Klaes knocked on the big solid front door of the burgomaster’s house. Then waited a while and knocked again. There was no knocker: he was obliged to rap with the edge of a coin taken from his pocket.
It was Bosilka who answered, which he might have anticipated but had not. He was outfaced for a moment, as she struggled and failed to hide her dismay on seeing him.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I need to speak with your master.”
“He’s not in.”
“Then I’ll wait,” said Klaes.
A serving maid can’t easily bar her master’s door, unless to gypsies and mendicants. With extreme reluctance, Bosilka stepped aside and allowed him in. “May I take your coat?” she mumbled, her gaze darting away from his every time their eyes threatened to meet. “Who shall I say is calling?”
“Well . . . me,” Klaes said. “Lieutenant Klaes. I’ve eaten at his table, Miss Stefanu. It’s not necessary for me to present a card.”
“No. Sorry. I meant . . . what shall I say the matter is?”
“The matter is private.” Klaes took off his greatcoat and handed it to her. She held it draped over her two arms, which made her look like Mary cradling the body of Christ in a pietà. Klaes suppressed the irreverent thought.
“Private. Yes. Very well.” Bosilka pointed to a door off to her left. “You’d best wait in the closet then. He’ll come and get you when he’s ready for you. Or I will. Most likely he will. I’m busy with the wash.” She turned away, seeming angry and unhappy.
“Miss Stefanu,” Klaes said quickly. “Wait.”
She stopped. “What?”
“My being here. I won’t . . . That is . . . I have no intention of implicating you.”
Bosilka gave him a cold look. “I don’t know what that means, Lieutenant Klaes. Is it a quotidian sort of thing?”
She didn’t wait for an answer but strode off, leaving him surprised and chagrined once again at how easily she’d given him the hip and thrown him. A woman like that, he thought sourly, had better not marry. Her husband would kill either her or himself before the year was out.
He went into the closet, a room even narrower than its name suggested. There was a chair with a misericord, a rack hung with the family’s winter coats and a great many jars of homemade preserves. A tiny window, made even smaller by the heavy wooden frame on which its shutter hung, allowed some light to dribble down the nearer wall. The overall effect—apart from the preserves—was of an eremite’s cell.
Inactivity stretches time and deceives expectation. It felt like a long while that Lieutenant Klaes stood at the window and waited. On the misericord there was a single book. He picked it up and read the title: Tausch’s Gazetteer and Almanac of Country Matters Mostly, MDCCXXXII.
He set it down again.
He had already decided on the course he was going to take, but he rehearsed the words in his mind several times over while he waited; honing his delivery, anticipating possible objections, making the performance watertight.
The door opened at last, and the burgomaster ushered him out of his confinement with a shooing gesture, like a farmer herding sheep. “This is a fine to-do!” he exclaimed. ”Nobody told me you were here, Corporal Klaes. I only noticed your coat on the table as I came through the hall, and asked whose it was.”
“It’s no matter,” Klaes said. He thought, I’m amazed she didn’t lock me in. Or bid me wait on the roof.
They went through into the drawing room where the family had received him the day the detachment took up residence at Pokoj. The chairs had been pushed back against the walls, but Weichorek set out two of them directly facing one another as though he expected this to be an interrogation of some sort. “Ease you,” he said, gesturing Klaes to sit.
Klaes did so. The burgomaster took up his place opposite, not bothering to sweep the tails of his jacket out from under his descending backside. No wonder they looked like the folds of a sack.
“Now,” he said briskly, “what brings you here?”
“A matter of some seriousness,” Klaes said, making his tone match the words. “And some delicacy, too. In the normal course of things, it would require me to make a formal report, but I would rather not involve my commander if it is possible for me to deal with it myself.”
Weichorek looked concerned—or perhaps he was merely puzzled. “A matter . . .”
“I have heard,” Klaes told him, “about Petos.”
For some moments the burgomaster did not speak. He merely regarded Klaes with the same air of troubled innocence. Klaes was content to let the silence continue for as long as it would. He had searched the cellar at Pokoj and found nothing incriminating or even interesting there—only the trunk and personal effects of the gypsy woman, Drozde. So he had decided to adopt another strategy, which was to extort information by seeming to possess it. And for that it was necessary to allow the other man to speak as much as possible while he himself said little but implied much.
