Bian and Max ventured through the jungle, the lamp of the young speleologist sweeping the thickets. They walked barely a hundred meters when they hit rocks. Bian took Max’s hand and helped him climb.
“Don’t worry, I know the way,” she whispered.
“That’s not what I’m not worried about it.”
“Liar.”
Max had to admit she was right. Especially since just behind it was a dark entrance, hidden by vines. Even the beam of the lamp was lost there.
Bian waved at him to follow her, and disappeared into the darkness.
“There are a few steps, but it’s easy,” the echo of her voice said.
Max hesitated, but the cry of an unidentified animal encouraged him to follow her. The rock had a stepped relief. He then followed Bian in a smooth gut, then crawled after her for a few feet. They arrived at a platform where he could get up. But as he wanted to take a few steps forward, Bian held him back.
She directed the beam of her flashlight at her feet: one meter from them the platform ended in a precipice. It also revealed a cave as vast and sumptuous as a cathedral.
Or more precisely, about ten cathedrals.
Max had never seen such a spectacular cave before. An orange stream flowed among the immense stalagmites, like thousand-year-old statues. Everywhere the light shone, it revealed different shapes and unexpected patterns, brought to life for the moving shadows.
“How do you know about this place?”
“It’s thanks to my grandfather,” Bian answered. “We used to come to the area often, to hunt a little, to bring back wood. I must have been nine or ten years old. One day, we noticed clouds coming out of the entrance of a hole. And it scared my grandfather, you know the ancestor stories, all that, so he forbade me to come back. Of course, I didn’t listen to him. I’ve always loved caves. I got a lot of stuff to make my caving equipment, I hid it behind the rabbit cages. My grandmother never found it.” She giggled. “A few years ago, I met the American speleologists. I asked them if I could work with them. They didn’t want to, of course, but I told them that my grandfather and I had found a cave with clouds and a river inside, that I could show them. These idiots, they didn’t follow me, they went to see my grandfather. They wanted to talk about money.”
That explained the cows, Max thought.
“Or rather, they gave us money not to talk. The following season, the Americans had left. And there was this signpost that said something about a museum. Everyone was happy, it meant more tourism. The sign is like the Americans, it didn’t last long. But my grandmother continues to receive money.”
“Not to talk.”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“And yet you speak to me,” Max said, in a soft voice. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll find you?”
“No, because I’m a girl.”
“So what if you’re a girl?”
“It makes no one take me seriously. And worse, I’m a poor girl. I’m just good at milking cows or serving beers at the bar. They think my grandfather took the secret of the cave entrance to his grave,” she laughed, but there was a sad resignation in her eyes.
Bian’s sudden emotion tightened Max’s throat.
“I tell you this because it’s more fun to explore with someone,” she said in a small voice.
“And also safer,” Max said, straightening his painful leg. “Haven’t you ever had a problem here?”
“Yes. Once a stalactite broke, fell on my wrist, and my hand was stuck. I had to cut off a part of my hand. With my teeth.”
Max’s wide eyes fell on her hand and a grimace distorted his mouth. Bian laughed, and raised her hand to him. “I’m kidding. I saw it in a movie. It was disgusting. On a more serious note, you have to be careful with the rain. It can flood a room in a matter of seconds. I almost drowned more than once.”
Max continued to grin. Instinctively, he rubbed his leg.
“The cave is gigantic,” she continued. “I’ve never seen the end of it. There are always more rooms, more tunnels. More colors, more reliefs. It’s a real world here.”
Max recognized in Bian’s face something he knew well: the pure happiness of following her own path. It was the one he had once felt when he was studying the pyramids. The pyramids had revealed themselves to him. In his mind, Cheops’s construction was as clear as if he had the plans in front of his eyes.
