HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘Doctor purged him twice this morning. He’s going to do it again…’ She stopped to wipe her nose and dab her eyes. ‘Sent me down the port this morning, he did, sir. To fetch those…creatures.’ Her shoulders shook with fear or revulsion, or just possibly with the cold. The temperature inside the house was lower than the air in the street.

  ‘A ship came in last night. The sailors laughed and told me to carry the bucket with care. If I touched one, it would suck my life out, they said.’ She looked up at me with fear in her eyes. ‘I did not know such creatures existed, sir. I did it for my master,’ she whispered, sniffling into her handkerchief again.

  I had no idea what she was muttering about. The sailors? The creatures, whatever they might be?

  ‘If he has truly seen the Devil,’ she added, ‘all the physicking in the world won’t save him.’

  I did not shift myself to reassure her, reflecting only that the Devil’s name enjoyed great popularity in Königsberg. Just then, the door was thrown open and a tall, gaunt man stepped out into the dimly lit passage. He was wigless, his head recently shaved. A tight, dark suit made him seem even taller and thinner than he really was. He saw the maid and his face lit up with some private satisfaction. But then he saw me, and his manner changed.

  ‘Who are you, sir?’ he barked in an uncouth manner. Without waiting for my reply, he turned on the girl and hissed, ‘His Excellency is in no condition to receive visitors. I told you that before!’

  ‘I am the new Procurator,’ I announced. ‘I have business with your patient, sir. Urgent business, which cannot wait.’

  The doctor drew himself up like a hooded serpent preparing to strike. His eyes gleamed like points of light in the dim corridor.

  ‘So, you are the person who is the cause of this distress!’ he snapped in a blunt and accusing fashion. ‘Herr Rhunken has been in a state of nervous anxiety all the day regarding you. I confess my surprise,’ he continued, staring rudely at me. ‘I was expecting someone altogether…different. An older man, let’s say. A more…experienced magistrate.’

  ‘I will not keep him long,’ I said.

  ‘I should think not!’ he replied. ‘I have work to do.’

  If the doctor was rude, I put it down to strain. I was on edge myself as I followed him into the sick-room. Procurator Rhunken was not confined to bed, as I had expected, but lay on a leather chaise longue close to the far wall, his legs naked and raised on pillows towards an open window. This ice-cold chamber was more cluttered than the rest of the house put together. Three thin candletapers wedged together in a single candle-holder lit up books and papers scattered everywhere, great piles of them tottering like drunkards against the walls on either side of a four-poster bed which stood in the darkest corner.

  If Doctor Plucker had been expecting someone older, His Excellency, Herr Procurator Wolfgang Rhunken, was far younger than I had anticipated. He could hardly have been forty-five years of age. I recalled the chambermaid’s description of him as fine and handsome, but I could find no evidence of those attributes. He was propped up in a sitting position, large cushions at his back, a dark woollen shawl draped around his shoulders, his careworn face hollow with suffering, his naked legs raised to the freezing night air. Drawing nearer, I observed the sickly colour of his face, his mouth drawn tightly into a thin black slit, eyes half-closed like a man looking into the next world. Large beads of sweat stood out on his pale brow like condensation on a warm glass, his hair drenched, despite the glacial cold. He turned like a blind man as my boots clattered on the stone pavement.

  I looked uncertainly at the doctor.

  ‘Closer, sir. Go closer,’ he urged. ‘Let’s get it over with, and quickly!’

  As I approached the patient, I heard the doctor out in the passage, calling to the maid. ‘Bring a stool for the new Procurator! And bring in that bucket!’

  Rhunken’s feverish eyes flashed open at the rude note of irony in the doctor’s voice. He glared at me, though he did not speak. The stool arrived and was placed beside the couch. I hesitated for an instant as the sick man raised his quivering right hand with what seemed to be a superhuman effort, then let it fall with a heavy thump on the stool.

  I took a deep breath and sat down, as the maid placed a large oak bucket covered with a linen cloth on the floor beside her ailing master. The sharp odour which I had at first taken to be the musty smell of a little-used room intensified. A heady compound of sweat, faeces and urine dosed with camphor and other medicines, it was the ethereal vapour of the magistrate’s volatilising decay.

  ‘I hope you’ll soon recover your health, sir,’ I began, uncertain what else to say, my voice lower than I might have wished.

