“That’s what I still don’t understand,” said Jacob. “Why get you taken to court? Surely that would ensure everything came out.”
“You think so?” Jaspar gave a humorless laugh. “There would have been no appearance in court. If Theoderich’s plan had succeeded, I’d be in the Tower now. Where I might well break my neck before another magistrate saw me. All sorts of things can happen going up the stairs. An unfortunate accident. Or I try to escape and one of the guards draws his knife. A natural reflex. And they do say the odd prisoner dies while being questioned under torture, if the executioner goes a bit too far. But before that I might have got fed up with the red-hot pincers and betrayed you and Goddert and Richmodis. I might even tell them that Bodo Schuif knows. I might betray everyone.”
Jaspar fell silent. For a while he might not have been there at all.
“So what now?” Jacob asked.
“Good question.”
“Still attack, attack?”
“What else?” It sounded as if Jaspar were getting more and more angry. “I’m trying to work out how Urquhart will have planned it all.”
“He’ll hardly go for a walk around the archbishop’s palace.”
“I don’t know. I’m coming to think that son of a whore’s capable of anything. The thing is, it’s almost impossible to get close to Conrad. He’s one person who’s learned from the past. The murder of Engelbert was only forty years ago. I can’t remember ever having seen Conrad in public except surrounded by men in armor.”
Jacob thought. “I can’t remember ever having seen him.”
“Of course. You’ve only been here a few months.”
“Still. When does he show himself?”
“He doesn’t.”
“And when’s the next time he won’t show himself?”
It was meant as a joke, and not a particularly good one at that, but Jacob literally heard Jaspar’s jaw drop. “You dunderhead, Rodenkirchen!” he exclaimed. “The Crusade! He’s going to say mass and then preach the Crusade against the Tartars from the pulpit, as the pope ordered.”
Jacob sat up. “When?”
“Tomorrow. No, in a few hours. No wonder Theoderich rushed everything like that. They’re worried we might spoil things at the last minute. Their nerves must be in tatters.”
Jacob swallowed. “To be honest, mine, too,” he said wearily. To crown it all he was to have the honor of saving the archbishop’s life. Why not the emperor’s? “You should have told Bodo everything,” he said. “Perhaps we could have gotten help.”
“Should, should! Perhaps you should have told us about the plot against the archbishop a bit sooner, since I’ve obviously got a turnip on my shoulders. But even then it wouldn’t have been a good idea. Theoderich would have gotten us one way or the other.”
“Not if we’d run away afterward.”
“What’d be the use of that? He’d just seize Richmodis and Goddert. What’s this? An attempt on Conrad’s life? And what does my fair lady know about it, or that old tub of lard with the twisted hands? To the Tower with them. For questioning. No, Fox-cub, as long as they are just the victims of some mysterious attack, Theoderich will have no excuse for taking them in. And we shouldn’t complain. We’re not in the Tower yet.”
Jacob sighed. “No, we’re in an ice-cold shed without the slightest idea where Urquhart will be in a few hours’ time.”
“Then we’ll just have to find out.”
“Sure. Any idea how?”
“No. You?”
Jacob lay back on the sacks with his hands behind his head. “I think Urquhart will lie in wait outside the church.”
“Not necessarily. Conrad’s going to say mass in the central chapel of the new cathedral. He’ll deliver his sermon there, too. There are thousands more convenient places he could have chosen, but that’s the chapel he wants to be buried in, so…And it’ll be the first time mass will be said in the new cathedral. A huge event, therefore. Beforehand there’ll be a procession from Priest Gate, along Spormacherstraße, Wappenstickerstraße, et cetera to St. Stephen’s, then left down Platea Gallica and past St. Mary’s-in-the-Capitol, across Haymarket, left again through Mars Gate and back to the cathedral. It’ll take about an hour.”
“You think Urquhart’ll be waiting somewhere along the route?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“If Conrad’s as cautious as you say, Urquhart won’t be able to get very close.”
