“Are you-uh-Magdalena Kuisl?” he asked fearfully. “The daughter of the Schongau hangman?”
“Who wants to know?” Magdalena snapped, scrutinizing him carefully. “You sure don’t look like a city guard.”
The boy shook his head shyly. “I’m Benjamin Teuber, the son of the Regensburg executioner. My friends and I have been looking for you everywhere. I have something to give you,” he replied, handing her a folded piece of paper. “It’s a letter from your father.”
Incredulous, Magdalena took the note. “From my father?”
Benjamin nodded and rubbed his toes together bashfully. “He gave it to my dad and asked him to find you and give it to you. And then I have a message for you from my father.”
“What’s that?” Magdalena asked.
“That your dad is a thick-skulled, pigheaded, low-down bastard.”
The hangman’s daughter smiled. There was no greater compliment anyone could give her father.
9
REGENSBURG
NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AUGUST 22, 1662 AD
This morning they began with the rack straightaway.
In silence the Regensburg executioner removed Kuisl’s bandages and bound his arms behind his back. Perceiving shadows behind the wooden lattice, Kuisl knew the doctor and the three inquisitors were already present. He fixed his eyes on the lattice as if by sheer force of will he might see through it to finally get a look at the man who’d set this awful trap for him.
Since Teuber had visited the cell to care for his wounds, only a single, agonizing night had passed and Kuisl had slept little. Instead, he’d spent the whole time brooding over the name Weidenfeld and where he might have heard it before. It was clear now that the third man whose face was hidden behind the lattice was an avenging angel risen out of his past. The same stranger had made all the inscriptions on the cell wall to remind the hangman of a time he’d long ago banished to the remote corners of his memory. The ghosts of the war had risen again, and the worst among them was hiding here, in the torture chamber in Regensburg behind a wooden lattice. Who was it? And why was he pursuing him?
P.F.K. Weidenfeld…
Kuisl moaned softly as the executioner strapped him to a modified ladder rack. The herbal ointment Teuber had spread on his wounds was a blessing but in no way a cure. Now Teuber tied Kuisl’s hands, already bound together behind his back, tightly to an upper rung of the rack. Sharply filed wood pyramids bored into his wounded flesh while the weight of his body pulled him inexorably downward along the rungs, prying his shoulder joints apart as he slid. Still, that wasn’t the worst: Teuber tied a noose around Kuisl’s legs, then attached it to a roller at the bottom of the instrument. When the executioner turned the roller, the victim’s arms would be pulled farther and farther upward, behind his back, until his shoulders would at last rip from their sockets.
“We begin the second interrogation,” the older man intoned from behind the lattice, a voice Kuisl now knew belonged to the president of the council, Hieronymus Rheiner. “Kuisl, you can save yourself a lot of pain if you simply confess that-”
“To hell with you, you dirty bastards!” Kuisl shouted. “Even if you cut me to pieces and throw me into boiling water, it wasn’t me!”
“It’s quite possible we’ll do just that,” the third voice replied sardonically. “But first we’re going to try the rack. Teuber, turn the crank.”
Drops of sweat appeared on Teuber’s brow, and his lips pressed into a thin line. Nevertheless, he moved the roller about a quarter turn, just enough for Kuisl’s bones to crack audibly.
“Don’t make this unnecessarily hard on yourself,” admonished the youngest inquisitor, presumably Joachim Kerscher from the Regensburg tax office. “The evidence is overwhelming. We all know you committed the murder, but by Carolingian Law we need your confession.”
“It wasn’t me,” Kuisl muttered.
“Blast it, we caught you red-handed! Right alongside the two corpses!” Hieronymus Rheiner fumed. “God knows you are guilty! He’s looking down on you now!”
Kuisl laughed softly. “God isn’t here. Only the devil’s present in this room.”
“This isn’t working,” the third man said icily. “Teuber, keep turning. I want to hear his bones break.”
“But Your Honors,” Teuber spoke up cautiously. His face looked pale and bloated in the torchlight. The merry sparkle in his eyes had disappeared, and he seemed to have suddenly aged by years. “Were I to proceed too quickly, Kuisl might pass out, and then-”
“Who asked your opinion, hangman?” the third inquisitor snarled.
Doctor Elsperger, who until that point had been sitting silently on the wooden bench, now stood up and cleared his throat.
“Teuber isn’t entirely mistaken,” he said. “From appearances the accused may indeed become unconscious. Then we’d have to terminate the procedure prematurely.”
“Elsperger, you’re right,” old Rheiner responded from behind the lattice. “We must proceed slowly. Teuber, just a quarter turn again, no more.”
The Regensburg executioner, who was leaning silently against the rack, didn’t seem to hear the inquisitor at first.
“Pardon, Your Honor. A quarter turn, as you command.”
As Teuber cranked the roller, Kuisl could feel his arms about to be wrenched from their sockets. This pain only intensified as the pyramid-shaped wedges dug ever deeper into his back. Kuisl closed his eyes and hummed the old nursery rhyme he’d first heard in an army encampment outside Breitenfeld long ago. Soldiers’ wives hummed it in their children’s ears to soothe them while villages burned on the horizon. Kuisl himself had sung it to send his little sister, as well as his own children, off to the land of dreams.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home…”
“Kuisl, stop this foolishness and confess!” young Kerscher warned him. “It’s over for you.”
“Your house is on fire…”
“Good Lord, confess!” Rheiner shouted.
“Your children will burn…”
“Confess!”
Kuisl spat at the lattice. “Go to hell, you potbellied little pricks.”
For a moment everyone fell silent, and the only sound was Kuisl’s labored breathing.
“A lovely song,” the third inquisitor said finally in a malevolent tone. “Unfortunately you’ll never again sing it to your children. You do have children, don’t you? And a beautiful wife, as well. What’s her name? Anna-Maria, I believe.”
He repeated the name, pronouncing each syllable slowly, almost lustfully. “An-na-Ma-ri-a.”
The Schongau hangman struggled to get up, while his bones cracked and his left shoulder snapped out of its socket. This devil knew his wife? And his children, too? What did he have planned for them? Had he already taken out his vengeance on them for some crime their husband and father committed decades ago? Though the pain almost caused Kuisl to faint, he spat a stream of bile in the direction of the wooden lattice.
“You goddamned swine!” he screamed. “Come out here and show me your goddamned face so I can rip the skin off it!”
“You’re a bit confused,” the third man calmly replied. “You’re the one whose face we’re going to tear to shreds in a little while.”
“I implore you to show a bit more respect, colleague,” Rheiner scolded. “This is an interrogation. One might almost think the accused has somehow wronged you personally… Elsperger?”
The gaunt surgeon sprang up from the bench. “Your Honor?”
“Is the subject still fit for interrogation?”
Elsperger approached the Schongau hangman and examined his crippled arm in the dim torchlight.