HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘Wax?’ I asked.

  A great quantity was cut into square blocks, piled high on shelves. As Biswanger wound up the wicks of his lamps and light invaded the gloom, a dozen forms laid out on the central worktable were thrown into stark relief. Each piece was milky grey, though the lineaments were different. Each one possessed the same deathly stillness. With blank unseeing eyes, they appeared to float in a world without feeling or emotion. Yet pain and torment were stamped on their faces.

  ‘Death masks. There’s no better way to remember the departed. Each is a true original. When a loved one has passed over, the mask remains for the living to cherish. It keeps alive the memory in their fickle minds. This is what I do. Of course, if the death is of an unusual or unnatural sort, I sell copies to the medical profession. Or to scholars who may be interested. As was the case with those three little angels recently massacred . . .’

  Lavedrine was hardly listening. He may not have realised what the man had said, but he sprang into action as he saw the difficulty Biswanger had in breathing. My hands had closed in an instant around his fat windpipe. I was trying to squeeze the life out of him, thumbs straining hard against his larynx.

  ‘Leave him, Stiffeniis!’ Lavedrine boomed in my ear, his hands on my wrists as he tried to drag me off. ‘Let him speak!’

  Biswanger began to heave great gulps of air into his lungs as I relaxed my grip. Turning away, I gasped for breath myself.

  Lavedrine stepped between us. ‘Biswanger, repeat what you said.’

  The undertaker’s eyes swivelled to meet mine. ‘He tried to kill me,’ he whimpered, coughing and spluttering, his voice rasping with fright.

  ‘He will not try again,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘Though I may throttle you myself, unless you tell the truth. Which children were you speaking of?’

  ‘The Gottewalds, sir. The ones whose throats were cut. They were brought to me to . . . to put them in decent order before being buried.’

  ‘Who brought them?’ I shouted, shaking with rage.

  I felt Lavedrine’s hand on my arm as he laboured to hold me back.

  ‘Prussian soldiers,’ Biswanger murmured, his eyes racing between us, as if to gauge where the next attack might come from. ‘Count Dittersdorf sent an order. It was countersigned by a French lieutenant. Requesting me to sew up the gashes, and cancel out the marks of violence on the corpses. Telling me to make them look . . . well, human, sir.’

  The face of Dittersdorf rose up before me like one of the death masks on the table.

  ‘Has the count buried them in my absence?’ I said to Lavedrine. ‘Did he tell you about it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Let’s hope we do not need to dig them up again.’

  ‘It was not easy,’ Biswanger continued. ‘The state they were in. Wounds so . . . so . . .’ He hesitated, fearing for his safety, perhaps. ‘It was a severe test of my skills,’ he concluded, unable to restrain his boasting.

  He was silent for a moment. ‘I would not want you to think that I’ve been misleading you,’ he said. ‘You’d hear it from Aaron, anyway.’

  Lavedrine repeated the name. ‘What has he to do with this?’

  Biswanger seemed to swell back into his skin, happier to talk about another man than to be interrogated about himself. ‘Aaron knew those children were in my workshop.’ He expressed himself carefully. ‘He asked me to make some casts in wax for his own use.’

  An image flashed through my mind. I saw warm, grey molten wax. I saw the hands of Biswanger moving over the faces of the three tiny victims. The bodies were cold and stiff. As the artist applied himself to the gaping throats, dry blood attached itself to the warm clinging wax. Perhaps the heat had caused the blood to dissolve and flow again.

  I reacted instantly. Not driven by anger this time, but riven by curiosity.

  ‘What would any man want with such things?’ I asked.

  Biswanger’s eyes were sparkling with fear.

  ‘Aaron Jacob is a scientist, sir,’ he said.

  23

  ‘BISWANGER HAS COMMITTED no crime.’

  Lavedrine broke the silence as we made our way back towards the river.

  ‘No crime?’ I snapped, disgust welling up in me. ‘It may be legal to tweak at dead flesh like a crow, but the bounds of moral necessity have been stretched beyond the limit. Nor will we know how far, until we speak to the Jew. What studies is this ghoul engaged in?’

