Death and the Devil

“—whether the justified execution of that whore of an archbishop will be successful. I have been praying, Johann, not sleeping, and the Lord has heard my prayer. Conrad will die, as we agreed.”

For a while Johann was silent.

“Mother,” he said hesitantly, “I’ve been thinking. Sometimes, when God wants to test our faith, he leads us astray. He clouds our thought and blinds us to the truth. We lose sight of our goal and fall victim to powers that would corrupt us. But we do not see the corruption, we take it for the expression of the Divine, just as the Israelites did when they asked Aaron to make them gods of gold. I believe it was not so much pride as uncertainty and fear that led them to make the Golden Calf. Sometimes I think they were not worthy to receive God’s Commandments. Even before that they were not really following the Lord, but another golden calf by the name of Moses. But this Moses was alive, he was—at least he was someone, a personality, and he had an inner flame. The calf, on the other hand, merely glittered and Moses was right to burn it. But who knows, perhaps even without Moses they would eventually have realized that the calf could not keep them together because it was only a hollow piece of metal, lacking meaning, lacking everything that can raise men, in humility and selflessness, up to the true God. They would have realized that as soon as they became disunited, and if they had been asked then who their god was, each would have given a different answer, the one that suited them best.”

He paused. Blithildis did not move.

“They would have seen that they were not following a common god,” he went on, “that each had his own idea of God, different from that of all the others. They would have seen that everything they had done in the name of that god was therefore wrong. Wrong and sinful.”

“You think what we are doing is wrong?” she asked bluntly.

“I don’t know. I mean, in whose interest are we acting? I have come to find out whether we are following God or a golden calf. Is there a common goal uniting us, a valid goal? I have never doubted you, Mother, but—”

“Then let us pray together,” she said in an almost voiceless tone. “Let us pray that Conrad will not survive the coming day. He has humiliated us before the whole of Christendom. Our house should shine in glory and splendor, not suffer exile and imprisonment. The fame of our holy city should be our fame, not that of priests and a brutal tyrant who has stolen our wealth and our property. I had hoped to end my life a proud woman able to show her pride but, thanks to Conrad, I sit here like a lost soul. He has cast me down and for that I pray that hell will devour him and that Satan and all his demons will torment him until the apocalypse. Then let him burn and his soul be consigned to oblivion.”

She paused, her chest heaving. Her bony fingers were clutching the arms of her chair like claws. Gradually she relaxed and turned to Johann. In the darkness he saw a faint smile cross her face, a face no longer made for smiling.

“Your father died so young,” she said.

Johann was silent.

There was a finality in her words that left no room for reply. He looked at her and suddenly realized that revenge was all Blithildis had lived for. She was the daughter of the founding father of the Overstolz dynasty. She had been part of the glorious rise of the house, had inherited boundless self-confidence, been the very image of good fortune. But then fortune had abandoned her. Thirty years ago the husband she loved had died. Her soul had withered, her eyes lost their sight, and now the house in Rheingasse, the magnificent symbol of Overstolz greatness, looked with empty windows out onto a different Cologne and a different glory that mocked her.

There had never been a common goal. Neither Matthias nor Daniel, Hermann nor Theoderich, certainly not Blithildis and not even Kuno had sought higher justice. Daniel wanted to kill Conrad out of personal resentment for the loss of the position of magistrate. Matthias had been a magistrate, too, but all he was interested in were his trading enterprises, which required different policies from Conrad’s. Theoderich was an opportunist who would jump on any bandwagon. Kuno’s interest was his brothers, and his brothers wanted to return, that was all. Heinrich von Mainz was interested in his business, like Matthias; Lorenzo had been bought and Blithildis was obsessed with revenge.

And behind it all was the secret bitterness of the Overstolzes that not they were the first among the leading houses of Cologne, but the Weises. That the Weises, having sold themselves to Conrad, still dominated the Richerzeche, the council of the richest families in the city, while the Overstolzes were facing total defeat.

It was not the patricians who were to triumph, it was the Overstolz family. Conrad’s end would be the end of the Weises, the end of the decades of conflict between the two houses.

Power at any price.