An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

“What would I write?” I asked.

  “I’m questioning the innkeeper. You’ll write it down.”

  “That’s why you brought me?”

  “Why else do you think?”

  I’d thought nothing else, but not that, either. “I’ll remember what you say and I’ll write it when I get home. I’ve a good memory. Will that do?”

  “It’ll have to do. Now, where’s the man?”

  He might have been anywhere under that roof. I looked into the Common Room for him first. It was emptier and quieter than before and I heard familiar voices, but not his. “Not in there. Maybe in the kitchen or the stable or a cellar.” Charon the cat listened.

  “Find him, then. Why else do you think I brought you?”

  I was wondering that somewhat more. But I went hunting and found him first shot and brought Cousin Gottlieb into the kitchen. The Common Room was lit by fire; the kitchen was consecrated to it. The hearth was the biggest in Basel, stretching the whole wall and all ancient stone. Four fires had space in it. All the pots and cauldrons were blackest, and the ironmongery of spits and braces and hooks that held them in the flames was blacker. Everything had been heated in such innumerable fires then cooled to bone by hours as immeasurable as the kettles that nothing was left but essence and hardness. And of everything Gustavus was the hardest, standing in the center pillar-like, Hephaestus in the pits of Olympia.

  Cousin Gottlieb took a chair. Kitchen maids as tough and heated as the stews they were stirring ignored us. They were chopping meat and their cleavers flashed and the table shook with every blow. Cousin Gottlieb ignored them.

  “What do you want, Master?” Gustavus asked in his voice of coals.

  “I am Inquisitor,” he answered like dust, and then I knew why he wanted his questions recorded. The council had chosen him to manage the Inquiry. I felt very sorry for him; and I felt sorry for Basel.

  “What are your questions?” Gustavus bowed his head in respect. He knew the Inquisitor’s power. And Gottlieb knew it, too.

  “Who was Knipper?”

  “He was a man.” His answer wasn’t frivolous but profound.

  “What was his life?”

  “To drive his coach.”

  “Why did he die?”

  “Because his life ended.”

  Cousin Gottlieb preferred proper beginnings. He found these answers satisfying. “Was he family to you?”

  “He was no kin.”

  “Was he to anyone?”

  “Only he would know.”

  “Then we won’t. And you employed him?”

  “We were partners.”

  “And the other inns, as well?”

  “The four inns. We had an arrangement.”

  “What are the four inns?”

  “The Broken Shield in Strasbourg. The Fiery Arrow in Freiburg. The Roaring Lion in Bern. This.”

  “Who’ll drive the coach now?”

  “Someone else.”

  “Do you grieve that he’s dead?” I doubted Gottlieb was asking after the innkeeper’s well-being.

  “No.” And for the first time, Gustavus answered more than he was asked. “He was ill-tempered. I’ll be glad for a less troublesome driver.”

  “Did you see him the evening when he came in from Bern?”

  “I saw him.”

  “What did you see of him?”

  “That he’d come.”

  “And who killed him, then? Was it Willi?”

  “Ask him.”

  “He’s in jail in Strasbourg. It was someone here in the inn who killed Knipper. This is where he was seen, and where the trunk was, and where he was put in the trunk. Whose trunk was it?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the trunk.”

  “It’s at the Watch barracks. Did it belong to one of the passengers?”

  “Ask them.”

  “They’re not here. Who carried the trunks to the rooms?”

  “Willi did.”

  “And who carried them back to the coach in the morning?”

  “Willi did.”

  “Was the trunk ever opened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To put him in it, it was,” Gottlieb said. “Did it come on the coach? Was it from Basel instead? Was it anywhere besides the inn? Was Knipper anywhere besides the inn? Tell me everything you know!”

  “I haven’t seen the trunk. I know nothing of it.”

  “Would you, if you did see it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I haven’t seen it, either, yet.” Gottlieb fell silent and his silence lasted more than a minute. I waited patiently, and Gustavus, not patient or impatient, just stood. The cooks never stopped. The cleavers, lifted high, fell to the table and cut by their own weight. I didn’t know what beast it had been, four-legged surely, and the women seemed to have no end to their hewing. “Who were the passengers in the coach when it left?”

