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

by Rob Swigart

  Steve produced a small, intense LED flashlight, switched off the single dangling bulb, and set off down a corridor. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Should be this way.”

  “Should be?” she mocked, following.

  The limestone walls of the narrow tunnel were crusted with salts and calcite; the ceiling dripped slimy white stalactites. “Part of an old quarry,” he said, running a fingertip track through the white powder. “You can still feel chisel marks.”

  “Catacombs,” she muttered unhappily. “Bones.”

  “Don’t worry, even though we come up near l'Ossuaire Municipal, we won’t see any skeletons. At least, I don’t think so. The good thing is, we got away from the Ophis people.”

  “That’s great, Steve, but it’s not the skeletons. I don’t much like being underground.”

  “Understandable. Stay close.”

  Ten minutes later they stood over a metal plate in the floor. Embossed lettering dated it to the early 18th century. “Here we go.” Steve tugged on the handle. With a screech the plate lifted a little and fell back with a thud. He braced and pulled again. This time the plate let go and he staggered back a step, letting it drop open.

  Lisa looked down into a black void. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” His flashlight revealed iron rungs.

  “I thought we were already in the catacombs.”

  “Nope.”

  “Catacombs are down there?”

  He bowed with a sweeping gesture. “Ladies first.”

  As they descended, his light flashed around the circular well. The stone was pockmarked, as if diseased.

  The ground quivered, a rumbling grew rapidly louder, and dusty rivulets cascaded down the walls. He mouthed “Train, RER B.”

  At the bottom she shivered. “It’s cold.”

  “Pleasant after the heat up above, no?”

  “Pleasant? I’m not sure that’s the word I’d use.” They reached a large chamber with several black openings. “Now which way?”

  “Follow me.” He started toward the opening on the right. “You know, there are hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, galleries, chambers down here. Easy to get lost.”

  “You’re really building my confidence, Steve Viginaire. Don’t forget bones. Millions of bones.”

  “You’ve never been down here before?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I thought everyone visited the catacombs first thing when they came to Paris.”

  “I’m interested in dead languages, not dead people.” After a moment she said, “Thanks, Steve.”

  “For what?”

  “For joking down here. It helps.”

  “I know. This was the only way out.”

  Bulbs encased in wire cages dimly lit some areas, leaving others in utter dark. Once they sent a nest of rats squealing in all directions. There were narrow passages choked with webs and dust, wider ones with strange, new smells, and always the penetrating chill. She hugged herself, trying to reconnect with her body, fearing a fugue coming on. She caught glimpses of the wide gray face, the mother in the painting, the underside of the boulder at Fontainebleau, and Frédo, a scallop halfway to his mouth.

  Steve said, “Hear that?”

  She listened. “Water.”

  “Aqueduct. It’s fascinating: hundreds of kilometers of tunnels were dug after the Revolution, but people have been digging down here since the fifth century at least. All that digging is why buildings can’t be more than six or seven stories high. The ground’s too unstable.”

  “So they help keep Paris Paris.” She spoke through a thick veil of jumbled visions. Suddenly they stopped and she knew in that moment where Frédo was and what he was doing.

  After a few minutes of scraping her shoulders and elbows she asked about the Ophis Sophia properties.

  “I didn’t have time to memorize them,” he muttered, sweeping aside a thick drapery of spider web.

  “Tell me what you do remember. I’m deep underground with some very bad people after me, and I don’t like closed spaces. And we need to figure out where they’re keeping Usem.”

  “You don’t have claustrophobia.”

  “I do. Look at me. No, don’t look at me, keep going. Take my word for it, my knees are weak and I’m sweating.”

  “The temperature in the Paris catacombs is a constant fourteen degrees Centigrade. That’s fifty-seven Fahrenheit.”

  “I know what it is in Fahrenheit. What did Constantine say?”

  They came to a very large chamber. His LED light was lost in the distance to their left. Their footsteps echoed, muffling Steve’s reply and he stopped speaking. At an arch into another tunnel, he said, “I remember they own some commercial property and a few houses.”

