He looked about him; they were going through another tunnel of alder. An otter slithered up the bank and disappeared in a shake of glittering water drops. “Even the war’d get lost around here.”
“I know. I keep trying to fit Anna into these surroundings. She just doesn’t.”
He couldn’t picture that strange little soul in this morass either. But he could imagine her wanting to leave it.
His woman, on the other hand, was reveling in the journey, taking picture after picture with her camera. “Oh, look,” she kept saying. “Oh, look,” at a heron frowning at them from a tree, another bird-covered lake, another set of reed-thatched huts, some watermen scouring weed from a dike.
She’ll run out of film, he thought as she licked a roll closed and tore open yet another.
His own knapsack included two bottles of Scotch whisky for the purpose of loosening tongues.
Such natives as they saw seemed friendly, if web-footed. They waved and exchanged shouted consonants with Jan. Compared with most peasants, he supposed, these were well-off; the water and air were full of food if you could catch it, and the boat was beginning to pass meadows fat with cattle. No Depression here; they were back in a primitive but contented eighteenth century.
“Jan says Bagna Duze is quite a big village,” Esther said. “Got a church, school, everything. It serves a hunting lodge belonging to”— she talked to Jan again—“the Count and Countess Zorawski. We can stay there if we have to.”
He didn’t question it. In this neck of the woods, barging up to some aristocrat’s house and asking to stay was probably normal behavior.
It was what they did. Bagna Duze might have been the metropolis of the marshes, but if its population topped five hundred, Schmidt would have been surprised—nearly all of it crammed into tweedy little cottages that were also part barn. The only stone buildings were an overlarge church and, in the far distance, among beeches, a house, more like a French château than a hunting lodge.
THE SOUP WAS hribnoy sup (mushroom and barley), the next course hrybi v smtane (mushrooms with sour cream), the entrée kotleta pokrestyansk (pork cutlet in mushroom sauce).
“Danuta went mushrooming today,” the countess said unnecessarily, “but tomorrow you shall have lampreys. Lampreys tomorrow, Danuta.”
Sagging, Danuta tottered off. So far, to Schmidt’s knowledge, she’d picked dinner, cooked it, served it, and prepared the guest room. Apart from a retainer in a powdered wig, even older than herself if that were possible, she appeared to be the only servant in the place.
“A king of England died of a surfeit of lampreys. Did you know that, my dear?” The count leaned as far as he could from his place at the top of the table to lay a liver-spotted, lecherous hand on Esther’s.
“We mustn’t let that happen to you,” the countess said, signaling impatience at her husband with her fan. “We are so pleased to have you. A book, you said, Frau Schmidt?”
It was the first time she’d shown curiosity. You had to say that for aristocratic Polish hospitality, Schmidt thought: it didn’t ask questions. He and Esther had been welcomed without a second’s hesitation, and not just because they were an inrush of freshness into a moldering house; they were travelers and therefore entitled to courtesy.
The count and countess had been more eager to show who they were than find out about the couple who’d landed on their doorstep. They spoke German well. The Almanack de Gotha—a book to which Schmidt had been introduced within half an hour—declared their rightful position among the Szlachta, Poland’s nobility.
The scarlet-and-white flag of Poland flew from a turret roof. Tattered standards from various battles for Polish freedom hung from the high, cobwebbed ceiling of the great hall in which the four of them were now dining. The motto “Nic o naz bez nas” (Nothing concerning us can be settled without us) was on each piece of beautiful, tarnished silverware on the table.
Decay was everywhere, in the mildewed portraits of Zorawski ancestors lining the walls of the enormous staircase, in the bulwark of planks that held up the door of a disused wing, on the rusted faces of clocks that had stopped as if too dispirited to tick on.
Like their house, the Zorawskis were museum pieces. The count-ess’s dress echoed that of the empress Maria Theresa, and her dentures made disconcerting attempts to escape. The count was half the size of his wife, a wizened, embroidered-waistcoated manikin, animated by the energy that had seized him on seeing Esther, as if a ferret had sat up at the sight of a rabbit.
