The Letterbox

by Layton Green

  Lou nodded. “The God Path. Maybe it’s some type of code, or a clue to the map.”

  “Maybe it means what it says,” Jake answered. “Follow the path and you’ll find God.”

  Lou snorted. “Once again, back to reality.”

  “All right, people,” I said, before they started arguing again. “We need to talk with Asha and Lucius.”

  “We’ll call him tonight,” Jake said. “And in the morning, we’re finding that cemetery.”

  Asha met us for a late dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the coffee shop, the dark circles under her eyes betraying her state of mind. Jake showed her the pictures and we filled her in on what Lou and I had seen in the courtyard, as well as Jake’s suspicions about a Druid connection. She swallowed and looked away.

  After dinner we piled into the cramped but serviceable stanza di affari on the hotel’s main floor. Asha dialed, pressed the speaker button, and Mr. Sofistere’s voice crackled through the ether. I imagined him sitting in his parlor, the secrets of his mansion settled in the walls around him.

  Jake leaned in. “Lucius? Can you hear us?”

  “Perfectly. Have you discovered something new?”

  Jake filled him in on the discovery of the second portion of the map, leaving out the boy at the castle.

  Though composed as always, Mr. Sofistere’s voice betrayed traces of eagerness. “Remarkable,” he murmured. “I admit I had my doubts about the validity of the map.”

  “Looks like it’s the real deal,” Jake said.

  “Have you reached any conclusions as to the origin of the piece?”

  Jake paused. “I’m looking into the Celtic connection, including the Druids.”

  “I suppose that makes sense. I’ll be conducting research from here as well. Please leave no avenue unexplored.” No one spoke for a moment, and he said, “Is there anything else we need to discuss?”

  I stared at my hands, wondering if Mr. Sofistere would have any insight into the strange occurrences, and why I was so hesitant to ask him. My eyes roved the table. Asha looked sad and lost in thought. I noticed Jake’s eyes on her, detecting a glimmer of sympathy in his hardened gaze. Lou was half-listening and half-reading a copy of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel.

  “Nothing else,” Jake said.

  Like Asha, I knew he was keeping quiet so as not to risk being pulled from the search. Still, his words invoked a false sense of relief. Sitting in that bland conference room in a Western European hotel, surrounded by guidebooks and coffee stains, the eerie encounter at the castle and threats from white-robed figures seemed absurd.

  “Whoever is willing,” Mr. Sofistere said, “I’d like to continue. Lou, I’ll extend the daily wage we discussed.”

  Jake and Asha quickly agreed. Lou and I glanced at each other for confirmation, then voiced our assent.

  “I’m impressed with the progress. Everyone have a buona sera and remember to keep me updated.” He relayed his parting words with quiet but distracted resolve, as if speaking to himself in his parlor. “I want to know what the letterbox is.”

  -20-

  After our chat with Mr. Sofistere, Asha crawled into bed next to me. I watched her sleep and couldn’t stop thinking about her brother.

  We reconvened the next morning in the conference room. Jake drummed his fingers on the table. “I’ll keep the letterbox with me and make some phone calls. I know some people who might be able to help narrow the search—an expert in ancient burial practices, and a Celtic historian at Oxford.” He turned to Lou. “Since we have an Ogham inscription, one place to start lookin’ will be the tombs of prominent Celts. Why don’t you check out the Internet café down the street?”

  “Sure,” Lou said between mouthfuls.

  “What about Asha and me?” I asked.

  “I’m sending you two to the library for some research. Find the section on cemeteries—what’s the word for that?”

  “Cimitero,” Lou said.

  “Come again?”

  Lou rolled his eyes. “It’s a cognate. Ce-me-te-ry. Ci-mi-te-ro.”

  “You’re both clever, I’m sure you’ll manage. Look for something connected to the Celts or the Druids, maybe a picture similar to the one on the map. I know it’s a long shot. Oh, and Commie—try to look more presentable. Italians are particular about their fashion.”

