The Dark Monk (4 page)

The tracks, clearly those of a large man, led from the walkway directly into the church. Simon made his way quietly through the snow, holding the knife like a sword in front of him until he reached the portal. From outside, nothing was visible inside the darkened church. Summoning all his courage, he stepped inside.

Farther back, the dead pastor was still lying on the floor. A bleeding Jesus on the cross stared wide-eyed and reproachfully at Simon from behind the apse, and along the sides wooden figurines of martyrs were standing in the niches, writhing in the throes of death, their bodies tortured, slain, and riddled with holes, like St. Sebastian on Simon’s left, pierced by six arrows from a crossbow.

The scaffolding, which towered up into the gallery, glittered with hoarfrost. As Simon stepped inside, he heard a loud spitting sound. His knife in hand, the medicus turned around, frantically seeking the source of the sound and scrutinizing the shadows the martyrs cast on the walls.

“Put the knife down before you hurt yourself, you quack!” someone growled. “And stop prowling like a thief through the church. You wouldn’t be the first one I’ve strung up for robbing the offertory box.”

The voice seemed to be coming from high up in the balcony, and when Simon looked up, he saw a huge cloaked figure standing behind the rotting balustrade. The collar of his coat was turned up and a wide-brimmed hat hung down over his face so all that was visible was the end of a huge hooked nose. Little clouds of smoke rose from his long-stemmed clay pipe, and between his hat and disheveled black beard, two lively eyes flashed, mocking Simon.

“My God, Kuisl!” Simon cried with relief. “You scared the daylights out of me!”

“The next time you go sneaking through a place, remember to look up,” the hangman scolded as he swung down the scaffolding. “Or the next time, your killer will lay you flat and that will be the end of the learned medicus.”

Having reached the ground, Jakob Kuisl brushed mortar dust from his threadbare coat and snorted contemptuously, pointing the stem of his pipe at the pastor’s corpse.

“A fat priest who ate himself to death…And that’s the only reason you called me? As a hangman and butcher of worn-out horses, I’m responsible for dead critters, but dead priests don’t concern me.”

“I believe he’s been poisoned,” Simon said softly.

The hangman whistled through his teeth. “Poisoned? And now you think I can tell you what kind of poison it was?”

Simon nodded. The Schongau executioner was widely viewed as a master of his craft, not only with the sword, but also in the field of healing herbs and poisonous plants. When they fell ill, many simple folk preferred the hangman over the medicus for a concoction of ergot and rue for unwanted pregnancies, a few pills for constipation, or a sleeping potion made from poppies and valerian. It was cheaper and they didn’t leave any sicker than when they’d arrived. Simon had often asked the hangman for advice about medicines and mysterious sicknesses, much to his father’s chagrin.

“Couldn’t you take a little closer look at him?” Simon asked, pointing at the stiff, frozen body of the priest. “Perhaps we’ll find a clue to who the murderer is.”

Jakob Kuisl shrugged. “I don’t know what we’d learn from that, but I might as well, since I’m here. He took a deep draw on his pipe and eyed the corpse lying on the floor. Then he bent down and examined the body. “No blood, no sign of strangulation or a struggle,” he mumbled, passing his hand over Koppmeyer’s clothing, which was spattered with frozen bits of vomit. “Why do you think he was poisoned?”

Simon cleared his throat. “The doughnuts…” he started.

“The doughnuts?” The hangman raised his bushy eyebrows quizzically.

Simon shrugged and told Jakob Kuisl briefly what he had learned from the sexton and the housekeeper. “It would be best for you to come back to the rectory with me,” he said finally, heading for the door. “Perhaps I’ve overlooked something.”

As they exited the church, Simon cast a questioning sidelong glance at Jakob Kuisl. “How did you get into the church, by the way? I mean…I have the key here…”

The hangman grinned and held out a bent nail. “These church doors are like curtains. It’s no wonder so many offertories are broken into around here. The priests might just as well leave the doors to their churches wide open.”

When they arrived back in the rectory, Simon led the hangman into the main room and pointed to the two glazed doughnuts and the vomit on the floor.

“There must have been around a half-dozen of these doughnuts,” the medicus said, “all coated with honey, though the housekeeper denies putting any on them.”

