Wolf on a String Read online

  But if Wenzel was vain, he was dangerous, too. This was the man who when no more than a stripling had ordered, so it was said, the assassination of his two brothers in a dispute over their father’s will.

  Reaching the fireplace, Wenzel stopped, raised his head, and squinted at me with what might have been an executioner’s measuring eye.

  “I could have you broken on the rack,” he said. “I could have you blinded and thrust out into the night to stumble off in search of whatever hole it was you crawled out of. I could do anything to you, Christian Stern, so-called.”

  Despite the harshness of the words, he had spoken them in a mild, almost playful tone, suave and amused.

  Beyond his shoulder, through the diamond panes of a window on the far side of the room, I saw the darkly agitated flicker of blown snow. From far off in the streets of the city came faintly the night watch’s mournful-sounding cry.

  Wenzel was regarding me still with a narrowed eye.

  “Well?” he said. “Have you nothing to say?”

  “I can say, sir,” I answered, “that whoever it is you think I am, you are mistaken. I am a traveling scholar, late of Würzburg. I came to this city last evening, as I have told you, and lodged at the Blue Elephant in Kleinseite, or Malá Strana, as I believe that part of the city is called in the Czech tongue. Being sleepless, and having drunk overmuch, I wandered from the inn out into the darkness and the snow, and found myself under the castle wall, and there happened upon the corpse of this unfortunate man’s daughter—”

  “This man,” Wenzel said, brusquely interrupting, “is Dr. Ulrich Kroll, court physician to His Majesty the Emperor.” He paused, and drew back his head and looked at me with rich contempt along the side of his nose. “Listen, fellow,” he said, “have you any notion of the enormity of the crime you have committed?”

  “My Lord Steward,” I patiently replied, “I have committed no crime. If I had murdered the young woman, would I have gone to alert the sentry at the gate and led him to where the body lay? Would I not have hurried back to the inn and gathered up my belongings and fled the city altogether, instead of returning to my room and to my bed, where the soldiers that you sent discovered me with such ease?” I paused. “If you knew anything of me, sir,” I said, “you would know that whatever else I may be, I am not a fool.”

  I turned to Kroll, who, his chin sunk again on his breast, was gazing bleakly into the fireplace and the throbbing white heart of the flames.

  “I swear to you, Doctor,” I said, “I never saw your daughter alive. She had long since drawn her last breath when I came upon her. I might have made off and left her corpse there in the snow, alone and uncared for. Surely it’s a pledge of my innocence that I did not?”

  The log in the fireplace broke apart in the middle, where the flames were strongest, and the burning ends of the two halves slumped at an angle to the stone floor of the hearth in a shower of crackling sparks. Kroll, a muscle beating steadily in his jaw, watched the agitated flames as they shot up from the ashy stubs only to fall back again as quickly as they had risen.

  “Yes,” he said, in his deep slow weary way. “Yes, yes.”

  Wenzel made to speak again but Kroll lifted a hand, gesturing for him to be silent. One of the broken parts of the log sank farther, sending up another spurt of sparks.

  “This is not the man who murdered my child,” Kroll said. “He is not lying.” He glanced up sidelong at me again. “She was already cold, you say?”

  “She was, sir,” I answered. “Her agony was long past, and she was at peace.”

  Yet even as I said this I recalled how the young woman had kept a grip on me somehow, as if her dying were not done with, as if something of her spirit were still there in her, for all that she was frozen and forever beyond stirring.

  Kroll put up his hand again, this time to cover his eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, as heavily and with the same finality as before. “Yes.”

  Wenzel made an impatient sound and turned away, plucking at the silken ruff at his throat. He looked about him ill-temperedly here and there, as if calling on invisible others beyond the firelight to be witnesses to the folly of the moment.

  Dr. Kroll set his hands tremblingly on the padded arms of the chair and rose to his feet, heaving the sorrowing burden of himself upright with an effort. Wenzel, turning towards the stricken man, put out a hand to help him but at once withdrew it, looking to see if I had seen the gesture, and turned aside again, biting the back of his thumb. He had seen me note the kindly impulse and its hasty withdrawal; he had seen me spot a weakness, and he would not forget.

