by Rob Swigart
Lacatuchi pushed the disk and pad across the desk impatiently. “Then you do it.” He walked to the window and looked at the town across the river, hands clasped tightly behind his back. A tractor moved along the opposite bank, turned away and slowly disappeared behind some buildings. The town appeared deserted, even at nine in the morning. It was Monday. This was the day the Struggle would end. It had to be the last day. He willed it so.
But doubt had crept in. He was no longer sure there was a message at all, or what language it was in. The letters had turned from nonsense to more nonsense.
The keyword Rossignol had confessed was de umbris idearum, The Shadows of Ideas, a book Bruno had written two years before Lo spaccio. Was it just a ruse, a trick Bruno was playing on them? Did it mean they were chasing shadows?
But it was true; he did lack patience. This was a failing, like his fastidiousness over torture. He swung his clasped hands hard against his buttocks. The sharp stab of residual pain from the masseur’s work revived him. The only pain he could truly appreciate was his own. He turned back to the room.
Defago’s head was bent over the disk. He turned it, wrote, turned it again.
The nun’s eyes, intently fixed on the monk, smoldered behind her yellow-tinted lenses.
Lacatuchi watched her moisten her thin lips with a pale tongue, fascinated. It probed between the lips like some kind of eyeless animal, a worm or rodent looking around blindly. It would dart sideways, right, left, and back to the center to resume its hunting movement. She seemed unaware.
Defago began to hum, working faster, turning the disk, writing a letter, turning the disk. The nun’s tongue seemed to speed up as well, as if they were psychically connected.
Finally Defago leaned back and held up the pad. “It’s Italian.” There was a strange edge in his voice.
“What does it say?” the Prior General asked, suddenly apprehensive.
“I’ll have to divide it up.” Defago began drawing strokes between the words. He put down the pen. “Yes.” He turned the pad around so Lacatuchi and the nun could read it.
The Prior General thought Defago’s smile was odd, not triumphant exactly, but something else, something unpleasant. “How did you do this?”
Defago shrugged. “Patience.”
Lacatuchi frowned at the large, widely spaced block letters and began translating in his head. Tell the king the glorious dwelling has fallen… “What is this?”
Defago’s smile widened but came nowhere near his eyes. “You recognize it, don’t you, Eminence?”
Lacatuchi looked again. Tell the king the glorious dwelling has fallen to earth, the springs that spoke are quenched and dead… “Is this a joke? Is that why you smile, Defago?” He glanced at the nun, but her eyes were still on her master, and in her eyes he saw the certainty of his own ultimate defeat.
The brother answered, “Yes, Eminence, it is most certainly the Great Heretic’s joke, perhaps the last. These words are from the final oracle, the one given to the Apostate Julian. The oracle is closed for good, looking further is a dead end. After more than four hundred years Giordano Bruno thumbs his nose at us. This disk is a fake, Eminence.”
He emphasized the title, almost aggressively impertinent, but his superior merely tugged at the bump of his broken nose, as if trying to pull something unpleasant off the skin. A vein pulsed in his temple. “I see,” he muttered. “Yes, I see. I went to Istanbul to bring back a practical joke.” He went back to the window and smacked his clasped hands against his hidden bruises over and over.
Sister Teresa exchanged looks with Defago. His eyes were hooded, secretive. Had he gone too far? Perhaps it was the Prior General who had gone too far, who was breaking apart before them?
Lacatuchi collected himself and turned back. “I forgive you this time, Brother Defago.” His voice was low and reasonable and absolutely cold.
An old memory of the bitter menace in his own father’s voice chilled Defago to the core.
“But the next time there will be no forgiveness for failure.” The Prior General added. “Bring them here, the Emmer woman and the Canadian. Take them to your workroom downstairs. Until they return to us what is rightly ours they must not be harmed. They must have the real inner disk, but more, they have the document, the cipher or whatever leads to the Founding Document, Defago. They’ve had them all along. We’ve been chasing a phantom. This time there must be no mistakes. Do whatever it takes, but do it now. I want results. Do I make myself clear?”
