The Keeper of Hands (32 page)

Drechlser sat quietly through Gross’s tirade.

‘Finished, are we?’

Gross turned his back on the inspector.

‘I am not saying I won’t investigate this barbaric act. It shakes me as much as it does you, this act of terror. To set off a blast like this in the heart of our city, it is unthinkable. And I will pursue whoever did it with all the powers at my command. I simply wanted to let you know what I will be up against at the Praesidium. Now if you gentlemen have any further information you are holding back from me . . .’

‘Men,’ Berthe suddenly spat out. ‘I don’t know what you are playing at. You treat this like some schoolyard competition.’

Werthen put out a hand to her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

‘We’re all on the same side here,’ she said. ‘Tell him, Karl, or I will.’

‘Frau Meisner—’ Gross began.

But she cut him off. ‘Doktor Gross! Somebody tell the inspector!’

‘She’s right,’ Werthen said.

And so they told Drechsler about the renewed investigation.

Frau Ignatz was busily sweeping out the foyer as they descended the stairs. The hospital matron simply raised her eyes at them as if to say she could not stop the woman.

Werthen could understand the need to stay busy, delay the realization of her brother’s death. Compassion was not an emotion he had experienced regarding Frau Ignatz in the past, but that was what was welling up in his chest now. He wanted to reach out to her.

But Gross beat him to it, though in his own peculiar manner

‘Frau Ignatz,’ the criminologist said. ‘You will want to help, of course. There is no good time for such questions, but the sooner we have answers the sooner we will be able to track down the monster who perpetrated this outrage.’

She looked up at him from her sweeping, suddenly a frail old woman. She peered at him as if he were speaking a foreign tongue.

‘Did you see anyone peculiar in the vicinity this morning or perhaps last night? Anything untoward about building security?’

Frau Ignatz continued to stare at him, as if he were a zoo exhibit.

Berthe finally put her arm around the woman’s bony shoulders.

‘Let’s go and have a cup of chamomile tea, shall we?’

The
Portier
made no protest as Berthe moved her away to her quarters nearby. Gross and Werthen were about to follow, but Berthe gave a curt shake of her head to ward them off.

Gross sighed as Berthe, Frau Ignatz and the hospital matron removed to the ground-floor
Portier
apartment.

‘Your wife certainly is taking charge lately.’

‘And we should both be thankful for it,’ Werthen added.

‘Yes, of course. No criticism intended. As I have said before—’

‘You like a woman with spirit. Not too much of it, however.’

Gross was silent a moment. ‘You should have that hand looked after.’

Werthen glanced at the bloodied handkerchief wrapped around his left hand. He shook his head.

‘Like a bad dream.’

‘It’s the shock,’ Gross said. ‘Still affecting all of us. We need to concentrate. To think clearly. There was nothing random about this attack. It was planned to kill me, you and your wife. Neatly arranged with matching telegrams to bring us together. Which means that whoever did it has knowledge of our domiciles; has been following us, in fact. And this person also has basic knowledge of bomb construction. Which indicates a military background perhaps.’

‘Or mining or land management, or a dozen other occupations that employ dynamite from time to time,’ Werthen said.

‘Motive?’

‘Clearly to silence us. But regarding what? Von Ebersdorf or the Bower murders?’

‘Or perhaps the two are indeed linked.’

They were silent for a time. Drechsler and his men continued to search the building for any signs of a break-in, but Werthen doubted they would find anything. They were dealing with a professional, of that he was sure. But even professionals might make mistakes, as this one had done about who would be the first person to go into Werthen’s inner office. And yet nobody could have foretold that Oskar would, today of all days, be so eager to prove his worth as to go into the inner office and put the newspaper on the desk himself. Custom had it that he would leave the newspaper with Fräulein Metzinger, who would in turn hand it to Werthen upon his arrival at the office. Thus, Werthen should have been the first to open the inner-office door this morning, in the company of his wife and Gross. But, out of eagerness, Oskar had beaten them to it.

Gross was observing an officer inspecting the lock on the front door of the building; he obviously felt as Werthen did, for he shook his head in indignation. Then turning to Werthen, he said, ‘One bright spot out of all of this.’

He paused, but Werthen did not feel like rising to the bait.

