The Empty Mirror Read Online Free PDF

necks and handy enough with a knife or other very sharp instrument to make similar incisions of the carotid. That is what I know thus far, Werthen.”
    “But why the disfigurement of the nose? How could that be linked with some ritual slayings?”
    Gross merely smiled at him.
    “I see.” Werthen nodded. “A reverse signature of sorts, is that your theory?”
    “Excellent, Werthen. You really do have a first-class deductive mind. You should never have given up criminal law. That is exactly my line of thought. What is the expression? As plain as the nose on your face.’”
    Gross waited for an appreciative smile from Werthen for his pun, but got none.
    “After all, what is the one caricature we associate with the Jew but his hooked nose? Thus, to cut off the noses of Aryans would be some kind of sadistic revenge. In fact, a Jewish signature.”
    “I hope you’re playing devil’s advocate.”
    Another shrug from the portly criminologist. “I merely state one possible avenue of investigation.”
    “And I assure you, Gross, that Klimt is neither Jewish nor an anti-Semite.”
    “Neither, as it turned out, was the perpetrator of the Pölnau murders,” Gross said with a wry smile on his lips. “As you so eagerly reminded me. But it proved an effective diversion from the truth for a time.”
    As Werthen made no reply to this, Gross plunged on, “I see a myriad of difficulties in this case, my friend. Speed is of the utmost importance. France may be renowned for its
affaire Dreyfus
, but I assure you Austria has its own homegrown fanatics in that sphere, many who hail from my own region of Styria,” Gross said. “There are Schönerer and his German nationalists; even your newly installed and esteemed mayor, Karl Lueger, and his famous dictum, ‘I decide who’s a Jew.’ If the details of these deaths were reported in the papers, it would take no time for such anti-Semites to turn them into ritual murders. Jew killings. With a mayor who spreads hatred of Jews from the political pulpit, there is no telling what might come of it all. Pogroms. Who knows?”
    Werthen still made no reply. He did, however, take exception to Gross’s description of Lueger as “esteemed.” The man whom the lower-middle classes loved to call Handsome Karl was infact a mountebank, ready to play to the masses with his brand of anti-Semitism. That the mayor, thrice denied confirmation by the emperor because of such beliefs, had initiated a cradle-to-grave form of municipal socialism hardly made up for such demagoguery
    “So you see, Werthen,” Gross blustered on, “we may be working under the gun here. I need to solve these murders before the public gets wind of them. Before some enterprising newspaperman ferrets out the information and publishes a story in the foreign press.”
    “Actually, what you
need
to do, Gross, and what I hoped to convince you to do, is prove my client innocent of this latest outrage,” Werthen said.
    “Well, it comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?” Gross stopped dramatically. “Either he is innocent of the fifth murder, or your good client is in fact guilty of all five murders. That is the only way he could know the killer’s signature method.”
    Werthen felt the chill of a goose crossing his grave. He was no longer so certain approaching Gross had been a good idea. Perhaps his own involvement in such an affair was also ill-advised. Two generations it had taken the Werthens to disguise their Jewish roots. Would this investigation link him forever with the Jews? Yet the innocent girl lying on that marble slab had moved him. He had not been prepared for such emotion; it had quite overwhelmed him.

THREE
     
    O n the long
Strassenbahn
ride out to Ottakring, Gross regaled Werthen with his trained observational skills.
    “You of course noted the distinguishing characteristic of the pathologist at the morgue, I assume, Werthen.”
    Werthen had been too affected by the smell of death to notice anything about