HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  But the woman did not stop screaming, as I half expected.

  Her nutbrown face was a mask of pain. Her physical posture was quite unnatural. She seemed to curve further and further backwards, towards a point at which she must inevitably fall, or turn a somersault. Lavedrine sprang forward to assist her, but Böll got there before him.

  ‘Stand back, sir,’ he warned, waving Lavedrine away. ‘We don’t want to lose the contact, do we?’

  He bent close to his wife, whispering, ‘Easy, my dear. Hold on, hold on. I’ll take as much of it as I can, I promise you.’

  His rod stretched out, touched the point of his wife’s stick, and suddenly the pair of them began to spin and spin, chasing after one another, circling around that spot on the ground, going faster and faster with every turn. Frau Böll screamed like a frightened child on a garden swing, but Böll began to shout as he ran, his eyes popping, twirling, twisting his head as he tried to catch sight of Lavedrine.

  ‘This is it, sir!’ he called. ‘I think we’ve found something!’

  I stood transfixed. I could find no explanation for what I saw. Their divining rods seemed to turn to liquid silver, entwining and running one into the other, as the Bölls circled and chased each other round and round that fixed point on the ground. The laws of Natural Science were cancelled out. I saw their two sticks blend into one.

  ‘This is the place,’ a voice breathed warmly into my ear.

  Lavedrine’s eyes were afire with excitement, his hair caught wildly in the wind.

  ‘We should have guessed,’ he hissed. ‘Your wife pointed out that spot. Helena has greater gifts then these two put together.’

  We were not in the bedroom. We were not inside the house at all. Not even close to the door. He and I were standing on the edge of the kitchen garden, while the Bölls were running round and round the tiny enclosed circle of stones in which someone had planted two oak stems and three smaller sprigs of holly.

  Without another word, Lavedrine stepped forward, caught Böll by his collar, and his wife by her arm, and yanked them away from the spot. Their sticks seemed to twirl of their own accord before they fell to the ground. He stood like a rock in the centre, holding them apart, waiting for the fit to ease. When he did let them go, Böll staggered off in one direction, his wife spun away in another. They came to rest like spinning tops when they hit something. Böll bounced off the wall of the house, and sat down in a large rosemary bush. His wife was more fortunate, running into a tree, which she had the good sense to hold on to.

  ‘There, sir. What do you think now?’ Böll called weakly to me. ‘That’s the second time it’s happened. I ain’t never seen Rumeliah like this before. Never have I known such a compelling force.’ He sank back exhausted against the wall. ‘Right in the middle of them plants. Ain’t that correct, Rumeliah?’

  Frau Böll had recovered her senses more quickly, and had swayed across the garden to his side. She knelt on the ground and ran her dark hand gently over his red face.

  ‘And there we will begin,’ announced Lavedrine, shrugging off his cloak.

  ‘What are you intending to do?’ I asked.

  He did not reply, but strode away to the end of the garden. He returned with a spade in his hand.

  ‘That’s simple, Stiffeniis. I am going to dig!’

  ‘Helena pointed out those plants the other day,’ I said. ‘Naturally, you mentioned them to your guests.’

  Lavedrine shook his head and rested his weight on the handle of the spade.

  ‘I like to experiment,’ he declared. ‘But I do not bend the rules. Of course I didn’t tell them! If we find anything at all, we’ll have Helena to thank for it. We ought to have taken her a good deal more seriously.’ He picked up the spade as if it were a broadsword. He might have been the Archangel Michael getting ready to do battle with Satan and his horde of fiends. Such was the look of grim determination on his pale face. ‘And now, a little healthy travail, as we call it.’

  He bent and swept away the dead leaves with his hand, using the point of the spade to lever out the encircling stones. Then he set his foot on the spade and attempted to dig in earnest. I almost laughed as the metal blade of the implement struck in vain and bounced up with a sharp ring off the permafrost. He was deluding himself. There was nothing to find. That ground had been frozen solid ever since the beginning of October. There had been a hard frost every night for the past two months. It would take a pick and a couple of hours’ work to make a hole. He would find nothing buried in the garden. The proposal was preposterous anyway. Why would any person who had just committed a murder bother to dig a hole in the garden? With each unsuccessful jab at the ground, I rejoiced in the futility of it. He was wrong. Wrong! The answer lay in Kamenetz. Within a day or two, I would be able to prove it . . .

