“My boys didn’t even see him at first,” Nathan whispered. “He must have been prowling around here the whole time, and I think he had the same plan you did. Well, he sure won’t find anything now.”
“Oh, God, Simon!” Magdalena whispered. “That’s the stranger who was in the garden at Silvio’s house! The man who tried to kill me! He’s coming toward us!”
Nathan raised his hands reassuringly. “Don’t worry; you have me and my boys here now.”
“Your boys are blind, crippled old men,” Simon sneered. “Just what are they going to do?”
“Well, see for yourself.”
The beggar king pointed to the doorway of a house, where two of his men loitered on the steps. As the stranger approached the ruin, presumably to get a better look, they lurched toward him. Simon noticed one of them was Crazy Johannes, Nathan’s right-hand man.
“My good fellow, a pittance for an old soldier who lost his sight in the Battle of Rheinfelden,” Johannes croaked, looking very much indeed like a down-and-out mercenary. “Just a kreuzer for a cup of mulled wine.”
“Away with you!” shouted the stranger. “I have no time for your twaddle!”
In the meantime the other beggars had reached the man and were jostling him. As the stranger faltered, Crazy Johannes raised a crutch and rammed it between the man’s legs, causing him to fall with a startled cry. Seconds later two more beggars on crutches emerged from the shadows of an entryway and began flailing away at the figure on the ground.
In one fluid motion the stranger jumped to his feet and pulled out his rapier. The beggars surrounded him like a pack of ravenous dogs, each waving a crutch through the air to hold the man at bay.
Unexpectedly the man lunged to one side, feinted to the left, then attacked from the right. Johannes let out a loud cry as the blade cut into his shoulder.
The cloaked stranger took advantage of the momentary confusion to jump onto a dung cart beside a nearby house. The beggars attacked the cart and tried to overturn it, but the man scrambled up to an open window in the second story, climbed inside, and disappeared. Moments later a woman’s scream was followed by heavy footsteps on a stairway. Simon looked up to see the stranger squeezing through a hatch in the roof, then dashing across neighboring rooftops in the direction of the Danube.
“Damn!” Nathan shouted. “We almost had him!”
Beggars arrived now from all directions to help their injured companion. In his sooty jacket Simon, too, rushed over to Johannes, whose wound, he saw immediately, was serious. The blade had pierced Johannes’s right shoulder clean through. The medicus was relieved to see that the blood seeping from the wound was dark in color rather than light, meaning the lung hadn’t been injured.
“Give me a hand!” he shouted, gesturing to some of the beggars. “We’ll carry him carefully to the catacombs, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for him there.”
Magdalena was still standing behind the collapsed wall, peering out over the roofs of Regensburg, where the red sun was just beginning to rise. She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice a boy standing directly in front of her. He was about ten years old, had strawberry-blond hair and a face so covered with freckles it looked as if he’d been splattered with mud. At first she presumed he’d come to see the collapsed house, but then she realized he was addressing her.
“Are you-uh-Magdalena Kuisl?” he asked fearfully. “The daughter of the Schongau hangman?”
“Who wants to know?” Magdalena snapped, scrutinizing him carefully. “You sure don’t look like a city guard.”
The boy shook his head shyly. “I’m Benjamin Teuber, the son of the Regensburg executioner. My friends and I have been looking for you everywhere. I have something to give you,” he replied, handing her a folded piece of paper. “It’s a letter from your father.”
Incredulous, Magdalena took the note. “From my father?”
Benjamin nodded and rubbed his toes together bashfully. “He gave it to my dad and asked him to find you and give it to you. And then I have a message for you from my father.”
“What’s that?” Magdalena asked.
“That your dad is a thick-skulled, pigheaded, low-down bastard.”
The hangman’s daughter smiled. There was no greater compliment anyone could give her father.
9
REGENSBURG
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AUGUST 22, 1662 AD
This morning they began with the rack straightaway.
