Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  The waiter approached with their tea and Lisa closed the book.

  When he was gone she opened it again. “You see,” she said, pointing at the bottom of the page where Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, stood in his library gazing across a body of water at the walls, ramparts and gates of a city. In the foreground a lawn was alive with deer and rabbits. To the right of the city two more deer with long pointed ears lay together in a meadow.

  “Extraordinary,” Steve said. “What do you make of these two deer hunters?”

  She clicked her tongue. “The spear in the side? Jesus, do you think?”

  “Odd, with cherubs as Roman soldiers. They’re out hunting in the countryside. No city nearby.”

  “I’m a papyrologist, not an art historian,” she said, turning the pages with the pad of her finger on the edges. The stiff vellum rustled.

  There were notes in the margins, written in several hands. Most were very old. Some were indecipherable, others merely mysterious. What did “Count seven” or “occasio facit furem” mean? “Opportunity makes a thief?” Lisa read. “What does that have to do with…?” She stopped and touched a marginal note in red ink. “This.”

  It was carefully written Latin and it said simply, “Guyton de Morveau, to his mother, Bois le Roi, 1586.”

  “I have no idea.”

  Her finger hovered over the inscription. “Bruno,” she said at last.

  “He wrote it?”

  “Yes. It feels right.” She continued to leaf through the book. At the end she flipped back, carefully reading each scrap of marginalia. “It’s the only one that makes sense.” She closed the book.

  “Not to me. Who’s Guyton de Morveau?”

  “I think Bruno hid the Founding Document among the letters Guyton de Morveau wrote his mother.”

  Steve stared at her. “Where would we even begin to look for them? Who was he?”

  “Listen,” she said earnestly. “During the 1580s Giordano Bruno was a Reader for Henri III. Henri sent him on a mission with the French ambassador in London. Bruno and the king were, if not friends, at least friendly, so I’d guess Bruno hid the Founding Document somewhere among the king’s archives. If so, we just need to find the royal archive, look for the papers of Guyton de Morveau. That’s where we’ll find the Founding Document.”

  “Another insight of the Pythia?”

  “I choose to ignore your sarcasm, doubter. Call it whatever you like. Do you have a better suggestion?”

  “No. Where do we look for Henri’s papers?”

  “The National Archives,” she said.

  “Great. We walk in and ask to see the papers of Guyton de Morveau, you know, of the Bois le Roi Morveaus. Perhaps that way we can attract some attention.”

  “In fact I believe that is exactly what we shall do.”

  They were about to leave when Captain Hugo and Lieutenant Mathieu entered the café and ordered at the bar.

  Lisa and Steve sat down again and leaned together, deep in hushed conversation.

  The two policemen chatted while they sipped their drinks. Lisa glanced up from time to time, but they showed no sign of leaving any time soon.

  “He’s watching us,” Lisa murmured.

  “Ignore him. We’re just a traditional couple out for tea. There’s no reason for him to be interested in us.”

  But Hugo kept glancing at them, as if he knew them but couldn’t quite place how. Lisa kept her eyes lowered, affecting the modesty befitting a woman of her faith, but once, when she lifted them momentarily, her eyes caught Hugo’s. Could he see hers were blue at this distance? She lowered them and whispered nonsense into Steve’s ear.

  The policeman seemed embarrassed and his gaze slipped away. She breathed again.

  He couldn’t keep his eyes away for long, though, and glanced at her again and shook his head thoughtfully, clearly trying to dredge something up from his memory.

  Despite the relatively effective integration of Muslims into French society, tensions were still high. Perhaps it was only hostility because of their dress?

  Hugo put down his drink and approached them. “Good afternoon,” he said in a friendly manner.

  Steve looked up. Lisa kept her eyes lowered.

  “I wonder if you heard about what happened at the basilica this afternoon,” Hugo continued with elaborate courtesy. “If you know anything it would be most helpful.”

