Borrower of the Night: The First Vicky Bliss Mystery (19 page)

I don’t know how Tony passed the rest of the day; I spent quite a lot of time washing. I was gray with dust and sticky with perspiration, but I kept on washing long after my surface was clean. The stink of those cells had penetrated to the bone.

I had another errand to take care of. By the time I finished, I was good and hungry. The dining room was full when I arrived. Glancing around, I realized I had been so absorbed by the small group of guests who occupied my wing of the
Schloss
that I had lost track of the others. The family from Hamburg and the honeymooners were gone. Most of the tables were occupied by a party of German students, husky, tanned youngsters who made even Tony look elderly.

George was brash and cheery as ever.

“Where were you two?” he asked. “I went downtown later, but I couldn’t find you.”

“We drank beer,” I said. “What did you do for amusement?”

“Went to church. I was breaking the Tenth Commandment—or is it the Ninth?”

“Coveting your neighbor’s goods?” Tony was not amused. “The Riemenschneider altar?”

“Yes. I’d steal it if I could think of a way to get it out of Germany. There’s another altar at Creglingen, across the valley. I think I’ll drive up there tomorrow.”

“It is considered his masterpiece by some,” said Blankenhagen suddenly. “I myself prefer certain figures in the museum of Würzburg.”

“We’ll have to see Würzburg,” George said. “Maybe after we leave here. How much longer do you plan to stay, Vicky?”

“I never make plans. I’m just a creature of impulse. Don’t let me interfere with your arrangements.”

Blankenhagen gave me an enigmatic look, and continued to be informative about Riemenschneider.

“He was one of the councillors of Würzburg. During the
Bauernkrieg
, he and eleven other councillors supported the peasants, and when the nobles captured the town he was imprisoned.”

“So he picked the losers,” George said. “He got his, I suppose.”

Blankenhagen shifted in his chair.

“They pierced his hands,” he said. “Never again did he do a work of sculpture.”

“Artists shouldn’t dabble in politics,” George said. “He should have stuck to his last, or chisel, or whatever he used.”

I wanted to hit him with something—something hard. I consider myself unsentimental, but I could not have joked about an atrocity like that. What made it worse was that George wasn’t joking. He meant what he said.

“He had at least the knowledge,” snapped Blankenhagen, “that he suffered for a cause he believed was right.”

“I wonder,” said George, “if that was any satisfaction to him.”

We spent the evening in the lounge, yawning at each other. Tony was silent and rather peaked-looking. For the first time in too long I remembered his injury. I hadn’t even had the decency to ask how he felt. Feeling guilty, I let him escort me to my room when the witching hour of ten struck. If he had asked me nicely, I might even have agreed to stay there. But he didn’t ask. He told me.

“Stay put tonight. That’s an order.”

I nodded. A reflexive movement is not binding legally.

The next two hours were difficult. I didn’t want to leave my room until I was sure Tony had fallen asleep. It would be just like him to check up on me. But I had a hard time keeping awake. I was short on sleep and long on tiring adventures.

Finally I barred my door and shoved the heavy cupboard away from the wall. As I started down the hidden stairs I noticed that the beam of my flashlight was getting dim, and I retraced my steps. I had bought extra batteries and a can of oil in town earlier, and I was taking no chances on having my light fade out in the middle of some dark hole. Then I went back to the passage.

This time the door at the other end opened without difficulty. My errand that afternoon had taken me to Schmidt’s room. His door was locked, but, as I had expected, my key opened it. Those locks were a joke. I assumed that the old ones had been ripped out and sold. If they were like the beautiful handmade antique locks I had seen in museums, they had been valuable. The
Gräfin
hadn’t missed much.

Naturally I couldn’t give the Burckhardt-Schmidt apartment the careful search it demanded during the day, with people wandering the halls and servants popping in and out. My aim was to clear the secret entrance so I could come and go in the small hours.

Since I knew where the passage ended, it didn’t take me long to locate the sliding panel and figure out how it worked. The mechanism was a variation of the carved rosette pattern in the Great Hall. It controlled a bolt instead of a handle; the door could be locked, but only from the inside.