The couple talked of other residences, a castle near Warsaw—“our son keeps it now”—a schloss in Austria—“but we are becoming too old to keep moving from place to place as we used to, so we summer here.
For the shooting, you know.”
And it’s cheaper, Schmidt thought.
He wondered when Esther would get to the point. Now she did. She took her hand from under the count’s and rested her arms on the table, the picture of a woman at ease. “Yes, we’re writing a travel book about Polesie,” she said. “At least my husband’s writing it—I’m taking the pictures. Of course, we had to visit the wetlands, and we heard about Bagna Duze in Berlin from a friend who used to know someone that lived here—Franziska Schanskowska.”
There was a pause, but only one attributable to an elderly couple searching failing memories. “Goodness gracious,” the countess said, “little Franziska. I haven’t heard that name in years. You remember her, Casimir, Józef Schanskowska’s daughter?” To Esther she said, “He was the village wheelwright. Dead now.”
The count strummed the table, squinting to remember. “Wasn’t she the girl involved in all that nasty business? I thought she got drowned.”
“She did,” the countess said. She turned to Esther. “More honey truffles, my dear?”
19
ESTHER STARED AT her hostess as at a gorgon, then pulled herself
together. “I beg your pardon, Countess. No, that was excellent.”
“Herr Schmidt?”
Fuck it, fuck it. “What? No thank you.”
“I’m sorry,” the countess said. “Did your friend believe Franziska to be alive? I’m afraid she died years ago . . . 1919.”
“Annus horribilis for Bagna Duze,” said the count.
“For all Poland,” said the countess.
“They threw everything at us that year, but, oho, we beat them all in the end.” The count’s little face was a triumphant demon’s. “Russians, werewolves, floods, Gypsies, Jews—we beat them all.”
“Casimir.” The countess snapped it out, then smiled apologetically at her guests. “Such a nuisance, werewolves. A peasant superstition, of course. But indeed there were an inordinate number of deaths in the village that year, and I’m afraid young Franziska’s was one of them.”
“Never found her body, of course,” the count said. “Yes they did, Casimir,” said the countess with a patience frayed by long-standing irritation. “Her father identified it. It wasn’t the
Gypsy girl’s. Józef was quite happy on that point, if you remember.” She turned back to Esther. “The floods, you see. So many were swept away that recovery was rather gruesome and not”—this was to the count—“a subject for the dinner table.”
“We survived, we survived it all,” the count exulted.
“Actually, we were in Warsaw at the time,” the countess interjected.
“And then 1920, annus mirabilis. We fought the Red Army and won, oh, yes, we won. Poland defeated them, and Bagna Duze did its bit.” Another stroke of Esther’s hand. “If the dead ever rise from these marshes, my dear, there’ll be sorry ghosts among them.”
The countess employed her fan, as if the hall were too warm, though walls a meter thick kept it cool. She pushed back her chair. “Frau Schmidt? Shall we leave the gentlemen to their port and cigars?”
Glancing helplessly at Schmidt, Esther followed her.
A traditionalist, the count told dirty stories over the excellent port and equally excellent cigars,
refusing to be diverted from the subject of sex and women except for tales of his prowess against the might of the Red Army. “Thought they’d export communism to the Western world, did they?” he said. “Oho, they didn’t reckon on Poland and Casimir Zorawski.”
In the countess’s cluttered drawing room, which smelled of lavender and cats’ pee, Esther focused her hostess’s attention on the subject of Franziska Schanskowska.
“Such a strange child,” the countess said. “Of course, I blame her father. He sent her away to school at the convent in Pinsk—education is such a mistake for peasant girls, don’t you think? It isolated her from the other village maidens, of course, and made her discontented on her return.”
“And the Gypsy girl?” Esther asked.