  Lavedrine turned fiercely on me. ‘You can’t believe there is any truth in the rumours?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ I replied curtly. ‘But blood was carried away. And now a Jew is involved. How long before the crowd gets wind of it?’

  ‘That all depends on us,’ he warned.

  ‘We must seek him out,’ I insisted, as we came to the bridge on the River Nogat, the boards rattling beneath our feet. ‘Dittersdorf ordered me to make enquiries within the ghetto. Now, we have no choice.’

  Along the wharf, my attention was caught by a noisy gathering in the square where fish were sold, though it was late for the morning market. French soldiers in dark-blue trenchcoats pushed the crowd back, two or three of them with bayonets fixed.

  ‘An ugly-looking mob,’ Lavedrine said.

  I am well known in Lotingen. In a smallish country town the local magistrate is loved and hated in equal measure. As a rule, I steer my own straight course, stopping to listen neither to flattery, nor recrimination. But those voices could not be ignored.

  ‘What are ye waitin’ for, Herr Procurator? They’ll be drinkin’ the blood of our children next!’

  The cry was quickly taken up by others. The crowd turned as one. They spotted me, a Frenchman at my side. They began to surge towards us in a horde, faces ugly with rage. Against a mob, two men could only save themselves if the soldiers chose to intervene, or with the help of weapons. But neither of us was armed, and the soldiers made no move to rescue us. As if they had been ordered not to shift from their stations.

  Sticks began to pound the cobblestones. Then a cry of battle was given, a word in the local dialect that I had never heard before. Like the beating of a night-owl’s wings as it swoops to snatch its prey. Wup, wup, wup! Whatever it meant, repeated gruffly over and over again, it made the violence palpable. Lavedrine and I were at the very centre of a throbbing tempest.

  A red-cheeked women pressed close to me.

  ‘Kill the yids!’ she screeched in my face, her spittle raining on my skin, her eyes glaring ferociously into mine. ‘Kill the yids!’

  Before I could react, Lavedrine sprang forward.

  His hand shot out, then pulled back. A sheet of blood poured down her cheek below the eye. That woman’s scream shut out all other shouts, as if the noise of a band tuning up had been sucked into a bugle that had blown one single, piercing note for silence. A musket was discharged, and the crowd fell back in a tumbling mass. Another followed it, and they whirled away, crushing bags underfoot, making their escape as a wall of blue materialised in front of us.

  ‘Merci, citoyens!’ Lavedrine encouraged the French soldiers. ‘Another minute, we’d have been lynched.’

  I had never been so glad to see armed Frenchmen.

  The officer in charge, a young infantryman with a smoking pistol in his hand, came running over. ‘My apologies, sirs,’ he said with a salute. ‘We were slow to see what was going on.’

  He glanced down at Lavedrine’s hand. ‘That is a very fine piece of weaponry, sir, if I may say so!’

  Lavedrine held up the ring on his middle finger like a proud bridegroom. The brass cylinder was mounted with a curving triangular point, and a drop of blood fell from the metal.

  ‘A trick I learnt from my cat,’ he said. ‘Lionel est terrible! A claw is the finest defence under the sun. Speed is the secret. This is a poor copy, though it does the job. It has saved me more times than a loaded pistol.’

  ‘You struck a woman, Lavedrine,’ I objected.

  ‘Is that what she was?’ he asked sharply. ‘She’d h
ave had her teeth into you.’

  ‘Colonel Lavedrine?’ the officer interrupted. ‘I’ve been looking for you, sir. For you and Procurator Steffenars’—he mangled my name.

  ‘Here we are. In one piece, thanks to you and your men!’

  ‘Lieutenant Mutiez’s compliments,’ the man replied. ‘A body has been found this morning. The body of a woman, sir.’

  Lavedrine turned to me, a peculiar light shining in his eyes.

  ‘Is it her, do you think?’

  Mutiez was in a warehouse at the end of the row, the infantryman reported, pointing down the wharf. The weak sun glistened over the windswept waters, rattling the sails and the tackle of a two-master which was making ready for sea. Petrels skipped, skimmed, and dived in the wake of a homecoming fisher-boat. There’ll be a storm before the day is out, I thought, but inside the head of my companion, a tempest was already raging.