I confess that bolt amused me. A tyrant, medieval or modern, needs all the locks and bolts he can get. But since one branch of the passageway ended in the bedchamber of the Countesses Drachenstein…Marriage was as perilous in those days as it is today.

In the still hours of the night the unoccupied chamber had an uneasy atmosphere. It didn’t feel abandoned. Too many Drachensteins had breathed their last in the carved, canopied bed. It may have been a trick of my imagination, but I almost fancied I could see a depression the size and shape of a human body in the smooth counterpane.

I wedged a chair under the door handle before I got to work. Schmidt was safely locked up in the local hospital, but that didn’t make
me
feel safe. He might be the villain who had engineered some of the supernatural games, but he couldn’t have played the star role of the Black Man. Some source of malice was still on the loose, and I didn’t want it interrupting me.

By this time I was becoming an expert on secret panels. It took me only a few minutes to find another carved rosette. The old craftsman hadn’t been very imaginative about that device, but maybe he had to select a design his dim-witted patrons could remember. The mechanisms controlled by the rosette were varied and ingenious; this one opened a panel rather than a door. It was only a couple of feet square, and its outlines were cleverly concealed by carved moldings that were part of the design of the paneling.

The count’s wall safe was a single block of dressed stone that slid out of the wall like a drawer. I knew right away I hadn’t found the shrine; the stone was only half a meter high. I lowered it to the floor and thrust my hand into the cavity in its top.

I touched some small brittle objects that felt like twigs. I shone my light down into the stone drawer and jerked my hand back with a snort of disgust. The brittle twigs were rodent bones—the remnants of a battalion of long-dead rats.

The bottom of the drawer was covered with scraps of chewed parchment and paper. I cursed the rat bones and selected a few scraps which were big enough to offer some hope of decipherment. Then I removed the only other object the drawer contained: a small chest, made of wood and bound with silver.

It had been a beautiful object—a rich man’s prized possession. But the silver had turned black and the revolting rodents had ruined the box. One corner was completely gnawed away. I lifted the top with a quick twist that ripped out the decayed hasp and lock. The chest was beyond repair.

Most of the interior was filled with the remains of a linen bag, also gnawed by rodent teeth. When I tried to lift it, the rotted cloth dissolved, spilling a heap of coarse gray powder into the bottom of the box.

I touched it with a cautious finger, wondering what it had been. The centuries might have reduced any substance, solid or semi-solid, to this state. My fingertip, penetrating more deeply, touched something hard. I extracted it and held it up to the light.

Not more than an inch in height, the small gold figure might have been an amulet; there was a rounded link at the top of it. After considering the object, I decided I would not care to wear it. It was meant to represent an animal of some kind. The wide, grinning jaws and pop eyes rather suggested a frog, but no frog I had ever met had such a wicked look. The Drachenstein crest had nothing to do with frogs. Whatever this monstrosity had been meant to be, it was not a dragon. It certainly wasn’t one of Riemenschneider’s pieces. He couldn’t have produced an abortion like this if he had wanted to. In fact, the trinket had a look of antiquity far older than the sixteenth century.

I shrugged and dropped it into the pocket of my robe. Maybe it was a talisman or lucky piece belonging to an ancestor of Burckhardt’s—that same crusading count who had brought the jewels back to Drachenstein. The amulet had an eastern look….

And with that, a dark and elusive memory stirred unpleasantly in the back of my mind—stirred and subsided, like a slimy thing in a swamp.

Ten

MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS WERE BEGINNING TO catch up with me. I didn’t wake till almost noon next day. I had dreamed that some faceless intruder was tampering with the little chest, but when I stretched out an anxious hand, I found it on the nightstand where I had left it. That had been a stupid place to put it, but I had been too tired the night before to think straight. I tucked the chest into a corner of my suitcase and locked the case.

