Needless to say, Mrs. Haven, this would prove a mistake.
The first name on the list was Moritz Schlick, lecturer in applied physics, who soon found it impossible to discharge his duties. The fact that Professor Schlick wasn’t Jewish at all, but the son of a defrocked priest from Salzburg, was taken by the student body — and even by some of his colleagues, once momentum had built — as one of the more damning points of evidence against him. Vienna’s beloved former mayor Karl Lueger had once famously declared, “I’ll decide for myself who’s a Jew and who isn’t!” and the university humbly took its cue from him. Within a month Schlick had resigned.
Nothing could have been more in character for Kaspar’s father-in-law than to refuse to acknowledge the mustering clouds. When Sonja confronted him — that same week, over dinner — he denied that the hubbub concerned him at all. “My boys,” he declared, “are entirely too busy for that sort of nonsense. I’ve fielded every conceivable question in the course of my lectures, from the cause of the aurora borealis to the relative merits of pince-nez and monocles; but I’ve never been asked whether Copernicus ate shellfish or matzo.”
Sonja, who’d heard all this before, kissed him sadly on the cheek and changed the subject. The outrage occurred the next morning.
Though his duties at the university were lighter than they’d been in the years of his prime, the professor was still in the habit of arriving at dawn. It afforded him a sharp, childish pleasure to greet his colleagues with a businesslike nod as they shuffled groggily past his office, where he was already hip-deep in the morning’s work; besides, one never knew when a student might drop in to talk. Young men were known to keep irregular hours — young physicists, especially — and he kept his door unlocked accordingly. From time to time, on arriving in the morning, he’d find a hastily scrawled note on his desk, deposited at God knew what small hour of the night. His own son-in-law had been a great one for such notes, he remembered, as had the boy’s brother — that gifted, unfortunate other.
The morning of February 16, 1927, found the professor arriving at the Department of Physics a quarter hour later than usual, having missed his customary trolley by a nose. The floors had been waxed during the night and his boot heels snapped agreeably with each step. His door was two-thirds closed, just as he’d left it, but a pistachio-colored envelope lay squarely on the blotter of his desk. He glanced back down the corridor before stepping inside, savoring the charged, monastic silence. No one else was in sight.
The note inside the envelope differed from those the professor generally received. First, it was unsigned; second, it was all but illegible; and last, it bore no address or signature of any kind. The text — once he’d deciphered its scrawl with the aid of his magnifying lenses — only added to his puzzlement:
THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, A GENTLEMAN ONCE SAID.
WHO WAS THIS GENTLEMAN?
A playing-card-sized scrap of paper had been included in the envelope, in accordance with custom, on which to compose his reply. He found himself sitting stock-still for an extravagant length of time, looking from his pen cup — a potbellied clay vase, meant for tulips or lilies, that Sonja had made as a child — to the uncommonly dusty air above his head. If an answer hovered there he did not see it.
The notes from his boys had taken all manner of guises over the years, but none had ever been presented as a riddle. Later, it would occur to the professor that he hadn’t been able to place the handwriting — though it did seem familiar — and this fact would appear significant; at the time, however, the question of authorship was immaterial. Silbermann relished a brainteaser as much as the next man of science, and eventually, after a great deal of deliberation, the germ of an answer began to take shape. He sat cautiously forward, mindful not to jar his idea loose too soon, and reached for his favorite pen.
Had anyone else been in the building at that hour, they’d have borne witness to a sound coming out of the department chair emeritus’s office unlike any he’d been known to make before. A quarter hour later, when Fräulein Landsmann, his secretary, shuffled past his open door, she found the professor slumped in his armchair, holding his right arm daintily away from his body. It was covered in blood, which gave her a nasty turn — but the blood was not Professor Silbermann’s. Fräulein Landsmann was a practical and clearheaded woman, of Tyrolean sheepherding stock. Once she’d established that the professor was unhurt, she helped him up and led him to the lavatory. He thanked her in an airy voice, praising her goodwill and promptness, then asked her — in the same cordial tone — to dispose of the contents of the pen cup on his desk.
Fräulein Landsmann did as directed, whereupon she was heard by the professor to produce a sound quite like the one he’d made himself. At the bottom of the pen cup, in a heap of clotted blood and cartilage, lay the fetus of a freshly stillborn pig.
* * *
Much was made of this episode, needless to say, in spite of the university’s attempts to keep it quiet. Expressions of youthful high feeling were certainly not unheard of, even in the Department of Physics; but none had yet been so lyrical, so enigmatic, so poetically rich in sign and symbol. In the days and weeks that followed, the significance of the event was passionately debated by students and faculty alike. The choice of pig flesh was perhaps understandable, given Silbermann’s creed; but why a fetus, with its connotations of nativity and promise? Members of the Agglomeration were consulted, as one might call an expert witness in a court proceeding; but to everyone’s surprise — even their own, it appeared — they were as baffled as anyone else. Eventually, some deep thinker pointed out that the fetus in question appeared to have been stillborn, which went some way toward settling the issue: the pig was a totem of waste, of abortion, of a race’s grand potential unfulfilled. The question of authorship, however, persisted. And what to make of the riddle? And why in the professor’s pen cup, of all places?
Kaspar saw little point in coming forward, and Sonja was inclined to agree. They never discussed the details of what had occurred, or why her father had been singled out, or how things could have come to such a pass. They only spoke about what should be done.
Quietly and efficiently, while speculation raged among his own students and colleagues (and an official inquiry into the affront was being indefinitely postponed), Kaspar conducted an investigation of his own. He spent another week at Trattner’s, visited the Bemmelmans villa — which he found boarded up for the winter — and even paid a call on the schoolteacher, Bleichling, who promptly broke down in tears, as though he’d been rehearsing expressly for Kaspar’s visit, and confessed that Herr von Toula had broken off all contact years before. After a full month of searching, Kaspar was forced to admit that he’d found no evidence whatsoever that his brother had returned to Vienna.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not you found evidence,” Sonja said. “We know he was here, because of what happened to Papa.”
Kaspar pointed out to her, as gently as possible, that Waldemar appeared to have accomplices — some shadowy fraternity at his beck and call — and that anyone could have delivered the note. Sonja countered that it made no difference.