Carefully, the medicus peered out from beyond the shelving. He saw a huge subterranean dome. Through a tiny opening in the middle of the ceiling, a rope descended to a block of wood on the ground. In one corner Simon recognized one of the two monks from the library. He was hacking on a grave slab with a pickaxe, and next to him, Augustin Bonenmayr was frantically pushing rubble off to the side. When a large-enough hole opened up, the abbot pulled back his white robe and crept inside.
“Give me the torch-quickly!” The monk handed Bonenmayr the torch, and moments later, a shout came from behind the gravestone. “Holy Mother of Jesus, we’ve found it! We’ve really found it!”
The Steingaden abbot began to cackle hysterically, and Brother Lothar, curious, crawled in after him. Once the monk disappeared into the hole, Simon gave the women a sign and they all tiptoed over to the opening. One inch at a time, Simon moved closer to the edge.
Finally, he worked up the courage and looked inside.
Holding his dagger between his teeth, Brother Nathanael pulled himself out of the trapdoor and onto the stage, only to realize he had left his torch down below. The auditorium was as dark as a dungeon! Brother Johannes had a lantern with him, but it had disappeared along with the monk himself.
“Brother Johannes!” Nathanael called out. “Are you here somewhere?” His voice echoed through the drafty building, but there was no answer.
Nathanael remembered seeing candleholders earlier in niches along the stage. Blindly, he groped toward the niches, until his hand grasped a bronze candelabra. With frozen fingers, he reached under his robe for the little box of matches he always carried with him and lit the five candles. After a few moments, he could just make out the stage and the seats in the auditorium. Brother Johannes was nowhere to be seen.
With the candelabra in hand, Nathanael crossed the stage, stopping in front of a heap of crumpled curtain material. He was just about to go down the steps into the orchestra pit when something on the floor caught the light. Stooping down with the candelabra, he saw a little puddle spilling out from under the heap.
It was blood.
“What the devil…?”
When Nathanael pushed the material aside, he saw Brother Johannes’s badly beaten face peering out from under the heap like a discarded doll. He was moaning softly. Blood ran from his nose and from a wound at the back of his head, where a large lump had already formed. Nathanael glanced at the wound before giving the monk an angry kick in the side. Brother Johannes would have a headache for a few days, but he would survive. It was most important now to find out who was out to get them.
“Please stand up and tell me who-”
At this instant he heard a whooshing sound so soft that an untrained ear wouldn’t have even noticed it. But Nathanael hadn’t survived a half-dozen murderers’ attacks in the Spanish provinces just to meet his end in a theater in the peaceful little Priests’ Corner. He lunged forward just before the heavy stage curtain came tumbling down from the ceiling. It crashed onto the stage, burying the candles, candelabra, and the head of Brother Johannes, whose moans stopped abruptly.
Nathanael jumped up and scanned the ceiling. His eyes wandered along the balconies and up the stairs leading to the loft, while he played nervously with the dagger in his hand.
“Come out, whoever you are!” he called out. “You cowardly dog! Fight like a man!”
Out of the corner of his eye, the monk saw a little flame blaze up. Nathanael cursed. The candles he’d dropped had set fire to the curtain!
He was about to stamp out the flames when he heard the rattle of a winch unwinding. Turning around, he saw a giant of a man gliding calmly down from the ceiling. He held onto a rope with one hand and, in the other brandished a short but heavy wood cudgel.
“No one calls me a cowardly dog,” the hangman growled. “Especially you. The three of you overpowered me in the dark once, but for you, I don’t need the cover of darkness. I’ll finish you off just like this, you shady, black-robed ruffian.”
Jakob Kuisl jumped over the burning curtain. The flames cast a flickering light across the stage as the hangman raised his cudgel and approached the monk, ready for a fight.
