“Thank you,” he said with a brief smile as the stewardess handed him a double bourbon. Thirty thousand feet in the air with a drink—it was practically like being in paradise after these last few awful days. He hoped this jet would never land.
But what the hell was this crazy thing, this report he was reading, anyway? A 16th-century werewolf? A magic dagger? This better have something to do with Dominic Abend or he’d have two thousand dollars’ worth of explaining to do when he got back to the office, along with his other troubles.
He sipped his drink, set the plastic receptacle down on the fold-out table, and read on.
After doing his duty in the torture and beheading of Stumpf, Hans the executioner all but disappears from history—although B. F. Korchinski maintains that a reference is made to his memory in the fictional picaresque account of the Thirty Years War, A Christian’s Progress, written shortly after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The sardonic narrator is describing the aftermath of a battle:
“The surviving women having been raped and disemboweled in the most Christian fashion imaginable, their still breathing bodies were tied with ropes and dangled from the branches of nearby trees so that the defenders of Our Most Gracious Lord could amuse themselves with their death throes. It was when I went out in the dark of night to see if I could bring relief to any of these poor creatures that I spotted the enormous wolf ranging among the dead and dying. Such a beast was he that had never been seen or even heard of in this region—twice the stature of a man, with flaming red eyes and teeth the size of daggers that glistened in the light of the full moon—so that I was certain I was witnessing a demon who had been summoned from hell by the wickedness that had been perpetrated here. After gorging itself on the bodies of the dying women, the thing retreated. My curiosity overcame my fear and, thinking I might witness some demonic marvel, I followed at a little distance. What then should I see as the full moon crossed the meridian, but the hideous beast transform itself into the likeness of a man! At first, I thought this must be the devil himself. But no. As I watched, this poor sinner, naked and covered in gore, sat himself down upon the grass atop a little ridge and, holding his face in his two hands, began weeping piteously and crying out, ‘My love! My love! It is for you I am become an abomination!’ Father Jacob [a local priest] later explained to me that this was the wandering spirit of a medicine man, who had rescued his lady from a werewolf only to be himself transformed into such a beast by the creature’s bite.”
Though the transformed wolf is referred to as a “medicine man,” Korchinski points out that many executioners doubled as healers, their medical skills enhanced by the anatomical knowledge they had acquired in the torture chamber and at the gallows. This and the fact that “poor sinner” was a common locution for referring to a victim of capital punishment indicates, according to. . . .
Zach was chewing on his ice at this point, his bourbon gone and he a damn sight more relaxed than he had been on takeoff—and he was thinking What the hell is this? This Dankl dame must be crazier than a bull-bat!, shaking his head at the pages on the fold-out table. He had to remind himself of Professor Dankl’s phone message—how she’d known about Dominic Abend—her academic credentials—her tone of urgency—Mickey Paz with his “stoomp bassard”—in other words, all the stuff he’d brought to bear when arguing for this trip in the first place. He had to remind himself that there really was a good reason for him to be traveling four thousand-some-odd miles on the taxpayer’s dime. Because otherwise, he’d be forced to admit that this thing—this paper or report or whatever it was that Dankl had sent him—was the screwiest and most irrelevant load of bull slop he’d ever read. Werewolves. Executioners. The Thirty Years War, whatever that was. What the hell did any of it have to do with a murdered New York fence and a German uber-gangster?
From here on, he began to skim the pages:
But while Hans the executioner faded from memory, not so his dagger. . . . Weapons used by executioners commonly thought to possess magical powers . . . mixture of werewolf’s blood with holy water on the blade . . . transforming the blood of human sacrifice into a panacea, curing every disease, and retarding the aging process . . . its owner slowly gaining magical powers over beasts and insects . . . mind-control abilities . . . a sort of black communion with demons or perhaps the devil himself . . .
Zach snorted. And then there was this:
. . . dagger referred to in the journal of several executioners during the witch panic of the early 17th century . . . half a dozen reported appearances of the dagger during the Thirty Years War . . . legend that Mozart witnessed the use of the dagger in a secret Masonic ceremony . . . long period when the talisman was forgotten . . . interest in the legend revived among the Nazis . . . Nazi fascination with the supernatural . . . Hitler’s desperate attempt to recover the dagger and enlist its demonic powers on his behalf. . . .
Zach’s chin began to sink to his chest. His eyes began to sink shut. He forced himself awake. He didn’t want to fall asleep. He wanted to have another drink. He wanted to enjoy as much of this time in the air as he possibly could . . . far away from his worries . . . from Margo’s outstretched claws. . . .
The meaning of the dagger is intertwined with the political-religious implications of the Stumpf trial. During the period of Stumpf’s worst crimes, the electorate of Cologne was torn by Catholic–Protestant warfare. The wealthy farmers sided with the Protestants and converted, but the Catholics ultimately won back the area. The public exposure of the werewolf’s depredations would have made a vivid example of . . .
The jet lurched. Zach woke up—sat up—startled. Dawn was suddenly breaking at the portholes: pale-blue sky over dark-blue ocean. The jet was beginning its descent into Germany. He’d dozed off and slept through the night.
