The Pegasus Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  “Saunière. Where Saunière hit the local lotto.”

  “Maybe,” Francis agreed, “but what about the picture, the shepherds? That’s supposed to be in Arcadia, Greece, not France.” He paused for a moment. “But then, Arcadia’s also used in poetry as a synonym for any place of pastoral beauty and peace. Could be metaphoric rather than geographic.”

  Lang knew from the intelligence business that only in fiction do all the pieces of a puzzle fit. There was almost always some bit of information that turned out to be unrelated to the problem at hand, perhaps to another, perhaps useless. But here? The Poussin had tripped whatever wire was set to guard a secret Pegasus wanted to protect.

  “Could be anywhere,” Lang agreed, “but that Templar, Pietro, and what you’re telling me now both point to the Languedoc. I’m not sure how the painting fits in, although it must have some connection. Otherwise, Pegasus wouldn’t kill to prevent anyone from understanding whatever the hell it means.”

  Francis grunted affirmatively. “Yeah, but what?”

  “Think maybe it has something to do with the Gnostic heresy, Joseph of Arimathea being Jesus’s brother and Mary Magdalene His wife?”

  “That’s two questions,” Francis said. “First, the Scriptures, at least the ones the Church recognizes as gospels, are silent about Jesus’s brothers and sisters. Since Jews of biblical times tended to have large families, it’s more likely than not that He had siblings. There’s always been speculation about a wife. Hebrew law required young men, particularly a rabbi as Jesus must have been, to marry. Some scholars speculate the wedding in Cana, the one where He turned water into wine, to be his own. Problem with siblings and a spouse is that they raise troubling questions about lateral and direct descendants, questions the Church had rather not deal with. That professor Wolffe who did the translation is correct about the Merovingian dynasty who ruled that area of France for a century or two after the collapse of Rome. They claimed to be descendants of Christ, no small problem for the papacy back then.

  “The Gnostics were a group of heretics who believed God created Christ mortal, that after His death, His spirit, not his body, ascended into heaven, contrary to Jewish Messianic prophecy. No physical resurrection, no Messiah. The Gnostic view had been specifically rejected by the Council of Nicea along with proposed gospels supporting it, hence the heresy in proclaiming the doctrine.”

  Lang nodded to the priest on the other side of the ocean as he struggled against weariness to understand what he was hearing. His jaws stretched in a monumental yawn. “Interesting church history, but I don’t see how it fits whatever the painting portrays. If it means anything at all. Pegasus seems to think it does. Whatever. I intend to solve the puzzle of the picture, or at least find out what Pegasus is trying to protect. Only way to get even for what they did.”

  There was an audible sigh, the sound of disapproval. “Lang, revenge can backfire. I wish you’d let the police handle it.”

  “Francis, you dream,” Lang snapped back. “The Paris police are clueless. I want results, not a murder case gone cold. You seem to forget those people, Pegasus, tried to kill me in Atlanta and I’m fairly certain it wasn’t friendly conversation they wanted this evening. And let’s not forget they managed to get me accused of a couple or murders. I’d say I owe ’em big time.”

  “You know you should give yourself up to the authorities before you have to kill someone else, before anyone else dies. God will see you through.”

  “Rumor has it He helps those who help themselves, Padre.”

  “How about advice from a friend, forget the Padre business?”

  “I am, as they say, all ears.”

  “Illigitimi non carborundum.”

  “Francis, you can do better than some sort of liberated Latin for ‘don’t let the bastards wear you down.’ ”

  “Then watch your ass.”

  Despite his problems, Lang was grinning when he hung up the phone. He was waging a losing battle with sleep but found enough reserves to take the Polaroid of the painting from his wallet. Crumpled from wear, the figures were still as enigmatic as the Latin inscription.

  He yawned again, wondering when he might be sleeping in his own bed again. The thought of home triggered a seemingly unrelated thought. He wanted to sit out on his balcony with his morning coffee, looking out over the city and reading the paper.

  The paper.

