HS01 - Critique of Criminal Reason (36 page)

The memory of that day seven years before came flooding back, tormenting in its clarity.

‘Walk me around the Fortress, Stiffeniis,’ Immanuel Kant suggested, as soon as the plates were cleared away after lunch.

‘In such dreadful weather?’ Herr Jachmann objected, a worried expression plainly written on his face.

Professor Kant chose pointedly to ignore the warning of his friend as we donned our coats and scarves. Out in the lane, the fog was as thick and heavy as a damp towel, and Kant caught hold of my arm immediately.

‘You lead, Stiffeniis. I will follow,’ he said.

He seemed to suggest that something more than youth and strength were expected of me. As I closed the gate, I spotted Herr Jachmann peeping anxiously from behind the curtains, but the fog was like a living thing. Kant and I walked straight into its gaping maw, and were swallowed up in one gulp.

As we pressed forward, I began to prattle nervously about the previous summer which I had spent in Italy. I told him of the relentless sun, the welcome cool as the autumn came on, the cold dampness of winter as I began my journey homeward through France, my preference for the dry cold of our own mountains.

Kant suddenly halted.

‘Enough of the weather!’ he snapped. I could barely see him in the faltering light. His deathly pale face seemed to blur in and out of focus, like an ectoplasm struggling to materialise. ‘One human experience is equal to the power of Nature, you said during lunch. The most diabolical of them all. Murder without a motive.
Cold
-
blooded murder
. What did you mean, Stiffeniis?’

I hesitated before replying. But I had come to Königsberg for that purpose, and for no other. I told him quickly what I had witnessed on a cold, grey morning not two months before. Intoxicated by Enlightened ideals, curious to see how the revolutionaries would deal with the monarch that they now disowned, I broke off my homeward journey in Paris. On 2 January 1793, I was standing in Place de la Revolution when Louis XVI mounted the steps to the guillotine. I had never seen a person put to death before, and I watched in thrall as the King knelt down before that fatal instrument. As the gleaming metal triangle was drawn up, drums rolled thunderously. Their thumping matched the clamour of my heart.

‘I stared into the Devil’s eyes,’ I told Kant, melodramatically, perhaps, ‘and the Devil stared back. The blade fell with a loud screech, stopped with a sickening crunch, and the whole of my being was invaded by the smell of blood.

‘I inhaled the salty tang as if it were frankincense. I drank in each spasm of that body as the severed head bounced into a waiting basket. The simplicity of the action: a lever shifted, a life was gone. It was the essence of Cause and Effect. So quick, so devastating, so final. I wanted to see it happen again, and again…’

A monster had risen up from the depths of the rational person that I had always thought myself to be. This
Doppelgänger
had a taste for death and the wild euphoria it brought. I tried to evoke the sensation for Kant in a word I thought that he would relish. ‘The experience was
Sublime
,’ I confided. ‘I was ravished by it, sir. My mind was petrified, my soul was thrilled.’

There! Finally, I had said it.

Professor Kant was silent for some moments.

‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ he said suddenly. ‘Why speak of murder
without
a motive? The people of Paris had reason enough to kill the King. You have something more to tell me.’

He seemed to be looking through me.

‘Indeed, there is,’ I admitted. ‘I brought the madness home with me. A month ago my brother died…’

What Kant said next was pronounced in the same polite tone with which, not an hour before, he had asked me whether I preferred my bread with butter, or without.

‘Did you murder him?’

Even in my shocked state, I was aware of the lack of emotion in his voice. He had made the connection that I had feared to make for myself, yet he showed no horror, no revulsion at the thought. It was simply a question that needed to be asked.

‘Stefan was discharged from the army a year ago,’ I hastened to explain. ‘He was voted the best cadet at the Academy, the son my father craved. The very opposite of my own moody character. But Stefan was sick. He had begun to fall down in a death-faint for no apparent reason. The sweetness of his urine was the cause. Only honey could revive him. If naught were done to help, the doctors warned, his life was in danger. Everyone in the house knew of it. The servants had all been instructed what to do if a fit came on. A pot of honey and a spoon had been positioned in every room. If Stefan were pale, sweating, confused in speech or behaviour, we must give him honey. He was prohibited from leaving the house unless he took a corked vial in his pocket.’

