Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  He stood up from the bed, my book still in his hand. He frowned at it, as if he had forgotten about it, then tossed it across to me.

  “A dry stick, old Pliny, don’t you think?” he said. “Or perhaps I haven’t got the temperament for it. Fortune favors the brave, indeed—and then poisons them in a pumice cloud on the shore below Vesuvius.”

  He touched my arm and drew me with him to the door. There he paused and turned, looking from me to his assistant and back again.

  “What do you say,” he asked me. “Shall I tell Curtius to carry on with his search, or would that be a further waste of his not unvaluable time?” I answered nothing; he smiled, and ushered me ahead of him through the door. “All right, Curtius,” he said over his shoulder, “you may carry on.”

  In the corridor he paused again, still with a hand on my arm, and looked about cautiously, with an ear cocked. There was the sound of the minstrels from afar, and of the bells from farther still.

  “We must be careful that you are not seen,” he said. “We need a little time together, you and I. The matter, as I say, is urgent.”

  “And what matter is it?” I asked.

  “Why, the matter of Dr. Kroll’s murder. Along with other things.”

  He led me through dim passageways, and across lightless halls I had never entered before and had not known the existence of—the castle was a limitless warren. At last we came to a place I recognized: his little cell, with the prie-dieu and the table and the tapestry showing Actaeon set upon by his dogs.

  He crossed to the window and peered out. From without came the sound of bugles and marching men, and the loud barking of sergeant majors.

  “Such nonsense,” Lang said, clicking his tongue. “His Majesty detests it all, of course.”

  He turned to me.

  “Sit, Herr Doktor,” he said, “sit, please. We shall not be disturbed here.”

  He smiled, and joined his hands together and paced the floor a little, with his rapid, skipping step. “There is not much time, so let us not waste what of it we have.” He paused, humming under his breath. “You know you are being sought for the Doctor’s murder?”

  “No, I do not know it,” I answered. “Who accuses me?”

  He stopped his pacing, and turned and smiled. “My dear man, you were seen coming from his house, with blood on your hands.”

  I stared at him.

  “Who saw me?” I demanded.

  “Some drinkers at an inn close by—”

  “Impossible—they were nowhere near enough to have seen me.”

  “Ah, so you do admit you were there?”

  “I admit nothing.”

  He nodded. Despite his talk of urgency, he seemed only amused.

  “Also the Doctor’s servant,” he said. “Fricka, I believe is her name; she testified that you were there.”

  “Yes, I saw her—but the Doctor was dead by then.”

  The Chamberlain squinted at the ceiling, and rubbed his hands together slowly, making a soft, slithering sound.

  “That is not what she says, I’m afraid,” he murmured, pursing his lips.

  “And what does she say?”

  He shrugged. “That’s all: that you burst in and murdered her master.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Well, the Emperor does.”

  “Where is the woman now?” I asked

  “The poor creature was greatly shocked, naturally. She was sent away, early this morning, to a convent in the hills. She needs rest; she needs to be cared for.”

  My hands were shaking. I had the sense one has on a sunny day when a storm cloud is approaching, that feeling of the light being squeezed out of the air, of a darkness seeping in even as the sun goes on brightly shining.

  “Listen to me,” the Chamberlain said, “listen carefully now.” He came and took me by the wrist and made me sit, and he sat too, in front of me, so that we were again almost knee to knee, as we had been once before, memorably. “His Majesty has ordered that you are to be apprehended and charged with the murder of Dr. Kroll—”

  “Who told him I was seen at the Doctor’s house? Was it you?”

  He reared back his head, in a show of wounded surprise.

  “I?” he said. “Certainly not! I am your friend—surely you know that? I have only your best interests at heart. No, I’m afraid the one who went to His Majesty was—was someone else, whom you know.”

  He turned away, tapping two fingers against his underlip. Outside, the bells had stopped tolling, and a solitary trumpet was sounding a slow military lament.