  Lou looked down at his green shorts and Princeton intramural soccer T-shirt, then back up at Jake’s worn jeans and flannel shirt. “Me?” he said in disbelief. “You look like you just got pulled out of Hardees.”

  Asha stifled a laugh.

  Jake stood. “This should be a good start. If nothing turns up, we’ll reassess. Everybody straight?”

  We all nodded.

  The public library in Naples looked like a library should look. A marbled foyer branched into soothing side rooms filled with ornate bookshelves, and a broad staircase spiraled upward from the center of the room.

  As we entered, an elderly librarian put down the book he was reading and peered at us between lowered reading glasses and jungle-thick eyebrows. “Posso aiutarti?”

  “Non parliamo Italiano, signore,” I said, repeating Lou’s coaching. We don’t speak Italian.

  “Non c’e problema.” He spoke in a friendly but vacuous manner. “I speaka little bit of Inglese. You are Americani?”

  “Yes, signore.”

  “We no have’a many books in Inglese.”

  “Actually,” I said, trying to speak slowly, “we would like to see pictures. Of cemeteries. Cimitero.”

  “Cimitero?”

  “Si,” I said.

  He pointed at the door. “You go out, you do a left, and walka ten streets. Very nice cimitero.”

  Asha stepped closer. “Signore?”

  “Yes?”

  “We want books. On cemeteries. Cimiteri.”

  “Books? Di cimiteri?”

  “Yes. With pictures.”

  “Aah. Si. Come.”

  He led us to the second floor, where narrow corridors wove in and out of the overburdened shelves, most of the dusty tomes looking as if they had been printed during the Roman Empire. It was the bibliophilic version of Naples’ city streets.

  We wound our way through the shelves until the librarian stopped in the middle of an aisle. He moved his hand in a semicircle, pointing out two long rows of shelves. There were far too many books for Asha and me to look through in a day.

  “Signore?” Asha said. “Pictures?”

  “Aah! Solo pictures.”

  He moved to the far left of the area he was showing us and pointed out three shelves with oversized books.

  “Mille gracie, signore.” Asha said, smiling hugely at the librarian.

  “No, itsa mi pleasure, bella.” He ambled off and we studied the three shelves. They looked manageable.

  We pored through the tomes, searching the indexes for Italian keywords Lou had written down, perusing pictures of cemeteries, crypts, and tombs of all imaginable shapes and sizes. After an hour of searching, we found nothing other than vague references to Celtic burial mounds scattered across Europe. Next we sought out prominent Celts buried in Europe’s cemeteries, combing the indexes for references to Celtic and Druid.

  Hours later, we had nothing to show for our efforts. “This is disappointing,” Asha said.

  “I think Jake gave us the ‘let’s keep them occupied’ task.”

  We finished with the last few books, finding nothing of interest. Asha sprawled on her back and released a deep, pensive sigh.

  “Your brother?” I asked.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve got this nauseous feeling that won’t go away. I may seem calmer on the outside, but I’m trying not to go insane.”

  “I understand. I don’t know how I’d react.” I took her hand. “I think you could use a dinner at a cozy trattoria tonight. Take your mind off it.”

  “That’d be nice.” She squeezed my hand and then sat. “Let’s put these books back and grab something at the
café outside.”

  As we began to re-shelve the books, I heard a shuffling sound. I had a moment of panic, remembering the footsteps dragging through the French Quarter, then turned to find the librarian ambling up the aisle.

  “Dida you find something?”

  “No, signore,” Asha said.

  “What you looka for?”

  “This.” Asha pulled out an enlarged photo of the map. He adjusted his glasses and puzzled over the picture. “I no knowa this cimitero.”

  Asha smiled at him. “We don’t either. We’re a little lost.”

  He pointed at the shape in the center of the photo, the two upright rectangles topped by another rectangle. “But I know what this looka like.”

