by Rob Swigart
“I see.” She bit her lower lip and brightened. “Very well, Raimond wrote Thomas’ sayings over the real message. The message was in cipher and points to the location of the real Founding Document, which the Order wants. Now they have half the disk, they’re that much closer.”
“Yes,” Alain agreed. “But they have the easy half.”
“Then why all the fuss? Why would Rossignol risk his life to get it for me? Unless there’s something else about it, something physical we don’t know about.”
Steve frowned. “Maybe, but without it there’s not much we can say.”
“No,” she agreed. “All right, then, if we had the scrambled alphabet half, and if we could reconstruct the message we could then decrypt it and recover the Founding Document.”
“Good,” Ted agreed.
“There’s a lot of if in that,” Steve said.
“We have to start somewhere,” Lisa said. She turned in her seat. “So, Alain, let me ask you, where’s the other part?”
“Honestly, I wish I knew, Miss Emmer, but I do not.”
“Any ideas? Anyone?”
They were still looking expectantly at one another when the pilot announced final approach to Le Bourget.
30.
A sedan was waiting for them outside the Apollonair hanger and they lost no time leaving the airport. When they had merged onto the highway and headed south, Lisa asked, “Where do we go now?”
“Dinner,” Steve suggested. “There’s a brasserie off the Place de la Bastille where we might get something decent this early. It’s small, obscure and discreet. We’ll be safe there.”
Alain, hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, kept his eyes straight ahead. “Don’t be too sure. Someone’s following us.”
She looked out the back, but there was a lot of traffic. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “Nothing special, anyway. Who’s following?”
Alain said, “Dark green Peugeot, Paris license, two men. It was waiting in the parking lot. Now it’s four cars back, same lane. Watch.” He swerved off the highway onto a side street. A green Peugeot followed them. Alain slowed as though lost, turned, cruised slowly, turned again. The Peugeot hung back, but remained always in the rear-view mirror.
“All right,” Lisa agreed. “What now?”
Alain swung the sedan around a semi trailer parked next to a warehouse. “Let them follow. They can’t do anything for the moment… Just a second.” Alain adjusted the mirror.
“What is it?”
“A Citroën. Either we have two tails or ours has picked up one of its own.”
He sped up the ramp to the highway. At the next exit and without further evasive maneuvering he returned to surface streets and worked his way south into the center of Paris.
Half an hour later the light began to fade. They inched toward the Place de la Bastille on the boulevard Beaumarchais. Traffic was barely moving, with much angry honking around them.
“What’s going on?” Lisa’s anxiety had been building since the airport. Something was about to happen.
Steve shook his head. “Gay Pride,” he said. “Seems a long time since this morning, but I should have remembered the parade ends at Bastille. The tail end must still be coming in and everyone’s here to greet, jeer or join.”
“We have to get off Beaumarchais,” Alain said. “Otherwise we’re going to be stuck, and if those people behind us want to do something we’ll be, as you say in English, seated ducks.”
Ted grunted. “Lisa, I think you should analyze that parchment very carefully, don’t you agree, Marianne?”
“Yes, Ted, it’s crucial. If it’s a palimpsest the Pythia must read the original text.”
“I’ll need equipment,” Lisa said. “Institut de Papyrologie is limited to ultraviolet, some chemical analysis. It’d be better if I could examine it under synchrotron radiation and that takes a high-energy physics lab.”
“There’s one at Orsay,” Ted said. “We’ll see what we can do.”
“Where?”
“University south of the city, Paris XI.”
“You have this kind of information in your head?”
Ted grinned. “I’ve read Bruno on the subject of memory.”
“I hate to interrupt,” Alain said, “but as soon as I get a chance I’m going to let you two out. We’ll try to draw them away. Join the crowd; get some dinner. Go back to the Gaîté safe house. I’ll call in the morning.”
One of their pursuers suddenly swerved into oncoming traffic and tucked back in behind them. Alain grunted and did the same, turned left down a narrow side street, turned again and slammed on the brakes. “Go!”
Steve grabbed their bag of clothes, calling, “You forgot your things!”
But Lisa was already out, her canvas bag slapping against her side. They ducked down an alley together while Alain drove away with Ted and Marianne. The other two cars followed him in quick succession.
They returned to the street and made their way toward the Place de la Bastille. The closer they got the thicker and more agitated the crowd became. “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,” Steve murmured.
“Baudelaire,” she acknowledged. “Swarming city full of dreams, indeed.”
There was a festive atmosphere, with noisemakers and music coming from the great traffic circle.
Warm evening air flowed around them. The darkening sky was dotted with puffy clouds, undersides dusted with orange. The gold-covered statue of the Genius of Liberty atop the July Column was now visible. People were dancing.
The names of Parisians who died in the revolution of 1830 engraved in gold on the column glowed. The square was clogged with trucks. The cacophony of blowing horns, bands, and flashing disco lights intensified the carnival atmosphere. It was phantasmagoric, dreamlike.
Lisa slid her hand under his arm, telling herself she did it so they wouldn’t get separated.
