HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘No one, so far as we know,’ I said, struggling to keep my balance and prevent myself from falling. ‘Of course, not everything is reported to the police.’

  ‘The clothes may help us identify her.’

  Even as he said it, the conviction seemed to die on Lavedrine’s lips.

  A tun of oil holds 252 gallons. A fair-sized whale will yield 150 barrels, ten or twelve of which had cascaded down from a height of twenty feet and struck the body. A great deal of oil had run away down the guttering which formed a canal down the centre of the long narrow room. It would have trickled out of the building and dribbled into the estuary without anybody noticing. But a huge slick had frozen solid, and in the middle of this milky mess was the flattened form of a black dress, a black bonnet, and a vivid red mash which had once been a human body. That grasping hand protruded from the oil like an isolated tree in a field that had been flooded.

  We stood on either side of the body, looking down into the ooze.

  ‘It will not be an easy task,’ I said. The face had been crushed and splattered by the falling weight. Fragments of the skull were scattered like a broken moon suspended in aspic, as if the head had shattered beneath the repeated blows of a heavy sledgehammer. A halo of brain fluid and tissue made a pale trace in the dark blood and greenish oil. The body was flattened to a wafer in places, as if some malignant force had chosen to take a flat-iron and impress that woman’s form on the ground. Entrails spread like pink tentacles from her stomach and her abdomen. ‘Impossible to tell how old she was,’ I said. ‘Or whether she was dead before the barrels fell on her.’

  ‘The clothes,’ Lavedrine repeated stubbornly. ‘They can be recovered, Stiffeniis. They can be washed and cleaned. There may be a tailor’s mark, a name-tag, or some clue in her pockets. The shoes, too,’ he pointed. ‘Would you mind? You are closer. Moving is a risky business.’

  I steadied myself, bent forward, and stuck my hands into the oily goo, which was cold and dense, but malleable, like soap that has been left in water and forgotten overnight. I felt a sense of sickness and revulsion as I moved my hand down the woman’s leg. The bones shifted easily beneath my fingers, not one of them was whole. At last, I touched the foot, and felt the raised surface of leather. I pulled the shoe away from its sticky moorings with a sickening squelch, and held it up.

  ‘The heel has broken off . . .’

  I said no more, but vomited where I stood, a shower spurting out from my mouth to compound the oily soup in which I was standing, ankle-deep.

  ‘Impossible to distinguish the colour,’ Lavedrine murmured. Then he looked at me with an air of concern. ‘Are you all right?’

  My hands were slick with oil; blood and blubber slowly trickled from the shoe and ran down my wrists and inside the cuffs of my shirt.

  ‘Well enough,’ I replied, gulping air into my lungs, holding on to my hard-won prize, struggling to quell the queasy rhythms of my stomach, and calm the racing of my pulse. ‘Her hair,’ I said, making an attempt to be as cold and practical as he appeared to be. ‘You are nearer. Can you see the colour?’

  Lavedrine let out a snort of frustration. ‘This damned stuff has impregnated everything. Her hair was long, but more than that I cannot say. Blonde, black, or brown. Who can tell?’

  ‘All we have for the moment,’ I said, ‘is that hand. The rest will have to be collected.’

  ‘It is not the hand of an old woman,’ he said, sitting back on his heels, the tail of his coat soaking up oil, visibly changing colour before my eyes.

  ‘If she had been dead long,’ I said, ‘it ought to have rotted away to nothing.’

  ‘Have you never . . .’ He stopped, turned to me, smiled wanly. ‘But no, of course, you haven’t. You have no oil of olives here in Prussia. The merchants in the south of France use olive oil to conserve certain delicacies—olives themselves, truffles, and certain precious kinds of mushroom. Oil will preserve anything for an indefinite length of time.’

  ‘There’s nothing to preserve,’ I said, forgetting the tail of my own coat, sinking down on my haunches close to that clutching hand. ‘The nails and the tips of the fingers are black with decomposition . . .’

  ‘Where the oil has run away,’ he insisted, ‘but the hand is a young hand. There are no age wrinkles. And there is a callus on the knuckle of the thumb. Can you see it?’

