The Play of Death
Kuisl’s curses resounded so loudly in the dark, damp space that more stones trickled down from the ceiling. There was a crunching sound not far away, and he stopped in shock, but soon started again lifting rocks one after the other. He couldn’t give up, ever, for the sake of the children, even if he felt more and more like this Grecian fellow he’d read about once. Whenever he removed a stone, two more came down in its place. There was a loud rumbling as these rocks crashed into one another.
After a while, the hangman was gasping for air. He took a break, leaning on the cold rock wall and staring into the darkness. He almost laughed out loud—after all these months of neglecting himself, boozing, and getting howling drunk, God had sent him the earthquake a few days ago as a warning, but now once again God was scorning him. Jakob grunted angrily.
God just doesn’t like hangmen.
He was finished.
Yet he’d almost solved the riddle—the many riddles in the valley. Someone was forcing the children into something like slave labor. Evidently it was all about gold, silver, or some other treasure in the mountain. Still, it was unclear what the murders of the actors had to do with the mystery. The man with the pockmarked face apparently feared that Jakob was on to him, that he knew something about the murders, but then he suddenly acted very self-confidently once he saw that Jakob didn’t know the whole story. What was it that Jakob still didn’t understand?
It has to have something to do with the children . . .
He was overcome with exhaustion and sat down on the cold stone floor of the cave, staring blindly into the darkness. Suddenly it all seemed so pointless to him. He’d been struck down by some young punk who hadn’t even fought in the war. If he met his death down here, he really deserved it.
Old worthless mongrels were put out of their misery before they became a burden. Hadn’t he thought he’d seen a Venetian, after all? A messenger of impending death?
Actually, he’d hoped for a better end than to die of hunger down in a damp, dark grave. Walling up a man alive was a favorite punishment, reserved mostly for the higher functionaries to avoid the disgrace of a public execution. Many years ago, Jakob’s father had walled up a man convicted of counterfeiting, in the dungeon in Schongau. For days his desperate knocking on the wall could be heard, and since then the place was considered accursed.
Jakob assumed it would take weeks for him to die of hunger in this damp hellhole.
If he didn’t lose his mind first.
Suddenly he thought again of the children in the mine, and their hungry, sad gazes. Those little urchins were buried alive down here, too, and they needed him. He’d have to free himself to prevent any more from dying.
A new will to live flared up inside him. He straightened up and began lifting the stones, one by one, as his thoughts raced. The mine looked like it had been abandoned ages ago, but apparently someone had started to dig there again—with success. He remembered the bucket next to the red-haired boy; there was something glittering inside it.
Even now he thought he saw a slight glitter on the wall opposite him.
He was stunned.
Am I going crazy?
The hangman was familiar with mica, that basically worthless mineral that glimmered alluringly in the dark. Mushrooms sometimes glowed mysteriously as well, but this light was stronger: light was actually reflecting off the wall.
“What the hell . . . ?”
Jakob stood up and moved toward the flickering light when suddenly he heard whispering behind the rock.
“He isn’t here, Maxl,” someone whispered. “Poxhannes probably already buried him. Let’s go back before he notices we’re not working.”
“He wanted to help us, didn’t he?” someone else whined. “He seemed like a very strong man—Hannes thought he was the hangman from Schongau, Peter’s grandfather.”
“Hey, you out there!” Jakob shouted. He hurried toward the light coming through the crack between the rocks, which turned out to be a lantern. Evidently, without being aware of it, he had cleared a space several inches wide to the passage on the other side. A slight draft was blowing through the hole. When he looked through he could make out some vague figures in the tunnel only a yard or so away. “I’m not dead, I’m here!”
The voices fell silent, and after a while someone asked cautiously, “Are . . . are you the Schongau hangman or a ghost?”
“By God, I’m the hangman. But if you wait much longer I will be a ghost, and I swear by my immortal soul I’ll come after you little rascals and haunt you from now until Judgment Day!”
