Alchemy, page 27
‘Why?’
‘He didn’t want to be blamed, of course.’
‘And did he report it? The theft of the boat, what he saw?’
The two men exchanged a glance and Novak sighed. ‘No, he didn’t. Because he’s a fucking idiot, that’s why, before you ask. He’s married to my wife’s niece, who’s waiting for him at home, seven months pregnant, and instead of earning money to provide for his first child, he takes a half-hour off to tup a cheap whore in the bushes, and that’s how he came to leave his boat unattended where anyone could steal it, and he doesn’t want any of that coming out, you can see why. His wife’s got two brothers who would knock his teeth through the back of his idiot head if they knew.’ He glared at Lude, who looked as if he might cry.
‘So no one knows except you two?’ I turned and squinted upriver, where the outline of the Stone Bridge was just visible through the drizzle. ‘What’s up there? Why would you go that way if you wanted to dump a body?’
Novak shrugged. ‘There’s the islands, I suppose.’
Lude muttered something and crossed himself.
‘What’s that?’
‘He said “Devil’s Channel”,’ Besler explained.
‘It’s a canal that runs round the back of Kampa Island, by the old watermills,’ Novak said. ‘It’s all overgrown – hard to get a boat through.’
‘Take us there,’ I said.
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘Take us now, unless you want me to go back to the castle and inform the authorities that your nephew or whatever he is failed to report the abduction of an important witness in a murder enquiry.’
I must have sounded more convincingly authoritative than I felt, because Novak, with much tutting and swearing under his breath, nodded us towards his boat and didn’t even demand extra money.
He had to work hard to haul against the current. I observed the tendons standing out on his forearms and reasoned that whoever had taken David in the boat must have been strong and fit, just like whoever slung Bartos over the bridge. Was it the same man? David could not have recognised the boat thief, or suspected any danger from him, or he would never have embarked, just as Bartos had not anticipated the killing blow from his attacker. Gusts of rain blew into my face; as the Stone Bridge loomed ahead, I tried to keep my thoughts steady and piece it together. David had been meeting someone regularly in the yard of the Winged Horse to sell information about the Jewish community; I didn’t know what, but I sensed that Esther had an idea. Was it connected with Rabbi Loew’s visits to the castle? Whatever the reason, last night David had tried to end the arrangement. The only person, other than me, who knew of his movements was the man in the cloak, the one who had paid him in the yard. He would have had time, while David and I spoke, to make his way down to the river and wait, knowing David was on his way home, though it would have been an extraordinary piece of luck on his part to time it with the half-hour window when Lude abandoned his boat. Did the man in the cloak want to silence David because he was afraid David would reveal their dealings? Surely David was the one who had more to lose from doing that.
There was an alternative explanation. Benjamin Katz knew that David was betraying their community. He may even have known the specific secrets David had been selling, given that he had made straight for David’s house and gone through his papers. And why, I wondered, had Benjamin felt the sudden need to remove evidence of David’s activities last night, of all nights, just when David had decided to end the association? Had he feared David was about to be exposed? Or did he know David wouldn’t be coming home last night? If so, it could only mean one of two things. Either Benjamin had followed David, witnessed the man in the cloak take him upstream and assumed the worst, so raced back to make sure nothing incriminating could be found at David’s house (but if he’d thought David was in danger, surely he would have tried to help, or at least raised the alarm?). Or else it meant that Benjamin was the man in the cloak.
I was so entangled in weighing the likelihood and potential ramifications of all these possibilities, particularly the last one, that I hadn’t realised Besler was speaking to me until he shook my arm.
‘What?’
‘I said – if his body was dumped in the water, why has he not drifted back downriver like the boat did?’
‘Might have weighted him down with something,’ Novak said with a sniff. ‘If that’s the case, it’ll take a couple of days for him to bob to the surface. You have to wait till the corpse bloats up and fills with gases. We see it a lot,’ he added, catching Besler’s look of horror. ‘Accidents, murders, jumpers. You’d be surprised how many bodies we fish out in a year. Mate of mine found one a couple of days ago, washed up by the saltpetre works. Young lad. Sad business – no one cared, because it was the same day they found that alchemist hanging off the bridge and all anyone could talk of was Golems. No drama in a drowned corpse, they’re two a penny.’
