J. Jones - The Third Place

‘It’s all right, Karl,’ Berthe said. She was seated on the leather couch next to him in the sitting room at their Josefstadterstrasse apartment. Gross sat opposite them in an armchair. ‘Inspector Drechsler won’t turn you in. I imagine he is merely feeling some pique at not being included in the initial investigation, especially so now that it seems to have grown to two murders.’

She was right, Werthen suddenly realized. Not about Drechsler necessarily, but about the murder of Herr Karl. There were two murders to investigate and clearly they were connected. He’d been so concerned about possible legal consequences of withholding vital information from the police that he had not given a thought to what the death of Herr Falk meant for the investigation of Herr Karl’s murder. The head waiter’s murderer must have felt threatened. Somehow he, or she, had discovered that the killing was witnessed. Falk, the lone witness, had to die. What the murderer had not known, however, was that Falk could not identify the perpetrator, not even the gender of the killer.

But how had this information gotten out? Only he and Herr Otto knew. Falk swore he had not told his wife. Had Herr Otto told his wife, Falk’s aunt? Had hers been the loose tongue?

And then Werthen realized he had also told his wife.

‘Yes,’ Gross intoned. ‘It does put a different slant on things, this second murder. This is beginning to catch my interest.’

‘I am so pleased for you, Gross.’

‘Sarcasm, my dear Werthen, does not become you. I merely wished to acknowledge the importance that this is taking on. It is unfortunate that both our talents are required by a higher authority.’

Neither spoke for a moment. Werthen still felt guilty that he had not shared the information about the bullet casings they had unearthed. He did not want Berthe worrying about him and knowing that an assassination attempt on the emperor was being arranged by Serbia, and that he and Gross were the ones duty bound to prevent it would do just that. Verdammt. It was worrying enough for him.

Berthe looked from Gross to her husband. ‘Are you waiting for a volunteer? I should think Inspector Drechsler capable of handling the matter. After all,’ she said directly to Werthen now, ‘you only took it on because Falk was afraid of being implicated. You’ve done much of the early leg work. Drechsler can surely carry on with your notes in hand.’

Werthen nodded, but without much conviction.

‘I feel somehow responsible for Falk’s death,’ he said. ‘And I am sure Herr Otto blames me, but he is being too much of a gentleman to say so. However, if I had continued with the investigation, Herr Falk might still be alive today.’

‘Turnips and pocket watches, Werthen. No good comes of traveling down the road of what-ifs.’

Then, to Berthe: ‘And you, Frau Meisner, sorely underestimate your talents. Look at the Lipizzaner matter.’

Yes, she thought, and look at me the other day, humiliated by that frightful Dumbroski woman.

‘What is it you would have me do, Gross?’ she asked.

‘Gross is right,’ Werthen said. ‘You do not give yourself enough credit for good work. And it would make me feel less of a shirker. Perhaps you could just monitor matters. See if Drechsler follows through with the threads of the investigation. Who knows what priority Meindl will give these murders? The victims are not wealthy industrialists or members of the aristocracy, after all.’

‘Well,’ Berthe said, ‘if you put it like that …’

‘Marvelous,’ Gross boomed. ‘That is settled then. Gather your papers, Werthen. We’ll go to deal with matters at the Praesidium.’

‘I do not care to listen to your lies, Herr Schmidt, or whatever your name is. I am finished with that business,’ she said to him the next morning over coffee.

‘As I am also, I assure you,’ Klavan said. He paused a moment, then smiled as he addressed her, ‘My dear Princess Dumbroski.’

‘Don’t ruin things for me here, I warn you. I have a new life.’

‘You can never really leave the old life behind, Lisette.’

‘Don’t call me that. Never call me that again.’

‘But we had some times, didn’t we? Remember the French field marshal? The German war minister?’

It was as if she relented for moment, remembering those sweet victories, those powerful men brought to their rickety knees by a little tart from Trieste posing as a virginal prospect for the nunnery or a daughter of an impoverished duke willing to sell her tender flesh to save her poor father and his estates.

The stories had changed from man to man, but in each she had been the untouched, unsullied virgin sexually debased by an aged roue, who also happened to have access to sensitive information regarding his country’s military formations, battle plans and mobilization schemes.

Klavan had been her handler in those escapades, unwillingly at first, for he felt like a pimp working such entrapments. However, he soon learned to share Lisette’s malicious sense of pride in ruining the lives of these pitiful old men who had gladly ruined – as they supposed – the frail sweet flower offered them. How shocking and degrading for them it had been to discover their old man fantasies had been faithfully recorded in photographs secretly taken at their assignations.

Confronted with the images of their own perversity, each had blustered and spluttered at first. But threatened with scandal and social ruin, each had eventually capitulated, and served up the morsels of secret information St Petersburg required.

All but Count Bartczak in Warsaw. He had taken the ‘honorable’ way out, leaving his body hanging from the rafters of his mansion for wife and grown-up children to discover instead of providing information on the border defenses.

Lisette Orzov was her name, of unknown or at least unremarkable birth, picked out of a Trieste brothel by a local Russian agent for certain horizontal skills she exhibited. It helped that she appeared to have a preference for those of her own sex, for old man fantasies tended to be in that direction as well. Promised a way out of the brothel, Lisette was only too eager to take the chance, Klavan remembered.

There was something in Lisette’s eagerness to blot out her personal history that reminded Klavan of his own journey, becoming an agent for the tsar. For her it was her parents selling her to a brothel-keeper at age fourteen. For Klavan it was a career as a concert violinist destroyed by the jealousy of other wealthy students at the music academy in St Petersburg. He was a scholarship student, sponsored by a wealthy patron from near his village by the Baltic who’d heard the youth playing at a local church. But the privileged sons of the upper class at the academy couldn’t stand the idea of a poor little son of amber fishers outstripping them in their lessons. One day they had cornered him and broke both his little fingers, ruining his possibilities of playing anything but a gun or knife. He looked down at his ruined hands, at the little fingers which had healed wrong and still jutted out from his hands at an awkward angle. And it was a gun or knife that these hands had subsequently learned to master, as his patron had recommended him thereafter to a very different sort of academy: the tsar’s training school of secret agents.

Klavan had jumped at the chance, just as Lisette had at her opportunity for escape.

Her voice brought him back from these evil thoughts. ‘In future I am Princess Dumbroski if you desire to stay under this roof. And you perhaps are a long-lost cousin, a black sheep sort of cousin. Agreed?’

He nodded with a smile.

‘That is settled, then,’ she said. ‘Now I shall take myself off to fencing practice. And I meant what I said about not spoiling this new life for me. I do not wish to know the nature of your mission in Vienna. I simply do not want it brought to my doorstep.’