  “There were two, a man and a woman. The same that came.”

  “Where were they bound?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Why do you know so little?”

  “Because I’m no fool.”

  “It’s knowing little that makes a man a fool.”

  “No, Master. Fools aren’t made, they’re born. And only a fool wants to know more than what’s needed.”

  “There’s more that I need to know. Go to the Barracks and look at the trunk, then tell me what you know of it. And learn something of it, and Knipper, and the passengers, and what passes under your roof, innkeeper. It begs imagining that you know so little.”

  There was no anger in what he said, or even suspicion. It was just a statement. Gustavus nodded. “Yes, Master.”

  “Magistrate Caiaphas is here?”

  “He is staying here.”

  “Why has he come?”

  “For his own reasons.”

  “Why for Knipper, and not for anything else for all these years? All the years Knipper drove, he never brought Caiaphas. It was Knipper not driving that brought him. There are reasons, his own, you say. I’d like to know them. Do you know them?”

  Gustavus only said, “They are his.”

  “It would be worth an Inquiry to learn them,” Gottlieb answered. “Tell him I’ll see to him tomorrow, and to have his reasons ready. Tell him the questions will be harder than last time we met. You know they will be, keeper, so tell him. And the boy who drove the coach from Strasbourg?”

  “He’ll be in Knipper’s room, Master. His name is Abel.”

  “I’ll see to him now.”

  I’d never seen Knipper’s garret at the Boot and Thorn. In it, I still didn’t see it. I saw a bed of planks with a straw pallet, and a floor of planks, and a shadow everywhere else, and a candle on a stump table. On the bed was Abel, sitting, not as hulking as Willi, but strong like any stable hand with yellow hair like straw and a block jaw and angry blue eyes like bruises, and he wasn’t glad to be wakened. But Gottlieb had no regard for the man’s sleep.

  “I have questions,” he said.

  “I won’t know your questions,” Abel said. Caiaphas’s speech had been jagged like broken ice, and Abel’s was jagged like gravel.

  “You’ll know them. Are you from Strasbourg?”

  “I know that and I am.”

  “Did you know Knipper?”

  “I knew him.”

  “What’s the inn in Strasbourg?”

  “The Broken Shield.”

  “Who keeps it?”

  “Dundrach’s the keeper.”

  “Were you there when the coach came in? Did you unload it?”

  “I unload the luggage and carry it.”

  “You took down the trunk?”

  “I did, and was all I did, and set it by the coach wheel.”

  “Who opened it?”

  “It was opened and Knipper was in it. It’s no matter who opened it.”

  “Who opened it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Did Dundrach?”

  “
No.”

  “Whose trunk was it? Which passenger?”

  “None of them opened it. It was none of theirs.” Abel’s shoulders were hunched and his head tilted like he was expecting a blow, but I saw that he might be ready to give one, as well. If he were to strike Gottlieb, as Inquisitor, it wouldn’t go well for him. Gottlieb himself showed no anger, though not patience, either. But he leaned forward, closer toward Abel, held him in an unblinking gaze, and said, “Did Caiaphas open it?”

  “What if he did?”

  “Why him? Why was it a magistrate who opened an unclaimed trunk? It should have been the innkeeper.”

  “I’m not saying he did.”

  “You’ve been told not to. By whom?”

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “Dundrach? Or Caiaphas himself then. What did he tell you?”

  “Old Vulture? Nothing. Nothing to me.”

  “Why was the driver from Basel arrested?”

  “For bringing a corpse into the city.”

  “Who ordered that arrest?”

  “Old Vulture, and ask him why.”

  In the bare candlelight, Gottlieb seemed less and drier than ever; but dead wood was harder than green. He stared at the sullen lout for minutes, longer than he’d been silent with Gustavus. Abel seemed to sense there was danger to himself.