  With trepidation, I leaned closer. A wave of nausea swept over me in a shudder as I pulled the clutching fingers open, letting the hand flop back lazily onto the oxidised skin of oil. ‘There are hard pads on the other fingers,’ I said, fighting to hold down another retching lurch of my stomach. ‘This woman worked . . .’

  ‘We have no way of knowing what she may have done. Housework, perhaps.’

  ‘Or chopping wood . . . The nails are broken. There is a trace of blood.’

  ‘Her own, or someone else’s?’

  ‘She’ll never tell us,’ I said, standing up, feeling the cold, grasping damp of oily stickiness as my coat attached itself to the calves of my legs. ‘We cannot proceed in this manner,’ I said. I was thinking of Professor Kant, and the investigation we had undertaken together four years earlier in Königsberg. ‘We need to be more scientific in our approach. Everything here must be gathered up, then examined in conditions that are conducive to a more precise analysis.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said, raising himself to his full height.

  With some difficulty we slithered and waded our way back to where Mutiez was waiting.

  ‘Can you get a gang of men in here?’ I asked him. ‘Fellows with strong stomachs. Tell them to recover whatever they can lay their hands on. There are four tanks ranged along the wall,’ I said, walking across and placing the sodden shoe in one of them. ‘They can drop everything in these, and leave them to soak. Water can be heated up in tubs, I suppose.’

  The lieutenant saluted and ran off to bring his men.

  I tried the handle of a water-pump beside the sinks. Cold water gushed forth, and I began to remove the blood and blubber from my hands and feet. Shivering as I cleaned myself, I glanced at the wreckage in the corner—the smashed wood, the forest of broken laths and twisted metal hoops. A cannon might have scored a direct hit in the warehouse.

  ‘There must be some way of identifying her,’ Lavedrine murmured, almost to himself, as he came across to clean himself up.

  The clatter of steel-tipped boots coming in through the door distracted me for a moment. ‘When her things are clean and dried,’ I said forlornly, sitting down to put on my stockings and shoes, ‘some person may be able to recognise them.’

  ‘Your wife? Is that what you are thinking? She met the woman.’

  Lavedrine was not looking at me as he said it.

  ‘Helena was not the person I had in mind,’ I insisted. ‘There are seamstresses, shoe shops, hatmakers, and the like, who may be able to distinguish their own work. If doubt remains, then, I suppose we may be forced to ask Helena. We can show her a scrap of cloth or leather, for all the good it’s likely to do.’

  I had no intention of subjecting Helena to the horror.

  ‘Would you care to instruct them in their duties, sir?’ Mutiez enquired, as the men formed up in a line. He addressed himself to Lavedrine, though there was a wayward drift in the question, which seemed to include myself.

  ‘Speak to them, Stiffeniis,’ Lavedrine urged. ‘Your investigation with Professor Kant was motivated by detailed analysis of the minutiae that were found at the scene of each crime. My own experience is limited to the study of criminal behaviour, and the perverted nature of the men who commit such acts.’

  I turned to the men.

  ‘A woman has been crushed beyond recognition. Her clothes and other effects are preserved in whale oil. Those objects must all be carefully collected,’ I stated mechanically, struggling not to think of the horror of the task. ‘Every item, no matter how small, which may have come from that woman’s body will be subjected to detailed examination. Do not ignore a hairpin,
a clip, or a scrap of paper. Do not cast aside anything. If it is located within a ten-yard radius of the corpse, it probably came into this place with the victim, or with whoever killed her. It may be useful in our attempt to establish her identity.’

  I paused for a moment, collecting my thoughts for what I was about to add.

  ‘There is a need for delicacy in what you are about to do,’ I continued. ‘It will not be pleasant. Many bones have been broken into fragments. I want every piece of the skeleton separated from the rest. Anything that you think is human’—I looked around, then pointed to the tin sink nearest to the open door—‘should be placed in that tray over there. If you are not certain, but you think that something may be organic, it should go into that tray, and no other. I will examine the contents and judge what is to be kept, and what is to be discarded. Do you understand me?’

