The Werewolf of Bamberg

  Jakob’s eyes weren’t as good as they used to be, and it took a while until he could make anything of the scribbles. When he finally was able to read it, he exhaled loudly. He knew the name—at least the surname.

  Dr. Johann Georg Harsee

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jakob said, shaking his head. “Is he perhaps—”

  “Yes, indeed, he just happens to be the father of our present suffragan bishop,” Jeremias said with a grin. “After Haan’s death, he became the chancellor, and isn’t it strange—all these men and women who in some way were connected with the commission at that time met their deaths, and the son of the presiding judge was transformed into a werewolf. If I didn’t know it had to be satanic magic, I’d believe God himself was taking sweet revenge.”

  “God . . . or someone else,” Jakob murmured. Then he pointed to a passage farther down in the notes. “See here—it’s signed by the two clerks who transcribed the proceedings.”

  “Of course,” Jeremias exclaimed, slapping his scarred forehead. “There were two clerks, not one. That’s something that puzzled me last night. I knew someone was missing. One is Johannes Schramb, isn’t it? So I was right.”

  Jakob nodded. “You’ll be more interested in seeing the name of the other scribe.” He pointed at the second name, signed in beautifully flowing letters. In contrast with the presiding judge, this person had not taken the slightest effort to conceal his name.

  Hieronymus Hauser

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to bring some very bad news to someone today,” the Schongau hangman said, closing the heavy book. “Our dear Katharina doesn’t seem to know her father as well as she thinks.”

  At that moment, the bells in the cathedral started to ring.

  It was time to head back.

  15

  SOMEWHERE UNDERGROUND, NOON, NOVEMBER 2, 1668 AD

  IN HER DARK, DAMP ROOM, Adelheid Rinswieser had spent the worst night of her life—alone with a sniffling, scratching, growling beast that was attempting to dig its way down to her. For the first time the dungeon felt less like a prison than a fortress, and she hoped it would protect her.

  From time to time the unknown monster vanished and the sounds stopped, but it always returned to continue digging, and now a ray of sunlight shone past a wooden panel in a corner of the room.

  Outside, it appeared to be a pleasant day. A few blackbirds were singing, and occasionally a magpie squawked nearby, but Adelheid just lay there holding her breath, waiting for the monster to return and continue digging. How long would it be before it had dug down deep enough and the wooden panel gave way? How long before it reached her and attacked her? Tied up as she was, she could neither flee nor defend herself.

  In these hours of terror, Adelheid could only imagine what the beast looked like. Was it the same monster that had attacked her in the forest? Was it the man who was keeping her down here? Whatever it was, considerable time had passed since she’d last heard the digging and scraping.

  Had the animal given up?

  Adelheid felt a flicker of hope. She tugged at the leather straps. She was dying of thirst and the cold, but as long as neither the man nor this monster broke into her dungeon, she was safe—for the time being. She used this time to ruminate frantically. Would it be possible for her to flee? Why had the man locked her up down here? Was there anything to gain from her newfound knowledge?

  She was sure she knew the man.

  Ever since she saw him without his hood, she’d been racking her brain but couldn’t remember where she’d seen him before. It took a long time before it finally came to her, but now she was certain—she recognized those gestures, those eyes, even the shape of the mouth. She knew who it was.

  And surely he realized that she knew.

  If only for that reason, he couldn’t let her go.

  But why? Why are you doing this? Why did you cry? How can I convince you not to kill me?

  Adelheid went over it again and again in her mind, but she couldn’t figure it out. She’d never be able to convince him by pleading and crying. The others had tried that in vain. She’d heard their screams as they became more guttural and softer, until they finally fell silent. If she could just figure out his motive, perhaps she had a tiny chance of persuading him.

  Why? Why is he doing this?

  She cringed on hearing a sound. It was the same tapping and sniffing that always preceded the scraping and digging.

  The monster had returned.

  It was prowling around out there, sniffing and panting, and once it growled briefly. Then the noise stopped.

