Vienna - February 3, 1908, 9:02 AM
He did not go inside immediately.
That was the first irregularity.
He had a key in his pocket. A door in front of him. A medallion at his feet - placed there with the patience of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. And still he stood on the landing, motionless, measuring something he could not yet name.
He was not thinking about the medallion.
That, too, was wrong.
The medallion was already filed - size, weight, symbol, duplication. Evidence belonged to a part of his mind that required no effort. It would keep.
The coat did not.
He saw it again as it had been in his hands: autumn of 1906, folded cleanly, bound with kitchen twine, carried eleven minutes to the Sisters of Mercy on the Wiedner Hauptstrasse. The nun who had accepted it had not asked questions. She had looked at the fabric once, briefly, with the appraising calm of a woman who has distributed charity long enough to stop feeling it.
Serviceable.
Someone will be glad of this.
He had accepted that. He had needed to.
Völker looked at the medallion at his feet.
Someone had been glad of it.
He crouched. He held the new disc beside the one already in the evidence tin. Same bronze. Same rose. Same five thorns, same plain border, same deliberate age-darkening - the kind that takes decades, or a very good chemist. He put both in his breast pocket and unlocked the door.
Vienna - February 3, 1908, 9:18 AM
The flat was undisturbed.
He checked it room by room with the slow, systematic attention he gave to crime scenes - not anxiously, but with the knowledge that the most important thing is always the thing that is almost not there. The study window: latched from inside. The kitchen door to the back stairs: bolted. The bedroom wardrobe. The space beneath the desk. The gap behind the tiled stove in the parlour where a thin man could stand if he held his breath and didn't mind the heat.
Nothing.
He stood in the centre of the study.
The photograph of Mathilde was where it always was - pinned to the corner of the blotter with a brass map tack, curling at the edges. She was twenty-four in it. Sitting on a low wall in the Prater, one knee pulled up, her hair escaping its pins the way it always did, laughing at something outside the frame. He had taken it himself, with a borrowed camera he barely knew how to use, on a Sunday in the summer of 1901. The focus was slightly off.
It didn't matter.
For three years he had looked at that photograph the way men look at things they cannot fix. Not really looking. Only failing to look elsewhere.
He looked at it differently now.
She had been alive in that photograph. Alive for four more years after it was taken. And then she had vanished, and someone had taken his coat - the coat he had bought with her in mind and surrendered when he could no longer keep looking at it - and dressed a dead woman in it and sewn a bronze medallion into the lining and pushed the whole arrangement into the Danube Canal to be found at dawn.
To be found.
Specifically. By the right person. At the right hour.
He sat down at his desk.
He poured two fingers of brandy from the bottle in the bottom drawer. Set the glass down without drinking it. Pressed both hands flat on the desk surface and breathed through his nose until the geometry of the room steadied around him.
He needed to go back to the mortuary.
Not because Klein didn't know his work. Klein knew his work better than most men knew their own names. He needed to go back because the first time, he had not been a detective. He had been a brother. For perhaps two minutes - at the sight of a pale scar on a left temple that he himself had closed, badly, with a sewing needle and a trembling hand, in the summer of 1891 - he had been only that.
Two minutes was two minutes too long.
He left the brandy where it was.
Vienna - February 3, 1908, 11:05 AM
The second time he walked into examination room three, Klein looked up from his notes with an expression that was equal parts relief and wariness. The relief was for Völker's steadiness. The wariness was for what that steadiness might cost.
"I wasn't finished," Völker said, before Klein could speak.
Klein stepped back from the table without a word.
She was covered now - a white sheet drawn to her collarbone, her hair combed back from her face by some attendant's careful hands. The gas mantle burned above. The carbolic had thickened with the hours.
Völker did not look at her face.
He put on fresh gloves and went to the coat.
Each button: pressed at the horn, thread checked at the shank. All six original. No replacements. Which meant the coat had been maintained. Someone had been wearing it, or storing it with care. Possibly both.
