An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

  “When will you?”

  “Come to my door at noon. Have what you’ve heard written by then for me.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll have it all.”

  “Just the first. The innkeeper and the driver. Not the last.”

  I stumbled home. Night in Basel was the dwelling of soft sounds and faint smells, and gentle brushings in the dark, all unseen. I unlocked my own door and saw a light in the kitchen. My grandmother was at the table in her nightdress.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  “I saw your bedroom open and empty.”

  “Cousin Gottlieb came for me. He’s Inquisitor and he has me for his clerk.”

  This was a stark statement of news that was important to both our home and our city. Grandmother breathed a sigh. “Then you’ll be part of the Inquiry.”

  “I’ll only be secretary. I have to write what I heard tonight.”

  “What did you hear, Leonhard?”

  “I’ve heard about Knipper and his driving, and I’ve seen his room in the Boot and Thorn, and I’ve heard that the last anyone saw of him was at the inn that evening unloading the coach.”

  “That was after he came to Master Johann’s kitchen?”

  “No, Grandmother. The last he was seen at the inn was before that.”

  “You saw him, Leonhard. You told me you had. And you told me also that a black trunk was on the floor there, which is the trunk he was brought back in.”

  “I told you truthfully,” I said.

  “Tell Master Gottlieb.”

  “Then Master Johann’s family would be accused.”

  “Master Gottlieb is part of that family. He’ll use wisdom in it.”

  “It wasn’t any of them.”

  “It’s Master Gottlieb’s task to find who did.”

  “It won’t be him or Daniel who’s first to solve it,” I said. “Nicolaus told them that. And that’s not Master Gottlieb’s true task. His questions were for something else. I don’t know what.”

  And then I went upstairs and started writing as Gottlieb had told me to do. I had a good memory, though I was very tired of the day.

  I’d wanted to wake early on Wednesday but my bed was very comfortable. It was nearly sunrise before I pulled myself from my covers. I endured my grandmother’s disapprobation and hurried to get her water, and I made sure to get it from the Barefoot Square. The coach was there in the morning light, but no light shone on glowering Abel already in the box, and Fritz from the inn was pushing luggage onto the rack. None of the bags and trunks was larger than a hound.

  Nothing withstood Abel’s whip and the thunder of those hooves; yet he’d have to return. Less than nothing could withstand the immutable rhythm of those roads from Basel south and north. Knipper was everlasting but finally died. Yet even death wouldn’t stop the ancient law that the coach would leave for Bern on Wednesday and then come back, and that the coach would leave for Freiburg and Strasbourg on Friday and then come back. The coach was a pendulum, hung from history and swung unending through its path. Even the Magistrates of two cities only planned their Inquiry within pendulum swings.

  Like Basel, Strasbourg was also a University city. Yet as Master Desiderius said, its University was much less prestigious. Not always, though: The school was planted with Martin Luther himself as one of its founders when he took refuge there. The city also joined the Reformation and became one of its centers, like Basel. It had the first printing presses in France, sent by Gutenberg. And it had its own great reformer, Martin Bucer, as great a man as Basel’s Oecolampadius. It was a rival to Basel and a mirror.

  But forty years ago the city, having for centuries been a free city, as Basel still was, was annexed by Louis the Fourteenth, and Strassburg became Strasbourg. The Protestants weren’t persecuted and exiled as the Huguenots had been, but the Cathedral was given back to the Pope and now the city was known as Catholic. The University was carefully un-reformed and lost what luster it still had. It was certainly an advance for Desiderius when he left Strasbourg for Basel. And though the annexation was military and by force, it was the great Reformed University, unlikely as it seemed then, that pushed and convinced the city into giving up its independence. Certainly in Basel, only the University would have the prestige and force to bring about such a transition.

