HS03 - A Visible Darkness (53 page)

The warm smell of melting wax.

I stopped before the door of the waxworks.

How should I enter?

It had been hot inside the vault. DeWitz had ordered the air vents to be opened to relieve the discomfort of his employees. A man had opened them, using a long hooked stick. I worked my way along the brick wall of the workshop, searching for one of these wooden hatches. I came to the corner without finding one, then turned down the narrow alley which ran along the side of the building. It was darker there, more putrid than the filthy street. I trod upon a rat, and heard it yelp.

Might there be a night-watchman?

A simple knock on the door, and he would have opened up. Would DeWitz employ a man to guard that place at night? Was there any sane man who wished to steal what the Dutchman manufactured? But then, I saw what I was seeking: a half-moon wooden shutter close to the ground. I tried to kick it in with my foot, but it would not give. A pale halo of light shimmered around the edges.

Somebody was in there . . .

The impulse to run was strong. I could go to General Malaport, and tell him what I knew. He would call out the French soldiers. They would storm the workshop in force. But would they come in time?

Heinrich-Vulpius would flee . . .

Whoever was inside the workshop was making no attempt to hide.

I retraced my steps to the front, raised my fist, and hammered on the door.

Nothing happened for a minute or more. No one came. I knocked again.

Then, I heard the murmur of voices. Not one person. More than one. They were talking—whispering—on the other side of the door.

I rapped harder.

‘Signor DeWitz?’
a female voice cried out. ‘
È lei là fuori?’

‘
Sono il magistrato Stiffeniis
,’ I answered.

I had learnt some simple phrases when I visited Italy fifteen years before.

The double door creaked, and half of it swung open slowly. Two women stood before me, their eyes were wide with fright. One of them held up an oil-lantern, and I recognised her.

‘Maria.’

The woman smiled uncertainly. ‘You came yesterday,’ she said in stilted German. ‘Signor DeWitz is not here tonight, sir.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied, stepping inside.

‘Was that you in the alley, sir? You frightened us. We are working. We thought it was the rats. They love the wax, and lay siege to this place at night.’

DeWitz had said that they worked at all hours when a suitable corpse required it.

‘I will not take up your time, I promise you,’ I replied, stepping inside. ‘Just show me one thing, and I’ll leave you in peace.’

Maria had been modelling a human hand in wax the day before. She turned to the other woman, who was older, plumper, her long black hair rolled up in a net which hung heavily on her shoulder. They spoke together in Italian for a moment, Maria explaining who I was, reassuring her friend.

‘Is anyone here, except yourselves?’ I asked.

They knew Vulpius, and would have let him in without any question.

‘There’s no one else tonight, sir,’ Maria assured me. ‘I’m helping Anna. She has a lung to finish.’

‘Lung nearly done,’ the other woman said in broken German. ‘Nothing left for the rats.
È quasi putrefatto
. Urgh!’ The look that appeared on her face was one of plain disgust.

‘No one wants to work at night,’ Maria said with a twitch of her nose. ‘But if there’s work to finish, well, we have no choice.’

‘What about Herr Vulpius?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, he is different,’ she said. ‘He’ll work any time.’

‘Have you seen him recently?’

‘Not for weeks, sir.’

I paused for a moment. ‘There is a place, I think, where freshly made models are left to set.’

‘The cold room.’

‘That’s it,’ I said, explaining nothing. ‘Can you lead me there?’

As we passed through the vaults, I noticed the tiny oil-lamps burning in every room beneath a brass cauldron so that the wax would not set hard during the night. And in the main work-room the other woman returned to her table, where a lamp and a mirror illuminated the puffed-up lungs on which she was working.

We stopped before a small wooden door.

‘Here you are,’ Maria said, and handed me her lamp.

As the door swung gently open on its hinges, I stepped inside, and looked around. There were four full-length figures in the centre of the room. They were laid out beneath white sheets which served as dust-covers. There was no other door, no room leading on from this one. This was the innermost sanctuary of DeWitz’s workshop.

The cold room.

