A Visible Darkness Part 46

A naked man, life-sized, was reclining on his back. He might have been peacefully sleeping, except for the fact that his snaking innards were exposed to view. No man could survive for long in such a state. Intestines had uncoiled onto his chest, arms and lower trunk to form a sort of vast amphitheatre. Deep down in the centre of the arena itself, the complex mechanisms by which the stomach functions were on display.

I raised my hand, covered my mouth, swallowed hard.

No blood, fluid, bile or mucus obscured the horrid spectacle. As a teaching instrument, the inanimate wax model would undoubtedly be useful. The statue was a monument to the combined miracles of Art and Nature. I recognised the hand that had fashioned the plaster casts of Erika Linder's limbs. There was the same precision in the detail, the same impeccable realism. But surely this was not the piece that he had been talking of.

I threw back the second dust-sheet, and held up the lantern.

An aged woman.

A head of braided hair-was it real?-a wrinkled face. From the point of her chin to the soles of her feet, the skin had been stripped away from the body, revealing the bare bones of the skeleton beneath. Large red-and-blue knots bulged along her arms and legs, together with the major blood vessels which connected them to her heart and lungs.

Where were the muscles?

It was a sort of abstract of a human corpse, and I recalled the French word that DeWitz had used to describe the models for the Albertina. ecorche. The French verb means 'to flay; to lay bare.' The effect was more p.r.o.nounced in this particular instance. The wax model ill.u.s.trated in infinite detail the cyclic flow of blood around and through the avenues of the body. Anything which was irrelevant had been eliminated for didactic purposes.

I pulled away the third sheet.

Relief. Disappointment. Nausea. I felt all three together. DeWitz had spoken of the governing principle in the making of such models. Here was vivid evidence of how they were constructed. A wire frame had been shaped in the figure of a child-the unfinished piece appeared to be a boy aged eleven or twelve. Lying comfortably on his left flank, the skin and fat had been removed from his arms, legs and stomach, exposing his maturing muscles, and the conformation of his developing s.e.xuality. Finer details in the form of the internal organs and the bodily ma.s.s were being added as each item became available, though the calves and the feet were still no more than bare metal wire.

Was this what Heinrich-Vulpius wanted me to see?

He had been so intensely mystical when he spoke of it, yet I saw nothing which could represent in any way the rebirth of a fallen nation.

I replaced the dust-sheet over the boy, and turned to the last table. I hesitated for an instant, then threw the sheet back.

A naked woman.

She was large-boned, muscular, strikingly beautiful.

I had seen such women on the coast. Their robust yet graceful physical structure, the harmony of the hips, their well-shaped legs and the long muscle-honed thighs. Indeed, I corrected myself, I had seen many of them.

Before, and after, death.

The face was only partially finished. It was a miracle of gory detail. The skin had been stripped away-perhaps, it had yet to be put on-revealing the underlying features, the muscles, fat and tissue, which would give it form. The upper teeth and the lower jaw were missing.

Kati Rodendahl . . .

A large triangular section was lacking from the throat and the larynx.

Ilse Bruen in the pigsty . . .

The women in Nordcopp had told the truth about the artist who was obsessed by the anatomical perfection of their bodies. Heinrich had picked them out, noted the pieces that he was searching for, murdered them at his own convenience, then brought the specimens to Konigsberg. He had still not found the time or the opportunity to model them in wax. I felt a tremor of revulsion course through my body. Were the missing parts kept in jars of distilled wine, together with the other creatures, in the attic of Frau Poborovsky?

Was it all so simple?

A maniac obsessed by a particular type of woman, possessed of the necessary artistic skill to reproduce her model, desperate only for examples on which to base his work? What was the finality of it all? What could he hope to achieve? I could see nothing that was revolutionary in the scheme. Could he hope to defeat the French army and send them packing with a wax model of a woman, no matter how perfect he might make her?

I pulled the sheet away entirely, exposing the figure.

The wax woman was naked below the waist. Her legs were long, graceful, strong, but the figure was incomplete. In the triangle where her legs joined her trunk, there was a large gaping cavity. I felt a painful jolt.

The womb.

I remembered something that DeWitz had told me about his modeller.

'He is a perfectionist. He'll not invent a thing when Nature can be called upon to provide a perfect specimen. He recently mentioned the case of a woman who will certainly die before her time is up. He called her the new Eve . . .'

A pregnant woman, her belly swollen with the child that she was carrying. The one thing missing: an unborn foetus.

Edviga Lornerssen.

