Part 2 (2/2)

'If we consider that the distances from the four main city gates to the slaughterhouse, which have been accurately measured by myself-they extend for a total of 2,100 yards-then we are able to calculate that about 2,900 pounds' weight of animal excreta lies untreated on our city streets every single day of the working week. This is a vast, a staggering, amount of fresh, stinking . . .'

Before I could complete the phrase, the door of the meeting-hall burst open.

There was a beadle outside with instructions to let no one enter once the a.s.sizes began. Nevertheless, a French soldier in the green colours of a despatch-rider came striding down the aisles between the pews, his boots thumping hard on the wooden boards, his spurs jingling in the shocked silence. He was tall, bright-eyed, moustaches greased, his hair wound up in a pig's tail, three white stripes on his sleeve.

He drew up before the bench, saluted, and held out an envelope to me.

'Procurator Hanno Stiffeniis?'

I took the packet, examined my name in a curlicue hand, then turned it over and glanced at the seal. Unbroken, as it should be, but smudged, as if the wax had been pressed down rather too heavily, and with great haste.

'Who is this letter from?' I asked him in French.

Even in a public courtroom, limited privacy is possible if two men converse in one tongue while all those about them speak another.

'It is from the office of Lieutenant-Colonel Claudet, monsieur.'

I tore the seal and opened the paper.

Herr Procurator, please follow this messenger without delay.

'Has something happened?'

The messenger's mouth pursed in that peculiar down-turned expression by which the French signal their ignorance of cause or consequence. 'I cannot say, sir.'

'And where are you to take me?'

'Les Quartiers Generals, monsieur.'

Every Prussian knew what the French General Quarters was. Every man in Lotingen was in awe at the thought of being taken there against his will. The cellars, according to local legend, were the daily scene of tortures and beatings that the Holy Roman Inquisition would have blenched at.

I stood up, then sat down again.

My thoughts flew this way and that, like crows in a cornfield when a musket explodes in their direction. The French must have realised that they would be prominently mentioned at the trial. They knew well enough what the local population thought about them, their horses, their cattle and their dung. Was that why I had been so urgently summoned? To prevent me from speaking out in public?

I looked at Knutzen.

'The court is adjourned until nine o'clock tomorrow morning,' I said. Though every person in the meeting-hall heard this announcement from my lips, Knutzen insisted on repeating it.

As I laid my judge's cap on the table, shook off my cloak of office and stepped down from the altar to join the French messenger, a stunned silence reigned in the courtroom.

All eyes were on me as I left the chapel in his company.

5.

THE DOOR WAS ajar.

I could hear the rumble of voices on the other far side of the door, though I could make out nothing of what they were saying. I knocked and waited, but no one called for me to enter. And yet, this was the room, according to the French soldier who had led me there.

I knocked again, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

An officer in a long-tailed jacket and brown riding-boots was standing before a desk, his shoulders turned towards me. He was tall, and very thin, a greasy yellow twist of a pig-tail drooping over his upturned collar below a bald flare of red scalp. He did not turn to face me, but continued speaking earnestly to someone on the far side of the desk that I could not see, his voice a rough, low, growl.

'. . . a great deal of time and effort to hack it off. A piece of bone. . . . Pure evil! Why would anyone . . .?'

The officer turned his head, revealing the profile of a low forehead and a broken, beaky nose, and spun round on his heel to face me. I recognised him. That is, I had seen him as he mounted a horse or climbed into a coach outside the General Quarters, though I had never actually met him, or been formally introduced.

'Procurator Stiffeniis?' he enquired, staring.

His hand hovered in the air, a gesture that might as easily have been a rebuff as a welcome. He did not offer his hand for me to shake. Nor did he make any step towards me.

I dipped my head in a necessary semblance of respect.

'Hanno Stiffeniis,' I answered, letting my outstretched hand drop, slapping it against my thigh. 'I was administering an important trial. Was such an interruption necessary, sir?'

I took a deep breath.

'I am Colonel Antoine Claudet, newly appointed commander of this garrison,' the officer announced, blatantly ignoring my question.

His hair fell over his forehead in crisp, white curls, like a sheep in need of shearing. His left eye was closed and shrunken, which added a grotesque air to his long, plain face. Despite his height and his bright silver epaulettes, he did not make a good impression on me. His nose was large and red, as were his hands. His sharp cheekbones were streaked with purple veins. And then there was his unsightly eye. He had started out as an infantryman of the lowest cla.s.s, I was convinced of it, and had spent so many years sighting down the length of a musket that he was unable to open it again. Seniority, persistence, and heaven knows what other dubious 'qualities' had moved him up through the ranks. But slowly, very slowly. He was one of those lowly individuals that the emperor Napoleon purposely chose to elevate above the legitimate rulers of the proud nations that he had crushed, a constant reminder of their humiliation.

How had we let ourselves be so easily conquered by such grubbing lice?

'May I ask what you want from me, sir?' I enquired.

Colonel Claudet gritted his teeth in a vain attempt at a smile. There was nothing cordial about it. Indeed, I thought, if I had judged him correctly, he was one of those men who exercised his arrogance on those below him, just as he suffered the arrogance of his direct superiors. And while I was a magistrate, I was also Prussian, a citizen of a country that he and his fellows had occupied and crushed.

'I did not ask for you at all,' he replied curtly.

He stretched his left foot out to the side, s.h.i.+fted his body after it in a sideways movement, and came stiffly to attention, allowing me to see the person sitting on the far side of the desk for the first time. 'I suppose you have heard of General . . .'

'Malaport. Louis-Georges Malaport.'

The voice from the far side of the desk sounded like the bubbling of a pot of porridge on a low fire. I knew the name, of course. Who did not? Malaport was in charge of the French troops all along the Baltic coast from Danzig to Konigsberg. As a soldier, he had distinguished himself at Auerstadt, leading the final charge on the exposed left flank, which had sent our army running from the field. He appeared to be exhausted, worn out, aged. His shoulders were rounded and narrow; his head seemed over-large; his stomach was enormous. He sat very quietly, looking down at his hands, which might have belonged to an ageing aristocratic lady. They were small, pink, creased and wrinkled like paper made from crepe, joined tightly together, as if to hold him anch.o.r.ed in that position.

Immediately, I was on my guard.

'General Malaport,' I echoed.

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