by Rob Swigart
“This is preposterous!” Hugo smacked his desk with both palms. “At the moment Lisa Emmer is our only viable suspect! She had the code to Foix’s apartment. He knew her. She was the only one who could get inside without alarming him.”
Hugo put as much energy into this speech as he could muster, but even as he was speaking he began to doubt his own words. There were other players, and the other players were surely suspects.
“But, sir,” Mathieu objected. “They were friends. Why would he lock the study door if she was a regular visitor? Besides, she doesn’t seem the type to carry explosives, does she?”
Hugo slumped back in his chair. “I know, I know. What I mean is, Emmer’s our best witness, and she’s eluded us twice now, which I find very suspicious.”
Hugo thought of himself as a good man, and more, a good policeman. He hadn’t become a captain because he was stupid or incompetent. His assistants, even Mathieu, were another matter. No, that was unfair. Mathieu did his best, and he was often of use. It was the case getting him down.
“There’s also the nun,” Mathieu suggested.
“Yes, I know, I know, there’s always the nun and her wheelchair. And her monk.” Hugo dismissed this with a wave of his hand. For some reason at that very moment he thought of the cutaway scale model of the beautiful Beaux Arts Gare d’Orsay he was building in his study. It was one of the most beautiful buildings in Paris and now served as a museum, but Hugo’s father had told him more than once of coming home from his years as a prisoner of war through the train station. As a child Hugo had heard de Gaulle announce his willingness to serve his country from the grand hotel attached to the station. That was in 1958. He had always loved the old station, and dreamed of the long-distance trains that came in and out until 1939.
He was currently working on the removable long curved ceiling with its broad skylights, arched windows and decorative medallions.
The station, for he always thought of it as a station and not as a museum of modern art, was just a long block away from the Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes. The Gare d’Orsay was a grand lady of Paris and one of the many reasons he loved the city.
He was considerably less fond of the Ministry building, and even more so this day.
Still, he felt calmer and more cheerful, and so smiled for the first time all afternoon. “Did Dupond have any good news for us?”
“Well…”
“Wonderful.” Hugo waved away this sarcastic sally and went on, still smiling wolfishly. “All right, gentlemen, I have something to tell you. I have just today received a telephone call from Quai d'Orsay. Someone in the Foreign Ministry whose name a mere captain in the Paris Police is apparently not allowed to know wanted to speak with me personally. This person I do not know said he was a private secretary to the Foreign Minister himself. A very private secretary, he said. He was calling to inform me that an investigation into the deaths of Raimond Foix and Antoine Rossignol doesn’t serve the interests of the Republic at this time. Delicate international issues are involved. These issues are of concern neither to me nor to the Préfecture of Police. The deaths of Foix and Rossignol were accidents or suicides. Their cases are no longer open.”
He glared at his two inferiors. “He made me angry, that man at the Quai d'Orsay. Very angry. I’m better now, really I am, but he roused my ire, didn’t he? Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Mathieu answered. “We’ll keep looking. Dupond said the Emmer woman and her friends are on their way back to Paris, so we’ll be waiting.”
“Well, then,” Hugo said affably. He was enjoying himself at last. “That’s a morsel of good news after all, isn’t it?”
29.
Lisa centered the sheet of parchment on the table. “All right, you believe there’s a clue here, correct?”
Ted looked on curiously. “That’s the one from the Procroft Collection, yes?”
She nodded.
“Then yes, that’s it. This is the first time we’ve seen it, isn’t it, Marianne?”
“First time, Ted,” she agreed.
“Is there anything special about it?” Steve asked, leaning over the table.
Lisa trailed her finger along the edge of the glassine envelope. She said without looking up, “Tell me about Bruno. Being famous would run counter to the Hypatia Doctrine, wouldn’t it? The Pythos should be unknown, a secret, not a famous person. So why Bruno?”
“We can’t explain why in the sixteenth century a well-known figure held this position but it seems to be true. We can name only a few others. For example, right before Dr. Foix there was Carter Samuels, an obscure British vicar in Wakefield. Before that, there was Bruno of course, and Alberti, the best known. The others were all humble people like Samuels who left little record of their existence.”
“I see. So what about the Founding Document?” she asked, tapping her fingernail on the glassine envelope. “This can’t be it.”
“No.”
“But you and Marianne believe there’s a clue to it in here?”
“You’re thinking out loud. Good. Please go on.”
She straightened. “If there is a clue, then there’s more here than Bourbaki and a list of quotes in Greek from the Thomas gospel.”
“Yes.”
She moved the envelope around to catch the light in different ways. “It’s a palimpsest,” she said. “There are faint traces of previous writing.”
Steve said, “What? Where?”
“Look at right angles to the writing, between the letters. It’s been scraped and reused. She looked up. “Most palimpsests like this one are on vellum or parchment, which were expensive and rare, and so economical to reuse. But why would Raimond do such a thing, erase something with this kind of history, something this important to his work? It doesn’t sound like him.”
Ted nodded. “Perhaps not, but go on.”
