HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  What did this long silence mean? Did it mean anything at all?

  With the outbreak of war between France and the united forces of Austria and Russia in 1805, and the catastrophic defeat of the unlikely allies at Austerlitz, Prussia found herself in an impossible position. King Frederick William III’s much-discussed Thoughts on the Art of Government amounted to nothing less than a plea for peace and neutrality for Prussia. But Napoleon had other plans. He struck hard and fast, and every available Prussian soldier had been drawn into the defence of the country. Including Senior First Lieutenant Gottewald; he had fought with remarkable courage at the battle of Jena. While travelling to Berlin carrying despatches for Katowice, he had been swept up in the events, and had discharged his duties with such élan that he had been awarded the King’s Own, the gold medal for bravery. As the battle drew to its close, and the French invasion of the country began in earnest, he had made a swift escape and withdrawn to Königsberg, bringing news of the national disaster to the fortress. He had then taken an active part in the defence of the garrison, and had distinguished himself again: General Katowice took chain-shot to the arm, and lost his hand. 1st Lieutenant Gottewald made a tourniquet with his sash, and carried the general to the company surgeon at great risk to his own life. He had, of course, been rewarded. Within three months, he was made up to second major, to replace Second Major Hans Krantz, who had died of wounds in the defence of the fortress.

  Gottewald had marched out of Königsberg bearing arms, and led half of the troops to Kamenetz. As the report of the ordered withdrawal stated, Herr General Katowice was in no condition to do so.

  I did a quick calculation. In the course of twenty-four years of military service, Gottewald had risen to third in command. This amounted to a fairy tale. How many men of uncertain birth had gone so far in such a short measure of time? How many men of noble extraction had gone less than half that distance in twice that number of years? Had he signed articles for another nine years of service, who could say how far he might have risen?

  Gottewald was dead—he would make no further progress in the army.

  But what if he had lived?

  If Prussia revolted against France, if Katowice led the revival of national pride from Kamenetz, if Gottewald had been alive and fighting at his general’s side, what might the future have held in store for him?

  The report of Gottewald’s death was too recent to appear in those files, of course, but the details of the report that I had read in Kamenetz were engraved on my mind:

  . . . extensive bruising of the right side of the head and the body, multiple cuts and abrasions of the arms, hands, and upper half of the trunk. A deep laceration crossing diagonally from the right temple to the left-hand corner of the mouth has destroyed the face . . .

  Seen within the context of all the rest, the behaviour of Bruno Gottewald was both strange and inexplicable, and made his sudden death seem even more striking. What was he doing leading a deer hunt? What excess of zeal had pushed him to take such a risk? If every other recorded act in his military career suggested the calculation of a man who meant to shine, what dim light had drawn him on that day? What was he trying to prove? And who was he trying to prove it to?

  I huddled inside my cloak, as these questions rattled inside my brain. I could have added a dozen more. Why was Gottewald held in such low regard by his fellows? Why had his career slowed down before it was brought to an abrupt and bloody halt? Was it true that he had shown leanings towards the French? Could he have been a spy? And what about Sybille Gottewald? There was no mention in those files of a wife or children. Had he failed to ask the general’s permission to marry? Was that why they had both been punished?

  I stacked the files together on the desk, and stood up.

  A moment later, I sat down again. I picked up a quill, and chewed on the end for quite some time. Finally, I came to a decision. There was one person who could tell me more. The only person who had made an effort to assist me in Kamenetz. A man who was desperate to escape from the fortress. I had met the garrison surgeon, Doctor Korna, in great secrecy, and I had promised to help him. But before doing anything on his behalf, he must help me a great deal more. Though I had found nothing in those documents to support my opinion, I was still convinced that the motive for the massacre lay in Kamenetz.

  I penned a brief request to the Minister of Justice, to be sent on my own initiative. Without telling Count Dittersdorf. Without referring to any authority, except my own.

