HS04 - Unholy Awakening (33 page)

‘You tried to kill the king, didn’t you?’ I said, recalling the note in the Lotingen archive. That was why Kassel had opposed the marriage contract. That was the news which Merson had discovered, and that Helena had brought to Marienburg. Erwin Rimmele had deflowered Gisela Kassel, and forced the marriage on her father.

‘Tried, and failed,’ he murmured.

I held the chamber-pot a trifle closer.

Rimmele’s eyes fixed upon it. Sweat broke out in pearls on his forehead.

‘Give it here, be quick!’ he demanded.

‘Kassel had discovered your plot,’ I said, still holding back.

‘He did not want to give his daughter to me. But that was easily overcome. He could not refuse me once he learnt that I was one of them.’

‘One of whom?’ I probed.

‘The vampires,’ he said, and all the breath hissed out of him. ‘I recruited them. I was their point of reference. Young men, patriots, ready for anything. Ready to feed on my blood when greed got the better of them. They wanted what was mine.’

‘How did the vampires kill, Erwin?’

He seemed perplexed by such sudden intimacy, hearing his name on my lips.

‘How?’

‘How was the death blow delivered?’ I insisted.

He let go of his trousers, which cascaded down around his ankles.

‘A single bite,’ he said with a sickly smile. ‘A wound to the neck like two sharp, pointed teeth. The instrument was made to my design. The symbol of our brotherhood. The Greek letter,
pi
. Two sharp prongs. One jab, the job was done. The chosen one was gone, along with his blood. We had his strength, his riches. His family shunned him. His energy was ours. The others were too terrified to ask what had happened.’

How many people had he killed? How many more had been murdered by the younger members of his fraternity? How many slaughtering bands like his had sprung to life in Prussia over the centuries? How many bloodthirsty vampires had they invented? How many of them still survived?

‘Kassel wished to save his daughter from the likes of you,’ I said.

‘Too late,’ the old man said. ‘I had made my way into his family by then.’

‘A familiar face,’ I murmured. ‘His daughter’s espoused. A vampire…’

Rimmele stared down his nose at me. ‘Gisela loved me. Passion makes the blood flow quick,’ he sneered. ‘You’ve never tasted victory, Herr Stiffeniis. That is what we have lost. A taste for blood, a delight in conquest. Important decisions are never made on the field of battle. Delicate strategies require closed rooms, deep thought. What were von Trauss’s scruples to me? I had his daughter; his daughter had my Emma. Then, a vampire took her place.’

He sat down on the bed as if his legs had been whipped from under him.

‘Tell me about the vampire who got her teeth into you, Herr Rimmele.’

He raised his head, and looked at me in a state of evident confusion. Was he searching for an excuse, an explanation, something to confound me? Or was the darkness closing in on him again?

‘The woman who took your daughter’s place,’ I spelled it out for him.

‘She…she wanted…’ He seemed to choke on the words. ‘She wanted every thing. She brought that girl to me at the house, the one who was murdered, hoping to seduce me. And when that failed, she…she came naked to my bed. My own daughter…’ He stifled a cry. ‘No,
not
my daughter. No woman, either. A demon. A demon had taken Emma’s place.’

My gaze fell on his shrivelled sex.

In the same instant, she appeared before my eyes. The creature I had known as Emma Rimmele. She might have been there in that room, enjoying his shame and my humiliation. Her lips so eager to feed on the flesh of others, so knowledgeable in the ways of pleasure, so ready to suck what she craved from those that she had chosen.

‘My daughter went to Marienburg,’ he said unprompted. ‘There were things to do, she had to go. I could not manage the estate, and Emma seemed pleased to help me. She had not smiled since the day her mother died. She did everything that a daughter should. But one day she did not return from town. Nor the day after.’

‘And so you went to Marienburg,’ I concluded.

Herr Rimmele nodded. ‘A carriage came to carry me off. Emma had sent it, the driver said. Gisela’s coffin had been removed from the vault. We would all be together again in a better place. It…was…a…lie!’

I watched him sob, but felt no compassion for him.

‘Emma was dead,’ I said. His daughter had been murdered in the cottage with Grangé. The Frenchman’s body had been left there, while the corpse of the girl had been carried off to Lotingen inside her mother’s coffin. ‘Did she take your daughter’s place so easily?’

‘It was dark. Her clothes were black, she wore a hood. She did not speak. I could smell that she was…different, though I could not see her face. That vixen sat beside me in the carriage. I felt her lips against my neck, breathing into my ear. “Emma is dead,” she whispered. “You will live, or die, Erwin Rimmele, when I decide it.”’

I saw the scene like a silhouette theatre on a wall. A beautiful young woman, a helpless old man. Lips pulled back, sharp teeth edging down towards the pulsing vein in his neck. The odour of the woods and fresh-turned earth, the perfumes that had entranced me that day at the Prior’s House. I was sickened by it. And suddenly, the lantern-slide clicked, and changed. The man was younger, equally in her thrall. Was it myself? Another? I knew she would not hesitate to use her charms on any man.

‘Find her, Stiffeniis. Throw her back into the hell-fire pit from which she crawled. Quiet her forever! Make the world safe…’

The sound of hissing distracted me.

I looked down.

Erwin Rimmele was urinating onto the trousers at his ankles.

No sooner finished, he began to scream, and he gave no sign of stopping.

Ever.

‘Face down, sir. Make her gnaw the earth.’

Georg Kaplan, commander of the town watch, was convinced that there was nothing human about the corpse. ‘Heaven forbid! We don’t want her waking up again in Danzig,’ he exhorted.