Simon moved along the wall cautiously until he was able to peer into the opening behind the smashed gravestone. With low ceilings, the space behind it was only a few paces wide and deep and expelled a musty odor. In the torchlight, the abbot and his helper knelt before a simple stone altar with a wooden cross atop it. At about shoulder height, it looked very old and weathered; rusty nails just barely held the crooked and bent cross together, and in a few places, it appeared to have been charred. Nevertheless, Augustin Bonenmayr bowed his head as if the Holy Mother in person were standing before him. After a while he stopped praying, took the relic carefully from the wall, and kissed it.
“The Cross of Christ!” he whispered. “Our Savior once touched this wood. See for yourself…” He pointed to a place on one of the crossbeams.
Brother Lothar bowed down reverently to get a better look.
“Here, see the hole!” the abbot said. “His hand must have been nailed to this very spot!”
“Your Eminence…” Brother Lothar whispered so softly that Simon could barely understand him. “The cross…I always thought it was much larger…”
“You fool!” said Augustin Bonenmayr, slapping his helper on the head. “This is only part of the True Cross. The rest was destroyed! It was the Templars’ duty to take the cross of Christ into every battle during the Crusades and to protect it. But at the Battle of Hattin, they failed. The cross fell into the hands of infidels and was almost completely destroyed. The cross bearer was an ancestor of this miserable fellow Friedrich Wildgraf.” The abbot gripped the weathered relic. “He was able to rescue just part of it. Since then, the cross has been considered lost without a trace. But now it has come to light again, here in Steingaden. Who could have imagined!” Bonenmayr stroked the two rotten crossbeams like a long-lost lover.
Magdalena, eager to see something, too, nudged Simon. Her soft body pressed up close against him, and he could feel her warm, slightly sour breath on his neck.
“Simon, say something!” she whispered. “What’s going on there?” She pressed even closer to him-too close, because he could feel himself losing his balance. He fell forward, crashing into the rubble of the gravestone.
Augustin Bonenmayr wheeled around, his face contorted with hatred. “Fronwieser!” he hissed. “I should have gotten rid of you right away! Well, it’s not too late. Brother Lothar!” He pointed to the monk, who picked a heavy stone up from the floor and was walking toward the medicus. “Do it for God! Deus lo vult!”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” Benedikta stepped into the opening, holding the little pistol she’d fired earlier at Brother Jakobus. Simon wasn’t certain she’d reloaded the dainty little handgun in the meantime, but in any case, the pistol had the desired effect. Uncertain, Brother Lothar stopped and looked over to his abbot. Now Magdalena appeared in the opening as well. For a moment, Augustin Bonenmayr was clearly caught off guard, but then a smile spread across his face and he seemed to change his strategy.
“Ah, I see. The three lovers have found one another again. How delightful!” The Steingaden abbot advanced one step toward Simon. “Brother Jakobus told me your Magdalena seems to be something of a bitch. But what does a monk understand about women…?” He grinned as if he’d just said something terribly amusing. “What divine providence, in any case, that he ran into her in Augsburg, of all places! We swear we wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her head. She was just…collateral so her father would stay out of this in case things got too difficult. How is Brother Jakobus, by the way?”
“You could light up your whole damned monastery with him,” Magdalena snapped. “He’s burning, just as if my father himself had hauled him over the coals.”
The abbot shook his head gently. “So much hatred! I have a proposal for you.” Holding the cross in his right hand, he advanced another st
ep toward the group.
Benedikta pointed the pistol at his head. “Stop right there! Not one more step!” she whispered. “Or blood will flow down this cross.”
The abbot raised his hands in apology. “Let’s not argue. If I remember correctly, you’re still wanted in Rottenbuch for desecrating holy relics. I’ve already given your name to Brother Michael, the superintendent at Rottenbuch. Believe me, he’d rather see you burn today than tomorrow. But I could have been mistaken, and the real perpetrators could have been some highway robbers who just happened to come along. All it would take would be a word from me-”
“That’s a filthy lie, fils de pute!” Benedikta growled.
The abbot shrugged. “Whether it’s a lie or not, would you want to take the chance? Your future is in my hands. Kill me and you’ll be chased through all of Bavaria as vagrants and outlaws. Let me leave with the cross and you’re free.”
