by Steve Berry
“We will begin with the altar.”
A curious look came to Rousset’s face.
“The people’s focus is there,” Saunière said.
“As you say, Abbé.”
He liked the respect his older parishioners showed him, though he was only thirty-eight. Over the past five years he’d come to like Rennes. He was near home, with plenty of opportunities to study Scriptures and perfect his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He also enjoyed trekking in the mountains, fishing, and hunting. But the time had come to do something constructive.
He approached the altar.
The top was white marble pitted by water that had rained down for centuries from the porous ceiling. The slab was supported by two ornate columns, their exteriors adorned with Visigoth crosses and Greek letters.
“We shall replace the top and the pillars,” he declared.
“How, Abbé?” Rousset asked. “There is no way we can lift that.”
He pointed to where Babou stood. “Use the sledgehammer. There is no need for delicacy.”
Babou brought the heavy tool over and surveyed his task. Then, with a great heave, Babou hoisted the hammer and crashed it down onto the center of the altar. The thick top cracked, but the stone did not give way.
“It’s solid,” Babou said.
“Again,” Saunière said with a flourish.
Another blow and the limestone shattered, the two halves collapsing into each other between the still standing pillars.
“Finish,” he said.
The two pieces were quickly busted into many.
He bent down. “Let’s haul all this away.”
“We’ll get it, Abbé,” Babou said, setting the sledgehammer aside. “You pile it for us.”
The two men lifted large chunks and headed for the door.
“Take it around to the cemetery and stack it. We should have use for it there,” he called out to them.
As they left, he noticed that both pillars had survived the demolition. With a swipe he cleared dust and debris away from the crown of one. On the other a piece of limestone still lay, and, when he tossed the chunk into the pile, he noticed beneath, in the crown of the pillar, a shallow mortise hole. The space was no bigger than the palm of his hand, surely designed to hold the top’s locking pin, but inside the cavity he caught sight of a glimmer.
He bent close and carefully blew away the dust.
Yes, something was there.
A glass vial.
Not much longer than his index finger and only slightly wider, the top sealed with crimson wax. He looked close and saw that the vessel contained a rolled piece of paper. He wondered how long it had been there. He was not aware of any recent work done to the altar, so it must have been secreted there a long time ago.
He freed the object from its hiding place.
“That vial started everything,” Stephanie said.
Malone nodded. “I read Lars’s books, too. But I thought Saunière was supposed to have found three parchments in that pillar with some sort of coded messages.”
She shook her head. “That’s all part of the myth others added to the story. This, Lars and I did talk about. Most of the fallacies were started in the fifties by a Rennes innkeeper who wanted to generate business. One lie built on another. Lars never accepted that those parchments were real. Their supposed text was printed in countless books, but no one has ever seen them.”
“Then why did he write about them?”
“To sell books. I know it bothered him, but he did it anyway. He always said that whatever wealth Saunière found could be traced to 1891 and whatever was inside that glass vial. But he was the only one who believed that.” She pointed off to another of the stone buildings. “That’s the presbytery where Saunière lived. It’s a museum about him now. The pillar with the small niche is in there for all to see.”
They passed the crowded kiosks and kept to the rough-paved street.
“The Church of Mary Magdalene,” she said, pointing at a Romanesque building. “Once the chapel for the local counts. Now, for a few euros, you can see the great creation of Abbé Saunière.”
“You don’t approve?”
She shrugged. “I never did. That was the problem.”
Off to their right he saw a tumbled-down château, its mud-colored outer walls baked by the sun. “That’s the Hautpouls estate,” she said. “It was lost during the Revolution to the government and has been a mess ever since.”
They rounded the far end of the church and passed beneath a stone gateway that bore what looked like a skull and crossbones. He recalled from the book he’d read last night that the symbol appeared on many Templar gravestones.
The earth beyond the entrance was littered with pebbles. He knew what the French called the space. Enclos paroissiaux. Parish close. And the enclosure seemed typical—one side bounded by a low wall, the other nestled close to a church, its entrance a triumphal arch. The cemetery hosted a profusion of table tombs, headstones, and memorials. Floral tributes topped some of the graves, and many were adorned, in the French tradition, with photographs of the deceased.
Stephanie walked to one of the monuments that displayed neither flowers nor images, and Malone let her go alone. He knew that Lars Nelle had been so liked by the locals that they’d granted him the privilege of being buried in their cherished churchyard.
The headstone was simple and noted only the name, dates, and an epitaph of HUSBAND, FATHER, SCHOLAR.
He eased up beside her.
“They never once wavered in burying him here,” she muttered.
He knew what she meant. In sacred ground.
“The mayor at the time said there was no conclusive evidence he killed himself. He and Lars were close, and he wanted his friend buried here.”
“It’s the perfect place,” he said.
She was hurting, he knew, but to recognize her pain would be viewed as an invasion of her privacy.
“I made a lot of mistakes with Lars,” she said. “And most of them eventually cost me with Mark.”
“Marriage is tough.” His own failed through selfishness, too. “So is parenthood.”
