Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  * * *

  When Gotthilf jumped down out of his wagon in the square surrounding the Rathaus, he found himself facing Byron. They spoke at the same time.

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “Demcker didn’t do it.”

  Byron snorted. “Okay, so we’re in agreement on that. Truth to tell, the man impresses me. I may visit his church sometime to hear him preach. But that means we’ve missed something, and we’re running out of time. Any other ideas come to you?”

  Gotthilf had been bothered by something ever since he left Heilige Geist church. Something was stirring around in the back of his mind, something that was important, but he couldn’t draw it into the light of day. The entire ride to the square he had been trying to tease it out, trying to grasp it firmly, but it kept eluding him.

  “Not yet, but there’s something…”

  Someone stepped between them at that moment, muttering, “Follow…”

  Byron gave him two steps, then followed in his wake. “Wait,” Gotthilf told their drivers, then he in turn followed his partner.

  Within twenty steps they all drifted into a nook between two buildings, and Demetrious turned to face them.

  “I had about given up on you,” Byron said bluntly.

  Demetrious shrugged. “I am not a miracle worker.”

  “Do you have something that will help?”

  Demetrious shrugged again. “I have something. You will have to decide whether or not it will help you.”

  “Give.” Byron’s voice was very hard at that point. Gotthilf was in a similar frame of mind.

  “You know a boy with no eyes?”

  Byron flushed and he started to raise a fist. Gotthilf grabbed his arm. “Byron, he means Willi.”

  Both of their minds flashed on the blind boy they had rescued from virtual slavery in their first case as partners.

  “What about Willi?” Gotthilf asked Demetrious.

  “The breeze whispers that the boy may know something that will help.”

  “What is it?” Byron demanded.

  “Best you get that from him,” Demetrious murmured. “There are those near him who do not let his voice be heard.” With that, he pushed past them. A moment later he was lost in the crowd.

  Without a word, the two detectives returned to their vehicles. Byron sent his back to the police station, and climbed up in Gotthilf’s wagon behind his partner.

  “Das Haus Des Brotes in the exurb,” Gotthilf ordered, “and fast!”

  What could Willi know? That refrain was running through Gotthilf’s mind in the trip from the square to the bakery run by the family that had fostered Willi after his rescue from the man who had abused him. What could a blind boy know that no one else in the city knew?

  The detectives jumped from the wagon before it even came to a complete stop in front of the bakery on the corner of Kristinstrasse and Canal Road. Frau Zenzi—Frau Kreszentia Traugottin verh. Ostermannin, known as Zenzi to one and all—was brushing a bit of mud from the steps up to the door. Her husband, Anselm, was the baker for Das Haus Des Brotes, but she was the one the buyers dealt with.

  “Good day to you, Frau Zenzi,” Gotthilf called out.

  “Lieutenant Byron, Sergeant Gotthilf,” she responded with a big smile. Nothing about Frau Zenzi was small, but her smile was especially large and warming to anyone who received it. “My two favorite Polizei men. What can I do for you this fine afternoon?”

  “We came by to talk to Willi. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him,” Byron said.

  “He’s around on the back steps, taking a break,” the shopkeeper pointed around the side of the building.

  “Thanks,” Byron said. The two detectives headed that direction.

  Gotthilf could hear whistling as they drew near the back corner. They rounded it to see the boy, flour-smudged cloth tied around his head, whistling one of the Irish songs that Marla Linder had made popular in Magdeburg. He was sitting on the top step next to an older man.

  Willi broke off the whistling, cocking his head to one side as he turned blind eyes toward the detectives. “Lieutenant Byron and…that must be Sergeant Gotthilf with him.”

  “Right,” the older man said. He shook his head. “I still do not understand how you can tell that.”

  Willi giggled. “Everyone walks differently, Papa. I can hear it.”

  “Willi, Herr Anselm,” Gotthilf said. Byron nodded.

