Brother Michael smiled. “You’ll never guess. Promise me you’ll stay the night, and then perhaps I’ll tell you the name of this artist.”
“If you insist…” Only now did the Steingaden abbot notice Simon and Benedikta, who were trying to slip away unnoticed behind the columns. “What a coincidence! The young widow from Landsberg!” he called to them. “And Simon Fronwieser! Well, have you made any progress in your investigations of the murder? Or are you applying for a position as physician here in Rottenbuch as well?”
Michael glanced from Bonenmayr to Benedikta and Simon, who came to a sudden stop between two columns as if they had been hit by a bolt of lightning. “Landsberg? Murder?” the superintendent asked, perplexed.
“Thank you. We…we…have figured everything out,” Simon stuttered. “But we don’t wish to disturb you gentlemen any further. Your Excellencies certainly have things to discuss.” He pulled Benedikta along with him, leaving the two gentlemen alone in the church.
Outside, in the church courtyard, Simon began to curse so loudly that some monks turned around to look. “Damn! What bad luck! The Steingaden abbot will certainly tell Brother Michael who we really are, and then this whole masquerade is over!”
“A masquerade that began with you!” Benedikta snapped.
“Oh, come now, what should we have said in Wessobrunn, and now here in Rottenbuch-‘Good day, we’re looking for the treasure of the Templars? Can we desecrate some of your holy relics?’ ” Simon talked himself into a rage. More and more monks turned around to stare and whisper.
Benedikta finally softened a bit. “In any case, the superintendent won’t let us open the coffins, and we can forget getting any help from him.”
“So much the worse,” Simon grumbled. “Then we’ll never learn whether a message is concealed in the relics. What now?”
Benedikta looked up at the church’s window frames, where workmen were just beginning to insert the new stained glass. The men were standing on a rickety scaffold, carefully raising the colorful windows on a pulley. Simon was certain that each window was worth a fortune.
“If the superintendent doesn’t open these coffins for us, we’ll just have to do it ourselves,” Benedikta said. “Primus and Felicianus could certainly use a little fresh air.”
“And just how do you intend to do that?”
Benedikta pointed again at the open windows. “We’ll pay a visit to the two dusty old gents tonight,” she said. “The glaziers certainly won’t finish their work today, and I can’t imagine that the church is guarded overnight. No doubt, the superintendent thinks that lightning will strike any grave robber and send him running.”
“How are you so sure that lightning won’t strike us?” Simon whispered. “Stealing religious relics is a sin that…” But Benedikta had already charged off.
Neither of them noticed the two figures hiding among the other monks. Like long shadows, they slipped away from the group and went back to following Simon and Benedikta’s trail.
In his cell in the Schongau dungeon, the robber chief Scheller was turning the poison pill in his fingers, looking out at the snow falling in front of his barred window. Behind him, many of his companions were dozing in expectation of their imminent deaths. The women whimpered and fathers said their farewells to their children in whispered voices, telling them about a paradise that was also open to robbers and whores where they would all see one another again. They spoke of a better life in another world and made the sick ten-year-old boy swear to God and to the Virgin Mary that he would lead a respectable life. They had robbed and killed, but now most of them had become penitent sinners. Some of them prayed. The next morning, the local priest would come and take their last confessions.
Hans Scheller stared at the little pill and thought back on his life so far. How had it come to this? He’d been a carpenter in Schwabmünchen with a wife and child. As a young boy, he’d witnessed the execution of the notorious murderer Benedikt Lanzl, who had screamed for two whole days while being beaten by the hangman. Tied to a wheel, the highway robber and arsonist had become the focal point of a spectacle unlike anything little Hans had ever seen before. At night, he could still hear Benedict Lanzl’s scream in his sleep.
Sometimes Hans Scheller could even hear it today.
Never did he dream that one day he, too, would stand up there on the wooden platform. But God’s ways were inscrutable.
Hans Scheller sighed, closed his eyes, and gave himself up to the memories that came flooding back. A laughing boy, his face smeared with porridge…his wife bent over the washtub…a field of barley in the summer, a good glass of beer…the smell of freshly cut spruce…
There was much that was wonderful about the world, and he could leave it behind without regrets. But he still owed the hangman something.
The night before, something occurred to him, a small matter he’d overlooked until then. But now, after everything Jakob Kuisl had told him, it suddenly seemed important.
He would tell the hangman the next day at the gallows.
Hans Scheller leaned against the ice-cold wall of the cell, fingering the pill, and whistled an old nursery tune. He was almost home.
He was called Brother Nathanael. This was the name the order had given him long ago-he’d long forgotten his real name. Where he came from, the sun burned brightly with a shimmering, unending heat, and thus the snow drifting down now in soft flakes seemed, to him, like a personal messenger from hell.
He was freezing under his thin tunic and black-hooded coat, clenching his teeth but not complaining. His former master had trained him to be tough. He was a guard dog of the Lord, and his command was to follow the woman and the man. And if they found the treasure, he was to kill them quickly and silently, retrieve the treasure, and report back to the brotherhood. That was his assignment.
Trembling with cold, he played with the dagger in his hand and pressed his back against the frost-covered wall of the monastery. Snowflakes melted as they fell on his brown, scarred face. He was from Castille, near the magnificent city of Salamanca, and his task at the moment seemed to him like a test from God. The Lord himself had sent him to this inhospitable, remote region and, as an additional punishment, had sent him Brother Avenarius.
The short, plump Swabian standing next to him and mumbling his prayers had been personally assigned to him and Brother Jakobus in Augsburg by the master. Brother Avenarius was second to none in his knowledge of the written word-he knew all about the treasure and was an expert in solving riddles-but as a comrade-in-arms, he was about as useful as an old woman. Once again, he started whining.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Why can’t we go back to our quarters?” His thick Swabian accent sometimes drove Brother Nathanael crazy. “Who can say whether the two will really try to break into the church tonight?” the Swabian lamented. “And even if they do, we can catch up with them again in the morning! So what are we doing here?”
Nathanael ran the dagger along his fingers-from his index finger, to his middle finger, to his ring finger, and back, a little nervous routine he could repeat for hours. It calmed his mind.
“I keep telling you we can’t let him out of our sight! The matter is too important. Besides, if you’d only solved the riddle before they did, we’d be back in Augsburg by now!”
Brother Avenarius looked to the ground with embarrassment. “I’ll admit I underestimated the physician,” he grumbled. “Who would have suspected that the words primus and felicianus referred to the two saints? At least I figured out before he did that the inscription referred to the Wessobrunn Prayer.”