  “You have encountered Don Giulio, Mistress Sardo’s eldest son?” Lang asked. “Officially he is Don Julius Caesar of Austria—absurd, I know—but his mother prefers the Italianate form. He was for a long time the Emperor’s favorite, and shared many of His Majesty’s interests. He has a fascination with clocks, for instance, and—and other things.” He frowned. “Lately, however, he has become distinctly strange, and difficult—so difficult, in fact, that he too is to leave the city this morning. The Emperor has ordered him to be dispatched forthwith to Krumlov, far in the south, to be held at the castle there, for the time being, or until he has recovered his senses sufficiently to be allowed to return to Prague—which, between you and me, will be a long time indeed. Schenckel the dwarf will be his escort. His Majesty is greatly upset, but he sees the necessity of the young man being kept, for now, far, far away from Prague and its—its temptations.”

  He paused, and looked hard into my face, nodding. For a moment I was again in that patch of darkness in the nighttime corridor, again I felt that foul thing flinging itself at me, all arms and legs and enormous hands. I saw again also my slaughtered cat, my poor Plato, stretched across the threshold in a mess of rusty blood.

  “Why do you speak of this person?” I asked. “What is he to me?”

  The Chamberlain steepled his fingers before him and softly closed his eyes.

  “Patience,” he murmured, “patience.” He stopped a moment, casting his gaze towards the ceiling. “Don Giulio,” he said, “has always had a special friend, here at the castle. There is his mother, of course, but he has also a protector and—and guide, shall we say.”

  “And who is this guide?” I asked.

  He fixed on me a slyly sarcastic smile.

  “That, my dear Herr Doktor, not even one so shrewd as you would ever guess.”

  But he was wrong. At once there came to me, out of the blue, like a bird alighting on a branch, a memory of that first day when Jeppe Schenckel was taking me to Dr. Kroll’s house to meet the Emperor. We had stopped at the spot where Magdalena Kroll’s corpse had lain, and I had described how the girl’s throat had been torn out as if by a wild animal. I saw us there, clearly, the two of us, and heard again the dwarf saying how her killer “must have been playing with her,” and saw how he had frowned, in a way, thoughtful and tense, that had struck me at the time as strange.

  “It is Schenckel,” I said, “isn’t it.”

  “Ah!” the Chamberlain said, opening wide his eyes. “Shrewd indeed, Master Stern—shrewd indeed!”

  He stood up quickly, in that odd, convulsive way he had, and began again his rapid pacing, with his hands clasped before him.

  “There were always the three of them, you see,” he said. “There was Mistress Sardo, there was Don Giulio, and there was the dwarf. A potent mixture, that trio—a lethal mixture. There was little even I could do to control them. The Emperor would not hear a word said against them, being especially sensitive in regard to Don Giulio, as is understandable. When Wenzel and Dr. Kroll pandered Kroll’s daughter to His Majesty—” He broke off. “By the way, did you know the Kroll girl was carrying Rudolf’s child?”

  He smiled at my shocked stare.

  “I believed Madek was the father,” I said.

  I was beginning, barely beginning, to see my way through this tangled thicket.

  He looked at me with a pitying smile.

  “Madek was not
hing,” he said softly, “nothing at all—not to us.”

  Us. There it was again, and clearly I heard the echo of Caterina Sardo, sitting naked on my bed with a bowl of cherries in her lap, smiling into my eyes and saying, “Us.”

  “Then it was Don Giulio who murdered Magdalena Kroll,” I said. “Is that what I am to understand?”

  The Chamberlain threw up his hands in a pretense of being horrified.

  “Ssh,” he hissed. “You must not be heard to say such a thing.”

  “But it’s what you’re telling me—that Don Giulio destroyed the girl, with the dwarf’s connivance.”

  He nodded slowly, putting on now a look of tragic sadness.

  “Yes,” he whispered, “with the dwarf’s connivance. And more than that, at his mother’s bidding.” He watched me keenly. “Are you shocked? You should be. I know in what high esteem you hold that lady.”