Suddenly, an idea came into his mind. The secret rooms. The gradual collapse, the water that filled a room in just a few minutes. The immensity, the darkness. He stood without realizing it, and he looked around him. He was no longer in a cave, but in a vast pyramid. It was not an imperial city that Alfred-Jean de Stehl was looking for. It was this extraordinary communion with the afterlife.
It was the cave itself.
He heard Bian’s voice, asking him what was going on. Probably because he didn’t answer, she stood as well.
“Bian, are there any traces in the caves?”
“Traces of what?”
“Footprints, inscriptions, drawings, negative hands. You know the cave of Lascaux, don’t you? Or the one in Chauvet, France?”
“Yes, the decorated caves.”
“There are also some in Australia, Africa, the Americas. Man has always ventured into caves, not only because they were protected from the elements and wild animals, but also because there were – ”
“The ancestors,” Bian said softly. “That’s what the old people say here.”
He looked at her and her eyes were sparkling, much like his own. “The spirits of the ancestors, exactly. The caves are a passage between this world and the afterlife.”
Bian and Max exchanged a look. For a moment, neither one of them spoke. The only sounds reaching them were drops crashing to the ground, and the screeching of a bat.
“I saw something like that,” Bian whispered. “Drawings, like sketches, in red, orange tones. But I don’t know if I could find them again.”
“Do you now see why they don’t want you to talk about this cave? I think they don’t want you to talk about it, because there are people buried here.”
Bian frowned.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said as he sat down.
For almost an hour, Max told Bian what he knew about Sixtine. She listened carefully, without interrupting him. No questions asked. Without even expressing any surprise. She accepted everything.
“And these people I’m looking for, they have disappeared in your village,” Max continued. “He’s a rich old man and his young wife. Their names were on the granite slabs. Just this morning, I was convinced that they would have gone to an illustrious temple, a UNESCO site. But now that I’m here, I know that it’s not a human-made structure the old man chose, it’s here. It is a larger and more spectacular gateway to death. Men’s fascination with the afterlife, their communion with spirits, began in the caves.”
“Caves are the ancestors of the pyramids,” Bian added.
“Exactly.”
“But if it’s the ancestor of the pyramids, you said the other one was buried in Greece, near the most beautiful monuments. The wonders of the world.”
“Yes, they obviously had a sense of decorum, and – ”
“Then I know which way they come in,” Bian interrupted. “Yes, it’s got to be there!”
With excitement coloring her cheeks, she told Max that they would go there at dawn the next day.
In the night, Max received a message from Franklin Hunter, informing him a BOLO had been put out for Florence Mornay.
13
“Rust? It’s Sue Parado from the nineteenth precinct. Look, we just received some fresh information about Elizabeth von Wär. We had a whole bunch of clowns trying their luck with the hundred thousand dollars in the witness call, but I think we’re getting something here.”
“I’m on my way.”
The affair was moving fast, Aziza thought, eyes riveted on the dark windows of the subway crossing Manhattan. The absurd and the impossib
le were gradually metamorphosing into more familiar patterns. Connections were made between facts, between people, between ideas. The snowflake was growing.
She took out her yellow notebook, and opened it on the snowflake page. It had six branches.
The first was the discovery of Room X in the pyramid, with the murder of Seth and Jessica Pryce.
The second was Tutankhamen, the looting of the Cairo Museum and the murder of El-Shamy.
Then Nefertiti, this immense fraud of the counterfeiter Oxan Aslanian, Yohannes De Bok.
Vivant Mornay’s secret society.
The murder of Elizabeth von Wär.
And finally the sixth, and very fresh: the disappearance of Florence Mornay.
Each branch increased in size with other smaller branches, the information relating to each case. Sometimes even these growths joined together, which never failed to cause a spark of pleasure in Aziza’s brain. That was why she loved her work, and that was why she loved doing it alone. To whom could she explain the satisfaction she felt in organizing the world and its problems as snowflakes?
Once she had solved everything, she could let it go, see it swirl until it disappeared in the breeze of an imaginary winter. And feel light for a moment.