Silence once more.
“What if he doesn’t have to?” said Jaspar slowly.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I would assume Urquhart is an excellent shot, even from a distance. The crossbow is a very accurate weapon, deadly accurate. At least that’s what Hieronymus said, and he ought to know. Perhaps distance is Urquhart’s big advantage. Something no one’s thought of. Just imagine: the archbishop falls to the ground during the procession. Result, chaos. It’ll be some time before anyone realizes what has happened, never mind where the bolt came from, even less that the assassin is a good way off—or, rather, was. Urquhart will be on his way before the archbishop hits the ground.”
Jacob tried to visualize where Urquhart could get sufficient distance. The narrow streets lined with people, the houses immediately behind them—if anywhere, it had to be Haymarket. But there’d still be too many people between the assassin and the archbishop. And a man with a crossbow would be noticed. Even if he managed—
“A house!” he exclaimed in surprise.
“A house?” Jaspar sounded bewildered. His thoughts had clearly been going in a different direction.
“Urquhart can only get Conrad from higher up. He has to shoot over the heads of the people. He’ll be in some building.”
“You’re probably right,” Jaspar agreed reflectively. “But in that case we’ve a problem. We can hardly search all the houses.”
“There is another way,” Jacob said hesitantly. He’d have preferred to have kept it to himself. It frightened him.
“Which is?”
It frightened him because he wouldn’t be able to run away. As he’d always done. As he did when—
“Come on, Fox-cub.”
He breathed out slowly and pulled himself together. “I got us into this mess, so I’ll go to the palace and warn Conrad.”
For a moment Jaspar was speechless. “Are you out of your mind?”
“No.”
“Slowly now. Of course you can try to warn Conrad, only I doubt whether he’ll even give you a hearing.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“For God’s sake, Fox-cub! Who says that by now the Overstolzes haven’t put the word around that you’re a thief? We’re both of us on the run. If they can pin a murder on me to keep me out of the way, what do you think they’ll accuse you of? You stole a guilder, Matthias said. How do you know it’s not a hundred, or a thousand by now? You’re going to hand yourself over to the archbishop’s guards voluntarily, in the hope that they’ll believe you? They might just arrest you and throw you in the Tower without further ado. Who’s going to trust someone like you?”
Jacob chewed his lower lip. “They’d believe you,” he said.
“Yes, they’d believe me. And I’d go if that idiot Theoderich hadn’t ruined everything.”
Suddenly Jacob was sure Jaspar was on the wrong track. “Jaspar,” he said slowly, “what would you be doing at this moment, if you were Theoderich?”
“Looking for us, probably.”
“You would? Well, I’d give myself a kick up the backside and do the exact opposite.”
“Why did we run aw—” Jaspar suddenly stopped and let out a soft whistle. “I see. Well, bugger me!”
“If Theoderich had got his hands on us, his plan would have worked. But he made a mess of it. His chances of finding us are minimal. If it’s made public that you’re wanted for Rolof ’s murder, then someone else is quite likely to arrest you, you’ll be taken before different magistrates and he’ll not be in control an
ymore, he’ll just have to sit and listen to you spilling the beans on him. Unlike me, you’re a respected citizen. They’d be all ears! What would you be doing now, in Theoderich’s place?”
Jaspar gave a quiet laugh. “I’d make sure the accusation laid against Jaspar Rodenkirchen was withdrawn as quickly as possible.”
“He’s probably already done so.”
“I’d say there’d been a mistake. Perhaps even that the real murderer had already been caught. Something like that. Damn it all, that’s his only chance of getting out of the mess he’s got himself into. You’re right. What the alliance wants is for no one to bother with us, at least not until Urquhart’s done his worst.”
“Exactly. For the same reason, I don’t think they’ll have spread rumors about me. So I can go to the palace and see if they’ll listen. If they don’t, then it’s their funeral—as you might say.”
