The Beggar King: A Hangman's Daughter Tale

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “You’ll have to go easy on the arm for a few days,” his colleague reminded him. “I’ll leave the ointment here for you. Be sure to rub some of it on every day…”

  “Yes, yes, fine.” Kuisl turned aside and took a deep breath. “I myself know what I have to do. I always have.”

  As silence spread through the room, only the Schongau hangman’s deep breathing was audible.

  “Do you still believe someone set you up?” Teuber asked at last.

  Kuisl nodded, staring at the wall in front of him. “Some bastard from years ago. He covered the walls of the cell with the names of old battlefields, so this must go all the way back to the war. He knows every battle I fought, and he knows my wife.” He pounded the wall with his good arm. “How the hell does this devil know my wife?”

  And where have I heard the name Weidenfeld? The thought flashed through his mind. Damn it!

  “You were a mercenary?” Teuber asked. “Why didn’t you stay a hangman? I’ve heard about you Kuisls. You’re a tough breed. A whole tribe of executioners all over Bavaria bears your name. Why didn’t you just stick with what your father taught you?”

  Kuisl was silent a long time. Not until the Regensburg executioner stood up and made ready to leave did he begin to speak.

  “My father is dead,” he said. “They killed him when I was fourteen. They stoned him to death because he showed up drunk to perform an execution one time too many.” Kuisl stared off into space. “It was the third time he was unable to handle his sword and turned the scaffold into a bloodbath. His drinking before every execution finally did him in.”

  A shadow passed over his face.

  The onlookers’ shouts… A single ear lying on the ground in front of the scaffold… Father staggering, falling as the crowd swallows him up… Mother at home crying for days until Jakob can take it no longer… He follows the sound of the drummer without once looking back…

  “Hey, are you still in your right mind?” Teuber grabbed the Schongau hangman, who appeared to be drifting into unconsciousness. Like a wet dog, Kuisl shook his head vigorously, trying to drive away bad thoughts.

  “I’m all right. Just need a little sleep.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “The damned war. I just can’t get it out of my head.”

  Teuber looked at him, lost in thought. “Kuisl, Kuisl,” he said at last. “Whoever is behind this affair has been more successful than he can imagine. There is an agony in your eyes greater than any rack could inflict.” He sighed as he rose to his feet. “I’m going to leave you alone now. Try to sleep, and tomorrow I’ll bring you some food and drink.”

  Stooping, he left the little room and rolled the barrel in front of the entry behind him, where Kuisl still lay in darkness.

  Though he could see nothing, his eyes were wide open.

  The master baker Josef Haberger lay stretched out on a wooden bench, moaning with pleasure.

  Daily dough-kneading made his muscles as stiff as old leather, and it was high time he paid Marie Deisch in the bathhouse another visit. No other woman in Regensburg was so skilled in handling a hard-working man’s worn-out muscles. Her hands were as strong as a butcher apprentice’s and as tender as a tight-lipped whore’s. Now, Haberger grunted and closed his eyes as Marie’s nimble fingers moved up and down his back.

  “To the left,” he moaned. “The shoulder blade. Those damn dough troughs are so heavy they’ll pull me into the grave yet.”

  Marie’s fingers scurried up his back again and, with a few targeted blows, began loosening the most painful places.

  “Here?” the bathhouse worker asked in her deep, throaty voice. As big around at the hips as a medium-size wine barrel, she could leverage that heft behind her movements.

  Haberger grunted in satisfaction. He loved strong women, women he could grab hold of, sinking into their warm, tender breasts like a pillow as they made love. His own wife was a bony, anemic shrew whose ribs stuck out like knives and who hadn’t been intimate with him since he fathered their last son five years before. But who needed a spouse when you had Marie Deisch? Haberger was glad to pay a half guilder every week for his trip to the bathhouse, which included bloodletting, beard trimming, and cupping with leeches. When he was young, there were many more of these blessed institutions in Regensburg to choose from, but the curses of French disease and sullen Protestants had turned these paradises on earth into temples of sin, and only a handful of bathhouses remained.

