HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘Those marks remained fixed in my mind, too. I thought there must be a way to make sense of their diversity. Science may help us,’ I said with more confidence than I felt. I had tried the experiment once or twice in an effort to entertain the children, but it was an evanescent sort of thing, and they soon grew tired of the game. Indeed, Manni complained that it was not much of a game at all.

  ‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Lavedrine, standing over me, peering down with interest. ‘Another drawing of the locus crimini? You’ve made a hundred . . .’

  ‘This is different,’ I replied in my own defence. ‘It will be true to Nature.’

  ‘Now I am interested,’ he growled ironically. ‘I heard a magician promise as much at the bear gardens when I was passing through Berlin. They pelted him with rubbish!’

  ‘My son calls this my “magic paper” trick, but there is English science behind it,’ I announced, ‘and I will need you both to help me.’

  As I prepared them for the performance—Helena standing before the window, holding a mirror, angling it down to cast light on the dark wall and its cryptic figures; Lavedrine with a square of black card in his hand, kneeling on the floor to one side—I told them briefly what we were going to do. I had read of Thomas Wedgewood and his silver chloride experiments a year or two before, when Sir Humphrey Davy of London first described them in the Journal of the Royal Institution. Our own Institute of Science in Berlin had translated the article into German, and a number of eminent scientists (and a host of frustrated artists, such as myself) had tried it out to see what would happen.

  ‘The great problem,’ I said, remembering the poor results that had failed to amuse the children, ‘is that we must be extremely quick in our operations. Each of us must do his bit, and in the exact sequence. Then, we’ll have no more than a minute. Oh, I forgot to mention my own role,’ I added. ‘I will see to the curtains.’

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ Lavedrine urged from the cold floor. ‘My knees are beginning to ache.’

  Helena looked at me and smiled conspiratorially.

  I drew the curtains tightly closed. As I bent and took a piece of paper from the envelope in my bag, I warned both of my assistants to be at the ready. Using a metal pin, I hung the paper on the wall over the mark that interested us. ‘Cover it up, please,’ I said, and Lavedrine placed his square of black card exactly over the paper hanging on the wall.

  I stood up, pulled back the curtains, and let light into the room.

  ‘One moment,’ I warned them, waiting as the sun began to slide from behind the clouds that covered it. ‘Helena, hold up that mirror. Its reflection must shine precisely on that square of black card that Lavedrine is holding. One more second . . . Another . . . And a third . . . Lavedrine!’

  At the sound of his name, Lavedrine pulled back the black card, exposing the paper hanging on the wall to the sunlight reflected brightly in the mirror. Then, I began to count slowly: ‘One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .’

  As I reached ten, I closed the curtains as tightly as I could manage. ‘Lavedrine, cover the paper again with your card, please. Helena, put down that mirror, and light the candle on the dresser.’

  She was nimble, striking the flint I had brought, lighting the stub of candle I had provided for the purpose. As she stood beside me in the gloom, the candle cupped in her hands, the flickering flame lent a waxy orange glow to her smooth rosy cheeks.

  ‘You can remove the paper from the pin, Lavedrine,’ I said. ‘Now, we must be very quick. The instant candlelight shines on the paper, the picture will begin to turn entirely black. Are we all ready? Good, let’s see what we have obtained.’

  I took the paper from Lavedrine, and held it close to the candlelight while they crowded at my shoulders. There, inscribed on the darkening paper, were two indistinct grey letters and some other formless stuff. The coating of silver chloride was less uniform than it ought to have been, but a vague image had formed.

  ‘I can just make out a large H,’ Lavedrine read. ‘A second capital H is repeated here, perhaps, in the middle of the sequence. But I can’t make sense of the rest.’

  Before he had finished, the ciphers disappeared, eaten up by the unstoppable chemical reaction of silver chloride when exposed to light. I held the blackened piece of paper in my hands. Nothing was visible.

  ‘Do you think the murderer left his signature?’ Helena suggested.

