A Visible Darkness Part 40

'The face, Frau Poborovsky. Is there anything that distinguishes him?'

She rubbed her hands together. 'He is quite handsome. Charming manners, too. Thin lips, a shapely nose, a good square chin, good teeth, a broad brow and . . . oh yes.' She pointed her finger toward me. 'His smell, sir. I could smell it on his hair and hands. It lingers in the air when he's at home.'

'What smell?' I asked.

She brushed her dress off, as if the smell were clinging there as well. 'Wax, I would say, sir. Once I told him that he smelled like a church at Christmastide.'

I needed something more visible than a smell to go on. I drew out my sketching-pad and turned to the page which held the face of the man that Ludvigssen had described to me.

'Is this him?' I asked her.

The lady's eyebrows rose in perfect arches. 'This, sir? Vulpius?' she said. 'As similar as a cat and a mouse, perhaps.' She clasped her hands and her shoulders drooped. 'This man's eyes are round and small. Herr Vulpius has a pair of eyes . . . well, they are very different. These lips are thick . . . Oh no, sir, this cannot be Vulpius. You are looking for the wrong man.'

I had realised that Ludvigssen had been of no great help. But how inaccurate had he really been? And how precise was Frau Poborovsky being now?

I went across and opened up the tallboy dresser. The smell seemed to unwind and unfold from the cupboard, like a snake uncoiling. It was not the sour smell of camphor which Helena and Lotte used at home to ward off moths. This smell was sweeter, almost medicinal, and there was a mild aromatic edge to it.

I hesitated.

Was it similar to anything I had encountered in the house of Dr Heinrich? I inhaled more deeply, held it in my nose and throat, then let it go. It was not dissimilar, I thought, though I could not be more precise. I looked more attentively at the contents of his wardrobe. Vulpius dressed well, though there was nothing remarkable about the long brown winter cloak, the green velveteen frock-coat, or the blue fustian jacket which were hanging there. Beneath the long tails of the overcoat, I noticed a round box the size of a skillet. I bent down, removed the lid. Empty.

'Do you clean his rooms as part of your fee, Frau Poborovsky?'

'No, sir. He said straight away that he would clean up after himself.'

'Usually a man renting rooms is glad to have that ser vice done,' I insisted.

'He didn't want me moving things, he said.' She did not seem upset at this rebuff. 'Jealous of his things, he is. And secretive, too. But I came in when he was out. One day, I had to . . .'

'Why was that, Frau Poborovsky?'

'The smell again. I didn't know what to make of it. So I used the spare key.' She wrinkled her nose with disgust. 'He keeps them in the bottom drawer of his desk . . . ugh!'

I turned my attention to the drawer and opened it, while she took a step backwards, shaking her shoulders like a professional actress.

The drawer was full of jewellery boxes. Though differing in size and colour, all the containers appeared to have come from such a source. I picked one up, removed the lid, and looked inside. Something was wrapped up carefully in a bit of tissue paper. I opened it up, and stared at the contents.

A strip of paper was fixed inside the lid, on which was written in a neat hand: Phylum: anthropoda. Cla.s.s: insecta. Subcla.s.s: pterygota. Infracla.s.s: neoptera. Order: coleoptera(Linnaeus, 1758).

'A beetle,' I said.

Frau Poborovsky was standing at my elbow.

'Why keep dead insects in a box?' she asked. 'It's not the only one, sir. There's something of the sort in all of them. I looked in three, then I looked no more. As if there were not creeping things enough, even in the most well-kept house.'

'He probably collects them,' I said, though my thoughts had taken a different direction.

Those letters sent to Ludvigssen. The crushed insect with which each warning was signed. Had Vulpius sent those messages? And if he had, why steal a ma.n.u.script from the very same archive? What did he hope to learn from Kant? And what did Baltic amber represent for him?

'I almost hope he don't come back,' Frau Poborovsky muttered. 'I could let the attic to two or three young men . . .'

'The attic?' I repeated, turning on her.

'He rents the attic, sir. Uses it as a workshop.' Her lips twisted and crinkled with disgust. 'You don't suppose . . .'

'It will be full of crawling creatures, I'm sure,' I said, intending to visit the attic alone. 'Bugs and slugs and spiders. Revolting things with fifty or a hundred legs. Shall we go up?'