In those moments, she even dared to hope that one of those flakes would carry the one who weighed her soul down with her broken branches.
It had been there for so long, and blossomed with piercing branches with each new year, each new lie, until it grew in her chest and in most of her memories.
But this one, she had to forget it.
It was necessary to focus on the yellow notebook, which still lacked branches. And above all, there was a void in the middle. It was this empty center that it was her vocation to fill. That was the heart of the matter.
Aziza could feel it, it was only a matter of weeks, maybe even days.
The 19th precinct police station on East 67th Street had a special place in her heart, because the chief inspector and the most senior detective were women. She liked to believe that there was a spirit of sorority there, even though her NYPD colleagues, like her, had long understood that to survive in their profession, it was better to imitate men.
She climbed the steps of the red building with the blue windows, determined to leave her vague feeling of guilt outside. She had not yet revealed to Detective Sue Parado that the body of the missing woman had been in a window at the Metropolitan Museum for several weeks.
But would she have believed her?
On reflection, Aziza decided that the great injustice was rather that the $100,000 had not gone to Cheryl Wood-Smith, the real whistleblower in the case, who, after sacrificing her career, would have well deserved it.
Patience, Aziza thought.
“Sophie Neumann,” Sue Parado said. “Does that mean anything to you? A German woman.”
The detective in charge of the case was a petite 50-year-old woman with short golden blond hair, and tobacco breath.
Aziza squinted.
Yes, she recognized the name, but where was it on the branches of the flake?
Sue clicked on the computer screen and brought up the color images of the police station’s surveillance camera. A beautiful blond woman, bourgeois dress, pearl necklace and Louis Vuitton bag, and impeccable makeup. She came in with a cardboard bag and looked like any rich woman shopping in chic boutiques on Fifth Avenue. She was wearing black leather gloves.
No, she had never seen it before.
“Sophie Neumann claims she is a friend of von Wär.”
“What was in the bag?” Aziza asked, eyes fixed on the video.
“These are the clothes Elizabeth von Wär wore on January sixteenth, the day she disappeared. You know we had pictures of her in a restaurant and two shops. Her family claims that her behavior was bizarre, she had not informed her driver, and she had missed two business meetings without warning. And yet, those were the clothes she was wearing.”
“So Sophie Neumann found the body?” Aziza asked, an eyebrow raised.
“No,” Sue smiled, mischievous. She seemed to enjoy the game of riddles and despite her impatience, Aziza did not deprive her of this pleasure. “No, Neumann claims that the body was dissolved in acid and that it will never be found.”
Aziza’s face remained unchanged, even as her stomach resisted her disappointment. Sophie Neumann was lying: the victim’s body was in a three-thousand-year-old sarcophagus. Aziza knew from experience that lies tend to metastasize into human consciousness. They never stopped at one. The rest was to be inventions.
“One wonders why her clothes were not destroyed with the body, especially since they can be compromising,” Aziza said.
“It’s more twisted than that.”
Aziza had no doubt about that, considering the rest of the case. She was staring at Sophie Neumann’s face. Something was wrong with the features of this elegant woman, without her being able to say what. Before she could decide, she saw her take something else out of her bag. A wig.
“Exactly the same hair as Elizabeth von Wär,” Sue announced.
“Ah. It wasn’t her on the videos.”
“Bingo.” Sue stretched out in her chair and put her feet on top of her garbage can.
“Sophie Neumann claims that she has proof someone impersonated her on January sixteenth to cover her tracks. And that someone is her murderer, who murdered her not on January sixteenth, but on January fifteenth. Neumann says she found the clothes at her house, and brought them to us. She didn’t even know there was a-hundred-grand-reward.
‘What about the identity of the murderer?’
‘She assured us her DNA would be found on the wig and on the clothes, along with her victim’s. We sent the clothes to analysis. We’ll have the results tomorrow, but Miss Neumann was kind enough to spare us the suspense.’
