HS03 - A Visible Darkness (49 page)

‘They are artists,’ he replied. ‘Florence and Naples are cities with a refined and ancient tradition in modelling wax. They can fashion a crib that will have everyone who sees it weeping on Christmas Eve.
Voi siete artisti, non è vero
, Pasquale?’ he called over to the man, who was scraping and levering with his knife, extracting some other organ from the cavity of the corpse that lay wide open before him on the table.

‘
Verissimo, capo!
’ the Neapolitan replied without looking up.

DeWitz turned to me and shook his head. ‘I went to Italy many years ago,’ he said, ‘intending to learn the waxy art myself, but it is not learnable. Either you have the talent, or you don’t. I did not . . .’

‘Does Vulpius have it?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, he does,’ DeWitz replied enthusiastically. ‘He’s one of the best, though relatively new to the trade. I had him making plaster casts for me at first, but when the Italian workers arrived, we needed extra help to meet the terms of the contract.’

‘And Vulpius volunteered?’

‘He did, sir. Displayed a rare skill, too. He is a student of medicine, and is working here to pay his way. His knowledge has been useful. His anatomical drawings are precise. That is, they are precious to me, as you can imagine.’

I had seen the drawings in Frau Poborovsky’s. Bizarre, they might be. Monstrous, too. But they were incredibly life-like and marvellously detailed.

‘You mentioned a contract,’ I said.

‘Science is all the rage at the university now,’ he replied. ‘It all began with the arrival of the French . . .’ He turned and stared aggressively at me. ‘I know what Prussians think of them, sir. But not everything they bring is bad.’

I was inclined to agree, though I did not like to hear such talk from a foreigner.

‘What is this contract for?’ I insisted.

‘A medical museum, Herr Procurator,’ DeWitz replied with a broad smile. ‘The Albertina is enlarging its faculty. I was working on a similar job in Paris before coming here. I spent two years at the Observatoire Nationale. These men and women came here with me. They have been imported, so to speak. It is easier to import people into Prussia nowadays than it is to bring in tea or coffee. No Prussian artist is their equal. Except for Vulpius. They are incredibly skilled in modelling the human anatomy. You’d be amazed at the sort of detail they are able to reproduce in wax. Just look here, sir.’ He led me over to a table where a middle-aged woman was working on a model of a hand. ‘
Con il tuo permesso
, Maria. Will you look at that? Have you ever seen anything like it?’

In my head a warning voice sounded.

Dr Heinrich had been there . . .

Dressed in a brown overall and bonnet, the lady was working by the light of a lantern with a magnifying mirror. Even in this fierce blaze, I was able to distinguish the real from the false by one token only: one hand was finished; the other was not. The hand from the corpse was laid out on a square of pale satin cloth. The loose skin had been peeled away from a central incision, and rested in two
triangular red flaps, exposing the veins, the nerves and the bones. The artist had already formed the general shape of the muscles; she was laying thin strips of purple wax over the fleshy pink mound between the thumb and forefinger.

‘She’ll form the veins one by one, then ripple them to suggest the contours and pulsing shape of blood-laden vessels. When all is perfect, she’ll weld the additions to her model by means of heat,’ DeWitz explained.

‘But the cloth is real,’ I challenged.

Like the real hand, the model was laid out on a piece of satin.

‘Wax!’ DeWitz proclaimed, as if the thought bewitched him. ‘The magic of wax and gum arabic. They build the model up, layer upon layer. And when it is quite finished, it goes into the storage room to set hard.’

He pointed to the furthest, deepest part of the vault.

In the gloom I could just make out long shelves piled high with covered objects. In the centre of the space were a number of long tables covered with white drapes. It looked to me like a ward in an epidemic hospital where all the patients had died.

‘As the gum sets, the wax takes on a permanent glaze,’ he explained. ‘Once that is done, the exhibits are ready to go on public display. Within a year, Königsberg will be in a position to open the doors of its very own wax museum.’

I remembered seeing something of the sort in Paris in 1793, though those exhibits were real: the decapitated heads of common criminals and nobles ranged side by side in gore-splashed baskets beneath the guillotine.

‘A lurid spectacle for the curious,’ I muttered.