‘Really? The same day?’ That seemed like a remarkable coincidence. I wondered that no one had mentioned it. ‘Who was he? Was there an investigation?’
Novak gave a dry laugh. ‘For a lad with no family, who catches stray dogs for a living? They wouldn’t waste their time. They reckoned he lost his footing and slipped into the water. It happens. Too many people don’t know how to swim.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor bastard. Couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He’ll be in a pauper’s grave now, I suppose.’
‘Stray dogs?’ Something about this story was pricking at my instincts, though I couldn’t think why. Hajek had mentioned using dogs for experiments. ‘At the castle?’
‘That’s right. Who knows what they do with them, up there. But the lad who drowned – I don’t even know his name, God rest him – he worked up there. ’Course, he was a bit slow. Didn’t speak much. I guess the dogs understood him, though. Here we are then – Devil’s Channel.’
He jammed his oar into the water and the boat lurched to the right, into a small opening in the bank where high walls on either side cut out the little light from the sky. I put aside thoughts of the drowned dog-catcher as we entered a narrow canal that passed under the arches of the Stone Bridge and curved around in a semicircle. Here the water was unmoving; immediately an eerie silence fell, the rhythmic splashing of Novak’s oars the only sound.
‘The Knights Templar built this, so they say,’ he informed us. ‘To move goods in and out from the old watermills further up. And for other secret dealings, according to the legends, hence the name. They owned all the land and the properties on both sides – this is going back a couple of hundred years. When the new mills were built across the river, this fell out of use, as you see. No one comes here now – least, not for any good purpose.’
I looked around as we progressed. I had the sense that he was talking to dispel the quiet; despite his bluster, Novak was clearly uneasy. I suspected he was only obliging me out of a sense of guilt on Lude’s behalf. I could see why he disliked the place. It smelled of stagnant water and rotting vegetation; an oily scum floated on the surface, broken only by unidentifiable refuse poking through here and there. The buildings on both sides had a neglected air; streaks of green slime covered the walls and weeds grew through cracks in the brickwork.
‘How deep is the water?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Ten, twelve feet, maybe. Enough for a body to sink, anyway.’
I instructed Besler to watch the water on his side for any unusual object; I did the same on mine, though I was rapidly losing faith that we would find any trace of David. As we progressed, the walls on the left gave way to overhanging trees, their branches reaching tangled and untended over the channel, until we came to a place where a tree had fallen across at an angle, tipped sideways by storms or subsidence, and it became impossible to take the boat any further.
‘That’s as far as I go,’ Novak said, lifting the blades out of the water. I could see he was impatient to turn around and be gone. ‘If you want to climb up on to the bank here, you could walk along a bit further, you might see down into the channel through the trees on the other side, but I doubt you’ll find anything. If your mate’s here, he’s at the bottom.’
I stood precariously in the prow and peered into the thicket ahead as the small craft tipped with every movement. The trees and high walls blocked the light so much that in the depths of the channel it felt more like dusk than midday. Even so, I could clearly see a trail where the tips of branches had been recently snapped and a piece of dark cloth fluttered from a broken twig; someone had forced their way through beneath the tilted trunk.
‘Good luck to them, I’m not risking my boat,’ Novak said, when I pointed this out. ‘You want to get past this, you’ll have to walk or swim.’
I hesitated for a moment, before grabbing on to one of the branches and hauling myself on to the bank. I scrambled up and pushed through the tangle of exposed roots until I could see clear to the channel on the other side of the obstruction. Here I found one of the abandoned mills Novak had mentioned, its great wheel motionless. Coots had built their scrappy nests between the broken slats, but there was no sign even of birdlife now; the only movement came from needles of rain stippling the dark surface of the water. I sighed; this was fruitless. I moved to go back and quickly turned again, my eye caught by something opposite. A ledge ran along by the mill wheel, and a few feet to the right there was a small door set into the wall for loading and unloading. In this alcove, on the ledge just above the waterline, I could see what appeared to be a heap of rags or sacks. I slid down the bank to the edge of the channel for a better view, and in the low light I thought I could make out a pale starfish shape amid the jumble of dark sacking. A sudden movement made me start, but it was only a rat, scurrying along the ledge to sniff with interest at the object. It was then that I realised the white shape was a hand.
