Where was his own body? Out in the overgrown garden, reclining in the dust. Snow was falling on his masked face; but his sleeping body was as unaware of the weather as of the contents of the natural history cabinet.
Above the bookshelves a couple of stuffed birds regarded the room. Milvas milvas: kite. And beside it, a black vulture the taxidermist had immortalised perching on a leafless branch. In its beak the vulture held a scrap of bloody meat. Just like the abbot in his cellar, he thought.
The door to the room opened and a housemaid entered carrying a paraffin lamp. The girl lit the wall-mounted lamps one by one and having done so crouched down on her haunches by the tiled stove, scraped out the ashes, put in more coal and blew life into the embers, opened the damper so that the fire would get going, then got up again and started walking around the room, curiously examining its contents.
From a ship’s captain’s table, superbly carved, she picked up a book and leafed carefully through its pages. She picked up a paperweight, and admired a porcelain ballet-dancer doll. Then she stiffened, her eyebrows raised in alarm, deftly replaced the objects in their rightful places. She smoothed her dress, checked the bow of her pinafore, quickly ran her hand over her hair and assumed a nervous smile at the very same moment as the door opened again.
A man came into the room. The years had deprived him of his hair, leaving a shiny tonsure in pledge. Locking the door behind him, he loosened his shirt collar and gestured absent-mindedly to the girl. She was very young, Hercule noticed, thirteen, fourteen at most.
Was this really the man he was looking for? He remembered him differently, from their single meeting long ago when the world had been in its cradle. And yet he was sure. He trusted in his hatred, this human emotion that cannot be clouded, that lives its own life beyond reason, and that is impossible to confuse with any other.
At a given sign the girl fell to her knees at the man’s feet. Fumbling with his fly buttons, he dug into his trousers and took out what was left of his male member. A suture had been made just below the foreskin, which was blackened. The flesh surrounding the urinary orifice had turned into a necrotic callus.
The girl closed her eyes. Secure in the knowledge that he had locked the door, the man rocked his hips rhythmically to and fro as he thrust himself more and more deeply into her mouth. Her lips trembled, her eyes were tightly shut . . . The man’s organ grew, he thrust harder still. Close to vomiting, the girl gasped. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. Breathing through his mouth, the man groaned, grabbed hold of her hair . . . dug his fingers into her hair knot and opened his eyes wide. Then he buttoned up his fly, smoothed the creases in his trousers and threw a quick glance at the wall mirror.
The girl, immobile, remained crouching. The man passed her a handkerchief. She spat into it. He dried off her mouth, went to his desk and settled down to his work.
Now the girl was gone and the red flush had disappeared from the man’s face. Distractedly, he leafed through a few legal documents before, submitting to an inexplicable bout of restlessness, he got up from his desk chair.
The cabinet with its naturalia, its immobile fauna, triggered off another train of thought, and his glance passed his eyes along the bookshelves, to one of the volumes the cat had just been focusing on: Trials and Punishments of Animals.
It occurred to him that the criminal case he was just now working on, whose outcome he’d been summoned to witness the following day, had much in common with animal lawsuits of old.
His thoughts strayed on to a certain favourite uncle on his mother’s side, the venerable Heidelberg district prosecutor Roes, dead this past decade, but vividly alive in his memory. In his youth, when he had been studying law at the university in Erlangen and had spent his holidays with him, Uncle Roes had told him about animal prosecutions he’d been personally in charge of some thirty years earlier, at a time when they still had fallen into the category of general prosecutions. On one occasion a sow and her piglets had been brought to trial for having caused the death of an infant. The sow had received a fair trial, Roes had smilingly assured him, her defender, a highly esteemed member of the Bar Association, had worn a pigtail wig. The interrogations had been conducted, not merely as a matter of form, but in a legally most correct manner. Questions of a personal nature had been put to the sow, which of course she had been unable to answer:
“What caused you to ignore the baby’s cries for help?” and, “What made you take your piglets down to the common? Was there a motive for your action? Can you present us with any extenuating circumstances?”
The sow had replied by turning round in the witness box, where she stood like anyone else under prosecution, and stared in astonishment at her defender, a certain Court Delegate Lehr, who was just about to deliver his speech.
Further away in the courtroom sat an astounded public. Roes remembered the sow’s master, a local crofter who, overwrought at his child’s death, had screamed abuse at his pig, and applauded when the chairman had imposed the maximum penalty for infanticide.
Two days later the offender had been hanged on Heidelberg’s gallows hill and her carcass buried in a field. Roes had found the fate of the piglets particularly amusing: they’d been acquitted on grounds of their tender years. Later, one of them had turned up on his dinner table.
Inspired by these recollections, the man now took out the volume, sat down in an armchair and began turning the pages. In Hamburg, AD 1601, he read, a cockerel had been sentenced to be burned at the stake for the heretical and unnatural crime of having laid an egg. Should a toad or a snake incubate such an egg, it could, according to popular belief, greatly endanger its surroundings: a basilisk might hatch out, with widespread death and disease as a result.
