Vienna -February 3, 1908, 6:17 AM
The river had been black all night, and now it was beginning to go grey.
Josef Pammer stood in the wheelhouse of the coal barge Helene and watched the first reluctant light push itself over the rooftops of the Leopoldstadt. The air smelled of soot and wet iron and the particular winter rot of the Danube Canal that low, stubborn stink of sewage and tar and dead fish that no amount of snow could cover. His breath hung in front of him like a second ghost.
Forty-one years on the water, and Josef could still tell the exact hour by the color of the sky above Vienna. Six-seventeen. Maybe six-eighteen. Mass would be starting at the Dominican church in twelve minutes. His wife would already be awake, crossing herself over the stove.
He tightened his scarf and stepped out onto the deck.
The cold hit him like a slap from an open palm. He cursed softly, the way a man curses a thing he loves. The barge was moored against the quay just short of the Schwedenbrücke, the great iron bridge looming above him like a rib cage. Gaslights still burned along the embankment, their flames the color of weak tea in the blue hour before dawn. A tram bell rang somewhere far off on the Ringstrasse.
And the canal was frozen in patches, the way it always froze in February, a mosaic of black water and grey ice and small dirty floes that spun lazily in the current.
Josef took his boat-hook down from its hanger on the wheelhouse wall.
There was nothing unusual in what he was about to do. Every morning since the first frost, he checked the water around his hull for ice buildup against the rudder. It was a ten-minute task. Push, prod, break, move on. His father had taught him. He would teach his son, if God ever gave him one.
He leaned over the gunwale and dipped the hook into the black water.
The first stroke caught nothing. The second nudged a floating beam of blackened wood.
The third stopped.
Josef frowned.
He pulled back on the hook, the way he would pull against a snagged root, and felt the weight give, then resist, then give again. Something soft. Something that did not want to be moved and did not quite refuse.
He pulled a little harder.
The shape came up out of the dark water the way drowned things come up: shoulder first, as if it were rolling onto its side to look at him. He saw pale hair, frozen into a slow dark braid by the water. He saw a shoulder in dove-grey wool, heavy with ice. He saw the collar of a coat that must once have been, in some warmer life, the color of a winter sky at noon.
Then his stomach went cold in a way that had nothing to do with February.
"Maria und Josef," he whispered.
His hand did not shake. That was the strange thing. In all the years afterward, when he would tell the story to men in smoky taverns and they would buy him another glass of beer just to hear him tell it again, Josef would always mention this first: my hand did not shake. It was as if his body had understood before his mind and had quietly made itself useful.
He braced the hook against the gunwale and guided her the rest of the way up.
She came to rest along the hull, face-down in the water, the braid drifting, the coat ballooning out around her like the petals of some heavy winter flower. One arm floated free. The other -The other ended.
Josef stared at the stump where the left hand should have been.
It was not a ragged wound. That was the second thing he would always tell the men in the taverns. It was not chewed, or torn, or gnawed at by fish or river rats. It was clean. Clean the way a butcher's cut is clean. Clean the way only a man with time and patience and a very good knife can make a thing clean.
He made the sign of the cross, slowly, from forehead to chest to shoulder to shoulder.
Then he turned and ran for the quay, and for the police box at the foot of the Schwedenbrücke, his boots ringing on the frozen cobblestones, his breath sawing in his throat, and behind him the woman in the grey coat turned in the current and seemed, for a moment, almost to drift after him.
Vienna — February 3, 1908, 7:42 AM
The district mortuary on the Spitalgasse was not a place for men who valued sleep.
It sat behind the old General Hospital like an afterthought in yellow brick, low and squat, its windows barred not against intruders but against the curious. Inside, the air was a particular compound that August Völker could have identified blindfolded in a foreign country: carbolic acid, damp stone, old blood, and the faint vegetable sweetness of the Bunsen burner Dr. Klein kept burning day and night to heat his eternal pot of bitter coffee.
Völker took off his hat as he came in. It was an old habit. The dead deserved it.
"She's on three," said the attendant at the door, a boy of perhaps nineteen with a bad shave and worse posture. "Dr. Klein's already started. Fished out of the canal before dawn. Schwedenbrücke."
"Thank you, Matthias."
The boy blinked, surprised to be remembered. Völker was already walking past him.
Three corridors, two doors, and the stink of carbolic thickening with every step. Völker's footsteps echoed against the tile. He was a tall man, taller than most Viennese of his generation, and the stoop in his shoulders had been growing steadily for three years now, the way a tree bends under a permanent wind. His coat was good wool, Loden grey, cut five winters ago by a tailor on the Graben who had since retired. His gloves were new. His boots were not.
He had not slept. The telegram had caught him at the tail end of a bottle of plum brandy and the beginning of a dreamless hour on his study floor. He could still feel the brandy behind his eyes, a low, sullen weight, and he had drunk tswo glasses of cold water and a cup of coffee so strong it tasted of tin before walking out into the dark.
He had not taken a cab. He had wanted the walk. He had wanted the cold.
Dr. Isidor Klein glanced up as Völker pushed open the door of examination room three.
"August."
"Isidor."
That was all, for a moment. Klein was a small man with a physician's careful hands and an old friend's tired eyes. The two of them had shared rooms at the University twenty years ago. They had dissected their first cadaver together on a November morning so cold their breath had fogged the student's manual. Klein had vomited. Völker had made a joke. They had been friends ever since.