Finally Gross explained. ‘At least we know our instincts about all this are correct. This is not something that has been neatly wrapped up and solved, as Inspector Meindl would like to aver. There is a killer out there. And knowing that he has failed, he will probably try again.’

Which gave Werthen a sudden idea. ‘But does he know that? I mean, why don’t we broadcast that the three of us were killed, and then we can work behind the scenes . . .’

But even as he said it, he realized the folly of the idea: whoever set off the explosion most likely witnessed it. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s still the shock working on my analytical skills.’

‘Not at all,’ Gross said. ‘But we must be on our guard now. And it is good that your wife convinced us to share our information with Drechsler. It provides a kind of insurance to us.’

At which point Berthe came out of the
Portier
’s lodge alone.

‘She did see someone,’ Berthe said. ‘But was unable to describe him. Medium height, nothing distinguishing about his features. He wore a blue suit. That is all that stood out. He passed her on the stairs last evening and she thought he was visiting someone, that a tenant had let him in. But she had never seen him before.’

‘Not much to go on,’ Gross said. ‘And yet, at the same time, much to go on. A nondescript man. One who blends so well he is not noticed. A worthy adversary.’

T
hey were given police protection, a constabulary man stationed outside their apartment building on Josefstädterstrasse who took his mid-morning
Jause
break at a local gasthaus, then lunch at the same establishment from noon to one. For afternoon coffee at three, the man wandered down to the Café Eiles, two blocks away, and for dinner he returned to the gasthaus. He went off duty at seven. It would be fortunate if the villains operated on such a schedule, too, Werthen ruefully thought.

He therefore hired the two stalwarts Meier and Prokop, and placed them outside the apartment door on Josefstädterstrasse. Prokop had been delighted to see the Advokat enter their office: a wine bar near the Margarethen Gürtel underneath the tracks of the new
Stadtbahn
. Meier bore further evidence to their violent profession: his left ear was bandaged, and it appeared that the top of it had been misplaced.

‘We’re your men,’ chimed Prokop, in his choirboy tenor, and nearly crushed Werthen’s hand in a gentleman’s agreement grip regarding the fee. His time at Schnitzler’s had affected Prokop, it seemed, for when he appeared for work, along with the sullen Meier, he carried a small Samuel Fischer edition of the playwright’s early theatre series,
Anatol,
about an idle young womanizing bachelor. Werthen felt something akin to shock seeing a book in Prokop’s meaty hands; he had never imagined the man was literate, let alone that he might actually enjoy such light entertainment. From time to time, when he passed the pair of them in the hallway, he would find Prokop reading a particularly piquant scene out loud, with Meier looking at first bored and then increasingly interested.

To ensure security, Gross moved into the flat, as well, taking over Werthen’s study and sleeping on the leather chaise lounge. Werthen had taken to carrying a silver-tipped walking stick which had a sword concealed inside it; Gross employed the pair of Steyr automatic pistols that he normally travelled with. Young Frieda was quite excited by all the activity, running here and there in the flat to see what was afoot, and opening the door and playing peekaboo with Prokop from time to time.

Frau Blatschky was the only one displeased with the new arrangements.

‘It’s like feeding an army,’ she said after a day of Gross living in and Meier and Prokop taking meals with the family. ‘I am not a mess cook. And that Doktor Gross . . .’

‘I thought you were fond of him,’ Berthe said, attempting to console her.

‘This is not about like or not like. He eats for two. Nothing stays around long enough in the kitchen to get stale except me!’

On the second day, Schmidt saw the scar-faced cornstalk man go into the apartment building. He had set up watch across the street from Werthen’s Josefstädterstrasse home, invisible to the policeman on duty outside as well as to pedestrians. He was dressed as a chimney sweep, wearing a sandwich board announcing the services of the ‘Soot Merchant’, and carried a fistful of flyers, which no one took.

That was just as well, for the firm was mythical, its address a derelict warehouse in Ottakring. But it provided him with the anonymity he needed to watch the comings and goings at Advokat Werthen’s flat. The policeman was no concern; the man took regular breaks during the day and was gone at night. Schmidt could easily enter the building in the middle of the night, or even at midday, and kill the entire family and the fatuous Doktor Gross.

