City of Shadows (42 page)

Schmidt withdrew the hand he’d placed companionably down the front of Esther’s blouse. “We haven’t done very well, have we?”

“I don’t know. We came to investigate Franziska’s past, and we find it to be odd. And I’ll tell you another thing: They’re hiding something. Everybody is. Why didn’t my jeweler in Pinsk want to tell me what it was, if it was just floods? Nobody can help floods. I tell you, something awful happened here in 1919.”

“I should think it did. ‘Russians, werewolves, floods, Gypsies, Jews.’ Only need the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and you’ve got the set.”

“The Russians were later,” she said.

They’d ventured into the garden. Neglected lavender bushes threw off a scent as they brushed past them. The faces of statues made white patches in black, entangling ivy.

“All I’m trying to point out,” she said, “is that Anna is quite possibly Franziska Schanskowska and is definitely
not
Anastasia.”

“You’re not making a very good case for it,” he said. He caught her up and kissed her. “But you might as well go on with it now that we’re here. Try to get the count on his own tomorrow.”

“He’s been trying to get me alone all evening,” she said. “He’s a droit du seigneur man if ever I saw one.”

“Small price to pay for information.”

Her laugh had an echo, perhaps from the lake or from the forest that began at the back of the house. Inside, the count had sat himself down at the piano, and the despairingly sweet notes of a Chopin nocturne cascaded onto the terrace.

“ ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ ”
she said.

He wished she hadn’t said it. His schoolmaster had claimed that the phrase was wrongly attributed to the world of nymphs and shepherds. “It was inscribed on a tomb,” old Müller had said. “It’s a statement by Death: ‘I am even in Arcadia.’ ”

I don’t want this, he thought. I don’t want Arcadia. I want slippers and quarrels and possibly a dog, I want everydayness. I want her to get old and have an ear trumpet. I want her ordinary and safe.

After a while she said, “And what will you be doing while I’m surren
dering my honor?”

“I’m interested in the werewolf reference. Werewolf equals murders. Murder is my business.” Death again, he thought. He said, “There was a mass being held in the church when we passed it. I’m going to ply the priest with liquor and talk to him.”

“Can you?”

“It was a Latin mass,” he said. “We should manage all right. Only thing I was good at in school, Latin. Lousy at everything else, but ...I remember having to translate the Gallic Wars and thinking, This is Caesar. He’s on some blasted heath surrounded by his centurions, there are blue-painted barbarians howling in the distance, and he’s telling me about it.”

“It’s a long time since I heard any Latin.”

“ ‘Ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.’ ”

She puzzled over it. “She-goats?”

“ ‘Go on home, you have fed full, the evening star is coming, go on, my she-goats.’ It’s the only bit of Virgil I can remember.”

They went in and said their good nights. The canopied bed in their room could have accommodated both them and a platoon of Napoleon’s army. Tonight, with moonlight and the smell of water and forest coming through the window, it was their world.

“Of course, there’s
an early reference to werewolves in Pliny the El
der,” Father Teofil said, rising to run his finger along one of his book
shelves. “And—I think I’m right—he got it from the Greeks. Euanthes, I believe.”

“You say that people around here still believe in them?” It had taken an hour to get the priest this far. Several pages of Schmidt’s police note
book were already full of geological and social information. Father Te
ofil had been overjoyed to meet another Latin speaker, if one somewhat rusty, and was flattered at featuring in a book, eager to display his learn
ing, which was considerable.

“You did not expect to find a classical scholar in the marshes, I imag
ine, Herr Schmidt, yet the wilderness and the solitary places shall be glad of him, to paraphrase Isaiah.”

Schmidt was sure they were, though the dusky flush of Father Te-ofil’s skin, his extreme thinness, and a collection of empty vodka bot
tles in a reed basket, to which one of Scotch had just been added, suggested other reasons for the priest’s lack of advancement.

