Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  She reasoned that it didn’t matter how preposterous the idea was that every human on earth had an invisible guardian looking over them. Just believing in it for a moment was like a balm to one’s soul. A beautiful delusion and a lifesaving truce in the never-ending battle that was life.

  Sixtine caught herself yearning for a guardian angel. A sharp sound and its long echo filled the chapel and broke her daydream. She lowered her eyes; her smile disappeared. The cherubs, in a blessed instant, had allowed her to forget her tragic reality; but now she remembered, and the need for vengeance was once again planting its dark flag in her chest.

  The chapel Thaddeus had taken her to was a simple, round space; at the heart of it all, nestled within a niche of decorated columns and surrounded by a golden halo, stood the Virgin of Guadalupe. She lived in a world of echoes and whispers, of candles that caressed the gilded icons with their warm and kindly light. Thaddeus was sitting on one of the wooden chairs towards the back of the chapel; Sixtine sat next to him. As close as they were to each other, the specter of Seth, and all the unanswered questions around him, created a distance impossible to bridge.

  “My last memory was in a church,” Sixtine said softly.

  “Your wedding to Seth.”

  She nodded. They both looked up at the gilded frame of the lone female figure bathed in a glorious light.

  “At the altar, you hesitated,” Thaddeus said.

  “I wonder whose fault that was.”

  Sixtine had meant it as friendly sarcasm, but her words cut through the chapel’s air like a scalpel. Thaddeus remained perfectly still, but a slight twitch in his mouth suggested he had felt the blow.

  “Listen, Sixtine, I wanted to find you to say I’m sorry. It was not my place to talk to you the way I did, on your wedding day. I’ve regretted it ever since.”

  He paused.

  “And when I heard what had happened to you and Seth … the remorse became unbearable.”

  “So that’s why you came to the hospital in Cairo? To apologise?” Sixtine asked as softly as she could, but there was still a sharp edge to her tone.

  “I came to Cairo to see for myself, hoping to be able to help, to do something. But there was nothing anyone could do. The only thing left was to ask you to forgive me.”

  The church filled with an odd silence; deeper than Sixtine had ever experiences, except at the bottom of her pool. The world outside the chapel seemed to have vanished, allowing the icons around the chapel to almost come to life, despite their stillness.

  Sixtine pursed her lips and studied the palm of her hand. The lines intersected with the thin light scars from scratching the walls of the pyramids.

  “In the museum, you said, ‘There are things happening–’”

  “I know what I said,” Thaddeus interrupted. He sighed. “I turned these words in my head a million times since they found you in the pyramid.”

  “But what was it?” Sixtine demanded.

  “I didn’t know, that was the point. Ever since we were kids, Seth had never kept a secret from me, and suddenly he was, and I didn’t like it.” He shook his head. “I think he asked me to be his best man to patch things up. I should have said no.”

  “But you must suspect something?” Sixtine pleaded. “What did you mean by ‘greater than you and me and Seth?’“

  “My friendship with Seth was everything. I told you, we were like brothers. What drove us apart had to be … had to be powerful.”

  “Did you try to find out what it was?”

  “Of course I did,” he replied impatiently.

  Sixtine held her breath. But Thaddeus lowered his gaze, and slowly shook his head.

  A bitter void opened in her stomach. The cross tattooed on her skin seemed to sink its cutting edges into her flesh. Suddenly she was burning with a fierce need to know, a hunger for truth that would stop at nothing.

  “There must be something, Thaddeus!” she hissed through gritted teeth. “What secret did he keep that tore you apart?”

  Thaddeus planted his majestic grey gaze into hers. It did not waver. It did not plead, nor attempt to conquer. It merely was, intensely alive, supremely confident. And suddenly more beautiful than everything she had ever seen.

  “Why he chose you.”

  37

  “Is falling in love so hard to understand?”

  Sixtine bit her lip. She was aware that her comeback was weak and clichéd, but she was struggling to find the right words to throw back at Thaddeus. Not just to prove to him that it was perfectly natural that Seth had chosen her; but to hide the shameful fact that she had never ceased to ask herself that question from the moment she had met her future husband.

