Frank Schätzing - Death and the Devil

Now it was dark and deserted. The only light was the torch at the entrance to the Malt Shovel. Jacob would have loved to be able afford to go in and crawl out on all fours. All the other houses around had an uninhabited air. At this time of night respectable people were in their beds, behind closed shutters.

That night more than ever, Jacob wished he was respectable.

Morosely he trudged across the marshy field to the drinking troughs and sat down by the pump. He tried to feel upset at Maria’s anger, but all he could feel was his own hurt pride. She was a whore. So what? At least she was something. Her beauty would find a home with some honest tradesman who didn’t feel it was beneath him to take her out of Clemens’s rat hole. All Jacob had to offer was what he could steal from others, and then only when he wasn’t caught, like this morning, or fell out of the archbishop’s tree.

For a moment his thoughts rested on the dyer’s daughter.

He and Maria had nothing more to say to each other, so much was clear. Poverty had held them together for a few weeks, but her pride had broken that tie. The worst thing about it was, he could understand her. All she was doing was cutting her coat according to her dreams in the hope of being able to grasp a hand from the world of respectability, from which a number of her clients came. For that she was prepared to forfeit the friendship of all those who had been her companions until now, the sick and downtrodden, beggars and thieves, the doomed and dishonored. Losers. Her friends.

The last will be first, thought Jacob. Why isn’t she content with what God has ordained? The poor are poor. The rich are there to give to the poor, and the poor to pray for the salvation of the rich, which in general was very necessary. That was the way of the world. What was wrong with it?

Nothing was wrong.

But, he followed his line of thought, if nothing is wrong, then nothing is right, either. Amazed at the logic of his conclusion, he jumped up. That explained the queasy feeling he got when the clergy started talking about each of us keeping to our proper stations. Keeping to them. Why should God object if a poor man tried to rise in the world? Were there not rich people who became poor, like that merchant, Berengar from Salzgasse? His business had gone from bad to worse, and now he went around with a begging bowl.

Perhaps Maria would get nowhere. Perhaps she was being naive with her dreams. But her pride would still be there.

And what about his pride?

He sat down by the pump again, at odds with himself now. Was it Maria’s fault if his ambition ran no higher than eating as much as he could stuff into his slim frame, stealing whenever he had the opportunity, and deflowering the virgins of Cologne?

Was it her fault that he ran away when anything got serious or demanded commitment? What could someone like him offer her that she didn’t have more than enough of already? What could he do?

What had he ever tried to do?

He felt in the baggy hose the dyer girl had given him. There was something in the pocket, the only thing he had a surplus of because he kept making new ones to give away.

He pulled out one of his curved whistles.

His tongue snaked over his lips. The next moment the notes of a fast, cheerful tune were buzzing over New Market Square like a swarm of bees. He suddenly felt as if the trees had stopped their rustling just to listen to him, the moon was peeping through the clouds to watch him, and the tall grass was swaying in time to his music. There was one thing he could do! And he made his whistle trill like a skylark, cascades of joy tumbling down—

All at once he stopped.

In his mind’s eye he saw the scaffolding and the shadow. The night-dark creature with long, flowing hair. With the figure of a man and the agility and savagery of a beast.

It had murdered Gerhard Morart.

And then it had stared at him.

The Devil!

Jacob shook his head. No, it was a man. A particularly tall and swift man, but a man, for all that. And a murderer.

But why should someone kill Gerhard Morart?

He remembered the supposed witnesses. There were no witnesses. No one had been there apart from him to see Gerhard fall. Whoever said differently was lying. Only he, Jacob, knew the truth. He was the only one who had seen Gerhard’s murderer.

And the murderer had seen him.

He suddenly felt cold all over. He drew his knees up to his chest and stared across at the massive facade of the Church of the Apostles.

Propped up on her elbows, she explored the furry landscape of Urquhart’s chest. Her fingers roamed through the hair, twisting it into little ringlets.

Maria giggled.

“Happy?” asked Urquhart.

“I was wondering how long it would take to deck you out all over like this.”

Urquhart grinned. “Your whole life wouldn’t be long enough.”

“I suppose not.” Maria raised her brows. Then she laughed, threw herself on him, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Well, anyway, I’ve never come across a man with so much hair on his body before. You almost look like a”—she looked for a suitable comparison—“like a wolf.”

Her drew her head down and kissed her. “Wolves are loving,” he whispered.

Maria freed herself and jumped up off the bed. She could still feel his weight, his hot breath, could feel him on her and inside her. He had made love to her with a fierce savagery she had found exciting and strangely disturbing.

“Wolves are cruel,” she retorted.

She stroked the soft material of his cloak, which was draped over her table.

Urquhart baffled her. She had had lots of men, good lovers and poor lovers, some impatient, some unhurried, some brutal, and some that were like children. Some were kind to her, gave her more money than agreed, which she had to keep from Clemens, and invited her to share their wine, even their food. Others treated her like a thing, an inanimate object. Then there were the lonely ones, who often only wanted to talk, others who were insatiable, worried, exuberant, unscrupulous—or conscience-stricken, tormented by guilt, so that she couldn’t tell whether their groans were groans of pleasure or disgust at themselves. And there were others with strange needs, God-forsaken creatures. But even those she took, as long as they paid. Each one she could identify, categorize like an herb or a species of animal. Setting herself above them, studying them from a distance, was her way of dealing with the fact that men came and took her body. Each one left something of himself with her, left a tiny piece of his pride behind in her room, and she gathered these pieces like trophies and locked them away in the dark chamber at the bottom of her heart.

Only Jacob, when he came to Cologne three months ago, had found the key to her heart and had kept his pride.

Now Jacob was past history. She had made up her mind to escape from poverty. Impossible, perhaps, but it meant sacrificing Jacob for the vague chance a decent man might one day come and offer her a better life than staying stuck here in Clemens’s stinking hole.

But with each man who came and went, her hope shriveled a little more to a foolish dream, and it became more and more difficult to believe the Blessed Virgin would raise a whore to a respectable burgher’s wife. When she was alone, Maria would pray to the Virgin Mary, but then Clemens would bring the men she knew so well. They were like fruit on a market stall—here apples, red or green, ripe or rotten, there quinces, peaches, cherries—each typical of his own kind, each always the same, each cowardly, each a disappointment.

Urquhart was like none of them.

There was something inside him that made her shudder. And yet she wished she could be his forever, follow him everywhere, whether to riches or damnation.