  The soldiers were a fair cross-section of the French forces in the town. Some were large, some were smaller, all were battle-hardened, proud of their waxed moustaches and their greasy pigtails. Some nodded, some sighed.

  ‘Are there any questions?’ I asked.

  A tall fellow with a pair of gleaming black eyes beneath his weatherworn canvas-covered shako spoke up at once. ‘Jewellery, sir? Personal effects? What d’you want us to do with those?’

  ‘Lieutenant Mutiez will be responsible for handling them,’ Lavedrine shot back.

  ‘This is a murder investigation,’ Mutiez added. ‘Remember that fact. If there is any suggestion of pilfering, you will find yourselves lashed to a gun carriage and dragged in shame before the ranks.’

  Lavedrine and I exchanged looks.

  ‘Send a runner to look for us if anything of interest comes to light, Henri,’ he said.

  ‘Where will you be, sir?’

  ‘A fair question,’ Lavedrine said with a smile. ‘Where will we be, Stiffeniis?’

  ‘Judenstrasse,’ I replied.

  We lingered for five minutes, watching them get down to work. ‘The evidence should be moved away from here, I think,’ I said to Lavedrine. I was thinking of Professor Kant’s laboratory near the castle of Königsberg. ‘Somewhere that is clean, dry, and cold. A place which is safe and secret, where you and I may examine the remains without being lynched by another mob.’

  Lavedrine nodded. ‘I’ll speak to Mutiez.’

  A few minutes later, still trying to clean the worst of the dirt from our clothes, we moved towards the door.

  ‘Is it her body, do you think?’ Lavedrine asked uncertainly.

  If he were asking me to confirm or deny the possibility, I refused to help him. He would probably have belittled my reasoning. The total devastation of that corpse, and the cruel death that the woman had died, were enough to convince me. I recognised the same crushing annihilation that had overtaken them all. One by one. Her husband had been hounded to his death. Her children had been mercilessly slaughtered. The mystery of how that woman had died was perplexing, but in the details only. Had she been murdered there, or somewhere else? Had she been raped, then left, stumbling about in the dark, accidentally bringing those barrels cascading down upon her head? Or had her lifeless shell been taken there by someone who knew that the warehouse was deserted, and believed that it would long remain so?

  ‘If it is her corpse, we are no closer to finding the killer,’ I replied, stepping out into the daylight. ‘He will be accused of four murders, rather than three. But we have to catch him first.’

  24

  DUSK WAS FALLING as we began to climb the hill in the direction of the ghetto.

  Our Judenstrasse is a winding, narrow street near the top of Nogatsstrasse which falls away towards the west, trailing out into the flat countryside in the direction of the Berlin road.

  If a man needed carpets, kitchen utensils, pots and pans, or knives and forks, someone in Judenstrasse would provide them at a reasonable price. There was nothing, except the name, to distinguish it from any other street in the oldest part of Lotingen, and it was frequented as much by Gentiles (so they called us) as it was by Israelites (as we called them)—in a word, a Gentile was a customer, and a Son of Israel was a trader, and they got on well enough.

  Indeed, Gentiles were oftentimes obliged to go there, for services were offered in our Judenstrasse that could be found nowhere else in town. If a man had money to invest, the only place to make contact with an agent who would expedite the movement of money against shares was Judenstrasse. Coffee was a movable commodity, but all of it passed through Holland. Russian hardwoods were equally profitable, but who in Lotingen would know the name, address or language of the man in St Petersburg who happened to administer the trade? And who could invest in English cotton with men who spoke only English, if it were not for Jews who spoke Yiddish between themselves? Of course, Napoleon and his Continental System had severely restricted the possibilities for investment, but the Jews knew ways to get around the prohibition and the English naval blockades. And if you had to go to Vilnius in the East, or Transylvania in the South, and needed coin of those places, who else but a Jewish money-teller would have some ready and waiting in his coffers?

  All this was Judenstrasse with its coffee shops and cluttered emporia, its kosher butchers and taverns. But as we turned into the street and walked the first fifty yards, I realised that much had changed with the coming of the French. I had had no reason to go there in more than a year. Many Jews had been forced to abandon the larger cities in Prussia out of fear, I had heard, and had made their way to smaller, safer towns, such as Lotingen. Our Judenstrasse was neither long nor wide, and it had always been busy, but not uncomfortably so. Now, the street was packed, and it grew increasingly difficult to push our way through the crowd.