  Adelheid listened intently. Would the animal start digging again? But there was no further sound; perhaps the beast had left.

  But . . . for how long?

  “Go away,” she whispered. “Go back to hell, where you came from. Please. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with you . . . ”

  Adelheid prayed the Ave Marias familiar to her from her childhood, one after the other, giving her strength and reassurance.

  “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death . . .”

  But for all her prayers, the Mother of God did not intercede.

  “I can’t understand why the two have been gone so long,” Simon murmured, pacing back and forth like a caged animal in Hieronymus Hauser’s study. “It’s already way past noon.”

  “Just calm down,” his father-in-law responded. “Bartholomäus may be an unpleasant fellow, but nothing will happen to your wife with him at her side. In a heavy fog like this, it takes a long time to do a good search of the city.”

  “I know you’re right, but still, it worries me.”

  Simon gave a sigh of resignation and continued pacing, his hands folded behind his back, through the room cluttered with chests and shelves, from one corner to the other. He’d been waiting more than two hours, along with Jakob, Georg, and old Jeremias, for Magdalena and Bartholomäus to return. They’d arranged to meet here in Hauser’s house, as Simon hoped they might find some clue in Hieronymus’s documents to explain his disappearance. So far they’d found nothing. And considering the massive disorder in the room, he didn’t believe he’d have any success here, either.

  Rolls of parchment, notebooks, and worn, weighty tomes lay scattered around, and a huge tower of files was piled atop a small desk in the corner. In his cursory search, Simon had almost knocked over a pot of ink carelessly left on the floor.

  Katharina herself had led them into the cramped attic room. By now she’d calmed down enough to go back to the kitchen and bake cookies with the boys. In the meantime, Bartholomäus’s servant, Aloysius, was taking care of the injured Matheo in the executioner’s house. The Bamberg executioner had sworn Aloysius to absolute silence, which was not particularly difficult for the uncommunicative servant.

  “At the moment I’m more worried about Hieronymus Hauser,” Jakob said, pulling out his pipe. He searched through his pockets for some tobacco but, not finding any, sucked on the stem and continued his musings. Finally, he spoke up. “After Sebastian Harsee, Hauser is the only one remaining on our supposed werewolf’s list. Everything suggests that now he, too, has fallen victim to the werewolf.”

  Shortly before the end of the mass, Jakob and Jeremias had returned to the cathedral without incident, bringing the minutes of Haan’s trial along with them. Now it was lying open on the small, ink-stained lectern in the middle of Hauser’s study. Jakob pounded his gnarled fingers on the entry listing the members of the commission.

  “It’s just as I told you,” he mumbled, chewing on his cold pipe stem. “All the victims were somehow involved in the trial of Chancellor George Haan. When a commission member has died, the murderer blames a surviving relative and takes his vengeance out on him—and in a rather bloody way, it appears.”

  “You’re right,” said Jeremias. “When I think how brutally we treated poor Chancellor Haan then, all this torturing of the victims suddenly doesn’t look so strange.” He poured himself another steaming tankard of hot
mulled wine, which made his nose look even redder. “Basically, the suspect is only treating the torture victims in the customary way.” He frowned. “Leaving aside, of course, the rabies infection. That’s so cruel, even we wouldn’t have thought about doing it back then.”

  “On the other hand, he’s being completely consistent,” Simon said. “Turning the son of the former head of the Witches Commission into a kind of witch himself—this vengeance is especially perfidious, worse than any other conceivable torture.”

  Simon cast a sideways glance at Jeremias, who had seemed so kind and innocent. The sensitive medicus was uneasy sitting in the same room with a man who had probably executed hundreds of people—to say nothing of the young prostitute. But there were also moments when Simon felt something almost like pity for the old cripple.

  “I remember young Harsee well,” Jeremias said, after taking a few long sips of the mulled wine. “Sebastian was an ardent student of theology, always carrying around his father’s documents for him. It’s quite possible that he, too, was involved in the intrigue against the Haans. Something smells fishy here.” He put his hand to his nose. “You can’t say that about the other members of the committee.”

