Suddenly, he turned to me.
‘You might think of it as a diplomatic exchange,’ he said. ‘I prefer to consider it a swapping of favours.’
He said no more until the boat drew alongside.
As the men climbed aboard, les Halles leant over the water. ‘Robert,’ he called. ‘Row the magistrate back to the beach. Make sure that he is permitted to speak with the women. He can question whoever he pleases, and go wherever he wishes to go inside the camp today.’
He turned to me, his eyes bright. ‘Now, it is your turn, Stiffeniis.’
‘My turn for what?’
‘To give me something in exchange. Your report to the general. I mean to read it.’
21
THE TRUMPET SHALL sound,
The dead will be raised . . .
Bodies lying prone and apparently lifeless on the shore suddenly began to stir and rise up. It was like the vision of the Day of Judgement in Corinthians.
‘That first blast sounds the reveille,’ Robert explained, more loquacious now that Colonel les Halles had sanctioned fraternisation with the Prussian. ‘When it blows again, the women must enter the sea. It’ll be hard to know exactly where each one is. Do you have any names in mind, monsieur?’
The girls were spreading out along the shore. In their gleaming leather garments, each one holding up a spear or net on a long pole, they looked like insects, their antennae twitching defensively as if they feared to be attacked. Glancing down the line, I searched for the girl. The women’s faces were invisible inside their leather hoods, so I was obliged to name her.
‘Only that one, monsieur?’
‘For the moment,’ I nodded.
The boat beached on the pebbles some way from the women. As we dragged the boat out of the water, I looked back over the sea that we had crossed. Sitting low on the eastern horizon was a burnished silvery plate, looking more like a pale moon than the sun of a new day. It cast a blue metallic light on the sea, the sky and the distant barge.
Another squall was coming on.
For a moment I imagined the coq du mer swept away.
But then again, the women would be carried off, as well.
‘Find her quickly, Robert,’ I incited him, struggling forward on the shifting pebbles. I had to stop her from entering the water, keep her safe by speaking to me until the storm had passed.
‘Wait over there, monsieur.’ He pointed to a group of huts raised on stilts above the sea. ‘I’ll send her to you.’
He sounded like a pimp, and this unpleasant impression was reinforced, as I made my way towards the huts. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I heard him call across to the trumpeter. ‘The Prussian magistrate’s got his eye on one of the lasses.’
Vulgarities followed on, but the trumpet did not blow.
I swallowed my pride as I stepped onto the narrow wooden gang-plank which connected the shore and the compound where the women lived. The place was deserted. Six wooden huts protected from the worst of the sea by a small bay and a curving shingle haf a mile from the shore. I stuck my head inside the first cabin, quickly pulled it out again. The air was stale and salty, rotten with the mouldy smell of warm bodies and damp clothes. Like seaweed-covered rocks at low tide.
The hut was tiny, yet it contained six narrow pallets, one along each wall, two more in the centre. Each head would be very close to someone else’s feet. What little space remained was taken up by a makeshift table and two wobbly chairs. The walls were hung with grotesque souvenirs of the deep: knotted tangles of wood like arthritic hands, the skeleton of a tope, a collection of dried-out crabcases. Large sea-shells dangled from the ceiling, tinkling like bells as I touched them. It would be a crashing symphony when a wind rushed through the room. In the corner, a covered pan stood on a tiny cast-iron stove. The odour of recently fried fish hung heavily in the air. A small wooden shutter had been thrown open to expose a tiny hole in the wall, though it could not improve the circulation of air.
‘Where were you last night, Herr Stiffeniis?’
Edviga Lornerssen seemed taller, even more statuesque, than I remembered.
‘Is the baby born?’ she asked me eagerly.
‘I’ve not been home,’ I replied defensively. ‘I stayed in Nordbarn, sheltering from the weather.’
What was I doing? Justifying the fact that I had not been in the camp last night?
