Borrower of the Night vbm-1 Page 14

  I had caught up with him by that time, having recovered my breath while he was floundering around in the open grave.

  ‘Hurry,’ I yelled. ‘Street outside is lighted . . . we can see . . .’

  We couldn’t see our quarry, but we could hear him. Cemeteries are notoriously quiet places, especially in the middle of the night. From the sounds, the man seemed to be heading for the gate on Ansbacher Strasse.

  As we had already ascertained, the gate was locked. I didn’t expect it to detain our agile adversary for long, however. He was over the gate before we reached the spot. Our progress had been frustratingly slow; even if I had had no qualms about stepping on graves, the stones were close together and the paths were winding. We got over the gate, in our turn, leaving a piece of my slacks on the spikes.

  The street outside curves and is lined with trees. There was no one in sight. Assuming that the grave robber would head for the inner city, and the Schloss, we took that direction. As we neared the open area in front of the city gate, we were finally rewarded by a glimpse of the man we were after. One glimpse was enough for Tony, who staggered and stopped, for a vital couple of seconds, before he got a grip on his nerves and began running again.

  I couldn’t blame him for hesitating. The figure was that of a tall Black Man, enveloped in a cloak that swooped out around his body like giant dark wings. The head appeared to be a featureless lump.

  The monstrosity disappeaerd under the stone arch of the Roedertor. I admit, without shame, that I felt a healthy reluctance as we followed, running into darkness and into the enclosing walls that had been designed to hold back entire armies.

  If you have never seen a medieval city gate you may picture it as a pair of wooden doors, plus a portcullis or two. No so. This particular gate, which is more properly called a bastion, consists of a series of massive walls and narrow passages, designed so that a defending force could clobber the attackers at several points. Once past the first gate, an invader found himself in a circular area hemmed in by high stone walls with enclosed galleries, from which various missiles could be propelled onto his head. The only way out of this area was over a moat, whose drawbridge could of course be raised. Beyond the drawbridge a high tower defended the inner part of the bastion.

  The gates are gone nowadays, and the drawbridge has been replaced by solid pavement. All the same, my shoulders hunched apprehensively as we entered the circular court. Pounding along the brick-paved street that crosses the moat and goes through the narrow tunnel under the tower, I felt a wave of sympathy for the soldier who had had to attack the place – not for the arrogant knight, safely encased in steel, but for the conscripted peasant in his leather jerkin, clutching his pike in a sweaty hand and hoping to God he’d never have to use it. I half expected an arrow to whistle over my head and rattle on the pavement. It was the sort of humourous gesture our adversary seemed to enjoy.

  We got through the tunnel without incident, however, and came to a baffled halt in the street beyond the bastion. The tall houses of the old city loomed dark and silent on either side. We hadn’t made enough noise to awaken the inhabitants, since we were both wearing rubber-soled sneakers. The loudest sound was Tony’s heavy breathing.

  I was pretty sure we had lost our man. There were a dozen hiding places in that crowded, narrow way, half a dozen alleyways and side streets he might have taken. Yet I still felt vulnerable and exposed, as if someone were watching me.

  I glanced up over my shoulder. The town walls were shadowy bulwarks, cutting off the sky. A single lonely streetlight did little to lighten their darkness.

  Up above, on the balustraded walkway, something moved. It looked like a black sleeve, flapping.

  I clutched at Tony, who was staring stupidly down the Schmeidgasse. He let out a yelp.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t do that!’

  ‘He’s up there,’ I gasped. ‘On the wall. Tony – I think he waved at me.’

  ‘You would think that,’ Tony said bitterly. He pulled away from me and ran towards the flight of stone stairs that led up to the ramparts.

