HS02 - Days of Atonement

by Michael Gregorio

  I raised my head.

  A belated knock came at the door, which I had forgotten to close.

  Wolfgang Beck, the flighty young clerk to the civic notary, Osvald Menckeren, whose offices were situated on the floor above my own, was watching me. The youth was an arrogant dandy, much given to embroidered waistcoats and brightly coloured neckties. He was hanging on to the doorpost, holding up a letter which he waved at me.

  ‘This arrived an hour ago, sir. Knutzen had just gone out.’

  ‘Come in,’ I said, holding out my hand for the letter.

  ‘There’s no name on it,’ the poppycock remarked, advancing across the room, waving the envelope tantalisingly just beyond my reach. ‘The man who brought it said that he was looking for you. “To be delivered by hand,” he insisted. Took an age to decide whether I could be trusted,’ he added with a smirk. ‘Obviously, he didn’t want to hang about. Too many Frenchmen in Lotingen.’ He winked. ‘He didn’t want to take this letter back. In the end my master signed for it’.

  He leant closer, letting me grip the letter with my fingertips.

  ‘Herr Menckeren swore on his honour that it wouldn’t fall into French hands. Now, isn’t that a turn-up?’

  He handed me the note, then snapped to salute. ‘It’s a pleasure to serve the nation, sir, even in such a small matter. We Prussians have to stick together.’

  As the door closed gently on his complicit smile, I opened the envelope.

  Request granted. The person that you wish to examine regarding the Gottewald case will present himself at your office within the week.

  The missive had been dated the previous Friday. A red seal of smudged wax obscured the signature. I dropped the paper onto my desk and felt a thrill of exultation. All I had to do was wait. As for Lavedrine . . . Now, I had to know where he was, and what he was doing. My heart lighter than it had been for a week, I rushed across to the general quarters, hoping that I would find him there, or that someone would tell me where to look for him.

  The guard was slack that day. The general quarters building was a bustling hive of activity. Officers and their subordinates raced up and down the corridors, waving sheets of papers in their hands, eloquently cursing. I asked to be received by Lieutenant Mutiez, but he himself came striding down the corridor to meet me a minute later. ‘Monsieur le Procureur,’ he greeted me, his eyes wide with surprise ‘What are you doing here? You have come too late, sir.’

  He did not register my confusion.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he went on. ‘Colonel Lavedrine decided on the spur of the moment. We are in a bit of a muddle, as you can see. The Ministry of Defence has issued orders for joint manoeuvres. You just missed the colonel. Or he missed you. In a word, you missed each other. If you will just be patient, Herr Stiffeniis, I’ll see if I can find you some means of transportation. These blasted manoeuvres!’ He held up his hands and let out a sigh. ‘Of course, I realise the urgency of your investigations. The sooner the matter is cleared up, the better for us all, French and Prussians alike. If I can manage to get you there, Colonel Lavedrine will bring you back with him.’ He shook his head and laughed as he led me out of the door. ‘That coach will take you,’ he said. Still smiling broadly, he added: ‘You and Lavedrine do mix with such strange company, monsieur!’

  Still he did not see the confusion which possessed me. Perhaps he put it down to mortification at missing an appointment with Lavedrine. In any case, he made nothing of my silence. He rapped his baton against the coach door.

  ‘Take His Excellency to join Colonel Lavedrine,’ he called to the driver. ‘You know where the Gottewald house is, don’t you?’

  ‘Who doesn’t, sir?’ the man grumbled.

  Despite the amount of traffic on the road, cannon and other engines of war being moved into position, more troops than I had even seen amassed in Lotingen, infantry and cavalry and teams of sappers and artillerymen, the journey was over almost as soon as it began. I took little note of the busy military world through which we passed. My head was spinning with questions.

  Why had Lavedrine gone back to the house?

  And what strange company was Mutiez referring to?

  The cabriolet lurched to a halt, leather brakes screeching against the iron wheels.

  Another carriage stood in the clearing. A soldier was asleep on the box. Lavedrine was there, then. And he had been there for quite some time, it appeared. He was alone in the cottage with his chosen guest.

  I leapt to the ground and charged along the leafy tunnel leading to the house.

  At the end, I drew up short.

