HS02 - Days of Atonement (31 page)

Lavedrine was hardly listening. He may not have realised what the man had said, but he sprang into action as he saw the difficulty Biswanger had in breathing. My hands had closed in an instant around his fat windpipe. I was trying to squeeze the life out of him, thumbs straining hard against his larynx.

‘Leave him, Stiffeniis!’ Lavedrine boomed in my ear, his hands on my wrists as he tried to drag me off. ‘Let him speak!’

Biswanger began to heave great gulps of air into his lungs as I relaxed my grip. Turning away, I gasped for breath myself.

Lavedrine stepped between us. ‘Biswanger, repeat what you said.’

The undertaker’s eyes swivelled to meet mine. ‘He tried to kill me,’ he whimpered, coughing and spluttering, his voice rasping with fright.

‘He will not try again,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘Though I may throttle you myself, unless you tell the truth.
Which
children were you speaking of?’

‘The Gottewalds, sir. The ones whose throats were cut. They were brought to me to . . . to put them in decent order before being buried.’

‘Who brought them?’ I shouted, shaking with rage.

I felt Lavedrine’s hand on my arm as he laboured to hold me back.

‘Prussian soldiers,’ Biswanger murmured, his eyes racing between us, as if to gauge where the next attack might come from. ‘Count Dittersdorf sent an order. It was countersigned by a French lieutenant. Requesting me to sew up the gashes, and cancel out the marks of violence on the corpses. Telling me to make them look . . . well,
human
, sir.’

The face of Dittersdorf rose up before me like one of the death masks on the table.

‘Has the count buried them in my absence?’ I said to Lavedrine. ‘Did he tell you about it?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Let’s hope we do not need to dig them up again.’

‘It was not easy,’ Biswanger continued. ‘The state they were in. Wounds so . . . so . . .’ He hesitated, fearing for his safety, perhaps. ‘It was a severe test of my skills,’ he concluded, unable to restrain his boasting.

He was silent for a moment. ‘I would not want you to think that I’ve been misleading you,’ he said. ‘You’d hear it from Aaron, anyway.’

Lavedrine repeated the name. ‘What has he to do with this?’

Biswanger seemed to swell back into his skin, happier to talk about another man than to be interrogated about himself. ‘Aaron knew those children were in my workshop.’ He expressed himself carefully. ‘He asked me to make some casts in wax for his own use.’

An image flashed through my mind. I saw warm, grey molten wax. I saw the hands of Biswanger moving over the faces of the three tiny victims. The bodies were cold and stiff. As the artist applied himself to the gaping throats, dry blood attached itself to the warm clinging wax. Perhaps the heat had caused the blood to dissolve and flow again.

I reacted instantly. Not driven by anger this time, but riven by curiosity.

‘What would any man want with such things?’ I asked.

Biswanger’s eyes were sparkling with fear.

‘Aaron Jacob is a scientist, sir,’ he said.

 23 

‘B
ISWANGER HAS COMMITTED
no crime.’

Lavedrine broke the silence as we made our way back towards the river.

‘No crime?’ I snapped, disgust welling up in me. ‘It may be legal to tweak at dead flesh like a crow, but the bounds of moral necessity have been stretched beyond the limit. Nor will we know how far, until we speak to the Jew. What studies is this ghoul engaged in?’

Lavedrine turned fiercely on me. ‘You can’t believe there is any truth in the rumours?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ I replied curtly. ‘But blood
was
carried away. And now a Jew is involved. How long before the crowd gets wind of it?’

‘That all depends on us,’ he warned.

‘We must seek him out,’ I insisted, as we came to the bridge on the River Nogat, the boards rattling beneath our feet. ‘Dittersdorf ordered me to make enquiries within the ghetto. Now, we have no choice.’

Along the wharf, my attention was caught by a noisy gathering in the square where fish were sold, though it was late for the morning market. French soldiers in dark-blue trenchcoats pushed the crowd back, two or three of them with bayonets fixed.

‘An ugly-looking mob,’ Lavedrine said.

I am well known in Lotingen. In a smallish country town the local magistrate is loved and hated in equal measure. As a rule, I steer my own straight course, stopping to listen neither to flattery, nor recrimination. But those voices could not be ignored.

‘What are ye waitin’ for, Herr Procurator? They’ll be drinkin’ the blood of our children next!’

The cry was quickly taken up by others. The crowd turned as one. They spotted me, a Frenchman at my side. They began to surge towards us in a horde, faces ugly with rage. Against a mob, two men could only save themselves if the soldiers chose to intervene, or with the help of weapons. But
neither of us was armed, and the soldiers made no move to rescue us. As if they had been ordered not to shift from their stations.

Sticks began to pound the cobblestones. Then a cry of battle was given, a word in the local dialect that I had never heard before. Like the beating of a night-owl’s wings as it swoops to snatch its prey.
Wup, wup, wup!
Whatever it meant, repeated gruffly over and over again, it made the violence palpable. Lavedrine and I were at the very centre of a throbbing tempest.

A red-cheeked women pressed close to me.

‘Kill the yids!’ she screeched in my face, her spittle raining on my skin, her eyes glaring ferociously into mine. ‘Kill the yids!’

Before I could react, Lavedrine sprang forward.

His hand shot out, then pulled back. A sheet of blood poured down her cheek below the eye. That woman’s scream shut out all other shouts, as if the noise of a band tuning up had been sucked into a bugle that had blown one single, piercing note for silence. A musket was discharged, and the crowd fell back in a tumbling mass. Another followed it, and they whirled away, crushing bags underfoot, making their escape as a wall of blue materialised in front of us.

