HS04 - Unholy Awakening (32 page)

Commissariat de Police.

Fresh black letters on a cream ground.

An older German script was just discernible beneath it.

The city had finally fallen to the French after an extended siege by General Lefebvre in May 1807. Elsewhere in Prussia, it would have been a cause for civic dismay. But this was Danzig. The inhabit ants had never liked being Prussian, though their city had long been the capital of West Prussia. Now, thanks to Bonaparte, they could call them selves free citizens of the Republic of Danzig, a semi-independent state under slack French dominion. The city had become a pirate colony once again, as it had been in the good old Hanseatic days.

Would they find the time to waste on a Prussian magistrate, I asked myself.

My fears were realised as soon as I entered the building, gave my name to the clerk who was sitting at a desk beside the door, and told him why I had come.

‘Looking for a woman? Do you know how many of those we’ve got in Danzig?’

The clerk’s sharp voice echoed off the walls, ran round the large empty hall, and came back to him.

‘This one is suspected of thieving in Lotingen,’ I specified.

‘Our book of light-fingered wenches is thicker than the Bible,’ the clerk replied, and he sounded very proud of the fact, as if no other town could contain so many thieves, nor such proficient female ones, as Danzig. ‘Are you sure she is here?’

‘She arrived three days ago,’ I said.

I did not mention that I had visited the Merchants’ Bank in town that morning. She had withdrawn a considerable sum of money there just two days before. In fact, she had emptied the account in her father’s name, and was now a very rich woman.

‘We’ll need to check whether she registered,’ the clerk said, giving me a sly look. ‘She might have dropped a false name at the customs gate. Thieves often do, you know.’

‘She’ll have used her own name,’ I assured him.

Without a registration slip, no-one could enter the city. The toll for strangers – persons intending to do business there, or sail off on the Baltic Sea – was five florins, the officer at the gate had told me, which would allow them to stay for up to a week. My fear was that she had already left the town.

‘Can you check arrivals and departures?’ I asked. ‘I want to know where she was lodging.’

The clerk stopped fiddling with his pen. He glanced around the empty hall, then placed his white hands flat on the desk, leaned forward and said in a low voice: ‘Consulting official documents in Danzig has its price, sir.’

I brought my face close to his. ‘How much?’

‘A florin each, in and out.’

‘Two florins?’ I repeated.

His tired black eyes peered into mine. ‘Do you want the information, or not?’

I searched in my pocket and found a thaler coin, which I placed on the table.

His hand shot out and covered it. ‘This is Prussian money,’ he hissed.

‘And worth two Danzig florins,’ I replied. ‘Prussia will still be here when Danzig sinks beneath the sea.’

He lifted up his hands in surrender, and the coin had disappeared.

‘What is the name of this female thief that you are looking for?’

‘Emma Rimmele,’ I said. ‘She is here in the company of her father, I think.’

‘A thief with a father? That’s a turn-up. What is his name?’

‘Erwin Rimmele. He is old, sick. His mind has gone. He may not know who he is.’

The clerk pinched his thin lips together, nodding towards a long wooden bench by the far wall. ‘Sit over there, if you will, Herr Procurator. I won’t be gone more than a few minutes.’

I sat down, watching as he shuffled away down the hall. He looked no more than forty years old, though he moved like a man who was twice that age, and would probably take twice as long as he had promised.

Instead, my coin appeared to have given wings to his uncertain steps.

‘Herr Procurator Stiffeniis,’ his voice boomed from beneath an arch a minute later. ‘Come here, sir. Come quickly.’

As I passed beneath the arch, I saw a taller figure at the end of a corridor talking with the clerk. The two men were starkly outlined against a large window at their backs.

‘We may have what you’re looking for, sir,’ the second man announced, coming towards me, leaving the clerk in his wake, presenting himself with a welcoming smile on his face. Such smiles, as a rule, light up the eyes of children who expect a treat. I was not surprised by the open hand which accompanied this smile, as an other one of my despised Prussian thalers disappeared from view.

