Critique Of Criminal Reason Part 5

'Murder...murder...murder...' the wind raged back a dozen times, like a hammer blow repeated over and over again. It echoed and resounded in my brain. In the flickering light, I seemed to see the stiff frozen mouth of the corpse open and close in speech. Vigilantius quivered from head to toe. Mangled words and rent phrases rushed from his lips in an incomprehensible avalanche.

Then, there was a sharp cry of pain.

'Who did this, Spirit?' Vigilantius stormed. 'Who murdered you?'

I heard the hoot of an owl, the sound of pigeons cooing, the howl of a cat, the wild babbling of a tuneless song, then that wind-like rush again.

'A tongue of flame. A fire at the back of my sku...' The speech slurred suddenly, then picked up more clearly with a s.n.a.t.c.hing, nasal sibilance which was quite distinct. Was this the true voice of Lawyer Tifferch? 'Dark...dark...a voice...'

'Which voice?' Vigilantius shouted against a babble of disconnected sounds like the tuneless mangling of a hurdy-gurdy when the handle is turned the wrong way. 'Who spoke to you? Describe him, I command you!'

I saw, or thought I saw, the lips of the dead man move in answer. 'The Devil's is a face...no more,' the corpse said, and silence fell as if a tomb-slab had been dropped in place. Time stood still, but questions rattled in a swirling vortex through my brain. What had I just seen? What jiggery-pokery had I just witnessed? Sweat ran cold along my spine. The performance had certainly been impressive, my heart was still heaving like a bellows. I gasped for air, and had to clear my throat for fear of choking. In that instant, I realised, Doctor Vigilantius was watching me. The real Vigilantius, if anything could be called real in that dark place. Suddenly, his upper lip curled, his black eyes sparkled, and he grinned fiendishly from ear to ear.

'You heard it, did you not?' he said. 'The human corpse is the receptacle of vital sensations. My magister, Emanuel Swedenborg, taught me how to tap them long ago. Open your blinkered mind to mystery, Herr Procurator. More ill.u.s.trious men than you have learnt to see without using their eyes.'

He took a step towards me, blocking the body from my sight. His sense of his own powers was absurd, unquestioning. Arrogance oozed from his person, sweat rained from his brow, rivulets ran down his face and his neck. 'Make the most of what you have just been privileged to witness,' he said, waiting for my reaction, the smile slowly fading from his lips.

I took a step forward.

'Impressive, sir,' I said, my pulse thumping rapidly. 'You've missed your calling. You should have been an actor. But what remains of the play when the curtain falls?'

I stared into his eyes for some moments, but he did not reply.

'You have told me nothing useful,' I went on, my anger mounting. 'How did this man die? What weapon killed him? And why could he not describe the face of his murderer? You are a ventriloquist, sir, a conjuror. I have heard not a single word of truth from the dead man's lips. Nor from yours. You are wasting my time, obstructing my investigation. The King will have a report of what is happening here.'

The necromancer's coal-black eyes stared defiantly into mine, and that annoying, self-satisfied smile twisted his thin lips once more. 'What has the King to do with this, Herr Stiffeniis?'

'Surely, you remember him?' I replied sarcastically. 'Our monarch? King Frederick Wilhelm III? The person who entrusted this case into my hands? I have his letter of authority here in my...'

'You couldn't be more wrong,' Vigilantius interrupted, waving his hand in the air as if to dismiss a bothersome fly. 'King Frederick Wilhelm knows nothing of you, or me. A person of eminence whom His Majesty trusts has promised to solve these mysteries for him. With your help, and with mine. Your letter of authority isn't worth the paper it's written on. It was signed and sealed by some faceless secretary in Berlin, I'd wager. A pretext to bring you here.'

My hands began to shake with rage, and I thrust them deep inside my cloak, trying to keep my voice cool and sharp when I spoke. 'An eminent person? A person whom the King trusts? And this great man has promised the King to solve these murders by means of sleight-of-hand and conjuring tricks. How remarkable! I am eager to meet this Professor of Chicanery. The city of Konigsberg could not be in better hands.'

Vigilantius stared at me in silence, that mocking smile fading into a stiff and brooding glare. 'You are insulting a great man, Herr Procurator. I hope that I am present when you meet him.'

'In this world, or the next?' I muttered, staring down at the corpse, before turning to Koch. 'Help me. I wish to examine the empty sh.e.l.l of this man now that the spirit has departed!'

