William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

can be of some help to him. It is urgent, or I would more willingly delay disturbing you.”
    “I am sorry to hear he is in difficulties,” Herr Jakob replied. “He is a brave man who was willing to risk all for his beliefs, which is the most any of us can do.”
    “But his beliefs were different from yours?” Monk said quickly, then wondered why he had.
    “No,” Herr Jakob replied with a faint smile. “Politically at least, they were the same.”
    Monk did not need to ask about the other side of ethical values. He had met Josef and Magda Beck, and seen the depth and fervor of their Catholicism. He had also seen that, for whatever reason, they countenanced in their house friends who were profoundly anti-Jewish. Whatever their beliefs, their words tipped over from discrimination into persecution. The first allowed the second, and therefore was party to it, even if only by silence. A sudden memory flashed into his mind, sharp as spring sunlight in the rectory front room, the vicar himself standing quoting John Milton to a twelve-year-old Monk, teaching him great English literature. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” But now it came differently to his mind: “They also sin who only stand and watch.”
    He came back to the present candlelit room in Vienna with the daylight fading rapidly beyond the windows, and this quiet couple waiting for him to say something to make sense of his visit here, and their courtesy in receiving both him and Ferdi, and welcoming them on this of all days. Anything but the truth would insult them all, he as much as they, and perhaps Kristian and Hanna as well.
    “Did you know Elissa von Leibnitz?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Jakob answered. There was profound feeling in his face and in the timbre of his voice, but Monk was unable to read it. Had they resented her, known that their daughter had been picked for the errand that cost her life, rather than Elissa, because Elissa, the Aryan Catholic, was valued more, her life held more important than that of Hanna, the Jewess? Immeasurably worse than that, did they know or guess that she had betrayed their daughter to a pointless death? But he had left himself no way to retreat.
    “Did you know that Kristian married her?”
    “Yes, I knew that.”
    Monk could feel the heat burning his face. He was ashamed for people he had not even known, far less shared acts or judgments with, and yet he felt tarred with the same brush. He was aware of Ferdi next to him and that perhaps he felt the same embarrassment.
    “Will you eat with us?” Frau Jakob asked softly, also in English. “The meal is nearly ready.”
    Monk was touched, and oddly, he was also afraid. There was a sense of tradition, of belonging, in this quiet room, which attracted him more than he was able to cope with, or to dismiss as irrelevant to him. He wanted to refuse, to make some excuse to come back at another time, but there was no other time. Kristian’s trial would begin any day, or might already have begun, and he was no real step nearer to the truth of who had killed Elissa, or why. Certainly he had nothing to take back to Callandra.
    He glanced at Ferdi, then back at Frau Jakob. “Thank you,” he said.
    She smiled and excused herself to attend to matters in the kitchen.
    The meal was brought in, a slow-cooked stew in a deep, earthenware pot, and served with prayers and thanksgiving, which included the servants, who seemed to join as a matter of custom. Only after that was the conversation resumed. A peace had settled in the room, a sense of timelessness, a continuity of belief which spanned the millennia. Some of these same words must have been spoken over the breaking of bread centuries before the birth of Christ, with the same reverence for the creation of the earth, for the release of a nation from bondage, and above all the same certainty of the God who presided over all things. These people knew who they were and understood their identity. Monk envied them that, and it frightened him. He noticed that Ferdi also was moved by it—and disturbed, because it reached something in him older than conscious thought or teaching.
    “What is it that we can do for Kristian, or Elissa?” Herr Jakob asked.
    Monk spoke the truth without even considering otherwise. “Elissa was killed . . . murdered . . .” He disregarded their shock. “Kristian has been charged, because he appears to have had motive, and he cannot prove that he was elsewhere. I don’t believe he