The Dark Monk

15

THE MUFFLED VOICES behind the door became louder and louder, then suddenly fell silent. Simon held his breath. He was sure he’d heard the Steingaden abbot. Had the secret passageway perhaps led them to St. John’s Chapel? But they must have gone much farther than that…The medicus had lost all sense of direction. Placing his finger to his lips, he motioned to the two women to keep silent. After a while they could hear the sound of pickaxes. Someone on the other side of the door seemed to be pounding away at stone.

Carefully, Simon pressed down on the rusty door handle. The tarnished portal opened a crack, unexpectedly, and then jammed. Peering through the crack, Simon couldn’t make out more than a few shapeless pieces of rubble that blocked his view. He pressed against the low wooden door with his shoulder, and it opened, squeaking, bit by bit. The pounding on the other side continued, and now Simon could clearly hear the abbot’s voice.

“Faster, faster! There’s an opening behind it, you asses! Hurry up!”

Suddenly, a loud crash sounded somewhere up above. Something big and heavy must have fallen over in the room above them. For a moment, Augustin Bonenmayr fell silent, but then he continued, even louder: “I don’t care if the world is coming to an end up there! That must not stop us! Keep going!”

Finally, the crack was wide enough that Simon and the two women could slip through. Not far from the door, he spotted a tall, rotten shelf they could hide behind. But looking closer, he stopped short. The shelves were piled high with masks with crooked noses, dusty wigs, fake beards, and moth-eaten clothing. Beside the shelf, he saw a strange apparatus, something he’d never seen before: Standing upright on a small wagon was a barrel with a little handle sticking out of the side. The barrel itself was wrapped in a bolt of fabric. Simon rubbed his eyes. What place had they stumbled into? This couldn’t possibly be St. John’s Chapel, could it?

Carefully, the medicus peered out from beyond the shelving. He saw a huge subterranean dome. Through a tiny opening in the middle of the ceiling, a rope descended to a block of wood on the ground. In one corner Simon recognized one of the two monks from the library. He was hacking on a grave slab with a pickaxe, and next to him, Augustin Bonenmayr was frantically pushing rubble off to the side. When a large-enough hole opened up, the abbot pulled back his white robe and crept inside.

“Give me the torch-quickly!” The monk handed Bonenmayr the torch, and moments later, a shout came from behind the gravestone. “Holy Mother of Jesus, we’ve found it! We’ve really found it!”

The Steingaden abbot began to cackle hysterically, and Brother Lothar, curious, crawled in after him. Once the monk disappeared into the hole, Simon gave the women a sign and they all tiptoed over to the opening. One inch at a time, Simon moved closer to the edge.

Finally, he worked up the courage and looked inside.

Holding his dagger between his teeth, Brother Nathanael pulled himself out of the trapdoor and onto the stage, only to realize he had left his torch down below. The auditorium was as dark as a dungeon! Brother Johannes had a lantern with him, but it had disappeared along with the monk himself.

“Brother Johannes!” Nathanael called out. “Are you here somewhere?” His voice echoed through the drafty building, but there was no answer.

Nathanael remembered seeing candleholders earlier in niches along the stage. Blindly, he groped toward the niches, until his hand grasped a bronze candelabra. With frozen fingers, he reached under his robe for the little box of matches he always carried with him and lit the five candles. After a few moments, he could just make out the stage and the seats in the auditorium. Brother Johannes was nowhere to be seen.

With the candelabra in hand, Nathanael crossed the stage, stopping in front of a heap of crumpled curtain material. He was just about to go down the steps into the orchestra pit when something on the floor caught the light. Stooping down with the candelabra, he saw a little puddle spilling out from under the heap.

It was blood.

“What the devil…?”

When Nathanael pushed the material aside, he saw Brother Johannes’s badly beaten face peering out from under the heap like a discarded doll. He was moaning softly. Blood ran from his nose and from a wound at the back of his head, where a large lump had already formed. Nathanael glanced at the wound before giving the monk an angry kick in the side. Brother Johannes would have a headache for a few days, but he would survive. It was most important now to find out who was out to get them.

“Please stand up and tell me who-”

At this instant he heard a whooshing sound so soft that an untrained ear wouldn’t have even noticed it. But Nathanael hadn’t survived a half-dozen murderers’ attacks in the Spanish provinces just to meet his end in a theater in the peaceful little Priests’ Corner. He lunged forward just before the heavy stage curtain came tumbling down from the ceiling. It crashed onto the stage, burying the candles, candelabra, and the head of Brother Johannes, whose moans stopped abruptly.

Nathanael jumped up and scanned the ceiling. His eyes wandered along the balconies and up the stairs leading to the loft, while he played nervously with the dagger in his hand.

“Come out, whoever you are!” he called out. “You cowardly dog! Fight like a man!”

Out of the corner of his eye, the monk saw a little flame blaze up. Nathanael cursed. The candles he’d dropped had set fire to the curtain!

He was about to stamp out the flames when he heard the rattle of a winch unwinding. Turning around, he saw a giant of a man gliding calmly down from the ceiling. He held onto a rope with one hand and, in the other brandished a short but heavy wood cudgel.

“No one calls me a cowardly dog,” the hangman growled. “Especially you. The three of you overpowered me in the dark once, but for you, I don’t need the cover of darkness. I’ll finish you off just like this, you shady, black-robed ruffian.”

Jakob Kuisl jumped over the burning curtain. The flames cast a flickering light across the stage as the hangman raised his cudgel and approached the monk, ready for a fight.

