by Ronan Frost
The wrought-iron gates were the first indication they had that they were in the right place. The intricate latticework of iron formed three spheres that seemed to be surrounded by an aura of flame. The metal rendering was delicate and precise. He’d seen the image before, hidden within the forged painting he’d rescued from the dealer’s studio.
He said as much.
“The three spheres represent Jing, the body essence, Chi, life force, and Shen, spiritual force, in the teachings of Taoism. They can also be thought of as embodiments of compassion, frugality, and humility.”
“I’m not going to ask how you know this stuff, Vic. You are an enigma, my friend. Instead I’ll ask, do you ever get the feeling that you are in way over your head?”
“Every day,” the big man said with a wry smile. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The gates were closed.
There was no sign of any intercom or gatehouse.
Rye got out of the car to try the gate; it was locked, and no amount of rattling would open it up.
He noticed a surveillance camera mounted on the wall. It watched him intently, though if anyone was watching it on the other side of the feed it was impossible to say. He waved at the lens, trying to draw someone’s attention in the hopes that his dance would be greeted by a deep resonating click as the magnetic lock disengaged.
No such luck.
He went back to the car, but didn’t get in. Vic wound down his window. “I’m going over the wall. If I can open up from the other side, I’ll let you in, otherwise I’ll head up to the main house and see if there’s a way to trigger the mechanism from up there.”
Vic killed the engine and sat back, waiting while Rye walked the line of the wall looking for the best way over. Even with the glass-lined top, the eight-foot wall presented little challenge for a man of his particular skill set. He took off his jacket and used it to cover an area of broken glass, then used one of the yew trees to brace himself and climb up to an overhanging branch. Thirty seconds later he dropped down on the other side of the wall and reached up to retrieve his jacket. It was as easy as that. He walked back to the gate, looking for something to release it. There was a panel set into the stone beside the gatepost. One of the buttons was worn smooth. Taking an educated guess, he pressed it a couple of times, and a moment later the huge gate began to open inward.
Vic started up the engine and drove slowly into Guérin’s estate.
The grounds went on and on, immaculately landscaped with miles of hedgerows and topiaries trimmed into an exotic menagerie. It was stunning and must have needed an army of gardeners to maintain. The lawns stretched as far as the eye could see, rising in gradual tiers until they reached the huge fountain before the chateau. It was imperial in its grandeur. It stank of the kind of privilege that led to a great queen proclaiming “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” He could only imagine the kind of security Guérin had in place. The driveway ran parallel to the hedge maze for two hundred yards, then curved around a crystal-blue lake with a glass butterfly house in the center. Everywhere he looked Rye saw the kind of ostentatious wealth that was out of the reach of mere mortals. Pathways wove around the lawns. Flower beds offered splashes of color to offset the thousands of shades of green. Several paths led to statues, but they were too far away for him to make out any details.
Peacocks strutted across an immaculate croquet lawn as they pulled up in front of the house. The black slate roof had seven conical towers of varying sizes, some with windows promising rooms up there, others without. On one side, away from the main building, stood a fortified tower that was attached to the main building by an elevated walkway. To the other was a chapel, though again the architectural ambition gave lie to the name; he’d seen cathedrals in poor countries that struggled to match the building’s beauty. Granite steps rose toward the huge iron-banded oak doors.
They got out of the SUV and walked toward the main house expecting someone to come out to challenge them at any moment, but no one did.
Rye looked up at the imposing house. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Vic didn’t disagree with him.
He walked up to the main door and pulled on the bell-pull to announce their arrival. The chimes resonated throughout the entire building. They waited. Still no one came to answer.
Rye moved to the side, pushing through manicured rosebushes to peer in through one of the lower windows.
It was dark inside, but he could just make out the lines of a chiaroscuro world of light and shadow. Deep within the darkness he caught a flicker of light that might have been a candle or a reflection from the sun behind him trapped in the glass.
“Ring it again,” he told Vic.
Again, he saw the flicker of light, but there was no other obvious response.
“No one’s home,” the big man said, stepping back from the door to peer up at the rows of windows.
The place didn’t feel empty, but it was hard to explain why.
“So, what do you want to do?”
“We’ve come all this way,” Rye said. “It’d be rude not to go in.”
TWENTY-ONE
Getting inside was easier said than done, even without any obvious security.
Rye walked the perimeter, looking for an uncomplicated point of entry that wouldn’t demand too much creativity on his part.
The windows on the lower floor were locked, many barred, some shuttered. He tried every door without joy. The second story was no better, and with no fairytale Rapunzel to let down her hair for him, scaling the side of the tower wasn’t a great option. Doable, probably, but there were better angles to climb if that was his only alternative.
Rye checked the chapel, not sure what to expect. The main building was round rather than rectangular, which dated it to post-Crusades. He’d read somewhere that these round chapels didn’t begin to appear until after the Templars returned from the Holy Land. The cross had been carved into the wall, alongside what appeared to be a weeping knight, both hands wrapped around the hilt of his huge greatsword, what looked to be a serpent or dragon slain at his feet. The craftsmanship that had gone into the carving was staggering. He could feel the warrior’s pain.
