The Beggar King: A Hangman's Daughter Tale (US Edition)

by Oliver Pötzsch

Smiling, he fingered a matchbox in his coat pocket. Soon enough all his worries would vanish like a puff of smoke.

  Simon and Magdalena waited until the night was as black as the bottom of the Danube before heading downstairs to the tavern of the Whale. With considerable reluctance, the medicus had finally agreed to Magdalena’s plan to search the bathhouse for some clue that might exonerate Jakob Kuisl.

  As he descended the creaking stairs, Simon noticed with astonishment that the tavern, empty just a few hours before, was now at full capacity. Every table was occupied with weatherworn raftsmen and craftsmen smoking their pipes, but more well-to-do citizens were there, too, with their lace collars and sparkling buttons. Laughing loudly and gossiping, they rolled dice as wine flowed so freely that the scrawny server could barely keep their steins full. A dark cloud of tobacco smoke enveloped the men, many of whom held women in their laps: garishly made-up and giggling, groping their patrons’ crotches as they licked their dark, wine-stained lips.

  At his usual spot in back by the stove, the Venetian reclined, staring dreamily at the chaotic scene around him and sipping his wine now and then. He was the only one in the room with a leadcrystal glass in front of him.

  “Ah, la bella signorina and her brave protector!” he exclaimed in greeting as Magdalena and Simon entered. “Have you abandoned your love nest in order to devote yourselves to the joys of the night? Sit with me, signorina, and tell me whether you’ve read my little book yet! I’m—come si dice—dying to know what you think of it.”

  Simon shook his head coldly. “Sorry, we have other plans for tonight.”

  Silvio Contarini winked at them. “For that you could have just stayed upstairs, no?”

  Magdalena smiled and pulled away. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to stick your nose into other people’s business? Enjoy your wine, and we’ll see you later.”

  “But what about my book?” he called after them. “The poems? Via piacciono questi versi?”

  “I’ll wipe my backside with your book tonight,” Simon replied softly, closing the door behind them.

  They were immediately engulfed in silence; only the muffled sound of laughter could be heard through the thick windowpanes. A warm breeze was blowing a moldy odor off the Danube.

  “Simon, Simon.” Magdalena shook her head with mock severity. “Can you please be a little more polite? Or I might be tempted to believe you’re jealous!”

  “Oh, come now!” Simon stomped ahead. “I just can’t stand it when someone uses such cheap tricks to seduce a woman!”

  “Cheap?” Magdalena grinned, catching up to him. “You’ve never written me any poetry. But no need to worry; the Venetian is much too short for me anyway.”

  They avoided the large square in front of the cathedral and hurried westward through the stinking, narrow back streets. At this hour it was so dark in Regensburg that they could barely see their hands in front of their faces. Simon had brought along a little lantern from the Whale that he held under his jacket; this at least threw faint light a few yards ahead. They didn’t dare risk any more light, as it was long past curfew, and if the watchmen caught them, they would no doubt both wind up locked in a cell and spend the next day in the stocks in the city hall square. Moreover, the light attracted thieves and murderers, who even now were no doubt lurking in doorways and around dark corners, looking out for drunks on their way home from the taverns and hoping to relieve these poor, besotted souls of their purses, their sterling silver buttons, and their finely polished boots.

  Just as he had earlier that day, Simon imagined a robber skulking around every corner: once when he heard the sound of pebbles crunching just a few yards behind them, and later when he heard the faint sound of footsteps. In a narrow passage where the houses were built so close they almost touched, a legless beggar reached for Magdalena’s skirt; she rid herself of that nuisance with a single well-placed kick. But otherwise, except for a handful of drunks they encountered, all was quiet.

  After a good quarter-hour that seemed infinitely longer to the medicus, they finally reached the Weißgerbergraben. Along the road a canal flowed gently and emptied into the Danube, and before them the bathhouse loomed up out of the darkness. A tired watchman clutched his halberd in the entryway, looking as if he might just collapse at any moment.

  “Now what?” Simon whispered. “Shall we ask the guard if we can have a look around?”

