Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “Is that significant?”

  She turned down her mouth. “Could be. He was a great scholar and may have sources like Oxyrhinchus that had not yet been published in the scholarly literature. New texts do still turn up from time to time, like the Archimedes manuscript a few years ago.” She let her head fall against the back of the couch and closed her eyes. “I’m so tired. Why are we going to Toulouse?”

  “Procedure,” he said softly. “I’ll explain, but right now we know that at least one person has died for this document and a platitude from Thomas doesn’t seem enough to kill for.”

  Her eyes snapped open. “It’s not!” She took the pad and pen from his hand, flipped to a new page, and began to write. “Look, if the letters before each text are there to organize it, you’d expect them to be sequential, wouldn’t you? A, B, C, D? These aren’t. The list starts with Beta, jumps to Omicron, and so on. There are even two Betas. It doesn’t make sense, either as a word or a list, unless it’s another of Raimond’s acrostics.” She showed him the letters: Β-Ο-Υ-Ρ-Β-Α-Κ-Ι. “In the Latin alphabet that would spell Bourbaki.”

  “Then it is an acrostic, and confirms it’s definitely a forgery.”

  She looked at him curiously. “We already know Raimond forged it. But why does this confirm it?”

  “Nikolas Bourbaki was one of the most famous mathematicians of the twentieth century. A little too modern for the first, wouldn’t you say?” After a pause he added, “On top of that, he didn’t really exist.”

  20.

  The earth turned, bringing darkness over the city of light, the flax fields, and the ruined abbey.

  After Captain Hugo had dismissed him, Guardian of the Peace Dupond took the number 14 Metro to the Gare St. Lazare and waited for a train to Mantes-La-Jolie. He browsed magazines at the newsstand, had a Perrier at the bar, and went without hurry to the platform. He found a seat in one of the middle cars by the window and read his copy of Paris Match. The train pulled out into the evening light. There was the promise of more rain.

  Half an hour later he descended, went through the station and waited for a bus which he took to an intersection in the countryside. There were flax fields in bloom all around but he could see only an edge revealed by the lamp at the bus stop.

  He sat down to wait.

  Twelve minutes later the van arrived. He got in the front. Defago nodded and drove on.

  Sister Teresa sat in back. She tapped Dupond on the shoulder with her gloved hand. “Well?”

  “Yes,” he answered shortly. “I’ll report to M. Lacatuchi.”

  She sat back, her lips tightly pursed.

  They arrived at the abbey. Xavier let them in and they proceeded through the ruins to the modern section.

  Lacatuchi looked up from a thick folder at the knock. “Ah,” he said with a bleak smile, closing the folder. “Come in, Brother Defago.”

  The friar dipped his head in a cursory bow. Obscurely he felt it was the most he could get away with without showing obvious disrespect. He stood aside and ushered Sister Teresa into the room.

  She looked around, taking in the opulent sofa, the enormous desk, and the pear wood coffee table with its cloisonné bowl of pistachios.

  The Prior General said, “You’ve brought your inclusa, I see.”

  “Sister Teresa, Eminence. Not enclosed at the moment, of course.”

  “I remember signing the dispensation, Brother Defago. I hope it is temporary. Soon this will all be over, yes?”

  Defago stammered. “Why, yes, your Eminence. I hope so. I mean…”

  Dupond, standing by the door, smiled.

  Lacatuchi’s gimlet eyes swiveled to the policeman. “You don’t agree?”

  “I’m sorry, Reverence, perhaps I was thinking of something else.”

  “Pray enlighten me,” the Prior General snapped.

  “Very well.” Dupond advanced to the desk. “Rossignol’s assistant, Étienne Viginaire, Canadian, thirty five, Doctorate in Economics from the University of Paris. He’s been helping the girl. This would seem normal, of course, if she’s the heir. I was assigned to follow them. They went out for lunch. Afterward they wandered around. On Mouffetard I lost them. I can’t confirm they deliberately evaded me, but suspect so. It took some effort to find where he lived, but between police resources and those of the Order, I succeeded. While it’s possible such secrecy is normal for someone in his profession, it may well mean he has something to hide. When I arrived, they were gone. A sales slip from Monoprix indicates they took some new clothing with them. I deduce they don’t plan to return. This is all in my report to Captain Hugo; I’m sure you can obtain a copy.”