She came towards me slowly, shrugging off her leather hood, shaking out her hair like a hunting-dog after a ducking. Droplets of dew glistened in her hair. With a sudden sweep of her hands she pulled back her tresses, revealing her ears and the fullness of her face. Two points of colour hung from her lobes. Amber suspended on knotted thread. Tiny pink eggs, glazed and polished to perfection. The Botticelli Venus flashed into my mind. I had seen it once in Florence. Only the pale nudity was missing and the sea-shell on which the dea floated. Edviga had not emerged from some azure southern sea, but from our own murky northern pond. She was taking a risk, showing herself to the world with amber hanging from her ears.
‘Were you looking for me again last night, Edviga?’
Was she wearing amber the night before, as well? For me to see?
‘I was,’ she said. ‘I came in the dark so nobody could see me.’
She looked around the hut to check that there was no one else. She was reproaching me, I realised. Meeting her alone like this was dangerous for her. Everybody in the camp might suspect that she was telling me things that were better left unsaid. Her friends, the friends of those friends, might believe it was best if she did not speak to me at all. I was, and always would be, the Prussian working for the French.
We stood in silence, face to face.
‘What do you want from me?’ she asked.
I saw her ner vous ness, and felt the ambiguity of the situation.
‘You must help me,’ I said, my voice harsher than I intended.
‘First let me out of this restrictive cage,’ she said, her fingers running like quick spiders over the thick laces of her bulky leather uniform. She slipped the upper half of the heavy costume off from her shoulders. Beneath, she wore a thin white singlet. As she sat herself down on the nearest bed, she wrinkled her nose. ‘Last night was dreadful, the sea was wild and cruel. It isn’t over yet,’ she said, looking towards the door.
Black clouds were gathering on the horizon, swallowing up the grey.
‘If you are here,’ I said, ‘you’ll not be in the water . . .’
‘That’s not what I’m afraid of, sir,’ she said, staring fixedly at me. ‘I was thinking of poor Ilse. They threw her body in the sea last night. You kept your promise, didn’t you? I mean, you know, the bit of amber . . .’
A lie may damn one’s soul, yet ease the suffering of someone else’s.
‘I placed it where you said. Beneath her tongue.’
‘Thank God for that,’ she said in a whisper.
Outside, the trumpet sounded. Muted cries were heard. Women crying to their neighbours to ‘stand further off’ or ‘go more to the left.’ The language was strong in tone, the vocabulary rich, but the racket soon died down, and the soothing flow of the waves lapping gently on the shore took its place.
‘Kati and Ilse may have gone to Nordcopp,’ I began. ‘Some months ago.’
Edviga looked up sharply.
‘Two girls took refuge in the Church of the Saviour. They stole amber relics from the sacristy when they left. Did all of the women know that there was precious amber in the church?’
Edviga shrugged her shoulders. ‘There has always been chatter.’
‘Did Kati and Ilse do the chattering?’ I asked.
‘We all tell tales,’ she laughed carelessly, ‘but we are a bunch of seasoned liars. Whores, thieves, and liars, as the French would say. And the folk in Nordcopp agree with them.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘The amber in Nordcopp church was not a fairy tale, then? And Kati had one of those pieces?’
‘It was very similar,’ I said. ‘It is possible, therefore,
that they might have known someone who was buying amber of that quality, whether found or stolen. I was hoping that you could tell me something more.’
‘Why should I know anything?’ she asked, rubbing her cheeks with her hands, causing those amber earrings to dance again.
‘Because you knew Kati and Ilse. And if they did not steal from the church, who did? Are there only two victims, or are other girls missing, as well?’
She stared at me, but did not say a word.
‘You told me that many girls had disappeared.’
‘Last month, a soldier told me that a girl had run away to Rus sia.’ She shrugged. ‘Was it true? He said the Colonel would hang her if he caught her, but maybe that soldier was trying to scare me. They threaten us all the time. It’s amber that they want, sir. I did not note that anyone was missing, but I know for sure that many other women have gone. Some came back, others didn’t.’
I decided to come at the question in a different way.
‘Where do you go, Edviga, when you leave the camp?’
