by Jon Steele
“Good evening, sir.”
“Sit down, Mr. Harper, we’ll begin the debrief in a moment,” the inspector said without looking up.
Sergeant Gauer eyeballed the empty chair across from the inspector. Harper took the hint and sat down. In the chair next to him were his overcoat and sports coat. Neatly folded. Interesting, Harper thought, how he kept losing the bloody things and they always found their way back to him. Harper looked at Sergeant Gauer.
“Where did you find those?”
“In an abandoned van off Avenue de la Grande Armée.”
“Astruc’s?”
“Affirmative.”
Meaning: Not only have we been tracking you since Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Mr. Harper, but we knew what Astruc was up to and let you walk into a trap, anyway.
“Right.”
Harper sat down.
Sergeant Gauer took a position directly behind him, made like Mutt and Jeff with his own moleskin. Sitting comfortably, listening to the sound of pens on paper, Harper caught a whiff of something dead. Took him a second to realize it was coming from his own clothes. He recalled why, felt sick again. He looked at the inspector.
“Couldn’t this wait till I get cleaned up?”
“It cannot. We’re on something of a tight schedule.”
“A schedule?”
Silence. Meaning: Just sit there and wait to find out.
Harper did . . . for twenty seconds. Shit.
“Whose place is this?”
The inspector looked up from the file.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Whose. Place. Is. This?”
The inspector didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Just then an elderly gent in a rumpled tweed suit, briar pipe anchored between his teeth and leaving a trail of Bergerac tobacco smoke in his path, stepped through the open door. The gent looked familiar, like the file on the table. Ditto on that queasy feeling. For some reason, Harper looked at the man’s shoes. Wingtips, scuffed, heel-worn. And at his well-worn heels came the three tramps who’d helped rescue Harper from the cavern. The elderly chap took the Chesterfield chair at the head of the table.
Harper noticed the tramps had swapped their submachine guns for more discreet lumps of heavy metal under their coats. They positioned themselves in a triangle around the elderly chap, each one standing with their hands belt-high, fingertips touching. Standard protocol for close protection. Made it easy to crouch into a firing stance, reach inside the coat to rip heavy metal from holsters and fill the room with lead, all within one-point-five seconds. At the same moment, Mutt, Jeff, and Sergeant Gauer closed their moleskins, slipped them into the pockets of their raincoats, and adopted the same stance.
Terrific, Harper thought. Someone sneezes, everyone ends up dead.
It was the elderly chap who broke the standoff.
“I hope you are feeling somewhat better, monsieur, after your ordeal in the cavern.”
“Tip-top. Thanks for asking,” Harper said. He turned to Inspector Gobet. “Who the hell is this?”
The inspector’s tone was sharp: “Focus, Mr. Harper.”
The elderly gent raised his hand to show no offense had been taken. “Ça vous dérange si je lui pose quelques questions, Inspecteur?”
The inspector nodded. “Voluntiers.”
The elderly gent looked at Harper.
“I have been told by Inspector Gobet that if I speak my name to you, it will . . . Comment dites-on, ça va provoquer une vision?”
Harper looked at the inspector, caught the command: Answer the bloody question, Mr. Harper.
“An imagination in time,” Harper said after long seconds.
“Oui, an imagination that carries you to the point in time where we met.”
Harper scanned the gent’s eyes, the eyes of the tramps. More than clean, they were human. He looked at the inspector again, this time wondering why the mechanics of imagination and flashing through timelines were being revealed to them. The inspector glared: Get on with it, Mr. Harper.
Harper looked at the elderly gent.
“My name is Bruno Silvestre, special investigating judge for . . .”
Fragments of disordered time tumbled through Harper’s eyes at the speed of light. The same elderly gent sitting at a desk in a sealed office, gold emblem on the wall. Scottish thistle, the words “Brigade Criminelle” curving above it. Got it.
“Bedroom slippers,” Harper said.
“Pardonnez-moi?”
“You were wearing bedroom slippers when we first met. At the cop shop on Quai des Orfèvres, the night of the attack on Paris.”
“Oui, c’est moi.”
Harper leaned across the table.
“Then that makes you the fucking clown who sent me to La Santé Prison for enhanced interrogation, doesn’t it?”
“Control yourself, Mr. Harper,” the inspector said.
“That was done at the order of the French president,” the judge said. “In fact, monsieur, I was doing all I could to help you and protect you from harm.”
“Is that right?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Well, cheers, gov, and fuck you very much.”
“Mr. Harper!” the inspector said.
Harper kept at it. “You’re the one they deleted from my timeline, but I know you’re the fucker who planted the memory of a dead man in my head, aren’t you?”
“C’est vrai, but—”
“Why? Why did you fucking do it?”
“Mr. Harper!”
“As I said, monsieur, it was the only way I could—”
Harper knocked aside a lamp, lunged at the judge. “Fucker!”
The tramps had their guns out and pointed at Harper. Only thing that kept lead from flying was Sergeant Gauer throwing a neck lock around Harper and pulling him back to his chair.
“Let go! Sod off, the lot of you!”
