Lisa Emmer Historical Thrillers Vol. 1-2 (Lisa Emmer Historical Thriller Series)

by Rob Swigart

  “Abraham,” Lisa repeated. “Yes. You were speaking of a child?”

  “Thaumastos wanted to hear about the story. You know how common they used to be, stories filled with omens, a Messiah or anti-Christ to save or smite us. I thought Brother Usem might know of this legend. Mesopotamia’s his specialty. For me it was just curiosity, a scary story about demons. But the tablet referred to demons, and I confess I got a little nervous at that.” He gave an embarrassed laugh.

  “Perhaps I could look at this letter,” Lisa said.

  Frédéric put the scallop into his mouth and waved the fork in the air. “I’ll send a copy over tomorrow. Anyway, when I read the email I called his cell phone. No answer.”

  His fork hovered over another scallop. His shoulders slumped and he set the fork down beside his plate with a sigh.

  He began speaking, chin down and his voice muffled. Lisa couldn’t quite hear. Fragments of gray bobbed at the edge of her vision: an eye, an ear, part of the nose. The harpsichord across the salon was an outline etched against the window, its reflection doubled in the glass.

  When she felt the pressure of Steve’s hand on her arm, she opened her eyes. It would not do to rush. She relaxed, letting the flow of Frédo’s words wash over her.

  He was going on about the middle of the second millennium before the Christian Era, how Harran, the ancient city of Abraham near the Euphrates not far from modern Urfa, appeared in Genesis 22.

  Lisa wanted to bring him back to the day’s events, but no sound came out. She cleared her throat and tried again. “After you called, what did you do?”

  “His fear was contagious.”

  “And?” She already knew the answer.

  “I went to his apartment and knocked. There was no answer.”

  “Could he have been home but not answering?” Steve said. “He might be ill.”

  “It just felt empty. The place is quite small, a tiny salon and bedroom and it. I could have heard him breathe. I banged on the door and it swung open. He was gone; he hadn’t even closed the door all the way, so he must have left in a hurry. That’s when I called you. He should have been there. He had asked me to go there.

  “The only other place I knew about was a café he goes to, so I went there. They saw him this morning. He was preoccupied and tense, ordered a coffee and tartine, and rushed off halfway through. I called the Jesuit office. They hadn’t heard from him. This isn’t like him, Lisa, not like him at all. He’s a man of habit. I’m worried.”

  “More than worried,” Steve suggested.

  Frédo looked up. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know why I contacted you. I couldn’t think of anyone else. The police wouldn’t listen; it’s too soon.” He spread his hands. “I’ve never felt so helpless. I know something terrible has happened.”

  Celia

  She moved sluggishly, as if through thick mud, along a corridor lined with closed doors, each with a small mesh opening at eye level. Despite the presence beside her, she was alone, had always been alone.

  The corridor extended beyond her vision; the walls came together in a far distance. She crept along and reached… nowhere. More corridor. No end, no beginning.

  She sensed distant hunger, a growl in her stomach, an ache or an itch, and looked around. No one walked in front, no one walked beside. So it was true, there was no one else. Even as a child? She searched, and found no memory of a childhood. Wasn’t everyone supposed to have a childhood? Mama and Papa, trips to the park, wheee down a slide or round and round to the squeak of bearings. A carrousel it was called. But there was no Mama or Papa, no park, no carrousel. There was only gray fog.

  Father Colmillo had told her she was vulnerable. She knew what it meant, to be vulnerable, but despite his wet fleshy mouth and dry white skin and disorderly gray hair, Father was not unkind, at least at first. If she was vulnerable, did he mean to hurt her? True, when he touched her hand she would shiver. He was Papa? They called him Father, the others did. One of the others, a woman, she thought, because of the voice, yes, the woman called him Father. Her head was embedded in stiff white and black material like a shell in stone. A talking shell, saying not to her but to him, “Father, this girl refuses to speak. We can do nothing with her. She’s just another lost soul rejected by God.”

