The Hangman's Daughter (18 page)

Josef Bichler crossed himself as he looked down on the destruction. “It must have been some kind of devil,” he whispered. “The same one that murdered the little ones. Who else knocks down entire walls?”

“A devil or a couple of strong men using a tree trunk,” Jakob Kuisl said. “This one there, for instance.” He pointed to a thick pine trunk with its branches removed lying in the clearing not far from the north wall. Tracks in the dirt revealed how it had been dragged from the edge of the wood to the spot and from there on to the wall. The hangman nodded. “They probably used it like a battering ram.” They climbed over part of the destroyed wall into the interior of the structure. The foundation had been smashed at several points as if someone had gone wild with a pickax. Slabs of stones had been pushed to the side and clumps of clay and pieces of brick were scattered around. In places the debris reached as high as their knees, so that they sometimes had to climb over heaps of rubble. It looked worse than after an attack by the Swedish forces.

“Why would someone do anything like that?” whispered Simon. “That’s no longer vandalism, that’s blind destructiveness.”

“Strange,” remarked Kuisl, chewing on his cold pipe. “Tearing down the walls would really have been enough to halt the building. But here…”

The carpenter looked at him anxiously. “I’m telling you…the devil,” he hissed. “Only the devil has such power. Look at the chapel next to it—he crushed it with his fist as if it were a piece of paper.”

Simon shivered. Now at noon the sun was trying to dissolve the morning mist but it couldn’t quite do that. The mist still hung in thick clouds over the clearing. The forest, which began only a few yards behind the building site, could be seen only dimly.

In the meantime Jakob Kuisl had stepped out again through the masonry archway. He kept searching around in front of the western wall fragment and finally stopped. “Here!” he called out. “Clear tracks. Must have been four or five men.”

All of a sudden he stooped down and picked something up. It was a small black leather pouch, no larger than a child’s fist. He opened it, looked inside, and then sniffed it. A blissful smile brightened his face. “First-rate tobacco,” he told Simon and the carpenter, who had both come closer. He rubbed the brown fibers into crumbs and deeply inhaled the aroma once more. “But not from around here. This is good stuff. I’ve smelled something like this up in Magdeburg once. For this stuff, traders got themselves slaughtered like pigs.”

“You’ve been to Magdeburg?” asked Simon softly. “You never told me about that.”

The hangman quickly stuffed the pouch into his coat pocket. Without answering Simon’s question he walked toward the foundation walls of the chapel. Here, too, there was nothing but destruction. What had been walls were toppled over, forming small stone mounds. He climbed one of them and gazed all about. His mind seemed to be still on the pouch he had found. “Nobody smokes that kind of tobacco around here,” he called down to the other two.

“How would you know?” asked the carpenter sourly. “All of this devil’s weed smells the same!”

The hangman was torn from his thoughts and looked down angrily at Josef Bichler. As he stood there on the mound of stones surrounded by clouds of mist, he reminded Simon of some legendary giant. The hangman pointed his finger at the carpenter. “You stink,” he shouted. “Your teeth stink, and your mouth stinks, but this…weed, as you call it, is fragrant! It invigorates the senses and tears you from your dreams! It covers the entire world and lifts you into heaven; let me tell you that! In any case, it’s much too good for a peasant numskull like you. It comes from the New World, and it is not meant for any old nitwit.”

Before the carpenter could answer, Simon interrupted, pointing to a mound of wet, brown earth just next to the chapel. “Look, there are tracks here too!” he shouted. The mound was indeed covered with shoe prints. With a last angry look the hangman climbed down from the mound and examined the tracks. “Boot tracks,” he said finally. “These are soldiers’ boots, that’s for sure. I’ve seen too many of them to make a mistake here.” He whistled loudly. “This is getting interesting…” He pointed to a particular impression, somewhat blurred at the end of the sole. “This man limps. He’s dragging one foot a little and cannot put much weight on it.”

“The devil’s clubfoot,” hissed Josef Bichler.

“Nonsense,” growled Kuisl. “If it were a clubfoot, then even you would be able to see it. No, the man is limping. He probably got a bullet in his leg during the war. They took out the bullet, but the leg has remained stiff.”