Muzzy, he blinked and stretched and looked around him. There lay the soporific report on the fold-out table. It was turned to the last page, the final paragraphs. His eyes passed over the words, though his befogged mind barely grasped their meaning.
The legend of Stumpf’s Baselard is the legend of Europe’s great moment. In its blade lie both the continent’s murderous savagery and its striving toward the holy, its sinful debasements and its yearning for redemption, its beastliness and its incomparable cultural beauty. The desire to lay hands on this artifact is the desire to take possession of a legacy that may have only been imaginary and yet was well worth the imagining: a history of blood sanctified by the mind of faith, the will to sacrifice, and the spiritual instinct to renounce vengeance in the name of love.
Who holds the dagger, therefore, owns the distilled energy of a dead past and thus lays his claim to the life of the future.
Who holds the dagger, therefore, holds power beyond telling.
6
PROFESSOR DANKL
Looking back on it later, Zach was never sure when he lost his grip on reality—or when reality, rather, lost its grip on him. It could have been that moment when he fell asleep with his head full of stories about werewolves and magic daggers. He certainly woke up unclear and befuddled. He dozed on and off through the landing as if he were in a fever. He walked through the airport at Frankfurt feeling distant and discombobulated. The place was mobbed with travelers—his cop eyes noted their worried faces, their furtive glances at the television sets hanging here and there from the ceiling. On the screens he saw the images of cities on fire, mobs in the streets. And yet it all seemed very far away and fantastic.
The fact that he had never been to Europe before added to the weird and dreamy atmosphere. He’d never been farther out of the U.S. than Mexico, which didn’t really count as a foreign country where he came from. He found it disorienting to be surrounded by people chattering in a language so completely incomprehensible to him. Ichten flichten richten schtickten. What the hell were they talking about?
“Looks like some kind of mass exodus,” he said to the woman behind the counter at the coffee shop, gesturing with his head at the crowds streaming th
rough the concourse. It was his first attempt to make a connection with one of the locals.
The woman behind the counter was brown-skinned and wore a scarf over her head. She looked at him with wide, frightened eyes. Said nothing. More weirdness, as far as Zach was concerned. He took his coffee from her and fought his way back into the crowd.
For the rest of the ninety-minute layover, he kept to himself, dozing in the waiting area by his gate or walking past the airport shop windows to stretch his legs. Trying to clear his head without much success. Then he boarded the plane for Dresden.
In Dresden, after the mob scene in Frankfurt, the airport seemed bizarrely deserted. Same pictures on the TV sets—the fires and mobs—but they played to empty rows of plastic chairs in the waiting areas. Carrying his overnight bag toward the exit, Zach had the nagging sense that he was wandering farther and farther away from the world he knew.
He made a brief, grateful connection with the lady at the rental-car counter. Trim and pert with short brown hair and the warm, patient expression of a young mom, she could’ve been any girl anywhere. That gave Zach the courage to talk to her—that and the fact that she spoke almost impeccable English.
“Y’all seem to be having some real troubles over here,” he said, by way of making conversation. He leaned his elbow on the counter while she worked her computer.
“Ach, it is terrible, the riots,” she said, her eyes never leaving the monitor. “Usually it is one or the other—the immigrants, the unions, the fascists—now it is all together, so I don’t know what will happen.” She handed him the car keys.
“Well,” said Zach. “Good luck to you.”
So all of this was a bit bewildering, but—again, looking back on these events later on—he sometimes thought it was during the drive to the university that some essential connection, between himself and the world as he had always known it, had been severed. The scenery along the way seemed whimsical and out of time. His sporty red Sebring, modern enough, cruised twisty mountain roads with ancient rocks and ancient walls looming over them. Inside, there was temp control and radio music and an English-speaking computer lady giving him directions from the GPS. Outside, it could have been the world of Peter Stumpf. It could have been the Brothers Grimm. Rolling fields and milling cows and autumn forests on misty hills. Startling veins of pastel lacing the pale green of vaunting firs and junipers and pines against clouds in an afternoon sky he’d seen in old paintings. The villages he passed: all so strange, so foreign and old-fashioned and unreal. Half-timbered buildings and churches with onion domes and ruined structures of maybe Roman stone and curlicued hilltop castles that seemed to have been imported from Disneyland. Really, the whole place seemed like something out of Disneyland.
Then—in his memories—or maybe even at the time—there came a city nestled in some past century. Red rooftops and chimney pots and church towers in a yellow valley surrounded by October hills. It seemed like the GPS lady was calling to him from the present day as he wound down the slope into the storybook past.
Finally, there was the university. He parked the car in a lot here. He continued on foot, bowing under the branches of an oak tree gone shockingly orange. He came into a grassy quad surrounded by great brooding temples of brick—what looked to him like courts and palaces, guarded by twisted verdigris statue-gods from some tribal age. Like the airport, the campus was nearly deserted. He saw only one student—a pert, slender girl with short black hair—wandering along an asphalt pathway under yellow lindens. To find the building to which Gretchen Dankl had summoned him, he had to break away from the main area and head down the slope of a small side path until he reached a stalwart stone lodge standing all alone in a grassy cul-de-sac.
