Burning Twilight (10 page)

Streams of it ran down her chin and all over her fine outfit, forming a glittering puddle on the floor.

“Don’t just stand there, fetch me some water,” Kassy said.

The captain, however, stood his ground while the sick woman’s chest rose and fell like a wounded bird we had just rescued from the bloody claws of a cat. Only when Francesca’s breathing slowed to near normal did he order one of his men to fetch water from the rain barrel out back.

Kassy took it from them, and the rest of us stood around like perfect models of ineffectiveness while she prepared some herbs and boiled them in the water from the barrel. After letting it steep a few minutes, she asked me to help prop up the woman’s head so she could drink the cup of restorative tea that Kassy had prepared.

Francesca jerked forward a moment after drinking, fell onto her hands and knees and disgorged everything she had consumed in the previous twelve hours. Thick rancid streams of yellow and black liquid mixed with semisolid chunks of red and white. I think I even saw some green peas in there from the night before.

“Eighteen years in the galleys . . . ” She coughed and spat, her voice barely above a croak, her face hanging low, her silky black hair streaked with bits of silver and bile.

“Your punishment will be considerably worse than that, I can assure you,” said the captain.

Kassy’s eyes cut sharply into him, but he didn’t take any notice of her.

“He sentenced my father to eighteen years in the galleys,” Francesca repeated in a low whisper.

“Who did?” Kassy asked.

“Who do you think?” Francesca said, pushing herself off the floor and squatting on the cold hearthstones, stirring up a cloud of cinders. “Who do you think runs this filthy operation?”

The goldsmith pleaded with her to keep silent.

“You keep out of this,” the captain warned, and turned back to the woman. “Surely you are referring to Herr Schildsberg?”

Francesca let out a sick laugh.

“All right. Who actually runs it?” said Kassy.

The goldsmith tried to drown out Francesca’s words with howls of protest until the sergeant-at-arms threatened to slap him across the mouth with an ironclad fist.

The woman finally raised her eyes from the mess she had made.

“Father Glemp.”

“Who’s he?”

Now it was the captain’s turn to laugh skeptically as Francesca turned to face Kassy and said: “He’s the priest at St. Bogdan’s Church.”

A
pair of the captain’s men took the goldsmith in for questioning. The rest of us followed the squadron as they marched the shackled female prisoner past the Ratusz and the flower market, toward a church at the end of a lane the Germans called the Ziegenstrasse. It was aptly named, since the closer we got to the river, the more it smelled like a wet goat.

“How did you find us so quickly?” I asked Kassy.

She bit her lip, which I’d noticed she often did when gathering her thoughts. “Even a woman with Francesca’s resources couldn’t possibly expect to pass a significant amount of false coins into circulation without arousing suspicion.”

Rabbi Loew nodded in agreement.

“Nor was there any trafficking in false coins where you expected to find it, among the thieves and lowlifes,” she said.

I grudgingly agreed.

“So it followed that I needed to look for a go-between who knew something of the law and the ways of men, who was able to travel to and from different parts of the city without attracting undue attention, and who had something no one else could offer the bandits—namely, the ability to give them refuge and sanctuary. Who else but a priest could pass undetected from the poorest slums to the parlors of the rich?”

“And of course, no one would suspect a priest,” said Rabbi Loew.

“Not that such an accusation could ever come from my lips,” Kassy interjected. “A Hussite stranger in these lands? Absolutely not,” she added as we arrived at the church in question.

Its stones were blackened and pitted with dirt and moss, and its sharply angled cornices and gargoyle-shaped rainspouts gave it the appearance of a crouching bird of prey.

The captain ordered one of his men to pound on the heavy wooden door with his halberd. When no one answered, he gave the word, and the guard used the blade of his halberd to pry open the door without too much damage to the lock.

But I bet no one expected to be greeted by the sight of Father Glemp in his spotless white collar and fine black cassock, surrounded by a retinue of armed guards. When he saw who we were, the priest waved them off, and his personal bodyguards stood down.

Father Glemp smiled, greeted the captain and explained that there had been a number of break-ins lately, mostly thieves looking to rob the poor box, but that some fanatical Protestants had recently dared to threaten his personal safety.

The Polish guards cursed the fanatical Protestants, while the captain dismissed the priest’s need to explain anything. He had the prisoner brought forth and indicated that we three newcomers to the city were responsible for her arrest. For a moment the priest looked at me the way a shipwrecked sailor looks at the blank expanse of sea around him, not fully understanding how the waves had washed all the ink off the map that was supposed to guide him to safety.

“Ask him to show you where he keeps the gold,” said Francesca.

“Forgive us, Father,” said the captain. “But the law says that we must act to verify—or refute—the prisoner’s claims.”

“Of course, Captain. You are only doing your duty,” said the priest, chilling me with his smile. “Come this way. We have nothing to hide.”

He gestured for us to follow him up the nave toward the altar.

“Then how come the vault is always locked and you’re the only one who has a key?” said Francesca.

The priest sighed, as if he were indulging the ill-bred child of a wealthy parishioner.

“Is it such a novel concept to keep the money for the poor under lock and key?” he asked with a gleam in his eye, as if he were sharing a private joke with the captain.

He led us down the stairs to the crypt and removed a heavy ring of keys from his waistband. He unlocked the iron grille and then had two of his men push the massive door, which opened with a rusty metallic creak.

“There!” Francesca said, pointing to a dented strongbox on a middle shelf. “The false coins are in there.”

