The Sixth Key

by Adriana Koulias

  ‘How was he killed?’ the girl dared to ask.

  Madame Corfu bent back that large head. She had been waiting for that very question. She was poised and ready, sharpening her words on the tip of her tongue before looking at them again with brilliant eyes. ‘He was butchered with an axe!’

  ‘Good God!’ The words escaped from Eva unbidden and she immediately put a hand to her mouth.

  The old woman with no teeth sobbed into her cake and the husband made a frown that would have withered a weed.

  The madame smiled a red smudge and shrugged. ‘Well, some say it was a fire poker, but there was no murder weapon found. Whatever the murderer used, it did the job and it made a big mess! Bang! Bang! Bang!’ She thumped her closed fist three times on the table so suddenly and with such vigour that it made every person jump. The old woman got up and took herself out, crying.

  Monsieur Corfu threw his hands up in the air. ‘I’ve had enough!’ he said, and hurled his napkin onto the table before leaving the dining room.

  The madame calmly watched her husband leave the room. Rahn knew she would not stop now, not while she still had an audience. ‘He was struck thirteen times in the back of the head!’ she continued with a fiery eye. ‘There were bits of brain all over the stove and on the floor – even on the walls! Apparently there was so much blood that the gendarmes were slipping about. Anyway, the interesting thing is what they found.’

  ‘What did they find?’ Rahn took a breath in, engrossed.

  ‘His slippers were placed next to his head, his arms were crossed over his chest and one leg was bent under him. A tidy fellow, whoever did it! And the only evidence he left was a packet of Tzar cigarette papers beside the body. On the packet, the murderer wrote two words: Viva Angelina,’ the madame ended, triumphantly.

  29

  More Watson than Holmes

  ‘You suspect someone?’

  ‘I suspect myself.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Of coming to conclusions too rapidly.’

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’

  In the bedroom Rahn paced up and down like a caged lion in front of the small hearth. The fire glowed but its warmth was meagre against the draughts spawned by the Devil’s Wind.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Eva said.

  ‘Your uncle’s list has something to do with the book of Pope Honorius or, as they call it, Le Serpent Rouge. As Deodat would say, it is elementary.’

  ‘Really? Are you certain you’re not jumping to conclusions?’

  He told her the phone call to Paris had been to a friend whom he had asked to look into Jean-Louis Verger. He informed her of what La Dame had found out about the connection between Le Serpent Rouge and the murder of an archbishop. He told her about the group Abbé Grassaud had mentioned at the hermitage, which was known as the penitents; and that Verger was rumoured to have belonged to this group at the time he committed the murder.

  ‘And now I’m quite certain that Saunière also had something to do with that group.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  He stopped his pacing to look at her. ‘Because when I was alone with Madame Dénarnaud, she said these words: “Penitence, penitence – remember that!”’

  ‘I see . . .’ Eva said, from her chair near the bed. ‘Who are these penitents?’

  ‘They’re a group of Jesuit priests who dabble in rituals of black magic and human sacrifice. The interesting thing is, that the sacrament had a special part to play in these rituals. All sorts of terrible things were done to it, like mixing it with urine and excrement and forcing people to consume it to rid them of evil spirits . . . or perhaps to do the opposite.’

  ‘To inoculate them with evil spirits – to possess them!’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that is what I have learnt.’

  ‘So, do you think that’s why my uncle scratched that symbol into the tabernacle, to protect it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Her paleness made her lips look all the more red. ‘He was afraid,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps he wanted to make certain that when his time came he would have a sacrament that was untainted.’