  “I must go home now and rest,” Dr. Kroll said.

  “Stay a moment,” Wenzel said. “I’ll have your carriage brought up to the door.”

  Kroll ignored him and instead bent his red-rimmed gaze once more on me.

  “Leave here, and travel on,” he said. “Go to Dresden—go anywhere. Prague is no place for you.” He glanced briefly in Wenzel’s direction. “Here everything is tainted and sick.”

  Then he walked heavily out, the hem of his dark robe trailing along the floor behind him.

  3

  Once more I was fenced within a square of men in clanking armor, once more I was marched across the cobbled square and thence out through the tall gate where a little while before I had been led in. It was snowing still. The spinning flakes might have been the tattered fragments of a celestial catastrophe, a sort of wet white ash sifting down upon the world.

  In that room, before the fireplace, after Dr. Kroll had departed, Wenzel had paced again for a little while, stroking his beard and seeming lost in thought, then had crossed to the door and summoned the guard and handed me again into their custody, without so much as another glance in my direction.

  Having passed through the gate now, the detachment, with me in its midst, wheeled to the right and marched along under the castle wall. Soon we came to a squat, round tower set on a corner of the wall, like the stump of a severed finger pointing skywards in pained protest. Here I was half pushed, half pulled up a flight of stone steps, to arrive, light-headed and giddy, at another studded door, this one narrow and low.

  The door was kicked open and I was thrust into a tiny cold evil-smelling cell. All jail cells smell the same, as I can well attest, after a life of greatly mixed fortunes.

  When the door was shut the darkness was total, a medium to itself, dense yet dizzyingly penetrable. I stood and listened to the slow, dull beating of my heart. Then I took a cautious step forward, with arms outstretched, my fingertips tingling in awful expectation of what they might meet with. All they met, however, was a curved, continuous, and coldly sweating wall, the stones of which had been polished smooth through countless centuries by hands like mine, feeling their way over them in blind helplessness.

  The little space, I soon discovered, was unfurnished save for a wooden bench of sorts, on which I sat down. I set my elbows on my knees and rested my head in my hands. In the utter darkness it made no difference whether my eyes were shut or open; the quality of the blackness before me remained the same. This gave me a sensation of queasy lightness, as if I were afloat somehow, motionlessly drowning, in a soft dark silent sea.

  Presently a gray glimmer began to creep down from what I saw was a barred window set high up in the wall at my back. The window was square and small, and I could reach it only by standing on the cot and taking hold of the bars and drawing myself up with my toes scrabbling for purchase on the slippery wall. Outside, a somber dawn was breaking over the roofs and spires of the city. I hung there, gasping from the effort, the muscles of my arms quivering, wanting to let go but loath to lose sight of even that deserted, wintry prospect.

  Bells in countless churches were tolling the hour; it seemed to me I had never in my life heard so bleak and comfortless a sound. The thought came slithering into my defenseless consciousness that I might never be released from this foul dungeon, unless it was to be taken out on a freezing midwinter morning m
uch like this one and marched to some grimy corner of the castle keep and made to kneel there with my neck on the block, where my last sight of this world would be that of the hooded headsman testing the edge of his blade with a thick thumb.

  I was still hanging there at the window with arms aquiver, my fingers numb and my wrists creaking, when I heard a sound at the door, a metallic clatter. I released my hold on the bars and dropped down to the cot. Cowering, I sat with my back pressed to the wall, expecting the soldiers to come crowding in again and haul me off to some new encounter just as menacing and bewildering as the one I had lately endured.

  But the door didn’t open. Instead a panel at the bottom of it was pushed aside, with an abrupt clack! that made me think of the confessional: nowhere like a prison cell to recall a man to his sins. A battered pewter plate with a lump of bread on it was pushed in, followed by a clay mug.