The inspector slammed his fist on the table: bang.
“Mr. Harper, that will be quite enough!”
The beveled glass doors of the bookcases rattled.
Quiet.
The inspector addressed Harper with the tone of a schoolmaster.
“Another outburst like that and I’ll have you back in the tank so fast, you won’t know up from down. And you can spend the rest of your days trying to claw your way out of your form, seeing as it worked so well for you the last time. Do you read me?”
Harper knew he was trapped in a bad joke, but he couldn’t remember the bloody punch line. His eyes locked on the file on the table. The blue ribbon, the thin, yellowed paper with handwritten script. He flashed back to Brigade Criminelle, saw the judge reading from the same goddamn file: Your name is Jay Michael Harper . . . And he heard the dead man in his head: Please, help me . . . Then came a rush of icy panic.
“Oh fuck.”
He backed away from the table, curled over, and vomited onto the carpet. He gasped, breathing the stench of death and vomit, retched again. He squeezed his arms against his sides to hold in his guts.
“Bloody hell.”
“Ici, monsieur.”
It was Sergeant Gauer, portable oxygen tank and respirator in his hands.
“Respirez quatre fois. Tu te sentiras mieux.”
Harper wanted to tell him to bugger off, but there was a craving . . . a need for something, anything. He let Gauer set the respirator over his nose and mouth. He breathed four times, stared at patterns woven into the carpet. Seventeenth century, Ardistan from Kashkan province. Strange, he thought, the things one flashes after two and a half million years of hiding among men. Sergeant Gauer pulled away the respirator, handed a handkerchief to Harper. Harper took it, straightened up, wiped his face. Gauer dropped an upended wastebasket over the mess to kill the odor.
“Sorry about your carpet.”
>
“It is not my carpet, monsieur. And this is not my place, monsieur,” the judge said.
“Whose is it?”
“Christophe Astruc.”
“Astruc.”
“Oui, monsieur. This was his cachette, his hiding place for many years. We discovered it the night of the attack on Paris.”
Harper scanned the bookcases. He didn’t notice it coming in, but there were no books behind the beveled glass doors. Just files, like the one on the table. Thousands of them, all bound with blue ribbons.
“What the hell are these files?”
“The files are you, Mr. Harper,” the inspector said. “Or rather, a search for you throughout history. Myths, legends, religious texts.”
Harper pointed to the file on the table. “And that one?”
“This? This is the mother lode. Every apparition you have made for the last eight hundred years as compiled by one Christophe Astruc. It appears you were, for lack of a better phrase, his obsession.”
Harper picked up something in the inspector’s voice.
“What are you getting at, Inspector?”
“Mr. Harper, let me bring you up to speed. Monsieur Silvestre, the judge, is indeed a member of the French Police. He is also, secretly, the deputy leader of a partisan cell in support of our kind. A sleeper cell, as it were.”
Harper looked at the judge, then the inspector. “So, the two of you are all old pals then.”
“On the contrary, it was only since the Paris operation that I became aware of the judge, this cell, and the cavern.”
Harper gave it five seconds.
“Bull. Every partisan cell in Europe is under your command.”
“You may recall, Mr. Harper, I had no knowledge of the cavern beneath Lausanne Cathedral or what was down there until you found it and revealed it to us. Given your work in this case, I’d say you have a talent for such things.”
Harper thought about it. Maybe he did have a talent for such things, just as the inspector had a talent for leading him down the garden path.
“Then how did you two meet?”
“When you did not emerge from the police cordon around the Manon, we assumed you had been arrested. Knowing you would never divulge your identity, I circulated an all-ports warning with the French Police for one Jay Harper, wanted on suspicion of felony burglary in Lausanne and suspected of hiding in Paris. If the APW wasn’t answered, it would be logical to assume that you had gone to ground and were waiting for us to find you.”
“But if someone responded?”
The inspector nodded. “I would know you were being held by someone who not only knew who you were, but what you were. This was confirmed two days later when I was contacted by the judge. He was most forthcoming with your situation and offered guidance as to how we might accelerate the glacial process that is the French judicial system. Most helpfully, he provided us with the exact coordinates of where you were being held within the two-meter thick walls of La Santé Prison, making it possible for us to pull you out with just enough time left over for a cleanup crew to lay down the trail of rather mysterious escape. Well, you know how things are in police work; interesting cases are discussed, information is exchanged. In particular, the judge asked if I could offer assistance in checking out someone who had been spotted prowling around the tunnels and quarries under Paris, asking questions of cataphiles.”
“Him . . . the priest, Astruc.”
The inspector considered Harper’s words.
“How did you know he was a priest?”
“He told me. No, I figured it out, after the cover you fed him blew up in my face.”
“Your cover?”
“You told him I was a priest, associated with—”
“The Vatican?” the judge said.
Harper stared at the two of them.
“That’s right. You built me up as being the personal representative of the Pope to investigate the cavern and to protect Gilles Lambert from evil. Tall order, gents, especially when the target was a priest in the first place. He saw me coming from a mile off.”
