Death and the Devil: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  “I was on the Brook,” he said.

  “Really?” Tilman gave a weak grin. “Perhaps I should go on the Brook, too.”

  “Don’t you dare! Or, yes, dare if you like. A man needs certain qualities to be given presents like these, if you get my meaning.”

  “Oh, I do. What’s she called?”

  “Richmodis,” said Jacob proudly. Only respectable girls were called Richmodis.

  “What does she do?”

  “Her father’s a dyer, though she’s the one who does the dyeing.” Jacob shook his head. “A piece of advice, Tilman. Keep your hands away from the butchers’ stalls. There’s a curse on all hams and sausages.”

  “They caught you,” said Tilman, not particularly surprised.

  “They chased me all around Haymarket. I escaped along the Brook. Into the Brook.”

  “And Goodwife Richmodis fished you out?”

  “She’s not a goodwife.”

  “What then?”

  “A divine creature.”

  “Good Lord!”

  Jacob pictured her with her crooked nose and her buxom figure under her modest dress. “And she’s still available,” he added, as if he were announcing his engagement.

  “Don’t fool yourself, Jacob.”

  “And why not, I ask?”

  Tilman leaned forward. “If I can give you a piece of advice, keep away from Haymarket as well as the Brook and stuff your belly somewhere else in future. They can recognize that mop from here to Aachen.”

  “You’re just jealous. I had to pay for these clothes.”

  “How much?”

  “A lot.”

  “Stop bragging. What have you got to pay with anyway?”

  “Had. Three carrots and a beef sausage.”

  Tilman sighed. “That is a lot.”

  “Yes. And I almost got torn to pieces for it.” Jacob stretched and gave an immense yawn. “Anyway, how’s the world been treating you?”

  “Very badly. I sat outside St. Mary’s Garden, but there were pilgrims there and they took all the pickings, God blast their eyes. The place was teeming with beggars from outside and tricksters faking deformities so that even the most softhearted put their purses away. What can a man do? There were others running around the town with rattles, collecting for the leper colony at Melaten. I left. I don’t want to catch leprosy and have my hand drop off when I hold it out for alms.”

  “Quite right. Had anything to eat?”

  “Well, naturally I was invited to the burgomaster’s. There were roast pears, wild boar, stuffed pigeons—”

  “Nothing at all, then.”

  “Brilliant. Do I look as if I’ve had anything to eat?”

  Jacob shrugged his shoulders. “Just asking.”

  “But I’m going to get a drink,” Tilman crowed. “Tonight in the Hen.”

  “The inn?” Jacob asked skeptically.

  “The very place.”

  “Since when have you had money to drink at the inn?”

  “I haven’t, have I? Otherwise I’d have spent it on food. But someone I know has. Don’t ask where he got it, I don’t want to know. But he wants to get rid of it. Says you can’t drink money, so he’s invited me and a couple of others to wet our whistles.”

  “The man must have gone soft in the head. When?”

  “Six o’clock. Why don’t you just come along? He’ll treat you, too.”

  It was an attractive idea.

  “Don’t know,” Jacob said, nevertheless. “I must get something solid down me first.”

  “Aha! You’ve not eaten either?”

  “Not a scrap’s passed my lips.”

  “Why do you have to go for sausages? Why didn’t you pay Old Market Square a visit and persuade a few apples to jump into your pocket?”

  “Why?” Jacob took a deep breath. “Because I had apples yesterday. Because I had apples the day before yesterday. Because I had apples before that. And before that. Because I’m starting to feel like an apple maggot.”

  “You’re too choosy.”

  “Oh, thanks very much.”

  Once more they were silent for a while. The clouds were gathering. The afternoon was making its weary way toward evening.

  “Not a bite to eat then.” Tilman’s summary was matter-of-fact. “As usual.”

  He coughed.

  It was the cough that did it. So casual and so terminal. Jacob jumped up and clenched his fists. “All right, you’ve persuaded me. Apples it is.”