  I remained quiet, fearing that my experiment had been more ridiculous than useful.

  ‘Why leave a signature?’ Lavedrine quizzed. ‘What could this double H mean? If it means anything at all . . .’

  ‘I hoped for something sharper,’ I mumbled.

  Having seen the letters form, I had been praying they would tell us something. Anything, which might have linked them to Kamenetz.

  ‘Don’t take it so hard,’ he comforted me. ‘You tried. Two Hs are better than none. Is it your fault if English science is not so perfect as the English claim?’

  Half an hour afterwards, Helena and I were riding back to town in the coach. The pale winter sun was swallowed by black rain-clouds which came rushing in from the coast. I ought to have been grateful for the few rays of sunlight that had allowed me to attempt the experiment, but I was sorely disappointed by its failure.

  The coach pulled up in town, and I helped Helena down onto the cobbles.

  Lavedrine dismounted, tied up his horse, and came to join us.

  ‘You made some interesting discoveries,’ he complimented Helena.

  ‘But what do they tell us?’ she replied, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. ‘She might have been preparing to move. To another house. Or another town. When we leave a house, we burn or throw out all the rags and rubbish. Only one thing makes me doubt it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Those saplings freshly planted in the garden. When we want to put down roots, we Prussians often plant a tree,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It is almost as if she wanted to stay there for ever, but could not . . .’

  Lavedrine turned to me. ‘Well, Herr Procurator. Do you still think death came calling from Kamenetz?’

  I held his gaze. ‘You still believe that the answer lies in that house.’

  ‘Perhaps we have both been looking in the wrong direction,’ he conceded.

  I felt my heart lurch. I knew what he was about to suggest. He did not speak to me, however. He turned to my wife. ‘I must carry your husband off with me for a day or two, Helena,’ he announced.

  Could I object to what he was about to propose?

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ she enquired, her eyes wide with surprise.

  ‘Königsberg,’ he said, his eyes flashing into mine.

  34

  I HAD READ reports of Kant’s last will and testament in the newspapers.

  Apart from the dubious pleasure of picking over the bones of a famous person who had recently died, there was not very much that was of interest to anyone, including myself, who had known him better than any man alive at the end. His material possessions had been sufficient to ensure his comfort. He had his plate, his silver, his household linen—he even had a deal of money held as savings in a local bank. But what concerned him most, it seemed, was the question of his papers.

  From his youth onwards, Kant had been a voracious reader and hoarder of books and pamphlets. As his own ideas began to gain credence throughout Prussia, then greater authority in the wider world, he wrote on almost every subject that ever interested man, as well as covering many arcane topics that no man before himself had even known existed. And in every case, he had published his findings, or assembled the material for a publication which, for one reason or another, had not materialised.

  What would become of it all when he was dead?

  This dilemma had assumed vast dimensions in the final decade of his life, the newspapers revealed. Of course, his three greatest works, the Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason, and of Judgment, had all been published, no
t only in German, but in various other languages as well. Lesser essays, written when he was a young professor still struggling to make his way, had appeared in studious journals and in more ephemeral magazines, and he had jealously conserved one or more copies of them, depending how widely the article had been taken up and reported—at second, third, or fourth hand, both at home and abroad. ‘A man cannot stop others stealing his ideas,’ Kant was recorded as saying, ‘but he can keep a jealous eye on the fruits of his labour.’

  There was a mountain of books, manuscripts and papers; if they were not to end up on a bonfire, a home must be found for them. The obituary notice in the Königsbergische Monatsschrift mentioned that Kant had left a sum of money to pay for a ‘suitable person to oversee the classification, and draw up a catalogue of the philosopher’s papers and published works’. A qualified archivist had been found in the person of Arnold Abel Ludvigssen. The name was not entirely new to me, though I knew it only in connection with Professor Kant, who had never been short of acolytes. Many students had progressed from one side of the teacher’s lectern to the other under his tutelage, and I felt certain that Ludvigssen must be one of them, a bright fellow who had attracted Kant’s attention by his diligence, a scholar who had been rewarded for his lesser talent with a few crumbs from the great man’s table.