  “You are asking the wrong person, I’m afraid.” Thaddeus smirked. “Don’t misunderstand me. You deserved every second of Seth’s love. Heaven knows you did. But…”

  He seemed suddenly very weary.

  “If you had known Seth like I did, you’d sensed there was a mystery around his devotion to you. It was not just that the wedding was rushed, and that you were so different from any woman he had ever been with, or that he had become obsessed with every single aspect of his life with you, even neglecting his businesses. It was…”

  Thaddeus laughed a short, nervous laugh, then shook his head, as if he could still not believe this was true. Sixtine let a few seconds pass; the air was pregnant with Thaddeus’ perfume.

  “Thaddeus?” she said impatiently. “What was it?”

  He turned his head towards her, disbelief still etched on his features.

  “He kept you away from me.”

  Sixtine couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s it?”

  Thaddeus smiled wearily. “One day you’ll understand. Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. Seth is gone. Whatever I do or say, nothing will bring him back.”

  “So you’ve given up?”

  “Letting go and accepting is not the same as giving up. My work is done. The only thing left for me to do was to make amends to you. Now we just have to live with the consequences of our actions.”

  “What about justice?” Sixtine asked, her teeth clenched.

  “What about it, Sixtine? What do you know about justice?” Thaddeus stood up, towering over her. His suddenly deep voice made him sound taller still.

  Sixtine stood up to him. “I want to reclaim my past and make whoever this did pay.”

  “Fancy yourself as an avenger, do you?” His grey eyes were suddenly shining like a new armor. His teeth shone through a joyless smile. “Have you ever wondered how it feels? Or have you just read fairy tales?”

  “It can’t be worse than what I’m feeling now!” Sixtine erupted. “Have you been through what I’ve been through? Let me tell you my fairy tale: once upon a time, a beautiful blonde girl married the man of her dreams. On her honeymoon, she woke up in a sealed tomb next to her murdered husband. Gods with animal heads dragged her to a green river where they took out her heart, which in turn betrayed her. After hearing a prophecy that made no sense, a giant eye sent her back to the living, with tattoos on her skin and beasts in her head. Once she woke up from that nightmare, she found that her past, her beauty, and the meaning in all the things she loved were all gone, as if by magic! Her life was a wasteland of grief and time stopped at night just for her to taste the terror again. The only place she felt home was at the bottom of a pool, seconds away from dying. And hope? Hope was a shadow in a hall of mirrors, reduced to a drunk poet who played dominoes with Death in Mexico. Do you know how that feels?”

  She caught her breath and walked closer to Thaddeus.

  “Before, I used to think that to kill someone you needed guns and knives and violence. Turns out, all you need is to close a door. Find a real lonely place and a key, and let time do its nasty thing. Sure, death takes forever but when it comes, you’ve gone so mad with fear that you no longer know if you’re dead or alive. The flesh on your hands is raw from scratching at the walls, but pretty hands don’t matter where you’re going, right?�
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  She swallowed hard, an unexpected emotion suddenly strangling her throat and misting her eyes. But she dug deep in the well in her soul, and in a deeper voice that resonated across the church, she snarled: “I’m writing my own fairy tale ending this time, Thaddeus. My happy ever after is to close the door on whoever did this to me and the man I loved. To give them a taste of eternity. Now the only question is: will you help me?”

  Thaddeus stayed silent for a long while, his eyes exploring Sixtine’s gaze, as if hoping to extract more of her experience, more of her truth. When it didn’t come, his lips slowly curled, and a smile dawned on his face. It radiated tenderness and sincerity and soother her anger.

  “No,” he said simply. “And for the record, you’re wrong. You haven’t lost any of your beauty. Quite the opposite.”

  Sixtine fell back on her chair. The incense added to the sting in her eyes. She felt so tired.

  “Your mother died when you were small, didn’t she?” Thaddeus asked in a soft voice.