Simon moved along the wall cautiously until he was able to peer into the opening behind the smashed gravestone. With low ceilings, the space behind it was only a few paces wide and deep and expelled a musty odor. In the torchlight, the abbot and his helper knelt before a simple stone altar with a wooden cross atop it. At about shoulder height, it looked very old and weathered; rusty nails just barely held the crooked and bent cross together, and in a few places, it appeared to have been charred. Nevertheless, Augustin Bonenmayr bowed his head as if the Holy Mother in person were standing before him. After a while he stopped praying, took the relic carefully from the wall, and kissed it.

“The Cross of Christ!” he whispered. “Our Savior once touched this wood. See for yourself…” He pointed to a place on one of the crossbeams.

Brother Lothar bowed down reverently to get a better look.

“Here, see the hole!” the abbot said. “His hand must have been nailed to this very spot!”

“Your Eminence…” Brother Lothar whispered so softly that Simon could barely understand him. “The cross…I always thought it was much larger…”

“You fool!” said Augustin Bonenmayr, slapping his helper on the head. “This is only part of the True Cross. The rest was destroyed! It was the Templars’ duty to take the cross of Christ into every battle during the Crusades and to protect it. But at the Battle of Hattin, they failed. The cross fell into the hands of infidels and was almost completely destroyed. The cross bearer was an ancestor of this miserable fellow Friedrich Wildgraf.” The abbot gripped the weathered relic. “He was able to rescue just part of it. Since then, the cross has been considered lost without a trace. But now it has come to light again, here in Steingaden. Who could have imagined!” Bonenmayr stroked the two rotten crossbeams like a long-lost lover.

Magdalena, eager to see something, too, nudged Simon. Her soft body pressed up close against him, and he could feel her warm, slightly sour breath on his neck.

“Simon, say something!” she whispered. “What’s going on there?” She pressed even closer to him-too close, because he could feel himself losing his balance. He fell forward, crashing into the rubble of the gravestone.

Augustin Bonenmayr wheeled around, his face contorted with hatred. “Fronwieser!” he hissed. “I should have gotten rid of you right away! Well, it’s not too late. Brother Lothar!” He pointed to the monk, who picked a heavy stone up from the floor and was walking toward the medicus. “Do it for God! Deus lo vult!”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” Benedikta stepped into the opening, holding the little pistol she’d fired earlier at Brother Jakobus. Simon wasn’t certain she’d reloaded the dainty little handgun in the meantime, but in any case, the pistol had the desired effect. Uncertain, Brother Lothar stopped and looked over to his abbot. Now Magdalena appeared in the opening as well. For a moment, Augustin Bonenmayr was clearly caught off guard, but then a smile spread across his face and he seemed to change his strategy.

“Ah, I see. The three lovers have found one another again. How delightful!” The Steingaden abbot advanced one step toward Simon. “Brother Jakobus told me your Magdalena seems to be something of a bitch. But what does a monk understand about women…?” He grinned as if he’d just said something terribly amusing. “What divine providence, in any case, that he ran into her in Augsburg, of all places! We swear we wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her head. She was just…collateral so her father would stay out of this in case things got too difficult. How is Brother Jakobus, by the way?”

“You could light up your whole damned monastery with him,” Magdalena snapped. “He’s burning, just as if my father himself had hauled him over the coals.”

The abbot shook his head gently. “So much hatred! I have a proposal for you.” Holding the cross in his right hand, he advanced another step toward the group.

Benedikta pointed the pistol at his head. “Stop right there! Not one more step!” she whispered. “Or blood will flow down this cross.”

The abbot raised his hands in apology. “Let’s not argue. If I remember correctly, you’re still wanted in Rottenbuch for desecrating holy relics. I’ve already given your name to Brother Michael, the superintendent at Rottenbuch. Believe me, he’d rather see you burn today than tomorrow. But I could have been mistaken, and the real perpetrators could have been some highway robbers who just happened to come along. All it would take would be a word from me-”

“That’s a filthy lie, fils de pute!” Benedikta growled.

The abbot shrugged. “Whether it’s a lie or not, would you want to take the chance? Your future is in my hands. Kill me and you’ll be chased through all of Bavaria as vagrants and outlaws. Let me leave with the cross and you’re free.”

“How can we be so sure you won’t turn us in, anyway?” Simon asked.

Bonenmayr smiled and put his finger on the weathered piece of wood. “I swear on the True Cross of Christ. Is there any stronger oath?”

Benedikta looked at Simon and Magdalena, hesitating. For a while, silence filled the crypt.

Finally, Benedikta sighed. “For my part, I can live with this offer. I’d hoped for a real treasure, a gilded crucifix inlaid with rubies, perhaps, or a velvet-lined silver box-or whatever! But this rotten cross isn’t worth any more than the thousands of other splinters of wood presumed to come from the genuine cross. I can’t make any money from it…So you can keep it!”

“Benedikta is right,” Simon said, turning to the abbot. “How are you going to convince your flock that this is the genuine cross?”

“This is the genuine cross!” Bonenmayr insisted. “At least part of it. The damned Templars never let the Church forget they had it, and for that reason the Holy See always protected those heretics, even when the Pope noticed that they were going their own way and becoming more arrogant and greedy. When the French king finally got rid of them, the Church hoped the cross would show up somewhere again. Many Templars were handed over to the Inquisition, but even under torture they all kept silent, and the cross remained lost. Our order has been looking for it for centuries! We were able to save many other relics from the heretics, who sprang up out of the ground like poisonous mushrooms, but the True Cross had disappeared from the face of the earth. Now it has returned to the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church, and everything has turned out for the best! The bishop of Augsburg will inform the Pope of what we’ve found, and His Holiness will confirm its authenticity.”

