The Dark Monk (8 page)

Baumgartner sighed. He had fallen from the scaffolding in the St. Lawrence Church a week ago, and since then his shoulder had been discolored with bruises. The pain throbbed all the way down to his right hand so that he could no longer even hold a spoon. He had hesitated for a long time before going to the hangman, but in the meantime, he worried that he might never be able to use his right arm again. So he had scraped together some money he had saved and set out at noon for Schongau. Jakob Kuisl was famous far and wide as a healer. Like all executioners, Kuisl earned his money less through executions and tortures, of which there were just a handful at most during the year, than through healing and the sale of salves, pills, and ointments. He would also sell you a piece of the hangman’s rope or a thief’s thumb. A mummified finger in your money pouch was supposed to protect you from thieves, but naturally only when you sprinkled the purse with holy water every day and firmly believed in it. Jakob Kuisl didn’t believe in it, but he earned good money from it anyway.

Like many other patients before him in the hangman’s house, Peter Baumgartner was torn between fear and hope. It was generally known that most people left Kuisl’s house no worse off than before, at least, and in many cases even better—something you couldn’t always say of doctors with university training. On the other hand, Jakob Kuisl was the Schongau hangman. A mere glance from him brought misfortune, and speaking with him was a sin. If Baumgartner confessed to this visit the next time he went to church, he would surely have to say a hundred Lord’s Prayers as penance.

“Come here, damn it, or I’ll dislocate your other shoulder, too.”

Jakob Kuisl, his hands smeared with fat, was still standing in front of the burly mason. Baumgartner nodded in resignation, made the sign of the cross, and then stepped forward. The hangman turned him around, carefully palpated the swollen shoulder, then suddenly seized Baumgartner’s right arm and yanked it back and down. There was a loud cracking sound.

The scream could be heard all the way up in the marketplace.

Baumgartner collapsed onto the stool by the table and nearly passed out. He was about to throw up and let out a stream of curses when he cast a glance down at his right hand.

He could move it again!

The pain in his shoulder seemed better, too. Jakob Kuisl handed him a wooden box.

“Tell your wife to massage your shoulder with this three times a day for a week. In two weeks you’ll be able to go back to work again. You owe me a guilder.”

Baumgartner’s joy at being relieved of his pain was short-lived.

“A guilder?” he gasped. “Damn, not even old Fronwieser asks that much. And he has studied at the university.”

“No, he’ll bleed you, send you home, and three weeks later, saw off your whole arm for three guilders. That’s what he studied.”

Baumgartner wrung his hands, thinking it over. He really did seem cured. Just the same, he began to haggle.

“A guilder, eh? That’s more than a miller earns in a whole day. How about half and we’ll call it a deal?”

“Let’s say a whole one, and I won’t dislocate your other shoulder.”

Baumgartner gave up with a sigh. He rummaged about in his purse and counted out the coins neatly on the table. The hangman picked up half of them and pushed the other half back across the table to Baumgartner. “I’ve given it some more thought,” he said. “Half a guilder if you can tell me something in return.”

Baumgartner looked at him in astonishment but then hurriedly put the coins back in his purse.

“What do you want to know?”

“You’re the mason up the Saint Lawrence Church, aren’t you?”

“Indeed,” Baumgartner replied. “That’s where I took a fall from that damned scaffolding.”

Jakob Kuisl pulled out his tobacco pouch and began slowly and carefully to fill his pipe.

“What are they building up there?” he asked.

“Well…Actually, they aren’t building anything,” Baumgartner said with hesitation. He watched the hangman with fascination as he filled his pipe. Pipe-smoking was a completely new fashion. The mason had never met anyone except Kuisl who did anything like it. To be on the safe side, the Schongau priest had declared it a vice in one of his last homilies.

“We’re just renovating the church,” Baumgartner continued finally. “Both on the outside and on the inside—the whole balcony. It was close to collapsing. The church is said to be a good five hundred years old.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary during your renovations?” Kuisl asked. “Drawings? Figures? Old paintings?”

The mason’s face brightened. “Yes, there was something unusual! Up in the balcony, the wall was full of bright-red crosses. The whole left-hand wall was covered with them!”

“What did they look like?”