With only the briefest hesitation, I pulled off my doublet and boots and jumped into the freezing water, gasping and spitting as I resurfaced with weed clinging to my face. The channel was no more than twenty feet wide and I crossed it in a few strokes, trying not to swallow the water or think about what my legs were brushing against beneath the surface. The rat vanished into a crack in the door as I levered myself up on the stone ledge beside the body and drew back the wet cloth.
It was David. His eyes were closed, his face crusted with dried blood. There was just enough space in the alcove to roll him on to his back and part the cloak wrapping him to see a dark sticky mass covering the lower half of his jacket, though I could not make out the exact site of the wound that had killed him. ‘Ah, God, I’m sorry,’ I whispered, as I tried to work out how best to move his body back to the boat; in some indefinable way, I felt that I should have been able to prevent this. If I could swim with him across the channel, Novak could help me carry him around the obstruction. I was mustering the strength to attempt this when I realised something strange; I could feel warmth against my fingers where I had touched his clothes. I looked down to see a trickle of fresh blood on his stomach, as if—
Dio mio – was he still alive? Corpses didn’t bleed, except in legends. I ripped open his doublet and saw that moving him had reopened the wound. I tore off my wet shirt and pressed it against the place where fresh blood bubbled up; at the pressure, the ghost of a groan escaped his lips. I tried to wipe the mess from his face with a corner of his cloak. His skin was freezing and grey-green beneath the gore.
‘David? Stay with me, I’m going to get you to safety.’ I had no idea if he was conscious, but I kept talking to him while I manoeuvred my hands under his armpits. As I lifted his head, I thought I heard a sound; I leaned my ear to his mouth and caught the laboured rattle of a breath.
‘David?’
His eyelids flickered and opened a fraction, though I doubted he could focus or had any idea who I was. Another rattling sound came from deep in his throat; I felt his fingers flutter against my sleeve and realised he was trying to speak.
‘Tell me,’ I said, and this time I heard the word clearly:
‘Esther.’
‘What about her?’
‘She—’ His breathing sounded as if fluid was trapped in his chest. ‘The book of—’
‘Which book? A book of Esther’s?’
‘Esther,’ he repeated, more urgently, grasping at my wrist – ‘my doing—’
With that, he seemed to collapse in on himself, as if the effort of dredging up those words had taken his last reserves. I realised I didn’t have much time. The wound appeared to be low down in his stomach; evidently it had missed vital organs, or he would have been dead long before, but I had no way of knowing if he was bleeding internally or if there was any chance of saving him. I could see that trying to heave him up the opposite bank would be impossible, while the shock of cold water might staunch the flow of blood. I tied my shirt around his waist and eased him into the canal, holding him face up with his head above the murky water while I swam behind him, kicking hard to keep us both afloat as I struggled through the branches of the fallen tree, calling out to Novak and Besler. It was slow progress and several times I feared he would slip from my grasp or that we would both be submerged, but somehow by sheer force of will I persisted, until I felt Novak’s strong hands on my arms and David and I were both landed inelegantly like a pair of fish in the bottom of the boat. The boatman laid David out in the prow and covered him with his cloak, while Besler threw his coat around my shoulders; I was shivering so violently I feared I would bite my tongue in half.
‘Jesus,’ Novak said, starting back from the injured man. ‘What’s that on his head?’
I leaned around him to look and immediately understood what he meant. The water had washed the dried blood from David’s face. I had assumed it had come from a head injury where he had been hit to knock him out, but I now saw that the source was quite different. Carved into his forehead was a sign. I glanced up at Besler, who had turned pale at the sight. He recognised it, even if the boatman did not.
‘That’s the alchemical symbol for Death,’ I said.