  “Vulture,” Gottlieb said. “Magistrate Caiaphas, you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  “You’ll be away in the morning, to Bern.”

  “I’m to Bern, then back, then to Strasbourg, and I’ll never be here again, if they whip me I’ll still never be here again.”

  “You’ll have whipping. The Masters you have are easily displeased. You won’t have Caiaphas on your trip to Bern, though. He’ll stay for the Inquiry.”

  “Ask him your questions. I won’t answer any.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll ask him.”

  We traced our path backward to the kitchen, which was empty of life now but for its fires. Gottlieb stopped there to think. “Is Daniel still here?”

  “I heard his voice when we came in.”

  “I want him next.”

  I followed up the corridor to the Common Room. Daniel’s voice cut through the room, as it always did. A near hour had passed from Gottlieb’s knock on my door. It was already late enough that the candles were yawning. The fire was intense but withdrawn into its hearth. I felt Cousin Gottlieb was uneasy beneath the weight of the beams.

  Dice were rolled from a cup onto a table, and that sound turned my eyes toward Daniel, still there, and Nicolaus, and I saw them for the second time that evening. They hadn’t moved but most other of the men had left. Daniel looked up to see Gottlieb, and me with him, and smiled his most mischievous smile; he’d been waiting.

  “Leonhard,” he said. “What’s this I see? Are you being tainted? Beware, beware!”

  Gottlieb answered for me. “You’ll beware.”

  “If you don’t corrupt me,” I answered Daniel myself, “nobody can.”

  “That’s a challenge, then. But what’s the purpose of this? I’m placid and smug, and I’ve no use for an interruption.”

  “You’ll make use,” Gottlieb said. “I’ll want answers from you.”

  “You? You! Brutus has made you his Inquisitor, and you’ll use the weight of that to bother me? Isn’t there a better use for Olympian authority?”

  “The Council appointed me.”

  “At his wink and nod. So, cousin, what will you pretend you need to know from me?”

  “It’s an odd chance that the driver dies after he drives you.”

  “Inference and induction, and that’s not Logic. Shouldn’t you know that?” There was an energy in Daniel’s voice that meant more than just wheedling and sparring. “Beside, you’d have reason to murder the driver who brought me home. I wouldn’t.”

  “I would have done it then before he brought you, not after; and after he had I’d have every reason to keep him alive to take you back away.”

  I had heard plenty of Gottlieb’s speech, in the lecture hall and in the parlor, and I heard a note I hadn’t before. But Daniel knew it, and he approved.

  “That’s clever, cousin. I like an answer with wit. There was a time when you were known more for it.”

  “There aren’t many who know it.”

  Daniel nodded to that. “It’s a street of dunces we walk.” He leaned back and put space between them. “But it’s time, Cousin. What are you after?”

  Gottlieb leaned forward and closed the space. “Why did you come back to Basel?”

  “It’s my family here.” He answered it quickly, with a shrug, “That’s why you left. I want to know why you came back.”

  “And that’s what Brutus wants,” Daniel said. “To know why I’ve returned, and he’ll use the Inquisition to find out.”

  “That’s not an answer to my question.”

  “It’s an answer to mine. If I don’t answer yours, will you torture me?” He laughed. “Brutus wouldn’t let that.”

  “You fully deserve it.”

  “We shouldn’t any of us get what we deserve, should we? What would you get, Cousin? Not a Chair, I think.” It was very difficult to tell how these words were spoken; but it seemed something like a horse race, with the riders each straining to pull ahead of the other. With this last word, though, the race ended.

  Gottlieb only said, “Who murdered the coachman Knipper?”

  “Is that how you’ll do your inquisition?” Daniel said, and now with contempt. “What’s the logic in asking bald questions? If I knew, wouldn’t I have said already? That doesn’t need an Inquisitor.”

  “Unless you knew and wouldn’t say.”

  “Then I’d have a reason to not say it, and I wouldn’t answer you. Two premises, opposite, that both lead to the same end, and so it might be either.” He rolled his dice. “That’s logic. Are you learning from him, Leonhard? Is that why you’re here?”