  “Yes. I was ten and a half,” whispered Sixtine, her eyes closed.

  “And a half,” he repeated with the earnestness of child laying claim to the full weight of his years. “They are tiny, these halves, but they count, when you’re that small,” he continued. A look of melancholy swept over his features. “My mother died too. I was thirteen.”

  After he took a short and shallow breath, he said, “Come, there is something I want to show you.”

  He stood and offered his hand, which she took without hesitation. The warmth of Thaddeus’ fingers reminded her that it had been a while since she had felt the soft touch of someone else’s skin.

  The chapel was now almost empty, except for an elderly woman arranging chairs behind them, the scraping of the timber on the uneven stone floor echoing off the walls. Thaddeus walked up to the large painting depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe that hung beside the main altar.

  “I come here every day when I’m in DF. Every single day.” He paused. “She reminds me of my mother.”

  He gestured up towards the painting: the Virgin, raised aloft by the arms of a winged cherub, was wrapped in a shawl of stars, in a midnight blue sky.

  “When she died, I promised to avenge her death.”

  “Was she murdered?” Sixtine asked.

  Thaddeus hesitated. He lit a candle and placed it near the altar. He searched for a coin in his pocket. “My father died when I was ten. I was not close to him and his death didn’t make much of a difference to my life, except making me wealthier than I was already was. But then my mother replaced him with another man, whom she was entirely devoted to. They got married. I hated him. A year later, she was dead. Like you, I was there when it happened. I survived only just. My mother was everything to me.” He paused. “To answer your question… Let’s say I was convinced someone was to blame. And they had to pay the price.”

  His smile disappeared.

  “Doesn’t being a mother mean making a promise of unconditional love?”

  Sixtine thought he was asking her, but when she looked up, she realized that he was pleading the Virgin.

  “To love in the face of anything, in life or death, whatever the obstacles thrown at us, whatever our mistakes, our prejudices, our acts of cowardice, our regrets, the crimes we commit or the courage we fail to have? Isn’t that unconditional love?”

  He paused, took a few steps toward the Virgin.

  “If I had survived what she hadn’t survived, there had to be a reason for it, right? There had to be a purpose. Avenging her death became my purpose. I did what I thought was right. In the name of divine justice.”

  His stillness was only disturbed by the dancing of candles in his pupils.

  “And now I come every day to ask her to forgive me for what I have done.”

  Sixtine’s throat locked in a cold breathless hold. She understood only too well. In her mind’s eye, she played out her own memories of a small, blonde girl, cartwheeling over dunes of warm golden sunshine. Would her mother love the woman she was becoming?

  “Did … did they pay for their crime?” she whispered.

  Thaddeus dropped the coin into the offering box with a metallic thud; multiplied by the echo, it filled all the church and disturbed the angels.

  “Only time will tell,” he said in a neutral voice.

  Candle wax dripped noiselessly on the floor. The orange of the flames appeared brighter, the Virgin’s eyes deeper. Night had come.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t lift your spirit as I promised I would.” Thaddeus said. “Let’s go, it’s late,”

  They ambled out onto the paved plaza, re-entered a world of traffic and seasons and people. Thaddeus’s car was parked a block away. Walking allowed Sixtine to lighten the dead weight of her emotions, so raw in the church.

  “Why Sixtine?” Thaddeus asked, as they strolled under a canopy of jacaranda trees.

  “The day my mother learned she was pregnant with me, she was moved to tears by a TV documentary about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. The French for Sistine is Sixtine, so there and then, she decided that it would be my name. But the story goes that my father preferred Jessica, and that’s the name he registered five days after my birth. A few weeks after that, he left us and never came back. Everybody knew me as Jessica, and that was the name that felt mine. But sometimes, when it was just her and me, when we felt very close, she called me Sixtine. Like when she was reading fairy tales to me before bed. I loved that.”

  Sixtine paused to push a lock of her grey hair behind her ear.

