The Beggar King

one corner of the room to the other, banging her forehead against the wall and flailing her arms about, as if trying to drive off invisible spirits. She’d screamed and cursed and, in the very next moment, nearly choked in a sudden fit of laughter. Katharina had whirled through her little cell like a gyroscope until, finally, she smashed head-on into the wall and fell motionless and bleeding onto the ground.

At that moment the eye had blinked almost imperceptibly.

He ought to have suspected it! How aggravating! This was the fifth time now that something had gone wrong! Usually the doses were simply too high. Once a girl had thrust a fork into her chest and bled to death, and another time a prostitute had thought she could fly and fell to her death from the second-story window. Thank God it had been night and he was able to hide the battered body without being seen. Aggravating, very aggravating…

The eye turned away.

Next time he would pad the walls with fabric and cut back the dosage a bit. The only thing still missing was the girl.

Fortunately, he already had an idea. Why hadn’t he thought of her sooner?

In the two days that followed, Magdalena and Simon saw just how well organized the ostensibly lazy guild of beggars really was. Nathan was willing to set his spies on Paulus Mamminger, provided Simon would continue caring for the sick and injured in the catacombs.

Mamminger’s house, located on the wide, paved Scherergasse where many patricians had their mansions, was an aweinspiring building complete with a seven-story tower with embrasures on top. The beggars kept the house under surveillance by hobbling up and down the well-traveled road and loitering across the street behind a manure cart until a bailiff inevitably came to drive them off. In this way a dozen of them took shifts every day.

Magdalena was amazed to learn all the vocations represented in the brotherhood. The Stabuler, along with their ragamuffin children, begged for alms; the Klenkner crawled about on their knees, pretending to be cripples; the Fopper were allegedly insane; the Clamyrer dressed as pilgrims stranded on their way to Rome; and the Grantner, who claimed to be epileptics, chewed on soap so that foam would run from their mouths. All had practiced and played these roles as well as any actor, and they were proud when their performances brought them even a few rusty kreuzers. Some beggars endlessly fine-tuned the details: the right accent for a pilgrim who’d traveled the world, for example; or an especially miserable facial expression; or the perfect, most gruesome color to paint the fake stump of a limb. Especially ambitious beggars rubbed their underarms with clematis juice to cause inflammation and blisters and thus inspire compassion.

While Simon was caring for his patients, Magdalena would often stroll down the Scherergasse to watch the beggars pass secret signs back and forth and converse in a strange language she couldn’t understand. They called their pidgin Beggars’ Latin, a hodgepodge of German, Yiddish, and incomprehensible scraps of words. So far Magdalena had been able to glean only that bock meant hunger, behaime idiot, and baldowern, apparently, to scope out the house of a patrician. Whenever the beggars spotted Magdalena, they just nodded to her, then continued harassing passersby who atoned for their sins by offering small gifts and hurrying off ashamed and disgusted.

At first it seemed nothing would come of all this watching and waiting. On the first day Mamminger did nothing remarkable whatsoever. He attended church with his wife and grown children and went to one of the bathhouses around midday. Otherwise he remained in his mansion and didn’t venture out again. On the second day, however, the beggars reported that several aldermen, one after the other, visited the patrician. Behind the panes of bull’s-eye glass on the second floor the merchants were engaged in rather heated debate, apparently in disagreement over one particular point. Though the beggars couldn’t understand what was being said, the men’s violently shaking heads and wild gesticulations made at least this much clear.

Not until early evening of the second day did the last of the aldermen leave the house, whispering to one another. Unfortunately neither one-legged Hans nor Brother Paulus, who was disguised as a mendicant monk, got close enough to understand what they were saying. And as night fell rapidly over the city, it seemed nothing else unusual would happen for a while.

Then, long after midnight, the securely locked massive portal of the patrician’s mansion suddenly opened and Mamminger himself scurried out into the street, wearing a cape and a hat drawn down so far over his face the dozing beggars almost didn’t recognize him.

But once they did, they promptly notified Simon and Magdalena. It was clear even to the most dimwitted vagabond that a patrician sneaking through Regensburg in the dead of night, and without a guard, must have something to hide.

And soon enough they’d find out what.

Kuisl, confess!.. One more turn of the crank… Confess!.. Put more sulfur matches under him… Confess!.. Tighten the screws… Let him feel the lash… Confess! Confess! Confess!

Jakob Kuisl tossed and turned as pain surged through his body in waves. Whenever pain subsided into a dull ache in one place, it resurfaced somewhere else with a vengeance: an all-consuming fire that ate away at him, wormed its way into his dreams even now, in the middle of the night, as he lay in a stupor in his cell.

The Schongau hangman knew all methods of torture and had applied most of them himself at one time or another. He’d seen pain flash in hundreds of pairs of eyes, but now he felt that pain in his very own body.

He thought he would have been able to endure more.

He’d suffered three days of torture now. On the second day they stopped just before his right arm was wrenched from its socket-not to spare him, Kuisl was certain, but to let his body recover for the torture yet to come. This morning they began with the Spanish Donkey, a vertical board whose sharp upper edge he had to straddle while his legs were weighted with stones. In the afternoon the Regensburg executioner repeatedly applied thumb and leg screws and forced burning matches under Kuisl’s fingernails.

Kuisl had remained silent. Not a whimper crossed his lips, not even once; he threw all his strength into the curses he shouted at his prosecutors. And from behind the lattice the voice of the third man could still be heard, taunting him.

You have children, don’t you? And a beautiful wife as well… Tighten the screws… Confess!

The man knew about Kuisl’s family; he knew the name of his wife. He knew all about him. And yet he remained a mere shadow behind the wooden lattice, a monster from the past that Kuisl couldn’t place.

Who was this man? Who was Weidenfeld?

On the morning of the third day they introduced the Maiden’s Lap, a chair covered with sharpened wooden spikes on which the victim had to sit for hours with bare buttocks while the spikes dug into his flesh. In the afternoon Teuber put him back on the rack and almost finished the work of dislocating his right shoulder.

It was during this part of the torture that the unknown third man delivered his next blow. So casually that the two other inquisitors didn’t notice, he whispered a few words, more pointed than any of the rest, that cut Kuisl to the quick.

Don’t believe for a second that your daughter can help you now…

These words pulled the ground out from under Kuisl’s feet. The third man not only knew his wife; he also knew his daughter! And he knew she was here in Regensburg! Had he intercepted the letter? Had he already abducted her?

Despite the fetters, Kuisl almost succeeded in breaking himself free of the rack now. The combined strength of four city guards was needed to force him back down on the board and tie him up again. Kuisl didn’t speak another word, and the bailiffs finally took him back to his cell. It took three men to do so since, with his shins crushed, Kuisl could no longer walk. His left arm hung limp at his side, and his hands, bright purple now, had swollen up like pig bladders.

As he lay there in his cell and drifted off into a half sleep, an endless nightmare played over and over in his mind. When the pain woke him again-as had so often been the case in the last few days and nights-it took him a while to get his bearings again. To judge by the darkness, it was already night. Moaning, he pulled himself up to a wall until he crouched in a halfway bearable position on the floor.

All of a sudden he heard a soft scraping sound. It took a while for him to realize it was the bolt to the cell door sliding back slowly. Silently, the door swung open and a dark figure stood in the entry.