He repeated his question. The man’s Latin was classical, and if he spoke slowly, Schmidt was able to keep up with him.

“I fear so, I fear so. Trying to eliminate paganism from their souls is the work of Sisyphus. Oh, here it is.” Father Teofil took down a book and collapsed into his battered wicker chair. “Yes, Pliny tells us, a man of the Antaeus family...mmm ... hung his clothing on an ash tree by a lake in Arcadia and swam across, thus being transformed into a wolf.”

“The count was saying there was an incidence of werewolves around here some while ago.”

“Just as I thought, it was from Euanthes.”

Schmidt unscrewed the top off his second bottle but kept his hand on it. “The count,” he persisted. “Werewolves. Around here.” He wasn’t sure whether the subject was worth pursuing, but he was damn well go
ing to pursue it. He’d traveled into Anna/Franziska’s past to find what it was that linked her to a murderer. Franziska might or might not be dead, but werewolves had been mentioned in virtually the same breath as her name. There was a connection in people’s minds between murderers and werewolves—both Kurten and Haarmann, his multiple murderers, had been designated werewolves at one time or another. Ergo . . .

“It happened around here, didn’t it?” he said, tapping the bottle.

“There were killings, but you don’t want to put that in your book.”

“Certainly not.” Schmidt put away his notebook, reached for the priest’s glass, and held it, like a biscuit in front of a puppy. “When was this?”

“Oh, years ago. About 1918, I think, or was it ’19? A little boy from the village disappeared. He’d been mushrooming in the forest with his mother. She was found murdered there—particularly brutally, I’m afraid—but no sign of the child. Her wedding ring, the only thing of value she had, was gone from her finger. The police were informed, yet little was done. It was wartime, and officialdom was in chaos. People became afraid for their children.” He shrugged sadly. “What would you, the werewolf legend was resurrected
.. . .
”

He was under way now. Schmidt poured the man’s whisky and handed it to him.

“Then, some weeks later, a little skeleton was found in a dike not far from here. There was ...trouble. The villagers now assumed they knew who had killed both mother and child.” Father Teofil looked at Schmidt over his glass. “It was Easter, you see, and it was assumed these were ritual killings.”

Schmidt was being told something, but he didn’t know what. “Go on,” he said.

The priest looked relieved. “It was thought the killer or killers had been found, action had been taken, the matter was over.”

“Yes?”

Father Teofil looked down at the floor, as if searching for something he’d dropped. Schmidt poured more whisky into the glass, but for a while Father Teofil’s eyes desperately scanned the dirty reed mat at his feet.

“Go on,” Schmidt said again. There was no place for pity at this point in an interrogation; time for that when you’d got the truth.

“Then the child’s father came forward
.. . .
”

“I wondered if it was the father,” Schmidt said. “Most murder victims are killed by their nearest, if not their dearest.”

“Oh, no, Herr Schmidt, no, no. It wasn’t him. I doubt if poor Tadeusz ever killed anything bigger than a fish. A most gentle person, almost effete for a villager, a mother’s boy. Indeed . . .” The priest’s eyes swiveled toward Schmidt and away again. “I had been greatly relieved when he married, if you understand me. You come from a metropolis; perhaps you are conversant with these matters.”

Schmidt nodded gently.

“He came forward in church,” Father Teofil said, “I have never wit
nessed such a scene and hope never to do so again. Ravaged, raving— we had thought it to be grief, you see. It was guilt. He pointed . . .”

His own arm swung out in accusation toward a worm-eaten grand
mother clock in the corner. “He pointed at a young man who had been his friend. There . . .” The priest’s hand stabbed again toward the clock. “Sitting in the congregation, a young man we all knew; indeed, I had baptized him, taken his confirmation. Mary, Mother of God, have mercy on us sinners, Almighty God, who seest we have no help in ourselves.”

“And this friend had killed his wife and child.”