“It’s really him, Jossi!” gasped a voice out in the passageway. “He’s alive, and we have to help him.”
“But maybe he really is a ghost . . .”
“Now you listen here, you two little wise guys,” shouted Jakob, whose patience was running out. “Stop your silly chitchat. Is there some sort of crossbeam or bar out there? If so, hurry up and push it through the hole before I get angry—and I swear, that’s something you don’t want to see.”
He heard a cracking and crunching, and then a splintered old support beam was shoved through the hole. He grabbed it and, using the beam as a lever, succeeded in pushing some of the large stones aside. His renewed hope, and also the fresh air flowing in through the hole, infused him with new strength, and soon the hole was large enough to crawl through.
On the other side, two boys about ten years old stared at him anxiously. One of them, the redheaded youth whom Jakob thought before was a little Venetian man, was holding a lantern. This time, however, he looked quite human in his ragged shirt and muddy trousers.
Human, and very vulnerable.
The hangman crawled over a few rocks and now stood directly before the two boys, who seemed to shrink in the presence of his imposing figure.
“And now, finally, tell me what’s going on here,” Jakob growled.
The two boys began to speak, first hesitantly, then without inhibition, like a gushing waterfall.
Outside the window of the Schwabenwirt tavern in Oberammergau, a barn owl called plaintively, like a crying child.
Simon startled and looked over at the shutters, shaking in the wind. He was still sitting by the table in the ambassador’s suite in his filthy clothes that stank of cow dung, still too lost in thought to touch either the food or the wine. How he longed for a cup of coffee to keep him awake and help him think, but he doubted the innkeeper would have any of the exotic beans. Even the influence of Johann Lechner couldn’t do anything to change that.
From time to time he looked up at the ceiling and at the chandelier holding the white candles that slowly burned down as the night steadily advanced. Wax ran down the iron holders, dripping onto the floor from time to time in front of the tile stove, forming little puddles that soon hardened.
He heard Magdalena’s regular breathing coming from the bed and lovingly looked over at her. She was fast asleep. Her chest rose and fell beneath the thick covers and her face was rosy and not as pale as it had been a few hours ago. Evidently, her fever really had subsided.
He couldn’t help thinking of Peter, who he hoped was sleeping just as peacefully over at Georg Kaiser’s house. A warm feeling of affection came over him as he looked again at Magdalena. Basically, they had happy lives. The Kuisls were perhaps a dishonorable family, but at least they were a close-knit family that loved, quarreled, and cared for one another. They always had enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and good reason to hope that their future would be better than their past.
Unlike some of the children here in this village, he thought darkly.
He shuddered, remembering the children’s bones he’d held in his hands just a few hours ago atop the Döttenbichl. They’d been so small, so fragile. Had those children ever known the love of a father or mother? When they had bad dreams, were they comforted, rocked, or sung to sleep? Had there been more to eat than just unsweetened porridge and a hard crust of bread every day?
Well, at least they seemed to have
friends. Martin was one, the boy who was now languishing with a black, festering stump of a leg in a cabin near the Laber with his sick mother and little sisters. Simon swore to himself he’d pay another visit to Martin before finally going home to Schongau. Basically, the case was closed, the murders were almost all solved, and the smugglers had been arrested. The two children had probably had an accident and wild animals had dragged their corpses to the Döttenbichl. Now it was important to help Barbara, who was clearly in serious trouble back home, but that was Lechner’s job, not his, and his work here was done.
Or was it?
He couldn’t stop thinking of the children’s corpses—he remembered their names. Martin’s mother had told him that day up on the Alpine meadow.
Markus and Marie.
And all of a sudden these names set off a bell deep inside him followed by a whirlwind of thoughts descending on him, crushing him in his chair. It was as if he’d been sitting here all these long hours just waiting for this whirlwind.
Markus and Marie . . . Markus and Marie . . . Markus and Marie . . .