“I always thought Lars’s passion silly. I was a government lawyer doing important things. He was searching for the impossible.”
“So why are you here?”
Her gaze stayed on the grave. “I’ve come to realize that I owe him.”
“Or do you owe yourself.”
She turned away from the grave. “Perhaps I do owe us both,” she said.
He let it drop.
Stephanie pointed to a far corner. “Saunière’s mistress is buried there.”
Malone knew about the mistress from Lars’s books. She was sixteen years Saunière’s junior, a mere eighteen when she quit her job as a hatmaker and became the abbé’s housekeeper. She stayed by his side for thirty-one years, until his death in 1917. Everything Saunière acquired was eventually placed in her name, including all of his land and bank accounts, which subsequently made it impossible for anyone, including the Church, to claim them. She continued to live in Rennes, dressing in somber clothes and behaving as strangely as when her lover was alive, until her death in 1953.
“She was an odd one,” Stephanie said. “She made a statement, long after Saunière died, about how with what he left behind you could feed all of Rennes for a hundred years, but she lived in poverty till the day she died.”
“Any one ever learn why?”
“Her only statement was, I cannot touch it.”
“Thought you didn’t know much about all this.”
“I didn’t, until last week. The books and journal were informative. Lars spent a lot of time interviewing locals.”
“Sounds like that would have been double or triple hearsay.”
“For Saunière, that’s true. He’s been dead a long time. But his mistress lived till the fifties, so there were many still around in the seventies and eighties who knew her. She sold the Villa Béthanie in 1946 to a man named Noël Corbu. He was th
e one who converted it into a hotel—the innkeeper I mentioned who made up much of the false information about Rennes. The mistress promised to tell Saunière’s great secret to Corbu, but at the end of her life she suffered a stroke and was unable to communicate.”
They trudged across the hard ground, grit crunching with every step.
“Saunière was once buried here, too, beside her, but the mayor said the grave was in danger from treasure hunters.” She shook her head. “So a few years ago they dug the priest up and moved him into a mausoleum in the garden. Now it costs three euros to see his grave … the price of a corpse’s safety, I assume.”
He caught her sarcasm.
She pointed at the grave. “I remember coming here once years ago. When Lars first arrived in the late sixties, nothing but two tattered crosses marked the graves, overgrown with vines. No one tended to them. No one cared. Saunière and his lover were totally forgotten.”
An iron chain encircled the plot and fresh flowers sprouted from concrete vases. Malone noticed the epitaph on one of the stones, barely legible.
HERE LIES BÉRENGER SAUNIÈRE
PARISH PRIEST OF RENNES-LE-CHTEAU
1853–1917
DIED 22 JANUARY 1917 AGED 64
“I read somewhere that the marker was too fragile to move,” she said, “so they left it. More for the tourists to see.”
He noticed the mistress’s gravestone. “She wasn’t a target of opportunists, too?”
“Apparently not, since they left her here.”
“Wasn’t it a scandal, their relationship?”
She shrugged. “Whatever wealth Saunière acquired, he spread around. The water tower back at the car park? He built it for the town. He also paved roads, repaired houses, made loans to people in trouble. So he was forgiven whatever weakness he may have possessed. And it was not uncommon for priests of that time to have female housekeepers. Or at least that’s what Lars wrote in one of his books.”
A group of noisy visitors rounded the corner behind them and headed for the grave.
“Here they come to gawk,” Stephanie said, a touch of contempt in her voice. “I wonder if they would act that way back home, in the cemetery where their loved ones are buried?”
The boisterous crowd drew close, and a tour guide started talking about the mistress. Stephanie retreated and Malone followed.
“This is nothing but an attraction to them,” Stephanie said in a low voice. “Where the abbé Saunière found his treasure and supposedly decorated his church with messages that somehow led the way to it. Hard to imagine that anyone buys that crap.”
“Isn’t that what Lars wrote about?”
“To an extent. But think about it, Cotton. Even if the priest found a treasure, why would he leave a map for someone else to find it? He built all of this during his lifetime. The last thing he’d want was for someone to jump his claim.” She shook her head. “It all makes for great books, but it’s not real.”
He was about to inquire further when he noticed her gaze drift to another corner of the cemetery, past a set of stone stairs that led down to the shade of an oak towering above more markers. In the shadows, he spied a fresh grave decorated with colorful bouquets, the silvery lettering on the headstone bright against a crisp gray matte.
Stephanie marched toward it and he followed.
“Oh, dear,” she said, concern in her face.
He read the marker. ERNST SCOVILLE. Then he did the math from the dates noted. The man was seventy-three years old when he died.
Last week.
“You knew him?” he asked.
“I talked with him three weeks ago. Just after receiving Lars’s journal.” Her attention stayed riveted on the grave. “He was one of those people I mentioned who worked with Lars that we needed to speak with.”
“Did you tell him what you planned to do?”
She slowly nodded. “I told him about the auction, the book, and that I was coming to Europe.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I thought you said last night no one knew anything.”
“I lied.”