“How can we be so sure you won’t turn us in, anyway?” Simon asked.
Bonenmayr smiled and put his finger on the weathered piece of wood. “I swear on the True Cross of Christ. Is there any stronger oath?”
Benedikta looked at Simon and Magdalena, hesitating. For a while, silence filled the crypt.
Finally, Benedikta sighed. “For my part, I can live with this offer. I’d hoped for a real treasure, a gilded crucifix inlaid with rubies, perhaps, or a velvet-lined silver box-or whatever! But this rotten cross isn’t worth any more than the thousands of other splinters of wood presumed to come from the genuine cross. I can’t make any money from it…So you can keep it!”
“Benedikta is right,” Simon said, turning to the abbot. “How are you going to convince your flock that this is the genuine cross?”
“This is the genuine cross!” Bonenmayr insisted. “At least part of it. The damned Templars never let the Church forget they had it, and for that reason the Holy See always protected those heretics, even when the Pope noticed that they were going their own way and becoming more arrogant and greedy. When the French king finally got rid of them, the Church hoped the cross would show up somewhere again. Many Templars were handed over to the Inquisition, but even under torture they all kept silent, and the cross remained lost. Our order has been looking for it for centuries! We were able to save many other relics from the heretics, who sprang up out of the ground like poisonous mushrooms, but the True Cross had disappeared from the face of the earth. Now it has returned to the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church, and everything has turned out for the best! The bishop of Augsburg will inform the Pope of what we’ve found, and His Holiness will confirm its authenticity.”
“Do you really believe that?” Simon asked.
Augustin Bonenmayr nodded enthusiastically. “With the Pope’s blessing, this cross will become Christianity’s most important religious relic! People will make pilgrimages from all over the world to visit us. I already have plans for a magnificent pilgrimage church near Wies’s farm-”
“Good Lord, there’s blood on that cross!” Magdalena interrupted. She pointed at Benedikta. “The blood of your brother and of many others! I almost died because of that accursed cross!” She walked toward the abbot with a menacing look. “If you think you can simply go out and keep preaching your rubbish, then you’ve got another thing coming. I’ll send my father after you; he’ll break every bone in your body with that cross.”
“Magdalena, calm down!” said Simon. “The abbot’s suggestion is not so bad. What’s dead is dead, and-”
“Just a moment!” Benedikta interrupted. “Do you smell that?”
Simon took a whiff and noticed the caustic smell of smoke coming from the larger room behind them. It was faint, but unmistakable.
“Fire!” Benedikta cried. “Everyone get out!”
They fled back to the domed vault where clouds of smoke were ascending through the hole in the stage floor. Just moments later, the entire ceiling looked like the sky on a gloomy November day, disappearing behind a billowing gray cloud of smoke. The abbot sat on the ruins of the gravestone, pressing the cross to his chest as if the relic could protect his scrawny body from the flames.
His lips moved in a quiet prayer.
On the stage above, flames were eating through the dry brocade as if it were straw. Fire climbed up the curtains to the ceiling and along the balconies, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. Soon the entire auditorium was bathed in a red glow, and despite the cold January day outside, an almost unbearable heat filled the theater.
The hangman and the monk circled each other like two wolves ready to attack, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Finally, Brother Nathanael struck. He feigned a move to the left, then attacked from the right with his dagger. The hangman dodged to the right and struck the monk with his elbow, knocking him down. Before he could fall onto the burning curtain, Nathanael rolled away, jumped up like a cat, and attacked again.
The hangman hadn’t expected such a quick counterattack, and the dagger brushed his right arm in the same place the highwayman had cut him earlier that same day. Kuisl suppressed a groan and swung the cudgel but landed only a glancing blow on Nathanael’s shoulder. The monk turned in a half circle, ducked, and thrust the dagger at the back of the hangman’s knees. With a spirited leap to one side, Kuisl avoided this blow, but in the smoke-filled room, he was too late noticing the burning curtain at his feet. To avoid jumping straight into the flames, he changed direction in mid-jump, stumbled, fell over, and was just able to pull himself up on a painted backdrop of a sky full of white clouds from which the Lord looked down.