”Petos,” Weichorek repeated at last.
“Yes.”
“I see.” Weichorek nodded. “And if I may ask, Captain, who was it told you about this?”
Could they not even keep his rank straight in their minds for two minutes? Klaes began to correct the error, but stopped himself. “The source does not matter. Only the facts in the case.”
“Ah. It was Bosilka, then.”
Klaes started. How in the world had Weichorek jumped to that conclusion? Because he’d been seen talking to the girl? Were rumours so quick, and so current? “I have no remit to give a name,” he said, striving to maintain a calm, impassive, card player’s face. “But I can tell you that it was not Miss Stefanu.”
“Who then?”
“A countryman of yours.” Klaes was aware that he should remain silent—let the burgomaster bring words and revelations to him. But he was obliged now to lay a false trail. He didn’t want Bosilka to suffer as a result of his subterfuge. “The man was in his cups. He spoke indiscreetly, and though I did not intentionally listen, I was compelled to overhear.”
“Ah,” the burgomaster said again. “So that’s how it was? And where did all this take place, Sergeant? If I’m permitted to ask? I didn’t know you men of the company were drinking in town with us. Certainly I’ve not yet seen you in Kolchek’s parlour—that’s our posthouse, and our inn, for want of anything better. Though if ten men sit there at the same time, half of them have their legs out of doors.” Weichorek laughed uproariously at this image, and Klaes gave a tight smile.
“No,” he admitted. “I have not, and the men in my command have not, drunk in the village. The colonel does not approve it.” When spoken, these words sounded evasive to Klaes, and pusillanimous. “And I,” he added. “I do not approve it either.”
“In Stollenbet then. The Sign of the Tartar.”
This guessing game could serve for nothing save to erode Klaes’s position. “I have said I will not name my informant,” he said. “He did not, in any case, mean to speak to me, and I would be sorry if his loose tongue brought him into censure.”
“Yes,” the burgomaster agreed. “That would be sad.” He threw out his arms in a shrug. “Well, this is an awkward thing, Lieutenant, and it somewhat gravels me how to continue.”
“I too,” Klaes said. “But I thought I would consult with you before I resolved upon how to proceed.”
“With me? Why with me?” The man was looking at him shrewdly now, and Klaes had to work hard to keep from looking away—which would be a virtual admission that his candour was only a facade.
“Well,” Klaes said, “with your knowledge of the local people and their situation, I felt you might have your own opinion as to what needs to be done.”
“Does anything need to be done?”
“Perhaps not. But I should like to hear your thoughts all the same.”
The burgomaster sighed, and scratched his head in a pantomime of deep rumination. “My thoughts. Well, of course. Why not? But I don’t know yet, my dear Klaes, what it is you’ve been told.”
The shift from his rank to his name was interesting, Klaes thought—and frankly something of a relief. The request for circumstantial detail was less so. “I believe I have most of the facts in my possession,” he said.
“Such as?”
Klaes found himself thinking back to that shooing gesture that the burgomaster had used to get him out of the closet and into the drawing room. Now, as then, he felt somewhat like a sheep being penned. “I know about the cellar,” he said. And then, taking a further gamble, “The cellar at Pokoj, I mean.”
Weichorek grimaced. “That’s far from the worst of it,” he said. “But I ask again. It was not from Bosilka that you heard all this?”
“No!” Klaes exclaimed. “Why from Bosilka? I have barely said good day to Bosilka. And what is this to her?”
“It concerns her,” the burgomaster said, calm in the face of Klaes’s slightly over-emphatic denial. “Not closely, perhaps, and not as one might assume, but it concerns her. And some aspects of it . . . well, they touch on her honour, Captain. They do. I feel, to some degree, as if I’m being asked to share confidences that are not my own to dispose of. You see? I’m sure you’re a man of discretion, but still . . .”