She had the impression she was back in one of Foix’s classes. She continued thinking out loud, “All right, the Thomas gospel wasn’t discovered until the Coptic Nag Hammadi library, so this writing can’t be older than 1945 when Nag Hammadi was found.”
Ted said nothing.
“But Thomas was known before that, of course: whoever sealed the Nag Hammadi library in a jar was trying to hide it from the eyes of the Church after the Council of Nicaea. That was when unauthorized or unapproved doctrines became heretical and subject to harsh penalties. The Nag Hammadi Thomas was a translation from an earlier Greek version; both were lost to history for sixteen hundred years. I presume Raimond had access to a Greek version.”
Ted and Marianne were both smiling. “That’s right,” Ted said. “In 325 the Council of Nicaea proclaimed the unity of the faith and standardized doctrine, very good. One copy of Thomas was hidden in the Nag Hammadi jar, and other copies exist as well. Please, go on.”
“OK. The Founding Document was written shortly after 395 when the priest of Apollo went to Alexandria. By then Nag Hammadi was already buried. Besides, Raimond wouldn’t harm the Founding Document, so this is something else, a text Raimond cleaned and wrote over. You think Bruno?”
“Good.” Ted folded his hands across his belly and smiled enigmatically. “Perhaps you can date the material?”
“Of course she can, Ted,” Marianne said, tapping his arm. “She’s the Pythia.”
“I’m a papyrologist,” Lisa muttered. She slid the page from its envelope and, with her eyes closed, stroked her fingertip very lightly over the surface. She held it up close to the window, where the slanted rays of the afternoon sun could illuminate its surface. She squinted, noting the subtle waves and ripples. She sniffed it.
“I see,” she breathed, slipping it back into the envelope. “Much later than the fourth century, perhaps as late as the sixteenth.”
Marianne clapped her hands. “Told you,” she said to Ted.
Lisa shook her head. “So Raimond scraped it and cleaned it and put Bourbaki in deliberately to date it. Then what was the original?”
>
Ted didn’t know.
“But you do believe it was Bruno? The date is about right.”
“Yes. The Alberti disk also belonged to him.”
“All right. It can’t possibly be the Founding Document unless Bruno copied it here, but from what you say he wouldn’t do that, either.”
“That’s correct,” Ted agreed. “It was forbidden to make copies and Bruno wouldn’t have needed one. He was famous for his prodigious memory and wrote widely on the subject. And remember – no joke intended – he was also very interested in the hermetic tradition.”
“Right. Alchemy?”
“Think of it as natural science, but of course it included chemistry, physics, optics.”
“Good. Let’s assume Bruno wrote something here. Further, let’s assume he was prepared for someone in the future to clean it and re-use it. A good alchemist might have ways of recovering the writing using milk or lemon juice. Or he might have used some other form of secret writing. Could he have foreseen this?”
Ted merely smiled.
“All right, what more can you tell me about the disk?”
Rossignol’s secretary Alain spoke up. “Round, flat, bronze, a few centimeters in diameter. Kept in the secure vault below M. Rossignol’s apartment on the rue Montpensier.”
“Right,” Steve said. “Designed to encrypt and decrypt messages. Rossignol was getting it to deliver to you, which means you need it.”
“You said it belonged to Bruno and he used it to write in code?”
“Technically, if he used the disk, it was to create a cipher, not a code,” Steve corrected. “Specifically, a polyalphabetic substitution cipher using a keyword. You line up the first letter of the keyword with its mate on the outer disk and write out the plain text message on the outer disk, substituting the letters on the inner disk. At an interval agreed to beforehand – every letter or more you shift to the next letter of the keyword. Someone smart might be able to break an enciphered message without the key word, but it would take much longer.”
“I see.” She bit her lower lip and brightened. “Very well, Raimond wrote Thomas’ sayings over the real message. The message was in cipher and points to the location of the real Founding Document, which the Order wants. Now they have half the disk, they’re that much closer.”
“Yes,” Alain agreed. “But they have the easy half.”
“Then why all the fuss? Why would Rossignol risk his life to get it for me? Unless there’s something else about it, something physical we don’t know about.”
Steve frowned. “Maybe, but without it there’s not much we can say.”
“No,” she agreed. “All right, then, if we had the scrambled alphabet half, and if we could reconstruct the message we could then decrypt it and recover the Founding Document.”
“Good,” Ted agreed.
“There’s a lot of if in that,” Steve said.
“We have to start somewhere,” Lisa said. She turned in her seat. “So, Alain, let me ask you, where’s the other part?”
“Honestly, I wish I knew, Miss Emmer, but I do not.”
“Any ideas? Anyone?”
They were still looking expectantly at one another when the pilot announced final approach to Le Bourget.
30.
A sedan was waiting for them outside the Apollonair hanger and they lost no time leaving the airport. When they had merged onto the highway and headed south, Lisa asked, “Where do we go now?”
“Dinner,” Steve suggested. “There’s a brasserie off the Place de la Bastille where we might get something decent this early. It’s small, obscure and discreet. We’ll be safe there.”
Alain, hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, kept his eyes straight ahead. “Don’t be too sure. Someone’s following us.”
She looked out the back, but there was a lot of traffic. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “Nothing special, anyway. Who’s following?”