But the lawyer was obviously no fool: Schmidt watched the arrival of the two strong-arm men and knew this would complicate matters. They looked thick as a plank, but the numbers were now badly against him.

And now there was that cornstalk, the Archduke’s man. These were not good odds. Forstl was indeed becoming a very expensive commodity.

‘What brings you to us, Duncan?’ Werthen asked as they settled in his study. Gross had made himself at home, sitting in Werthen’s chair behind the desk. He and Duncan sat across from him.

‘The Archduke wishes to express his concern,’ the Scot said in a German that was grammatically precise but had the ring of the Highlands to it. Werthen strained to understand, but Gross’s ear picked it up at first utterance.

‘Please convey our thanks for his concern,’ Gross said. ‘We have taken certain precautions, as I am sure you noticed.’

Duncan smiled at this, an expression of scepticism rather than mirth.

‘The two in the hall are the literary type, it seems.’

In fact, Duncan had made it to the door of the flat before Prokop and Meier, deep in the misadventures of Anatol, awoke from their fictional miasma. And the policeman on duty on the street had not noticed him enter the building, being too busy chatting to the young
Portier
next door who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her building.

‘Have you come to offer your services once again?’ Werthen asked, hoping that was the case.

Duncan tilted his head, as if giving the notion some thought.

‘The Archduke indicated that I could use my own discretion in that, but actually I have come with information. The Archduke wishes to tell you that there was something that might prove valuable in the case of Baroness von Suttner. You recall that we induced the night clerk from the Hotel Metropole to repatriate to Italy?’

Werthen and Gross nodded simultaneously.

‘The man did supply one piece of interesting information. The telephone number he used to reach the person employing him. The Archduke has had the number traced and finds that it belongs to the Bureau.’

Gross and Werthen exchanged quick glances, each thinking the same: confirmation that it was Military Intelligence that had set up Frau von Suttner, and not the Foreign Office.

‘More particularly,’ Duncan added, ‘it is the number of the Operations Section of the General Staff’s Intelligence Bureau. The head of that section is one Captain Adelbert Forstl.’

‘Forstl?’ Gross repeated the name. ‘I’ve come across that name recently. But where?’

He began drumming on the desk with his knuckles, as if to beat an answer out of the wood.

‘It will come,’ said the Scot philosophically. ‘But there is something else you should know.’

He went to one side of the window, making sure that his silhouette was not showing, and peered at the street below.

‘Ach, so he must have noticed.’

‘Who?’ Werthen said, following Duncan to the window.

‘You had a watcher down there across the street. He was disguised as a chimney sweep wearing a sandwich board. But he seemed more interested in this building than in handing out the flyers he had.’

Werthen peered at the street below. ‘I don’t see him’

‘No, you wouldn’t. He’s not there anymore. As I said, he must have noticed that I was aware of him. He’s at least enough of a professional to know when to disappear.’

‘Then he’s still tracking us,’ Werthen said, sick at the thought of once again putting his family in danger because of his work.

‘Of course he is tracking us,’ said Gross, still seated at the desk. ‘I noticed him yesterday when he first appeared on the street.’

‘And you didn’t see fit to tell me?’ Werthen said, unable to hide his outrage.

‘I did not want you confronting the man. It is imperative for us to discover if he is working alone or in concert with others. I contacted Drechsler, and he was going to have two men dispatched today to follow our chimney sweep wherever he might go. I am afraid, however, that the arrival of friend Duncan has upset those plans and sent our man scurrying before Drechsler’s men could be in place.’

‘I apologize, Doktor Gross,’ the Scot said.

Gross shook his head. ‘There is no way you could have known.’

‘But Gross,’ Werthen persisted. ‘I still feel you should have warned me. This is my home, in case you have forgotten.’

Gross ignored this remark, suddenly tapping his high forehead with a forefinger.

‘Yes, that’s it! I came across the name Forstl when investigating the past of the deceased Arthur Schnitzel. Schnitzel was in the medical corps before training as a doctor. And one of his officers wrote in an annual conduct report that he was a diligent orderly, but that there had been certain rumors about his attentions to a certain young lieutenant convalescing from a bout of pneumonia. Yes, that lieutenant’s name was Forstl!’