HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘You’ve won a fair bit on those creatures,’ I began in a friendly fashion. Koch stood close beside me, and though the soldiers had retreated a pace or two, they held their muskets ready.

  ‘Want to know which one to bet on, do you?’ the man replied with a lazy nasal hiss. There was no Arctic inflection in his voice, his German precise enough. ‘I know them critters,’ he said with a rumbling laugh which shook the loose skins of his furs.

  ‘Indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Now, tell me about the woman.’

  Schuppe narrowed his eyes and studied my face. ‘What woman?’

  ‘Anna Rostova,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah, that woman,’ he smiled, and that laugh rumbled out of him again. ‘When a man’s condemned, he takes his pleasure where he can. He can’t take nothing with him. Only money, sir. Money buys a dram, a warm blanket. There’s not much else. A bite to eat. Women…I spent mine well enough last night. Grog, a bet, a warm body rubbing up to mine.’

  ‘Tell me more about the warm body,’ I said, as casually as I could, though it cost me a great deal. The image of Anna Rostova copulating like a beast in the darkest corner of that dark pit with a fiend who not only killed his brother, but ate him too, took my breath away.

  ‘What did she tell you?’ I insisted.

  The rough laugh which erupted from his throat made all eyes turn in our direction. ‘Between their thighs, they got warm lips that don’t say much!’

  ‘Before you part for the North, I may decide to have you whipped within an inch of your life, Helmut Schuppe,’ I said coldly. ‘Or worse, if I discover that you played any part in her death.’

  The threat had had no effect on him, as I was soon to realise, but what he had heard from my tongue had worked its own small miracle. I had pitched a rock into a pool, and the ripples told me what I would never otherwise have believed. Helmut Schuppe, fratricide and cannibal, was moved by the news of the death of Anna Rostova.

  ‘Dead, sir?’ he whispered, his voice as tender as a child’s.

  ‘Strangled,’ I replied.

  ‘I saw her killer, sir,’ he whispered, staring me in the eyes.

  I caught my breath. ‘Can you describe him?’

  Schuppe shook his head and looked away. ‘A shadow, sir. A shadow carried her off. I know evil when I see it. The rats went quiet when he entered here.’

  ‘Beware!’ I hissed angrily. ‘Speak plainly, if you please.’

  He stared at me intently for some moments. ‘That man was hunting her like a hungry wolf. She knew where we were bound, sir. Wanted to come along, she did, so she tried it on with them two.’

  He looked at the soldiers, his eyes flicking from one to the other.

  ‘Over there,’ Schuppe indicated the corner furthest from the fire and the lanterns, then he spat at the soldiers, staring hard at them. ‘I’d give an arm an’ a leg to get my teeth in those pigs’ livers! But they got guns, and I must live. You can’t get rid of me in Russia, bastards!’ he shouted at them with hatred. ‘I’ll be back to feast on your warm guts!’

  Six thousand miles on foot through a hostile country. The felons would be lucky to arrive, I thought, let alone come back.

  ‘So, then she turned to the prisoners,’ I said, my voice hoarse, low.

  ‘One or two fancied their chance,’ he said proudly, ‘but I got money, I have. I gave her Geld to keep her close beside me. Promised this lot I’d make coats for ’em afore we got to Narva. Keep ’em quiet, like. There’s rats a-ship. Fur’s more warmin’ in the ice and snow than the memory of a whore.’

  I felt a wave of confused gratitude towards that rough man. Unlike the soldiers, his heart was not immune to the bewitching charm of beauty.

  ‘You said that she was afraid. Of what? Of whom?’

  Schuppe shook his head. ‘People are dying in Königsberg, that was all she said.’ He looked at me intently. ‘What did she mean, sir? Is there a pestilence in the city?’

  I ignored the question.’ What passed between you?’

  Schuppe blew out his cheeks and scratched his nose. ‘Siberia, I told her. Forget it, women can’t survive out there!’

