I said.
“A doctor, huh?”
They were starting to relax.
“Yes.”
“Her doctor?”
“No. Look here, who are you? And where’s Frau Warzok?”
“Police,” said the one with the hat, flashing a warrant disk at me. “Deutschmeister Platz.”
This seemed reasonable enough. The Kommissariat on Deutschmeister Platz was less than a hundred yards away from where we were standing.
“She’s in there,” said the cop with the scar.
The two cops put away their guns and led me into a tiled bathroom. It had been built at a time when a bathroom was not a bathroom unless a football team could bathe in it. As it happened, there was only one woman in the bath. Except for the one nylon stocking she was wearing, she was naked. The nylon stocking was knotted around her neck. It wasn’t the kind of knot that would have detained Alexander the Great for very long, but it was effective enough. The woman was dead. She had been strangled. Beyond the fact that I had never seen her before it was impossible to say more because the smell didn’t encourage delay. Both the body and the water it was lying in were a slimy shade of poisonous green. And there were flies. Curious the way there are always flies on bodies, even when it’s very cold.
“Good grief,” I said, reeling from the bathroom like a man who hadn’t seen a cadaver since medical school, instead of less than half an hour earlier. And it was my hand I put up to my nose this time. For the moment the kickers were safely in my pocket. The effect the smell had on me was real enough. I went straight back to the open window and leaned into some fresh air. But it was just as well the stench left me gagging for a moment or two. Otherwise I might have said something stupid about how the body in the bathroom wasn’t Britta Warzok. And that would have spoiled everything, in view of what the cop in the hat now said: