HS03 - A Visible Darkness

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘They may have gone back where they came from,’ he said. ‘If that was the game, whoever sent them would have welcomed back the thieves with open arms. Until they’d laid their hands on what the girls had stolen, that is. At that point, they could be dispensed with.’

  ‘If the French sent the girls to steal Spener’s treasure,’ I countered, seeing the holes in his argument, ‘why content themselves with three pieces? They could have stormed in here with a troop of soldiers and seized the lot. Still, there is a way to settle the business,’ I said, taking Kati Rodendahl’s piece of amber out of my pocket. ‘Pastor Bylsma, is this specimen one of the stolen pieces?’

  Gurten’s hand shot out. Instinctively, I closed my fist around it.

  ‘I . . . I thought it was about to fall, sir,’ Gurten said apologetically.

  ‘Pastor Bylsma,’ I said again, turning to him, indicating that he should open his palm and stretch it out. As he did so, I placed the nugget in his hand.

  Gurten leant forward and peered at the amber.

  ‘A wasp . . . a bee of some sort, sir,’ he said. ‘But absolutely enormous.’

  If eyes had hands, I thought, that gaze of his would have carried the prize away.

  Bylsma shook his head. ‘The size is right, it’s pretty enough,’ he said, obviously caring little for amber that had not belonged to Jakob Spener, ‘but this is not one of the pieces missing from the reliquary.’

  ‘Where did you find a piece of that quality, sir?’ Gurten asked.

  I picked the amber up between my thumb and forefinger, and put it safely away in my pocket. ‘On the body of the girl who was murdered three days ago,’ I told him. ‘The killer did not find it. If he was looking, that is.’

  Bylsma made a rapid sign of the cross.

  ‘Pastor Bylsma,’ I said, ‘I need your help, sir. Would you direct me to the office in Nordcopp where the amber-gatherers are recruited. I believe it is called the Round Fort.’

  Edviga had mentioned the place the night before.

  I intended to see it for myself.

  19

  ‘IT’S OUT ALONG the coast road, going east, sir.’

  Pastor Bylsma turned to me with an approving smile. ‘You have chosen well, Herr Procurator,’ he said. ‘This assistant of yours knows the area better than many of the local inhabitants. No one goes to the Round Fort very much these days.’

  ‘I went there with my father several times for the fur-trading,’ Gurten explained.

  Bylsma’s words rang in my ears as we left the convent. Had I chosen Gurten, or had he chosen me? As for whether I would allow him to assist me in the investigation, the question was still unresolved in my own mind.

  We left town by the South Gate, where four French soldiers were on guard.

  ‘Had your fill of praying, then?’ one of them barked at me.

  I did not reply, as we hurried out onto the dusty Königsberg turnpike. Johannes Gurten wore a stylish dark brown corduroy riding-jacket. An unstoppable fountain of news and information all morning, now he walked in brooding silence at my side. His eyes were fixed on the road, his brow was dark, and he had nothing at all to say for himself.

  ‘Is something troubling you?’ I asked him.

  ‘The French, sir!’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘They care nothing for our traditions.’

  ‘You’ll have to get used to them if you hope to work for me,’ I warned him.

  ‘Our religion means nothing to them,’ he burst out.

  ‘The less they know about Jakob Spener and his treasure,’ I replied, ‘the better.’

  Gurten stopped short and stared at me.

  ‘Surely they must learn to respect Pietism?’ he challenged.

  I thought for a moment of sending him back to where he had come from. I had trouble enough with the French. I did not need a Prussian provocateur at my side to make matters worse.

  ‘Listen to me,’ I said sharply. ‘I’m not employed to teach the French our history and traditions. Don’t you understand my position? The French authorities ordered me to come here. I must give a good account of myself to them. There is a murderer in Nordcopp, and he will not be caught without their help. This is a criminal case. You said this morning that you chose me as your tutor. Let me offer you another choice. Stay here and help me, or take the next coach to Berlin. I’m sure they can still find a place for you in the offices of Otto von Rautigan!’

  Gurten looked up sharply.

