Oliver Potzsch: The Dark Monk

When they arrived back in the rectory, Simon led the hangman into the main room and pointed to the two glazed doughnuts and the vomit on the floor.

“There must have been around a half-dozen of these doughnuts,” the medicus said, “all coated with honey, though the housekeeper denies putting any on them.”

Jakob Kuisl gingerly took a doughnut in his huge hands and smelled it, closing his eyes while his powerful nostrils flared up like those of a horse. It looked almost as if he wanted to inhale the doughnut. Finally he put it down, kneeled, and sniffed the pool of vomit. Simon felt himself gradually becoming nauseous. There was an odor of smoke, bitter stomach acid, and decay in the room-and something else that the medicus could not place.

“What…what are you doing there?” Simon asked.

The hangman stood up.

“I can always rely on this,” he said, tapping his red-veined hooked nose. “I can detect any little illness, no matter how small, just by smelling a filthy chamber pot. And this filth here smells of death. Just as the doughnuts do.”

He took a piece of dough in his hand and started to pull it apart. “The poison is in the honey,” he mumbled after a while. “It smells like…” He lifted the piece to his nose again and grinned. “Mouse piss. Just as I thought.”

“Mouse piss?” Simon asked with annoyance.

Jakob Kuisl nodded. “Hemlock smells like that, one of the most poisonous plants here in the Priests’ Corner. The numbness creeps up your body from your feet right to your heart. You watch yourself die.”

Simon shook his head in horror. “What monster would have thought up something like that? Do you think it could have been someone from the village? I could see a jealous worker in the church clubbing Koppmeyer from behind…But something like this?”

The hangman puffed on his cold pipe, lost in thought. Then he abruptly left the warm living room and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Simon called after him.

“I want to have a closer look at the dead priest,” Jakob Kuisl grumbled from outside the house. “Something isn’t right here.”

Simon couldn’t help smiling. The hangman had smelled blood. Once he was onto something he was as precise as a Swiss watch.

Back at the church, Jakob Kuisl bent over the corpse and examined it closely. He walked around the body without touching it, as if he were studying its exact position. Just as it had early this morning, Andreas Koppmeyer’s corpse lay on the slab of stone depicting the faded countenance of the mother of God surrounded by a halo. The priest’s hair was white with ice crystals and he lay curled up on one side so that only his profile was visible. In the meantime, the skin on his face had taken on the color of a frozen carp. His left arm was crooked along his body and his right hand seemed to be pointing to the inscription over the Madonna.

“ Sic transit gloria mundi, ” the hangman mumbled. “ Thus passes the glory of the world …”

“He even circled the words. See for yourself!” Simon said, pointing to a squiggle around the inscription. The line was shaky, as if Koppmeyer had drawn it in the ice with the last ounce of his strength.

“It was clear to him that his end was near,” the medicus mused. “Old Koppmeyer always had a sense of humor; you’ve got to hand it to him.”

The hangman bent down and passed his hand over the stone relief of Mary, whose head was surrounded by a radiant halo.

“One thing surprises me,” he mumbled. “This is a gravestone, isn’t it?”

Simon nodded. “The whole Saint Lawrence Church is full of them. Why do you ask?”

“Look around for yourself, you idiot.” The hangman gestured broadly at the interior of the church. “On the other stones you always see images of the deceased-councilmen, judges, rich broads. But this one is no doubt the Virgin Mary. No woman would be so bold as to let herself be depicted with a halo.”

“Perhaps it was a donation to the church?” Simon thought out loud.

“ Sic transit -” the hangman mumbled again.

“ Thus passes the glory of the world, ” Simon interrupted him impatiently. “I know, but what does that have to do with the murder?”

“It’s possible that it has nothing to do with the murder, but with the hiding place,” Kuisl said suddenly.

“Hiding place?”

“Didn’t you tell me the priest spent all last night working in the church?”

“Yes, but…”

“Look a little closer at the squiggle,” the hangman mumbled. “Do you notice anything striking?”

Simon bent down and examined the circle a little more closely. Then it hit him.

“The circle isn’t complete; it doesn’t go around the entire inscription,” he gasped, “but only around the first two words…”

“ Sic transit, ” Jakob repeated, grinning. “The learned doctor surely knows what that means.”

“ This is the way …” Simon murmured absentmindedly. Only then did he get it. “Through…the slab of stone?” he whispered incredulously.

“First we have to move it aside, of course.” The hangman was already struggling to move Andreas Koppmeyer’s huge frame aside. He grabbed him by the cassock and dragged him behind the altar, several yards away. “This will be his resting place for the time being,” he said. “No point scaring any old woman to death who comes in to say her rosary.” He spat into his hands. “Now let’s get to work.”

“But the slab…It weighs at least a couple of hundred pounds,” Simon interjected.

“So what?” Jakob Kuisl had already wrestled the stone from its setting using a carpenter’s nail as a lever. Now he grabbed it with both hands and raised it slowly, inch by inch. Tendons as thick as a man’s fingers protruded from his neck.

“If a fat priest can lift it, it shouldn’t be so heavy, should it?” he panted.

With a grinding sound, the massive stone slab crashed down right next to Simon’s feet.

Magdalena Kuisl knelt in the bloody straw and pressed down on the swollen, bruised abdomen of Frau Hainmiller. The peasant woman screamed in her ear, making her wince. The expectant mother had been screaming for hours now, but it seemed like days to Magdalena. The night before, the hangman’s daughter had come to the Hainmiller household along with the midwife, Martha Stechlin. At first everything seemed to point to a normal birth. The aunts, nieces, cousins, and neighbor women had already spread fresh straw and rushes, put water on the fire, and spread out linens. The air was redolent of smoked mugwort. Josefa Hainmiller, whose head was as red as beetroot, pushed calmly and regularly. It was the farm woman’s sixth child, and up to then, she had always managed without difficulty.

But now Josefa was losing more and more blood. The bedsheets, pink-hued at first from the broken water, had now taken on the color of a butcher block. But the child simply wouldn’t come. Josefa Hainmiller’s initial whimpers gave way first to sobbing and then to loud screams so that her husband, horrified, kept knocking on the door and praying aloud to St. Margareta. He didn’t dare enter-this was a woman’s realm-but if his wife or the child didn’t survive the birth, he already knew who was to blame: the goddamned midwife.

Martha Stechlin groped inside the mother for the child, who was lying crosswise in the uterus. Her arms reached up to her elbows inside the Hainmiller woman, whose dress had slipped up over her thighs, but still the midwife could not get a firm hold on the child. The face of the older midwife was spattered with blood, sweat streamed down her forehead, and she had to keep blinking as it dripped into her eyes.

Magdalena looked anxiously at the aunts and cousins. They whispered among themselves, murmured their rosaries, and kept pointing at the midwife. Just last year, Martha Stechlin had been accused of murdering a child and practicing witchcraft. Only quick action by Magdalena’s father and the young medicus had saved her from the fire. Nevertheless, the midwife was viewed in town with suspicion, and it clung to her like a baby’s first stool. People still called upon her when there was a birth or asked her for herbs to reduce a fever, but behind her back the good citizens crossed themselves to ward off her black magic.