  There may be worse places in which to pursue a crazy grave robber, but offhand I can’t think of many. The stairs are composed of the same rough brownish stone that constitutes the walls. They are steep, narrow, and very uneven. The walkway is stone-floored too; it is actually the top of the rampart, with a thin outer wall on one side. On the other side, only a waist-high wooden railing stands between the wall-walker and the paved street twenty feet below. There are lights at infrequent intervals; they are suspended from the houses that face the wall across a wide alley, and they do not illumine the stone underfoot, which is rough and full of unexpected dips and bumps. Tony took the stairs three at a time and went roaring down the narrow walkway like a mad bull.

  I went after him, though I would have preferred not to do so. The pursuit was pointless now, and potentially dangerous. Our quarry could easily elude us; the fact that he had not already done so in the Schmeidgasse made me highly suspicious of his present route. But there is no arguing with Tony when he gets in one of his rages; I couldn’t even get close enough to talk to him, much less reason with him. So I followed. I had left him in the lurch once before, and I didn’t enjoy the memory of that moment of cowardice.

  It’s a wonder we both didn’t break our necks. I kept stumbling; once I caught my foot in a concavity and ricocheted off the railing with a force that made that insufficient barricade quiver. Tony was some distance ahead, running like an Olympic champ. He kept vanishing and reappearing as the stretches of darkness between the streetlights swallowed and then disgorged his fleeting form. The effect was quite unnerving.

  The worst places were the towers that break the wall at intervals. The walkway goes through them, and the enclosed chambers are extremely dark. Preoccupied as I was by more vital matters, I couldn’t help noticing the stench as we passed through these tower rooms, and I wondered what primitive instinct moves some members of the so-called human race to relieve themselves in every secluded corner, as dogs do.

  All at once I heard a rackety din ahead. We had been running noiselessly till then; I recognized the new sound and a chill stiffened my knees. I ran faster, but it was useless; I couldn’t catch up with Tony. He had already reached the wooden flooring.

  That was the cause of the rumbling noise – heavy feet, no longer on stone, but on thin wooden planks. One stretch of the walkway had this surface underfoot; I suppose it replaced a broken section of stone. I glanced over the railing to my right and saw that my memory of the topography was accurate. The alley was gone; steep tiled roofs crowded up to the very rail. And that meant we were approaching a critical spot.

  The walls of Rothenburg have many towers, but only six or seven main gateways. We had ascended at one of these gateways and were now approaching the next, at a rate that spelled trouble. The inner chambers of the towers are brightly lighted compared with the complicated inner structure of the bastions. Still running, I tried to remember how the next one was designed. It was the Spitalstor, if my memory served me, and it was a wonderful place for an ambush.

  In a desperate burst of speed I closed up on Tony, who was getting winded. I was close enough to see what happened, but not close enough to prevent it.

  The rock missed his head. It must have meant to miss it, because it was as big as a skull and it came whizzing out of the pitch-black entrance to the Spitalstor when Tony was less than six feet away. It landed on his bad shoulder, and it knocked him flat.

  I had no intention of vaulting over Tony’s prostrate body to continue the chase. No, indeed. But I wouldn’t have been able to in any case. Tony fell on me. It was becoming a habit.

  Tony was out cold, but he was breathing okay. I untangled myself and lifted his head onto my lap. He sat up with a start.

  ‘Damn it,’ he shouted, ‘why aren’t you chasing that guy?’

  There was a brief silence, fraught with emotion.

  ‘I ought to let your head bounce off t
he floor,’ I said, finally.

  ‘Damn, damn damn. To fall for a hoary old trick like that . . . Damn.’

  ‘If you’re restraining your language on my account, don’t,’ I said, helping him up. ‘Can you make it back to the Schloss? No point hanging around here.’

  ‘Oh, sure. The principal damage is to my inflated ego.’

  That was an exaggeration. He was feeling poorly, and our progress was slow. With Tony leaning heavily on me, I began to feel my own age, and I was looking forward to going to bed. But when we reached the Schloss it was evident that I was still some distance from that indulgence. Our corridor was wide awake. The first person we saw was George, and the sight of his flushed, grim face told us something serious had happened.

  ‘What’s up?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Schmidt. He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead!’ Tony tried to enter Schmidt’s room, but George’s arm barred the door.

