The Dark Monk (54 page)

“Wait for me!” he gasped. “Where are you? Where—”

At that moment, an especially large chunk of the ceiling directly above the monk broke loose and came crashing to the ground. Brother Lothar could only watch in horror as he was buried in burning timbers. After a few moments, his plaintive cries ceased.

In the meantime, Simon and the two women opened the door they’d used to enter the crypt. The medicus was relieved to see that the smoke in the tunnel behind the door was not as dense as he’d expected—the door had held it back, for the most part. They ran down the corridor, past the intersecting tunnel, until they finally arrived back at the entrance to the monastery. Benedikta leaned against the door, just as she had the last time, and pushed as hard as she could, but the wooden door would not budge this time, either. She cursed and rubbed her shoulder.

“Let me try,” Simon said. He took a running start and hit the door as hard as he could. A sharp pain went through his leg, but still, the door didn’t budge. Behind them, the corridor was already filling with smoke.

“You did close the door into the crypt, didn’t you?” Simon asked uncertainly.

Benedikta shrugged and pointed to Magdalena. “I thought she had—”

“Aha, it gets even better,” the hangman’s daughter responded. “First your shot misses the abbot, and now you’re blaming other people.”

“You were the last, you silly little twit,” Benedikta shouted.

“Cut it out!” Simon replied. “We don’t have time for your petty quarrels! If a miracle doesn’t happen, we’ll suffocate here like a fox in its den. I’ve got to get this damn door open!”

Stepping even farther back, he took another run at the door, screaming loudly.

Too late, he noticed that the door had opened silently and an astonished monk was staring at him. “What in the world…?”

Simon ran into him at full speed, knocking the monk down.

“Sorry to bother you,” the medicus gasped, standing up quickly, “but this is an emergency. The monastery is on fire.”

The monk’s expression changed from astonishment to horror. “The monastery on fire? I’ll have to let the abbot know at once.”

The two women headed up a narrow stone stairway with Simon right behind them.

“I’m afraid that’s not a very good idea,” he called back to the monk. “His Eminence is very busy at the moment.”

At the top of the stairway they came to another door, but unlike the last, this one opened easily. Stepping outside, Simon realized they were in the same cloister where he and Benedikta had first met Augustin Bonenmayr an eternity ago.

A group of white-robed Premonstratensian monks ran toward them excitedly, but to Simon’s astonishment, they continued past them toward the rear exit of the cloister, paying the intruders no mind. In the distance, a shrill bell began to ring.

“Fire! Fire!” everyone was shouting. “The playhouse is on fire!”

Taking advantage of the chaos, the three followed the monks. As they rushed outside, they looked back at the monastery wall, where flames shot up into the night sky and people ran back and forth shouting.

“The playhouse!” Benedikta shouted. “Clearly, the cross was not in Saint John’s Chapel, but in the theater! The underground corridor must lead from there to the cloister. What a labyrinth!”

Simon quickly realized that it was too late to save the burning building. All that remained of the two-story structure now was a glowing shell. When the roof collapsed, the physician could only shake his head. The theater! He had clearly overlooked something in the solution to the last riddle, but none of it mattered now. Simon wondered whether the abbot had managed to flee or had burned to death inside.

And with him, the cross of Christ!

He felt overcome by exhaustion now as the burden of the last few days’ events came over him. Magdalena and Benedikta seemed weary and drained, too. Together, they dragged themselves to a small snow-covered cemetery nearby to watch the building consume itself like an enormous funeral pyre.

“Our search was for nothing!” Simon finally lamented, tossing a chunk of ice into the darkness. “Our dream of all that money came to naught! Now I’ll no doubt end up as the poor town doctor of Schongau…”

Benedikta stood there silently, clutching a ball of snow so hard that water ran through her fingers.

“Do you think that crazy Bonenmayr got away?” Magdalena asked.

Simon stared into the fire. “I don’t know. If he didn’t, we’re in big trouble. If the abbot was telling the truth, then the whole world knows that Benedikta and I defiled the holy relics in Rottenbuch. Bonenmayr is the only one who could have helped us.”

Benedikta spit on the ground. She had clearly gotten her voice back. “Do you seriously believe he’d do that if he’s still alive? I’ll tell you what he’ll do. He’ll take the cross and watch with glee as the hangman breaks every one of our bones, one by one.”