  These rations I pounced on almost joyfully. The bread was moldy, and hard and dry as chalk, but I gnawed at it nevertheless, hunched over like a starved rat, mumbling the dough into sticky pellets in my mouth and washing them down as best I could with gulps of foul-tasting water from the mug.

  When I had eaten, if eating it could be called, I lay down on my side on the cot with my knees drawn up to my chest, pulling my coat close about me. After a little while I began shivering, the shivers coming in spasms that started at the nape of my neck and flowed swiftly downwards along my back like waves running upon a shallow shore. Gradually the daylight strengthened, though it brought me no consolation, as it is supposed to do. Somehow it only made stronger the sense I had of drowning, as if it were not that light was falling, but that something else, some thick, transparent liquid, were welling up all round me.

  At last I fell into a nightmarish half-sleep. I suspect a delusioning philter had been slipped into the water in the mug, for in my dozing I entered upon a strange state in which I seemed to be not in the cell but merely dreaming that I was, while yet knowing full well that I was wholly there and that it was no dream.

  In the depths of my delirium a face appeared and hovered over me in the glimmering dawn light, a face I recognized from the countless likenesses of it to be seen throughout the empire, painted on canvas, carved in stone, and stamped on coins. The face was heavy and broad, with a pendulous jaw, a sagging nether lip, and large, dark eyes brimming with an infinite melancholy. For some time it hung above me motionless, a visage stark and pale like a floating moon, regarding me with the moon’s cold, remote, and unreturnable gaze.

  I can’t say how many hours passed before I emerged at last from that hazy torpor. The light seemed not much stronger than it had been before I fell asleep. The cold, however, was more intense. I could barely stir my limbs, they were so stiff, and there was a cramp in the pit of my stomach as if a stone were lodged there, which was no doubt the persisting presence of the crust of indigestible bread I had unwisely consumed earlier. I raised myself on the bed, my stiffened joints protesting, and sat shivering with the collar of my greatcoat clutched close about my throat.

  Strangely, I began to be convinced that there was someone else in the cell along with me, a figure without substance yet ineluctably there, crouching beside me on the cot. It had no moonlike face, no mournful eyes, no soft brown beard; instead, it seemed to be another version of myself, a conjured, invisible twin. This other me, however, was no company or comfort but wholly alien, my terrifying and hideously knowing, insubstantial double.

  How long, I wondered, would it take, in this place, for me to lose my mind?

  I had never up to then been able to entertain seriously the prospect of my own death—it had seemed a bad joke, crassly told—but now I thought it entirely possible that I would die, that even if my head were not to fall under the axe the numbing cold alone would kill me before night came again. It is a measure of my desperate straits that I fancied I would welcome death as a happy release. I thought of the numbness spreading over all my flesh and penetrating through muscles and into bone; I thought of my heart fluttering inside me as a hawk hovers before folding its wings and sinking down in stillness. Would something of me persist for a little while, a tiny, failing light such as I had sensed glimmering still in the corpse of Magdalena Kroll? If so, there would be, for me, no one here to witness its final extinguishing, except for that formless phantom at my side, although he, surely, would die the instant I did.

  Unlikely as it may seem, I found myself harking back with longing to the days of my childhood, days that, in this present gloom, all at once seemed to me to have been nothing but happy and bright. Even that dismal house on Pfauengasse became in my memory of it a haven of tranquillity and loving-kindness. And the Sterns, what of them? Why, were the cell door to be thrown open at that moment and they to come scowlingly in, chanting prayers and loudly upbraiding me which was ever their way, I believe I would have fallen to my knees before them and kissed their hands for joy at the familiar sight of them.

  The snow was still falling outside: I could see the shadow of it moving at the window. In my mind I pictured the city huddled as though in mute submission under that soundless lapsing, succumbing like me to the merciless, creeping cold.