  All at once, we were forced to pull up short in front of a gate.

  A large gate made of iron, which had not been there before.

  Armed soldiers were standing guard in front of it. During my absence in Kamenetz, a high wooden paling had been erected across the street, beyond which the milling crowd inside the ghetto seemed suddenly wild and agitated. This mêlée was caused by the fact that the soldiers, who were members of the Lotingen Palisaders, had presented arms with a loud clash, slamming their rifle butts to the ground at the approach of the local magistrate.

  ‘Herr Procurator,’ the corporal in charge saluted. ‘Do you mean to go inside, sir? We have orders to let no one out.’

  ‘It would be better if we entered alone,’ Lavedrine suggested. ‘If the people in there intend us any harm, four members of the local militia can do nothing to stop them. If the soldiers come in with us, they may provoke a riot. Word will soon get out that we have entered the ghetto. The town will think that we are taking the accusations very seriously. That was what Dittersdorf intended, was it not? An investigation inside the Jewish quarter.’

  Lavedrine had put it in a nutshell. The greatest fear of the authorities, French or Prussian, was not prompted by what the Jews might have done. They were afraid of what the people of Lotingen might still sink to. So long as indiscriminate mud-slinging against the inhabitants of the ghetto continued in the papers without a sign of a visible response, there was a danger of a full-blown attack against the Jews.

  ‘Wait here,’ I said to the militia-men.

  I was filled with doubts as I gave the order. Entering alone might produce the opposite of the desired effect. The people might think that we had gone inside to arrest the killer of the Gottewald children. If any man came out with us, he would be lynched on the spot.

  ‘Keep your hands in view,’ Lavedrine warned me, as one of the soldiers stepped forward and turned a key to let us through. ‘They must not think we are armed, or bent on doing them any harm.’

  Before the gate was halfway open, a cry went up, many voices shouting out in strange tongues that I did not recognise, and an ululating chorus of high-pitched female voices assaulted our ears. The crowd fell back, scattering this way and that, fanning out before the opening gate, making space like ants that fea
red being crushed underfoot. As the hubbub swelled, an old man emerged from the crowd. He shouted something in their tongue, and the noise inside the ghetto began to dwindle, then die away.

  This man, his face a wrinkled target of concentric rings, stretched out his hands, and placed them on the vertical bars, pressing his forehead hard up against the metal.

  ‘Have you come to murder us?’ he asked quietly.

  Lavedrine placed his own hands above the old man’s. They could have been friends meeting by accident at a garden gate.

  ‘My name is Colonel Lavedrine,’ the Frenchman said, in a relaxed, colloquial manner. ‘I am French. You know the laws of France, sir. All men are equal. No man is a slave. No man is better than any other man, except in what he does. The Jews are men with rights, like all the rest in French law. We make no distinctions.’ He turned to me. ‘This is Procurator Stiffeniis,’ he said. ‘He is the Magistrate of Lotingen. He can go wherever he wishes. This town belongs to him. He can call for the police if he needs them. He asks no man for permission. But . . .’

  He paused for a moment, and the old man nodded, as if encouraging him to continue. ‘We do not wish to force our way inside without your consent,’ he said. ‘We will not enter, if that is what you prefer. But three children have been murdered in town. Their mother has disappeared. Those people out there’—he nodded over his shoulder—‘believe that the Jews are responsible. If you have nothing to hide, sir, let us enter.’

  I was impressed by his composure. Not a word or a gesture was wasted.

  ‘Nothing will happen,’ I promised, trying to sound equally reassuring, but a tumult of voices began to drown out mine.

  I glanced over my shoulder. A large crowd was gathering at our backs, pressing forward, edging closer, but never too close to the armed soldiers. The windows of the street outside the ghetto were filled with screaming Prussians, egging on the mob to do its worst. Inside, terror was written on the faces craning out of the windows all along Judenstrasse.