No cauldrons bubbled there. It was cooler than the other rooms, but not cold. Neither was the chamber large, though it was cramped, and full of things. In the weak light of the lamp I could see that there were shelves on three of the walls. They were loaded down with objects, each of which was covered with a cloth. They might have been packages waiting to be collected from a post office. Signs hung at intervals on the walls:
BONES/SKELETAL COMPONENTS
.
MUSCLES
,
TENDONS
,
CARTILAGES
,
EXTENSORS
.
LUNGS/FINE TISSUE
.
ORGANS
.
MEMBRANES
.
BRAINS.

I peeled back the sheet which shrouded the object on the nearest table.

A naked man, life-sized, was reclining on his back. He might have been peacefully sleeping, except for the fact that his snaking innards were exposed to view. No man could survive for long in such a state. Intestines had uncoiled onto his chest, arms and lower trunk to form a sort of vast amphitheatre. Deep down in the centre of the arena itself, the complex mechanisms by which the stomach functions were on display.

I raised my hand, covered my mouth, swallowed hard.

No blood, fluid, bile or mucus obscured the horrid spectacle. As a teaching instrument, the inanimate wax model would undoubtedly
be useful. The statue was a monument to the combined miracles of Art and Nature. I recognised the hand that had fashioned the plaster casts of Erika Linder’s limbs. There was the same precision in the detail, the same impeccable realism. But surely this was not the piece that he had been talking of.

I threw back the second dust-sheet, and held up the lantern.

An aged woman.

A head of braided hair—was it real?—a wrinkled face. From the point of her chin to the soles of her feet, the skin had been stripped away from the body, revealing the bare bones of the skeleton beneath. Large red-and-blue knots bulged along her arms and legs, together with the major blood vessels which connected them to her heart and lungs.

Where were the muscles?

It was a sort of abstract of a human corpse, and I recalled the French word that DeWitz had used to describe the models for the Albertina.
Écorché.
The French verb means ‘to flay; to lay bare.’ The effect was more pronounced in this particular instance. The wax model illustrated in infinite detail the cyclic flow of blood around and through the avenues of the body. Anything which was irrelevant had been eliminated for didactic purposes.

I pulled away the third sheet.

Relief. Disappointment. Nausea. I felt all three together. DeWitz had spoken of the governing principle in the making of such models. Here was vivid evidence of how they were constructed. A wire frame had been shaped in the figure of a child—the unfinished piece appeared to be a boy aged eleven or twelve. Lying comfortably on his left flank, the skin and fat had been removed from his arms, legs and stomach, exposing his maturing muscles, and the conformation of his developing sexuality. Finer details in the form of the internal organs and the bodily mass were being added as each item became available, though the calves and the feet were still no more than bare metal wire.

Was this what Heinrich-Vulpius wanted me to see?

He had been so intensely mystical when he spoke of it, yet I saw
nothing which could represent in any way the rebirth of a fallen nation.

I replaced the dust-sheet over the boy, and turned to the last table. I hesitated for an instant, then threw the sheet back.

A naked woman.

She was large-boned, muscular, strikingly beautiful.

I had seen such women on the coast. Their robust yet graceful physical structure, the harmony of the hips, their well-shaped legs and the long muscle-honed thighs. Indeed, I corrected myself, I had seen many of them.

Before, and after, death.

The face was only partially finished. It was a miracle of gory detail. The skin had been stripped away—perhaps, it had yet to be put on—revealing the underlying features, the muscles, fat and tissue, which would give it form. The upper teeth and the lower jaw were missing.

Kati Rodendahl . . .

A large triangular section was lacking from the throat and the larynx.

Ilse Bruen in the pigsty
. . .

The women in Nordcopp had told the truth about the artist who was obsessed by the anatomical perfection of their bodies. Heinrich had picked them out, noted the pieces that he was searching for, murdered them at his own convenience, then brought the specimens to Königsberg. He had still not found the time or the opportunity to model them in wax. I felt a tremor of revulsion course through my body. Were the missing parts kept in jars of distilled wine, together with the other creatures, in the attic of Frau Poborovsky?