  Procurator Rhunken’s mouth fell open, his lower lip trembled, the left side of his face twitched frantically. He struggled against the rebellious muscles, grasped my arm and pulled me close to that vile stench. Then, gasping desperately for air, he fell back against the cushions without having managed to say a word. For one moment, I thought that he was going to expire before my eyes. A violent tremor shook his body as he attempted to raise his head again.

  ‘Do not exhaust yourself, sir!’ Doctor Plucker exhorted. ‘This gentleman has excellent young ears and patience aplenty. Now, stay still, sir, while I apply the remedy,’ the doctor muttered. ‘A ship came in last night from Rio del Plata. I had to fight for these with Surgeon Franzich from the Fortress infirmary. You’d baulk, Herr Rhunken, if you knew how much they cost. Haementaria ghilianii,’ he announced, whipping the cloth cover from the bucket and raising it to his nose. ‘Hmmm! The primal stench of the Amazon forests! You can almost see the dark, musky swamps where it creeps and crawls. These will do you the world of good, sir. They’re a hundred times more effective than the hiruda worms that Monsieur Broussais brought back from Egypt. Military authorities throughout Europe are stocking up before the outbreak of war.’

  I watched in awe as the physician extracted a massive black worm from his bucket with a pair of callipers. The creature squirmed and wriggled, trying to wrap itself around the doctor’s arm. The instant it touched his patient’s naked flesh, all the fight went out of it. Doctor Plucker stretched the massive leech out along Herr Rhunken’s calf from the knee to the ankle, and left it there to feed.

  ‘If I can help in any way,’ I offered weakly, my gaze horridly attracted by the massive Amazonian slug. It was thirty centimetres long, at the very least. As it began to siphon off the invalid’s blood, it seemed to surge and swell. ‘I am…’

  A yellow hand shot out from beneath Rhunken’s shawl and came to rest before my face with such rapidity that the words froze on my tongue. ‘You have come, then,’ Rhunken gasped. ‘From Berlin, I suppose?’

  ‘Berlin, sir?’ I repeated, uncertain what he meant. I darted a glance at the physician, but found no comfort there. He was busily engaged, laying out another giant leech upon the sick man’s other leg. ‘I have come this day from Lotingen, Your Excellency.’

  Herr Rhunken frowned. A chasm seemed to split his brow.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Lotingen. On the western circuit,’ I said. ‘I am the presiding magistrate there.’

  ‘Lotingen?’ Rhunken cried, the distress on his face painful to see. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The last thing I expected was to be quizzed about my identity by the man who had recommended me.

  ‘I was ordered by His Majesty to relieve you of the case. I have your own note here in my pocket!’

  Rhunken shook his head, disbelief writ large on his face.

  ‘Surely you nominated me?’ I pressed.

  Procurator Rhunken turned his face to the wall as Plucker applied two more famished bloodsuckers to his naked thighs.

  ‘I nominated no man,’ the patient muttered angrily. ‘This is his doing! That serpent does it to torture me!’

  I chose to ignore his raving. Herr Rhunken was ill, after all. I could understand his situation. When a man is ill, he knows not who to blame, and so b
lames every man whose health is better than his own.

  ‘I expected a special emissary,’ he went on. ‘From Berlin. From the secret police. Not you…’

  ‘He’s never heard of you,’ Doctor Plucker hissed angrily in my ear, as he draped a smaller black worm across his patient’s sweating brow, and another on his right temple. ‘Any fool can see that. You are inflaming his brain, sir! You’ll kill him! He was removed from the case. Sacked! Forced to cede. To an expert, he believed. Have you no grain of pity, sir?’

  Suddenly, the magistrate gasped for air. Phlegm bubbled in his throat, and he coughed violently, spitting into a bowl which the doctor held up for him. ‘Do not exert yourself, sir,’ the physician implored. Looking over his shoulder at me, his expression tense, he cried, ‘I beg you, sir!’

  ‘I am not to blame if he is sick,’ I replied stubbornly, then stopped short, uncertain how to continue. I had no wish to worsen his condition. ‘I have been empowered to act by the King. Herr Rhunken knows more about these murders than any other living soul. I need his help.’

  Doctor Plucker turned on me with anger.

  ‘Herr Rhunken needs rest. You have robbed him of peace enough, I think, for one day. Leave him be!’