  ‘I told them!’ Lavedrine remonstrated, as we hurried along the sea wall, holding on to our hats against the driving wind. ‘Search the town from top to bottom. Enter every barn and outhouse, every shed and derelict building. Did no one look inside these warehouses?’

  He was a handsome man, but in a rage his face was dark, brutal, ugly.

  ‘If a killer hides a body,’ I replied, as the cobbles gave way to square-cut blocks of worn stone, ‘he does not want it to be found. Discovery boils down to luck on our part, or miscalculation on his. Seven days have gone, and each one reduces the probability of finding her alive, I fear.’

  Lavedrine was not listening.

  ‘What is their business on this quay?’ he asked in an angry burst.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He pointed ahead at a huge wooden winding-drum.

  ‘Whales,’ I replied. ‘They used to handle whales.’

  The Old Windlass warehouse is different from the others. Built from rough red sandstone fifty years ago by Adolphus Gummerstett, it played a greater part in the history of Lotingen than it does at the present. In the last century, a small flotilla of herring boats would take themselves off to the Swedish fishing grounds in spring, passing through the Malmö Straits and into the Kattegat, searching for the whales that mate along the coast from Halmstad to Gotteburg. The vessels were not equipped to handle animals of any great size. They would kill what they could, then sail home, towing the carcasses in their wake. When they arrived in our estuary, the labourers at the Old Windlass would be waiting. Doors all along the quay were thrown open, vast tubs for boiling blubber were set out on the stones. There was a shelving ramp in front, where the whales could be secured. Then, the windlass that had caught Lavedrine’s eye was brought into play. ‘The Peeling Wench’ was the playful name the fishermen gave to this vast wooden engine. A dozen strong men pushed staves to drive the winch around the bole, ripping the blubber from the whale, which rolled in the river, shedding blood as its skin and fat were unwound in strips and dragged to the top of the ramp. There, it was hacked, chopped and boiled. As the operation proceeded, the oil was filtered into barrels and stored in the warehouse, to be sold in chandlers’ shops around the town.

  ‘The owner died intestate, leaving a mountain of debts,’ I added. ‘The Old Windlass has been closed for many years.’

  ‘It is open now,’ Lavedrine replied sharply, making for the double doors, one of which hung awkwardly from a broken hinge.

  As I followed him into the cavernous warehouse, I saw that Mutiez was talking with a man. That is, Mutiez tried to talk, while the man was shouting.

  ‘I can do nothing,’ the lieutenant insisted.

  ‘These goods are mine! By what right . . .’

  ‘By the right of conquest, monsieur,’ Mutiez answered with a smile. ‘Your oil has been requisitioned for the French army. You should be pleased to serve l’Empereur. You will be compensated eventually.’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ I muttered to myself.

  Lieutenant Mutiez saw Lavedrine and saluted, while Gummerstett turned on me.

  I had met him on numerous occasions, and knew his case by heart. Julius Gummerstett still lived in the house that his father had built next door to the warehouse. He must have seen the empty barges arrive, the doors being broken in, the soldiers milling around outside.

  ‘Herr Procurator, I’m being robbed! My property . . .’

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ I replied, ‘the property is not yours. No decision has yet been handed down from Potsdam . . .’

  ‘There’ll be nothing left to inherit by the time they’ve finished!’

  Rather than enter into a legal argument, I turned to Lavedrine. ‘This is Colonel Lavedrine of the French . . .’ I hesitated, uncertain of the Frenchman’s precise military status.

  ‘Thank heavens!’ Gummerstett exclaimed, offering his hand to Lavedrine, who did not take it. ‘I hope that you can make short work of the tangle of Prussian bureaucracy, sir.’

  ‘The workers found a body, sir,’ Mutiez was explaining. ‘A woman . . .’

  ‘He won’t let me see the damage!’ Gummerstett protested again.

  Lavedrine turned on him like a fierce dog. ‘Did you hear intruders, or see anyone entering in the last few days?’ he snapped.

  Gummerstett took a step backwards as if to avoid a blow. ‘Nothing, no one. As I have already explained to this man . . .’

  ‘Then get out!’ Lavedrine barked. ‘Before I order your arrest.’

  The frustrated heir pulled angrily at his heavy plaid overcoat, then cursed the heavens roundly. But not before he had reached the safety of the door to the quay.

