The Werewolf of Bamberg (55 page)

“What is that thing?” she whispered anxiously as Bartholomäus continued clicking his tongue.

“Shhh!” he said. “You’ll scare it away. Believe me, this beast is as quick as a fox and agile as a squirrel. Once it took us half a day to catch him again.”

Magdalena looked at her uncle in astonishment. “You’ve seen this monster before?”

“More than I care to. It’s one of the apes from the bishop’s menagerie, a so-called baboon. From time to time I take meat scraps to the animals up there and clean out the cages. This fellow comes originally from Africa—a very unpleasant animal, if you ask me. Devious, underhanded, and sly in a bad way—almost human. Aloysius and I gave him the name Luther.”

“Luther?”

Bartholomäus shrugged. “Reminds me of a Lutheran heathen and itinerant priest I once drew and quartered.” Addressing the animal, he said, “All right, Luther, just come here. Be a good little fellow.” The executioner kept making the clicking sounds while slowly retrieving a piece of dry soul bread from his pocket. “Katharina gave me this earlier. Let’s see if we can tempt him with it.”

Still almost frightened to death, Magdalena watched as the baboon’s little hands twitched back and forth. It was clear he couldn’t decide whether to take the bait.

“You mentioned before you had a suspicion,” Magdalena said. “How did you know—”

“That it would be Luther? Well, Captain Lebrecht expressed his vague concerns to me a few days ago. He couldn’t say anything specific—the bishop would have forbidden that. Evidently Rieneck ordered him and a few other guards to search for the beast under orders of strict confidentiality. That’s why Lebrecht was always so tired. He’d been doing double duty for some time, looking for a werewolf as well as for Rieneck’s cuddly toy.”

“It looks like a number of people have already made Luther’s acquaintance,” Magdalena replied. “For example, this drunken night watchman you told me about.”

“Matthias?” Her uncle grinned. “Actually, that’s what I suspected when he described the animal to me. But then everyone started going on and on about a werewolf, and I myself started thinking Brutus might have something to do with it. Since then I’ve talked with a lot of people who say they’ve seen a werewolf in the city, and their descriptions were all more or less the same: silver fur, sharp teeth, suddenly stands up on its hind feet. Yesterday, when I went back to the menagerie to take some meat to the old bear, I was reminded when I saw that Luther’s cage was empty. It’s possible he’d been gone a long time.”

“And is it possible the baboon is responsible for all the terrible events recently?” Magdalena wondered.

“Luther?” Bartholomäus laughed. “Just look at him. He might frighten you to death, but he certainly can’t carry people away, torture them, and rip their bodies apart. No, our werewolf is someone else.”

While they’d been talking, the baboon had grown more confident. He ventured down a few steps and reached out for the soul bread. Despite his evil-looking red eyes and sharp teeth, Magdalena suddenly thought he looked cute.

“Too bad he’s not the monster we were looking for.” She smiled. “Even my children would like to play with this little fellow.”

She was about to reach out to the baboon, when the animal suddenly snarled at her and jumped toward her. The attack came so quickly that Magdalena fell over backward. Little demonic hands tugged at her hair, and Luther’s sharp fangs were just a few inches from her nose.

“Do something!” she shouted to her uncle. “The thing is trying to bite me.”

“Luther, behave yourself.”

Bartholomäus seized the baboon by its mane and pulled him away from his victim. The animal was furious and flailed about with his arms and legs.

“The cellar door!” Bartholomäus shouted as the animal howled and struck out. “Open the cellar door!”

At first Magdalena didn’t know what her uncle meant, but then she spotted a wooden trapdoor at the foot of the stairway leading down. She quickly descended the staircase, found a rusty ring in the middle of the door, and pulled. Nothing happened immediately, but after some shaking and tugging, it opened. Bartholomäus followed her, still holding the enraged baboon, tossed him through the opening, and quickly closed the cover. Luther’s shrieking continued from down below, like a voice from the depths of the underworld. Bartholomäus straightened up with relief. His coat was ripped, his hair disheveled, and his face covered with bloody scratches.