  If the physician was determined to end the interview, the patient seemed intent on prolonging it. His hand clenched at my sleeve, dragging me down, and I was forced to my knees on the floor at his side. The leech at his temple throbbed and buckled, gorged with blood, sliding onto his cheek until the doctor picked it off with haste.

  ‘Go to the Court House,’ the magistrate said weakly. ‘See if you…can do what I have failed to do.’

  He fell back against the cushion, eyes closed, panting desperately for air.

  ‘This will be the end of him,’ Doctor Plucker protested, pushing me away from the stool without ceremony and sitting down himself, his hand on the pulse of his patient.

  I stood back, my brain in a whirl, and watched the doctor administer to him.

  ‘But you must know what weapon killed them!’ I shouted, confusion giving place to frustration, as Procurator Rhunken closed his eyes and seemed to fall into a dead faint, those worms on his face and temples wriggling and twisting like the portrait of the Medusa I had seen in Rome at the Villa Borghese.

  ‘Can’t you see the state he’s in?’ Doctor Plucker shouted, taking hold of my arm, pushing and pulling me to the door. ‘I must order you to quit this room!’

  Throwing open the door with great energy, the doctor surprised me by his strength as he thrust me out into the corridor, where the maid was waiting.

  ‘Show Herr Stiffeniis out!’ he thundered.

  I must have looked like a lost child, for the girl began to coax me gently along the corridor in the direction of the front door.

  ‘Come along now, sir,’ she said, retracing our path through the book-lined rooms and darkened corridors. ‘Just follow me.’

  As the front door closed behind me, I stood stock-still in the cold light of the low moon. Beyond the garden fence, Sergeant Koch was waiting. He turned at the sound of the door closing and began to advance towards me, his face mottled like veined marble in a church. The temperature had dropped while I had been inside, and fresh-fallen snow had settled on the crown of his hat.

  ‘Is everything in order, Herr Stiffeniis?’

  I ignored his solicitude. ‘Who instructed you to come to Lotingen today, Sergeant Koch?’ I was quivering with humiliation and with rage.

  ‘Procurator Rhunken, sir,’ he replied without a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘He had no idea who I was,’ I said with a coolness which surprised me.

  Koch opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Finally, he said, ‘I presumed it was Herr Rhunken. I was handed a despatch by a messenger.’

  ‘Who signed this despatch?’

  ‘It was not signed, sir. I am an employee of the Procurator. The messenger said that the note had come from upstairs. Herr Rhunken does not need to sign his orders to me,’ he said. ‘That order told me what to do, and where to go. The same messenger handed me that letter with the Royal seal and those documents I was to consign to you while travelling to Königsberg. If I’ve done any wrong, I am most heartily sorry for it, sir.’

  ‘You did not see Herr Rhunken at all?’

  Koch shook his head. ‘No, sir, I did not.’

  ‘I must go at once to the Court House,’ I said, turning on my heel, setting off in the direction of the massive Fortress on the far side of the square. I had gone some way before I realised that Koch had made no move to follow me.

  ‘The Court House, sir?’ he called after me. ‘Don’t you want to see your lodgings first?’

  I turned on him. There was something ludicrous in what he had suggested. ‘Do you think I am here on holiday? I have come to Königsberg to investigate murders, Sergeant!’

  Koch took a step forward and removed his hat. ‘The moon is not yet high enough, sir,’ he said. For a moment I thought I had misheard him, but then he went on: ‘We have time enough to…’

  ‘Has the cold afflicted your brain, Koch?’ I interrupted. ‘What in the name of heaven has the moon to do with it?’

  ‘I was instructed to take you to the Fortress after the moon had reached its peak, sir. Not a minute before.’

  I strode back through the snow, resisting the urge to grab him by the throat.

  ‘Is this the way that time is generally measured in Königsberg, Koch? By the phases of the moon? Or is this just one more instance of your superstitious nonsense?’

  ‘There’s to be a meeting over there, sir. When the moon is at its height. That’s all I know,’ Koch stated flatly.

  ‘You made no mention of this before, Sergeant,’ I observed. ‘It is not the first time that you have tricked me.’

  Koch looked at me with measured coolness. ‘Mine is not to question why, sir. A person has been appointed to help you, that’s all that I have been told,’ he said.

