Wohlrat looked up from the books, which had just been delivered from the censorship.
“Came by internal post,” Wohlrat answered. “No-one else has been here today. They’ve all been given the day off. This afternoon the Secret Association is holding a meeting behind locked doors. The Emperor’s indisposed again.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have seen the internal post arrive?”
Wohlrat gave him a weary look.
“The letter has not been stamped,” Langhans clarified. “You haven’t seen any private messengers? Or visitors?”
“You know as well as I do that no visitors are allowed. Secrecy, Langhans, is the only protection we have in a land of intrigues! And believe you me, apart from you, myself and the caretaker there’s not a living soul has set foot in here today. The copyist is off, just like everyone else, and I’ve been sitting five metres from the entrance since eight o’clock this morning. The internal post came at ten. Same errand boy as usual. Your letter can’t have flown in here on wings, can it?”
“Is the Emperor really indisposed?” Langhans asked, to cover up his unease.
“Epilepsy. Our monarch sets the tune for the bureaucracy, nothing works any more. Look!”
Wohlrat waved a folder across the desk. “I’m having to deal with censorship even though I, like yourself, have been educated in religious matters. The cutbacks have gone too far . . .” Wohlrat spat into an over-full spittoon, before sitting down at his desk. “Besides which, you have the authority to work in whatever way you see fit,” he said. “And if it’s a question of secret missions, you know where you must turn to.”
Langhans settled for this answer and returned perplexed to his office.
Once installed behind his desk, he unfolded the letter again and read, once, the forty-three words of the three sentences; then once more, to make sure he had understood it aright.
He couldn’t detect any messages between the lines, nothing that appeared to be out of order considering the nature of the errand. Receiving sensitive material from anonymous sources was part of his work, but his recent sense of being watched had made him suspicious. Officials, he thought, were pitched against each other in the power vacuum arising from the Secret Association’s court intrigues. Loyalties tended to shift, depending on whose protection they happened to be enjoying. Not even a man in his position was safe.
That someone wished to secretly hand in information about Count Kollowrat didn’t surprise him: an emperor who preferred book-learning to writing decrees, and charity to replenishing war funds paved the way for many possible intrigues. Vienna was astir with rumours. The Emperor’s marriage was childless, and his sister-in-law – or so it was said – was trying to induce him to abdicate. A secret court group with Metternich at the helm was ruling the land however it saw fit, but the Council was made up of enemies who spent most of their time conspiring against each other. Count Kollowrat was secretly attempting to have Metternich deposed and was seeking support from the third most powerful member of the council: Archdeacon Ludwig. With a political agenda like this, Langhans reflected, the letter ought not to arouse his suspicions. Yet it did.
Having completed some written recommendations concerning the day’s routine affairs, Langhans put his files aside. An hour remained before his meeting with the anonymous letter-writer.
Through the only window in the room he looked out over the afternoon traffic. On the other side of the street a coupé was parked. The coachman had fallen asleep on the box, but the curtain in the coach window stirred. It occurred to Langhans that whoever it was who had been following him might be in this particular coach, and watching him from there. But the longer he looked at the carriage, the less he felt this to be the case.
By now it was obvious that whoever had sent the letter must also be involved in the attempts to discompose him, and might, therefore, also be the same person who, without making his presence known, had been watching him at the inn. It was imperative that he find out why, and who it was.
One thing that still puzzled him was how the letter had found its way on to his desk. He was quite sure it hadn’t been delivered by internal post – the obligatory stamp was missing, and so was the caretaker’s pagination. Of course Wohlrat was correct in saying the letter couldn’t have flown in by itself. But it had not been lying there when he’d left the office earlier that day. The rest of the staff had been dismissed, and unless somebody had made themselves invisible and managed to walk into his office unseen, only one possibility remained . . .
He was interrupted in his ruminations as the object of his suspicion came into the corridor. Unable to hear the secretary’s footfall he became aware instead of the contours of his own thoughts. Something was bothering him, and this he confirmed on entering the room.
