“Unrest?” Simon no longer took the trouble to be quiet. With quick steps he hurried to the table, while he continued to speak. “Who has brought unrest to this town, then? Who ordered the soldiers to kill small children who had seen too much? Who caused the Stadel to be burned? Who saw to it that fear and hate returned to Schongau and that witches should burn at the stake again?”
He had worked himself up into a rage. With one more step he reached the chair and spun it round toward him. He looked into the blind eyes of the old man, who just shook his head as if he pitied him.
“Simon, Simon,” said Matthias Augustin. “You still haven’t understood. All this happened only because you and that wretched hangman interfered. Believe me, I don’t wish to see any more witches burned. I saw too many people burned at the stake when I was a child. I only wanted the treasure. It belonged to me. Everything else that happened is the responsibility of you two.”
“The treasure, that damned treasure,” Simon muttered as he let himself fall into the chair next to the old man. He was tired, simply tired out. He spoke on, almost as if in a trance.
“The parish priest gave me the decisive clue in the church, but I didn’t understand him correctly. He knew that you were the last one to speak to old Schreevogl before he died. And he told me that you and he were friends.” Simon shook his head before he went on. “When I went to him for confession at that time, I asked him if anyone else had recently shown any interest in the site,” he said. “Until today he had forgotten that you had indeed asked him about it shortly after old Schreevogl’s death. It wasn’t until today, at the May feast, that he suddenly remembered.”
The gray-headed patrician bit his bloodless lip.
“The old fool. I had offered him a lot of money, but no, he just had to build that damned leper house…But the property should have been mine, mine alone! Ferdinand should have left the site to me. It was the least that I expected of the old miser! The very least!”
He took a walnut from the table and cracked it with a practiced hand. Fragments of shell scattered over the tabletop.
“Ferdinand and I had known each other since our childhood. We went to grammar school together, as little boys we played marbles together, and later we had the same girlfriends. He was like a brother…”
“The painting in the council chamber shows you both in the middle of the patricians. A picture of trust and unity,” Simon interrupted him. “I had forgotten about it until I saw you this evening at the table with the other aldermen. In the painting you are holding a paper in your hands. Today I asked myself, what was on it?”
Matthias Augustin’s eyes turned to the light of the flames visible through the open window. He seemed to be looking into the far distance.
“Ferdinand and I were both burgomasters at that time. He needed money, desperately. His stovemaking business was nearly bankrupt. I lent him the money, a considerable sum. The paper in the painting is the receipt. The artist thought I should, as burgomaster, hold a paper in my hand. So I took the receipt, without the others noticing what it was. An eternal witness to Ferdinand’s debt…” The old man laughed.
“And where is the receipt now?” asked Simon.
Matthias Augustin shrugged.
“I burned it. At that time we were both in love with the same woman, Elisabeth, a redheaded angel of a girl. A bit simple perhaps, but of unsurpassable beauty. Ferdinand promised me that he would have nothing more to do with her, and in return I burned the receipt. Then I married this woman. A mistake…”
He shook his head, regretfully. “She bore me a useless, stupid brat and then died during childbirth.”
“Your son, Georg,” Simon interjected.
Matthias Augustin nodded curtly. Then he went on, while his thin gouty fingers twitched.
“The treasure is mine by right! Ferdinand told me about it on his deathbed, and that he had hidden it somewhere on the building site. He told me I would never be able to find it. He wanted to have his revenge. Because of Elisabeth!”
Simon walked around the table. Thoughts rushed through his head in confusion, then came together again in a new pattern. Suddenly it all made sense. He remained standing and pointed to Matthias Augustin.
“You yourself stole the sketch of the deed of gift from the town archives,” he cried. “Fool that I was! I thought that only Lechner or one of the four burgomasters would have known about the hiding place behind the tile. But you?”
The old man chuckled.
“Ferdinand had that hiding place made when he built the stove. He told me about it. A tile with a picture of a court clerk with documents coming out of his arse! He was always well-known for his coarse sense of humor.”
“But if you had the sketch—” asked Simon.
“I couldn’t make sense of it,” Augustin interrupted him. “I turned it this way and that, but I couldn’t see anything there about the damned hiding place!”
“So then you had the work on the building site disrupted so that you could have more time to look for it,” reasoned Simon. “And then the children overheard you, and you simply had them killed because of the dangerous knowledge they had. Did you know that they hadn’t recognized the instigator? All these murders were unnecessary.”
Angrily, Matthias Augustin cracked another nut.
“That was Georg, the simpleton. He got his brains from his mother, not from me. He was supposed to give the soldiers money only for the destruction of the building site. But even for that he was too stupid! He was careless and let himself be overheard, then gave the order to kill the children. He didn’t seem to realize the trouble that sort of thing would cause!”
The patrician seemed to have forgotten Simon. He continued his rant, without paying any attention to the physician.
“I told him to stop! He was to tell that devil that it was enough. What great secrets could the children have revealed? And who would have believed them anyway? But the killing went on. And now the children are dead, the Landgrave is sniffing around looking for witches in the town, and in spite of all that we still haven’t got the treasure! An absolute disaster! I should have left Georg in Munich. He has ruined everything!”
“But why do you worry about the treasure?” asked Simon incredulously. “You’re rich enough. Why risk so much for a few coins?”
The old man suddenly pressed his hands to his stomach and bent forward. A wave of pain seemed to pass through him before he could speak further.
“You…don’t understand,” he panted. “My body is a lump of rotten flesh. I’m rotting away while I’m still alive. The worms will be eating me soon. But that…is…not important.”
Once again he had to stop briefly and let the pain pass over him. Then the attack seemed to be over.
“What counts is the family, our reputation,” he said. “The Augsburg wagoners have almost driven me to ruin. Damned pack of Swabians! Before long, our house will go to the dogs. We need this money! My name is still good enough to obtain credit, but soon even that will be of no use. I need…this treasure.”
His voice turned into a soft rattle, while his fingers grasped the edge of the table convulsively. The colic pains returned. With increasing horror, Simon saw the old man twitch, jerk his head back and forth, and roll his blind eyes. Saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. The pain must have been beyond imagining. Perhaps an obstruction in the gut, the physician thought, perhaps a growth that had spread over the whole abdomen. Matthias Augustin would not live much longer.
At this moment Simon noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye. As he started to turn around a mighty blow hit him on the side of the head. He sank to the floor, and as he fell he saw young Georg Augustin standing there, his hand grasping a heavy iron candlestick raised for a second blow.
“No, Georg!” his father gasped from behind. “You’ll only make things much worse!” Then a black wave swept over Simon—he didn’t know if the candlestick had hit him again or if he had lost consciousness from the first blow.
When he came to, he felt a tightness around his chest, hands, and feet. His head throbbed with pain, and he could not open his right eye. Presumably blood had run into it and clotted. He was sitting on the chair where he had been before, but he could no longer move. He looked down and saw that he was tied to it with a curtain cord from top to bottom. Simon wanted to call out, but only succeeded in uttering a choking sound. A gag had been stuffed into his mouth.
In front of him the grinning face of Georg Augustin appeared. With his sword he poked at the physician’s
