HS03 - A Visible Darkness (27 page)

‘You know much of me, Gurten,’ I admitted. ‘But I know nothing of you. If I do decide to tutor you, I would like to know more.’

The dark cloud shifted from the young man’s face.

He chatted amiably, telling me stories from his family life, his schooling, and, most especially, his time at the University of Dresden. He had begun by studying medicine for a year or two, but then he had visited Königsberg, paying homage at the tomb of Immanuel Kant. He had read a newspaper account of Immanuel Kant’s last days—my name was mentioned in the article, he said—where much was made of our hunt for a murderer who was terrorising the city.

‘As a consequence, I decided to change to jurisprudence,’ he concluded. ‘Just as you did, sir.’

What would Gurten have thought if he had known the real motive which had induced me to become a magistrate? Would he still have held me up as a paragon to admire and follow?

We did not have to walk very far, which was fortunate, given the persisting heat. The Round Fort was not a mile from Nordcopp. Before the French arrived, Pastor Bylsma said, the building had been used for centuries as a stronghold repository by the margraves of Marlbork. The aristocratic family had held the royal mandate for the amber working on that stretch of coast for generations, until the French invaders seized possession of their monopoly. Now, the Round Fort was a local labour station for the French administration. Each Monday morning, new girls were taken on to replace the ones who had run away of their own accord, often without collecting their pay, or to replace others who had decided to leave the employment for some reason known only to themselves, but with money due to them in their hands.

Naturally, I thought, Colonel les Halles would close the place at his earliest convenience.

‘Byslma did not say that the place was falling down,’ I observed, as we caught our first sight of the tower. Nor had he said how old the building was.

Thirty feet high, and almost twice as wide, the Round Fort squatted on the crown of the hill like a well-fitting hat. Its walls were a dense mosaic of grey and black stones set in a muted green overcoat of moss. Round and smooth, of every size from very large to very small, those stones had not come from the local seashore. Somebody had gone to a deal of trouble to import the materials and build that stronghold. A crumbling curtain-wall on top of the fort was castellated to aid defence. Angled arrow-slits had been cut in the wall to allow the defenders to fire obliquely on anyone trying to undermine or storm it. I was impressed by the strategic position of the edifice.

Equally, I was impressed by something that Johannes Gurten had just said.

‘Just think, sir, the Teutonic Order controlled the amber trade for several hundred years,’ he said, his voice bubbling with ardour. ‘Can you imagine the riches that must have passed through their hands?’

‘All gone,’ I murmured. ‘
Mutatis mutandis
.’

‘Are you certain about that, sir?’ Gurten challenged. ‘Can six hundred years of valiant history be wiped out by a single battle, and a temporary subjection to a foreign power? Is Prussia dead? A man may wear his heart upon his sleeve, but he will hide his truest feelings deep within his soul if he is wise. We share that sentiment, I do believe. Professor Kant has shown that thought and action are not invariably consistent.’

He might have been waiting for me to agree with him.

When I said nothing, he added passionately, ‘Prussia is crushed, but for the moment only. The Prussian eagle will soar again.’

From the look of the Round Fort, I thought, Prussia had been crushed for Eternity.

We reached the top of the hill, and stopped before the entrance
to catch our breath. A dry ditch ran around the building, twenty feet deep, and wider still. Access to the only door in the squat tower was provided by a narrow bridge constructed of the same heavy stone. As we walked across it, Johannes Gurten read out a date that was carved above the door. ‘Thirteen hundred and two,’ he intoned, as if the numbers were some magical code from the Kabbalah.

Above the arch, an ancient inscription had been recently chipped and chiselled at. Someone had tried to obliterate the Gothic lettering, though it had proved no easy matter to dent the granite slab so deeply set in the wall.

‘Do you see, sir?’ he said, pointing up. ‘We cannot be so easily cancelled out.’

‘If I were you,’ I advised him, ‘I’d be more guarded in my speech. We do not know who runs this place. Perhaps the French themselves. At the very least, they finance it. This is where they find replacement labour. A magistrate must listen first, and only judge when he has heard all sides of a case.’

If I sounded overly pedantic, I made no attempt to soften the lesson.

‘Better a reprimand now than a year in a French labour camp,’ I warned him.

