‘What a face!’ exclaimed the Surgeon with bounding enthusiasm. ‘Once that eye of his has dried out, I’ll have a cast made. Such wicked devastation! Smallpox, that lip, now the eye. My students at the University…’
‘Is his life in danger?’ I asked.
‘Not in the least!’ he replied energetically. ‘No, no, that man’s as strong as a lion. Refused to let me tie him down! Can you imagine? Refused to let me draw the pus from the socket with hiruda worms! “Get on with it,” he said. “Just tell me when you’ve finished.” You’d have thought he had some more important business in hand than saving his own life! Can you believe that?’
‘May I see him?’ I asked. I had a good idea what Lublinsky’s more important business might have been.
‘Certainly, sir,’ Colonel Franzich returned. ‘But let me warn you, that man has suffered a terrible injury, yet he seems to shrug it off. So far as I can gather, he doesn’t care a damned fig about the loss of his eye. No, no,’ he continued as he tapped his forefinger to his head, ‘his problems are up here. He may turn on you. Shall we go?’
The Colonel-Surgeon led me down to the ward.
‘There he is,’ he said, pointing to the far end of the aisle.
There were fifty or sixty single beds lined up on either side of the room, but only one other patient shared the large hospital ward with Lublinsky. This patient had been allocated a bed next to the door, while Anton Lublinsky was placed on the opposite side, and at the farthest end, as if Colonel Franzich had decided that they were two very different species of wild animal and better kept apart.
‘Is there any way a man can leave this room?’ I asked.
Colonel Franzich looked at me in puzzlement. ‘Not before he is fully recovered and fit for duty,’ he replied.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ I interrupted. ‘Are they allowed free passage in and out of this ward while being treated?’
‘This is not a prison, Herr Procurator. Just look at them! Do you believe that either man could have walked out of here without assistance? This man’s leg has been amputated below the knee, while the fellow you wish to see has not eaten, or shifted from his chair since they brought him in last night.’
I nodded, though I was not convinced.
‘Be careful how you speak to him,’ Surgeon Franzich urged. ‘I have rarely seen a man in such a dismal state of depression.’
‘A few words, no more,’ I murmured quickly, walking away towards the far end of the room.
Lublinsky sat facing a large window, though he did not seem to be gazing out at the world. He might have been looking at himself in a mirror. Wrapped up tightly in a large black great-cloak, his shaved head tucked into the high collar of his uniform, there was an air of such abject melancholy and shrunken manhood about him that I hesitated for a moment before addressing him.
‘So, we meet again, Lublinsky,’ I said.
He did not move. Nor did he turn or shy away, though he must surely have recognised my voice.
‘I hardly thought to meet you,’ he muttered after some moments. There was something flat and inexpressive in his manner that I took at first to be a doomed acceptance of his fate. ‘I hardly thought to meet anyone ever again.’
I sat down on the bed and looked at him. A large padded dressing had been draped over the left side of his face. It was held in place with bandages. He shifted on his chair and fixed his good eye on me. He made a better impression than he had the first time we had met, the deformity of his face hidden by the medical dressings.
‘I’m glad to find you better, Lublinsky.’
‘Better than the last time, you mean?’ His attempt at a smile appeared like a horrible distortion on his lips. ‘You’re right, though. I feel at home here. In a soldiers’ hospice they’ve seen worse faces than mine. They don’t baulk away from such revolting things, if you catch my drift.’
‘We must talk, Lublinsky.’
He shifted in his seat again, showing only the bandaged side of his face. Clearly, he was not going to let me forget what he had been subjected to. Even so, I did not mean to harm him further. My only wish was to extract the truth and so conclude my investigation.
‘I’ve told you all I know,’ he said.
‘Not all, Lublinsky,’ I replied. ‘Not everything. Anna Rostova is dead. But you know that for a fact already.’
He sat up stiffly. ‘Do you believe that loss of sight has given me greater powers of vision? I have not learnt that trick yet.’