TWENTY
Everything happened in blurred fragments after that. Novak rowed us back to the Jewish Town, where Besler ran on ahead to Rabbi Loew’s house to fetch help, while Novak and I lifted the wounded man and tried to carry him between us, though I was so numb with cold by that time that it was painful to walk and I could barely feel my hands; I was relieved when Benjamin appeared with another man to take my share of the load. The last I saw of David was his head lolling backwards, eyes closed, that ominous mark on his forehead livid red against the grey skin. There had been no repetition of his attempt to speak; I might have believed him dead already, were it not for the slow oozing of warm blood from his stomach.
I found myself in Rabbi Loew’s parlour, dressed in unfamiliar dry clothes loaned by one of the brothers-in-law, with a woollen blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a cup of hot wine clasped between my hands. I had sent Besler back to the Old Town to fetch Hajek – I thought the doctor ought to see the body – and now I shivered on the settle by the fire, conscious that the dank smell of the Devil’s Channel still clung to my skin, as the feeling returned painfully to my limbs. Esther paced behind me; her face, when I glimpsed it, was a tight mask of anxiety. Now and again she paused as if she were about to speak, but thought better of it and resumed her agitated movement. I hardly knew what to say to her; I was struggling to make sense of David’s last words. Was he telling me that Esther was involved? That he had been killed by her, or because of her? Or because of a book? How was it his doing? I thought of that dagger in her father’s desk drawer, and hoped she might leave me alone long enough for me to see if it was still there.
‘Will he live?’ she blurted suddenly, coming to a halt above me. I looked up and met her angry gaze.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps if he has good medical attention …’ It was unlikely, but I guessed she already knew that.
‘Benjamin is with him,’ she murmured. I didn’t reply; I still could not entirely discount the possibility that Benjamin knew exactly what had happened to his cousin. Had he ransacked the shop in search of the book David mentioned?
‘Was he lying there all night?’ she asked. ‘I can’t bear to think of it. How could he have survived?’
‘I didn’t have a chance to examine him properly, but he appears to have been stabbed in the stomach,’ I said. ‘If the knife perforated the bowel, he would be bleeding internally but not enough to kill him right away. Not like a blow to the heart or lungs.’ Not, in fact, like the blow that killed Ziggi Bartos. Which meant what? It could not be the same killer? Or that the killer, with his apparent knowledge of anatomy, had deliberately chosen to inflict a cruel and lingering death on David? That argued against Benjamin, who couldn’t even bring himself to deface his cousin’s books. But if it was not the same killer, it was certainly someone wanting to make David’s murder appear connected with that of Bartos. This was why I had sent Besler for Hajek; he would be able to tell if the same kind of curved dagger had been used – assuming the family allowed him to examine the body.
‘That awful mark on his head,’ Esther said, as if she had been following my thoughts. ‘He was meant to be found, don’t you think? Otherwise, why maim him like that? Unless it was a kind of punishment.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, privately feeling it was a relief that David had not suffered worse mutilations, the way Bartos had. ‘If he was stabbed in the boat, the killer could have thrown him overboard and he would have drowned. Instead, he was left on an exposed ledge where he could easily be seen as soon as people started looking.’
‘Did they mean to leave him alive?’ she asked quietly.
I shook my head. ‘I couldn’t say. It might simply have been that the attacker didn’t know what he was doing.’ Or wanted it to look that way.
‘So.’ She came to a halt by the fireplace and stared into the flames, the light catching the curve of her cheek as she frowned, ordering her thoughts. ‘We have an alchemist murdered, with the Hebrew word for Death cut into his face. And now, the attempted murder of a Jew, marked with the alchemists’ sign for Death in the same way. So how are we supposed to read it? Was David attacked as revenge? Was this a message to us from the alchemists?’ She was largely speaking to herself, so I didn’t interrupt. ‘But that makes no sense – the alchemists are not our enemies. If anything, they are better disposed to us than the good Christian citizens of Prague – we share the same approbation from society. Then why would someone wish to make it seem that we are attacking each other?’
