‘I will suggest it to him, Mr Remington.’
‘You’re not staying for the shows?’
‘Maybe another day.’
‘You just tell them at the front ticket window you’re a friend of Taylor Remington. You’ll get a day pass.’
‘Very generous. And thank you for your cooperation.’
‘Remember,’ the man shouted as Werthen was leaving. ‘Thomas Remminghaus exists no longer. It is Taylor Remington. Done all legal in New York City.’
Werthen caught up with Gross just outside the tent.
‘We know now,’ the criminologist said.
‘Yes,’ Werthen agreed. ‘If that is the future, I am not sure I want to know.’
‘That is not the future, I guarantee you. Not if I have anything to do with it.’
‘One thing seems clear,’ Werthen said.
Gross waited for him to continue.
‘It would seem Remington is not responsible for the deaths of Steinwitz and Praetor.’
‘What leads you to deduce that, dear friend?’
‘Well, we are still alive and able to discuss our interview with the man. If those two posed such a dire threat to Remington that he or his lackeys killed them, then would we not also be seen as a comparable threat that needs eliminating?’
‘Good. And the second reason?’
Werthen shook his head. ‘I did not mention a second reason.’
‘Then I shall for you. Remington and his show only arrived in Vienna last Sunday. After the deaths of both men.’
‘How long have you known this?’
‘I ascertained it last night from the clerk at my hotel. It seems Mr Remington is a guest there as well. He must have already been in communication with Lueger before his arrival. But his physical presence here began last Sunday, that is certain. I placed a call to Drechsler this morning to make sure. The foreign registration office shows Remington’s entrance at Braunau am Inn on February 18, along with his menagerie.’
‘Advokat Werthen!’
Werthen turned at the sound of his name and saw Fraulein Metzinger with young Heidl Beer and, of all people, young Ludwig Wittgenstein.
‘I had no idea you were an enthusiast of the Old West,’ his assistant said.
‘Actually we are here on business. But it looks like you are prepared for a good time.’
Both young boys had large bags of popcorn in their hands.
‘And how were you able to effect an escape this time, Master Wittgenstein?’
The boy blushed. ‘Well, I practiced a bit of magic.’
He nudged Heidl as he spoke, for the other boy was obviously in on the scheme.
‘Yes?’ Werthen said. ‘Don’t worry. I am no longer representing your father.’
‘Saturday afternoon is my piano lesson. I go to Madame du Pauly in the First District for my torture and am not expected back until teatime. So-’
‘Allow me a conjecture,’ Gross said. ‘You had your young friend here, Herr Heidl Beer, appear in all his finery at Madame du Pauly’s with a message.’
Young Wittgenstein’s eyes grew large at Gross’s speculation.
‘Ah, I see I am close to the truth. Perhaps the message would be from your parents, stating that you needed to return home. A sensitive young lad like you would not use illness as an excuse; that could have an unfortunate resonance.’
‘You said you wouldn’t tell anybody,’ Ludwig said, turning on Heidl.
‘I didn’t.’ The other boy sounded outraged at the suggestion.
‘Thus, barring medical emergency, I would suggest the unexpected arrival of a favorite relative. An aunt, perhaps. Or an uncle, latterly traveling in South America.’
‘You’re a wizard,’ Wittgenstein said.
Gross shrugged. ‘No. Merely a reader of the “Notables” column in the daily paper. I see your uncle did return from Paraguay this very week.’
Wittgenstein now looked disappointed, and huddled himself into his fur-collared coat.
‘Explanation ruins magic,’ he said.
He sat back in the first-class coach of the Alpine Express and watched the snow-blanketed landscape race by outside his window. The time away from Vienna had done him good; no longer was his left foot so swollen and painful. Gout, the doctors said, but he knew better. It was only a matter of time. He could try to control his disease, but he knew that eventually it would get the better of him.
He lit a Gross Glockner cigar, only his third of the day, and exhaled a wreath of blue smoke into the compartment where he sat alone. He had taken the entire car; his aides were scattered in the other compartments.
The train whistled through the station at St Polten. Its platforms were empty except for a mother and her small daughter standing at her side, thumb in her mouth, staring wide-eyed at the express flying past her, ruffling her long mauve skirts.
How long did he have? No one was saying, but he tried to live each day as fully as possible. Keep your mind in the present; the future will take care of itself.
But events in the present were now intruding on his future. His vendetta against the Habsburgs was so near to coming to successful closure, all his careful machinations about to come to fruition.
Yet at the same time everything was beginning to unravel. He understood from Bielohlawek that investigators were snooping about, picking at the ashes of Steinwitz’s death, nosing around the affairs of the Rathaus. If so, it was only a matter of time until they would make associations, put the pieces together. The press had not come into it yet, but that, too, was only a matter of time.
He had to contain this, at least until Wednesday. Then let the critics wail and gnash their teeth. He would weather it. The Christian Democrats would weather it. He could always count on the small people of Vienna who loved him like a saint. He could always blame it on the Jews. After all, the Jew Wittgenstein represented one group of bidders; Remington, or whatever he chose to call himself, the other. And he, Mayor Lueger, had done his homework on Taylor Remington, formerly Thomas Remminghaus. The man was a chameleon. Not only had he re-created himself as a frontier American, a character out of the pages of Karl May, but before that he had already reinvented himself as a German. For, Lueger and his aides had discovered, the impresario and his family had originally hailed from Galicia, where his name as a young boy was Tomas Remstein. The Jewish Remstein.
Lueger looked at his bearded handsome reflection in the window of his train compartment and smiled contentedly.
Once again, the Jews did it. The despoilers of the country.
And once the money was collected there were a thousand and one ways to conceal its uses. Through years of redirecting ‘gifts’ from industrialists and municipal funds toward campaign expenditures, Lueger and his team had devised a Byzantine structure of funding channels and money redirection and ‘cleaning’ that not even a Swiss bank director could follow. Just get him the money from the sale, and it would be safe.
Lueger looked at the stub of cigar wedged between his forefinger and middle finger. Those fingers were stained almost as dark as the cigar itself. He had long ago given up on trying to eradicate that nicotine stain.
But this stain of disclosure was another matter. Only a few more days of containing this affair.
Was it time to enlist Kulowski’s aid in the matter?
Karl Lueger was a tidy man in his personal habits; he liked to have his desk neatly arranged, his affairs in order. Hildegard, his older sister, looked after domestic arrangements at his simple apartment in the Rathaus. Lunch was always on the table promptly at twelve ten. Clean suits and freshly polished gold cufflinks awaited him every morning after his bath. His life was untroubled by marriage. Like a priest to the church, he felt he was married to politics, to his duties as mayor of the finest city in Europe. He found release with Marianne, but that, like the state of his health, was a closely guarded secret.
Now, his orderly plans were at risk of becoming messy in the extreme. And all because his old school chum Steinwitz had suddenly found a conscience. That was a deep betrayal. Middle-class boys, the both of them. And the Theresianum had been the making of them. They were the bright boys, the day boys, the first of their generation to claw their way into the lair of privilege and nobility. And Lueger had not forgotten his friend Steinwitz. He had taken him with him on his meteoric rise in Vienna politics. He had made the man. And to be paid back in such a pitiless manner. It was really too much. Where was the man’s sense of loyalty? The killing paid him back, though. He could almost understand-