‘I’ll watch what I say,’ he promised with an apologetic smile.

His loose tongue was the best proof of his ingenuous nature, I thought to myself. Even so, I was not so foolish as to trust him entirely. Wouldn’t a spy speak in the most enthusiastic terms of his nationalist sympathies if he wished to sound out my opinions on the same subject?

There was no need to knock on the squat fortified door. It hung loose from the upper hinge, and was so heavy that a team of labourers would have been required to set it straight again. The wood was leached grey with age, damp, and salty encrustations.

And so, with no undue hindrance, Gurten and I invaded and took the citadel.

The place appeared to be deserted.

‘Is anybody here?’ I called.

My voice echoed around the large circular stone chamber.

It was dark and chill, almost impossible to see the perimeter wall on the far side of the room. Motes of dust jigged and danced in the beam of sunlight coming in through the door. There was no other source of illumination.

I heard the scrape of a boot on the stone floor, then a man of middle height and great age stepped out of the shadows.

‘What can I do for you, sirs?’

I identified myself and Johannes Gurten—it was, I recall, the first occasion on which I chose to describe him as my assistant—then I asked the old man who he was.

‘Benedikt Tanzig, Herr Procurator. At your ser vice.’

‘And you are . . . ?’

‘The archivist, sir. Now, I am more of a caretaker. Paid by the Margrave of Marlbork to maintain his fortress and his records. In the interests of neighbourliness, I also do the picking on a Monday for the French gentlemen. They’re supposed to take on women for the amber workings,’ he explained. Then, he sneered: ‘
I
know what they should be looking for. In the way of fit women, if you know what I mean.’

I hid a smile by coughing into my hand. Herr Tanzig could not have been less than seventy years of age.
Sans
hair,
sans
teeth,
sans
who knew what else!

‘When they bother to come,’ he rumbled on. ‘The girls, I mean, sir. There aren’t so many these days looking for this sort of work. Won’t be any before too long from what I be hearing.’

‘How many girls were taken on by the French last Monday?’ I asked him.

Tanzig raised his hand, crushed his gnarled fist to his bare gums, blew hard, and let out a curious popping sound. ‘Not a one, sir,’ he answered. ‘And no one came up from the camp either. Usually they
send an officer. No hiring officer, no hands to hire. There are always accidents, girls running off . . .’

‘Or being murdered,’ I put in.

He sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘Makes no difference to
them,
does it?’

Clearly, he was talking about Colonel les Halles and his officers.

‘Amber isn’t what it used to be, Herr Procurator. I been here close on fifty years. There were men here then, as well. But the great King Frederick turned the country into a barracks. All men had to serve in the army. Which left the women in the water. When the margrave had the diggings, we’d have twenty, thirty, forty comely wenches lining up, depending on the season.’

‘What difference does the season make?’ Gurten had taken a step forward.

‘Very few in winter, sir. Count ’em on one hand. Them’s the desperate ones—work, or starve! Spring’s the very best time. That’s when the pick ’o the crop turn up in droves. Big, strong, healthy wenches, thighs like tree-trunks!’ he exclaimed with a toothless leer. ‘When harvesting comes around, that lot go off to do a bit of reaping out in the fields, sir. Get free ale, bread and cheese, and a lark about in the hay with the workmen. Them girls, they . . .’

‘What about the summer?’ I interrupted him. ‘What happens when the weather’s very hot, like it is today?’

‘Generally good. But times are changing, sir,’ he said, and rubbed his hands. ‘As I told you, Monday last there wasn’t one.’

‘Which archives do you keep?’ I enquired.

He made that popping sound again with his gums. ‘Archives keeps themselves as a rule. In the old days,’ he went on, ‘we used to weigh and add the totals for all the amber that was being brought in daily. Herr Margrave had three collection centres down along the coast. Every night they’d bring it up here for safe-keeping. Six armed guards, there were. The round house is impregnable when the door . . . that is, when the door
was
locked! Now, the French make their own arrangements. Have to fix the door again once they’re gone,’ he said dismissively. ‘I keep the paperwork here. Try to keep the place in order . . .’

‘Can I see these records?’ I interrupted brusquely.

Herr Tanzig sniffed, then shook his head. ‘Without permission, sir, I couldn’t do that,’ he said.