  ‘Where is she?’ Lavedrine growled.

  ‘Hard to call that thing a she, sir,’ Mutiez echoed, as he led us next door into a vast storeroom. ‘If it hadn’t been for the dress . . .’

  He looked around as if the sheer size of the place had robbed him of breath.

  ‘Who found the body, Henri?’ Lavedrine pressed him.

  ‘The bargees, sir. They’d been given orders to empty the place. Our soldiers had been sent to safeguard the proceedings. They called for me at once.’

  The room was piled high with barrels. There must have been three or four hundred stacked in row upon row along the back wall. Rich takings for an army marching on its stomach. Each barrel was taller than my waist, and there were four or five solid layers. On the face of each was a brand bearing a date. Near the door, 1789. But as we marched down the room, the year progressed to 1794, which was when Adolphus Gummerstett had died, and the Old Windlass had been placed under juridical supervision.

  ‘Why was this place not searched?’ Lavedrine demanded, his black eyes glinting.

  ‘It was searched,’ Mutiez replied. ‘Five days ago. Nothing was found.’

  ‘A body within the last week?’ Lavedrine looked away, as if digesting the news. ‘Did she come of her own volition, or was she brought?’ he murmured. Suddenly, he raised his nose in the air: ‘What smell is that?’

  In Paris, I thought cynically, they recognise the smell of American oil from the South Seas, and pride themselves on dabbing ambergris behind the ears of their ladies. But we in Lotingen know the secrets of the Arctic whale, from the stink of rotting flesh to the odour of the densest spermaceti.

  ‘That is blubber oil, I think.’

  Lavedrine looked at me. ‘There is a rancid quality to your Prussian oil that I have never met before,’ he observed.

  The face of Mutiez was set in a grimace. ‘A quantity of oil has been spilled,’ he said, ‘but there are other odours in the air, sir, for a man with a sharp nose.’

  ‘What are you talking of?’ I asked as we reached the far end of the room.

  A number of barrels had fallen away from the wall, crashing onto the floor and breaking, spilling their precious contents onto the paved flagstones.

  ‘Crushed spleen, spattered brains, a split stomach, the shit and piss of rats,’ the lieutenant said, pointing at a blackened mess beneath a creamy lake in the far corner. As we moved nearer, I saw that streams of blo
od had twisted and interlaced with the congealed oil, standing out like veins in the milky mess. At the source, just below the surface of the oil, was a body, like that of a person who had drowned.

  Was this the corpse of Sybille Gottewald?

  ‘. . . ten barrels at least, sir.’

  ‘A crushing weight . . .’

  Fragments of conversation seemed to reach me from some other world.

  ‘. . . if she’d been hidden here, against her will . . .’

  ‘There’s not a rope in sight, sir.’

  ‘They left the body here, confident that it would not be found. They did not know that the warehouse was about to be emptied.’ This was Lavedrine. ‘As you said before, Herr Procurator, a matter of chance, or miscalculation. Who would know of this place?’

  I tried to drag my eyes from the matted soggy pile and the broken wood. A human hand protruded from the oil, as if the victim had not been quite struck dead on the spot. As if she had made a vain attempt to call for help, to lift and shift herself, perhaps, before the oil flowed into her throat and choked her life away.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Who knows about Gummerstett’s warehouse?’

  ‘Everyone in Lotingen,’ I replied hopelessly. ‘Fourteen thousand, eight hundred and thirty-nine adult souls, according to the census taken seven years ago. This place is no secret to anyone. But how did she arrive here?’

  ‘I think we’d better take a closer look,’ Lavedrine responded. He began to remove his boots and peel off his stockings, urging me to do the same. ‘Are any other Lotingen women known to be missing?’ he asked.

  I stifled a bitter laugh as I placed one naked foot on the cold stone floor. ‘How far do you wish to go back?’ I asked. ‘If you are asking how many women have disappeared since the French came to Prussia, I can give you a fair idea.’

  ‘They do not interest me,’ he said, as we took our first careful steps into the chill, slippery pond. ‘Has any woman disappeared in the past few weeks with the exception of Frau Gottewald? That’s the period I am concerned about.’