The inspector shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“In fact, your cover was that you were a professor of ancient languages from Lausanne University, nothing more.”
“Sorry?”
The judge turned to one of the tramps. “Le photo, s’il vous plaît.”
The tramp reached into his jacket, pulled out a three-by-five photo, handed it over. The judge lay it on the table. Harper looked at it. Group shot. Young men in two rows, standing in St. Peter’s Square, all of them wearing black and white robes. A yellow circle had been drawn around one of the men in the back row.
“Who’s this?” Harper said.
“Father Christophe Astruc, OP. On the day of his ordination at the age of twenty-four.”
Harper looked at the photo again. The highlighted priest was tall. He was also blond, freshly scrubbed, and skinny.
“When was this taken?”
“Thirty-seven years ago. Is this the man you met at Saint-Germain-des-Prés?”
Harper gave the photo one more scan.
“Maybe, maybe not. The man I met was muscular, his face looked like it’d been through a meat grinder. And he couldn’t be more than midforties. If you’ve got your dates right, Father Astruc would be in his sixties.”
“Did you see a cross?”
“A cross?”
“Of any kind?”
Harper flashed through the night.
“No, but I wouldn’t have expected to.”
“Why not?”
“Because the priest I met had a bloody machine gun. And he handled it like someone who had knowledge of weapons and tactics. And I watched him kill an innocent man.”
“But he told you his name was Astruc, and that he was a priest.”
“He admitted it when I called him on it.”
“Could he have been pretending to be a priest?” the judge said.
Harper flashed Astruc reciting the Our Father in French.
“No, he was telling me the truth.”
“And you know this because?”
“Because I heard it in the sound of his voice.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s the way we do things, gov, like imagining our way through time.”
The judge pointed to the photograph.
“This is the only surviving picture of Christophe Astruc. We know he was an orphan, raised by the Catholic Church, and later ordained into the Dominican Order. He was considered brilliant, and something of a protégé in the field of apocalyptic studies.”
“End-times, you mean. Armageddon and the like.”
“Non. His work was closer to the true definition of the word apocalypsis.”
Harper ran the word: Greek, root words apo and kalyptein. Meaning: to uncover something that is hidden. Harper wondered if now would be a good time to mention the something hidden Father Astruc—or whoever the fuck he was—had uncovered in the cavern two hundred plus meters below Paris. Not yet, boyo.
“And?”
“Given his specialty, Father Astruc was assigned a research position within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican.”
“Hang on, Astruc told Lambert I did the same damn thing.”
“Are you familiar with this office, monsieur?” the judge said.
Harper scanned the History Channel. Landed on an episode called Inside the Vatican.
“Enough to know it’s responsible for safeguarding the faith and morals of the Church and that it reports directly to the Pope. Had a rough go of it lately when it was discovered the same office responsible for Catholic morality was covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests. Has something of an even worse past, though. It was first known as the Office of the Holy Inquisition
. Famous for burning witches and heretics at the stake in the sixteenth century, but its work actually began in the mid-thirteenth century with the extinction of the Cathars of southern France.”
The judge bowed his head a moment, his lips trembling. If Harper didn’t know better he’d say the man was praying.
“Indeed, monsieur. It is one of the darkest passages in the history of the Catholic Church. More than five hundred thousand human beings were slaughtered in the most horrific and unimaginable ways, all in the name of Christ.”
Harper stared at him, seeing the mournful look in the gent’s eyes. Words ran through Harper’s brain: Oh, ever thus, from childhood’s hour. He wondered where he’d heard the line. No idea.
“What was Astruc doing for the Church, the last you know?” he said.
“He had been asked to research those events in preparation of a Statement of Responsibility to be delivered during the millennium year by Pope John Paul II. It was the wish of the Pope to ask forgiveness for the millions of innocents who suffered and died at the hands of the Church. He was given complete access to the Vatican Library as well as the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum, the private archives of the popes. His research led him to the Archdiocese of Toulouse, the seat of the Inquisition. He made many trips there, from his days as a seminarian.”
Harper added it up.
“He was feeding me his own history. Why the hell would he do that?”
“Why, indeed,” Inspector Gobet said.
Harper stared at the inspector, waiting for an answer. It didn’t come.
“So what happened to him?”
“He was defrocked by Pope John Paul II sixteen years ago.”
“Why?”
“Murder.”
Harper thought about it.
“That’s some career change. Why the hell is he still on the streets?”
The judge picked up the story.
“When the Toulouse police went to arrest Father Astruc, he had already disappeared. Two and a half years later, a man described as very large with wounds on his face and calling himself Father Christophe Astruc arrived at an orphanage outside Toulouse. He demanded that a certain twelve-year-old boy be released to him, as if the boy were a prisoner. When the staff refused, the man pulled a pistol and proceeded to kidnap the boy. There were no security cameras to record the kidnapping, and the police assumed the discrepancy in descriptions of the kidnapper to be related to the stress of the moment. It was also noted by the staff that the boy did not resist being taken and acted as if he recognized the man. He was heard addressing the man as ‘Father.’”