When he pushed the heavy front door open, the snap of the latch seemed to echo through empty halls. His footsteps likewise echoed on what might have been marble as he stepped into more unreal, out-of-the-past eeriness: a towering hallway lined with stony saints. That was all that was there: Zach and two long rows of bowed apostles on their pedestals—oh, and gargoyles hung up high, dragon-faced drains grinning down at him at intervals from the top of the walls.
An echoing door echoed his, echoing footsteps echoed his, and he looked down the long gallery of statues to see that a woman had entered through the farthest door. She was small, slumped, wearing a misbuttoned gray cardigan and a wool diamond-pattern gray skirt that even Zach knew was out of fashion. She wasn’t short but seemed small, slumped, narrow, frail. Her hair was drabbish silver—what woman let her hair turn such a color nowadays?—and her face was pouty and pinched like the face of an anxious monkey. She was smoking too. That in itself was startling to the American. In a public building, a museum like this? She had a filter cigarette scissored between two overlong fingers of one wrinkled hand.
She came toward him unsteadily in the pale daylight from the Catherine windows between the gargoyles.
“Agent Adams,” she said—and Zach recognized the deep, sure, yet somehow trembly and feminine voice of Professor Dankl from her phone call. She gestured vaguely with her cigarette at . . . something. He wasn’t sure what. “Do you believe?”
Zach blinked, confused—as he had been ever since he fell asleep on the plane coming over. “In werewolves?” he said.
Her anxious monkey face went lopsided with a world-weary grin. “In God, I meant.”
“Oh, in God.” She had been gesturing at the statues. He made as if to consider them. “Yeah, sure.”
“‘Yeah, sure.’” She planted her hand over her mouth and took a long, hissing draw of her cigarette. It seemed to Zach a somehow decadent, Old World procedure. “A very American response,” she said, the smoke tumbling out between her lips. “You look very American. Like a cowboy.”
“Well,” said Zach. “I guess I am. American, I mean. Not a cowboy.” Not knowing what else to say, he offered her his hand. “Zach Adams.”
The professor went through an elaborate, careful series of movements to transfer her cigarette from her right hand to her left. Then she took his hand and shook it. “Come,” she said, with a quick motion of her head.
Their combined footfalls set up a complicated reverberation as they walked together under the blank stone eyes of the apostles.
She said, “If you believe in God, the evidence of Him is all around you. But if you do not believe, no evidence can ever be enough. Here, we do not believe.”
“Here in Germany, you mean?”
She made what seemed to him another Old World gesture, circling her cigarette hand in the air between them. Zach thought this was meant to answer his question, but he had no idea what the answer was supposed to be.
“We see the violence now, the riots, the burning, and we think ‘Ach, it is destroying us,’” Gretchen Dankl continued. “But no, this is not the case. It is not the violence. It is the peace, the too-much peace that came before. We were already destroyed—inside, you know—before the rioting began. You see, where there is no spirit, there is only flesh. Where there is only flesh, there is nothing but pleasure and pain. Where there is nothing but pleasure and pain, who would choose pain? Who would choose conflict? Who would not choose peace?”
“Well, peace . . . peace is always a good thing,” said Zach because he thought he ought to say something, even though he hadn’t the slightest clue what they were talking about. The whole conversation already seemed surreal to him—which was almost funny when he thought back on it later, considering how surreal it was about to get. This was Surreality Amateur Hour, compared to what was coming.
They reached the far door of the gallery—the glass-and-metal door through which the professor had come. She paused with her hand on the handle, the cigarette sending a zigzagging line of smoke up from between her fingers. She gave what seemed to Zach a Germanic shrug. “Peace would be wonderful, the most wonderful thing,” she said, “if only there were no God. Then there would be no good or evil, nothing to fight over. But there is, you see. There is good and there is evil. A
nd if you will not fight for the good, if you will not suffer for the good, if you will not accept pain even unto the pain of your own damnation for the good, then there is only evil. This is what Dominic Abend understands. This is how he has triumphed over us.”
With that, she pulled the door open sharply. Zach held it for her while her hunched, weary-looking body hobbled through. He was glad of the mention of Abend—glad she had gotten to something real, something solid, something he could hold on to. This whole experience—this whole trip—had grown way too febrile and phantasmagorical for him. He had come to investigate the murder of a fence—so what were they even talking about?
Also, where the hell was everyone? Professor Dankl and he were in a long hall of offices now, and still there was not another human being in sight. Dankl led the way past display cases full of stone fragments, past one closed door after another.
“After the Wall came down, after he escaped from the East, he took over everything here,” she was saying, smoking, gesturing over her shoulder at him, walking in a way that suggested it was difficult for her to keep her balance, staring at the floor as if she had some kind of spinal complaint that forced her to bow her head. “The politicians, the churches, the criminals, even the people—all became the agents of his power-madness and corruption. He knew we would not fight him.”
She stopped at a thick wooden door. Brought a heavy ring of jangling keys out of her cardigan pocket. She selected one and held it up to Zach—as if she wanted him to take it, he thought at first, but then he realized she was just pointing it at him, like a finger.
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