  My exultation froze as hard as the ground.

  I heard the dull sound of the spade slicing into soil, rather than a clanging rebound.

  I watched in awe as he pushed that blade deep into the ground. His foot pressed hard, but not so very hard. The earth had yielded. It had given in more easily than it ought.

  Lavedrine looked up at me.

  The signs of disappointment on his face had grown more marked with each failed attempt to breach the earth. Suddenly, Janus changed his mask. His eyes gleamed, his features seemed to stretch with amazement, his mouth wide with shock. With a rapid thrust, he bent his body to the spade again, and heaved. His silver hair shook and sparkled in the cold air, beads of sweat glistened on his brow, as he tossed a quantity of loose soil to one side.

  He repeated the gesture twice more. My heart was in my mouth.

  Frau Böll, standing close by his side, let out a piercing cry, pointing at something dragging on the point of the spade, half in, half out of the hole.

  I took three or four steps towards them. Lavedrine laid the spade flat on the ground, then lifted it quickly again at the bottom of the shaft, the handle resting on the ground, the blade rising into the air.

  ‘In heaven’s name,’ he murmured.

  A piece of meat, I thought—black, old, rotten, the buried carcass of a dog or cat.

  The tense expression on Lavedrine’s face warned me to be careful. He brought his nose close to the spade, and breathed in deeply. His eyes flashed wide open, and I knew that I had lost. Helena had guessed. The Bölls had pointed it out. But he had found it.

  He raised his hand and touched the heavy object with reverence.

  ‘They are here,’ he murmured.

  There was no note of triumph in the declaration.

  Instead, I thought I heard a fearful tremor.

  I fell down on my knees—he sank down beside me—and together we began to dig with our hands, pulling out the heavy pieces of frozen cloth, one after the other, laying them one on top of the other beside the hole in the ground. Each piece was the same dull red-brown tint. The colour of blood.

  ‘Try to lift, rather than pull,’ he warned.

  Indeed, each piece—there were more than a dozen—had been carefully folded into a neat square before it had been put into the ground, as if they had been put there by some tidy maid.

  ‘A most peculiar domesticity, Stiffeniis,’ he murmured as the last of the Gottewald rags was placed on top of the pile. ‘They are here. Just as Helena suspected.’

  Lavedrine ran his hand gently over the topmost cloth, almost as if he could not believe in the physical nature of the find, as if his fingers must tell him what his eyes would otherwise have doubted, as if they might have been conjured up by Böll and his wife. Then, he stretched down into the hole.

  ‘There’s something more,’ he grunted.

  He held up a piece of paper which had been buried at the very bottom of the pit. He handed it to me.

  ‘Read it out, would you mind?’ he asked.

  I unfolded the paper, which was soiled, barely legible in places, where blood and damp had fouled the ink. The calligraphy was childlike. One line rose up, the next sank down, as
if it had been written by someone in a hurry, the paper resting on the writer’s knee for want of any better surface.

  ‘I cannot make it out,’ I said, holding the letter close to my eyes. ‘The paper is badly stained, the ink has run.’

  ‘Do your best,’ Lavedrine replied quickly. ‘We have this, and nothing else.’

  ‘Gubermann?’ Lavedrine interjected. ‘That sounds like a Jewish name.’

  I remembered what I had read regarding two Jews who had been killed in Korbern, when Gottewald led a night patrol on the village. Might these Gubermanns be the same people? No name had been mentioned in that report. I hesitated, wondering whether to tell Lavedrine. It would mean breaking my word to Dittersdorf. More to the point, I did not know if there was any connection between the murdered Jews, and the name Gubermann. Nor could I guess what that name might have meant to Bruno Gottewald.

