The cook interrupted them to collect their plates and announced that dessert was about to be served. Sixtine took the opportunity to discuss a neutral topic of conversation and defuse the risks she had just taken. The front door opened and De Bok announced, happily, ‘Ah, a visitor. Thaddeus maybe?’
As Sixtine’s heart raced, the breathtaking profile of Cybelle, the skeleton woman, appeared in the doorway. She said a few words in Spanish to De Bok, which Sixtine did not understand. After the slightest pause, he then made the introductions, and asked Sixtine if she didn’t mind if Cybelle joined them for coffee. When they sat down, De Bok turned to Cybelle ‘Our friend Sixtine was wondering where Thaddeus resided when he was in the city. Have you seen him?’
He repeated the question in Spanish and Sixtine heard Cybelle’s hoarse and rich voice respond with a convoluted, phlegmatic phrase by rolling a cigarette.
‘She doesn’t know. Hasn’t seen him in weeks. But if we see him, we can give him a message. What hotel did you stay at?’
Was it the presence of the skeleton woman? While she had so easily given the address of the red house to the old lady of the chapel, a strange instinct for preservation prevented Sixtine from revealing it.
‘Oh, here and there, but I often go to the chapel, the Pocito Chapel. He can easily find me there.’
Sixtine felt a bolt of black lightning strike her whole body. Cybelle’s gaze fell on her with intense violence. Barely a second later, she kept rolling her cigarette, as if nothing had happened, but this look in Sixtine’s consciousness left a bad trail. De Bok noticed it and set off in a tone of light mockery.
‘Thaddeus still refuses to have a mobile phone. He would have been more in his place in the Renaissance, certainly, but it is to push the game a little further. Above all, I will tell him that the price to pay for this stubbornness is not to have had the pleasure of your company tonight.’
De Bok asked her questions about her stay in Mexico City, but Sixtine remained vague. They exchanged some more banalities, and Sixtine took the opportunity to say that it was late and that she had to go home. De Bok made her promise they would meet again soon. Sixtine thanked her host warmly but when she wanted to shake Cybelle’s hand, Sixtine noticed the cigarette holder.
The initials E.V.W.
It belonged to Thaddeus.
21
Florence and her father arrived at Max’s shabby hotel and she found him in the middle of his half-packed suitcases. “I decided go back sooner, but the next flight to Germany is only in two days,” Max muttered. “Naya lied to me. All the satellite images that the tunnel was actually an ancient road. No tunnel.”“I’m so sorry, Max.”There had never been a tunnel before.
Max sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I want to carry on searching, Florence. Franklin’s murder proves that someone out there is hiding something, and I want to find out what that is. Will you help me?”
She was speechless for a few seconds, then answered, “If you have two days, then you’re going to be our guest. And I’ll put you to work. I have a couple of documents you can help me with, perfect to forget your pyramids. At least, for now.”
An hour later, Max left his suitcases at Charles Mornay’s address when he was in Cairo: a house that was more like a palace than a pied-à-terre, lent by one of his friends. Admittedly dilapidated, but quite wonderful, the place seemed straight out of a comic book by Blake & Mortimer, with a view of the pyramids, large, worn Persian rugs, wobbly fans and gloved staff.
Max had barely been shown his room when Florence was already waiting for him in the library. There, stacked on a large teak table set in the middle of the floor-to-ceiling, books-covered walls, were forty-nine bound and dusty volumes.
Each contained about a hundred blackened pages of tight, barely legible writing.
The archives of Vivant Mornay.
While eating kebabs, Florence told Max about her unfortunate adventures in Paris and the delusions of Andrew Sheets.
“Drop the pyramids and the Pryce case, that’s one thing, but I can’t sleep soundly until I know if my ancestor was involved in all this. What if Sheets is right? If I ended up in Cheops precisely because my family is involved in this?”
“Mmm,” Max muttered, leafing through the volumes. “So all we have is a cross with vertical tips on a tattoo and a few thousand pages of scribbles.”