Just as the hangman was standing up, the heavy wall tipped forward, taking him with it, burying him with the Almighty. With a thundering rattle, additional backdrops fell over onto him.
For a moment silence prevailed, broken only by the crackling of the flames and the strange hissing voice of the monk. “I once met a man in Salamanca like you,” he whispered. “Big and strong, but stupid. I slashed his throat as he was preparing to take a swing at me with his double-edged sword. He stared at me in disbelief before he fell forward.”
Jakob Kuisl struggled to separate the heavy canvas-covered frames, but they were somehow stuck together. As hard as he pressed, they didn’t move an inch. He heard steps approaching the fallen frame and the dagger scraping across the canvas. Nathanael was cutting the material lengthwise, and it wouldn’t take him long to reach Kuisl’s neck.
“The church is not a gentle flock of lambs waiting to be slaughtered,” Nathanael said as his knife inched forward, cutting through the material. “The church has always needed people like me, and that’s the only reason it’s survived this long. It must punish and destroy, just as Saint John the Baptist prophesied about our Savior. Do you know the Bible verse, Kuisl? He will thoroughly purge his floor, separating the wheat from the chaff and gathering the wheat into his garner. But the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire.” The dagger had reached the hangman’s neck now. “And now you are the chaff, Kuisl.”
At that moment, the executioner’s fist shot through the canvas-right at the spot depicting the kindly, smiling mouth of the Savior-and the hangman grabbed the hand holding the dagger, pulling Brother Nathanael down. Gasping, the monk lost his balance and fell onto the canvas as his dagger clattered onto the floor. Kuisl’s other hand punched through the material and gripped Nathanael by the throat like a vise. Nathanael wriggled like a fish out of water and poked his fingers through the backdrop but couldn’t get hold of the man underneath. The monk shook and waved his arms about, but his movements became weaker and weaker until his forehead finally fell into the canvas. For a moment it looked as if he were kissing the painted Savior on the mouth. Then he rolled to one side and lay still on the stage floor with eyes wide open.
When Jakob Kuisl finally managed to extricate himself from under the backdrop, he cast a final, almost remorseful look at the dead Dominican. “Why did you always have to talk so much?” he said, wiping off his massive, soot-stained hands on his jacket. “
If you want to kill someone, just shut up and do it.”
Only now did Kuisl notice the inferno raging around him. The flames had reached the seats in the middle of the hall, and even the backdrops at Kuisl’s feet had caught fire. The first heavy timbers from the balcony came crashing down.
Because of all the smoke, Kuisl could no longer see the trapdoor on the stage floor. He coughed, climbing down the stairs toward the main exit. One last time, he turned around and shook his head. Unless there was another exit, anyone still beneath the stage was doomed. At any rate, it would be insane to climb down there again.
He was already halfway to the back of the hall when he heard the squeak of a pulley.
In the meanwhile, the smoke down below in the crypt had become so dense that the upper third of the room was no longer visible. The ropes connected to the platform ended somewhere in a gray cloud. Simon stopped to think. The tunnel through which they’d entered was presumably already filled with smoke, so the only way out was, in fact, up. He ran to the platform, eyes peeled for the mechanism to set it in motion.
“There has to be a pulley here,” he shouted to Benedikta and Magdalena. “A lever, a crank-something! Help me find it!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Simon could see Augustin Bonenmayr still standing in the opening to the crypt, clutching the cross. The Steingaden abbot stared at the flames eating through the floor of the stage above, the flickering light reflected in his pince-nez, which was perched at an odd angle atop his nose. Bonenmayr’s murmuring grew louder, swelling to a long litany as the auditorium above him threatened to come crashing down. “And the first angel blew his trumpet,” the abbot intoned, “and hailstones and fire mixed with blood fell over the land…”
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