  She turned to the hearth and fell quiet. ‘So, you think the priests on the list formed a kind of—’

  ‘Conventicle?’ Rahn prompted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps – let’s look at the list again and go through what we know, shall we?’ He took the list out of his pocket along with the pencil and gave them to her. ‘If you would be so kind as to write down what I tell you, it may help me to get some perspective.’ He resumed his pacing. ‘Verger was executed in 1857 . . . can you add that date? Antoine Bigou, we know nothing about yet except that he was a contemporary of Saunière’s. Now, the next abbé, Grassaud, met Saunière in 1886 when he came to Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet. I think he has a lot more to do with this than he admitted. Saunière came here to this village in 1885 and sometime later he found something; something so interesting that the Bishop of Carcassonne paid for him to take it to Paris.’ He continued to pace. ‘We also know that Saunière told two other priests of his discoveries: Abbé Boudet and Abbé Gélis. Gélis wrote something in his diary about treasure and shortly after that he was brutally murdered, in 1897. The next abbé is . . . ?’

  ‘Rivière,’ Eva said.

  ‘That’s right. He outlived Saunière. He’s the one who refused to give him his last sacrament in 1915. He refused because of something he’d apparently heard in Saunière’s confession and before he died he told someone that Saunière had gone over to the Devil. What does that mean and what did he hear?’ He paused to look at her. ‘All of these priests were connected and they all seem to gravitate around Saunière – like the rings of Saturn.’

  He went to Eva to look at the list again.

  Jean-Louis Verger – Paris 1857

  Antoine Bigou – Rennes-le-Château

  ~

  A J Grassaud – Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet 1886

  A C Saunière – Rennes-le-Château 1885

  A K Boudet – Rennes-les-Bains

  A A Gélis – Coustaussa murdered 1897

  A L Rivière – Espéraza refused last sacrament 1915

  ‘These five priests were contemporaries and are set apart from the other two. Why? Perhaps they had a different significance for Abbé Cros.’

  ‘Or perhaps those are the priests my uncle was investigating?’ she said.

  ‘We don’t know that with any certainty yet.’

  ‘Do you think Saunière found the Pope’s grimoire, Le Serpent Rouge?’ she asked.

  ‘Or else he found the missing key that we spoke about before, the formula that is missing from the grimoires.’

  She watched him take up his pacing again, with a puzzled expression. ‘Do you know what this key is?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue, but everything we’ve heard points to it having something to do with the Cathar treasure.’

  ‘If it’s been left out of the grimoires intentionally, perhaps it is too evil?’

  ‘That is a very good assumption. I have a sense things will be clearer when we learn something about this Abbé Bigou, the man who sits at the top of the list with Verger. It seems to me that he had a very important part to play in the mystery surrounding these priests.’

  But Eva wasn’t listening. She was taken by her own thoughts and he had a moment to observe her more closely. She was taller than most women and thinner than was generally considered the ideal, but there was no angularity in her frame and it gave her a look that was almost elf-like. Her face was fine boned and symmetrical, her eyes large and widely spaced, her short hair reflected the firelight in reds and golds. She needed protection, someone who knew what he was doing, and right now Rahn felt more like Sancho Panza than Don Quixote, more like Watson than Holmes. Deodat was right – what good was knowledge without the wisdom to use it? Maybe Satan knew him too well and had surmised that he was good when it came to imponderables but a poor
detective when it came to real life.

  Eva sighed. ‘I need to sleep.’

  She was right, there was nothing they could do until morning.

  She took the bed and he settled down valiantly in the lumpy, uncomfortable chair. She blew out the candle and he heard her undress in the darkness and get into bed. To be so near to a woman reminded him of his last night with Etienne.

  Etienne had always been her nom de guerre. They had met in the circles of Antonin Gadal and thereafter had seen one another occasionally, but it had been four years or more since she had vanished without a trace, and he had stopped thinking about her until recently. Once again, he thought how the motives of women were inscrutable and he wondered how a man could build on such quicksand.