  Willi had really blossomed in the months since Byron and Gotthilf had rescued him from the man who had been running a faginy racket in part of Magdeburg. He had settled in with Anselm and Zenzi with the church’s blessing, and had quickly become a part of their lives. He’d filled out physically as well, becoming a solid chunk of a boy instead of the waif that they had found begging on the street.

  “So, Willi,” Byron began, “I hear you may know something we need to hear about as policemen.”

  “Wait a minute,” Anselm began, bristling a little. “Willi’s only a child. You have no right to involve him in your work.”

  “Seems like he’s been involved in our work before,” Byron said. “He’s with you now because of the work we do.”

  “Papa,” Willi said, smile gone, “he’s right. If I can help them, I must, because they helped me. And besides, it’s the right thing to do.”

  “But…” Anselm began. Willi’s head turned to face him, blind eyes behind the masking cloth still pointed in his direction. “All right,” Anselm sighed. “For all that you’re not her blood and bone, you have your mother’s strength of will.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” Frau Zenzi’s voice was heard as she stepped into the door behind her two men. “Willi, you tell them what you think you heard. But you two,” she leveled a very direct gaze at the detectives, her former smile absolutely vanished from her face, “you’d best be sure that nothing comes back to touch my boy.”

  Byron nodded.

  “As if he were our own kin,” Gotthilf said.

  She nodded in return. “Go ahead, Willi.”

  Willi stood and stepped back up the steps to the doorframe. “Excuse me, Mama.” Frau Zenzi stepped back inside the shop and the boy stopped inside the door. “It was the evening of the night when the last woman was killed.”

  “Are you sure?” Gotthilf asked.

  “Yes. I remember Mama talking about it two days later, and I knew that it was the same night.”

  Gotthilf motioned for him to continue, then grimaced as he remembered the boy couldn’t see him. “Sorry, Willi. Go on.”

  “I was standing just here in the doorway, with the door only part way open, getting ready to come out and sit down to enjoy the evening air, when I heard them.”

  “Heard who?” Byron asked.

  “A man and a woman, walking down the alley. And either they were hurrying or they weren’t very tall, because their steps came close together.”

  “As close as mine?” Gotthilf asked. For once his lack of stature might be of use.

  Willi tilted his head, considering. “Almost that close, yes.”

  “Okay, so you could tell there were two of them by the different steps, and you could guess at height by the speed of their steps,” Byron said. “But how did you know they were a man and woman? Were they talking?”

  Willi nodded his head. “I only heard a little bit. She said, ‘Why are we going this way?’ and he said ‘I can’t let some people know about us yet.’”

  Gotthilf stiffened, and said, “Is that exactly how he said it?”

  Willi’s face showed a frown, partially masked by the cloth around his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Can you describe his voice? Can you make your voice sound like his?”

  “A screechy kind of voice,” Willi said, changing the pitch and accent of his voice, “that sounded something like this.”

  Byron looked at Gotthilf and raised his eyebrows. Gotthilf’s thoughts were chasing in circles. Almost he could place that sound. He shook his head and pulled out his note
pad.

  “Do you remember anything else?” Byron asked.

  “No,” Willis said. “They turned the corner right after that and I couldn’t hear them anymore.”

  “And what time of day was that? You said it was evening, but can you be more precise than that?”

  “It was almost full dark,” the boy replied. “I can feel it when it turns dark. The air gets colder, even in summer.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Frau Zenzi said, putting her hands on Willi’s shoulders. “I made him close the door right after that, and it was as he says.”

  “All right,” Byron said as Gotthilf scribbled notes hastily. “If a couple of days later you thought maybe this might be involved with the murders, why didn’t you say something then?”

  “That was my fault,” Anselm said from where he still sat on the steps. “I didn’t think this was anything very important, and I didn’t want to see Willi mixed up in something ugly, so I told him to say nothing.” He sighed and spread his hands. “You have to admit, it doesn’t sound like much.”

  “Except that when we put that little bit together with the other bits we have, it sounds like Willi may have been the last person to see—or hear, rather—Justina Hösch alive.”

  Willi swallowed audibly.

  Anselm ducked his head. “I am sorry,” he muttered.