Backed up by the famous piece in Exodus 21:28, beasts had at times been considered no less responsible for their actions than humans: “If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned.” Thus man and beast were equal in the eyes of the law, and by joining Mosaic law to Roman law, European man had laid the foundations of his civilisation.
Then there was a piece about murder and fornication committed by horses, bulls, oxen, dogs and even cats. A footnote told of how a stallion had been tortured to make him confess to having caused criminal damage. Magnanimity or an excellent defence had led to some of the animals being pardoned, or, as in the case of the piglets, because they had been minors at the time of the crime. Moles had been banished from two parishes in Swabia, and a goat had had to pay a fine of milk for pulling down a fence.
Offensa cujus nominatio crimen est, the man was thinking as he turned round and saw to his astonishment a pair of cat’s eyes flash in the window. “Strays everywhere,” he muttered. Like that cat out there. It was only natural if they sometimes caused injuries to humans, simple statistics could tell you that.
He got up and put the book back in its proper place on the shelf. Cautiously he went over to the window and looked at the cat. It was still sitting on the windowsill, absent-mindedly licking one of its paws. It seemed not in the least afraid of him, but looked him straight in the eyes, blinked, and resumed its grooming.
He tapped the glass with a finger. The cat didn’t stir.
Perplexed, he went back to his desk. The case he had just put behind him in his judicial capacity might be compared in all its bizarre details to the animal trials of former times, he thought as he began to set his papers in order. Only one document was still needed before he could put the case aside: the accused’s death certificate.
The lawsuit and execution the man was working on had drawn attention far beyond the limits of Danzig. The case was, as several of the jurors had put it, inexplicable. It was the motive, primarily, that was in dispute, subject to all thinkable interpretations. Sitting there at his desk, he reflected that he’d never in fact come across anything like it.
Two years earlier, the city had accepted a request from the Jesuit Order to found a monastery within the diocesan limits. The old one
had been abandoned two decades earlier during the religious dispute between Danzig’s German Lutherans and a minority of Polish Catholics. A certain Abbot Johann Kippenberg had been responsible for the work, a man who, as far as was known, was an exceedingly conscientious cleric who for years had successfully governed an establishment in Silesia.
The Order had purchased a building in the ancient part of the inner city. After less than a year its members had numbered about forty, half of them novices. The monastery had cottages where the poor could come and warm themselves, primary schools for indigent children and it carried on certain missionary activities among sailors. Half a dozen older monks had come with the abbot from Silesia, but one by one, those men had disappeared.
Probably the matter would not have come to light – at least not until much later – had not one of the novices voluntarily reported the disappearances to the police. The boy, a convert by the name of Fischel, had grown suspicious when the abbot had responded to a query about the disappearances by asking him to keep the matter a secret so as not to damage the monastery’s reputation. It was not until then, Fischel explained, that he had suspected that all was not as it should be.
The chief constable had set in motion a routine investigation. But when Kippenberg had been summoned for interrogation, he had broken down and, without further ado, confessed to having murdered five of his Order’s brethren. The very same day he had pointed out the places where the bodies – that is to say, what remained of them – lay buried in pieces under the chancel of the monastery chapel. The crimes made no sense. The abbot was unable to give any plausible motive whatsoever. He seemed relieved at having confessed, as if an enormous burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
The man at the desk, who had been presiding judge at the trial, had been one of the first to read the shorthand minutes of the inquest, taken down in the new Gabelsberg system. Since that morning in December scarcely a year before when the prosecutor had handed the minutes over to him, he had read through them so many times that by now he knew them off by heart.
Above all, he was mystified by references to “the boy”. Kippenberg maintained that he was governed by a voice that could not abide contradiction, a voice that had driven him to commit one bestial act after another. “The boy” was behind all this, he’d said. “The boy” was the real murderer, for it was he who had ordered him to kill his brothers. But when he’d been asked who this “boy” was, the abbot had answered evasively or merely burst into tears, saying the “boy” had forbidden him to tell what he knew.
On one occasion when the judge had visited the gaol incognito, the abbot had been sitting on his cell bunk in deep self-absorption, an imbecilic smile on his lips, and gazing into the distance. Though his lips moved incessantly it was impossible to hear what he was saying. The judge had to address him several times before he even reacted.
“Help me,” he’d said in the end, and his voice had been so desperate that those gathered around him had come out in goose pimples. “It was the boy who made me do it. He told me exactly what I had to do.”
The murders had been so savage that the newspapers had been reluctant to publicise any details. Kippenberg had imprisoned the monks in a cellar he had rented on the city outskirts. He had forced one of them to drink hydrocyanic acid and nailed another to the wall as if crucified, even thrust a processional crucifix up his anus. Two others he’d turned into living torches, and then eaten them up piecemeal, “grilled and superbly spiced”, as he admitted under cross-examination, without so much as batting an eyelid. The fifth one, whose head was still missing, he had carved up, alive, into little bits: a toe, a finger, the genitals, the ears. After that he’d locked a starved stray cat in the cellar. The monk, he had confessed, was still alive when the animal started feasting on him.
“The boy tells me exactly what I have to do,” Kippenberg had repeated on being asked for the reason for these excesses. “The boy is driven by a hatred beyond belief. He’s avenging himself for what we did to Schuster.”
