The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  They passed a vertical stone slab on their right that bore the name Rennes-le-Château and the village crest or coat of arms, and on their left a bar restaurant and a large plan of the village, then continued into the settlement. It looked like a fairly typical French hill village, the lanes – they weren’t big enough to be called streets – dotted with solid stone houses under reddish tiled roofs. Most of the windows had their shutters closed, and there was little sign of life, again typical of most villages in France, in Bronson’s experience. At a sort of crossroads – two lanes, a very narrow street and what amounted to a track heading off to the right – they went straight on along the narrow street, which turned out to be the impressive-sounding Grand Rue, though it was neither grand nor really a road, being barely wide enough for a single vehicle.

  They saw a glass-blower on the left, the kind of tourism-based activity that always seemed to spring up in places that got a lot of visitors, and almost opposite it, behind a low wall and a line of trees that gave it privacy and some seclusion, the stone towers and walls of the old Château Hautpoul, now a private residence.

  They stopped for a few moments to look at the building. It wasn’t a classic French chateau with turrets and spires; more like a medieval fortification with solid walls marked by few openings. In front of them was a square tower, the side facing the road pierced by a single vertical line of windows, two of them bricked up. To their left was a round tower, again with one of the windows blocked, the towers linked by a stone curtain wall to form one side of the castle.

  ‘Not the most attractive chateau I’ve ever seen,’ Bronson remarked, ‘but it wasn’t built to look pretty. It was built to keep people out.’

  ‘How old is it?’ Angela asked.

  Bronson took out his smartphone, accessed the Internet and came up with the answer.

  ‘According to Wikipedia, it’s seventeenth century, but that’s obviously wrong.’ He tried another site. ‘This looks more like it. There’s a French site here that gives its history. Some of the cellars in the building date back to the time of the Visigoths, and the first above-ground stones were laid in the thirteenth century. It has to be at least as old as that, because it was standing at the end of the Albigensian Crusade in 1244. I read that it was captured by the Crusaders from the house of Trencavel, who had presumably built it on earlier ruins and given to the Voisin family because of their support for the campaign. It’s been damaged and repaired over the centuries during the various conflicts down here and was renovated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does look a bit battered and patched up.’

  Angela took a couple of pictures and they moved on.

  The Grand Rue curved around to the left by a souvenir shop, but they turned right instead, following the sign that pointed to the ‘Eglise’.

  ‘The core of the mystery,’ Angela said, gesturing to the small building at the end of the path in front of them. ‘The Church of St Mary Magdalene. The place where Bérenger Saunière was the priest from 1885 to 1917. He’s the real puzzle.’

  ‘I’ve read quite a lot about the man and the village,’ Bronson said, ‘and it’s good to finally see the place. Let’s do the tourist bit and have a look inside, then we can think about how the Ark fits into this. If at all.’

  It was immediately clear that the Church of St Mary Magdalene was an unusual place of worship, if indeed it was a place of worship. Carved into the central stone above the porch was the Latin inscription TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE, with the longer inscription DOMUS MEA DOMUS ORATIONIS VOCABITUR on the horizontal stone behind it.

  Bronson pointed at them. ‘Help me out here,’ he said. ‘I know what the central one means, but what about the longer inscription?’

  ‘That’s more or less what you’d expect to read. It translates as “My house will be called a house of prayer”, which is fairly conventional. The other isn’t conventional in any way at all. It means “This place is terrible”, which is not exactly what most people would expect to see as they enter a church.’

  ‘There’s another interesting inscription here,’ Bronson said. ‘Look right at the top, above the statue of Mary Magdalene. Can you see it?’

  ‘Yes. IN HOC SIGNO VINCES. It means “By this sign you will conquer”. That’s quite an old Christian expression.’

