‘Let me say one thing, Herr Magistrate Stiffeniis.’ The forefinger of les Halles came up and pointed at my heart. ‘We’ll give ourselves a week. You write your summary of the investigation for General Malaport, and see if you can make some sense of what has happened. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for the corpse of Gurten.’ He shook his finger sternly at me. ‘That man did not think like any other human being, nor did he behave like one. I’ll keep looking ’til I find him. The baby is a girl, you said?’
I nodded.
‘I want that child and her mother to sleep in peace in the nights to come!’
L
IGHT SHONE FORTH
in fragmented sunbeams which caught the clouds, highlighting the edges, darkening the shadows. The mist began to lift. I could see the fields, the trees, the house. All was calm. All seemed right. The night had passed. Another day had begun. As it must.
I closed the gate and made my way along the lane to town, as I had done almost every day of the nine years that I had been living in Lotingen. I had called the assizes for that morning, intending to conclude the case of Keillerhaus
v.
Gaffenburger, the very same litigation that I had been obliged to postpone the day that General Malaport had sent me post-haste to the coast.
The ‘Silly Cow-Pat’ case, as I had privately christened it.
My boots crunched loudly on a black carpet of flies and insects. The noise raised my spirits.
That
enemy had been defeated. The night before, a cold wind had begun to blow. It whistled in from the coast like a witch’s breath, and instantly all the flies and insects fell dead. That wind had sucked the life out of them. They dropped to the ground like bits of lead, their wings and shells hard, dry, dull in colour.
In no time, the earth was coated with them.
I thought of the creatures imprisoned in the frozen world of amber. They were larger and more monstrous than the ones that I was stepping on.
Could anyone hope to bring that world to life again?
Could any man believe that such bestiality was buried in our minds and souls?
In
my
mind and soul?