I didn’t see Tony till lunchtime. I found him alone at our table. George had gone off to Creglingen to see the altar there. Tony seemed vexed by this. His mood was not improved when the
Gräfin
came in, a royal procession of one, and joined us at our table. I wondered what she was after this time.

“I wished to tell you again how sorry I am that your vacation has been so unpleasant,” she began. “It is unaccountable. Never, until you came, have we known such violence.”

“Is that right,” I said. “You surprise me. I would think a place like this had seen a lot of violence over the years.”

“Many years ago, perhaps. But this is ancient history now. There has not been a prisoner in those horrid cells since sixteen hundred and thirty. And on that occasion Graf Otto was severely reprimanded by the emperor.”

I exchanged glances with Tony. Damn her, the woman knew every move we had made.

“You are well acquainted with the family history for someone who is not a Drachenstein by birth,” I said.

“I was forced to amuse myself. To be buried in this provincial spot after Prague, Vienna, Budapest was not easy for a spoiled young girl. My husband loved his home and would not leave it. I painted, embroidered, studied music; but these soon pall.”

“Especially when one has mastered them,” Tony said. It was a reluctant compliment, and not an empty one. I too was sure the old lady could master anything she attempted. She acknowledged his courtesy with a chilly smile.

“So then I turned to a study of genealogy. As a professor of history, you will understand its fascination. Are you making progress with your research into the Peasants’ Revolt, and Count Burckhardt?”

“I’ve been to the town archives.” Tony eyed the woman with what he obviously thought was a look of fiendish cunning. “I imagine you’ve used them too.”

“Oh, yes. I know the story of the Countess Konstanze’s death.”

“Does your niece know it?” I asked.

“She does not. She is already sufficiently unbalanced on that subject.”

Tony was turning red—a sure sign that he was about to lose his temper.

“Irma must know the story,” he said. “How else can you account for what she said in the séance?”

“Must I account for it? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ as your poet so cleverly puts it.”

“Rrrr,” said Tony. He turned the growl into a cough. “I would be more willing to admit the supernatural if there were some quasilogical reason for a haunting. Even a specter has to have a
raison d’être
. You surely know the classic explanations—unexpiated crime, for instance.”

“How clever!” exclaimed the
Gräfin
. “But what of innocence abused and unavenged? Konstanze was falsely accused—”

“Naturally.”

“Yes, we moderns know the folly of the witchcraft persecution. Yet her fate was not surprising. She was a learned woman who had been educated by a family priest in her home near Granada. His lessons apparently gave her ideas which were, in that day, dangerously heretical. It is said that she was in communication with Trithemius, at Würzburg.”

“That must be apocryphal,” Tony said. “Trithemius died in fifteen hundred sixteen. But that doesn’t account for the lady’s restlessness. She can’t be worried about her reputation; we know she was innocent. And I’m afraid we’re in no position to punish her persecutors, or give her Christian burial.”

He looked at his hostess with the candid wide-eyed stare that had brought out the motherly instinct in many middle-aged ladies. I could have told him it wouldn’t work; the
Gräfin
had about as much maternal instinct as a guppy. She smiled gently.

“It is very mysterious.”

After she left, Tony and I discussed the interview. We agreed on one thing: the
Gräfin
almost certainly knew about the shrine. One of the most common motives assigned to restless spirits is their desire to tell their descendants where the gold is buried. The
Gräfin
must have been familiar with the whole corpus of supernatural literature; her failure to mention this point was significant.

“She knows,” I summarized, “but she doesn’t know where. If she had the shrine, she’d throw us out of here. She has every excuse; our snooping has been outrageous.”

“I don’t know.” A visit from the
Gräfin
always depressed Tony. “She might let us stay on just for the fun of watching us stumble around. We must look pretty ridiculous, and her sense of humor is decidedly macabre.”

“She couldn’t risk it,” I argued. “If we find the shrine, we’ll turn it over to Irma—unless Elfrida can lift the loot before we make the discovery public. She’d have to silence us, in that case. Why should she take such a chance unless she had to? I’m sure she hasn’t found it. Not yet.”

Tony looked more cheerful.