  Dupond paused and looked around. Darkness pressed against the window facing the river and he could see only a washed-out reflection of the four of them. He turned back to the Rumanian. “Viginaire drives a dark green Renault Megane, the most common vehicle in Europe. He has a special permit. I was able to discover that late in the afternoon this vehicle was parked outside the Sorbonne. During that period there was an incident: a secretary at the Institut de Papyrologie fell from a window. It appears he was pushed. Hugo may think the Emmer woman and her companion were involved, but this I doubt.” He glanced at Sister Teresa and cleared his throat. “They’re looking for a nun. And a monk.”

  “Thank you, Dupond, that’s most helpful.” Lacatuchi leaned back and tented his pudgy fingers on his chest. His voice was barely audible when he continued. “Though we knew this would happen eventually, the situation has grown more complex, has it not, Defago?”

  On hearing his name, the monk flinched. “Pardon?”

  “The incident.” The Prior General leaned forward. “You didn’t mention it, Brother Defago. This would be the work of your man Cedric, would it not? Are you withholding other information? Perhaps to conceal your incompetence?”

  Defago twitched. “No, Prior General. Brother Cedric evaded pursuit. The situation was contained. I didn’t want to bother you with…”

  Lacatuchi stroked the lump on his broken nose. “Well, we anticipated the police would find out about Sister Teresa. As long as we move her carefully….” He smacked the desk with impatience. “But the girl, Defago! She was supposed to be neutralized. Now she’s disappeared and has effective and powerful assistance.” He stood and towered over the desk, leaning forward. “Dupond will help you find her, Defago. You and Sister Teresa will track her down and you will eliminate her. The Canadian, too. Do I make myself clear?”

  Defago straightened. “I’ve already taken measures.”

  “See to it.” Lacatuchi sat down and reopened the thick folder.

  Dupond led the way out of the room, followed by Defago and Sister Teresa. Her prosthetic foot fell heavily, emphasizing every other step.

  21.

  Lisa tilted her head quizzically. “Bourbaki was a famous mathematician who didn’t actually exist?”

  “Correct. He was a group.”

  She sat up, her fatigue forgotten. “Explain.”

  “There was a real person named Bourbaki, a general in the French army and the son of a hero of the Greek war of independence. He died in 1897.”

  “Not a mathematician, then?”

  “Bear with me. In 1923 a group of students in Paris put out the word that the prime minister of Poldevia was going to speak at the boulevard Montparnasse. A large crowd assembled, and a student began speaking about Poldevia’s misery and abject poverty. They passed around a hat and collected money. Then the student introduced the prime minister, who appeared in his underwear, so poor he couldn’t afford a pair of pants. It was all a great joke.”

  “What about Bourbaki?”

  “I’m getting to that. One of the students involved was a mathematician with a sense of humor. He had a friend write, as Bourbaki of Poldevia, a bogus article on the so-called ‘Bourbaki Conjecture’ for an obscure Indian math journal. The ‘Conjecture’ was no more real than its author. But later he helped found a group that wanted to revolutionize French
mathematics. And so they did, publishing many important books under the name Bourbaki. Over the next decades Bourbaki developed set theory and the New Math, among other things.”

  Lisa said thoughtfully, “Raimond, again. He’s suggesting we should be looking for a secret group of some kind.”

  Steve rolled his eyes. “Uh-oh. I hope you’re not talking about something like the Rosicrucians or the Templars.” He showed his pleasure at her laughter by grinning back.

  “No,” she said. “They’re too well known. And besides, they don’t really exist.”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked suddenly grave. “What are you saying?”

  “You can’t prove a negative.” Steve’s mock seriousness stopped her for only a moment.