‘You may just be doing us a favour,’ the man went on, and I was tempted to hold out my hand and ask for my money back. ‘An old man was found down by the port last night, wandering around in a state of evident confusion. Unable, or unwilling, to say who, or what, he was, they brought him here. As nobody has come today to claim him back, I was on the point of consigning him to the lock-up for the poor and the insane, for such he appears. I can get no sense out of him, and we cannot keep him here in cells intended for whores and their pimps. So, let us hope you are able to identify him. By the way, sir, I am Georg Kaplan, captain of the watch.’

‘I would like to speak with the man,’ I said.

If he were Erwin Rimmele, I had the feeling that Captain Kaplan would be walking him down to the hospice for the insane that day, in any case. I was glad that I had found him, obviously, though I had little hope of getting anything useful out of such a witness. He was lost in a mental fog, as Emma had never failed to tell me.

‘Follow me,’ Herr Kaplan said, turning away, leading me along the corridor towards a ramp of stairs which went down into the basement.

‘I’d like to speak with him alone,’ I said, as Georg Kaplan palmed another thaler.

‘I have to lock you in,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you twenty minutes, right?’

I turned away and took a lamp from the wall. I did not offer to pay.

‘Right,’ I said.

Kaplan opened the door, and I stepped inside, the key turning immediately in the lock behind me. The lamp flared like coal-gas in a mine; it took some moments for my eyes to get accustomed to the gloom. The stench was as dense as a Baltic fog. Black mould scarred the blistering walls like leprosy. The tiny room appeared to be empty except for a heap of rags on a pallet.

Something shifted, and the pile moved.

A hand emerged and began to scratch what was, I realised, a matted mop of uncombed hair. Erwin Rimmele was curled up like an egg, pressing his knees against his chin, his face buried in a grey mattress which was spewing forth straw. The straw was rotted, black, creeping with lice.

‘Herr Rimmele, I am Hanno Stiffeniis, the magistrate from…’

‘I know who you are,’ he said, looking up at me, his voice harsh, strained. ‘I know why you’re here. You could have stopped her. You had your chance. I told you! She was not what she appeared to be.’

He was not incoherent, as Kaplan had reported. Nor as his erstwhile keeper had always insisted. Not then, at least. I stretched out my right hand, laying it gently on his shoulder. I could feel him trembling beneath my fingers. I squeezed gently, feeling his bones, hoping to reassure him by my presence, and gain his confidence.

‘We met that day in the cemetery…’

‘You should have taken her then,’ he snapped.

His eyes held mine, gleaming like silver coins from the bottom of a dark pit.

He swung his legs towards me, heaving up his body, sitting on the edge of the pallet, leaning forward. The smell of him caused my tongue to catch in my throat. How long had it been since he had seen soap and water? His once-white hair was matted with dirt. His bony hands were blacker than his face.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

He raised his hand, combing out his knotted hair. His fingers quivered and shook, barely within his control, as his hand moved jerkily back and forth, rearranging his hair. There was a stately earnestness about it, as if he had some thing important to say, but would not say it until he had spruced himself up.

‘How do I look?’ he asked, dropping his hands into his lap.

I pretended to examine his face. ‘Much better,’ I lied.

‘The bird has flown,’ he said.

I was amazed by his lucidity. Had everything been exaggerated and distorted to manipulate
me
?

‘I had no idea,’ I admitted. ‘I did not realise what was going on.’

He nodded slowly, frowning, raising his hand, passing his fingers through his hair again. I watched and waited, then began to fear that he would never speak again.

‘Where has she gone?’ I prompted him.

He stopped his combing, his hand poised above his head, staring at me with a look of the greatest intensity. He pushed an imaginary curl behind his ear, shifting others off his forehead.

‘They came for her,’ he murmured.

‘They?’ I repeated. ‘Who, sir?’

His eyes blazed open. ‘Those who wake the living dead,’ he hissed. ‘You know how they do it, don’t you? Everyone in Prussia does.’

I looked into his eyes and shook my head. ‘Tell me, sir,’ I invited him.

He smiled to himself before he spoke. ‘You have to wake the creature up before you can kill it forever,’ he whispered, leaning close to me. ‘The eyes must be wide open, or it will come back. It will return to haunt us all.’