“All you need is a little elbow grease, that’s all,” Florence said.
“And baklava,” Charles added, bringing in a tray of sticky desserts.
They sat down on a worn-out blue velvet couch and sifted through the notebooks. Moroccan wine helped them, if not to see clearly, then to endure the long night ahead.
Later that night, a storm broke out, throwing lightning over Cairo, disturbing the dust of the pyramids.
They discovered in the archives that there had been three periods in Vivant Mornay’s life. Before Greece, during Greece and after Greece.
Before, the excitement of a curious man ready for all kinds of madness to discover this great world that was before him.
Then, the bad poet cried for not having the words to express his immense love of the country and its riches.
And then, the nostalgic hypochondriac dropping into his Cornish mansion. He had amassed fortunes without any joy at all. A marriage of convenience, where he had provided her with offspring, and deprived her of love. Only antiquities seemed to brighten his old age, and the pages were black with lyrical and particularly soporific flights.
Around midnight, Charles announced that he was going to bed, and Florence and Max were left alone with the last volumes which, logically, promised a dull and lonely end.
“I found it,” Florence suddenly exclaimed, around one in the morning.
It was only when she tapped him violently on the arm that Max realized he had dozed off, his head on an open notebook. She jumped on the couch beside Max and opened the diary of 1825, about ten years before Vivant’s death.
“Vivant talks more and more about evenings spent with an Egyptologist, Foster, also a crumbling old man. They are both nostalgic for their travels in the sun, both in love with their antiques, and, between two glasses of sherry, they talk about forming a club with other gentlemen. There, Vivant’s social life seems to be improving, and he is making tons of friends. I’ll give you the reports of the club’s parties.”
“Yes, please,” Max yawned.
“Wait, wait, wait, it gets a lot hotter when he starts mentioning a certain ‘F’.”
“A woman. Well, let’s hear it.”
“At the same time, he, who could write twelve pages on the reliefs of a Doric column, became strangely laconic about a certain person who occupied his days and nights. He doesn’t sleep anymore.”
“Let me guess. ‘F’ is his new girlfriend.”
“Right on the mark. Félicie Johnson, an apprentice mercenary orphaned in Chichester fifty years his junior. Endowed with long black hair which, according to the distraught old man, makes her look like a goddess from the Greek islands.”
Florence turned to Max, still holding the book. “Look at this, Max. Even his handwriting seems to have changed, he’s more cheerful, don’t you think? After a few months of devouring passion, he took Félicie to Greece, to the Parthenon. Isn’t that romantic?”
Florence then started giggling, and blushed a little. “To start this adventure so great, so beautiful when I’m so old,” she reads. “Unable to trust you, my soul, with hardly any, why I am living again! The light of eternity, eternal youth, immortal youth. To find my Greece, my Parthenon, in the arms of his muses!”
Then she stopped talking, silently scanning the rest of the pages and groaned.
“Oh no.”
“What?” Max asked.
Florence kept reading low and blushed as the pages went by.
“The old man plays us The Empire of the Senses in the Parthenon.”
With amusement Max leaned over to Florence to read over her shoulder. “Hi
s alabaster skin under my fingers worn by the dust of this ancient land. Naked against the column, Felicia, like an Artemis,” Max read dramatically.
“Stop it, I can’t take it anymore,” Florence exclaimed with as much drama in her voice as Max and she chuckled.
Max nudged his elbow into Florence’s ribs and said, “There’s your ancestor’s relationship with the Pryces. You expected bloody plots, you find sex in the air at archeological sites in Greece and Egypt. And they sowed their love on the stages of the Grand Tour. Wait, there’s still a great passage here.”
They began to read and laugh, these two who had met at the most sordid moment of their lives.
As the night sky was lit by electric flashes, they had come closer, moved by a simple joy as much as by the shivers that emanated from the yellowed pages.