“That damned beast,” he ranted, wiping the blood and sweat from his brow. “Let Lebrecht try to figure out how to get this little monster back to the menagerie. For all I care, he can lock the bishop up in the cage with him, where His Excellency can delouse the beast and we’ll be relieved of the two baboons at the same time.”

Angrily, Bartholomäus hobbled toward the front door, kicked it so hard it flew open, and disappeared outside into the foggy night.

“Rabies?”

Samuel looked at his friend Simon, puzzled. The two were still standing at the bedside of the suffragan bishop, who lay like a piece of dead wood in a pile of soft pillows. The Bamberg city physician slapped his forehead. “You may be right.”

“Not only
may
be, I
am
right,” Simon replied with a trace of satisfaction in his voice. “It’s really amazing we didn’t think of this before—but we were thinking only of wizardry and human illnesses, and completely forgot animal ones. These werewolf stories can make you dizzy, like bad wine that addles your brain.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Actually, I just read about it again this morning. Uncle Bartholomäus has an astonishing collection of works on veterinary medicine, among them some about dogs, which he loves more than anything else. One of the books discusses rabies. It affects dogs, but also wolves, foxes, cats, and even some smaller animals. If one of those animals bites a person, the victim shows the same symptoms as the suffragan bishop here.” Simon paused to look down at Harsee. A long thread of saliva was dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “It occurs to me that Aloysius, the hangman’s servant, also mentioned cases of rabies in this area several times.”

Simon remembered now that his father-in-law, too, had spoken of it several times, and the furrier had also mentioned the spread of the illness.

“So you think Sebastian Harsee contracted rabies from an animal?” Samuel asked, looking at the paralyzed bishop, who was glaring at him with wide-open eyes like a dead fiansh.

Simon nodded. “The infection must have come from this bite in his neck. All the symptoms point in that direction. The victim, whether animal or human, becomes very aggressive, and then there is paralysis and hardening of the muscles, and the victim loses the ability to swallow, resulting in a buildup of saliva. At the end, the victim goes mad.” He leaned down to Sebastian Harsee, who struggled to sit up as if he were restrained by invisible chains. “Eventually the victim dies of thirst,” Simon added. “In the case of dogs, even the sight of liquid is painful. That’s probably how it works with humans, as well.”

Simon watched sadly as the suffragan bishop lay there quivering. He’d known Sebastian Harsee as a power-hungry and almost pathologically bigoted man, but now he felt great sympathy for him.

I wouldn’t wish such an illness on my worst enemy—buried alive as you’re slowly eviscerated by madness from within.

“It’s all described in great detail in my uncle’s books,” he said, shaking his head. “That is, in various aspects and in several books, in a bombastic prose style. But I should have recognized it earlier.”

“That wouldn’t have changed anything,” Samuel replied with a shrug. “As far as I know, there is no cure for rabies.”

Simon frowned. “Well, some scholars recommend a Saint Hubertus key, a sort of branding iron in the shape of a key that is heated until it glows and can be used to cauterize the wound. Others believe in the power of certain magical letters. But that is no doubt just hocus-pocus. You’re right, there probably is no cure.”

Once again, Samuel leaned down over the patient, who was now just trembling slightly. Taking out an eyeglass, he checked the wound.

“The bite is rather small,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t caused by a wolf or a dog, and even a fox is too big. Was it perhaps a rat?”

Simon mulled it all over, inwardly cursing himself. Would they never get to the bottom of this?

“It’s possible,” he replied after a while. “I think I recall that bats were also mentioned in the books. But I’ll have to check on that. Still . . . there’s still something here I can’t quite put my finger on . . .” He hesitated.

Samuel rolled his eyes. “Don’t start in again with this pussyfooting around, just speak up.”

