J. Jones - The Third Place

In turn, Gross and Werthen kissed the air an inch above the proffered hand and took their leave. Franzl was waiting in the front hall, his small satchel of belongings at his side. As they were leaving, Fraulein Anna came tripping down the hall.

‘Off so soon, poppet?’ she said, a look of surprise on her face.

Franzl looked confused.

Werthen tried to cover for him, saying, ‘Frau Schratt has decided she needs an older assistant in the kitchen. We agreed to take him back into town.’

A vacuous enough explanation, but it seemed to satisfy Fraulein Anna, who bent over and gave Franzl a hug and kiss on the cheek.

‘Take care of yourself, poppet.’

He sniffled. ‘You, too.’

Franzl did not speak a word the entire ride back to Habsburgergasse.

They meet at the Hofburg that same afternoon. Gross was last in Montenuovo’s city office on the matter involving Court Opera Director Gustav Mahler. He was joined this time by Werthen, who was gazing out of the fine lace curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows, through the embroidered Habsburg eagle in the center of the curtain to the Imperial Chancellery across the courtyard. The emperor had his town apartments there. Gross wondered if he were at the Hofburg or at Schonbrunn, or perhaps even at Frau Schratt’s paying the good lady the attention she required.

As he was mulling this over, the hidden door in a wall of bookcases opened and Montenuovo made a dramatic appearance. Today he was dressed in the quasi-military style of his office with embroidered blue tunic and sword at his side, supported by a broad red sash from his right shoulder to his left hip.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please be seated,’ the diminutive prince said as he took the large chair on the opposite side of a massive rosewood desk. ‘I understand from my aide that congratulations are in order. Splendid work.’

‘Rather mundane, actually,’ Gross said, again taking the lead and leaving Werthen in the role of Greek chorus. ‘The letter had merely been misplaced.’

Montenuovo formed a steeple with his fingertips touching upraised in front of his chest. He tapped the fingertips together rhythmically.

‘Misplaced?’

‘Put into another folder by accident.’

‘I see.’ He said it as if he were blind.

Silence for a moment.

‘You brought the letter, I assume.’ The prince reached across the desk as if to take it in hand.

‘Actually, I left it with Frau Schratt. She and the emperor can determine what is to be done with it, I imagine.’

Montenuovo drew his hand back in. ‘ If it does not go missing again in the meantime.’

Gross shook his head. ‘I do not believe that will happen again. And now perhaps, Prince Montenuovo, you can tell me what this is really about. In lieu of payment, I would greatly prefer the truth.’

The prince leaned back in his chair, smiling at Gross. ‘I see why they call you the father of criminalistics. Tell me, what leads you to this deduction?’

Werthen eyed Gross: he would like to know, as well, for it was the first that he heard of this.

Gross cleared his throat as if preparing to deliver a university lecture.

‘It was patently obvious from the first day we met. You told us that the emperor needed our services because of the delicate nature of the missing letter and because he did not want to appear to have feet of clay to his junior officers. Nonsense and piffle. He is the emperor: he commands, the others obey. No, there is only one reason that he would call in an outsider such as myself …’

Werthen noted his absence in the outsider category. Gross might be a great criminologist, but he was even a greater egotist.

‘And what would that be, Doktor Gross?’ Montenuovo obligingly queried.

‘That he cannot trust even his inner circle. That there must be a reason for such distrust-’

‘But you are assuming that he does trust me?’ Again the steepling of the fingertips.

‘Most certainly. You are the one man he can trust, Prince. You would have the most to lose in professional status were anything to happen to the emperor.’

Montenuovo displayed no reaction to this rather demeaning comment: no one else would have the prince.

‘And that is what this is all about, is it not, Prince? Something happening to the emperor. As with the unfortunate accident with his royal carriage two weeks ago.’

The fingertips bounced with increased tempo until the hands intertwined and were lowered to the desk.

‘Very good, Doktor Gross.’

Werthen had finally had enough. ‘What’s all this about, Gross?’

The criminologist turned to him. ‘A theory, my dear Werthen. A theory.’

‘Would you care to appraise me of it? As usual, I had the mistaken notion we were working together.’

‘I should rather the prince do that,’ Gross said with that irritating superciliousness that made Werthen want to crush the man’s hat.

Gross turned to Prince Montenuovo. ‘Am I correct, Prince?’

An appreciative nod from the small man. ‘There was an unfortunate incident a couple of weeks ago, yes. The royal carriage was overturned when a fiaker ran into it.’

‘There was rather more to it than that, as I understand,’ Gross said.

‘But how could you know any of this, Gross?’ Werthen asked. ‘You were in Prague two weeks ago. I live in Vienna and had no knowledge of such an accident.’

To which remark Gross merely rolled his eyes.

‘So you keep informants about,’ Werthen said.

‘Otherwise known as assistants. Clever journalist chaps who are kept from publishing the news they gather but who do not mind earning a few crowns to pass on valuable information to me.’

‘It seems you have your own network of spies at work, Doktor Gross,’ Montenuovo said.

‘Assistants,’ he repeated.

Werthen wondered if one of these assistants might not be his secretary’s beau, Herr Sonnenthal, journalist for the Arbeiter Zeitung.

‘All the better,’ Montenuovo said. ‘You will need them. You are absolutely correct that the emperor does not trust his inner circle. He has even begun to worry that there may be a traitor in his Trabant Life Guards. The incident of the royal carriage was a bit unnerving. One can only thank the Lord that, at the last moment, he decided to walk. That is why, when this letter went missing-’

‘The emperor thought it was another plot to do him harm,’ Gross finished.

‘Quite,’ the prince said.

‘Please forgive this poor benighted individual,’ Werthen interrupted, exasperated at being excluded from the facts. ‘But are you saying that someone is trying to kill the emperor?’

‘Concision, Werthen,’ Gross said as a proud parent might to a ten-year-old. ‘You are its master.’

‘It would appear so,’ Prince Montenuovo affirmed. ‘The carriage incident was, as Doktor Gross indicated, rather more complicated than a mere accident. Armed men stormed out of the fiaker in broad daylight at the gates of Schonbrunn, threw open the imperial carriage doors and, discovering it was empty, killed the driver and lone guard instead. They most brutally and brazenly emptied their revolvers into the two men, then reloaded and fired off a fusillade at approaching guards from the palace.’

‘Why an empty carriage?’ Werthen said.

‘Pardon me?’ the prince asked.

‘He means,’ Gross said, ‘why would the carriage proceed when the emperor had decided to go on foot to his nearby destination? One assumes he was on his way to Frau Schratt’s?’

A curt nod from Montenuovo. ‘And it is standard protocol to vary the means of transport.’

‘In other words, when the imperial carriage draws down a Viennese street it might very well be empty.’