Vienna Blood

5

The carriage crossed a streetcar rail and veered off in the direction of Spittelberg. Rheinhardt and Haussmann were preoccupied with their private thoughts-neither of them had been very talkative.

Out of the window, Rheinhardt saw briefly the impressive neo-Renaissance edifice of the Justizpalast. He silently implored the gods of jurisprudence for assistance. A maniac capable of performing such appalling acts of violence must be stopped immediately.

The carriage turned sharply along a narrow cobbled street.

“Spittelberg,” said Haussmann.

The contrast with the palatial law courts, only a short distance away, could not have been more marked. Although the houses had a certain antique charm, they were mostly dilapidated after generations of neglect. The buildings were of uneven height and size and the stucco paintwork was faded. But vestigial streaks of pink, ocher, and blue betrayed a more colorful and prosperous history.

The carriage negotiated a tight corner and rattled down a gloomy alley that was hemmed in on both sides by ramshackle dwellings. Washing lines hung overhead like oversize threads of spider's silk. Rheinhardt imagined a giant arachnid, its legs folded around its fat abdomen, waiting to pounce. The carriage escaped the squalid street and entered a small square. On one side was an inn, and nearby was a corner of plain walls around which ran a continuous undecorated metal balcony. In front of the inn was a melancholy fountain-a stunted black spire out of which feeble jets of water spurted into separate basins. The carriage turned again, but within moments the horses began to slow.

The driver had had no trouble identifying the detectives’ destination. It was a low two-story house, squashed between larger buildings and guarded by two constables. The men were blowing into their hands and stamping their feet on the ground, trying to stay warm. On the other side of the road, an elderly gentleman in a threadbare coat, scarf, and Bohemian hat had stopped to observe. He leaned on a knotted stick, his crooked back bent at a cruel angle. Apart from this solitary tatterdemalion, there were no other members of the general public present.

The carriage wheels ground to a halt.

Rheinhardt opened the vehicle's door, stepped down, and looked at the houses. The relics of more salubrious times were now clearly visible: relief cherub heads stared out blankly into space from below several window ledges. One building had a domed recess above the front door that was occupied by a figure of Saint Joseph, his aureole represented by radiating metal strips. A plump but weather-beaten infant Jesus was balanced in the crook of his left arm.

The snow was getting heavier: the air was growing dense with feathery flakes. A curious hush seemed to have fallen over Spittelberg, a magical stillness somehow enhanced by a vague impression of constant, mesmeric descent. The horse snorted and shook its bit. One of the constables advanced, his sabre dragging over the cobbles.

“Security office?”

“Yes. I am Detective Inspector Rheinhardt, and this is my assistant, Haussmann.” The constable bowed and clicked his heels. “I presume you and your colleague are from Neubaugasse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you been inside yet?”

“Worst I've seen, sir,” said the constable. “God only knows what happened in there.” He jerked his head toward the half-open door.

“I understand that the landlord's agent discovered the bodies. Where is he?”

“At the station, sir. He gave us the key and refused to come back. Be careful as you go in-he was sick in the hallway.”

A snowflake landed on the constable's eyelashes.

The inspector moved toward the door but then halted suddenly. He turned and marched over to the old man who was still watching.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said Rheinhardt.

The old man's eyes were bloodshot. He moved his head backward and forward, trying to bring the speaker into focus. Finally he asked a question in heavily accented German. “What happened?” His mittens were fingerless and he raised a fossilized digit. “In there.”

“Are you acquainted with the householders?” Rheinhardt asked in turn.

“Not at my age,” said the old man. His lips parted to form a gummy smile, the curve of which was broken by a single black tooth. “It's a whorehouse!” He couldn't sustain his laugh. It fractured, turning into a hacking cough. Fluid crackled in his lungs.

Rheinhardt rested a hand on the old man's arm.

“It's cold, my friend. There's nothing for you to see here.” The old man shrugged. “Go home and light a fire,” Rheinhardt urged him.

The veteran lifted his stick and stabbed the cobbles with unexpected violence. Dragging his feet, he created two parallel tracks in the snow as he negotiated the slippery incline.

Rheinhardt walked back to where Haussmann was standing with the constables.

“All right, let's go in.”

The hallway was dim, claustrophobic, and smelled of vomit. A thick soup of half-digested food had been disgorged onto the floor. Haussmann's features twisted, showing his disgust.