"Barge captain pulled her up at dawn," Klein said, nodding at the table. "Near the Schwedenbrücke. She's been in the water perhaps six hours. Perhaps eight. I'll give you better when I've opened her."
"Cause of death?"
"Before I open her? Unofficially?" Klein gestured at the body's throat with the back of a gloved hand. "Someone cut her. Deep, single stroke, left to right. From behind, I'd say. She was almost certainly dead before she went into the canal."
Völker approached the table.
She lay under the harsh white glare of the gas mantle above, her hair still wet, her skin the color of old candle wax. The grey coat had been cut away and laid neatly on a side trolley. A sheet covered her from collarbone to knees. She was thin. She had been young. Her face was turned away from the door, toward the tiled wall, as if she had chosen in her last moment to spare the living the trouble of looking at her.
And her left arm ended, as Pammer had said, at the wrist.
Völker took out his magnifying glass.
It was a small brass instrument, scratched at the rim, engraved on the handle with the initials J.V. - his father's. He bent over the stump and studied the cut for a long, silent moment.
"Not a saw," he said at last.
"No."
"Not an axe either. There's no crushing. The bone is sheared, not split."
"I thought the same."
"A very heavy knife, then. Or a short cleaver. And whoever used it knew the anatomy of the wrist. He went between the carpal bones here, see - rather than through them. That takes practice. That takes a great deal of practice."
Klein said nothing.
Völker straightened up and exhaled through his nose. He could feel the beginning of a headache starting behind his right eye, the old familiar ache that came when his brain started moving faster than his body could keep up with.
"She wasn't killed for the hand," he said.
"How do you mean?"
"The throat cut is the killing blow. The hand was taken afterward. Carefully. Surgically. Which means the hand was " he searched for the word — "important. To him. Not as an obstacle. As an object."
Klein's mouth tightened.
Völker turned his attention to the coat on the side trolley.
It was a woman's winter coat, good wool, dove-grey, the hem stained black by canal water. Double-breasted. Six buttons of horn. A fur collar, damp and matted, that had probably been rabbit rather than anything finer. Serviceable. The coat of a woman with taste and limited means.
He lifted it. Heavier on one side than the other.
He frowned.
He ran his gloved fingertips along the inner lining and felt it almost at once — a small hard lump sewn into the seam just below the left breast pocket. About the size of a coin. Perhaps a little larger.
"Isidor. Your smallest scissors."
Klein brought them without a word.
Völker worked the lining open with the care of a man unwrapping a letter he was not sure he wanted to read. Three tiny stitches. Four. The cotton thread was fresh, still white where the rest of the lining had yellowed with age. Someone had sewn this in recently. Within the last week, possibly within the last day.
The lump came free into his palm.
He held it up to the gaslight.
It was a disc of bronze, no larger than an Austrian ten-heller piece, slightly darkened with age. On its face, in low relief, was a heraldic rose a rose of five petals surrounded by five thorns, the whole device enclosed within a plain circle. No letters. No numbers. No maker's mark.
Völker had never seen it before in his life, and yet, looking at it, he felt the back of his neck go cold in a way the mortuary's temperature did not explain.
"August?"
He did not answer for a moment.
"August. What is it?"
"I don't know yet," Völker said quietly. He closed his hand around the medallion. "But I want a photograph of this before anything else is done. Front and back. And I want the coat catalogued intact. Every button. Every stain. Don't let anyone touch it who doesn't have to."
"Of course."
Völker slid the medallion into the small brass evidence tin he carried in his breast pocket, and the tin clicked shut with a small, final sound.
Then he turned, at last, to the woman on the table.
"Let me see her face."
Klein hesitated. It was the faintest thing a half-beat of delay, a flicker behind the eyes. Völker caught it and did not, for some reason he could not yet name, remark on it.
"Of course," Klein said.
He stepped to the head of the table, and with both hands, gently, the way a man might turn the face of a sleeping child, he rolled her head toward them.
The gaslight caught her.
And Matthias the attendant, who had come silently to the doorway behind them with a clipboard and a pen, made a small sound in his throat that was not quite a word. The clipboard slipped from his fingers and clattered against the tile.
Then, very deliberately, very slowly, the boy raised his right hand to his forehead and began to cross himself.
His lips were moving. Völker could not hear what he was whispering.
But he could read it.
Gott im Himmel. Das ist sie. Das ist das Mädchen aus der Zeitung.
Good God in Heaven. That's her. That's the girl from the newspaper.
Völker's blood went still in his veins.
He had not, in three years, opened a newspaper without looking for a face. He had not, in three years, passed a photograph in a shop window without stopping. He had trained himself, like a dog, to expect nothing and hope for nothing and see nothing, and the training had worked, the way such training always works, right up until the moment it did not.
He turned his head, very slowly, to look at the woman on the table.
At her face. At her open, sightless, grey-blue eyes. At the small pale scar on her left temple that he himself had stitched closed, badly, with a sewing needle and a trembling hand, on a summer afternoon in 1891, when his little sister had fallen out of a cherry tree in their grandmother's garden in Graz and he had been the only one home.
The magnifying glass slipped from his fingers.
It did not shatter. It rolled, once, across the tile, and came to rest against the leg of the examination table with a small musical chime.
Behind him, somewhere very far away, Dr. Klein was saying his name.
August Völker did not hear him.
He was looking at his sister's face, and his sister's face was looking at nothing at all, and somewhere inside his chest a door that he had spent three years bolting shut was very quietly, very gently, beginning to come off its hinges.
To be continued in Chapter 2.