Oliver Potzsch - The Dark Monk

Magdalena was crying when she sensed someone standing nearby.

She looked up to see a young man leaning against the side of a house a few feet away. It was the little pickpocket who had tried to steal her purse. He watched her silently.

Finally, Magdalena lost her patience. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she shouted. “Mind your own business, and get out of here!”

The boy shrugged and turned to leave.

Suddenly, Magdalena remembered that there was, indeed, someone who might help her. She could at least get shelter for the night, and perhaps he would have a suggestion about getting the money back. Magdalena had hoped she wouldn’t have to go there, but as things stood now, it was her last chance.

“Wait!” she called to the boy, who turned around with a questioning look.

“Take me to Philipp Hartmann,” she whispered.

“Who?” the boy asked, anxious. Faint light fell on his face from a window nearby, and he suddenly looked as white as a sheet. “I don’t know any-”

“You know exactly who I mean.” Magdalena stood up and wiped the saliva and tears from her face. “I want to go and see the Augsburg hangman-and hurry up about it, or I’ll see that he strings you up by the Red Gate. I swear I will, as sure as my name is Magdalena Kuisl.”

At six o’clock the next morning, Jakob Kuisl headed up to town. At this time of year very few people were out and about so early in the day, even on the busy Munzgasse. The few wine and cloth merchants he did meet crossed to the other side of the street when they saw him coming or made the sign of a cross. It was never good news when the hangman came up the hill from the Lech to Schongau. People tolerated him as long as he stuck to executions and carting away dead animals, but otherwise, they preferred that the executioner stay down below in the stinking Tanners’ Quarter.

Jakob Kuisl could sense the townspeople watching. Word had gotten around that he’d smoked out the Scheller Gang, and no doubt his dispute with the young patricians was no longer a secret. Without paying any attention to the whispers behind him, he headed to the tower dungeon-a squat, three-story tower with soot-stained walls situated right along the city wall-where the watchmen had locked up the bandits the night before. Wrapped tightly in a coat that was much too thin, a bailiff stood guard in front of a heavy wooden door. He had propped his spear against the wall in hopes of warming his frozen hands in his pockets. He looked astonished as the hangman approached with a broad smile.

“Here, Johannes,” Jakob Kuisl said, handing the bailiff a few warm chestnuts he’d been concealing under his coat. “My wife put a few of these aside for you and sends her best wishes.”

“Well…thank you…” The bailiff sneezed and rubbed the warm chestnuts between his frozen fingers. “But you didn’t come here just to bring me something to eat, did you?” he asked, peering out from under his rabbit-fur hood. “I know you, Kuisl.”

The hangman nodded. “I’ve got a score to settle inside there with Scheller. Just let me in for a moment. I’ll be right back.”

“But what if Lechner hears about it?” Johannes muttered as he hungrily shelled the warm chestnuts. “He’ll give me hell.”

Jakob Kuisl dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “Oh, Lechner, he’s turning over in his bed right now and going back to sleep. Go down to see my wife today after the noon bells, and she’ll give you a pine liniment for your cold.”

The bailiff grinned, popped a steaming chestnut between his rotten yellow teeth, took out a large rusty key, and opened the door to the dungeon.

“But don’t rough up Scheller,” he called to the hangman with a full mouth, “or he’ll keel over before we have a chance to break him on the wheel, and that would be a pity.”

Jakob Kuisl didn’t answer but headed to the cells in back. The men and women had been split into two groups. Some of the robbers lay around listlessly on the cold stone floor, their wounds largely untreated. The six-year-old boy Kuisl had noticed the day before seemed to suffer from a high fever. His whole body trembling, he looked toward the ceiling vacantly while his mother rocked him in her lap. As Kuisl approached, some of the men who could still stand started rattling the rusty bars of their cells.

“So soon, Hangman?” one of them shouted. “Just when it’s getting comfy here! Didn’t you at least bring along a last meal for us?”

Others laughed. The air was filled with the stench of excrement and damp straw.

“Goddamn you!” one of the two women prisoners shouted, holding a screaming child out to him. “Who will take care of my little boy when I’m no longer here? Who? Or do you want to string him up along with us?”

“Oh shut up, Anna!” said a voice from the adjacent cell. “If the kid survives, they’ll give him to the church. The boy is better off than any of us. If you didn’t live with dignity, you can at least die with some.”

Hans Scheller struck a defiant posture in the middle of the cell, his muscular arms folded across his chest. He looked like a rough-hewn, immovable block with facial features chiseled out of hard walnut. His cheeks were black and blue and swollen from being struck, and his left eye was glued shut with dried blood. With his right eye, however, he stared Jakob Kuisl down attentively and proudly.

“What do you want, Kuisl?” he asked. “You’re not coming to take us to the gallows. You’ll make a big deal out of that, with wine, dancing, and laughing, and if Scheller screams loud enough when you break him on the wheel, you’ll get an extra guilder. But I won’t scream; you can count on it.”

“There’s never been anyone who didn’t scream,” the hangman growled. “You’ve got my word on that.”

Jakob Kuisl noticed a flash of fear in Scheller’s eyes. The wheel was one of the cruelest forms of execution. After the executioner broke every bone in the condemned man’s body with an iron bar, he tied him to a wagon wheel. If the prisoner was lucky, the executioner was merciful and broke his neck. If the prisoner wasn’t, the executioner set the wheel up outside and let him die a slow miserable death in the blazing sun. That could take several days.

Jakob Kuisl winked at Scheller. “But we’ll see. Perhaps it will be very different this time.”

“Ha-ha!” jeered a neighbor in the next cell. “The hangman will let us go when the Pope wipes his ass with leaves!”

“Shut up, Springer!” Hans Scheller shouted. “Or I’ll cut off your nose even before the hangman gets around to it.”

The robber fell silent, and the others slowly moved back from the bars, too, settling down in the filthy, damp straw.

“So, Kuisl, what do you want?” the robber chief whispered.

The hangman was close enough to the bars now that he could smell the robber’s foul breath. Hans Scheller’s stubbled face was scarred, black and blue, and coated with dried blood.

“If you tell me where you’ve stashed your loot, I might be able to arrange a more lenient punishment,” Kuisl said softly.

“Loot?” Hans Scheller feigned surprise and stared at him innocently. “What loot?”

In a lightning-fast motion, Jakob Kuisl reached through the bars to grab the robber chief’s hand, bending his fingers back until they cracked. Hans Scheller turned white in the face.

“Let’s not play games, Scheller,” Kuisl growled. “This is just a little foretaste of what you can expect if you keep this up. Tongs, thumbscrews, the rack-I can show it all to you today. So what do you say?”

Hans Scheller tried to pull his hand back, but the hangman just applied more pressure. The cracking was now quite audible.