Father Teofil looked up and nodded. “They had been lovers, it seemed,” he said simply. “Ryszard had wanted them to go away together, for Tadeusz to leave his family.... Ryszard, oh, a strange, afflicted boy. In the confessional he would burden me with recitals of such sins, as if he took pleasure in it.” Father Teofil’s voice, which had begun to slur, suddenly sharpened. “And I only tell you that now because he must be dead.”

“What happened then?” Schmidt poured more whisky into the old man’s glass, a hunter dripping the blood of a goat to attract the tiger. The killer’s near, he thought. He’s coming toward me.

“In my own church,” Father Teofil said. “A scene from the
Oresteia,
accusation of slain innocence, the audience my own horror-struck con
gregation.” He lapsed into Greek, where Schmidt couldn’t follow him, holding out his glass. Schmidt filled it.

“Tadeusz, my poor boy, my poor, poor boy, he made his accusation, then ran from the aisle to the door, pursued by the Furies.” Tears gath
ered in the hollow of the priest’s eyes and tipped over to slide down the planes of his cheeks. “He drowned himself. They found him in the dike afterward. He’d put his mother’s flatiron in one pocket and his wife’s in the other to weight him down.”

“And Ryszard?”

The old man’s hands lifted and fell in helplessness. “We could not be
lieve it. What would you? These people do not belong in the world of Aeschylus. This is a simple village. They are born, they worship, they marry, they give birth, they die. Such things are as far away from them as the stars. A young mother slaughtered? Her child butchered? Because one man wished ownership of another? They did not move. They could not believe it of one of their own.”

“No,” Schmidt said. “I can see that. He got away.”

“He went that night. Even then we could not believe. ...But there came the testimony of his cousin, a girl. Their two families shared a smallholding. She had always suspected Ryszard, she said, had been in terror of his violent nature all her life. She took us to his room. There was the young mother’s wedding ring, other things ...an ax.”

“Was the cousin’s name Franziska Schanskowska?”

“Franziska, yes.”

Schmidt had become merely a chorus, the prompt that moved on the protagonists of the tragedy being reenacted in the room by the old man’s memory. “And Ryszard? Do you know what happened to him?”

The priest shook his head. “He escaped human justice.” He looked up. “But it may be that he was subject to God’s, because soon after that the floods came, the Lord’s punishment on wickedness, a deluge visited on the innocent and guilty alike. Poor little Franziska was swept away with so many others. Her Gypsy friend, too. How the ripples of evil spread out and out, on and on, to this very day.”

“Oh, yes,” Schmidt said. “What was he like, Ryszard?”

“Oh, a big boy, tall, the Galczynskis were all tall. Very big, very clever. I think often that the village was too small for him and that had he been allowed ...But his father was a harsh man, a brutal man. I baptized him, taught him his catechism. That he should have ...So terrible. I look at his picture sometimes, pray for his soul ...pray for his victims.”

“A picture? You’ve got a picture?”

It was a matter of bullying now. Schmidt scrabbled through a dresser drawer, holding up photograph after photograph of Sunday-school pic
nics, church processions, a cart bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary with white-clad, palm-carrying little girls walking beside it, a confirmation class. “Is that him? Is that him?”

He went on searching. “Is
that
him?”

“Ah.”

It was of a boys’ church choir. He took it over to the old man. “Which one?”

“Lord have mercy on his soul, and...and there’s Tadeusz
.. . .
” The priest’s finger glissaded across the photograph from a tall figure to a slighter one. “My boys, my boys.”

“I’m sorry,” Schmidt said. He took the glass out of the priest’s hand, where it had begun to tip, lifted the thin, cassocked body more com
fortably into its chair, and stood looking down at it until its breathing became regular. “I’m very sorry.” He put the photograph into his pocket and went to find a neighbor who would sit with the old man and make sure he didn’t vomit in his sleep.

Walking back up the street toward the hunting lodge, he attracted bright Polish greetings that he neither heard nor returned.