The Inquisitor's Key bf-7

by Jefferson Bass

  “I hate to say it, Inspector, but millions of Americans — like, forty percent — think the world is about to end. Almost half of Americans believe that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world will happen by the year 2050.”

  He held up a finger. “Ah, but this preacher — he says he knows exactement when these things will happen. God brought him to Heaven, he says, and gave him a special preview.” I had to admit, this was starting to sound fringy. “Two years ago, he tells everyone, ‘The Rapture happens in six months.’ So his followers quit their jobs to help him warn everyone. When the Rapture does not happen, does he say, ‘Sorry, I was wrong, I am an idiot’? Non! He says, ‘God gave me more time to save souls, so give me more money.’” He spat out a strawberry cap. “Morceau de merde.”

  It was the same phrase—“piece of shit”—that he’d used about Felicia Kensington, the black-market art dealer.

  “That isn’t all. He wants the world to end. Look, I’ll show you.” He pulled several folded pages from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me the top one. It was a printout from the church’s Web site, advertising a series of upcoming sermons by Reverend Jonah titled “Signs of the End Times.” Most of the page was filled by an illustration in vivid color. The illustration was captioned by a quotation from the Gospel of Mark: “Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down…and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows…For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time…” At the center of the picture was an immense, shining cross rising from the smoldering ruins of shattered skyscrapers. In the smoky sky, winged angels hovered beneath the gates of Heaven, welcoming a handful of white-robed, haloed people streaming upward from the ruins. Underground, naked bodies writhed amid the flames of Hell; some were being tortured, and others were engaged in sexual acts that were graphic, degrading, and grotesque.

  I handed the page back. “I don’t know which is more disturbing,” I said, “his eagerness for the world to end, or his fascination with pain and perversion.”

  “He isn’t just waiting for the Apocalypse. He’s trying to speed it up.”

  “Speed it up? How?”

  Descartes took a sip of coffee. “For one thing, by creating red cows for Israel.”

  I paused, my own cup halfway to my lips. “Red cows for Israel?”

  “Oui, exactement. Red cows. For Israel.”

  “I don’t understand, Inspector. What on earth do red cows have to do with the end of time?”

  “I don’t understand it, either,” he said. “It’s very complicated. But some of these end-of-the-world people — not just this preacher, but also some fringe Jews, Messianic Jews — believe that Jesus, or the Messiah, will come again after the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt.”

  “Rebuilt by red cows?”

  “Oui, special cows, trained in architecture and construction.” He laughed. “Non, of course not. Here is how the red cow fits in. Somebody important a long time ago — Moses or Solomon or God, whoever — said that the best way to clean up sins is to sacrifice a red cow. Pure red, with not one hair of any other color — no brown, no black, no white — anywhere on its body. Also, not just a cow, but a génisse. I don’t know the word in English, but it means a female cow, one that is young. A virgin cow, you know?”

  “Ah. The English word is ‘heifer.’ Yes, a sacrificial virgin. Female virgins always seem to take the sacrificial bullet for the team. But I still don’t get it, Inspector. What does sacrificing a red heifer have to do with the end of the world?”

  “Pfffttt.” Descartes blew out a puff of air, a versatile French expression of irritation or impatience or uncertainty. “I’m telling you, it sounds crazy to me. But. These people who want the Apocalypse, they think that when the perfect red cow is sacrificed, the Jews will be purified and inspired. They will unite to drive the infidels from Jerusalem and rebuild their holy temple. And when that happens, voilà—the Messiah comes again.”

  “So the eager preacher in Charlotte,” I mused, “joins forces with the militant rabbi in Jerusalem in the quest for the perfect cow.”

  “Oui. But not just looking for the cow. Creating the cow. The preacher is paying farmers and scientists to breed red cows. They thought they had her, the perfect génisse, a few years ago. There was much excitement in Jerusalem and Charlotte, but then poof! — she sprouted some white hairs in her tail. There was much disappointment. But they keep trying.”