Defago lowered his head. A pulse tugged at his eyelid. For the moment he dared not look at the nun, his comfort and companion, his shield and sword. He dared not. And then he did look at her, and saw in the light in her eyes the same feeling of triumph he felt himself, and was lifted up again. “Yes, Eminence,” he said. His voice was steady and gave no hint of the turmoil within.
At the door Sister Teresa turned to look at the Prior General.
Had he not been looking at the river, Lacatuchi himself might have felt the first uneasy twinges of fear at the expression of profound hatred in her eyes not even her tinted glasses could soften.
38.
The only light in the optics laboratory came from a large monitor covering half the end wall. The screen was divided into four panels, each holding the image of a page in a different color: red, green, blue and natural light.
Lisa, Steve, along with Ted, Marianne, and Alain, were gathered around a technician in a white coat, watching intently. A series of filters flickered, bringing out at times a block of blurred lines, at others some faint dots, dashes, curves. Only the page in natural light clearly displayed the Greek sayings of Thomas.
The tech had a goatee and glasses. “Is that an acrostic that spells Bourbaki?” he asked, evidently able to read Greek. “He was a mathematician, wasn’t he, but a kind of hoax? Is someone playing a joke?” He looked down to tap a few keys and his lenses momentarily reflected the screen. “What’s this passage?” He pointed at one of the selections.
“It’s an Apocalypse, perhaps Thomas,” she said. “Raimond either translated from the Latin or from an original Greek text: ‘There will be great disturbance among the people, and death. The house of the Lord will fall…’ ” She paused. “That’s odd, nearly the same words as the last Delphic Oracle: ‘the glorious dwelling has fallen to earth.’ A coincidence?”
The tech’s expression was blank.
“Never mind.” She continued translating, “ ‘The altars will be abhorred and spiders will weave their webs in them. The altars will be corrupted, the priesthood polluted, agony will increase, virtue be overcome, joy perish, and gladness depart. In those days evil will abound, truth will be no more, covetousness will spread among the priests,’ and so on. The usual.”
“Oh.” He lost interest and turned to the keyboard. A large image of the page replaced the four windows. “This is the multi-spectral composite,” he said. The blurry lines almost coalesced into something like writing in a fine printed hand.
Lisa shook her head. “Not good enough. How about X ray?”
An older man leaning unnoticed against a table in the shadows at the back of the room, moved into the light, bobbing his head energetically. “I’m Dr. Sully. We’ve done this before, you know; coherent X rays make the iron in the ink fluoresce. I have great confidence we can improve the imaging.”
The platform holding the Procroft 506 began to move into a round structure like a pot bellied stove on its side. There it stopped and a door closed.
“Watch the screen,” Sully said. “This is synchrotron X ray radiation from the high energy collider ring.”
A new image formed the outline of a page with uneven edges. After a moment a dense block of neat, small letters appeared.
“I’ll need a hard copy,” Lisa said. She was exultant.
The technician nodded and tapped a key. On the far side of the room a large color printer began to hum.
Steve puzzled over the block of text on the printout. “As we thought, it’s
in cipher.”
Lisa walked to the screen and touched the letters one by one, her hand up in the light. “Look at that,” she breathed, her voice was full of admiration. “Raimond Foix, you truly were a son of a bitch!”
Steve looked at Alain, who waggled his eyebrows. Ted and Marianne joined Lisa at the screen. “Yes,” Ted said, nodding. “I see. Very interesting.”
“What?” Steve demanded.
Ted said, “There’s another message. Some of the letters are darker than the others.”
“To me it looks like a little extra ink, like the writer had just dipped the pen before writing.”
