1636: The Devil's Opera Read online

  “But we do need that room sealed off,” Gotthilf said. “It’s a crime scene now. We at least need to get the photographer in there first thing tomorrow.”

  Amber shifted uncomfortably. “I knew you would want that, so I had it closed down, and the room behind it—after we got the costumes out.”

  The two detectives both started to frown.

  “Sorry, guys,” Marla chimed in. “But only two or three people went in, people who were already in there, and as much as possible they walked around the footprints and stuff. But we had to have those costumes.”

  Byron looked at Gotthilf, and after a moment they both shrugged.

  “It’s not what I would want,” Byron said, “but in this case, I don’t think it’s going to matter. But keep everyone out of there until after we’re done tomorrow morning.”

  “We won’t be here until after two in the afternoon,” Amber said. “That’s our regular schedule. We have a few more performances to give before we pack this show away.”

  “That’s all for now,” Byron concluded. “We’ll be in touch.” He shook hands with Amber and Franz, and gave Marla a big hug. “Glad we got here in time tonight.” He separated with a big grin. “Jonni would have killed me if I’d let anything happen to her baby sister.”

  “Get out of here,” Marla said, grinning also.

  * * *

  When they came out of the room, they found Mary Simpson and Rebecca Abrabanel standing by the stage manager’s desk, talking with Frau Frontilia and Heinrich Schütz.

  Heinrich held out his hands, and Amber took them. “A triumph,” the older musician said. “A veritable triumph, thanks to all of you.”

  “Indeed,” Mary said. “The first opera in Germany, written by a German, sung in German, performed by—mostly—Germans. And the emperor stayed awake through the whole thing. All in all, a cause for celebration.”

  “I think an even greater cause for celebration,” Rebecca said, “is that our own monarch returned to us. He is not the King Arthur of legend, of course. No real kings are. Still, things would probably be much worse now if he hadn’t.”

  “Amen to that,” Amber said.

  Dieter had apparently been listening in on the conversation. Still wearing the blond wig, he turned to the celebrating cast and crew.

  “Hey, everyone, be quiet! Quiet!”

  Dieter had a big voice, so it wasn’t long until a condition of sort-of quiet existed. He held up the wine bottle he’d been drinking from. “Everyone fill your hands. I’m going to propose a toast.”

  It took some hunting and scurrying, but before too many moments had passed everyone had some kind of container with either ale or wine in their hand.

  “Everyone got one?” Dieter asked, looking around. “Good. Here’s my toast: To Gustav Adolph, the Once and Future King!”

  A roar went up in response, glasses/bottles/cups/etc. were clinked together, contents were drunk, and a rousing cheer echoed in the rafters.

  The ensuing party, although not the earliest to celebrate the emperor’s restoration, was certainly one of the rowdiest. But what could you expect from a bunch of musicians and actors—and one very rowdy Italian singer?

  * * *

  “Do you carry that sword stick with you all the time?” Gotthilf Hoch asked Friedrich von Logau when they caught up with him at Walcha’s Coffee House for their interview.

  “Oh, no,” Friedrich replied. “That is my evening walking stick. My morning walking stick,” he lifted the tool in question, “is merely solid oak. At night, you see, one sometimes needs a bit more than to thump someone to discourage them.”

  Byron snorted. “So do you know how to really use that blade, or were you just lucky?”

  Friedrich smiled. “I am rather good with it, in fact. Years with Viennese and Italian fencing masters. Boring, really, but it has come in handy on occasion.”

  “Such as a certain night in a certain opera hall basement,” Gotthilf said.

  “Indeed.”

  Chapter 71

  Karl Honister and Mayor Gericke entered the building that housed Georg Schmidt’s offices, to be confronted with what appeared to be a miniature mob. A number of men were gathered around the door leading to Schmidt’s office, all of them talking excitedly.