  I looked around me, taking in the loveliness: the blooming lavender, the splashing fountain, the mobile rotating beneath the plane tree as miraculously and gracefully as the planets circling the sun. It was surreal, this conversation about the destruction of the earth, the desirability of mass suffering, and the notion that a cow’s pigmentation could flip the switch of the doomsday machine. “You’re making this up, Descartes. You’re just messing with my head.”

  “Non, non, mon ami, I cannot make up such crazy shit — I do not have such a big imagination. It’s all true. Incroyable, but true. And there is more. More and more and more. This preacher, Reverend Jonah Ezekiel, he thinks your government — well, not the government tout entier, but the Democratic Party, for sure — is controlled by demons. He’s making friends with Republicans who have the potential to become president. Can you imagine? If your president — the man with the nuclear launch codes — decides to launch the battle of Armageddon? Very scary, Docteur.”

  “Demons, you said? He thinks demons — actual demons from Hell — are running the government?”

  “Oui. Also Hollywood. Also Wall Street. So to fight back, this preacher and his followers want to get power—‘dominion,’ they call it, that’s why it’s in the name of the church — over everything and everybody.”

  I rubbed my throbbing eyes; squeezed my aching temples. “Unbelievable.”

  “Here’s what worries me most,” Descartes said. “In one of his sermons, the preacher says that God is calling for martyrs — people ready to fight and die in the battle against evil.”

  “Martyrs? Did he really use that word?”

  “Yes. ‘Holy martyrs,’ those were his exact words.”

  “Yikes. He sounds like Osama bin Laden.”

  “Exactement. Put him in robes and a turban, glue a long beard to the chin, change the name of the religion, et voilà—an American bin Laden. La même chose—the same thing. Fou, fanatique, et dangereux. Crazy, fanatical, and dangerous.” He handed me the other folded pages he’d brought.

  One was a close-up of Reverend Jonah preaching, his arms outstretched and lifted toward Heaven. One hand clutched a Bible; the other brandished a sword. The expression on his face was like nothing I’d ever seen before, an electric mixture of elation and rage. This is what zealotry looks like, I thought. He’d like nothing better than to hack some unbeliever to pieces with that sword.

  The final two pages were grainy photos from a security camera. Despite the poor quality, I recognized the first photo as Reverend Jonah. The other picture showed a large, muscular man — he could have been a professional wrestler or football player — sporting a shaved head, wraparound sunglasses, and a black suit and shirt that strained to contain his chest and shoulders. “Who’s the gorilla?” I asked Descartes.

  “That is the preacher’s chief of security. His name is Luther Talbot, but his pseudo—his nicked name, I think you say? — is Junior.” The inspector’s translation gave me a smile, but the time stamp on the photo quickly took it away. In the upper right-hand corner of each photo was a string of numerals indicating the date and time of the photo. The men had been photographed two minutes apart — Reverend Jonah Ezekiel at 9:11 A.M. and Junior at 9:13.

  The pictures had been taken at Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris, less than twenty-four hours before Stefan Beauvoir had been transformed into a human crucifix.


  CHAPTER 27

  Simone Martini. The name was like a fly against the windowpane of my mind, buzzing incessantly — and with more insistence than Stefan’s name buzzed — as I hurried to meet Miranda at the Avignon library again. Could Martini be the creator of the Shroud of Turin? If so, when, and why? Had he done what Emily Craig postulated had been done — copied a crumbling first-century original? Or had Miranda nailed it when she called the Shroud “the world’s first snuff film,” created by the murder of its main character?

  My sense of having split-personality disorder — or, rather, split-century disorder, of being torn between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries — hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had intensified as I waited for Stefan’s three “fishes” to nibble at the bait Descartes and I had dangled. If not for the mystery of the bones themselves, I’d have gone off the deep end during the wait.

  Elisabeth had shown me a book on Italian artists of the early Renaissance, but Martini merited only a few pages in it. So Miranda and I were returning to the library once more.

  In the M section of art books, we found a slim volume devoted to Martini. Scurrying upstairs to the mezzanine — which we had to ourselves today — we huddled over the plates of Martini’s paintings.