“Now, that was an odd thing. A band of Gypsies came wandering through the marshes—from Russia, as far as anyone could tell, getting away from the civil war, one supposes. In 1919, this was. Was it? Or was it earlier? Well, of course, they weren’t welcome—the thieving. People’s geese went missing, washing off the line. A totally dishonest people, you know, despite all that rubbish that’s talked about how romantic they are. Anyway, there was this girl with them—she didn’t seem to belong to them, and...I’ve forgotten how it was that Józef took her in. On Franziska’s insistence, I think. She had some weird fixation that the girl was a changeling, either stolen from a royal nursery or ...I don’t know, something highly improbable. They were inseparable, the two of them. And, poor things, they were swept away together when the floods came.”
“And they didn’t find the Gypsy girl’s body?” Esther asked. But the countess’s head had lolled in the same instant; she was asleep.
Reunited with Schmidt to stroll on the terrace before going to bed, Esther said, “I don’t see how they identified Franziska. The floods were dreadful; this area was inundated, whole villages swept away. They were recovering bodies for months, and the only thing recognizable on Franziska’s when they found it was the cross on the chain around her neck. But every girl in Poland wears a cross, except the Jews, of course. And some of the bodies were carried away into the Pripyat and never found. Her father said the cross was hers, but for one thing they’re mass-produced and, for another, I expect that after all that time he was desperate to put an end to uncertainty and lay his daughter to rest.”
“So it could have been the Gypsy girl?”
“Could have been anybody that was female.”
“So what you’re saying is that they buried someone else while Franziska, who’s been swept away by floodwater, manages to drag herself onto a riverbank, thinks ‘Bye-bye, Bagna Duze,’ and squelches off.” His mind was turning to bed.
There was a reluctant snuffle in the darkness. “I’m saying there’s a strong possibility that Anna is Franziska. Similar character.”
“Or she could be the Gypsy who was really the grand duchess Anastasia in disguise, having been picked up by this band of kindly nomads on their way through Ekaterinburg.”
“All right, then, smarty-pants. What did you learn from the count?”
“Apart from the fact that he fought off the Bolshies single-handed, very little.”
“He was in Warsaw at the time, hardly heard a shot fired, according to the countess,” Esther said. “It was their son. He was with Pilsudski in the counterattack that drove the Red Army back. My God, the Poles were brave. And stop doing that. They’ll see us.”
Schmidt withdrew the hand he’d placed companionably down the front of Esther’s blouse. “We haven’t done very well, have we?”
“I don’t know. We came to investigate Franziska’s past, and we find it to be odd. And I’ll tell you another thing: They’re hiding something. Everybody is. Why didn’t my jeweler in Pinsk want to tell me what it was, if it was just floods? Nobody can help floods. I tell you, something awful happened here in 1919.”
“I should think it did. ‘Russians, werewolves, floods, Gypsies, Jews.’ Only need the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and you’ve got the set.”
“The Russians were later,” she said.
They’d ventured into the garden. Neglected lavender bushes threw off a scent as they brushed past them. The faces of statues made white patches in black, entangling ivy.
“All I’m trying to point out,” she said, “is that Anna is quite possibly Franziska Schanskowska and is definitely not Anastasia.”
“You’re not making a very good case for it,” he said. He caught her up and kissed her. “But you might as well go on with it now that we’re here. Try to get the count on his own tomorrow.”
“He’s been trying to get me alone all evening,” she said. “He’s a droit du seigneur man if ever I saw one.”
“Small price to pay for information.”
Her laugh had an echo, perhaps from the lake or from the forest that began at the back of the house. Inside, the count had sat himself down at the piano, and the despairingly sweet notes of a Chopin nocturne cascaded onto the terrace.
“ ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ ” she said.
He wished she hadn’t said it. His schoolmaster had claimed that the phrase was wrongly attributed to the world of nymphs and shepherds. “It was inscribed on a tomb,” old Müller had said. “It’s a statement by Death: ‘I am even in Arcadia.’ ”
I don’t want this, he thought. I don’t want Arcadia. I want slippers and quarrels and possibly a dog, I want everydayness. I want her to get old and have an ear trumpet. I want her ordinary and safe.
After a while she said, “And what will you be doing while I’m surrendering my honor?”