Details of recent events came flooding back to him, and he grew more and more restless.
Finally, he jumped up and paced back and forth like a caged animal while Magdalena snored softly and shifted around in her sleep. From far off he heard the bells striking midnight, and he paused briefly to count the strokes.
Midnight. The hour of the mountain spirits, kobolds and dwarfs . . . I, too, once almost believed in them.
Then he stopped short. He couldn’t remember ever hearing a church bell ring this late at night. Evidently the priest was still awake. On this night that had brought so much misfortune to the village, the venerable Tobias Herele was reminding the Oberammergauers of their guilt. Simon walked over to the shutter, opened it softly, and looked over at the church, whose steeple stood out in gray before the black backdrop of the mountains. The light was still on downstairs in the rectory.
And suddenly Simon knew what he had to do.
He looked over at Magdalena and hesitated. It certainly wouldn’t help her recovery if he woke her now. On the other hand, she’d never forgive him if he took off on his mission without telling her.
Not if what he feared had actually happened.
He finally went over to her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Unexpectedly, she opened her eyes at once.
“What is it?” she asked sleepily.
“There’s something we have to check,” Simon said. “Something very important. I hope it will finally bring us clarity.”
Stooped over, Jakob Kuisl raced with Jossi and Maxl through the low passageways in the mine toward the exit. Occasionally he bumped his head against a low-hanging rock, which didn’t exactly help his headache, but he persisted and ran on, driven by irrepressible fury. The two boys had told him only briefly what was going on down there, but it was enough to enrage him like a wild bull. It appeared the children were being used as cheap labor, as slaves whose lives weren’t worth a heller. They all came from workers’ families, and they all had to work in the mine at night and on their days off, looking for gold and silver. Jakob still hadn’t figured out who in Oberammergau knew about it. He couldn’t imagine it was just this stupid pockmarked fellow who evidently worked as a teacher’s assistant in the village school.
“Poxhannes is furious,” redheaded Jossi exclaimed, panting, as the three of them ran on. “He thinks one of us ratted about the mine. He drove all the others back down into the large cave and is beating them black-and-blue to make them tell who it was. We’re the only ones who escaped.”
“Now he surely thinks we’re the traitors,” Maxl said. “He’ll kill us just as he did Markus. The poor kid didn’t properly support a passageway, and it caved in. Marie was killed by the falling rock.” He shuddered. “Poxhannes beat Markus with a club until he couldn’t move any more, then he buried him, along with Marie.”
“On the Döttenbichl, I know,” Jakob said. “But there will be no more of that. This scoundrel won’t beat kids anymore, as sure as I am the Schongau hangman.”
They were just turning a corner when Jossi suddenly stopped. They could hear a child crying somewhere, and again and again a loud, threatening voice.
“We’re very close now,” Jossi whispered, pointing the lantern toward the left, where a hole the size of a barrel was visible in the rock wall. “There’s a cave back there that’s probably even older than the mine itself. We found the bones of huge bears in it, and strange drawings of animals on the walls that look like they were made by a child.”
“How long has this been going on?” Jakob asked. “How long has he been tormenting you?”
Maxl shrugged. “Many years. Jossi and I have been working in the mine since we were six, and before that there were others. He needs small children who can fit through the low passages.”
“Just like dwarfs.” Jakob nodded. It seemed that at least here, in the Ammergau Valley, there was some truth to the legends. “And do you find gold and silver?”
The wailing continued in the great cave below, and Jossi laughed bitterly. “If only that were so. But there’s nothing here, just bits of mica, fool’s gold, and sometimes alum. As far as I know, no one has ever found anything of real value here, but still he doesn’t give up. It’s like an obsession.”
The hangman remembered having seen something sparkling in Jossi’s bucket earlier, and had thought they were precious stones. But it was just mica sparkling seductively in the light of the lantern. There were no dwarfs, and there was also no treasure.