  His crimson lips stretched into a crescent smile. Then he tapped me on the knee with the tip of a forefinger, and rose and began pacing again. I could hear the rapid padding of his slippers on the flags of the stone floor.

  “She pretends,” he said, “good Mistress Sardo, to care nothing for His Majesty. She laughs at him and mocks him behind his back. But there are some things she will not countenance. Oh, no. She might have put up with Kroll’s daughter as Rudolf’s bed-mate, his little playmate. She herself had other diversions, after all”—he turned his head and smirked at me over his shoulder—“but a child, now, a Hapsburg cuckoo in the nest, of which she herself was not the mother? No: that prospect was too much.”

  The trumpeter outside blew the final flourish of his lament, and into the silence he left behind came the sound of distant cannons: a salute for the royal birthday was being fired from the heights of Vyšehrad.

  “And what has any of this to do with Wenzel,” I asked, “with Dr. Kroll—with all of that?”

  He broke off from his pacing and in a flurry came and plumped himself down in front of me once more, looking like nothing so much as a large black intently staring crow. This time our knees did touch.

  “Nothing!” he said, lifting up his hands to heaven. “It had nothing to do with Wenzel, and Wenzel’s plots and plans, into which poor Dr. Kroll had been unwittingly drawn. That was what Wenzel was so baffled by—that the girl died. He sought to detect my hand in the deed, but failed. And it made no sense to him. Do you see?” He sat back on the chair, hugging himself for glee. “It made no sense! And Wenzel is a man who must have sense—which is why he fixed on you as the culprit. Poor Felix, I almost feel sorry for him: so clumsy, though he thinks himself such a wily, slippery fox.”

  He rose and went to a cupboard by the fireplace and took from it a bottle and two glass goblets and returned with them to the table and poured out wine for both of us.

  “A toast,” he said, lifting up his glass. “Let us drink to Hermes, the god of chance!”

  He sat down.

  “Consider,” he went on, “consider the unlikeliness of it—I swear, some sportive god must have had a hand in the making of that piece of glorious mischief.” He drew his chair closer still to mine. “Madek,” he said excitedly, “hallooing his love for his lost girl, stole her father’s box of magic mumbo jumbo and brought it to Kelley out at Most. They huggered, they muggered, and in the end came to a bargain, by which Madek returned to Prague with a treasure rich beyond his highest hopes: the correspondence between Wenzel and Elizabeth of England. That much Kroll was able to verify, when he went to Most at Wenzel’s behest and broke Kelley’s broken legs a second time. Madek had the letters. And when the young fool threatened Wenzel with them, Wenzel seized him, tortured him, forced what information out of him that he could, then had him throttled and disposed of.” He leaned forward again, showing his teeth in a fierce smile, and jabbed a finger into the center of my chest. “And then the girl was murdered. Why? By whom? It terrified him, the senselessness of it, the unconnectedness. And still the letters were missing—the letters that Kelley’s daughter told you about, that you somehow found, and that now—oh, my dear fellow!—that now are so mysteriously missing again.”

  We were silent, and so were the cannons. Lang was watching me, waiting for me to speak.

  “And Kroll,” I said, “why was he killed?”

  He drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair.

  “Ah, well, now,” he said, “as to that, I fear I must confess to a certain level of—involvement, to a certain level of—of culpability, even.” He smiled wincingly, grimly nodding. “Yes, I’m afraid it’s true. You must remember, however, that he was engaged in a conspiracy, with Wenzel, against the throne. He had to be destroyed, if for no other reason than to clear the line of fire.”

  “What do you mean,” I asked. “What line of fire?”

  He put his hands together as if to pray, and touched the tips of his fingers lightly to his mouth. “Dr. Kroll, let us say, was one of the lesser fallen angels, to Wenzel’s Lucifer. Do you see?”

  “And you are Saint Michael, of the flaming sword?”

  He smiled, almost shyly.

  “Ah, no,” he said, “no, I cannot claim such sanctity.”

