Death in Advent 

By 

Mary Jo Rabe 

Annagret Gumpert loped over the red, blue, and green stone floor of the dark hall. She was fast, but not so fast that she lost control of the silver-metal book cart she was pushing. It was only about one meter high with four wheels, but had two shelves, and she could pile a significant number of heavy books and magazines on it. 

Library work in a company library wasn't a sedentary activity. She never left work with her step counter showing fewer than fifteen thousand steps per day. Delivering requested books and circulation materials to eager and impatient readers was usually stressful, but the exercise helped her stay fit and trim, probably not a bad thing now that she was pushing fifty. 

Today she had to interrupt her delivery route at twelve. It was time for the annual Advent vocal concert in the chancery office in Fredburg. Every year she hoped the songs would be more fun to sing, but the purists always had their way. "This is Advent," they proclaimed. "No Christmas carols, just Advent songs." With one exception, most Advent songs were plaintively sad and boring. 

The employees' council members and other singers were already gathering on the top floor of the west-side, massive, stone staircase. The historic, multi-colored, decorated staircase was divided into two separate flights of stairs, west and east, and separated by a four-meter-wide empty space in the middle that stretched up three floors. 

Entering the chancery office on the ground floor, visitors looked up the three floors, red, painted staircases to the right and the left with figures of the evangelists and Greek muses on the walls above them. The view was supposed to inspire, or so the architect Randolf Eblinger had claimed back in 1903 when he submitted the plans. 

Eventually the entrance probably did inspire, but since Herr Eblinger ended up spending twice the amount he claimed the building would cost, he was more or less run out of town and never found out how people felt about the building and its impressive staircase. 

The acoustics around the staircase were phenomenal, but for optimal acoustics - after all some three hundred employees would be assembled on the three floors in the hopes of enjoying the music—the choir stood on the highest steps at the top of the staircase, four singers on each step, a little crowded but doable. The director of the cathedral choir, who had been "volunteered" to participate, set up his electric keyboard in the hall directly in front of the choir. 

Annegret decided not to try to push her book cart across the keyboard's electric cables that stretched from the staircase across the hall to an office with an electrical outlet. Instead, she stood at one end of the cart and tried to make herself inconspicuous during the brief rehearsal. The concert was scheduled to begin in about five minutes. 

The choir director played an introduction to "Zion's Daughter." Most of the singers chimed in immediately, but the evil head of personnel, Frau Grob, a chunky little troll whose short black hair looked like it had been dyed with shoe polish, bickered and complained. Suddenly she screeched, "I don't want to stand here next to the stone banister. I can't hear the other soprano voices. Why can't Herr Steinle switch places with me?" 

The choir director stopped playing and sighed. Annegret thought he was trying not to roll his eyes. Poor man. Tall and scrawny, even with his graying hair, he still looked like an uncertain graduate student. "Herr Steinle?" he asked hesitantly. 

Annegret snorted and didn't even try to maintain a neutral expression on her face. Why did everyone give in to that witch? Obviously because Frau Grob, as head of the personnel department, was the most powerful layperson in the chancery office as well as the most vindictive person anyone had ever met. No one made an enemy of her if it could possibly be avoided. 

But the director of the cathedral choir had nothing to fear from Frau Grob. He had a permanent position with the cathedral, and she had no authority over him. And yet, he knuckled under just like all the others. 

Herr Steinle, a man in his late forties, was the mild-mannered, balding chairman of the employees' council, the church's poor substitute for a union. He had already switched positions with Frau Grob. Annegret saw how he wiped the sweat off his face. 

Poor man. He had enough dealings with the wicked witch every day, negotiating complaints the employees had about Frau Grob, and now he had to stand next to her for the concert and endure her very unpleasant off-key soprano squealing. Zion's Daughter's heart might be full of joy, but in the choir today no one else's was. 

Annegret pushed her book cart as close to the wall as she could. People kept coming out of the doorways in this hall and searching for a good place to stand, generally just where her book cart was. Since she wasn't that tall, she saw less and less of the choir and more and more of the heads and bodies of the audience in front of her. 

The concert began and fifteen singers were able to drown out Frau Grob. "Zion's Daughter" went well. All three hundred employees enthusiastically joined in the last two verses after the choir belted out its mostly competent version of the first verse. Hymns alternated with prayers and a short speech by the archbishop. The concert ended with the triumphant "Raise up the door, open the gate wide". 

The new apprentice from the mailing room bumped into Annegret's book cart just as the choir started the second verse, and so she glared at him and briefly looked away from the choir. The screams brought her back. Herr Steinle was no longer standing on the staircase, and everyone was peering down toward the entrance. 

"He fainted and fell over the banister," Frau Grob said. "Whoever is responsible for first aid on the ground floor, go and see if Herr Steinle is injured." 

By this time, however, Klaus the doorman was calling for an ambulance and the concert had come to a chaotic end. Annegret pushed her way through the crowd over to the railing. She saw an emergency doctor come through the door with two paramedics. They ran over to Herr Steinle and kneeled while the doctor examined him. The doctor stood up and took out his cell phone. Annegret heard him calling the police. "I'm calling to report a death with unexplained causes. You need to send detectives," he said. 

Annegret abandoned her book cart and ran down the flights of stairs, but she couldn't push her way through the crowd to get to the entrance area. The paramedics stood around the stretcher and the emergency doctor was blocking all access to Herr Steinle's presumably dead body. The archbishop, a still youthful and athletic forty-something, had run down the east staircase faster than anyone else and was talking to the doctor. 

Archbishop Zahlten then moved to the center of the entrance square and said in his famously sonorous and quite audible speaking voice, "Herr Steinle is dead. The police will need to talk to all of you, especially the members of the choir. Please remain where you are." 

Annegret didn't know what to do. She should have stayed next to her book cart, but here she was, down on the ground floor watching the police officers enter the building. It was all so confusing. The building was more than a hundred years old and no one had ever fallen over the banister before. 

True, the German workplace safety board had officially complained about the banisters being too low, but since the staircase stood under monument protection, no one could force the chancery office to add any ugly, protective railings. However, the employees' council had been demanding some change for years. Annegret could remember talking to Herr Steinle about precisely this issue last summer. 

Now what was she to do? She had books to deliver, but the archbishop said everyone had to stay in place. She looked up and saw that the staircases were empty except for Frau Grob who was staring down at the entrance with what looked like a satisfied smirk on her face. 

END OF EXCERPT