I noted this change of attitude. There was a sarcastic bitterness about him. A desperate vein of dark humour had ousted the timidity which marked him out at our first meeting. And yet, fear of what I could do to him was there. Resentment too. It seemed to charge his being, as if he lacked strength of character to master it. Well, I thought, I have played on his fear of my office once before, and I mean to do so again.
‘You’ve told me but half the truth,’ I began. ‘I want to hear the rest. How did you manage to escape from this place last night?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he protested in that mewling nasal voice, raising the back of his hand to wipe the spittle from his lips.
‘You know nothing of the murder of Anna Rostova?’
‘Must I answer such a question?’
‘I think you must, Lublinsky.’
‘You know the answer, then.’
‘Yesternight you swore to murder her,’ I insisted.
Lublinsky turned full-face, and brought his good eye to bear on mine like a man-of-war coming around broadside and lining up its heavy cannons. There was something majestic in his manner of doing so which surprised me. I realised then that his life had changed. He had altered since our meeting the night before. I had expected a mutation, but I was not prepared for the nature of it. There was, as I have mentioned, majesty and dignity, but they were the majesty and the dignity of malevolence. Lucifer after the Fall. There was no evidence of self-disgust, no sign of repentance, nothing to denote the agony of a tortured Christian conscience. Had I been able to remove the bandages from his face, I doubt I would have found the features I had come to know. There was evil in him, and he made no attempt to suppress it. He appeared capable of any act, any offence, any degradation, and I felt myself defenceless before him.
As he stared at me in silence, his eye seemed to gleam and swell with evil pride. I could not tell what was going through his mind. I only knew that I would not like it. He did not flinch or look down as he had done the first time that Koch had called him into my presence.
‘You killed her,’ I said quietly. ‘What have you to lose by admitting it?’
He held his silence for some moments.
‘I was here in the Infirmary, Herr Procurator,’ he said with a bitter-sweet smile. ‘Anna saw to that.’
‘She was seen with a man last night in a tavern out at Pillau,’ I pressed on. ‘They were coupling, Lublinsky. Rutting like wild animals. Is that her power of attraction over you, too?’
‘Over me, Herr Procurator? Me? Over you, I would have thought!’ he rattled off angrily. ‘I’ve seen the way you ogled her. Me? With half a chance, you’d have given her a length! In spite of what she is. For that reason, maybe.’
I swallowed hard before I spoke.
‘Do not accuse me of your own sins. I am a happily married man!’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he replied with a dismissive shake of the head. ‘Then they hand over the coin and unbutton their pants. A wife is only a wife. Anna was something really special.’
‘It does not change the fact that you murdered her last night.’
Lublinsky did not reply immediately.
‘Let’s say, for just one moment, that you are right, Herr Procurator,’ he said at last, and he was taunting me. ‘What bloody difference does it make? Whoever killed her, God will forgive the deed. That man did the world a favour.’
‘I am not interested in your opinions of Divine Justice,’ I snapped. ‘Nor am I inte
rested particularly in the murder of Anna Rostova last night. The only thing I want from you is an admission of the truth.’
The pupil of his eye dilated, and I was faced with a dark, imponderable hole. ‘What are you talking about, sir?’ he said with a flash of exasperation. ‘The truth about what?’
‘I want to know what you really saw and did when you went to examine those murdered corpses in the streets with Kopka.’
Lublinsky swivelled towards the window and studied himself in the glass. A dense fog had swept in from the sea with the turn of the tide. It had suffocated the wind and banished the sleet, transforming the world into a silent milky void.
‘I’ve told you that before,’ he snarled. ‘I saw what I drew.’
‘I’ve seen your sketches, Lublinsky,’ I said. ‘They are incomplete.’
‘What do you want from a soldier? I’m not an artist. I said that to the odd old gentleman, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had money to throw away. I just did as he asked.’
‘You didn’t draw the footprints that the killer left on the ground beside the bodies,’ I accused.
‘Which footprints?’
‘In the case of the first murder, you sketched in what you found around the body, including footprints bearing a knife-cut in the shape of a cross. But you did not trace out those marks in all the other cases.’