  “And when I came out of the coma, Jessica didn’t feel like my name anymore. That part of me was dead. I was Sixtine.”

  “Have you ever been to the Sistine Chapel?”

  “No.”

  “You’d like it.”

  Thaddeus’s eyes suddenly sparkled with playfulness; for a moment, Sixtine thought he was going to offer to take her there, but she didn’t take the time to find out. First, she felt the touch of a feather on her skin, then a mental tug and a flash of recognition. As if a brick in the fortress around her lost past had been forced loose, but not enough to reveal what was on the other side.

  She turned around slowly, desperately trying to locate what had triggered the sensation. She spotted a collection of bill posters glued to a wall. All at once, she was seized by a dizzying storm: shadows, snatches of conversation, images of red cloth and clinking glasses, Seth laughing and a multitude of other snapshots, none of which she could make complete sense of. Then she saw it.

  A poster, only partly visible, showing some Aztec artifacts, and announcing an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Anthropologiá. What she was unable to look away from was the largest and most prominent of the items shown on the poster:

  A headdress of blood red feathers.

  38

  “I'm sorry. I was wrong.”

  Franklin kept his eyes on the road ahead as the airport receded into the distance behind them. The old car cruised along the El Orouba highway and Max stretched out his stiff legs on the rear seat.

  “How do you know?”

  Franklin took a deep breath. He caught Max’s eye in the rearview mirror. The young man didn’t seem too bothered. But he might as well tell him. It had done him no good, this journey in the world of counterfeiters; maybe Max would have more luck.

  His voice thick with the admission of defeat, Franklin recalled for Max his visit to the Scultore’s workshop, and his soul-crushing realization that the funeral mask of Tutankhamen had not been stolen after all.

  “Are you going to stay in Cairo?” Max asked, watching as they crawled through the traffic.

  “I have this client...” Franklin hesitated, weighing up just how much to tell him. “She has asked me to take a closer look at the murder in the pyramid. But if the mask is a dead end, then perhaps Moswen really was the murderer. He had the opportunity, the means, and the motive.”

  “She?”

  The two men looked at each other in the rearv
iew mirror. The detective said nothing more. But it sure sounded like Max suspected who the client was.

  “Why did you come back here anyway?” asked Franklin, preventing more questions.

  “To figure out the access to Room X. Even if Moswen was the murderer, there is still no good explanation for how they got into a room with no exit. And with Moswen dead...”

  Max was distracted by a ping from his phone: an urgent message from Shiriko.

  Please call right away.

  But the signal was weak, and the call would not connect. While he waited for a better coverage, Max told the detective what he had found out from the Khufu climbers' forum. Especially the night of June 14th, when Al-Shamy and Moswen had made their unexplained visit.

  Franklin parked in front of the Intercontinental Hotel, on the banks of the Nile, and helped Max with his bags. The two men shook hands. Before leaving, they both promised to share any developments that might help the other’s cause.

  Half an hour later, Franklin was seating, alone, at the bar of the Windsor hotel, a former colonial British Officer’s club, that had been a favorite of his when he had first arrived in Cairo. Once, he had reveled in the understated elegance of the place. He felt at home in this tiny enclave of quiet and civility, its carefully detailed brick walls holding back the chaos of the city beyond, just long enough for him to catch his breath.

  He almost ordered a whiskey; just in time, he remembered he couldn’t drink anymore; he asked the bartender for a Coke instead. Bored of staring at the lazy bubbles in his soda, he looked around. He caught his dim reflexion in a mirrored panel, with his frayed jacket and worn jeans. He sighed. The sense of sanctuary that he remembered was no longer there. He just did not belong here anymore. But where did he belong these days?

  He placed some money on the bar and left, his drink half drank.

  Once back at his small apartment above the café, he removed the photos and documents from the walls. One by one, he put them in a pile on the table. When he was finished, all that was left of the wall was an empty expanse of dirty wallpaper. What a good job his collage of images had done, hiding the grimness of the room. He took a karkade from the refrigerator, lay down on his unmade bed.