At least, these were my imaginations of those places. I didn’t know.
And Little Johann listened. I don’t know if he was as easily caught as I was, if he was with me in far-off lands, or if he only wanted someone to talk to him. He was still beside me as we came to the barracks.
“Simeon?”
He was there, snoring in a chair. He was Day Watch and it was Day.
“What?” he started gently. “What is it? Oh, Leonhard. It’s not still an inquiry?”
“No,” I said. “Except my own.”
“What do you want?”
“Could I see Knipper’s trunk?”
“That he was in? Why do you want that?”
“There was something written in it, and I wanted to see it again.”
“What written?” Simeon’s a friendly one, but he’ll ask all the questions first. He’d want a reason to let me in.
“I’ll show you.” That was good enough. The hall we walked had no windows, just light from the doorways on each side. It was all as it had been with Gottlieb five days earlier. We stopped a moment by the rusted armors standing guard beside the weaponry store: swords, axes, maces, bows, and guns. The room across from it stored Watchmen, some sleeping and some at tables playing and talking. Another room stored grain, potatoes, dried meat, and more foodstuffs. The last had shelves loaded with closed boxes and barrels of less obvious meaning. But here there was a change from my last visit. The floor was empty.
“Has it been moved?” I asked.
“It hasn’t been moved,” Simeon said. “Where would it be moved?”
“But it isn’t here.”
“I’m not blind.” He wasn’t, even when his eyes were closed, and now they were open, narrow, and suspicious. But not of us.
“It’s been taken. Would the Watch have taken it?”
“I’m the Watch for this room, and I haven’t. It must have been Night.” He stared at the space a moment, then at me, frowning. “Then do you know who might have taken it, young Master Leonhard?”
“I’d like much to know,” I said.
“It was taken at night, I know that. Not on my Watch.” He left us then, suspicious and grumbling threats against the Night Watch.
“You won’t see it now,” I said to Little Johann.
“Leonhard, I have.”
“When I looked in it before, I found something,” I answered him. “A crumb of dough. Good bread dough. So I thought you’d seen it.”
All he said was, “I won’t tell you.”
“I don’t know what you’d tell me,” I answered. “Did you know that Knipper came to your kitchen?”
“I only saw the trunk. It was dusty.”
We walked slowly back to the Munster Square. “What was in the trunk?” I asked
“Not Knipper.”
“No, he wasn’t. He was still on the road from Bern. What was in it? Was it papers?”
“Notebooks of papers. It wasn’t near full.”
“Were they Jacob’s?”
“They were. I don’t like Latin and I didn’t read them. But I knew they were. They were wrapped in bundles, in linen. I looked in one and saw them.”
“Gottlieb wrote the Ars Conjectandi from them. He knew what they were. I heard what Gottlieb said to Huldrych and I saw the empty trunk. It had Jacob’s spiral in it.”
“Why was it in our kitchen?”
“I think it had been in your house for a few years. I don’t know how it got there from Huldrych’s. It had been in an attic, I think, or somewhere, and brought to the kitchen.”
“Because Daniel was coming home,” Little Johann said. “Poppa wanted it away so he wouldn’t find it.”
“Do you think?” I asked.
“I know Poppa would.”
“Then he hired Knipper to take it somewhere away.”
“There was a envelope in it, too.”
“A letter?”
“From Poppa. It had his seal, but no name on it.”
I walked with Little Johann. We turned into the alley, and through the gate I’d just mended into the back yard, and he held the door for me into the kitchen as if it was expected. So I went in with him.
It was about noon, as the clocks of Basel defined it. Lunch was past and the room was empty. Little Johann stopped in the middle of the floor, just before the spot the trunk had been. I stood with him.
“What pots are there?” I asked. “Any with a dent in them?”
He shrugged. “Heavy pots wouldn’t take a dent.”
“Did you look?” He nodded. “When did you realize that Knipper was here?” I said.
“When I heard how he came back.”