The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (34 page)

Hate even has its own taste, he thought, looking over to the tavern on the yard’s far side. His oral cavity had been filled with a sweet dough spewed up, ruminated, then blanched in the stomach of his hatred, but impossible to spit out, grief having sewn his lips together.

His hate could also be touched: it was a razor blade his toes could grasp with all their strength, and which could be swallowed, an icy blade that cut throats and sliced open stomachs, cold as ice, hot as burning coals.

There, alone in the inn on the other side of the yard, sat the man who had unleashed these passions. At one of its windows, sitting bent over a mug of beer, looking through some papers, was the final, but also the most powerful object of his hatred, had it been quantifiable. But the hatred would not let itself be quantified. All objects of such hatred were of equal importance, he’d noticed, and he found this confusing. He didn’t hate this man any more than he had hated the others. He hated them all to the same extent, but limitlessly. Hatred had no chronology. It stretched away in all directions into infinity. Not being conceivable from any other perspective than infinity, it had always been there, and always would be. It abrogated all sense of time. It was Being itself.

But with this man at the inn table he had to be careful, for he possessed a gift not unlike his own. Which was why he now raised his eyes from his papers and looked about him, as if aware of being watched.

Hercule read the man’s emotions. His thirst had been quenched. His premonitions had made him wary. In a moment he would get up and leave.

To a deaf person, in this city of a million inhabitants the carriages slid by on soundless wheels. The frantic animals in the slaughterhouse yard, the bellowings, the howls and death rattles from throats choking in their own blood went unheard. The apprentices talked and laughed without him noticing them, mouths moving like fishes’ mute gobs.

Having made up his mind not to let the man out of his sight, Hercule left the slaughterhouse and went into the alley, where a cab almost ran him down, its driver swearing at his suddenly rearing horses. Only the horses notice me, he thought, and perhaps also those children who, somewhat astonished, are looking over in my direction.

Overhead the sun broke through the cloud cover like an icebreaker. It was morning, but already very hot. He waited for the inn door to open and his enemy to appear. This man is the last, he thought. Only when he too was gone would Hercule at last have avenged his love.

But hate made him careless, as love had once done. Inside the inn, Johannes Langhans was beginning to track down the deformed man’s tinnitus of desire for revenge. Then, taking care to let his thoughts go in a misleading direction, he left the premises through a back door and hailed a cab.

It took a while before Hercule realised his enemy had gone. Not that this troubled him in the least, since he already knew where to find him. He’d only followed him to the inn in order to strengthen his resolve. But his plans for the Jesuit were already formed. And any moment now he would implement them.

When Johannes Langhans got back to his office, only his immediate superior, Secretary Wohlrat, was still there. After enquiring about a couple of appointments, all having to do with the paperwork he’d been looking through in the tavern, he withdrew to his own office room, a gloomy chamber at the end of a dark corridor.

Next to the pile of documents which had heaped up during the week, lay a note. Sealed and stamped, the letter was addressed to him personally. He opened it and read:

There followed some directions to an address in the suburbs. The letter had been signed with a scarcely legible signature, and lacked a return address.

Langhans remained seated, held the note. There was something about this communiqué that wasn’t right.

After having thought over the ins and outs of the matter awhile, it struck him that the envelope had not been stamped by the office, and in order to elucidate this mystery he went back to the office where the secretary was standing bent over a pile of books.

“Do you know who handed this in?” he asked, holding out the letter.

Wohlrat looked up from the books, which had just been delivered from the censorship.

“Came by internal post,” Wohlrat answered. “No-one else has been here today. They’ve all been given the day off. This afternoon the Secret Association is holding a meeting behind locked doors. The Emperor’s indisposed again.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have seen the internal post arrive?”

Wohlrat gave him a weary look.

“The letter has not been stamped,” Langhans clarified. “You haven’t seen any private messengers? Or visitors?”

“You know as well as I do that no visitors are allowed. Secrecy, Langhans, is the only protection we have in a land of intrigues! And believe you me, apart from you, myself and the caretaker there’s not a living soul has set foot in here today. The copyist is off, just like everyone else, and I’ve been sitting five metres from the entrance since eight o’clock this morning. The internal post came at ten. Same errand boy as usual. Your letter can’t have flown in here on wings, can it?”

“Is the Emperor really indisposed?” Langhans asked, to cover up his unease.

“Epilepsy. Our monarch sets the tune for the bureaucracy, nothing works any more. Look!”

Wohlrat waved a folder across the desk. “I’m having to deal with censorship even though I, like yourself, have been educated in religious matters. The cutbacks have gone too far . . .” Wohlrat spat into an over-full spittoon, before sitting down at his desk. “Besides which, you have the authority to work in whatever way you see fit,” he said. “And if it’s a question of secret missions, you know where you must turn to.”

Langhans settled for this answer and returned perplexed to his office.

Once installed behind his desk, he unfolded the letter again and read, once, the forty-three words of the three sentences; then once more, to make sure he had understood it aright.

He couldn’t detect any messages between the lines, nothing that appeared to be out of order considering the nature of the errand. Receiving sensitive material from anonymous sources was part of his work, but his recent sense of being watched had made him suspicious. Officials, he thought, were pitched against each other in the power vacuum arising from the Secret Association’s court intrigues. Loyalties tended to shift, depending on whose protection they happened to be enjoying. Not even a man in his position was safe.

