The Empty Mirror Read Online Free PDF Page A

point of fact. There have been no religious Jews in the Werthen clan for decades. Just good Protestants.”
    Gross, a Catholic, made no comment, and they walked on in silence for a time, watching the antics of a long-haired dachshund that had escaped its leash and now ran rings around its parasol-wielding mistress.
    Werthen and Gross had developed their bantering manner from long association in Graz. After losing an early case to the prosecutor-cum-criminologist, Werthen had become a disciple.He sought Gross out privately after the trial and told him what a fine job he had done and how he wished to learn from his copious experience. Gross for his part had been flattered and took Werthen under his wing. The young lawyer had become a frequent visitor in the charming flat that Frau Adele Gross so expertly managed in Graz’s inner city.
    In between generations of the family, as it were, Werthen became a confidant to their troubled young son, Otto, who was thirteen years Werthen’s junior; Hanns Gross was seventeen Werthen’s senior. Werthen thus acted as their go-between in the difficult age and helped guide the young boy intellectually before the boy reached his majority.
    Gross had been grateful for Werthen’s intercession, for Otto and father Hanns did not have a comfortable relationship. So wise about the psychology of the criminal, Gross was seemingly ignorant of the proper way to conduct human affairs. Hanns Gross was far too imbued with the military rigor of his forefathers to appreciate the extreme sensitivity and perhaps neurasthenia of young Otto. Werthen, on the other hand, was only too familiar with such a life lived on nerves, for his own younger brother, Max, had been consumed by such hypersensitivity. Max had ended his life in a most Austrian manner, shooting himself at the grave of his beloved muse, the playwright Grillparzer. Werthen was determined such a fate not be Otto’s. He was pleased to learn the younger Gross was now in his final year of medical school.
    Such history served to bond Gross and Werthen. Where others saw the blustery criminologist as merely pompous, Werthen had an appreciation for his weaknesses.
    The yapping of the boisterous long-haired dachshund brought the lawyer’s attention back to the here and now.
    “I do hope, Gross, that you are not making a similar hypothesis about these killings,” Werthen finally said, turning away from the canine amusement. “The Pölnau affair was not your brightesthour. In fact, if memory serves me right, the murders were found to be the result of local jealousies, and the blood was drained to divert suspicion from the postmaster, the actual killer.”
    “Yet I maintain that it is our duty as examining officers to investigate wherever the evidence and clues lead us.”
    “Even if it leads to anti-Semitism?”
    “It
is
said the Jews use human blood for their unleavened bread, matzo, at Passover,” Gross replied with his Socratic voice, as if trying to incite debate.
    Werthen stopped dead in his tracks. “You can’t be serious! Ritual murders? But this is almost the twentieth century. Pure poppycock.”
    “The bodies were found in the Prater,” Gross said. “The Jewish district.”
    “You can’t actually believe this. I may be assimilated, but I’m still a Jew and I find such theorizing highly offensive.”
    “I am examining the case,” Gross said evenly. “I take nothing on trust. Science is my guide, not superstition. What I know is that there have been five victims thus far, two male and now three female victims. Ages disparate, from eighteen to fifty-three, as was their social standing, from middle and lower-middle class to upper class. To date the only common thread we have in all the murders is the method of killing, the draining of the blood after death, the severed noses, and the location where the bodies were found. I deduce, therefore, that we are looking for someone, most probably a man, who is strong enough to break people’s