  ‘Don’t go in yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of dead men,’ said George, ‘but I never saw one who looked like that.’

  ‘Stop talking like The Monk,’ I said sharply. ‘What happened?’

  George fumbled in his pocket and located a cigarette and matches. He looked at them blankly, as if he had forgotten what to do with them.

  ‘I heard him scream,’ he said. ‘What a sound . . . The Gräfin heard it too. She was in the hall when I came out of my room. I went through Schmidt’s door like a bulldozer. It wasn’t locked. Schmidt was sitting up in bed facing the window. The lamp by the bed was lit. He didn’t look at us, not even when the door crashed open. He was looking at the window. He never looked at us at all. He just kept staring . . . at the window. Then he keeled over.’

  George was perspiring. His shirt clung to his broad chest.

  All eyes turned towards the windows, which were open to admit the night air.

  I pushed George aside. Without looking at the motionless form on the bed, I crossed the room, and leaned out of the window. The distance between it and the window of Tony’s room was a good twenty feet. To the left, at an even greater distance, were the windows of the neighbouring guest chamber. There were no windowsills. The outer panes were flush with the stones of the wall. Below was a stretch of blank wall reaching down to the foundations.

  I craned my neck and looked up towards the sloping eaves of the roof. A very tall man, standing on the window ledge, might have been able to touch the edge of the roof with his fingertips. I might have done it myself. I’d have hated to try.

  ‘Unless somebody has suckers on his hands and feet, like the Human Fly, there’s no way out here,’ I reported, withdrawing my head.

  ‘But that’s impossible. I tell you I was in the corridor within seconds of the time I heard him scream. Nobody could have come out of that door without my seeing him.’

  ‘And I,’ said a cool voice, ‘was in the corridor when Herr Schmidt cried out. No one left his room.’

  The speaker was the Gräfin. Blankenhagen was with her. He was fully dressed, of course; I wondered what kind of emergency it would take to get Blankenhagen out of his room without his pants. He bent over Schmidt. Then he flew into violent action, stripping the clothes from the little man’s chest and fumbling in his bag for a hypodermic.

  ‘The man is not dead. Telephone to the hospital. We must have an ambulance as quickly as possible. Run!’

  The Gräfin obeyed. She didn’t run, but she moved fast. The rest of us stared blankly at one another.

  ‘You said he was dead.’ I looked accusingly at George.

  ‘I thought he was.’ George was badly shaken. ‘He sure looked dead. I couldn’t help – ’

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you,’ I said, more mildly. ‘Doctor, can we do anything?’

  ‘You can go,’ said Blankenhagen, without looking up. ‘All of you. Out of here.’

  So we left. But I sat in my room with the door open till the ambulance arrived and took Schmidt away. The doctor went with him. Then I closed and locked my door and, remembering the interchangeable keys of the Schloss, I wedged a chair under the handle.

  I was glad Schmidt wasn’t dead. I rather liked the old guy, despite the fact that I would not have been willing to stake my life on his honesty. In fact, I had been willing to consider him a prime suspect. His earlier attack hadn’t put me off the scent; the suggestion of invalidism was a good alibi in a case where the villain displayed such startling agility. But this attack couldn’t have been faked. Unless . . .

  I had already considered the idea that there were two villains. Tony’s encounter with the armour was particularly significant. Blankenhagen had suggested that Tony had hit his head when he fell, but I had seen that neat round lump behind his ear, and the word that came to my mind was ‘blackjack.’ If someone had been waiting for Tony in the darkness under the stairs, and had knocked him out, it would explain a lot of things.

  It began to look more and more like Blankenhagen. If Schmidt’s heart attack tonight was a fake, only the doctor could back him up in his pretence. Yet in that case would Blankenhagen risk taking Schmidt to a hospital, with a whole staff of doctors and interns?

  It looked less like Blankenhagen.

