Taking a ladder from a corner, he climbed to the top of the next-to-last shelf.
“Lawrence Church, Lawrence Church…” he muttered to himself, looking around at the individual shelves. Finally, he called out in surprise. “Well, good heavens, here it is right in front of me.” He came down with a tattered roll of parchment with bits of red sealing wax still clinging to it.
Simon looked at the broken seal in surprise. “The roll has evidently been opened already,” the medicus said, passing his finger over the edges of the parchment, “and not too long ago. The wax is still shiny where the pieces broke off.”
Augustin Bonenmayr examined the brittle parchment thoughtfully. “Indeed,” he mumbled. “It is strange. After all, the roll is several hundred years old. Oh well, but…” He walked over to the table and unrolled the parchment. “But perhaps it was just recently copied because of the bad condition it’s in. Let’s have a look.”
Each standing to one side of the abbot, Benedikta and Simon stared at a document that was beginning to crumble at the edges. The writing was faded, but still legible.
“Here it is.” Bonenmayr pointed with his right index finger at a passage in the middle. “The monastery of Steingaden purchased the following properties in the year of our Lord 1289: two properties in Warenberg, two in Brugg, one in Dietlried, three in Edenhofen, one in Altenstadt, and…Indeed, that’s the Saint Lawrence Church in Altenstadt!” Bonenmayr whistled appreciatively. “Really a big transaction. It cost us two hundred and twenty-five denarii. That must have been a tidy sum back then.”
“And who was the seller?” Simon persisted.
The abbot’s finger moved up to the top of the parchment. “A certain Friedrich Wildgraf.”
“What was he?” Simon asked. “A merchant? A patrician? Please tell us.”
The abbot shook his head.
“If what I see here is correct, Friedrich Wildgraf was no less a person than the provincial master of the Order of the Knights Templar in the German Empire, an extremely powerful man at the time.”
Bonenmayr raised his eyes and looked into Simon’s petrified face.
“What is the matter?” he asked anxiously. “Are you not well? Perhaps I should explain to you first who the Templars were.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Simon said. “We know about them.”
Just half an hour later they left the monastery. From a safe hiding place, a figure watched as they disappeared with their horses into the trees. Turning away, the man fingered a rosary in his sweaty hands once again, one pearl after the other. Many years had passed, but now he felt they had almost reached their goal. God had chosen them.
“Deus lo vult,” he whispered, then fell to his knees to pray.
5
AN UNPLEASANT ODOR brought Jakob Kuisl back from his nebulous nightmares and into the present. A musty smell of dust and earth, somewhat moldy and damp, like in a trench, he thought.
Where am I? What happened?
The memory came surging back-and with it, the anger and pain. He had failed to notice the third man! He must have come down the stairway to the crypt behind him. The stranger, who smelled of violets, had nearly strangled him with a leather strap. Jakob Kuisl knew that people who were strangled lost consciousness in a minute’s time and that death followed just a few minutes after that. He knew this well, as he himself had executed some people in this fashion. Some of those condemned to death at the stake had paid him to strangle them and spare them the painful death by fire. In the heavy smoke, onlookers couldn’t see that the person in the flames was already dead.
Jakob Kuisl remembered the poison dagger that paralyzed him down in the crypt in a matter of minutes. Some interesting poison that he had never heard of. The plant or berry no doubt came from another part of the world. Carefully, the hangman tried to wiggle his fingers and toes. They moved-a good sign. The effect of the poison, whatever it was, had started to wear off, and for the first time, he was able to open his eyes now.
And saw nothing.
He blinked a few times. Was he blind? Had the men blindfolded him? Or was it really so dark in this cellar? He tried to reach up and touch his face.
He couldn’t.
After a few inches, his hand bumped into something cold and hard. He tried the other hand, but the same thing happened. He tried to sit up, but his head bumped into a stone slab. He broke out in a sweat, and his mouth felt dry. He turned this way and that, but on all sides there was nothing but cold stone. He felt his heart beginning to race and struggled to control his breathing.
They’ve buried me alive. In the sarcophagus…
Jakob Kuisl counted his heartbeats. He struggled to breathe regularly, and finally he felt how the time between heartbeats was lengthening until it was beating normally again. And then he began to scream.
“Hey! Can anyone hear me? I’m here!”
He sensed that his voice reached no farther than the stone slab, where it was completely swallowed up. Considering the huge weight of the stone, it was likely that even someone standing directly next to the sarcophagus would not be able to hear him. He had to help himself.
Perhaps Jakob Kuisl could have raised the slab with his strong arms, but the cover was so close to him that he couldn’t raise his arms any higher than his chest. Perhaps he could…
Taking a deep breath, the hangman pressed his whole body upward so that his broad forehead touched the slab.
It felt as if he were trying to push his way through a wall with his head.
The veins on his temples bulged, and blood surged through his head. He pressed and pumped, his muscles as hard as rock. He could hear his bones crack, but the slab was as unmoving as if had been cemented in place.
Then, finally, he heard a soft grating sound.
A ray of light appeared in a narrow crack-actually, not a ray of light at all, but a darkness not quite as dark as the interior of the sarcophagus. He continued pushing his upper body against the stone, knowing that if he gave up now he wouldn’t regain the strength to raise the slab again for a long time. Perhaps forever. His lower back felt like a mighty oak that was ready to splinter, but finally he moved the slab far enough that he could raise his arms to his chest and push them up against the cold stone above him.
With a loud cry, he pushed away the six-hundred-pound stone.
The slab hovered above him for a moment like a serving tray, then tipped to one side and crashed to the stone floor, where it broke into pieces. Like a corpse rising from the dead, Jakob Kuisl sat up in the coffin. His body was covered with stone dust and crushed bone. Human bones and scraps of cloth were scattered all over the room, and in one corner lay the slab with the inscription.
Jakob Kuisl climbed out of the sarcophagus and reached for the marble slab. Only now did he notice that he was still holding in his left hand a scrap of the black cowl he had seized just before losing consciousness. He held it up to his nose and smelled a fragrance of violets, cinnamon, and something else that he couldn’t quite place.
He would never forget this fragrance.
With the scrap of cloth and the marble tablet in hand, he climbed out of the crypt. They would find out that it was a mistake to pick a fight with the hangman.
Magdalena had a bad night behind her. She had waited a full hour in front of the St. Lawrence Church, but her father still hadn’t returned. Finally, three figures in dark robes had crept out of the same church window they had pried open before and disappeared into the darkness. Magdalena could hear from far off the whinnying and hoofbeats of their horses as they left.
Where was her father?
Finally, she hurried to the rectory to awaken Magda and the gaunt sexton. Together they opened the door to the church, while Magda, terrified, kept making the sign of the cross, praying, and staring up into the night sky. If someone was really still lurking around in there, the shock would probably kill both of them, Magdalena thought. But the church was empty. The stone slab above the crypt had been moved aside, but even after Magdalena had descended the stairway-despite Magda’s praying and moaning-she had not been able to find anything. Evidently, there had been a struggle in both underground rooms, which were littered with refuse. In the back room, the sarcophagus had clearly been examined again. Bones and scraps of material lay around the room, but the sarcophagus stood just as her father and Simon had left it, with its lid closed. A strange fleeting feeling came over her as she looked at the sarcophagus, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. It almost seemed as if she could sense the presence of her father. But he was still nowhere to be seen.