  “So you murdered him,” I said. “You murdered Kroll.”

  “I?” He lifted high his eyebrows and opened wide his eyes. “No no no. I do not murder people, my dear Herr Doktor. What a vulgar charge to lay against His Majesty’s High Chamberlain!”

  “But you cause people to be murdered,” I said.

  “No no no,” he repeated, more forcefully this time, with a vehement shake of the head. “What I did, if it can even be called doing, was to mention to your stunted little friend, Herr Schenckel, that the good—or, I should say, the not so good—Dr. Kroll had deduced at last who it was that had done his poor daughter to death, and was about to reveal all to the Emperor. The dwarf, in turn, went with this dark news to Caterina Sardo, and that was all it took for the imperial wolf cub to be unleashed. The rest was—well, the rest was as you saw, all blood and mess and cruel tragedy.”

  “And the note,” I said, “the note summoning me to Kroll’s house—did you send that?”

  He pulled low the corners of his mouth in a mummer’s imitation of guilt and contrition.

  “I cannot lie,” he said. “I know it was wicked of me, but how could I resist? There were the two birds, perched plump and inviting on the fence, and I had the stone in my hand. Who would not seize such a happy opportunity to bring them both down?”

  I felt an anger stirring in me, like a beast that had been long a-slumber and all at once had been pricked awake.

  “You do see it, don’t you?” Lang pleaded reasonably. “It was a way for me to convince you to surrender what I most ardently desired of you. I feared you might try with me what that numskull Madek tried with Wenzel, and hold the letters over me, for your own gain. Did I wrong you?” He produced one of his actorly sighs. “I have lived so long at court, I fear I am of a hopelessly suspicious turn of mind.”

  “What if you were right to be suspicious?” I inquired darkly, scowling at him. “What if I were to keep the letters, to ensure my own safety and security?”

  He looked at me in silence. His eyes, which up to this point had been bright with merriment, went slowly dead.

  “Give them to me,” he said softly, “give them to me, and you are free. Withhold them, and I have my witnesses who will swear they saw you last night stumbling through the streets with a murderer’s blood on your hands. In Prague, it does not take much to have a man hanged—this you know already. Do not give me cause to summon Curtius and his men. They are every bit as brisk as Wenzel’s were that night he sent them to seize hold of you. I take it you have not forgotten that night, and who it was that saved your neck?”

  Silence fell between us then. I could hear faintly the sounds of the festive crowd out in the courtyard. A thought had been burrowing its way into my mind, silently, secretly, and now it broke through an inner protecting wall.

  “Whose s
on is he?” I asked.

  The Chamberlain sat back with a start, then checked himself, and fixed on me a long, large look.

  “Whom do you mean?” he asked.

  “Don Giulio—whose son is he?”

  He held out his hands and spread them wide.

  “Why, Mistress Caterina’s, of course.”

  “But who is the father?”

  He drew his head still farther back, still staring at me.

  I thought of the picture on Malaspina’s wall, soft Venus in her great hat, and the stunted Cupid offering her the honeycomb.

  The Chamberlain was nodding now, slowly, taking me newly in, with a narrowed eye.

  “Ah, you are not so dull as I first took you to be, Christian Stern,” he said. “You see far, you see deep.”

  “‘There were always the three of them,’” I said. “Those were your words. Three of them—Mistress Sardo, the dwarf, and Don Giulio, the son.”

  A mandrake root, bristling with tendrils and all caked with marl, its forked form entwined about her white and gleaming limbs.

  The Chamberlain went on staring, then lifted his head abruptly and softly laughed.

  “Fie, sir!” he said, still laughing. “What things you do allow yourself to imagine. And yet”—he touched a finger to the tip of his chin—“it’s true, there is nothing so malign or misbegotten that it may not catch a lady’s fancy, when the moon is full.” He leaned his face close up to mine. “But tell me,” he murmured, “this thought that’s come to you, have you the stomach to entertain it?”

  Abandon Prague, I told myself. Leave now, be gone, tonight.