  ‘What did he have in mind?’ Lavedrine murmured.

  I did not answer. The line that followed seemed to say it all.

  Helena had told me of the terror of the woman she had met. That letter was an expression of the selfsame fear. The husband had passed it on to his wife like a disease. But fear of what? Of whom?

  ‘Two days later, Gottewald was dead,’ I whispered.

  ‘A week later, they were dead as well.’ I felt the warmth of Lavedrine’s breath upon my cheek. ‘Kant suggested the unthinkable. This letter provides the evidence. Now we know who killed the children,’ he murmured close to my ear.

  ‘We still do not know why,’ I reminded him.

  ‘She killed the infants, then buried the rags and the letter,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘Somehow, she ended up in Gummerstett’s warehouse. And there she died as the result of an accident, or by her own hand. That is all we need to know.’

  He shrugged his shoulders, as I folded up Gottewald’s letter.

  I glanced down at the pile of rags. They were so stained with dirt, it hardly looked like blood at all. ‘When he speaks of storm clouds gathering, what does he mean?’ I asked. ‘And which abyss did Moloch lead him to? The long night, days of atonement . . .’

  ‘The man was mad,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘And he drove her to the same folly. The ghosts that had terrorised him were transported to Lotingen by means of this letter. The evidence is overwhelming. Helena set us on the track. Kant helped us along it. Now, the Bölls have brought me successfully to the conclusion.’

  He stared at me and a hollow smile scarred his lips.

  ‘You are ignoring Kamenetz,’ I objected.

  He turned on me sharply. ‘Something did come from Kamenetz,’ he answered, ‘but it was not a killer. It was this!’ He tore Gottewald’s letter from my hands. His eyes were as bright and challenging as they had been that night at Dittersdorf’s feast. ‘A letter. Nothing more . . .’

  ‘That letter caused a mother to murder her own children!’ I objected. ‘We still don’t know why she did it.’

  ‘That is for you to find out,’ he snapped back. ‘You’ve always been obsessed with Kamenetz as the cause of everything. Just as this house has fascinated me.’

  He turned and began to round up the Bölls, preparing to leave.

  ‘I intend to write my report this evening. If you come by Mutiez’s office tomorrow morning, you can add your own remarks. I will explain what happened—who the murderer was, and how the thing was done. That is the easiest part, I admit. The hardest part I’ll leave to you. You may say what you will about why it might have happened.’

  ‘What about this evidence?’ I said, pointing to the hole and the rags.

  ‘The soldiers will collect them together and send them back to town,’ he said, folding up the letter, putting it away in his pocket. ‘Do you wish to ride back with us?’

  ‘I am going to stay here for a while,’ I replied stubbornly, pointing at the pile of bloodstained rags. ‘Don’t concern yourself, I’ll take care of those. I mean to bury them again. Sybille Gottewald marked this spot as some sort of family shrine, if Helena is correct. I think we can allow her that, don’t you?’

  Lavedrine was silent. As if he meant to raise some objection. Then, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘Beneath the earth is where they belong.’

  I watched them go.

  Then, I buried those blood-soaked towels exactly where we had found them.

  The day was drawing on by the time I replaced the saplings and the holly shrubs, pressing down the circle of stones with my heel. I had no transport to take me back to Lotingen. Mutiez had ordered my driver to return to town at once. But I did not care. I set off along the road in the hope of tiring myself out.

  I walked in search of peace, but I did not find a trace of it.

  39

  LAVEDRINE HAD WON.

  At every stage of the investigation, he had turned instinctively in the right direction, while I had stubbornly opposed him. If I laid an obstacle in his way, he struggled all the more to prove me wrong. I had been secretive, unhelpful, and all in defence of a hypothesis that I was unable to demonstrate.

  As I returned alone on foot to Lotingen, as the daylight began to fade, one question pounded in my head like the remorseless piston of a steam engine.

  Was there no connection between the father’s death in Kamenetz and the massacre of his children in Lotingen?