  ‘I would not wish to make your task more onerous than it is, Herr Stiffeniis,’ he said. ‘But my heart ran away with my tongue. I can never forget that you were once the confidant of Herr Professor Kant. He recognised your qualities. Indeed, sir, I believe that he saw talents in you that no lesser man would ever have guessed at.’

  He spread his hands wide as if to display the sincerity of his sentiments.

  ‘That’s why I wish to become a magistrate, sir. That is why I hoped to serve you, to learn from you what you had learnt from Professor Kant. Why, even now I feel as though he is listening to our conversation!’

  I hoped that Kant was deaf to all living voices. As deaf as he was dead. My only wish was to cancel from my memory the days that I had spent in Königsberg. I wanted to forget that Kant had ever chosen me to work at his side. Instead, Gurten threw the fact in my face, expecting me to boast proudly of all that I had learnt under the tutelage of the philosopher whom he admired without reserve. If I had one desire, one ardent wish that I did not dare confess—I hardly dared admit it to myself—it was that the French would extirpate the name of Immanuel Kant from the history of Prussia.

  ‘You know much of me, Gurten,’ I admitted. ‘But I know nothing of you. If I do decide to tutor you, I would like to know more.’

  The dark cloud shifted from the young man’s face.

  He chatted amiably, telling me stories from his family life, his schooling, and, most especially, his time at the University of Dresden. He had begun by studying medicine for a year or two, but then he had visited Königsberg, paying homage at the tomb of Immanuel Kant. He had read a newspaper account of Immanuel Kant’s last days—my name was mentioned in the article, he said—where much was made of our hunt for a murderer who was terrorising the city.

  ‘As a consequence, I decided to change to jurisprudence,’ he concluded. ‘Just as you did, sir.’

  What would Gurten have thought if he had known the real motive which had induced me to become a magistrate? Would he still have held me up as a paragon to admire and follow?

  We did not have to walk very far, which was fortunate, given the persisting heat. The Round Fort was not a mile from Nordcopp. Before the French arrived, Pastor Bylsma said, the building had been used for centuries as a stronghold repository by the margraves of Marlbork. The aristocratic family had held the royal mandate for the amber working on that stretch of coast for generations, until the French invaders seized possession of their monopoly. Now, the Round Fort was a local labour station for the French administration. Each Monday morning, new girls were taken on to replace the ones who had run away of their own accord, often without collecting their pay, or to replace others who had decided to leave the employment for some reason known only to themselves, but with money due to them in their hands.

  Naturally, I thought, Colonel les Halles would close the place at his earliest convenience.

  ‘Byslma did not say that the place was falling down,’ I observed, as we caught our first sight of the tower. Nor had he said how old the building was.

  Thirty feet high, and almost twice as wide, the Round Fort squatted on the crown of the hill like a well-fitting hat. Its walls were a dense mosaic of grey and black stones set in a muted green overcoat of moss. Round and smooth, of every size from very large to very small, those stones had not come from the local seashore. Somebody had gone to a deal of trouble to import the materials and build that stronghold. A crumbling curtain-wall on top of the fort was castellated to aid defence. Angled arrow-slits had been cut in the wall to a
llow the defenders to fire obliquely on anyone trying to undermine or storm it. I was impressed by the strategic position of the edifice.

  Equally, I was impressed by something that Johannes Gurten had just said.

  ‘Just think, sir, the Teutonic Order controlled the amber trade for several hundred years,’ he said, his voice bubbling with ardour. ‘Can you imagine the riches that must have passed through their hands?’

  ‘All gone,’ I murmured. ‘Mutatis mutandis.’

  ‘Are you certain about that, sir?’ Gurten challenged. ‘Can six hundred years of valiant history be wiped out by a single battle, and a temporary subjection to a foreign power? Is Prussia dead? A man may wear his heart upon his sleeve, but he will hide his truest feelings deep within his soul if he is wise. We share that sentiment, I do believe. Professor Kant has shown that thought and action are not invariably consistent.’

  He might have been waiting for me to agree with him.

  When I said nothing, he added passionately, ‘Prussia is crushed, but for the moment only. The Prussian eagle will soar again.’

  From the look of the Round Fort, I thought, Prussia had been crushed for Eternity.