  Lang routinely worked a syndicated puzzle where letters were scrambled. If solved, a familiar phrase appeared. What if the Latin inscription were like the puzzle in the paper, an anagram in which a seemingly superfluous word supplied letters necessary for the message?

  ETINARCADIAEGOSUM.

  ET IN ARCADIA EGO (SUM).

  His exhausted body and mind protested as he got up from the bed to rummage through the chest of drawers until he found a sales receipt from Harrods. Further search located the stub of an eyebrow pencil on the vanity. Using the blank back of the sales slip, he began rearranging letters. He started with the one the shepherd’s finger was touching, so that each version began with the letter A.

  Twenty minutes later, Lang was staring at what he had written, sleep forgotten. Could he be reading this correctly? His Latin was good enough for competitive aphorisms but he had to be sure he had this right.

  He snatched the door open so fast he startled a young woman walking the hall in a fire-engine-red teddy.

  “Where can I find Nellie?” he asked as if the world depended on the answer.

  Recovering with the aplomb demanded by her profession, she pointed, speaking with an accent Lang didn’t recognize. “The office, end of the hall.”

  Nellie’s face had an unhealthy pallor, a reflection of the blue of the computer screen inches from her eyes. The world’s latest technology was now in the service of its oldest profession.

  She swiveled around, the casters on her chair squeaking. “Change your mind about . . . Bloody hell! Look like you seen a ghost, you do.”

  Lang guessed the office had previously been a closet. There wasn’t room for both of them, so he stood in the doorway. “In a way, I suppose I have. I’ve got a really strange request.”

  She gave him a lopsided smile, a conspiratorial nod and said, “Strange requests are part of the business, luv. Leather, chains?”

  “Even stranger. Any place you could put your hands on a Latin-English dictionary this time of night?’

  She was shocked, quite possibly for the first time in her professional career. “Latin? I’m running a university now, am I?” She thought for a moment. “There’s a bookstore down by the university, though it’s not likely open this hour.”

  Lang was too excited to wait. If he was right . . . The prospect overcame his better judgment. “I’ll go see. Keep the room open for me.”

  She put a restraining hand on his arm. “Don’t bother, luv. I’ve got a girl visiting a customer in Bloomsbury. She’ll ring in shortly ’n’ I’ll have her pop over to Museum Street. No need you riskin’ bumpin’ into the law, now is there?”

  Museum Street was a collection of cafes and small shops selling old books and prints. Many of them kept hours as eclectic as their inventory.

  “Thanks.”

  An hour later, Lang put down a tattered paperback Latin-English dictionary, shocked to discover he had been right. The painting was an enigma no more, although it was going to take an Olympic-quality broad jump of faith to believe its message. But Pegasus sure as hell did. That was why they were willing to kill.

  Pietro’s narrative and the enigmatic inscription said the same thing, as unbelievable as it might be. Now all Lang had to do was evade the cops and some very nasty people long enough to locate a specific spot among thousands of square miles and verify the tale of a monk dead seven hundred years.

  He was on his way to France.

  THE TEMPLARS:

  THE END OF AN ORDER

  An Account by Pietro of Sicily

  Translation from the medieval Latin by Nigel Wolffe, Ph.D. />
  5

  And so did the days fly by on the wings of falcons. Such time as I could spare from assisting the cellarer as his seneschal, doing sums on the abacus and making inventory of such produce as the Temple’s serfs produced.1 Such time as I could, I stole from my labours to spend in the library, learning more about the Gnostics and their pernicious apostasy, documents so vile that at least one was secreted not in the library but in a hollow column. Its existence was revealed to only a few brothers. How I wish I had not been one of them! I was not amused by the irreverence shown the Holy Gospels as much as I was curious as to the contents of the vessel mentioned in those ancient volumes. I also was curious as to the reason the Holy See would send what amounted to tribute to a single Temple whose only duty was to guard Serres and Rennes, two simple villages which appeared to apprehend no danger.

  Thus did the Gnostic documents tempt me as the serpent did Eve, induce me to seek knowledge of that better left in obscurity.