In spite of Steve’s reassuring presence, her uneasiness wouldn’t leave her. They were exposed and vulnerable and there was so much noise and confusion an attack might well go unnoticed. She imagined their bodies discovered the next morning by the street cleaners. She leaned into him and whispered urgently, “Let’s go somewhere quiet. It’s too open here.”
“Right.” He touched the back of her hand reassuringly.
A shock ran up her arm like small chains of lightning. For only a moment she thought it was his fingertips, and then she knew that something was about to happen. A random configuration of the individual particles around them lined up in such a way that a lane opened. Her vision widened and she saw at one time, as through the wrong end of a telescope, the nun walking toward them and the little red spot from her laser sight jittering on Steve’s forehead.
Lisa dragged Steve sideways into the turbulent sea of humanity. As it closed around them someone whirled a noisemaker and shouted words she couldn’t understand. The costumes and lights were chaotic, out of control, and all the festivity turned to nightmare. Her feet were entangled in vines. Everything moved too slowly, her foot lifting, weight falling forward, Steve toppling off balance. There were police after them, soldiers, killers. That much she knew.
But nothing happened, her other foot lifted, swung forward, fell to the pavement. Steve was right beside her. She remembered who she was, and in that moment began to doubt the nun; it was just a hallucination, a vision, a primitive fear dredged up from her unconscious. The nun couldn’t have returned from Mirepoix so quickly, could she?
Trucks blocked them, as they had early that morning in another part of the city, a lifetime ago. The thought that she couldn’t possibly be the Pythia arose like a wave and fell back again. She was running for her life from a nun who wanted to assassinate her! It was ridiculous.
And undignified! She patted the side of a truck with both hands, as if a secret door would open and let them through. They pushed their way alongside, past the cab, another truck, a school bus.
The troubled feeling left from her momentary p
anic wouldn’t leave, though. Something was going to happen. Something bad.
She’d felt the same way early this morning outside Steve’s apartment long before she had even met him. She kept looking over her shoulder.
“Wait,” he shouted over the hubbub.
“What?” Her voice sounded like it was under water. “What?”
“Quebec,” he called.
She was standing beside a large painted fleur-de-lys.
“Henri!” Steve called.
A head appeared over the side. “Ah, mon vieux! Come up.”
Steve gestured acceptance. Hands reached down and lifted them.
They were in a nest of oddities. Two women in identical white ties and tails nodded. One mouthed, “Bienvenue,” and smiled. Someone clapped Lisa on the back. She turned and it was a woman with a five o’clock shadow. A tall man in a stovepipe hat and patches of whiskers on the points of his cheekbones nodded gravely and raised a champagne glass.
She looked down. The small red circle was dancing again, this time on her own chest.
Steve lunged, knocked her sideways, suddenly twitched. A startled look passed over his face and the movement turned into a fall. Blood sprang through the back of his shirt near the armpit. He dragged Lisa down with him.
Henri leaned over them. “What happened?”
“He’s been shot,” Lisa said. “They shot him.”
“Homophobes?” Henri pressed his palm against the wound.
“Dominicans,” Lisa answered, but Henri didn’t hear.
Steve struggled to sit up. “I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not.” Henri held him down. The Canadians crowded around them, men and women and everything in between. Only a small patch of darkening sky showed overhead. Lisa saw feathers, helmets, painted faces, and heard people shouting for the police, though the shouts were lost in the general hubbub.
The bed of the truck became an instant medical clinic. Two or three people squatted around them, watching Henri cut Steve’s shirt open. Someone handed him bandages from a first aid kit.
It was the first time Lisa had seen Steve without a shirt. Was it the sight of his skin or the tiny dark circle on his back just below the armpit oozing blood that startled her?
“Entered next to the scapula and just grazed a rib,” Henri murmured. “Exit wound in front. Is anyone else hurt?” A dark bruised line joined the entry hole to the exit. Henri’s hands moving with practiced ease.
Someone said, “Everyone seems fine.”
“Find the bullet,” Steve whispered to Lisa. “Keep it away from the police. Now that you’re the Pythia….”
“I understand.” She squeezed his hand. “Don’t talk.”
The doctor bent back to his task, pressing the tape down firmly. Steve’s breath hissed. When he finished he looked up again. “We’ll probably find the bullet down here on the floor somewhere.” He told Lisa, “It’s not serious, but he’ll need to rest for a day or two.”
She glanced up from her covert search for a telltale hole in the wood. “That won’t be easy. We’re in the back of a truck in the middle of a parade.”
The shouting and music were diminishing, gradually replaced by the sounds of truck engines starting up. “Where are we going?” she asked as they jolted into motion.
“Parade’s over.” Henri said. “We go back to Montparnasse.”
She considered. “If you let us off where we saw you this morning I can take him somewhere safe.”
“What if we’re followed? It might be better to take you home, just in case.”
“It’s better you don’t know where we’re going. Believe me, you don’t want to be involved any more than you already are.”
Henri shrugged. “Suit yourself. We’ll provide some diversion.”