  Then, I took up the key that Dittersdorf had left on his way out.

  The street was deserted. The hour of curfew was drawing near, and the dismal weight of that long day crushed heavily down upon me. Now, another thankless task awaited me. I would have to speak to Lieutenant Mutiez and tell him what I wanted for the following day. Without Lavedrine at my side, I was not sure how far my power would stretch.

  What would I do if he refused?

  To bolster my courage, I tried to imagine that things had ended differently on the battlefield of Jena, and that I, a victorious Prussian, was about to impose my will upon one of the defeated Frenchmen.

  In this belligerent frame of mind, I marched across the square to face the enemy.

  28

  LIEUTENANT MUTIEZ KEPT his pledge.

  A hooded barouche was waiting in the lane outside my door at seven o’clock the following morning. The fields were a crusty carpet of frost, the sky a startling shade of blue, the colour of a robin’s egg. I had not seen such a beautiful start to the day in over three months.

  I climbed up, and closed the carriage curtains.

  No man would see me leaving town in a French vehicle, or ask himself where I might be going.

  The driver cracked his whip, and the vehicle rattled along the rutted lane that follows the west bank of the River Nogat in the direction of the sea.

  With the town well behind, I threw back the curtains.

  The blue sky had vanished. A pale orange glow hung low over the invisible far bank of the estuary. Thick fog rolled in off the dark tidal waters like an invading army, wiping out everything in its path. On the landward side, close beside the carriage, the head-high sandstone levee glistened dull and black with moisture. The light seemed to flicker, as if a total eclipse were pressing darkness down upon the morning. Then, the sun went out altogether. The rippling water faded to opalescent grey beneath the encroaching mist. Every sign of life seemed to dissolve away. All forms lost shape and substance, and were blotted out by the time we reached the coast.

  I had not been out along the coast road in the past year. The area was heavily guarded. French troops patrolled the quay and the wooden doors that ranged raggedly along the sandstone cliff-face in all shapes and sizes. I remembered visiting the bay the summer before last with my family, driving slowly, passing these irregular openings in the rock, peering into the deep, dark caverns that lay beyond. Manni was curious to see what went on there. In one vast lock-up, fires burned languorously, damped down with hay and sea-wrack, throwing up huge aromatic clouds of dense smoke that made us cough. Lines of charcoal sparkled dully on the ground. Rows of gutted herring hung from hooks in the roof. The fish were being smoked inside, the useless innards tossed out onto the quay, where petrels and larger solan geese squawked and scrambled, fighting over the pickings.

  In another shed we watched them making ropes, winding the different strands into massive cables. I remembered standing hand in hand with Manni, watching the work. The torques let out almighty creaks and terrible groans as the hemp was wound ever tighter. The little boy laughed, then clung to my legs as the noise grew fiercer. It was a glimpse into hell—the black-faced labourers, the thick smoke rising up to facilitate the twisting of the heated cord.

  All this had gone.

  The basic trade of the place had always been fish. Fresh fish, live fish, fish just caught, their tails slapping and thrashing in shallow tanks of seawater. Dead fish were gutted, then stored in barrels, packed down with salt. Fish of eve
ry shape and size laid out in boxes on the stones. This bounty had been sold in the Old Fish Market. But now, it, too, was closed. The fishmongers, ropemakers, coopers, and all the rest had been pushed out by the French. The masters and their labourers had moved to the area closer to the town, the new port, where Leon Biswanger had his workshop. Meanwhile, the estuary had been requisitioned for the use of the invaders.

  ‘I discovered the place myself,’ Mutiez confided triumphantly. ‘You won’t be troubled there, Herr Procurator. When we held the bodies of the children in Bitternau, there was a riot in the square. But there, they’ll stop a bullet if they try anything.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I hope you’ll find it to your liking, sir.’

