An Elegant Solution(36)

Gottlieb continued to stare for a moment, and longer. Then he calmly, and even gently, asked, “Why was Knipper in Jacob’s trunk?”

“It’s odd if he was,” Huldrych said, not any surprised, though I was. “But was he?”

“I saw it. Why was Knipper in it?”

“He must have been, if you say he was. But why? That’s harder to say.” Huldrych looked slowly and mournfully to the floor. “And he can’t say, can he? He’s dead. I’d heard that. In the trunk? I don’t know why he’d be there.”

“How’d the trunk come to the Boot and Thorn?”

“To the Inn? It was there? Then it wouldn’t be here, would it? It wouldn’t. But I’m sure it is. I’ll look at where it is, or where it isn’t, if it isn’t.” He stood, as vague under his robe as the thoughts in his head. He moved, as ponderous as those thoughts. We went with him and he climbed the stairs to his laboratory.

I’d seen into this room a few times, looking for the Master when students were waiting for him, though I’d learned soon enough he was never in it. Only dust was. The many tables and their very many objects were coated with dust as a chicken with feathers, so that shapes were clear but softened and colors muffled. Master Huldrych looked about as if he’d never seen the room before.

“Who moved it?” Gottlieb asked and the dust rose just at the abruptness.

“I put it here,” Huldrych answered. That seemed to be the same as saying it wouldn’t move ever again.

“When, sir?” I asked. It wasn’t my part to ask questions, but I was quite amazed at the thought of any motion in that space.

“When I first had it.”

That was all I had the temerity to ask. But Gottlieb didn’t scowl. He pushed me on. “Ask him more,” he said to me, and I was thrust, in that moment, into the place of Inquisitor myself, and over my own Physics Master.

“When did you first have it?” I asked. But this was not the question I had been meant to ask.

“I know that already,” Gottlieb said. “Ask a better question.”

The day was Wednesday and in the morning, but I felt Saturday afternoon anxiety, as if Master Johann himself was testing me. I grasped for the better question, and Huldrych waited patiently for it. “Where did you put it in here, sir?”

“Well, just here, of course.” And he pointed. Of course we all turned to see where, including Huldrych himself, and the motion of his arm and our quick spin raised a strange new cloud of the omnipresent dust; and I was reminded of the cloud that followed Knipper on his last drive into the city. Light from the window opaqued the haze and all we saw for the moment was a solid block of golden, glowing air. Then it faded to translucent, and to transparent, and we were staring at a glow and a wall and floor, lit by the same light that had filled the dust, released. It was the far wall from the door. The floor against it was occupied by blank space, between a table on one side and a cabinet on the other. The trunk could well have sat there, as the emptiness was just the size of it, but the space was so heavily coated with the ever-dust that nothing could have been there for a very long time. “It was there,” Huldrych said. “I quite remember putting it.”

“Was that long ago?”

“It must have been, I think.”

I’d already put myself forward into Gottlieb’s role. Now I tried an even bolder request. “May I go look?”

“Go?” Huldrych said. “Of course. Why shouldn’t you?”

That no one ever before had seemed a possible reason, at least no one in at least a half inch, with time measured in dust. But I put my foot deliberately forward and then again, and walked as slowly across the floor as if it were slick, thin ice. Clouds rose against me, disturbed from their sleep, and I was blinded. I paused and moved again, and finally I came close to where the trunk wasn’t. I stopped.

Years at least had passed since anything had held that place. I very slowly leaned down and in the dust I saw a line where the trunk’s edge had been. And even very faintly, I could perhaps see the press of feet placed wide in the brown and gold dust, and more faintly yet a shade of gray dust in those places. I moved my own feet back to the door. “It was there,” I said. “But it’s been moved long ago.”

“How long?” Gottlieb asked, of me, and Huldrych, and the dust. Huldrych answered.

“I don’t remember anyone coming for it. Not after you did.” Then he coughed. The dust was choking him.

“What was in it?” I asked.

“Just what’s always been in it,” Huldrych said, struggling to breathe. “You remember, don’t you?” he asked Gottlieb. He coughed again, more violently. “It’s the—”