HS02 - Days of Atonement (28 page)

‘But you think otherwise.’

‘She was afraid,’ Helena repeated, her own eyes wide with fright. ‘As a rule, the weather may hamper our plans, but it does not provoke fear.’ She shook out her hair, and stared at me intently. ‘I may be making more of what that woman said than she intended, but . . . I took it as a warning. A warning to me. Am I a witness, Hanno?’

‘Is that what Lavedrine said?’

‘I want
you
to tell me,’ she replied.

‘Lavedrine says, and I quote, that you are a credible witness.’

Then, I know not what took possession of me. My words were rough, but I chose them with care. ‘I found him in a bordello this evening,’ I said. ‘A whorehouse. In the company of a creature of the night.’

She looked at me, her face a mask of troubled incomprehension.

‘What were you doing that day?’ I asked. ‘Alone in the countryside.’

Helena looked down. Her head sank low. I could not see her for the mass of waving dark curls, like seawort in the rolling tide, or the glistening serpents of some mysterious Medusa.

Her words were sharp and clear, though she choked back tears.

‘What were
you
doing this night, husband? Roaming the town instead of seeing that your babes were safe. Instead of reassuring me that all was well.’

 21 

A
S DAWN BROKE
, I crept from the house like a thief.

I had no wish to relive the ugly tension of the night before, no desire to add extra fuel to the fire of the interrogation to which I had subjected my wife. Before I saw her again, I would need time to decide how to put the questions that still rankled in my mind.

Under cover of a dense white fog, I closed the kitchen door, and set out along the road to town, making myself and my destination known to the all-too-familiar French soldiers guarding the East Gate. Though preparing myself for a busy day, I had no idea how hectic it would turn out to be. I made my way through the empty town and went directly to my office. I was faced with the tiresome necessity of writing two distinct and different accounts of my voyage to Kamenetz. The first was meant for the eyes of Count Dittersdorf. The other would be added to the mounting pile of documentation regarding the massacre, which would be scrutinised, sooner or later, by the French. If I had hoped that the freezing cold, and the fifteen-minute walk which separated my home from the courthouse, would be sufficient to shake the cobwebs from my head, I was wrong.

I sat by the window for almost three hours with a quill in my hand, an inkpot and sheet of paper laid out before me, looking over the empty square at the vacant gallows where Junior Lance Corporal Braun-Hummel had been executed. As the town began to wake up, I found that I had managed to compose no more than half a dozen lines of the report that was meant for Dittersdorf’s consumption. I ought to have repeated word for word what I had told him in person the previous night, but writing it out in fair copy was a more complicated business. Lies that fall with ease from the tongue stand out on the page and scream their falsity.

Indeed, as the hour for my appointment with Lavedrine approached, I left the unfinished report on the table, knowing that I would be obliged to grapple with it again before the day was out.

It was a quarter to ten when I entered The Bull’s Eye.

I went there early, hoping to drink a beaker of hot, expensive chocolate in peace while I waited for Lavedrine to appear. But he had arrived before me, no worse the wear for a night of debauchery.

‘Would you care to join me?’ he asked.

‘No, thank you,’ I replied stiffly, still smarting from the wedge that he had driven between myself and my wife.

He was in fine fettle, his hair crushed and tousled, as if he had forgotten to brush it, his silver earring notable by its absence. Was it dangling from the ear of Putipù? I asked myself.

‘I hope I did not spoil your entertainment last night,’ I said, sitting down.

‘Not at all.’ He smiled. ‘Putipù’s, perhaps. They are such possessive creatures. They want our attention all for themselves, do they not? Those from the Mediterranean shores are true
divae
,’ he said, using the Latin tongue with nonchalant gusto. ‘I had to work hard to be forgiven. I hope your return home was equally rewarding?’

I bridled at this familiarity.

Did he not realise the difficulty his intrusion in my personal affairs had caused?

He appeared to be totally unconcerned. He opened his mouth and sank his teeth into a thick slice of shortcake. Despite the war, anything could be had by a man with French coin in his pocket, even in Lotingen, where the price of sugar had trebled in the space of a single year.

‘Heavenly!’ He sighed, reaching for his coffee. That was another imported luxury which very few Prussians could permit themselves. Then, he bolted down the last of his breakfast, washing the crumbs from his lips with the remains of his coffee. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked, pulling a paper from his pocket, throwing it casually on the table-top.

The face was monstrous to behold.

A gaping hole of a mouth, ripping teeth that froze the blood in my veins. The canines were exaggeratedly long, poking from the molars like the tusks of a bloodthirsty walrus. They had pierced the skin of the victim’s neck with the ease of surgical knives. Blood spurted in showers to form a dark red pool, the killer’s lips drawn wide in a hungry grin, eager to feast on human flesh. The victim howled a wordless protest—eyes clenched shut, a grimace of horrid awareness on his face, ruffled hair dripping blood, drops flying off in all directions, like a hound shaking itself dry after a ducking. A struggle to the death. No doubt which was the predator, which the victim. The nails of the killer were curved, like the raking talons of a dragon. The nose was sharp, hooked; the eyes piercing black, with wild, pitiless lights. Pointed ears, a pointed beard, dark hair flying around the head in greasy tangles and bouncing ringlets. A black skullcap. A crude caricature. A Son of Israel. A
large crucifix dangled from a chain at the neck of the victim. A Christian child, a baby boy, awash in a sea of his own red blood. A title formed in the same bright colour:

WHY THEY WANT OUR CHILDREN’S BLOOD

Beneath the drawing, a short explanation, scientific in tone, horrifying in its details. The Jews were creatures of an alien race. They needed blood—the baptised blood of innocent Christian children—to sanctify their pagan rituals. Their rabbis would defile the blessed Host, stolen for the occasion, then eat the sodden mess to perpetuate their own sort in orgies of unthinkable brutality. They were animals, human in appearance only. How long would the Jews go unpunished for their crimes? A list followed on in alphabetical order of towns where similar outrages had taken place, together with the names of Christian children who had been sacrificed to the Jewish lust for untainted blood. The final sentence claimed that the cynical French invader used these heartless monsters to keep the Prussian populace in check.