  Steve shook his head.

  “Ah, I see. You have arrived in St. Denis too recently, then. May I ask when?”

  “Just a few minutes ago.” Steve put the faintest hint of a Maghreb accent into his French. “We are from Minguettes.”

  “Ah, yes, near Lyon. You have relatives in St. Denis, then?”

  Steve shook his head no.

  Hugo arched his eyebrows. “So, why come, if I might ask? You are tourists? Alas, you have picked the wrong day. There has been an incident not long ago, very bad situation. You’re sure you haven’t heard anything? Conversation in the street?”

  “Sorry, nothing,” Steve said.

  Hugo smiled. “I suggest you don’t linger here in St. Denis.” His voice was light but there was steel underneath. “Things are a bit tense at this moment, and the basilica is closed to visitors. Just a friendly word of advice.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Hugo started away, then turned back and said, “There’s something…. Your eyes are very blue. You are not Berber, are you?”

  “My mother,” Steve said. “She was German.”

  Hugo smiled. “Yes, I see, that would explain it, then. And your wife, does she also have blue eyes?”

  Lisa kept her eyes on the Augustine in her lap.

  “She is a good Muslim,” Steve said.

  “Of course,” Hugo replied, examining her sharply. After a long pause he said, “Well, have a good afternoon.” He returned to the bar where he and Mathieu shared a joke.

  “We’d better go,” Steve whispered. “I think he’s on to me.”

  “The eyes,” Lisa said. “We should have bought dark glasses.”

  They were at the door when Hugo stopped them. “Just a moment, please.”

  Steve looked openly into the policeman’s eyes. “Yes?”

  Hugo showed his teeth in good humor so obviously false Steve nearly laughed. “Titkallam bil-arabi?” he asked. Do you speak Arabic?

  “Shwaya bark!” Only a little. Steve laughed at Hugo’s surprise. The policeman’s trap had failed.

  Hugo didn’t give up immediately. “Min feen inta?” Where are you from?

  “Min al Minguettes. As I said.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, shukran.”

  “Bislama.”

  Steve pushed past Hugo and out the door, trailed by Lisa. After the cool of the air-conditioning, the furnace outside smacked them hard. They hurried past the Metro entrance, pausing only to look across the street at Alain’s empty car.

  Lisa made a painful effort to lighten their grim mood. “All that and you speak Arabic, too?”

  “Just a few words. Important for a banker to know how to be polite in several languages, especially ones that might involve large sums of money.”

  In front of the basilica four police vehicles aimed at the entrance, and groups of cops stood in three or four disconsolate groups, sweating and trying to smoke. The crime scene tape was gone, but the church was closed. No doubt the investigators were still inside picking through evidence. They would stay as long as possible. It was much cooler inside.

  Yet the concert that night had not yet been canceled. Perhaps the Requiem would happen after all.

  They paused, irresolute, and then entered the Hotel de Ville. It was cooler inside and near the entrance Lisa used Steve’s cell phone to call Ted.

  “Alain’s in hospital,” the librarian said. “Concussion and a dislocated shoulder. They set the shoulder but the concussion looks serious. We’ll know more later.”

  Lisa asked about the National Archive.

  “We have a membership. I’ll set it
up for us to get in – it’s best if we do this together. We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

  They returned to the Metro through the passage, got off at Chatelet-Les Halles and headed east across the boulevard Sebastopol. No one paid any attention to a Muslim couple walking slowly in the heat. After all, everyone was walking slowly, heads down, as if the sun had become an intolerable burden.

  49.

  Lisa and Steve stopped at the impressive stone gate set into the high wall surrounding the Hôtel de Soubise on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. Columns flanked the gold letters above the entrance: Archives Nationales. This was the home of documents of importance to the Republic of France.

  The gate opened on the broad walk leading up to the classical façade of an eighteenth century building that enclosed green lawns lined with lush green topiary cones on three sides. This part of the Archives was now home to the Museum of the History of France. A plaque by the entrance informed them that the only things remaining from the original fifteenth century building were the west door and the two old towers.