“But why does he make you keep digging here, when there’s nothing to find?” Jakob asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“As I said, he’s obsessed,” Jossi whispered. “Sometimes he sends us down to the Laber to dig in another mine, or to the old bear cave above Pulvermoos. But there’s nothing there either. For about two years we’ve been working mostly at this mine in the Kofel. He sends us at the strangest times into the mountains—we never know when it will be our turn. Sometimes we work for a week without rest, like now, and we have to work at night, as well.”
Jakob nodded. He remembered the little creature he and Simon had seen shortly before the avalanche in the Laine Valley. It must have been one of the children. With the leather miner’s hoods, they could have passed for Venetians.
“You stay here,” he whispered to the two boys.
He crept silently into the hole in front of them, which he was just able to fit through. The crying and the shouted commands as well as the whistling of the stick and the slapping sound as it hit bare flesh again and again became louder as he advanced. Jakob scooted a few steps forward. He peered through an opening into a large cave with a ceiling high enough for adults to stand up in. Some rocks were piled up in front of the hole, partially blocking his view.
Just as in the rest of the mine, the rock ceiling was propped up with crumbling wooden beams and rough-hewn pillars made from oak trees. Burning torches were driven into cracks in the rock floor and they cast eerie shadows on walls where someone had sketched bears, stags, and hunters in shades of red and black. The drawings were faded and no doubt very old.
More than a dozen children were gathered in the cave, and one of them, a small boy, was leaning over a large rock and screaming while Poxhannes beat his bare backside with a stick.
“Give me the names of all the people you told about the mine,” Hannes shouted. “The Ettal abbot? The Schongau secretary? If that hangman knows about it, then so does the secretary, doesn’t he? Who talked? Jossi and Maxl? Speak up before I rip the skin off your friend’s ass.”
“We don’t know anything,” a little girl cried, holding her hand in front of her face. “I swear we don’t! Please stop beating Benedikt. You’ll . . . you’ll kill him!”
“First you brats are going to talk. Hurry up, I’m waiting.” And again the teacher’s assistant flogged away mercilessly at the boy. “I’m going to keep beating him until the culprit confesses. So w
hat’s your answer?”
Jakob had seen enough. He crept back into the passage and turned to the boys, who were waiting anxiously for him.
“Now listen here,” he began in a whisper. “I have to know where the fellow keeps his pistol. A little while ago he had it with him, but he’s not wearing it on his waist now, so far as I can see in this accursed darkness. So where is it?”
Maxl frowned. “Hannes takes it around with him and likes to show off. Once, as a joke, he held it to the head of one of the kids and pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t loaded. But where it is now—”
“The chest,” Jossi interrupted excitedly. “His chest is back there in a niche in the cave. That’s where he keeps his lamp oil, the torches, and some other things that have to be kept dry. I’ll bet he keeps his pistol there.”
“Then I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Jakob growled. “You go in there and distract him, and I’ll follow just out of sight. If I can get to the chest before he does, then he’s through.”
“And if not?” Maxl asked anxiously.
The hangman shrugged. “I know pistols like his from the war, a single-barreled Dutch wheel-lock gun, large caliber, but with just one round. The fellow better pray to all the saints that he doesn’t miss, or I’ll rip his ass off, so—”
Another loud scream rang out, and the boys froze. Evidently, Hannes had just hit the boy very hard.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Jakob said. “Why didn’t you ask anyone in town for help in putting an end to this?”
“Because he threatened us,” Jossi replied despairingly. “He keeps saying he’ll see to it that our families are driven out of the valley. Just like many years ago, we workers would be chained to wagons and taken down to the Loisach. He said that if we even said a word, our families would be destroyed.”
Jakob grunted with disgust. “That guy in the cave looks as dumb as an ox. Why are you afraid of him? A teacher’s assistant? He doesn’t have any power in the village.”
Jossi looked at him, wide-eyed in terror. “But . . . but I don’t mean Hannes,” he said quietly.