“I think we can expect worse than this,” said Rheinhardt stiffly.

To the left was a sparsely furnished room containing a sofa, an armchair, and a small table by the window. On the table was a paraffin lamp, the upper cylinder of which was made of red glass. A potbellied stove stood in the center of the room. Rheinhardt tested the iron with his fingers and found it to be cold. The floor was littered with ashtrays, most of them overflowing with cigar stubs. Three empty champagne bottles stood in the corner.

The unnatural quiet was suddenly disturbed by the sound of ordnance. Outside, the horse began to clop restively on the cobbles.

“The barracks,” said Haussmann.

“Yes. How very convenient.”

They crossed the hall to a second room that faced the first. As they entered, both men recoiled. Haussmann turned his head away sharply. Only by degrees did he then reverse the movement, and slowly, as if the atrocity that confronted him could only be properly apprehended piecemeal.

The victim was a middle-aged woman with slate-gray hair that hung in lank strands around her swollen, bruised face. Her body was sprawled out on the floor with her hands either side of her head, the palms open, suggesting an attitude of submission. She was wearing a blue bathrobe, which had ridden up her legs, exposing the varicose veins of her calves, bony ankles, and dainty feet in embroidered silk slippers. Her throat had been opened with a clean, deep slice, and a vast quantity of blood had escaped from her arteries. The floor around her head was a black lake of coagulated gore. Some cartilaginous material was clearly visible protruding from the wound. The unfortunate woman had been almost decapitated.

Rheinhardt stepped closer and squatted next to the body, making sure that his coat did not make contact with the blood. He pinched the material of the bathrobe and tried to lift it up, but the garment was stuck. Eventually it came away, making an unpleasant ripping sound.

“She was stabbed in the heart too,” he said quietly.

Haussmann did not reply.

“Are you all right, Haussmann?”

“Yes, sir. I think so, sir.”

“Good man.”

Rheinhardt pushed down on his thighs, stood up, and looked around the room. It contained very little furniture: a writing bureau, a tallboy, and a simple bed with a plain headboard. The blanket was pulled back, and the undersheet was rucked up. Beyond the bed was a half-open window. Rheinhardt walked around the bloody pool and pulled the curtains aside. A dim, cramped passage ran between the brothel and its neighbors.

“This is where he made his exit,” said Rheinhardt. “There are bloodstains on the frame and sill. I'd like you to comb the area in due course.”

“Yes, sir.”

Making his way back to the writing bureau, Rheinhardt turned the key and let the lid down. Inside were some papers, a few silver coins, and a locked cash box. The papers were promissory notes of payment addressed to Madam Borek-almost all of them were signed by military men.

“Lieutenant Lipos?ak, Captain Alderhorst, Lieutenant Hefner,

Private Friedel…”

Rheinhardt took out his notebook and scribbled down their names. Haussmann lifted the cash box and shook it. “Full, sir.” “Indeed. The motive for such wanton carnage is rarely theft.” Haussmann replaced the cash box and Rheinhardt closed the bureau.

“Come, Haussmann. I fear that even greater horrors await us.”

The two men left Madam Borek's room and climbed the staircase at the end of the hallway. Rheinhardt noticed a trail of dark spots on the bare boards. As they ascended, the smell of vomit receded, only to be replaced by more ominous odors. As they neared the top of the stairs, the landing wall came into view. Rheinhardt stopped, his attention captured by a curious emblem that had been crudely painted on the bare plaster.

“Look, Haussmann.”

“A cross of some kind?”

They finished their ascent slowly. Dark runnels, striping the wall, dribbled down from the strange crooked cross. Rheinhardt reached out and rubbed his forefinger into the dried liquid. Even in the poor light he could see that the gritty particles he had collected were crystalline and rust-colored.

“It's blood, Haussmann. The cross has been painted in blood!”

Rheinhardt, taking pity on his tallow-faced companion, said quietly, “Now might be the time to examine the passage behind Madam Borek's room.”

The assistant detective raised a hand to his mouth and coughed.

“Yes, sir, I think it might be better…”

Rheinhardt nodded. Haussmann, relieved, ran down the stairs.