  “Houses? Where?”

  “Wait ‘til we’re outside.”

  She gave up and they trudged on. Half an hour later they climbed stone steps, two metal ladders and a circular staircase, and exited through a side door of the Catacomb entrance onto the intersection named after Pierre Denfert-Rochereau, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War.

  His name echoed the original name, the Barrière d'Enfer, the Gate of Hell.

  The Bookbinder

  They walked past the famous black statue of the Lion of Belfort by Frédéric Bartholdi to a shop set into the corner of a Haussmann style building a few hundred meters away. The Montparnasse cemetery was nearby. Elegant calligraphy in purple on an antique white board in the window was set off against the dark blue paper concealing the inside of the shop. The sign read: Jacques Delteil, Relieure.

  Lisa pushed the door open and a bell chimed sweetly. The light inside was dim and pointedly artificial. “Jacques! T’es là?” she called.

  The door swung shut behind them. They were immediately assailed by a complex mélange of smells: glue, leather, tobacco smoke, old paper, with the faintest floral undertones.

  “Jacques loves Lavender,” she explained when Steve sniffed. “He’s from Provence.”

  There was no response to her call. Steve crossed his arms and leaned back against the doorpost, watching her circle the room, trailing fingers over the spines of books filling floor to ceiling shelves.

  Two large desks in the center of the room were littered with scraps of cloth and leather, small tools, brushes, book frames, and other, more obscure items of vaguely Medieval utility. She paused once to examine a pair of delicate scissors. Raimond Foix had bequeathed her a similar pair.

  Distant coughing approached from above, followed by the appearance of an elderly man at the top of a circular staircase. “Lisa,” he muttered with neither surprise nor delight. He fell into another paroxysm of racking coughs, gripping the railing.

  She waited with a faint smile. He recovered and started down. His baggy forest green corduroys were streaked with different colors of dust, and the tails of a once-white shirt hung out the back. A ragged, ornately brocaded velvet vest flapped open with each step.

  At the bottom he scraped both her cheeks with his stubble and sank down at one of the desks. He stared into his clasped hands as if his descent had exhausted him. His short, thick fingers had tufts of white hair between the knuckles.

  With a sudden quick nod he looked up. “What do you want this time?” The question, though gruff, was not unkind.

  Taking no offence, she withdrew the FEDEX package from her bag. She slid the tablet out and placed it before him.

  “Hmph,” he grated, aligning it precisely with the edge of the desk, an oddly fussy gesture for one so seemingly disorganized. “And this is?”

  “A tablet. Cuneiform. Very old.”

  “Yes, yes, I see that it is old. I see that it is a tablet. Cuneiform? I can see that also. Some Mesopotamian language, then. You want it bound?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  “I don’t bind tablets. Tablets can’t be bound. They have no pages, spines, covers. Books. I bind books. That’s why people call me The Bookbinder.” He coughed for the sp
ace of four slow breaths and wiped both palms over his long thin hair. The tablet glowed honey-colored in the artificial light.

  “How is Madame Delteil?” Lisa asked politely.

  “See for yourself,” he muttered, staring at the tablet, dismissing her change of subject.

  She winked at Steve. “Upstairs?”

  “Down.”

  Lisa descended to the sous-sol and returned a few minutes later to report that Madame Delteil had said “to tell you she’s fine.”

  Jacques turned the tablet over with a grunt. Pieces clinked together. He replaced it squarely on the desk again, and stared some more.

  “I do not like it,” he said at last.

  “Just an old tablet, Jacques.”

  “No.”

  “Please. It’s important to keep safe. Concealed.”

  “Ah. But, no.”

  Lisa turned away from him. She examined a shelf containing the complete Tintin albums of Hergé, individually bound in colored leather, beginning with indigo on the left for Tintin Chez les Soviets, through the spectrum to deep brick red for the unfinished, posthumous Tintin et l’Alph-Art. “This set has been here as long as I can remember,” she observed.

  “Not that long,” the old man growled, still staring at the tablet. “Five years. Maybe six. Hasn’t found the right buyer.”