Simon nodded. He could still remember such operations from his days as an army surgeon’s son. Using long, thin grasping pincers, his father had burrowed into the wounded man’s flesh until he finally found the bullet. Pus and gangrene had often developed afterward, and the soldier would die within a short time. But sometimes all went well, and the man could go back into combat, only to come back to them with a stomach wound the next time.

The hangman pointed at the mound of moist earth. “What is the clay doing here?” he asked.

“We use it to plaster the walls and the floor,” the carpenter said. “The clay is from the pit by the brick hut behind the tanners’ quarter.”

“This property here belongs to the church, doesn’t it?” Simon asked the carpenter.

Josef Bichler nodded. “Schreevogl, the old codger, willed it to the church shortly before he died last year, and the young heir wound up with nothing.”

Simon remembered his conversation the day before yesterday with Jakob Schreevogl. That was more or less what the patrician’s son had told him. Bichler grinned at him and poked at something that was stuck between his teeth.

“It sure bothered the young Schreevogl,” he said.

“How do you know that?” asked Simon.

“I used to work for the old man, over at his kiln. They sure got in each other’s hair, and then the old man told him that he was giving the land to the church for the leper house, and that heaven would reward him for it, and then he told his son to go to hell.”

“And young Schreevogl?”

“He cursed mightily, mainly because he’d already planned a second kiln here. Now the church got it all.”

Simon wanted to ask more questions, but a crashing noise caused him to whirl around. It was the hangman who had jumped over a stack of boards and was now running across the road toward the forest. There, almost swallowed up in the fog, Simon was able to make out another form, crouched down and running through the trees toward the high bank of the Lech.

Simon broke away from the surprised carpenter and ran diagonally across the clearing, hoping to cut off the other person. When he reached the edge of the woods, he was only a few yards behind him. From the right he could hear branches breaking as the hangman drew nearer, panting and swinging his cudgel.

“Run after him! I’ll stay on the right so he won’t escape over the fields,” he panted. “We’ll get him up on the steep bank at the latest.”

Simon was now in the middle of a dense pine forest.

He couldn’t see the fleeing person anymore, but he could hear him. In front of him twigs kept snapping, and muffled steps were moving away rapidly on the needle-covered ground. At times he thought he could distinguish a vague shape between the branches. The man, or whoever it was in front of him, was running in a crouch and somehow…strangely. Simon noticed that he was breathing harder, and there was a metallic taste in his mouth. It had been a long time since he had run so long and so fast. Come to think of it, it had been since his childhood. He was accustomed to sitting in his room reading books and drinking coffee, and he hadn’t done much running in recent years, except for those few times when he had to flee from angry fathers of pretty burghers’ daughters. But that, too, had been a while back.

Simon was losing ground to the runner in front of him and the snapping of twigs became less audible. From far off to the right he could hear the splintering of wood. That had to be the hangman, bounding like a wild boar over the fallen trees.

A few moments later Simon had reached the bottom of a small depression. The slope on the other side rose steeply before him. Somewhere beyond it began the bank of the Lech. Instead of pine trees, low intertwined bushes grew there, making it almost impossible to break through. Simon pulled himself up on one of the bushes and, with a curse, let go of it immediately. He had reached right into a blackberry bush and his right hand was now covered with small thorns. He listened, but all he could hear was splintering wood behind him. Now he saw the hangman coming from that direction. Kuisl leaped over a moldy tree trunk and finally came to a stop in front of him.

“So?” asked Jakob Kuisl. He too was breathless from the chase, even if not nearly as much as the physician. Simon shook his head while bending over with a stitch in his side. “I think we’ve lost him,” he panted.

“Damn,” the hangman cursed. “I am sure it was one of the men who destroyed the building site.”

“Then why did he come back?” asked Simon, still out of breath.

Jakob Kuisl shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe he wanted to see first if the site had been abandoned. Perhaps he wanted to see it once more, and perhaps he just wanted to look for his good tobacco.” He hit his truncheon against a stunted fir tree. “Whatever. We’ve lost him in any case.” He looked up the steep slope. “He must be pretty strong if he can climb this. Not everybody could.”