Max had found Florence’s head on his shoulder, and at that very moment it seemed to him it belonged there. Their eyes were lost in one look, she stretched her neck and he moved his face. Their breaths mixed and their lips met, and then turned into a saving kiss.
Soon they were kissing on the beautiful blue sofa and the books were crashing to the ground around them. A bottle of wine tipped over and its contents stained the floor, but it didn’t matter. Max and Florence forgot everything, drunk with kisses.
22
Sixtine waited in a corner of the Plaza de la Constitución, leaning against Aztec stone. On one side stood the imposing Cathedral Metropolitana, the great work of the conquistadors. On the other side, the aromas of black pudding and fried onions from a popular cantina. Above her, floating in the clear sky, the Mexican flag with its eagle devouring a snake. Under her feet, under the cobblestones, the quicksand of Lake Texcoco, into which the whole city was sinking, inexorably. In front of her, a naco store, kitsch souvenirs with a religious connotation. There worked the skeleton woman, whom she had seen enter a few hours earlier.
Sixtine had asked the cleaning lady who worked in her house, who warned her that even if the shop had honorable appearances during the day, it should not be visited under any circumstances after dark. To operate as a tattoo and piercing parlor without a valid license was one thing, but the address was known to be a center for passport smuggling and forgery. The place attracted all kinds of thugs and had been closed several times by the police, only to be reopened each time a few weeks later.
“That’s the way it is here, what do you want us to do about it,” the owner simply shrugged.
It was after six in the evening, and there were still numerous tourists walking around the square. Finally, after a few hours of waiting, Cybelle left the shop, hailed a taxi and disappeared into the messy traffic of Mexico City.
Sixtine waited a few minutes and crossed the square. The bell of the door jingled as the door opened and Sixtine stepped inside. Inside the shop were hundreds of kitsch religious icons of all sizes, postcards, colorful ponchos, Friday Kahlo posters, free lucha masks, Aztec jewelry made in China and a thousand other objects in bright colors. An obese young man with a goatee and a jovial face leaned against a glass counter. They were alone, but the singing sound of a conversation in the back shop filled the silence of the small store.
Sixtine asked to look at their tattoo catalogue. The young man came out from under the counter with a sticky binder. Sixtine leafed through it, found nothing resembling the cross with its vertical tips.
“Maybe I can help you?”
Without looking up from the catalogue and turning the pages with a soft hand, Sixtine placed a banknote on the counter.
“I would like some information.”
Just as naturally, the boy pocketed the money. Sixtine pretended not to have seen and continued, as if she was speaking for herself. “Thaddeus di Blumagia.”
The salesman looked at her, said nothing. She moved to the icons, grabbed one, a plastic Virgin and asked, “How much for this one?”
“Two hundred pesos.”
Sixtine placed the Virgin and the two hundred pesos on the table. The boy took out the colored paper, wrapped it up without hurrying. Finally, he says in a low, relaxed tone, “A personal friend of the manager’s. Very personal.”
“He is currently in Mexico City?” Sixtine asked in the same tone.
“He was here this morning.”
“An address, perhaps? I need it today. Tomorrow I won’t be here anymore.”
The boy looked at her, walked towards a shelf behind him and said in a louder voice, holding a baby Jesus with pink cheeks lying in a manger, “Do you like this one? Very popular, a beautiful object made in a traditional way in Jiutepec.”
Sixtine narrowed her eyes slightly, but didn’t say a word.
“Three hundred pesos,” he announced, although the price tag said sixty-five pesos.
“Fine,” Sixtine said and placed the money on the counter.
He grabbed the money, opened the cash register and took out a receipt, on which he scribbled a few words. He placed the ticket in a plastic bag with the idols.
“Good evening, señorita.”
Sixtine took a few steps towards the door, then stopped. As if something was stopping her, an idea that was pulling her steps, an atmosphere of last chance. She took a look at the back shop where invisible men continued to chat, then stared at the seller.
“One last thing,” she said, falsely cheerful.