“What boy?” they had asked again. “And who is Schuster?”
“The mind-reader,” had been the abbot’s cryptic answer, “Schuster’s deaf and dumb protégé.” Whereupon he’d fallen into a fit of hysterical weeping.
The name Schuster had cropped up so many times during the interrogation that the police felt impelled to make certain enquiries. Schuster, it turned out, was an old Jesuit priest who, years earlier, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances on a pilgrimage to Italy. “We sent him to his death, knowingly,” had been Kippenberg’s comment. “Myself and the other five . . . the ones the boy instructed me to kill . . . it was we who had Schuster sent off to his death, that’s why the boy’s avenging himself . . .”
One of the experts summoned by the court came up with the hypothesis that Abbot Kippenberg was a pyromaniac, since the police investigation showed that he, together with two brethren, had burned some of the house’s collection of books, and that this, according to one witness, had apparently given him a “disproportionate sense of satisfaction”. It was not impossible that behind the abbot’s weird actions lay a combination of perversions.
In his report this expert had had the sexual offenders classified in a spirit almost worthy of Linnaeus. Apart from pyromaniacs, the list had included sodomites, pederasts and exhibitionists. Then there were perversions the mere mention of which sent shudders up the spines of the members of the court: gerontophiles, perverts with a predilection for having intercourse with the very aged; zoophiles and zooerasters who preferred animals. Further, presbyophiles who raped the blind, and gynecomasters of both sexes, united in the worship of men with matured female breasts. Then there were the so-called invertites who were prepared to pay a small fortune for one night with a hermaphrodite, not to mention dysparaneutics, men who favoured females who suffered agonies of the womb during sexual intercourse. It might well be, the report concluded dryly, that several of these perversions are indulged by the abbot.
The similarity with animal trials of bygone days, the judge was thinking, lingered on in the starving cat the abbot had let loose on his fifth victim. In his uncle’s day and age, might not the cat have been brought to trial as an accomplice to murder?
The crimes, moreover, were of such a kind that Kippenberg’s brethren had denied him absolution on the eve of his execution. Even the prison chaplain had refused to bless the condemned man, while no fewer than eight Catholic blacksmiths had offered to fashion a broad axe. It was unprecedented: a Catholic, an abbot no less, denied unction!
A rumour was going the rounds that the abbot’s hair had turned white as chalk during his last week, and that his fear of the “other side” had driven him out of his mind. According to information received from the prison governor, he’d spent his last hours staring at the crucifix on the wall of his cell, his body in cramps and convulsions, as one possessed. He’d screamed at the prison guards that they’d better watch out, because, although the boy had made himself invisible, he was right there, close at hand. Several times he asked whether they could hear his voice. Himself, he could hear it loud and clear, the boy was “laughing” at him and “mocking” him.
“The abbot ain’t waitin’ for hell,” one of the prison warders had observed to the prison governor, unable to contain his malicious pleasure, “him’s there already.”
Sitting at his desk, the judge thought he didn’t much believe in mankind’s spiritual profitability, least of all in his own. He cultivated the thought that morals have no intrinsic values of their own; they need tasks to endow them with meaning. The Jesuits were most likely prepared to agree with him, though naturally they would have condemned him had they known his motives.
He recalled the counsel for Kippenberg’s defence, who had rounded off his speech with a few words well worth considering: “Our verdict on a deed is never the same as the verdict for the aspect of the deed that God punishes or rewards.”
God alone knows the true nature of a deed. But if God ex
isted, he would also know the true nature of the judge, and not only his own moral shortcomings . . .
The clock had just struck eleven when he laid aside the minutes of the trial. A branch was tapping the window. Turning round, he saw the cat was still there.
It must be sick, he thought, or deeply confused. Why else is it still sitting on that windowsill?
He repressed a shudder. Under cross-examination the abbot had told of the stray cat he’d let loose on his last victim. “A mottled tom-cat,” he’d said in a tone of voice one might use about some much-loved family pet. “It had lost an ear in a fight, and had a white patch on its forehead.”
The judge got up and walked over to the window. Confusedly he wondered if this could possibly be the same animal. This creature too, had an ear missing, though the patch on its forehead was more grey than white.
Next day was a Saturday. The judge rose early so as to be in good time for the abbot’s execution. His wife, the aristocratic Rosalinda von Kiesingen, with whom he had not been intimate for the best part of a decade, since the unfortunate maiming incident, about the details of which she still remained in doubt, regarded him with sleep-dazed eyes from her bedside as he did his morning toilet.
He poured water from the enamel pitcher, lathered the soap and took out a razor. As he shaved himself he pondered whether it was fitting to wear eau de cologne to an execution. He reminded himself of his duties. It was he, together with the doctor, who would ascertain that death had occurred. A death certificate would be signed, and a receipt issued for the doomed man’s last possessions. In view of all this he laid aside the aftershave lotion.
Dusting his armpits with talcum powder, he put on his starched front shirt, the loose collar with the silver button, the waistcoat and his dark official suit. Just as he was about to wind up his pocket watch, his wife sat up in bed.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 22