Count Luna Read online

  For Spinette may not even have been Elisabeth Jessiersky’s only lover. That fellow, for instance, whose steps he had heard in the winter had not necessarily been Spinette. He might have been someone else entirely. Perhaps, in addition to these two, this one and the one the past winter, she had had a third, or even a fourth, lover. But however many there may have been, one of them was out now, and that might make all of them a little less impetuous.

  And Luna? From all appearances, he did not want to risk a personal encounter with Jessiersky. But might it not have been he after all who had got Jessiersky embroiled in this murder? This was not unlikely . . . in fact it was quite likely, for he would scarcely have merely wanted to do him the favor of pointing out to him that his wife had a lover. Instead, he had got Jessiersky into a situation in which he would now have to be extremely careful if he did not want the devil to get him. Jessiersky did not stop to consider that the whole affair might have nothing to do with Luna. The connection between Luna and Spinette was perfectly obvious! Why else would he, Jessiersky, obsessed with his fear of Luna and the desire to get rid of him, have neglected his wife to such an extent that she had finally turned to other men? Luna had failed in his scheme of bringing misfortune upon one of the children after the other. On his first attempt to poison the next youngest, he had come to grief. So he had concentrated on Jessiersky himself, attacking him through his wife. In Jessiersky’s eyes, Luna was a more or less ghostly madman who had returned from the realm of the dead, as it were, solely for the purpose of retaliation — an avenger lifted into the sphere of a higher conscience who did not and would not understand that Jessiersky was not to blame for his misfortune; and Jessiersky no longer doubted that such a person was capable of establishing relations that had nothing to do with reason, and that, therefore, would have consequences far more logical and more frightful than those of any scheme devised by reason.

  When he reached home, dawn was already beginning to break. The policeman in front of the Hungarian Embassy took no notice of him, as far as he could tell, and it was also possible that, during the interval, there might have been a change of guards. Jessiersky unlocked the door for the third time that night, walked up the stairs to his bedroom, and went to bed. But he could not sleep. It was as though the dawn had entered the house with him, for a gray light, like a cobweb, hung over all the furniture, all the objects in the room. It grew brighter and brighter, and instead of obliterating the images that were flooding his mind, it made them more sharply defined — as though they were projected right there before him in the room. He kept seeing Spinette, feeling him, as he had tried to raise himself up, tried to shake him off, to throw him off. He kept hearing the pitiful, choking cry of the unfortunate man; and it sounded and sounded in his ear like an electric bell that has got stuck.

  It was now broad daylight, but still he had not slept. He heard the bells of the Minorite Church and of St. Michael’s, the morning sounds in the house, and the distant noise of the street. The hours crept by, but still he did not get up. This time, too, though there was no longer any reason for it, he stayed in bed until three in the afternoon.

  Finally he got up, drove to his office, which on this Saturday afternoon was completely empty, and there he read the midday papers. They not only mentioned his collision with the two motorcyclists in Maria Ellend, but also contained a full report of Spinette’s death. It was thought to be a robbery murder committed by a particularly bestial killer. For the dead man had no less than twenty-two wounds in his neck, his head, and his back, “apparently made by a dull pocket knife,” and in his pockets, except for a little change, there was nothing of value. Jessiersky laughed aloud. Of course there was nothing of value in Spinette’s pockets! For a long time, there had been nothing of value in those pockets. Ever since the dowry of Jessiersky’s wife, Hradek and Sossnowetz, had been taken away from him, Jessiersky hated all aristocrats who had also had everything taken away from them. He thought it absurd that the dispossessed should still be going about with titles when they could no longer command the price of a streetcar ride.

  That evening at dinner, Elisabeth Jessiersky was still so overcome with emotion that she could not even bring herself to comment on her husband’s motor accident. But she did her best to control herself. He looked at her closely — for the first time in a long while. She was now thirty-five, but despite all the children she had had, she did not look more than twenty-eight, thirty, at most. It occurred to him that she had never lost her girlish looks. . . . But did she really believe that her cousin had been killed by a robber? “She should be able to guess the truth,” Jessiersky told himself, “ — guess it by mistake, for she may well suppose that I got my face all scratched up in a fight with her lover. Otherwise she would not be making such an effort to control herself — why should she? And surely she would make some allusion to the murder, instead of not saying a word about it.” At last he said to her: “I am sorry to hear that your cousin . . . on the street . . . very strange, right here in our neighborhood!”

  “Yes,” she stammered, looking at him with the eyes of a frightened heifer, “so you, too, find it odd that it happened here.”

  What else could she say? thought Jessiersky. She might even think that he would be trying to kill her next. “Really,” he said to himself, “no matter how reasonable people may think they are, the moment their so-called passions get involved, they become completely witless.”

