The Fifth Servant (63 page)

           
The sun rose higher. Easter morning was going to be beautiful. The air was sharp and clear, the colors brighter, the texture of the stones visible from a greater distance. I could even make out the severed heads on the stone bridge, though they were too far away to tell the common criminals from the rebels.

           
“That kind of quiet costs more than a few dalers,” he said.

           
“I can get it.”

           
“From where?”

           
“That depends.”

           
“On what?”

           
“On finding the two men who drove a shipment of meat from Kopecky’s slaughter house down the Kreuzgasse early yesterday morning.”

           
“Oh,
them
. Sure, I saw them. Whadaya wanna know about them?”

           
The waves buffeted the small craft, and I wondered just how deep and swift the current was in this part of the river. The combination of pork sausage, rolling swells, and that slug of firewater was definitely getting to me.

           
“Where are we headed?” I asked.

           
“You see that?”

           
He pointed to a dark, gaping hole in the side of the earth.

           
“Six feet high and half a mile long,” he said. “Eleven years of digging and it’s almost finished. It’s gonna supply the water for the pond in the emperor’s garden.”

           
“So it leads straight to the Royal Game Park?”

           
“Pretty much. So what’s so special about those two drivers?” he asked.

           
“I’ve heard they can keep their mouths shut.”

           
The taste of that
treyf
came bubbling up from my gut again.

           
“You know, I always figured that the easiest place to dump a body would be the river,” I said, gripping the gunwales and trying to keep my breakfast down.

           
“Nah. It might float back to the surface.”

           
“And you wouldn’t want that to happen.”

           
“Course not. Is that what you need such quiet men for?” he asked.

           
I didn’t answer.

           
“I mean, who’s paying for this?”

           
“You don’t need to know that.”

           
My jaw clamped tight as another wave of nausea came over me.

           
When it passed, I said, “Can you just tell me what they looked like?”

           
“Is that what you’re after?” he said, pulling us close in to shore.

           
“Unless you happen to know their names and addresses.”

           
“Better than that. I can take you right to their hideout.”

           
He jumped over the side and steadied the boat. I followed his lead and dropped to the ground, where my boots sank into the muck, and together we dragged the boat up onto the shore.

           
I still felt fairly woozy.

           
The mouth of the tunnel was easily six feet high and more than ten feet wide, with wooden supports shoring it up every few yards. I couldn’t imagine the labor involved in cutting a tunnel this size half a mile deep into the side of a mountain, just to supply the emperor with fresh water for his man-made pond.

           
The water was only about a foot deep at first, but after a couple of steps, it got much deeper and came pouring into my boots, the water so icy cold that it hurt. A few more steps and it had climbed up to my knees.

           
“There’s a dry spot over here where they keep the torches,” he said, stepping into a recess cut into the rock. He took the smoldering twig from my hand and ignited a pitch-soaked quarterstaff with it.

           
The cave lit up, and I drew back from the sight of bleached bones and shrunken skin laid across a rock. But it was only the dried carcass of a fox or a raccoon.

           
The eel merchant led the way, and I followed the smell of burning pitch for a good fifty yards or so before he said, “So what’s your trade then?”

           
“Oh, this and that.”

           
“Come on, I know how to keep my mouth shut. Ask anyone.”

           
I made him think he was dragging it out of me.

           
“I feed the melancholiacs’ habits,” I said.

           
“What’s that mean?”

           
“It means there are many rare and imported herbs that can lift the spirit, and there’s plenty of money to be made supplying them to the melancholiacs.”

           
“You must mean the
rich
melancholiacs.”

           
“My goods don’t come cheap.”

           
“You apothecary types sure have it made.” He shook his head and chuckled at me. “Selling pipe dreams to the rich, following strange men down dark tunnels—”

           
I sensed it coming before he swung the torch at me. I backed up through the knee-deep water as he kept swinging the torch in furious arcs that made his face glow orange on one side then the other. Then I backed into the bare rock face, and the only thing left to do was lunge toward him as he tried to set fire to my clothes. My tunic was too damp to catch right away, but then a sharp burning bit into my shoulder and I pulled away, off-balance. He barreled into me, and I fell backward. We both hit the icy water, which slapped me in the face like the flat edge of a sword. Thankfully the flame sizzled and went out.

           
I went under. He dropped the torch and tried to hold me down, the water chilling my veins and numbing my senses. But I’ve learned a few things about severe cold in my time and even though my limbs should have been deadened by the cold, I still found his fingers and pried them away from my throat.

           
We broke the surface and fought and kicked and grabbed and punched, churning up the water like a boiling pot, until he let out a snarl that echoed through the tunnel and tried to bite me in the neck, his teeth glistening in the darkness. My hand groped around in the water and finally found the extinguished torch. I brought it up and tried to stuff it into his mouth. He clawed the air trying to grab the torch, but I spun it around and whacked him in the groin, and when he dropped to his knees, I got behind him, pressed my knee between his shoulder blades and held the rod against his windpipe.