‘Where did you find it?’ I murmured.

‘Pinned to the door of my house this morning. They could have saved themselves the trouble. Lotingen is papered with them. Very soon after the massacre, they started to appear all over the place. I have twice issued orders for the troops to collect them up and tip them on a bonfire. However, given the nature of the accusation, I wonder whether I have improved the state of things. Any Prussian with a mind to do so will accuse us of trying to cover our tracks. The Jews are in cahoots with the French, whose revolution gave them civil rights. Have you ever heard such nonsense?’

He did not wait for my reply.

‘Time to go,’ he said, standing up, leaving an inordinate sum of French coin on the table as payment. ‘The situation grows more complicated by the day,’ he said, sweeping up the handbill and ramming it into his pocket. ‘If any other persons were to die . . .’

He did not complete the warning. Nor did he need to. I foresaw only too well the consequences of finding Frau Gottewald. Alive or dead, she would breathe new life into the passions that her disappearance had excited. What she herself might say hardly mattered. The Francophobes, the Prussophobes, the haters and baiters of the Jews would have a field day.

‘Let’s see if your presence will help to loosen this Prussian tongue,’ he said as we walked along the street.

I looked up at the sky. Fog had given way to tumbling steel-grey clouds, one or two with silvery edges. They washed over the town in rapid sequence,
carried on the strong breeze, wave upon wave of them, reminiscent of the incoming tide on the nearby Baltic coast.

We were heading for the port.

The house of Leon Biswanger was in the new part of Lotingen, Lavedrine said.

In recent times, King Frederick Wilhelm III had held on stiffly to an uncomfortable position of non-alignment and non-aggression. Before Jena, the economy of the town had prospered as a result. We were only eight miles from the coast, our harbour was deep and frequently dredged, the river wide and gentle enough to take seagoing ships, while the wharf was a solid, respectable crescent of three- and four-storey warehouses. Grain had been imported from Russia through Lithuania, stored for a month, then exported again to Britain at a profit. Until the invasion, the French emperor had not been able to contain us within his rigid ‘continental system’, as the newspapers called it. But grain was only one of the commodities that fed the growth of Lotingen. Linen, wool, weaving, amber, timber—all of these were valued by the French themselves. They were the local riches, and many men had made a fortune from them. Down by the riverside, a bustling new hamlet had grown up in the service of trade, and it was in this direction that we headed. There was a solid wooden bridge that crossed the river upstream from the dock, and we crossed it, holding on to our hats against the stiffening wind.

If the French bombardment of the old town had caused great loss, there was little sign of it in that district. The damage had been quickly repaired in the pressing interests of business. On the far side of the river, there was not a trace of destruction as we walked the length of the unpaved street. Nor as we stood before Leon Biswanger’s freshly polished front door, which was at the farthest end. There were no signs of forced French entry, no split wood, no broken lock hanging uselessly from a twisted nail. If there had been a war, it had not forced its way over that man’s doorstep. Indeed, the extensive workshop or storehouse attached to the side of the house gave every appearance of having been newly constructed. Despite its size, there were only two small windows in the wall that ran along the road, and they were tightly shuttered. Whatever Biswanger kept in his storeroom, it needed neither air, nor light.

‘What smell is that?’ Lavedrine asked, his nostrils quivering.

It was sickly-sweet, like rotting beetroot, something organic that had been left to soak in water. Jute, perhaps, or hemp. Sack and rope were products for which Lotingen was justly famed.

‘These warehouses are packed to the roof with the riches of the Baltic
Sea, and many another sea besides. Whatever it is,’ I added, ‘it’s pungent stuff.’

‘I’m surprised the neighbours haven’t complained.’

I smiled to myself, thinking that the Frenchman’s flat nose was not the sharp one of a tradesman, as I knocked three times on the door.

The man who opened it was small and robust with large, paw-like hands, a large square face, and grizzled hair turning white, like a dusting of snow, cut close to his scalp. There was a worried, guilty look on his face even before he spotted Lavedrine standing at my side.

‘Good morning, Biswanger,’ Lavedrine began, with a most un-German emphasis on the final syllable of the man’s name.

Biswanger blinked uncomfortably.

‘This gentleman is Procurator Stiffeniis,’ Lavedrine continued. ‘You have heard of him, no doubt. We need to clarify a few details regarding the letting of that cottage to the Gottewalds.’

He left Biswanger to take this information in. The man had not been summoned to appear before us, the Law had come to him. And for the moment, it was wearing carpet slippers and felt gloves. Biswanger took a step forward, glanced quickly up and down the road, then waved us in without a word, shifting his bulk to one side in the cramped hall.