HS02 - Days of Atonement (50 page)

‘Frenchmen, are you, sirs?’

I set down the beer. ‘Colonel Lavedrine is French, but I am Prussian,’ I said. ‘I am looking for one of my countrymen. And I’m a magistrate, at that.’

‘Those lads are staying here,’ the landlord said, glancing towards the fire. ‘There’s no one else in the house, my wife apart, and a couple of other lodgers upstairs sleeping.’

‘Unless they go by the name of Ludvigssen, they are safe,’ I said.

‘Ludvigssen?’ the landlord murmured, darting a wary glance towards the far end of the room.

I followed the line of his eye, and smiled. In that shadowy corner was a table with two wooden settles on either flank of it. Just visible, hanging over the end of the far bench, were a dirty pair of boots.

‘Go easy on him, sir,’ the tavern-keeper warned. ‘He’s been drinking all the afternoon.’

‘Ludvigssen?’ I hissed.

He nodded grimly, as if he did not care for the man.

‘We do not mean him any harm,’ I said, reflecting as I crossed the room that it is easier to drink a landlord dry and pay for it, than to win his affection. ‘Herr Ludvigssen, wake up. I need to speak to you.’

Lavedrine helped by kicking the settle and making it shudder.

The sleeping man was wide awake, if bleary, in the twinkling of an eye. He backed along the bench and huddled in the corner by the wall. I sat down alongside him, while Lavedrine slid onto the seat on the other side of the table. We had him cornered.

‘What will you drink?’ Lavedrine asked, pulling out his purse, waving it in the air to the landlord, who watched all this as if it were a daily, nay, an hourly occurrence in his tavern.

Arnold Abel Ludvigssen was older than I expected—certainly not a student, forty years of age, or even older. His face was long and very thin, and his greasy black hair hung straight down, lank from a central parting, covering his ears and cheeks like two shining curtains. His long, pointed chin and hollow jaw had not seen a razor that day, nor the day before. He looked to all appearances like a man who habitually drank a great deal more than was good for the liver or the soul.

‘A glass of porter,’ he murmured, his tongue swishing over dry, cracked lips.

‘I read of you in the newspapers, Herr Ludvigssen,’ I said.

He stared at me dully, but did not open his mouth.

‘In connection with Professor Kant,’ I added.

‘The
Kantstudiensaal
,’ he said with a sigh.

‘Is that what you call the place where his manuscripts and papers are kept?’ asked Lavedrine.

The man looked tiredly across the table. ‘That is what
they
call it,’ he said. ‘I would call it dusty. Very dusty. But the work keeps me in food and drink, and pays for my bed. What more can a man ask of Life?’

The landlord came striding across the room and slammed a pewter tankard of dark-brown beer on the table-top so forcefully that it slopped. He picked up the coins that Lavedrine pushed towards him, weighing them in the palm of his hand, then turned away, growling something to the effect that at least
that
pint wasn’t going on the slate like all the others.

‘The bursary pays out at the end of the university term,’ Ludvigssen confided, but the mug of beer was in his mouth before he had finished speaking. An instant later, blowing beer-froth off his lips, he called loudly after the landlord, ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, Sigismund!’

It was hard to say whether it was a promise to pay his debts, or a threat.

‘Come, sir,’ Lavedrine urged him. ‘We have serious business in Königsberg. You can help us expedite it.’

Ludvigssen looked at him, then laughed in that bleary provocative manner that serious and regular application to alcoholic drink induces. ‘At this hour?’ he challenged. ‘I’m going nowhere, sir.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ Lavedrine replied. ‘Drink up, and tell us about Professor Kant’s archive. That’s why we’ve come. Surely, you know more about it than any other man living.’

For some reason, this sentence caused Ludvigssen to laugh all the more, or rather to gurgle, as he continued drinking while he laughed.

‘Is there a man living who
is
interested in Kant?’ he asked at last. ‘I am paid to be, but that does not mean I am. But what is your specific interest, sir? Are you a Parisian philosopher? I thought that they had all said goodnight to Madame Guillotine by now?’

He was a strange surly creature. Not stupid certainly, but his humour was fired by alcohol. If he had hoped to make some progress in the academic world by accepting the bursary left by Immanuel Kant, evidently he had made none, for he was, somehow, marked by failure and an air of dissolution.

