Toymaker, The (24 page)

Mathias had run blindly through the ruins. He had no idea where Katta or Stefan had gone. He just ran. When he couldn’t run any more, he found a small dark crevice and crawled into it. He lay squeezed against the stones, listening, but all he could hear was the sound of his own breath and the hammering of his heart. Then he saw the glow of a lantern going slowly to and fro amongst the high walls and buildings, as though someone were searching, and he drew himself deeper into the darkness. But the light didn’t come any closer, and after a while he couldn’t see it any more.

‘Katta?’ he called in a barely audible whisper, and then again, scared lest anyone but her should hear him. But no one answered.

It wasn’t until dawn that he dared crawl from his hiding place. Cautiously he stood up and looked around. A low mist had rolled in across the ice,
filling the hollow places amongst the ruins, drifting between the fallen walls.

He didn’t know what to do.

Then, deadened by the mist, he heard the sound of voices, only faintly at first. He drew himself back into the wall and listened. Someone was calling his name.

Koenig had already found Stefan. Now he was searching for Katta and Mathias. As he stepped out of the mist in front of Mathias, he looked like a dead man. For one moment that’s what Mathias thought he was. His face was ash-grey, his lips bloodless. He stood looking at Mathias with hollow-set eyes.

‘Where is Katta?’ he said.

Mathias shook his head. A little way behind Koenig, Stefan walked out of the mist.

‘She was with you,’ Mathias said.

‘She run.’

Stefan made a movement with his arm as though to show that she’d gone another way and that he’d lost her. But he did it as though he were not quite sure which way that was.

They began to search among the ruins, calling her name, but she didn’t answer and they didn’t find her.

It was only as the mist blew away and they stood on the cliff top, looking down onto the rocks below, that they saw the two sets of tracks left by the runners of a sleigh. One set curving out across the ice towards them, and the other going back towards the land.

Katta woke.

She was lying on a hard cold floor. Her wrists were tied together with a cord. There was a bitter-sick taste in her mouth. It was the lingering taste of the cloth that Dr Leiter had held over her face, pushing it so tightly against her that she couldn’t breathe in anything else. She remembered struggling against it and her head filling with screaming, then velvet-black silence.

Now she was here, but she didn’t know where ‘here’ was. Blinking slowly, she looked around.

She was in a large room. It had a high, gilded ceiling. Rows of cages hung along its walls. Some held small birds that flitted from perch to perch; others had squirrels, others cats. In one a small monkey sat watching her. Row upon row of sharp,
beady eyes all watching her. There were tables too, but she couldn’t see onto them.

Voices were coming from another room. Getting closer. What she had taken to be a grand bookcase set into the wall suddenly swung open and a man stepped through. She didn’t know him, but the man who came behind him was Dr Leiter.

‘She should be awake,’ Leiter was saying, but there was hesitation in his voice as he said the words, as though he were worried what the consequence might be if he were wrong.

The other man wore a long thick gown trimmed with rich fur. He was older than Leiter and was carrying Katta’s leather cap in one hand. Instinctively she tried to put her hands to her head, feeling for it.

‘Will it make any difference?’ he said to Leiter.

‘No,’ said Leiter. ‘I examined her while she slept. She is fit and strong. It was some accident perhaps, no more than that.’

And Katta heard it again, that same uncertainty. It took her a moment to understand what it was, and then she realized.

Leiter was afraid.

‘Good,’ said the man.

He stood looking down at her with pale green eyes, and then she felt it too – cold clawing fear. It didn’t need words; it was wrapped about this man like a cloak.

‘I hope you are pleased with her, Toymaker,’ said Leiter.

‘She is the right height too,’ the Toymaker said.

Katta felt her mouth moving before she even knew what it was she was going to say. She could feel the inside of her palms damp with fear.

‘My friends know I’m here,’ she blurted out.

Menschenmacher might not have heard her. He reached down and began parting her hair with his fingertips, looking for the small broken place on her head. She tried to move her head away, but he wound her hair around his other hand and pulled it so tight that she couldn’t move. Then, with a touch full of menace, he ran his fingernail around the edges of the bone. Katta let out a whimper.

‘Did you look in the coffins?’ he said.

‘No!’ she gasped.

He dug his fingernail under the edge of the bone. It felt like hot wire. Her breath came in short, terrified gasps.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes!’

‘What did you see?’

‘The Duke!’ She couldn’t say the words quickly enough – she just wanted him to stop.

‘Who else saw him? Your friends?’

‘Yes!’

‘Does anyone else know?’

‘No!’

He looked up at Leiter. ‘She is the only one left?’

Leiter nodded.

He let go of her hair. She tried to scrabble away from him, but her hands were tied.

‘I don’t know nothin’,’ she whimpered. ‘Please?’

She looked imploringly at Leiter, as though, of all people, he might help her. But his face was impassive.

‘Bring her,’ the Toymaker said.

Leiter reached down and lifted Katta to her feet. She stood up, mute and terrified. He put one arm around her shoulders, like some kindly old uncle, and together they followed the other man.

They went between the tables. The tops were covered in things that she didn’t understand at all – tools, lathes, tiny wheels and cogs. On a slab of clean white porcelain lay a little marmoset monkey; its unseeing milk-glazed eyes were turned towards her. Its chest had been cut open and the fur hooked back with long silver pins. She looked quickly away.

‘We won’t hurt you,’ said Leiter, but she could feel his hand on her back, gently pushing her forward.

They went through another door and into a room, round like a clean, white drum. Daylight flooded through a domed ceiling of clear glass. Katta could see clouds and the blue, wintry sky beyond.