“I’m not going to break any bones,” a voice boomed behind them. “At least not Simon’s.”

Surprised, the three wheeled around to see the Schongau hangman sitting astride an old gravestone. With his coat collar turned up to shield himself from the cold, he was blowing little puffs of smoke into the frigid January night.

Simon looked at Jakob Kuisl as if he’d seen a ghost. “How…how in the world did you get here…?” he stuttered.

“That’s just what I wanted to ask my daughter,” the hangman said, turning to Magdalena. “Couldn’t stand being away in Augsburg, hmm? Had to return to your sweetheart?” He grinned. “You women are all the same.”

“It wasn’t…exactly like that, Father,” Magdalena replied. “I was—”

“You can tell me all about that later,” Jakob Kuisl interrupted, hopping down from the gravestone. “But first tell me why the Steingaden abbot burned alive in there,” he said, pointing to the roaring fire behind him, his face glowing red in the light from the flames. “I can feel in my bones that you had something to do with that. Am I right?”

“So Bonenmayr is really dead?” Simon asked.

The hangman nodded. “As dead as a witch at the stake. So tell me—out with it!”

“It was all about the cross,” Simon began. “The Templar hid the True Cross underneath the playhouse. The riddles led us to this place…” He briefly told Kuisl everything that happened since they had last spoken.

Jakob Kuisl listened silently, and when Simon finished, he exhaled a huge cloud of smoke. “All that looking around just for a rotten old cross,” he grumbled. “And now the accursed cross has fallen victim to the flames as well. I saw it all…ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Probably, it’s best that way. That cross has brought nothing but death and misfortune.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Benedikta said, standing up from the drift of snow she was sitting on, “before the monks notice we’re here.”

“You’re not going anywhere, girl,” the hangman replied suddenly, “except perhaps to the gallows.”

“What are you saying?” Simon looked at Jakob Kuisl in astonishment. “This woman is a respectable lady from Landsberg. You don’t talk that way—”

“She’s nothing but scum.” Kuisl knocked out his pipe on a gravestone. “She’s not a respectable lady, and she doesn’t come from Landsberg.”

For a few moments, no one said a thing.

Finally, Magdalena spoke up hesitantly. “Not from Landsberg? I don’t understand—”

Her father immediately cut her off. “Perhaps she’ll tell us herself what her real name is. In Augsburg, she was Isabelle de Cherbourg; in Munich, she was Charlotte Le Mans; and in Ingolstadt, Katharine God-knows-what…But I doubt any of those is her real name.” Scowling, the hangman drew closer until he was only a step away from her. “Damn it, your name! I want to know—at once! Or I’ll jam glowing embers under your pretty little fingernails until you beg for mercy!”

Simon and Magdalena both eyed Benedikta as she stood there clutching a gravestone with both hands. Her eyes flashed and she bit her lips as she lashed out at the hangman. “How dare you slander me like that! If my brother were still alive, then—”

“Silence, you brazen hussy!” Jakob Kuisl shouted at her. “You have sullied the good name of our priest long enough! I found the courier’s letter pouch, and from there, I only had to do a little looking around. Your game is over! Do you hear? Finished!”

“Which letter pouch do you mean?” Simon asked.

The hangman took a drag on his cold pipe. Only after calming down a bit did he continue. “When we smoked out Scheller and his gang, I found a leather bag in the cave. It belonged to one of the couriers who deliver mail in our area. Scheller told me they’d taken the bag from another gang of robbers.” Again, he paused long enough to stuff his pipe.

Just as Simon was about to say something, the hangman continued.

“I had a look at the letters, especially the dates on them. They were all written around the time the fat priest must have written to his beloved sister, Benedikta. Now, if all these letters were stolen…”

“Then Benedikta in Landsberg could not possibly have received a letter from her brother!” Simon groaned. “But how then did she—”

“This is all pure coincidence and nothing more,” Benedikta said, smiling at Simon. “You don’t really believe this, do you?”

“I’ll tell you who this brazen hussy really is,” Jakob Kuisl interrupted. “She passes herself off as a wine merchant in cities all over Bavaria. She spies on merchants’ routes and passes the information on to her accomplices so they can rob the coaches.”

“Where did you ever come up with this nonsense?” Benedikta replied angrily.

“One of your partners told me so himself.”