He drew up his knees and tried to sound firm and resolute, but the urge to run away was almost unbearable. He felt the gray chill of fear creeping up his spine, and all at once he knew it wasn’t Urquhart or the Overstolzes he wanted to run away from but something quite different, something immensely greater, something that would catch up with him again, as it always had, and he would run away again, keep on running until he ran himself into the grave—
Urquhart was his personal demon. God had created a being for him alone, for his fear, and he had to face up to it if he ever wanted to be free.
“I have no choice,” he said. It sounded good. It sounded brave, almost dauntless.
Jaspar said nothing.
“I have no choice,” he repeated.
“Fox-cub.” Jaspar cleared his throat copiously. “Didn’t you tell me I had the choice of helping you or not? Fine words. You think they don’t apply to you, too? Of course you have a choice. Everyone has a choice, always. What is there to keep you in Cologne? What’s to stop you from simply walking away?”
Could that blasted dean read his thoughts? “And what’ll happen to you and Richmodis?”
“That’s not important,” said Jaspar calmly.
“Of course it’s important!”
“Why? Just tell yourself it was all a dream. You might find it a bit difficult at first, but if you try hard enough, Goddert, Richmodis, and I will disappear without a word of complaint into the realm of fiction. As if we were part of a story you’d heard. Delude yourself. Perhaps we are just clowns in a story. You as well! Be a figment of the imagination, Fox-cub. Figments don’t have to take responsibility.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“I’m getting you to save your life. Run away.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve had enough of running away,” Jacob heard himself say.
There was a rustle of cloth from where Jaspar was. He’d obviously stretched out. Jacob waited for him to say something, but there was no reaction to what he’d said. He gave up.
“All right, Jaspar,” he said wearily, “what is it you want to know?”
“Me?” said the dean innocently. “Nothing at all. I don’t want to know anything.”
They lay there in silence for a while. Jacob listened to his heartbeat. It seemed to get louder and louder until his chest resounded with hammer blows. He suddenly realized he was crying.
He was amazed and happy at the same time. Had he ever shed a tear? He couldn’t remember. Overwhelmed with sorrow, flooded with sadness, he yet felt boundless relief. Puzzled and at the same time curious, he abandoned himself to this unknown emotion. And as he sobbed and sniffled, he felt as if his grief were feeding a bright, blazing fire that gradually consumed him, while a new, unknown strength began to throb in his veins. Scenes from an old story, too long repressed, rolled past his mind’s eye, and with every image, every sound, every sensation his fear shrank a little more, giving way to the desire for a home.
Jaspar left him to himself.
After what seemed like an eternity, the tears dried up. He stared into the darkness. His heartbeat had slowed down, his breathing was calm and steady. In fact, he didn’t feel bad at all.
“Jaspar?”
There was a quiver in his voice. Not a trace of firm resolution left. He didn’t care.
“Jaspar, that time I came back—I mean when I was a boy, to my father’s house—I told you there was nothing but a smoking ruin left.” He paused. “There was something else.”
“I know,” said Jaspar, unmoved.
“You know about it?” exclaimed Jacob in surprise.
“No, Fox-cub. I know nothing, really—except that you were able to remember everything that happened before that day. Or were willing to remember. Every detail. You were a bright lad. Still are. But then one day you saw the wreckage of a house and took flight. From then on your life seems rather hazy, almost as if it was that of another person. The day before yesterday, when we talked together for the first time, I thought, if he goes on pouring out his memories like this, I’ll end up pouring out the whole of my wine cellar. Then everything suddenly ended at a few smoldering timbers, and the rest was sketched in with a couple of strokes. You saw something, didn’t you? Something that’s been haunting you to this day? You started running away when you turned your back on the burned-down shack and you haven’t stopped since. Whatever you’ve run away from over the years—constables, women, responsibility—basically it’s that shack you’ve been running away from. Even now, if you run away, you’ll be running away from that shack.”