Jakob Kuisl gingerly took a doughnut in his huge hands and smelled it, closing his eyes while his powerful nostrils flared up like those of a horse. It looked almost as if he wanted to inhale the doughnut. Finally he put it down, kneeled, and sniffed the pool of vomit. Simon felt himself gradually becoming nauseous. There was an odor of smoke, bitter stomach acid, and decay in the room—and something else that the medicus could not place.

“What…what are you doing there?” Simon asked.

The hangman stood up.

“I can always rely on this,” he said, tapping his red-veined hooked nose. “I can detect any little illness, no matter how small, just by smelling a filthy chamber pot. And this filth here smells of death. Just as the doughnuts do.”

He took a piece of dough in his hand and started to pull it apart. “The poison is in the honey,” he mumbled after a while. “It smells like…” He lifted the piece to his nose again and grinned. “Mouse piss. Just as I thought.”

“Mouse piss?” Simon asked with annoyance.

Jakob Kuisl nodded. “Hemlock smells like that, one of the most poisonous plants here in the Priests’ Corner. The numbness creeps up your body from your feet right to your heart. You watch yourself die.”

Simon shook his head in horror. “What monster would have thought up something like that? Do you think it could have been someone from the village? I could see a jealous worker in the church clubbing Koppmeyer from behind…But something like this?”

The hangman puffed on his cold pipe, lost in thought. Then he abruptly left the warm living room and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Simon called after him.

“I want to have a closer look at the dead priest,” Jakob Kuisl grumbled from outside the house. “Something isn’t right here.”

Simon couldn’t help smiling. The hangman had smelled blood. Once he was onto something he was as precise as a Swiss watch.

Back at the church, Jakob Kuisl bent over the corpse and examined it closely. He walked around the body without touching it, as if he were studying its exact position. Just as it had early this morning, Andreas Koppmeyer’s corpse lay on the slab of stone depicting the faded countenance of the mother of God surrounded by a halo. The priest’s hair was white with ice crystals and he lay curled up on one side so that only his profile was visible. In the meantime, the skin on his face had taken on the color of a frozen carp. His left arm was crooked along his body and his right hand seemed to be pointing to the inscription over the Madonna.

“
Sic transit gloria mundi,
” the hangman mumbled. “
Thus passes the glory of the world
…”

“He even circled the words. See for yourself!” Simon said, pointing to a squiggle around the inscription. The line was shaky, as if Koppmeyer had drawn it in the ice with the last ounce of his strength.

“It was clear to him that his end was near,” the medicus mused. “Old Koppmeyer always had a sense of humor; you’ve got to hand it to him.”

The hangman bent down and passed his hand over the stone relief of Mary, whose head was surrounded by a radiant halo.

“One thing surprises me,” he mumbled. “This is a gravestone, isn’t it?”

Simon nodded. “The whole Saint Lawrence Church is full of them. Why do you ask?”

“Look around for yourself, you idiot.” The hangman gestured broadly at the interior of the church. “On the other stones you always see images of the deceased—councilmen, judges, rich broads. But this one is no doubt the Virgin Mary. No woman would be so bold as to let herself be depicted with a halo.”

“Perhaps it was a donation to the church?” Simon thought out loud.

“
Sic transit
—” the hangman mumbled again.

“
Thus passes the glory of the world,
” Simon interrupted him impatiently. “I know, but what does that have to do with the murder?”

“It’s possible that it has nothing to do with the murder, but with the hiding place,” Kuisl said suddenly.

“Hiding place?”

“Didn’t you tell me the priest spent all last night working in the church?”

“Yes, but…”

“Look a little closer at the squiggle,” the hangman mumbled. “Do you notice anything striking?”

Simon bent down and examined the circle a little more closely. Then it hit him.

“The circle isn’t complete; it doesn’t go around the entire inscription,” he gasped, “but only around the first two words…”

“
Sic transit,
” Jakob repeated, grinning. “The learned doctor surely knows what that means.”

“
This is the way
…” Simon murmured absentmindedly. Only then did he get it. “Through…the slab of stone?” he whispered incredulously.

“First we have to move it aside, of course.” The hangman was already struggling to move Andreas Koppmeyer’s huge frame aside. He grabbed him by the cassock and dragged him behind the altar, several yards away. “This will be his resting place for the time being,” he said. “No point scaring any old woman to death who comes in to say her rosary.” He spat into his hands. “Now let’s get to work.”

