HS02 - Days of Atonement (29 page)

Clearly, he was not happy about this unexpected visit. As he led us into a cold reception room, and invited us to sit down, his face was a rigid mask of deference.

There was a strange, sombre atmosphere about the room. Plain whitewashed walls, a simple floor made of red bricks set in a chevron pattern. Nor was the house furnished in traditional Prussan style. There were no heavy curtains hanging to keep out draughts, no reed matting covering the floor. Unlit logs were piled up neatly in the chimney grate. A single Pietist print in a simple wooden frame hung on one wall—
Christ Beheading Satan with the True Cross
. That chamber was unused, it seemed, except for receiving visitors, then sending them quickly on their way again.

‘What can I do for you?’ Biswanger asked, his eyes fixed on me, his bass voice brusque, as if he had no time to fritter away. ‘I told this French gentleman everything I know about that family of unlucky wretches.’

‘Important details sometimes return to the mind on second telling, Biswanger,’ Lavedrine interrupted with an acid smile. ‘Is that not true, Stiffeniis?’

Lavedrine turned to me with a show of the same perfect understanding we had used while interrogating Franz Durskeitner. But we had not agreed on any strategy, and I wondered which tactics the Frenchman had hidden up his sleeve.

As we sat there, studying each other across the plain pine tabletop, Lavedrine and myself on one side, Biswanger on the other, my attention was attracted by the only piece of ornamentation in the room. It occupied the centre of the table. A brass bowl on three short legs, the lid engraved and pierced with small, round holes. It reminded me of the incense-burner found in churches, though it gave off a strong persistent whiff of camphor, or some other household disinfectant. This was the only evidence of a female presence in the room. There were no embroidered cushions, no linen antimacassars, no decorative tablecloth. No dried flowers in a vase, no sprig of herbs. Nothing perfumed, except for the unmistakable smell contained within that metal casket on the table.

Was Biswanger a widower? I wondered.

‘Let us pretend, Herr Biswanger,’ Lavedrine went on, ‘for the sake of my Prussian colleague here, that our first conversation about the Gottewalds never took place. I would like you to tell him everything that you told me. If you would be so kind?’

Leon Biswanger nodded his head, but he did not speak.

‘Begin by telling us how you happened to meet Major Gottewald,’ Lavedrine prompted, ‘and what you agreed upon between yourselves in the way of business.’

I saw a range of expressions flash across the man’s pale face, as though some inner kaleidoscope had been shifted by a hand not his. He seemed to flush, then fade, then plump himself up for what he was about to say, a look of blank determination settling on his mouth.

‘I wouldn’t want you gentlemen to think that I’ve been reticent,’ he began. ‘Nor that I do not wish to help. This investigation of yours must be difficult, I do not doubt.’ He looked down at the table and shook his head in sympathy. ‘The thought of what has happened in that cottage! Who’d ever have imagined such a thing in Lotingen?’

He looked up suddenly, rubbed his hands together. He darted a glance at the Frenchman, then spoke directly to me, as if Lavedrine had ceased to exist. ‘What it was, sir, it was being hauled in to speak to a French official in a French police office like that. Made me nervous, it did. I work with everyone, I do. Frenchmen, Prussians, traders from all over the place that are passing through. I’m not ashamed to admit it,’ he hurried on, ‘I’ll do a deal with any man, if he’s honest. Anything to help the nation, know what I mean? Still, it isn’t easy. You know better than I do, sir. If a Prussian goes strolling into a French police station bold as a cider barrel, his neighbours are going to think the worst of him. They are bound to say that he’s a sneak. Or worse!’

He let out a melancholy sigh, but I said nothing to help him. I found it
hard to imagine him telling Lavedrine what he had just told me. He had not looked once in the Frenchman’s direction from the moment he opened his mouth. He cleared his throat, as if to shift a fishbone. ‘I thought that I had done my best by them, sir. Given them all I had to give, so to speak,’ he confided.