“Do you really believe that?” Simon asked.

Augustin Bonenmayr nodded enthusiastically. “With the Pope’s blessing, this cross will become Christianity’s most important religious relic! People will make pilgrimages from all over the world to visit us. I already have plans for a magnificent pilgrimage church near Wies’s farm-”

“Good Lord, there’s blood on that cross!” Magdalena interrupted. She pointed at Benedikta. “The blood of your brother and of many others! I almost died because of that accursed cross!” She walked toward the abbot with a menacing look. “If you think you can simply go out and keep preaching your rubbish, then you’ve got another thing coming. I’ll send my father after you; he’ll break every bone in your body with that cross.”

“Magdalena, calm down!” said Simon. “The abbot’s suggestion is not so bad. What’s dead is dead, and-”

“Just a moment!” Benedikta interrupted. “Do you smell that?”

Simon took a whiff and noticed the caustic smell of smoke coming from the larger room behind them. It was faint, but unmistakable.

“Fire!” Benedikta cried. “Everyone get out!”

They fled back to the domed vault where clouds of smoke were ascending through the hole in the stage floor. Just moments later, the entire ceiling looked like the sky on a gloomy November day, disappearing behind a billowing gray cloud of smoke. The abbot sat on the ruins of the gravestone, pressing the cross to his chest as if the relic could protect his scrawny body from the flames.

His lips moved in a quiet prayer.

On the stage above, flames were eating through the dry brocade as if it were straw. Fire climbed up the curtains to the ceiling and along the balconies, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. Soon the entire auditorium was bathed in a red glow, and despite the cold January day outside, an almost unbearable heat filled the theater.

The hangman and the monk circled each other like two wolves ready to attack, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Finally, Brother Nathanael struck. He feigned a move to the left, then attacked from the right with his dagger. The hangman dodged to the right and struck the monk with his elbow, knocking him down. Before he could fall onto the burning curtain, Nathanael rolled away, jumped up like a cat, and attacked again.

The hangman hadn’t expected such a quick counterattack, and the dagger brushed his right arm in the same place the highwayman had cut him earlier that same day. Kuisl suppressed a groan and swung the cudgel but landed only a glancing blow on Nathanael’s shoulder. The monk turned in a half circle, ducked, and thrust the dagger at the back of the hangman’s knees. With a spirited leap to one side, Kuisl avoided this blow, but in the smoke-filled room, he was too late noticing the burning curtain at his feet. To avoid jumping straight into the flames, he changed direction in mid-jump, stumbled, fell over, and was just able to pull himself up on a painted backdrop of a sky full of white clouds from which the Lord looked down.

Just as the hangman was standing up, the heavy wall tipped forward, taking him with it, burying him with the Almighty. With a thundering rattle, additional backdrops fell over onto him.

For a moment silence prevailed, broken only by the crackling of the flames and the strange hissing voice of the monk. “I once met a man in Salamanca like you,” he whispered. “Big and strong, but stupid. I slashed his throat as he was preparing to take a swing at me with his double-edged sword. He stared at me in disbelief before he fell forward.”

Jakob Kuisl struggled to separate the heavy canvas-covered frames, but they were somehow stuck together. As hard as he pressed, they didn’t move an inch. He heard steps approaching the fallen frame and the dagger scraping across the canvas. Nathanael was cutting the material lengthwise, and it wouldn’t take him long to reach Kuisl’s neck.

“The church is not a gentle flock of lambs waiting to be slaughtered,” Nathanael said as his knife inched forward, cutting through the material. “The church has always needed people like me, and that’s the only reason it’s survived this long. It must punish and destroy, just as Saint John the Baptist prophesied about our Savior. Do you know the Bible verse, Kuisl? He will thoroughly purge his floor, separating the wheat from the chaff and gathering the wheat into his garner. But the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire.” The dagger had reached the hangman’s neck now. “And now you are the chaff, Kuisl.”

At that moment, the executioner’s fist shot through the canvas-right at the spot depicting the kindly, smiling mouth of the Savior-and the hangman grabbed the hand holding the dagger, pulling Brother Nathanael down. Gasping, the monk lost his balance and fell onto the canvas as his dagger clattered onto the floor. Kuisl’s other hand punched through the material and gripped Nathanael by the throat like a vise. Nathanael wriggled like a fish out of water and poked his fingers through the backdrop but couldn’t get hold of the man underneath. The monk shook and waved his arms about, but his movements became weaker and weaker until his forehead finally fell into the canvas. For a moment it looked as if he were kissing the painted Savior on the mouth. Then he rolled to one side and lay still on the stage floor with eyes wide open.

When Jakob Kuisl finally managed to extricate himself from under the backdrop, he cast a final, almost remorseful look at the dead Dominican. “Why did you always have to talk so much?” he said, wiping off his massive, soot-stained hands on his jacket. “If you want to kill someone, just shut up and do it.”

Only now did Kuisl notice the inferno raging around him. The flames had reached the seats in the middle of the hall, and even the backdrops at Kuisl’s feet had caught fire. The first heavy timbers from the balcony came crashing down.

Because of all the smoke, Kuisl could no longer see the trapdoor on the stage floor. He coughed, climbing down the stairs toward the main exit. One last time, he turned around and shook his head. Unless there was another exit, anyone still beneath the stage was doomed. At any rate, it would be insane to climb down there again.