With her heart pounding in her chest, she took a few steps towards the largest figurine she could find in the store: a Christ on the cross almost a meter long, glassy eyes, a hollow face, a crown of thorns stuck in her bloody forehead. A very realistic object of the worst taste.
“This one, how much?”
The salesman was about to talk when he saw that Sixtine had slightly lifted her black T-shirt, revealing her tattooed stomach. The boy tried to control his reaction, but his skin had turned red. His eyes moved furtively towards the back shop, he swallowed and finally said, “That item is not for sale. In fact, we’re closing.”
Sixtine said nothing and simply left the tattoo parlor. Several streets away, when she finally caught her breath and was reassured that no one had followed her, she swore against her recklessness. She had just taken a very big risk, but now she knew. This was where she got her tattoo, probably by Cybelle. She took the ticket out of the bag.
Mexico City Arena, Plaza de Toros. Tonight at 8:30. VIP box.
In the back shop, no one had seen this skinny, gray-haired young tourist who wanted to buy the great Christ. They had seen the salesman had taken his break earlier, seemed feverish. But they were busy with much more serious things.
One of their important clients had arrived. He wanted his brand new papers: a passport, a driver’s license, the whole nine yards of the highest quality.
“The papers are not ready. Quality takes time, you of all people should know this.”
“I swear to God, if I don’t get them by-”
“They will be ready tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night. Is that the best you can do?”
“Yes. Tomorrow night. I promise, Mr. De Bok.”
23
The setting sun intruded through the windows, caressing the tools with its copper glow. Thaddeus frowned, a knife in his dirty hands, coated in dust, as he worked on a sculpture of a woman’s bust.
He worked in absolute silence – but he appreciated her feline presence in the workshop.
She always arrived quietly. Her body molded in leather leggings, her shoulders and chest barely hidden by a grungy tank top, she leaned against the door frame and observed the artist.
The only one who’s allowed to be there these days.
Cybelle.
She had known him for so long. He had been using these tools since childhood. At a time when children were forbidden to cut things, a brilliant mentor had taught him to use the sharp edges of tools to make worlds appear; to mix toxic products to make colors shine, to use fire to obtain better charcoals. Thaddeus painted and sculpted so well that at the age of twelve, un
der the encouragement of his mentor, he had sworn that he would be an artist. His stepfather had never found any talent for him. It took Thaddeus twenty years to finally be able to laugh about it.
Twenty years, she thought.
She had loved him for almost as long.
Cybelle opened the monogrammed cigarette holder, lit the lighter, then returned to its contemplation, smoking.
“Is he still on the move?” Thaddeus asked without looking at her.
Cybelle replied in a hoarse voice, in perfect English, “He’s still there. He received a guest last night, even had dinner with her.”
“Her?”
Perched on high heels, she walked over to Thaddeus. “Sixtine, she calls herself. Like the chapel.”
Thaddeus gave her an intense look. She placed her hand on his bare skin, stroked the bottom of his back, then went down to the back pockets of his jeans. He didn’t move. Without him seeing it, she pulled out the bullfight ticket that stuck out of his pocket and stuffed it into her own without a sound. Then she slowly moved towards a corner of the workshop where a dusty grandfather clock stood. The skeleton on her face reflected in the glass that protected the delicate hands and face of the clock.
“She’s looking for you.”
Cybelle knew she had his full attention, and offered herself a long silence to enjoy this rare opportunity. “Why?”
Cybelle turned to look at him, and raised an eyebrow, amused. A question, a moment of weakness? She stared at the clock once more, which indicated it was almost eight o’clock.
“Who knows,” she scoffed. “Said she was in Pocito Chapel. Maybe she’s already gone.”
A few minutes later, Thaddeus’s sports car zigzagged through the chaotic traffic of Mexico City. Thaddeus frightened the bystanders on the streets with his white headlights, leaving some insults in his wake. Finally, Pocito’s night blue dome.
Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 40