  One sin begot another and I began to journey far from the Temple, my peregrinations taking me even beyond the boundaries of the Temple’s fiefdom and along the River Sals and among the hills and mountains, particularly the white mountain called Cardou. I chose this path because it was the one most similar to the one described in the writings of the heretics as being the ancient Roman road and the one taken by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene when they came into these parts.2 I compounded these derelictions of my duties to my brethren and to God by wantonly lying to my superiors, falsely testifying that I was but walking the metes and bounds of the Temple’s estates. Much more the sin because I was seeking forbidden knowledge.

  Directions could not be had from the villeins thereabout, for they spoke in a dialect I could not comprehend. Had they been conversant in Frankish or Latin, it is improbable they could have answered the queries that filled my head. Caked as they were with the dirt in which they lived, reeking of sweat and their own excrement, I found it difficult to remember that they, too, were children of God. Even more uncomfortable was the knowledge that I had come from stock such as these. Clean clothes, meat each day and a fresh bed at night had engendered the sin of pride which had attached itself to my soul like a lamprey upon some hapless fish.

  It was from one of these journeys I was returning one day in October. The earth was still dust, for winter’s rains had not yet begun. The orchards were ablaze both with ripening fruit and autumnal foliage and the vines were no more than twisted twigs, having already been harvested and pruned. A cold wind blew from the west, the breath of the new snow I could see on those mountains known as Pyrenees at which the Languedoc ends and the Iberian country of Catalonia begins. I wondered at that time why the knights did not free the lands on the other side of those mountains from the heathen.3

  On the slope of the mountain called Cardou, I paused for a moment to give thanks to God for a spectacle so rich and to wonder at the majesty that created it in six days’ time. I had barely said my “Amen” when a hare, large and fat no doubt from a summer of repasts at the expense of the Brothers’ gardens, ran nearly over my feet. It stopped a short distance upwards and away and looked at me with an insolent eye.

  The animal robbed me of all thoughts of Him who made us both. Instead, I remembered the summer months which had passed without the spicy flesh I saw before me. I raised my staff and moved forward with caution.

  My second step did not stop with what I thought to be firmament beneath wild berry bushes. Instead, I had stepped into a void to the extent that I fell forward. When I stood, reaching for the staff I had dropped, I observed that the bushes obscured an opening in the earth much larger than that into which I had stumbled.

  I was facing no mere animal burrow but a cave or shaft in the stone white as the distant snow, a hole so cleverly concealed that, had I not fallen, I would have walked past without notice. Without moving from where I stood, the marks of stonecutters were visible upon the walls. This was, then, no natural crevice or fault in the mountain but one brought about by the hand of man.

  Had I but turned and sought explanation of my discovery, I would go to the fate that awaits me in peace. As it is, Satan himself fueled the curiosity that led me forward.

  From the light outside, I could see I was in a chamber, a cave, perhaps, crudely enlarged. Darkness prohibited my taking its exact measure, but I could stand upright and my extended arms touched neither side nor ceiling.

  In the dimness, I perceived an object in the middle of the rough floor, a block of stone of about the size of a bound manuscript.4 On this stone were carvings, letters I scarcely could make out which appeared to be of Hebrew characters, perhaps Aramaic, and Latin. I let my fingers explore since there was insufficient light to see clearly.

  Could this be the vessel spoken of in the Gnostic heresies? The stone was of a texture like the white of the Languedoc, so it likely had been carved where I found it,5 a more believable occurrence than transporting such a heavy object from the Holy Land. Without reading the inscriptions, I would not know and I was filled with a lust for that knowledge no less carnal than that which drives a man to seek a harlot.

  I needed light by which I could probe the mystery of what I had found. The Temple was but a quarter of an hour away and could be seen from the mouth of the cavern. The light of a single taper would assuage a hunger for knowledge more acute than any my belly had ever felt for victuals.