In the meantime the physician had sat down on a moss-covered stump and was hard at work pulling the blackberry thorns out of his hand. A multitude of tiny mosquitoes swarmed around his head, looking for a good place to find blood.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, waving his arms to ward off the mosquitoes.

The hangman nodded and walked ahead a few steps. Suddenly he stopped and pointed to the ground. In front of him lay an uprooted tree. At the spot where it had been rooted in the ground there was now a patch of moist, loamy soil. Two boot imprints were plainly visible in the center. The left one was less clear and ended in a sliding footprint.

“The limping man,” whispered Jakob Kuisl. “It really was one of the soldiers.”

“But why did they destroy the leper house? And what does that have to do with the dead children?” Simon asked.

“That’s something we shall soon find out. Very soon,” muttered the hangman. His eyes wandered once more over the crest of the hill. For an instant he thought he saw a human form up there, but then clouds of mist drifted by once more. He pulled the small tobacco pouch from his coat pocket and started to fill his pipe as he walked along.

“At least the devil has good taste,” he said. “You have to grant the bastard that much.”

As for the devil, he was standing at the top of the slope and, hidden behind a beech tree, looking down at the two small figures directly below him. Next to him lay a large boulder. For a moment he was tempted to get the rock rolling. It would loosen other rocks as it fell, setting off an avalanche of gravel, rock, and dead branches that would descend on those two down there and possibly bury them. His pale skeletal hand reached for the boulder, but then the taller of the two figures suddenly turned his head in his direction. For a brief moment he looked into the man’s eyes. Had the hangman seen him? He pressed himself back against the beech tree and dismissed his idea. This man was too strong and agile. He would hear the rockslide coming and would jump to the side. The little quack was no problem, a snoop whose throat he would cut the next time they met in some dark corner of town. But the hangman…

He should not have come back here. Not in broad daylight. Of course they would examine the building site at one time or another. But he had lost his tobacco pouch, and that was something they might be able to trace to him. Besides, he had a nagging suspicion. Therefore he had decided to look into things himself. Only the others mustn’t know anything about it. They were waiting for the devil to come and pay them off. If the workmen were to start building again, they would simply return and pull everything down once more. That was their order. But the devil was shrewd and had figured out right off that there was more than that to this business. And so he had returned. That the little snoop and the hangman had shown up at the same moment was annoying. But they didn’t catch him and he would simply give it another try at night.

He had told the others to look for the girl, but they had only reluctantly followed his order. They still obeyed him because they were afraid of him and had already accepted him earlier as their leader. But they were contradicting him more often now. They couldn’t understand how important it was to eliminate the children. They had caught the little boy at the very start, and now they figured that the others would be terrified. They did not understand that the business had to be finished. The mission was in danger, and the payment was at risk. These dirty little brats who thought they could get away from him! A filthy little gang, squealing piglets whose throats had to be slit to make the shrill sounds in his head stop.

Shrill tolling of bells, crying of women, high-pitched wailing of infants that makes one’s eyeballs burst…

Again, mist clouded his vision and he had to cling to the beech trunk so as not to topple down the slope. He bit his lips until he could taste blood, and only then did his mind clear. First he would have to eliminate the girl, then the snoop, and then the hangman. The hangman would be the most difficult. A worthy opponent. And then he would straighten things out down there at the building site. He was certain that the moneybags had kept something from him. But you can’t fool the devil. And if anyone tried to, the devil bathed in his blood.

He breathed in the scent of fresh earth and delicate flowers. Everything was all right now. With a smile on his lips he walked along the edge of the hill until he was swallowed up in the forest.

When Simon and Jakob Kuisl returned to Schongau, the appearance of the ghostly figure had already become the talk of the town. Josef Bichler and the other workmen had run straight to the market square and told everyone of the devil’s imminent arrival. The market stalls all around the Ballenhaus were abuzz with whispering and gossiping. Many of the local craftsmen had laid down their work and were now standing around in groups. The whole town was gripped with tension. Simon had the feeling that it wouldn’t take much for the fuse to blow. One wrong word, one shrill cry, and the mob would force their way into the keep and burn Martha Stechlin themselves.