Mr. Monk Goes to Germany Lee Goldberg (my reading book .txt) 📖

Instead, she slit the sausage down the middle, and delicately rolled the white meat out of the skin with her fork. She dipped the meat in some kind of mustard and ate it.

That looked more appealing to me than sucking the meat out of the skin, but I didn’t think I could eat anything with mustard in the morning.

Within a few minutes of my arrival, the businessman went off to his meeting, the old woman was picked up by relatives, and the young couple hurried back to their room, probably to finish what they’d started at the table.

I took a sausage and decided to eat it like the old woman had, only without the sauce. I was about to put the meat in my mouth when Monk scowled.

“You know what a sausage is, right?” he said. “It’s minced meat jammed into a pig intestine. And you know what’s in an intestine, right?”

“Yes, I know, thank you,” I said. “You ate a sausage yesterday.”

“I doubt that,” he said.

“Does that drug you take cause amnesia, too?”

“No, but after it wears off, the things I remember doing are so outrageous that I don’t know how much was real and what was a nightmare.”

“It was all real,” I said.

Monk shivered. “God help me.”

I ate the sausage. It had an unusual texture, but it was delicious and had a surprisingly complex favor. I could taste smoked meat, onion, ginger, and a hint of lemon. I quickly gobbled down some more.

Friderike joined us and asked what our plans were. When I told her we didn’t have any, she told us the farmers market was being held in the town square today. She was going to do some shopping for groceries, and if we wanted to walk with her, she’d be glad to be our tour guide on the way. I quickly accepted for us both, though Monk didn’t look too excited about it.

She retrieved a big woven basket from the kitchen, stuffed it with some small burlap bags to carry her groceries, and off we went.

It was a perfect day, with a mild temperature, a slight breeze, and only a few wisps of cloud in the sky. The air felt clean and light, as if all the pollution had been filtered out as it blew through the Spessart.

Friderike and I walked on either side of Monk, who kept to the gully in the center of the road.

Now that I was up close to the buildings, I noticed that above each tiny doorway was something handwritten in chalk: 20*C+M+B*08. I gestured toward the writing.

“What does that mean?” I asked Friderike.

“It’s the year, two crosses, and a blessing on the house,” she said. “It’s part of a ritual that goes back to the sixteenth century.”

“Everything here does,” Monk said. “It’s time you people modernized.”

“January sixth is the Feast of the Three Kings: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. On that day, children go door-to-door dressed as the kings and ring the bell,” she explained. “When you open the door, the children declare that the Messiah is born, sing a song, and if you give them some coins for the poor, they write that sign with sanctified chalk.”

“And if you don’t pay?” Monk asked.

Friderike shrugged. “Everyone pays or you won’t be blessed. Things will be very bad for you.”

“And the police allow this?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Friderike replied.

“You’re paying for protection. If you don’t, then these ruffians see to it that something bad happens,” Monk said. “It’s extortion.”

“It’s for charity,” Friderike said.

“That’s what they always say,” Monk said. “But it goes straight for hooch and weed. No wonder they are in disguise. It makes it harder for them to be identified.”

Friderike looked puzzled. “Hooch and weed?”

“Never mind,” I said, waving off Monk’s remark as if it was smoke in the air.

Monk motioned to a church we were passing. “The top is missing off that eight.”

There was a date etched in stone atop the doorway. Monk was right. It looked like someone had lopped the top off the eight in the date 1387.

“That’s a four,” Friderike said.

“It’s definitely the bottom of an eight,” Monk said.

“That’s how they wrote fours back then,” she said. “As half of an eight.”

“And nobody could find the time in the last six hundred and twenty years to fix it?” Monk said. “I’ll be glad to do it for you while I am here. Do you have a chisel I can borrow?”

Friderike was so bewildered by Monk’s remarks that she stumbled on a cobblestone, but quickly regained her footing.

“You should walk in the pedestrian lane,” Monk said.

“The what?” she said.

“The people path,” Monk said, motioning to the gully he was in. “It’s much safer.”

“Oh, no, you shouldn’t walk there,” Friderike said. “It brings bad luck.”

“Whoever said that must have been the same guy who thought carving half an eight is the same as a four,” Monk said. “What could possibly be wrong with walking where it’s smooth, safe, and orderly?”

“That’s where people used to empty their room pots,” she said.

“What’s a room pot?” Monk asked.

“A medieval toilet,” I said. “Basically, a bucket of—” Monk yelped, leaping out of the gully and practically into my arms.

He looked back accusingly at Friderike. “You dumped sewage into the street?”

“They didn’t have indoor plumbing back then,” she said. “The streets are sloped so the drains run all the way down to the creek, which feeds into the river.”

“Where they drank their water, washed their clothes, and got the mud