  “All right, all right. For the sake of argument let’s say we’re looking for a group that doesn’t want anyone to know they exist. One would think that all secret groups would be modest and, well, secret. They wouldn’t attract attention; they’d blend in, be part of society. They’d work behind the scenes, doing… whatever they do. But like Bourbaki, it would at the same time be something in the world, something important.” She examined the papyrus again. “Gnostics, perhaps,” she muttered. “Or something else. And the Greek in the skytale, gnothi seauton. It means ‘know thyself.’ A well worn phrase, yes? Was Raimond a member of this group?” She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. “I’m hungry.”

  “Right. What we have will be canned, powdered or, more likely, frozen, but I think I can put something together.”

  Steve opened the freezer, which was full of packages from the chain of frozen food stores called Picard. He turned out to be a wizard with frozen food. Lisa could do nothing but stand idly by and watch him thaw and season.

  Soon they were sitting down to slices of a terrine of salmon with basil and suprêmes de pintade with port and mushrooms. There were even bottles of a decent Bordeaux.

  Over dessert of apple tarte Normande she asked him why this part of Paris was called Montparnasse. “Mount Parnassus is a limestone mountain behind Delphi, sacred to Apollo. How did it get here?”

  “Interesting question.” He filled her glass. “There was once a huge pile of construction debris on the southern edge of the city where Montparnasse and Raspail now meet. In the seventeenth century the students in the Latin Quarter called it Mount Parnassus, because it was white, and because they were studying Greek. It was a joke. The modern boulevard was begun in the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth the hill was just a memory, but the name stuck. A good setting for Poldevia’s prime minister to demonstrate his poverty, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I think it’s important, this connection with Montparnasse, or Mount Parnassus.”

  “Why? It’s just a name.”

  “No, it’s more than that. Raimond was a professor of Greek. He forged this papyrus in Greek. He left the name Bourbaki, a Greek, and a secret society as well.” She paused in astonishment. “That’s it! You know I said he closed the shutters on the court but left them open on the street side? He was trying to get me to think about the street.”

  Steve shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “The name, rue du Dragon, draco, drakaina, also the python Apollo killed at Delphi, under Mount Parnassus. The dragon or snake was identified with Gaia, an earth spirit, because snakes live in the earth. Perhaps her death at the hands of Apollo was a symbol of the conquest of the primitive inhabitants by the more civilized Hellenes, but the Python was a hero to the original inhabitants, and the Greeks instituted funeral games in her honor. The Pythia, the priestess of the Oracle at Delphi was named after Pytho, the Python. And puthein is Greek and means ‘to rot,’ after the rotting corpse of the snake. Or dragon.”

  “Isn’t all this a bit far-fetched?”

  “More than far-fetched, it’s ridiculous, but do you have a better idea? He did leave the street shutters open and I know he meant something by it.”

  “Are you saying we’re looking for the Delphic Oracle?”

  This time her laugh held no humor. “Of course not, the Oracle was closed by the so-called fourth law of November 8, 392 by Theodos…” She stopped.

  “What is it?”

  She began to pace restlessly, as if looking for a window, but there were no windows and she sat again. “Theodosius. The book that was out of place was a biography, Histoire de Théodose le Grand by Valentin Esprit Fléchier. Raimond wanted me to notice, to put it all together. Theodosius closed the pagan temples for good. It was the end for Delphi and all the old gods, and the final triumph of orthodox Christianity. From then on the Church ruled.” She slapped the table and made the glasses jump. “And the Hesiod! It was open around line 500. I thought it might refer to Procroft 506, but that’s not it. It was the lines themselves, the story of Kronos, who knew he would be overthrown by one of his children. To prevent this he swallowed all his children, but Gaia and Ouranos saved Zeus by substituting a stone. Zeus later forces Kronos to vomit up the stone.”

  “So?”