  At length, shamed by these self-pitying maunderings, I made myself get up from the cot and pace vigorously up and down the floor, stamping my feet and flapping my arms to get the blood moving in my veins, all the while drawing in long, slow, strength-giving breaths, though the icy air seared my lungs. After a time, however, I succumbed to a renewed deathly weariness and was forced to lie down. Again I was half in a doze when suddenly a key rattled in the lock and the door was thrown open. I sat up, knuckling my eyes and blinking, certain this time of more soldiers, more shouted commands, more cuffs and kicks. I had chafed in my solitude, but now my only wish was that it might not end.

  It was not soldiers who entered, but only the jailer, a sad-eyed, crooked fellow with a hump high up on one shoulder and a big bunch of keys jangling on an iron hoop attached to his belt. He motioned me to my feet and led me out.

  We descended the winding stair, I going first and the hunchback lurching clumsily from step to step behind me. Two guards were waiting below, and I was set between them and marched away. The guards spoke not a word, to me or to each other, only strode stolidly along, swinging their halberds. The snow had stopped, taking a brief rest, as it might be, after so much swirling effort. Under a low, leaden sky the daylight had the look of water in which a drop of ink had been dispersed. Few folk were about, and of those few, none paid me the slightest heed; I might have been a walking ghost.

  Along the way I happened to glance into a little sloping yard enclosed by three blind walls. A gibbet stood there, and dangling from it at the end of a short, thick rope was the fat sentry, his face purple and his swollen tongue stuck like an apple in the round O of his gaping mouth. I recalled the fellow toddling along sullenly beside me through the darkness and the snow in Golden Lane, after we had finished viewing the corpse of Magdalena Kroll, and I thought with a shudder how those bandy little legs of his must have kicked and wriggled when the hangman was hoisting him aloft.

  We passed through other gateways, doors, antechambers; rooms giving onto yet other rooms. In one of these the soldiers at last halted.

  The place had, curiously, the look of a monk’s cell. There was a prie-dieu of polished dark oak, a small table with a stack of bound books on it, and two wooden armchairs like the one Dr. Kroll had sat in the previous night, before the fire. What light there was came in by a single small window with many leaded panes. In the fireplace a few damp logs smoldered, giving off the barest glimmer of warmth, which nevertheless I was grateful for. Shutting off entirely the back wall, or so I thought, was a faded tapestry depicting the slaying of Actaeon by his own hounds. Gazing at it, I felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the unfortunate hero horribly dying there, and I would not have been much surprised if the sentries had stood back now and a slavering pack of dogs had come bounding in to rend me to pieces. This vision
, or hallucination, was so vivid that I think I must have been suffering still from the effects of whatever potion it was that had been put in the water I had drunk in that prison cell.

  Time passed. The escort pair exchanged words in a language I did not recognize—I presumed it was Czech or some dialect of it—and laughed wheezingly into their fists. I watched them grimly, wondering if I and my likely fate were the object of the joke that was amusing them so. They loitered by the doorway in slovenly fashion, squeaking in their dully shining Spanish tunics and their hinged leather leggings. When a step sounded outside, however, they sprang to attention smartly enough.

  The person who entered wore a black habit, all of a piece and reaching almost to the floor, so that at first I took him for a cleric of some kind, a priest or monk. He was tall and thin, a man all of angles, with a narrow face and a somewhat swarth complexion. He would have seemed the very essence of the ascetic but for his dark and darkly passionate eye and the carnal look of his mouth, which was scarlet-lipped, strikingly wide, and curved like a sickle.

  He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture and the soldiers hurriedly withdrew, almost elbowing each other in their eagerness to be gone from the presence of this tall thin person in his long black robe. He did not so much as glance in my direction but crossed swiftly to the little table and fingered the books there, frowning, and moving his lips without sound, like an actor silently rehearsing his lines. I waited; for all the man’s seeming to ignore me, I had the impression of being circled about and sniffed at by a sleek and gleaming creature—a panther, say, or some such sinuous, burnished beast.

  Now the man turned, giving an elaborate, histrionic start, as if he had just that moment noticed me standing there. He smiled, if a panther might be said to smile.