  Though Wars of Religion had ended, the Wars of Philosophy now raged, less violent and more literate. Strasbourg was Cartesian, while Basel was not. Strasbourg was also a Rhine city, but not on the Rhine. It was a mile from the bank on a small tributary river. And if a man in Strasbourg wished to cross the Rhine by carriage, with his horses’ hooves on a dry road, he would need to come the eighty miles to Basel.

  For the greatest difference was that Strasbourg had no Rhine bridge.

  I was still thinking of pendulums as I came to Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen. I watched her broom swing, and a hanging pot sway, and a clock hand swirl, and a ripple in the washbowl swim, and the sunlight through the window walk; all of them in motion repeating. I thought about how words went out and echoes came back, how word went out and consequence came back. How ideas went out and change came back, how something unknown could go out, and a death come back.

  Wondering how anyone could stay unmoving in that storm, I came to the front sitting room to take wood to its fireplace. I found Daniel there musing; and his reverie was also oscillatory. He was standing and in his hands was a small table. He gripped it firmly, and the table flew up, and around, and down, like a bird wheeling and circling. Some odd mechanism was on the table but not falling off as the table flew. He saw me and cried, “Leonhard! You’ll drown!”

  “In what?” I said and dropped my wood on the hearth.

  “In the waves and wind!” He leaned to one side and to the other and his table rode high and low, a ship in a storm. “It’s a rare tempest about you here and you’re walking on water.”

  “Peace, then, Daniel,” I said, “and be still. What sea are you in?”

  “A sea of deception. Look what I have.” He set the table to safe harbor on the calm floor. It was an hourglass tied to it, with twine from the table legs knotted to the glass’s odd base. “See the sand? It’s about to run out. Now look.” From another, un-wavetossed table, he held another hourglass. “Identical. They both have kept the same time, one through the storm and one landlocked.” The last grains of sand did run through each at the same moment. I looked at the intricate base twined to the table. It was gimbaled and pivoted, and as I watched he tilted the table one way and another; the glass stayed upright. “See it? An hourglass that measures time evenly, even as a ship pitches. I had a blower in Padua make the glass for me, and a tinker make the frame to my design.”

  It was an anti-pendulum, still while all else was moving. “Why did you make it?”

  He was very intent on it. “For the Paris Competition.” He made an effort, for a moment, to seem as if it was trivial. But then he saw my grin, and no veil could have covered the bright light in his eyes and his own broad smile. “The problem this year,” he said, with passion, “is to tell how fast a ship moves against the water.” I knew this fervor in him. The only time that he was completely sincere and truthful was when he was in its grip, and it only sprung from his fascination with machines and their Mathematics: Daniel rendered childlike! “The captain throws out a log on a rope and measures how many knots on the rope the ship passes in a minute. But how can they measure the time? A time glass only keeps steady time if the ship is steady.”

  “Until now,” I said.

  “Yes, until now! Now a captain can have a glass that keeps steady in an unsteady world. Last winter I sent the plans to the Paris Academy. And a working model!”

  “What was their response?”

  He collapsed. Childish joy was brittle. “No response. I haven’t heard from them. The judging is complete, though. I’ll hear one way or another, and I know which way it will be.”

  “Where would they have sent their letter?”

  �
�Here.”

  “Have you received any mail here?”

  “Not a scrap.”

  “None was waiting, either?”

  “Not any.” Then the old Daniel returned, bright, shrewd, confiding. “And he wouldn’t, I know it. Not even him.”

  “Your father, you mean?”

  “Even he wouldn’t hold mail from me. It would come out soon enough, then he’d be in a real scandal.”

  “Could there be any reason he would?” I asked.

  “His strongest reasons are jealousy and spite. He couldn’t stand that I’ve won! He’d be in delirium.”

  “But you say he’d never hold mail from you. And the winner of the Paris Competition is no secret. How will you hear who won? It would be in newspapers. There’d be more letters, too, from Societies.”

  “I know it’ll come,” he said. “I want to hold that letter in my hand!”

  “What will you do with it?”

  He went cold, as cold as ice. “I’ll wave it under his nose, till he faints from the smell of it.”