  “Zeus then set it into the earth at ‘goodly Pytho,’ under Parnassus, ‘to be a sign thenceforth and a marvel to mortal men.’ That stone is the Omphalos, the Navel Stone. It’s supposed to be the center of the world at Delphi. Pytho of course was the Python, the dragon Apollo defeated….” She shook her head in frustration. “But I don’t understand. It makes no sense.”

  He tried to get her to continue but she refused to say more.

  Later he said, “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Anything, something about yourself. Who are you? Why is this happening to you in particular? I’m your banker now but I’m not sure yet what I’m to do for you…”

  “You mean, besides save my life?”

  “Well, that, that was nothing. It might help if you told me more. There must be a clue in your background somewhere, something that would help explain what’s going on.”

  She told him about going to cheerleader practice, holding back only how much of a fraud she had felt then, how it was her face for the world. She told him she was at the door, and so was Raimond Foix. “It was intentional, him appearing like that out of nowhere and telling me to follow him. Why did I do it? Up until then my life had been very clear, very predictable. I could see my future to the very end. I wanted that future. We lived north of Chicago, my father was an executive in an office tower doing something mysterious with transportation, or so I thought, and my mother baked and did charity. I was following her. I had looks and was supposed to use them. That’s what I was doing, despite my prob….”

  Her expression darkened and she shook her head to clear it. “Anyway, the world was a tidy place, then, with clear rules, at least to a teenager in Chicago. But Raimond appeared and it turned out to be all too easy to change course, though my mother didn’t talk to me for another ten years, and then only to call one day to let me know my father had died.”

  They were sitting on the sofa. Steve had found a bottle of brandy, but Lisa, lost in her memories, had barely touched her glass. “I went back for the memorial service. It was in a hotel, all very well bred and decorous. Everything was exquisite, the setting, the floral display…. There must have been four or five hundred people there. They said things about my father, nice things, and they might even have been true, but I realized I had no idea who this person was they were talking about. He had been instrumental in getting some technology or other used by Homeland Security. I thought he was in transportation, but it turned out to be some kind of surveillance. He made things to spy on people, Steve. My mother was very brave, of course. Now we speak on the phone every few months. She’s busy, of course, with her charity boards. She never talks about my father. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m not sure she knew him either.”

  “What about Foix? What was he like?”

  “There’s a picture of him when he was young on his dresser at the ap
artment. He’s squinting at the camera, looking half over his shoulder. He has his hand up so it looks as if he’s telling the photographer not to take the picture, to leave him alone. You know he had blue eyes, like yours?”

  “Like yours,” Steve said.

  “Ours. Anyway the picture makes him look shy, but when you got to know him you found out he really was rather shy. But in spite of it, I never, in all the years I knew him, would have guessed he could belong to some kind of secret society. And if it’s so secret, why did he send me all these hints? What does he want from me?”

  She put her head on his shoulder, breathing softly. He turned, but her eyes were closed. She was asleep.

  22.

  They emerged at 5:36 in the morning into a watery dawn light and headed toward the Gare Montparnasse, but the Avenue du Maine was clogged with a mass of trucks parked nose to tailpipe and people of every size, color and costume.

  “What’s going on?” Lisa asked.

  A man in a bright orange wig and a navy blue suit with broad white vertical stripes shouted something. In response a crane lifted an enormous pomegranate the same color as the man’s wig above the truck bed. The object, at least three meters in diameter, lowered with a light thump. The man in the suit disconnected the cables and patted it.

  “I forgot,” Steve told her. “Gay Pride parade this afternoon. We’ll have to find a way around.”

  They walked along the floats under construction – an enormous wedding cake lathered in pink icing of plastic foam, an elaborate lavender hospital operating room with disco lights, and an Alice in Wonderland toadstool beside which the caterpillar, antennae bobbing, puffed on a cigarette while chatting with a mime. Just past a rainbow-hued school bus someone called to them from the driver’s seat of a truck, “You need to get across?”

  Steve looked up.

  “Steve?” The man jumped down. He wore a black tank top emblazoned with a stylized white kokopelli. “Steve Viginaire?” He spread his arms.