She hugged herself, and let out a little squeal.

'I'll go alone then, ma'am, if you don't mind? If the bailiffs are to be called,' I reminded her smoothly, 'it may be best if we have a clear idea of the task that faces them. Do you have the key?'

Frau Poborovsky unlatched a key from her bunch, and pointed me up the final flight of stairs. There was no other door up there, she said, I could not miss it. I left her on the first-floor landing, and made my way to the top of the house by means of an uncarpeted staircase until a narrow door prevented me from going further. I put the key into the lock, and turned it twice.

It would not open.

Was Vulpius in there?

I listened at the door for some moments. It was so very silent, I thought I could hear the worms inside the wood. Then, I tried the key again. I could feel the lock turning, but the door refused to budge, no matter how I pushed it. I went back down three stairs, and bent to examine the bottom of the door. A thin band of light was shining beneath it. That was when I noticed a bit of string which pa.s.sed beneath the door, peeping out at me like a rat's tail.

Had Vulpius used some secondary means of barring entrance to his domain?

I took my clasp-knife from my bag, slipped it under the door, and found that there was indeed some hindrance near the string. I jabbed forward with the knife once or twice, and the obstacle gave way a little. Then, I tried the door again. As the door swung back, I saw a wooden wedge with that piece of string attached to it by a knot. Having closed and locked the door, Vulpius employed this simple but ingenious stratagem to safeguard the contents of his workshop. That was the word that Frau Poborovsky had used.

'Is everything in order, sir?' Frau Poborovsky called from below.

I rea.s.sured her that it was, while I pushed open the door.

Two eyes stared at me.

My heart had leapt into my throat. They were the eyes of a pretty young woman. I let out a deep sigh as I stepped inside the room. I closed the door carefully and blocked it with the wedge, as Vulpius himself might have done.

Then, I turned around and examined those eyes.

It was a painting. An oil, no larger than a linen handkerchief, which made the face exactly life-sized. The surface was oddly rippled in some indefinable way, executed in a style which seemed distinctly old-fashioned. Certainly, it was from another era. A young woman with a powder-white face, high cheekbones, piercing black eyes, and a strange blue-and-white cap on her head. A gold ring dangled from her left ear.

Her eyes seemed to follow me as I began to explore the place.

Ancient raf ters rose to a point ten feet above my head. A murky gable window at either end let in light. There was a lantern, but I had no need of it. Even in the gloom, I could see what Vulpius was engaged upon. Along one wall was a shelf lined with gla.s.s jars. Some were large, some were small. All of them gleamed in the half-light. Each one contained a quant.i.ty of pale yellow liquid, and some dark object. I could not put specific names to the contents, but I could see that they were insects, most of them from foreign climes. From Africa, India, other exotic places. Beetles with horns and others with more legs than I, or Frau Poborovsky, would have had the heart to count. Unlike the bugs in the boxes in the room below, the jars had not been labelled. There were no t.i.tles in German or Latin, no dates to indicate where, when or how the samples had been collected. As if the scientific data did not interest him, but rather the exotic shape and the genus of the creatures.

I turned away from the exhibits, and began to examine the rest of the attic.

Other gla.s.s jars contained live creatures: black slugs, green worms, a long-legged spider with a thick pelt of brown hair that was larger than a plum, a beetle with two large horns on its head. He probably purchased them from the ocean-going ships in the port. Some were in the last, twitching stages of life. Wherever he had gone, Vulpius had left his private menagerie to starve to death. There was nothing sentimental in his h.o.a.rding, that was evident. Each jar was empty and bare, except for the life form that it contained. There was no moss, no gra.s.s, no stick or stone, which might have made the occupant feel any more at home in its cold gla.s.s prison. Vulpius seemed intent only in watching those creatures live, grow and die.

A keen eye, I thought, but a heart of stone.

For the rest, the contents of the workshop were-I felt some degree of relief-works of the imagination which he had committed to paper. I am a fair artist, but Vulpius was a gifted ill.u.s.trator. Large sheets of paper were spread out on an angled desk, where he appeared to be working on some project which I would have been hard put to describe. He favoured the use of a blood-red chalk-the sort they call sanguigno in Italy-which he appeared to have moulded and shaped with his finger, having laid it on the surface of the paper.