Her honour? This sounded like a murky business, and Klaes was sorry all over again that Colonel August had obliged him to try to fathom it. It distressed him, too, to discover that Bosilka Stefanu’s honour was compromised. He had himself thought unworthy things of her as recently as two days ago, but after their encounter in the forest he had come to have a better opinion of her. It was not that she had brained him with a rock, it was that she had acknowledged the attack afterwards and stood ready to take the consequences. He admired that. And if he now found her to be mixed up in some tawdry scandal, it would force him to withdraw that recently bestowed respect.
“Before I speak any further,” Weichorek said, “I need your assurance that what I say will not go beyond this room.”
“I can’t make that promise, Meister Weichorek,” Klaes said scrupulously. “I wish I could, but I cannot. My overriding responsibility is to my commander, Colonel August.”
“What, a colonel command a captain?”
“I’m not a captain, I’m a lieutenant. And a colonel commanding a lieutenant—or a captain, for that matter—is the normal order of things. Even if I were a rittmeister”—he used the Schönbrunner word—“Colonel August would still be three full ranks above me.”
Weichorek waved the correction aside with just a touch of asperity. “I’m not trying to make you party to a conspiracy,” he said. “Obviously, if you need to report this to your major—”
“My colonel.”
“—to your colonel, then you’ll do so. But I’d be desirous, in that case, of having your undertaking to omit the names of any third parties who might be hurt by it, do you see? Not to restrain your hand against the guilty, but to protect the innocent.”
“That I will vouchsafe to do,” Klaes said. “With all my heart.”
“Then I’ll fill in the gaps for you,” Weichorek said, slapping the table. “For the devil thrives on secrets, does he not?”
“Petos—Nymand Ilya Petos, son of Jan Petos and Saska Lubisch, who was Sandra’s daughter, from Grünberg, that married Lion Tchalk—”
“I think, if third parties are to be protected,” Klaes interjected hastily, “you should be less categorical about names and places.”
“—was Bosilka’s cousin. He was born in Narutsin, and grew up here. A quiet boy, always, and some said a strange one. But Bosilka pushed him out of a tree one day, when they were both seven years old, and after that the strangeness was more in evidence. It was in the course of a game, not in spite. But then, there it was. If only our motives counted, there’d hardly be any sin at all, would there? After that Petos would be found in the middle of the night, standing stock still in someone’s field, or their barn, or even on one occasion in their bedroom.
“There was no harm in the lad, he was just simple. Perhaps it was always there in him, and the falling from a tree had done no more than bring it out. Or perhaps that impact with the impacted soil of Girn Hoyter’s orchard had scrambled up his vital spirits past untangling.
“Then there was an incident involving a sheepdog. The dog died, and Petos was accused. He was fourteen years old. He cried a great deal, and said he’d never hurt the dog, which was Otto Bibran’s sheepdog, Lightning. But Otto was furious. The dog was the last pup of his old bitch, Phye, and he treasured her more than she was worth. He would take no compensation, he said, but he would have the boy whipped out of town for her death.
“Well, Petos was not whipped—I intervened, poured oil on the waters, brought the various parties to some sort of amity—but he was obliged to leave. The family sent him to Grünberg, where his mother still had kin. Kin on her mother’s side. Bledviks. They raised the lad,” Weichorek said with a slow shake of his head, “as something between a serving boy and a pet. He slept in the hayloft, not in the house, and they didn’t take him to church with them on Sundays. A sorry state of affairs, but what could you do? My cousin’s cousin, Molinesz, is town clerk in Grünberg and he knew what was going on, but I had no voice that I could raise there.
“Time passed. In Narutsin, Nymand Petos was all but forgotten. Then something awful and unprecedented happened—a wave of thefts that had the whole village gossiping and pointing fingers. First it was Gelen Stromajik’s ladle. Then a silver-gilt hair slide from Dame Dubin’s bedroom. And from my house, too, something was taken,” Weichorek said. “A dollar—a hard dollar, I mean, not a rix-dollar—that was given to my son Jakusch on his first name day. It was a special pressing, with the face of Jakusch’s saint, James the Fisherman, alongside that of the emperor. He prized it highly, and it was a hard loss.”
Klaes began to suspect at last where this rambling story was going. “Was Miss Stefanu suspected?” he asked.
“That she was. She was the only one, you see, with a foot in all those three houses. Gelen Stromajik was her father’s sister. She was thick as thieves—pardon me, was close friends, I should say—with Dubin’s daughter, and always up there helping her collect eggs from the hens and the geese. And of course she worked for us.
