HS02 - Days of Atonement (25 page)

‘You look frightful, Stiffeniis. Have you just returned?’

‘An hour ago,’ I said, waking up from dazed embarrassment. ‘I had a word with Dittersdorf. Since then, I’ve been trying to track you down. I went to General Quarters, then to the lodging-house of Herr Böll, the ragman.’

‘And the good Böll told you where to find me,’ Lavedrine said, evidently amused as he sat back in his seat. ‘What did you make of him?’

‘I am not here to discuss my opinion of your landlord,’ I replied.

‘What a pity!’ he replied, clearly pleased with himself. ‘I take a professional interest in the man. I have never seen any person fall so easily into such a deep and lasting trance.’

I remembered the stout man, the way his eyes had rolled up into his head, my fear that he might be about to faint in front of me.

‘Hypnosis is a favourite subject of mine,’ Lavedrine explained. ‘I was hoping to study this local phenomenon and make the most of my idle hours. It may be of use in my profession, I thought. But you’re not here to listen to my prattling tales,’ he said, running his hand through his hair, brushing the silvery curls back from his forehead. ‘Would you care for a fig preserved in honey?’

He offered a platter from the table, taking one for himself when I refused. He held up another for his companion. Putipù leant forward, mouth open, tongue chasing after the slippery fruit, as Lavedrine pulled it playfully away. Her chestnut-coloured hair shifted lazily to one side, giving off a more tantalisingly sweet perfume than the delicacies on the plate.

‘Bien,
to business! What did Gottewald have to say for himself?’ he asked. ‘How did he take the news of the massacre?’

‘Must we talk here?’ I asked, looking towards the silent creature who made up the third member of our party.

Putipù held my gaze. She did not say a word. Only her mouth moved, as she chewed the fig, then swallowed it. She seemed content to sit there, showing off her partial nudity and total ambiguity, as if it was all that she asked of life.

‘Putipù will excuse my momentary disattention while we talk. The
gentildonna
comes from Naples, as I mentioned, though
femminiello
is the musical-sounding name they use down there for such entrancing ambiguity. She understands no other tongue,’ he said, turning to the object of our discussion with the warmest of smiles.

The girl, if that is what she was, made an impatient grimace, flirting with her eyes in a manner that was almost too feminine to be believed, murmuring words to him in what I took to be an Italian dialect.

Lavedrine blew a kiss to her, then turned to me.

‘You must be thoroughly exhausted after hunting Sybille Gottewald all this time.’ I said it mildly enough, but I could not suppress a note of accusation.

The smile died on his lips. His large, irregular face, which was, as a rule, lively, animated—fascinating, I supposed, to judge from the greedy way his companion watched him—seemed to crumble and collapse into a mask of tired melancholy. Again, he ran his hand through his hair. Again, the silvery curls fell back as soon as he desisted. He had been drinking heavily, I realised.

He snarled: ‘You suppose that I have been on my worst behaviour, while you’ve been slaving like a dog. Am I correct?’

He threw out his forefinger, which quivered in the warm air.

‘I have
not
found Frau Gottewald. Dead, or alive. But not for want of trying. I’ve searched this town from end to end. It is harder to find a well-hidden corpse than a living, screaming woman, Herr Procurator.’

He sat back, and a deep sigh escaped from his lips.

‘I hope you have been more fortunate,’ he said, stretching out his hand to take another sweet.

I held my silence.

‘Well, damn you,’ he said, snatching up another fig, ‘aren’t you going to tell me what Gottewald had to say while you were travelling together?’

I waited until he had chewed and swallowed.

‘Bruno Gottewald is dead,’ I announced.

The expression of confusion that flashed across his face might have given me pleasure in other circumstances, but I had more important things on my mind.

‘We must hammer out a pact,’ I said with fierce determination. ‘Just you and I. No one else. The French and Prussian authorities must never know.’

‘Coming from a genuine Prussian,’ Lavedrine replied, ‘that sounds to me like a treasonable offence.’

I nodded two or three times, savouring the words before I said them.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Treason is what I am proposing. In the interests of truth.’

 19 

‘I
SHOULDN’T BE
telling you any of this.’

My throat was sore with cold. It ached with every lie that I told him. Still, I kept my promise to Dittersdorf. As I described it, Kamenetz fortress was a forgotten enclave that could be cancelled out at the drop of the emperor’s crown. General Juri Katowice, commander of that lonely outpost, was an ancient relic, a tottering invalid with an amputated hand, content to steer clear of trouble until his pension was granted. His troops were a defeated and demoralised band of melancholy failures. Of boys training for a future war against the French, I said not a thing. Baptista von Schill was another phantom not worth mentioning. And, of course, those French heads pickled in vinegar had ceased to exist.

‘They are an innocuous, inoffensive lot in Kamenetz,’ I concluded.

‘But Gottewald died there,’ Lavedrine insisted, pushing a glass of dark red wine across the table, inviting me to drink with them.

‘His death was recorded as an accident,’ I replied. ‘He fell from a cliff while out on a routine training exercise, and broke every bone in his body, including his neck. Herr General Katowice insists that the massacre in Lotingen is nothing but a strange coincidence.’

Lavedrine glanced away with a heavy sigh, while Putipù followed every shift and movement that the Frenchman made. My tale was of no interest to her. Nothing seemed to interest her, except for Serge Lavedrine.