Rye opened the door. Inside was small and cold. A number of graves had been laid into the stone floor, the memorials in a language he couldn’t read.
He walked across the dead.
There was very little in the way of ostentation in here, no elaborate carvings in the stonework, no decorative flourishes. It was a simple place of worship. Even the altar was a single block of stone, though he noticed runnels had been carved into the flat surface which, he realized, meant that old stone had almost certainly seen sacrifices.
To one side, he saw a worn-smooth font filled with holy water, and to the other a small iron-banded oak door.
There were Bibles on every seat, which he took to mean the chapel was still in regular use. The only concession to modernity was a blackboard that appeared to display hymn numbers and Bible verses.
Vic entered the chapel behind him.
He crossed himself before the altar.
“What are you thinking?” The big man—who seemed so much bigger in the cramped confines of the medieval chapel—asked. He walked the line of small wooden pews, fingertips lingering on the backs of the seats as he passed.
The sun filtered through the stained-glass windows. A kaleidoscope of light spread out across the stones at the foot of the altar. It was beautiful and simple at the same time. There was a crack in the glass, he realized, which had caused a dark fissure to run through the center of the kaleidoscope like a crooked smile.
“I’m not sure,” Rye admitted. “Maybe there’s a passage that joins this place to the main house.”
“Not impossible,” Vic said. “The chapel almost certainly predates the chateau by a couple of hundred years by the looks of things.”
He tried the door. After some initial resistance, the iron latch lifted, and the heavy old door
groaned like it bore all the weight of the world on its rusty hinges.
Inside was dark.
Vic pulled a Maglite from his pack and lit the way.
Stone stairs led down to a vault, which contained a single stone sarcophagus. They approached it cautiously, their footsteps loud in the eerie silence. The lid of the grave bore the same detailed likeness of the weeping knight from outside the chapel. At another time it might have been interesting, but they weren’t here to rob any graves. Vic shone the light around the dank chamber picking out the mouth of a deeper darkness—a tunnel leading off in the direction of the house. The stone around the tunnel was damp with the cold. The tunnel walls weren’t constructed from bricks. Bleached skulls were stacked on top of each other, thousands upon thousands of them, to create the low arches of the catacomb. The beam of Vic’s Maglite roved across the walls and arches, only settling long enough to confirm that they were all fashioned from bones.
“Cheerful,” Rye said, not wanting to touch anything.
“We could break a window if you’d rather?” The big man nodded up in the direction of the fresh air.
“This is better,” he said, not sure who he was trying to convince, himself or Vic. “Right now, Guérin has no idea we’re onto him. The longer we can keep it that way the better. Broken glass all over the floor tips our hand.”
“This way,” Vic said, nodding his agreement. He shone the way as the bone passageway branched out into two, and then into two again. Thousands upon thousands of people had died to make this tunnel—or been stolen from the cemeteries of Paris postmortem. He didn’t ask how Vic could possibly know which tunnel to follow, he was too busy looking at what he hoped was a garter snake curling itself around an eye socket a few feet from his face. They had made their nests inside the skulls. The light drew them out.
He followed Vic through several more twists and turns, not looking back once, before they came to a stone staircase, six short steps that led up to a door.
Vic reached out for the handle.
It twisted, but the door didn’t open.
The big man put his shoulder to the door and, leveraging his weight, hit it once, twice, three times, and the wooden frame around the lock gave way.
“So much for covering our tracks,” Rye said, picking at the splinters of wood where the lock plate had come loose.
“It’s still better than a pile of glass on the floor upstairs,” Vic said. “And we’re inside, which is what counts.”
“We can only hope that Guérin doesn’t spend much time down in the servants’ quarters.”
Vic stepped through the open door. He looked back at Rye. “Coming?”
TWENTY-TWO
The door opened onto a pantry that appeared to have been stocked to survive the apocalypse.
There was all manner of canned goods, their labels faded beyond recognition, lining the shelves. He took a can down and saw the smudged numbers printed on the aluminum. Not apocalypse, Rye realized. Holocaust. Row upon row of canned goods, all decades over their Use-By Date. There was enough here to survive occupation, but of course at the time the room had been stocked that’s exactly what this little idyllic slice of France had been facing. Canning went back to the Napoleonic Wars, the process perfected not a hundred miles from where they were. Tomatoes, sardines, tuna, vegetables. Peaches, pears, and ham. The pantry was filled to bursting with all of that and more.
There was a second door that led out into the servants’ quarters below stairs, and off to the left, the kitchens, which by rights ought to have been the heart of the house.
They went through.
It was as though that one simple step had taken them back a couple of hundred years.
Nothing down here had changed in forever.
Rye looked around the kitchen. The thick patina of dust and cobwebs told their own story: no one had prepared a meal here in a very, very long time. The range, which should have been permanently warm, was ice cold. One of the far walls had a cream refrigeration unit with a weird, almost robotic head on top of it with a single temperature dial that offered no reading.