  The girl didn’t like the way this woman talked, like small stones clacking against each other, so she thought about something else. Seaside. The fog was near the sea. She remembered the smell of salt water, sea plants, wet sand.

  Father Colmillo wasn’t walking there beside her, but she remembered his case full of objects. Some were silver; some were black. A cup. Others of cloth, wood, metal. He opened the case to show her, and she drew back. “Don’t be afraid,” he would say. She was more afraid than ever when he said that. Every time he opened the case he said, “Don’t be afraid.” The case too was black, like his gown, the narrow black gown with all the buttons that made him seem so tall, so pale, his long pale hands clasped before his belly or pressed together in prayer. His mouth twisted to one side when he spoke.

  Something touched her elbow and she looked up. The sister, she remembered then the woman was called Sister, the stone-talking woman, pointed at a door, and she saw that it was open. Sister had been behind her all along. So she was not alone, but wished, for an instant, that she was. No one asked her to talk when she was alone.

  Inside was a bed, little lights that winked and winked, as if they knew things she did not. She pulled back, turned to go back to her cell in the Children’s Hall, but Sister pushed her roughly, and she was inside. This was called the infirmary, but she wasn’t sick.

  There was a chair by the bed. Sister pointed and she sat. Sister’s lips moved. “You will wait.”

  Sister swept out with a rasp and closed the door. It clicked, and she was alone. Her eyes wandered around the room. There was a window, covered by shutters that were never open. Beyond it was a white blur. And gray shapes. She had seen them once. These were thin, twisted limbs heaving back and forth, reaching out. They must be alive because they were angry.

  She looked elsewhere, and saw: a white ruffled curtain hiding a corner; a tray and screen on wheels; a ball of fluffy dust against the baseboard.

  Her stomach growled again. She waited, holding a hand to her belly.

  Sister returned with a tray. On it was a bowl of something hot, steaming. It smelled good and she ate. Sister watched her without expression, her face a mask surrounded by white and black.

  When she was full she put down the spoon. Sister was holding up a large cross she wore on a chain around her neck. “You see this?” Sister asked.

  Of course she saw it.

  “Well?”

  She nodded. She didn’t want to, but she did. Every time she showed them she heard, they pressed her harder.

  “Speak!” the Sister commanded.

  She stared. It was best she didn’t react.

  “You have offended God,” Sister said. Her voice was without emotion. She gestured with the cross. “Only this can save you.”

  Celia looked down at the swell of her belly. She spoke in a silence wrapped in gauze, careful to make no sound. “Father said not to be afraid,” she said, but she was afraid, just as when Father Colmillo opened his black case.

  “Are you afraid?” the nun asked. “Father Colmillo tells you not to be, but you are still afraid. I can see that, despite your stubborn silence. It’s good. You should be afraid. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

  Celia wanted to frown or shake her head, to show she didn’t understand. Wisdom was a word without meaning for her. She pushed herself back in the chair. Her belly growled again and she took her hand away, as if it burned. Didn’t she just eat? She could taste oatmeal in her mouth, unsweetened. She knew the taste. Fog, she thought. It tastes of fog.

  Sister began to talk again. Her mouth was moving, sound was coming forth, sound that shaped into words that stitched together. “You’re a vessel. You’ve been filled. Who filled you? Speak.�
�

  She shook her head, her eyes blank. It was best to be stupid. She thought that, and made it so.

  Sister lifted the cross and stabbed it toward her. She flinched.

  “Never mind, then,” Sister continued. “We’ll find out. Not a man, certainly. What man would have you? Something else, then. I spent my life, since I was small, looking for evil, girl, do you understand me?” This was not a question, for the nun continued talking. “Evil is a thief. You wouldn’t understand this, would you? It comes to you as a friend, eases beside you while walking to the market, perhaps, or here in the infirmary.”