  More to the point, I thought I knew where Ludvigssen might be located.

  It was almost seven o’clock when we arrived in town.

  ‘The curfew hour,’ as I reminded Lavedrine.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he replied. ‘I have my papers with me.’

  ‘And I have mine,’ I confirmed. ‘But will a letter from Mutiez, or a passport signed by Dittersdorf, hold any power in Königsberg?’

  ‘Do not trouble yourself,’ he assured me. ‘I will be the Dante to your Virgil. Just tell me which part of this Inferno you intend taking me to visit next.’

  We were stopped almost immediately by a squad of French soldiers as we made our way through the dark, deserted city, heading in the direction of the university. Lavedrine had predicted correctly. His impeccable passport and high rank were more than sufficient to guarantee our freedom of movement. The soldiers apologised, saluted, and wished us good night without asking to see my humbler papers. Ten minutes more, and we stood before the university library, a tall building in the perpendicular Gothic style with high pointed windows, stained-glass tracery, flying buttresses, and horrid gargoyles. It was deathly silent, and seemed a fitting place for learned tomes to sleep while waiting for a reader.

  Lavedrine thumped heavily on the door with the iron knocker.

  When nothing happened, he hammered even more determinedly.

  Above our heads, a window on the first floor rattled, then swung open.

  The dark shadow of a head looked down.

  ‘Closed for the night,’ a grumbling sort of voice called out. ‘Open at six in the morning. You lads should be abed. Only a cat can read in the dark.’

  ‘We are looking for Herr Ludvigssen,’ Lavedrine shouted up. ‘Do you know where we can find him?’

  A grumbling sort of laugh echoed off the walls. ‘He’ll be where he is always to be found.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘The Old Goat,’ the voice cried, then the window crashed shut again.

  Lavedrine turned to me. ‘An inn, do you reckon?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘I think it would be wise if we retraced our steps towards the town centre.’

  While doing so, we were stopped by patrolling French troops once more. Again, Lavedrine’s papers passed muster. Again, mine were of no interest to them. The corporal saluted and began to beg pardon for stopping and questioning us, but Lavedrine cut him short.

  ‘Do you know a place called The Old Goat?’

  It was a two-minute walk.

  When we pushed open the door and strode into the bar-room of the inn, it was getting on for half past seven. With the exception of four young men dining at a table in the far corner close to the fire—student lodgers, in all probability—the place was empty. Our entrance did not go unnoticed, however. Any man who walks the streets after curfew with impunity is a man to be feared. There are only three alternatives. He is a soldier, he is French, or else he is a criminal caught out in an act of wrongdoing. As the door swung closed, all eyes turned quickly. The young men looked away just as quickly, but the landlord standing behind the bar was a braver sort. He bent down and came up holding a cudgel, which he slapped three times in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he called. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Lavedrine walked across the room, set his foot on the bar-rail, rested his elbow on the counter. ‘Two steins of frothing beer would make a good start,’ he said.

  The landlord, a big strong fellow with muscles bulging through his shirt, stared at him for a moment. Then, laying the cudgel down on the nearby bar-top, he placed two beer jugs under the tap of a barrel, and gave a twist to the stopper, glancing at the rising level of the ale, then back to us again in quick succession. He did not say a word until the steins were full.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said, placing one beer on the bar, then the other, using his left hand only. His right hand hovered close to the cudgel, a solid black stick with a number of splinters missing, as if it had been used, and recently, for smashing pates. ‘You know that there’s a law at night in Königsberg, do you not?’ he asked.

  ‘In Königsberg alone?’ Lavedrine replied, lifting up the jug and drinking through the grey froth that hid the liquid. ‘In the whole of Prussia, surely.’

  As he pronounced the last two words, he did so with a marked rolling of the ‘r’.

  ‘Frenchmen, are you, sirs?’