  The last time he saw Etienne it was in Berlin where she had come to write an editorial on National Socialism for La République. They had celebrated the New Year in grand fashion by going to The Femina Club on Nurnberger Strasse; a club usually frequented by men looking for feminine company. Etienne, true to form, had hung on his arm dressed in a suit and tie like Marlene Dietrich, her hair combed through with pomade. Dressed this way, she hadn’t made too many heads turn when they sat down to order a bottle of Sekt, and to conspire about which girl they would invite to the table. There were pneumatic tubes that criss-crossed the room and carried messages, or presents, from patrons on one side, to girls on the other side – all one needed was money and good eyesight. But it had been nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, and they had laughed afterwards. Towards the night’s end, as they were walking back to the hotel, Etienne paused to look at him, and Rahn thought she looked almost vulnerable, a strange androgynous creature with the round blue eyes of a hunted doe. She had said to him, ‘One day I will leave and you will never see me again . . . You will forgive me, Otto, won’t you?’

  At the time he had laughed it off and later they had made love affectionately, tenderly. In the morning, however, he woke to find he was alone. He never saw her again.

  The Countess P’s clock on the table chimed ten times. He sighed and brought his mind to the present. If he was to be of any use to Deodat he had to sleep. Tomorrow he would think about the Rotas wheel, Pierre Plantard, Monti, De Mengel, Abbé Cros, the church, the fish pond, the key to the tabernacle, a symbol to ward off evil, a list of priests, Abbé Grassaud, Gélis bludgeoned to death and the only evidence being a packet of cigarette papers . . . cigarette papers . . . Etienne had been involved with Marxists and she had smoked Russian cigarettes . . . like Pierre Plantard. He remembered the cigarette paper left beside Gélis’s body, a Russian brand? He wondered who had killed Gélis and why, and then he remembered the inspector, Beliere. Madame Sabine must have arrived home by now to find the house a shambles, a dead man in the barn and he and Deodat gone! Surely she would have called the gendarmerie at Carcassonne and that meant that tomorrow the inspector, who reminded him of Professor Moriarty, would be on their trail like a bloodhound on a scent. Then again, for whom was the inspector really working?

  His eyes grew heavy . . . He thought of the satanic grimoire of Pope Honorius and the missing key sought by a shadowy circle of powerful men – those bankers Deodat had mentioned– sitting in an underground room, smoking Russian cigarettes, making decisions about the fate of the world. He saw their faces: Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, Freemasons, Jesuit priests, black magicians . . .

  Outside the wind howled, and the trees rapped on the windows in time to the old woman’s words: ‘Penitence – remember that!’

  THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD

  30

  Nothing is What it Seems

  ‘You do not comprehend?’ he said.

  ‘Not I,’ I replied.

  ‘Then you are not of the brotherhood.’

  Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’

  Venice, 2012

  ‘Is it true about those brotherhoods?’ I interrupted the Writer of Letters.

  He contemplated the fire a moment, tenting his fingers, his face striated by shadow and light. Something about that face, the singular angle of the nose, the mouth and chin, struck me as deeply familiar. I had the sudden sense that he was a mirror and that I was looking at myself. The feeling vanished the moment he spoke.

  ‘The first Lodge in Paris, the French Grand Lodge, wasn’t started by Frenchmen, it was founded by British merchants. Did you know that?’

  I told him that no, I had not heard of it.

  ‘It is interesting, isn’t it? In fact, the British founded Lodges all over Europe in the eighteenth century, weaving a web capable of disseminating occult and political impulses. Of course, once a web like this has been spun, it takes only the whisper of one word to set everything in motion.’ He threw a log into the fire and gave it a poke. ‘For instance, who do you think was behind secretive revolutionary groups like the Carbonari and the Jacobins?’

  ‘Are you suggesting the English were behind the French Revolution?’ I was incredulous.

  ‘Would that be so preposterous?’

  ‘For one thing, it would rewrite history.’

  ‘And would you consider that a bad thing?’

  I smiled. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘The truth is—’ he looked at me pointedly, ‘—the English Lodges were also behind the American Revolution.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t in the interest of the English to lose America.’