“I guess you’re right. Shall we have a look at Burckhardt’s room?”

“Right now?”

“Right now. No more roaming by night. That’s when all the kookie things happen.”

“Okay,” I said agreeably.

But when we reconnoitered, we found Schmidt’s room occupied by a buxom chambermaid who was scrubbing the floor. It was clear that the process would take some time, so we retreated. I tried to console Tony—not, of course, by telling him I had already searched the room—but by pointing out an unpalatable fact that had just occurred to me.

If the
Gräfin
knew about the shrine, she had certainly searched Burckhardt’s room and all the other obvious hiding places. She wasn’t stupid; if she had not located the shrine, it must be concealed in a more obscure spot than we had anticipated.

The idea didn’t cheer Tony much. It didn’t cheer me either. My reasoning was not invalidated by the fact that I had found the secret drawer. Its contents held no useful clue, and the
Gräfin
would have no reason to remove them. Perhaps the scraps of parchment and the mutilated bag had not even belonged to Burckhardt, but to one of his many successors or predecessors.

Since there was nothing else to do, we went sightseeing. By Tony’s definition, this activity includes frequent stops for liquid refreshment. The drinking places of Rothenburg are all charming; you can guzzle beer or drink tea in dark, raftered rooms or sit in a cobblestoned square admiring the view. We tried both, and since we couldn’t decide which ambience was preferable, we tried both several times.

I suppose it was inevitable that we should end up at the Jakobskirche. With our chance of finding the shrine seeming even more remote, we were just torturing ourselves by visiting Riemenschneider’s altar, but we couldn’t keep away.

It is so beautiful that all the adjectives critics and art historians use seem inadequate. The dark wood glows. The bodies breathe, and are just about to move. The central carving depicts the Last Supper, at the moment when Christ makes the statement: “One of you shall betray me.” You can see the effect of the words on every face.

I glanced at Tony, who was standing beside me. He never looked at
me
that way.

“Come on” I said gruffly. “Let’s have another beer.”

We had several more beers before we went back to the
Schloss
, but the beverage didn’t have its usual effect on our spirits. I knew why I felt so uneasy. For the last thirty-six hours, there had been a strange absence of activity—not even a séance to disturb the peace. It was as if something were waiting for us to move. But it could not wait indefinitely.

I went to bed early that night. Tony gave me the usual lecture about staying in my room, but even that didn’t stimulate me. I had no plans for the night. I was, to use a classic phrase, baffled.

Once in bed I found I couldn’t sleep, or concentrate on the novel I had brought for light reading. The room was very quiet. The single lamp glimmered lonesomely in its restricted circle of light. But as I lay on the bed, smoking one cigarette after another in reckless defiance of every health regulation, I had never felt less sleepy. The sense of something waiting, a mounting pressure against my mind, grew steadily.

From where I lay I could hardly avoid staring straight into the painted eyes of the face that had become an unreasonable obsession. With just a little imagination I could sense a slender presence, just beyond the bounds of ordinary sight and sound, pressing on an invisible door, trying to come through, to tell me something….

I sat upright with a profane remark. Going to my suitcase, I took out the crumbling wooden box. Maybe if I tried some logical research on the fragments of parchment, it would brush the cobwebs from my brain.

But the scraps were hopeless. Only a word here and there was legible, and they were common words such as “have” and “we.” I couldn’t even find a name.

Absently I reached into my pocket and took out the small golden frog. I sat staring into the empty pop eyes as if they held some knowledge. And as I stared, the memory stirred again—the dark memory, like fragments of a childish nightmare….

My finger had dipped into the peculiar gray-black powder in the box. It was an odd substance, dusty but not dust. It was too coarse for dust, almost crystalline….

The monstrous idea struck me like a fist in the stomach. For several seconds I sat gaping down into the box, my finger buried to the end of the nail in the gray powder. When I realized what I was doing, I jerked it out and wiped it against the skirt of my robe.

“It’s impossible,” I mumbled.