I have questioned people of every sort – prisoners, witnesses, anyone who can add to what I know. In Erwin Rimmele’s case, I lacked a compass. What was madness, what was truth? Regarding what I knew already, this posed no problem. Regarding all the rest, I would have to take his hand and walk with him along the same dark path.

‘When did they come for her?’

‘Why did you come to the house?’ he fired back.

‘A girl had been murdered…’

‘The first time,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But you returned.’

‘I had to ask questions. The killers…’

He began to chew on a fingernail, ignoring me. ‘She knew the killers,’ he said at last. ‘She knew what they could do. The threat was clear to her.’

I hunched forward, very close, looking into his mild grey eyes. ‘How did they manage to threaten Emma?’

He shuddered violently. ‘Emma?
Her?
’

I held up my hands to pacify him. ‘That woman,’ I corrected myself. ‘The young woman who was at the house with you. The one who claimed to be your daughter. How did they frighten her?’

‘They left a sign. They always do. We’re watching you, it said.’

‘A sign, Herr Rimmele? Which sign are you talking of?’

‘The tooth,’ he said. ‘They yanked it out before they threw the body into the pit.’

I did not need to ask of whom he was speaking. ‘Why do such a thing?’

‘It was a message. She could not escape from them. They had placed a corpse where she was hiding. You saw the wounds yourself. The sign of the vampire. People would blame her, kill her. Unless she did as she had been told.’

He knew what had happened at the Prior’s House. He knew the details concerning Angela Enke’s death, as well as the accusations which had followed on from it. But how had he known? There was no way that he could have known, unless she had described it to him. He lived in total isolation, seeing no-one but her. Clearly, she had told him what had happened: the body in the well, the tooth in the bucket, the fact that somebody was menacing her.

Why would she tell him?

‘You knew what the tooth meant, didn’t you?’

Erwin Rimmele nodded his head. ‘It’s a sign of treachery, a promise that treachery will be avenged. Your tooth is next, it says. She could not escape from them. What ever she was doing, it was not what she’d been told to do.’

‘You guessed what she was up to, didn’t you?’

‘Wasn’t it obvious? She wanted what belonged to me, and she…’

He stopped in mid-sentence, caught hold of my hand.

‘Give me the piss-pot,’ he said. There was something in his voice which told me that he was used to giving orders, used to being obeyed. ‘Give it here,’ he snapped.

I resented the distraction. What he had been saying was beginning to make a kind of sense. How much longer would his clarity last? Emma had told me of the sudden swings to which his mind was subject, and she might have been telling the truth.

‘The pot,’ he said again, more urgently.

I reached down and picked it up, holding my breath to avoid the sickly stink. As I stood up again, Rimmele stretched out his right hand, his left hand burrowing among the rags, searching for an opening. He jolted upright, throwing back what passed for a shirt across his shoulder, his trousers slipping down around his knees. He stood be fore me, catching at his trousers by the waistband, his member held in the other hand.

I took a step back, holding out the chamber-pot.

‘Who were they, Rimmele? Who was threatening her?’

He stared at me defiantly. His legs were as white as chalk in contrast with his black face, neck and hands. His sex poked out from the bush of long white hairs at the base of his stomach like a slice of blackened, desiccated fruit.

‘Were they French soldiers?’ I demanded.

I thought that he might spit in my face. ‘They were Prussians. Nationalists. Patriots. Men of honour. Our history is long and glorious. A group of knights, followers of the late Franz von Sickingen, began it all in 1525. Before the battle of Frankenhausen. Two and a half centuries later, I became the Grand Knight. Our meetings were held in Kirchenfeld. In the Blood Room. Far from prying eyes. We swore allegiance to our German brothers. We vowed to fight for a German nation. We sealed an oath in blood!’

He closed his eyes, and seemed to sway.

‘Have you ever tasted blood?’ he went on quietly. ‘Strength surges from the dead corpse to the living body. It made us strong. It made us dangerous.’

‘Dangerous to whom?’ I prodded gently.

‘The enemies of Germany,’ he replied with great deliberation. ‘Even a Prussian king can be one of those. They called him the “Great”, but Frederick’s soul was French. He spoke their language, played French music, drank French wine, invited Frenchmen to
Sans Souci
at our expense. Voltaire was his chosen guest.’