  Sister leaned forward and lowered her voice. The muscles in her face writhed. She hissed, “I know this: I found ways to see that others don’t know about. Father Colmillo doesn’t know. Oh, he has his black case, yes, the one that scares you, and he thinks that’s all he needs, but he doesn’t understand the sly ways of Evil, not really. Good survives only by following the rules, but you don’t follow the rules, do you? No, you went without thinking whichever way Evil led. You felt his urge in your belly, between your legs, and that’s why you’re here with us now.”

  The nun’s mouth was so close to the girl’s ear, her words seemed to slither in. “You remember that one time when you were speaking, not long ago? You knew not what you were saying. No one can understand your words, Celia. They made no sense. Father Colmillo had a little machine that captured your words, and he played your words back to you, do you remember?”

  She nodded. The memory, if that’s what it was, was hazy, but she did remember how the strange words coming from her mouth. They frightened her, the way she was frightened now. So she nodded. Her chin touched her neck and she could feel the skin. It was cold.

  “Good. You remember. They were the words of Evil, and that’s why one day soon Father Colmillo will come to you with his black case. He’ll take out his instruments and place them carefully on a table in the proper order. He knows the order, the gestures, the words. He will drive Evil from you. He does know these things. He will try to rid you of it. He is clever, Father Colmillo, but Evil clings tightly to those It possesses. You will suffer, girl; you will suffer greatly. You must endure the pain. Think about this. Pray. I want this for you, but don’t do it for me, do it for your own immortal soul. You do know how to pray, don’t you? Of course you do.”

  The nun leaned back and her eyes glittered, staring into hers. She made a dismissive gesture. “Do not pray on your knees, though. That would be dangerous. You must stand. Standing, you will feel the weight of your sin; the pull of it will remind you of the Evil you have invited in. Only then will you remember, and when you do you will tell me. You will confess. Oh,” and again the Sister made the dismissive gesture, brushing aside any unspoken objection, “not now, of course not. You’re not ready. But anyone can see Evil has written his blasphemies on your face, over your body. It struts in the way you walk, they way you turn your head, the way you close your mouth to keep your words from escaping. You refuse to speak, I know that. That is the work of Evil. Evil was present, hiding in those abominable sounds you uttered last month. The moon was full, do you remember?”

  Again the girl nodded. She did remember the moon. She was speaking words she did not know, and the moonlight flowed darkly along the arms of Sister’s cross. This, too, she remembered.

  “But Father Colmillo will try to help you, won’t he, though he may not understand all the ways of Evil, not really. Oh, but what he will do to you will be painful, that is certain. Perhaps you will scream out in your pain. Perhaps you will whimper and avert your eyes. It will not help, you, Celia.” Sister hissed the name.

  Sister lowered the heavy cross into her black lap, holding it loosely between her twisted hands, threaded with dark veins. Her mask-face stopped its restless motion. Her eyes froze in place, staring at the girl.

  It was all right, though. The girl had a name. She was Celia, daughter of the sky.

  Lex

  When Alexander Treadwell, who insisted on being called Lex, told his parents he was going to study with a Maronite Teacher named Nizam al-Muriq in Iraq, his father said, for the last time as it turned out, that he’d better toughen up, then; the boy’s squint made people think he was a sissy, and that part of the world was not kind to the weak. Alex was sixteen.

  Mr. Treadwell had named his son Alexander for a reason. “The name makes the man,” he told the boy’s mother, and she acquiesced. She wanted her son to be great, too.

  Lex repaid their dreams by leaving for lands his namesake had conquered millennia before, ever since a place of perpetual tyranny and war.

  After he was gone, the Treadwells consoled themselves that although the Maronites were an Eastern sect, they were not heretical. They were, in fact, in communion with the Holy Mother Church, so at least he wasn’t leaving the faith entirely.

  But when the Teacher— Ustadh was the word Lex used in his rare emails from some functioning Internet café or another— led his closest followers into the desert and finally settled in the tiny town of Al Qa-im near the Iraq-Syria border, something broke in Lex’s father.

