‘This is no ordinary fugitive,’ Simon said. ‘Hope is a product of his training, combined with exceptional ingenuity. Talk to his former military superiors, and they’ll tell you he’s the best they ever had. Even though he’s been years out of the SAS, he still operates like one of them. He travels light and unseen from place to place, using the resources that he finds on the ground. Capturing enemy ordnance and transportation whenever possible, and making use of their communications. He’s a guerrilla. Just when you think you’re closing on him, he’s slipped right through your fingers and he’s miles away. The normal means are hopelessly inadequate.’
There was a lull as the whole room stared at Simon. ‘What are you saying?’ Saunier asked numbly. ‘That he can’t be caught? How is that possible?’
‘He can be caught,’ Simon said. ‘We just have to understand the way he thinks.’
‘I hope to God,’ the minister said, ‘that you’re going to tell us you do?’
Simon paused. ‘Here’s what I propose, gentlemen.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
When Ben bobbed slowly back up to the surface and opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was the bad watercolour landscape on the wall by the bed. The second thing he saw was a figure crossing the room. He blinked, still not fully awake, reality slowly returning. It wasn’t Luc Simon come to arrest him, two armed Interpol heavies guarding the door and more waiting outside in a car to whisk him away in manacles and leg irons. It was a female figure. Silvie. He watched her cross the room, backlit by the rectangle of bright sunlight that shone through the window. She was fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel that covered her from chest to mid-thigh. Her hair was dark with moisture and loose over her shoulders. She walked to the window, checked outside with a cautious glance, saw that all was quiet and then padded barefoot back to the bathroom to finish getting dried off.
Ben could see her holstered Glock flung carelessly down among the pile of clothes on the other bed. She hadn’t looked at it once.
Trust me.
He yawned and propped himself up on one elbow, then swung his legs off his bed and planted his feet on the floor, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and ruffled his hair, rubbed his face and yawned again. He looked at his watch. Nearly quarter to one in the afternoon. He’d napped far longer than he’d meant to.
Moments later Silvie came back, this time with her hair wrapped in a smaller towel and wearing a motel bathrobe.
‘You should have woken me sooner,’ he said.
‘I didn’t have the heart to. You were out for the count. Sleeping like a little boy.’
‘Thanks a million.’
‘Besides, I can’t have a partner stumbling about in a daze. We have work to do.’
He craved coffee. The room came complete with a jug kettle and a few sachets of instant stuff that barely qualified, but it would do. ‘What about you?’ he asked her. ‘Catch some rest?’
She shrugged, bending over the other bed and tossing her gun to one side as she snatched up pieces of clothing. ‘A little. Then I went out to get some things. There’s a Carrefour up the road.’
‘That’s tactically smart,’ he said. ‘Last I heard, hostages don’t generally walk around free. Or go off shopping in a hot car.’
‘Relax. I told the receptionist my phone battery was dead, asked her very sweetly to call me a taxi, for which I paid cash out of your little bundle. That’s a lot of money you’re carrying around.’
‘Spoils of war,’ he said, standing up and heading for the table where the kettle was.
‘I won’t ask,’ she said. ‘But it came in useful. I got us some more food, if you’re hungry. Got you some clothes, too.’ She pointed at a plastic bag on the floor. ‘Fresh jeans and a couple of shirts. Had to guess your size.’
‘I’ve been buying all my own clothes since I left the forces, but thanks anyway.’ He reached the table and reached for the kettle to check its water level before turning it on. Then stopped and frowned. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking down at the compact laptop computer that was sitting in the middle of the table, wired up to the landline phone socket.
‘Oh, I got us that too,’ she said nonchalantly, unwrapping the towel from her hair. It fell loose and thick over her shoulders and face, curling and lightening as it dried. It looked good. He could smell the apple scent of the shampoo she’d washed it with.
‘Why do we need a bloody computer?’ he asked. Perhaps he wasn’t wide awake yet, but it seemed like the strangest thing to him. Seven months living in a monastery, he’d almost managed to forget the abominable things existed.
‘You’re so old school,’ she said. ‘Everyone else has them, including the opposition, so why shouldn’t we? They’re kind of essential equipment now, you know?’
Ben shook the kettle, felt the slosh of water inside, thought about rinsing it out and topping it up with fresh but couldn’t be bothered, turned it on and ripped open three sachets of instant coffee and emptied them into a cup. She was only fifteen years younger than him, but she was making it feel like thirty.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking over what we talked about. Secrets and ghosts. I couldn’t get out of my head that maybe what Streicher knew about the monastery is key to understanding what he’s really up to. So while you were sleeping I ran a few internet searches based on simple keywords: the name of the monastery, the blind guy Streicher talked about, the mass grave you found.’
Ben poured hot water into his cup and stirred the contents up into a brown goo that vaguely resembled coffee. ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘Why is it that everyone under the age of thirty seems to think all the mysteries of the world can be solved on Google?’ He took a slurp of the scalding liquid and pulled a face at the taste of it.
‘Well, as it happens I didn’t do so badly,’ she said. ‘I turfed up this guy called Jehan de Roucyboeuf. Ever hear of him?’