  One of his earliest works enchanted me. The image — a fresco in a chapel in Assisi, Italy — depicted Saint Martin being knighted by the Roman emperor. With a golden disk behind his head and his hands folded in prayer, Martin looked every bit the pious saint. But other figures in the scene looked like entertainers at a medieval party. Three singers had been captured in midnote, open mouthed, forever singing in close harmony. Beside them, a dark-haired man in a colorful, bejeweled robe strummed a stringed instrument — a mandolin? a lute? Accompanying the strummer was a flute player, smiling slyly, and for good reason. I pointed him out to Miranda. “Look,” I said, “he’s playing two flutes at once.”

  “Cool,” she marveled. Then — a slight variation on her favorite utterance—“How does he do that?”

  One of Martini’s final works—The Holy Family—was striking in its treatment of Mary, Joseph, and a youthful Jesus, age ten or twelve. “Wow, a family quarrel,” I told Miranda. “Mary and Joseph are scolding Jesus — you don’t see many pictures of that, huh?”

  “And get a load of that pout Jesus is giving them,” she said. “What a brat!”

  But it was Martini’s Avignon portrait The Blessing Christ—the red-ochre sinopia drawing I’d seen in the palace — that I kept flipping back to stare at again and again. The drawing had been made as a study for a fresco at the cathedral, one of four scenes tucked beneath the small roof of the front porch. The paintings themselves were gone, but the underlying sinopia of Jesus had been found and moved to the palace to preserve it, along with a companion drawing of Mary. The eyes of Jesus seemed to be looking right at me, as if to say, “You’re right — the Shroud, the bones, and I: Martini’s Holy Trinity.”

  Miranda translated the artist’s biography for me; it didn’t take long, since details of his life were sketchy. “His first known work was in Siena, Italy, in 1315,” she said. “He worked in Siena, Padua, Naples, and Florence for twenty years. He moved to Avignon in 1335 or ’36 to paint at the papal court. He died here in 1344.”

  “At the papal court? So he might have had a connection to the bones,” I noted. “Might have had access.”

  “That’s a mighty big might,” she said. “Hey, this is interesting. He was friends with Petrarch, the sonnet-spinning chaplain who loved to hate the papacy. Martini painted a frontispiece for Petrarch’s copy of the writings of Virgil. Oh, cool—he also painted a portrait of Laura, Petrarch’s not-quite girlfriend.”

  “Let’s see it,” I said. “What page is that on?”

  “None, alas — it’s long lost. But we know it existed because Petrarch wrote two poems praising the picture, and praising Simone’s artistic genius.”

  But was it possible that Martini had a dark side? Was it possible that he’d created a “snuff shroud,” as Miranda had speculated in Turin — a work made expressly to document the murder of the man it depicted? The idea was horrifying but undeniably fascinating. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the relic revered by millions was actually a piece of forensic evidence — the world’s most sensational and incriminating piece of forensic evidence, one whose meaning had been misunderstood for centuries?

  But was Martini capable of committing a cold-blooded murder for the sake of…what? Did he have both motive and opportunity, as my detective friends had taught me to wonder? What might drive a talented and prominent artist to commit and document such a crime, and then commit the sacrilege of passing off the evidence as a holy relic?

  I took out a pocket-sized notebook and flattened it open. At the top of a left-hand page, I wrote “Motive?” and — on the facing page—“Opportunity?” I stared at the neatly lined pages awhile, feeling foolish and bereft of ideas. Finally, shaking my head in frustration, I forced myself to put pen to paper. Under “Motive?” I wrote “artistic rivalry?” Did Martini have a competitor in Avignon he felt jealous of, threatened by? I nudged Miranda. “Know of any artists who’ve killed other artists?”

  She looked amused. “Dueling paintbrushes? Spray cans of Krylon at twenty paces?”

  “Come on, be serious. I’m talking poison, a dagger, a bludgeon, whatever. Murder motivated by artistic jealousy?”

  “I think character assassination is more common in cases like that,” she said. “Premeditated bitchiness.”