SEVENTEEN
ABBEY DES FONTAINES
1:00 PM
De Roquefort was pleased. His first confrontation with the seneschal had been a resounding victory. Only six masters had ever been successfully challenged, those men’s sins ranging from thievery, to cowardice, to lust for a woman, all from centuries ago, in the decades after the Purge, when the brotherhood was weak and chaotic. Unfortunately, the penalty of a challenge was more symbolic than punitive. The master’s tenure would still be noted within the Chronicles, his failures and accomplishments duly recorded, but a notation would proclaim that his brothers had deemed him unworthy of memory.
In recent weeks his lieutenants had made sure the requisite two-thirds percent would vote and send a message to the seneschal. That undeserving fool needed to know how difficult the fight ahead was going to be. True, the insult of being challenged mattered not to the master. He would be entombed with his predecessors no matter what. No, the denial was more a way to deflate the supposed successor—and to motivate allies. It was an ancient tool, created by Rule, from a time when honor and memory meant something. But one he’d successfully resurrected as the opening salvo in a war that should be over by sunset.
He was going to be the next master.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon had existed, unbroken, since 1118. Philip IV of France, who’d borne the despicable misnomer of Philip the Fair, had tried in 1307 to exterminate them. But like the seneschal, he’d also underestimated his opponent, and managed only to send the Order underground.
Once, tens of thousands of brothers manned commanderies, farms, temples, and castles on nine thousand estates scattered across Europe and the Holy Land. Just the sight of a brother knight clad in white and wearing the red cross patee brought fear to enemies. Brothers were granted immunity from excommunication and were not required to pay feudal duties. The Order was allowed to keep all its spoils from war. Subject only to the pope, the Knights Templar was a nation unto itself.
But no battles had been fought for seven hundred years. Instead, the Order had retreated to a Pyrenean abbey and cloaked itself as a simple monastic community. Connections to the bishops in Toulouse and Perpignan were maintained, and all of the required duties were performed for the Roman Church. Nothing occurred that would draw attention, set the abbey apart, or cause people to question what may be happening within its walls. All brothers took two vows. One to the Church, which was done for necessity. The other to the brotherhood, which meant everything. The ancient rites were still conducted, though now under cover of darkness, behind thick ramparts, with the abbey gates bolted.
And all for the Great Devise.
The paradoxical futility of that duty disgusted him. The Order existed to guard the Devise, but the Devise would not exist but for the Order.
A quandary, for sure.
But still a duty.
His entire life had been only the preamble to the next few hours. Born to unknown parents, he was raised by the Jesuits at a church school near Bordeaux. In the Beginning, brothers were mainly repentant criminals, disappointed lovers, outcasts. Today they came from all walks. The secular world spawned the most recruits, but religious society produced its true leaders. The past ten masters all claimed a cloistered education. His had begun at the university in Paris, then been completed at the seminary in Avignon. He’d stayed on there and taught for three years before the Order approached him. Then he’d embraced Rule with an unfettered enthusiasm.
During his fifty-six years he’d never known the flesh of a woman, nor had he been tempted by a man. Being elevated to marshal, he knew, had been a way for the former master to placate his ambition, perhaps even a trap whereby he might generate enough enemies that further advancement would be impossible. But he’d used his position wisely, making friends, building loyalties, accumulating favors. Monastic life suited him. For the pa
st decade he’d pored through the Chronicles and was now versed in every aspect—good and bad—of the Order’s history. He would not repeat the mistakes of the past. He fervently believed that, in the Beginning, the brotherhood’s self-imposed isolation was what hastened its downfall. Secrecy bred both an aura and suspicion—a simple step from there to recrimination. So it must end. Seven hundred years of silence needed to be broken.
His time had come.
Rule was clear.
It is to be holden that when anything shall be enjoined by the master, there be no hesitation, but the thing must be done without delay, as though it had been enjoined from heaven.
The phone on his desk gave a low trill and he lifted the receiver.
“Our two brothers in Rennes-le-Château,” he was told by his under-marshal, “have reported that Stephanie Nelle and Malone are now there. As you predicted, she went straight to the cemetery and found Ernst Scoville’s grave.”
Good to know one’s enemy. “Have our brothers merely observe, but be ready to act.”
“On the other matter you asked us to investigate. We still have no idea who assaulted the brothers in Copenhagen.”
He hated to hear about failure. “Is everything prepared for this evening?”
“We will be ready.”
“How many accompanied the seneschal to the Hall of Fathers?”
“Thirty-four.”
“All identified?”
“Every one.”
“They shall each be given an opportunity to join us. If not, deal with them. Let’s make sure, though, that most join us. Which should not pose a problem. Few like to be part of a losing cause.”
“The consistory starts at six PM.”
At least the seneschal was discharging his duty, calling the brothers into session before nightfall. The consistory was the one variable in the equation—a procedure specially designed to prevent manipulation—but one he’d long studied and anticipated.
“Be ready,” he said. “The seneschal will use speed to generate confusion. That’s how his master managed election.”
“He will not take defeat lightly.”
“Nor would I expect him to. Which is why I have a surprise waiting for him.”
