The Empty Mirror Read Online Free

hospital grounds. The General Hospital loomed in front of them, as big and gray a building as ever swallowed the hopes of man, Werthen thought. In the background was the squat, sandstone
Narrenturm
, Fools’ Tower, used until only just three decades before to house the insane in pitifully medieval conditions.
    Gross led the way to a side entrance of the main hospital building and past a gray-uniformed, gray-faced guard who exactly matched his surroundings and who apparently knew the criminologist by sight.
    “Back again, is it, Herr Doktor?” the man asked.
    Gross nodded. “I expect you’ll have a message from Inspektor Meindl from the Police Presidium?”
    “That I do, sir. Fine day for a visit. Cool down there. Like going into a cathedral.”
    Werthen followed Gross past the guard, finally realizing their destination. The phone call the criminologist had needed to make was obviously to his former colleague Meindl, who had cleared their visit to the morgue. Once inside, Werthen was struck with a smell so spit-and-polish clean that it was downright obscene.
    They took the stairs down, and the temperature dropped with each subterranean step; a natural form of refrigeration, just as the guard said, ABTEILUNG I was the first door they came to on the left.
    “This is it,” Gross said, giving a light rap on the door before entering.
    Inside were two rows of tables topped with marble slabs, each slab with a small trough built around it and a drainage hole at one end. Some tables were empty; their beige marble was scratched and dull from constant scrubbing. Others bore a body atop, covered in thick, off-white muslin. The floor was tiled in pale yellow. A window high up on one wall cast murky, greenish light into the half-basement; away from the window, gas lamps hung from the ceiling at several junctures.
    Bent over one of the slabs, a pathologist was up to his elbows in blood, peering into the stomach cavity of a cadaver. Werthen caught his breath and also a large gulp of the stink filling the room: chemical preservative and human decay. Bile stung the back of his throat, and he quickly averted his eyes from the autopsy in progress.
    “Inspektor Meindl telephoned, I believe,” Gross said to the pathologist, who had not bothered to look up from his work as they entered.
    “Table seven,” the doctor said, his eyes never leaving the corpse he was working on.
    It was the table farthest from the window, and the body under the sheet was smaller than others in the room. Gross, an old hand at the morgue, threw the sheet back without ceremony. A young woman lay before them. Her body, once so vital and fresh and pink, was now absolutely and startlingly white, Werthen observed. There were no obvious signs of violence, though there looked to be a scar upon her nose. Her lips that might have kissed young men were so white as not to be distinguished from the rest of her facial features; nipples meant to suckle children had lost their color as well and were now gray and slack. The only color at all was a splash of auburn hair splayed about her head and another forming a triangle at her groin.
    Werthen felt like a voyeur looking at the unfortunate young woman. Then came a flood of memory.
    “Mary,” he whispered.
    Werthen was not sure he’d actually spoken the word, but this poor young woman did powerfully remind him of his dead first love. She was about Mary’s age when they were engaged, he reckoned. Then the old familiar sadness crept over him, the loss and grief and guilt for not having been there when she needed him. Working all day and most of the night to establish his name in Graz as a criminal lawyer, he had not even realized how sick she was until the last days of her confinement at the tuberculosis sanatorium in the Semmering Alps. Marie Elisabeth Volker, who loved the Anglicized form of her name, who laughed at Werthen’s seriousness, who tousled his hair and made him feel so very young and alive, who gently chided him