‘Indeed, Herr Biswanger,’ I said. ‘By way of business, then, you agreed to rent that house to Bruno Gottewald. You met him, I take it. You spoke to him . . .’

‘Very little, Herr Procurator,’ he interrupted, shaking his head. ‘Half a dozen words, no more. Just the time to finalise the details.’

Lavedrine watched silently. This was a conversation between two Prussian nationals.

‘Which “details”?’ I asked.

Biswanger nodded his head, and began to speak. His account was short, concise, and plausible. Early in August, he said, a Prussian major named Gottewald came to seek him out. The man had just arrived in Lotingen with his family, and knew that Biswanger had a cottage to rent. The soldier expressed the very greatest urgency in wishing to find suitable accommodation for his wife and children. Out of the town, he said. Somewhere quiet, preferably in the country. Gottewald told Biswanger that he would be leaving soon to join his general in a distant outpost, and wanted to see his loved ones comfortably settled before he set out.

‘Why did he come to you?’ I queried.

‘I did not ask. He did not tell me. I am well known in Lotingen.’

‘So Gottewald came looking for a lodging, and you offered to show him that house in the wood.’

‘No, sir,’ Biswanger countered. ‘He asked for
that
cottage, and no other. At the time I was handling a number of other properties. They were larger, more expensive, of course, but that was the one he wanted.’ For the first time, he glanced over at Lavedrine, then back at me. ‘I told him, sir. I warned him. Out there in the country, all alone, I said, your wife would be happier in town, sir! An’ what do you think he said to that?’

I waited without answering.

Biswanger shook his head. ‘His wife decided, sir.
She
insisted that she wanted to live off the beaten track. In a quiet place. That cottage was ideal, he said: the fewer the neighbours, the better!’

‘It really could not have been any quieter,’ Lavedrine murmured, unable to resist the obvious. Something in his tone told me that he was not thinking from the point of view of the victim; he was considering the vulnerability of that isolated house as the murderer must have seen it.

‘Did he seem to be afraid for his family? Or for himself?’ I asked.

‘Not at all, sir,’ Biswanger replied promptly. ‘As I told Colonel Lavedrine, Major Gottewald was in a hurry—that was the house he wanted.’

‘How long had the house been standing empty? Who used to live there?’

I was wondering whether the Gottewalds had been murdered by mistake. After all, the previous occupants might have been the real object of the attack.

‘No one has dwelt there for years,’ Biswanger answered, promptly stamping on my hypothesis. ‘Not since the days of the Wolfferts. Ten years, or more, I’d say. The family living there at that time must have been tied serfs. I’ve no idea who they may have been, or where they might have gone.’

‘The house has been recently refurbished. Did you buy it, Biswanger?’

Lavedrine must have read my thoughts. He had awakened from apparent distraction to fire this question at the man.

Biswanger shifted heavily in his seat, looking from Lavedrine to me, then back again. Then he stared at the back of his pudgy hands, turning them over to examine the palms before he found the answer that he was looking for.

‘The house has been set in order in recent times,’ he said, looking at neither one of us. ‘After Jena, as a matter of fact. It’s a bit out of the way if your business lies in town. Then again, it stands on the Danzig highway. Not bad, if your interests point that way.’

‘Interests?’ queried Lavedrine. ‘The French? Is that who you were hoping to rent it to?’

Biswanger rolled his mouth up into a tight grimace. ‘Let’s say, anyone who might be . . . interested in keeping an eye along that road. The French, of course, sir. But not only them. When politics shift, there’s always room for improvisation. An inn, perhaps. Or a hunting lodge for officers . . .’

‘A whorehouse for French squaddies,’ Lavedrine offered with a wink.

Biswanger smiled uncertainly, and winked back. ‘You catch my drift, sir. That house did seem to offer a fair number of commercial possibilities, though it was slow finding an enterprising soul.’

‘Until that Prussian officer turned up,’ Lavedrine concluded. ‘May I enquire how much you paid for it, and how much you charged for the rent?’

