‘Your wife is as stubborn as a donkey,’ Herr Meisner grumbled. With that, he got up and stormed out of the room. Herr Meisner, however, would not be going back to his hotel, for he was staying with them. In the past, such visits had been enjoyable. Now, however, it was one more added strain on their domestic calm.
Herr Meisner and his parents were like oil and water. At first meeting a few days ago, the von Werthens had taken one look at Herr Meisner’s long, almost rabbinical beard, and another at his birth gift — a pair of silver rattles shaped like miniature dreidels — and it was as if they were sea turtles, pulling their necks back into their carapaces.
Herr Meisner, a successful shoe manufacturer from Linz, was also one of the foremost Talmudic scholars in Austria, while Werthen’s parents, offspring, the both of them, of Jewish merchants and bankers, had hidden their Jewish ancestry away in a tightly locked pantry of family secrets. Baptized Protestants, they even had a ‘von’ to their name, earned in 1876, and which Werthen himself refused to use. He and Berthe both despised the hypocrisies of the Austrian social system and its so-called Dienstadeln, or service nobility, and were also quite indifferent to religious matters.
At tea the day of Herr Meisner’s arrival, with Berthe holding the gurgling Frieda in her lap, Werthen’s parents queried, almost in a chorus, ‘When is the baptism to be?’
It was as if somebody had broken wind in the august Musikvereinsaal. Silence reigned for a full minute, and then Werthen’s mother began bubbling on about the guest list.
‘We have no such plans,’ Werthen said, hoping to head off what he sensed might quickly become a domestic crisis.
‘No plans?’ his father blustered. ‘Why, boy, you can’t raise the little darling as a heathen. Nor can you deny us the great fun of mounting a celebration. That is the prerogative of grandparents.’
Herr Meisner had cleared his throat at that moment. Werthen hoped for words of wisdom from this wise man who had become a true friend, but the adults just were not doing their job.
Looking at Berthe, Herr Meisner said, ‘I was rather hoping you might decide to raise Frieda in the faith of your fathers.’
Berthe rolled her eyes and was about to comment with the biting sarcasm Werthen knew so well, when Herr Meisner, the scholar, the man of rectitude, common sense, and affability, added further oil.
‘I know it is what your mother would have wished.’
Her mother had died when Berthe was ten. She never spoke of it, nor had Werthen ever heard Herr Meisner mention his deceased wife before.
Lines had been drawn after that. Tension ruled the household.
Now Werthen sat gingerly as if there were a bomb under his chair. He unfolded his napkin and placed it in his lap.
‘Aren’t you going to ask?’ Berthe said.
‘I imagine you will tell me when you want to. Besides, I have already had my own domestic crisis.’
‘He still insists on an Aliya for Frieda.’
Werthen looked at her blankly.
‘A formal naming ceremony and blessing at a temple. He wants her to have a Jewish name, too.’
‘Like you,’ Werthen joked.
‘But I actually do,’ she said. ‘I just never use it.’
‘What is it?’ Werthen asked, wondering for a moment what other things he did not know about his wife.
‘Rachel.’
‘A nice name. I suppose we could add Sara to Frieda’s name. Or Ruth.’
‘It is not the name, darling. .’
He nodded. ‘I know. Why can’t our parents behave like adults?’
Frau Blatschky, her eyes still red, came with the Gulasch and they settled in to the meal, forgetting their troublesome parents for the time. Finally, Werthen mentioned the new case.
‘Wittgenstein,’ she said. ‘Impressive clients.’
‘One could get lost in their town house.’ He went on to explain how far he had gotten in the investigation.
‘So what do you think happened to the young man?’
‘I think this Herr Praetor may be able to clarify matters.’
‘That name sounds familiar to me. Other than his surgeon father, I mean.’
‘The priest at the Theresianum thought he may have gone into journalism.’
‘Yes,’ she said, putting her spoon down. ‘That’s where I’ve heard the name. He writes for the Arbeiter Zeitung.’
‘An interesting place for a former student of the Theresianum to publish his articles.’
‘Perhaps he is a displaced socialist, like your wife.’
Finally, Werthen was beginning to feel they had their life back. It was moments like this with Berthe that he longed for: the small teases, the familiarity, the communal understanding.
Six
After lunch, and after finding a few moments to dandle the just awakened Frieda on his knee, Werthen returned to the Wittgenstein affair. He placed a telephone call to the Vienna city morgue and ascertained that there was one unidentified body that might fit the description as well as the time period that Werthen supplied. There was nothing for it but to go there in person and make a preliminary identification. If the body in question looked closely enough like Hans Wittgenstein, then he would have to get a family member to make a conclusive identification. He hoped it would not be so.
This afternoon he decided he had already had enough exercise and took an Einspanner, a cab drawn by one horse, to the General Hospital, in whose basement the city morgue was located. The snow was gone now, but the temperature was once again dropping. February could be a quarrelsome, unsettled month in Vienna with sudden and unaccountable changes in weather. Werthen enjoyed the three-four time the horse’s hooves kept as he was rattled along the Ringstrasse to Alsergrund.
Since first coming to the morgue with his colleague and sometime collaborator, Doktor Hanns Gross, in 1898, he had made his own personal connections with the director, the unfortunately named Doktor Starb. Tall and jovial, Starb, whose surname came from the past tense of sterben, to die, hardly looked the part of director of a morgue, dressed as he was nattily in a checked morning coat and butter-yellow tie, but when it came to death, he was all business. He took Werthen personally to the drawers of unclaimed bodies.
‘This one was found at the harness racing track at Freudenau,’ Starb explained as they entered the chill of the basement rooms. ‘Poor chap seems to have been despondent about something. Though the track is closed down now for the winter, it could be a symbolic act. Perhaps he’d lost money on the races last fall.’
Werthen had neglected to ask about the means of death earlier and thus did not know it was a suicide. He hoped it was not a messy one; his stomach for gore was not the strongest.
Sensing Werthen’s thoughts, Starb added, ‘Shot himself. We’ll examine the good side of the head. Who is it you’re looking for?’
Werthen shrugged. ‘The family does not wish to make it public.’
‘Ahh,’ Starb said. ‘Important, then?’
‘Prominent,’ Werthen allowed.
He took the family photograph out of his pocket as Starb found the proper drawer and pulled it out. The corpse came out feet first, and Werthen saw that the body was about the proper height. He caught a flash of dark hair as the head, turned to one side, came into view. A slight moustache, as well. This was not how he had expected this to end.
He moved around the body, getting closer to the head and making sure he kept the photograph concealed from Starb, who would surely recognize Karl Wittgenstein in the family grouping.
Werthen bent over the head, looking closely at the face in profile. But having never met Hans Wittgenstein, he was not sure. The photograph he had was of a full face, but obviously the other side of this man’s head had been shattered by the self-inflicted wound.
Still, he needed to ask. ‘Is there a frontal view?’