The Cathar Secret: A Lang Reilly Thriller

by Gregg Loomis

  Instead, he said, "That will suffice for the moment. There is one more request."

  "Anything I may do for the Holy Father."

  "I want someone keeping watch on this child."

  "Watch? As in spying?"

  "Call it what you will. It is important to be aware of any effort to spread this heresy."

  "And just how long do you want me spying?"

  "Until I have one of our own people in place."

  Steinmann stared at the phone for several seconds after he had returned it to its cradle. Reincarnation, a myth accepted by fools! At least that was the Church's position. Few, even in the Church itself, understood the potential damage the belief could do, where it could lead.

  That was a secret as old as the Church itself.

  Steinmann intended to see it stayed just that way: a secret.

  CHAPTER 27

  480 Lafayette Drive

  The Same Day

  Monday Morning

  PAIGE AND WYNTON HAD AGREED TO preserve as much normalcy as possible despite the media encamped in front of their home. The Atlanta Police had done nothing to follow up on the threat of towing the TV stations' trucks despite repeated complaints from neighbors. Property rights had, however, been observed, the various news personalities kept their vigil from the sidewalk. Had they slept in the trucks? The vehicles must have airline-type bathroom facilities on board. Peering from behind closed curtains, Paige had watched Wynton ease his car out of the drive and through a collection of reporters slightly smaller than yesterday's if no less aggressive. She was not looking forward to facing them when she took Wynn-Three to St. Philip's.

  She had just gotten him into his ski jacket when her cell phone beeped.

  Without looking at the number display, she flipped it open.

  "Hello?"

  A familiar voice. "Paige, it's Marcie."

  "Marcie!"

  The audacity of the woman to call after the problems she had caused struck Paige temporarily dumb, a silence Marcie misattributed to pleasant surprise.

  "I wonder if I can come by and chat with you and Wynn-Three."

  "For what this time, an article in People magazine?"

  "Well, I suppose that's possible, but I . . ."

  "Listen, Marcie," Paige growled, "you apparently didn't hear what I said when you brought my child back from that crackpot hypnotist: if I ever see you anywhere near Wynn-Three again . . ."

  This time the silence was on Marcie's end of the line. Then, "Look out of your window, Paige. You and Wynn-Three are famous. Isn't that what you really wanted, a persona of your own rather than just being Wynton's wife? How many housewives would jump at the chance? If we play this right, you can make the national talk shows, maybe even a book . . ."

  Paige took the phone from her ear long enough to stare at it, certain she had not heard correctly, before blurting out, "Are you out of your fucking mind? What you've done is turn our home into some sort of circus sideshow with Wynn-Three as freak-in-chief. Whatever you're getting out of this, money, a promotion, I hope risking ruining a child's life was worth it." She tried to bite her lip, but the last words escaped anyway. "You stupid bitch!"

  She did, however, manage to resist the impulse to throw the phone against the far wall as she hit the "end" key.

  "Momma mad at Marwie?"

  Paige squatted on her heels to hug her bewildered son. "Not so much mad as disappointed."

  "Dis-pointed like when I wet bed?"

  "Something like that."

  "Marwie wet bed?"

  Paige had to smile. "In a manner of speaking."

  The doorbell's ring made Paige frown. Leaving Wynn-Three in the hall, she marched to the door.

  "Get off my property or I'm calling the police," she said through the door.

  "Mrs. Charles?" came a reply muffled by the solid oak. "Department of Family and Child Services."

  A quick look through the peephole showed a black woman extending some sort of credential wallet. Her other hand held a briefcase.

  Paige unlatched the door and opened it. "I was just taking my son to nursery school. Can you come back?"

  ID still extended, the woman thrust her way across the threshold into the foyer. "We don't have the resources to make repeat visits just for convenience's sake," she said huffily. "Besides, regulations require I see the child."

  Anger and adrenaline shot through Paige's body and it was all she could do not to harangue this rude government functionary about who pays her salary and general standards of respect and etiquette. But dealing with various federal agencies and commissions as a lawyer had taught her that pissing off a bureaucrat, particularly one with any power, usually did not bring the results the client sought.