  “I’m just to hold the red hot irons for him,” I said.

  “He’d do it,” Daniel said to me. “He would but for Brutus telling him not to.”

  “You’d rather have torture than be humble and answer me,” Gottlieb said. “And you still haven’t. Do you know who killed him?”

  “Sure I do.”

  The dribble of light from the open doorway was stopped as Gustavus entered. He took a place behind the counter and nodded to the woman there to be finished. She seemed glad to be. Though the room was near empty, there were still hundreds of eyes on us: all the tankards on all the shelves, high and low, and all were staring directly at us. If we’d moved, their gaze would have followed.

  “Who killed him, then?” Gottlieb said.

  “Huldrych.”

  “Daniel!” I said. “Don’t mock.”

  “Why not? If that old artifact is cleared out of the Physics Chair, someone better could have it. I say it was Huldrych that did Knipper in.”

  “You’d accuse him to have him executed?”

  “You think I’d kill to get a Chair?” Daniel said. “Maybe I would. I wouldn’t be the first in the family to do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Or the second, either. What bargain did you make for yours?”

  “I wouldn’t bargain,” Gottlieb said.

  “You didn’t win it by chance.”

  “Prove that I didn’t.”

  “Deny that you didn’t.” Daniel leaned into the sudden silence. “Deny it? You don’t.”

  But Gottlieb only said, “I never bargained.”

  “What happened to the missing Logic Chair? What was his name? Grimm. And now you have his Chair. That was the last Inquiry, wasn’t it, Cousin?”

  “Which Chair are you trying for now, Cousin?” Gottlieb replied.

  “Perhaps Logic again.”

  “It’s taken.”

  “The lord giveth,” Daniel said, “and the lord taketh away.”

  “Don’t use scripture for malice,” I said, “o
r the Lord’s name.”

  “Not that Lord,” he said, glancing up. It was hard to imagine heaven in any direction from that room. “I mean the one here who has a real say over the Chairs.”

  Gottlieb was done with Daniel’s bitter stream. “Was the trunk on the coach from Bern?”

  “I don’t count luggage.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I don’t ask it questions, either!”

  “Did you see it anywhere?”

  “I haven’t seen it at all.”

  “What did you see of Knipper?”

  “I was too taken with nostalgia at the sight of my dear home to notice coach drivers.”

  “Why is there an Inquisitor?” They were Nicolaus’s first words I’d heard that evening, and they were an ox to throw a cart out of its ruts. Gottlieb and Daniel both shot their heads around to look at him.

  “Because the Magistrate of Strasbourg demands it,” Daniel said. “And because Brutus finds it useful.”

  “No,” Nicolaus said. “Why is there an Inquisitor?”

  I understood his meaning. “Because the world has unanswered questions,” I said.

  “And why’s that?”

  “So that we’ll answer them.”

  “Are you an Inquisitor, Leonhard?” Nicolaus asked.

  “That kind, I’ll always be,” I said.

  “Choose fit questions, then.” Whatever Nicolaus’s purpose had been, he was done with it. Daniel waved away those airy thoughts with his own advice to Gottlieb.

  “I’ll tell you where to look, if you’re genuine in solving this,” he said. “There’s one man who has any answers.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You know.”

  “You think your father is the murderer?” Gottlieb said. “You think he crushed a skull with his books and papers? Knipper was never in the house, and your father never left it. None of us did. It’s our family who’re the only ones I know couldn’t have killed him.”

  “But there’s no one outside our family that’s scheming enough,” Daniel said. “I’ll wager you, Cousin, that I solve this before you do.”

  “You’ll neither be first.” Nicolaus stood, and looked at me. I stood to follow his lead. “Or even first to bed.” And that ended their joust. But Daniel held back in the hall, and Gustavus was there with him as we left, and Nicolaus stayed also, keeping watch on his brother.

  I would often be awake late reading, and it never tired me. But standing in the Barefoot Square, at only about midnight, I was yawning and nodding. “I’ll want you tomorrow,” Cousin Gottlieb said.