I recalled the way she asked about my wife. I saw again the gentle and protective way in which she laid her hands in her lap as she listened to my replies. She had even mentioned the fact that she feared for the effect that cold sea-water might have upon a child. I had had the right intuition: Edviga was asking about Helena, but she was thinking of her own baby.

Edviga Lornerssen was pregnant. She had gone to speak to Dr Heinrich. He knew about the baby growing inside her. The perfect foetus for the perfect Eve.

He would strike again in Nordcopp.

35.

'WHAT DID you see there?'

The voice of les Halles was brusque.

I stood at his side, looking down on Nordcopp beach. Everything had changed during my short absence. A dozen braziers had been set up near the waterline. These fiery beacons cast a pink glaze on the rippling black waves that broke upon the shingle. Thirty paces out, the steam-pumps of the coq du mer were chattering furiously. Piston-driven rods flew up and down, sucking up the sea-bed, sending the sludge hissing through a series of filters, spewing the water back to where it had come from. A rotating canvas belt fed stones and shale into a long, narrow flume which carried it onto the beach, where the detritus cascaded noisily into a metal tray. The amber-girls were working there, throwing unwanted pebbles higher up the beach, dropping fragments of amber into sacks which dangled around their necks. Their nets and spears were gone. They were obliged to work bare-armed, bare-foot. French soldiers pressed close around them, making sure that nothing was stolen.

Once, they had seemed to me like G.o.ddesses.

Now, they looked like humbled slaves.

Colonel les Halles surveyed the field of battle. Sweat rolled off his brow and trickled down his chin, running under his collar like dark rivulets of blood. His cheeks were gaunt, his cheekbones scuffed with oil where he had tried to brush away the sweat with the back of his filthy hands. His face was the painted mask of a warrior. He was fighting the final skirmish in his war against the Baltic Sea. He had violated the sea-bed, illuminated the sh.o.r.e, triumphed over gravity with his ingenious pipes and pumps. His machines would work all day, and through the night, digging endlessly for the precious amber that was buried beneath the shallow waters.

'Well, Stiffeniis?'

His patience was short. His mind was on his own task, not on mine.

I began to tell him what I had done the minute I arrived in Nordcopp.

'Why didn't you report your discoveries to me?' he snapped. 'He could have murdered you, as well.'

His questions were intelligent, rational. My behaviour had been neither. I had ridden hard from Konigsberg. Three hours in the saddle, the horse almost lame by the time that I reached the town. I had gone immediately to Heinrich's house. Afterwards, I reported what I had found to Sergeant Tessier in the North Tower. Five minutes later, aboard an open carriage with an armed escort, I was racing through the dunes towards the sea and Colonel les Halles.

'You cannot go alone,' Tessier grumbled.

But I saw the truth in his eyes. He did not trust me. I was a Prussian. Prussians were devious, dangerous. I must be carried directly to his superior, while he went off to verify what I had told him. For all he knew, I might be mad.

'Why did you enter that house alone?' les Halles demanded.

His eyes were red, he had not slept all night. The blazing orbs of a man possessed. They peered out from his smoke-blackened face with demonic energy. Success was the only reward that he craved. Amber was there to be taken; he would take it.

I envied him.

Had I conducted my investigation into the murders half so well? Had I saved a single Prussian life that might have been saved? Or was I, on the other hand, a.s.sisting the French to strip my native country of its wealth?

The killer had beaten me at every stage, but now I knew for certain who he was.

'I wonder why you took such risks,' he said with a loud sigh. 'This was not a contest between the two of you alone. A duel, let us say. The aim of your enquiries was to put an end to these disturbances, restore the peace, and let me to get on with my job.'

I could not tell les Halles why I had been so foolhardy. I had feared to lose far more than just my life. My soul was in the balance. My integrity. I had to outface Heinrich, and get back what was mine. By confessing what I had revealed to Kant, I had persuaded him to spare my life in Konigsberg. But now, I wanted that secret back.

No ghost must haunt me.

'And why would he leave the front door open?' Les Halles frowned. 'It is almost as if he wished you to find what he had left behind.'

His eyes flashed up into mine.

'Is that his game, do you think? Is he playing with you?'

My first impulse had been to call Gurten from the Church of the Saviour. But in the pale glimmer of the moonlight, I had seen the dark gap between the frame and the door. It was a clear sign of the killer's presence. He had used the same trick on me in Konigsberg, luring me into Rickert's house.

Like a fool, I rushed into the trap, slamming the door back on its hinges, crashing it against the wall, announcing my arrival.

'You expected to meet the doctor,' les Halles summarised.

