Irreparable damage? A nursery rhyme that my children loved to sing with Lotte tinkled through my mind. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men had tried, but they couldn’t put that broken egg back together again.
. . .
to the retentive muscles around the right eye, and the consequent evacuation of the eye socket. The visual organ, which is crushed and badly bruised, remains suspended only by the optical nerve and one partially severed tendon. There is also clear evidence of multiple fracturing of the osteo-nasal triangle, and the loss, either in whole or in part, of several teeth in the upper jaw. The lower jaw has been crushed and broken in at least three places, although compression of the mandible and shattering of the palate makes exact measurement extremely difficult. The tongue has also been severed from its root, and cleanly bitten through at one-third of its extension.
Good God, I asked myself, what had happened to Gottewald?
The neck and trunk have also suffered extreme violence. The neck has certainly been broken, though whether before or after the man was dead cannot be ascertained with reasonable security. There is widespread evidence of the collapse of the ribcage all down the right-hand side, many bones having pushed out through the flesh, which is, in turn, black and blue with haematin, and blood-caked. The bones of both the arms and the forearms—that is, of both the left and right upper and lower arms—have been smashed and broken in many places from the shoulder all the way down to the wrist. Tearing of the supporting muscles and rupturing of the internal tissue, despite the fact that the webbing of the skin is relatively intact, means
that the arms are deprived of tonic form. Pressure with the fingers reveals that the underlying structure lacks any sort of solid consistency: it is not dissimilar to gelatine. There is also clear evidence of scarnification of the lower abdomen, the testicles and the virile member. The area is marked by deep cuts, scraping and significant crushing or compression.In conclusion, when physical pressure is applied to the left-hand side of the thorax, there is a sound of loud cracking, which leads me to suppose that the lungs, and perhaps the heart, have been pierced by fragments of bone, leading to lacerations of these vital organs, with consequent malfunction and collapse.
It is my considered opinion that Major Gottewald died of pulmonary suffocation as a result of his injuries. There is ample congealed blood and mucus in the mouth, nose and breathing passages. No autopsy or examination of the internal organs was deemed necessary, given the evident gravity of the observable exterior damage.
The report ended there. I sat back, raised the soiled document to within an inch of my nose and took a deep breath, juddering with revulsion as that unmistakable organic ordure worked its way down into my lungs. What had Bruno Gottewald done to earn such hatred? Was Rochus expressing his own childish disregard for a high-ranking officer whom he did not respect, or was there some other explanation for the posthumous insult?
‘What made Gottewald so popular, Rochus?’
The boy was standing over me like a sentinel.
‘Is that what it says?’ he frowned. ‘It’s a plain lie. He was a dark one, all right. The fattest rat in the fortress was more popular.’
I stored up this comment, and turned back to the document.
What sort of accident or physical maltreatment had led to the man’s death? The doctor offered no hypothesis. He had simply set down the facts of what was clearly a cut-and-dried case of inevitable decease, listing the terrible injuries one after another, as if they were items on a shopping list.
An additional sheet of rougher, darker paper had been pinned to the doctor’s report. This page had not been subjected to defecation, I noted with relief, and I read it over with growing curiosity. It was the report of Lieutenant Konrad Klunger, the duty officer, and it was dated 8 October, like the doctor’s note.
No smile graced my lips this time as I read the weary formulaic introduction.
On this, the 8th day of October, in this, the year of the Lord, 1807, being this, the tenth year of the glorious reign of our Supreme Monarch, King Frederick Wilhelm III, Ruler of all the States of Prussia, the corpse of 1st Major Gottewald
Bruno was carried into the fortress by trooper-privates Albrecht Rainer, Zoran Malekevic, Ludwig Karteller and Corporal Rodion Luthant at 4.51 this afternoon. By the sworn statement of the four men, corroborated by the other six men in the unit, and by an entry in the Out-Book, Major Gottewald led his men into the woods to the east of Kamenetz not long after first light this morning for a routine hunt-and-kill exercise, commonly referred to as ‘the deer hunt’.Despite the fact that he was officer in charge, whose duty was simply to observe and supervise, Major Gottewald surprised the men under his command by electing to play the deer . . .
