It was as I passed the ruined Kunsthistorische that I felt there was someone behind me, someone hanging back between the shadows and the piles of rubble. I stopped in my tracks, looked around and saw nothing. Then, about thirty metres away, next to a statue of which only the torso remained, like something I had once seen in a mortuary drawer, I heard a noise, and a moment later saw some small stones roll down a high bank of rubble.
'Are you feeling a bit lonely?' I called out, having drunk just enough not to feel stupid asking such a ridiculous question. My voice echoed up the side of the ruined museum. 'If it's the museum you're interested in, we're closed.
Bombs, you know: dreadful things.' There was no reply, and I found myself laughing. 'If you're a spy, you're in luck. That's the new profession to be in.
Especially if you're a Viennese. You don't have to take my word for it. One of the Ivans told me.'
Still laughing to myself, I turned and walked away. I didn't bother to see if I was followed, but crossing onto Mariahilferstrasse I heard footsteps again as I paused to light a cigarette.
As anyone who knows Vienna could have told you, this wasn't exactly the most direct route back to Skodagasse. I even told myself. But there was a part of me, probably the part most affected by alcohol, that wanted to find out exactly who was following me and why.
The American sentry who stood out in front of the Stiftskaserne was having a cold time of it. He watched me carefully as I passed by on the other side of the empty street and I reflected that he might even recognize the man on my tail as a fellow American and member of the Special Investigations Section of his own military police. Probably they were in the same baseball team or whatever game it was that American soldiers played when they weren't eating or chasing women.
Further up the slope of the wide street I glanced to my left and through a doorway saw a narrow covered passage that seemed to lead down several flights of steps to an adjoining street. Instinctively I ducked inside. Vienna might not have been blessed with a fabulous nightlife but it was perfect for anyone on foot. A man who knew his way around the streets and the ruins, who could remember these convenient passages, would, I thought, provide even the most determined police cordon with a better chase than Jean Valjean.
Ahead of me, beyond my sight, someone else was making his way down the steps, and thinking that my tail might take these for my own footsteps, I pressed myself against a wall and waited for him in the dark.
After less than a minute I heard the approaching sound of a man running lightly.
Then the footsteps halted at the top of the passageway as he stood trying to judge whether or not it was safe to come after me. Hearing the other man's footsteps, he started forward.
I stepped out of the shadows and punched him hard in the stomach so hard I thought I would have to bend down and retrieve my knuckles and while he lay gasping on the steps where he had fallen, I tugged his coat off his shoulders and pulled it down to hold his arms. He wasn't carrying a gun, so I helped myself to the wallet in his breast pocket and picked out an ID card.
' Captain John Belinsky,' I read. ' 430th United States CIC. What's that?
Are you one of Mr Shields's friends?'
The man sat up slowly. 'Fuck you, kraut,' he said biliously.
'Have you orders to follow me?' I tossed the card on to his lap and searched the other compartments of his wallet. 'Because you'd better ask for another assignment, Johnny. You're not very good at this sort of thing I've seen less conspicuous striptease dancers than you.' There wasn't much of interest in his wallet: some dollar scrip, a few Austrian schillings, a ticket for the Yank Movie Theatre, some stamps, a room card from Sacher's Hotel and a photograph of a pretty girl.
'Have you finished with that?' he said in German.
I tossed him the wallet.
'That's a nice-looking girl you have there, Johnny,' I said. 'Did you follow her as well? Maybe I should give you my snapshot. Write my address on the back. Make it easier for you.'
'Fuck you, kraut.'
'Johnny,' I said, starting back up the steps to Mariahilferstrasse, 'I'll bet you say that to all the girls.'
Chapter 15
Pichler lay under a massive piece of stone like some primitive car mechanic repairing a neolithic stone-axle, with the tools of his trade a hammer and a chisel held tight in his dusty, blood-stained hands. It was almost as if while carving the black rock's inscription he had paused for a moment to draw breath and decipher the words that seemed to emerge vertically from his chest. But no mason ever worked in such a position, at right angles to his legend. And draw breath he never would again, for although the human chest is sufficiently strong a cage for those soft, mobile pets that are the heart and lungs, it is easily crushed by something as heavy as half a tonne of polished marble.
It looked like an accident, but there was one way to be sure. Leaving Pichler in the yard where I had found him, I went into the office.
I retained very little memory of the dead man's description of his business-accounting system. To me, the niceties of double-entry bookkeeping are about as useful as a pair of brogue galoshes. But as someone who ran a business himself, albeit a small one, I had a rudimentary knowledge of the petty, fastidious way in which the details of one ledger are supposed to correspond with those in another. And it didn't take William Randolph Hearst to see that Pilcher's books had been altered, not by any subtle accounting, but by the simple expedient of tearing out a couple of pages. There was only one financial analysis that was worth a spit, and that was that Pichler's death had been anything but accidental.
Wondering whether his murderer had thought to steal the sketch-design for Dr Max Abs' headstone, as well as the relevant pages from the ledgers, I went back into the yard to see if I might be able to find it. I had a good look round, and after a few minutes discovered a number of dusty art-files propped up against a wall in the workshop at the back of the yard. I untied the first file and started to sort through the draughtsman's drawings, working quickly since I had no wish to be found searching the premises of a man who lay crushed to death less than ten metres away. And when at last I found the drawing I was looking for I gave it no more than a cursory glance before folding it up and slipping it into my coat pocket.
I caught a 71 back to town and went to the сafé Schwarzenberg, close to the tram terminus on the KSrtner Ring. I ordered a mTlange and then spread the drawing out on the table in front of me. It was about the size of a double-page spread in a newspaper, with the customer's name Max Abs clearly marked on an order copy stapled to the top right-hand corner of the paper.
The mark-up for the inscription read: 'SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF MARTIN ALBERS, BORN 1899, MARTYRED 9 APRIL 1945. BELOVED OF WIFE LENI, AND SONS MANFRED AND
ROLF. BEHOLD, I SHEW YOU A MYSTERY; WE SHALL NOT ALL SLEEP, BUT WE SHALL ALL BE
CHANGED, IN A MOMENT, IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE, AT THE LAST TRUMP: FOR THE
TRUMPET SHALL SOUND, AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED INCORRUPTIBLE, AND WE SHALL BE
CHANGED. I CORINTHIANS 15: 51-52.'
On Max Abs' order was written his address, but beyond the fact that the doctor had paid for a headstone in the name of a man who was dead a brother-in-law perhaps? and which had now occasioned the murder of the man who had carved it, I could not see that I had learned very much.
The waiter, wearing his grey frizzy hair on the back of his balding head like a halo, returning with the small tin tray that carried my mTlange and the glass of water customarily served with coffee in Viennese сafés. He glanced down at the drawing before I folded it away to make room for the tray, and said, with a sympathetic sort of smile: 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.'