God's Formula

by James Lepore

  “Does the boy know what he has in his head?”

  “Not specifically, no, but he’s probably surmised by now that it’s not just a birthday poem. I went into it rather deeply with him. I had to. He’s not stupid. Everyone he’s come across has asked him about a formula. He’ll put two and two together if he hasn’t already.”

  “Can the Germans do a translation?”

  “It would take them a while, but I daresay they could.”

  “We must get the boy to England.”

  “Post haste. How do we go about it, I feel compelled to ask.”

  “I’m going up into the hills tonight to look for a likely landing strip. When I find one, I’ll radio the coordinates to London. We could leave tomorrow night.”

  “I didn’t know we had a radio.”

  “We don’t, but Philippa’s people do.”

  “What did you see topside?”

  “Germans everywhere, looking for the entrance to the secret caves. The three towers manned around the clock. They can see everything happening from up there in all directions.”

  “Will they find us?”

  “Philippa thinks not.”

  “Philippa. So you’ve graduated.”

  “Professor…”

  “Is that why you’ve been poking at your food?”

  Fleming smiled as his mind flashed back two years to a dark night in the Bavarian Forest, when it first occurred to him to wonder what role exactly John Tolkien was playing in his life, and how it was that he had come to fill it. He looked at the mug of coffee he had barely sipped and the untouched bread and cheese on the wooden slab resting on the stone ledge between him and the professor that served as their table. “This is my second breakfast,” he said.

  “She’s not one of us,” said Tolkien.

  “Not one of us?”

  “The world we live in.”

  “That’s odd,” said Fleming. “She told me much the same thing.”

  “Were you listening?”

  “Professor, I’ve had some experience of women.”

  “You weren’t, more’s the pity. She could conquer you, you know.”

  “I somehow don’t think you mean that in its traditional sense.”

  “Are you falling in love with her?”

  “My dear professor…”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t think I’ll fall in love again, not after Billie Shroeder.”

  “The triumph of experience over hope.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Then you’ll miss the whole point.”

  “The whole point of what?”

  “Of life.”

  Now Ian Fleming remembered the insight he had had in that German forest. John Tolkien the surrogate father. His own father barely remembered, his brothers with their stiff upper lips. The old don, nothing in it for him, unabashedly conveying life lessons. Makes one pause, of course, must admit that much.

  “And neither is our Mademoiselle Archambeau part of our world,” said John Tolkien.

  “Excuse me?” Ian Fleming replied. “I must say, my dear Professor Tolkien, you are full of surprises today.”

  “I don’t think we should tell her about the formula.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Why?”

  “She may reveal her true intentions.”

  “Or bring hell upon our heads.”

  “What is her state of mind?”

  “She does not like being guarded, stealthy though it might seem to be.”

  “Have you transferred your affections?”

  “I never had any affection for Madamoiselle.”

  “Nor she for you.”

  “Perhaps when we return to England you can start writing an advice to the lovelorn column. I happen to know the publisher of the Daily Mirror. Get you a spot on the staff.”

  Tolkien smiled. “I’d have to use a pseudonym. The Holy See at Oxford would frown, you see.”

  “Take one of your hobbit names. Bucky Periwinkle or some such.”

  “So you’ve taken a glance?”

  “Read the whole thing. Brow knitted.”

  “Good. It couldn’t hurt to know why I’m such a famous children’s author.”

  “I expect more from you next time.”

  “And I from you.”

  “Referring to my love life.”

  “No, your moral compass.”

  “Of course. What else. Assuming there is a next time.”

  “Quite.”

  Chapter 22

  Foix, June 18, 1940, noon

  “Are your sisters twins?” asked Professor Tolkien.

  “Yes,” Philippa Esclarmonde replied.

  “Claude seems to like Karl, Monique, and Conrad. Do you trust them to watch the boys?”

  “They don’t know the way out. Only Etienne and I do.”

  “Yes, but they seem to have become attached.”

  “They are Cathar.”

  “Are Cathars born without hearts? Without human needs?” The professor surprised himself with this question. He was not wont to interfere in other people’s lives. But, when they first met formally, and Philippa touched him gently on the back of his hand, from that moment, John Tolkien knew that the girl had a gift, that she had been touched by the hand of God. A gift that was also a terrible burden, and thus his heart went out to her.

  “Of course not,” Philippa answered.

  “Shall I be frank, my dear Philippa?”

  “You will be anyway.”

  “Your uncle has done them and your brother, and you, a disservice. The flesh is not evil.”

  “It is.”

  “Pride is the first of the deadly sins. Especially to be so proud as to set yourself above the common lot, to believe them ignorant while you yourself are precious.”

  Philippa turned and held her torch to John Tolkien’s face. They had climbed down the long shaft and were now in the lower complex of caves, heading toward the domed alter. “I am anything but proud, professor.”

  “That means you must have doubts.”

  “I cannot allow myself to have doubts.”

  “Philippa…” Was that a tear? Hectoring someone, especially someone so innocent, is also a sin, my dear John Ronald. “Are you…?”