  Professor Kant was in my thoughts when I spoke to Mutiez. Kant had devised an ingenious method to preserve the body of a murdered man in Königsberg four years before, instructing soldiers to protect the corpse inside a tarpaulin, then cover it with snow. I had asked the lieutenant to find a dry, cold place where I might examine the body that I believed was Sybille Gottewald’s. Kant’s methods had horrified me at the time, but I found myself in the same position. I did not want that corpse to decompose before I had made every effort to identify it.

  Was this the best that Mutiez could do? He had sent me to a place where putrefaction was the order of the day.

  The coach stopped suddenly, and the driver announced that we had arrived.

  I stepped down before a huge double door which opened into the rock. The wood was ancient, pitted and rotten, grey with caked salt and the spray of the sea. The number ‘11’ had been painted freshly on the door in large white strokes.

  The coachman leant down from his box, holding out a large key in his hand. ‘For you, monsieur,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll be back with the other gentleman inside the hour. The fog seems to be lifting.’ He whipped the horse, and cantered ahead, looking for a place to turn the vehicle and retrace his route to town, while I stood before the door, jiggling the ancient key in the rusty lock.

  The door swung inwards, and cold air swept out to meet the damp of the day.

  On the floor lay a storm lantern and a flint. I struck a light, adjusted the wick, then pushed the door closed behind me. As I looked about, I began to wonder whether I ought to revise my unkind opinion of Lieutenant Mutiez.

  The air was incredibly dry compared to the fog on the dock. There was a constant whistling current of ventilation, as cold as a mountain breeze. So cold, indeed, that my teeth began to chatter as the bones and muscles grew rigid in my jaw. Holding up the lantern, I made my way deeper into an unexpectedly vast space. The hollow in the rock was twenty yards wide, but three times as long, and surprisingly well lit even by a single lamp. The walls had been covered with shining white ceramic tiles, and on each tile there was a tiny design of a fish, and undulating green lines to represent the shifting sea. I might have been walking under water in the middle of an extraordinary shoal of every imaginable species, each one of an identical size. Crabs, clams, crayfish, flounders, brill, halibut, narwhals, plaice, eels, a thousand other mysteries of the deep. Huge beams had been fixed crossways in the roof, and the wrinkled carcasses of larger fish suspended from the tree trunks shifted and swayed in the air currents above my head. I spotted a huge stingray, a dolphin, the body of a shark, the corpse of a walrus with curving tusks almost as long as my legs.

  Along the walls and down the centre of the room, wooden tabletops had been used to display the catch before it was sold. But my attention was captured by a table at the far end of the hall. In the gloom, I could just make out the uneven contour of the remains of the woman, which had been laid out for my inspection. Moving closer, I had to marvel once again at the freshness of the place. Cold was hardly the word for it, and only the merest hint of the smell of fish remained. As I held up the lamp, and looked down onto that table, I saw that Henri Mutiez had not merely done what I had asked—he had done a great deal more.

  The shattered remains of the corpse had been carefully recomposed to form the shape of a body, while the clothes, now washed and dried, had been laid out in perfect order next to the corpse. It was as if a set of twins had been laid out side by side. One was decently dressed, if flat, lacking only a head and hands and legs. The other was a ravaged skeleton: the head, the hands, the legs, the feet, and all the rest were visible, but the skin and the recognisable features of the face were crushed and mangled.

  I set the lantern to rest, then turned my attention to the corpse, starting from the top, and working slowly down, as Kant had taught me to do. The skull had been broken into several pieces, most probably crushed under the weight of falling barrels. I counted them. There were six plates of different sizes, which would have formed the casket of the head. Brain tissue, stained dark-grey by oil, traced scrimshaw patterns over the remains. Clumps of straggling hair and wrinkled skin still held the pieces together. Shattered fragments of vertebrae led down to the ribcage which had split apart, like the gaping halves of a huge oyster shell. The bones of the ribs had splintered, but they hung together as if the calciferous fibres refused to be parted. And in the centre of this human oyster, a terrible spectacle of crushed, compounded organs had coagulated as a formless black pearl, the size of a plum cake.