  An hour later, back at home and done with all the morning, I pictured the hourglass. To a man on the deck of a ship, it would seem it was the glass that was whirling and twisting; and to the glass, the man would be. And which would be right? Was there any true level to measure against? Or was every man the only measure of his own life? Everything would be shaken, and then maybe it would be plain what was fast and what was loose. I could hear a storm about me, with wind and rain, and saw its clouds and felt its cold and penetrating wet, even if the streets of Basel were sun-filled and pleasant. I wasn’t sure what was an anchor.

  My grandmother gave me a warning as I left the house in proper black and white. “You aren’t too wise, Leonhard, as you might think, and you might be too clever.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I don’t think I’m wise at all, and everyone’s more clever.”

  As appointed, I awaited and met Cousin Gottlieb at his own front door at the hour of twelve. I’d been unable the previous night to present myself appropriately as the Inquisitor’s Assistant. Now, even properly black and white and with paper and ink, I still did not meet Cousin Gottlieb’s expectations.

  He frowned at me from his door. “Is that all you have?” he asked. I knew what he meant.

  “It is my only.”

  He returned to his closet and then returned to me, and in his hand was an item I viewed with both awe and anxiety.

  “Put this on,” he said.

  I put my hand on my own hat. As it had always been, it was plain black with a wide round brim, turned up on either side, and projecting from my head front and back, as was proper for a student. I took it off. From Cousin Gottlieb’s hand, I received, and donned, a slightly worn but still unimpeachable tricorne. It sat on my wig emanating maturity, respectability, wisdom, and significance. I could feel it. My fellow students would laugh if they saw me, but nervously. There were consequences for mocking a gentleman.

  “I will examine the trunk first,” Gottlieb said, though he was still examining me, weighing whether I could hold up my hat. My head had never had such a weight, and I hoped my brain was dense enough for the task. “It is at the Watch Barracks.”

  So, to the Watch Barracks we went. This military hub of the city was on Martinsgasse, directly behind the Town Hall. It was once nearly a small castle, but years of peace had softened its castellation to mere heaviness. Narrow windows had been widened, wide towers lowered. The last real threat, two decades past, had been from France. Since then sharp edges had rusted and dulled some, but were still at hand and could be re-sharpened at need. The world wasn’t yet peaceful.

  It was Simeon who took us past a mess hall, a sleeping hall, an armory of muskets and axes, a cell with thick bars, and a line of rusted suits of plate armor on stands and tired of standing, to a storeroom lit by high, tiny windows only a flying mouse could have got through. But there was enough light through them to see the black trunk, dull, heavy, and empty of both life and death, in the center of the floor.

  I’d seen the trunk twice before, in Master Johann’s kitchen and in the Market Square, and both had been with Knipper woeful. Now it was without him, dusty, old, and black, and maybe as his coffin better than the box he’d had for burial. I tried to remember it on Mistress Dorothea’s stone floor; I thought it had been dusty there, also. Dust to dust. Gottlieb seemed turned to dust himself, staring at it. He took in a deep breath and it was a long time before he let it out.

  “Open it,” he finally said. I knelt to do that, putting my black breech knee onto the plank floor, and the same dust. I had a tremor of nervousness as I put my hand to the latch, and I must have looked the same as the gendarme when he’d opened it. But it was empty. I lifted the lid and laid it back to the floor, and stayed bowing and close while Gottlieb inspected from above. Its open throat had little to say. There was no sign on the wood, either the strong frame or the smooth planed sides, of its last contents. But it wasn’t purely plain. “Is there a marking in it? In the back corner, on the left. At the bottom.” I’d already noticed there was. I looked closer. An emblem was branded into the wood.

  “It is a spiral,” I said.

  Gottlieb was displeased. “What type?” he said bluntly and as though he knew what the answer would be.

  “Logarithmic.”

  “That complicates greatly.”

