‘Open Sesame!’ he said in a deep voice, then gave a soft whistle. It was hollowed out and a thick stack of letters and papers lay in the nest cut out for them. He grinned, considered, set the Bible down on the desk, then spent five minutes giving the room the look of a place speedily ransacked. He pulled out the desk drawers and scattered the papers, yanked out a random number of volumes from the upper shelves and dropped them all so their spines snapped. The pages that had been loose on the desktop when he entered, he threw over his shoulder.
His ransacking done, he sat down on the floor with the papers from the Bible and sorted through them. Some were letters in plain language. Of these he noted down an idea of the contents, and names used; these were mostly classical pseudonyms, but one never knew where these things might lead, and each one was addressed to Spartacus. So Spartacus is Dunktal, he thought. The signatures were similarly unlikely, though Pegel grinned, his eyebrows raised, to see letters apparently from some of the Muses of Antiquity. For Muses, he couldn’t help thinking, they wrote ugly sentences. Some pages seemed to be instructions on the recruitment and training of members; others some of the central tenets of the organisation. He whistled silently and made notes. Several sheets were in code and there were three longer documents that seemed to have been written by the same hand, and bearing the same date. They must be copied exactly and there was no way of knowing how much time he had. He set down his notebook, picked up the coal-scuttle and emptied its contents down the stairs then shut the door, wedged a chair under it and opened the hatchway into the attic.
Thus, as prepared as he could be, he settled down to his work.
‘An alchemist?’ Crowther said coldly.
‘Yes,’ Krall replied, and knocked again. ‘He is a good man. He was an apothecary.’
‘The drugs used on Clode are of a sophistication-’
‘Bugger off!’ The voice sounded from deep within.
Krall rattled the handle again. ‘Open up now, Adam, or I will break down the door.’
‘I said, bugger off!’
Crowther looked around the square while negotiations continued. So even in a city as new as Ulrichsberg there were places that could look neglected. The house at which Krall hammered so vigorously looked like a crabbed old woman surrounded by spring brides. Its windows were thick with filth, there were tiles loose and greenery sprouted from the gutters. The paint on the half-timbering was peeled. The houses on either side showed what it should have been and it seemed to hunker and slump between them, neglected and resentful. Above the door was a faded emblem of a unicorn.
Krall began to count slowly down from ten and a new storm of expletives erupted from behind the low door. Crowther was a little gratified to realise how many of them he understood. He had always thought German a pleasing language to swear in. It had the proper supply of consonants. The unseen owner of the house was proving himself to be an inventive user of the linguistic tools to hand.
As Krall reached ‘Five’ there was a screech and a wrench and the door opened. The man who appeared behind it was an elderly, stooped creature whose eyes were made huge by a pair of smeared glasses. He peered at Krall over them and sneezed, then kicking the door open a little wider against some resistance, spoke.
‘Come in then.’ Noticing Crowther for the first time, he paused. ‘Who’s your pet?’ He spoke clearly enough, but under his words was a faint high wheeze; it was like a slow puncture in an organ bellows.
‘This man is Mr Crowther.’
‘Foreigner?’
‘English.’
‘Explains it,’ he said, then tramped off into the gloom of the house. Krall and Crowther followed.
The ground floor of the building was one low, continuous space but so cramped with old furniture and broken oddments that the man in the eyeglasses had to lead them down a narrow path between the tumbling piles. It was like a junk shop in a corner of the docks somewhere, a place where lost remnants of better places went to die. Crowther saw chairs, dressers, tables upended and balanced on half-opened packing cases; portraits thick with grime set at an angle and half-hidden by the skeletons of chandeliers. Their guide had now scurried ahead of them, more sure-footed and confident among the wreckage.
Krall said quietly, ‘Twenty years ago, Adam Kupfel — Whistler, as he is known now — was a rich enough man. He was an apothecary, and had a house outside Ulrichsberg worth envying. Now he lives in what used to be his shop, surrounded by the wreckage of his old home.’
‘What happened?’
Krall sighed. ‘He turned alchemist, and that turned him.’
‘How?’
‘He always had a liking for all old books, and he found a thing in one of the bookshops of Leuchtenstadt one day — an old volume full of woodcuts and patterns and spells. It took some sort of hold on him. He spent all his money on similar works and turned the apparatus of his trade into a means of searching for the Elixir of Life.’
‘I am still unclear, Krall, what you hope to achieve by questioning a delusional recluse. What can he know of this drug, or who might have made it? These are matters of the real world.’
Krall’s eyebrows drew together. ‘I am not the first person who thought a recluse with unusual interests might yet do some good.’ Crowther felt his meaning, and his lips thinned. ‘Thing is, Kupfel was a good friend to me before this madness took him. My father died when I was just starting off in life, and without Adam’s advice and guidance I’d have probably lost everything he left me. Many the evening I spent at his house while his son played on the hearth-rug. He had the sharpest mind, and such learning. We would have been in a better state in Maulberg if he had taken the seat where Swann now sits, but such opportunities are available only to those of noble blood.’
‘I see.’
‘I doubt that you do. As to what he can tell us now, for all his madness no man within a hundred miles is as skilled with the methods of distilling and preparing drugs.’
‘Stop dawdling! Think I have all day to wait while you pick apart my history?’
Kupfel had to turn sideways to lead them into his lair, so close did the piles of refuse tumble together, but in the narrow opening Crowther saw a steady glow. As he squeezed through after their host he found himself in a more open space. It was as if they entered a cave, carved from the walls of detritus around them. There was no dust here. Every surface was clean and bright. A fire burned evenly in a huge brick fireplace, and by its light Crowther saw the walls were lined with books. Desk and stool stood to the right, a pair of armchairs to the left, and behind them a door, part-open to show a wall of glass jars and distilling bottles. Kupfel saw where Crowther was looking and went to shut the door, frowning.
‘Sit down then, Benedict, you and your friend. Why do you disturb me? I was reading.’ He said the last with a vicious emphasis. Crowther noticed that Krall looked a little abashed.
‘You have heard of the murder?’ Krall asked.
‘At the Festennacht? A woman, slaughtered by some hot-blood.’
‘Mr Clode’s guilt is called into question.’
‘Hmm.’ Kupfel curled up in the armchair by the fire like an old dog and began to work his hands over each other. Crowther noticed they were covered in small scars and burns. There was a scar on his neck too which Crowther only noticed now as he twisted sideways in the light of the flames. It lapped his neck on the left side from collarbone to the underside of his chin, the flesh pink and puckered. Some sort of burn, certainly. Vitriol? Without willing it Crowther imagined a vessel exploding, the man turning away to shield his eyes and leaving the flesh of his neck exposed to the clawing liquid. The pain must have been indescribable, and the damage deep. No wonder his voice had that wheeze. How long had it been before Kupfel returned again to the fire? ‘How was she killed?’