  He continued to follow everything that was published in the papers concerning Spinette’s death and very shortly he became convinced that the real murderer would never be discovered. The police picked up their old customers — those fellows with whom crime had become such a habit they committed it rather carelessly. Their pictures were in the rogues’ gallery at headquarters, where that collection was genteelly referred to as the “Albums” — like the volumes of family photographs on the parlor tables of the eighties — and the police had only to look through them to pick up suspects. The police, after all, were only human, or rather, only officials, who like all officials, disliked nothing so much as to be put to extra trouble. If a person had managed to avoid getting his photograph into one of those “Albums,” he could do anything he wanted, within what he chose to regard as reasonable limits.

  Jessiersky went with his wife to Spinette’s funeral as though he were simply paying his last respects to a man who had not had an affair with his wife and whom he had not killed on account of this affair. After the funeral the police still did not appear at the house, but only Spinette’s mother. She and her son had lived on a meager pension from her late husband, a civil servant, and she now assumed that the rich Jessierskys would pay for the funeral expenses, at least. Alexander Jessiersky was on the point of telling her that now that her son was gone, she would have more to spend on herself. But he refrained from making this remark and merely gave the now slightly more prosperous baroness a look of disgust, and paid for the funeral.

  “This tragic event,” he said to his wife, “has not only upset you, but also disturbed me, as I notice. I, therefore, suggest that we go to Zinkeneck earlier than usual this year. Take the children out of school, or leave them here, if you want, with the governess. But be ready yourself to go with me in a few days.”

  She tried to say something in reply, but could only move her lips.

  It would have done her no good to raise any objections, for, meanwhile, some very good reasons for going to the country at once had presented themselves to Jessiersky’s mind. In the city, it seemed to him, he really was at the mercy of his sinister persecutor: it was so easy for the man to lose himself in this impenetrable human thicket, to leap out at him from the crowd and vanish at will. While in the country, particularly in Zinkeneck, where Jessiersky knew his way about reasonably well — and in the countryside generally, which was virtually empty of people — he would certainly notice anything that was going on and would know it if anyone tried to get near him. In the city, for example, t
he affair between Elisabeth and Spinette had probably gone on for months without attracting any attention. Such a thing would be impossible in the country! Spinette would only have had to stop at the village inn, or at the one in the neighboring village, to become the talk of the whole valley; it would have been impossible for him to get into the house at night without being bitten by the dogs; and if he had tried to meet Elisabeth somewhere outside the house, it would have created a scandal overnight. What applied to Spinette applied to an even greater degree to Luna, and Jessiersky could not remember, in fact, ever having seen any sign of him in Zinkeneck. He had shown himself only in Vienna. Therefore Jessiersky and his family would be quite safe there, for Luna, if he dared to come at all, would be completely at his mercy.

  But two days later Elisabeth announced that the schools had refused to let the children go so early. The children, therefore, would have to stay with Mademoiselle, and it might, after all, be best if the two of them . . .

  Why, wondered Jessiersky, is she so set against going to the country? Aloud he said, “Not at all, my dear! We are leaving, and your offspring, whether the stupid schools want them to go or not, will leave with us.”

  “But you said . . .”

  “Yes — but now I’ve changed my mind. Pack your things and be quick about it.”

  Chapter 8

  Zinkeneck was situated at a point in the high mountains where four valleys met, or rather, where two side valleys came into a main valley. And as they together formed the shape of a cross, and as each of them had a mountain brook flowing through it, Jessiersky had named the rivulets after the rivers of Paradise. There, to be sure, it was the sources of the streams that were adjacent to one another, while here it was the mouths; and Paradise had four rivers while here there were merely three brooks. But he solved the problem by naming the main brook, upward from the point at which the side brooks flowed into it, Gihon, and the section below, Pison. The right-hand tributary he called Euphrates, and the left one, Hiddekel. But he frequently mixed up the names; and his gamekeepers, not only because of that curious nomenclature, but for other reasons as well, thought Jessiersky insane.

  Originally, the name Zinkeneck was not applied to the village, but to a mountain rising from the spur of a much higher mountain that was situated between Hiddekel and Gihon and was called Hochzinken. Zinken means “to shine”; Zinken are also certain stringed instruments with a high, bright tone; and finally, country people refer to a red, shiny nose as a Zinken. Zinkeneck, then, literally means the Village at the Foot of the Spur of a High Shiny Mountain. It had been originally made up of the farm buildings belonging to the “castle,” a stone hunting lodge built by Emperor Maximilian I. That castle, together with the hunting preserve, had been purchased by old Fries about the turn of the century — God knows why, for surely he had never been cut out for hunting in the high mountains. Probably he had made this purchase, as well as that of the Strattmann Palace, to give prestige to the firm. His grandson, however, accepted with grace not only the palace but also the estate, and when anyone inquired how long it had been in the possession of the family, would reply scornfully, “For three generations now.”