  And now that the Hofmann house on Weißgerbergraben was gone, there was even one fewer…

  The massage diverted the master baker temporarily from worries that had pursued him like demons the past few days. But now, with his eyes closed and the soft hum of the bathhouse woman in his ears, they returned. He felt as if his heart were in a vise and knew that the best massage in the world wouldn’t relieve this pain.

  They’d gone too far; that much was clear. The plan was not only dangerous but megalomaniacal, and if they weren’t careful, they would bring the whole city down around them. The bathhouse owner, Hofmann, had been right in trying to convince the others of the plan’s madness and, then, in simply refusing to go along with it. But what good had it done? He lay dead in Saint Jakob’s Cemetery now, a putrid sack of maggots, just like his wife, the fresh little bitch. It was probably she who put the idea of stopping it into his head.

  But they couldn’t be stopped.

  After Hofmann’s death Haberger made a mistake that he regretted now more than anything else in his life. In despair he pointed a finger at the others, accused them of murder, while they met him with silence, letting his accusations ricochet off them as off a rock wall. At that moment he realized he’d crossed the line. Their convictions were cast in stone, and they would carry out the plan to its bitter end.

  With or without him.

  It quickly became apparent that with his rash assertions he’d become a liability, and now he imagined assassins around every corner, the clicks of crossbows behind every door. Death could be waiting for him under his bed or in the privy. Still, they needed him! They couldn’t do without him… or could they? No, not without the most important master baker in the city with customers at city hall, at the Reichstag, and among the most important patricians.

  In retrospect the whole plan seemed an outrageous, scandalous crime, a crime so devilish that everyone involved would roast in hell forever. Haberger considered turning on the others, but his fear of their vengeance was too great. And besides, what would happen to him when everything finally came to light? He heard that traitors were often hanged before they were gutted and quartered. Could the same fate await him?

  Preoccupied with his fears, he didn’t notice that Marie had stopped humming. Her fingers, too, had disappeared. Surprised, Haberger was about to get up when he felt hands on his back again. He sighed in relief. The bathhouse worker had likely just gone for some more olive oil and was now preparing to massage the right shoulder blade. Haberger closed his eyes and tried to suppress bad thoughts and concentrate only on the present massage.

  The hands worked their way up his back until they reached the shoulder blades again. For an instant Haberger had the premonition that these hands were somehow stronger than before, that they lacked Marie’s delicate, feminine touch and their grip on him was harder.

  Much harder.

  As if they were trying to mash his muscles to a pulp.

  “Thanks, Marie,” Haberger moaned again. “But that should be enough. I can’t feel anything in my shoulders anymore.”

  The hands didn’t stop, though, but moved higher until finally they reached Haberger’s throat.

  “What the devil…?”

  Haberger tried to stand up, but unrelenting muscular arms forced him back down to the bench. When he attempted to scream, he felt fingers tighten around his neck, squeezing the life from his body bit by bit.

  The master baker quivered and flailed about like a fish out of water. He tried to slip free, but the strong arms held him down, pressing him hard
against the wood like a piece of raw meat. His face turned red first, then blue; his tongue stuck out of his mouth like a slug; then, with a final gasp, he collapsed.

  Just before the world went black, Josef Haberger glimpsed right before his nose an arm with powerful protruding sinews. He saw close-up—almost as if magnified—a mass of curly hair, and he smelled sharp manly sweat.

  Strange. I don’t feel pain anymore, Haberger thought.

  Then he passed into a dark tunnel ending in ethereal light.

  Still enthused by his conversation with Brother Hubertus, Simon left the bishopric around noon with the beer-stained invitation from the bishop’s brewmaster in his pocket.

  They had discussed Descartes, whose Discours de la méthode he read as a university student in Ingolstadt. Simon was especially taken with the revolutionary idea that a rational explanation could be found for everything. The Franciscan had kept Simon’s glass brimming with cool, splendid wheat beer, and the medicus felt tipsy now as he wondered how Descartes would have solved the double murder in Regensburg. Presumably the philosopher would have found a simple answer for every riddle. Sighing, Simon had to admit he didn’t have Descartes’s divine intelligence. Just the same, he tried to order his thoughts—though the accursed alcohol kept getting in the way.

