Gazing up and down the street, he first made sure no one was about. Then, standing about knee-high to the figure, he took off his felt hat and jumped up, sweeping with the brim to rid the blotch of snow from the statue’s penis. Chill flakes speckled his face, but he was pleased to see that the Atlas now stood in all its original and unadorned splendor.
‘Gruss Gott.’
The greeting gave him a start. Behind him stood the building Portier. She was looking at him with a quizzical expression, but he felt in no mood to explain himself to this elderly woman, long the bane of his existence at Habsburgergasse 4.
He quickly put on his hat, then tipped it to her.
‘Frau Ignatz.’
Bundled in numerous layers of woolen cardigans, most of them out at the elbows, she carried a rag and a bottle of polish.
‘Surely you do not mean to polish the brass on such a day,’ he said, attempting to be cordial, or at least to sound concerned.
Once again, his overtures were strongly rebuffed by the gruff old woman.
‘Some of us have a living to be made.’ She scowled as she spoke. ‘Some snip of a girl is already in your office. Says she belongs there.’
‘Yes,’ Werthen replied. ‘She does. She is my new assistant.’
He glanced for a moment at his own brass plaque outside the house door: Advokat Karl Werthen: Wills and Trusts, Criminal Law, Private Inquiries.
‘And mind you get the edges of the plaque shiny, as well,’ he said, trying to salvage some dignity from the exchange.
As Werthen climbed the flights of stairs to his office, hat in hand, his right knee began to hurt. Injured in a duel, that knee had not bothered him in months, but a chance meeting with Frau Ignatz could resurrect even long-dormant ailments.
The ‘snip of a girl’ was indeed at work when he entered the office. Erika Metzinger tried bravely to look the part of a secretary, wearing a prim white, high-necked blouse with full sleeves, her hair piled atop her head and affixed with several tortoiseshell combs. She’d even installed a typewriting machine and was busy clacking away at it with two forefingers. The little fingers on both her hands pointed quite elegantly upward, as if she were at a tea party.
Fraulein Metzinger, in fact, had the appearance of a Volkstheater actress attempting the role of secretary. Her obvious discomfort came from the fact that she was, in fact, much more than an office dogsbody. After the recent unfortunate loss of his former junior member of chambers, Werthen had been left in the lurch. He was attempting to build his new business as inquiry agent and thus needed a competent assistant.
‘Morgen.’ The young woman greeted him in the languid tones of the West Country, for she hailed from Salzburg. The accent, however, was the only thing Werthen had found to be relaxed about her. She was in fact a veritable dynamo; Werthen had never met someone her age so knowledgeable of the law.
However, because of Austria’s outmoded customs vis-a-vis the education of women, she was denied entrance to the university. Indeed, it was only two years ago that the University of Vienna allowed entrance to its first female students, and those only in the philosophy faculty. There was talk recently of allowing women to study medicine in Vienna, but legal studies were still off limits to women in the Austrian capital and were likely to remain so for decades.
‘Fraulein Metzinger,’ Werthen said in reply to her greeting, nodding his head at her. ‘Murderous weather.’
She looked startled at this comment. He had noticed a tendency toward literalism on her part.
‘The snow,’ he added, showing his snow-speckled hat, and she visibly relaxed.
The daughter and granddaughter of well-known jurists, Fraulein Metzinger might not possess a sense of fantasy or humor, but she had studied law privately and possessed as much legal knowledge as any licensed lawyer. The Austrian feminist Rosa Mayreder, good friends with Werthen’s wife, Berthe, had introduced the young woman to him and vouched for her intelligence and character. Fraulein Metzinger had demonstrated both qualities during their brief interview, and Werthen decided immediately to hire her. Still, she was not a certified lawyer, and though she could do much of the paperwork at the office, Werthen had to be the one to check all her work, sign documents and meet with clients, a small price to pay for having one so capable — and yes, so willing and grateful — in the office.
‘The Kleist file is waiting your signature, Advokat Werthen. It’s on your desk.’
‘Excellent,’ he said. He could think of no higher praise, made almost speechless by her statement, for that file had languished for months, desperately needing reworking, rewording, adjustments, and disentanglements. Werthen himself had tackled it several times, only to retreat with a headache after several hours of sifting through interminable memoranda and cancelled clauses. The Kleist clan, it seemed, had relatives on every continent, each of whom had numerous amendments to the wording of the family trust. Now Fraulein Metzinger, after only a few days on the project, had brought it to fruition.
‘I mean, very excellent.’
You are a dithering fool, he told himself. Just get in your office and sign it.
With the office door closed behind him, Werthen took off his coat and hat, placing them on the mahogany rack, and settled into his chair. As promised, the Kleist file lay on his desk suppliantly.
Wonderful girl, he thought, even if she was deficient in a sense of humor.
He quickly browsed the documents and signed them. Then he settled back to peruse the morning papers, something that he had taken particular pleasure in of late.
For the last five days, Advokat Werthen had kept himself apprised of the Rathaus scandal surrounding the death of Councilman Steinwitz, for the man was a former client of his. He remembered the councilman quite welclass="underline" a large, florid man who was a blend of Viennese bluff bonhomie and Czech fatalism. Had the Czech blood in the man gotten the upper hand? he wondered. Graft scandal or no, Steinwitz seemed to Werthen the last person in the world to take his own life.
The Viennese newspapers had made an event of the councilman’s suicide. Over the previous days the tragic tale had been featured in every newspaper in the land. The usually staid and conservative Neue Freie Presse was atwitter like a maiden aunt having taken too much elderberry wine. The day of the suicide, the headline of its evening edition attempted to balance itself between decorum and innuendo: ‘Councilman Takes Life, Irregularities Noted.’ Irregularities in the death or in his role as councilman? The eager reader must peruse the article and decide for himself. A feuilletonist for that paper felt called upon to go into great length in his meandering essay on the family history of said Steinwitz: married to Valerie Gutrum, youngest daughter of Colonel Gutrum, a veteran of the Battle of Konigratz during the Austro-Prussian War, and therefore an imperial icon; their two children, Joachim and Helene, ‘distraught at the loss of their beloved Vati.’ The less august Neues Wiener Journal did not bother with suggestion: ‘Steinwitz Kills Self, Subject of Investigation.’ Here the reporter posited a link between a recent City Hall graft investigation and the suicide of the center of that storm, Councilman Steinwitz.
The socialist Arbeiter Zeitung, which had first published the tale of City Hall corruption, also placed the story of Steinwitz’s death on its front page, above the fold. ‘Death of Councilman Laid to Graft Investigation,’ read that paper’s headline, though no such direct connection had, in fact, been made, for there was no suicide note. Facts, however, should never get in the way of a good lead. The anti-Semitic Deutsches Volksblatt put the entire matter — the story of City Hall graft and the subsequent suicide of Steinwitz — down to a Jewish plot to discredit Lueger and his associates. Even the gadfly journalist and social critic Karl Kraus used the councilman’s death as an excuse for an exegesis on suicide, the Viennese sickness — one that, according to the journalist, claimed more lives per year in Vienna than did deaths from other killer diseases, such as tuberculosis and syphilis. Kraus pointed out in his Die Fackel article that between 1888 and 1896, 3,164 Viennese had taken their own lives, an average of about one a day. Men were in the majority, with a four-to-one advantage over female suicides. While hanging was the preferred method, gunshot came in a close second. And, Kraus added, December surprisingly (with all the expectations of the holiday season) proved to be the month with the lowest average number of suicides, while May, with its seemingly uplifting and invigorating weather, was the month with the most, over fifty on average.