Was it all so simple?

A maniac obsessed by a particular type of woman, possessed of the necessary artistic skill to reproduce her model, desperate only for examples on which to base his work? What was the finality of it all? What could he hope to achieve? I could see nothing that was revolutionary in the scheme. Could he hope to defeat the French
army and send them packing with a wax model of a woman, no matter how perfect he might make her?

I pulled the sheet away entirely, exposing the figure.

The wax woman was naked below the waist. Her legs were long, graceful, strong, but the figure was incomplete. In the triangle where her legs joined her trunk, there was a large gaping cavity. I felt a painful jolt.

The womb.

I remembered something that DeWitz had told me about his modeller.

‘He is a perfectionist. He’ll not invent a thing when Nature can be called upon to provide a perfect specimen. He recently mentioned the case of a woman who will certainly die before her time is up. He called her the new Eve . . .’

A pregnant woman, her belly swollen with the child that she was carrying. The one thing missing: an unborn foetus.

Edviga Lornerssen.

I recalled the way she asked about my wife. I saw again the gentle and protective way in which she laid her hands in her lap as she listened to my replies. She had even mentioned the fact that she feared for the effect that cold sea-water might have upon a child. I had had the right intuition: Edviga was asking about Helena, but she was thinking of her own baby.

Edviga Lornerssen was pregnant. She had gone to speak to Dr Heinrich. He knew about the baby growing inside her. The perfect foetus for the perfect Eve.

He would strike again in Nordcopp.

‘W
HAT DID
you see there?’

The voice of les Halles was brusque.

I stood at his side, looking down on Nordcopp beach. Everything had changed during my short absence. A dozen braziers had been set up near the waterline. These fiery beacons cast a pink glaze on the rippling black waves that broke upon the shingle. Thirty paces out, the steam-pumps of the
coq du mer
were chattering furiously. Piston-driven rods flew up and down, sucking up the sea-bed, sending the sludge hissing through a series of filters, spewing the water back to where it had come from. A rotating canvas belt fed stones and shale into a long, narrow flume which carried it onto the beach, where the detritus cascaded noisily into a metal tray. The amber-girls were working there, throwing unwanted pebbles higher up the beach, dropping fragments of amber into sacks which dangled around their necks. Their nets and spears were gone. They were obliged to work bare-armed, bare-foot. French soldiers pressed close around them, making sure that nothing was stolen.

Once, they had seemed to me like goddesses.

Now, they looked like humbled slaves.

Colonel les Halles surveyed the field of battle. Sweat rolled off his brow and trickled down his chin, running under his collar like dark rivulets of blood. His cheeks were gaunt, his cheekbones scuffed with oil where he had tried to brush away the sweat with the back of his filthy hands. His face was the painted mask of a warrior. He was fighting the final skirmish in his war against the Baltic Sea. He had violated the sea-bed, illuminated the shore, triumphed over gravity with his ingenious pipes and pumps. His machines would work all day, and through the night, digging endlessly for the precious amber that was buried beneath the shallow waters.

‘Well, Stiffeniis?’

His patience was short. His mind was on his own task, not on mine.

I began to tell him what I had done the minute I arrived in Nordcopp.

‘Why didn’t you report your discoveries to me?’ he snapped. ‘He could have murdered you, as well.’

His questions were intelligent, rational. My behaviour had been neither. I had ridden hard from Königsberg. Three hours in the saddle, the horse almost lame by the time that I reached the town. I had gone immediately to Heinrich’s house. Afterwards, I reported what I had found to Sergeant Tessier in the North Tower. Five minutes later, aboard an open carriage with an armed escort, I was racing through the dunes towards the sea and Colonel les Halles.

‘You cannot go alone,’ Tessier grumbled.

But I saw the truth in his eyes. He did not trust me. I was a Prussian. Prussians were devious, dangerous. I must be carried directly to his superior, while he went off to verify what I had told him. For all he knew, I might be mad.