That someone wished to secretly hand in information about Count Kollowrat didn’t surprise him: an emperor who preferred book-learning to writing decrees, and charity to replenishing war funds paved the way for many possible intrigues. Vienna was astir with rumours. The Emperor’s marriage was childless, and his sister-in-law – or so it was said – was trying to induce him to abdicate. A secret court group with Metternich at the helm was ruling the land however it saw fit, but the Council was made up of enemies who spent most of their time conspiring against each other. Count Kollowrat was secretly attempting to have Metternich deposed and was seeking support from the third most powerful member of the council: Archdeacon Ludwig. With a political agenda like this, Langhans reflected, the letter ought not to arouse his suspicions. Yet it did.

Having completed some written recommendations concerning the day’s routine affairs, Langhans put his files aside. An hour remained before his meeting with the anonymous letter-writer.

Through the only window in the room he looked out over the afternoon traffic. On the other side of the street a coupé was parked. The coachman had fallen asleep on the box, but the curtain in the coach window stirred. It occurred to Langhans that whoever it was who had been following him might be in this particular coach, and watching him from there. But the longer he looked at the carriage, the less he felt this to be the case.

By now it was obvious that whoever had sent the letter must also be involved in the attempts to discompose him, and might, therefore, also be the same person who, without making his presence known, had been watching him at the inn. It was imperative that he find out why, and who it was.

One thing that still puzzled him was how the letter had found its way on to his desk. He was quite sure it hadn’t been delivered by internal post – the obligatory stamp was missing, and so was the caretaker’s pagination. Of course Wohlrat was correct in saying the letter couldn’t have flown in by itself. But it had not been lying there when he’d left the office earlier that day. The rest of the staff had been dismissed, and unless somebody had made themselves invisible and managed to walk into his office unseen, only one possibility remained . . .

He was interrupted in his ruminations as the object of his suspicion came into the corridor. Unable to hear the secretary’s footfall he became aware instead of the contours of his own thoughts. Something was bothering him, and this he confirmed on entering the room.

“Don’t you have an appointment in an hour’s time?” Wohlrat said.

“You’re well informed about my daily schedule.”

“Spare me your ironies, please. I’ve just received a report from the Ministry. They know you’re going to receive information about Kollowrat from a secret source, and the archdeacon’s delighted.”

“It said so in the letter I showed you.”

“What letter?”

“The one you said arrived by internal post . . .”

Wohlrat appeared unaffected by this insinuation. Instead he sighed and sat down on a chair.

“This work is tiring,” he said. “The circumstances demand discretion. We take great care not to find ourselves at loggerheads with anybody, but it’s impossible when the land’s being ruled the way it is.”

“It’s not being ruled, it’s being ‘managed’.”

“I know about your double loyalties, with Metternich on one side and the Vatican on the other, and that’s precisely why you ought to be more on your guard.”

Langhans did his utmost to track down what was going on in his superior’s head, but much to his surprise, and maybe dismay, he couldn’t pick up anything at all, only a dull weariness with his work, possibly with life itself.

“Considering the political situation”, Wohlrat went on, “and your vulnerable position, I was merely wondering whether you might not need an escort?”

The secretary was referring to a body of guards which for some time now had been at the disposal of the officials. This offer calmed Langhans somewhat. Maybe, he thought, the letter had in fact come by internal post, and they had simply forgotten to stamp it.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, “but I’d appreciate it if I could order a carriage.”

Wohlrat proffered one of his rare smiles.

“Send the coachman back when you’re done with this. And then take a few days off. You look awfully tired.”

In his thoughts Langhans accompanied his superior back to his office, where he sat down to resume the red tape of disappointment. But not even now, when the secretary ought to have eased up on his vigilance, did his consciousness revolve around anything but work, the Emperor’s indisposition, and the task of censor he considered ill-placed on his desk.

The address given by the letter-writer was near a market area on the northern outskirts of the city. A group of high-spirited people was crowding in front of an enclosure made of rough planks. No-one seemed to be waiting for Langhans.

He asked the coachman to hold the carriage. Got out. Went over to a drinking fountain where he’d be in full view and waited for the informer to appear.

He felt safe. The driver had been given orders to come to his rescue should anyone threaten him. But the minutes went by without anybody revealing themselves. Just as he had decided to abandon the rendezvous, he again got the feeling of being watched. But though he turned this way and that, he saw nothing suspicious.

Instead, without being able to explain why, he walked over to the area enclosed by the plank fence. A poster advertised animal contests. The crowd, he now realised, was in fact a sort of queue.

An inner voice whispering that the letter-writer wouldn’t make himself known until he was inside the enclosure, he bought a ticket, on impulse, or so he told himself.

From his position on the stand he looked out over a makeshift arena. A rough fence separated the audience from the show ring. Not far from where he was standing, next to the stalls selling drinks, were some caged wild beasts. The animals were frightened out of their wits, he could feel their mortal anxiety as clearly as if it had been his own.

The impresario was wheeling and dealing with folk placing bets on the sanguinary spectacle they were about to witness. People were arriving in hordes. The stands were near filled to capacity.

Langhans let his gaze wander over the sea of people. Over and over again it came to a halt in a place near the wild boars’ cages; an empty patch, scarcely a square metre in size, where, oddly enough, there was nobody.

The crowd’s excitement was growing. The impresario, a man with a duelling scar on his cheek and a patch over one eye, was leading a real-life grizzly bear into the compound. The beast had an iron tether through its nose, and the tether was fastened to a metre-long chain. The beast’s nostrils must have been very sensitive, Langhans could find no other reason why it followed its master with such acquiescence.

In the middle of the arena the impresario affixed it to a metal hook on the ground. The lead was so short that the bear was unable to get up on its hind legs without tugging on its nose ring. It was going to have to fight on all fours.

Now another man was bringing in a pack of bloodhounds. The mastiffs were seething with excitement, baring their teeth and tugging at their leads, almost causing their owner to lose his balance. The man let them loose in the enclosure. A shudder passed through the crowd.