‘Not at all!’ he protested vehemently. ‘Have you been to Florence, sir? Have you never seen La Specola, the museum of the Duke of Tuscany? It is a waxen mirror of life and death, the finest scientific collection in the world. Duke Peter-Leopold of Hapsburg-Lotharingen was an enlightened scholar of the first order. Public dissection of the human body was odious, he declared, and he decided to prohibit it. But doctors and surgeons still needed to be trained. They had to know in detail the mechanics of life and
death. So how were they to learn? There was only one way, sir. By cutting up human bodies. There is no lack of common criminals in Florence, you might think. But how many bodies does a medical school require in the course of a year, Herr Procurator? The number disgusted Duke Peter-Leopold, and it continues to horrify the religious authorities in Königsberg. The Pietists object to capital punishment for fear of condemning an immortal soul to Hell. They prefer long prison sentences, hard labour, much prayer, and the possibility of eventual penitence. I am their salvation,’ he added archly. He seemed to pulse with pride at the thought of such admirable human and scientific progress.

I trembled also, aghast with a sense of horror.

Had the jaw of Kati Rodendahl and the larynx of Ilse Bruen passed through their hands? Had the Italian woman working patiently on that lifeless hand worked on the amber-gatherers, as well? Or had Vulpius attended to them? Had he made models of the pieces that he had heartlessly ripped from the living?

My doubts melted like hot wax. Heinrich was leading a double life. And the name of his double was Vulpius! He was not concerned with amber alone. Nor with the ancient creatures that it contained. Malaport had guessed. ‘He is interested in anatomy,’ the general had said. ‘Female anatomy.’ That would explain why Dr Heinrich was so enamoured of the amber-gatherers.

Had Erika’s deformity saved her from a similar fate, I wondered. Was he more concerned to study her than to cut her up into little pieces?

‘How many bodies do you need to make a single model?’ I managed to ask.

DeWitz looked at me with a complacent smile. ‘Just to make that hand,’ he said, glancing at the modeller as if he were talking about the manufacture of a bit of furniture, ‘Maria will have used at least a dozen. A fair-sized medical school will work its way through a hundred bodies every year.’

I asked him where he found them all.

‘In times of war, supply is plentiful,’ he said with a shrug. ‘In
times of peace, any person, male or female, who dies in the poorhouse ends up here. Any corpse that is found within the city limits. All executed criminals are brought to me. That body over there belonged to a nameless vagrant.’

‘So, the authorities approve . . .’

‘They know that time will end our work,’ he insisted. ‘When the museum is complete, public dissection will still be necessary, but the need will be greatly reduced. Young doctors will learn about the human body from wax models, then they’ll attend a dissection or two to learn in detail what they are about. If cutting up meat were the only criterion, they could work for a week in a butcher’s shop!’

‘Isn’t that what your workers are doing? Chopping up . . .’

‘That is not exact!’ DeWitz objected, staunchly defending Enlightened science. ‘Dissection is an extremely wasteful business. The body is hacked to pieces, decaying in a very short time to a state where it is fit for burial, and nothing else. As you see, I have seven artists—eight, when Vulpius is here—working from a single body. That corpse will keep them busy for days.’

‘Supplying bodies would be a profitable trade,’ I began to say.

‘Oh no. There’s no shortage of supply,’ he interrupted quickly again. ‘While poverty is rife, Nature’s toll is a heavy one. Disease, illness, accidents . . .’

‘Are female cadavers easy to come by?’

‘Two a penny,’ he replied bluntly. ‘A peasant will sell the body of his mother, wife, or daughter for a pittance. We rarely bother to buy them, though. The port is a hive of prostitutes. We get one or two a week from that source.’

So why did Heinrich-Vulpius kill and mutilate the amber-gatherers?

I could not shake off the image of Kati Rodendahl’s face, the cavity hacked in Ilse Bruen’s throat. What I had discovered in De-Witz’s workshop should have given me a sense of triumph. But I felt nothing of the sort. Another question rumbled in my mind, instead, and not even DeWitz could answer it.
Was there some connection between amber and the mutilations?

And if so, what might it be?

‘You have been most helpful, sir,’ I admitted. ‘I have just one final question, then I will leave you to your work.’