‘And you, sir?’ he enquired, rocking slowly in my direction. ‘Are you a Prussian thinker, then? The last of a short line . . .’

‘I am a magistrate,’ I replied sharply. ‘I could lock you up for the night for indecorous speech and conduct, if it pleased me. Just answer as you are requested.’

‘I cannot . . . recall the question,’ he murmured, burping in the middle of his response.

‘The archive,’ Lavedrine reminded him. ‘Kant’s papers. This
Kantstudiensaal.
Where is it?’

‘At the university,’ the man slurred.

‘But you have the key in your pocket?’

He nodded as Lavedrine grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him to his feet, upsetting the little that remained of Ludvigssen’s ale.

‘Take us there. Now.’

Five or ten minutes later, having pushed and prodded the drink-sodden archivist across the cobbled cathedral square, where snow was gusting in again from the Baltic Sea on the wings of a furious wind, and through the narrow cobbled streets, where the snow fell in gentler flurries, we stood once more outside the doors of the university library.

Ludvigssen fumbled in his pockets, and eventually produced a keyring. The largest key of all turned noisily in the lock. The lychgate door fell back with a resounding creak, and we stepped inside, relieved to be out of the wind.

‘Who goes there?’ cried an anxious voice.

Footsteps sounded, a hollow echoing in the dark, then a stocky nightwatchman appeared in the hallway a moment later, a lantern in his hand, a nightcap on his head. This was the man who had greeted us so curtly from the upstairs window half an hour before.

‘Herr Ludvigssen! What are you doing here, sir? Two gentlemen . . .’

‘We are scholars,’ Lavedrine replied swiftly, stepping forward. ‘Come to examine the archive of Professor Kant.’

‘Professor who?’ the man replied, turning away, probably going back to some warm corner where he had made his nest. There was nothing remotely aggressive, or even challenging in his manner. The fact that we were with Ludvigssen was enough to reassure him, though I had my suspicions that Ludvigssen’s presence would tranquillise any man alive. Indeed, I wondered how he had managed to stay sober for long enough to impress the University authorities of his competence as a scholar.

‘We’ll be in my room,’ Ludvigssen added, but the nightwatchman and his lantern were already receding into the distant gloom. The archivist turned to us. ‘Follow me, sirs.’

Nightlights had been placed along the staircase that spiralled down to the basement. It was not well lit, but bright enough to avoid a tumble. At the bottom of the stairs, we turned to the left and followed a corridor that became darker and murkier the further we progressed along it. At the very last door at the end of a corridor which seemed to run the length of the library above our heads, Ludvigssen stopped, and began to feel about on his keyring again. The wrong key went into the lock, then the right one, and the door swung open. A smell of mildew and mice wafted out into the passage.

‘One moment, sirs, I have a lamp in the corner here.’

He went into the room ahead of us, while Lavedrine and I stood waiting in the darkness. The sound of a flint being struck was rewarded a moment later by the glint of a flame, and a lantern swinging, as the archivist held it up.

‘Come in, sirs,’ he invited. ‘I can light another, if you wish.’

As he bent over a table, lighting a larger lamp from the one that he held in his hand, he turned to us, the left side of his face glowing like a peach in the candlelight. ‘What do you want to see?’ he asked.

Before he spoke, I thought I felt the delight of Lavedrine vibrating in the cold air.

‘Everything,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Every single scrap of paper that Professor Kant conserved.’

As we were entering, I had looked around curiously, realising for the first time what a daunting task we had set for ourselves.

Ludvigssen did not speak, he merely gestured with his hand. That room was as large as my own dining room; that is, it was very large by Prussian domestic standards. With the exception of a desk piled with papers in the centre of the room, and a single chair, the rest of the space was taken up with towering piles of manuscripts, folder upon folder of them, each one filled with sheaves of paper, propped up and tottering against the walls to shoulder height. Books and pamphlets filled a cabinet at the far end of the room. That bookshelf was six feet high, and three times as wide. I caught a glimpse of fading gold-tooled letters stamped on vellum spines in many languages: German, of course, but also English, French, Italian, Spanish, some more of Russian, Estonian, and Lithuanian origin, the titles in Cyrillic lettering, and even a group of books that bore what looked to me like curlicues from the Greek and the Arabian alphabets.