  The shape was so simple I hadn’t paid much attention to it. He pointed a bent finger at the photograph. “It looka like—I no know this word in Inglese.” He was quiet for a minute, trying to come up with the word. “Forgive me,” he said. “I bring dizionario.”

  He puttered off again, returning with a large English-Italian dictionary. He thumbed through it, then moved a shaky finger down the page. “Dolmen.”

  Asha and I looked at each other in confusion. Dolmen?

  Had he mispronounced the word? I checked the dictionary, Asha peering over my shoulder, but the English translation was the same: ‘dolmen.’ The definition was in Italian, so we were still lost.

  We tried to get the librarian to explain what a dolmen was, but the language barrier was too great. We thanked him and he wandered off. Not wanting to pay fifty dollars to search on our smartphones, we stepped outside to find an Internet café and saw Lou’s rotund body sauntering towards the entrance, whistling as he went.

  I flagged him down. He said neither he nor Jake had found anything useful, nor had Jake’s experts been useful. Jake sent him to see if we needed help with translation.

  “We do,” I said with an embarrassed frown, “with a word in English.”

  I filled him in, gave him the piece of paper, and he translated aloud. “Dolmen—a prehistoric stone structure typically having two upright stones and a capstone.” He looked up. “Oh. Like a megalith, or menhir.” A look of comprehension spread across his face. “Of course,” he murmured. “It’s so simple I can’t believe I missed it.”

  “I’m still missing it,” I said. Asha’s face was also scrunched in confusion.

  “Dolmen, menhir, megalith: they’re all names for ancient stones, typically gathered together and arranged in a circle or another configuration. There’re a number of them in England and other parts of Europe.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Like Stonehenge.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So?” I said.

  “Don’t you see? Stonehenge is the most famous, but the British Isles are littered with these megaliths. No one is sure who built them, but we know who later made use of them, for religious and astrological purposes.”

  “Let me guess,” Asha said. “Celts.”

  “More specific.”

  “Druids,” I said grimly, garnering a nod.

  -21-

  We hurried back to the library, planning to cross-reference cemetery with the various words for ancient stone structures, though none of us had any idea why a cemetery might be connected to a dolmen.

  We again enlisted the help of the old librarian. He was grateful when Lou spoke with him in Italian.

  “He says it’ll be hard to cross-reference something like that with the library’s outdated catalogue system,” Lou said. “There’s an employee computer in the basement we can use.”

  We followed the librarian down a set of stone steps to a drab employee area containing restrooms, a coffee maker, and a dinosaur of a computer hooked up to a gray monitor. The librarian signed on, and Asha and I crowded around Lou.

  “What is this,” Lou muttered, “a Commodore 64?” After a few moments, he leaned back in his chair. “We got a hit.”

  Halfway down the first page, one of the summaries below the search terms contained the words cemetery and dolmen right next to each other. Lou clicked on it.

  The link was a news article from a San Francisco paper entitled “Spiritism in North America.” Lou began reading from the article. “The famous French medium Allen Kardec . . . known for popularizing mediumship, reincarnation, mesmerism, and other spiritualistic practices into a uniform quasi-religion dubbed ‘spiritism’ . . . obtained a large following in Latin America, particularly Brazil, and then spread into North America . . . died suddenly in 1869 and was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery . . . the tomb is recognizable by the large dolmen that marks the entrance.”

  I whistled. “It’s promising.”

  “Except what could this Kardec person and his tomb have to do with any of this?” Asha said.

  Lou turned back to the computer. “No idea.” He typed in Kardec’s name and hundreds of search results were revealed. “Too many,” he muttered. He combined Kardec with Pere Lachaise, and a slew of pages similar to the San Francisco article popped up. Nothing new or useful.

  “Try Druid,” Asha suggested. “Kardec and Druid.”

  “Doubtful. But I’ll try.”

  We looked on in surprise as the search revealed a website containing both search terms. The site was a two-page biography of Kardec, and the interesting paragraph was halfway through the article, where Druid appeared in bold.

