The Empty Mirror Read Online Free Page B

working. A schnitzel sat on the plate in front of him as lifeless as the corpse on the marble slab.
    Their trip to the morgue had made Gross late for luncheon at the Bristol, and the criminologist had insisted on a heavy lunch. Thus, Werthen had taken him to the Schöner Beisl, a pretty little restaurant tucked into a side street not far from the university; the sort of place he normally loved, so full of bustle and hearty cooking smells coming from the kitchen. But he could not get the dead girl out of his mind. The way she had blended with Mary, as if his fiancée were trying to reach out to him from the grave, to speak to him through another’s death.
    “Not hungry, Werthen?”
    “A stomach for such sights takes some developing,” he responded.
    Gross, whose ample midriff had forced him to unbutton his coat before sitting, was deaf to double entendre. He merely tucked into the
Burenwurst
with renewed vigor.
    After lunch, they strolled through the newly completed Rathaus Park, smoking after-lunch cigars and admiring the spray of the fountains. They could hardly discuss the matter in the crowded confines of the
Gasthaus
, but full of wurst and a digestive schnapps, Gross was all volubility.
    “Now you have seen,” he said. “This latest victim fits exactly the pattern of the other killings. Which means either your painter friend is guilty of all of them or none.”
    “He is not
my
painter friend,” Werthen said. “He is a client. And I concur. Highly unlikely that he is the killer.”
    “We still have a line of inquiry regarding that. The mistress in Ottakring, I believe it was.”
    Werthen nodded.
    “A bit of a postprandial walk would be in order, I think,” Gross said. “And as the stomach does its work, perhaps our brains can also be enterprising. Now that you have seen, do you have any theories beyond that of a madman at work?”
    “The letting of the blood,” Werthen said suddenly. “There is a strange resonance in that.”
    Gross cut his eyes at his companion. “Yes?”
    “I seem to remember one of your cases. Was it in Pölnau?”
    “Aah.” Gross sniffed appreciatively. “You surprise me, Werthen. You’ve been keeping up with my career.”
    “Well, yes. I suppose that is one way to look at it. However, as I recall, the murders were all over the papers at the time. One could hardly ignore the affair.”
    “Remember the particulars?” Gross asked.
    “Two-or was it three victims?-in the small Bohemian district near the village of Pölnau. Each of them strangled anddrained of blood. There were those who immediately labeled the murders ritual crimes. Yourself among them, if I recall rightly.”
    “Presented with certain facts, one is dutybound not to discount them simply because they might be uncomfortable.”
    “Jewish ritual killings, in fact,” Werthen continued.
    “I am not an anti-Semite, Werthen. After all, look at our friendship as proof of that.”
    “Oh, but then I’m so very assimilated. I recall you saying that my surname sounds absolutely Aryan and my fair complexion and height also lend to the confusion.”
    “Well, they damn well do,” Gross spluttered.
    “What was it you once called me? ‘The Golden Boy,’ I believe. As if Jews have to be some grotesque physical caricature of the hunched and grasping moneylender. Well, we Werthens try to blend,” Werthen said flippantly.
    He recalled with no little vehemence his father’s insistence on his son’s learning the ways of a gentleman, which meant endless hours on horseback over the hills of Upper Austria, agonizing sessions with a fencing master, and entire weeks in the fall and spring lost from his studies in order to tramp over hill and dale in search of chamois and wild boar. Against his will, young Werthen had been turned into a fine physical specimen and a crack shot, yet he always longed for a life of the mind.
    “It was the grandfather’s choice of surnames,” Werthen added. “That of his former employer, in