  “Long enough,” she sniffed.

  The next shelf over held an eighteenth century encyclopedia. Some of the volumes had been rebound, seemingly at random, A-C and L-N in exquisite leather, D-K in tattered canvas, N-P and XYZ in morocco, the rest lacking covers entirely. “When are you going to finish this?” she asked.

  “Never.”

  Steve re-crossed his feet.

  Jacques turned the tablet over again and placed his forefinger on the upper left corner. “What’s it say?” he muttered, as if he didn’t expect an answer.

  Lisa shrugged. “I don’t know, precisely. It’s a prophecy. About a child.”

  “Mph.”

  She waited.

  “I don’t like it.”

  She said nothing.

  He looked up. “Concealed, you say? Inside an old, useless book, seventeenth century court records, perhaps. Slightly larger than this… object. Would that do? I have such a book.”

  “I wouldn’t have such a book. It will have to blend into my bookcase. Seventeenth century court archives would be an anomaly.”

  “Hmm.” After some thought, he agreed. “Very well. I have a copy of Voltaire I can sacrifice, Lettres Philosophiques. Inferior printing, but adequately bound. About the right size. Would that do?”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “Very well, leave it here. Come back in a month.”

  “Tonight, Jacques, before midnight.”

  “I’ll be asleep.”

  “No, you won’t. You stay up well past midnight.”

  “Can’t do it that fast.”

  “It doesn’t need to be a work of art.”

  The old man let out a long breath, fished a rumpled package of unfiltered cigarettes from his vest pocket, pulled one out and put it in his mouth. He stared at the tablet. Finally, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the package with a shrug.

  At the door, Lisa said, “Thank you, Jacques.”

  He coughed. “I still don’t like it.”

  “Before midnight.”

  “All right,” Jacques grumbled. He took the cigarette out again. This time a match flared and he exhaled a long streamer of smoke.

  The door closed behind Lisa and Steve, cutting off the sound of the bell.

  Montsouris

  The warm breeze was sweeping a handful of discarded flyers along the gutter in fitful bursts. Traffic was light.

  “Now?” Steve said.

  “Montsouris.”

  “What makes you think Frédo’s there?”

  “I know it,” Lisa said. “It’s where he’d go if he wasn’t at the Sorbonne. He loves that park, the lake; it’s anonymous, open, crowded. A pleasant place to dream.”

  He nodded. “All right, if you think he’d be dreaming after knocking someone out and wrapping them up in duct tape. Walk or taxi? We still have a couple of hours.”

  “Walk. It’s not much more than a kilometer to the park, twenty minutes at most, and we got away from Ophis Sophia.”

  “For the moment,” he said grimly.

  “For the moment.”

  Trees newly in leaf along Avenue René Coty seemed to be whispering secrets at them as they passed. “All right,” she said. “Ophis Sophia properties, please.”

  Steve referred to the list. “Forget the commercial buildings; they’d be too well trafficked,” he suggested. “Too many neighbors, opportunities for escape, shouting for help, that sort of thing.”

  “So, a private place, separated from neighbors.”

  He nodded. “Three possibles inside Paris. If none of them pans out, we’ll move to the suburbs.”

  “No,” she said with certainty. “They’re going to be in the city, with easy access to trains and planes and ready to move Usem if they think we’re getting too close.”

  They compared the merits of the properties, ruling out the suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois and small apartment buildings near the Canal St. Martin and in Montmartre. That left a semi-detached house in the Butte aux Cailles and a sprawling nineteenth century property on the Parc Monceau.

  They crossed under the railroad tracks into the park. As expected, it was teeming with mothers and nannies pushing strollers, earnest joggers, strolling elderly couples, children shrieking, solemn teenagers engrossed in their ear buds.

  A careful tour of the lake led them sooner than expected to Frédo, sprawled on the grass. He was apparently engrossed in the ducks paddling and flapping their wings on the lake.

  Lisa stood over him. “Frédo!”