  We reached the top of the hill, and stopped before the entrance to catch our breath. A dry ditch ran around the building, twenty feet deep, and wider still. Access to the only door in the squat tower was provided by a narrow bridge constructed of the same heavy stone. As we walked across it, Johannes Gurten read out a date that was carved above the door. ‘Thirteen hundred and two,’ he intoned, as if the numbers were some magical code from the Kabbalah.

  Above the arch, an ancient inscription had been recently chipped and chiselled at. Someone had tried to obliterate the Gothic lettering, though it had proved no easy matter to dent the granite slab so deeply set in the wall.

  Teutonic Order

  ‘Do you see, sir?’ he said, pointing up. ‘We cannot be so easily cancelled out.’

  ‘If I were you,’ I advised him, ‘I’d be more guarded in my speech. We do not know who runs this place. Perhaps the French themselves. At the very least, they finance it. This is where they find replacement labour. A magistrate must listen first, and only judge when he has heard all sides of a case.’

  If I sounded overly pedantic, I made no attempt to soften the lesson.

  ‘Better a reprimand now than a year in a French labour camp,’ I warned him.

  ‘I’ll watch what I say,’ he promised with an apologetic smile.

  His loose tongue was the best proof of his ingenuous nature, I thought to myself. Even so, I was not so foolish as to trust him entirely. Wouldn’t a spy speak in the most enthusiastic terms of his nationalist sympathies if he wished to sound out my opinions on the same subject?

  There was no need to knock on the squat fortified door. It hung loose from the upper hinge, and was so heavy that a team of labourers would have been required to set it straight again. The wood was leached grey with age, damp, and salty encrustations.

  And so, with no undue hindrance, Gurten and I invaded and took the citadel.

  The place appeared to be deserted.

  ‘Is anybody here?’ I called.

  My voice echoed around the large circular stone chamber.

  It was dark and chill, almost impossible to see the perimeter wall on the far side of the room. Motes of dust jigged and danced in the beam of sunlight coming in through the door. There was no other source of illumination.

  I heard the scrape of a boot on the stone floor, then a man of middle height and great age stepped out of the shadows.

  ‘What can I do for you, sirs?’

  I identified myself and Johannes Gurten—it was, I recall, the first occasion on which I chose to describe him as my assistant—then I asked the old man who he was.

  ‘Benedikt Tanzig, Herr Procurator. At your ser vice.’

  ‘And you are . . . ?’

  ‘The archivist, sir. Now, I am more of a caretaker. Paid by the Margrave of Marlbork to maintain his fortress and his records. In the interests of neighbourliness, I also do the picking on a Monday for the French gentlemen. They’re supposed to take on women for the amber workings,’ he explained. Then, he sneered: ‘I know what they should be looking for. In the way of fit women, if you know what I mean.’

  I hid a smile by coughing into my hand. Herr Tanzig could not have been less than seventy years of age. Sans hair, sans teeth, sans who knew what else!

  ‘When they bother to come,’ he rumbled on. ‘The girls, I mean, sir. There aren’t so many these days looking for this sort of work. Won’t be any before too long from what I be hearing.’

  ‘How many girls were taken on by the French last Monday?’ I asked him.

  Tanzig raised his hand, crushed his gnarled fist to his bare gums, blew hard, and let out a curious popping sound. ‘Not a one, sir,’ he answered. ‘And no one came up from the camp either. Usually they send an officer. No hiring officer, no hands to hire. There are always accidents, girls running off . . .’

  ‘Or being murdered,’ I put in.

  He sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘Makes no difference to them, does it?’

  Clearly, he was talking about Colonel les Halles and his officers.

  ‘Amber isn’t what it used to be, Herr Procurator. I been here close on fifty years. There were men here then, as well. But the great King Frederick turned the country into a barracks. All men had to serve in the army. Which left the women in the water. When the margrave had the diggings, we’d have twenty, thirty, forty comely wenches lining up, depending on the season.’

  ‘What difference does the season make?’ Gurten had taken a step forward.