The inspector withdrew his notebook and sketched a simple equilateral cross. He then added opposing horizontals to the vertical line, and opposing verticals to the horizontal line. He looked again at the original. This strange daubing, and its bizarre method of execution, seemed to indicate the existence of a greater level of evil than Rheinhardt had ever before encountered. Satisfied that his sketch was accurate, he replaced the notebook in his coat pocket and braced himself.

On the first floor, a baleful light filtered through a grimy window. Three doors could be seen from his vantage point-two to the left and one to the right. Rheinhardt moved forward, his footsteps sounding a funereal beat on the bare boards. He pressed his fingertips against the nearest door-the one to his right-and pushed. It swung open and the receding edge revealed-inch by inch-the Grand Guignol tableau within. It was of such unspeakable depravity that Rheinhardt was forced to bow his head.

“Dear God…,” he muttered at his shoes.

The remnants of his childhood faith stirred.

The dusty interior of a provincial church.

Cassocks and incense.

The protective potency of holy water…

Something close to instinct made him want to touch his forehead and cross himself.

A young woman with thick brown hair was lying on a large bed that took up most of the available space in the room. The front of her bloodstained nightdress had gathered in a sopping heap beneath her breasts. As with Madam Borek, her throat had been cut; however, her body had been arranged so that her legs were wide open, exposing the genital area. She had been viciously mutilated. Where her thighs met, a ragged crater had replaced the expectation of a tidy vertical line. An incontinent eruption of gore had flooded the mattress and splashed onto the floor. A flap of skin, covered in matted pubic hair, hung precariously from where it seemed to have stuck on the bedspread.

Rheinhardt felt an involuntary spasm in his gut. A wave of nausea made him feel unsteady. His rational everyday self struggled to comprehend such depravity-such unspeakable savagery.

The scene in the second upstairs bedroom was even more sickening. Another woman, young like the first, had been laid out in a similar fashion. Again, her throat had been cut, but in addition her belly had been sliced open and her intestines scooped out. A bulky segmented length of colon had been looped around her head like a garland. The smell was so revolting that Rheinhardt's head began to swim. He rushed to the window and forced it open. Leaning out, he saw two faces staring up at him.

The senior constable called out, “Unbelievable, isn't it, sir?”

Rheinhardt nodded. There was nothing he could add.

The street was now covered with a thick carpet of snow. In the recess opposite, Saint Joseph and the infant Jesus had acquired an attractive white mantle. The winter weather was cleansing Spittelberg, concealing its poverty beneath a garment of vestal purity. Rheinhardt could not reconcile such beauty with what he had just seen. It seemed impossible that a single world could accommodate such disparities. In the distance, he saw a figure trudging up the incline: it was young Haussmann. Rheinhardt reluctantly resolved to continue with his own ordeal.

In the final bedroom he found the fourth body: a woman lying facedown on the floor. It appeared to Rheinhardt that she had stumbled and had grabbed the bedsheets as she fell. Her right hand, adorned with cheap jewelry, was still closed around a blanket. She was wearing a nightdress, but unlike those of her housemates, its material was relatively clean. There were no bloodstains, splashes, or trails of grume.

Suddenly it occurred to Rheinhardt that the girl might still be alive. He hurried over to the prone body and fell to his knees, anxiously resting a hand on her back. She was cold-very cold-and perfectly still. Refusing to accept that this newly kindled hope should be so precipitately extinguished, Rheinhardt snatched a small hand mirror from a chair by the bedside and wedged it close to the woman's nose and mouth. There was no misting. She was, all too clearly, dead.

Rheinhardt sighed and sat back on his heels. As he did so, he noticed a crusty deposit on the woman's crown. He systematically teased her hair apart, burrowing down toward her scalp. The perfumed fibers became increasingly matted with blood. She had obviously received a fatal blow that had been delivered to the back of the head.

As Rheinhardt rose, he caught sight of an object sticking out from beneath one of the pillows. He flipped the pillow over, exposing a small book bound in worn red leather. He picked it up, opened it, and discovered an inscription on the first page. The spidery scrawl was written in a foreign language, but he recognized the name Ludka. On the next page there were a Star of David and some Hebrew characters. Rheinhardt flicked through the thin, almost transparent pages, and surmised that the item was some kind of prayer book. He placed it in his pocket and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Resting his elbows on his knees, Rheinhardt placed his head in his open hands. He remained in this position for some time, eyes closed, unable to think, and feeling strangely numb, impressions of carnage flaming in the darkness behind his eyelids.