  He was right about that. The deportation agreement had been signed with Paulus Romanov in 1801, and two women had been shipped out with the first consignment. One was a prostitute, the other wretch had killed her husband and her children. I remembered the reports that had appeared in all the newspapers, the scandal that had emerged. The women had been raped repeatedly by the other prisoners, and the cold had killed them before they reached their destination. State Minister von Arnim had issued a Circular correcting the first, prohibiting any magistrate or prison commander from deporting a woman. Arnim insisted that only strong, healthy men should be sent, as the Tsar would not accept malingerers in his labour colonies. Ironically, the inflexibility of the Romanovs had worked more wonders on our penal system than any Enlightened discussion of the nature of crime and punishment would ever do.

  ‘She’d been there,’ he added. ‘Siberia and back!’

  ‘Deported?’ I quizzed.

  Schuppe nodded. ‘ “Look at my hair, my skin,” she said. “Where d’you think I turned to ice?” ’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘I live by hunting animals, sir. I sells their skins and I chews their meat. Moles in the summer, rats in the winter. God knows how many towns in Prussia I’ve rid o’vermin! I’ll make warm socks to see me through the snow. I’ll be back!’ he shouted, turning to the soldiers. ‘White as ice like her, but I’ll come back for you bastards!’

  Come back from Nerchinsk? Only a ghost could return. A ghost or a tern, able to fly across the ice and the snow, flying high above the ravaging wolves of the tundra forest, the hungry polar bears, the frozen desert of the Steppe. No one would be coming back from Nerchinsk. A man who was deported there was dead before he set a foot outside Prussia. Again, that newspaper report flashed through my mind:

  …the temperature of minus 55 degrees, 5250 miles from St Petersburg, 480 miles north of the Great Wall of China, 100 miles west of the Pacific Ocean, remote not only from Western Europe, but from the trade routes between Russia and China. Desolate steppe and bare mountain stretching for vast distances, inhabited only by a wandering horde of Tartar savages.

  There was something gleefully punitive in the official gazette from Berlin.

  Was this the final act of Anna Rostova? She had told a brazen lie and brought hope to this man. I prayed for her soul. For that falsehood, if for nothing else.

  ‘She left you, Schuppe,’ I said, flatly. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I fell asleep after the ratting stopped. I’d had a skinful. Then I woke with a start, and I saw her near the door. Chained to this lot, I couldn’t do nowt but yell at him. She glanced back, then they was gone. He dragged her out by the hair…’

  ‘A man, you say?’

  ‘In a big black coat, a hat pulled down low. They was gone in a flash.’

  ‘Thank you, Schuppe,’ I began to say, nodding to the guard to return him to the bench and his chains.

  ‘You know what I done, don’t you, sir?’ he interrupted in an urgent whisper, moving his head close to mine.

  I nodded in silence, drawing back from his person.

  ‘I killed my brother,’ he said, looking deep into my eyes.

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘I needed shelter, soldiers were searching for me. He told me to get lost, threatened me with an axe. I took it off him, an’ I gave it back to him by the blade.’

  He told this tale with stark simplicity. As if the sequence were inevitable. The brother. The need for sanctuary. The axe. As if there was nothing else to be done.

  Could I have done the same? Could I have given a similar uncomplicated account of what had happened between Stefan and myself? This man was fated to die in Siberia, while I was hunting a killer in the company of Immanuel Kant…

  ‘I have eaten human flesh,’ he said, breaking in upon my thoughts. ‘I’ll do the same again, given the circumstances
.’

  ‘Which circumstances are you talking of?’ I asked, curiously.

  ‘War. Famine. A long march. Wait ‘til Bonaparte gets here, sir, then see how many souls end up in the cooking-pot. When a man is desperate…’

  I recalled the scene I had witnessed on my way to Königsberg with Koch, the gang of robbers at the bridge who had butchered the farmer’s horse for meat.

  ‘I’ll eat my way across the Arctic waste unless you help me…’

  ‘Help you, Schuppe?’ I asked. ‘How, in the name of Heaven, can I help you?’

  He stepped so close that one of the soldiers shouted and dug his musket fiercely into the prisoner’s spine.

  ‘A man in furs can die of hunger,’ he hissed, clacking his teeth together noisily, working his jaws as if he were chewing something tough but tasty. ‘Save these poor creatures from my sharp fangs, sir.’

  We stared at each other for a moment, then his hand rose up before my face clasping a stub of graphite.

