Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [39]
“No,” she answered. “We know you’ve suffered as much as the rest of us.”
“We do have our troubles,” agreed the driver. “Have you noticed, sir, what is so disturbing about the dogs in Vienna?”
“I haven’t seen any dogs,” replied Younger.
“That’s what’s so disturbing. The people are eating their dogs. And you must have heard of the sobbing sickness? People begin to sob for no explicable reason—men as well as women—and can’t stop. They sob in their sleep; it goes on so long it ends in epileptic fits. When they wake, they have no memory of it. It’s our nerves. We’ve always been nervous, we Viennese—gay but nervous.”
Colette complimented his French.
“Mademoiselle is as generous as she is charming,” replied the coachman. “I had a Parisian governess as a boy. Here is my card. If you require a cab again, perhaps you will send for me.”
The name engraved on the card was Oktavian Ferdinand Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau.
“You’re a nobleman,” said Younger. The word Graf is a title of nobility in German; the von in his last name carried a similar meaning.
“A count, yes, and a most fortunate count at that. I held on to my very last carriage, and it has given me a living. A baron friend of mine sweeps floors in a restaurant. And consider my livery.”
Younger for the first time noticed the driver’s once-dignified but now-threadbare uniform.
“It belonged to one of my servants. I was lucky there too: I had a man as short and round as his master. Here we are—the Hotel Bristol.”
But this—this is much too grand,” said Colette when she saw her room. Luc’s eyes fixed on a table dressed in white linen, where a silver tray was piled high with pastries along with two steaming pots—one of coffee, the other of hot chocolate. He wasn’t starving like some of Vienna’s children, but he wasn’t too far from that condition either. His sister added, “I’ve never been in a room like this in all my life.”
“And they dare to charge three English pennies for it,” replied Younger. “Robbery.”
Less than an hour later, in a small but comfortably middle-class apartment house on Berggasse—a narrow, cobbled lane gently sloping down to the Danube canal—a maid let Younger and Colette into Sigmund Freud’s empty consultation room. “I’m so nervous,” Colette whispered.
Younger nodded. Well she might be, he thought: Colette would be both worried and excited about the prospect that Dr. Freud might actually be able to help her brother; and she would be eager to make a good impression on the world-famous Viennese physician. But she, Younger reflected, was not the one who had disappointed him.
Freud’s consulting room was like a bath into which civilization itself had been poured. Leather-bound volumes lined the walls, and every inch not occupied by books was filled with antiquities and miniature statuary: Greek vases intermixed with Chinese terracottas, Roman intagli with South American figurines and Egyptian bronzes. The room pulsed with a rich fume of cigar and the deep crimson of Oriental carpets, which not only lay thick on the parquet floor, but also draped the end tables and even covered a long couch.
A door opened. A dog, a miniature chow, trotted through it, yapping. The animal was followed by Freud himself, who paused in the doorway ordering the dog away from Younger’s and Colette’s shoes. The chow obeyed.
“So my boy,” said Sigmund Freud to Younger without introduction, “you are no longer a psychoanalyst?”
Freud wore a suit and necktie and vest. In his left hand, half-raised, was a cigar between two fingers. He had grown older since Younger last saw him. His gray hair had thinned and receded; his short, pointed beard was now starkly white. Nevertheless, for a man of sixty-three, he remained handsome, fit and robust, with eyes exactly as Younger remembered them—both piercing and sympathetic, scowling and amused.
“Miss Rousseau,” said Younger, “may I present to you Dr. Sigmund Freud? Dr. Freud, I thought you might wish to speak with Miss Rousseau before