He was already halfway to the back of the hall when he heard the squeak of a pulley.

In the meanwhile, the smoke down below in the crypt had become so dense that the upper third of the room was no longer visible. The ropes connected to the platform ended somewhere in a gray cloud. Simon stopped to think. The tunnel through which they’d entered was presumably already filled with smoke, so the only way out was, in fact, up. He ran to the platform, eyes peeled for the mechanism to set it in motion.

“There has to be a pulley here,” he shouted to Benedikta and Magdalena. “A lever, a crank-something! Help me find it!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Simon could see Augustin Bonenmayr still standing in the opening to the crypt, clutching the cross. The Steingaden abbot stared at the flames eating through the floor of the stage above, the flickering light reflected in his pince-nez, which was perched at an odd angle atop his nose. Bonenmayr’s murmuring grew louder, swelling to a long litany as the auditorium above him threatened to come crashing down. “And the first angel blew his trumpet,” the abbot intoned, “and hailstones and fire mixed with blood fell over the land…”

“Where is the damned pulley?” Simon shouted into Brother Lothar’s ear. The monk was staring, frozen with fear, at the cloud spreading across the ceiling. “If you want to get out of here alive, open your big mouth!”

Brother Lothar pointed silently to an inconspicuous crank on the wall next to a costume cabinet. Without another word, Simon ran to it and started turning the handle.

“Hurry!” he shouted to the two women. “Get onto the platform! I’ll pull you up. Once you’re there, let the lift back down again. Now hurry!”

Magdalena and Benedikta hesitated for a moment, then ran over to the platform. As Simon turned the handle, the lift squeaked to life. At the last second, the women jumped on.

“Watch out, Simon!” Magdalena suddenly shouted. “Behind you!”

A heavy blow struck the medicus on the back of the head, and as he fell, he saw the abbot standing over him with the cross.

“You set this fire, didn’t you?” Bonenmayr whispered. “You wanted to make sure the cross would burn. But you won’t succeed! Who are you, Simon Fronwieser? A Lutheran? A Calvinist? What connection do you have with this Templar gang?”

“Your Eminence, snap out of it!” Simon panted. “Why would we set this fire? We’ll burn to death ourselves if we don’t hurry. We have to, both of us-”

Bonenmayr swung the cross at him again. Simon had just enough time to put his hands in front of his face, but the blow was so hard that, for a moment, he thought he would pass out.

The sound of a pistol firing brought him back to his senses. Apparently, Benedikta had reloaded her weapon. The abbot was still standing over him, the cross raised high for one last fatal blow. But then he put his hand down to his side where a red spot was slowly diffusing across his white tunic. Astonished, he looked at the fresh blood on his hand. “The same place the Roman soldier’s lance pierced the body of our Savior,” Bonenmayr murmured, looking up at the ceiling in ecstasy. “Now there is no more doubt that God has chosen me!”

Simon tried to get up, but his legs buckled under him. Lying on the floor, he had to watch as Augustin Bonenmayr, despite having been shot in the side, ran toward the two women, swinging the cross like a club.

“You accursed lot of heretics!” he shouted. “The cross has returned to the bosom of the Church! God has sanctified this place by delivering it to me! You will not stop me!”

As the abbot raised his hand to strike again, Benedikta ducked and managed to trip him. Bonenmayr stumbled, his glasses fell to the ground, and he staggered toward the wall on the other side, just managing to catch himself before he fell. He leaned on the cross, exhausted, as blood dripped down his robe. Still, he didn’t seem to have lost much of his strength.

“Damn it, Brother Lothar!” he gasped.

His assistant’s face filled with tears as his whole body started to shake like a little child’s.

“Pull yourself together. Those before you are enemies of the Church. Heretics! Do what I have taught you to do! Deus lo vult!”

The final words awakened the monk from his panicked stiffness. He pulled himself together, the trembling stopped, and with a loud cry he charged at Magdalena, who was running to help Simon. The hangman’s daughter was accustomed to giving an impudent workman a good slap in the face, but Brother Lothar was something else. He was almost six feet tall, with the muscular arms, broad shoulders, and the huge hands of an Augsburg raftsman. When he charged toward her, she ducked behind one of the shelves. She had no plan; she just knew she had to get away from the monk at all costs. Perhaps she would think of something as she ran from him.

Magdalena dodged again, but Brother Lothar was right at her heels. She dived under shelves, jumped over metal contraptions whose purpose she couldn’t guess, and climbed over stone sarcophagi and piles of rubble.

Suddenly, she came to a huge cabinet of costumes. She slipped inside, hoping the clumsy monk would run past. The dusty garments inside had the mildewed smell of fabric stored in a damp place too long.

The hangman’s daughter sensed she was not alone. She smelled the sweaty odor of a stranger breathing heavily beside her.

Pushing aside a silver angel costume, she saw Benedikta crouched in front of her. Benedikta put her finger to her lips, motioning for her to remain silent. Only a few inches separated the two women. Magdalena had never been so close to her rival. Benedikta, too, had a terrified expression on her face, and all the refined French mannerisms had vanished. Sweat poured down her face, her hair was in tangles, and the expensive lacework of her precious clothing was smudged and torn. But behind all that, Magdalena saw something else, something she had never seen until then-a wild fire burning in the eyes of the merchant woman from Landsberg, a readiness to fight, an unbending will, and an inner strength that would put many men to shame. Magdalena had seen eyes like that before.