He moved to the shoulder seams. The stitching was original - he could tell by the thread colour, faded to an ivory that matched the rest of the lining's age. He turned the coat interior-side up and ran his thumb along the breast pocket seam, where the fresh white stitching marked the place he had opened it two hours ago.
He brought it close to the gaslight.
Small stitches. Even. Tight. Not the work of someone sewing in a hurry. Not the work of someone who rarely sewed.
He set the coat down.
"Her hands," he said.
Klein opened his notebook. "Right hand shows callusing at the base of the index and middle fingers. Consistent with extended pen use. The ring finger carries an old lateral deviation at the proximal joint - break, healed badly. And under three of the right-hand fingernails: traces of a chemical compound. Unidentified as yet. Possibly photographic developer. Possibly a mild bleach."
Völker absorbed this without moving.
She had been writing. Extensively. And she had been somewhere with photographic chemicals - or bleach - and she had broken a finger and had it set badly and let it heal at a crooked angle that she would have hated. Mathilde kept her hands with the attention of a craftsman. She played piano to a standard she described as competent with occasional flourishes of the miraculous. She would have hated that finger. And it had healed without her being able to do anything about it.
Someone had kept her.
Not in a comfortable sense.
"The stump," he said.
Klein set down his pencil. "The cut is between the carpal bones, at the radiocarpal joint. No crushing. No tearing of soft tissue beyond what the blade required." A pause. "It is the work of someone with anatomical knowledge. Not necessarily trained. But the kind of knowledge developed through - repeated exposure."
Völker straightened. He removed his gloves, folded them once, set them on the trolley.
"Tell me something," he said. "As my physician. Not as my friend."
Klein met his eyes and said nothing, which was the right answer.
"How long has she been dead?"
A beat.
"Between twelve and sixteen hours. Seven to eleven in the evening. Yesterday."
"Yesterday evening."
"Yes."
Völker was quiet.
Yesterday evening. While he had been on his study floor with a bottle of plum brandy and the beginning of a dreamless sleep, his sister had been alive somewhere in this city. She had been alive and someone had cut her throat and dressed her in a coat and put her in the canal.
For three years she had been alive.
"August." Klein's voice was careful. Gentle. The voice he kept for families who had just understood something they could not ununderstand. "She's dead."
"I know she's dead, Isidor."
He looked at the coat. At the fresh white stitching. At the dove-grey wool, the colour of winter cloud at altitude - that specific, particular grey, because he had stood in a tailor's on the Michaelerplatz and asked a woman what colour a young academic would want, and she had shown him this, and he had bought it without hesitation.
"Then why," he said, "is she wearing a coat I gave her three months after she disappeared?"
The question settled over the room like snow settling over a courtyard.
Klein had no answer.
There was no answer that didn't open into darkness.
Völker took the two bronze medallions from his breast pocket and set them side by side on the trolley. In the gaslight, they looked identical. Two messages sent by the same hand, through different channels - one sewn into a dead woman's coat, one left on a detective's doorstep like a visiting card.
He looked at them for a long time.
Then he looked at Klein.
"Seal this room. No one enters without my permission. Not the district chief. Not the Staatsanwaltschaft. Anyone who arrives with paperwork waits outside until you've reached me. Can you do that?"
"For how long?"
Völker picked up his hat.
"Until I understand what I've been asked."
He walked to the door. Stopped.
He looked back, one final time, at the white sheet. At his sister's hands folded at her sides - the one that remained, and the one that didn't. At the pale scar on her temple, the one he had stitched closed with a sewing needle in their grandmother's garden when she was seventeen and he was twenty-two and neither of them had known yet what the world kept in its deeper rooms.
He had spent three years searching for her.
She had been alive for all of them.
And someone had watched him search. Had known where she was. Had, with enormous patience, waited - for what, he did not yet know. Had built something out of the years, the way a man builds with stone, layer by layer, until it holds a weight.
The weight was him.
Völker put on his hat.
He walked out of the mortuary into the cold white morning and did not look back.
It was an invitation.
And it had his name on it.
To be continued in Chapter 4.