  ‘Extra rations,’ he said with a disarming smile.

  ‘Shackle this prisoner,’ I ordered the soldiers, taking the pencil, turning towards the meagre light from the fire. ‘And let me see your list.’

  At my back I heard the clink of chains as Helmut Schuppe was returned to his place. Then I made a note next to the name of the last man who had shown any tenderness to Anna Rostova, a man who been condemned for murdering his brother and eating his liver, the man with ‘Murderer’ branded on his cheeks in large capital letters: ‘Merits extra food’.

  I turned to Koch. ‘Take the names of the guards, Sergeant. I’ll have them punished for negligence in the exercise of their duties. For taking advantage of the woman with false promises of a passage to Siberia.’

  ‘They might end up in chains themselves, sir,’ Koch advised. ‘With a long, cold march in front of them.’

  I turned away and strode towards the exit. I had no sympathy for animals who had slaked their lust on a vulnerable wench, then failed to protect her from the man who had murdered her. Outside, the smell of the estuary at low water was foul and damp.

  ‘What now, Herr Procurator?’ Koch asked, his voice subdued.

  ‘Did you get their names?’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very well. Let’s make our way back to town. To the Infirmary,’ I said. ‘Lublinsky had a motive to kill her. But did he have the opportunity?’

  Koch was silent, and I thought that he might be sulking, that he dared to question my decision, though I could not have been more mistaken. He was a professional. Having closed the door on that hellhole, his mind was already moving forward.

  ‘With your permission, sir,’ he said, ‘I’ll not come with you.’

  ‘Not come? What are you plotting, Koch?’ I asked.

  ‘I was thinking of my wife, Herr Stiffeniis,’ he replied, and there was such abject melancholy in his voice that I was unable to meet his glittering eyes.

  ‘Your wife?’ I echoed, astounded. ‘You told me that you lived alone.’

  ‘Merete was taken during the last typhoid epidemic,’ he continued in a low voice. The loss still caused him evident pain. ‘She was an embroidress, sir. I was thinking of the needles that she used. I always knew what to buy on her nameday, or for the Saint Nicolaus feast. Last night, when you discovered the murder weapon, sir, I could not help but think of Merete. If I could find the man who sold those needles, I thought, perhaps he’d recall the people who had bought them in the past. It might provide a lead, don’t you agree?’

  ‘If such things are so commonly used by housewives, there may be a multitude of users in Königsberg,’ I objected, but Sergeant Koch did not back down.

  ‘Merete mentioned a man in the trade,’ he went on with conviction. ‘A gentleman who could supply anything that a person might need. If I could trace him, sir, he might be able to tell us something about the type of needle, and the people who buy them. It’s not the common sort my wife used.’

  The proverbial search in the haystack came to mind, but I had no wish to dampen Koch’s enthusiasm.

  ‘You don’t need me at the Infirmary, sir,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps I can locate the man. There aren’t many shops in Königsberg selling haberdashery.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I encouraged, though I had little hope of success.

  Thus, it was decided. Koch would accompany me back to town, then our ways would part. As we stood there talking in the salty, windblown air, rivulets of damp formed on the waterproof surface of the cape Professor Kant had given me. I shook them off as we boarded the coach. At the same time, I could not help but notice that the sergeant’s pea-jacket was soaking wet.

  ‘You look like a drowned rat,’ I said lightly. ‘Take this cape. You’ll be obliged to walk in town, while I will have the coach.’

  ‘There’s no need, really, sir,’ he protested weakly.

  I slipped the cape from my shoulders and handed it to him.

  ‘Precisely, Koch. My lack of need is greater than yours,’ I said, unfolding my woollen cloak once more and wrapping myself up in it.

  Having crossed any number of wooden bridges to the centre of town, the carriage stopped; Sergeant Koch climbed down and strode off purposefully into the gathering gloom. Dressed in Kant’s glistening waterproof cloak, I seemed to see myself in hot pursuit of the murderer. I had to smile, though it would be many a day before I managed to smile again.

  Chapter 25

  ‘Anton Theodor Lublinsky,’ Colonel-Surgeon Franzich nodded vigorously. ‘Lost his left eye, of course. No help for that, Herr Procurator. Putrefaction had set in. He’d have lost the other one, too. Do take a seat.’