  I could find no answer as I trudged along the empty road.

  Had I not seen Gottewald’s death certificate, I might have believed that he had come to wipe his family off the face of the earth. Full of strange forebodings, that letter had been written by a man who feared for his life. Had he still been living, I might have read it as the feverish announcement of an incomprehensible deed.

  But Gottewald had died before the children.

  And Lavedrine had found the evidence that the mother had killed them.

  What was I to ask Doctor Korna now?

  A cold wind blew strongly in my face as I entered town by the southern gate, and it began to snow. Occasional dancing flakes settled on my mouth and eyelashes. I could be home within ten minutes. The fire would be burning brightly in the kitchen. Lotte would be preparing dinner. Helena might be darning by the hearth, telling stories to the children as she plied her needle. They would all be waiting for me.

  But I had no heart for home.

  I turned towards my office, cursing the permission I had received that morning from Berlin. The authorities wished to see the murder solved. The Minister of Justice had given me a free hand to summon Doctor Korna from Kamenetz. How I wished that the reply had been negative! If only the Minister had denied my request!

  I climbed the stairs with lead in my heart.

  Knutzen started nervously as the door creaked open. He was alone, a broom in his hand.

  ‘Herr Procurator, I did not expect you so late.’

  ‘Did any stranger come today?’

  Knutzen shook his head. ‘The clerk from general quarters brought some sentences to be countersigned, sir. They are waiting on your desk. A signature, he said, no more. Five minutes’ work, I’d say.’

  Relief washed over me. It was after six o’clock. Doctor Korna would not be coming. We would see no more post-coaches in Lotingen that night. Still, I had no wish to sit at my desk, pick up a quill, endorse sentences for minor infractions against the French. I was in no mood for it. I was in no mood for anything. I was stinging from the drubbing Lavedrine had given me.

  ‘Don’t you have a pig to nurse?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ Knutzen smiled contentedly. ‘They’ll have slit her throat by now. They took her off my hands yesterday.’

  In my mind’s eye, I saw that pig, basted with honey, scented with chives, an apple in its gaping mouth, lying in state on some French dining table. I could almost smell the aroma. Among the diners, Lavedrine, perhaps, boasting of his cleverness, laughing at the blind stupidity of the dull Prussian magistrate they had forced him to work with.

  ‘It will soon be curfew, Knutzen,’ I advis
ed him. ‘Go home while you can.’

  Shortly after, I was on the point of leaving myself. My hand raised to pull open the door, when it was pushed violently inward and a large man bundled up in black—a huge cloak, large hat, a scarf wrapped about his face—came rushing in. He surged past, barging me aside with his shoulder. He strode across the room as if he were the only creature left on earth, threw off his cloak and hat, and sat himself down behind my desk.

  ‘My men are answerable to me!’ he thundered like a cannon. ‘Before you speak to my surgeon, you must tell me what you want with him. I’ll instruct him in his answers. Every soul in Kamenetz belongs to me!’

  My legs gave way, and I collapsed in the chair reserved for visitors.

  It was worse than a nightmare. I had sent for the doctor, his superior had come. And I had questions for neither of them. The case was closed, Lavedrine had seen to that.

  Yet, there was General Juri Katowice, sitting in my chair.

  ‘Well, Magistrate? What have you to say?’

  Blood pounded painfully at my temples.

  ‘You summoned my surgeon,’ he accused again, his voice hoarse with anger. ‘What did you want with him?’ he insisted,

  ‘I wrote to Berlin . . .’ I stuttered and stopped.

  He closed one eye, sighted at me as if he held a pistol in his fist.

  ‘You won’t find anyone to listen,’ he roared. ‘They know me there. They won’t admit it, but they know me. They won’t stop me. They do not dare. The king must bend to Bonaparte, but that doesn’t mean he likes being shafted.’ He laughed at this barrack-room metaphor. ‘He will need an army, and I’ll be ready for him. Our time will come. Tomorrow, or the next day, true Prussians will stand up, and they will be counted!’