“But the slab…It weighs at least a couple of hundred pounds,” Simon interjected.

“So what?” Jakob Kuisl had already wrestled the stone from its setting using a carpenter’s nail as a lever. Now he grabbed it with both hands and raised it slowly, inch by inch. Tendons as thick as a man’s fingers protruded from his neck.

“If a fat priest can lift it, it shouldn’t be so heavy, should it?” he panted.

With a grinding sound, the massive stone slab crashed down right next to Simon’s feet.

Magdalena Kuisl knelt in the bloody straw and pressed down on the swollen, bruised abdomen of Frau Hainmiller. The peasant woman screamed in her ear, making her wince. The expectant mother had been screaming for hours now, but it seemed like days to Magdalena. The night before, the hangman’s daughter had come to the Hainmiller household along with the midwife, Martha Stechlin. At first everything seemed to point to a normal birth. The aunts, nieces, cousins, and neighbor women had already spread fresh straw and rushes, put water on the fire, and spread out linens. The air was redolent of smoked mugwort. Josefa Hainmiller, whose head was as red as beetroot, pushed calmly and regularly. It was the farm woman’s sixth child, and up to then, she had always managed without difficulty.

But now Josefa was losing more and more blood. The bedsheets, pink-hued at first from the broken water, had now taken on the color of a butcher block. But the child simply wouldn’t come. Josefa Hainmiller’s initial whimpers gave way first to sobbing and then to loud screams so that her husband, horrified, kept knocking on the door and praying aloud to St. Margareta. He didn’t dare enter—this was a woman’s realm—but if his wife or the child didn’t survive the birth, he already knew who was to blame: the goddamned midwife.

Martha Stechlin groped inside the mother for the child, who was lying crosswise in the uterus. Her arms reached up to her elbows inside the Hainmiller woman, whose dress had slipped up over her thighs, but still the midwife could not get a firm hold on the child. The face of the older midwife was spattered with blood, sweat streamed down her forehead, and she had to keep blinking as it dripped into her eyes.

Magdalena looked anxiously at the aunts and cousins. They whispered among themselves, murmured their rosaries, and kept pointing at the midwife. Just last year, Martha Stechlin had been accused of murdering a child and practicing witchcraft. Only quick action by Magdalena’s father and the young medicus had saved her from the fire. Nevertheless, the midwife was viewed in town with suspicion, and it clung to her like a baby’s first stool. People still called upon her when there was a birth or asked her for herbs to reduce a fever, but behind her back the good citizens crossed themselves to ward off her black magic.

Just as they do with me,
Magdalena was thinking as she wiped strands of matted black hair out of her face. Her eyes, usually so cheerful, looked tired and strained, and sweat gathered in her thick, bushy eyebrows. She sighed as she continued to push down rhythmically on the mother’s body.

Magdalena was grateful when Frau Stechlin had asked her about half a year ago if she would like to be her apprentice. As the daughter of a hangman, she didn’t have many choices. The job of hangman was a dishonorable line of work, and people avoided her and her family. If she wanted a husband, her only real choice would be another hangman, and because that didn’t interest her, she had to support herself. At twenty-one, she could no longer be a burden on her parents.

The vocation of midwife was just the right thing for her. After all, she had learned everything worth knowing about herbs from her father. She knew that mugwort was good for internal bleeding and parsley would ensure that unwanted children didn’t come into the world. She knew how to prepare an ointment of goose fat, melissa, and mutton bones, and she knew how to prepare hemp seeds with a mortar and pestle to help a young girl get pregnant. But now, seeing all the blood, the whispering aunts and the screaming mother, she was suddenly no longer sure she really wanted to be a midwife. As she continued pressing and squeezing, her mind wandered. In another world, she could see herself standing at the altar with Simon, a wreath of flowers in her hair and an “I do” on her lips. They would have children, and he would make a modest income as the respected town medicus. They could—

“Stop dreaming, girl! We need fresh water!” Martha Stechlin’s blood-spattered face turned toward Magdalena. She tried to speak in a calm voice, but her eyes said something else. Magdalena thought she could detect a few new wrinkles in the wizened face of the forty-year-old woman. In just the last year, her hair had turned almost completely gray.