The master baker Josef Haberger lay stretched out on a wooden bench, moaning with pleasure.
Daily dough-kneading made his muscles as stiff as old leather, and it was high time he paid Marie Deisch in the bathhouse another visit. No other woman in Regensburg was so skilled in handling a hard-working man’s worn- out muscles. Her hands were as strong as a butcher apprentice’s and as tender as a tight-lipped whore’s. Now, Haberger grunted and closed his eyes as Marie’s nimble fingers moved up and down his back.
“To the left,” he moaned. “The shoulder blade. Those damn dough troughs are so heavy they’ll pull me into the grave yet.”
Marie’s fingers scurried up his back again and, with a few targeted blows, began loosening the most painful places.
“Here?” the bathhouse worker asked in her deep, throaty voice. As big around at the hips as a medium-size wine barrel, she could leverage that heft behind her movements.
Haberger grunted in satisfaction. He loved strong women, women he could grab hold of, sinking into their warm, tender breasts like a pillow as they made love. His own wife was a bony, anemic shrew whose ribs stuck out like knives and who hadn’t been intimate with him since he fathered their last son five years before. But who needed a spouse when you had Marie Deisch? Haberger was glad to pay a half guilder every week for his trip to the bathhouse, which included bloodletting, beard trimming, and cupping with leeches. When he was young, there were many more of these blessed institutions in Regensburg to choose from, but the curses of French disease and sullen Protestants had turned these paradises on earth into temples of sin, and only a handful of bathhouses remained.
And now that the Hofmann house on Wei?gerbergraben was gone, there was even one fewer…
The massage diverted the master baker temporarily from worries that had pursued him like demons the past few days. But now, with his eyes closed and the soft hum of the bathhouse woman in his ears, they returned. He felt as if his heart were in a vise and knew that the best massage in the world wouldn’t relieve this pain.
They’d gone too far; that much was clear. The plan was not only dangerous but megalomaniacal, and if they weren’t careful, they would bring the whole city down around them. The bathhouse owner, Hofmann, had been right in trying to convince the others of the plan’s madness and, then, in simply refusing to go along with it. But what good had it done? He lay dead in Saint Jakob’s Cemetery now, a putrid sack of maggots, just like his wife, the fresh little bitch. It was probably she who put the idea of stopping it into his head.
But they couldn’t be stopped.
After Hofmann’s death Haberger made a mistake that he regretted now more than anything else in his life. In despair he pointed a finger at the others, accused them of murder, while they met him with silence, letting his accusations ricochet off them as off a rock wall. At that moment he realized he’d crossed the line. Their convictions were cast in stone, and they would carry out the plan to its bitter end.
With or without him.
It quickly became apparent that with his rash assertions he’d become a liability, and now he imagined assassins around every corner, the clicks of crossbows behind every door. Death could be waiting for him under his bed or in the privy. Still, they needed him! They couldn’t do without him… or could they? No, not without the most important master baker in the city with customers at city hall, at the Reichstag, and among the most important patricians.
In retrospect the whole plan seemed an outrageous, scandalous crime, a crime so devilish that everyone involved would roast in hell forever. Haberger considered turning on the others, but his fear of their vengeance was too great. And besides, what would happen to him when everything finally came to light? He heard that traitors were often hanged before they were gutted and quartered. Could the same fate await him?
Preoccupied with his fears, he didn’t notice that Marie had stopped humming. Her fingers, too, had disappeared. Surprised, Haberger was about to get up when he felt hands on his back again. He sighed in relief. The bathhouse worker had likely just gone for some more olive oil and was now preparing to massage the right shoulder blade. Haberger closed his eyes and tried to suppress bad thoughts and concentrate only on the present massage.
The hands worked their way up his back until they reached the shoulder blades again. For an instant Haberger had the premonition that these hands were somehow stronger than before, that they lacked Marie’s delicate, feminine touch and their grip on him was harder.
Much harder.
As if they were trying to mash his muscles to a pulp.
“Thanks, Marie,” Haberger moaned again. “But that should be enough. I can’t feel anything in my shoulders anymore.”
The hands didn’t stop, though, but moved higher until finally they reached Haberger’s throat.
“What the devil…?”
Haberger tried to stand up, but unrelenting muscular arms forced him back down to the bench. When he attempted to scream, he felt fingers tighten around his neck, squeezing the life from his body bit by bit.
The master baker quivered and flailed about like a fish out of water. He tried to slip free, but the strong arms held him down, pressing him hard against the wood like a piece of raw meat. His face turned red first, then blue; his tongue stuck out of his mouth like a slug; then, with a final gasp, he collapsed.
Just before the world went black, Josef Haberger glimpsed right before his nose an arm with powerful protruding sinews. He saw close-up-almost as if magnified-a mass of curly hair, and he smelled sharp manly sweat.
Then he passed into a dark tunnel ending in ethereal light.
Still enthused by his conversation with Brother Hubertus, Simon left the bishopric around noon with the beer-stained invitation from the bishop’s brewmaster in his pocket.
They had discussed Descartes, whose
All that beer, however, had one benefit: Simon had temporarily forgotten his quarrel with Magdalena. But now the nagging thought returned that the love of his life was possibly still hanging around with that Venetian dwarf. But then again she might have returned to the catacombs by now, worrying herself sick about him. It served her right! What business did Magdalena have in the dressing room of that vain fop? Simon looked down at his torn, hastily patched jacket, his shredded breeches, and muddy boots and had to admit he himself wished he could spend half a day in a filthy-rich ambassador’s dressing room. But for an unmarried girl that was completely inappropriate! And who knew what else the two had been up to amid all those mirrors, linens, and clothing? Whatever the case, everything would have to be cleared up tonight.
The marketplace at the cathedral square was filled with noisy, chattering market women, cursing stable boys, churchgoers deep in conversation, and blase patricians. Although the medicus assumed he wouldn’t attract undue attention in the bustling crowd, he pulled up his jacket collar and lowered his eyes nevertheless. He didn’t want to give the bailiffs a second opportunity to identify him as the Wei?gerbergraben arsonist.
Despite his three or four mugs of wheat beer, Simon tried his best to concentrate. There had to be some connection between the Hofmann murders and the trap set for Magdalena’s father, something he just hadn’t thought of yet, a logical scheme that would bring together all the disparate and bizarre little incidents. Simon hoped fervently that Brother Hubertus could help him analyze the strange powder. By now the medicus was convinced it wasn’t just burned flour. Perhaps it was the key to solving the other riddles.
Simon suddenly realized there was yet another person he hadn’t spoken with about the matter: the raftmaster, Karl Gessner! The bathhouse owner, like Gessner, had been a leader of the freemen, so it was quite possible Gessner knew something about Hofmann’s alchemical experiments. When they last met on Wohrd Island, Gessner hadn’t said anything about it, but perhaps that was only because Simon hadn’t brought it up.