'I saw two hands,' I said. 'Gripping the bottom of the door like talons. The body was in the kitchen, I could not see it from the hall. But those eight fingers caught the ray of a moonbeam. Blood had run beneath the door and formed a pool of glistening darkness on the tiles. I stepped into the room.'

A loud, dismissive grunt confirmed what he considered to be my foolishness in entering the house alone. 'What had he done to the corpse?' he asked with barely controlled impatience.

'The right side of the skull had caved in. Blood and brains spilled out . . .'

I could not finish. I saw once more the blue, metallic sheen that the moonlight cast on her skin. The blood seemed as heavy as mola.s.ses. It had congealed in the folds of her face and neck. The skull had been crushed by a ma.s.sive blow. White fragments glinted like pinpoints in her tangled brown hair. She had been bludgeoned to death with one of Heinrich's plaster casts. It lay in smashed and b.l.o.o.d.y pieces beside her body. The ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s which had barred my way to the doctor's surgery but a week before had settled heavily to the side, pulling her body aslant. Her white linen blouse was piebald black with blood.

Can one feel relief at the sight of a corpse so brutally slaughtered?

I breathed more easily as I stared into those lifeless eyes. They were not Edviga's, as I had feared. I recognised Frau Hummel. Dr Heinrich had murdered his housekeeper.

'Had he mutilated her?' les Halles insisted.

'She was not what he was looking for,' I said. 'He is only interested in the girls who gather amber.'

'You said that there was more than one,' les Halles prodded, impatiently.

'Indeed,' I said. 'There is another room where Heinrich performs his surgery. The same room where he makes casts of human limbs from gypsum and wax . . .'

I paused.

There was a smell of wax in the surgery, but it was nothing like as strong as the smell of wax in the house of Frau Poborovsky, nor could it ever hope to compare with the overwhelming atmosphere of DeWitz's workshop.

I took a deep breath, preparing myself to tell the worst.

'He was tied to a chair,' I said. 'He was sitting at the desk . . .'

'But how did he die?' the colonel snapped, as if the deed did not interest him. He wanted facts, and nothing more.

'Face down in a bowl of plaster,' I replied, equally brutal in my description, recalling the large blue bowl in which Heinrich had been mixing plaster when I called on him in the company of Gurten. 'Heinrich held him down until he drowned, then left him where he sat. The plaster had set hard and fast. It was a horrid way to die,' I said. 'The agony was long. His wrists were deeply cut as he tore against the rope. This killer likes to torture his prey . . .'

Whenever I thought of Heinrich, that word rose spontaneously to my lips.

'He used the plaster of Paris like the resin which forms amber,' I continued. 'It smothers, chokes and kills the victim as it hardens. Just like the insects trapped inside it.'

Colonel les Halles let out a groan of dubious perplexity.

'Never let it be said that Prussians lack imagination!' he exclaimed. 'And what do you think he had in mind when he mutilated those women? Is it not the inspiration of the moment which guides his cruelty?'

I admired the practical nature of his thinking.

'If the victim's face had set fast inside a bowl of plaster,' les Halles ploughed on, 'how did you recognise him?'

The only source of light in Heinrich's surgery was a candle on the mantelpiece. The tallow was almost out, burnt down to a stub, but there was flame enough to see what had happened.

'I recognised his jacket,' I said. 'The same dark brown riding-jacket that he always wore. And the ring on his finger. A cornelian with a swan and the initials J.G.'

Heinrich had murdered my a.s.sistant.

Johannes Gurten had returned to Nordcopp, as I instructed him, but he had ignored the warning that fright had inspired me to add: 'Prudence-prudence-prudence!'

He had paid for his rashness with his life. Heinrich had pushed his face into a bowl of plaster, and held him there until he was dead.

'You know his name, then?'

'Johannes Gurten was a trainee magistrate,' I told him. 'He had been sent to Lotingen to serve his apprenticeship with me, but when he learnt that I was engaged on a case in Nordcopp, he took it on himself to follow me to the coast. He had been . . . helping me, let's say.'

'Did he not go with you to Konigsberg?' he enquired sharply.

'I a.s.signed a different task to him. Concerning Heinrich. He was to search for information . . .'

'I knew nothing of this person,' les Halles interrupted me.

'I knew you would not let him into the camp. I did not ask. I, too, have had my share of obstacles,' I reminded him, without insisting that those obstacles were of his making.

'I suppose you have,' he agreed, looking out over the sh.o.r.e.

Down below, the machines continued to thump and pound like a dismal orchestra playing some strange, heathen symphony. Pride gleamed in his eyes, however. Nordcopp sh.o.r.e was where he wished to be.