  She extended her hand. "Paige Charles."

  The woman ignored the hand, bypassing Paige and settling on Wynn-Three. She was still holding her creds, "Attrita Byron-Smith, investigator, Georgia Department of Family and Child Services."

  "Well, please come in," Paige said.

  If Attrita Bryron-Smith noted the sarcasm, she ignored it. "This the child?"

  "It would so appear, yes."

  The woman shifted her gaze to Paige for the first time. "Is it or isn't it?"

  Swell. Not only had a social worker invaded her home, Paige was going to have to deal with someone lacking a sense of humor.

  "It, he, is."

  The woman was unabashedly gawking, looking around like a potential burglar casing the place. "I'm going to want to see where he stays."

  Paige pointed. "At the head of the stairs."

  The social worker set down her briefcase, extracting a clipboard with a form on it, picked up the case, and started up. The sound of each step seemed to express anger, suspicion, and jealousy all at once. Paige guessed the woman didn't visit a lot of homes in Ansley Park.

  The social worker clumped back down a few minutes later, writing something on the form. "The child's father?"

  "What about him?"

  Attrita Byron-Smith glared at her as if she were the butt of some sort of joke Paige was making. "He stay here?"

  Paige nodded. "He lives here, yes."

  The woman checked several items on her form. "He here now?"

  Paige shook her head. "He's at work."

  Pen poised above her clipboard, the social worker frowned. "I'll need to meet him, too."

  "As I said, he's at work."

  "And as I said, we do not have sufficient personnel to suit the convenience of everyone we interview."

  Paige smiled, anticipating what was coming. "What do you suggest, that he drop what he's doing and come home now?"

  "I'm not suggesting. I'm telling you I need to talk to him. Now."

  "Tell you what: at this very moment he's trying a lawsuit in federal court downtown. Why don't you just go down to the Richard Russell Building, Judge Craig's courtroom. You tell 'em you're not in a position to convenience the judge and jury. I'm sure they'll stop the trial for you."

  It didn't take long for Attrita Byron-Smith to see the flaws of that plan. "When will he be out of court?"

  Paige tried to keep the triumphant tone out of her voice. "In about three weeks."

  The social worker knew when she was beaten. She shoved her clipboard back into her briefcase and turned for the door. "I'll be back."

  Threat or promise?

  "You got a daytime phone number, case I need to call?" Attrita Byron-Smith wanted to know.

  Paige gave her a number. "My cell. We no longer have a landline."

  "You got a pen and something to write on?"

  Paige looked around and went to a small desk in the living room, returning with one of her old business cards. "Here. I've written our number on the back."

  The social worker slipped it into her purse and, without thanks or good-bye, turned and left.

  In the meantime, several miles south, Wynton had received his own nasty surprise. His heart sank when a cluster of microphones and cameras greeted him, Glen Richardso
n, and Charlie Frisk as they stepped off the elevator. For the briefest instant, he prayed the media was there for something else, some political scandal, some widely publicized case he had been too busy to read about. It was too much to hope that the press had suddenly developed an interest in class-action litigation.

  He had just wheeled the two carts containing the files into the lobby when any other explanation disappeared like punctured bubbles.

  A man in a suit and expensive haircut shoved a mike into his face. "Mr. Charles, how long have you been aware of your son's previous life?"

  Glen Richardson stared, open-mouthed. Wynton had never seen him speechless. Frisk, with a banker's distaste for anything out of the ordinary, recoiled as though he had stepped on a snake. Indifferent, the press corps thrust more mikes and cameras in Wynton's direction and their questions came in torrents.

  "Do you or your wife have any relatives who were at Auschwitz?"

  "Anyone in your family Jewish?"

  "What are your plans for your son, Mr. Charles?"

  Not waiting for the other two men, Wynton fled to the sanctity of the courtroom, grateful Judge Craig had used the imperial powers of the federal judiciary to ban cameras and microphones.