In the mirror.

The two women stared at each other for a few seconds, until a grating sound pulled them out of their thoughts. Looking to one side, Magdalena was shocked to see that the closet was tipping over.

“Benedikta, watch out!”

Through the back of the closet, Magdalena could hear Brother Lothar panting as he pushed against the closet, finally toppling it and burying the women under it, along with the moldy costumes. Something was burning nearby; evidently, the costumes around them had caught fire.

Frantic, Magdalena pushed against the door of the wardrobe, but something was blocking it. The smoke was thickening, and alongside her, Benedikta was coughing. As Magdalena flailed her arms around wildly in all directions, she noticed light coming through a crack near the top of the cabinet. She pushed against the top and it popped off, crashing to the ground and letting in air and light. The two women crawled out, coughing, just in time to see the Steingaden abbot and the cross ascending on the lift toward the auditorium above. In the crypt, Brother Lothar was furiously turning the crank.

“The cross! I’ve saved it!” Bonenmayr screamed, staring up at the opening from the platform. “It’s ascending into heaven while the heretics are burning in hell! It’s such a pity that this play will never be performed. It really deserves an audience.”

With these words, the abbot disappeared into a black cloud while the stage flooring began raining down on those trapped below.

Just before reaching the main portal, Jakob Kuisl turned around again to see a figure in a bloodstained white robe emerge onstage from below. The figure held a cross at about shoulder height and shouted something Kuisl couldn’t quite make out over the ever-louder crackling of the flames. He thought he heard the words heaven and hell. Though the hangman was not an especially religious man, for a brief moment, he thought he was witnessing the Savior’s return to earth to judge mankind with blood and fire.

Was Judgment Day at hand?

Jakob Kuisl blinked and only now realized that the white form staggering across the burning stage was the Steingaden abbot, who was evidently wounded. Bonenmayr was looking for a route down into the auditorium, but the stairway was already in flames. The hangman hesitated. What in the name of the Holy Trinity had happened down there under the stage? Just a moment ago, Kuisl had heard a shot; there must have been some sort of fight. But with whom?

In the meantime, Augustin Bonenmayr had recognized the hangman through the clouds of smoke. He screamed, pointing his clawlike fingers at Kuisl. “You will not stop me, either!” he shouted. “The devil sent you, Kuisl! But God is on my side!”

Holding the cross in one hand, Bonenmayr ran to the left side of the stage, where a narrow spiral staircase led to the upper balcony. The top third of the stairway was already a charred, glowing skeleton, but that didn’t stop the abbot. Taking a huge leap, he managed to get one foot on the balustrade. With the cross still tucked under his right arm, he clung by one hand to the railing above the auditorium.

“For God’s sake, just throw the damned cross away,” Kuisl shouted. “Or you’ll meet God face-to-face in a minute!”

In the inferno, though, the abbot couldn’t hear him. He was trapped in a world of fire, hatred, madness. In vain, he tried to pull the wooden cross up with him over the balcony railing. Instead, he hung there like a huge pendulum, kicking in all directions, trying to get a foothold on the balcony. But then the burning railing gave way, breaking into pieces in a spray of sparks, and with a scream, Bonenmayr plunged headfirst into the flames that were eating through the rows of seats beneath him.

The cross seemed suspended in air for a moment before finally crashing down on the Steingaden abbot and shattering into pieces.

For a brief moment, Kuisl thought he saw a hand appear from beneath the seats, fingers desperately reaching for something, but then a mass of glowing debris showered down, and all that was left of Bonenmayr was a memory.

From the open doorway, the hangman watched the fire consume the theater. The entire auditorium had become one huge funeral pyre.

Glowing pieces of wood and burning scraps of curtain rained down on Simon and the two women. As the fire burned slowly through the stage floor and cellar ceiling, the air became so hot that it was harder and harder to breathe, and the smoke burned their eyes and lungs.

After he’d hauled the abbot up on the lift, Brother Lothar tried to crank the platform down into the cellar again, but the rope caught fire and the lift crashed to the floor, breaking into pieces. Now the monk looked around in panic. He was imprisoned with the same people he’d just tried to kill. Would they attack him? Why had the abbot abandoned him?

Simon struggled to his feet again. His head ached and blood spurted out of his nose and from a wound on his temple, but at least he could walk again. “We’ve got to leave through the underground passage,” he croaked, “through the locked door in the monastery where we were before. Quick! Go before everything crashes down on us!”

Ignoring the monk, the three ducked and ran toward the low doorway as burning pieces of the ceiling continued to rain down around them. Brother Lothar stood in the middle of the room, petrified and undecided. Finally, he tore himself away from the spot and hurried after the others, but the smoke had now become so thick he couldn’t see where they’d gone. The huge man groped through the smoke, coughing, bumping into shelves, and knocking over statues of saints.

“Wait for me!” he gasped. “Where are you? Where-”

At that moment, an especially large chunk of the ceiling directly above the monk broke loose and came crashing to the ground. Brother Lothar could only watch in horror as he was buried in burning timbers. After a few moments, his plaintive cries ceased.

In the meantime, Simon and the two women opened the door they’d used to enter the crypt. The medicus was relieved to see that the smoke in the tunnel behind the door was not as dense as he’d expected-the door had held it back, for the most part. They ran down the corridor, past the intersecting tunnel, until they finally arrived back at the entrance to the monastery. Benedikta leaned against the door, just as she had the last time, and pushed as hard as she could, but the wooden door would not budge this time, either. She cursed and rubbed her shoulder.