Ben gulped down more of the coffee-surrogate and looked at her. ‘Any particular reason why I should have?’
‘He was a chronicler in fourteenth-century France,’ she said. ‘One of these itinerant scribes who used to go around writing about stuff they observed. Because so few people were literate in those days, the chronicles have actually become one of the most important sources for modern historians. Anyway, it so happens that this Jehan de Roucyboeuf’s writings tell, among other things, the story of what happened to Salvator l’Aveugle. Of course it’s all in medieval French, which is almost like another language.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Interested?’
‘Spellbound,’ he said, and took another slurp.
‘My, we are a grumpy one in the morning. You will be. Turns out Salvator was a friar who was travelling through France with the ultimate goal of joining the Franciscan monastery founded in Jerusalem in the 1340s by Roger Guérin of Aquitaine. The writer doesn’t say much about that, but I can fill in the blanks for us.’
Ben scowled at her. ‘I see, so you’re some kind of historian now.’
Silvie grinned back at him. ‘Top of my class at the Sorbonne. It was my first degree, before I studied law. And what Roucyboeuf says is dead right. Guérin did succeed, after a lot of negotiations and using funds provided by the King and Queen of Naples, in purchasing the Cenacle. You know, the room where the Last Supper was held?’
‘You’re not the only one who’s been to college,’ Ben said. ‘I am aware of what the Cenacle is.’
‘He also bought enough land around the holy site to set up a new Christian community there. Even though Jerusalem was occupied by the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate, political relations with the Christian West were favourable enough to allow it.’
‘All right,’ Ben said irritably, ‘so please tell me why this should possibly matter to us.’
‘Because it supports the integrity of Roucyboeuf’s chronicle,’ she replied. ‘It’s important for us to verify it checks out historically, since some of these old sources can be wildly off the mark when it comes to factual accuracy
. The chronicle tells us that Salvator never made it to the Holy Land. In fact, he never even made it out of France. After becoming ill and taking refuge in a mountain village in the Alps near Briançon, he fell foul of church authorities, was eventually accused of all kinds of devil worship and witchcraft, and was sentenced to death by burning.’
‘Nice.’
‘According to the chronicle, the key evidence for his condemnation by the authorities was the seizures that would make him fall to the ground, writhing and speaking in tongues.’ She snorted. ‘Sure sign of demonic possession, naturally.’
‘I get it,’ Ben said. ‘Epilepsy. A lot of sufferers got a raw deal back in those days. Fear and superstition are a powerful combination.’
‘But reading between the lines, his medical condition just gave his accusers a handy pretext for getting rid of him,’ Silvie said. ‘The real reason for his execution was that he was outspoken against the Church and highly vocal about the papacy, which at that time wasn’t centred in Rome but in France, in Avignon. Salvator was a Franciscan, meaning he was sworn and devoted to a life of poverty in Christ, and it’s little wonder he nursed grievances against the religious establishment. The pope at that time, Clement VI, loved luxury and high living, and issued a papal bull in 1343 to justify his use of indulgences. Meaning, basically, cash for forgiveness. The Avignon papacy was notoriously corrupt, selling everything from remission from sins to high-ranking ecclesiastical office. Even holy relics were for sale to the highest bidder, to keep the senior church authorities in the luxury to which they were accustomed during this so-called “Babylonian captivity” period of the Church’s history.’
‘You found all this online in one session?’ Ben said, staring at her.
‘No, silly. Some of us were paying attention in history class. So, without actually spelling it out, the chronicle tells us that Salvator’s burning at the stake was really a political assassination, sanctioned simply to eliminate one of the Church’s critics.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Ben said. ‘But—’
‘Let me go on. Now, according to the chronicle, as the poor man hung there burning alive in front of the church authorities and all the villagers who’d gathered to see him die, he screamed out a terrible curse against them. Do you begin to see?’
The connection clicked like an electrical circuit in Ben’s mind.
‘You told me that Streicher talked on and on about a curse,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Silvie nodded. ‘He was obsessed with it. It’s something important to him, and now here it is. Salvator l’Aveugle wished for a thousand years of pestilence to descend on his tormentors, the villagers, their children, and all the way down the line, as punishment for what they’d allowed to happen to an innocent man.’
Ben went on drinking the bad coffee as he listened, trying to decide whether this was getting them anywhere.
‘Now, these were medieval times,’ Silvie said. ‘An era of widespread superstition and ignorance, especially in the Christian West, while in the Islamic world and the Far East science and mathematics were light years ahead. Curses and prophecies of doom were ten a penny across Europe back then. People really did fear them, and if by pure coincidence one of them appeared to come true, they were very quick to fall for it wholesale. Like if some clergyman told the people God was angry with them, and the next thing their crops were washed away by a bad storm or blighted by a drought, this would be taken as cast-iron evidence that the clergyman really did have word from the Lord. All about luck and timing.’ Silvie smiled grimly. ‘And you couldn’t ask for better timing than Salvator’s curse. I mean, this was 1348.’
‘So what’s so special about 1348?’ Ben said, not getting it.
‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said. ‘Apart from the fact it was the year that the Black Death first swept through France, taking with it about half the population. Just months after Salvator’s curse was still literally ringing in their ears, the people began to drop dead like leaves off a tree. An isolated community, way up in the mountains with little to no contact with the outside world, wouldn’t realise that the rest of the country, in fact the whole of Europe, had it just as badly as they did. Easy for them to remember Salvator’s words as he burned alive, and to assume the plague was a visitation on them, God’s punishment for their sin of colluding in an innocent man’s execution. Too late to repent, though, when everyone around you is dying. Some of the local villages died out completely. So did most of the clergymen who’d attended Salvator’s execution. Roucyboeuf gives some pretty vivid accounts of the bodies heaped up in mounds, the plague dead being loaded on carts while the living prayed for Divine mercy. They were so overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and the sheer number of dead and dying, the bishop decreed that the victims should be entombed in a mountain cave beneath the nearby monastery. No prizes for guessing which monastery we’re talking about?’
Ben said nothing, just grimly nodded.
‘Not just the dead, but the living, too,’ Silvie went on. ‘Anyone thought to be infected was taken and thrown in alive with the hundreds of corpses. No mention of them being chained up, but it figures, doesn’t it? Afterwards, the cave was walled up and became a mass tomb. Anybody left alive inside would have died a slow, agonising death.’
Ben put down his unfinished coffee and tried not to think too hard about what it must have been like for them down there. In the pitch darkness. The stench of the dead all around them. The squeak and scuttle of the rats. The moans of the dying and the weeping of those awaiting the same inescapable fate.
‘The chronicle goes on to tell the story of Eloise,’ Silvie said. ‘She was the leader of a group of heroic nuns who had been trying to help the sick, and who for their troubles were taken and walled up along with them. The legend tells how Eloise’s screams could still be heard echoing down the mountainside long after the mouth of the cave was sealed up.’
Every place has its secrets from the past. Even here, some things remain that ought to be forgotten. Ben remembered Père Antoine’s words. So this was the shameful episode in local history that the old monk had been so unwilling to reveal. It explained why he’d become cagey when Ben asked about the walled-up crypt. It explained the scores or even hundreds of men, women and children whose bones Ben had discovered under the monastery.
But it still didn’t explain everything. Far from it. All it did was open the door to more questions.
‘Not a bad morning’s research, hmm?’ Silvie said.
‘It’s a start,’ Ben said. ‘As far as Streicher’s concerned, it doesn’t take us anywhere.’
‘I don’t agree. It has to mean something, if we can just figure it out. We know he was obsessed with the curse.’
‘But we don’t know why,’ Ben said. ‘Why would that be his reason for launching a raid on the monastery all these centuries later? What’s the connection with the gold? Did the chronicle mention anything about that?’
‘Nothing,’ she admitted.
‘None of it makes sense,’ he said. ‘Why would the church authorities seal hundreds of plague victims inside their own treasure vault, knowing they were sealing off their gold with it?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t know it was there.’
‘In which case, Streicher couldn’t have known about it either. Not from the story of Blind Salvator, and not from the writings of this Jehan what’s-his-name?’
‘Maybe there’s more in the chronicle,’ Silvie said. ‘Something that we’re missing.’
‘You said you read the whole thing.’
‘Just what’s viewable online,’ she said. ‘There could be more of it that isn’t yet digitised. France has an awful lot of history. We’re still working on the National Archives. It’s a big task that will take years, decades even. Meanwhile, there are still hundreds of kilometres of shelves of original ancient documents that can only be accessed physically, in person.’
He looked at her, sensing her intention. �
��We’d have to travel to Paris,’ he said.
‘So?’
‘So Streicher is in Switzerland,’ Ben said.
‘This could be the key to understanding his plan.’
‘Or it could be a complete blind alley,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking up a number,’ she said, stepping quickly over to the laptop and flipping up the lid. The screen flashed into life. She clicked a few keys. ‘French Ministry of Culture website. Contact details for the Archives Nationales centre in the Marais, in Paris. Here we go.’ She picked up the phone from the table, dialled the code for an outside line and quickly punched in the number from the screen.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ Ben said, and let her get on with making the call as he grabbed the bag of fresh clothes and headed for the bathroom. He could hear her talking as he locked himself in. The tiles and mirror were still steamed up from Silvie’s shower earlier. He undressed quickly, letting his dirty clothes fall to the floor. He turned the water up high, and as he waited for it to come to temperature he inspected his bruises. They were still livid, but less tender now. His hands hurt worse, and there were still a few bits of grit embedded in his palms. He stepped under the hot water and spent ten minutes blasting away the last of his weariness.
After his shower, he opened up the bag of fresh clothing and found that Silvie had also bought a pack of disposable razors and a can of shaving foam. He rubbed a squiggle with his finger in the condensation in the mirror above the sink, and gazed at himself. His burned cheek was red and felt a little tight. It would look worse before it looked better. There wasn’t a lot he could do about the patch of singed hair, either. But after washing away the last of the grease stains from his face and a careful shave, he decided that, all in all, he wasn’t looking too terrible. The clothes fitted him well, too. Silvie had a good eye.
The Martyr’s Curse Page 21