  ‘People have names, Koch,’ I replied.

  Snow began to fall again in drifting, wispy flakes, and Koch glanced up at the sky before deigning to answer. ‘The person’s name is Doctor Vigilantius.’

  I opened my mouth to protest, but words would not come. Snowdrops settled cold on my lips and melted on my tongue.

  ‘A necromancer?’ I managed at last. ‘What is he doing here?’

  ‘I have heard,’ Koch replied hesitantly, ‘that the doctor will be conducting experiments of a scientific nature, sir.’

  ‘Which science are you talking of, Koch?’

  Sarcasm appeared to be lost on my stolid companion.

  ‘I’ve been told that he is an expert regarding the flux of electrical currents in the brain,’ he replied.

  ‘Exactly, Koch. What is Vigilantius doing here?’

  ‘I have just told you, sir. Experiments.’

  ‘Let us try another tack, Sergeant Koch,’ I persisted. ‘Who called Augustus Vigilantius here to Königsberg?’

  Koch stood to attention. ‘I really am most terribly sorry, Herr Procurator Stiffeniis,’ he apologised. ‘I cannot answer that question.’

  ‘Cannot, or will not? That seems to be your personal motto,’ I muttered through clenched teeth, though Koch did not move a muscle or make any attempt to explain himself.

  ‘You’ve time to spare before the appointed hour,’ he said instead. ‘I’m to take you to your lodging first, sir. The coach is waiting.’

  I pointed to the Fortress on the far side of the square. ‘Am I not staying over there?’

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ he returned quickly. ‘I have been instructed to take you to another place.’

  Suddenly, I felt drained of energy, as if I had just been leeched myself. Was there any point in arguing or complaining further with this intransigent man? I followed him to the coach as meekly as a ceremonial lamb being led to the slaughter.

  Chapter 4

  The coach pulled away slowly. The fresh snow on the cobbles made the horses nervous,
the driver hesitant. The rattling wheels echoed off the towering walls of the dark stone buildings lining the narrow streets through which we drove, but I paid no heed to my surroundings. My thoughts were taken up with Procurator Rhunken. He had not been expecting me. He had no idea who I was, nor why I had come. In which case, why had I been sent to see him? If he had not given my name to the King, who had? Rhunken had admitted himself that he was expecting a magistrate from Berlin. The Imperial capital was home to the Secret Police. Was that who he had been waiting for, a Procurator from the Secret Police, a specialist in politics and murder? These new uncertainties, together with the host of unanswered questions lurking in the sparse official documents that I had been permitted to read on my way to the city, threw me into something approaching despair. And to make my situation even worse, I was bereft of reliable assistance. Herr Sergeant Koch was a minor official, an uninformed messenger following orders, as rigorous as he was unhelpful.

  The raucous screeching of seagulls broke in on my thoughts. My nose began to twitch with the stink of stale fish and the nauseous tang of seaweed as I raised the blind and looked out of the coach. The listless grey sea stretched northwards beyond a narrow sand bar to infinity. The tide was out, and a small fleet of fishing-smacks lay awkwardly on their keels, the masts and rigging a forest of icicles. The shallow beach was a sheet of solid ice, except for a narrow channel of fast-flowing water in the centre of the estuary. A black stone pier projected out like an arm into the stream. Tall three-masters lining the sea wall were moored in line like dead whales waiting to be hauled on shore. Navvies carrying sacks and bales went running up and down the gangplanks, while ancient derricks creaked and groaned under the weight of the cargoes being loaded and discharged. Apart from the ubiquitous presence of the soldiers on the streets, this was the first sign of life that I had witnessed since arriving in Königsberg. The city was renowned for the industry of its inhabitants, the canny tight-fistedness of its merchants. It was, after all, the most extensive port on the Baltic coast. Hamburg and Danzig were rivals to some extent, but neither place could boast a tonnage equal to that of Königsberg. In a normal day, Koch reported, a dozen ships from the farthest reaches of the earth hove to along that pier, while another dozen weighed their anchors and plotted their route in the opposite direction. The labourers came and went, each one following an identical path to the dockside warehouses, hard on his neighbour’s heel, then running back to the vessels, like ants carrying a grain of seed to their communal store. One of those ships, I thought, had journeyed all the way from the tropical jungles of South America with its cargo of leeches for the army.