by Rob Swigart
“Certainly, I’m at your service,” she said. She started toward the door, turned back, and added, “I want you to find whoever killed Raimond.”
Hugo’s smile was bleak.
They waited in silence for the elevator.
“Do you know what a rossignol is in French?” he asked casually when the cage doors closed and the little box had started down.
“A bird, a nightingale.”
“Yes, of course.” He turned her to face him. “But it’s something else, too.”
“What?”
“Antoine Rossignol was cryptographer to Louis XIV. He was a master at breaking codes and ciphers, of opening locked doors. Since the seventeenth century a rossignol has been what you call in English a ‘lock pick’ or ‘skeleton key.’ ”
Steve and Lisa turned toward the boulevard St. Germain as if propelled by the sound of the great green door of Foix’s apartment building clicking shut behind them.
After they passed the entrance to the rue Bernard Palissy, a man in a tan raincoat dropped into formation a few paces behind them. When they turned right on the boulevard, he followed.
At the big intersection at Odeon, Steve guided Lisa with a gentle hand on her elbow down the rue de l’École-de-Médecine toward the rue des Écoles. The follower remained twenty steps behind, looking like any member of the early lunch crowd in this popular tourist district.
Steve stopped to admire a bookstore display. “Turn slowly,” he said. “Pretend you’re interested in books. Back there, at the corner you see the man, the one in the raincoat? He’s a cliché, one of Hugo’s hounds, I’d guess.”
She nodded. “If I had any doubts I was a suspect, they’re gone now. Who else would wear an overcoat in June when everyone else carries an umbrella?”
“Except us,” Steve grinned. “Shall we lose him?”
“After lunch. I’m hungry, and if we eat he might get careless. I have a lot to think about and I can’t do it if they’re going to chase me all over the place. But do you have any money? I only have a few euros and I’m afraid my dining choices are on the side of affordability.”
“I’m a banker,” Steve answered. “And I know just the place.” They crossed the rue Saint-Jacques, and turned onto the Impasse Chartière where they were confronted by the prow of a triangular six-storey building.
“It looks like the Flatiron,” Lisa said. “Sort of.”
“That would be in New York?”
“Yes.”
“This building is older,” Steve said. “Seventeenth century.”
The entrance was framed in lush green vines. He indicated the sign by the door. “They say the Coupe-Chou, or in English literally the ‘cabbage-cutter,’ was a kind of razor. It seems that during the thirteenth century a barber nearby used to slit the throats of his clients and hand their bodies over to the butcher across the street to be made into paté. May I invite you to join me for lunch?” he added with a courtly bow.
“Charming,” she replied. “I’d be delighted.” A few drops of rain fell and their pursuer took refuge in an entrance across the street. “Well,” she added, opening the door. “He has the raincoat, so I guess he can wait outside.”
14.
The windowless chamber was large and cold and dark. A dim electric bulb hanging from a ceiling lost in shadows was a poor substitute for the smoking torches that would have been here in another age. Somewhere water dripped and ran. Chaotic echoes, footsteps, muffled voices, a burst of raucous laughter, reverberated around the room.
The man known as Rossignol was naked, a frail, worn man looking much older than his years. His white hair was disordered. His arms and ankles, with their prominent bones and thin, sagging flesh, were strapped to the thick wooden supports of a chair. His chin touched his bony chest and his eyes were closed.
His head snapped back. He looked around in confusion, straining to get up.
Inside the small circle of light the Dominican nun stood a few feet away. The glossy beads of a rosary passed rapidly between her fingers. She was staring at him.
He stared back and nodded once. From then on he ceased to struggle.
“For centuries now we have been forbidden to shed blood,” she began slowly, speaking English with overtones of East Texas. If the methodical deliberation of her words was designed to inspire dread, Rossignol gave no sign it was working.