  Tilman gave him a long look. Then he smiled. “Apples it is.”

  MATTHIAS

  Matthias had strolled along the Rhine embankment, watching pepper, spices, and barrels of herring being unloaded from Dutch ships, past the Franks Tower and along the Old Bank before turning into Dranckgasse. This ran along the old Roman wall, part of which had been demolished to make way for the new cathedral. On the left in front of him the chapels surrounding the apse towered up into the sky and his heart was filled with misgivings.

  He knew Gerhard’s plans. This—provided it was ever completed—would be the perfect church, the Holy City here on earth. The plans for the facade alone, with its two mountainous towers, had covered almost fifteen feet of parchment. Matthias had asked Gerhard whether he had forgotten he wouldn’t live forever.

  Gerhard had patiently tried to explain that having a chancel with five aisles gave him no choice but to set out the whole massive church in one single design, following the precedent of Paris and Bourges. Even if he didn’t fully understand, Matthias took the architect at his word. His journeyman years had taken him to the scaffolding of Troyes and the new churches in Paris, including the much-praised Sainte Chapelle rising up in the courtyard of the Palace of Justice. By the time the choir of Amiens cathedral was being built his opinion was valued more highly than that of many a French colleague. Pierre de Montereau, the builder of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, had been his teacher and he was in constant contact with Jean de Chelles, who was supervising the construction of Notre Dame.

  Oh, yes, Gerhard Morart had been through a good school, the very best, and above all he had managed to bring together a team of master craftsmen who were familiar with the new style.

  For one brief moment he wished he could turn around and forget everything, but it was too late for that now. It had already been too late when the group met for the first time.

  He cast his doubts aside and felt his usual calm return. His stoicism was his great virtue. Neither Johann nor Daniel was sufficiently pragmatic to carry their plan through in a businesslike manner. They were liable to outbursts of rage, pangs of conscience, and indecisiveness. The only one he felt at all close to was the old woman. Not emotionally close—God forbid!—but close in their attitude to life.

  The bell of St. Mary’s-by-the-Steps beyond the cathedral building site struck five.

  He quickened his pace, left the chancel of the new cathedral and the old Roman wall behind him, turned right opposite Priest Gate into Marzellenstraße and, after a few hundred yards, left up the lane to the Ursulines’ convent.

  There was hardly anyone about. The convent grounds were surrounded by a twelve-foot-high wall and had only one narrow entrance, which was usually left open. Matthias went through the low arch into the long courtyard. The rather modest but pretty convent church on the right with its one spire corresponded more to Matthias’s own conception of what a church should be like. He knew that, as a person who relied on cold reason, he lacked the imagination to visualize the new cathedral in its completed state. It was a blind spot he at times regretted. At others, however, he saw the titanic enterprise as a symbol of his own ambitions. He would marvel at the way one stone fitted in with the next, obedient to the almost magic power of ruler, square, and plumb line, and watch how the windlasses allowed human muscle to raise a block of Drachenfels stone weighing tons high into the air for the masons to set it precisely edge-to-edge with its neighbor. The cathedral seemed to grow like a living organism, filling him with a sense
of his own power and pride at what the future would bring.

  Then the image of the old woman suddenly reappeared in his mind, replacing the cathedral with the vision of a gigantic ruin.

  He leaned back against the wall, staring at the empty courtyard. Opposite the spire was a well. After some time two nuns came out of the convent building to draw water. They gave him a cursory glance.

  If the man he had come to meet did not turn up soon he would have to go. A waste of time.

  He swore to himself.

  “Fiat lux,” said Urquhart.

  Matthias gave a violent start and scanned the courtyard. No one.

  “Up here.”

  His eye slowly traveled up the wall. Urquhart was sitting on the top, directly above, smiling down at him.

  “What the devil are you doing up there?”

  “Waiting for you,” Urquhart replied with his habitual mixture of politeness and gentle mockery.

  “And I for you,” Matthias replied sharply. “Perhaps you would have the goodness to come down.”