  I considered Logarithmic spirals superior to Archimedean, and I knew Gottlieb also must, so it must have been not the spiral itself that irritated him, but its implication. I put my finger on it and something rubbed off, not quite hard, and crumbly. I rolled a crumb of it over my thumb. Gottlieb was no longer watching me. He hadn’t been, much, since he’d seen the trunk. But at this point he was not at all.

  A boot had stepped into the room and onto his thoughts; the gendarme of Strasbourg had arrived.

  “I’ve been sent for you” were his first words. “Come immediately.”

  Gottlieb only looked up at him from the trunk. Perhaps he truly had to pause and think what he would say, but certainly the hesitation was an affront to the soldier. Finally he said, “You were sent by your Magistrate Caiaphas?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “What is your name?” Gottlieb had clasped his hands together behind his back, but made no other move.

  “I am Foucault.”

  Gottlieb nodded. “I have questions for Caiaphas. Take me to him.”

  This presented Gendarme Foucault with a difficulty: To obey his own Master, he needed also to obey Gottlieb. When he finally managed a reply, it was simply, “You must come at once.”

  But Gottlieb had him off balance. “Who opened this trunk in Strasbourg?”

  “Magistrate Caiaphas did,” he said, before he thought to refuse.

  “Caiaphas himself! Even the driver was afraid to admit that. Why did he open it? And why doesn’t he want that known?”

  This was far beyond Foucault’s ability. He was a picture of confusion. “You must come!” he said at last. “At once!”

  “Yes, take me to him,” Gottlieb said, and I only had time to close the trunk and run after them.

  Many places in Basel were suitable for a Magistrate: the Town Hall; the wealthy homes of the great merchants, the grand Councilors, and the Deans and leading Chairs of the University; even the highest churches had very adequate guest quarters. Of course, no place in Basel was sumptuous. Instead, they were honorable and worthy. But the Boot and Thorn was not any of these. Caiaphas had chosen to be a protestant against Reformed Basel by exiling his person to a private room in an inn. At least Gustavus had done him the honor of not requiring him to share it with other travelers.

  As we had been the night before, we were taken to somewhere within the pile of the inn that surely couldn’t have existed in real geometry. In and up and in more, all the time turning corners, I felt we must be in the middle of the Barefoot Square if all the distances and angles had been measured. But we were at a door in a narrow hall that had
no other doors.

  Foucault knocked on that door. “Your guard, Lord Caiaphas. I have brought the man.”

  I thought the barracks where we were apprehended must have been Gethsemane. Foucault might have been better named Malchus. I determined myself not to deny that I knew Gottlieb.

  “Then bring him in,” Caiaphas said.

  Foucault opened the door as if it had been to an imperial chamber. He bowed and stood aside for Gottlieb to enter. The room was no better than any inn had in German or French lands. It was small with bare floor and walls; this had one window. Outside the window was a courtyard which must have been internal to the inn. I’d never seen it.

  The only furnishings in the room were a plain chair and barrel table, and the huge bed. The bed was the reason for the room, and on Gustavus’s profitable nights it would hold three or four or five paying sleepers. It filled the space as law filled a courtroom. With Caiaphas present, in his wig and robe, the chamber became a tribunal.

  “You are Gottlieb?” he asked.

  “You are Caiaphas?” he was answered.

  “You know that I am!”

  “I do, and you know that I am, though it’s been twenty years since I saw you. I want to know why you have come to Basel.”

  I anticipated the Magistrate bursting. He seemed to live in a state of anger. “I have come to require an Inquiry of you.”

  “I am the Inquiry,” Gottlieb said. “You have some reason for wanting it, and it wants to know why. Why did you open the trunk?”

  “Who told you that I did?” Caiaphas said, and Foucault answered by gasping.

  Gottlieb pressed in. “Did you know what would be in it?”

  “Your authority doesn’t run here,” he answered. “I am not answering questions.”

  “I have authority in all of Basel.”

  “You are not in Basel. When I am in this room it is Strasbourg.”