  They spent a few minutes going over Willi’s account again, Gotthilf adding a few more notes to his page. But it was obvious that Willi was remembering only a few brief seconds of an encounter, and without sight there really was very little more he could tell them.

  “Okay,” Byron said, bringing the discussion to a close. “Thanks for your help, folks. And if you think of anything else, or if you see or hear anything else that seems at all odd, make sure you let us know. Notify a patrolman right away. He’ll get word to the station house, and we’ll be here as soon as we can after that.”

  “Good job, Willi,” Gotthilf said as he shook the boy’s hand.

  “Yeah, great job, Willi,” Byron repeated.

  Anselm and Zenzi drew the boy back inside the bakery, and the two detectives turned to walk back out to Kristinstrasse.

  “Well,” Byron murmured, “have you thought of whatever it was the boy pointed you toward?”

  “Hmm?” Gotthilf replied.

  “Oh, come on,” the up-timer said. “I could see the wheels start turning in your head the moment the kid tried to mimic the voice he heard. Kid better stay with baking. He’s not much of an impressionist.”

  “No, he almost had it, I think. It just won’t come to me.”

  “So you think there’s something to what he said? Or how he said it?”

  The very moment that Byron asked his question, all the different thoughts that had been hanging just outside Gotthilf’s grasp all day came together for him.

  “I,” Gotthilf pronounced with seeming calm, “am an idiot.”

  Byron looked taken aback. “How so?”

  “I didn’t ask the right question. Come on.”

  They hustled back to the wagon and jumped in as Gotthilf gave the address information to the driver. “So what did you miss?” Byron asked. Gotthilf just shook his head and made a sideways motion with his hand, not wanting to derail his thought processes.

  Their wagon pulled up in front of a familiar house. The two detectives were standing before the door a moment later, and Gotthilf rapped the door knocker with some force.

  This time the door opened quickly, with Frau Backfennin standing there, wisps of gray hair again straggling from beneath her cap, eyes blinking in the light.

  “Yes?”

  “Frau Backfennin,” Gotthilf said hurriedly, “it’s Sergeant Hoch again, with my partner Lieutenant Chieske. We have two more questions for you if we can have just a moment more of your time.”

  “Come in, boys, come in,” the old woman said with a smile. “I have little on my hands but time these days. Come give me some company and liven up my day, please.”

  Frau Backfennin led them to the room they had used in their previous conversations, despite their protestations that this “would only take a moment.” She settled into her chair, then looked at them with lowered eyebrows. “Sit down, boys, sit down. I’m not talking until you do.”

  The two detectives looked at each other. Gotthilf shrugged; they sat down.

  “Now, you said you had some more questions?”

  There was a hint of a giggle in the old woman’s voice. Gotthilf had no trouble believing that she must have been quite the lively maiden, back in her youth.

  “Frau Backfennin,” he said, “when you and I talked the other day, toward the end of our conversation you said that you believed that the two victims who attended St. Ulrich’s Church both, ah…”

  “Would have spread their legs for the archidiakon,” the old woman completed the thought. “Yes, I remember saying that. And I meant it. I’ve been on this earth longer than most people, and I’ve seen more fools and foolishness in my life than you youngsters would perhaps credit, including fools in the church.”

  “All right, Frau Backfennin,” Gotthilf said. “We believe you. But here’s the first question I need to ask: when you said the archidiakon, did you mean Archidiakon Laurentius Demcker, the man who is the archidiakon today?”

  Frau Backfennin got a guilty look on her face. “No.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so then?” Byron interrupted.

  She flushed a little, ducked her head, and muttered, “I wanted you to come back.”

  The two detectives looked at each other, then back at her.

  “Why?” Gotthilf asked.

  The old woman looked up at them with a defiant air. “I can’t see to get out much anymore, and hardly anyone will come by except my daughter. You brought a moment of excitement to an old woman’s life. Is it so wrong to wish for a bit more of it?”