  “What about romantic rivalry? See if you can find anything on Martini’s love life.”

  “Like, self-portraits showing him in a jealous rage?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “But Petrarch left a boatload of poems about his love life.”

  She gave me a skeptical look, but she humored me by scanning the rest of the bio. “Sorry,” she reported. “Looks like your man Martini was the model husband.”

  “What’s your evidence for that?”

  “Spotty,” she conceded. “Just before he got married, he bought a house for his bride, Giovanna — Italian for ‘Joanna’—from her dad. He also gave Giovanna two hundred twenty gold florins as a wedding present.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” I argued.

  “Okay, try this,” she said. “Martini died in Avignon in 1344; three years later, when Giovanna moved back to Siena, she was still wearing widow’s weeds. He must not have been too scummy if she was still mourning. Of course, who knows what evil lurks in the heart, right? But from the little bit of bio there is, he seems like a stand-up guy.”

  “The flower of Avignon?”

  She nodded. “The flower of Avignon.”

  CHAPTER 28

  AVIGNON

  1330

  The flower of Avignon is unfurling, bursting into full and glorious bloom. By now, twenty years after the papacy arrived for a “temporary” visit, Avignon has grown from a sleepy village of a few thousand souls to a bustling city ten times that size. The cobbled streets clatter with the wheels of carts bringing in wine, meats, cheeses, spices, silks. Every square inch of ground within the old perimeter has been claimed, and the noise of prosperity is deafening: carpenters’ saws rasping through framing timbers; hammers pounding pegs into newly raised posts and lintels; tiles scraping and clattering onto new roofs, occasionally slithering off to shatter in the streets below. Most of the new buildings are modest — tenements, tanneries, bakeries, butchers’ shops — but others are grand. Avignon and Villeneuve, just across the Bénézet bridge, now boast a score of cardinals’ palaces, many of which outshine the pontiff’s own makeshift quarters, which are crammed into what had been the bishop’s palace until the papacy arrived and took it over.

  Pope John XXII has now worn the papal crown for fourteen years. During his reign, he has steadily refilled the papal coffers; under his watchful eye, the treasury has swelled from a paltry 70,000 florins to 17,500,000 florins — an increase of 250-fold, which must surely p
lease our Lord. The profusion of florins is heaven-sent—“sent” in a manner of speaking, that is, for the tithes and rents and payments for offices and indulgences must always be collected, sometimes upon threat of excommunication, by God’s tireless, toiling clergy. But never before has the machinery of collection been so well oiled; Pope John has been blessed with a genius for organization and administration, and that genius has yielded a rich harvest. Still, wealth can be a heavy burden, imposing the responsibility of sound stewardship, of protecting what God has entrusted to His humble servant for safekeeping.

  And really, could there be any better steward than Pope John? A banker’s son by birth, a lawyer by training, John has brought the church’s administrative and banking systems into the modern era. By consolidating and centralizing his minions and their work, he can keep watch over his flocks of clerks and accountants, his vast expenditures and vaster revenues. His eagle-eyed oversight has brought unprecedented protection against embezzlement and fraud. But administrative protection isn’t enough; the ever-richer prize of the treasury must be physically protected as well. The snake pit that is Rome, God knows, became a hotbed of assassins and thieves during the papacy’s thousand years of residence there. Now, with the papacy’s wealth and power centered here, Avignon’s gravitational pull is strong, attracting some of Europe’s finest painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. And where money and artists converge, can thieves be far behind? No, the treasury must be secured.

  Such are the cares that increasingly occupy the thoughts and prayers of John XXII. The pontiff is now eighty-six — an age prone to mistrust and fear — and lacks the strength to undertake the project needed to safeguard the Church’s assets. That work must fall to his chosen successor, Jacques — Cardinal Fournier — who stands before him in the plain monk’s robe he still insists on wearing. The robe suggests pious simplicity, but the pope happens to know — His Holiness has spies in every cardinal’s palace — that Jacques owns no fewer than twenty such robes, so he will never lack for a spotless one.