  In a calm, ordered, commanding voice, Lavedrine was giving orders.

  ‘Slowly. More slowly!’ he exhorted. ‘Take your time. No one is hounding us.’

  I listened for a reply, but there was none.

  I moved to the shelter of a tree and took stock of the place.

  The Frenchman was standing in the garden at the corner of the house. He was wrapped up in his leather overcoat, his arms outstretched, watching, or directing, something that I was not able to see. He looked taller, more imperious, than when I had seen him last. His hair was tied up at the nape of his neck with a gleaming white ring, the vertebra of a bull, or something equally bizarre. As he glanced left and right, loose silver curls danced in the stiff breeze. His profile was fixed on someone that I could not see. Someone hiding behind the impenetrable screen of his leather mantle.

  I took a step forward, holding my breath.

  I craned my neck to see.

  A small man was gripping the arm of a tiny woman. Wrapped up in vast cloaks and serpentine scarves, they might have been preparing to set off across the Siberian wastes with only Lavedrine to lead them.

  But what was he doing there with his landlord and that man’s wife?

  38

  I DID NOT shift from my vantage point behind the tree.

  Landlord Böll was dressed in a bulging brown ball of an oversized topcoat. The rough-cut fur was shaggy and bristling. He might have been a captive bear at a country fair. All that was lacking was a dark-skinned urchin to blow a fife and make him dance. His round bulk and diminutive size were not improved by a tall black stove-pipe hat that sat uneasily on his head. It was festooned from the crown down to the brim—long white ribbons pinned up with silvery buttons. His wife was holding tightly on to his arm, as if in danger of collapsing. She might have been going to a summer wedding. Her tightly bodiced gown was sky-blue, unseasonable satin, which shimmered and shifted in the stiff breeze. As she turned this way and that, her dress billowed out and trailed lazily behind her, like a deflating hot-air balloon. Frau Böll’s air-filled gown seemed to drag her fitfully in one direction, while her legs struggled to take her the opposite way. Her eyes were clenched and closed, as if she were concentrating. Clearly, she was in a trance.

  This state of other-worldliness was not the only strange thing about the scene.

  Lavedrine stepped aside, then quickly chased behind them, as the husband and wife swirled and floundered around in a never-ceasing dance that twirled the length and the breadth of the garden. In their interlacing hands they held long silver sticks, like rapiers. The couple appeared to be acting out a furious, silent duel against an invisible enemy.

  Suddenly, they froze.

  ‘It’s stronger here, sir. Isn’t it so, Rumeliah?’

  Böll’s voice was thin and nasal, oddly feminine. His tone was timorous, as if he feared to say what he ought. He watched his wife like a man feeding a hawk, ready at any moment to pull back his finger before it was bitten off. Without any warning, his eyes rolled up into his skull, showing off the whites. He looked like a man who had been blinded by cataracts. He lurched, began to stumble, then righted himself, as if that stick pointing at the earth were welded to the spot, holding him in place.

  ‘Don’t move, sir!’ he snapped. Lavedrine had launched himself forward, either to support the man, or to help the lady. ‘You’ll ruin everything. She’s far stronger than m
e, Herr Lavedrine. Her powers are pure celestial.’

  Lavedrine stopped in his tracks, his gaze fixed on the points of the silver sticks that hovered over the surface of the ground. Böll held one in his right hand, his wife gripped the other in her left. Whenever their rods happened to touch, the couple recoiled as if a painful electrical shock had passed between them. The tips twitched and quivered like the antennae of sounding insects, vibrating, wavering, separating, coming together again with the attendant shock. Suddenly, the couple’s twin sticks rose in unison into the air, and hovered for a moment, before plunging down to the ground again.

  ‘Notable turbulence,’ rasped Böll. ‘She passed this way for certain . . .’

  A shriek cut him short.

  ‘It’s pulling her hand off,’ Böll confided, glancing with concern at his tortured wife. ‘That woman passed here, she did. And she were . . . yes, sir, she were alive!’

  The landlord’s diminutive companion began to scream and screech again. Her mouth gaped open frantically, saliva dribbling in a white froth from her pale lips.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ Lavedrine demanded. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I was asking myself the very same question.’

  I might have waved a magic wand and cast a spell on all three of them.