  Lisa said, “The irony is that during the reign of Henri III this was the headquarters of the Duc de Guise, a Catholic and his bitter enemy.”

  “Henri had him killed.”

  Lisa nodded. “And his friends in turn had the king assassinated. Today the religions are different but the wars are much the same.”

  “Bruno was trying to stop the wars, wasn’t he? It was after Henri had died that he agreed to go back to Venice and into the hands of the Inquisition.”

  “He was trying to change history. Though he knew he was probably going to fail and there would be years of torture and suffering for him ahead, he did it anyway. Some people believe he wrote his own epitaph in one of his books: ‘I have preferred a courageous death to a non-combatant life.’ In spite of breaking the rules, or perhaps because of that, he was a real Pythos, a great one…. What’s the time?”

  “Three-forty.”

  “We have just over an hour to retrieve the Document before the Archives close.”

  They walked around to the rue des Quatre-Fils and along the blank wall of the back of the Archives, staying in the shade. Ted and Marianne were already waiting by the thin gray pyramid pointing up at the bottom of a glass tower supported by four slender columns of sand-colored stone.

  “We almost didn’t recognize you,” Marianne said. “They look different, don’t they, Ted?”

  Her husband only tilted his head and squinted at Lisa with an enigmatic smile.

  Lisa removed her hijab and pushed it into her shoulder bag on top of the Augustine. “Let’s get inside before we die of heat stroke.”

  Steve removed his robe and added it to the bag. He swiped his forehead with his hand and flicked away the sweat. “Glad to get that off.”

  The revolving door was set in a heavy square frame of the same sand-colored stone. They entered into the cool quiet of an atrium filled with light. Stairs on the left led up to the reading rooms.

  Marianne talked to the guard and a few moments later returned with badges for everyone. “Before we go up, we have to check our bags, everything except Ted’s laptop, loose sheets of paper, and pencils.”

  Lisa said, “How are we going to…?”

  Ted’s look cut off the question. “Find the document?” she finished lamely.

  “I’ve already phoned in the call numbers,” Marianne said. “The Guyton de Morveau archive is waiting for us.”

  They checked their things and climbed two flights of stairs to a locked door. Through the glass wall they could see people working at the rows of tables.

  Marianne swiped her card and the door clicked open. At an empty table near the back Ted plugged in his laptop. In moments he had the archive catalog on the screen. “The letters are listed as part of the 1586 diplomatic correspondence of Henri III, but there are no other records of a Guyton de Morveau. We checked him out.”

  Lisa said. “There’s a street near my apartment.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ted agreed. For him the repetition was strangely impatient. “An eighteenth century chemist, not a sixteenth century diplomat. There are no diplomats with that name. Yet, as far as we can tell this file has been requested at least twenty-three times since Bruno created it and not one of them has written a word about it.”

  “Twenty-three?” Steve frowned a moment. “That would be five or six a century.”

  “The Pythos,” Lisa said. “Every Pythos reads the Founding Document. So it must be here.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Steve said.

  With a little wave Marianne went to the front desk.

  “The Morveau file has been with the archives for over four hundred years, moving each time the documents moved, until they ended up here. Well, we’ll soon know. Here’s Marianne.”

  She carefully placed a folio box bound in leather and tied with a cord on the table. A handwritten label read, Correspondence. Guyton de Morveau à sa mère, Bois le Roi, 1586. “There it is,” she said with satisfaction, sitting down.

  “Well,” Lisa said. “Go ahead, open it.”

  Ted shook his head. “We think you should be the one to open it, don’t we, Marianne?”

  “We certainly do. Lisa is the Pythia. We believe only the Pythos, or Pythia, is supposed to read the document, and we too concluded that the previous twenty-three held that office. So this is Lisa’s trust. This box really contains the Founding Document. So we hope.”

