The Forest Lake Mystery Read online

  It is so strangely still; not a single sound of a rolling carriage, no noise of wheezing machines, only the lapping of the water against the quayside and subdued oar strokes from the slender black gondolas, gliding out of the night bearing a yellowish flame, silent, with a flickering wake behind.

  Holst and Braun sat themselves in a gondola and Braun gave the name of the hotel – the Bauer-Grünewald, the place which most Germans head for. The gondola glided silently from the quayside across the Grand Canal into a network of crooked canal streets, between white and yellow houses with closed shutters. The deepest stillness descended over their journey. The two travellers sat in silence, their eyes searching over the water towards the damp walls where the wake murmured. They slipped silently past the houses. Then the gondola turned sharply round a corner; the gondolier uttered a short, muffled, monosyllabic word and past them glided another gondola, the yellow lamp of which for a second threw its faint gleam over the water to light up the black bow of their boat, which with its broad, serrated nose pointed forward like the prow of a Viking ship. The gondola listed over slightly, then picked up speed once more down a new street, still and desolate like the first. The nocturnal journey took a powerful hold on Holst. He looked ahead – it was like an adventure in an unknown country, where the waves whispered the most mysterious fairy tales, telling of hundreds of years, of a city whose power was great, but whose streets were silent, whose strange legends grew forth not out of soil, not rooted in the solid land, but like creepers and strange species of seaweed from a deep where the water wiped out every track, and where everything was wrapped in the deepest cover of silence.

  Then the gondola glided out into Grand Canal. It became livelier; boat after boat met them as they glided past the tall, dark palaces with their solid pales, embossed with shapes like dragons’ heads which told of the greatness of their owners, and on the wide marble stairways of which Venice’s great men had trod, where the destiny of kingdoms had been decided, where festoons of flowers had once waved in the sea breeze and flaming torches flickered in the night, when the young slept and the old had kept vigil and spun their schemes.

  Here and there a window was open; figures dressed in light colours bent out over the marble balconies, and music rang from high-ceilinged halls, where lights flashed in cut-glass chandeliers and cast a shiny glitter over the canal. There came a sharp whistle as a wheezing steamer worked its way up the undulating street, lacerating the dreams of vanished times and striking the quiet water with its paddles, so that the gondola swayed from side to side as the frothing wake struck its bow.

  They swung once more into the narrow canals; the same muted shout sounded, the same quiet meeting, the same dead houses and the same dull slap of the oar in the dark water. They journeyed softly, slipping through the night, gently lifting the veil over the sleeping city, then the gondola stopped with a jolt by narrow steps. A sharp voice ripped Holst and his companion out of their dreams.

  “Zwei Zimmer – vierter Stock.”

  Two rooms, fourth floor.

  And they found themselves standing once again in the caravanserai, in the middle of one of the 20th century’s great hotels, between suitcases, boxes, gas and telephones, while the smell of food rushed out to greet them, bells chimed and called, and apron-clad waiters ran up and down carpeted staircases.

  The Hotel Bauer-Grünewald.

  Holst was shown to a room on the fourth floor and settled back into the interrupted dream. He opened the window and looked over the canal: roof after roof with strange extensions, peculiar angular chimneys, quaintly protruding walls and cornices and, deep down, the water lapping.

  On the canal, a boat with music was gliding by. A guitar, a violin and male voices sang unfamiliar, pulsating melodies that rose up to him in the still of the night – heavy, subdued, at times tremulous, at times full of fire and like tolling bells, messages from alien lands, singing about love, about sighing and sadness, while the oars splashed.

  He looked up at the sky where the stars flickered so unendingly close, as if weighing down on him with the mute, insoluble riddle of existence – who are you? who are you?

  He felt so alien to himself, gripped by an indomitable horror, while the stars kept repeating – who are you? who are you?…

  He was alive – and yet he felt it wasn’t actually him. He shuddered and took a step back into the longish rectangular room, where the ceiling was very low, and where there was a sigh in every nook, as if countless generations were whispering their most clandestine secrets to the silent walls.