‘Nordcopp, sir,’ she answered quickly. ‘Sometimes further.’
‘Carrying amber with insertions?’
‘Those are rare,’ was all that she would say.
‘And dangerous, too,’ I added.
‘We all go out. Kati, Ilse, and all the others. Sometimes we go alone, sometimes we go together. Usually we come back for more. Is that what you want to know?’
‘Did Ilse ever mention the Church of the Saviour when you were sharing the hut?’
‘We don’t speak much of where we go, or what we do. If you find a good piece, you don’t breathe a word to anyone. And as for robbing the church, sir, who’d dare speak of that? We may be friends, but amber is amber.’
Should I believe her?
Edviga had taken risks to honour her dead friends. Did that not mean that she felt strong ties with her companions? And weren’t those ties even stronger than her greed for amber? Or did she fear the ugly destiny that had befallen them; was she afraid to end her own days in the dark, cold depths of the Baltic Sea?
‘The girls who robbed the church told Pastor Bylsma that their names were Annalise and Megrete. But I can find no record of those names in the camp register . . .’
‘And so you thought that they were Ilse and Kati?’ Edviga interrupted.
I nodded. ‘Unless you know those girls by name. Annalise, Megrete. Have you ever heard of them?’
She was silent for a moment. ‘Names don’t mean a great deal here,’ she said. ‘I know the girls by sight, but only three or four by name. The camp is a sort of limbo, sir. In the real world, a name marks you out from others. Out there, you meet a person, and if you want to see him again, you give him your name. But here, what use are names? Why bother to learn them? Will I go looking for them, or they for me, when we get clear of this place?’
She was talking, but she had not told me much. Who did the girls sell amber to? Who might have stolen the amber from the church? Were Ilse and Kati Megrete and Annalise? Were there really two more victims than the French records showed?
Again, I changed tack.
‘You say you go to Nordcopp to sell amber,’ I began. ‘Tell me, Edviga, how would you find a buyer? Or do you go to one person alone?’
‘Me?’ She was looking down at her hands. Strong, dark with the sun, they rested elegantly joined in her lap. She looked up, held my gaze, and an expression of amused curiosity lit her face. ‘I go where the money is.’
‘Would you tell the buyer what you do, where you work?’
‘Never that!’ she countered. ‘Not until I know who I am talking to.’ She tilted her face at me. ‘I pretend to look for a bauble for a sister, say, who’s getting married. Amber is cheaper here than in Königsberg. That’s why I’ve come, I’d say. If they see me again and again, they’d think that I am a regular customer. Instead, I sell it to the right person,’ she said with convincing vivacity. ‘But only when I’m sure it’s safe.’
‘What about Erika Linder? Erika knows you all . . .’
‘Erika?’ she said, and smiled, turning her head away. ‘I’ve sold her things, of course. She is obsessed by amber more than anyone else in Nordcopp. She knows us all. She is attracted to the amber-girls. She clings to us, and wants to feel the strength in our arms and hands . . . You should see her, sir! I almost think that she is . . . well, that she is physically attracted to the amber-girls.’
This statement caused me to shiver.
‘She’s a strange little creature. Like the gnomes that roam the woods. She would not harm us, sir. She is in awe of us. We could snap her neck in an instant, if we wanted. She thinks that amber makes us beautiful. She thinks that it will make her beautiful and strong, as well, when she has gathered enough of it.’
‘Do you know where she lives in Nordcopp?’
She seemed less reticent now. She laughed and shook her hair out. It fell upon her shoulders, taking on a strange blonde reddishness. In that instant, Edviga herself looked like a supernatural creature from some other world. ‘I see her dwelling in an abandoned cellar like a bat,’ she said, ‘or nesting high in the trees with sparrowhawks. Or in a deep, dark hole dug by moles in the ground.’
‘That is precisely where I met her,’ I said with gravity.
Edviga laughed.
So, the girls could move about the town without being recognised, or challenged. And anyone who knew them would say nothing, so long as it suited them.
‘What about the French in town?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t they be on the look-out?’