“So yes, she was suspected. And then she was accused. And when it was put to her, she admitted it.”
“Admitted her guilt!” Klaes exclaimed. He could not help himself.
“Yes. To me. But not to the priest. When she was urged to make confession, she would not do it. She only wept and wondered what would become of her.” Weichorek scratched his head again and then passed his hand across his brow. “It grieves me now to think on her distress,” he said. “But once she had said it, of course I had to act on it. We have no constable here. I sent to Stollenbet, where there is a parish officer and a gaol. A cell, rather, for it’s only the one room in a Martello tower that was once a lookout against the border men. They came and took her, and locked her up. A date was set for her trial.”
Klaes tried to reconcile this image with the forthright and even fierce young woman he had met. It made a bad fit. “I find I cannot believe this,” he said.
“It troubled me too,” the burgomaster admitted. “Especially that detail of her not making confession. I wondered if there was some other side to the affair that was hidden from me. And then, you know, once she’d been taken away and we were all examining our consciences, or counting our spoons as it might be, the most curious thing happened.
“The thefts went on, just as before. One man lost a milking stool, spirited away from his barn between sundown and sunup. Another, a poker from the fireplace.”
“These are not precious things,” Klaes said.
“No.” Weichorek looked grim. “Nor was Dame Stromajik’s ladle. I might have thought of that before, but I didn’t. I didn’t even think of it then, to tell you the truth. I thought only of Bosilka’s innocence, and I made up my mind to go to Stollenbet and have the charges against her withdrawn before she came to trial. Only my wife, God bless her, thought that was a sign of undue partiality on my part. To be blunt, she thought I looked on Silkie with an improper affection, and wanted her home again for that reason. And while we argued the point back and forth, with more heat than sense, the snows fell. They fell thick, and they fell deep.
“You would have thought a foot of snow on the ground and a wind you could shave your beard with would deter a thief from going abroad. And so they did, for two nights and three days. But on the third night we were all roused from our beds with great halloos and alarums. Jorg Stefanu came running into town to say that his workshop had been broken into in the night, and two of his hammers were gone.
“A man’s tools are sacred things, but I suspect that had little to do with what happened next. One of the village lads, Tilde Shweven’s boy, points out that the thief has left his footprints in the snow. And then all the men are fetching up knives and cudgels and torches and talking themselves into a great fervour. They’ll catch this rascal and serve him properly for his tricks.
“I tried to calm them. I pointed out that the tracks would keep until dawn, and that daylight would make their enterprise safer and surer, but it would not do. Off they ran into the dark, hunting like hounds but braying like donkeys. And soon enough the trail led them into the woods—and yes, there is someone running before them. They’ve roused up their quarry. So some yell at him to stop, while others throw their weapons at him as though bread knives and paring knives and chisels and awls were javelins.
“He did not stop, naturally. He must have been afraid they would tear him to pieces. He ran on. Now he was out of sight among the trees, now they caught a glimpse again, and to make the story short they drove him before them all the way to Pokoj. In Pokoj he went to ground, and they lost him for a while. But only for a while. They found him in the first of the cellars, the one with the empty wine racks all along the wall and the broken table in the far corner.
“The room stank of shit and sweat and rotten food, and they could see why. The thief had made himself a nest there behind the broken table, and stuffed it with blankets and curtains from the rooms above. He had evidently lived there for some weeks, in the most impoverished and degraded conditions. Someone—it was Bosilka, of course—had brought him clothes, and a slop bucket, and food. The food was scraps from my table. The bucket he hadn’t used. He’d just relieved himself against the walls, choosing a different spot each time.
“I suppose I don’t need to tell you that it was the idiot boy, Petos. Only he was an idiot man now.
“He had come back from Stollenbet to be close to his former friend, who he still loved. He had followed her, whenever he could, and watched her from a distance, filled with longing for her. Not a man’s longing, I think—just a child’s longing to be close to someone who’d loved him. All the things he’d taken were from places where she’d been. Which of course had led to her being accused and sent away. And she knew it was him, and took the guilt on herself in order to spare him.