In front of her were two large tables. One was scrubbed clean and laid out with tools and sharp instruments. Motionless on the other was a young woman in a pale cotton gown. Leiter pushed Katta forward and closed the door. It shut with a click behind them.

The Toymaker turned and looked at her. ‘Give the girl a drink, Leiter,’ he said.

Unhurriedly Leiter filled a small glass from a jug on the table. It took him a moment and he had his back to Katta as he did it. When he turned round, he held the glass out to her. She stared at the glass, then at him.

‘It is only water,’ he said. ‘Drink it.’

She took the glass in both hands, then, like a small
child told to take medicine, she put it to her lips and drank, watching Leiter the whole time. Her hands were shaking, but her mouth was so dry. He took the empty glass from her.

‘Now, come and see,’ said the Toymaker.

He was standing beside the young woman, lightly brushing her hair with his hand.

Katta moved closer, and then stopped. Sleeping people breathe; they move – you only have to look carefully enough and you see it. But the young woman on the table wasn’t breathing at all. She wasn’t dead either – dead people look dead, like Jacob, but she didn’t.

Katta looked up at him, not knowing what she was supposed to do.

‘Touch her,’ he said.

Hesitantly she reached out a hand and touched the tips of her fingers against the young woman’s cheek. As she did so, Katta’s face clouded with confusion and she pulled her hand back, because the skin was hard and cold. She wasn’t real at all.

She was a doll.

‘All she needs is a heart, child. When she has a heart, even you would believe that she was real. She will be able to dance and talk, though she will never
need to say very many words. Her beauty will speak for her.’

Katta looked at the face of the young woman and it seemed to her that she was seeing something she’d seen before – the cold, empty face of the Duke as he had walked beneath her window. She was just like him.

‘You see,’ the Toymaker said, ‘the people expect their Duke to take a wife.’

As he spoke, he picked up from the table a small fine ivory handle. There was nothing else to it that Katta could see.

‘All she needs,’ he said, ‘is a heart.’

Katta could hear his voice. She could see him holding the thin ivory handle in his hand, but the room was wider than it had been a moment before. It felt as if she were watching what was happening, without being part of it at all. She turned round and looked at Leiter. He was still holding the empty glass, but he was watching her as though he had been waiting for this. He put the glass on the table and she knew that it couldn’t just have been water. He caught her as her legs gave way, holding her as she slowly folded to the floor.

The Toymaker’s voice came slowly, out of a fog a
thousand miles away. ‘Even my little dolls with sparrows’ hearts sometimes remember they were sparrows, once. You will have to tell me, Duchess, if you ever remember being a girl.’

A line of bloody footprints marked the path that Koenig took as they came back across the ice. He walked slowly, his fist pressed deep into the wound made by Valter’s knife, but still it bled. None of them spoke. Mathias watched Koenig, expecting him to fall at any moment, but he didn’t. He just kept on walking, step by step, his eyes fixed on the distant shoreline as though that was all he could see.

Stefan walked on the other side of him. Every now and again he would cast a glance at Mathias. He didn’t know whether Mathias had guessed that he’d left Katta behind. All the time they’d spent looking for her on the island, Stefan had hidden what he’d done, not knowing what to do if he found her first. He didn’t know what to do now either – Koenig was bleeding to death, he could see it, and he didn’t know what to do.

Still Koenig walked on, step by step, fist pressed into the wound, his eyes never leaving the distant shore.

Mathias hadn’t understood exactly what they had found in the crypt, but he knew now that Gustav’s secret wasn’t gold or silver – it was murder. What Katta had said made no sense to him. He wasn’t sure if he’d even heard it right – how could those men have been dead and still alive? And where was she? He looked at Koenig, at the blood seeping into the ice, and such a wave of despair welled up in him that he buried his face in his hands and began to cry.

But still Koenig walked on.

When at last they reached the harbour, they made their way between the tangle of thick ropes, and up across the quay to the stables. If there were stable-boys about, none saw them. In the warm dark of the stall, Koenig stood with his eyes closed, resting his forehead against the side of the huge horse. Then he turned his head and looked at the square of daylight that fell through the door.

‘Get me that coat,’ he said.

A dirty stable coat hung on a nail. It must have belonged to one of the grooms. Stefan pulled it down and watched as, one-handed, Koenig slowly unbuttoned the blood-sodden remains of the coat he wore and dropped it onto the straw. Then he began to wash himself clean in the ice-cold water of
the drinking trough. He unwound his fine lace scarf and stuffed it into the deep wound that Valter had made, binding it tight. But it did little good. It stained with blood even as he did it.

‘We have to get you to a doctor,’ said Mathias.

Koenig shook his head. ‘The little man was meant to kill us,’ he said. ‘Leiter doesn’t know that he didn’t.’

It was only then that Mathias understood what Koenig meant to do. He had an account to settle with Leiter. Katta was a small part of it, but if she were alive, Koenig would find her. That was all that mattered to Mathias. He didn’t care about the rest.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Koenig pulled the remaining pistol from the bags beneath the straw. ‘Don’t thank me yet, boy,’ he said.

Koenig knew where they had to go, just as Anna-Maria and Lutsmann had done. No one spared them a look as they pushed their way through the streets. The narrow lanes and alleyways were full of carts and stalls. Mathias looked at the faces they passed, wanting to find one that was Katta’s. But they passed only one red-haired girl, and when she turned round, she looked straight through him.

Dr Leiter’s house stood in one of the courtyards of the palace. There were no guards or soldiers – not there. Leiter had no need of them.

The building had a fine front and a walled garden at the rear. There was a door in the wall that wasn’t locked. They pushed it open and stood under the bare trees, looking up at the back of the house. A low frost-covered hedge ran beside a path that led to windows opening onto the garden.