“Don’t you have an appointment in an hour’s time?” Wohlrat said.
“You’re well informed about my daily schedule.”
“Spare me your ironies, please. I’ve just received a report from the Ministry. They know you’re going to receive information about Kollowrat from a secret source, and the archdeacon’s delighted.”
“It said so in the letter I showed you.”
“What letter?”
“The one you said arrived by internal post . . .”
Wohlrat appeared unaffected by this insinuation. Instead he sighed and sat down on a chair.
“This work is tiring,” he said. “The circumstances demand discretion. We take great care not to find ourselves at loggerheads with anybody, but it’s impossible when the land’s being ruled the way it is.”
“It’s not being ruled, it’s being ‘managed’.”
“I know about your double loyalties, with Metternich on one side and the Vatican on the other, and that’s precisely why you ought to be more on your guard.”
Langhans did his utmost to track down what was going on in his superior’s head, but much to his surprise, and maybe dismay, he couldn’t pick up anything at all, only a dull weariness with his work, possibly with life itself.
“Considering the political situation”, Wohlrat went on, “and your vulnerable position, I was merely wondering whether you might not need an escort?”
The secretary was referring to a body of guards which for some time now had been at the disposal of the officials. This offer calmed Langhans somewhat. Maybe, he thought, the letter had in fact come by internal post, and they had simply forgotten to stamp it.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, “but I’d appreciate it if I could order a carriage.”
Wohlrat proffered one of his rare smiles.
“Send the coachman back when you’re done with this. And then take a few days off. You look awfully tired.”
In his thoughts Langhans accompanied his superior back to his office, where he sat down to resume the red tape of disappointment. But not even now, when the secretary ought to have eased up on his vigilance, did his consciousness revolve around anything but work, the Emperor’s indisposition, and the task of censor he considered ill-placed on his desk.
The address given by the letter-writer was near a market area on the northern outskirts of the city. A group of high-spirited people was crowding in front of an enclosure made of rough planks. No-one seemed to be waiting for Langhans.
He asked the coachman to hold the carriage. Got out. Went over to a drinking fountain where he’d be in full view and waited for the informer to appear.
He felt safe. The driver had been given orders to come to his rescue should anyone threaten him. But the minutes went by without anybody revealing themselves. Just as he had decided to abandon the rendezvous, he again got the feeling of being watched. But though he turned this way and that, he saw nothing suspicious.
Instead, without being able to explain why, he walked over to the area enclosed by the plank fence. A poster advertised animal contests. The crowd, he now realised, was in fact a sort of queue.
An inner voice whispering that the letter-writer wouldn’t make
himself known until he was inside the enclosure, he bought a ticket, on impulse, or so he told himself.
From his position on the stand he looked out over a makeshift arena. A rough fence separated the audience from the show ring. Not far from where he was standing, next to the stalls selling drinks, were some caged wild beasts. The animals were frightened out of their wits, he could feel their mortal anxiety as clearly as if it had been his own.
The impresario was wheeling and dealing with folk placing bets on the sanguinary spectacle they were about to witness. People were arriving in hordes. The stands were near filled to capacity.
Langhans let his gaze wander over the sea of people. Over and over again it came to a halt in a place near the wild boars’ cages; an empty patch, scarcely a square metre in size, where, oddly enough, there was nobody.
The crowd’s excitement was growing. The impresario, a man with a duelling scar on his cheek and a patch over one eye, was leading a real-life grizzly bear into the compound. The beast had an iron tether through its nose, and the tether was fastened to a metre-long chain. The beast’s nostrils must have been very sensitive, Langhans could find no other reason why it followed its master with such acquiescence.
In the middle of the arena the impresario affixed it to a metal hook on the ground. The lead was so short that the bear was unable to get up on its hind legs without tugging on its nose ring. It was going to have to fight on all fours.