He tried a couple of the drawers, which were stocked with ivory- and bone-handled knives and other cooking utensils. The prep surface was a huge oak block deeply scored from years of cooking, stained with all sorts of juices and fats.
They moved through the kitchen, looking for the servants’ stairs that would lead into the house proper.
The place was vast.
They could have walked through the warren of passages and rooms that made up the below-stairs portion of the house for hours; there were over fifty rooms that had obviously been set aside for the full contingent of staff that a place this size needed to keep functioning smoothly. None of the beds had been slept in for years. There was a musty quality to the air that suggested the place had been mothballed, like some weird museum to a better life. There was a newspaper folded up beside one of the beds. Rye couldn’t read a word of the headlines, or anything above the fold, apart from the date, which marked the paper as over seventy years old.
Things were no less confusing—or strangely dilapidated—upstairs.
The back stairs offered a passage all the way to the top of the chateau, joining the various floors, ballrooms, and dining and reception rooms. The wealth amassed within these four walls was incredible, but that wasn’t what caught Rye’s eye. One of the great rooms had been transformed into a gallery. Several works of art hung on the walls. “Metzinger’s En Canot,” Vic said, pointing at one. “Van Gogh’s The Lovers: The Poet’s Garden IV.” He pointed out another. He shook his head as though he couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of what they’d stumbled upon. “And that one is Otto Dix’s The Trench. Incredible.”
They just looked like paintings to Rye; good paintings, sure, but aside from the Van Gogh, he didn’t recognize the artists’ names, and didn’t think any of them were incredible, but he didn’t say anything for fear of betraying his ignorance. Art wasn’t his thing. As far as he was concerned, a picture was just a picture.
“All three pieces were declared degenerate art by the Nazis and thought lost,” Vic said, continuing his commentary. “And here they are.”
“Worth a pretty penny?” Rye asked.
“Priceless.”
“Our boy Guérin gets more and more interesting by the hour,” he said.
TWENTY-THREE
They found the body in the library.
It had been a long time dead.
Much of the black skin had ruptured and shrunk away from the bones, leaving a skeleton sitting in the old leather armchair. There was no sign of putrescence. The dead man’s hair had fallen out, and the fingers clutching at the armrests had no nails. The dead man’s chin had collapsed to rest on his chest—a chest that was open to the air where the internal organs had swollen and ruptured, finally tearing the skin apart.
Despite the mess, the cause of death was obvious, even without going close to examine the corpse: a bullet to the back of the head. The hole was dime-sized in the top of his skull. Where it still clung to the corpse, the dead man’s skin was like leather, puckered and rigid, and harder than it had ever been in life.
As Vic lifted the man’s head up, Rye saw the harrowing expression that had been frozen in place. “I think we just found the real Sébastien Guérin,” Vic said, looking the dead man in the eye cavity. The seventy-year-old newspapers, the musty trapped air of a mausoleum that clung to the old house, the photographs with Guérin posed side by side with the Führer’s inner circle, all of that added to the fact the man they were chasing should have been one hundred plus, and it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to make.
“But if this is Guérin, who are we chasing?”
“Someone else,” the big man said.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Vic, but I’m seriously beginning to wonder who the fuck you people are. This shit is off the charts. I signed up to play courier, pick up a map, go home. This is a whole other level of fucked up.
”
“That it is, but in my defense, it isn’t always like this,” the man said.
He didn’t believe him. Not even for a minute.
Vic rifled the dead man’s pockets, looking for anything that might confirm his identity. He found an old leather billfold stuffed with colorful banknotes.
Rye didn’t recognize them at first.
They weren’t Euros. They were French francs, a fairly large denomination, utterly worthless now as it had been nineteen years since the franc had gone the way of the dodo. These notes were older, all dated between 1927 and 1938. There was a driver’s license, but it was so old it predated photo ID and was a single folded piece of paper on pink stock. It was Guérin’s license, dispelling any notion that the body in the chair could be anyone other than him.
Putting the cash back, Rye walked across to one of several grand bookcases lined with leather spines and gilt lettering. There were several photographs on display, but one caught his eye. It was of a monastery set high on a mountainside. It looked oriental in design, certainly not Christian in origin. The snow had slid down from the steep pitch of the roof, leaving red clay tiles exposed. The building seemed to grow out of the sharp angles of the mountainside. The monastery wasn’t the focus of the photograph. There were a dozen men in high-altitude climbing gear with guide ropes strung between them, fur-lined hoods covering most of their faces. One of the men appeared to be smoking a bone pipe, which was an incongruous detail that caught Rye’s eye. The sleeve of his thick coat bore the familiar Nazi swastika, though rather than being the stark black he was familiar with, it appeared to be two-tone with four spheres in the spaces between the arms of the swastika. One of the other men in the photograph had the silver spread-winged eagle atop the swastika on his arm.
He took the old black-and-white shot out of the frame and slipped it into his back pocket, putting the empty frame back on the shelf.
