Vienna Secrets

24

Professor Mathias stood between two mortuary tables. On one was the headless body, on the other the abomination of its disconnected head. He looked from one to the other. “Yes.” The syllable was prolonged, and its satisfied descent suggested sudden insight.

“What?” asked Rheinhardt.

“The head definitely belongs to the body,” replied the old professor.

Rheinhardt sighed loudly, betraying his irritation.

Mathias turned toward the inspector, and his eyes-enlarged behind the thick glass of his spectacles-delivered a tacit but powerful reproach.

“A rather important fact, I feel,” said the pathologist, pronouncing each syllable with precise and equal emphasis.

“But one that has already been established, Herr Professor!”

“Has it? Have you made a close examination of his trapezius, his levator scapulae, his arytenoid cartilage? I think not.”

“Why would anybody trouble to decapitate two people, mix up the parts, leave one chimera where it can be found, and conceal the other?”

“It’s no more absurd than bothering to decapitate anyone in the first place. After all, there are much more convenient ways of ending a life. Who is he, by the way?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“The wristwatch looks expensive.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Professor Mathias crouched down and rested his hands on his thighs. He stared at the man’s head, peering into the neck. Then, turning slowly-while maintaining his stance-he stared into the great, gaping hole between the man’s shoulders. He repeated this maneuver several times, while humming to himself. The tune wandered around a tonal hinterland before finally settling in a key that was rather too high for Professor Mathias. The upper notes broke up and became nothing more than hoarse croaking.

“Well, Rheinhardt?”

“I believe you are trying to sing Lachen und Weinen by Schubert.”

“Trying?”

“Your rendition of the opening phrase took certain liberties with the concept of key.”

Mathias shrugged. Then he raised his arm and stretched out his fingers in a manner reminiscent of a stage hypnotist. The tips of his fingers almost made contact with the interior of the dead man’s neck. Looking down his arm as if he were aiming a pistol, he closed one eye and began to rotate his wrist-first clockwise, then counterclockwise. As he did this, he muttered anatomical terms to himself: “Thyroid cartilage, cricothyroid muscle, fifth vertebra…”

Rheinhardt gazed across the morgue to the bank of square metal doors behind which, he knew, the dead had been stacked. He imagined their supine bodies, their bloodless lips and ice-block feet, the enfolding darkness, and the reek of decay. He imagined their brains dissolving, the last physical traces of recollection losing their integrity, and each skull filling with an insensate chemical sludge: memories of love and friendship, clear skies and the sound of rain, music, tears, and laughter-all reduced to nothing. The fate of all of us, he thought. Even his daughters, within whom the life force seemed so strong, and whose ebullience and flashing smiles seemed powered by an inexhaustible source of energy, they too would one day surrender their memories to an inexorable process of disintegration. At that moment the terrible sadness of the human condition was converted into a heavy weight that fell squarely on Rheinhardt’s shoulders. He became dimly aware of a querulous voice. Its reedy wheedling coaxed him out of his grim meditation like a snake charmer’s pipe.

“Wake up, Rheinhardt!”

“I’m sorry. I was thinking…”

The professor gave him an equivocal look, seasoned with just enough skepticism to suggest an unspoken (but intentional) slur.

“I said the method employed is identical.”

“What?”

“The monk you brought in two weeks ago. Exactly the same-the displacements suggest that the head was twisted off the body. Clockwise cranial rotation.”

Mathias rotated his hand to demonstrate the direction.

“How many men would it take to do this?”

“Difficult to say…”

“Could you hazard a guess?”

“I would prefer not to.”

Rheinhardt sighed again, a great expulsion of air that declared his patience was at an end.

“Oh, very well,” said the pathologist, grumbling and wiping his hands on his apron, even though they were perfectly clean. “Come closer, will you? That’s it. Bend down so you can take a good look. Good. Now… see here.” Mathias urged Rheinhardt to peer into the dead man’s neck. Under the bright electric light every detail was revealed with sickening clarity. Rheinhardt realized that-until that moment-he had never fully acknowledged what his eyes were seeing. An instinctive revulsion had made him gloss over the arabesques and flourishes of human flesh. He had only registered an impression of gory redness and felt with it a sympathetic horror, a vague tingling of imaginary pain. Now that he was faced with the stark reality, he realized that the interior of the human neck did not correspond with the sketchy representation that had hitherto occupied his mind, that of a hollow tube down which food and air could pass. In fact, the neck was complex, and dense with glistening slabs of meat.

“Look at these muscles. See how thick they are… and look at this tissue here.” Mathias pulled at a flap of rubbery white gristle. “See how elastic it is? Have you ever seen a fat man hang? No? Well, the neck often stretches. It doesn’t tear.” Mathias released the elongated sinew, and it snapped back, wetly. “What are you doing, Rheinhardt? Don’t look away. I’m trying to explain! Now… if I were to pick up that saw and cut through the neck to create a clean transverse section, what would it look like? I’ll tell you: the flat end of a substantial ham. Now, let us return to your question, which might be expressed in another form: How many men would it take to tear a large joint of meat apart?”

“It would take quite a few, wouldn’t it?”

Mathias gave his tacit assent by raising an eyebrow.

“And it would take time,” Rheinhardt added.

“Of course.”

“Yet the Piarist monk and this man were both killed in conspicuous locations, on open concourses next to street lamps! They must have been able to achieve these decapitations very quickly. Otherwise they would have risked being caught.”

“Then you are looking for two exceptionally strong men… or a gang of some kind. Although…” Mathias’s fingers circumnavigated the ragged perimeter of the giant wound, occasionally lifting the repugnant skirt of skin. “I can’t help thinking about that poor chap I told you about, the one who got killed by a bear when I was doing national service. If this man’s clothes were torn, and there were scratches…”

“You’d say he’d been mauled by a wild animal.”

“Precisely.”

Rheinhardt frowned. “But his clothes haven’t been torn.”

“No.”

“And an angry bear running loose in Vienna would surely have come to someone’s attention by now.”

“Indeed,” said Mathias. The two men looked at each other, neither of them very sure what the other was thinking. Mathias broke the silence. “It was only an observation, Rheinhardt! I wasn’t suggesting that you should go to the zoo to look for suspects!”

The pathologist rolled the head over and riffled through the hair, as if looking for nits. He discovered a laceration on the crown.

“Again-just like the other one, just like the monk. He was struck on the back of the head.”

“What with?”

“Something blunt. That’s all I can say.” Professor Mathias righted the head and stroked the wrinkled brow. He opened both of the eyes, and then closed them again. “‘There is a gentle sleep,’” he whispered, “‘Where sweet peace dwells, Where quiet rest heals the weary soul’s sorrow.’”

“You have me there,” said Rheinhardt.

“‘Secret Grief,’ by Ernst Koch.”