  The castle was reached from the village by crossing a beautiful old stone bridge over the Pison. The structure stood in the angle formed by Pison and Hiddekel — in other words, in the region of the heart of an imagined huge man suspended on the cross formed by the brooks. The village then was situated in the region of his liver, extending on for a little distance (across the Euphrates) into the region of the right lung of the giant. In the region of his left lung, that is, in the angle between Gihon and Hiddekel and right at the foot of the Hochzinken, lay the park of the castle, which Jessiersky had named the “Garden of Eden” although — or perhaps because — owing to the high altitude, it had never done very well; since the three dry summers immediately following the war, it had consisted mostly of windblown trees, among them a rather tall and particularly windblown one — the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” as Jessiersky called it. But it was in the inhabitants of the village that he saw the most striking similarity to conditions in Paradise, or, more correctly, to conditions prevailing there at a certain moment. In the eyes of Jessiersky, who had been forced to deal with those people for decades, their depravity was quite comparable to that of our first ancestors after the fall. Had it been possible for him to drive them out, he gladly would have done so. But he had neither the power nor the means.

  The castle, or hunting lodge, was built of quarry stone, but the door jambs and window frames were of marble. Above the entrance was a plaque with the coat of arms of Maximilian, disproportionately large for the size of the house. On it, the imperial eagle surrounded with its wings a huge cross on which was the figure of Christ. Nestling between the arms of the cross were the shields of all the countries over which the Emperor had ruled. Twined around the cross and the shields was a chain from which was suspended the Golden Fleece.

  The mountain world all around was tremendously imposing. The wind from the high peaks was constantly beating against the last vestiges of a primeval forest which was still attempting to climb the slope but was making little headway. As a general rule, it was possible to live quite comfortably here for a few months of every summer. Elisabeth Jessiersky, however, this year was of another opinion. For after only six weeks she became so ill that the doctor from Schreinbach, the next community, which was slightly larger than Zinkeneck, held out no hope for her recovery. A specialist Jessiersky then sent for from the capital of the province was in agreement with the village doctor. For, said he, when a lady had herself operated upon illegally, she should at least see to it that it was not performed in a manner bound to result in blood poisoning.

  Blood poisoning seemed to be Luna’s specialty. His plans had misfired in the case of the next youngest. But now, in the case of Elisabeth Jessiersky, he had carried them out! Though Alexander Jessiersky told himself again and again that it was the Zinkeneck midwife who had performed the operation because there had been no time for it in Vienna who was to blame for his wife’s death, the person really to blame was Luna. Had it not been for Luna, Jessiersky himself, not Spinette, would have been the father of Elisabeth’s child. But because Spinette had been its father, it had not been allowed to come into the world and had cost its mother her life. That was why she had not wanted to leave Vienna! And if it had not been for Luna, Jessiersky would not have gone so early to Zinkeneck. But he had gone because of him, and now his wife was dying.

  She followed the unborn child and his father down into the darkness, and while she was still on her deathbed, he thought back over the first years of his marriage with her, of the time when she still owned Hradek and Sossnowetz, when everything had been different. And if in the end she had betrayed him, it was not her fault, or, at least, not entirely her fault. It was really he, Jessiersky himself, or rather Luna, again, who was to blame; and that was why he was sorry for his wife, as he had been sorry for Spinette.

  All this took place at the beginning of August. Several of Elisabeth’s relatives appeared for the funeral; as they were titled, they had been forced to flee from Czechoslovakia and were quite penniless. Jessiersky disliked them immensely. And although Elisabeth’s father and brother were also present (her mother, whose dowry, Sossnowetz and Hradek, Elisabeth had inherited and brought to her own marriage, had been dead for some time), Jessiersky spoke as little as possible with any of them. It was his privilege to be speechless with grief, and he took the fullest possible advantage of it — particularly on the way back from the funeral.

  His chief gamekeeper, however, who also held the office of general manager in Zinkeneck, considered this an excellent opportunity to ask him a few questions. The gamekeeper was a fine, upstanding man. But, like all fine, upstanding employees, he was regularly being left in the lurch by his employer. For one thing, he scarcely ever got a chance to speak to Jessiersky, and when he did, he found it impossib
le to get any clear instructions out of him.

  “Use your own judgment,” would be Jessiersky’s nonchalant reply to most of his questions. But later on, for no discernible reason, he would fly into a rage and tell the man that he could not have acted more stupidly.

  While Jessiersky walked on ahead with the chief gamekeeper, the relatives followed behind, talking to the children and wondering how long they themselves could possibly prolong their stay in Zinkeneck as mourners — the present occasion being probably the last one for capitalizing on their relationship with the deceased. The gamekeeper, meanwhile, was talking as hard as he could to Jessiersky. What particularly was on his mind this time was the situation in the neighboring preserve.

  “All I ask of you,” said Jessiersky, “is to tend to our own preserve.”

  Certainly, agreed the gamekeeper, he was doing that. But that was just why the situation in the adjoining place worried him so much. The hunting grounds there belonged to a Baron Koller who, being hard up for money, leased out shooting rights left and right, and, in fact, shooting rights for more game than there was.

  “If it were not a case of a baron in need of money,” Jessiersky said, “I would call it a swindle.”

  Yes, said the gamekeeper, that it was. But the worst of it was that Baron Koller’s men, in order not to lose the “trophy money,” had begun to bring their hunting guests over to the Zinkeneck property. And the guests either didn’t notice or simply went along without bothering to protest.