Now another man was bringing in a pack of bloodhounds. The mastiffs were seething with excitement, baring their teeth and tugging at their leads, almost causing their owner to lose his balance. The man let them loose in the enclosure. A shudder passed through the crowd.
Dust whirled up when the dogs attacked. One of them sunk his teeth into the bear’s abdomen and tore off large tufts of its fur. Another hopped to and fro in front of the bear’s nose, feigning an attack, then withdrawing. The two remaining animals approached it on either side.
The bear flailed wildly, but the moment it struck with its paws in one direction, a dog would attack it from another. Again and again the tether stopped the bear from getting at its tormentors.
Then one of the dogs lost its balance, and with a movement which seemed unnaturally swift, the bear pinned it to the ground. A sound like a piece of cloth being ripped could be heard as the beast tore the dog’s belly open. The animal tried to drag itself away, its intestines trailing in the sand.
Foaming at the mouth, the mastiffs kept throwing themselves at the bear, as if to avenge their dying friend. The bear’s ear was ripped off, blood gushed from an abdominal wound and sinews lay exposed on a front paw.
Then, once more, something happened to change the scene. One of the dogs lunged at the bear’s back leg, feinted and withdrew; the bear tried to attack it with one paw but failed to notice the dog approaching from the side; with a single bite it tore off the bear’s nose.
Thick streams of blood welled out, as from a fountain. The beast gave a scream of pain, but now that the nostrils were completely gone, so was the tether. The bear reared up on its hind legs, snorting out its own blood.
Blood pumping from the open wound, the bear went on the attack. The dogs tried to escape, but the arena gates were closed. A sweetish smell of blood and intestines descended over the area.
The bear flung one of the dogs to the ground, and tore off its lower jaw. The animal was still alive when the bear turned round and went to attack its next tormentor.
The mastiffs’ owner was shouting out, calling for an end to this performance, it had gone too far, too much blood had already been spilled; but the audience held him back. Bloodlust, Langhans thought; ravenous for the suffering of others. They all bore within them a desire to witness others’ pain, to feel on their cheeks the breath of others’ deaths, the horror of a life so easily extinguished, the tremor that went through them all when one of them, for no good reason, almost nonchalantly, was snatched away simply because life was abandoning them . . . At the same instant, he again got that feeling of being watched. He looked around at the crowd, but as before, no-one stood out.
People’s thoughts were easier for him to pick up than they had been for a very long time. Over by the wild animals’ cages he saw the one-eyed ringmaster who had led out the bear. He was in a cold sweat of excitement, inebriated by the scent of blood. His consciousness was that of a drunk, and inside him someone was whispering, though Langhans couldn’t grasp exactly what.
The sun blazed down over the compound, and he was overcome by an intense thirst.
A little way off he saw a drinks stall, but the crowd was now so dense he couldn’t budge. Once again he picked up on the thoughts in the one-eyed man’s mind, or rather, the thoughts of someone else speaking to the one-eyed man and making him walk over to the cages of the last remaining beasts.
This is what happened. In response to some inexplicable inner command the one-eyed man, owner of an entire menagerie of wild animals, began walking towards them, towards the cage containing a highly aggressive wild boar. All this the one-eyed man did in a kind of a trance, little knowing it wasn’t his own will that was controlling his every action, but that of a small figure he couldn’t even see, even though he’d been standing less than a metre away for the last few hours, on a vacant spot in this human sea, vigilant of every step he took, but so unnoticed he could have been taken for thin air. And it was the wild boar’s cage, constructed of high-grade timber, that he now, inexplicably, opened, as panic broke out in the arena.
While the one-eyed man, believing he had temporarily lost his self-control having maybe had a drop too much to drink, was engaged in carrying out the invisible man’s will by releasing the wild boar, the bear, pain-crazed, had managed to break out of the compound, smashed through the fencing, and with blood splashing out of the open wound that formerly had been its nostrils, charged into the audience.