‘Satan leaves no prints,’ Lublinsky said with a bitter laugh. ‘His cloven feet don’t touch the ground.’
‘Do not joke with me,’ I flared with anger. Had he really omitted the footprints from his later drawings, or were there none to be seen? ‘You believed that Anna Rostova was the culprit. And when the killings continued, you convinced yourself that she had committed them all. She was a witch sacrificing human lives to her demons. You chose to consort with her to cure your face. So, you covered the tracks that she had left behind her. That is why you drew no more prints. You thought that they would lead to her.’
A noise like shifting gravel rattled from Lublinsky’s throat. He was laughing. ‘That needle must have entered my brain,’ he said. ‘I don’t follow you, sir. How could I have done such diabolical things? Kopka was with me.’
‘Kopka is dead, and the dead cannot speak. You killed him, didn’t you?’ I hissed. ‘He must have guessed what you were up to, that you were covering up for a criminal. Rather than denounce you, he tried to desert from the regiment. But you chased him, and you brought him back. You were the capturing officer the report talks about, Lublinsky, were you not? Kopka was made to run the gauntlet, while every man in the regiment, yourself included, tried to crack his skull open with a stick.’
‘Deserters know the score,’ he growled. ‘It’s no easy thing to leave the Prussian army. That bastard got what was coming to him.’
‘How very convenient for you, Lublinsky.’
‘You cannot frighten me, Herr Procurator,’ he replied boldly. ‘I’ve nothing left to lose. If you wish to believe that Anna Rostova was the murderer and that I was her accomplice, you’re free to do so. If you think that I connived at Kopka’s death, dream on. But you’ll not put those words into my mouth. You won’t get me to confess…’
I played my final card. God help me, I had no alternative.
‘You are proud to be a soldier, are you not?’
‘It was my life,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll be cast off now, I suppose.’
‘A dishonourable discharge,’ I added, ‘a barebacked whipping out of the regiment. Then civil charges to face. Complicity to murder, obstruction of Justice, theft from a corpse. You are going to pay in full for Anna Rostova’s crimes, as well as for your own. You won’t find much in the way of sympathy in any prison. An officer who’s betrayed his trust? The lowest of the low. Sentence? Life. With forced labour and reduced rations. With a bit of luck, you may survive a year or two. I want you to suffer, Lublinsky. And to make quite sure of it, I will condemn you to serve out your time in a…military prison!’
‘You can’t do that!’ he roared, the enormity of the threat opening up before him. He would be hated and brutalised by his guards, reviled and tormented by his fellow prisoners. Each moment of every day he would be hounded and harried by a heartless pack of wild dogs.
‘Can I not, Lublinsky? You know the legal code by heart, I suppose? I can condemn any man to the sentence I think most fit. Article 137 of the Penal Code. You go where I decide to send you.’
There is no such article, but Lublinsky was not to know. I pronounced this threat like a pagan god who knows no pity for the creatures under his jurisdiction. And like a deity devoid of all Christian compassion, I obtained what I insisted on having. He blubbered for a moment, but then he found his voice. His mutilated tongue began to squawk in fractured measures.
‘The first time, that morning, I went to see the corpse she’d found. I guessed she was hiding something. Some secret…’ His voice was strained, low, and I had to struggle to understand. ‘Then, Kopka went for gin. For her, for Anna. She put her spell on me while he was gone. “I’ll cure your face,” she said.’
‘There is nothing new or interesting in this, Lublinsky,’ I cut in. ‘I want to hear the rest. I want to know about those footprints.’
‘Kopka saw them…’
‘And you assumed that the woman had left them?’
Lublinsky shook his head. ‘Not the first time, sir.’
‘You drew them on that occasion, did you not?’
‘I drew what I could recall. It was months afterwards. I was no good at it, but Professor Kant was happy. There were footprints all around that body. On the ground. In the snow,’ Lublinsky went on. ‘There was a cross on the sole. When I told Anna, she said that cross was the sign of the Devil mocking the crucifixion. It was a sacrilege, she said. So when I saw that cross again, I did not draw it. Nor did I report everything that I found there…’
He paused, and peered into my face, looking for approval. He was offering me something, working to save his miserable hide, just as he had done when he surrendered Anna Rostova into my hands the day before.