‘Questions seem to be your business.’ DeWitz smiled broadly. ‘You did not come to order a death mask, or purchase candles. And my anatomical models would not hang well on your parlour wall. What can I do for you?’

I took my sketching-album from my bag.

‘Does this remind you of Herr Vulpius?’ I asked, showing him the picture that I had drawn with Ludvigssen’s help.

‘Not a lot,’ he replied quickly. ‘Indeed, not at all.’

I flicked to the next page, and the portrait that Frau Poborovsky had helped me to make. The two faces had little in common, but I hoped that he might be able to resolve the enigma for me. If De-Witz recognised either face, I would report the fact at once to General Malaport and the French.

But the Dutchman showed no enthusiasm for the second portrait, either.

He turned back to the first, and his uncertainty seemed to mount even more.

‘I cannot say that either picture resembles him much,’ he said, as he handed the album back. ‘The second sketch . . . well, there is a tenuous likeness, but it’s very slight.’

I took the album from his hand, turned to a blank page, then handed it back to him.

‘With your experience in handling human flesh, you must be an expert physiognomist,’ I said in a categorical way. ‘You can accurately describe a face, and draw it, too.’

DeWitz frowned, as if he were considering the proposal.

Then, his hand dived into his pocket, and came up holding a piece of charcoal.

‘You exaggerate my skills,’ he replied. Nonetheless, he began to trace the contours of a face with rapid, dashing strokes on the paper. ‘I am not the artist in this workshop. We do not use drawings as a rule, though Vulpius sometimes makes a sketch for his own use.’

The portrait that DeWitz produced was smaller than the others.
But as the features began to materialise in a flurry of lines and hatchings, I almost led myself to believe that I saw the eyes, nose and lips of Dr Heinrich taking shape upon the page. There was an ironic, slanting set to the mouth which recalled the proud, bluff confidence of the surgeon of Nordcopp to my mind.

The work was quickly finished.

His sketch showed no resemblance to the other portraits, however. This Vulpius was thin, gaunt. His cheekbones were high, his gaze challenging. His chin was speckled with a dark stubble.

Dr Heinrich?

‘I hope you find him,’ DeWitz remarked. ‘He’s in no trouble, I hope?’

I should have expected the question. ‘No trouble,’ I replied neutrally.

The Dutchman took stock of me. ‘Vulpius knows the secrets of the human body, Herr Procurator. He is a first-class artist in the modelling of wax. A stickler after perfection. Why are you looking for him?’

‘Why?’ I snapped my album shut and remained in silence for some moments. ‘For the very reasons you just mentioned. Because he is an anatomist and an expert modeller.’

I
LAID
G
ENERAL
Malaport’s
laissez-passer
flat on the counter.

‘I must send an urgent message,’ I announced.

The French corporal sitting behind the despatch counter looked up. His uniform appeared to have been used for the purpose of greasing axles. His
képi
tilted down over his right ear as if he had just been walloped by his superior officer. There was nothing military about his appearance. Nor did his counter inspire confidence. A mound of letters lay scattered in a haphazard heap, a dagger planted upright in the wood like the sword in the oak of German legend.

‘Are you a Prussian?’ he said, propping his elbows on the counter, looking me up and down, as if to assess the value of my clothes and boots.

‘A Prussian magistrate,’ I specified.

‘That doesn’t change the rules,’ he warned me in laboured German. ‘If you want to send a despatch by way of this office, I’ll have to read it first. Censorship.’

I tapped my forefinger on General Malaport’s letter. ‘I would advise you to read this authorisation with care,’ I said in my very best French.

He glanced at the contents, then let out a sigh.

‘General Malaport, right. Save us a bit of time, that will. Got a date with a Prussian sausage,’ he added, as if it were a task of unimaginable importance.

As he reached for a pen and a despatch paper, I saw what he was talking about. On the table behind him lay a piece of black bread, and a garlic-seasoned sausage which he had probably sliced with that same dagger. The slender blade was greasy with pork fat.

‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked carelessly.

‘I can write my own messages,’ I replied.

‘Name,’ he insisted, dipping his pen into the inkwell.

‘Hanno Stiffeniis of Lotingen.’

‘Stiffeniis?’ he asked aggressively, dropping his pen, and clasping the handle of the dagger as if he meant to attack me with it. ‘Lotingen?’