  “Idiot!” Magdalena scolded. “But it is strange, isn’t it, that they’re still guarding the house? After all, the murder took place a while ago.” She stopped to think for a moment. “Let’s see if we can enter from the courtyard in back—nobody will see us that way.”

  Simon grabbed her sleeve. “Magdalena, think about it: if they catch us inside, they’ll draw and quarter us along with your father! Is that what you want?”

  “Then you can stay outside.”

  Magdalena broke away and slipped through a little alleyway barely wider than her hips that separated the bathhouse from the neighboring building. With a sigh, Simon followed.

  They climbed over slimy heaps of garbage and a foul-smelling mass of something that on closer inspection turned out to be a pig carcass. Dozens of rats scurried about. A few yards in, a hole appeared in the wall and, behind it, what seemed to be a back courtyard.

  Simon’s gaze wandered over a mildewed wooden tub, some nondescript piles of junk, and a newly built well. Behind this was a small garden with pots of soil neatly arranged in rows. A small door gave entry to an outbuilding.

  Magdalena hurried over to it and shook the handle gently. It was locked.

  “Now what?” Simon whispered.

  The hangman’s daughter pointed to a window that appeared to open into the bathhouse. The shutters were open a crack.

  “Looks like my uncle wasn’t especially cautious,” she said in a soft voice. “Or somebody’s been here before us.”

  The shutters creaked as she pushed them aside, then she boosted herself up and into the building. “Come on,” she whispered to Simon before disappearing into the darkness inside.

  Having crawled in behind her, Simon held up the lantern to illuminate the cavernous room in which they found themselves. It seemed to extend all the way to the front of the building and was divided into niches, each containing a wooden tub. Fresh towels were stacked on shelves all along the walls, and next to them stood rows of vials filled with fragrant oils.

  Magdalena stopped short. The tub directly next to her was still filled with water, and dark spots spattered the ground in front of it. She bent down to run her finger along the floor, and in the light cast by the lantern she could see her fingertip was red.

  “So this is where my aunt and uncle were murdered.” She wiped the sticky substance on her skirt. “Right in the bathtub, just as my father said. Look, you can still see the drops there.”

  Slowly she approached a far window that overlooked the back courtyard and motioned to Simon. By the light of his lantern he could see a bloody handprint on the windowsill.

  It was the handprint of a man of about medium build, certainly not of Jakob Kuisl, who had what were probably the biggest hands Simon had ever seen in his life.

  The medicus shrugged. “The print could be from one of the guards who removed the corpses.”

  “What, out the back window?” snapped Magdalena. “Nonsense! The murderer entered the house back here, killed the two of them, and escaped again the same way. The size of the handprint proves it wasn’t my father!”

  “Nobody will believe that in court,” Simon said, resuming his inspection of the room. By now his curiosity had gotten the better of his fear. He pointed to a door hidden at first glance behind one of the niches. “This seems to lead somewhere.”

  He pressed the door handle and found himself standing in a room with a brick oven. Stained copper kettles as big as slaughterhouse vats were arranged on the oven, and alongside it wood was piled high enough to burn a witch. A narrow stairway led to the second floor through a ceiling bl
ack with soot.

  “The heating chamber,” Magdalena said with an appreciative nod. “Aunt Lisbeth didn’t exaggerate when she wrote my father that their bathhouse was one of the largest in the city. With all this hot water, the entire Regensburg city council could probably splash around in the tubs all day long, all of them at once. Look.” She pointed to a circle of stones in the floor that surrounded a hole. A chain passed through the hole, allowing a damp wooden bucket to draw water from a well below. “Their very own well!” The hangman’s daughter sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to have something like that at home in Schongau. We’d never have to haul buckets up from the river again!”

  She took a yard-long stick from the woodpile, wrapped it with brushwood, and fashioned a torch to illuminate the dark space below. Meanwhile, Simon ventured up to the second story, where he found two additional rooms. In one, apparently the Hofmanns’ bedroom, stood a large bed and an open chest. Peering inside, Simon realized someone had already rifled through it. An empty folder lay on top of tattered linens along with a crumpled set of Hofmann’s Sunday best. The medicus assumed the folder had once contained the bathhouse owner’s official papers, which the guards had seized as evidence.