  Georg, sitting next to him, cleared his throat. He’d returned more than an hour ago from searching the western part of town and, until now, hadn’t said a word. It was clear he was upset by the disappearance of his twin sister.

  “Isn’t it about time we told Katharina the truth about her father?” he asked. “After all, it’s quite possible he’s already dead.”

  “She’ll learn about it soon enough,” Jakob grumbled. “For now, I’m happy she’s keeping busy caring for my two grandsons who are always looking for something to eat. Let’s all put our heads together now and try to think about who might be the culprit.” He turned to Jeremias. “Did you say all the members of the Haan family died?”

  Jeremias nodded. “So far as I know, yes—the chancellor and his wife, their son, two other daughters, and a daughter-in-law. Another son was supposedly poisoned a few years later, and a son-in-law died in an accident. I believe that’s all of them.”

  “And the grandchildren?” Simon quickly chimed in. “All that happened almost forty years ago, and if we’re really looking for someone who was alive at that time and is still looking for vengeance, he must have been quite young then.”

  “You can forget that—there was no one else. The family died out.” Jeremias took another deep swallow. “Just be happy I could remember anything at all and could lead you to the documents in the archive. I’m just an old cripple now, nothing more.”

  “Oh, come now. You’re also the ruthless murderer of a young prostitute, and I’m still uncertain whether to turn you over to Lebrecht’s guards,” Jakob growled. “If your life means anything to you, you’d better use your head, or you won’t have it much longer.”

  Jeremias groaned. “You’re asking too much. I’m neither an archivist nor a court clerk. How can I—”

  “A court clerk!” Simon interrupted excitedly. “That’s it! Hieronymus was the clerk. Katharina said he often brought documents back home to work on them here. Perhaps there are some notes that will tell us something about the Haans. This family, once so powerful, cannot simply have vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “Such documents would have to be decades old,” said Jakob. “Why would Hieronymus keep things like that?”

  “He didn’t keep them, he just found them again.” Simon paced back and forth, faster and faster, waving his arms as he spoke. “Until now I thought Hieronymus had perhaps left a note behind. But that’s not the case.” He pointed at all the books on the floor. “Just look around you. Katharina’s father was looking around for something in the old notes—something he’d forgotten. And I think he found it.”

  He stopped pacing and turned to the others. “Think about what’s happened here. Two days ago I paid a visit to Hieronymus. Clearly something in our conversation about the witch trial jogged his memory. He probably remembered the Haan trial and noticed the connection between the people who’d disappeared. At the same time he realized that if he was right, he himself belonged in the group of potential victims. But he wasn’t certain, and that’s why he hurried off to the bishop’s archives—”

  “Where he found the document,” Jakob broke in, nodding as he chewed on the stem of his pipe. “It was on the very top of the shelf, meaning it had just been taken out recently, probably by Hauser. So far, so good. But how does that help us?”

  “Now hear me out,” Simon quickly continued. “Magdalena told me that Katharina was watching her father as he searched through everything up here. That was after he returned from the archive, so it’s clear he wanted to check something, and after that he was very agitated. During the bishop’s reception he kept looking around, as if searching for someone.”

  “Probably the suspect,” Georg added, looking at Simon intently. “You think he discovered something here in this room that put him on the right track to the perpetrator?”

  Simon nodded. “But evidently the perpetrator found Hieronymus first. Katharina told us she had lost sight of her father in the courtyard, so we can guess that this unknown avenger was among the guests and reached out to strike there. Who could that have been? There must be a clue, something . . .” He looked around the cluttered room. “If Hieronymus really found something here, where would he have put it?” He walked through the room, then stopped in front of the bookshelves. “Where?”

  Simon closed his eyes and tried to put himself in the place of Hieronymus Hauser. He imagined him running through the room . . .

  I’m terrified. I’ve learned something terrible, and now I want to be certain, so I’ll start taking books off the shelves at random. No, not at random—I’ll look for something very specific . . .