  All that beer, however, had one benefit: Simon had temporarily forgotten his quarrel with Magdalena. But now the nagging thought returned that the love of his life was possibly still hanging around with that Venetian dwarf. But then again she might have returned to the catacombs by now, worrying herself sick about him. It served her right! What business did Magdalena have in the dressing room of that vain fop? Simon looked down at his torn, hastily patched jacket, his shredded breeches, and muddy boots and had to admit he himself wished he could spend half a day in a filthy-rich ambassador’s dressing room. But for an unmarried girl that was completely inappropriate! And who knew what else the two had been up to amid all those mirrors, linens, and clothing? Whatever the case, everything would have to be cleared up tonight.

  The marketplace at the cathedral square was filled with noisy, chattering market women, cursing stable boys, churchgoers deep in conversation, and blasé patricians. Although the medicus assumed he wouldn’t attract undue attention in the bustling crowd, he pulled up his jacket collar and lowered his eyes nevertheless. He didn’t want to give the bailiffs a second opportunity to identify him as the Weißgerbergraben arsonist.

  Despite his three or four mugs of wheat beer, Simon tried his best to concentrate. There had to be some connection between the Hofmann murders and the trap set for Magdalena’s father, something he just hadn’t thought of yet, a logical scheme that would bring together all the disparate and bizarre little incidents. Simon hoped fervently that Brother Hubertus could help him analyze the strange powder. By now the medicus was convinced it wasn’t just burned flour. Perhaps it was the key to solving the other riddles.

  A bathhouse owner as rebel and alchemist… What was Hofmann experimenting with anyway?

  Simon suddenly realized there was yet another person he hadn’t spoken with about the matter: the raftmaster, Karl Gessner! The bathhouse owner, like Gessner, had been a leader of the freemen, so it was quite possible Gessner knew something about Hofmann’s alchemical experiments. When they last met on Wöhrd Island, Gessner hadn’t said anything about it, but perhaps that was only because Simon hadn’t brought it up.

  The medicus decided to pay a visit to Gessner at the raft landing. While there was some danger in going down to the Danube, where so many city bailiffs were afoot, he was willing to take the risk.

  Simon turned around, hurried northward past the bishop’s court, and entered a labyrinth of small lanes. Finally, between two buildings, he spotted the river flowing lazily by. At the noon hour there was almost no activity on the raft landing. Most freight had been unloaded in the early morning, and the raft attendants and laborers were dozing now in the shadows of crates, bales, and barrels, waiting for the sweltering noon heat to pass. A single rope hung down from a wooden crane over the Danube, swaying calmly back and forth in the breeze. The air smelled of fish, river water, and freshly cut firs, and the stench of the city was not quite so strong here. Simon felt he could breathe freely for the first time in a long while.

  He asked one of the dozing workers where he might find the raftmaster and was directed to Gessner’s office in a small building next to the lumber-loading dock. As he strolled along the fortified jetty, Simon noticed for the first time just how vast the Regensburg harbor actually was. This stretch of river that ran along the city wall extended from the boat landings east of the Stone Bridge almost as far as the western boundary of the city. On his way down to the lumber dock Simon passed the wine-loading dock, dotted with respectable middle-class inns; salt-storage depots as big as barns; and innumerable mooring posts encrusted with mussels. Finally, huge piles of boards and timber came into view. A dozen day laborers were busy stacking planks and wet pieces of driftwood, some as long as a yard, that they had fished out of the Danube. Not far from here stood the raftmaster’s house—a low, lopsided shed built directly onto the jetty that looked as if at any moment it just might collapse.

  Simon was about to knock on the door when he noticed it was already ajar. He carefully pushed, and it swung inward without a sound, revealing a rough-hewn table covered with an assortment of stained documents in the middle of a pleasantly cool room. Shelves built into the back wall overflowed with sealed, rolled parchments. But there was no sign of Gessner.