  Now Simon turned to the other room, and what he saw from the doorway stopped him in his tracks. It looked as if some evil spirit had wreaked havoc there. Over the fragrant reed-covered floor bouquets of dried herbs had been scattered and trampled. Shards of glass littered the floor, too, apparently broken cupping glasses. To his left, one shelf had been overturned and another held only a single bronze mortar; everything else had been hastily knocked to the floor. By the dim light of his lantern Simon saw a hopeless mess of torn parchments, tattered book bindings, leather purses ripped at the seams, and heaps of pills crushed to powder—all strewn across an enormous oak table that spanned the width of the room.

  The medicus picked up a pill and sniffed the powder. It smelled strongly of alum and resin. Clearly this was Andreas Hofmann’s treatment room. As bathhouse operator, he also tended to his patrons’ little aches and pains.

  Simon frowned. Why in God’s name would the guards have made this mess? Had they been looking for something?

  Or had someone else come back here after they’d left?

  He picked up a tattered book from the floor and leafed through it, a conventional herbarium depicting various kinds of grain. The pages with illustrations of rye, wheat, and oats were dog-eared and marked with red ink.

  “Simon, come quick! I’ve found something!”

  Magdalena’s stifled cry roused Simon from his thoughts. He put the book aside and hurried downstairs, where the hangman’s daughter was standing hip-deep in the well, pointing down excitedly.

  “See for yourself! There are iron rungs built into the wall leading down! And I hardly believe my uncle was climbing down the well to fetch water. There must be something else down here.” She continued climbing downward until she disappeared into the darkness.

  “Upstairs I found—” Simon began, but Magdalena interrupted him with an astonished cry.

  “I was right! There’s an entrance here just a few rungs farther down. Hurry and come down!”

  Queasy, Simon climbed down after her, arriving in just a few feet at a hole in the wall the size of a wagon wheel. He stumbled through, into a low chamber roughcast in white limestone. Inside, barrels, crates, and moldy sacks stood along the walls. Magdalena was already at work ripping open a number of them by the dim light of the lantern. She wore a disappointed look as she held up a few dried apples for him to see.

  “Damn! The cellar is nothing more than a storage room!” she said with disappointment.

  Simon thrust his stiletto into one of the barrels and stuck his finger inside. He tasted sweet, heavy red wine.

  “Malvasia,” he said, smacking his lips. “And not bad. At home only the fine burgomasters get stuff like this. Perhaps we should take a little keg for ourselves…”

  “Idiot!” Magdalena cursed. “We’re here to help my father, not to get drunk!”

  “That’s a pity,” Simon replied, shining his lantern around the room. In one corner he saw that rats had helped themselves to a bag of flour, as a faint white trail led along the wall to where other bags of ground meal were stacked—basic gray linen sacks cinched with black cord. Stooping down, the medicus ran his finger through the dust. He stopped short. The powder was light blue in color and had a sickly sweet odor. He suspected the meal had already begun to mold in the dampness down here.

  Simon followed the trail of dust until he came to a place along the wall where a sack had been torn open lengthwise. A half-dozen dead rats were lying on a mountain of flour, their bellies distended. Evidently the rodents had gorged themselves to death. As Simon nudged one of the cadavers with his shoe, he noticed footprints in the flour.

  The footprints came to an abrupt halt in front of the wall. One of them—

  All of a sudden he was startled by a rumbling from the room directly above them. The medicus ran to the hole where they’d entered the room and looked up. The darkness at the mouth of the well looked blacker to him now than before. He heard a splash, as if someone was filling one of the large kettles with water.

  “What’s going on up there?” Magdalena whispered, letting the apples fall to the ground.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Simon replied, scrambling up the rungs of the ladder.

  When his head struck something hard above him, his worst suspicions were confirmed. Someone had covered the mouth of the well with one of the large kettles from the boiler chamber and was now filling it with water.