  He was in Venice, the silent city of dreams.

  Holst went down and met his travelling companion in the restaurant. The kitchen was French, neither worse nor better than at most European hotels. The elongated dining room was abuzz with guests speaking all the languages of the world, while the service personnel, aproned and hurried, crossed the floor with steaming dishes and wine in coiled carafes and long-necked German bottles. Dr Braun raised his glass.

  “Welcome to Venice and many thanks for your company on the journey.”

  Holst smiled. He had been lucky with his companion. Dr Braun was a young German scholar who was studying art and had travelled widely around the world. He had spent several years in Copenhagen as the guest of a major Danish manufacturer and patron of the arts, in whose large collection he had worked on the exhibiting and cataloguing of works of art bought abroad. He was a true Bavarian, with a South German’s lively nature; full of jokes, but often strangely silent. Holst had quite won his heart on their journey, when their travelling companions had consisted of a couple of Middle German commercial travellers of the dreadful, international hawker type, whose banal chatter and racy stories had irritated Holst and the doctor equally. In Bozen they had properly found their feet with each other and spent the rest of the trip in lively conversation about things beautiful and grand and about the promised land – Venice. The meal was quickly over, and they walked together through the narrow, twisting streets to the place that attracts and calls, the place to which everyone hastens – the eternal, the incomparable, St Mark’s Square.

  They entered the square, which appeared white as if covered with snow in the sharp, clear moonlight, through an arch in the colonnade of the procurators. Only a single wanderer slipped effortlessly across it; it belonged to the night – not the heavy, sighing night that spread itself over the silent canals, but the moonlit night, where the stones were bathed in moonbeams, where dreams take off easily in the bright silence only to tremble in the shimmering white lustre with a yearning filled with presentiment.

  Nothing burdens the mind when the moon shines over St Mark’s Square. It isn’t the depth of this wealth of beauty that forces one to bow one’s head in humble wonder; neither is there a feeling of peace, a craving for rest – it is an enticement to imbibe beauty, like emptying a crystal glass of wine, yellowish and sweet. The arms of the procurators don’t extend out wide like St Peter’s columns in Rome; they aren’t open so as to squeeze the observer in towards the great bosom of the mother church, but lightly stroking, as a confident love strokes the hair and neck, a love that knows that its call will be followed so willingly.

  The Byzantine domes of St Mark’s Basilica rise up behind the rearing horses and the slender pillars as if to offer a barrier to the eyes. The Campanile reaches up to the sky as if lifting its gaze towards wide expanses where nothing stands in its way, and the beautiful doorway that leads to the Doge’s Palace is firmly closed like a mouth that, if it so wished, could open up and tell about the pain which lies behind all this silent desire that captures the eyes and the thoughts.

  And the feet move willingly – to the Piazzetta, where the Moorish surfaces of the Doge’s Palace offer themselves to the eye, unveiled like the sultana in the fairy tale for the one she has chosen in secret, and one’s gaze slides over the Piazzetta’s stones across the lagoon, the wide water, to where the island lies in the distance with the domes and spires of San Giorgio Maggiore and an inkli
ng that the chalice of beauty is still not empty, that Venice still has rich treasures hidden away for those who are willing to tread the gently rocking pathway which mirrors the sky and its light, the path which is trodden as if in a dream, without the tramp of footsteps but with the murmuring of waves.

  One doesn’t speak when the moon is shining over the Piazzetta in Venice, but if the peals sound muted from the clock tower at the left wing of the procurators’ building, mutedly tremulous in quick succession, they build a bridge for every impression of beauty, pulling the thoughts upwards, gathering them in a uniquely blissful feeling of seeing and enjoying.

