by Rob Swigart
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 panic 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 sometime
s 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 of 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.”
But she never felt she could control it. At times it just came over her, as the other night when she found herself underneath Steve’s apartment before she knew him. The night Raimond was murdered.
Who was she? A girl from Chicago whose life, almost by accident, took some surprising turns. Thirty-two years old, flawed by a hidden disability, or blessed, as her mentor would have had it, unmarried, a scholar of crumbling Greek and Latin domestic and legal texts, a student of Dr. Raimond Foix, professor of Greek from the Sorbonne who had one day appeared and changed her life.
It struck her again even more forcefully that her meeting with Foix was not accidental. He had materialized at the door to the gymnasium just as she was about to commit herself to a clear path. Why? And, she had to ask herself, why had she so willingly turned away from her destiny and followed him across the campus to his temporary office in Classics, beginning a completely different and unfamiliar path? He was only a visiting professor, after all, on campus for a semester.
Somehow he had chosen her. How?
He was the Pythos. He simply knew!
That couldn’t be all of it. Certainly, his agents had been watching. They knew everything about her. She had been selected, because of her genetics or her personality she didn’t know, and he had gone to California to recruit her. The organization not only had charter airlines and numerous businesses and banks at its disposal, it had a human resources that spanned the globe.
That day, despite her weakness, or because of it, Raimond Foix had somehow known in advance she would agree.
Raimond had turned and walked away. She stood for a heartbeat or three, and walked after him, the gym forgotten. “You’ll teach me life?” she asked, knowing she was leaving everything behind, and feeling in that moment a tremendous relief and excitement.
Without breaking stride he answered, “Life, yes; a very precious thing, life. Best not to waste it.”
“How is studying dead languages going to help?” she had asked.
This time he stopped to look at her with a twinkle in his eye. “Are you willing to find out?” It didn’t occur to her then that he had answered her question with one of his own.
Now she couldn’t tell if this was a memory or a dream and decided in the end it didn’t matter. This was as close to Raimond Foix as she could ever be again.
32.
Sister Teresa lay naked in the tub, her misshapen legs stretched out before her. Her eyes were closed. She could smell the perfume Defago had added to the water in the vapor rising from its surface. They were in the special lodgings of the Dominican Order a few streets east of the Place de la Bastille. This was their refuge, but despite the soothing ritual bath she remained restless and unhappy.
“Don’t worry so, my Tisiphone,” Defago said gently. He was seated behind her, his hands on her neck. “It wasn’t your fault. He got in the way.”
“The bullet hit, but he lives. I’m sure of it.” Her breath disturbed the rising steam. Twisted scar tissue on the side of her head glowed pink and white in the subdued light. Her gray-blond hair, what was left of it, was tied up in a knot on top of her head. The rest of her body was submerged, hidden.
“Scoot up,” Defago said.
She struggled and her shoulders emerged from the foam. The terrible scars continued from the side of her skull and ear down her shoulder. Inside the puckered skin and ravaged flesh there was forged titanium alloy, plastic, screws; there was also muscle, bone, the pulse of blood. She was vital and alive. Defago touched the shoulder with a sponge. Hot water flowed.
“That’s good.” Her eyelids fell closed.
He gripped the joint and squeezed. An echo of her pain passed over her face. She sighed, leaning into his hand.
He undid the knot of her hair and brought water up, wetting it. Soon he was rubbing in shampoo, and foam cascaded down her cheeks. Leaning over her he whispered into the dark hole that had been her ear: “We’ll get them, my dove, I promise you.”
She nodded. “How? How will we get them, Armand?”
“Mm.” He soaped her neck and kneaded the cord of muscle on each side of her spine. It had the durable temper of oak. She was strong, his instrument! She was strong, and true. “They have gone to ground,” he said softly. “They hide, but they must come out, and we will be there. We watch around Montparnasse where they left the Canadians. Our eyes lost them in the crowd of heathens then, but when they emerge we will have them. We have eyes, my sister. We have eyes.”
“It is too bad about Cedric,” she murmured dreamily. “We could use him now.”
“No,” he answered gently. “Brother Cedric made mistakes, serious mistakes, he attracted attention. He was careless and had lost his value. We are well rid of him. But we have choices. If we knew where they were hiding we could burn them out, perhaps, but we do not know, and besides, we should not do it. We could kill when they come forth. I think instead, we should convince them to give us what other secrets they might have.” His voice momentarily changed register, becoming cold, with an edge of calculation. “The Prior General wants them dead. Perhaps for that reason alone we should keep them alive.”
She didn’t acknowledge his change of tone, and spoke dreamily, saying, “Do we really need such secrets, even if they exist? Shouldn’t we really just kill them, my master? It would be over. They would no longer have importance. The Pythos already is gone. If we kill the girl and the man there would remain the one who drove them and that couple in Mirepoix, and none of them are the Pythos or ever could be. They are just soldiers, workers. We can kill them any time. You did tell me the war would be over by now.”
“Do you grow weary, my sister, my pure one?”
She turned in the bath and the water rippled away from her torso, lifted now above the froth, and ricocheted off the ceramic. Her flat breasts, cupped
in chaotic waters, were fixed to an armature of muscle and bone. She gripped the side of the tub and her biceps bulged; the awful power of her upper limbs was visible only for a moment.
She softened. “I’ll never be tired as long as you’re with me, my priest, my father, you know that.” Her voice was a harsh whisper. “I meant no reproach. Forgive me.” She seized his hand and kissed it, murmuring apologies in Latin.
“We shall see,” he said. “Perhaps it would be better to kill them after all.”
Later he washed her battered chest, her horrific scars, and her tense, muscular back. She sat straight and still, her head bowed. “Stand,” he commanded, and she did, holding a bar.
He worked his way down her sides, sponging over the narrow hips, the groove of her backside, her long-forgotten sex, her thighs and ravaged calves. She stood patiently on her one good foot, showing neither pleasure nor pain, but there was something stoic and docile in her manner of standing, in her acceptance of his ministry as he laved the sharp stump where her leg ended just above the ankle.
He finished. She remained standing, a scar-veined statue of weathered wood. “I’m done,” he said.
“What? Oh.” She shook once and, bending her knee, carefully lowered herself until she was sitting once more in the water and her legs were stretched out before her.
“Shall I add hot?” he purred, a bass rumble.
She nodded, and he ran the water. She slid down below the foam, resting her head against the back of the tub with her eyes closed, and sighed. “I can see it now, Armand, I can see how it will end.”
“Yes?”
“It would not be seemly to kill them, not right away, you’re right about that. We must lure, draw them to the abbey. They must come to the abbey. They must.”
“If we must lure them there, then it shall be so.”
She looked up. He was leaning over her, and she could see his eyes, so full of light and love. “I don’t ask this for myself, my father. I ask this because we do our best work at the abbey, don’t you think? It’s there, where we examined Rossignol, that we must examine them. We will tell them about Rossignol, how he screamed, how he begged. They will be afraid, and they will tell us all about the cipher, the message. They will say everything. They will cry like babies. They will beg. They will beg, won’t they? At our feet, hands clasped in prayer, they will beg to be spared. Yes.” Her eyes rolled up, inward. “The Pythos died too quickly, my father. I was in his place and couldn’t take my time. They will be in our place, at our mercy, and mercy we will not show them, Armand. Tell me we will show them no mercy.”
