The Werewolf of Bamberg (9 page)

“Or perhaps because the rats have had a feast on the corpse?” Hieronymus Hauser suggested, without any reaction to Jakob’s sarcastic remark.

Jakob Kuisl shook his head. “Believe me, my brother and I know what it looks like when someone’s nails have been pulled out. We’ve done it ourselves often enough, haven’t we, Bartholomäus?”

Bartholomäus nodded silently, and Jakob had the feeling that the two others were distancing themselves a bit from him and his brother.

After a while, he bent down over the girl’s corpse and began sniffing noisily, his huge nostrils flaring out like sails. Again he noticed the strange, musty odor that he had wondered about the previous night. Now it was far fainter, barely perceptible.

“What in the world is your brother doing?” the horrified captain whispered.

“He . . . well, he has a good nose, a sensitive one,” Bartholomäus tried to explain. “Sometimes he smells things that no one else can. Almost like a bloodhound.”

The others remained silent as Kuisl examined the wound in the neck more closely. The edges were frayed, as if the murderer had used not a sharpened knife, but a saw or a jagged sword.

Or claws?

Kuisl put the thought aside and concentrated on the cut to the chest. Pulling the edges of the wound apart, he noticed that the breastbone had been almost cut in half in one place. Evidently the murderer had been interrupted while he worked. The wound was in the upper third of the breastbone, directly above the heart.

He paused.

Was that possible?

“Why are you stopping?” asked the clerk, who had been watching him with great curiosity up to that point. “Did you find anything?”

Jakob hesitated, and then shook his head. “Just a hunch. But too vague to say—”

“Now come out with it,” his brother interrupted. “Always the mystery! That’s what I couldn’t stand about you back then—even if you were usually right,” he added, grumbling.

“Speak up,” Martin Lebrecht insisted.

“The perpetrator cut through the skin and evidently wanted to open the chest with a saw, or something like it,” Jakob said finally as he turned to the circle of onlookers. He pointed at the clean incision. “This, unmistakably, is the act of a skilled workman. My brother and I probably disturbed him, and the question is why he was doing that.”

“And what do you suspect?” Hieronymus asked.

“The deep incision is right at the level of the heart,” Jakob replied. “I myself have made incisions like this in order to examine the inner organs of a body. I think . . .” He hesitated. “Well, I think the murderer wanted to cut out the girl’s heart.”

For a while no one said a word, and the only sound was the constant rushing water of the Regnitz. Finally Martin Lebrecht cleared his throat.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not this is sheer nonsense,” he finally said. “One thing must be clear: this assumption is never—I repeat,
never
—to be mentioned outside the walls of this guardhouse. If the bishop gets wind of it, great misfortune will come to this city—a misfortune like the one known all too well by the older men among us.” He cast a gloomy look at Bartholomäus. “If that should happen, Master Bartholomäus, I promise you there will be much for you to do here in Bamberg.” His voice failed him. Finally, he continued in nearly a whisper.
“God in heaven, will this horror never end?”

“If I’d known our new aunt was sending us on so many errands, I would have thought twice before coming along on this shopping trip.” Groaning, Barbara pushed past the many displays in the Fischgasse, where brook trout and slimy perch were thrashing about. A huge catfish glared scornfully at the two women, while mussels and river snails soaked in wooden tubs next to the displays. It was already past noon, but the hustle and bustle of the marketplace showed no sign of ending.

“We promised Katharina,” Magdalena said in a stern voice, “so stop complaining. Besides, the only thing we still need now is the crabs for this evening, and then we’ll be done.”

“Yes, after we’ve bought thyme, carrots, cabbage, onions, eggs, stockfish, a jug of muscatel, half a pig of bacon fat, and . . . oh, I’ve forgotten the stinking tobacco for Father.” With a sigh, Barbara sat down at the edge of a well and splashed some water on her face to cool off. “How many markets have we been to today? I stopped counting hours ago.”

“You insisted on seeing the marketplace.” Magdalena grinned. “Aunt Katharina likes to cook, and surely we can get a few recipes from her.”

“Well! I didn’t come to Bamberg just to sit by the stove and exchange recipes. Besides, I don’t want to get as fat as Aunt Katharina, and . . . Hey, wait a minute!”

Magdalena had turned away with a shrug and continued down past the many stalls on Fischstrasse toward the harbor. Their shopping trip had indeed taken the two hangman’s daughters through half the city. They’d gone from the Green Market in front of St. Martin’s Church to the fruit market, the milk market, and finally down Butcher’s Lane. The city seemed much friendlier to Magdalena now than it had on their arrival the night before. The streets were wider and cleaner than in Schongau, and some were even paved. Gaily colored, half-timbered houses, breweries redolent of malt, and a huge number of small churches and chapels bore witness to the rich heritage of this seat of the Archdiocese of Bamberg, formerly one of the mightiest cities in the Reich. It was clear, however, that Bamberg’s best years lay behind it. Again and again the two women had come across abandoned houses and ruins that looked like festering wounds between the other buildings. Not for the fist time, Magdalena asked herself why people had simply abandoned their magnificent homes.