  “Why?” Urquhart laughed. “You can come and join me up here, if you like.”

  Matthias’s face was expressionless. “You know very well—” He stopped as he suddenly registered the height of the wall. “How on earth did you manage to get up there?”

  “I jumped.”

  Matthias started to say something, but the words stuck in his throat. What was there to say? No man could jump twelve feet.

  “Do you think we could talk?” he asked instead.

  “Of course.” With a supple twist of his body Urquhart swiveled around and landed on his toes beside Matthias. He had put up his long blond hair in a kind of helmet shape, making him seem taller than ever.

  “We’d better wait till those women have gone,” Matthias growled. He was irritated that Urquhart had kept him waiting longer than necessary.

  His companion raised his eyebrows in surprise. “How complicated you make things! Isn’t openness the best disguise? If we were to behave like thieves, keep looking around shiftily and muttering in low voices, then we would deserve to end up in—what do you call that funny tower? Oh, yes, in the Weckschnapp. Just behave naturally. Let us show some courtesy toward the venerable servants of the living God.”

  He turned to the nuns and gave them a gallant bow. “It’s going to rain,” he called out. “Better get back inside.”

  The younger of the two beamed at him. “Rain is also a gift from God,” she replied.

  “Do you still think that when you’re lying alone in your cell and it’s hammering against the walls as if the Prince of Darkness himself were demanding entrance?” He wagged his finger at her playfully. “Be on your guard, my little flower.”

  “Of course,” she stammered, gaping at Urquhart as if he were every reason to leave the convent made all-too-solid flesh. Then she hurriedly lowered her gaze and blushed. Fifteen at the most, Matthias guessed.

  Her companion shot her a sideways glance and hastily crossed herself. “Come,” she commanded. “Quickly!”

  She turned on her heel and marched back to the convent with all the grace of a draught horse. The younger one hurried after, looking back over her shoulder several times. Urquhart gave her an even lower bow, combined with a mocking scrutiny from beneath his bushy brows. He seemed to find the whole business amusing.

  They were alone in the courtyard.

  “That got rid of them,” Urquhart stated complacently.

  “Is that one of your tactics?” Matthias’s voice had a frosty note.

  Urquhart nodded. “In a way. Openness is the best concealment, the best way not to be remembered is to make yourself obvious. Neither of them will be able to describe us, not even me. Had we turned away they would have wondered why we didn’t salute them and would have had a good look at our faces, our clothes, our posture.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, I have no reason to hide from anyone.”

  “But then you’re a respectable citizen.”

  “And I don’t want to be seen together with you,” Matthias went on, unmoved. “Our next meeting better be somewhere more secluded.”

  “You suggested we meet here.”

  “I realize that. Now stop turning the heads of harmless nuns and tell me how you mean to go about your assignment.”

  Urquhart put his lips to Matthias’s ear and spoke quietly to him for a while. The latter’s face brightened visibly with every word.

  “And the witnesses?” he asked.

  “Found and paid.”

  A smile appeared on Matthias’s lips, the first in a long time. “Then I give your plan my blessing.”

  Urquhart bowed his blond head. “If it is the will of the terrible God.”

  Matthias frowned and tried to remember where he had heard the expression before, the Old Testament God of vengeance who is terrible to the kings of the earth.

  He felt the excruciatingly slow drip of a bead of sweat running down his forehead. Disconcerted, he looked at Urquhart’s eyes. Were they really a dead man’s eyes, as Heinrich had whispered? At that moment the other gave him an amused wink and Matthias felt a fool. Urquhart was playing with words like a jester. The living were alive, the dead were dead.

  “We shouldn’t meet at the same place twice. Understood?” he said icily. “Tomorrow at seven o’clock at Greyfriars church.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Don’t disappoint me.” Matthias walked off without a further word and hurried back the way he had come. Just to make it clear who was in charge.

  It was only when he was back in Dranckgasse that he was suddenly overcome with the humiliating feeling that he had actually been running away from Urquhart.