           
“You better say your prayers,” I hissed into his ear.

           
I wanted to beat his skull against the rocks until there was nothing left of him but wet skin and a few clumps of hair.

           
Instead I waited until his head sagged loosely and he crumpled over, then I took the rope from around my waist and tied his hands behind his back. When that was done, I splashed his face with water, hauled him to his feet, and marched him back the way we came.

           
“Lucky for you I’m a God-fearing man,” I said. “What’s your name, anyway?”

           
“Tomáš,” he said, his voice all hoarse.

           
“Your full name.”

           
“Kromy. Tomáš Kromy.”

           
“Well, Tomáš, you’ve just done the worst thing you could possibly have done to me.”

           
“Yeah? What’s that?”

           
“You wasted my time.”

           
“So file a friggin’ lawsuit against me.”

           
Great. Now I had to rush back to the ghetto without having learned anything useful about the men who drove the butcher’s cart.

           
But when we emerged into the light, I saw that the gates of the
Yidnshtot
had been breached, and the smoke and sparks were flying upward.

           
And Tomáš just loved that. It even made him smile.

CHAPTER 33

           
THE WHOLE STINKING CITY was a mess, thought the bishop. Even on Easter day, the holiest day of the calendar, a day that was supposed to unite all Christians, the Bohemians were dancing their little jigs on the east side of the square and the Germans were doing the same on the west side, but they might as well have been half a world apart. And some idiot on the city council had foolishly given free rein to a bunch of Venetian architects whose undisciplined demolition crews had turned this quiet neighborhood of old stone churches, elegant gardens, and stately town houses to rubble and mud.

           
The unruly mobs of people shoving to the front of the church reminded him of a bunch of farm animals jostling for a spot at the feeding trough. They were practically climbing over each other just to get a glimpse of the glittering gold monstrances, instead of solemnly contemplating the mystery of their salvation and preparing to receive the Body of Christ. But what they lacked in politeness they made up for in passion. They smote their chests three times while repeating the confessional
por mi culpa
s, and they filled the coffers with their pennies, buying scraps of the martyred girl’s dress, locks of her golden hair, and other holy relics to take home and worship, which clearly demonstrated the sincerity of their devotion.

           
One of the Fuggers was there to ensure that every penny was properly recorded.

           
And to top it off, some
Dummkopf
had decided that today would be the perfect day to cram the whole population of the
Judenstadt
into a single church and force them to listen to a conversionist sermon. So the town sheriff had to drag his men out of bed and pull them off other duties just to handle the crowds.

           
And now thousands of Jews were standing out in the cold, waiting to have their ears inspected for wax or cotton plugs before they were allowed to enter the church. They were patted down one by one and directed to stand against the north wall while guards patrolled the marble tiles armed with pikes and paddles in case an impiety was whispered or a drowsy head nodded off.

           
As the Mass dragged on, the bishop’s eyes wandered to the face of Jesus in a high relief of the Last Supper. It was odd how the sculptors had elected to carve such deep worry lines into the Savior’s brow, when the current preference was to depict the passive tranquillity of a being who was not of this earth. This Christ who stood before him was a man of flesh and blood whose halo receded into nothingness. You could barely see it. Bishop Stempfel would have to have a talk with the master craftsman and remind him that such literalism was dangerously close to the Protestant heresy.

           
The same was true of
Die Silberlinge
, another high relief sculpture of the silver-tongued Judas betraying his master for a bag of coins. The sinister group of conspirators hid their crooked features behind their cloaks as they whispered to each other, in stark contrast to the open and honest faces of the other witnesses to the Passion. And all of them except Judas wore the pointed “Jewish hats” that were still common until quite recently, when they were replaced by the yellow badges. And so the moment of Christ’s capture, the judgment of Pilate, and the Stations of the Cross all depicted Jews as living memories in a way that made it look like the Jews were
still
betraying Christ. No wonder the common people hated them so much.

           
Once the guards established order, Brother Popel began his sermon, which relied on stitching together tried-and-true phrases, and included whole passages repeated word-for-word from the mundane lectures at the Jesuit college.

           
The bishop looked upon the Jews, and saw their cheeks sunken with hunger and their thrice-turned clothes falling to shreds before his eyes. Where were all the gold teeth and diamond brooches that the Jews had allegedly acquired by squeezing the Christians for so many years? It could have been a clever subterfuge, but it wasn’t easy to fake sunken cheeks.

           
So Brother Popel wasn’t going to save any souls by telling these world-weary Jews that they needed to learn the
true
meaning of the Old Testament by abandoning their false interpretations of it and focusing on “the plain sense of the text,” which he tried to quote in Hebrew.

           
When the bishop saw that the Jews were desperately trying to keep from laughing at the priest’s awful pronunciation, he interrupted the sermon by ringing a little bell he kept on a nearby table for just such a purpose.