  Lisa sighed. “I still can’t get used to this.” She untied the cord and after a moment’s hesitation lifted the lid.

  On top was a small note dated 1793: “Who was de Morveau? I haven’t found him in any other archive.” There was no signature.

  “Maybe one of the twenty-three wasn’t a Pythos,” Lisa said. “Looks like someone looked at it by mistake.”

  Ted shrugged. “Could happen.”

  Under the note was a stack of handwritten pages. This she placed on the table and lifted the first sheet. “A deed to a pasture in Bois le Roi. That’s a real place?”

  Ted nodded. “Southeast of Paris, not far from Troyes,” he explained. “One of the king’s estates.”

  She held up another. “A letter from Guyton to his mother complaining of the weather in Strasbourg. He is going to send her a case of champagne. He asks after his nephews and says he loves her.” She turned over another page. “This records a lawsuit against someone who repaired his mother’s roof. She has complained that the slate was inferior, and several tiles blew off in the first wind. He says he will start a process as soon as he returns.” She held the next sheet up to the light, turning it this way and that.

  “Do you think Bruno wrote all this?” Steve asked.

  “Too bad the Augustine is locked up downstairs,” she answered. “If I had it here I could compare the writing, but this writing certainly resembles the marginal note.”

  Steve watched her closely. “You seem very much at home with this stuff.”

  “It’s a lot like papyrology.”

  When the box was empty they stared at one another.

  “Where is it?” Ted asked.

  “No Founding Document. This is all trivial.” Lisa waved at the stack. “Everyday stuff: letters, legal documents, an invitation to a local nobleman’s hunt. Nothing earlier than the sixteenth century.”

  “If de Morveau didn’t really exist, and the Founding Document isn’t here, why would Bruno create this elaborate hoax?” Steve asked. “Why have people been requesting this box?”

  Lisa stared.

  Marianne cleared her throat. “Maybe de Morveau was real,” she suggested. “Just not important enough for anyone to be interested in him. Maybe this is a wild goose chase.”

  Lisa was shaking her head. “No, this was important. Bruno deliberately wrote it in the Augustine. ‘Guyton de Morveau to his mother, Bois le Roi, 1586.’ He also forged these documents for a reason. The Founding Document is here…. Or it was.”

  “Where?” Marianne turned over all the pape
rs slowly and carefully, holding them up to the light pouring in through the windows.

  Steve chewed his thumbnail. “Maybe your eighteenth century reader?” he said at last, voicing all their fears.

  Lisa shook her head. “No, I think it’s here.”

  They sat in glum silence. Steve checked his watch. It was four thirty. The Archives closed in fifteen minutes.

  Lisa let her eyes go soft. The papers blurred into a white block on the dark table. The lamp’s light was washed away by the outside glare. Ted, two seats away, frowned at the screen of his laptop.

  The box was solid, made of thin wood covered with dark brown leather. Its hinged lid lay open. The interior was lined with linen. The cord that had tied it shut lay coiled loosely on the surface of the table.

  She leaned forward.

  The cord was attached to the center of the back of the box by a metal loop. Through the bottom of the inside she could see a small bump. She touched it with her fingertip, still not focusing directly, and felt along a subtle irregularity to the side.

  Steve sat up. “Foix’s desk,” he said softly. “A hidden…”

  Lisa felt the irregularity branch at the side. She slid her fingers to the top and bottom of the box, inserted her fingernails. The cloth lining obediently curled back, revealing the edge of a small sheet of very fine vellum. She gave a gentle tug and the lining came away.

  The vellum was covered with a block of Greek text written in a precise, even prissy, hand.

  50.

  Philippe Dupond refolded his Tuesday Le Monde and slipped it into the side pocket of his jacket. He had been waiting in the parking lot but Hugo had not returned and it was nearly five o’clock, nearly an hour late for their appointment.