With his hands folded behind his back, Simon paced the floor, trying to get his thoughts together. Finally, he turned to Samuel.

“It’s a strange coincidence that all of Bamberg is going crazy because of a werewolf at the very moment the Bamberg suffragan bishop catches rabies—which, in the eyes of simple people, makes him a werewolf, too. If this was a stage play, then you could say the playwright tied it up a bit too neatly.”

“Do you think, perhaps, this illness was a plot?” Samuel asked in astonishment. “That Harsee was poisoned?”

Simon nodded. “Poisoned with one of the most horrible plagues that exist. It’s possible. Didn’t Harsee tell you he had probably been bitten in his sleep? Suppose someone hid a rabid rat in his room . . . or a bat?”

Once more Samuel inspected the wound with a magnifying glass. “I don’t know,” he murmured finally. “I’ve seen rat bites before, and they’re smaller. And even though I’ve never seen a bat bite, I think that’s also out of the question.”

“It really doesn’t matter what kind of an animal it was,” Simon replied. “At least now we know—”

There was a knock on the door, and old Agathe peered out through the opening. She seemed quite excited.

“Gentlemen,” she said.

“What is it?” Samuel demanded angrily. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”

“You have a visitor,” she replied. “A very important visitor.” “Well, who is it?” Simon asked. “One of the councilors?”

Agathe shook her head. “No, no, much more important. His Excellency the elector, the bishop of Würzburg, is standing downstairs at the door! Oh God, oh God,” she exclaimed, rubbing her hands together nervously. “He says he would like to speak with both of you.”

Simon took a deep breath, smoothed down his hair, and passed his hands several times over the creases in his soiled clothing.

“I’m afraid it’s rude to keep His Excellency the elector waiting longer than necessary,” he said, turning to Samuel. Then he sighed deeply. “Why must such noble personages always come to visit when I am not properly attired?”

About half an hour later, Simon, Samuel, and Archbishop Johann Philipp von Schönborn stood in the small chapel of the suffragan bishop’s quarters. The chapel had three rows of pews and a simple house altar with a single wooden crucifix on top, alongside a vase of dried roses and a statuette of Mary.

The sacral surroundings made it easier for Simon to engage in conversation with the archbishop, who was also a German elector and a friend of the kaiser. Old Bonifaz Fronwieser had always hoped his son would rise to a prominent position as a doctor, and now Simon was meeting face-to-face not only with mayors and counts but even with one of the mightiest men in the Empire.

If only my father were here to see this,
he thought.
How proud he would be of me.
But in the next moment he suddenly felt ashamed of his vanity.

Johann Philipp von Schönborn turned out to be an exceptionally cordial gentleman. Samuel had told Simon earlier that the Würzburg bishop was inclined to liberal ideas and abhorred belief in witches. The seizure suffered by Sebastian Harsee the day before had unsettled him so much, however, that he wanted to speak with the two doctors again. His bodyguards waited outside on the walkway in front of the chapel, rattling their swords and halberds. Trembling, Agathe entered with a carafe of wine but was politely dismissed by the bishop.

“I hope you know how it reassures me that this matter can be explained logically,” Schönborn said, reaching out to shake hands with the astonished Simon. “I was beginning to think I’d lost my mind. Thank you for that.”

Embarrassed, Simon made a cursory bow. “I hope your thanks are not premature, Your Excellency. It’s just a suspicion—”

“A suspicion based on a careful diagnosis,” Samuel interrupted with a smile. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel, Simon,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m just annoyed I didn’t think of it myself. Rabies. I should have known.”

At the victim’s bedside, Simon had told the archbishop of his suspicion that Harsee was suffering from the contagious animal disease. At first he had hesitated to mention his further suspicion that the suffragan bishop had been poisoned, but Schönborn’s friendly manner had convinced him not to withhold that detail.

“And you really believe that the disappearance of all these people and the bishop’s rabies are somehow connected?” Schönborn asked with interest. “That they could both be the work of one and the same person?”