  He looked up. “Ah, Lisa. Steve.” He smiled broadly. “I knew you’d find me here. So many ducks today, you see?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Me? Oh, yes, indeed, no need to worry, I’m just fine, thank you.”

  A quizzical smile played at the corner of her mouth. “What accounts for this sudden confidence? You were pretty upset the other night.”

  Frédo closed his eyes, breathed in, and exhaled slowly. A sudden gust whipped his hair around his ears. He opened his eyes slowly. They were clear, even transparent. “I’ve discovered I’m not helpless.”

  “That’s good.” Lisa looked at the ducks padding around in mating pairs. A stab of envy passed through her and evaporated. “And how did you come to it?”

  Frédo considered this question, his broad smile undiminished. “Hm. Well, I was scared, you see, hiding at the office. Then this man came… Walid, his name was, I guess. Hm. I don’t really remember how it happened, but I think I, uh, hit him. With a fire extinguisher. I called the police and left.”

  “You wrapped him in duct tape,” Steve said.

  “Yes, I guess I did do that.” Frédo shrugged, then added, “He had a gun.”

  “A gun?”

  “A gun, yes.” He took the revolver from his pocket and showed it to them before putting it back. “So, I’m not helpless, you see.”

  Steve cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea how to use it?”

  Frédo was surprised. “It’s difficult? I assumed you point it at someone and pull the trigger.”

  “Is it loaded?”

  “I assumed…”

  Steve nodded. “It probably is. Would you let me check?”

  Frédo stood and hurriedly brushed himself off. His hand passed over the bulge of the weapon. His eyes showed the whites. “I’m sorry. This just isn’t… I mean, I can’t, I don’t know. I think I’ll just keep it.”

  “Suit yourself,” Steve replied doubtfully.

  “Snakes!” Frédo said suddenly.

  Lisa turned back from her examination of the ducks. “Excuse me?”

  “I used the secretary’s computer. Steve said whoe
ver attacked brought snakes to your apartment and I started thinking about them, about snakes…”

  “Yes?”

  “I hate snakes and now suddenly they’re everywhere. Snakes as food, snake venom as medicine, as poison. Snake cults. Snake charmers, snakes in assassinations, snakes as protectors of the house, sacred snakes in India, snakes in Central America, snakes as dragons.”

  “Yes, Frédo, but there are also mammals, birds.”

  He looked away, chewing on his lip. In a moment he continued, more softly, “There are snakes on every continent except Antarctica. They creep on their bellies, they sidewind, they see in the infrared.”

  “I’m sure your research was very thorough, Frédo,” Steve said. “But we have something to do now. Perhaps you could tell us later.”

  Frédo ignored the interruption. “In Egypt, a snake was a god. Cleopatra killed herself with a snake. Medusa’s head was covered with snakes. A cobra sheltered the Buddha.”

  “Frédo.”

  He looked directly at Lisa, his eyes wide. “Did you know in France we have something called the common adder, Natrix natrix?”

  She put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Calm down, Frédo, there’re no adders in Montsouris Park.”

  “Oh,” he laughed, “I know that. It’s not what I meant. No, what I was getting at was when I was looking into cults I came across a group called Ophis Sophia, now there’s a name for you, eh? Wisdom Snake? Snake Wisdom? The snake in the Garden of Eden, eh? Wisdom, or Satan? This Ophis Sophia still exists!”

  “We know that, Frédo.”

  “You know?” His manic enthusiasm melted away. “Well, there you go. You know. Did you know they worship some kind of Mother Snake? I thought at first it might be the Python Apollo defeated at Delphi. After all, Ophis Sophia is Greek. But no, that was later, in the Iron Age. I think Ophis Sophia was originally a Mesopotamian snake cult closely connected with the demon Usem mentioned, Dimme, Lamaštu, she who kills babies in the womb, who sickens young mothers, who spreads terror and panic. She holds a snake in each hand. I think that’s what that tablet was about; why Usem was so frightened. He knew about the snakes, I’m sure of it, in his vision or waking life, I don’t know, but that’s who took Usem, I’m sure of it.”