  As soon as I introduced myself, he had led me up three steps to his room, one wall of which appeared to have been recently constructed. Unlike any other room that I had observed inside the Fortress of Königsberg, this wall was entirely made of panes of glass.

  ‘Far easier to keep a watch on the inmates,’ Colonel Franzich said by way of explanation, waving his hand in the direction of the ward. ‘All you have to do is stand up. Like a skipper on the bridge.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ I replied with an appreciative smile.

  ‘They, of course, are forbidden to stand. We have “condemned” them to bed!’ he joked with a tired smile. ‘They cannot see us. All they can see is this wall at my back.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I replied.

  ‘The Wailing Wall, I call it. Biblical reference, you know?’ he replied with the same fixed, tired smile.

  From where I sat, my back to the glass partition, I was obliged to look at the very wall he was talking of. And more than once, I asked myself whether the array of objects so carefully positioned on that Wailing Wall would convince any sick man to place his trust in Colonel-Surgeon Franzich. That wall was guaranteed to frighten all remaining hope out of any man at risk of dying, or losing a limb from the injuries he had suffered.

  ‘Are those figures made of wax?’ I asked.

  ‘Most certainly,’ he replied. ‘Most of the victims are still alive and…relatively well, I suppose. Military surgery has come on by leaps and bounds in the past decade. Before these patients were allowed to leave the Infirmary, I had a wax cast made of their injuries. To an expert eye, the possibilities of reconstruction are…well, they are evident.’

  His smile was meant to be reassuring, but it reminded me, disconcertingly, of Gerta Totz’s. The exhibits arrayed on the wall were macabre in the extreme. Wax castings of hands, arms and legs which had been severed and torn by grapeshot, or lost forever to the chop and slash of bayonets and sabres. But worst of all were the faces. They hung in a row at the top like ghostly death masks. The faces of men unlucky enough to suffer the cruel and crushing deformation of cannonballs and the heavy machinery of war.

  Surgeon Franzich sat calmly in his chair before these monstrous mementoes of his carving-block like the proud owner of a wax museum selling tickets to his tent of human horrors. The flame from the lighted oil lamp on h
is desk flickered and fluttered in the gloom, and I was reminded suddenly of a summer evening I had spent in a splendid hunting lodge with my father and his elder brother, Edgard Stiffeniis, in the hills near Spandau over a decade before. As moths and insects threw themselves wildly at the dancing candlelight, dying in an unending sequence of flashes of light and sharp crackles, Uncle Edgard recounted the hunting adventures which had resulted in the collection of stuffed, mounted heads of bears and boars which decorated the walls of his lodge. This was far, far worse. Those faces immortalised on the wailing wall of Surgeon Franzich seemed to live and breathe an agony of tortured nerves and stretched skin. The impression that the effigies made on my mind was not softened by the unmistakable stains of blood which had dried on the Company Surgeon’s workmanlike grey apron.

  One face in particular attracted my unwilling attention. It was hard to look away, more painful still to look. The man had lost his lower jaw. His upper teeth hung jagged, exposed and broken above the unthinkable gap, his tongue a naked, bulging purple snake with no place to hide, nowhere to rest, slopping forward where his lips had once been. The exposed parts of the poor man’s throat and neck had been carefully painted in the colours of life, a brutal kaleidoscope of indigo, red and adipose yellow. As the light from the candle shifted and stirred, the tendons, muscles and membranes appeared to pulse with all the vitality of everlasting pain.

  ‘You signed the death warrant for Rudolph Aleph Kopka, I believe?’

  ‘Kopka?’ the colonel replied guardedly, as if he had never heard the man’s name before.

  ‘A deserter. Six months ago, he died of a fractured larynx.’

  Colonel Franzich drummed his fingers on the edge of the table for some moments. ‘I’ll need to check the files,’ he said.

  ‘You won’t find much there,’ I replied. ‘I have already looked.’

  ‘Well, then?’ he shrugged. ‘What more can I tell you?’

  A great deal, I thought, but I did not say so.

  ‘Let’s speak about Lublinsky,’ I said instead.