The top sheet was a large-scale drawing of a frog's leg, the skin stripped away to reveal the muscles and tendons in the act of jumping. Next to it, a drawing of a human leg in matching scale, performing the same action, as if man and frog were of the same size. The frog's upper leg muscle made the man's seem puny in comparison; the man's calf was immense beside that of the frog. And on the very same sheet, he had created a hybrid model, combining the jumping power of the frog with the marching power of the man. It was an impossible dream, yet it seemed to attract and fascinate the man that I was searching for.

The man that I had already met?

The casts and drawings Dr Heinrich had made of Erika's limbs would not have been out of place in that workshop. In my mind's eye, I saw him bending over that work-top with a red chalk-pencil in his hand. I could imagine the interest with which he would observe the creatures in their jars, humming quietly to himself as he went about his task, totally absorbed in it, as he had been when he showed the plaster casts to Gurten and myself. I remembered what Gurten had said. The doctor is guilty, sir. Once again, it seemed, my a.s.sistant had been pointing in the right direction.

I turned to another drawing, and felt a sense of shock and revulsion. Indeed, I felt my stomach heave. He had moulded the legs and wings of a house-fly onto the body of a man, as if both fly and man would benefit from the adaptation. Sheet after sheet, there were dozens of these bizarre representations. I went through them quickly, looking for some drawing of Erika, convinced that I would find the final connection between Vulpius and Dr Heinrich, whom I had thought to leave behind me in Nordcopp. Would it not be ironic if I found in Konigsberg what I had sent Gurten to look for in Lotingen?

But there was nothing so obvious.

I dropped the papers on the table with a sigh. I was surrounded on all sides by a bizarre and cruel vision of grotesque Nature. But as my eye swept over the room and its contents, I let out an involuntary cry as I spotted something familiar on a narrow shelf at the far end of the attic. Treading carefully, as if the sound of my footsteps might make that mirage disappear, I went towards the far wall, and stood there staring for some moments at what was on display.

Amber.

An entire collection. Dozens and dozens of pieces. Some of the lumps were the size of boiled sweets, others were as large as a closed fist. But it was what the amber contained that was so breathtaking. The flies and other nameless insects caged inside were unlike anything that I had ever seen before in my life. Could such creatures once have crawled upon the ground, or taken wing on a sky that was the colour of lead and stank of the sulphurous fumes of volcanoes in endless eruption?

I recalled the horror of Helena the night before I was torn from Lotingen, the description she had given of an enormous insect disappearing into the open mouth of baby Anders. She had described a creature such as these, a creature unlike anything that might be found in the house, or in the garden. I held the very creature she had seen in the palm of my hand. I beheld a host of them. Though dead and trapped inside the golden amber for countless centuries, they seemed no less terrible. If those creatures had ever moved on Prussian soil, I thought, this was no vision of Paradise. It was a nightmare.

Which of those pieces belonged to the Spener collection?

And who had brought the others from the coast?

Kati and Ilse? Megrete and Annalise? Edviga Lornerssen?

And if he had taken those treasures from the girls, why had he slaughtered them?

I had found the killer. Half man, half beast, a hybrid creature of a more primitive age, like the strange things that he pawed over. A doctor, who cured the sufferings of the amber-gatherers; a beast, who mutilated their corpses.

I pulled up with a start.

I was facing the portrait on the wall.

By some dev ilish artistry, the pretty young girl had disappeared, her angelic face transformed into a bone-white skull. Only the gold ring dangling from her ear remained unchanged. I eased closer to the portrait, realised that there were, in fact, two portraits overlaid, the lower one visible through narrow slats in the surface of the upper canvas. As I went beyond a certain point, the picture began to dissolve, then it suddenly snapped clear, and I was staring at the face of the beautiful young woman once again.

As I left the attic, I did as Vulpius would have done. I positioned the wedge close beside the door, and placed the string at the side of the door-jamb before closing the door. When the key was turned and the lock snapped shut, I pulled hard on the string and tugged the wedge back into place.

Frau Poborovsky was waiting at the foot of the stairs, her eyes wide with alarm.