  Lou read aloud. “Kardec was interested in numerous spiritual practices outside the sphere of accepted Western religious beliefs, including a strong interest in reincarnation . . . dabbled in Celtic mysticism . . . Kardec believed that in one of his former lives he had lived as a Druid priest.”

  My eyes widened. “That’s our connection.”

  Lou leaned back and folded his arms. “There’s one large problem here. Kardec died in 1869. If the letterbox is over fifteen hundred years old, then his tomb in Pere Lachaise can’t possibly be the right place.”

  “Keep reading,” I murmured. My eyes had already scanned the article, and I read aloud this time. “‘The dolmen that serves as the entrance to the tomb of Mr. Kardec was supplied by an unnamed and wealthy follower of the late spiritist. The follower purchased the dolmen, along with another, smaller dolmen, from the British government. The dolmens were originally appropriated from an ancient Celtic necropolis for the construction of a highway, and the smaller dolmen is the oldest known megalith found at a burial ground. Reputedly at the bequest of Kardec,’” I emphasized the words, “‘the dolmen was placed at the entrance to his tomb to symbolize his past life as a Druid and his affinity in life and in death with the ancient Celtic religion.’”

  I looked up, a slow grin spreading across my face. “I think we might have found our cemetery.”

  Asha squeezed my arm. “An ancient Celtic burial ground with a dolmen—that’s got to be it! Wait—shouldn’t we be going to the original cemetery instead? That’s the one that would be depicted on the map.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think the dolmen that was moved to Pere Lachaise is the key. It’s the centerpiece of the map section, remember. The original cemetery was destroyed by the British government and anything that was there is lost anyway.”

  “Good point.”

  “Can someone buy something like a dolmen?” I asked her. “Wouldn’t it be put in a museum or protected?”

  “Not necessarily,” Asha said. “The government frequently sells off lesser pieces to the highest bidder if it needs the revenue and no public interest groups protest too much. I’ve no doubt a dolmen in the path of government expansion could’ve been bought by a private collector.”

  We lingered over the screen, half of the tingling running down my spine stemming from satisfaction at our discovery, half deriving from the chilling realization that we had stumbled onto yet another connection between the letterbox and the Druid high priests.

  -22-

  We returned to the hotel to find Jake sitting in the lobby, hunched over a book. Asha related everything we discovere
d in the library, and Jake leaned back in his chair. The corners of his lips were upturned, but his eyes were cold. “Get packed for Paris.”

  We called Mr. Sofistere later that evening to update him. He expressed his excitement with our find, reiterated that he would fund our search, and urged us on to France. Again, I found nothing to be overtly suspicious about, except for my gut instinct that something about Lucius Sofistere wasn’t right.

  After the call, Jake said, “The next available train for Paris leaves the day after tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t we just fly?” Lou asked.

  “I don’t fly unless I have to. I don’t trust boxes with wings.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  Although eager to see where the map would lead, no one minded taking a day to recuperate, and I carried through on my promise to take Asha to dinner. I hadn’t forgotten about Dubrovnik, but was willing to take a cautious step forward.

  After consulting the concierge, she took my hand and made me promise we wouldn’t talk about the letterbox, her brother, or anything else connected to the events of the past few weeks. We walked a block away to a quiet little trattoria, the kind where the family lived upstairs and picked their vegetables and herbs from a garden in the back.

  After two glasses of Brunello di Montalcino and an order of bruschetta fresher than the first day of spring, the waiter arrived with a huge plate of linguine con le vongole.

  I kept glancing at Asha as we ate. Her hair was drawn up, and her strapless dress was the same plum color as the wine. I had on jeans and a thin black shirt, enjoying the lingering balmy weather.

  “Naples is growing on me,” I said. “The food makes up for everything.”

  “Food is important in a relationship, don’t you think? You probably spend more time eating together than anything else.”

  “Mm. I suppose so.”

  She took a sip of wine. “I like that we always share entrees.”

  “Me, too. I eat faster than you, so I get more food out of the deal.”