I paused, expecting some reaction from Professor Kant, but he remained silent, watchful, a pale shadow in the swirling fog.

‘When I returned,’ I went on, ‘the turbulence I had felt in Paris was still inside me, like a poisonous, invisible dart. I dared tell no one. Only Stefan, my brother. He listened to me in silence. He did not judge or criticise, but stared unflinching into my eyes. Then, some days later, out of the blue, he challenged me to do what Father had warned us never to do again.’

‘And what was that?’ asked Kant, tiring, perhaps, of my narration.

‘There is a rocky outcrop near the house called the Richtergade. When we were little children, sir, a race to the top was our favourite sport. I ought, nay, I
should
have refused the dare, but I did not. He egged me on, he provoked me. Stefan had proposed a distraction, a
divertissement
, a game, which I enthusiastically embraced. Physical, exhausting activity would take my mind off the problems which bore down on me. I did not think of him, except to remind him to take a glass of honey in his pocket. He answered with a quick nod, then off we went. It was cold, a good day for a climb, and I was the first to stand on the summit of the rocky mound. I had never ever won the race before. Standing on the brink, facing into the wind, the rush of elements subdued the storm within me. I yearned to tell Stefan of my exhilaration. I wished to thank him. But then I heard him panting as he struggled to grasp the rocky ledge below me. Looking down, I…I froze once more in the face of Death. Froth bubbled from his lips, his eyes rolled back, his muscles quivered as he tried to speak. His tongue was a balled fist. His nails scraped and slithered on the damp stone. A battle was being fought before my eyes, but it might have been a…a scientific experiment. Stefan slipped, fell back into the void. And what did
I
do? I did nothing. Nothing at all. I watched him fall to his death. Stumbling down from the heights at last, my mind in a turmoil, I found his lifeless body stretched out on the grass. A sharp rock, like an angry beast, had bitten a chunk out of his head as he fell. Blood and tissue spattered that mossy bank.

‘That evening, my father stormed into my room. In his hand he held a golden vial of honey. “I found this in
your
pocket,” he accused. The expression on his face is engraved in my memory. “Why did you not save your brother?” it seemed to say. Perhaps he had found the honey in a different jacket from the one I wore that day. I cannot say. I swear to you, I had taken no honey along with me. At least, I do not remember doing so.

‘He did not call me a murderer. That was the last word my mother spoke before she died. She lay in bed like a statue for weeks after Stefan’s death, her glassy eyes staring at nothing. She turned to me at the instant of her death and made an accusation that no faithful son should have to bear. I was allowed to attend her burial, then Father ordered me to leave the house, never to return.’

I paused to catch my breath.

‘At the funeral, a friend of my father’s spoke of you, Professor Kant. He told me that the moral dictates of Reason are far stronger than the sentimental impulses of Man. I
had
to speak with you, sir. I felt that you might understand. I hoped that Philosophy would rescue me. That’s why I came today,’ I explained. ‘And so, at the end of the lesson, I made my way to your desk, saying…’

‘ “I have been bewitched by Death.” ’ Kant finished the sentence for me. He leaned close and peered into my face, a craving curiosity burning in his eyes.

‘Am I a murderer, sir?’ I asked.

I might have been standing before God, waiting for supreme judgement, but Kant was silent for some time.

‘It was your brother who issued the challenge,’ he said quietly at last. ‘He knew the risks better than you. Let us say that you picked up the honey mechanically, without thinking. In that case, you really did not know it was in your pocket. Your brother, on the other hand, took for granted that he had done as he always did, whenever he left the house. But he had not done so. The mind plays strange tricks,’ he observed with a smile, tapping his forehead with his finger. ‘Have you never noticed? Sometimes there is a forgetful blank where habits are concerned. We forget to do the most obvious things, vital as those things may be.’

‘A blank, sir? But I stood watching. Why didn’t I try to save him?’

‘I would guess, Stiffeniis, that you were so unnerved by what was happening that you failed to react. Immobilised by fright, there was no one else to help. You take the burden of his death upon yourself, but this is only half the picture. The same thing might have happened, there or in some other place, whether you were present or not. He was ill, as you said.’

‘I was
there
,’ I repeated obstinately.

‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Kant replied soothingly. ‘And in a very odd state of mind after what you had seen in Paris, I imagine. You were still haunted by the decapitation of the King when your brother’s death occurred. Death commands us all. Horror does possess us. Sublime terror calls forth,’ he hesitated, searching for an expression, ‘a most
peculiar
state of mind, a mental condition for which I can find no better term…’

He paused and stared distractedly at the ground, as if he were searching for a word or concept that stubbornly refused to unbend and make itself known even to his penetrating mind.

‘What must I do?’ I pleaded, waiting for his verdict.

What Professor Kant said was destined to change my life.

‘You’ve been inside the mind of a murderer, Hanno. You have harboured thoughts that few men would dare to admit. You are
not
alone! And the knowledge makes you special. Now, you must turn it to good account,’ he replied warmly.

‘But how, sir? How?’

As he spoke, his words settled on my troubled spirit like a healing balm.

‘Bring order where crime brings chaos. Right wrongs. Study the law.’

Two weeks later, I enrolled at the University of Halle as a student of Jurisprudence. Five years afterwards, my bachelor’s degree confirmed, I began my working career as a magistrate. Accompanied by Helena Jordaenssen, my wife of seven months, I started out in the country town of Lotingen. It was a quiet, regular sort of life, but I enjoyed the drab anonymity of it. I was not called upon to judge and punish, so much as to officiate. But I had only partly followed Kant’s advice. Violent crimes being unknown in the town, I had never been truly called upon to test myself.

Until the day that Sergeant Koch entered my office.

I looked down at the page and read what Kant had dictated to Lampe.

The question presented itself to my mind with the force of a hammer blow. Had Professor Kant been infected by the insanity that he had meant to cure in me? Had I opened a barred path and handed him the Golden Apple of forbidden knowledge which lay at the end? Kant’s philosophy had been foundering on a reef, and I had unwittingly thrown him a lifeline. Had he found, in his declining years, the pathway to Absolute Freedom which the exercise of rational discipline and logical disputation had denied him? Just before the body of Sergeant Koch was found, Kant had been feverish, his voice hoarse with passion.

‘They cannot imagine what
I
have been able to conceive,’ he had raged. He had been talking of his detractors, the Romantic philosophers, the high priests of
Sturm und Drang
. ‘They cannot begin to know what
I…
’

I completed the sentence for him.

They cannot begin to know what I have done with your help, Stiffeniis
.

This thought erupted in my mind like red-hot magma exploding from an uncapped volcano. Had Immanuel Kant sown the evil seed in the mind of his valet with that book, dictating night after night, knowing that Lampe would take him at his word? Had Kant knowingly created a murderous Golem in his valet, then set him loose on Königsberg?

If Kant knew…

Jan Konnen, Paula-Anne Brunner, Johann Gottfried Haase, and Jeronimus Tifferch were his victims. He had provoked the humiliation that led to the death of Procurator Rhunken, he had precipitated the murder of the serving-boy, Morik, driven the Totzes to suicide, pushed Anna Rostova beyond the pale, and made Lublinsky’s soul as monstrous as his face. The lives of Frau Tifferch and her embittered maid would be forever blighted by his meddling. Like those of everyone who had known or loved the murdered ones. The city and the people of Königsberg had been entangled in the web of terror that Kant had woven so artfully.

And he had killed Koch. My faithful, stolid adjutant. Humble servant of the State and of myself. Sergeant Koch had found nothing safe in Kantian philosophy, nothing reassuring in Professor Kant himself. Koch had sensed the sinister nature of Kant’s involvement in the case, detected evil in that laboratory, while I had been overwhelmed with admiration.

If Kant knew…

He had chosen me for one reason alone. I had been inside the mind of a murderer. He had said it himself. He had chosen
me
– not Herr Procurator Rhunken, or any more expert magistrate – to admire the infernal beauty of his final philosophical thesis. The sublime expression of will, the act that went beyond Logic or Reason, Good or Evil: murder without a motive. The moment when a man is free, unchained from the claims of morality. Like Nature. Or like God. When I insisted on the need for logical proof, credible explanation, when I
failed
to understand what he intended me to see, Kant had opened the door and sent me out to be murdered with his own cloak on my shoulders. But Koch had stepped in the way. He had taken the fatal blow that was meant for me.