‘Pleased to meet you,’ Huck said, extending his thin hand.
Fraulein Metzinger smiled to herself as the two boys shook hands with great seriousness.
That done, Huck promptly reported delivery of the documents.
‘Do you work here?’ Ludwig asked, his eyes growing large.
Huck breathed in deeply, expanding his chest. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s wonderful. I mean, you go out into the town and all?’
‘Every day.’
Ludwig simply shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s the life,’ he muttered.
‘You’ve got a very handsome coat, if you do not mind my saying so.’
Huck had been taking lessons in polite small talk from Fraulein Metzinger and was obviously trying his new skills out now.
‘You think so?’
Huck nodded. ‘Really. Kein Mist.’
He reddened when he realized he had slipped into his old street argot again, meaning ‘no manure,’ or, in this context, no nonsense.
‘So, Herr Wittgenstein,’ Werthen broke in. ‘What brings you here, and. .’ he exaggerated a glance at the door, ‘apparently on your own.’
‘Luki,’ he reminded. ‘And I have to make this quick. I am supposed to be at the Fine Arts Museum with my tutor. We are studying Raphael today,’ he said with a sigh. ‘He left me there for a time to have his gabel Fruhstuck.’
Werthen thought he could do with a mid-morning snack today, too, and led Ludwig into the inner office. ‘And what was so important that you are playing truant?’
Werthen closed the door behind them, and Ludwig promptly pulled out a maroon-colored leather-bound diary from his coat pocket.
‘I thought you would be interested in this. Hans left it with me.’
‘But that is all settled. Hans is in New York.’
‘Yes,’ Ludwig said somewhat impatiently. ‘But Hans told me I should give this to someone I really trust. Someone who could make use of it. I don’t know many people and this has been nagging at me. Please take it.’
The boy handed the diary to Werthen. ‘Anything to relieve you of the burden.’
‘You make a joke about it, but it really has been bothering me. I feel badly about not giving it to you earlier when you were investigating Hans’s disappearance. But you see, at that time I did not know if I could trust you.’
Werthen smiled at the child’s conundrum. ‘And now you do?’
‘Trust you? Well, as much as anyone, I guess. But this diary’s been bothering me so much that I have made no progress at all on the model of Herr Daimler’s motorcycle.’
‘Well, I hope now you can concentrate on your work,’ Werthen said kindly. ‘What’s in it that it is so important?’
Ludwig looked abashed. ‘Gentlemen don’t read other men’s mail or diaries. Papa always says so.’ Then he brightened. ‘You were trying to trick me, right? To find out if I could be trusted. Very good. Now I know I have the right person.’
On the way out, Ludwig and Huck exchanged a few more words. Fraulein Metzinger had another envelope ready for delivery, and so Huck accompanied Ludwig on his way back to the museum.
When the boys were gone, she beamed at Werthen. ‘I really think they hit it off.’
‘And I do believe you would make a fine matchmaker. That letter you gave Huck already went out two days ago.’
She had the good grace to blush at being caught out.
‘I was thinking of getting tickets for the Remington show in the Prater. What do you think, Advokat?’
What he thought was that Remington’s Wild West Show was the most tasteless performance event yet thought up by Americans, in many cases the kings of bad taste. He would never subject even his basest enemy to the supposed jollities of seeing fake Indians slaughtered or herds of buffalo decimated by sharpshooters. Remington himself was a crass businessman and showman whose Wild West Show had traveled several times around the world and was definitely the worse for wear. That’s what Werthen thought.
‘What an excellent idea, Fraulein Metzinger,’ he said. ‘I am sure Huck would love seeing it.’
‘Really, Gross. Each time you come to town, you make everything topsy-turvy.’
Police Praesidium Inspector Meindl was a small, fastidious man who did not like his closed cases reopened. He was ensconced in a massive armchair behind his cherry wood desk at police headquarters and cast Gross a look of exasperation at his request for crime scene photographs from Steinwitz’s office at the Rathaus and for permission to enter the Praetor apartment, which was still under seal, there to obtain the platen and ribbon from the dead man’s typewriting machine.
‘I do not live to complicate your life, I assure you, Meindl.’
Gross used a teasing tone; Meindl had been a former junior colleague of his in Graz before finding higher office in Vienna and well before Gross himself had been elevated to his current position in Czernowitz.
Detective Inspector Bernhard Drechsler, sitting beside Gross and looking more painfully gaunt than usual, followed these proceedings with a sardonic expression.
‘I’ve no objections to Doktor Gross taking those items from Praetor’s apartment,’ he offered. But there was an unpleasant edge to his voice that Gross could not fail to notice.
Meindl, hands on his chest, formed a steeple with opposing fingers. ‘I am delighted to hear that, Detective Inspector. But I thought you put the young man’s death down to suicide.’
‘Well,’ Drechsler began with a Viennese drawl. ‘There could be a loose end here and there.’
‘Such as the absence of the death weapon?’ Meindl peered down at the Praetor report on his desk. ‘What did the gun do, simply walk off by itself?’
Now it was Gross’s turn to watch events and smile inwardly.
Just as quickly Meindl turned his attention back to the criminologist, his former mentor.
‘And what is this about photographs from the scene of Councilman Steinwitz’s death? Are you suggesting his death was not a suicide as well?’
‘It is one possible theory,’ Gross said without offering more.
‘You believe there is a connection between these two deaths?’ Meindl’s voice sounded peevish.
‘Of course if you are unable to assist. .’ Gross began.
‘Who said anything about not being able?’ Meindl sat forward in his large chair now, hands on the edge of the desk. ‘You’ll get your photos and permit to enter the Praetor flat. But please, Gross, keep us posted, eh? I should like to know if we have a killer running loose in Vienna.’
Drechsler left with Gross, maintaining a stony silence as they took the newly installed elevator to street level. Outside the wind whipped up off the nearby Danube Canal; Gross tucked his hands more deeply into his woolen overcoat.
‘A bit dour, Drechsler,’ Gross said, thinking that perhaps the man was ill.
Instead Drechsler stuck his hawk-like face so close to Gross that the criminologist could see the pores in the man’s nose.
‘I do not appreciate being ambushed like that. By you or Werthen.’
Gross jerked away from him as one would from a leper displaying his sores.
‘I assure you, Detective Inspector, that you were not ambushed, as you put it. Werthen and I are investigating a case. Clients are paying good money for us to get to the bottom of the death of young Praetor. You cannot blame us for your own oversight.’
‘You’ve got the luxury to have fancy clients paying your way. Me, I’m stuck with grade G-4 in the Austrian bureaucracy. And I’ve got a full plate what with keeping track of Serbian anarchists and a crime gang that is operating out of the sewers and using runaway children as their proxies. You’ll find that Praetor had a lover who got jealous or that he tried to solicit the wrong sort of gent. I’ve no time for that sort of thing, nor would you if you were in my place.’
The speech was so unlike Drechsler that Gross was momentarily stunned. No one ever accused the Vienna constabulary of being the most gifted lot, but Drechsler had, Gross always thought, stood out from the rest of the pack for whom Schlamperei, or lazily muddling through, was a way of life.