'Nothing . . . strange up there?' she asked uncertainly.

'Books for the most part,' I rea.s.sured her. 'But I wonder where I might find him. You say he had no friends. What about acquaintances at work, perhaps?'

She curled up her bottom lip, and shook her head. 'I can't think of anyone. Apart from that letter of reference . . .'

'Letter?'

'When he signed the lease for the room, I insisted on a character note from a person of respectable standing in Konigsberg.'

I felt a flush of excitement. 'Do you have this letter?' I asked her.

She shook her head again. 'I clean out regular.'

'Do you remember the name of the person who signed for him?'

She crossed her arms, and thought for a moment. 'I can't recall it now. Still, I do remember thinking he was Dutch, though.'

'Dutch? What makes you say that?'

'It was the name. De-something-or-other. You know the way they have them funny shoes, and funny names? The gentleman had a shop down in Schwartzstra.s.se.'

31.

TURNING INTO SCHWARTZSTRa.s.sE, I pulled up sharply.

It was as if Frau Poborovsky had opened Vulpius's wardrobe again.

That smell.

The same pungent aroma that clung to Vulpius's working clothes. Cloying and sweet, it invaded my throat, and sat heavily upon my stomach. Frau Poborovsky had said that it was constantly on his hands and hair. A most peculiar perfume that he favoured, she believed. It was certainly distinctive, but she was wrong in thinking that he wore it as a pomade.

Tall, dark ware houses lined the far side of the street. They had been abandoned for some time by the look of them. The doors were barred, the hatches closed, the joists and pulleys used for heaving sacks to the upper floors were orange with rust. Even so, the street was busy. On the near side there were mechanics' dens, a blacksmith's yard, workshops of endless variety. Saws rasped and buzzed from one door, beating hammers exploded from the next. I paused outside a barrel-maker's, and heard the creak and shriek of staves being bent, the rattle of iron hoops, the thumping of wooden mallets. Up above my head, seagulls screeched forlornly. Perched on roof-gables, they stared fixedly north in the direction of the Baltic Sea.

I worked my way along the street, following that smell.

There had been more fragrant scents there in the past, it seemed. Hand-painted signs offered spices from the Indies, tropical fruits from South America. But then the French had arrived and the British naval blockade had put an end to foreign trade. Where pepper, nutmeg and other rare vegetable extracts had once been ground and packaged in paper sachets, mackerel were now being smoked on strings hung over a charcoal-pit. The view through the open doors of the smoking-yard was like a still-life painting from the Low Countries: bright glowing embers in strips on the ground; hazy blue smoke on a dark ground; silver-glistening, dead-eyed fish.

But that other smell kept coming back to me.

I lost it for an instant as I pa.s.sed beside a carpenter and his lad who were making coffins beneath an ancient sign. PRECIOUS WOODS-INTAGLIO WORK, it read. They were rooting through a mound of cast-off lumber which had just been tipped out onto the cobbles. A lanky man in rags with a skinny horse and makeshift cart was dumping broken doors and scorched planks onto the pile, whistling through his gap-teeth while he worked. Wood-shavings, glue and varnish filled the air.

But not for long.

I caught the scent again, then lost it immediately.

The doors of the next shop were thrown wide open. Three men were hard at work. Their faces seemed to be melting in a lather of sweat. Old sacks covered their bodies and heads. They were filling large gla.s.s jars with vinegar and baby eels, which twisted and jerked away as each man grabbed a writhing handful from a tub, and tried to press the reluctant creatures into their little gla.s.s coffins.

I lingered for a moment, remembering.

One of our serfs had been sent to Konigsberg to collect the leather harnesses for a new coach. When he returned to Ruisling, he brought back a jar of pickled eels for my father, saying that they were considered to be a great delicacy. Father, mother, Stefan and I had sampled the eels that eve ning, and been sick for three days afterwards. Helena had expressed a craving desire for pickled eels one morning recently, as pregnant women sometimes will.

Very soon, her time would be up . . .

I had never felt so helpless. I thought of her swollen belly. The child would be gathering his strength now. He, or she, would be preparing to fight his, or her, way into the world. I ought to have been there. And maybe I would be there soon.

That distinctive smell grew stronger.