  The bones of the upper and lower arms had been fragmented into pieces of varying lengths. The pelvis was cracked and broken, the larger bones of the thighs also. One hand was whole; the other a collection of bones, too many, too fractured, and too small to be reassembled. How many barrels had fallen on the woman? I hoped to God that she had died in an instant, or was already dead. The frail composite bones of the lower legs and feet had been roughly laid out as a primitive and approximate map of human anatomy. It would have foxed the wits of the author of Exercitatio anatomica to make sense of that osseous puzzle, but Lieutenant Mutiez, or one of his men, had done a remarkable job of reconstruction.

  ‘Who were you, ma’am?’ I murmured helplessly.

  I looked from the clothes to the bones, and back again, trying to imagine what that body had once looked like. I struggled to see that woman on her feet, fully clothed, her hair neatly dressed, but I floundered. What had she been in life? A wife, a mother? Who had she loved, and who had reciprocated that affection? Was somebody somewhere still seeking the dear companion that he had lost? Or were they all dead? Helena had told me of the woman she had met. She was dark of skin, small of stature. She had been afraid, as if some imminent danger threatened her. If the body were truly Sybille Gottewald’s, my lantern supplied irrefutable proof of the implacable destruction that had fallen like a thunder-clap on every single member of that ill-fated family.

  ‘Herr Procurator?’

  I started with fright.

  How long had I been staring at those remains, searching for some clue that would confirm the identity of Sybille Gottewald?

  The door at the other end of the cavern had opened a crack. The tenuous light of day crept in with a swirling cloud of fog. A solid figure stood silhouetted against the light, starkly framed in the doorway. I stared down at the corpse again, wondering whether I had made a mistake by inviting him there.

  ‘Did anyone see you board the coach?’ I asked.

  His footsteps halted short of the table. ‘I don’t think so, sir. Your instructions were precise, the coachman acted with caution. I didn’t realise he was French till we were well away from Judenstrasse.’

  I felt better for that. ‘It was not my intention to bring more trouble on you, or on your people,’ I said, turning to look at him.

  He was wearing an ancient overcoat which fell far below his knees, blue trousers with ragged cuffs that had seen better days, and an enormous tricorn hat. In his left hand he held a dirty sack of jute. He might have been a man who had fallen on hard times, wearing clothes that he had found by chance, rather than picked by choice. He was certainly not recognisable as a Jew.

  ‘Are they your own garments, Aaron Jacob?’

  ‘A loan from Burckhardt, the ragman,’ he m
urmured.

  We stood together in silence, looking down on the body. His clothes gave off a smell of soap and mould, as if they had been washed a long time ago, but never worn until that day.

  ‘Sir?’ he asked, a note of uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘This is why I had them bring you here,’ I said.

  ‘Whose body is this? A woman, I can see that. But what happened to her?’

  ‘Colonel Lavedrine and I suspect that this is what remains of Sybille Gottewald,’ I said, never taking my eyes from the corpse. ‘We have no proof to confirm or confound the hypothesis. I have a task for you, if you accept it.’

  He replied with such eagerness, I felt the need to block him immediately.

  ‘Is it possible to find some evidence that this woman was the mother of those three murdered children?’

  No noise disturbed the silence but the high-pitched whistling of the draught in that large storeroom. I felt it race across the surface of my face like a cold shiver.

  Aaron Jacob nodded, set his sack on the table, untied the knot, and carefully extracted the skull casts of the Gottewald children. He laid them out next to one another above the woman’s head.

  ‘I was wondering why you wanted to see them again,’ he began, his voice trailing away as he spoke.

  ‘I did not know where to start,’ I answered brusquely. I did not mention my fear that he would find only what he was looking for. I hoped against hope that this man was as scientific and analytical as he claimed. ‘I had a feeling that some sort of comparative physiognomic examination might . . .’