He looked around the room where they had been asked to wait. It was warm and comfortable, decorated in excellent taste, a little old-fashioned, but the furniture was of fine quality, and his policeman’s eye estimated the value of the miniatures on the walls to be higher than one would find in most private houses, even of the well-to-do. The larger pictures over the fireplace he thought to be very pleasant but of less worth, either artistically or intrinsically.
The maid returned and said that Mr. and Mrs. Jakob would see them both, if they would follow her.
Going into the parlor, Monk had a sudden and sharp awareness of being in a different culture. This was not Austria as he had seen it; it was something intimate and far older. He glanced at Ferdi and saw the same look in his face, surprise and slight discomfort. It was a timeless room for family, not strangers. There were two beautiful, tall candles burning. Herr Jakob was a slender man with dark, shining eyes, a black cap on the crown of his head.
With a jolt of embarrassment, scraps of memory came back to Monk, and he realized why his visit had occasioned such surprise. This was Friday evening, near sundown, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. He could hardly have chosen a worse time to interrupt a family meal—and a religious celebration. It was an act of the greatest courtesy that they had received him at all.
“I’m sorry . . .” he said awkwardly. “I have been traveling and I forgot what day it is. I am sorry, Frau Jakob. This is an intrusion. I can return tomorrow . . . or . . . or is that even worse?” How could he explain to them his urgency without prejudicing anything they might tell him?
Herr Jakob looked at him very directly, his eyes unflinching, but his deep emotion was impossible to miss. “You said that you are here on behalf of a friend of my daughter, Hanna. If that is true, Herr Monk, then you are welcome at any time, even on Shabbat.” He had replied in English, heavily accented but easily understandable. Monk need not have brought Ferdi after all.
Monk framed his answer carefully. “It is true, sir.” Only afterwards did he even realize he had deferred to this man by using the word
“I am sorry to hear he is in difficulties,” Herr Jakob replied. “He is a brave man who was willing to risk all for his beliefs, which is the most any of us can do.”
“But his beliefs were different from yours?” Monk said quickly, then wondered why he had.
“No,” Herr Jakob replied with a faint smile. “Politically at least, they were the same.”
Monk did not need to ask about the other side of ethical values. He had met Josef and Magda Beck, and seen the depth and fervor of their Catholicism. He had also seen that, for whatever reason, they countenanced in their house friends who were profoundly anti-Jewish. Whatever their beliefs, their words tipped over from discrimination into persecution. The first allowed the second, and therefore was party to it, even if only by silence. A sudden memory flashed into his mind, sharp as spring sunlight in the rectory front room, the vicar himself standing quoting John Milton to a twelve-year-old Monk, teaching him great English literature. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” But now it came differently to his mind: “They also sin who only stand and watch.”
He came back to the present candlelit room in Vienna with the daylight fading rapidly beyond the windows, and this quiet couple waiting for him to say something to make sense of his visit here, and their courtesy in receiving both him and Ferdi, and welcoming them on this of all days. Anything but the truth would insult them all, he as much as they, and perhaps Kristian and Hanna as well.
“Did you know Elissa von Leibnitz?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jakob answered. There was profound feeling in his face and in the timbre of his voice, but Monk was unable to read it. Had they resented her, known that their daughter had been picked for the errand that cost her life, rather than Elissa, because Elissa, the Aryan Catholic, was valued more, her life held more important than that of Hanna, the Jewess? Immeasurably worse than that, did they know or guess that she had betrayed their daughter to a pointless death? But he had left himself no way to retreat.
“Did you know that Kristian married her?”
“Yes, I knew that.”
Monk could feel the heat burning his face. He was ashamed for people he had not even known, far less shared acts or judgments with, and yet he felt tarred with the same brush. He was aware of Ferdi next to him and that perhaps he felt the same embarrassment.
“Will you eat with us?” Frau Jakob asked softly, also in English. “The meal is nearly ready.”
Monk was touched, and oddly, he was also afraid. There was a sense of tradition, of belonging, in this quiet room, which attracted him more than he was able to cope with, or to dismiss as irrelevant to him. He wanted to refuse, to make some excuse to come back at another time, but there was no other time. Kristian’s trial would begin any day, or might already have begun, and he was no real step nearer to the truth of who had killed Elissa, or why. Certainly he had nothing to take back to Callandra.
He glanced at Ferdi, then back at Frau Jakob. “Thank you,” he said.
She smiled and excused herself to attend to matters in the kitchen.
The meal was brought in, a slow-cooked stew in a deep, earthenware pot, and served with prayers and thanksgiving, which included the servants, who seemed to join as a matter of custom. Only after that was the conversation resumed. A peace had settled in the room, a sense of timelessness, a continuity of belief which spanned the millennia. Some of these same words must have been spoken over the breaking of bread centuries before the birth of Christ, with the same reverence for the creation of the earth, for the release of a nation from bondage, and above all the same certainty of the God who presided over all things. These people knew who they were and understood their identity. Monk envied them that, and it frightened him. He noticed that Ferdi also was moved by it—and disturbed, because it reached something in him older than conscious thought or teaching.
“What is it that we can do for Kristian, or Elissa?” Herr Jakob asked.
Monk spoke the truth without even considering otherwise. “Elissa was killed . . . murdered . . .” He disregarded their shock. “Kristian has been charged, because he appears to have had motive, and he cannot prove that he was elsewhere. I don’t believe he would have done such a thing, no matter what the provocation, but I have no evidence to put forward in his defense.”
Herr Jakob frowned. “You say ’provocation,’ Herr Monk. What is it that you refer to?”
“She was gambling, and losing far more than he could afford,” Monk answered.