  THE CATHEDRAL

  It was a crazy idea, of course.

  But Jacob had set his mind on getting hold of the most noble apples in the whole of Cologne and they happened to belong to Conrad von Hochstaden, lord archbishop of Cologne, who had commanded an army in the service of the emperor and also crowned the anti-king, Henry of Holland. A powerful gentleman and not one to be trifled with.

  Getting at these apples necessitated a visit to the archbishop’s orchard, which was combined with his zoo. It lay between Conrad’s palace and the rising walls of the cathedral choir, or, to be more precise, somewhat behind them. Naturally it had a wall around it and locked gates. Fantastic stories about the animals could be heard in Cologne, for example that the archbishop kept lions and a legendary beast called elephantus with a diabolically long nose and legs like tree trunks. In fact, most of the animals lurking among the laden fruit trees were peacocks and pheasants, which were not only a fine sight, but also a fine adornment on the archbishop’s table. And that, apart from a dozen squirrels, was that.

  The only way into Conrad’s private Garden of Eden was over the wall, and the only place where it was worth risking was Große Sparergasse. A misnomer, really. There was nothing “great” about the narrow alleyway, which was little more than a wormhole between the cathedral building site and the orchard. There were walls on either side, too high to climb without a ladder.

  But no obstacle to Jacob the Fox.

  At this point a few massive, ancient apple trees stretched out from the orchard across the alley and over the building site on the other side. The higher branches pointed straight at the cathedral, but lower, gnarled arms twisted down low enough over the alley for him to be able to grab on to them with both hands and pull himself up.

  So he didn’t actually need to go into the orchard itself. On the other hand, nature had so arranged things that only an excellent climber could get at the apples. People kept on trying, but most of them ended up dangling from the branches like bats, unable to get their footing before the constables or the archbishop’s thugs came to pick them off. But despite the fact that this kept the loss of apples within limits, Conrad had recently announced severe punishments for anyone caught stealing them in the future. Since then the number of thefts had dropped to nil.

  Jacob
intended to change that.

  He stood underneath the branches and waited. By now it was after seven; the sun was just going down. Although heavy rain clouds were approaching inexorably, the setting sun still left enough light in the sky. A gusty wind sprang up. The laborers and craftsmen on the cathedral stopped working and went home. There was no point in continuing once it started to get dark; they only made mistakes and would have to do it all over again the next day.

  Suddenly, from one moment to the next, the alley was deserted.

  Jacob tensed his muscles, flexed his knees, and pushed off. His hands grasped the lowest branch. Without pausing, he pulled his body up smoothly, did a straddle with his legs and slipped up into the foliage.

  It was the work of a moment. And no one had seen him. He clutched the branch above him and swung up onto it. Now he was completely invisible.

  But Jacob could see all the better, and what he saw set his heart beating. Nature’s bounty was spread out before him. There was nothing in the world to match these apples. Greedily he grabbed one, his teeth tore through the firm green skin, slicing the apple in two. The juice ran down his chin. The apple disappeared, a second followed, and a few moments later all that was left of the third was the stem.

  Jacob gave a loud burp. He looked down through the leaves in alarm.

  No danger.

  He was going to have a terrible stomachache, that he knew. There was nothing for his belly to work on but the acid fruit. But a stomachache would pass. Now that he had stilled the more immediate pangs of hunger, he could set about filling his new and, fortunately, wide coat with further spoils. He thought of Tilman, and of Maria, the woman who sometimes gave him a roof over his head when the winter was too harsh—and her professional commitments permitted. Taking his own needs into consideration as well, he came, after some laborious counting on his fingers, to the figure of thirty.

  No time to lose.

  First of all he picked the best fruits he could reach from where he was. But he still had nothing like enough when all that was left were smaller, inferior specimens. Cautiously he shuffled along the branch. Now he was right over the middle of the alley. He held on tight with his left hand, while his right was busy among the branches. You could have fed whole families on the fruit growing there.