  Honister tried to shout over them, but quickly had to give that up as an exercise in futility. It took a blast on his patrolman’s whistle to bring silence.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded, as soon as he removed the whistle from his lips. A babel of voices responded, and he blew the whistle again.

  In the resulting silence Karl held up his badge wallet, flipped open to display the snarling lion mask. “Sergeant Karl Honister, Magdeburg Polizei.” He stowed the badge in a pocket and pointed to one man.

  “You—what’s your name and why are you here?”

  “Samuel Bauer. I work at the ledgers for Master Schmidt.”

  “Right. Now what’s going on?”

  A couple of the other men tried to speak, but Karl held up his hand. Samuel said, “Someone said the master has killed himself, and we all came to see if it was true.”

  “What?” Karl and the mayor spoke in unison, in identical tones of mingled disbelief and astonishment.

  “And it is true,” Samuel averred, with nodding heads all around to back him up.

  “All right,” Karl said, snapping into detective mode. “You, Samuel, did you see it happen?” Negative headshake. “Right; then you run and find a patrolman, tell him I’m here, and I want a police photographer and a crime scene team here yesterday. Got that?”

  Samuel nodded his head quickly.

  “Good. Run.”

  Samuel did as he was commanded.

  Karl looked around.

  “The rest of you, back up. Get out of the way. Line up against the hallway wall.”

  Once the crush of bodies was untangled, it proved to be seven more men.

  “Did any of you see what happened?”

  Headshakes all around.

  “Right. You stay right here, then. Don’t leave, but don’t come in the room, either.”

  Karl turned toward the office doorway. He said over his shoulder, “I assume you’re coming with me, Mayor?”

  “You assumed right,” was the response.

  * * *

  “He did what?”

  Byron sounded stunned. Gotthilf didn’t blame him. He was shocked himself.

  “According to the report, Schmidt blew his brains out with a pistol right before the mayor and Honister arrived for their meeting.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, I wish I were. Karl sent for the photographer and for some help.”

  Byron picked up his hat.

  “Come on. We’ll go chip in.”

  * * *

  Karl Honister watched from the door as the photographer took pictures of everything in the office.

  “I want close-ups of the head and body,” he called out. The photographer waved a hand in acknowledgment and murmured something to his assistant.

  There was no question that Master Schmidt was dead. Bullet holes in the temple were usually a good indication that life was gone. Schmidt’s head had lolled back against the back of his chair, so that his vacant eyes stared toward the ceiling. His right arm hung over the side of the chair, with what looked to be a .32 revolver, similar to the one that Karl carried, lying on the floor below his fingers.

  He looked around to see Lieutenant Chieske and Sergeant Hoch push through the crowd in the hallway and pass by the patrolman guarding the door. In a moment, they were standing by him looking into the inner office.

  “Messy,” Chieske said.

  “Yah,” Karl responded.

  “So what happened?”

  Karl beckoned to a man sitting in the corner of the outer office.

  “Who is he?” Hoch asked.

  “This,” Karl said as the man approached, “is Stephan Burckardt, personal secretary to Master Schmidt. He was here when it
happened. Tell it again, Herr Burckardt.”

  “I was working at my desk,” Burckardt said, pointing to a small desk to one side of the room. “The master had dictated several letters earlier, and I was writing them out for his signature. I heard the noise. I knocked on his door…”

  “The door into his office was closed?” Hoch interrupted.

  “Yah.”

  “Was that unusual in any way?”

  “No.” Burckardt shook his head. “The master often closed his door when he wanted to concentrate on something. I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “Okay, you knocked on his door. Did you get an answer?”

  “Uh, no.”

  What then?”

  “I, uh, I knocked again.”

  “Did you say anything?” Chieske asked.

  “I think I said, ‘Master Schmidt, are you all right?’”

  “Then what happened?” Hoch again.

  “I opened the door, and saw…” Burckardt swallowed hard, and waved a hand at the doorway.

  “Did you go in? Did you touch anything?”