  ‘Very few in winter, sir. Count ’em on one hand. Them’s the desperate ones—work, or starve! Spring’s the very best time. That’s when the pick ’o the crop turn up in droves. Big, strong, healthy wenches, thighs like tree-trunks!’ he exclaimed with a toothless leer. ‘When harvesting comes around, that lot go off to do a bit of reaping out in the fields, sir. Get free ale, bread and cheese, and a lark about in the hay with the workmen. Them girls, they . . .’

  ‘What about the summer?’ I interrupted him. ‘What happens when the weather’s very hot, like it is today?’

  ‘Generally good. But times are changing, sir,’ he said, and rubbed his hands. ‘As I told you, Monday last there wasn’t one.’

  ‘Which archives do you keep?’ I enquired.

  He made that popping sound again with his gums. ‘Archives keeps themselves as a rule. In the old days,’ he went on, ‘we used to weigh and add the totals for all the amber that was being brought in daily. Herr Margrave had three collection centres down along the coast. Every night they’d bring it up here for safe-keeping. Six armed guards, there were. The round house is impregnable when the door . . . that is, when the door was locked! Now, the French make their own arrangements. Have to fix the door again once they’re gone,’ he said dismissively. ‘I keep the paperwork here. Try to keep the place in order . . .’

  ‘Can I see these records?’ I interrupted brusquely.

  Herr Tanzig sniffed, then shook his head. ‘Without permission, sir, I couldn’t do that,’ he said.

  ‘Permission from the French?’ I queried.

  ‘No, sir,’ he chuckled quietly. ‘Not them. They don’t give a toss one way or the other. The margrave, sir. The Margrave of Marlbork, my master.’

  ‘And where may he be found?’ I asked. My patience was running thin. The French were bad enough, but this decrepit Prussian book-keeper was worse.

  ‘I would not know precisely, sir,’ he said. ‘He may be on the Marlbork estate, that’s twenty miles t’other side of Lotingen, or he may be off someplace else. It’s more than a year since I had a reply to one of my despatches. You’ll have to go . . .’

  Gurten took a brisk step forward, and clasped hold of Tanzig’s hand.

  For a moment, I thought that he was about to ask my permission to whip the man. In the days of Frederick the Great, a superio
r official would often whip an underling, or order him to be whipped. Instead, he began to drop coins into Tanzig’s palm. Having counted out five, he twisted the archivist by the wrist, and brought his shoulder low. He gazed down into the old man’s face, and said: ‘I hardly think we need to trouble the margrave, do you?’

  Tanzig nodded, and Gurten let him go.

  ‘Now,’ he said, while the old man pocketed the coins and made a fuss of rubbing his wrist, ‘I believe Herr Procurator Stiffeniis would like to visit this archive of yours without further delay.’

  A stone staircase hidden in the deepest shadows curved up along the wall.

  Herr Tanzig led us to the floor above without a word.

  All was blinding light up there.

  The circular room was slightly smaller than the one below on account of the dictates of military architecture. Sloping castle walls are harder to climb, and easier to defend, Leonardo da Vinci once declared, and no one had ever dared to challenge his wisdom. But the upstairs chamber had not been used as a military keep in a long time. Indeed, where once a round hole in the stone roof had let in rain—the only source of water in that barren land—the aperture had been domed with panes of glass to let in light alone. The sun shining strongly through it spread the pattern of the leaded window-frame like the legs of a spider which seemed to hold the room in its embrace.

  I peered at the custom-made arrangement of ancient shelves and cubby-holes that had been constructed all around the walls. It might have been a pigeon-loft, but there were no pigeons. Each dusty hole was stuffed with a ledger or a bulging folder containing a sheaf of papers.

  ‘How many ledgers are there?’ I mused aloud. I looked around and began to calculate: from 1306 to the present day. That was 502 years. Multiply it by fifty-two . . . I began to multiply by fifty instead, thinking it was easier. Then I would add 1004 to my total.

  ‘Twenty-six thousand, one hundred and four,’ said Gurten instantly.

  ‘Impossible!’ I said, looking around me. There were certainly many hundreds of spaces in the wooden honeycomb, perhaps a thousand books and bundles of paper, but hardly so many thousands. And some of the holes along the right-hand side were empty, still waiting to be used.