“Let me try,” Simon said. He took a running start and hit the door as hard as he could. A sharp pain went through his leg, but still, the door didn’t budge. Behind them, the corridor was already filling with smoke.

“You did close the door into the crypt, didn’t you?” Simon asked uncertainly.

Benedikta shrugged and pointed to Magdalena. “I thought she had-”

“Aha, it gets even better,” the hangman’s daughter responded. “First your shot misses the abbot, and now you’re blaming other people.”

“You were the last, you silly little twit,” Benedikta shouted.

“Cut it out!” Simon replied. “We don’t have time for your petty quarrels! If a miracle doesn’t happen, we’ll suffocate here like a fox in its den. I’ve got to get this damn door open!”

Stepping even farther back, he took another run at the door, screaming loudly.

Too late, he noticed that the door had opened silently and an astonished monk was staring at him. “What in the world…?”

Simon ran into him at full speed, knocking the monk down.

“Sorry to bother you,” the medicus gasped, standing up quickly, “but this is an emergency. The monastery is on fire.”

The monk’s expression changed from astonishment to horror. “The monastery on fire? I’ll have to let the abbot know at once.”

The two women headed up a narrow stone stairway with Simon right behind them.

“I’m afraid that’s not a very good idea,” he called back to the monk. “His Eminence is very busy at the moment.”

At the top of the stairway they came to another door, but unlike the last, this one opened easily. Stepping outside, Simon realized they were in the same cloister where he and Benedikta had first met Augustin Bonenmayr an eternity ago.

A group of white-robed Premonstratensian monks ran toward them excitedly, but to Simon’s astonishment, they continued past them toward the rear exit of the cloister, paying the intruders no mind. In the distance, a shrill bell began to ring.

“Fire! Fire!” everyone was shouting. “The playhouse is on fire!”

Taking advantage of the chaos, the three followed the monks. As they rushed outside, they looked back at the monastery wall, where flames shot up into the night sky and people ran back and forth shouting.

“The playhouse!” Benedikta shouted. “Clearly, the cross was not in Saint John’s Chapel, but in the theater! The underground corridor must lead from there to the cloister. What a labyrinth!”

Simon quickly realized that it was too late to save the burning building. All that remained of the two-story structure now was a glowing shell. When the roof collapsed, the physician could only shake his head. The theater! He had clearly overlooked something in the solution to the last riddle, but none of it mattered now. Simon wondered whether the abbot had managed to flee or had burned to death inside.

And with him, the cross of Christ!

He felt overcome by exhaustion now as the burden of the last few days’ events came over him. Magdalena and Benedikta seemed weary and drained, too. Together, they dragged themselves to a small snow-covered cemetery nearby to watch the building consume itself like an enormous funeral pyre.

“Our search was for nothing!” Simon finally lamented, tossing a chunk of ice into the darkness. “Our dream of all that money came to naught! Now I’ll no doubt end up as the poor town doctor of Schongau…”

Benedikta stood there silently, clutching a ball of snow so hard that water ran through her fingers.

“Do you think that crazy Bonenmayr got away?” Magdalena asked.

Simon stared into the fire. “I don’t know. If he didn’t, we’re in big trouble. If the abbot was telling the truth, then the whole world knows that Benedikta and I defiled the holy relics in Rottenbuch. Bonenmayr is the only one who could have helped us.”

Benedikta spit on the ground. She had clearly gotten her voice back. “Do you seriously believe he’d do that if he’s still alive? I’ll tell you what he’ll do. He’ll take the cross and watch with glee as the hangman breaks every one of our bones, one by one.”

“I’m not going to break any bones,” a voice boomed behind them. “At least not Simon’s.”

Surprised, the three wheeled around to see the Schongau hangman sitting astride an old gravestone. With his coat collar turned up to shield himself from the cold, he was blowing little puffs of smoke into the frigid January night.

Simon looked at Jakob Kuisl as if he’d seen a ghost. “How…how in the world did you get here…?” he stuttered.

“That’s just what I wanted to ask my daughter,” the hangman said, turning to Magdalena. “Couldn’t stand being away in Augsburg, hmm? Had to return to your sweetheart?” He grinned. “You women are all the same.”

“It wasn’t…exactly like that, Father,” Magdalena replied. “I was-”

“You can tell me all about that later,” Jakob Kuisl interrupted, hopping down from the gravestone. “But first tell me why the Steingaden abbot burned alive in there,” he said, pointing to the roaring fire behind him, his face glowing red in the light from the flames. “I can feel in my bones that you had something to do with that. Am I right?”

“So Bonenmayr is really dead?” Simon asked.

The hangman nodded. “As dead as a witch at the stake. So tell me-out with it!”

“It was all about the cross,” Simon began. “The Templar hid the True Cross underneath the playhouse. The riddles led us to this place…” He briefly told Kuisl everything that happened since they had last spoken.

Jakob Kuisl listened silently, and when Simon finished, he exhaled a huge cloud of smoke. “All that looking around just for a rotten old cross,” he grumbled. “And now the accursed cross has fallen victim to the flames as well. I saw it all…ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Probably, it’s best that way. That cross has brought nothing but death and misfortune.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Benedikta said, standing up from the drift of snow she was sitting on, “before the monks notice we’re here.”

“You’re not going anywhere, girl,” the hangman replied suddenly, “except perhaps to the gallows.”

