It was as if, when they looked at me, they ran newsreel film of Belsen and Buchenwald inside their heads. And what was in their eyes was a question: how could you have allowed it to happen? How could you have let that sort of thing go on?
Perhaps, for several generations at least, when other nations look us in the eye, it will always be with this same unspoken question in their hearts.
Chapter 38
It was a pleasant September morning when, wearing an ill-fitting suit lent to me by the nurses at the military hospital, I returned to my pension in Skodagasse.
The owner, Frau Blum-Weiss greeted me warmly, informed me that my luggage was stored safely in her basement, handed me a note which had arrived not half an hour before, and asked me if I would care to have some breakfast. I told her I would, and having thanked her for looking after my belongings, inquired if I owed any money.
'Dr Liebl settled everything, Herr Gunther,' she said. 'But if you would like to take your old rooms again, that will be all right. They are vacant.'
Since I had no idea when I might be able to return to Berlin, I said I would.
'Did Dr Liebl leave me any message?' I asked, already knowing the answer. He had made no attempt to contact me during my stay in the military hospital.
'No,' she said, 'no message.'
Then she showed me back to my old rooms and had her son bring my luggage up to me. I thanked her again and said that I would breakfast just as soon as I had changed into my own clothes.
'Everything's there,' she said as her son heaved my bags on to the luggage stand. 'I had a receipt for the few things that the police took away: papers, that kind of thing.' Then she smiled sweetly, wished me another pleasant stay, and closed the door behind her. Typically Viennese, she showed no desire to know what had befallen me since last I had stayed in her house.
As soon as she had left the room, I opened my bags and found, almost to my astonishment and much to my relief, that I was still in possession of my $2,500 in cash and my several cartons of cigarettes. I lay on the bed and smoked a Memphis with something approaching delight.
I opened the note while I ate my breakfast. There was only one short sentence and that was written in Cyrillic: 'Meet me at the Kaisergruft at eleven o'clock this morning.' The note was unsigned but then it hardly needed to be. When Frau Blum-Weiss returned to my table to clear away the breakfast things, I asked her who had delivered it.
'It was just a schoolboy, Herr Gunther,' she said, collecting the crockery on a tray, 'an ordinary schoolboy.'
'I have to meet someone,' I explained. 'At the Kaisergruft. Where is that?'
'The Imperial Crypt?' She wiped a hand on a well-starched pinafore as if she had been about to meet the Kaiser himself, and then crossed herself. Mention of royalty always seemed to make the Viennese doubly respectful. 'Why, it's at the Church of the Capuchins on the west side of Neuer Markt. But go early, Herr Gunther. It's only open in the morning, from ten to twelve. I'm sure you'll find it very interesting.'
I smiled and nodded gratefully. There was no doubting that I was likely to find it very interesting indeed.
Neuer Markt hardly looked like a market square at all. A number of tables had been laid out like a сafé terrace. There were customers who weren't drinking coffee, waiters who did not seem inclined to serve them and little sign of any сafé from where coffee might have been obtained. It seemed quite makeshift, even by the easy standards of a reconstructed Vienna. There were also a few people just watching, almost as if a crime had occurred and everyone was waiting for the police. But I paid it little regard and, hearing the eleven o'clock chimes of the nearby clock tower, hurried on to the church.
It was as well for whichever zoologist who had named the famous monkey that the Capuchin monks' style of habit was rather more remarkable than their plainish church in Vienna. Compared with most other places of worship in that city, the Kapuzinerkirche looked as if they must have been flirting with Calvinism at the time that it was built. Either that or the Order's treasurer had run off with the money for the stonemasons; there wasn't one carving on it. The church was sufficiently ordinary for me to walk past the place without even recognizing it.
I might have done so again but for a group of American soldiers who were hanging around in a doorway and from whom I overheard a reference to 'the stiffs'. My new acquaintance with English as it was spoken by the nurses at the military hospital told me that this group was intent on visiting the same place as I was.
I paid a schilling entrance to a grumpy old monk and entered a long, airy corridor that I took to be a part of the monastery. A narrow stairwell led down into the vault.
It was in fact, not one vault, but eight interconnecting vaults and much less gloomy than I had expected. The interior was simple, being in plain white with the walls faced partly in marble, and contrasted strongly with the opulence of its contents.
Here were the remains of over a hundred Habsburgs and their famous jaws, although the guidebook which I had thought to bring with me said that their hearts were pickled in urns located underneath St Stephen's Cathedral. It was as much evidence for royal mortality as you could have found anywhere north of Cairo. Nobody, it seemed, was missing except the Archduke Ferdinand, who was buried at Graz, no doubt piqued at the rest of them for having insisted that he visit Sarajevo.
The cheaper end of the family, from Tuscany, were stacked in simple lead coffins, one on top of the other like bottles in a wine-rack, at the far end of the longest vault. I half expected to see an old man prising a couple of them open to try out a new mallet and set of stakes. Naturally enough the Habsburgs with the biggest egos rated the grandest sarcophagi. These huge, morbidly ornamented copper caskets seemed to lack nothing but caterpillar tracks and gun turrets for them to have captured Stalingrad. Only the Emperor Joseph II had shown anything like restraint in his choice of box; and only a Viennese guidebook could have described the copper casket as 'excessively simple'.
I found Colonel Poroshin in the Franz Joseph vault. He smiled warmly when he saw me and clapped me on the shoulder: 'You see, I was right. You can read Cyrillic after all.'
'Maybe you can read my mind as well.'
'For sure,' he said. 'You are wondering what we could possibly have to say to each other, given all that has happened. Least of all in this place. You are thinking that in a different place, you might try to kill me.'
'You should be on the stage, Palkovnik. You could be another Professor Schaffer.'
'You are mistaken, I think. Professor Schaffer is a hypnotist, not a mind-reader.' He slapped his gloves on his open palm with the air of one who had scored a point. 'I am not a hypnotist, Herr Gunther.'
'Don't underestimate yourself. You managed to make me believe that I was a private investigator and that I should come here to Vienna to try and clear Emil Becker of murder. A hypnotic fantasy if ever I heard one.'
'A powerful suggestion, perhaps,' said Poroshin, 'but you were acting under your own free will.' He sighed. 'A pity about poor Emil. You're wrong if you think that I didn't hope you could prove him innocent. But to borrow a chess term, it was my Vienna gambit: it has a peaceable first appearance, but the sequel is full of subtleties and aggressive possibilities. All that one requires is a strong and valiant knight.'
'That was me, I suppose.'
'Tochno (exactly). And now the game is won.'
'Do you mind explaining how?'
Poroshin pointed to the casket on the right of the more elevated one containing the Emperor Franz Joseph.
'The Crown Prince Rudolf,' he said. 'He committed suicide in the famous hunting lodge at Mayerling. The general story is well-known but the details and the motives remain unclear. Just about the only thing we can be certain of is that he lies in this very tomb. For me, to know this for sure is enough. But not everyone whom we believe to have committed suicide is really quite as dead as poor Rudolf. Take Heinrich Mnller. To prove him still alive, now that was something worthwhile. The game was won when we knew that for sure.'