  And onward it goes along the quayside, across the canal where the Bridge of Sighs stands darkly against the Doge’s Palace, where all of Venice’s dark legends are given life in muted speech and strange stories of death and oblivion. The water slops against the quay, and out there, like a reminder of the present, the hull of a large steamer glides forward across the mirror, anchor chain clattering and windlasses whining, while steam is breathed out of its funnels in short, hoarse snorts. The wanderer turns instinctively towards land and his eyes meet the equestrian statue of the Piemontese soldier who put the crown of Italy on his head: Il Re Galantuomo Vittore Emanuele, whose rearing horse towers over the Riva degli Schiavoni like a brutal monument to a victory won by others and written in the destiny of the losers.

  Again, the wanderer is drawn to the past, towards the Piazzetta and Doge’s Palace, and from the arch of the procurators he casts his last look at the beautiful St Mark’s Square, as it rests, bathed in moonlight, eternally one in its silent loveliness…

  Holst slept only briefly on his first night in Venice.

  II

  Time was scarce and work was waiting. Holst knew only that Sjöström had travelled to Venice and that a countryman had bumped into him there and had brought back the message which the equerry had disclosed. It didn’t sound like his financial circumstances were in the best of health and he wasn’t staying at one of the big hotels. The hotel the equerry had mentioned was a small unimpressive hotel by the Riva, where sailors in particular would stay. Holst enquired there the next day, but no one was familiar with any Lieutenant Sjöström; it was probable that he had lived there under an assumed name. It was natural to assume that, if he intended to stay in Venice, he had looked for private accommodation, but it was most probable that he would be found at the Lido, where the best opportunities presented themselves for an adventurer like Sjöström who was struggling to pay board and lodging. Holst wasn’t in much doubt that Sjöström had put the stolen money into play in Monte Carlo; his brother had already disclosed that he had been seen there in May, eagerly involved in the roulette.

  Holst spent two days on the search without discovering any clues to his whereabouts. Then one evening as he was about to go to bed, he felt an icy chill, and when night came, it was as if poisonous mists came in through the window and lay over him. His temples were pounding, his blood pumped like fire through his veins, he completely lost consciousness and he slipped into feverish imaginings so violent that they flickered around him like flames, and all his thoughts whirled around like a maelstrom. Dr Braun, whose room was close by, came to him and fetched a doctor, who shook his head and diagnosed a malignant feverish cold, the type that so often grips foreigners who succumb to Venice’s alluring beauty. Holst’s condition was not without danger, especially in the first days, but gradually the mist lifted and his strong constitution prevailed. It took eight days for Holst to overcome his indisposition and he now decided to continue the search for Sjöström with full force. When he took a light lunch with Braun in the Bauer-Grünewald, he noticed that his young friend was somewhat depressed and seemed to be plagued by a number of specific, constantly recurring thoughts. Holst questioned his friend intensely, but to start with he didn’t want to discuss it.

  It was an embarrassing story, he said, but Holst persisted.

  Eventually, the whole tale was revealed.

  While Holst had been ill, Braun had been to St Mark’s Square where he had met a very beautiful young French-speaking lady, with whom he had exchanged several looks of the type which initiate an acquaintanceship. The young lady was not completely unwelcoming, but on the other hand she behaved in a perfectly ladylike manner, and Braun had decided to fasten Germania’s broad sword on his loins to take up the conquest. It was begun with small courtesies, brief opportune words when the lady had taken a seat at one of the numerous tables in the arcades, and led quite quickly to small excursions to the Gallerie dell’Accademia – even a trip by steamer to the Lido. Finally, Braun decided to risk a full-frontal attack and, during a promenade in the park, he confessed his love to the beauty with as much warmth as his Bavarian nature allowed. It appeared that victory would follow his assault. He obtained permission to follow the beautiful lady back to the Riva and from there in a gondola to an unknown destination along secretive waterways.

  The gondola meandered through the strangest out-of-the-way corners, without Braun being able to recognise anything other than that he twice passed along the Grand Canal and finally after this strange detour found himself near the Arsenale. The trip ended and he followed his beautiful companion up a narrow staircase to a first-floor apartment in a well-maintained old house in the usual Venetian style with many small rooms, corridors and balconies.