“Rubbish!” Benedikta grumbled. “
C’est impossible!
”

“Believe me,” the hangman said, lighting his pipe with a glowing sliver of tinder. “Sooner or later, I make everyone talk.” He puffed until the pipe caught fire. “And after that, they don’t talk to anyone ever again.”

Horrified, Benedikta stared at him for a moment. Then she threw herself at him, beating her fists against his broad chest. “You killed them!” she shouted. “You monster, you killed them!”

Jakob Kuisl seized her hands and flung her away so hard that she bounced off a gravestone like a puppet. “They were robbers and murderers,” he said. “Just like you.”

The silence that followed was broken only by the distant crackling of fire and the cries of the monks desperately trying to save the adjoining buildings.

Incredulous, Magdalena eyed the self-declared wine merchant still crouching beside the gravestone, looking up at them with cold, scornful eyes. “Your gang robbed the courier and read the letter!” Magdalena shouted. “That must be what happened! They read that the fat priest Koppmeyer had found something valuable, and then you pretended to be his sister and spied on us.”

“It wasn’t only her, but her whole gang following us.” Simon buried his face in his hands and groaned softly. “The people I saw in the Wessobrunn forest were
your
accomplices, weren’t they? And it was
your
accomplices who started the fight with the monks in the Rottenbuch Monastery. How could I have been so stupid?”

The woman who just a minute ago had been Benedikta Koppmeyer smiled. It was a sad smile. She seemed to have lost all desire to fight and leaned against the gravestone like an empty shell. “They were there to protect us,” she said softly, “not only me, but you as well, Simon. We knew earlier than you did that there were others trying to get their hands on the Templars’ treasure. We knew they weren’t people we could trifle with.”

“Back there in the forest on the way to Steingaden, when we were attacked by robbers…” Simon murmured. “Those were your friends who helped me back onto my horse. Isn’t that right? I thought it was a dream, but the men were really there.”

The woman facing him nodded. “They always kept an eye on us.”

“Nonsense!” the hangman exclaimed. “They were there so the loot wouldn’t slip through their fingers. Wise up, Simon! If you’d found the treasure, her cronies would have slashed your throat without giving it a second thought, and she would have stood by and watched. That’s the reason I came to Steingaden—to warn you about this hussy!”

Simon stared at the redheaded woman with delicate features whom he’d for so long viewed as a refined ideal of the fair sex. “So you’re not from France at all?” he asked softly.

She chuckled, and for a moment, it seemed the old Benedikta had flared to life again. “Oh, but I am. I come, in fact, from an old Huguenot family, but even as a child I hung around on the streets. I wanted to be free—not wind up the dutiful wife of some fat, conceited merchant.”

“Manslaughter, deception, and murder—that’s the life you chose!” the hangman growled. “I asked the burgomaster to find out what this hussy had been up to. The trail of her gang leads through all of Bavaria—Munich, Augsburg, Ingolstadt…She always pretended to be a fiery, temperamental merchant woman and managed to wrangle information from old moneybags in the taverns about the routes they would be taking. Later, one of her accomplices would come to the tavern and get all the information from her. And if the madam was so inclined, she even went on the raids herself.” Jakob Kuisl stepped up to the imposter. “How often did you have your hand in what went on in Schongau? Once? Twice? How many died because of you? Weyer from Augsburg? Holzhofer’s servants?”

The woman fell silent and the hangman continued. “In Landsberg, there is, in fact, a Benedikta Koppmeyer. She lives a very quiet, modest life there and first learned of the death of her brother from Burgomaster Semer.”

“So it was Karl Semer who gave you the final clue?” Simon asked.

“I should have known sooner,” Jakob Kuisl said. “Scheller told me about the perfume he took from the other gang. Even then, I suspected the monk with the violet perfume had something to do with it. Only later, on the gallows, did Scheller remember having seen something else at the campsite.”

“What was that?” Magdalena asked.

The hangman grinned. “A barrette. I’ve never heard of a man wearing anything like that.”

Simon collapsed onto a snow pile. He still couldn’t believe that he had been swindled. “What a fantastic plan,” he groaned, not without a trace of admiration in his voice. “The worldly woman hangs around in the taverns to find out which routes the wagon drivers will be taking. She knows where they’re going and how heavily they’re guarded. Her accomplices need only stand at the right crossroads and hold out their hands. And then, more or less by accident, they hear something about a fabulous treasure…”