I knew exactly the sort of exercise that was being referred to. It was used in every military barracks and training camp in Prussia. I had played the game myself as a boy in the company of my brother, Stefan, and our friends in the hilly woods surrounding the family mansion in Ruisling. The idea was to run from point A to point B without being seen. This was the role of the deer. The hunters were supposed to hide themselves in the woods or grass along the way, and ‘kill’ the deer before it reached point B. ‘Killing’ in this case meant actually touching the deer, and shouting out ‘you’re dead’. When trained soldiers played out such an exercise, it would be extremely dangerous.
How many times in his career had Gottewald been put to the test?
How often had he elected himself to play the deer?
I rubbed my brow in puzzlement, wondering what had gone wrong.
Rainer and Malekevic swear that Major Gottewald insisted on running in a part of the wood where the men had never been before. Gottewald told them to report back to the fortress in time for lunch. He boasted that his men would find him waiting there when they arrived. At 2.00 p.m., the men were waiting outside the mess, but Major Gottewald did not present himself at the officers’ table. Having left the fortress at dawn, he had not signed in again at either of the gates. The obvious conclusion was drawn. He had been lost, possibly injured, while out on field exercises. Despite the fact that it was snowing, General Katowice promptly gave orders for a search to be launched, sending the men who had gone out with Major Gottewald that morning to search the same part of the woods where the game had taken place. By late afternoon, the body had been discovered at the bottom of a narrow gorge. The officer’s face was covered with blood. Possibly he had fallen over, or had accidentally struck himself in the face. In a state of temporary blindness, he did not see the insuperable obstacle which blocked his path, a chasm approximately fifteen feet wide, and he fell eighty or ninety feet to his death on the frozen bed of the river at the foot of the cliff. He had suffered extensive injuries, and may have been dead on impact. Jutting rocks were certainly implemental in inflicting the mortal wounds.
If the doctor’s report and the memorandum of the duty officer had been read out to me in court, I would have had little doubt in declaring that the man had been murdered. Could so much physical damage be caused by a fall alone? Had he been beaten up first, then thrown off the cliff to simulate an accident? But I could see no sense in it. Those soldiers would be taking an enormous risk, killing their officer in the wood while out on an exercise. If they wanted him dead, the dreary fortress was a better hunting ground. Would any murderer, no matter how bold or stupid, wish his name to appear in an official document relating to the death of his victim?
Could it really have been an accident, then?
Given the snow and the treacherously slippery ground, it was, perhaps, a wonder that only one man had been killed.
The corpse has been interred in the cemetery of Kamenetz
, I read.
I sat up stiffly.
Sybille Gottewald must have known that her husband had been killed a week or so before death darkened her own door in Lotingen. I felt a welling-up of compassion mixed with horror. What had caused such tragedies to fall on that family? A father and three children dead. In such different ways, and at such a great distance. All within a matter of days.
My thoughts flew to Lotingen. Had Lavedrine managed to find the mother in my absence, or was her corpse rotting somewhere in the woods, deprived of Christian burial, prey to the ravages of the winter and the ferocity of animals? Was it a matter of blind, cruel Fate, or had some darker design decreed the annihilation of the entire Gottewald family?
It seemed impossible that there was
not
a connection. It was beyond the range of statistical reckoning to imagine that violence had struck the whole family indiscriminately. But the opposite was also true. Numerical computation, as Voltaire has demonstrated, is an incomplete science. Nothing under the sun is wholly impossible; it may simply not have happened yet. It would take only a short conversation with that other cynical French Encyclopaedist in Lotingen to remind me. Lavedrine would chuckle if I insisted that they had all been victims of a plot, unless I could present him with convincing evidence to support the suggestion.