  I took a sheet of paper and a pencil, thinking maybe things would be clearer if I wrote them down, the way the detective always does in a mystery story. I wrote down Schmidt’s name, and that of the doctor. I couldn’t think of anything else to write.

  Even if Schmidt’s heart attack was genuine, he could be one of the conspirators. However, he had not been the black figure we had pursued that night; he was far too short. The Black Man had had ample time to reach the Schloss while we were limping along the streets.

  So then what? George’s crazy story implied that Schmidt had faced someone, or something, that had scared him almost to death. How had the intruder reached Schmidt and escaped without being seen? And what had the hypothetical villain done to frighten the old man so badly?

  Suppose someone had dangled an object from the roof in front of Schmidt’s window – an object so horrifying that the mere sight of it swimming in space had been enough to paralyze Schmidt’s weak heart.

  I scowled and drew doodles over the rest of the paper. I couldn’t think of anything that scary. A grinning skull? A phosphorescent phantom? Schmidt was a grown man. He might be startled, but no homemade phantom could frighten a man to that extent.

  How about a Black Man crawling up the wall like a bat?

  I threw my pencil on the table so hard the point broke, and stood up. Just for that, I told my undisciplined imagination, you and I are going exploring.

  The heavy cupboard that served as my closet was pushed into the corner I wanted to examine. It was ten feet high and four feet wide and seemed to be built of concrete. My first shove didn’t even rock it. After I had greased a track under the feet with a candle, and strained every muscle in my back, it began to yield. There are some advantages to being big, I guess.

  Finally I had the cupboard moved out at an angle. I squeezed in behind.

  The whole room had once been wood-panelled, but now only a few rotting fragments remained, in areas like this, which were normally concealed by furniture. I lifted my lamp in one hand and ran my fingers over the stones. They felt like stones. I rapped tentatively on one of them, and scraped my knuckles. I put the lamp on the floor, sat down beside it, and made a profane remark.

  And there it was. As simple as that. I had been looking at the stones which were on my eye level, and that would have been over the head of a stocky medieval male. The doorway was so low that even Burckhardt would have had to bend over in order to pass through. I could see the outlines clearly, where the mortar was missing. In earlier times, of course, tapestries and/or panelling had covered the door.

  It yielded a trifle when I pushed against it, but it refused to open. I looked in vain for a bar or catch. Then the answer came to me. I was in the countess’s room. The active party in the nocturnal get-togethers woul
d be coming into the room, not leaving it. In those days a lady was supposed to act like a lady.

  A wooden coat hanger proved strong enough to act as a lever. The door opened with a protesting squeal of rusted hinges. I told myself that next day I would squander a few marks on a can of oil. The creaking doors of Schloss Drachenstein were beginning to get on my nerves.

  I lifted up the lamp and held it through the opening. I couldn’t see much – only the top of a flight of stairs going down.

  There were only four stairs. Then the passage levelled out. I had wondered how a passage could run between the rooms of the count and countess without blocking the windows of Tony’s room. Now I understood. It was below the window level.

  When I reached the end of the passage I found a variation where I had expected a repetition of the arrangement outside my own room – that is to say, steps leading up to the count’s chamber. The steps were there, but at the foot of them was a narrow opening just wide enough to admit a human body, through which the stairs went on down.

  I stood on one side of the hole and meditated. I was awfully tired, and the stale air was giving me a headache. I didn’t expect to find a hiding place in these walls; they were too accessible, if not to servants, then to the innocent inhabitant of the countess’s room. Burckhardt wouldn’t hide the shrine in any place where Konstanze might have found it. So what was I after?

  It was no use. Even fatigue doesn’t deaden my insatiable curiosity. With a sigh I stepped over the gap in the floor and mounted the stairs that led up.

  They ended in the outlines of a door, which yielded, as mine had done, to the leverage of my handy coat hanger. It only opened an inch or so, though, and then it stuck. I put my flashlight and one eye up against the opening and saw a blank wooden surface beyond. I poked at it with my coat hanger. Nothing happened.