  The penetrating eyes of Böll fixed unblinkingly on me as I stepped out from the greenery. His wife was in a fright. For some unimaginable reason, their divining rods seemed to have lost all their gravitational pull. They might have been a pair of truffle-hounds that had lost the scent. As I stepped into the garden, the landlord and his wife took a step backwards.

  ‘What strange goings-on are these?’ I asked.

  Lavedrine passed his hand through his unruly locks. He did not seem pleased to see me. ‘I knew it would not be to your taste, Stiffeniis,’ he murmured. ‘I’d have told you, if anything had come of it. Otherwise . . . well, what would there be to tell?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I would have put it down to experience. An experiment, let’s say. I requested these people to come and use their powers for me. You’ve met Herr Böll, the sensitive, and his wife, I believe?’

  The lady and gentleman bowed together, perfectly synchronised, their eyes and dowsing sticks fixed modestly upon the ground, like performing illusionists in a theatre. Lavedrine, the master of ceremonies, had introduced them as if they were a famous stage act.

  ‘I was under the impression that they kept a lodging house,’ I remarked. I did not look at the pair, my eyes still fixed on Lavedrine. Even so, I perceived that Böll and his wife relaxed and breathed more easily, as if some necessary clarification had been made, which released them from all responsibility.

  ‘Very well. You know what we are doing.’ Lavedrine stepped in front of the pair, as if to hide them from my sight. ‘Those missing rags and cloths that Helena pointed out must be hidden somewhere near the house, Stiffeniis. They were not carried away. There is no reason to believe such a thing.’

  ‘Your folly amazes me,’ I said.

  His face grew ugly. Lines bit deeply into his brow, his eyes narrowed. ‘Your lack of faith shocks me,’ he replied. ‘Are you suggesting that your wife invented everything?’

  I shook my head. ‘Helena pointed out what was obvious to any woman,’ I replied. ‘There could be more than one explanation for the lack of rags. Helena herself provided one. The family may have been preparing to abandon the cottage. A tidy woman would destroy everything she was not intending to carry off. Sybille Gottewald did not know that her children were about to be butchered. Or that she herself . . .’

  ‘Oh, that’s excellent, sir!’ Lavedrine exclaimed haughtily.

  He stumped up the garden, then back again. ‘If we find nothing, I will publicly admit that I am wrong. I’ve been pondering on this experiment for quite some time. If paranormal sensibility can help us resolve the matter, why deprive ourselves of such aid? It may be a valuable resource. And how much more intriguing, if such persons may lead us to the heart of an impenetrable criminal mystery? This was too good an opportunity to miss. Humour me for once, I pray you.’

  He might have been a father chiding a wayward child. He had the gift of finding the chinks in my armour. It was true, I was too harsh, too dismissive to trust such unscientific claims. I would rather avoid the risk of being taken for a dupe than fall into such a trap. He saw the breach, and thrust through it.

  ‘Herr Böll, would you be so kind as to answer his question?’

  Böll looked at me, then rolled his eyes. I stared into the blanks. A moment later, the pupils slotted back into place. ‘It’s all a question of flux, Herr Procurator. Electrical flux, I mean to say. Energy passes from Rumeliah to me, and back again, by way of these batons.’ He raised his silver wand for me to inspect. ‘They are copper sticks wrapped around with finest silver wire. Voltaic coils, they call ’em. Copper is dull, but it picks up the smallest trace of any charge. Then the twists of coiled silver accelerate it up to human sensibility.’

  ‘How interesting!’ I said. I had never heard such babble in my life.

  ‘The energy increases as me an’ Rumeliah make the triangle with our points. The perfect form. The all-seeing Eye. Eye-sosceles triangle. It’s not called that for nothing!’

  He smiled to his wife.

  ‘Rumeliah’s more the practical sort,’ he declared. ‘I dabble in the theory. Then again, sir, she’s Turkish. Doesn’t speak or read a word of German. Just feels. I am something of a dab hand myself, but she’s the true phenomenon. If there’s a tremor, the slightest tickle, she’ll feel it coursing through her rod. She’s good at fluids and fluxes, but Material Emanation is not beyond her skills . . .’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  Böll glanced at Lavedrine, who nodded encouragingly. While he looked at the Frenchman with his left eye, his right remained fixed immovably on me. He might have been gifted with independent vision, as certain species of reptile—lizards from Tierra del Fuego, in particular—are thought to be.