‘Permission from the French?’ I queried.

‘No, sir,’ he chuckled quietly. ‘Not them. They don’t give a toss one way or the other. The margrave, sir. The Margrave of Marlbork, my master.’

‘And where may he be found?’ I asked. My patience was running thin. The French were bad enough, but this decrepit Prussian book-keeper was worse.

‘I would not know precisely, sir,’ he said. ‘He may be on the Marlbork estate, that’s twenty miles t’other side of Lotingen, or he may be off someplace else. It’s more than a year since I had a reply to one of my despatches. You’ll have to go . . .’

Gurten took a brisk step forward, and clasped hold of Tanzig’s hand.

For a moment, I thought that he was about to ask my permission to whip the man. In the days of Frederick the Great, a superior official would often whip an underling, or order him to be whipped. Instead, he began to drop coins into Tanzig’s palm. Having counted out five, he twisted the archivist by the wrist, and brought his shoulder low. He gazed down into the old man’s face, and said: ‘I hardly think we need to trouble the margrave, do you?’

Tanzig nodded, and Gurten let him go.

‘Now,’ he said, while the old man pocketed the coins and made a fuss of rubbing his wrist, ‘I believe Herr Procurator Stiffeniis would like to visit this archive of yours without further delay.’

A stone staircase hidden in the deepest shadows curved up along the wall.

Herr Tanzig led us to the floor above without a word.

All was blinding light up there.

The circular room was slightly smaller than the one below on account of the dictates of military architecture. Sloping castle walls are harder to climb, and easier to defend, Leonardo da Vinci once declared, and no one had ever dared to challenge his wisdom. But the upstairs chamber had not been used as a military keep in a long
time. Indeed, where once a round hole in the stone roof had let in rain—the only source of water in that barren land—the aperture had been domed with panes of glass to let in light alone. The sun shining strongly through it spread the pattern of the leaded window-frame like the legs of a spider which seemed to hold the room in its embrace.

I peered at the custom-made arrangement of ancient shelves and cubby-holes that had been constructed all around the walls. It might have been a pigeon-loft, but there were no pigeons. Each dusty hole was stuffed with a ledger or a bulging folder containing a sheaf of papers.

‘How many ledgers are there?’ I mused aloud. I looked around and began to calculate: from 1306 to the present day. That was 502 years. Multiply it by fifty-two . . . I began to multiply by fifty instead, thinking it was easier. Then I would add 1004 to my total.

‘Twenty-six thousand, one hundred and four,’ said Gurten instantly.

‘Impossible!’ I said, looking around me. There were certainly many hundreds of spaces in the wooden honeycomb, perhaps a thousand books and bundles of paper, but hardly so many thousands. And some of the holes along the right-hand side were empty, still waiting to be used.

Benedikt Tanzig regarded us as if we were a pair of idiots.

‘Keeping track of names and numbers is what my job is all about. When we’re short of room,’ he said, ‘we take the oldest ones out and burn them.
We
. . . I’m the only one left here now. Every year I have a bonfire. Today’s the day, as it happens. Feast of the Venerable Jakob Spener. My way of celebrating. I was about to make a start when you gentlemen arrived. An entire shelf will be going up in smoke very shortly.’

Would someone do the same thing to my own archive in Lotingen one day? Burn all the notes and drawings that I had made so carefully while preparing for the trials that had occupied my working days? The case in Königsberg with Kant? Last year’s investigation of the Gottewald family massacre? All the other less memorable
proceedings, including the one that I had left unresolved just a few days before in Lotingen?

‘Which ones are you planning to burn?’ I asked him.

Tanzig pointed to a stack of files and thick leather ledgers lying on a desk in the centre of the room beneath the skylight. ‘1700 to 1720,’ he said. ‘I’ll rip the covers off, of course—all the leather goes back to the margrave’s factor—but the paper is no use to anyone. Who wants to read the names and the dates of a million dead amber-workers?’

‘A million?’ I queried.

Tanzig turned to Gurten with a toothless smirk.

‘You’re the one that’s good at counting,’ he said. ‘I’m asking
you
, sir. How many men, women and girls have passed through them doors down there at the rate of . . . say, forty a week—averaging them out, of course, good times and bad times taken altogether—over a period of five hundred years?’