Oliver Potzsch: The Dark Monk

For a few moments, no one said a thing.

Finally, Magdalena spoke up hesitantly. “Not from Landsberg? I don’t understand-”

Her father immediately cut her off. “Perhaps she’ll tell us herself what her real name is. In Augsburg, she was Isabelle de Cherbourg; in Munich, she was Charlotte Le Mans; and in Ingolstadt, Katharine God-knows-what…But I doubt any of those is her real name.” Scowling, the hangman drew closer until he was only a step away from her. “Damn it, your name! I want to know-at once! Or I’ll jam glowing embers under your pretty little fingernails until you beg for mercy!”

Simon and Magdalena both eyed Benedikta as she stood there clutching a gravestone with both hands. Her eyes flashed and she bit her lips as she lashed out at the hangman. “How dare you slander me like that! If my brother were still alive, then-”

“Silence, you brazen hussy!” Jakob Kuisl shouted at her. “You have sullied the good name of our priest long enough! I found the courier’s letter pouch, and from there, I only had to do a little looking around. Your game is over! Do you hear? Finished!”

“Which letter pouch do you mean?” Simon asked.

The hangman took a drag on his cold pipe. Only after calming down a bit did he continue. “When we smoked out Scheller and his gang, I found a leather bag in the cave. It belonged to one of the couriers who deliver mail in our area. Scheller told me they’d taken the bag from another gang of robbers.” Again, he paused long enough to stuff his pipe.

Just as Simon was about to say something, the hangman continued.

“I had a look at the letters, especially the dates on them. They were all written around the time the fat priest must have written to his beloved sister, Benedikta. Now, if all these letters were stolen…”

“Then Benedikta in Landsberg could not possibly have received a letter from her brother!” Simon groaned. “But how then did she-”

“This is all pure coincidence and nothing more,” Benedikta said, smiling at Simon. “You don’t really believe this, do you?”

“I’ll tell you who this brazen hussy really is,” Jakob Kuisl interrupted. “She passes herself off as a wine merchant in cities all over Bavaria. She spies on merchants’ routes and passes the information on to her accomplices so they can rob the coaches.”

“Where did you ever come up with this nonsense?” Benedikta replied angrily.

“One of your partners told me so himself.”

“Rubbish!” Benedikta grumbled. “ C’est impossible! ”

“Believe me,” the hangman said, lighting his pipe with a glowing sliver of tinder. “Sooner or later, I make everyone talk.” He puffed until the pipe caught fire. “And after that, they don’t talk to anyone ever again.”

Horrified, Benedikta stared at him for a moment. Then she threw herself at him, beating her fists against his broad chest. “You killed them!” she shouted. “You monster, you killed them!”

Jakob Kuisl seized her hands and flung her away so hard that she bounced off a gravestone like a puppet. “They were robbers and murderers,” he said. “Just like you.”

The silence that followed was broken only by the distant crackling of fire and the cries of the monks desperately trying to save the adjoining buildings.

Incredulous, Magdalena eyed the self-declared wine merchant still crouching beside the gravestone, looking up at them with cold, scornful eyes. “Your gang robbed the courier and read the letter!” Magdalena shouted. “That must be what happened! They read that the fat priest Koppmeyer had found something valuable, and then you pretended to be his sister and spied on us.”

“It wasn’t only her, but her whole gang following us.” Simon buried his face in his hands and groaned softly. “The people I saw in the Wessobrunn forest were your accomplices, weren’t they? And it was your accomplices who started the fight with the monks in the Rottenbuch Monastery. How could I have been so stupid?”

The woman who just a minute ago had been Benedikta Koppmeyer smiled. It was a sad smile. She seemed to have lost all desire to fight and leaned against the gravestone like an empty shell. “They were there to protect us,” she said softly, “not only me, but you as well, Simon. We knew earlier than you did that there were others trying to get their hands on the Templars’ treasure. We knew they weren’t people we could trifle with.”

“Back there in the forest on the way to Steingaden, when we were attacked by robbers…” Simon murmured. “Those were your friends who helped me back onto my horse. Isn’t that right? I thought it was a dream, but the men were really there.”

The woman facing him nodded. “They always kept an eye on us.”

“Nonsense!” the hangman exclaimed. “They were there so the loot wouldn’t slip through their fingers. Wise up, Simon! If you’d found the treasure, her cronies would have slashed your throat without giving it a second thought, and she would have stood by and watched. That’s the reason I came to Steingaden-to warn you about this hussy!”

Simon stared at the redheaded woman with delicate features whom he’d for so long viewed as a refined ideal of the fair sex. “So you’re not from France at all?” he asked softly.

She chuckled, and for a moment, it seemed the old Benedikta had flared to life again. “Oh, but I am. I come, in fact, from an old Huguenot family, but even as a child I hung around on the streets. I wanted to be free-not wind up the dutiful wife of some fat, conceited merchant.”

“Manslaughter, deception, and murder-that’s the life you chose!” the hangman growled. “I asked the burgomaster to find out what this hussy had been up to. The trail of her gang leads through all of Bavaria-Munich, Augsburg, Ingolstadt…She always pretended to be a fiery, temperamental merchant woman and managed to wrangle information from old moneybags in the taverns about the routes they would be taking. Later, one of her accomplices would come to the tavern and get all the information from her. And if the madam was so inclined, she even went on the raids herself.” Jakob Kuisl stepped up to the imposter. “How often did you have your hand in what went on in Schongau? Once? Twice? How many died because of you? Weyer from Augsburg? Holzhofer’s servants?”

The woman fell silent and the hangman continued. “In Landsberg, there is, in fact, a Benedikta Koppmeyer. She lives a very quiet, modest life there and first learned of the death of her brother from Burgomaster Semer.”

“So it was Karl Semer who gave you the final clue?” Simon asked.

“I should have known sooner,” Jakob Kuisl said. “Scheller told me about the perfume he took from the other gang. Even then, I suspected the monk with the violet perfume had something to do with it. Only later, on the gallows, did Scheller remember having seen something else at the campsite.”

“What was that?” Magdalena asked.

The hangman grinned. “A barrette. I’ve never heard of a man wearing anything like that.”

Simon collapsed onto a snow pile. He still couldn’t believe that he had been swindled. “What a fantastic plan,” he groaned, not without a trace of admiration in his voice. “The worldly woman hangs around in the taverns to find out which routes the wagon drivers will be taking. She knows where they’re going and how heavily they’re guarded. Her accomplices need only stand at the right crossroads and hold out their hands. And then, more or less by accident, they hear something about a fabulous treasure…”

“We robbed the courier because we hoped to find something of value in his bag,” the redhead whispered. “A bill of exchange, a few gold coins-but this time all we got were letters! I read a few of them out of pure curiosity and suddenly came across this incredible letter that mentioned a Templar’s grave and a riddle. In our family, the Templars were always the stuff of legend. When I was just a young child in France, my father told me about the legendary treasure. It could have been our last great exploit…” She stood up and brushed the snow from her charred dress. “Now what are you going to do with me?”