But then, another oddity struck me.
Why had the wife made no attempt to have the body sent to Lotingen for burial, as she had every right to request?
‘Have you finished?’ Rochus asked gruffly. The boy was standing over me in a defiant mood once more, one hand held out boldly in front of him, the other dangling his bayonet. ‘I’m to take them papers back where they came from. Orders of General Katowice. He told me to leave you at the officers’ mess. If you want to eat, that is?’
I handed over the report without a word, drew my cloak more tightly around me, and followed the boy. A zigzag course through the highways and byways of the fortress led at last to a very large open space, in the centre of which stood a tall narrow building.
Rochus pointed his finger. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
So Rochus, or some other trusted minion of Katowice, was to keep me under strict surveillance until the time for my departure. It was not the thought of being watched like a criminal that irritated me, but the implications of what I had just read. Gottewald had died in Kamenetz, his children had been murdered in Lotingen. Was the killer at large in the fortress? Would I find myself sitting down at the same table as a man whose hands were stained with their blood, unable to investigate as I would have wished, simply because General Katowice had set a veto on my doing so?
I walked away across the courtyard, mounting the stone steps that led to the dining hall. As the door swung closed behind me, I paused, openmouthed, at the size of the room. The mess was in the central core of the fortress. It was impressive and depressing at the same time. The room was octagonal in shape, as high as a church, but no more than sixty feet at its widest point. A log fire roared and sparked colourfully in a fireplace large enough to stable ten horses, but the atmosphere was as cold as a tomb in February. Three large tables had been laid out in the centre. Two officers sat at one table, two more sat at another, while three of them had taken their places at the table nearest to the fire.
I made my way towards the latter.
‘Do you mind if I join you?’ I asked.
The men looked up, but no one said a word.
I sat myself down on the wooden bench. ‘My name is Hanno Stiffeniis,’ I said, increasingly uncomfortable in the strained silence. ‘I am a magistrate, here to . . .’
‘We know,’ one of the officers interjected. He did not look in my direction as he spoke. His eyes remained fixed on his plate. He was a solid bulllike man with mottled red skin, and hair that had been shorn to the scalp, except for a black skullcap which had escaped the barber’s blade. The heads of the other men had been tonsured in a similarly brutal fashion. They might have been monks of a holy order sworn to silence. Only their uniforms betrayed their profession.
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll not try to worm anything from you that General Katowice would disapprove of. Carry on as you would normally do.’
They needed no encouragement. The heavy silence endured for the fifteen minutes that it took for a bowl of thin spelt soup and a plate of pale boiled beef to appear before me, carried wordlessly in the hands of a
serving-boy. While I spooned down my lukewarm broth, and carved away at my half-cooked meat, the soldiers stood up one by one, pushing their plates away, and left the mess hall. No one said a word to me. There was nothing strange in that, of course. They had been told to have nothing to do with me, and they were following orders. But I had not been prohibited from watching them, and I did so eagerly. They were all most meticulous in their observances. If one man alone had done such a thing, I would probably have dismissed it as an idiosyncrasy. But all seven officers went through the self-same ritual. They made for the central wall on the left-hand side of the hall, stood to attention in stiff silence for thirty seconds or so, then clicked their heels, and strode swiftly to the exit. As I cleared my plate, wiping up the gravy with black bread, I sat alone, wondering what it was all about.
‘Have you finished, sir?’ a voice sounded at my elbow.
The boy orderly was waiting, anxious to take away my dish and set the hall in order after lunch. He looked even younger than Rochus.
‘Yes, I have,’ I said, but I held my pewter plate firmly, determined not to let go of it until I had got to the bottom of the mystery. ‘What flag is that?’ I asked, pointing to the far side of the room.
‘Sir?’ the child asked, his eyes wide with fright.
He was just a kitchen-boy. Perhaps no one had bothered to tell him that I was not to be spoken to.
‘That one,’ I said again. ‘That banner over there on the wall. What is it?’