  This time from Chieske. Karl saw that his two fellow detectives were alternating questions, not giving the secretary much time to think.

  “Yah.” Burckardt swallowed again. “I, uh, I touched his neck, I think.”

  “And after that?”

  “I, uh, I was still in there when the mayor and he,” he pointed to Honister, “arrived.”

  “The blood drops were still fresh when we walked in,” Karl added. “It had to have happened just a few minutes before we got here. I’m surprised we didn’t hear the shot.”

  “But you didn’t hear it?” Gotthilf asked.

  “No.”

  “And neither did I,” Otto Gericke spoke from behind them. They turned toward him.

  “I was just upstairs tending to my sister. She’s now a widow, and she is not taking this well. But her pastor, Dr. de Spaignart, has arrived, so I have left her in his care.”

  Karl noticed a certain air about the mayor, what you might call a he’s welcome to her attitude, which for a moment seemed odd. But then, thinking of his own sister, perhaps he could understand.

  “So this happened before you could talk to Herr Schmidt?” Byron asked.

  “Yah.” Karl knew he sounded bitter. He had reason to. His whole case had just been shut down.

  “Get lots of pictures, get the body to Doc Schlegel, and grab all the papers you can find.” Byron again. “Maybe you can still figure something out.”

  “Right.”

  The other two detectives left. So did the mayor. Karl was left to watch the photographers and wait for the medical examiner. He ignored the men in the hallway who were still looking in and talking not-so-quietly.

  He pulled a search warrant from his pocket, looked over at the secretary.

  “You have boxes here?”

  “I think so.”

  “Go find them. All the files and papers in this office are going to the Polizei station.”

  * * *

  Standing in the shadow of the Heilige-Geist Church, Gotthilf stared at where Dr. Schlegel was doing a preliminary examination of yet another corpse. Beside him, Byron was muttering one curse after another under his breath.

  Gotthilf elbowed his partner. “Stop it. We don’t even know that that’s our guy.”

  Byron snorted. “A one-eyed guy turns up shot to death in a back street of the old city. After everything that’s been going on, I somehow doubt that this is just some random guy who lost an eye somewhere somewhen. There can’t be that many one-eyed men around Magdeburg right this minute.”

  After a moment of consideration, Gotthilf gave a reluctant nod of agreement.

  “Nathaniel,” Byron called over to the police photographer who had finished packing up his equipment, “I need copies as soon as you can get them.”

  The photographer touched the brim of his hat, and headed off, followed by his assistant.

  Dr. Schlegel stood and wiped his hands on a towel. “Dead since before midnight,” he said, forestalling the detectives’ first question. “Probable cause of death, bullet wound to the head. I’ll examine the body in detail as soon as we get it back to the morgue, but the blood evidence indicates the bullet wound was not post-mortem, so I doubt I’ll find anything else. Assuming I don’t, you’ll have a report later today.”

  “Okay, thanks, Doc,” Byron said.

  The two detectives stood and watched the medical examiner’s assistants load the corpse on a stretcher and place it in a wagon. Even after the wagon had been gone for some time, Byron continued to stand, staring at the blood that had pooled on the paving stones.

  “We’re missing something,” the up-timer finally said. “With all that has happened, there’s something we haven’t picked up.”

  * * *

  The two detectives arrived back at the police station just as Karl Honister lugged the last box of files from Schmidt’s office to his desk. He set it down with a sigh.

  “That’s all Schmidt’s stuff?” Byron asked.

  “Yah.”

  “Well, drag it all into the conference room. We’ll bring our files. There’s at least one piece of the puzzle missing, maybe more, and the three of us are going to go over all this stuff until we find it.”

  Karl gave a long-suffering sigh, picked up the box he had just set down, and headed for the conference room.

  * * *

  The three detectives spent over thirty-six hours in that conference room. They reviewed every piece of paper they had. They compared notes. They talked. They argued. They shouted. They drew charts and circles and arrows on big pieces of paper. They drank—reluctantly—gallons of horrible station house coffee. They sent Peltzer out with a photo of the one-eyed man to have Demetrious confirm that he was the man the informer had been tailing.