‘It happened before the children died. Before Gottewald’s wife disappeared.’ I took a gulp of wine, and felt a soothing warmth. ‘There must be some connection, I am certain. How can there
not
be? I managed to speak with a number of Katowice’s officers, and with some of his men. They all believe that Gottewald was a traitor. A coward. That was the impression I got. They hated him for some reason. Which brings me to the point. Why would his colleagues believe that Major Gottewald had betrayed them? He was a career soldier, a typical product of our military cadre. He must have done something extraordinary to jeopardise that position.’

Lavedrine stared back, then pulled an ugly face. ‘What do you suspect?’

The nonchalance with which he greeted me had given way to concentration.

‘I have no idea yet,’ I admitted.

Lavedrine set his glass down on the table-top and refilled it. With a tilt of the bottle, he invited Putipù to join him. The creature smiled. Was there a hint of a shadow under all that paint and powder, the suggestion of closely shaven hair on the upper lip and the jaw? Women from the Mediterranean shore were darker of skin, more careless about their bodies. I had seen hair exposed on the arms and the legs of fisherwomen in Genoa that any decent Nordic woman would have hidden beneath long sleeves and extravagant flounces. Putipù sipped at the wine with a careless grace that was, I thought, exaggerated, stretching forth her chin unnaturally far, pursing her lips to meet the rim.

As her Adam’s apple bobbed, over-large, all my doubts returned.

‘The situation you have described,’ Lavedrine continued, waving his glass in the air, ‘may explain the death of Gottewald in the fortress. But does it explain the murder of his children?’

‘If we knew why he had been murdered,’ I said, ‘many things might appear in a clearer light.’

Lavedrine sat up suddenly. His eyes flared into mine. His breath was hot with wine, but his sarcastic temper was more inflamed. ‘Are you suggesting that someone came all the way from Kamenetz to Lotingen to kill those children, and carry off the mother?’ he challenged. ‘The inhuman ferocity of Prussian soldiers does not surprise me. They are renowned for it. On the field of battle they are merciless. But I can make no sense of the notion that a battle-trained soldier would slit the throats of children, then mutilate their corpses. How might this relate to Prussian military honour?’

He sat back heavily, his eyes dull and bleary.

‘The final punishment may not have been administered by a soldier,’ I replied.

Lavedrine’s eyes flashed in the candlelight. ‘Who, in that case?’

‘Someone who raises no suspicion in Lotingen. Someone who can be discarded, sacrificed, if it comes to that.’ I paused for effect. ‘Franz Durskeitner, for example. A man who knows the local terrain. A man who possesses skill with a knife. A man who can be easily browbeaten,’ I added, remembering the ease with which Lavedrine had insinuated himself into the woodsman’s favour. ‘The perfect instrument for the perfect murder. Durskeitner will have to be interrogated again.’

Lavedrine held up his hand to stop the flow.

‘That man is also dead,’ he said, staring deep into his wine glass. ‘They
found him the day after you left. Inflammation of the lungs was the doctor’s diagnosis. You’ll recall how cold it was when we questioned him. A prison cell was not the best place for him. Not in that condition.’

A living image of the woodsman flashed before my eyes. The monstrosity of that half-formed body. The knotted muscles in his arms and shoulders, the fragility of all the rest. I recalled the discoloured wounds on his chest which had been doused with acid, then cruelly probed by the French soldiers.

‘Surely you spoke to him again?’ I quizzed. ‘You’d won his confidence. He must have told you more about Frau Gottewald.’

I did not underestimate the Frenchman. He was capable of keeping the best news until the last, if only to confute my theories and exalt his own investigative abilities. But Lavedrine slowly shook his head again.

‘The only interrogation he underwent was the one that you conducted,’ he said.

I sat in silence absorbing this announcement.

I had gone to Kamenetz to find the father. Lavedrine had stayed in Lotingen to search for the mother. Neither of us had been successful. And now, the last man to see the woman and her children alive was dead.

He raised his eyes and stared at me, drumming on his lower lip with his fingers. ‘The morning after your departure,’ he murmured, ‘I went back to the cottage alone. We were under too much pressure that night. We . . . That is,
I
was distracted,’ he corrected himself. ‘Despite my familiarity with murder and violence, I was shocked. The sight of those children . . .’

As he spoke, his expression changed. His gaze was fixed on the surface of the table, though I do not think he saw it. He was in that room again.

‘There is something in that house. Some element,’ he said, ‘that I am unable to put my finger on. I should be able to see it, but I cannot.’

He raised his forefinger and twirled it emptily in the air.

‘It is there. I know it. Right before my eyes. But I cannot focus properly.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose it is because I am a foreigner,’ he said. ‘It’s like the German language. I understand it well enough, but sometimes a particular nuance of meaning escapes me. In a French house, it would be different . . .’

He tapped his fist on his forehead.

‘Those stains of blood on the wall beneath the window, for instance,’ he mused.

I thought back to those traces. We had puzzled over them together that night. But then, we had been distracted by the horror of the scene in that bedroom, caught up in the frantic search for the missing woman.

‘Have you made any sense of them?’ I asked.

He raised his eyes and stared at me, again drumming on his lower lip with his fingers.

‘They are distant from the bed, where the bodies were found. Yet, they are distinct, thick, dripping with blood. It’s almost as if they had been daubed there.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Lavedrine did not answer at once. I thought he had not heard me, or that he did not care to answer.