  I set down the beer. ‘Colonel Lavedrine is French, but I am Prussian,’ I said. ‘I am looking for one of my countrymen. And I’m a magistrate, at that.’

  ‘Those lads are staying here,’ the landlord said, glancing towards the fire. ‘There’s no one else in the house, my wife apart, and a couple of other lodgers upstairs sleeping.’

  ‘Unless they go by the name of Ludvigssen, they are safe,’ I said.

  ‘Ludvigssen?’ the landlord murmured, darting a wary glance towards the far end of the room.

  I followed the line of his eye, and smiled. In that shadowy corner was a table with two wooden settles on either flank of it. Just visible, hanging over the end of the far bench, were a dirty pair of boots.

  ‘Go easy on him, sir,’ the tavern-keeper warned. ‘He’s been drinking all the afternoon.’

  ‘Ludvigssen?’ I hissed.

  He nodded grimly, as if he did not care for the man.

  ‘We do not mean him any harm,’ I said, reflecting as I crossed the room that it is easier to drink a landlord dry and pay for it, than to win his affection. ‘Herr Ludvigssen, wake up. I need to speak to you.’

  Lavedrine helped by kicking the settle and making it shudder.

  The sleeping man was wide awake, if bleary, in the twinkling of an eye. He backed along the bench and huddled in the corner by the wall. I sat down alongside him, while Lavedrine slid onto the seat on the other side of the table. We had him cornered.

  ‘What will you drink?’ Lavedrine asked, pulling out his purse, waving it in the air to the landlord, who watched all this as if it were a daily, nay, an hourly occurrence in his tavern.

  Arnold Abel Ludvigssen was older than I expected—certainly not a student, forty years of age, or even older. His face was long and very thin, and his greasy black hair hung straight down, lank from a central parting, covering his ears and cheeks like two shining curtains. His long, pointed chin and hollow jaw had not seen a razor that day, nor the day before. He looked to all appearances like a man who habitually drank a great deal more than was good for the liver or the soul.

  ‘A glass of porter,’ he murmured, his tongue swishing over dry, cracked lips.

  ‘I read of you in the newspapers, Herr Ludvigssen,’ I said.
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br />   He stared at me dully, but did not open his mouth.

  ‘In connection with Professor Kant,’ I added.

  ‘The Kantstudiensaal,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘Is that what you call the place where his manuscripts and papers are kept?’ asked Lavedrine.

  The man looked tiredly across the table. ‘That is what they call it,’ he said. ‘I would call it dusty. Very dusty. But the work keeps me in food and drink, and pays for my bed. What more can a man ask of Life?’

  The landlord came striding across the room and slammed a pewter tankard of dark-brown beer on the table-top so forcefully that it slopped. He picked up the coins that Lavedrine pushed towards him, weighing them in the palm of his hand, then turned away, growling something to the effect that at least that pint wasn’t going on the slate like all the others.

  ‘The bursary pays out at the end of the university term,’ Ludvigssen confided, but the mug of beer was in his mouth before he had finished speaking. An instant later, blowing beer-froth off his lips, he called loudly after the landlord, ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, Sigismund!’

  It was hard to say whether it was a promise to pay his debts, or a threat.

  ‘Come, sir,’ Lavedrine urged him. ‘We have serious business in Königsberg. You can help us expedite it.’

  Ludvigssen looked at him, then laughed in that bleary provocative manner that serious and regular application to alcoholic drink induces. ‘At this hour?’ he challenged. ‘I’m going nowhere, sir.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘Drink up, and tell us about Professor Kant’s archive. That’s why we’ve come. Surely, you know more about it than any other man living.’

  For some reason, this sentence caused Ludvigssen to laugh all the more, or rather to gurgle, as he continued drinking while he laughed.

  ‘Is there a man living who is interested in Kant?’ he asked at last. ‘I am paid to be, but that does not mean I am. But what is your specific interest, sir? Are you a Parisian philosopher? I thought that they had all said goodnight to Madame Guillotine by now?’