  Richardson and Frisk made it into the otherwise empty courtroom in a dead heat. Through a window, the banker watched the newsies milling about outside the door like a great white shark held at bay by a diver's cage.

  Richardson sat down heavily next to Wynton. "What the hell was that all about?"

  Wynton was trying to think where to begin when Frisk answered from his post by the door. "You must not read your city's newspapers, Glen."

  "Why would anyone who can read above third-grade level?"

  Frisk turned to face the courtroom. "Because if you had, you'd know Wynton here is sort of a celebrity. Seems his three-year-old son recalls a previous life, is a reincarnated soul from a Nazi death camp."

  Richardson looked as if he had just swallowed something that tasted very bad. "Reincarnation? Nazi death camp?"

  Wynton was rescued, at least temporarily, by the arrival of Buddy Karp and the team of plaintiffs' lawyers. If they had read the article, they showed uncharacteristic decency in not mentioning it.

  Wynton prayed again, this time for deliverance from this reincarnation business. It was a prayer that would go unanswered.

  CHAPTER 28

  Zagstrasse 18

  Munich, Germany

  Two Days Later

  09:29 A.M. Local Time

  FRIEDRICH GRATZ FINISHED HIS COFFEE AND stood up from the small table in his tiny kitchen. He was about to wad up that day's Süddeutsche Zeitung when a small headline on one of the back pages caught his eye. He sat down again.

  Auschwitz.

  High among things about which Friedrich not only had no interest but an active aversion were stories about the camps, those places his father's generation had used to house those they considered detrimental to the Reich. As a younger man, he had accepted the camps as a particularly unattractive and uninteresting part of history. The older he got, the more he became annoyed that the subject would not slide into obscurity. It was always the Jews who would not let the matter die a natural death, the Jews who still bewailed what had happened. No matter that America's great ally, Stalin, had managed to exterminate twice as many of his own countrymen, as well as even more Jews and Gypsies, than Hitler, it was the Germans at whom the Jewish finger inevitably pointed.

  Tiresome.

  But this back-page story was different and certainly worthy of a closer reading. Among the extracts from the foreign press was one from a paper in Atlanta, Georgia. It seemed that a small boy somehow remembered being imprisoned in one of the camps as a Polish Jew named Solomon Mustawitz. The name, of course, meant nothing. The number on the Jew's arm, though, was a different matter.

  The number.

  Friedrich was almost sure he remembered it from the list left by his father, a list he had wistfully reviewed a number of times before reluctantly conceding it was probably as worthless as the artifacts with which it was stored.

  Friedrich read and reread the article before going into the single bedroom. Under his father's old uniform hanging in the back of the closet was a box, dusty and almost invisible in the dim light. Friedrich took it out of the closet and turned on the overhead light. He closed the curtains against the bleak, overcast Bavarian winter day. With fingers shaking in anticipation, he lifted the top. Beneath an old photo album lay an envelope, its once white color now stained with the spotted yellow of age. Carefully, almost reverently, he opened the flap and pulled out the list. At the top of the single sheet of paper an embossed eagle clutched a swastika in its talons above the words, Meine Ehre heißt Treu, my honor is loyalty. The symbol and motto of the SS. Below, in ink faded to a pale blue, were a list of a dozen numbers. Friedrich ran a finger down the column. He unconsciously and unintentionally stopped at the third, 14257.

  Clasping the list, he returned to the kitchen and held it next to the newspaper page.

  No doubt.

  With amazing prescience, his father prepared for the possibility of Germany losing the war and the acrimony that would follow. A list of Jews to whom he had shown some degree of kindness might inoculate him against the retribution sure to follow. Although the old man could not have foreseen the witch hunt of the so-called War Crimes trials (and had somehow escaped them), he had kept the list of numbers because, for all practical purposes, Jews shed names once they entered the camps.

  He had never really expected to ever match one of those numbers but he had fantasized what he would do. Now it was time to act.