Sue’s eyes shone and Aziza felt her pulse accelerate.
‘It was her own brother, Thaddeus di Blumagia.’
Aziza’s eyelids fluttered. In her mind, the snowflake began to transform, with this new information crystallizing on his branches.
Thaddeus di Blumagia. Helmut von Wär’s son, Nefertiti’s buyer. Seth Pryce’s best friend. The artist whose studio was in Mexico City. Mexico City, where Yohannes De Bok, also known as Oxan Aslanian, died.
Yes, she now remembered who Sophie Neumann was. She was the one who had found Nefertiti in her grandfather’s shed in Berlin. She was the one who called De Bok. She was the one who received Helmut von Wär in De Bok’s shop in Cairo.
Thaddeus di Blumagia.
But if Elizabeth’s body was in Nefertiti’s sarcophagus, was Thaddeus an accomplice of Oxan Aslanian? And if Nefertiti’s mummy was just a fake, what role did Sophie Neumann, officially the original owner of the mummy, play?”
The information was still swimming around in her head when her colleague confirmed that a detective was already on the suspect’s trail, but that it would take several days before an arrest warrant was issued. Aziza asked Sue to give her the information about Thaddeus di Blumagia; she passed her a file, which Aziza scanned in a few seconds.
They already had pictures taken one night on New York Avenue.
Sue kept talking, evoking the scenario of a brother killing his half-sister for an inheritance or something like that – “It's always about money with the rich, believing they never have enough" – then the brother dressed up in drag to cover his tracks. It was premeditated, the proof.
They had to find the wig!
Aziza stopped listening the moment her eyes landed on the images. Her senses reacted before his intellect.
The cold attractiveness of Thaddeus di Blumagia took her breath away.
The intensity in his gray eyes, his timeless elegance. A strange magnetism that seemed to irradiate the shots taken with a telephoto lens. He was holding the hand of a young woman. The attention he gave her was intense, and tender.
Since joining the FBI, Special Agent Aziza Rust had experienced all the n
uances of the human palette, allowing her to read details and behaviors in seconds. Her first impression was always the right one.
Thaddeus di Blumagia obviously had the confidence and ego to commit murder. With this flawless physique, he was probably narcissistic, which reinforced psychopathic traits. His fortune not only provided him with the means to commit murder; it probably also spared him remorse, thanks to the feeling, typical of this social class, that he was above the law. With a name like that, he was not to be a new rich man, but rather an heir, perhaps even the last representative of a prestigious lineage. He then had to have a different notion of time than the average person, because his family history spanned several centuries. The concept of his destiny and his place in the world had been transmitted to him from an early age. In addition, his clothes and the way he wore them showed a certain attachment to tradition. His education, both in the private sphere and in institutions attended by the elite, had reinforced this idea of destiny.
And of course, he must have developed the same addiction as all the men in his family.
Power.
On one of the pictures, Thaddeus di Blumagia seemed to be setting the objective. Aziza doubted that the spinning mill was so incompetent; it was probably an optical effect. She focused on the beautiful pale eyes.
Special Agent Aziza Rust, who had faced psychopaths and terrorists, who had remained composed in front of bloody crime scenes, who examined autopsy photos during her coffee break, was wavering in front of a simple picture of Thaddeus di Blumagia. But this unexpected vulnerability had not obscured her certainties.
On the contrary, it only strengthened them.
Could this man have killed his sister in cold blood?
No doubt about it.
Not only did he not feel any remorse. But he had committed others. And he was convinced that his cause was noble.
“We’ll never find his sister’s body,” Sue said. “Neumann told us that he kept a whole bunch of chemicals in a workshop in his house in Carnegie Hill.”
Oh yes, we will find the body, Aziza thought.
“And the girl in the pictures, do you have any where she is seen from the front?” Aziza asked.
Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 54