“How about some dinner?” Steve asked weakly, lifting his head. The July Column and the modern curved façade of the Opera House flowed around and back.
“Hush,” Lisa whispered in his ear. “I’ll fix you something when we get there.”
31.
“I found the bullet,” Lisa told him after he had slept almost three hours, sprawled on the blue silk bedspread. He sat up and groaned. He managed to say, “Good.”
“Don’t move. I made soup.”
She brought him a bowl. “Frozen, of course, the magic of microwaves. Can you eat?” She fluffed pillows behind him and placed the tray across his knees. “You have a nice chest, by the way.”
“Thanks. It’s the left side that hurts and I’m right-handed, so of course I can eat. Where?” Seeing her expression he added, “Where did you find the bullet?”
She put her hand inside her bag and stuck a finger through the hole. “It would have killed me. You saved my life.” She dropped the bullet on his tray.
He looked at it curiously, a misshapen lump of metal. If there were traces of blood they were no longer visible. “Did it damage the document?”
She gaped. “That’s the first thing you think? You’re too much, Étienne Viginaire, altogether. It was next to the envelope, and no, no damage. The science of ballistics.”
“I don’t remember what happened.”
“Your friends brought us to rue de la Gaité. I didn’t give them the address, just said goodbye. Henri was terrific. He gave you a shot of something. He also gave me his phone number, just in case.”
“He wants a date.” Steve winked. “I’m kidding. I feel no pain, not much, anyway, so I guess whatever he gave me worked. Then what?”
“You could walk. We all got off the truck. Your friends acted drunk and festive, dancing in the streets and singing so we had good cover, believe me, a terrific diversion. Perhaps we were lucky, but here we are.”
“How’d we get inside?”
She gave him a brief smile. “I have a good memory, Steve. I watched you enter the code the other night. The key was in your pocket. You really don’t remember me getting it out of your pocket? You seemed to enjoy it.”
“No. I wish I did remember.” His grin was a little painful.
“Well, you did act drunk. I assumed it was the drugs. Anyway, I barely got you on the bed before you were out.”
He nodded. “The soup’s good. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, of course.” She pressed her lips together. “How could that nun get back from Mirepoix and find us at Place de la Bastille so quickly?”
He tried a shrug and winced. “Scheduled flight back from Toulouse, probably. One of the people following us from Le Bourget was theirs. It’s beginning to piss me off, the way they’re always ahead of us.”
“Piss you off? For a Canadian your slang is awfully American.”
“I’m Quebecois. We like American slang.”
She gave him two aspirin and he fell back with a sigh. Soon he was lying on his right side, snoring lightly. The bandage wrapped around him from nipple to spine. She stood over him for several minutes, watching his chest rise and fall. His legs stirred and he rolled onto his back. An artery pulsed in his neck. She pulled up the blanket and carried the tray into the living room.
Here inside the safe house there was no sense of time, though the clock said it was well after midnight. It suited her, the isolation and the silence. She had much to consider.
What did it mean, really, that she was the Pythia? She knew the history of the Delphic oracle, of course, up to its end in 392. It was a long and at times distinguished history. The oracle had played a role in some of the most important turning points in the ancient world, above all the war with the Persians, and it had answered thousands of supplicants who came, made an offering, and asked mundane questions about marriages, business proposals, harvests, missing people.
The answers were often straightforward, but sometimes they were ambiguous, and could be interpreted more than one way. Was that the oracle’s secret, to give unclear responses? “Cross the Halys River and a great empire will be destroyed,” it told King Croesus. He thought he understood and launched his pre-emptive invasion of
Persia. The great empire destroyed turned out to be his. He couldn’t complain; the answer was true, it was his interpretation that was wrong. A little more thought and he might have understood this.
He was one of the lucky ones. He was wise enough to understand at last, and ended his days as an adviser to the Persian king who had defeated him.
Could she possibly give answers like that, answers that were both ambiguous and true, and satisfied the client?
She made a cup of espresso and sat on the couch.
Was someone going to ask her a question about the future? When? How could she possibly respond? She knew nothing about the future, how to forecast it, what to say.
The Pythia induced trance to become a conduit for the god. To this end she might have ingested drugs, chewed laurel leaves, or inhaled ethylene gas, but no one had ever figured out what drug it could have been. Besides, she didn’t believe in Apollo or any other supernatural being.
It had to be something else. All those professionals, the people who collected information and analyzed it, they supported the oracle. It was a genre, a form of speech, of persuasion. The agenda had always been to influence events in a way that maintained balance. It never took sides. It told the truth.
How did it know the truth in such a subtle way?
She leaned her head on the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling. Spots illuminated the room. They looked like giant stars. She closed her eyes. It was impossible. She knew nothing about intelligence, about gathering information and analyzing it.
Yet Raimond had left her a clear message: Faith. Know thyself.
He had trained her. Many times during the years of their association he had put her in a dark room, given her something, forced her to go into her fugue state. Many times she had awakened in a different place and days had gone by. He was always there, smiling at her. “Very good,” he would say. “That was very good. You’re learning control.”