  I ran as though hell itself were behind me, as indeed it turned out to be. I dashed through the portcullis, hardly extending a greeting to those who guarded the entrance. I crossed the cloister at a run that drew the attention of all and did not care of the opprobrium such conduct would bring.6 Such was my haste that I neglected to cleave to the walls of the arcade surrounding the garth, thereby demonstrating my humility by surrendering the wider path. Instead, I dashed along the middle, caring not which of my brethren were forced to give way. Inside, I suppressed the instinct to snatch the first lighted candle I saw from its sconce. Instead, I found one in my own cell and I stopped in the chapel to light it from those that eternally burn there. In such a haste was I, I nearly neglected to genuflect upon my departure.

  My return to the cave was at a more sedate pace than my departure, for, should an errant breeze or a sudden move extinguish the candle, I would have to return to the Temple to light it anew.

  Inside the cavern, I knelt beside the stone edifice and shielded my candle. The Latin inscription was of a dialect so archaic I found it difficult to decipher. The stone into which it was carved badly crumbled.

  As I contemplated what was written, it was as if the cold hand of Satan squeezed my heart and I swooned into darkness. I know not how long I was oblivious to the physical world but when I awoke, I wished I had not. According to the label carved thereon, this stone contained that which even now I dare not mention. The fire to which I will shortly be consigned will not be hot enough to expurgate my soul of the perdition engraved upon that stone.

  I was distraught, knowing not what to do. I must have been possessed by demons, for I first tried to lift the top from the stone. God’s mercy made it far too well lodged to come free. Had I succeeded, I would surely have suffered a fate not unlike Lot’s wife, for my eyes would have beheld that far more odious to God than the end of Sodom. My next thought was to share my find with those far wiser and more dedicated to God than I, who could surely explain what I had found. I now realize this was the same urge Satan fostered upon Eve to share her sin with Adam, spreading the disease of sinful knowledge like the plague.7

  I know my mind was not my own, for I left the unused potion of the taper, an extravagance but one of the lesser sins I was to commit because of the curiosity the devil inspired in my soul.

  As I gained sight of the Temple, I witnessed an outpouring of men on horseback, among them most of the knights, all clad as though for battle. Among them I recognized Guillaume de Poitiers, Tartus the German and others, being most of the Temple skilled in the arts of war. With them were asses, burd
ened as if for a long campaign. They were gone before I reached the walls, their memory being little but a cloud of choking dust.

  I was surprised to find the portcullis raised and unmanned, for if the brethren had ridden forth to vanquish the invaders feared by the Holy See, they most surely would have secured their own source of supply.

  Inside the walls, all was confusion. Swine and oxen were unfettered, running freely through the cloister gardens as ducks and chickens flapped and scattered underfoot. I could not find Phillipe and presumed he had gone with his master. The cellarer was in the storage area off the refectory, musing over provisions strewn across the floor—wine barrels, their staves crushed—and the litter of haste predominant.

  The cellarer was an old man, his love the order in which he kept his charge. His voice quavered as though broken by sorrow.

  “They are gone,” he said before I could inquire into the tumult and disorder. “A rider from Paris, from Brother de Molay himself.8 All the brothers otherwise unoccupied were ordered to collect the holy relics, empty the treasury and take such provisions as they would need for seven days. For what purpose, I know not.”

  This was exceeding strange. Brothers “otherwise unoccupied” would pertain to those knights trained in the art of war, leaving those charged with the actual sustenance of this Temple. Were the departing knights sallying forth to battle, they would certainly not be ordered to subject the Temple’s holy relics and treasury to the vagaries of conflict. So full of my virulent discovery was I that I held the whimsy of the Master of the Order to be of little consequence. I only pondered in whom, if at all, I should confide.

  It was after Vespers that the wisdom of the Master became apparent. We were gathered in the chapter house, each seated on the stone benches that were carved into its walls, discussing what little business might be left upon the departure of so many of our number. I had in my robes ink, quill and paper, planning to return to my duties when our meeting concluded, though verily my mind had so succumbed to my discovery, I doubt I could have added two figures. I knew not to whom, if anyone, I should confide. The first chapter of the rules of the Order had been read,9 when the door slammed open. Therein stood the king’s bailie for Serres and Rennes. With him were a host of men-at-arms.