  Gotthilf felt compassion for Frau Backfennin. For someone so lively to be so restricted…he felt pity for her. Nevertheless…

  “Your lack of forthrightness could have put Archidiakon Demcker in danger of being executed for murder,” he said quietly.

  Frau Backfennin paled, and her hand went to her throat. Then she squared her shoulders and sat up straight. “You shouldn’t be misled by the foolishness of an old woman,” she pronounced crisply. “That young man is a credit to the parish and the quarter. Oh, he’s sometimes too credulous, too willing to believe the best of people, and he’s not the sermonizer that Dr. de Spaignart is—at least, not yet—but the church and the parish do better with him than they have in years.”

  Gotthilf felt an inner tension release, at the same time that he simultaneously mentally kicked himself for overlooking that question the first time he had interviewed the old woman and felt his gut tighten as he began to look in a new direction.

  “Thank you, Frau Backfennin, that clarifies things very well, and it’s a great help to us. Now, I have one more question, please: if you weren’t referring to Archidiakon Demcker, who were you referring to?”

  “Why, the one who was there before him, that Saxon lickspittle Bauer, him who changed his name to Latin to be more impressive.”

  Name change…Bauer…farmer…

  “You mean…”

  “Yah, him; the one who was Dr. de Spaignart’s shadow and would have been his child if he could have but entered the old man’s loins to claim to be his seed.”

  Gotthilf blinked at that, and looked at Byron. The up-timer’s eyes were almost as wide as his felt. Even for the old woman, that was a rather strong statement.

  “Ah, thank you, Frau Backfennin,” Gotthilf said. “That answer also helps us, but it means we have a lot to do in a very short time. We must go.”

  The two detectives stood. The old woman remained seated and picked up her knitting from beside her chair.

  “You boys can find your own way out, I’m sure. But I have one request.”

  “Yes?” Gotthilf was a little wary of what the old woman might desi
re.

  “When this is all over, you come and sit here and tell me the whole story, all right? From beginning to end, with all the details.”

  Gotthilf looked at Frau Backfennin, and for a moment he saw not just a hunger for knowledge, but a pining for involvement, a longing for connection. The lively, beautiful, vivacious young woman was trapped now in an old woman’s body, having outlived almost all of her contemporaries. She was truly lonely, he saw.

  “I will,” he said. “Or at least as much of the truth as I can tell anyone.”

  “Good,” the old woman sniffed. “You see to it that you remember that.”

  A moment later the two detectives were out the door standing by the wagon staring at each other.

  “I was right,” Byron said. “She’s the spitting image of my Grandma Pearl.”

  “What do we do now?” Gotthilf said.

  Byron narrowed his eyes in his “thoughtful” look. “Let’s go talk to Archidiakon Demcker.”

  They weren’t far from St. Ulrich’s church, so in a short time they were dismounting from their wagon and heading toward the side door. Just as Gotthilf was reaching for the handle of the door, it opened before them to reveal Archidiakon Demcker and his friend Archidiakon Schönfeldt. Everyone stopped short, surprise on every face.

  Byron recovered first. “We’ve got to quit meeting this way,” he quipped. That evoked chuckles from the others.

  “If you need to see Dr. de Spaignart,” Demcker said, “he left for Rudolstadt this morning to visit with Pastor Johann Rothmaler. I expect him to return in perhaps three days.”

  “Actually,” Byron replied, “we’d like to speak with you in your pastoral capacity.”

  “You as well, Archidiakon Schönfeldt,” Gotthilf added.

  The two pastors looked surprised, then looked at each other. After a moment, Demcker said, “Certainly. Come this way, please.”

  They ended up in a side chapel. “We should be undisturbed here,” Demcker said. “The sexton is home sick today, and it’s a couple of hours yet before the evening mass.” He looked at the detectives. “So am I cleared of suspicion, since you are coming to me in this manner?”

  “We think so,” Byron said.

  Gotthilf nodded to reinforce that statement. “However, the fact that you are does not mean that there is not a pastor under suspicion. We do not at this moment have sufficient evidence to request either a search warrant or an arrest warrant. We have a need, however, to examine his church.”