It certainly showed signs of having been opened recently, since unlike the rest of the crypt, its surface was completely free of dust. But the priest’s manner was far too relaxed and accommodating to support the idea that the box contained anything incriminating.

He opened the box and handed it to the captain.

“We occasionally receive false coins in the collection plates,” Father Glemp admitted. “Perhaps the parishioners themselves are unaware of their provenance. In any case, we were about to do our civic duty and turn the coins to the proper authorities. But there are so many responsibilities in this parish, so many hungry mouths to feed, so many poor souls who need a sympathetic ear, that I’m afraid I have let these languish here a bit longer than I should have.”

“You don’t have to explain your actions to me, Father. I understand completely,” said the captain, handing the strongbox to one of his underlings.

Despite the irons on her wrists, Francesca broke free from her captors and yanked a thick gray sheet off a workbench, revealing an array of tools for grinding, filing, and melting down metals.

“What about these, then?” she said, her eyes blazing as a couple of pikemen dragged her away from the bench. “Open those sacks and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

The captain eyed the sacks under the bench, then his gaze shifted to the priest, who bowed slightly and gestured toward the sacks, as if to say,
Be my guest
.

The captain nodded, and two of his men strode forward and dragged a couple of sacks out from under the bench and sliced them open. They were filled to the brim with luxurious objects—brass candelabras, silver tankards, and what I could have sworn was a solid gold monstrance for holding the most sacred object in a Catholic church—the blessed wafer of Holy Communion.

“For the poor,” offered the priest. “Friends of the church salvaged most of these items from the houses that were damaged in the great fire, but nobody ever came forward to claim them. A few of these trinkets were unearthed when the von Lembergs added a room to their house, and one kind soul donated a battered pair of silver drinking cups he found while digging a privy. We were planning to melt them down to remove the impurities and make it easier to transport the precious metals to the weighing house.”

“Of course, Father.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No, I believe you’ve given us all we need.”

“You’re just going to let him go?” said Francesca. “He runs the whole cursed business! I’m just his servant. Sometimes his washerwoman too, and believe me, I could tell you things. And he only pays me a lousy ten
zlotys
a year.”

In other words, less than a third of my meager wages.

The priest mumbled something about how untrustworthy and dishonest some servants can be, and the captain mumbled something about how true that was.

Francesca practically leapt through the air and tried to claw Father Glemp’s eyes out, but the guards had put up with enough of her outbursts, so they wrapped a thick chain around her waist, pulled it tight and cuffed her hands to it. Then they gagged her and carried her kicking and squirming up the stairs of the crypt to the sacred space above. But somehow she managed to spit out the gag and yell something about how Father Glemp had sentenced her father to eighteen years as a galley slave.

The pikemen balled up the gag and stuffed it deep into her mouth until she could barely breathe, while the priest explained in that long-suffering manner of his that Francesca’s father had indeed worked for him at one point, but when he found the old man clipping the edges off the coins from the collection plate, he had turned him over to the proper authorities—and it was
they
who had sentenced the villain to eighteen years in the galleys.

“Yet you continued to employ his daughter,” said the captain admiringly.

The priest made an expansive gesture. “Charity is boundless.”

The captain nodded his understanding.

Nobody took much notice as Kassy scooped up a sample of the silvery powder from the workbench and slipped it into a small leather pouch.

Everyone was watching Francesca as her body writhed and contorted and her face became inflamed with rage. But her words, whatever they were, went unheard.

I stood there speechless as the sounds of her struggle echoed about the vaulted nave, then died.

“Such a brilliant mind,” said Kassy, lowering her eyes.

“A brilliant mind who shamelessly misused her gifts,” said Rabbi Loew. “And brought nothing but dishonor to her family.”

“It’s no fun being publicly gagged either, I can assure you,” Kassy replied.

She was unusually silent as we left the church and made our way back to Zydowska Street.

As the fog thickened about our ankles, Rabbi Loew shared his observations with us, his authoritative voice echoing through the empty streets as if he were pronouncing judgment in a court of law: “The thirst for gold often turns brother against brother. But when a man gives to charity, that piece of gold becomes a sacred object in the eyes of God, since it is destined to help heal the sick, or feed the widows and orphans in the poorhouse. And so it follows that anyone who dares to deprive the needy of such a holy treasure should be tried and punished in the same manner as a man who has committed murder.”

But Kassy wasn’t listening. She was absorbed in a sort of standing-on-one-foot analysis of the metallic powder she had collected, taking a pinch of the stuff from the pouch and rubbing it between her fingers, feeling its texture, then bringing a tiny bit to her nose and carefully sniffing at it. Then she wet a finger and rubbed the powder around some more, and smelled that, recoiling. She stopped to wash her hands in a public fountain.

“Well, what do you make of it?” I asked.

“The only explanation that makes sense,” she said, “is that the man we know as Reb Schildsberg and a number of unknown accomplices were indeed working together in an unholy alliance to manufacture and distribute false coins using high quality materials—the same metals that are used in the Paracelsian tinctures and love potions and such like. But you and I know that no amount of gold will ever satisfy the limitless greed of a certain class of criminal, and someone working in that church’s crypt began experimenting with cheaper materials, including arsenic, as far as I can tell without further study, and no doubt a number of other dangerous metals. The priest may be guilty of many crimes, but he may not have been aware that one of his servants was also using the materials to brew various potions.”

“So Reb Schildsberg, or whatever his real name was, drained the cup of his own free will, thinking it was his usual love potion,” I said. “But the metals in it were debased, and it killed him.”