‘We agreed on ten thalers a month.’

This was more of a murmur from the side of his mouth than a proud proclamation of business acumen, and Lavedrine’s eyebrows arched with surprise. ‘Not a lot,’ he said. A moment later, he added: ‘Indeed, the rent is incredibly low.’

Biswanger pulled an uncomfortable face, and looked extremely unhappy, even embarrassed. He had answered our questions, and answered them honestly, I presumed, but still there was a trace of something that I could
not put my finger on. He appeared to be telling us what we wanted to hear, but that was not the same as freely telling us everything he knew. Was this the attitude that had puzzled Lavedrine at their first meeting? Did the man have something to hide?

Lavedrine slapped the flat of his hand on the table, and fixed Biswanger with a look of frightful intensity. ‘Let us recapitulate,’ he said. He raised his hand and held one finger up in the air. ‘You set a house in order with the intent to speculate on its commercial use.’ He added a second finger to the attack. ‘That house was on the Danzig road, and you hoped to make a handsome profit renting it to Frenchmen, or those who make a profit out of them.’ The third finger popped accusingly into place. ‘But then a desperate Prussian officer arrived on the scene, and you rented it to him for next to nothing. I ask you, Biswanger! In your own words, he was interested in
that
house, and no other. You could have asked for twice as much, but you did not. What miracle of Christian charity took possession of you?’

Biswanger raised his hands in the air as if Lavedrine had pulled a pistol from under his cloak and cocked the hammer. ‘You know already, sir, I think.’ He looked at me, and made a nodding motion with his head. ‘You’ve laid your hands on the contract, haven’t you, Herr Procurator?’

Lavedrine avoided my eye. I nodded my head to hide my incredulity.

‘Could we ignore it?’ Lavedrine said with a sneer, following it up with a blinding platitude. ‘A legal contract is a binding contract, when all is said and done.’

Although he spoke with knowing intelligence, he had made no previous mention of it. The existence of this document was as new to him as it was to me, I realised.

‘You know the house does not belong to me, then,’ Biswanger declared. ‘I should have told you at once, Colonel Lavedrine, but, well . . . there and then, I did not think that it was a matter of any great importance.’

He popped the top button of his bulging waistcoat loose with his finger, and let out a mournful sigh, as if he had been in danger of suffocating.

‘In the circumstances,’ he went on, his brow red, beaded with droplets of sweat, ‘I do believe I’d better make a clean breast of the whole thing.’

‘Excellent,’ I agreed. ‘Rather than make your position worse.’

Biswanger jammed his eyes tightly closed. I thought he was about to cry. ‘If you’ve spoken to lawyer Wittelsbach, you’ll know that I am merely the nominee. I do rent other houses, but not that one. It isn’t mine to rent.’

‘We know that,’ I said, stepping quickly into Lavedrine’s shoes. ‘But before we act on the information, we want to hear from you the name of the owner.’

I hoped my voice would not betray the excitement that I felt.

Biswanger rubbed his chin for what seemed an interminable length of time. ‘The trouble with that house, sir . . .’ he began. ‘The trouble with
any
house . . . You need a respectable name. Isn’t that right? If deeds are to be signed, I mean to say, with a lawyer there, you need a man who . . . Well, a person like myself. That house does not belong to me.
That’s
why the price was low.’

‘Who owns it, then?’ I asked.

He jumped to his feet. ‘It’s not a crime as such, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see my half of the agreement? It’s here in my office, signed by lawyer Wittelsbach, just like the copy you’ve seen. I can go and get it for you . . .’

‘Herr Biswanger,’ I said, standing in front of him, ‘you are in grave danger of getting yourself into very serious trouble. Who does that house belong to?’

‘It belongs to Aaron Jacob, sir,’ he said.

Before I could react to this revelation, Biswanger took it upon himself to elucidate.

‘Aaron the Jew,’ he added.

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