‘Face down,’ I conceded, ashamed of what I had just said, ashamed of what we were about to do.

Kaplan had sent the other two policemen to wait for us by the coach. The corpse had been rolled up in a canvas sheet to avoid exciting curiosity as they carried it away from the riverside warehouse. One or two of the lodgers had watched the proceedings, but they showed little real interest. Then again, to see the police removing a corpse from such a place must have been the order of the day.

‘I will write the report,’ I insisted, as we reached a wood outside the town which Kaplan declared a suitable spot for the burial. ‘This location must remain a secret.’

‘Don’t worry about that, Herr Stiffeniis. What happened in Lotingen cemetery will not be allowed to happen here in Danzig.’

The concern on his face surely matched my own. We intended to do what Merson and I had done the week before with the corpse of Angela Enke. A clandestine burial. It was becoming a ritual. It seemed to me as if the seamstress from Krupeken were taking posthumous revenge on the woman who had been the cause of her death. The murderess would lie in unhallowed ground without a name, or any symbol of Christian pity to mark the place.

‘No-one heard or saw a thing,’ Kaplan murmured. ‘I cannot figure it.’

The warren in which the body had been discovered might have been built to contain and suppress every sound, voice and smell. And every vice, too.

I planted the shovel in the loose, sandy soil and began to dig.

I remembered going up the narrow staircase, following Georg Kaplan, then passing through a sort of tunnel – the walls, ceiling and floor were all the name less shade of filth and careless abandon. The tenement was on the waterfront in the poorest part of the town. Light filtered through a distant window frame with no glass, or from the open doors of tiny rooms where eight, nine, ten pairs of eyes glanced up at us. We had burst into rooms on either side of the one where the body had been found, asking the paupers huddling there if they could help us.

Some seemed not to understand the words.

Others turned away, or shook their heads, their eyes blank, uncaring.

The building smelled like a shed where herring are pickled in salt, then hung on lines to desiccate, or be smoked. At some point, though, the drying-rooms had been divided into living-spaces. The poor had taken the place of the fish, hanging over flop-house ropes, seeking oblivion in standing sleep. It was a vision of hell that Dante might have recognised. A corpse could rot in there every day of the week, and no-one would have noticed.

She had been there for a night, perhaps two. And yet, there was no trace of the corruption that one might have expected in such damp air, so close to the water’s edge. Her skin was just as I remembered it. Smooth, flawless, with a point of bright colour in the cheeks. Full red lips, white teeth. Physical perfection. The appearance of the corpse convinced Herr Kaplan of the danger. He took one look, and said to me, ‘We must get rid of her before the terror spreads.’

I rested on my shovel, watching Kaplan dig. His frenzy seemed to be growing.

She had come to Danzig, obtained the money, then found a place to hide for the night. And that had been her fatal mistake. If she was invisible, so was her killer. Before she could cry out, she was dead, and no-one knew, or cared. The warehouse owner had seen them, of course. He had noticed her anxiety to conclude the business and get in off the street. ‘She didn’t quibble about the price,’ he said, as if it was the least a customer could do. ‘The pretty lady’, he called her. ‘The old man could barely stand up. He didn’t know what day was what, if you ask me.’ To clarify the concept, he tapped his finger against the side of his temple. The following day, he had seen Erwin Rimmele wandering off alone, like a man who was lost.

She was dead by then, I supposed.

I asked him if he had seen anyone else leave the building.

He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head.

It took an hour to dig a hole, ten minutes more to fill it in again.

Back in town, Kaplan took me to his office. He poured us both a glass of schnapps, while I sat down at his desk intending to write immediately to Lavedrine. First, I told him what Helena had discovered in the cottage near the slaughter-house.

I drained the schnapps, then began to tell him what I had seen that day in Danzig. While I was writing this account, I prayed to God that I would never be obliged to report such a story again.

I sent the despatch by messenger to Lavedrine in Marienburg, and then I waited, expecting him to arrive before the day was out. I ate a little lunch, then walked out along the quays, watching the ships, the bustle of the harbour, the simple straightforwardness of it all. I spent a good part of the afternoon sitting on a bench in the square where Georg Kaplan’s office was situated. I had given that address as the place where Lavedrine and I might meet. As the day moved on, I went over the entire story in my head, trying to clarify those points which seemed less certain in my under standing of the affair, knowing that Lavedrine on his arrival would ask me to explain it all to him from beginning to end.

Lavedrine did not arrive. Nor did any message. I could not understand it.

What had happened to prevent his coming to Danzig?

First thing the following morning, I set out for Lotingen and home.

Two hours later, as I jumped down from the saddle outside my office, a group of townspeople gathered around me. Some of them asked after my health. Others were more concerned about the recent events in the town.

I could tell them very little, except to say that I believed the French soldiers would remain on guard at the cemetery. At least, until a new sexton had been appointed, and the damage had been set to rights.

And yet, where there is a crowd, there is always a troubling voice in the middle of it. A man stepped forward, his eyes bright with fright, or excitement. ‘That vampire got what was coming to her. Isn’t that right, Herr Procurator? The vixen what was living out at the Schuettlers’ brought the seeds of evil in that coffin of hers. They flowered, an’ all! Turned an old hag into a fresh young girl. Lord have mercy on us! Them are the most dangerous, sir. Young and pretty. Who would dream of being bitten by such a sweet thing? Who’d have the courage to say no to her!’

I picked up my bag and walked into the office without saying a word.