  “It’s the smoke. Shall we?”

  If it was a tear, the professor said to himself, then it cannot have been caused by my crude attempts at dissuasion. Something has shaken her serene, and, I daresay, supreme, confidence. A moral crisis perhaps, around which she must pivot, as we all must from time to time.

  They were at the dome now.

  “Don’t take too long, please, professor,” said Philippa. “The smoke from the torches exits in a remote spot, but the Germans have keen eyes and they have not stopped looking.”

  “There,” said Tolkien. “I remember it now.” He was holding his torch up to one of the columns. With his free hand, he reached up and rubbed away grime and dust until a carved image of a cupped hand came clear. In the hand was a gemstone of some sort with rays emanating from it. Above it was a row of lightning bolts.

  “Is this what you saw in the ossuary?” Philippa asked.

  “Something similar, and the Latin ferum and virid.”

  “Green iron.”

  “Yes, green iron. Did Father Raymond talk about these carvings?”

  Philippa put her hand to her chest and, through her cotton blouse, fingered the emerald pendant that Tolkien remembered she wore. “No,” she replied.

  The professor moved the torch higher on the column, to a script in Old French, much of it obliterated by time, that read, something, something fer, something, something. “Can you make that out?” he asked.

  “No,” Philippa answered.

  “And this?” Tolkien asked. He had begun to circle the column. “These are clearer.”

  “They are Cathar prayers,” Philippa said. “For victory in battle.”

  “This looks like Zeus heaving a lightning bolt. Pre-Christia
n, I’d say. And here are two giants fighting with swords of fire. They look like Vikings.”

  “We must return, professor. The climb will be difficult.”

  “What did Father Raymond make of all this?”

  “He was convinced that the treasure of the Cathars would be found here.”

  “What did he think it might be?”

  “The Holy Grail, the dust from the Temple Mount, used by God to create Adam, the actual mace wielded by Vishnu, the glowing sword wielded by the Norse god, Surtr. He was obsessed with these thoughts.”

  “And what would he have done if he had found one of these things?”

  “He wanted to prove that Catharism was the one true religion.”

  “This altar,” Tolkien said. “Was there a mass?”

  “Something similar.”

  “I see 1:1-17 carved here.” The professor was standing at the altar now.

  “John’s Gospel is read during the Consolamentum.”

  “A ceremony, I take it.”

  “Yes, in which the postulant becomes a parfait. A perfect.”

  That sounds like more Cathar pride, John Tolkien thought, only God is perfect. But he kept his tongue. He, a sinner, had spoken enough of pride for one day, one lifetime.

  “Here,” he said, lowering the torch to the base of the altar. “The cupped hand again.”

  As Philippa stepped closer and leaned over to get a closer look at the carving in the stone, she stumbled and pitched forward head first. Reflexively, the professor reached out, grabbed a handful of the back of her blouse and yanked hard, halting her momentum and preventing her head, by an inch, from cracking into the stone altar.

  “Are you all right?” he asked as she stood and composed herself.

  “Yes, professor.”

  The rectangular area behind the altar was marked off by rough stones of various shapes and sizes, each containing the same eroded script and crude images as were to be seen on the dome and the altar. One of these was misaligned. “You must have tripped on that,” Tolkien said, pointing. When he bent down to put it back, he noticed something on the ground where the stone had been. Clearing away loose dirt with his hand exposed a piece of cast iron. He continued to dig and remove dirt and rubble until he saw what it was: an iron ring similar to the ones he had been chained to when he was first captured.

  “Did they sacrifice here?” he asked.

  “No.”

  The professor took hold of the ring and pulled on it.

  “It’s in a metal plate in the ground,” he said. “Odd.”

  Then he yanked harder on the ring, and, as an afterthought, twisted it, first right then left. When he twisted it to the left, it yielded, and from behind them came a loud cracking sound. They turned to see the altar swiveling slowly away to reveal a gaping hole perhaps three feet wide. Next to the hole, on a stone shelf, was a leather-bound book. Its title was written in faded, calligraphic gold leaf: LeFer Vert, Diex de la Formule

  Tolkien and Philippa looked at the book, and then into the hole—a deep, cylindrical cave that seemed to extend to the bowels of the Earth—and then at each other.

  “Green Iron, The Formula of God,” said Tolkien. He picked up the book and, with Philippa by his side following along, began to leaf through it. Though its leather binding and cover were dry and cracking, the vellum pages inside were remarkably preserved. On them were a series of drawings that looked to describe a mining operation. On the first page, the dome was replicated and from it there appeared to be suspended a pulley system, with a man in a harness being lowered into the hole. The next drawings depicted harnessed men holding torches and using small pickaxes to gouge pieces of rock from the walls inside the hole. Pictures of baskets filled with these rocks being drawn up on separate pulleys were then shown. After these, there were pages with drawings of men on the parapets of Foix Castle hurling chunks of rock at halberded and sworded men on the slopes below, with flames bursting everywhere. The last several pages were thick with text in a mixture of Old French and Latin.