Langhans shuddered. Out in the arena he could see three of the dogs in their death throes, their bellies gashed open and intestines bared. The white corrosive sunlight illuminated this macabre scene. The bear flailed wildly. People fled in all directions. And in the midst of this chaos, this orgy of death, he became aware of how someone else, someone with a gift similar to his own but infinitely stronger, was planting his legionary will in the wild boar: driving it to rush out of its open cage, into the crowd of humans, and, ploughing ahead with Homeric force amid the horror-stricken onlookers, move with a speed only a wild boar can muster, until, to Langhans’ horror, it stood in the very place where he too was standing, pinned against a wall by the immense force of the panicking crowds.
You think you live a life, he heard a voice hiss inside him, but it’s life living us, and when we’re used up it carries on without us.
Apt final words, he thought, preparing himself for the horrific coda. The crowd had locked him into a sitting position, on a level with the beast’s tusks, sharp as awls. Confronted with this raw power his gift had little worth. At the very moment the bear avenged its humiliation, with one deft blow of its paw decapitating her one-eyed master, the wild boar, taking Langhans to be its enemy, went on the attack.
For such was the power of the man he couldn’t see, it could create something out of nothing, and carry a trick of substitution to its extreme. A beam of pure energy lifted up Langhans’ face, a concession, or so it seemed, to a sudden desire to look up at Vienna’s blinding white sky, but which in fact bared his throat to the wild animal’s tusks.
Where Hercule Barfuss was standing invisibly, or rather, unseen by the terrified crowd, it occurred to him that no man can imagine his own end, with the result that he dies astonished.
In order to fully enjoy the Jesuit’s imminent death from the inside, to pay him back for the loss of his one true love, he had placed his mind in the grandstand of Langhans’ consciousness. Yet, at the very last instant, something stopped him.
Langhans would subsequently recall how the wild boar had stopped short in mid-onrush, as if someone had command
ed it to halt. Then, turning round, it had gone calmly back to its cage. And, almost instantaneously, right there in front of him, as if appearing out of thin air, was the deformed boy.
Never before had Langhans experienced anything like it. The boy seemed to have made himself invisible, then materialised before his very eyes.
He sensed Barfuss inside his mind and knew all about him. Yet at the same time, he, Langhans, was inside Barfuss and knew all about him, too. They were inside each other, were each other, as if their souls had changed places. Never would he be able to account for how long this went on, whether for an eternity or for only the briefest of moments. But inside the boy he heard a girl’s voice. And it was the girl, he heard, who bade the boy contain himself.
For Hercule Barfuss this moment altered his life for ever. Inside him he heard Henriette Vogel speaking. And it made him a changed man.
It was indeed her voice, reaching out to him from the brink of the abyss; clearer, more tender than ever before. Beyond all human language, beyond life and death, it was the voice of love itself speaking to him from within; pure, undiluted love, its very ideal, its essence spread warmth through him, banishing the force of hatred that had threatened to destroy him. Suddenly he was engulfed in a tenderness he had never before felt, so strong it obliterated everything else: abhorrence, bloodlust and what he had believed to be unremitting sorrow. No longer aware of his surroundings, he was carried away from the macabre place where he was, on an inner journey. The priest Langhans, the wild beasts, the crowds – everything vanished in the face of this experience of unalloyed purity. A final capitulation to a love that defied the laws of nature. From some place on the other side of time, he heard the girl explain that these acts of cruelty were pointless and would poison him if he did not cease. He heard her pledge her undying love, saying death isn’t the end, only the beginning of a new existence where they would one day be reunited.
It wasn’t people, she explained, which were his most powerful enemy. It was hatred. The hatred he had lived with half his life and which, having driven him to a dead end, the limit of what a man can endure, would erode him. Hate, she continued, was meaningless; it gave nothing, only took. Forever placing new demands for more nourishment, more blood, more loathing, hatred demanded to be satisfied. Only love could replace it.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 27