Only her face, framed severely by white wimple, form-fitting coif and stiff white headband, was visible, the lower part arranged into a bleak smile. “This prohibition against spilling blood,” she continued, “explains why so many heretics over the years were burned at the stake. No blood flows in fire.” She leaned forward and stared into his face. The beads of her rosary flowed relentlessly. The black veil above the headband fell alongside her head. Her eyes, behind yellow-tinted glasses, were blank ovals. “The blood…,” her tongue darted between her pale lips, “…goes up in smoke.”
She leaned back with a sharp laugh and closed her eyes, as if relishing this moment.
They snapped open. “Are you familiar with the Judas Chair?” She stabbed with her crucifix at a stool with a pointed iron pyramid in place of a seat. Vague figures stirred restlessly in the gloom beyond the circle of light.
Rossignol lowered his chin to his chest in exhaustion.
“In French it is called la veille,” she continued. “I understand this means the Night Watch.” She lingered over each word. The bleak smile returned. “The accused is lowered slowly onto the point. Quite painful, as you can imagine. The accused instinctively tightens the muscles of the anus to keep the point from penetrating. The examiner can adjust the amount of body weight brought to bear, varying the amount of pain. If the accused falls asleep and the muscles relax, the result is regrettable damage. Though it sheds no blood,” she added thoughtfully. “Not on the outside, at least.”
Rossignol cleared his throat. “Historically, use of such a device is extremely doubtful,” he observed. “Even by the Inquisition.”
She barked once in what he presumed was a laugh. “We do not speak of history, we speak of the present. The Judas Chair exists; it is right there, not far away. The ropes above it are in place. The examiners are ready.”
Rossignol said nothing.
After a few moments she continued, “The disk we found in your pocket, the disk you collected from your apartment… this disk.” She produced it from a pocket in her habit and held it up. The tarnished bronze caught the dim light. “This is part of a fifteenth century enciphering device invented by Leon Battista Alberti.”
“You’re very well informed.” His tone was dry.
“We want the rest of it.” She put the disk away and resumed her rosary.
“I’m sure you do.”
“You will give it to us.”
Though his thin chest rose and fell, he said only, “I’ll give you nothing.”
She sighed. “Regrettable.” She produced a pistol from inside her habit with the same hand holding the rosary. “This is my Glock 17. I love this weapon. I know you saw what it did to the Pythos,” she stated. Her beads clicked against the metal. “We are thorough, you may be sure. This war is ending.”
“I’m sorry?” Rossignol said. “What war? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She snapped the barrel against his kneecap. Her strength was such that the bone shattered with a dull, wet sound. She ignored Rossignol’s agonized writhing. “Don’t play with me. Foix was your client. He left you instructions and you retrieved the disk. You were going to give it to someone. Our two questions are simple: was it to the girl and where is the rest of the Alberti disk? The girl’s name, by the way, is Elizabeth Sybilla Emmer, thirty-two years old, born in Chicago. She has a doctorate in Classics and works at the Sorbonne. I believe she also does archaeological research in the Egyptian desert. She and Foix are not related, so why is she his heir? I guess that’s a third question,” she added thoughtfully. “But it’s less important than the others. If she is the heir
and you were to give her the disk, then we will presume she knows where the rest of it is. Of course we will question her. If she knows anything, anything at all, she is dangerous and will be eliminated.”
She looked expectantly into Rossignol’s eyes.
So far the scene had been too preposterous to believe. He was confined in a Medieval dungeon under threat of torture by a nun. Even the smoothness with which he had been captured and sedated seemed unreal.
But now, for the first time, he felt real fear. They knew about the girl! “If the Inquisition was not supposed to spill blood,” he said with a ragged smile. “You must be planning a public burning. Of course, that’s not done any more, so I suppose it will have to look like an accident.”
This time she slammed the barrel of the Glock on the back of his hand. He felt the small bones break and shock flooded him. He bit through his lip, filling his mouth with blood, but did not cry out.
