Abraham Gedler, the sexton of St. Lawrence’s in Altenstadt, had shown up at the Fronwieser house early in the morning and pounded on the door. He had been strangely pale and uncommunicative and said only that the priest was sick and the doctor should come as fast as possible. Then, without another word, he had run through the snow back to Altenstadt.
Simon had been lying in bed, as usual at this hour, his head still aching from the Tokay he drank the previous night at the Goldener Stern Inn, but his father had yanked him out of bed, swearing vilely, and sent him on his way with nothing to eat.
Again Simon broke through the crust up to his hips and had to fight his way out of the drift. Despite the dry cold, sweat was pouring down his face. He grimaced as he pulled his right leg out of the snow, almost losing his boot in the process. If he didn’t watch out, he’d soon have to doctor himself! He shook his head. It was crazy to tramp all the way to Altenstadt in this weather, but what could he do? His father, the city doctor Bonifaz Fronwieser, was busy caring for a fabulously wealthy alderman suffering from gout; the barber surgeon was bedridden with typhoid fever, and old Fronwieser would rather bite off his own finger than send the hangman to Altenstadt. So he sent his wayward son…
The scrawny sexton was waiting for Simon at the door to the little church located a little way out of town on a hill. Gedler’s face was as white as the snow around him. He had rings under his eyes and was trembling all over. For a moment, Simon wondered if Gedler, and not the priest, needed treatment. The sexton looked as if he hadn’t slept for several nights.
“Well, Gedler,” Simon said cheerfully. “What’s troubling the priest? Does he have intestinal obstruction? Constipation? An enema will do wonders for him. You should try one, too.”
He was heading for the rectory, but the sexton held him back, pointing silently toward the church.
“He’s in there?” Simon asked with surprise. “In this weather? He should be happy if he doesn’t catch his death of cold.”
He was heading into the church when he heard Gedler behind him, clearing his throat. Just in front of the entrance, Simon turned around.
“Yes, what is it, Gedler?”
“The priest…he’s…”
The sexton lost his voice and looked down to the floor without saying a word.
Seized by a sudden presentiment, Simon opened the heavy door. He was met by an icy wind a few degrees colder than the air outside. Somewhere a window slammed shut.
The medicus looked around. Scaffolding towered above them along the interior walls on both sides, all the way up to the rotting balcony. A timber framework higher up under the ceiling suggested that a new wooden ceiling would be installed there soon. The window openings in the back of the church were chiseled out so that a steady, ice-cold draft swept through the nave. Simon felt his breath on his face like a fine mist.
The priest was in the rear third of the nave, only a few steps from the apse. He looked like a statue hewn from the ice, a fallen white giant struck down by the wrath of God. His entire body was covered in a thin layer of ice. Simon approached carefully and touched the white, glittering cassock. It was as hard as a board. Ice crystals had even formed over the eyes, which had been wide open in the throes of death, giving an ethereal look to the priest’s face.
Simon wheeled around in horror. The sexton stood at the portal with a guilty look, turning his hat over in his hands.
“But…He’s dead!” the medicus cried. “Why didn’t you tell me that when you called for me?”
“We…we didn’t want to make a big fuss, Your Honor,” Gedler murmured. “We thought if we said anything in town, everybody in town would know about it at once, and there would be gossiping, and then maybe trouble with the remodeling here in the church.”
“We?” Simon asked, confused.
At that very moment, Magda, the housekeeper in the rectory, appeared at the sexton’s side, sobbing uncontrollably. She was the polar opposite of Abraham Gedler, round as a barrel, with fat, bloated legs. She blew her nose into a white lace handkerchief so large that Simon could see only part of her puffy, tear-stained face.
“What a shame,” she lamented, “that any man must go that way, let alone the pastor. But I always told him not to gorge himself like that!”
The sexton nodded and kept kneading his hat. “He overdid it with the doughnuts,” he mumbled. “He left only two. And it finally caught up with him here while he was praying.”
“The doughnuts…” Simon frowned. His fears had been confirmed-at least in part, except that the pastor was not sick, but dead.
“But why is he lying here and not in his bed?” he asked, more to himself than to the two of them standing there.
“As I said, he probably wanted to pray before he met his maker,” Gedler mumbled.
“In this weather?” Simon shook his head skeptically. “Can I have a look around the rectory?”
The sexton shrugged and turned around to leave for the neighboring building with the maid, who was still sobbing. Magda had left the door open, so the snow had drifted into the main room and crunched under Simon’s feet. On a table by the hearth stood a bowl with two greasy, glistening doughnuts. They looked delicious-brown, about the size of a palm, and coated with a thick layer of honey. Despite the recent encounter with the deceased, which was not exactly appetizing, Simon’s mouth watered. He remembered that he had not yet had breakfast. For a moment he was tempted to try one, then thought better of it. This was a death vigil, not a funeral reception.
Standing at the pastor’s bedside, the Schongau medicus retraced in his mind the pastor’s last steps.
“He must have gotten up and gone over into the kitchen to get a drink of water. This is where he collapsed,” he said, pointing to fragments of the mug and the sticky traces of vomit. The small room reeked of gastric acid and curdled milk.
“But why then, in God’s name, did he go out to the church?” he mumbled. Suddenly, he had a hunch and turned to the sexton.
“What was the pastor doing last night?”
“He…he was in the church. Till late at night,” Gedler added.
The housekeeper nodded. “He even took along a jug of wine and a loaf of bread. He thought he would be there a while. When I went to bed, he was still over there. I woke up again shortly before midnight, and I saw a light burning over there.”
Simon interrupted: “Just before midnight? What is a pastor doing at that time of night in an ice-cold church?”
“He…he thought he had to have another look at the renovation of the choir vault,” the sexton said. “It seemed in the last two weeks that the pastor was acting a bit strange. He was always over in the church, even in this cold!”
“The good man never left things for others to do,” Magda interrupted. “A bear of a man. He knew his way around with a hammer and chisel like no one else.”
Simon thought about that a while. The previous night had been the coldest in a long time. It was not for nothing that the workmen had stopped their work on the church now, in January. If anyone took up a hammer and chisel on such a night, there had to be a damned good reason to do so.
Without wasting any more time on the housekeeper or the sexton, Simon hurried back to the church. The pastor was still lying there on the ground, just as he had been when they had left. Only now did Simon notice that the corpse lay directly over a tombstone with a relief of a woman who looked like the Virgin Mary. The words of an inscription circled her head like a halo.
“
It almost seemed as if the pastor, in a final gesture, had been pointing to the inscription with his right hand. Simon sighed. Had Andreas Koppmeyer really fallen victim here to the desires of the flesh? Or was the gesture a final admonition to those still living?
A sound made him jump. It was Magda, who approached him from behind. She stared wide-eyed at the frozen corpse, then looked at Simon. It seemed she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t get the words