In silence the Regensburg executioner removed Kuisl’s bandages and bound his arms behind his back. Perceiving shadows behind the wooden lattice, Kuisl knew the doctor and the three inquisitors were already present. He fixed his eyes on the lattice as if by sheer force of will he might see through it to finally get a look at the man who’d set this awful trap for him.
Since Teuber had visited the cell to care for his wounds, only a single, agonizing night had passed and Kuisl had slept little. Instead, he’d spent the whole time brooding over the name Weidenfeld and where he might have heard it before. It was clear now that the third man whose face was hidden behind the lattice was an avenging angel risen out of his past. The same stranger had made all the inscriptions on the cell wall to remind the hangman of a time he’d long ago banished to the remote corners of his memory. The ghosts of the war had risen again, and the worst among them was hiding here, in the torture chamber in Regensburg behind a wooden lattice. Who was it? And why was he pursuing him?
P.F.K. Weidenfeld…
Kuisl moaned softly as the executioner strapped him to a modified ladder rack. The herbal ointment Teuber had spread on his wounds was a blessing but in no way a cure. Now Teuber tied Kuisl’s hands, already bound together behind his back, tightly to an upper rung of the rack. Sharply filed wood pyramids bored into his wounded flesh while the weight of his body pulled him inexorably downward along the rungs, prying his shoulder joints apart as he slid. Still, that wasn’t the worst: Teuber tied a noose around Kuisl’s legs, then attached it to a roller at the bottom of the instrument. When the executioner turned the roller, the victim’s arms would be pulled farther and farther upward, behind his back, until his shoulders would at last rip from their sockets.
“We begin the second interrogation,” the older man intoned from behind the lattice, a voice Kuisl now knew belonged to the president of the council, Hieronymus Rheiner. “Kuisl, you can save yourself a lot of pain if you simply confess that-”
“To hell with you, you dirty bastards!” Kuisl shouted. “Even if you cut me to pieces and throw me into boiling water, it wasn’t me!”
“It’s quite possible we’ll do just that,” the third voice replied sardonically. “But first we’re going to try the rack. Teuber, turn the crank.”
Drops of sweat appeared on Teuber’s brow, and his lips pressed into a thin line. Nevertheless, he moved the roller about a quarter turn, just enough for Kuisl’s bones to crack audibly.
“Don’t make this unnecessarily hard on yourself,” admonished the youngest inquisitor, presumably Joachim Kerscher from the Regensburg tax office. “The evidence is overwhelming. We all know you committed the murder, but by Carolingian Law we need your confession.”
“It wasn’t me,” Kuisl muttered.
“Blast it, we caught you red-handed! Right alongside the two corpses!” Hieronymus Rheiner fumed. “God knows you are guilty! He’s looking down on you now!”
Kuisl laughed softly. “God isn’t here. Only the devil’s present in this room.”
“This isn’t working,” the third man said icily. “Teuber, keep turning. I want to hear his bones break.”
“But Your Honors,” Teuber spoke up cautiously. His face looked pale and bloated in the torchlight. The merry sparkle in his eyes had disappeared, and he seemed to have suddenly aged by years. “Were I to proceed too quickly, Kuisl might pass out, and then-”
“Who asked your opinion, hangman?” the third inquisitor snarled.
Doctor Elsperger, who until tha
t point had been sitting silently on the wooden bench, now stood up and cleared his throat.
“Teuber isn’t entirely mistaken,” he said. “From appearances the accused may indeed become unconscious. Then we’d have to terminate the procedure prematurely.”
“Elsperger, you’re right,” old Rheiner responded from behind the lattice. “We must proceed slowly. Teuber, just a quarter turn again, no more.”
The Regensburg executioner, who was leaning silently against the rack, didn’t seem to hear the inquisitor at first.
“Pardon, Your Honor. A quarter turn, as you command.”
As Teuber cranked the roller, Kuisl could feel his arms about to be wrenched from their sockets. This pain only intensified as the pyramid-shaped wedges dug ever deeper into his back. Kuisl closed his eyes and hummed the old nursery rhyme he’d first heard in an army encampment outside Breitenfeld long ago. Soldiers’ wives hummed it in their children’s ears to soothe them while villages burned on the horizon. Kuisl himself had sung it to send his little sister, as well as his own children, off to the land of dreams.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home…”
“Kuisl, stop this foolishness and confess!” young Kerscher warned him. “It’s over for you.”