‘Merci, citoyens!’
Lavedrine encouraged the French soldiers. ‘Another minute, we’d have been lynched.’

I had never been so glad to see armed Frenchmen.

The officer in charge, a young infantryman with a smoking pistol in his hand, came running over. ‘My apologies, sirs,’ he said with a salute. ‘We were slow to see what was going on.’

He glanced down at Lavedrine’s hand. ‘That is a very fine piece of weaponry, sir, if I may say so!’

Lavedrine held up the ring on his middle finger like a proud bridegroom. The brass cylinder was mounted with a curving triangular point, and a drop of blood fell from the metal.

‘A trick I learnt from my cat,’ he said.
‘Lionel est terrible!
A claw is the finest defence under the sun. Speed is the secret. This is a poor copy, though it does the job. It has saved me more times than a loaded pistol.’

‘You struck a woman, Lavedrine,’ I objected.

‘Is that what she was?’ he asked sharply. ‘She’d have had her teeth into you.’

‘Colonel Lavedrine?’ the officer interrupted. ‘I’ve been looking for you, sir. For you and Procurator Steffenars’—he mangled my name.

‘Here we are. In one piece, thanks to you and your men!’

‘Lieutenant Mutiez’s compliments,’ the man replied. ‘A body has been found this morning. The body of a woman, sir.’

Lavedrine turned to me, a peculiar light shining in his eyes.

‘Is it her, do you think?’

Mutiez was in a warehouse at the end of the row, the infantryman reported, pointing down the wharf. The weak sun glistened over the windswept waters, rattling the sails and the tackle of a two-master which was making ready for sea. Petrels skipped, skimmed, and dived in the wake of a homecoming fisher-boat. There’ll be a storm before the day is out, I thought, but inside the head of my companion, a tempest was already raging.

‘I told them!’ Lavedrine remonstrated, as we hurried along the sea wall, holding on to our hats against the driving wind. ‘Search the town from top to bottom. Enter every barn and outhouse, every shed and derelict building. Did no one look inside these warehouses?’

He was a handsome man, but in a rage his face was dark, brutal, ugly.

‘If a killer hides a body,’ I replied, as the cobbles gave way to square-cut blocks of worn stone, ‘he does not want it to be found. Discovery boils down to luck on our part, or miscalculation on his. Seven days have gone, and each one reduces the probability of finding her alive, I fear.’

Lavedrine was not listening.

‘What is their business on this quay?’ he asked in an angry burst.

‘What do you mean?’

He pointed ahead at a huge wooden winding-drum.

‘Whales,’ I replied. ‘They used to handle whales.’

The Old Windlass warehouse is different from the others. Built from rough red sandstone fifty years ago by Adolphus Gummerstett, it played a greater part in the history of Lotingen than it does at the present. In the last century, a small flotilla of herring boats would take themselves off to the Swedish fishing grounds in spring, passing through the Malmö Straits and into the Kattegat, searching for the whales that mate along the coast from Halmstad to Gotteburg. The vessels were not equipped to handle animals of any great size. They would kill what they could, then sail home, towing the carcasses in their wake. When they arrived in our estuary, the labourers at the Old Windlass would be waiting. Doors all along the quay were thrown open, vast tubs for boiling blubber were set out on the stones. There was a shelving ramp in front, where the whales could be secured. Then, the windlass that had caught Lavedrine’s eye was brought into play. ‘The Peeling Wench’ was the playful name the fishermen gave to this vast wooden engine. A dozen strong men pushed staves to drive the winch around the bole, ripping the blubber from the whale, which rolled in the river, shedding blood as its skin and fat were unwound in strips and dragged to the top of the ramp. There, it was hacked, chopped and boiled. As the operation proceeded, the oil was filtered into barrels and stored in the warehouse, to be sold in chandlers’ shops around the town.

‘The owner died intestate, leaving a mountain of debts,’ I added. ‘The Old Windlass has been closed for many years.’

‘It is open now,’ Lavedrine replied sharply, making for the double doors, one of which hung awkwardly from a broken hinge.

As I followed him into the cavernous warehouse, I saw that Mutiez was talking with a man. That is, Mutiez tried to talk, while the man was shouting.

‘I can do nothing,’ the lieutenant insisted.

‘These goods are mine! By what right . . .’

‘By the right of conquest,
monsieur,’
Mutiez answered with a smile. ‘Your oil has been requisitioned for the French army. You should be pleased to serve
l’Empereur.
You will be compensated eventually.’

‘I very much doubt it,’ I muttered to myself.

Lieutenant Mutiez saw Lavedrine and saluted, while Gummerstett turned on me.

I had met him on numerous occasions, and knew his case by heart. Julius Gummerstett still lived in the house that his father had built next door to the warehouse. He must have seen the empty barges arrive, the doors being broken in, the soldiers milling around outside.

‘Herr Procurator, I’m being robbed! My property . . .’

‘Strictly speaking,’ I replied, ‘the property is not yours. No decision has yet been handed down from Potsdam . . .’

‘There’ll be nothing left to inherit by the time they’ve finished!’

Rather than enter into a legal argument, I turned to Lavedrine. ‘This is Colonel Lavedrine of the French . . .’ I hesitated, uncertain of the Frenchman’s precise military status.

‘Thank heavens!’ Gummerstett exclaimed, offering his hand to Lavedrine, who did not take it. ‘I hope that you can make short work of the tangle of Prussian bureaucracy, sir.’

‘The workers found a body, sir,’ Mutiez was explaining. ‘A woman . . .’

‘He won’t let me see the damage!’ Gummerstett protested again.

Lavedrine turned on him like a fierce dog. ‘Did you hear intruders, or see anyone entering in the last few days?’ he snapped.