“What are you saying?” Simon looked at Jakob Kuisl in astonishment. “This woman is a respectable lady from Landsberg. You don’t talk that way-”

“She’s nothing but scum.” Kuisl knocked out his pipe on a gravestone. “She’s not a respectable lady, and she doesn’t come from Landsberg.”

For a few moments, no one said a thing.

Finally, Magdalena spoke up hesitantly. “Not from Landsberg? I don’t understand-”

Her father immediately cut her off. “Perhaps she’ll tell us herself what her real name is. In Augsburg, she was Isabelle de Cherbourg; in Munich, she was Charlotte Le Mans; and in Ingolstadt, Katharine God-knows-what…But I doubt any of those is her real name.” Scowling, the hangman drew closer until he was only a step away from her. “Damn it, your name! I want to know-at once! Or I’ll jam glowing embers under your pretty little fingernails until you beg for mercy!”

Simon and Magdalena both eyed Benedikta as she stood there clutching a gravestone with both hands. Her eyes flashed and she bit her lips as she lashed out at the hangman. “How dare you slander me like that! If my brother were still alive, then-”

“Silence, you brazen hussy!” Jakob Kuisl shouted at her. “You have sullied the good name of our priest long enough! I found the courier’s letter pouch, and from there, I only had to do a little looking around. Your game is over! Do you hear? Finished!”

“Which letter pouch do you mean?” Simon asked.

The hangman took a drag on his cold pipe. Only after calming down a bit did he continue. “When we smoked out Scheller and his gang, I found a leather bag in the cave. It belonged to one of the couriers who deliver mail in our area. Scheller told me they’d taken the bag from another gang of robbers.” Again, he paused long enough to stuff his pipe.

Just as Simon was about to say something, the hangman continued.

“I had a look at the letters, especially the dates on them. They were all written around the time the fat priest must have written to his beloved sister, Benedikta. Now, if all these letters were stolen…”

“Then Benedikta in Landsberg could not possibly have received a letter from her brother!” Simon groaned. “But how then did she-”

“This is all pure coincidence and nothing more,” Benedikta said, smiling at Simon. “You don’t really believe this, do you?”

“I’ll tell you who this brazen hussy really is,” Jakob Kuisl interrupted. “She passes herself off as a wine merchant in cities all over Bavaria. She spies on merchants’ routes and passes the information on to her accomplices so they can rob the coaches.”

“Where did you ever come up with this nonsense?” Benedikta replied angrily.

“One of your partners told me so himself.”

“Rubbish!” Benedikta grumbled. “C’est impossible!”

“Believe me,” the hangman said, lighting his pipe with a glowing sliver of tinder. “Sooner or later, I make everyone talk.” He puffed until the pipe caught fire. “And after that, they don’t talk to anyone ever again.”

Horrified, Benedikta stared at him for a moment. Then she threw herself at him, beating her fists against his broad chest. “You killed them!” she shouted. “You monster, you killed them!”

Jakob Kuisl seized her hands and flung her away so hard that she bounced off a gravestone like a puppet. “They were robbers and murderers,” he said. “Just like you.”

The silence that followed was broken only by the distant crackling of fire and the cries of the monks desperately trying to save the adjoining buildings.

Incredulous, Magdalena eyed the self-declared wine merchant still crouching beside the gravestone, looking up at them with cold, scornful eyes. “Your gang robbed the courier and read the letter!” Magdalena shouted. “That must be what happened! They read that the fat priest Koppmeyer had found something valuable, and then you pretended to be his sister and spied on us.”

“It wasn’t only her, but her whole gang following us.” Simon buried his face in his hands and groaned softly. “The people I saw in the Wessobrunn forest were your accomplices, weren’t they? And it was your accomplices who started the fight with the monks in the Rottenbuch Monastery. How could I have been so stupid?”

The woman who just a minute ago had been Benedikta Koppmeyer smiled. It was a sad smile. She seemed to have lost all desire to fight and leaned against the gravestone like an empty shell. “They were there to protect us,” she said softly, “not only me, but you as well, Simon. We knew earlier than you did that there were others trying to get their hands on the Templars’ treasure. We knew they weren’t people we could trifle with.”

“Back there in the forest on the way to Steingaden, when we were attacked by robbers…” Simon murmured. “Those were your friends who helped me back onto my horse. Isn’t that right? I thought it was a dream, but the men were really there.”

The woman facing him nodded. “They always kept an eye on us.”

“Nonsense!” the hangman exclaimed. “They were there so the loot wouldn’t slip through their fingers. Wise up, Simon! If you’d found the treasure, her cronies would have slashed your throat without giving it a second thought, and she would have stood by and watched. That’s the reason I came to Steingaden-to warn you about this hussy!”

Simon stared at the redheaded woman with delicate features whom he’d for so long viewed as a refined ideal of the fair sex. “So you’re not from France at all?” he asked softly.

She chuckled, and for a moment, it seemed the old Benedikta had flared to life again. “Oh, but I am. I come, in fact, from an old Huguenot family, but even as a child I hung around on the streets. I wanted to be free-not wind up the dutiful wife of some fat, conceited merchant.”

“Manslaughter, deception, and murder-that’s the life you chose!” the hangman growled. “I asked the burgomaster to find out what this hussy had been up to. The trail of her gang leads through all of Bavaria-Munich, Augsburg, Ingolstadt…She always pretended to be a fiery, temperamental merchant woman and managed to wrangle information from old moneybags in the taverns about the routes they would be taking. Later, one of her accomplices would come to the tavern and get all the information from her. And if the madam was so inclined, she even went on the raids herself.” Jakob Kuisl stepped up to the imposter. “How often did you have your hand in what went on in Schongau? Once? Twice? How many died because of you? Weyer from Augsburg? Holzhofer’s servants?”