Her eyes flashed wide. ‘We pay them, sir.’
I swallowed hard. ‘How do you pay them? Amber? Money?’
‘One or both, or something else,’ she replied without flinching. ‘They let us in, they let us out again.’
I looked away. That thought disturbed me.
There was nothing feminine about the leather breeches and the heavy laced-up boots that Edviga was wearing. Instead, I imagined her in pink hessian pumps, a matching summer gown of fine silk muslin. And dangling from her ears, two sparkling baroque pearls in the place of those bits of amber.
It was a blinding vision.
‘And yet,’ she said, throwing a glance in my direction, ‘if I had gone to Nordcopp church really seeking a safe refuge, I would have told the pastor who I was, and where I had come from. They know how difficult our lives can be. The French soldiers . . .’
She did not finish. What more was there to be explained?
‘But if I went to steal from the church, I would give no name at all.’
Edviga stopped abruptly, and looked down. Was she trying to tell me something?
‘What would you do?’ I encouraged.
‘I’d go about the business in a different way. To make sure no one there would be in a position to report the theft.’
‘How would you do that?’
‘There are things that no respectable priest wants the world to know.’
Gurten was right, then. Here was an explanation for the red cheeks of Pastor Bylsma. It explained the ease with which those amber relics had been taken from his charge. A diabolic sensuality emanated from those women, a sensuality no man could easily resist, according to Magda Ansbach. Not even a man of God, I thought.
‘Is that what Ilse and Kati would have done?’
‘It’s what Megrete and Annalise have done,’ she laughed. ‘Whoever they may be.’
One pace forward, two steps back. She might have been toying with me. It was not the first time she had done so. Beyond her shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the women working in the sea. The grey water reached their armpits. They prodded beneath the waves, swept the surface with their nets. Stark black outlines against a uniform grey backdrop of the sky, the sun casting a weak, slanting light across the scene.
‘How would you get in and out of the camp, Edviga?’
She clenched and unclenched her fingers, uncertain whether to answer me at all.
‘We wal
k upon the water,’ she said impulsively. ‘What else?’
She seemed to enjoy the ease with which she could perplex me.
‘Not like Jesus on the Sea of Galilee,’ she said. ‘We know the secrets of the coast. Out there, not far from the end of this enclosure, there is a level outcrop of solid rock. It’s three feet wide, a few feet below the surface of the sea. There was an ancient harbour here, they say. It runs due east for a quarter of a mile.’ She drew a line in the air with her finger. ‘You can walk along that wall at night without the risk of drowning in the sea. At that end of the beach, there is a guard-post. You must watch and wait, take your chance when it comes. Sometimes you manage to slip through. But other times, they catch you, and you have to pay.’
The naked corpse of Kati Rodendahl had been found down there.
‘You’d be soaked,’ I said incredulously. ‘How could you escape attention in that condition in Nordcopp? Quite apart from those clothes you are wearing. Anyone would guess where you come from, if . . .’
‘We don’t wear these,’ she smiled demurely. ‘We carry a dress and shoes in a bundle on our heads, the way a peasant woman carries a basket. Even in the winter. The water’s not so cold as you might think. If the bundle falls into the water, the game’s up, of course.’ Suddenly, her face clouded over. ‘Few of us can swim. One foot wrong, a wave that’s bigger than most, and you’ll be swimming in the dark for all Eternity.’
Had Kati Rodendahl lost her clothes in the sea? Had the killer met her naked on the beach? Ilse had been wearing a light summer gown when she reached the pigsty. Had she been carry ing a piece of amber hidden in her sex, as Kati was?
‘You took a great risk last night in such a storm,’ I said softly.
‘I had to,’ she replied even more softly.
We were murmuring like lovers. My cheeks were hot. Just like Pastor Bylsma’s.
‘Why did you have to come?’
‘I remembered something,’ she said. ‘Something Ilse spoke of. We were resting on the beach between one shift and the other. This was weeks ago, when we were sharing the same hut. She said she had received a strange proposal.’
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