“Well, different from the cross of Our Savior. They were rather…May I?” Baumgartner pointed to one of the sharp knives on the table. When the hangman nodded, Baumgartner carved a cross into the wood. The arms were of equal length and became narrower toward the center. The mason nodded with satisfaction. “They looked something like that.”

“And what did you do with the crosses?” Kuisl continued.

“It was strange. The priest told us to paint them over. That was shortly after he got so upset about the cellar.”

“The cellar?” The hangman frowned.

“Well, on New Year’s Day, while moving the slabs, Johannes Steiner noticed that under one grave marker there was a hollow space. We then moved the cover aside. We needed three men to do that—it was a huge thing—and from there, steps led down below.”

Jakob Kuisl nodded, lighting his filled pipe with a glowing wood chip. Baumgartner looked at him with growing enthusiasm.

“Did you go down into the cellar, too?” Kuisl asked, puffing on his pipe.

“No…Only the priest went down, and soon he came back all excited. The next day he told us to paint over the crosses, and we did.”

The hangman nodded slowly. “Are you sure none of you went down?” he asked again.

“I swear by the Virgin Mary, no!” Baumgartner cried. “But why is that so important?”

Jakob Kuisl stood up and walked to the door. “Forget it. You can go now.”

Peter Baumgartner straightened up, relieved. He didn’t know why Kuisl was asking all these questions, but at least it had saved him half a guilder. Besides that, he was happy he could leave the executioner’s house. He was sure he could see evil lurking in every corner of the room. Still, he was itching to ask just one last question.

“Kuisl?”

“What do you want to know?”

“This pipe of yours. How does it taste? It smells…well, really not so bad.”

Jakob Kuisl expelled a huge cloud of smoke that almost completely enveloped his head.

“Don’t get started with it,” his voice rang out from behind the cloud. “It’s like with drinking. You enjoy it, but you can’t ever quit.”

When the mason had left, Magdalena came down the narrow staircase into the main room. After the strenuous night, being thrown out of the Hainmiller house and meeting Benedikta Koppmeyer, she had lain down for a rest and had had weird dreams in which Simon and Benedikta rode past her in a sleigh, laughing and waving. Simon’s face was a grotesque mask that dissolved and dripped to the ground like melting snow. She was finally awakened by Peter Baumgartner’s scream. Through the thin floor, she overheard the rest of their conversation.

“Why do you think the priest wanted to have the crosses painted over?” she asked as she descended the staircase. “Do you think they had something to do with the crypt? And by the way, what did you find down there, anyway?”

“It would be better for you not to know,” her father grumbled, “or you’ll just start snooping around again.”

“But, Father,” she said with a look that had always bewitched him since she was a little girl, “if you don’t tell me, Simon will. So tell me!”

“You’d better keep a close eye on your Simon.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know exactly what I mean. He’s doing more than just making eyes at this woman from the city.”

Magdalena blushed. “How can you say something like that? You have hardly ever seen them together,” she cried. “And besides…I don’t care who Simon flirts around with, anyway.”

“Then it’s all right.” He walked over to the stove and threw another piece of wood on the fire, sending sparks into the air. “It’s much more important for us to learn who the workers were in the church.”

Magdalena had trouble focusing her thoughts on anything but Simon. They had been a couple for more than a year, even if they couldn’t act like one openly. She cursed her father for suggesting that Simon might have something to do with another woman.

“Why are you concerned with the workers?” she said finally, trying to pick up the thread of the conversation. “You certainly don’t believe that—”

“You heard it,” her father interrupted. “The workers opened the crypt, and even if Baumgartner swears up and down that none of them were down below, I don’t believe it. Someone poked around down there.”

“And then killed the priest?” Magdalena gasped.

“Rubbish!” Kuisl exclaimed, spitting on the floor, something he only dared to do when his wife, Anna Maria, wasn’t home. At the present, she was up at the market in town with the twins.

“Naturally, none of them is responsible for what happened to the fat priest,” he continued. “But they weren’t able to keep their mouths shut, either. We’ve got to find who they spoke to, and I’m sure we’ll have the murderer then.”

Magdalena nodded. “The murderer learned about the crypt and was afraid Koppmeyer would find out too much, and that’s why he killed him. That could be what happened,” she said, mulling it over.