She crooned, “I thought I had made it clear that the prohibition is no longer in force. The Order has complete discretion in this matter, and has had for a very long time. Only through extreme measures have we been able to bring this matter so close to a final conclusion.”
Sweat stood out on Rossignol’s forehead, but his voice was steady. “That explains how you could shoot Raimond Foix.” It also meant they didn’t believe it was really finished. Could he find a way to convince them they had won?
The nun’s wintry smile stretched her thin, dry lips.
He said, “Since you’re going to kill me, too, why should I tell you anything?”
The smile faded. “Your choice is between a long and very painful death, or a short, merciful one. God prefers mercy, but this matter is too important to be hindered by weakness. His will must be done.”
Rossignol forced himself to smile back, feeling the blood slick on his teeth.
His defiance seemed to unsettle her, for the beads moved more rapidly through her fingers. One of the figures in the shadows stirred and detached from the others. He was a tall, thin man who stayed just outside the circle of light, examining Rossignol. After a moment he struck a match and lit a cigarette. Rossignol couldn’t see the face behind the flare of light.
After exhaling a long slow plume of smoke the man, speaking a quiet, unhurried French, said, “We have had many centuries of experience in persuasion. You know the Pythos is dead, the last of a long line; there are no successors. We have, over the centuries, killed others, many of them. There is no regret for those deaths; they were necessary. God’s creation must be protected from the satanic plague of paganism and barbarity, with sword and torch and pain, as needed. No price is too high. There really are some things man should not know, M. Rossignol, things that belong to God’s domain and the Holy Mother Church.”
His voice fell to a low, caressing purr, more ominous even than the nun’s. “Our Order,” he continued smoothly, “has nearly completed its work. With the elimination of Raimond Foix the only institution surviving from the misguided past is finished. You, and perhaps the girl, are merely loose ends, but the Order leaves nothing to chance. It is our sacred duty. Once these matters are settled, we will have fulfilled our destiny. You can only imagine our satisfaction, after all these centuries.”
He leaned into the light and Rossignol saw an older man with a gray beard. One eye drooped slightly, and his breath carried the strong smell of cigarettes, yet the face was kindly, compassionate. Furrows of concern divided his brows. “My name is Defago. I want you to remember my name for the rest of what life is left to you. We want the rest of the Alberti cipher disk, M. Rossignol.”
“You’re from Languedoc,” Rossignol said, averting his face. “A Dominican, I would guess, though out of uniform. Are you an Inquisitor? The Inquisition no longer exists.”
Defago straightened the knot of his black tie and smoothed his lapel. “Don’t play games, M. Rossignol. We are not fools. We know who you are. The Order and its predecessors have been pursuing the Pythos for sixteen centuries. Our struggle has been long, and at times seemed agonizingly slow, but the Order is patient, and now, finally, today, our patience is rewarded. All we want is the disk, and we will get it.”
“Even if you had it, you would still need the keyword,” Rossignol replied, yielding some of the pretense he didn’t know what they were talking about. “Not to mention a message to decipher.”
The friar gazed at Rossignol the way a father looks at a son who has disappointed him. “We’ll have the message, you may be sure. We’ll have everything we need. And since Charles Babbage broke the Alberti cipher in the nineteenth century, we won’t really need the keyword, will we? But we believe the cipher disk itself may be important, something about the disk itself. A simple monalphabetic substitution cipher hardly seems worth all the trouble you went to if it weren’t important. Therefore we will have it,” he continued with an air of irrefutable logic. “If it’s important to you, then it’s important to us, don’t you see? You may give us the keyword as well if you wish, but I don’t think it will be necessary as long as we have the rest of the device.”
Despite the pain in his hands and knee, and the growing chill, the banker retained his poise. “I don’t believe so.”
“Touching faith, M. Rossignol.” Defago moved beside the wheelchair and took a deep drag on his cigarette. He exhaled slowly, grinding it out on the stone floor with his shoe, and let his palm fall softly onto the nun’s shoulder. “You’ve met Sister Teresa. Say hello to M. Rossignol again, Tish.”