‘The lot, sir?’ Ludvigssen sounded amused. ‘You’ll be here a good while, then.’

Lavedrine moved quickly around the room, trying to take it all in—attempting, I imagined, to make some sense of what seemed like a disorganised panoply, a huge and disorienting collection of books and random papers.

‘How long have you been working here?’ he asked.

Ludvigssen sat himself down in his chair. ‘Going on two years now, sir.’

‘And what have you done in all that time?’

The archivist pointed to the shelves. ‘I started with the published works,’ he said dispiritedly. ‘They are catalogued from A to Z, together with a brief abstract relating to the contents of each book, or publication. I took particular interest in those that were sent to the printer by Kant himself, and those foreign translations that were sent on to him by respectful publishers. Thank God, most of them didn’t bother! If I’d had to trace all the robberies as well, I wouldn’t have finished in my own lifetime. Can a man write so much, and be so soon unread and out of fashion?’

I walked across and scanned the spines of the books. The three
Critiques
alone took up three shelves, including unrevised loose-leaf proofs cut roughly into book form and held in shape with metal clips, first and subsequent editions, then all the foreign editions as well. One
Critique
—the fourth and final volume, the
Critique of Criminal Reason
—was missing, and the greedy brown waters of the River Pregel would never yield that up again. I would never forget the sight of page after page disappearing beneath the waves. I tore them up and threw them into the river the night of Kant’s funeral. That book would certainly
not
have been forgotten. Ever . . .

‘What about these papers, Ludvigssen?’ Lavedrine asked, with a wave of his hand. ‘How far have you got in the sorting?’

Again, the archivist sighed, and seemed amused in the lonely, self-interested way that only a scholar working in his ivory tower can know. ‘I have managed to build them into piles,’ he said. ‘A more Herculean task than you might think, sir. Filthier than the Augean stables. At the time when Professor Kant’s house was sold, I had still not been employed to organise his material. Everything went willy-nilly into a hundred boxes, none of which was marked. There was no order in it.’

I remembered the painstaking precision that Kant had brought to his assembly of evidence in the Königsberg case on which we had worked together. Despite his age and frailty, the methodical approach he employed gave sense to material that would have had no apparent meaning whatsoever, thrown haphazardly into a box.

‘As each sheet of paper was taken out, I attempted to put it where it belonged.’

‘Each sheet?’ I queried.

Ludvigssen ran his thin hand through his lank hair. ‘It sounds like hyperbole, I know, but I am not exaggerating. Of course, many of his manuscripts came to me more or less intact, a sheaf of pages tied up with a ribbon, or held in a folder, or a cover, identifying the nature of the work, but many thousands of pages—letters from his publisher, his copies of his letters to them, correspondence with readers and critics, notes and footnotes, addenda, and so on—had just been tipped straight into the boxes. Whoever bought Kant’s house was in a hurry to make space, and I’ve been trying to make sense of the chaos ever since.’

‘But you have made a start?’

This was Lavedrine, whose impatience knew no bounds. Ludvigssen realised, for he turned to the Frenchman with a mincing smile, and asked: ‘Have you ever tried to shift a mountain with a teaspoon, sir? I have grouped everything roughly into related blocks, but that’s about it. If you tell me where your interest lies, I may be able to point you in the right direction. Mind, I promise nothing.’

‘We are searching for notes or documents written in the 1760s,’ Lavedrine replied, giving nothing away. ‘Now where would those be?’

Ludvigssen turned and nodded in the direction of the farthest corner. ‘Juvenilia and ephemera,’ he said dismissively.

I looked where he had indicated, and my heart sank. Imagine a library after it had taken a full hit from a twelve-pounder cannon! Papers lay in a crushed, crowded, knee-deep, yellow pile. It would take a week just to rifle through it, a year or two to read every word.

If I was daunted, Lavedrine was not.

‘Let’s get started, Stiffeniis,’ he said.

‘If you don’t need me,’ Ludvigssen remarked, ‘I’ll rest my head on the table and sleep until you’ve had enough.’

Without waiting for a word of encouragement, he did just that.

Lavedrine pulled a loose sheet from the top of the heap. ‘A letter dated 1746,’ he read. ‘From his father’s family in Tilsit, expressing regret for the father’s death. That’s no use to us. We are digging through the dunghill of a great man’s life, Stiffeniis. God knows what we shall find!’