  Lex had harbored murderous thoughts toward his domineering, critical father since he was fourteen. Even after he had discovered the Teachings, he considered returning home to strangle the man who had named him. He never got around to it, though, and suddenly it was too late. The police concluded the death was accidental. Treadwell was in the kitchen cleaning his gun at the island when it went off. They overlooked or ignored the absence of oily rags and cleaning materials, the fact that his father’s finger was on the trigger, and the entry wound just under the chin. The bullet had traveled upward and slightly back. Recoil had sent his arm out and down in a wide arc until his hand struck the granite counter, fracturing the fifth metacarpal. Bone and brain spattered over the refrigerator door and into the ceiling where the bullet, little the worse for wear, came to rest. Some accident.

  The old man’s generous contributions to certain charities and politicians earned him a proper Catholic burial and opened the spigot to the insurance money, which allowed Mrs. Treadwell to move to St. Louis, where she did everything she could to forget her previous life. The day she left, she emailed official photographs of the ‘accident’ to her son. He flipped through them, deleted them, and moved on. They had not communicated since.

  For the next ten years armies of various ideologies swept up and down the Euphrates and across porous national borders. Many times they overran Al Qa-im. Many times they were driven out or left. The armies were sectarian, tribal, nationalist, or militant. Sometimes they were organized, disciplined, and professional; sometimes they were an incompetent and brutal rabble. Lex made little distinction. They were all pretty much the same, temporary inconveniences. He avoided those he could, defended his Teacher when necessary, joined when forced, changed sides when expedient, and survived them all. Nizam al-Muriq cared nothing for them. For him and his following, the world was out of balance. Only the latest in a long line of Islamic States or Caliphates or Jihadi Republics was occupying Al Qa-im when he ordered Lex to move to Paris. His presence in the City of Light would help restore the balance.

  Alex was thirty-two years old.

  It was already dark outside. He sat with three other men around a butcher-block table in the back room of a small Moroccan couscous restaurant named Khadija two streets from Lisa Emmer’s apartment on the rue du Dragon. They were sipping strong red tea from small glasses and waiting for the device on the table to notify them. On the small screen a greenish night-vision image from a camera attached high up on the side of a building near Saint-Germain displayed the rue du Dragon. Cars approached and passed underneath. Scattered pedestrians cast changing shadows front and back as they passed the street lamps. The air was heavy with the threat of rain.

  Lex finished his tea and set his glass down on the table next to the hotplate with the kettle. “There are three inside,” he purred, speaking Maronite Aramaic lightly accented with Midwestern American. �
�We wait.”

  “Why?” Kemal’s fingers tightened around the rhinoceros horn hilt of the curved Yemeni janbiya he wore on his right side. “Why wait? Why don’t we go now, get it done?”

  Kemal was a Turk from Gaziantep, hot headed and impulsive. Because his faith was strong, Lex answered mildly. “There are two kinds of snake in this world, Kemal. This you know well, for it is written in our creed. There is the Snake of Wisdom, and the Snake of Ignorance. Ignorance is evil, and our mission is to cut off its head. If the people in there learn of us,” here he gestured at the screen, “they’ll stop us. Already they know about the Jesuit. Yes, we have neutralized him, but Teacher knows they are persistent. They will ask questions that must not have answers. They must never learn of the Miraculous Child, the One Who Will Bring Light. You will cut off the snake’s head before that can happen.” He picked up his glass and turned it slowly, watching light from the pantry play through its curves before continuing. “Be patient and deliberate. Haste betrays, Kemal. Haste and distraction are enemies. Our Teacher has asked; it is our duty to obey.”

  Kemal growled, “Yes, Iskander,” and withdrew into silence.

  Lex refilled his glass. The others held theirs out. He poured for them and replaced the kettle on the hotplate. They sipped noisily; steam wreathed their faces and diamond drops of condensation sparkled in their beards. No one spoke.

  The stoves, ovens, and food preparation tables were shrouded in plastic sheets. The large refrigeration units were silent. The restaurant had been “Closed for Renovations” for the last seven months, serving as a downtown safe house.