  In the living room of the flat, he withdrew a large, thin volume, an atlas from a bookcase against the wall. A few flips of the pages confirmed that Atlanta was in the southeastern part of the United States. All Friedrich knew about the city was that the 1996 Olympics had been held there and someone had planted a bomb in a public park during the Games. He believed he had read somewhere that Lufthansa had direct flights from Munich.

  Leaving the open newspaper on the table, he returned the sheet to its place in the closet. He made sure his cell phone was charged, stuffed it into an overcoat, and went out.

  He crossed two streets that pointed like an arrow to the Münchner Freiheit U-Bahn station. Just outside the entrance, two men older than Friedrich had scraped away last night's light snow from a chessboard of large tiles embedded into the small Platz and were playing with pieces a meter and a half tall. Their faces were blurred by the steam of their breath as they taunted each other with good-natured insults.

  The cold dampness of the day had kept the park visitors to a minimum. Friedrich used a gloved hand to clear as much snow as he could from one of the benches and, while pretending to watch the chess game, he made four phone calls. Minutes later, he descended into the station, stopped to get his ticket franked, and boarded a train.

  Two stops later, he climbed up another set of stairs, careful not to slip on the melted snow that had been tracked in by the morning's commuters. He turned left on Neuhauser Strasse onto Marien Platz, past the Marien Kirche, and was soon abeam of the Neues Rathause. A huge Netherlands Gothic structure that could have been centuries old but in fact was completed in the late nineteenth century, the structure housed the Glockenspeil, a clock-driven display of figures that, at noon, marched, moved, and played musical instruments, all illustrating Bavarian history and legend. It included a pair of knights on horseback that charged each other with lowered lances. The mixture of tourists and lunching workers always applauded the victory of the rider cloaked in the blue-and-white check of Bavaria as forty-three bells pealed in concert.

  Past that and a left turn was the Hofbräuhaus, a former royal brewery. Lately it had become a tourist mecca, but the management remained loyal to its local clientele.

  Inside was a large hall. White tablecloths floated like islands in a sea of semidarkness that was hardly disturbed by weak light filtering through opaque
colored glass. It was too early for the luncheon crowd, but the bustle of waiters anticipated the kinetic energy to come. The place had the faint odor of beer and a stronger smell of meats roasting in the kitchen.

  A man in a business suit approached Friedrich. "Herr Gratz! Wie gehts?"

  "Sehr gut, danke," Friedrich replied. He explained he was meeting some old Kameraden and wanted a private room upstairs.

  He did not have to wait long. Within fifteen minutes, his four companions had joined him around the table. Their conversation stopped each time the waiter entered to deliver another round of beer or to clean out the ashtrays. Friedrich tried not to show his disgust at the stinking mound of cigarette butts. The things not only smelled bad, but cigarettes, along with the Alzheimer's disease, had killed his father.

  All five men watched the server close the door behind him before Friedrich looked around the table. "We are all in this, then?"

  Four heads nodded. "Jawohl!"

  Friedrich could not help but wonder if this was what it had been like when his father had gathered with friends from an old war no one wanted to remember. He hoped this enterprise would be more successful.

  CHAPTER 29

  McClatchey Park

  Atlanta

  February 20

  12:42 P.M.

  MCCLATCHEY PARK, ONE OF THE PARKS within Ansley Park, was about a quarter of a mile from Paige's home and well out of sight of the remaining news vultures perched on the sidewalk in front of her house. It seemed an ideal place for Wynn-Three to play after she had picked him up from St. Philip's. She did notice that one van had followed her, but its crew remained inside the vehicle while Wynn-Three played rather than shouting questions and shoving microphones in her face. Perhaps, she thought, some small fraction of the media respected their privacy.

  Paige had joined the collection of mothers and nannies on the benches next to the area where small children noisily alternated between slides and swings. Her enjoyment of the relative peace, if not quiet, was mitigated by the fact that Wynn-Three was not interacting with the other kids. Instead, he trudged between the end of the slide back to the steps to the top with an air of obligation, rather than pleasure, as though it were his assigned duty to extract his share of usage of the facilities provided.