“Your house is on fire…”
“Good Lord, confess!” Rheiner shouted.
“Your children will burn…”
“Confess!”
Kuisl spat at the lattice. “Go to hell, you potbellied little pricks.”
For a moment everyone fell silent, and the only sound was Kuisl’s labored breathing.
“A lovely song,” the third inquisitor said finally in a malevolent tone. “Unfortunately you’ll never again sing it to your children. You do have children, don’t you? And a beautiful wife, as well. What’s her name? Anna-Maria, I believe.”
He repeated the name, pronouncing each syllable slowly, almost lustfully. “An-na-Ma-ri-a.”
The Schongau hangman struggled to get up, while his bones cracked and his left shoulder snapped out of its socket. This devil knew his wife? And his children, too? What did he have planned for them? Had he already taken out his vengeance on them for some crime their husband and father committed decades ago? Though the pain almost caused Kuisl to faint, he spat a stream of bile in the direction of the wooden lattice.
“You goddamned swine!” he screamed. “Come out here and show me your goddamned face so I can rip the skin off it!”
“You’re a bit confused,” the third man calmly replied. “You’re the one whose face we’re going to tear to shreds in a little while.”
“I implore you to show a bit more respect, colleague,” Rheiner scolded. “This is an interrogation. One might almost think the accused has somehow wronged you personally… Elsperger?”
The gaunt surgeon sprang up from the bench. “Your Honor?”
“Is the subject still fit for interrogation?”
Elsperger approached the Schongau hangman and examined his crippled arm in the dim torchlight.
“His left shoulder seems to be dislocated,” he said finally, “but the right one still looks in good shape.”
“Respiration?”
Elsperger nodded. “He’s still breathing. This man is as strong as an ox, if I may say so. I’ve never seen-”
“Nobody asked for your opinion,” Rheiner said. “Esteemed colleagues, may I suggest the left arm be untied and we continue with the right? And as far as I’m concerned, we might as well get started with the hot poker. I’m certain we’ll have our confession soon. Teuber, take down the left arm, and we’ll continue with the right. For God’s sake, Teuber, what’s the matter with you?”
The Regensburg executioner wiped the sweat from his brow as his gaze went blank. “Pardon, once more,” he stammered. “But I believe the man has had enough for today.”
“Another person determined to have his say!” the older councilman groused. “Where are we? In a ship of fools? Now hurry up and do as we’ve ordered, or I’ll cancel the two guilders you’re to be paid for the day’s work.”
When Teuber loosened the shackles, Kuisl’s arm collapsed like an empty wineskin. Then the executioner reached again for the crank.
“Good Lord, confess, will you!” Teuber whispered in Kuisl’s ear. “Confess, and it will be over!”
“My dear, sweet twins…” Kuisl whispered, on the verge of passing out. “Lisl, my Lisl, come and I’ll sing you to sleep…”
“Teuber, crank the damned roller at once,” the third man snarled. “Or must I come out and do it myself?”
With a clenched jaw, the Regensburg executioner once again began turning the crank, as Kuisl continued singing the nursery rhyme over and over.
The melody would echo in Teuber’s mind the entire night.
Simon and the beggar carried Crazy Johannes through the dark, deserted streets toward Neupfarr Church Square while Magdalena scouted ahead to make sure their strange ensemble didn’t encounter any watchmen who might have some unpleasant questions to ask. Having finally arrived back in the catacombs, they bedded the injured man down in the niche they were using as a sick bay.
Just as the medicus had assumed, the blow hadn’t pierced the lungs. And though the blade had passed straight through his shoulder, the wound was clean. After Simon applied some moss to stanch the bleeding, he treated it with an ointment of arnica and chamomile.