We bent over Jeronimus Tifferch. There was not a drop of blood on his clothes, nor any bruising of the skin, no evidence of a blow or strangling. The tip of his tongue protruding between his yellow teeth was a clear pink, neither black nor swollen. I put both hands flat on his chest and pushed against the ribcage. All was sound. I opened his shirt and found no sign of stabbing or a.s.sault. What kind of murder was this? Which closed door had the robber, Death, unlatched to enter Lawyer Tifferch's body?

'Help me turn him over, Koch.'

I forced myself to lay my hands on the stiff, cold corpse again, and together we levered the dead man onto his left flank. His clothes crackled as we shifted him, the skin hard to the touch like wet stone. In times past, doctors of medical science must have felt as I did then, while they practised the forbidden art of anatomical dissection. The place was fitting enough, a secret room in the stinking bowels of the earth. Outside, it was night. Inside, it was night too, but of a far darker hue. Was it possible to imagine doing what we were engaged in beneath the unforgiving light of day? There was something desecrating in the action.

'Do you have a knife, Sergeant Koch?'

'What do you intend to do with it?' Vigilantius objected.

I ignored him, taking the pocket-knife from Koch's hand, and scoring a line from the collar of the dead man's jacket down to the hem. With a rent I tore the stiff cloth away and repeated the cut through his linen shirt. We both stared in amazement at what was revealed.

'Good G.o.d!' Koch exclaimed in a whisper.

I replaced my gloves to avoid contamination. The dead man's upper back was a ma.s.s of ancient weals and recent cuts. Had Tifferch been a living-room carpet, one might have thought he had been recently beaten and combed with an iron brush. Slowly, carefully, with the tip of my finger, I rubbed away the crust of congealed blood to reveal the frozen flesh beneath.

'Whipped,' Koch murmured.

'There can be little doubt of that,' I said, my eyes racing over the flayed skin as if it were an ancient scroll written in a mysterious language that I had still to decipher.

'Could this have caused his death, sir?' Koch asked, gesturing uncertainly at the man's tormented flesh.

'He told you himself!' Doctor Vigilantius erupted. 'He spoke of flames. Of fire in his brain. That must be your starting point.'

'I'll decide where I will start!' I snapped back.

'Those wounds are not the cause, Herr Stiffeniis,' the necromancer insisted. 'Your stubborn incredulity is the poisoned fruit of dogmatism. Logic is only one of many systems of understanding. Can you not see? There are a hundred paths to Truth.'

'This man has been beaten,' I replied forcefully. 'I know that the beating did not kill him. But it may explain why he was killed. I cannot ignore that fact. The investigation must begin with this.'

Augustus Vigilantius smiled broadly. Facts, apparently, did not diminish him. 'Tifferch himself has just told us a different story. You would not be wise to ignore his words.'

'If they were his words,' I countered.

'My information is not the result of physical examination of the body,' he replied stiffly. 'My concern is with the vital energies imprisoned inside the fragile human sh.e.l.l. I am merely the drum, the sounding-board.'

'Hocus-pocus!' I sneered. 'I'm surprised that you haven't produced a rabbit from the dead man's hat!'

The arrow bit home.

'When the moon is at its height,' the necromancer spat back, 'the flux of the human spirit waxes to its fullest power. Then, it may be tapped by any scholar learned in the art of divination. His body was preserved here for that purpose. But the vital moment has pa.s.sed, it will come no more. You intoxicate yourself with external appearances, Herr Stiffeniis.'

'Help me turn him back, Sergeant Koch,' I said, pointedly ignoring the mountebank.

'You should be grateful to me, Herr Procurator,' Vigilantius insisted at my shoulder. 'Do not disdain the help I can offer you.'

I did not answer, but in the silence which followed, I heard the same disgusting noise that had given me the shivers only minutes before. As I turned, I met the necromancer's mocking eyes. His nostrils twitched open, then closed, sucking at the air with greedy energy. His head was close to mine, and he was sniffing me.

'Are you a dog, sir?' I snarled, standing back. 'This trick may work with the dead. But I am alive.'

He drew further off, but nothing could wipe the smirk from his face.

'Only on the surface, Herr Stiffeniis. Beneath, I smell the death you carry with you everywhere.' He tapped the side of his nose. 'It stinks. There is a dark, stagnant pool where a carca.s.s lies rotting. A dead thing is poisoning your mind and your life. Am I wrong, Herr Procurator? What stalks you in your nightmares? What secrets do those murky waters hide? You are afraid of what might float to the surface at any moment.'

His words resonated and echoed beneath the vault.

'Thank you for your invaluable opinions,' I murmured. 'There's nothing more to keep us here, Koch.'