  Desperately Simon pushed against the copper base, but the kettle was already so full that it wouldn’t budge, and they could hear the sound of ever more water pouring into the massive container. The sound of water pouring finally stopped, only to be followed by a crackling and wisps of smoke that penetrated the gaps between the kettle and the walls of the well.

  “Fire!” Simon cried. “Someone pushed the boiler over the hole and lit the wood! Help! Somebody help us!” He pounded desperately against the bottom of the kettle, though he knew no one could hear them up above.

  No one but whoever’s setting the fire, he thought.

  In the meantime the first tendril of smoke had grown to a dense and acrid cloud that was filling the entire shaft of the well. Coughing, Simon applied his shoulder to the kettle with all his might, but in vain. He couldn’t get a good foothold on the slippery rungs. He nearly plunged headlong down the well and threatened to take Magdalena with him, who by this time had clambered up the rungs behind him.

  “Damn it!” she shouted. “This is pointless! We can’t both push against the kettle at the same time. Let’s go back down and see if there’s a way to escape through the water. Perhaps it connects with the well in the yard!”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Simon wheezed. He was hardly visible through the thick smoke above her. “Then we’ll both drown like rats in the canal! No, there has to be another way!”

  He pushed once more against the base of the copper kettle, but it was like trying to move the wall of a house. If only the kettle hadn’t been filled with all that water!

  The water?

  Then an idea came to him. He drew his stiletto and jammed it repeatedly, in short, sharps jabs, at the bottom of the kettle. The metal was very hard, but after a while he managed to poke a tiny hole in it so a thin stream of water trickled down. Simon kept jabbing at it, and the stream became broader until a flood of warm water soon poured down over him and Magdalena. Once more he pressed his shoulder against the kettle, and now, finally, it budged! He continued pressing until the veins on his temples stood out and the smoke made him gag. With a crash, the heavy vessel finally tipped, and heavy smoke poured into the well.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Simon shouted as he climbed up the last few rungs. Coughing and struggling for breath, Magdalena followed. The boiler room was already filled with thick, caustic smoke, and Simon kept bum
ping into walls like a blind man until he finally stumbled on the door to the bath chamber. The medicus screamed as he touched the glowing-hot door handle; tiny shreds of his flesh stuck to the metal, hissing. In desperation Simon kicked down the door and stumbled into the large room where the bathtubs and wooden partitions were already ablaze. Someone had knocked over the oil containers, and waist-high flames rose from glistening puddles around the room. Simon was about to run toward the main entrance, but Magdalena grabbed his shoulder and held him back.

  “That door is most certainly locked,” she gasped. “And anyway, the guard is probably still there. We have to get out through the back again!”

  With burning eyes and lungs practically bursting with pain, they staggered toward the rear window, which fortunately was still open. Simon pushed his way through the opening and landed hard on a pile of rubbish. Pain shot through his right ankle. Beside him he could hear Magdalena groaning loudly. She struggled to her feet and ran through the inner courtyard and down the narrow lane. All she wanted was to get away from this inferno. Simon could hardly stand now—on top of everything else, he’d sprained his ankle. When he turned around again, he could see the fire had already spread to the attic, and the roof timbers had started crashing down behind him. The flames licked at the neighboring houses like the tongues of malevolent spirits.

  Somewhere nearby an alarm started to ring.

  The old night watchman Sebastian Demmler smelled the fire before he saw it—a faint odor in his nose at first, then stronger, more biting, coating his palate with an acrid taste and awakening his worst fears. Demmler had lived through the great fire during the war and remembered the conflagration quite vividly from his childhood. Two entire city neighborhoods had been reduced to ashes back then, and the cathedral had just barely been spared. He would never forget how the townsfolk screamed as they leaped from their burning homes.

  Demmler had been a night watchman for decades, and when he smelled this fire, his infallible instinct told him that such a time had come again. He took one step around the next corner to see the home of the murdered bathhouse owner blazing now like a gigantic torch. Three other buildings had already caught fire. This close, everything was lit up as brightly as on Easter night when they set bonfires to drive away the evil winter spirits. Demmler could feel the heat singeing the hair on his bare arms. Stepping back a few paces, he sounded the alarm with his little bell.