“They were all there. His odd little trophies, laid out in patterns that presumably meant something to him. But we couldn’t ask him by then. Some of those absurd weapons must have hit their mark after all, or else Petos wounded himself by running into trees and falling over rocks in the dark as he was pursued. He was dying, at any rate. From these injuries. From exhaustion. Who knows? From heartbreak, perhaps, since storytellers say a man can die from that. He must have thought Bosilka had abandoned him. That would have cut deep.”
Klaes opened his mouth to speak, but Weichorek raised a hand, indicating that he hadn’t yet reached his peroration.
“We might have called a crowner to come and sit and answer all our questions. To tell us how he died and most likely to hold one of us, or all of us, to account for it. Perhaps that was the proper thing to do. But I didn’t see, Lieutenant, what good it would have served. Nobody had meant to harm him. And it might be argued that the blow that killed him had come fifteen years before, when Bosilka pushed him and he slipped and fell from that tree. Certainly she blames herself for it, and will not be convinced that it was an accident. I brought her home. I told her what had happened. I advised her to forget. But then you and your men arrived in Pokoj, and to some of us here—saving your presence, in their eyes one authority is very much like another—it seemed that you might have come to call them to account for this sad business. So. Forgetting, at the moment, is not easy for her. For anyone.”
Weichorek sighed and shook his head again. He waved his hand, inviting Klaes to say what he had been about to say before. But Klaes had been going to ask about Bosilka’s imprisonment and how she had been delivered. With that question resolved, he found he had nothing else to say. The whole grotesque affair reflected well on nobody, and yet he was impressed both with Bosilka’s courage and with the generosity of her heart. He felt, too, that the burgomaster had probably made the right decision in a difficult situation. He hoped that he could persuade Colonel August to do the same.
He stood. “Well,” he said, “I’m answered. And I commend you, Meister Weichorek, for your frankness in this. While I can’t promise, I think it unlikely that we’ll need to speak any further on the matter.” He paused, choosing his next words with care. “And it goes without saying that I’ll keep Miss Stefanu’s confidence. If I’m obliged to repeat any of what you’ve told me to my commander, I will take care that her name is not mentioned.”
“I’m sure of it, Sergeant Klaes. I know I may rely on your discretion.” Weichorek smiled in a way that might or might not be seen as conveying some hidden import. He also stood and offered Klaes his hand. They clasped and shook solemnly, as though they were men of business concluding an agreement.
Then the burgomaster waved Klaes out of the drawing room, gave him good day, apologised for not offering him any refreshment, commended his good wishes to the colonel (“A colonel, you say he is? That’s fine, now!”) and his wife, commented on the way the weather seemed to be turning and excused himself to attend to other business, in that order and without a pause. Klaes was left blinking in the hallway, bemused at the speed of his dismissal.
He was about to open the door and see himself out when Bosilka emerged from the closet, almost colliding with him in the narrow space.
“Your coat,” she said, thrusting it at him.
“Thank you,” Klaes said. But he did not immediately take it. “Miss Stefanu, did you purposely omit to mention my arrival to Meister Weichorek?”
The girl bridled, then blushed. “I told him right away that you’d come!” she exclaimed. “Almost right away. Very soon after. I do have other duties, you know. Hirschel is meant to be answering the door today, but he’s nowhere to be found. So everybody complains that I’m slow, when I’m up to my elbows in washing.”
“I’m not complaining,” Klaes assured her. “Only, I’d like you to know that you don’t have to be afraid of me. I wish you’d believe that. I’m not trying to work you harm.”
Bosilka’s mouth set into a tight line. “I believe that, Lieutenant Klaes.”
“Thank you. I’m glad of it.”
“But the harm may come, whether you work it or not.”
Klaes cast about for an adequate reply, but found nothing. He opened the front door instead, intending to depart before she could lambast him any further. He was turning towards Bosilka to take his leave when he noticed that her eyes had widened, a look of horror on her face. And then, as if underscoring her words, he heard shouts and cries from the street behind him, and the dull thud of flesh hitting flesh. Filled with foreboding, he turned and met a scene which gave him some taste of the harm Bosilka had in mind. And he swore in terms which no gentleman should ever use in a lady’s hearing.