  ‘Effluvia, sir. Manifestations. Ectoplasms. Spirits . . . There’s words and words for it. I only knew of dowsing myself, sir. But then I met Rumeliah.’

  ‘Water dowsing? Divining springs and sinking wells?’ I interupted him. ‘My father had a man who used to do it with a willow branch.’

  ‘Indeed, sir?’

  My father never trusted that dowser, and cursed when he had to pay. He swore that the cunning fellow knew exactly where to look for water before he started searching with his twitching stick.

  ‘Not just liquids, sir. Objects, too. Buried things, things that careless persons have lost. Things that give off a strong magnetic signal. Objects that were living once . . .’

  ‘Could you be more precise?’

  ‘Blood, Herr Procurator. Fresh is easy. Old blood has a different ring to it. It’s all a question of the throbbing energy it gives off. Dry blood, now, that has a very distinct sort of quivering feel . . .’

  ‘We retraced this path from the house, Stiffeniis,’ Lavedrine added brusquely.

  ‘I was watching,’ I told him with a smile.

  ‘The vibrations are strong at this point,’ he continued unflustered. ‘Perhaps they stopped here. Frau Gottewald and the killers. She was definitely alive as she made her way across the garden.’

  ‘Alive,’ Frau Böll echoed the foreign word with a shudder.

  I shuddered myself at the outrageousness of the suggestion.

  ‘Let me explain, Herr Procurator,’ Böll intervened. ‘Our rods vibrated all the way along the path from the house, but here the energy really is tremendous. That woman was breathing, sir, palpitating with emotion.’

  ‘You and I have passed this way, Lavedrine,’ I commented. ‘So have the soldiers. If there is any truth in what they assert, it may be misleading.’

  Böll hurried to reassure me with a sickly smile. ‘You are correct, sir. But let me ask you this, sir. Were you afraid for your life? Were you trembling with terror? In any case, my w
ife insists that the presence was female.’

  Helena had passed that way.

  The thought sent a cold ripple down my back. What passionate emotions had she experienced?

  ‘The quivering is powerful here,’ Lavedrine seconded, ‘but it is even more pronounced on other parts of the property. We must return towards the house—by the garden path, I think—we have not been that way. We will let Herr Stiffeniis see for himself. Frau Böll, will you take my arm?’

  Lavedrine bowed and offered his arm with a show of French gallantry that would have stolen any Prussian woman’s heart away. Frau Böll looked at the arm, looked at her husband, then deigned to accept, carrying herself as if the benefits were all on the French pretender’s side.

  ‘You will be devastated, madame,’ Lavedrine confided, ‘but this will be the last time, I promise you.’

  The woman frowned and pursed her lips in confusion, but she allowed herself to be led. I fell into step behind that ill-assorted couple, with Herr Böll at my side. Which pair made the more ridiculous sight, I did not like to think.

  ‘Poor Rumeliah almost fainted just now,’ Böll confided in a whisper. ‘The force was so strong, as if it meant to rip the sounding-rods from our hands. There are powerful demons present in the earth hereabouts.’

  We followed Frau Böll and Lavedrine along the path and began to approach the front of the house. I knew where we were heading. Lavedrine would open the cottage door, lead us all up the stairs, then set those damned divining-rods twitching at the sight of the blood-stained walls in the room where the massacre had taken place. In front of those mysterious letters inscribed on the wall in blood.

  But as we were passing through the kitchen garden, before we reached the door, Rumeliah Böll began to perform without any prompting. She let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and broke away from Lavedrine. She gripped her wand and tugged with both of her hands, as if some unseen person were trying to pull it away from her. She staggered across the garden, trying vainly to dig her heels in the frozen ground. Then, all of a sudden, the rod struck the ground and began to quiver violently like a plucked viola string. She was applying the pressure, making the baton vibrate, I was convinced of it, but I did not say a word. Let them act out their little charade, I thought, steeling myself to suffer the play without comment. I would save my ironic remarks for Lavedrine, when we were left alone. My triumph, and his come-uppance, were drawing nearer with every moment.