  “What does it say?” Tolkien asked. But Philippa was no longer at his side. She was on her knees staring down into the hole.

  “Child,” said Tolkien.

  Silence. Philippa, pale, her eyes glazed, knelt back on her haunches. Her hand stroked the pendant on her neck.

  “Did you see something?” the professor asked.

  “There is a spring at the bottom of the cave,” said Philippa. “The book speaks of it.”

  “Shall we try to get down there?”

  “Impossible. We must go.”

  “What about the book? Perhaps it is what your uncle was looking for.”

  “Return it, close the altar. I will come back for it. But we must go now. The smoke from our torches will be seen.”

  Chapter 23

  Foix, June 18, 1940, 5:00 p.m.

  “Tell me, Etienne,” said Adrienne Archambeau, “how long will I be a prisoner here?”

  “You are not a prisoner,” Etienne Esclarmonde replied. The handsome and muscular twenty-one-year-old had set down Archambeau’s supper tray and was pouring out water from a clay jug. Sitting on her cot, Archambeau took note of the Frenchman’s trim young body as he bent forward and concentrated on measuring out her wine. The surgical bandage on the side of his neck, just visible above the collar of his thick peasant’s sweater, added a touch of danger and mystery to his otherwise perfect Greek form. Adonis himself could not have been more beautiful.

  “Then let me leave,” she said. “Show me the way out.”

  “Philippa says you are here to help us kill Germans.” Etienne, the pouring complete, still holding the carafe, remained standing a few feet from Archambeau. There was no place to sit in the cavern, except for the space next to her on her cot, which the raven-haired Frenchwoman glanced at sideways for a second before casting her large violet eyes back up at Etienne.

  “How?” she asked. “I am unarmed and a prisoner.”

  “We are fortunate.”

  “Fortunate? I don’t understand.”

  “Who would have thought that so many thousands of German troops would come to Foix? So many to be killed.”

  “I see. I am eager to help. Tell me what to do.”

  “Philippa will decide.”

  “Why do you allow your sister to rule you? You are a grown man.”

  Etienne smiled, which pleased Archambeau, as it was something she had been trying to get him to do since she had been placed in her own separate cavern and realized that he was her guard. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  “I am Philippa’s legal guardian.”

  “How did that come to be?”

  “My uncle was our guardian. When he died, I succeeded him.”

  “Then tell her to let me go.”

  “I will discuss it with her.”

  “She rules you.”

  “Only God rules me.”

  “She is jealous of Fleming.”

  Adrienne watched as Etienne’s eyes flashed and he smiled again. “There you are mistaken,” he said.

  “She loves him.”

  “She does, but not in the way you think.”

  “Do you love anyone? A girl, I mean? You are young and handsome.”

  Archambeau watched as Etienne gathered himself. Seeing the confused look in his eyes, she thought, good, he is a man, he has a cock. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I have embarrassed you.”

  “No…”

  “The two German boys,” Archambeau said, changing the subject deliberately, “are they also your sister’s prisoners?”

  “No one is a prisoner here.”

  “Why can’t I speak to Monsieur Fleming and Monsieur Hope? Why have I been isolated here?”

  Silence. In which Archambeau hoped she had sounded sufficiently distressed. Save me, Adonis. “Will you come back to speak to me later? I am losing my mind in this hole.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Perhaps I will overpower you and escape.” Archambeau smi
led herself now, a smile, she knew, that had melted men made of much sterner stuff than the boy standing so uncomfortably before her.

  “You could not find the way out,” Etienne replied.

  “Yes, my dear, handsome Etienne,” said Archambeau. “I must rely on you for all my needs.”

  Chapter 24

  Foix, June 19, 1940,12:00 a.m.

  “We explored caves in our HJ corps, in Bavaria, both natural and man-made.”

  “HJ? What is HJ?”

  “Hitler Youth.”

  Conrad Friedeman and Monique Esclarmonde were standing in a small antecave. At their feet was the top of the shaft that led, some fifty feet below, into the complex of caves beneath the catacombs. They had opened a thick, oaken trap door and were looking into the narrow, craggy passageway, which, beyond the few feet illuminated by their torches, was, to all intents and purposes, a black bottomless hole.

  “What is Hitler Youth?” Monique asked.

  “First I was in German Youth. I had just started Hitler Youth when—”

  “When what?”

  “When my father was tricked into sending me away.”

  “Were you soldiers?”

  “We would have been, yes.”

  “We must close the door. We shouldn’t be here.”

  “Let’s go down,” said Conrad.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You saw what was down there. The next step is Hell itself.”

  “The bones, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to those people?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Have you been outside?”

  “I don’t know the way.”

  “Does anyone go out?”

  “Philippa and Etienne.”

  “Do you know why I’ve been brought here?”

  “Your secret.”

  “Why are we all hiding down here?”

  “There are German troops in town, thousands of them. Please Conrad…help me.”

  They bent and heaved the heavy door back into place. “Thank you,” Monique said, when they were done.

  “Shh,” said Conrad, “someone’s coming. Put out your torch.”