Alain said, “Dark green Peugeot, Paris license, two men. It was waiting in the parking lot. Now it’s four cars back, same lane. Watch.” He swerved off the highway onto a side street. A green Peugeot followed them. Alain slowed as though lost, turned, cruised slowly, turned again. The Peugeot hung back, but remained always in the rear-view mirror.
“All right,” Lisa agreed. “What now?”
Alain swung the sedan around a semi trailer parked next to a warehouse. “Let them follow. They can’t do anything for the moment… Just a second.” Alain adjusted the mirror.
“What is it?”
“A Citroën. Either we have two tails or ours has picked up one of its own.”
He sped up the ramp to the highway. At the next exit and without further evasive maneuvering he returned to surface streets and worked his way south into the center of Paris.
Half an hour later the light began to fade. They inched toward the Place de la Bastille on the boulevard Beaumarchais. Traffic was barely moving, with much angry honking around them.
“What’s going on?” Lisa’s anxiety had been building since the airport. Something was about to happen.
Steve shook his head. “Gay Pride,” he said. “Seems a long time since this morning, but I should have remembered the parade ends at Bastille. The tail end must still be coming in and everyone’s here to greet, jeer or join.”
“We have to get off Beaumarchais,” Alain said. “Otherwise we’re going to be stuck, and if those people behind us want to do something we’ll be, as you say in English, seated ducks.”
Ted grunted. “Lisa, I think you should analyze that parchment very carefully, don’t you agree, Marianne?”
“Yes, Ted, it’s crucial. If it’s a palimpsest the Pythia must read the original text.”
“I’ll need equipment,” Lisa said. “Institut de Papyrologie is limited to ultraviolet, some chemical analysis. It’d be better if I could examine it under synchrotron radiation and that takes a high-energy physics lab.”
“There’s one at Orsay,” Ted said. “We’ll see what we can do.”
“Where?”
“University south of the city, Paris XI.”
“You have this kind of information in your head?”
Ted grinned. “I’ve read Bruno on the subject of memory.”
“I hate to interrupt,” Alain said, “but as soon as I get a chance I’m going to let you two out. We’ll try to draw them away. Join the crowd; get some dinner. Go back to the Gaîté safe house. I’ll call in the morning.”
One of their pursuers suddenly swerved into oncoming traffic and tucked back in behind them. Alain grunted and did the same, turned left down a narrow side street, turned again and slammed on the brakes. “Go!”
Steve grabbed their bag of clothes, calling, “You forgot your things!”
But Lisa was already out, her canvas bag slapping against her side. They ducked down an alley together while Alain drove away with Ted and Marianne. The other two cars followed him in quick succession.
They returned to the street and made their way toward the Place de la Bastille. The closer they got the thicker and more agitated the crowd became. “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,” Steve murmured.
“Baudelaire,” she acknowledged. “Swarming city full of dreams, indeed.”
There was a festive atmosphere, with noisemakers and music coming from the great traffic circle.
Warm evening air flowed around them. The darkening sky was dotted with puffy clouds, undersides dusted with orange. The gold-covered statue of the Genius of Liberty atop the July Column was now visible. People were dancing.
The names of Parisians who died in the revolution of 1830 engraved in gold on the column glowed. The square was clogged with trucks. The cacophony of blowing horns, bands, and flashing disco lights intensified the carnival atmosphere. It was phantasmagoric, dreamlike.
Lisa slid her hand under his arm, telling herself she did it so they wouldn’t get separated.
In spite of Steve’s reassuring presence, her uneasiness w
ouldn’t leave her. They were exposed and vulnerable and there was so much noise and confusion an attack might well go unnoticed. She imagined their bodies discovered the next morning by the street cleaners. She leaned into him and whispered urgently, “Let’s go somewhere quiet. It’s too open here.”
“Right.” He touched the back of her hand reassuringly.
A shock ran up her arm like small chains of lightning. For only a moment she thought it was his fingertips, and then she knew that something was about to happen. A random configuration of the individual particles around them lined up in such a way that a lane opened. Her vision widened and she saw at one time, as through the wrong end of a telescope, the nun walking toward them and the little red spot from her laser sight jittering on Steve’s forehead.
Lisa dragged Steve sideways into the turbulent sea of humanity. As it closed around them someone whirled a noisemaker and shouted words she couldn’t understand. The costumes and lights were chaotic, out of control, and all the festivity turned to nightmare. Her feet were entangled in vines. Everything moved too slowly, her foot lifting, weight falling forward, Steve toppling off balance. There were police after them, soldiers, killers. That much she knew.
But nothing happened, her other foot lifted, swung forward, fell to the pavement. Steve was right beside her. She remembered who she was, and in that moment began to doubt the nun; it was just a hallucination, a vision, a primitive fear dredged up from her unconscious. The nun couldn’t have returned from Mirepoix so quickly, could she?
Trucks blocked them, as they had early that morning in another part of the city, a lifetime ago. The thought that she couldn’t possibly be the Pythia arose like a wave and fell back again. She was running for her life from a nun who wanted to assassinate her! It was ridiculous.