Vigilantius's eyebrows arched with surprise. 'But I have one thing left to show you. Something even more important may be got from this corpse.'

'I've had my fill of corpses and their keepers,' I snapped.

'But, sir!' he opposed, and there was something two-faced in his way of doing so which contrasted sharply with the honeyed entreaty which followed. 'There is another aspect of my art which may be of use to you.'

'Your arts do not interest me,' I sneered.

'As you wish, then, Herr Procurator,' he said with a bow of exaggerated courtesy. 'I cannot force you to stay against your will.'

I strode out of the room with Sergeant Koch hard on my heels, and we retraced the dark and musty pa.s.sages through which we had come. We climbed the staircase to the surface without exchanging a word, our matching footsteps ringing along the narrow corridors and across the claustrophobic courtyards.

'What an impertinence! Talking to you like that, sir?' said Koch with feeling as we emerged into the central courtyard. 'What do you think he's up to?'

'That's anybody's guess,' I said dismissively. I felt no desire to imagine what Vigilantius might be doing down there with the dead body. A stiff wind had swept away the clouds, and I raised my eyes to gaze at the stars which dotted the dark sky like precious grains of sugar accidentally scattered across a table, drawing the fresh air deep into my lungs. 'Did you have any idea that some other person than Procurator Rhunken was involved in this investigation, Koch?'

The Sergeant did not reply at once.

'No, sir,' he said at last. 'None at all. But can you wonder that the city fathers would appeal to any person that they thought might be able to help them out in their trouble?'

If there was one irrefutable good quality to be found in Koch, it was his sound common sense. I took comfort in it and had to smile.

'The coach is waiting,' he reminded me.

'Let it wait,' I said. 'Take me to Herr Rhunken's office. We have wasted time enough this evening. The investigation must begin in earnest. Sniffing dead men's bones will get us nowhere fast.'

Chapter 6.

If the bas.e.m.e.nt cellars of the Fortress of Konigsberg had reminded me uncomfortably of the lower reaches of Hades, the upper floors were as confusing as the maze of Crete. Gloomy, ill-lit pa.s.sages shot off left and right of the main corridor, no feature distinguishing one way from any of the others.

'The building was erected in the twelfth century by the Teutonic Knights, sir, as a stronghold during their long struggle to capture Prussia from the pagans,' Sergeant Koch explained with obvious pride as we trod the labyrinthine corridors. 'It has been enlarged in recent times, of course. Now it is an impregnable fortress. Bonaparte himself could not hope to storm it successfully.'

'How many men are stationed in the garrison?' I asked.

'Three thousand soldiers, as a rule,' the sergeant reported, though we met not a single one that night.

'So, where are they all?'

'General Katowice has sent them out on defensive manoeuvres.'

At that point, we were obliged to pa.s.s across a wooden walkway laid over iron gratings which had been let into the stone floor. Rough voices snarled curses beneath our feet as we clattered across this makeshift bridge, while others cried out for food and water. The clinging vapour of sweat and stifled breath rose all around us in drifting clouds, like steam from a kettle on the hob. We might have been crossing a marsh. The air was rank, fetid, the noise little short of demonic Alighieri's harrowing vision of h.e.l.l came unwillingly to my mind. Had the Italian poet, I asked myself, been to visit the prisons of his native Florence in his search for inspiration?

'What's happening down there, Sergeant?'

'Prisoners awaiting transportation,' Koch informed me.

He paused for a moment and inclined his ear towards the grating as a fine female voice rose high above the hubbub, wailing a keening lament. I knew the ballad well enough. It was one that my own grandfather often crooned. He had learnt it, he said, during the Seven Years War, and it was the only song that he ever sang. When he had no voice for singing, he whistled the tune beneath his breath. There was a pining, nostalgic note in the woman's voice which added a new, tragic dimension to the soldier's tale: The snow will feed me, the snow will sate my thirst, the snow will warm my bones when I am dead.

'Mezzo-soprano,' said Koch with a smile and a shake of his head.

We moved on, and shortly after, having climbed a newel staircase to the floor above, stopped before a heavy wooden door no different from a hundred others that we had pa.s.sed along the way.

'Here we are, sir,' Koch informed me. 'This is Herr Rhunken's office.'

I was too stunned to speak. There was no nameplate on the door, no symbol of the authority that Herr Procurator must surely have enjoyed, nothing to indicate that the owner of the capable hands to which the peace and safety of the city had been entrusted was to be found inside that room.

'So close to the squalor down below?'

'Procurator Rhunken was in charge of Section D, sir. If you'd rather be somewhere else...'