“How do you know all this? You hardly know me!”
“I know you quite well. I can see others in you, Fox-cub. What was it you saw?”
Jacob sat up slowly and stared at the darkness. But it was something else he saw: countryside, fields, a column of smoke—
“My father and my brother,” he said.
“Dead?”
“They were lying outside the shack. It looked as if they’d been cut down. I stood there, quite a way away. I felt unable to take even one step closer. I was too cowardly to go and look them in the face. I was afraid of having their deaths confirmed. I thought if I looked away, forgot everything as quickly as possible, then it wouldn’t have happened.” He swallowed hard. “I turned around. But just as I looked away, I thought I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. As if my father had waved to me.”
“And still you ran away.”
“Yes. I didn’t have the courage to go and look. I’ll never know whether I ran away from two dead bodies, or whether, in my fear, I left someone to die I could have helped. I didn’t want to see if they were dead, so I never saw if they were perhaps alive.”
“Do you sometimes have dreams about it?”
“Rarely. When I do, it’s the wave I see. Sometimes it’s the desperate wave of a dying man, sometimes a mocking farewell from the dead. That’s the truth, Jaspar. I left them in the lurch, and I keep on asking myself what would happen if I had the chance to go back and start again.”
“No one has that chance.”
“I know. But I can’t get it out of my mind. I wish I could turn the clock back.”
He heard Jaspar scratching his bald head.
“No,” said the dean, “that is not a good wish.”
“It is. Then it wouldn’t have happened.”
“You think so? When they wish for things like that people deny their hopes, their convictions, their whole being. It’s what indecisive and weak people wish for. Did you know that, for the whole of his life, Abelard never regretted his love for Heloise? He was cruelly punished for it, but given the chance he would always have made the same choice.”
“You keep going on about this Abelard,” said Jacob.
“I model myself on him,” Jaspar replied. “Even though he’s been dead for over a hundred years now. Peter Abelard was one of the most outstanding minds France has produced. He was humble before God, yet bold enough, when at the height of his fame, to describe himself as the greatest of all philosophers. They ca
ll disputation the clerics’ joust—he was unbeaten in it. And he seemed to love making enemies. His belief that mankind possessed free will was diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Mystics. Eventually he fell in love with Heloise, a canon’s niece who was his pupil. Forbidden love. There was a series of scandals that concluded with a punitive expedition to his house one night. The canon had him castrated.” He gave a soft laugh. “But he could not cut off their love, nor could he stop them being buried beside each other in the end. Abelard never wished he could turn the clock back, and that was the basis of his greatness. Everything was of his own free will.”
“My father,” Jacob mused, “was always talking about how impotent sinful mankind was. That we had no choice to decide anything for ourselves.”
“And that’s what you believe, too?”
“No.”
“Goddert believes that.” Jaspar sighed. “And there are many like him, men who have no real convictions and confuse weakness with faith. He drifts from one view to another, picks up a bit of each, but never the real point, and patches together something out of them he likes to think of as his opinion. Oh, he enjoys an argument. We spend all the day in disputations on everything under the sun, but they never lead anywhere. It’s just good fun, concealing the sad fact that Goddert has no real opinion. I know I shouldn’t talk about him like that, but he’s typical of the unfortunate attitude prevailing today. When people stop forming their own opinions, when they take bits for a whole and don’t look for connections, then the world becomes a church with no mortar between the stones. One day it’ll collapse spectacularly and people will talk of the coming of the Antichrist, whom Saint Bernard conjured up in vivid words like no one before or since. But the Antichrist is no fiendish destroyer, no horned devil, nor a beast rising from the sea. The Antichrist is a product of the Christians. He is the emptiness behind a faith that knows only inertia and punishment. And he is also the emptiness behind the fatalism you have been sucked into, the emptiness in your life. One could say the Devil’s just waiting to take possession of you.”
Death and the Devil: A Novel Page 38