Up to that point, they had been strolling only through the new part of the city, a large area standing like an island surrounded by two branches of the Regnitz. The old part of the city, where the canons and the bishop resided, lay on the other side of the canal, where a cathedral was built atop a hill, the highest point in the city. The two sections of town met at the harbor, not far from city hall. Huge river rafts, flat-bottomed boats, and small barques traveled serenely past the houses there. More ships lay at anchor at the piers to pay their tolls before proceeding to Schweinfurt or Forchheim. A wooden crane was unloading crates from one of the rafts, and the air smelled of algae, fish, and stagnant river water. Men shouted, laughed, and cursed as fishwives offered their slippery catch to passersby.

Magdalena went to a booth off to one side and bought the river crabs that Katharina had asked for. Her basket was now filled to the top, and Barbara also had a heavy bundle to carry, with carrots and bunches of leeks sticking out of their wrappings.

“So that’s it,” Magdalena said with relief. “Let’s take these things as quickly as we can to the hangman’s house before Aunt Katharina gets impatient, and then—”

She was interrupted by a drumroll and a squawking fanfare of rusty trumpets, and when she turned around, she saw a group of men down at the harbor with drums and wind instruments. They wore colorful, threadbare costumes and powdered wigs on their heads like those currently in fashion at German and French courts. In the middle was a beanpole of a man who, with great ceremony, unrolled a parchment.

“Are these actors?” asked Barbara with surprise. “I’ve never—”

“Shhh!” Magdalena whispered while the gaunt man began a speech in which he enunciated each word like a traveling priest, with a strange accent Magdalena had never heard before.

“Citizens of Bamberg, hear and be amazed,” he proclaimed. “The venerable troupe of Sir Malcolm that has traveled widely and performed to great acclaim in London, Paris, and Constantinople has the honor of performing in this city tragedies and comedies, unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Beginning tomorrow, come to experience love and murder, nobility and villainy, and the glory and fall of royal dynasties. We offer for your enjoyment music, dance, burlesque—in short, a true feast for the eye and ear, in the large ballroom of the wedding house.” The man pointed dramatically to a multistory building beyond the harbor square. “Our first play will be given there tomorrow afternoon, at a cost of just three kreuzers per visitor. Anyone missing it will regret it for a long time.”

“The wedding house,” Barbara whispered. “Isn’t that where the celebration for Uncle Bartholomäus and Katharina will be? Can we go there right now, Magdalena? Let’s see what’s going on there.”

Magdalena chuckled as she watched her younger sister stare longingly at the actors. A large crowd of people had gathered around the group and began to cheer. The sound grew louder when the men began doing cartwheels and juggling balls. One of them, a handsome young fellow, glanced at the two young women and smiled. He had matted, jet-black hair and was tanned, almost dark-skinned, with sinewy muscles standing out from beneath his tight-fitting linen shirt. Magdalena grinned when her little sister ran her fingers through her curls in embarrassment as they watched the antics of the actors.

Once again, Magdalena realized how little she herself had seen of the world, despite her thirty years. Occasionally, troupes of jugglers came to the provincial town of Schongau and performed their little tricks and dances and made crude jokes. Many of them came from lands beyond the Alps, and they played short, comical scenes wearing masks on their faces. But a troupe that performed longer stories on stage was new to Magdalena.

There was a long roll of drums, then the trumpets sounded again, off-key, and the troupe moved slowly back into the wedding house.

“Come, let us see where they’ve set up their theater,” Barbara pleaded again. “Just for a few minutes.”

“But what about all these things we’ve bought?” Magdalena asked.

“We’ll take them along.” Barbara was already making her way through the crowd toward the entrance to the wedding house. “Half an hour one way or the other won’t matter.”

With a sigh, Magdalena followed. She was going to object, but she couldn’t deny that the theater had an almost-magical attraction for her, as well.

As soon as the two young women entered the wide door of the wedding house they could feel the coolness of its huge walls. It was almost as if winter had already arrived. Shivering, Magdalena looked around the spacious area where kegs of wine, bales of cloth, and crates were standing. Some servants were unloading a cart that had made its way from the harbor to the building entrance. Farther back, the room opened into an interior courtyard that evidently belonged to a large tavern. The two girls could hear the shouting and quarreling of some revelers, and somewhere a fiddle was being played very badly. Under the dome itself, a wide, winding stairway led to the upper floors, where people could be heard hammering and sawing busily and a roll of drums could be heard now and then.

“I think the actors are somewhere up there,” Barbara said, and started running up the stairs so fast that Magdalena had a hard time catching up with her. The basket in her hand was full to the bursting point and getting heavier with every step.

On the second floor they indeed found the troupe. The area was dominated by a huge dance floor, surrounded on three sides by a gallery with a walkway. At the opposite end, several actors were standing on a stage normally used by musicians. They were setting up a structure whose purpose Magdalena didn’t understand. After a few moments she spotted the tanned youth again, now sweaty and wearing an open shirt, doing gymnastic tricks and putting together a pole from two pieces, at eye level, dividing the stage in two halves. Magdalena was amused to see that Barbara had spotted him, as well, and was once again playing with locks of her hair.

“Ah, I see the ladies are admiring our equipment,” they suddenly heard a voice behind them say. “Good gracious! You two would truly make charming queens.”

Magdalena turned around and saw the haggard man who had given the dramatic speech earlier. Despite his height, he was as thin as a rail, and his body was wrapped in a long, black coat that fluttered like a scarecrow’s. He was pale and poorly shaven, and he had dark eyes that appeared to bore into everyone he spoke with. Strands of a cheap wig curled like dead snakes down to his shoulders. When the man noticed the women’s hesitation, he bowed slightly.