An Elegant Solution(33)

My grandmother gave me a warning as I left the house in proper black and white. “You aren’t too wise, Leonhard, as you might think, and you might be too clever.”

“I know that,” I said. “I don’t think I’m wise at all, and everyone’s more clever.”



As appointed, I awaited and met Cousin Gottlieb at his own front door at the hour of twelve. I’d been unable the previous night to present myself appropriately as the Inquisitor’s Assistant. Now, even properly black and white and with paper and ink, I still did not meet Cousin Gottlieb’s expectations.

He frowned at me from his door. “Is that all you have?” he asked. I knew what he meant.

“It is my only.”

He returned to his closet and then returned to me, and in his hand was an item I viewed with both awe and anxiety.

“Put this on,” he said.

I put my hand on my own hat. As it had always been, it was plain black with a wide round brim, turned up on either side, and projecting from my head front and back, as was proper for a student. I took it off. From Cousin Gottlieb’s hand, I received, and donned, a slightly worn but still unimpeachable tricorne. It sat on my wig emanating maturity, respectability, wisdom, and significance. I could feel it. My fellow students would laugh if they saw me, but nervously. There were consequences for mocking a gentleman.

“I will examine the trunk first,” Gottlieb said, though he was still examining me, weighing whether I could hold up my hat. My head had never had such a weight, and I hoped my brain was dense enough for the task. “It is at the Watch Barracks.”

So, to the Watch Barracks we went. This military hub of the city was on Martinsgasse, directly behind the Town Hall. It was once nearly a small castle, but years of peace had softened its castellation to mere heaviness. Narrow windows had been widened, wide towers lowered. The last real threat, two decades past, had been from France. Since then sharp edges had rusted and dulled some, but were still at hand and could be re-sharpened at need. The world wasn’t yet peaceful.

It was Simeon who took us past a mess hall, a sleeping hall, an armory of muskets and axes, a cell with thick bars, and a line of rusted suits of plate armor on stands and tired of standing, to a storeroom lit by high, tiny windows only a flying mouse could have got through. But there was enough light through them to see the black trunk, dull, heavy, and empty of both life and death, in the center of the floor.

I’d seen the trunk twice before, in Master Johann’s kitchen and in the Market Square, and both had been with Knipper woeful. Now it was without him, dusty, old, and black, and maybe as his coffin better than the box he’d had for burial. I tried to remember it on Mistress Dorothea’s stone floor; I thought it had been dusty there, also. Dust to dust. Gottlieb seemed turned to dust himself, staring at it. He took in a deep breath and it was a long time before he let it out.

“Open it,” he finally said. I knelt to do that, putting my black breech knee onto the plank floor, and the same dust. I had a tremor of nervousness as I put my hand to the latch, and I must have looked the same as the gendarme when he’d opened it. But it was empty. I lifted the lid and laid it back to the floor, and stayed bowing and close while Gottlieb inspected from above. Its open throat had little to say. There was no sign on the wood, either the strong frame or the smooth planed sides, of its last contents. But it wasn’t purely plain. “Is there a marking in it? In the back corner, on the left. At the bottom.” I’d already noticed there was. I looked closer. An emblem was branded into the wood.

“It is a spiral,” I said.

Gottlieb was displeased. “What type?” he said bluntly and as though he knew what the answer would be.

“Logarithmic.”

“That complicates greatly.”

I considered Logarithmic spirals superior to Archimedean, and I knew Gottlieb also must, so it must have been not the spiral itself that irritated him, but its implication. I put my finger on it and something rubbed off, not quite hard, and crumbly. I rolled a crumb of it over my thumb. Gottlieb was no longer watching me. He hadn’t been, much, since he’d seen the trunk. But at this point he was not at all.

A boot had stepped into the room and onto his thoughts; the gendarme of Strasbourg had arrived.

“I’ve been sent for you” were his first words. “Come immediately.”

Gottlieb only looked up at him from the trunk. Perhaps he truly had to pause and think what he would say, but certainly the hesitation was an affront to the soldier. Finally he said, “You were sent by your Magistrate Caiaphas?”

“Yes, of course!”