Instantly she slammed the barrel of the Glock on the back of his other hand. This time Rossignol grunted with pain when the bones cracked.
“As you can see,” Defago continued conversationally, “Tish was once seriously injured. She has suffered much already. Her wounds were grievous indeed. She lost a foot, an ear and much flesh. This shoulder here is metal. Each day pain burns her body. If you could see the scars! She’s torn and charred, yet in spite of this, or, perhaps, because of it, she has become our holy instrument, unshakable in her resolve and without mercy in pursuit of her mission.”
The nun reached up with her free hand to cover his. His grip tightened on her shoulder, and a fleeting expression of pain washed over her face. Instantly it turned to rapture.
Defago squeezed again. “You will save us time if you tell us what we must know.”
Rossignol pressed his lips together.
Defago nodded. Two men stepped forward, released him from the chair and roughly tied his chest and knees to ropes hanging from the distant ceiling. When he was suspended in a seated position over the Judas Chair, Defago asked, “Where is the rest of the Alberti disk?”
Blood drooled onto Rossignol’s chest, which heaved with the effort of breathing. “I don’t know,” he managed to whisper. He bent his arms but his useless hands only twitched, unable to grip the ropes. His knee was already black and grotesquely swollen.
Defago nodded. Pulleys creaked in the darkness overhead.
The cold iron point of the pyramid had barely touched his skin when Rossignol began to scream. Defago made a gesture and they raised the banker a few centimeters. His body swayed above the stool.
Gloom swam in his eyes. He saw two Defagos, two Sister Teresas. How much of this could he bear? If he confessed too soon they would not believe him. If he told them where they could find the disk they would only keep him alive until they found it and then kill him. If they discovered he had lied, they would torture him again. He had no idea if they could retrieve the real message, the one encoded with the Alberti disk, the one that Foix had hidden for Lisa. He, Antoine Rossignol, did not know where it was, but he did know it was intended for her, and that this was something he must never reveal. To confirm their suspicions would be to condemn her to death.
He was helpless, and could expect no rescue. There were no good options.
This had always been a possibility, though he had never truly believed it would happen to him any more than he believed they would really kill the Pythos. Perh
aps he had grown complacent. Only a few weeks ago Foix had told him the girl was almost ready. It seemed he had relaxed his vigilance. Now it was the end.
Despite his labored breathing he ignored the men manipulating the ropes and kept his half-closed eyes on Defago and the nun. He had to keep conscious and aware long enough to judge the right time for confession. It must not be too soon, and certainly not too late, when he really might tell them things he shouldn’t. He had to protect the girl above all other things.
Again they lowered him. The pain, limited at first, gradually grew until his vision ran with red and his arms flailed, vainly trying to seize the ropes. He began to scream, a series of staggered shrieks broken only by brief pauses to suck in more air. Screaming seemed to help, so he kept it up until his voice grew hoarse and his vision had black fringes.
The Inquisitor and the nun watched him closely. Perhaps he was imagining the ecstatic look that illuminated their faces. Was it really compassion that touched their eyes and played around their lips?
He was not a young man and his strength was limited. His hands were broken and useless, his knee a black hole of pain, his mouth was full of blood, he was cold and utterly humiliated, and with every second that passed the pain increased. He could feel the muscle begin to tear as the metal point slowly penetrated.
Almost time.
It didn’t seem possible, but the pain intensified. They raised and lowered him at unpredictable intervals and different speeds, sometimes lowering his torso, sometimes his legs, so the point worked its way deeper inside. They would give him brief moments of respite, which only increased the agony when they lowered him again.
Time!
“Please,” he moaned. “Please.”
The pain slowly receded, leaving exhaustion and growing darkness.
“Yes?” Defago crooned.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Rossignol gasped. “Please. I don’t know much, but I’ll tell you everything I can.”