  Simon opened his eyes, bent down, and picked up a heavy volume with a sewn binding lying on the floor in front of him. He leafed through it with trembling fingers. It was an old accounts book for the city, showing tax receipts as well as expenditures for a new gallows, building materials, and food for the kaiser’s emissaries.

  Two hundred guilders for eight barrels of Rhine wine, plus five pigs at twenty guilders, a cartload of wood . . .

  Simon reached for the next book, but that, too, only recorded city expenditures—endless columns of figures—and soon his eyes began to swim. Again Simon tried to think about what Hieronymus had told him during their last conversation. Just what were his final words?

  The council has ordered me to recopy a huge pile of old, barely legible financial records . . .

  “He must have found something in these old volumes and receipts,” Simon mumbled to himself. “But what? What, damn it?” He put the book aside, closed his eyes, and tried again to put himself in the place of the clerk. The others watched him—and waited.

  I’m grabbing book after book from the shelves, looking, paging through, and finally I find something. I’m in front of the shelves, but the book is too heavy to spend any more time standing here and leafing through it. I can’t hold it any longer, so I go . . .

  Simon opened his eyes and looked around.

  To the lectern.

  There in the corner stood the lectern with a pile of books on top. A large book lay open at the bottom of the pile, looking similar to the other books on the floor. Simon hurried over, took the books on top and put them on the floor, and then studied the open page of the book that had been on the bottom. At first he was disappointed, for once again what he saw were lists and columns of income and expenses. But suddenly he noticed a particular name and knew at once he was on the right track.

  Confiscation of the property of the Haan family, 4,865 guilders, distributed in equal parts to the commission, the city, and the Prince Bishopric . . .

  “Did you find something?” Jakob asked, rising from his stool and looming over Simon like a huge shadow.

  Simon nodded silently, then continued reading.

  . . .
less 400 guilders to the Carmelite Cloister on the Kaulberg to care for the minor Wolf Christoph Röhm, son of Martin Röhm and Katharina Röhm, née Haan. Attested to December 17, anno domini 1629 . . .

  Now Simon turned to the others, looking at them ashen-faced.

  “I think we’ve found our werewolf,” he said in a soft voice. “It says here Wolf Christoph Röhm—son of a Haan, so, in fact, the chancellor did have a grandson. What irony.” He shook his head. “His parents really gave him a suitable name for his crimes to come.”

  Magdalena waited impatiently in the little guardroom of the city prison for Captain Lebrecht to finally release her and Bartholomäus. She was certain their family was worried and eagerly awaiting them. But there was nothing they could do—the captain was not going to let them off that easy. It seemed to her he was even intentionally taking his time with the paperwork.

  “And you come from Schongau, do you?” he asked her for perhaps the tenth time. “Where’s that again?”

  Magdalena sighed. “A few hours south of Augsburg, north of the Alps, like I’ve already told you.”

  Lebrecht didn’t answer but continued scratching letters with a quill into a thick folder. Magdalena shifted nervously back and forth in her seat and cast annoyed looks at her uncle.

  Just as they’d been leaving the old house with the baboon stashed safely away in the cellar, the city guards, alerted by the beggar Josef, appeared. In a fierce struggle, the men succeeded in pulling the biting and scratching Luther out of the cellar and tying him up. Three guards wrapped the animal in a blanket and took him back to the menagerie, while Captain Lebrecht ordered Magdalena and Bartholomäus to follow him back to the city jail. Ostensibly, the reason was to take their testimony, but Magdalena quickly realized that Martin Lebrecht had something quite different on his mind.

  “I want to stress again that nothing—I repeat, absolutely nothing—about this incident is to be made public,” the captain said, gazing sternly at Magdalena. “This order, by the way, comes not from me but from the prince-bishop himself, and I’m telling you this only to stress its urgency. His Excellency fears that the citizens of Bamberg might blame this entire werewolf story on him.”