“No,” Lisa assured him. “You can see a distinct difference. Raimond wrote over these letters with a different kind of ink. That’s why they look thicker under X ray. He did that, then washed the sheet and wrote those sayings of Thomas the same way a medieval monk might have scraped a bit of vellum clean and written a prayer book over the old text. Lines of text were written at right angles so there’s a cleaner background. Raimond knew I’d find this palimpsest. He hid another message in the letters.”
She spelled them out. “C A M O N D O S T A I R.”
“That’s it?” Steve said. “What’s a Camondo Stair?”
He looked at Ted but it was Marianne who answered. “Ah, well,” she said. “This would be a place in Istanbul called the Kamondo Merdivenleri.”
Ted said fondly, “This is just the sort of thing Marianne would know.”
She shrugged. “I took a tour once, before we were married, Ted. I remember things.”
“Even the Turkish name!” Steve murmured. “So what is it?”
“The Camondo were a family of prominent Jewish bankers for the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth century in Pera, north of the Golden Horn, they built a stairway, as much a sculpture as a stair, to make it easier to get to their Bank on the street below their residence.”
“What is this, a guide book?” Steve mused.
“You have all this on a hard drive?” Lisa asked the technician.
“Of course.”
She began collecting her things. “Please erase it. Permanently. No record, nothing anyone can recover.”
“But surely we should keep it?” Sully protested. “This document must be priceless.”
“Secure erase it now,” she ordered. “There must be no record – we can run this analysis again later if we must. Even one hard copy could be too many, but for now we need this. We will destroy it if necessary.”
He started to object, then shrugged. “You’re the boss.” He nodded at the technician who pressed a key. The images vanished.
“Thank you.”
In the parking lot next to the car she asked Alain if he could arrange for the plane to take them to Istanbul.
He nodded and got in the car. They could see him making a call on his cell phone.
She handed Ted the envelope containing the Procroft manuscript, keeping only the printed copy, folded twice. “Take care of this, please. Protect it. With your life, if necessary.”
“Of course. Marianne and I will take it back to our place in… you don’t need to know where. Alain has our number.” They got in their own car and drove away.
Steve said, “Excuse me, but what exactly are we doing?”
“Whatever the Order took from Rossignol, it was a diversion. He and Raimond fooled them. And us, I’m afraid. We never needed Rossignol’s disk. The real one’s in Istanbul.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know how I know, call it a hunch, but I’m sure of it. Raimond was too clever to have exposed the original like that. He and Rossignol gave their lives to buy us time. It means you were right, we do need the complete disk to read the message.”
“So we’re going to visit this Camondo Stair?”
She was already in the car. “Are you coming?”
He shrugged and followed, only dimly aware of an almost imperceptible but deep tectonic shift in their constellation. She had taken charge.
39.
Guardian of the Peace Philippe Dupond lowered his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. Hours of watching the abbey from the concealment of this rusty tractor behind an old storage shed had gained him little. Not long before the nun and her keeper, along with their boss, had entered the office and begun working at the desk. The fat man threw something down and stood in the window, rocking onto his toes and beating himself with hands clasped behind his back. His agitation was interesting. After some time he had gone back to the desk and Defago showed him something. Then all hell broke loose: the fat man’s face had reddened and he started shouting.
Dupond wished he could hear, but he was not equipped for sound surveillance. This was regrettable, perhaps, but unavoidable. A parabolic mic was too large and clumsy and a laser mic too expensive and hard to explain. Better to stay as low-tech as possible, and glean what he could from watching. It was uncomfortable and difficult, but necessary.
No matter, he was well paid. Since he was also providing intelligence to the American Department of Homeland Security (at least that’s where he assumed his employers were from) as well as the police and Lacatuchi, he received three different paychecks. Though he feared his position with the Church might soon be compromised, the danger for the moment appeared minimal. After all, he was across the river and well concealed. Both Lacatuchi and Hugo thought he was in Paris looking for the Emmer woman.
What wasn’t clear was how long this cozy situation could last. He would have to confront Lacatuchi soon or it would be obvious he wasn’t as dedicated to the cause as the Prior General believed.