  It was very hot and the beautiful unknown lady swiftly put a soft drink in front of her conqueror, while he continued his attack, encouraged by the generous concessions he had extracted from his beautiful enemy. The temperature rose and the lady took compassion on the greatly overheated northerner, bringing him a very fine, light dressing gown, and discreetly retired while he put the tunic on and at the same time removed a not-so-small part of his civilised clothes.

  Everything was set up for a moment of dalliance when suddenly Arcadia was ravaged by a storm with violent thunderclaps. There was a thundering at the door and a powerful male voice was heard in the hallway outside the dallying couple’s sanctuary. The beautiful lady shot to her feet in horror.

  “My husband has come home unexpectedly,” she exclaimed

  Braun was gripped by a paralysing terror and, unfamiliar with the dangers of war, he allowed himself to be hurriedly pushed aside into a kitchen-like back room, while the angry man, like a troll who has got a whiff of human flesh, came storming into the apartment’s rooms.

  In the murky room, a new danger popped up in the shape of an old hag who adopted a very menacing attitude and demanded a significant sum to let the unfortunate wooer escape down the back stairs, with the threat of handing him over to the rightful owner’s charge if he refused. Braun chose to buy his freedom. He had a hundred and fifty lire on him, which he offered, and after he had stripped off the silk tunic and quickly dressed on the stairs, he beat the retreat in an extremely cooled-down state of mind that wasn’t warmed by the discovery that he had forgotten his very valuable gold watch and an especially valuable jewel ring, probably now being valued for profit in Arcadia. The war costs thus amounted to around one thousand lire in the country’s money, in addition to the loss of honour – to put it briefly, total defeat.

  No wonder the young German was depressed by this experience of battle. Holst laughed, but his police instincts led him quite quickly to lay plans for an attempt to make good the losses by a new energetic attack on the beautiful lady with other more prosaic goals than before, and since it was not out of the question that the opportunity could present itself, he subjected his friend to an incisive interview in order to draw up a report for his own pleasure. They quickly agreed that there was nothing to be gained by involving the local police in the matter; it would only lead to the German being ridiculed in the local press and the beauty quickly being given no more than a warning.

  The first step was to reconnoitre the terrain and they discovered that the route from the scene of the crime to the Riva degli Schiavone had only been three or four small alleys away from the Via Vittorio Emanuele, which
heads northwards from the Riva. It was not possible to determine the house, of course, and, moreover, not wise to walk around too much in that area, which would probably attract attention, but Holst found another far safer and more convenient way to the target by sea.

  Braun had an innate ability to remember faces with great certainty; he was able to recognise any person he had noticed, even a total stranger, and with their confidence in this, the friends decided to pay attention to the gondoliers by the Riva, where Braun recalled that the beauty had repeatedly used the same gondola. It proved possible to find the man once again, but approaching him directly would be unwise, as he had probably been used frequently by the lady and would therefore naturally be reluctant to give information about her. Holst therefore chose to use his gondola frequently for a few days and pay him generously for quite short trips. The man wondered at first about this, but reconciled himself with the thought that it was probably a disturbed Englishman who had conceived a certain fondness for his gondola and his small talk and he thus decided to exploit him.

  It didn’t take long for Holst and the gondolier to become good friends, and Holst made good use of the scraps he recalled from his studies of Lombroso. To begin with, their conversation was about a tall, blonde northerner who was supposed to be staying in Venice, and whom Holst was eagerly looking for, without any significant information coming out of it. Then Holst cautiously asked the gondolier about the beautiful lady, and he immediately saw from the man’s crafty smile that he knew who Holst was talking about. However, he was reluctant to reveal what he knew, and only after Holst, who in order not to cause any suspicion, had left Braun back on the Riva during these trips, had assured him of his burning love for the lady, did the gondolier agree, in return for a substantial tip, to show Holst the house, which lay by a small canal not far from the Arsenale, and also deliver a note to the lady about an assignation on St Mark’s Square at a specific time.