“You’ll have to dispense with your crazy Saint Vitus’ dances for a while,” he told Johannes as he tentatively pressed the edge of the wound, whereupon the beggar let out a shout of pain. “How about trying to earn some honest money the next few weeks?” Simon continued. “Just lie down by the cathedral and hold out your hand.”
“That’s not half as much fun,” Johannes said, trying to grin despite the pain.
In the meantime Magdalena handed Simon clean water, cloths, and bandages, always keeping an eye on the ragged bunch crowded behind the dirty sick-bay curtain. By now she’d come to know some of the beggars: the crippled and sick, the disbanded mercenaries, stranded pilgrims, cast-off wives, prostitutes, and abandoned orphans-a motley mix of outcasts just like Magdalena. Looking over their faces, she felt a strange bond with them all.
I’m one of them, she thought. A city within a city, and I’m part of it.
The previous night she and Simon had gone for a walk through the winding subterranean passageways, counting almost forty cellars all connected to one another. Many were empty, but the beggars had stashed food and furnishings in some. Musty drapes and trunks, even a child’s toy here and there, all suggested whole families called these damp, dark vaults home. Beneath some of the cellars Simon and Magdalena came upon even deeper cellars by way of staircases or narrow, winding corridors. Here they found Latin inscriptions on the walls, and tucked away in one corner they even discovered a small bronze pagan statue. Were these the remains of an even older Roman settlement predating the Jewish ghetto above?
Here, deep in the bowels of the city, far from the beggars, they found themselves alone together for the first time in a long while. They made love in the dim, sooty glow of a lantern and promised each other not to give up. Magdalena still believed they could save her father. What might come next, though, she refused to consider now. Would she return with Simon to Schongau, where she could expect nothing but mockery and shame? Where Alderman Berchtholdt and his cronies would make their life hell? And where they could never expect to build a life together?
In spite of it all, Magdalena missed her mother and the twins desperately. Perhaps the little ones were ill or her mother was spending sleepless nights worrying over the disappearance not only of her husband but of her eldest daughter as well. Wasn’t it Magdalena’s duty to return to report her father’s fate?
A sharp cry brought her back to the present, where Simon had just finished sewing up Johannes’s wound and given the beggar a friendly slap.
“That’s it!” he said, helping the beggar back to his feet. “As I said, no tricks for the
next few weeks. And lots of wine; you’ve got to get your strength back.”
Despite his pain, Johannes forced a smile. “Now that’s a medicine to my liking. Is there an illness for which peach brandy is the cure?”
Smiling, Magdalena packed the bandages and salves into a leather bag. She found it hard to imagine she’d ever feared the beggars. For a while now they’d felt to her like one big family.
At that moment she remembered the letter from her father that the hangman’s son had given her. She hadn’t even gotten around to opening it! So once she’d helped Simon wipe the bloodstains from the sickbed, she retired to a quieter niche and with trembling fingers unfolded the crumpled piece of paper. What did her father have to tell her? Had he found a way to escape?
Looking down at the letter, she stopped short. The faded note consisted of a single line:
GREETINGS FROM WEIDENFELD…
Magdalena held the paper close enough to the candle that its edges slowly started to curl, but there was nothing else legible in the note.
GREETINGS FROM WEIDENFELD…
Was her father trying to tell her something that no one else was supposed to know? Was this a secret clue, something only she was meant to understand?
Then Magdalena realized this letter couldn’t possibly be from her father.
It was in someone else’s handwriting.
The boy had told her the letter came from her father, so someone was lying. Deep in thought, Magdalena folded it up and returned it to her skirt pocket.
“What’s wrong?” Simon, who had returned to her side, looked at her with surprise.
“The letter from my father…” she began hesitantly. “Someone else wrote it.” She told Simon about the mysterious text.
“Well?” Simon asked. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
Magdalena shook her head. “Unfortunately no.” She bit her lip, thinking. “This letter must have come from the man who’s out to get my father. I’m pretty sure there’s more behind this than the patricians retaliating against the freemen.” Magdalena collapsed onto the straw, rubbing her temples. “Someone has it in for my father-maybe someone he crossed a long time ago, someone who is sparing no pains to pay him back now.”
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