‘What did you find?’ I asked, trying to sound detached.
‘A chain,’ he said. ‘In the hand of Jan Konnen. A watch-chain with a broken link.’
‘What did you do with it?’
‘When Kopka wasn’t looking, I slipped it in my pocket. It was silver.’
‘That’s theft,’ I sneered.
He hesitated for a moment. ‘I gave it to Anna. A gift from Satan, she said, and I’d be rewarded ‘cause I’d done the right thing. She told me then what she had done. She’d pulled the Devil’s claw from the dead man’s neck before we arrived. Afterwards, she made me bring her any trifle that I found at the murder scenes. Those things were charged with the power of life and death…’
‘If she was the murderer, why didn’t she take them herself?’ I objected.
‘She wanted to tie me to her, sir,’ Lublinsky mumbled. ‘To make me her accomplice. She promised she’d heal me with the Devil’s claw. I had to swear an oath. Tell anyone this secret, she said, and the spell won’t work.’
‘The second time, you found the same footprints by the body?’
Lublinsky nodded. ‘There was that cross-cut again. It was hers, I’d swear, though I didn’t see her that time. Her power was growing with each murder, she said. I thought she’d put a spell on Professor Kant ’cause he insisted that I should be sent out. Whenever there was another murder, I had to go and draw it. An’ while I was there, I collected the Devil’s gifts for Anna.’
I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘They all had something hidden in their hands, sir. All of them. Those corpses…I took the objects and I gave them to Anna Rostova like an obedient dog.’
My heart beat fast. A new light shone on what I knew.
‘What did you find?’
‘A key in the fist of the dead lady.’
Professor Kant had surely been referring to something of the sort when he spoke of the murderer having
used some stratagem to induce the victims to fall down on their knees. The list that Lublinsky gave me contained nothing of any import or value. The victims had died clasping banal objects of everyday use, sinister and mysterious by their association only with murder and witchcraft. The chain of Konnen, the key in Frau Brunner’s hand, a brass button stamped with an anchor in the hand of the third, a groat from the fingers of Lawyer Tifferch.
‘I cleaned the bones of the dead for her. I sorted through the muck for Anna Rostova,’ Lublinsky went on. ‘Like a carrion crow.’
‘Did you take the weapon for her, too?’
‘No, sir. She must have spirited it away. I never saw her there again. Not once after the first time.’
He stared at me in disbelief, as if awaking from a dream.
‘She killed them, but I didn’t give a damn. Not me. If people dying meant her power was growing, I was glad of it. God help me! I wanted her to kill again.’
He let out a strange cry, a strangled whimper, and I realised he was laughing.
‘I carried a mirror in my pocket,’ he said, his shoulders heaving, ‘to see my face. Waiting for it to change after each murder. She promised much, but nothing changed. Still the same. Ugly brute…’
He was mad, lost in a world of vain hopes of his own creating.
‘It’s funny, is it not?’ he said with sudden vehemence, his head jerking round at me. ‘That woman terrified the city and commanded the King. No one would have given her a second glance if Nature hadn’t marked her out. We’re two of a kind, we are. Me, with a face disfigured by smallpox. That wild silver hair she had. Those blazing eyes. I wanted her. Even as she plunged that dart in my eye…’ He fixed me with that mocking eye of his. ‘Did you think to find the answer to your mystery in two such monsters, Herr Stiffeniis?’
There was a claim to omnipotence in his tone, I suddenly realised. He was proud of what he had done. He seemed to think that he and Anna Rostova had held Königsberg in their hands. And he was right. They had toyed with the authorities, with the police, the King. Professor Kant had been taken in by them. And so had I. Anger burst from me like hot water gushing from a Greenland geyser. All pity gone, I felt the urge to harm him, to repay him for his arrogance.
HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason Page 30