In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure what that cause was. They had kidnapped and probably killed the banker known as Rossignol. Now they wanted the girl, just as Hugo did, probably not for the same reason. What did she know or have that these people would go to such lengths to get? It had to be valuable.
To Hugo she was a murder suspect. The Americans wanted to interrogate her. Everyone wanted whatever she had. He would have to choose which party he would sell the information to first.
All this only increased her value. There could be great profit for a lowly policeman. He raised the binoculars and watched the monk and the nun leave the room.
Lacatuchi again stood at the window looking directly at him. For a brief moment Dupond thought he must have seen him, but there was no recognition on the bland, puffy face, only a scowl, as if he hated the very water flowing between them.
The Prior General returned to his desk and picked up the phone. A moment later Dupond’s portable vibrated in his jacket pocket. He let the binoculars dangle while he fumbled for it. He raised them again and answered.
It was odd watching Lacatuchi talk in close-up and hearing him speak in his ear at the same time. The Rumanian was saying, “You have a new mission.”
“Yes?”
“Say, where are you?” Lacatuchi asked, looking out the window, again directly at him. “It sounds like you’re outside.”
“I am outside.”
“I don’t hear any traffic. Are you in the country?”
“Of course. I’m taking a walk. Sometimes I need a break. It’s not easy doing two jobs at once.”
This ready response threw Lacatuchi off guard. “Ah.” For a moment he seemed about to say something else, but thought better of it. “Defago and Sister Teresa,” he continued. “I want to know what they’re up to.”
“You want me to spy on them?”
“Get close to them. Let me know what they’re doing.”
“Am I looking for anything in particular?”
So the tension between Lacatuchi and the others was increasing. Interesting.
“Not anything – everything,” Lacatuchi said. “Where they go, who they see, what they do. They’re becoming… unreliable.”
“What makes you think that?” Even from here Dupond could see how tensely the man gripped on the receiver and absently stroked the bony bend in the bridge of his nose.
“I hav
e my reasons. Follow them, call me any time if they do anything out of the ordinary.”
“I hardly know what ordinary would be.”
“Never mind. Just report everything.”
Five minutes later his cell phone rang. “What about my suspects?” Hugo demanded.
“I thought the case was closed. The Ministry…”
“My suspects!” Hugo’s voice was hard; the Ministry was not going to stop his investigation and he no longer cared who knew it.
Dupond looked around, as if Lisa Emmer and Steve Viginaire might be lurking nearby, but everything was quiet. He could see one or two of the few remaining inhabitants at the far side of the flax fields. No traffic disturbed the access road to the abbey. Lacatuchi had turned off the lights and left the office. The buildings looked as deserted as this village.
He wasn’t going to tell Hugo he didn’t know. “I’ll get them,” he said. “I know where they are, but I’ll need a couple of days.”
Hugo answered promptly, “You have until tomorrow afternoon, Dupond. My office, four o’clock sharp.”
Was it a threat, an order, or a request? Hugo seemed to borrow his dialog from the cinema. Merde, he though, he would have to give Hugo something just to keep him off his back. It occurred to him that the Americans had let slip Rossignol’s true name. That should keep him off my back for a while, he thought.
“Excellent, Dupond,” Hugo replied with evident satisfaction. “That should help with the Quai d’Orsay.”
Dupond smiled his relief the captain hadn’t asked how he learned it. He had no easy answer.
Time passed. He was finishing his sandwich when the van drove away from the abbey, leaving a plume of dust settling slowly in its wake.
Although he was on the other side of the river he wasn’t worried. There would be no more trains and buses for him. Despite Lacatuchi’s insistence he use public transportation “for security reasons,” today he had used his nondescript Peugeot parked next to the old tractor. It was streaked with rust but he kept it in excellent condition. He drove along the road by the river with one eye on the van on the opposite bank. He could intercept them at the bridge a few kilometers upstream.