The woman fell silent and the hangman continued. “In Landsberg, there is, in fact, a Benedikta Koppmeyer. She lives a very quiet, modest life there and first learned of the death of her brother from Burgomaster Semer.”

“So it was Karl Semer who gave you the final clue?” Simon asked.

“I should have known sooner,” Jakob Kuisl said. “Scheller told me about the perfume he took from the other gang. Even then, I suspected the monk with the violet perfume had something to do with it. Only later, on the gallows, did Scheller remember having seen something else at the campsite.”

“What was that?” Magdalena asked.

The hangman grinned. “A barrette. I’ve never heard of a man wearing anything like that.”

Simon collapsed onto a snow pile. He still couldn’t believe that he had been swindled. “What a fantastic plan,” he groaned, not without a trace of admiration in his voice. “The worldly woman hangs around in the taverns to find out which routes the wagon drivers will be taking. She knows where they’re going and how heavily they’re guarded. Her accomplices need only stand at the right crossroads and hold out their hands. And then, more or less by accident, they hear something about a fabulous treasure…”

“We robbed the courier because we hoped to find something of value in his bag,” the redhead whispered. “A bill of exchange, a few gold coins-but this time all we got were letters! I read a few of them out of pure curiosity and suddenly came across this incredible letter that mentioned a Templar’s grave and a riddle. In our family, the Templars were always the stuff of legend. When I was just a young child in France, my father told me about the legendary treasure. It could have been our last great exploit…” She stood up and brushed the snow from her charred dress. “Now what are you going to do with me?”

“First, you’ll go to the dungeon in Schongau,” Jakob Kuisl said. “After that, we’ll see. It’s possible they’ll put you on trial in Munich.”

The woman without a name bent down to wipe the snow off the hem of her dress. “Will you torture me in the dungeon?” she asked softly, as she continued brushing the snow from her boots. “Simon told me about the tongs and the brazier…”

“If you confess, I’ll see that not a hair on your head will be harmed until the trial,” Kuisl growled. “You have my word on that.”

Suddenly, the dainty little woman sprang up and threw a handful of snow in the hangman’s face. In the next second, she ran off between the gravestones.

“Stop, you bitch!” Jakob Kuisl shouted, wiping the snow out of his eyes. Then he looked at Simon and Magdalena standing alongside him, bewildered. “Why are you staring at me like two jackasses? Go after her! Her accomplices have killed people in Schongau!” The hangman ran after the fleeing woman as fast as he could.

Finally awakening from his paralysis, Simon set out after the hangman. He spotted a red shock of hair briefly above a gravestone, but then the woman disappeared again. The medicus turned left to run along the cemetery wall, hoping to cut her off if she tried to flee through the main gate. He reached the end of the wall, where he could see the hangman running through the crooked gravestones, but Magdalena was nowhere to be seen.

Arriving at the far end of the cemetery, Simon looked in all directions. The woman he knew as Benedikta had vanished from the face of the earth! He turned and started walking back slowly, checking behind the stones as he went. There was nothing there.

Perhaps it’s really better this way, he thought.

At that moment he heard a soft, muted sound off to one side, someone gasping for breath. He tiptoed along a narrow, snowy path leading to a family burial vault through an archway whose columns were entwined with ice-encrusted ivy. Atop the archway was a statue of the Virgin Mary, smiling down benevolently and keeping watch over the dead. Behind a rusty gate, a few stone steps led down to a marble slab sealing off the entrance to the crypt.

Simon looked down in front of him at fresh tracks in the snow. Made by dainty feet.

Climbing over the gate, he saw her cowering at the foot of the steps-the woman who, for a week, had been the wealthy merchant’s widow from Landsberg, Benedikta Koppmeyer. She had tucked her legs under her now and wrapped her arms around them. Trembling with cold, her tangled hair falling down over her face, her makeup smeared, she looked up uncertainly at Simon standing at the top of the steps. Her eyes seemed to be begging for mercy, and her narrow lips formed a thin smile, like a child asking for forgiveness.

Simon looked at her for a long time. Behind the genteel exterior, the vanity, the ruthlessness, and the greed, he saw her now as a human being and believed he grasped who she really was.

“Well?” a voice asked from far off. It was the hangman. “Did you find her?”

Simon looked the redheaded woman in the face again, then turned around. “No, she’s not here!” he called out. “Let’s have a look over there.”

After searching another half-hour, the three finally met again at the main cemetery gate. Not only Benedikta, but also her horse was gone as well; the swindler had clearly managed to flee.

Magdalena, who hadn’t joined in the chase, was leaning against a gravestone waiting for the two men to return. “I don’t want to take part in a chase like that,” she said. “Even if I couldn’t stand her, she didn’t deserve that.”

“You fool!” Jakob Kuisl scolded. “That woman is responsible for the cold-blooded killing of at least a dozen men! She’s a murderer! Can’t you get that into your head?”

“She didn’t act like a murderer with us,” Simon said. “On the contrary. Back in the forest, on the other side of Peiting, she even saved my life.”

The hangman gave him a long, piercing gaze. “Are you certain you didn’t see her somewhere here in the cemetery?” he finally asked.

“I thought I saw her,” Simon said, “but I was mistaken.” Then he stomped away in the snow toward the dark monastery.