  ‘Who said they lost anything?’ The fire in the hearth blazed now as if he had conjured the flames. He then said, quite fittingly, ‘From the ashes was born the phoenix – the replacement of a physical aristocracy with a spiritual one: an aristocracy of the Lodges working behind the façade of democracy. In other words, the Lodges were the puppet masters of the new world. It is well known that Benjamin Franklin was a Mason, as were most of the founding fathers. Now . . . many of these men had fine intentions but there were also those whose intentions were not fine; those who wanted to gain power over the many on behalf of the few by using a means that lies hidden in the Lodges.’

  ‘What means?’

  ‘The power of magic.’

  I considered this.

  ‘Why do you look so amazed?’ He laughed, but it was cold and cheerless. ‘Every time you go into a church you are exposed to ceremonial magic: incense, song, mantras; they’re all magical, any priest will admit it, and so are the rites and rituals of the Masons. Now, I’m not suggesting they’re all the same. There are white, grey and black ceremonies.’

  ‘And the book of Pope Honorius?’

  ‘It is the blackest, in some respects.’

  ‘Because it mixes the rituals of the Catholic mass with the rituals of black magic?’ I asked.

  ‘What you have to understand is that white magic doesn’t trespass on human freedom – it is based upon the premise that human will is free, but because the will lies asleep in the human being, it can be seized, pulled out and manipulated by the black magician – an example of this is hypnotism. Now, this will in the human being is also a form of energy – a form of magnetism. A similar type of magnetism is found in the Earth. Have you heard of kundalini?’

  ‘The yogis achieved enlightenment through it, am I right?’

  ‘That’s right, they called it the fire that works upwards from the base of the human spine to the head – like a fiery snake. A similar fire, or magnetism, runs upwards from the centre of the Earth and becomes trapped within those great mountain ranges that are aligned towards the magnetic north. Rahn was working on a report written by De Mengel about grid lines and ley lines of energy – places where magnetic forces become exceptionally strong. Black magic rituals connect these forces in the Earth with the same forces in the human being, and you can’t imagine the untold power this gives to the magician capable of manipulating it.’

  ‘I remember something about the Templars and the building of churches . . .’

  ‘The Templars built their churches on locations they knew were potent, magnetically,
hoping to redeem the rising forces of the Black Mother.’

  I sat forward, amazed. ‘The Black Mother . . . is that why there are so many churches devoted to the Black Madonna – Chartres for instance?’

  ‘Yes, didn’t you know that?’

  ‘You are opening up a universe to me,’ I admitted.

  ‘Those who built these churches understood that the Black Mother is the Earth’s kundalini – this is what makes a place like Wewelsburg powerful.’

  I was speechless, breathless. I wanted to laugh out loud like Rahn. At least to shout ‘Aha!’ I didn’t, of course.

  ‘Even Matteu didn’t realise how close he had come with his Song of the Grail, which portrays how Esclarmonde de Foix sealed the Grail inside a mountain. But to understand that we have to move onto another gallery, and this one is called The Abbot. The abbot of the monastery of Saint Lazarus.’

  I sat up, surprised and puzzled. ‘I know that monastery! I’ve written a novel about it!’

  ‘Yes . . . of course you have,’ he said, with raised brows. ‘You also had the Grail locked in a mountain, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t understand where this is going.’

  ‘You will.’

  31

  The Abbot

  ‘Death on the summit of the hills struck from the sky: The abbot will die when he will see ruined

  Those of the wreck wishing to seize the rock.’

  Nostradamus, Century II Quatrain 56

  Monastery of Saint Lazarus, 1244

  The monastery was hung with low cloud and stood sequestered in the bosom of the mountains like a creature grown from out of the snow. So hidden was it from the world of ordinary men and so protected by false paths that, even with a guide, it took the four men and the child all day to reach the foot of it; and then it was long past compline before they knocked at the great gate.