The hangman opened the door so that clouds of tobacco smoke and fumes from the stove could drift out, and an ice-cold breeze blew through the room.

“So what are you waiting for?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Magdalena said, with some irritation.

“You wanted to help me snoop around, so go find the workers who were in the Saint Lawrence Church and talk with them. Talking with men and making eyes at them is something you can do, can’t you?”

Magdalena grimaced at him, then put on her cape and walked out into the cold.

When Simon walked in the front door, he realized it would probably be some time before he would be able to continue reading the little book about the Templars. Sitting on the bench by the stove were three citizens of Schongau, all of whom looked like they needed more than just a few words of consolation and a cheese compress. Simon knew them all. Two were farmers from the area whom he had often seen in the marketplace. The third was the Schongau blacksmith’s journeyman. He was coughing up reddish-yellow mucus, which he thoughtfully spat into some brown rags. Nevertheless, some kept spattering onto the wooden floorboards, which were only sparsely covered with dirty reeds. The faces of the patients were drawn, beads of sweat stood out on their foreheads, and all of them had dark rings around their eyes and faces the color of wax.

To drive away the poisonous miasma, old Fronwieser had been burning lavender and balm, and it smelled like Easter mass in the little room. Simon didn’t think these vapors did any good. He had read, in fact, that diseases were carried by dirt and bodily fluids, but his father considered this to be just newfangled nonsense. As the blacksmith’s journeyman on his left went into a new fit of coughing, Simon cautiously moved one step to the side.

“Isn’t it nice that the young gentleman finally showed up. What kept you so long in Altenstadt? A nice little supper with the priest?” Bonifaz Fronwieser entered from the adjacent room holding a smoking pine chip and a few more sprigs of lavender. At one time, as a dashing young army surgeon in the Great War, he had been an imposing figure and had made eyes with many a pretty girl, but now, stooped over with thinning gray hair, he looked older than his fifty years, and all that remained of his former self was his piercing, alert eyes. And his harsh tone.

“I’ve been waiting for you for hours!” he snapped softly enough that the three patients on the bench couldn’t hear. “I have to pay a visit to Master Hardenberg, a member of the city council. He’s come down with it, too! And instead, here I am fooling around with a few farmers who can only afford to pay me with a few eggs, at best!”

He poked his withered index finger at Simon’s chest. “Tell me the truth—you’ve been keeping company with the hangman again and sticking your nose into those filthy books! People are already gossiping, and you’re giving them a reason to.”

Simon rolled his eyes. Bonifaz Fronwieser hated the hangman, who he thought was corrupting his son with books and his unorthodox methods of healing.

“Father, the priest—” he said, trying to interrupt his father’s harangue, but his father cut him off nevertheless.

“Aha, so that’s it! No doubt you were partying with the fat old codger, eh? Hope you enjoyed your meal, at least,” he croaked. “His housekeeper at least is supposed to be a good cook!”

“He’s dead, Father,” Simon said softly.

“What?” Bonifaz Fronwieser seemed irritated. For a moment, he wanted to continue his litany of complaints, but now he hesitated. He hadn’t reckoned with this news.

“Koppmeyer is dead, so there were some things that had to be done,” Simon repeated.

“I’m…I’m really sorry,” the older physician grumbled after a short pause. “Did he have this fever, too?”

Simon eyed the three patients, who looked at him partly out of curiosity and partly out of fear. Then he shook his head.

“No…It was something else. I’ll tell you later.”

“Very well,” his father grumbled, falling back into his familiar role. “Then get to work. As you can see, there are still a few of the living here and they need to be treated.”

Simon sighed, then helped his father in examining the patients. There wasn’t a lot to do: fetch a few dried herbs for a potion, listen to a few chests, check tongues, the usual sniffing and observing of urine samples. Simon had no illusions—most of this was just cheap playacting performed to give sick people false hope and take their money. Even doctors with university degrees couldn’t usually tell very much. The two Fronwiesers were just as helpless in the face of this fever, which had been spreading around Schongau for a full two weeks and had killed a dozen people. People were getting chills and pain in the joints, and some died suddenly overnight. Others survived the first onslaught, only to be overcome with terrible coughing fits soon after.