“I’m interested in the werewolf reference. Werewolf equals murders. Murder is my business.” Death again, he thought. He said, “There was a mass being held in the church when we passed it. I’m going to ply the priest with liquor and talk to him.”
“Can you?”
“It was a Latin mass,” he said. “We should manage all right. Only thing I was good at in school, Latin. Lousy at everything else, but ...I remember having to translate the Gallic Wars and thinking, This is Caesar. He’s on some blasted heath surrounded by his centurions, there are blue-painted barbarians howling in the distance, and he’s telling me about it.”
“It’s a long time since I heard any Latin.”
“ ‘Ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.’ ”
She puzzled over it. “She-goats?”
“ ‘Go on home, you have fed full, the evening star is coming, go on, my she-goats.’ It’s the only bit of Virgil I can remember.”
They went in and said their good nights. The canopied bed in their room could have accommodated both them and a platoon of Napoleon’s army. Tonight, with moonlight and the smell of water and forest coming through the window, it was their world.
“OF COURSE, THERE’S an early reference to werewolves in Pliny the Elder,” Father Teofil said, rising to run his finger along one of his bookshelves. “And—I think I’m right—he got it from the Greeks. Euanthes, I believe.”
“You say that people around here still believe in them?” It had taken an hour to get the priest this far. Several pages of Schmidt’s police notebook were already full of geological and social information. Father Teofil had been overjoyed to meet another Latin speaker, if one somewhat rusty, and was flattered at featuring in a book, eager to display his learning, which was considerable.
“You did not expect to find a classical scholar in the marshes, I imagine, Herr Schmidt, yet the wilderness and the solitary places shall be glad of him, to paraphrase Isaiah.”
Schmidt was sure they were, though the dusky flush of Father Te-ofil’s skin, his extreme thinness, and a collection of empty vodka bottles in a reed basket, to which one of Scotch had just been added, suggested other reasons for the priest’s lack of advancement.
He repeated his question. The man’s Latin was classical, and if he spoke slowly, Schmidt was able to keep up with him.
“I fear so, I fear so. Trying to eliminate paganism from their souls is
the work of Sisyphus. Oh, here it is.” Father Teofil took down a book and collapsed into his battered wicker chair. “Yes, Pliny tells us, a man of the Antaeus family...mmm ... hung his clothing on an ash tree by a lake in Arcadia and swam across, thus being transformed into a wolf.”
“The count was saying there was an incidence of werewolves around here some while ago.”
“Just as I thought, it was from Euanthes.”
Schmidt unscrewed the top off his second bottle but kept his hand on it. “The count,” he persisted. “Werewolves. Around here.” He wasn’t sure whether the subject was worth pursuing, but he was damn well going to pursue it. He’d traveled into Anna/Franziska’s past to find what it was that linked her to a murderer. Franziska might or might not be dead, but werewolves had been mentioned in virtually the same breath as her name. There was a connection in people’s minds between murderers and werewolves—both Kurten and Haarmann, his multiple murderers, had been designated werewolves at one time or another. Ergo . . .
“It happened around here, didn’t it?” he said, tapping the bottle.
“There were killings, but you don’t want to put that in your book.”
“Certainly not.” Schmidt put away his notebook, reached for the priest’s glass, and held it, like a biscuit in front of a puppy. “When was this?”
“Oh, years ago. About 1918, I think, or was it ’19? A little boy from the village disappeared. He’d been mushrooming in the forest with his mother. She was found murdered there—particularly brutally, I’m afraid—but no sign of the child. Her wedding ring, the only thing of value she had, was gone from her finger. The police were informed, yet little was done. It was wartime, and officialdom was in chaos. People became afraid for their children.” He shrugged sadly. “What would you, the werewolf legend was resurrected.. . .”
He was under way now. Schmidt poured the man’s whisky and handed it to him.
“Then, some weeks later, a little skeleton was found in a dike not far from here. There was ...trouble. The villagers now assumed they knew who had killed both mother and child.” Father Teofil looked at Schmidt over his glass. “It was Easter, you see, and it was assumed these were ritual killings.”