  Simon was turning to leave when he heard a sudden clatter, a loud crash like the sound of a crate falling. The noise came from the other side of the shelves; evidently there was another room somewhere behind the office, a kind of storage room, he supposed, but inaccessible from the office directly.

  Was there perhaps an entrance around the back of the building? Puzzled, the medicus left the way he came in and walked briskly around the little house. Gessner had to be working in the adjoining room, and when he finished stacking his crates, he’d surely be able to answer a few friendly questions over a glass or two of wine. All of a sudden Simon felt incredibly thirsty. The heat was bringing on a hangover—Brother Hubertus’s wheat beer must have been stronger than Simon first assumed. He had to get out of the sun, now! Where was the other damned entrance? Could he have overlooked it? To be sure, he walked around the building again, with the same result.

  There was no other entrance.

  Simon hurried back inside. Only now did he realize that the size of the little office didn’t correspond to the exterior dimensions.

  It was considerably smaller.

  Simon held his breath, listening closely. He could definitely hear the muffled sound of crates being moved around.

  What in the world…?

  As Simon cautiously approached the wall on the other side of the room, he noticed a gap between two shelves. He reached in, pulled on one of the boards, and to his surprise the entire left wall—with its shelves and everything on them—swung silently away, revealing a windowless room piled high with crates and sacks. Gessner stood with his back to the entrance, building precarious towers of some large containers. By the light of a lantern on the floor Simon could see that some of the crates had been opened. Inside, dried brown leaves were gathered into bundles and tied with fine thread. The medicus instantly recognized the bundles’ scent as one he knew so well from the Schongau hangman’s house, though Simon had never before smelled it as strongly as here.

  Tobacco.

  Now Gessner turned around, his look turning quickly from frank astonishment to outright anger. “What in hell’s name are you doing here, you nosy little quack?” he snarled, reaching for a hatchet on his belt. “I don’t recall having invited you.”

  “Uh… excuse me,” Simon stuttered, “I was looking for you, and the door was open…”

  “Certainly you don’t mean this door.” The raftmaster pushed him rudely aside and slammed the wall of shelves shut be
hind him. The darkness in the room was now almost palpable, mitigated only in part by the small lantern on the floor. By its flickering light Gessner’s otherwise sympathetic features now appeared very threatening.

  “You’ll keep this little secret to yourself, won’t you?” the raftmaster whispered. “One hand washes the other, as they say. I told you about the patricians’ plans, so you won’t say a word about this room. To anyone. Understood?”

  Simon nodded eagerly. Despite his fear, he couldn’t resist looking around with curiosity. When Gessner noticed Simon’s gaze, he reached into a box for a few of the brown, curled leaves. He crushed them between his fingers and held his hand out to Simon to smell.

  “Expensive West Indian tobacco,” the raftmaster said, taking a seat on one of the large wooden crates. With an impatient gesture, he motioned for Simon to do the same. “There’s no better ware to smuggle right now. Tariffs are higher than ever, and therefore so are my profits.” He shrugged apologetically. “A Regensburg raftmaster struggles to make ends meet. Taxes are eating me alive, lumber thieves steal the privy seat right out from under my ass, and just two years ago a blasted flood washed my whole house clear away. So, I’ve had the new one built to order, so to speak, exactly the way I wanted.” He winked, gesturing toward the wooden partition.

  With a sudden creaking sound, the secret door opened a crack. In the dazzling sunlight Simon could make out only the outline of a very large figure.

  “Is everything all right in there?” a deep voice barked.

  Gessner raised a reassuring hand. “We have a visitor, big fellow. But don’t worry. I’ve got it under control. You may leave.”

  “You sure?”

  The raftmaster nodded impatiently. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  With another soft creaking sound, the door closed again. Gessner reached into another crate and fished out a bottle of brandy, which he proceeded to uncork with his teeth. He took a long swig before offering the bottle to Simon, whose hangover had started bothering him again.