'I wouldn't think of it,' I replied quickly. 'If this room was good enough for him, I will make the best of it.'

'The felons destined for Siberia are kept in those cages. Herr Rhunken was still working on the list. There are places left on board the ship. Once the ice-pack begins to break up...'

There had been a raging debate about deportation over the last three or four years. King Frederick Wilhelm III had decided to rid the nation once and for all of recidivist criminals, despatching them to some remote penal colony for life, under sentence of death if they should ever dare to return. His Majesty's overtures to many distant foreign powers with colonies or unpopulated territories, including the United States and Great Britain, had been rejected, but finally, the Russian Tsar had declared his willingness to take them for a substantial fee. There was still a great deal of lingering controversy among liberal thinkers concerning the Royal decision. Criminals do not occasion much sympathy in Prussia, or anywhere else, but the notion of selling them into Russian slavery had met with much opposition in Enlightened circles. The n.o.ble Savage was still a popular catchphrase, and the French government, and the Americans before them, had declared all men to be equal. Still, on 28 February 1801, an agreement had been signed. Prison governors throughout the land had been ordered to select the most serious and incorrigible offenders in the land for banishment.

'Herr Rhunken chose this room himself, sir,' Koch reported. 'This is where he carried out interrogations. Those cries and screams down below had a certain effect on the person being questioned.'

'I can picture the scene,' I said with an involuntary shudder.

'Herr Procurator was held in great respect for the severity of his methods,' Koch concluded, drawing a large key from his pocket, and opening the door.

He stood aside to let me pa.s.s, and I waited in the darkness with growing impatience while he struck a damp flint again and again, eventually managing to light a candle. The apartment was large with a high ceiling and grubby grey walls which needed a fresh coat of paint. A large rust-stained iron stove filled the far corner, though it had not been lit. Narrow window-slits looked out over the prison-gratings on the floor below. Four lanterns had been hung on the walls to provide illumination, and Koch hurried to light them all, but the flames of a dozen more would not have done the trick.

'Two smaller rooms adjoin this one, sir. One is the Procurator's archive. In the other one, there's a cot where Herr Rhunken sometimes took his rest when he was obliged to work late.'

This is where I should have been put up in the first place, I reflected. Not in a quayside inn, comfortable as The Baltic Whaler undoubtedly was. In the austere and inhospitable Fortress of Konigsberg, my newly gained authority as the magistrate-in-charge of the investigation would be clear for all to see. I made myself comfortable at a heavy, elaborately carved desk which stood in splendid isolation in the centre of the room. This piece of furniture alone spoke of power and status. A wine carafe and cut-gla.s.s goblet had been provided for refreshment during the hard hours of labour. Now the decanter stood empty, its stopper thick with dust, and a large, dead spider lay imprisoned beneath the upturned wine gla.s.s.

'I want to see Procurator Rhunken's reports and files concerning the murders. They should be here somewhere, Koch. The ones you showed me in the coach are incomplete. Ulrich Totz told me he had been interrogated personally by Procurator Rhunken soon after the murder of Jan Konnen. I wish to read what he had to say for himself.'

Koch glanced around uncertainly.

'I've no idea where they are kept, sir. Papers the Procurator gave me are locked up in my own desk. The rest are stored in the archive, I suppose. But my master would allow no one to enter there.'

'You have my permission to enter, Sergeant.'

I stood up and walked to the window to cut short any objection he might have made. Wiping the dust away from the filthy pane of gla.s.s with the hem of my cloak, I gazed down onto the floor below with its iron gratings and the hum of imprisoned misery. In the darkest corner, one of the guards, the first I had seen, was squatting in the gloom, his white trousers down around his ankles, defecating. The memory of my own pleasant office in Lotingen returned to me in a blinding flash of light and warmth. With its cheerful flower beds and clipped green lawns, mothers and nursemaids brought their charges to play beneath my windows in the spring and summer. The soldier finished his business, hauled up his pantaloons, then adroitly covered the mess with his boot before going on his way.

I turned back to the room once more, but I felt little in the way of comfort. The dismal rumbling of the prisoners down below was inescapable. I hoped to go at least one step further than Rhunken had gone. Despite his vast experience, Herr Procurator Rhunken had been as helpless to stop the murders as any of those who had died directly at the hands of the killer. Could I dare to hope for success where he had failed?

I paced out the length and the breadth of my predecessor's professional tomb, preparing myself for the work that lay ahead, until Sergeant Koch returned some minutes later.

'I found this lot, sir,' he reported, the papers in his hands pitifully few. 'They were stacked on one of the shelves.'

'Nothing more?' I asked incredulously.