appropriately. After a short while they arrived in the square, which looked quite different in the early-morning hours than during the typical daytime hustle and bustle.
The fatter of the two men pointed his spear at a rusty cage sitting on the ground and chained to the wall of city hall. It looked like a gigantic birdcage.
“The House of Fools,” the night watchman said. “You’ll stay here for the next few hours. You should have lots of fine company.”
“But everyone will see me in there!” Simon croaked, temporarily forgetting his role as a drunk and falling out of character.
The tall, thin night watchman holding the lantern nodded. “Correct. The people need something to gawk at. Everyone we pick up at night winds up in the House of Fools-drunks and drifters, but also honorable citizens and men of the church. Once we even locked up an alderman, since the fine gentleman couldn’t pull together the money to buy himself out. Oh, and don’t you try to hide in a corner or we’ll chain you to the bars up front where it’s hard to dodge the rotten vegetables that’ll come flying at you.”
Simon’s heart began to race.
“Can’t we perhaps… come to some other arrangement?” Simon simpered.
The fat night watchman nodded, thinking. “Do you have money?”
The medicus shook his head silently.
“Then I have good news for you,” the bailiff responded. “Food and lodging are free at the House of Fools.”
He poked Simon in the back with the point of his spear and pushed him along toward city hall.
10
REGENSBURG
EARLY MORNING, AUGUST 24, 1662 AD
Simon buttoned up his tattered jacket to ward off the cool night air that was worst now as dawn was breaking. He closed his eyes, then opened them again, but the scene around him remained bleak as before.
A trio of drinking buddies next to him were snoring so loudly it sounded as if they were trying to saw through the bars of their drafty dungeon. Two of them were presumably traveling journeymen who’d spent far more than they could afford that night making the rounds of the city taverns. They wore ragged trousers and linen shirts but had apparently forgotten their hats at the last tavern. Purses fastened to their belts hung down weightless and empty. Simon guessed that after a lash or two of the whip, the two day laborers would be banished from the city in the morning, but that would be all. These traveling journeymen offered very little to interest the crowds that would start arriving at city hall square before long. The city guards rounded up such specimens every night of the week.
The third reveler was a different story. To all outward appearances he looked like a Franciscan monk whose brown frock was pulled tightly across a remarkably fat belly. Innumerable blowflies flitted about his fresh tonsure and greasy, flushed cheeks, feeding on sweat that streamed down his face despite the cool morning air. In his pudgy hands he held a dirty linen sack that he pressed to his chest from time to time like a nursing infant, murmuring something incomprehensible in his sleep. Each time he was about to belt out another snore, his whole body quivered as if he were in the throes of death. Then, at other moments, he stopped breathing altogether, only to start in again all the more violently minutes later.
Of these cellmates Simon hated the fat monk the most.
The medicus had tried again to convince the guards not to lock him up, but they just laughed and wished him a pleasant night’s rest. Now he sat on a hard wooden bench, wedged between the two snoring workmen, and watched night slowly recede from the square. From time to time one of the journeymen’s heads would fall onto Simon’s shoulder and he would smack his lips peacefully, no doubt dreaming of the expensive roast goose he had enjoyed for dinner the night before-probably the last he’d have for a long time, Simon imagined. The medicus couldn’t bring himself to waken the journeyman, so he just pushed the workman’s head back gently.
Simon closed his eyes again and tried to concentrate-not easy given the loud snoring all around him. In no more than an hour shopkeepers would start opening their doors, maids would stroll across the square, and every person who passed would have a look into the House of Fools. Simon was sure it was only a matter of time before someone recognized him as the bathhouse arsonist. The description of him and Magdalena had been rather precise, and the guards surely possessed a warrant by now. Simon considered cutting his finger with his stiletto and rubbing blood over his face in the hope of passing himself off as the unfortunate victim of a barroom brawl. But he couldn’t change his height or his clothing, and those alone were probably enough to give him away.
Unless he had something else to wear.
Simon glanced again at the two workmen and the fat Franciscan, who still clutched his linen sack like a doll.
Simon’s heart began to pound. He could at least turn that into a hood, and-who knows? — perhaps there was more clothing inside it! The medicus rose quietly and stepped toward the monk, who lay like a corpse on a bench across from him. Inch by inch he gingerly reached for the sack in the Franciscan’s arms. Although Simon fumbled with it, he felt the bundle coming free. He’d almost extricated half the sack from the monk’s grip when he heard a deep snarl.
Simon froze as the monk’s bloodshot right eye opened and glared back at him suspiciously.
“Are you trying to take my wine away, you damned son of a bitch?” the cleric growled. “That’s wine for mass, the blood of Christ. If you do that, they’ll boil you in oil, you damned heretic…”
The eye closed and the man resumed snoring loudly. Simon exhaled, waited a while, and then reached out confidently a second time.
Now the monk’s fingers closed around Simon’s wrist like a vise and pulled him close. The stench of wine on the monk’s breath almost knocked the medicus out.
“No one steals from Brother Hubertus,” the monk bellowed. “No one, do you hear?”
Looking for all the world like an overgrown bat, the Franciscan rose up and hit his head on the low top of the cage.
“Ouch, damn!”
Only now did the monk seem to comprehend where he was. Looking at his cellmates, then onto the city hall square, he let out an endless stream of curses. “In the name of the unholy trinity, that goddamned band of blockheaded bailiffs has locked me up
“Virgins?” Though he was afraid, Simon couldn’t resist asking.
The Franciscan, evidently Brother Hubertus, looked back at the medicus with some irritation, as if he’d only just now noticed him. Apparently he’d already forgotten Simon’s botched robbery.
“Yes, virgins!” he barked. “They hang around the brothel down at Peter’s Gate waiting for someone to come and read the Bible to them.”
Simon nodded sympathetically. “And you were so selfless as to take on that thankless job.”
A grin broke across the brother’s face. “What was it Saint Augustine said?” He began in a professorial tone, though his tongue was still too thick to pronounce some of the words. “‘If you suppress prostitution, capricious lusts will overthrow society.’” Hubertus shook his finger. “We cannot therefore hinder the prostitutes, but we can still bring them closer to God.”
Simon chuckled. “A noble undertaking and a necessary one. I remember Thomas Aquinas saying, ‘Remove prostitutes from the world-’”
“‘And you will fill the world with sodomy,’” Brother Hubertus interrupted. He nodded his fat head in agreement. “I see you’re a true scholar. Very few know this passage by the great Dominican. May I inquire what