But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. It distressed me horribly. It made me sick at my stomach. True or false, the bizarre theory should not have had such a strong emotional impact. It was only a side issue in any case, one which could never be settled.

That last thought was pure wishful thinking. Even as it formed in my mind, my inconvenient memory produced a paragraph from a book I had once read.

I must have stood by my door for almost five minutes, reaching for the handle and pulling my hand back, reaching, pulling back…It was a horrible idea. It was crazy.

I knew I would never sleep soundly again unless I found out.

The hour was later than I had realized. Tony was sound asleep. I beat on his door for quite a while before he answered.

“Come on,” I said. “The game’s afoot.”

I didn’t wait for him. The next victim was Blankenhagen. It took almost as long to rouse him. By the time he opened his door, Tony had joined me, which was just as well; Blankenhagen probably wouldn’t have let me in without a chaperon. A chaperon for him, that is.

They were both furious. After I had talked a while they were still furious—but they were interested. I asked the doctor a question. His face was a sight to behold.

“
Heiliger Gott
—I do not know. I suppose it is possible….”

“That’s what I thought. Then…” I spoke softly but urgently. Several times Blankenhagen’s mouth opened as if to interrupt, but he didn’t. I think he was struck dumb. Tony kept making strange strangling sounds.

“But,” said Blankenhagen when I had finished. “But — but — now, at this hour?”

“It has to be now. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve got to find out. If I could do it alone, I would.”

Blankenhagen sat twitching like a hen on a clutch of radioactive eggs. Finally his narrowed blue eyes moved to meet Tony’s. They both turned to stare at me.

“I am insane,” muttered Blankenhagen. “You understand, I have not the equipment, even if—”

“I know. But the first part has to be done now.”

“Allow me then to assume my trousers.”

Tony and I went out into the hall while the trousers were assumed. He was wide-awake now and so torn between anger and fascination that he was barely coherent.

“Why didn’t you — why did you — I ought to kill you, you — you woman!”

“I woke you up,” I pointed out. “I needn’t have done that. I’m sorry I did, if you’re just going to stand around and yell.”

Blankenhagen emerged, with trousers, just in time to prevent an undignified scuffle. I led the way down the corridor, stopping in my room to get a coat and some other equipment. Our next stop was at the carpenters’ shack in the south wing. Then we proceeded to the crypt.

As the work went on, I was convinced of one thing. This particular tomb had not been opened before. It was doubtful whether we could open it now. The mortar chipped away easily, but the stone slab on which lay the carved effigy of Count Burckhardt von und zu Drachenstein behaved as if it were reluctant to leave its place. But it was a couple of inches thinner than the first slab we had raised, and this time nobody sat on the floor and watched. Finally we had the slab propped back, and Blankenhagen climbed down into the vault.

The coffin was metal. Even after Blankenhagen had shot the bolts that held the lid in place, he had to score through the corroded joint. I had anticipated this possibility; our tools included a couple of metal files. When Blankenhagen’s hands gave out, Tony took his place in the vault. I followed Tony, ignoring male chauvinist complaints from Blankenhagen. (There were no complaints from Tony, but not because he wasn’t a chauvinist.) To reach the upper part of the coffin I had to sprawl across the lid, and some of my wilder fancies can be imagined. I got the lid loose at last. My hands were raw and so were my nerves.

Lying on the floor of the crypt, Blankenhagen reached down into the vault and grasped one of the coffin handles. Tony took the other. They heaved in unison; and we found ourselves looking down on the face of Graf Burckhardt, who had departed this life in the year of our Lord 1525.

Thanks to a well-sealed coffin, the Count’s body was fantastically preserved, almost mummified. The features were not nice to look at. They had an expression of twisted agony which was the effect (I kept telling myself) of the shrinkage of the facial tissue. The leathery lips were drawn back over yellowed teeth that looked predatory and vicious in spite of the long moustache that half veiled them. The body wore a gaudy court costume which had suffered more from the ravages of time than the flesh itself. The gold lace was black, and the velvet tore under Blankenhagen’s careful hands.