  Bill Reilly peered in on them every hour or so during the day, shook his head, and withdrew without saying anything.

  They were dazed, not even sure what day it was, when it happened.

  * * *

  Gotthilf stared at the cold dregs of coffee in his cup. He sniffed it and shuddered, his acid-stoked stomach rebelling at the thought of pouring more of that noxious stuff into it.

  “This stuff is even worse than Grade Four,” he muttered. He walked over to a window, popped it open, and tossed the dregs out right into a sudden gust of breeze, which carried the dark droplets back into the room. Many of the droplets landed on the hand holding the cup.

  Gotthilf stood there, blinking, staring at his spotted hand. A thought wormed its way to the front of his mind, slowly, effortfully. When it arrived, he dropped the cup and turned back to the conference table, where he pawed through the piles of papers and files until he found what he wanted. He looked at the photograph, then at his hand, then back at the photograph, then back at his hand.

  This cycle went on until Byron asked, “What are you thinking, partner?”

  Gotthilf focused on the photograph. “Schmidt didn’t kill himself.”

  It took a moment for that to register, then Byron straightened from his slouched position, and Honister raised his head from where it had been pillowed on his arms.

  “What?” Byron again.

  “Schmidt didn’t kill himself.”

  “How do you know that?” Honister husked, trying to clear his throat.

  Gotthilf looked at the other sergeant. “Was Schmidt right-handed?”

  Honister looked in his notebook. “Yah.”

  Gotthilf turned the photograph around.

  “There’s no blood spatter on his hand.”

  “There was blood spatter on the gun,” Byron said, looking for and holding up the report about that.

  Gotthilf pointed to the photograph of the hand dangling just above the gun at the crime scene. “No blood on the hand. Blood on the gun but not on the hand means…”

  “He wasn’t holding the gun!” the three of them chorused.

  “So he was murdered,” Honis
ter said. “How do we find the killer?”

  “Who benefits from it?” Byron said. “And to find that…”

  “Follow the money,” they chorused again, and dug into the papers before them with a new will.

  Chapter 72

  Gotthilf looked around the room. It looked like everyone was there. The last few days had been hectic; frenetic, even. But today’s meeting would provide closure to the events of the last few months, he thought.

  He looked around at the room itself. They were in a lecture room at the hospital; appropriate enough, since the hospital expansion project seemed to have been the trigger for much of what had occurred since January. It amounted to neutral territory: not the mayor’s office, or the police station.

  It was a bit sterile, though. Four bare walls, hardwood floors, big windows admitting light from the south. No decorations. Given that the room had to be able to be scrubbed down to up-time hospital standards, its utilitarian décor was understandable.

  Facing him were several people—the interested parties, one might say.

  Mayor Gericke was at one end of the arc of chairs. Beside him was a woman he had introduced as Frau Sophie Gericke verw. Schmidt. By the name everyone knew that she was his sister, the new widow of Georg Schmidt.

  Gotthilf had heard that Frau Sophie had two young daughters at home. He was saddened at the thought that they no longer had a father; but the thought of the kind of man Herr Schmidt had proven himself to be tempered the sadness.

  On the widow’s other side was Stephan Burckardt, Schmidt’s secretary.

  The next group in the arc was Marla Linder and her husband, Franz Sylwester.

  Next to Franz sat Gunther Bauer, the new project manager of the hospital expansion project, and beside him was Herr Schiffer himself.

  There was no one alive in Magdeburg who had a legitimate connection to Herr Schardius who could represent his interests. He, of course, was dead, his wife had died before the sack, and he had no children. More distant relatives were too far from Magdeburg to attend this meeting, so Mayor Gericke had appointed Jacob Lentke to stand in for Schardius’ estate. He had his gouty foot propped up on a stool and his cane resting over his lap.