  ‘It is, but more interestingly, it has a Templar connection, though most people don’t know it. There’s a story that Don Afonso Henriques, who was the first King of Portugal – prior to 1139, Portugal was only a county, not a country – was praying one night before an important battle as part of the Reconquista against the Moors and claimed he saw those words emblazoned in the sky. The next day the Portuguese forces defeated a Moorish army at the Battle of Ourique. As a result, In hoc signo vinces has been the motto of Portugal since 1143, as well as a Templar motto, and it’s also used by the Freemasons. The Templars were a major presence in Portugal – after 1307, they were renamed the Knights of Christ and carried on business as usual – and were a driving force behind a lot of the Portuguese voyages of discovery. You’ve only got to look at paintings of the ships they sent out with Templars like Vasco da Gama in command. Virtually every one of them had the red Templar cross pattée on the sails.’

  As they walked into the church, the very first thing they saw was the font on the left-hand side. There was nothing unusual about finding such an object in a church, but a font being held aloft by a devil was at best unexpected.

  Chapter 35

  ‘Yes,’ Marco Ferrara said, answering his mobile.

  ‘It’s me,’ the unmistakable gravelly voice of Luca Rossi announced. ‘I’m up in the village following the two targets. Where are you?’

  ‘In the car park halfway down the hill. What are they doing?’

  ‘Pretending to be tourists, as far as I can see. They looked at the castle from the outside, and they just walked into the church. I can’t follow them in there because it’s so small. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Just follow them when they come out and tell me if they do anything you think is important. If they pay attention to an inscription or anything like that. Anything that might suggest they’ve found some kind of clue.’

  ‘Got it,’ Rossi said and rang off.

  Chapter 36

  ‘The devil Asmodeus, I presume?’ Bronson said. ‘He’s an ugly sod, isn’t he?’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ Angela replied.

  The devil was depicted kneeling, his right leg bent, his left knee on the ground and the font resting on his shoulders. He was looking down, his gaze apparently locked on the black-and-white tiled floor of the church.

  ‘Is he supposed to be holding something? With his right hand, I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bronson replied. ‘Apparently when the statue was commissioned the devil held a trident, though I don’t know why. Asmodeus represents lust, so unless the idea was to pin down his victims, I don’t know why he’d need a trident. Now, we have a devil, but we also have angels.’

  He pointed above the font at a statue of four winged angels, each painted a different colour and each apparently making a part of the sign of the cross.

  ‘They may help to balance out the devil,’ he said, ‘and the French inscription on the pedestal below the statue is almost a word-for-word translation of the Latin motto outside. PAR CE SIGNE TU LE VAINCRAS means “By this sign you will vanquish him”. I suppose that’s meant to refer to the sign of the cross. The old “spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch” mantra.’

  Angela glared at him.

  ‘That’s the way I was taught it at school,’ he said defensively, ‘and it’s one of those things that’s always stuck, despite my lack of religion. The other things on that statue that are interesting are the bright red oval that contains Saunière’s initials – BS – which seems a little showy for a priest who’s supposed to be humble, and the basilisk on either side of the circle. As well as Asmodeus, you really do have to ask why carvings of a couple of legendary reptiles
– serpent kings, in fact, and reputed to be capable of killing with a single glance – are found inside a supposedly Christian church.’

  They walked further into the building, which threw up other obvious inconsistencies. The plaster statues of Mary and Joseph might be expected, but each of the figures was also carrying a child, which was unusual.

  ‘That could be a reference to the Cathars,’ Bronson suggested. ‘Their beliefs supported the idea of a god of good and a god of evil, where Satan was the god of evil and Jesus was the god of good. More importantly, they believed that Jesus and Satan were both sons of God the Father, a divine being able to generate both good and evil. So maybe, if that statue of Mary is supposed to be holding Jesus, then Joseph is holding Satan. Have you noticed the slightly sinister aspect to this as well? Sinister in its old Latin sense, I mean.’

  Angela nodded. ‘Yes. You mean left, obviously. From where we’re standing looking at the altar, Joseph is on the left, the sinister side, which is where you’d expect to find Mary. And unless I’m mistaken, because I’m not a churchgoer either, it looks to me like the way of the cross is in the reverse order to the way it’s usually depicted. And then there’s that statue of Mary Magdalene over there’ – she pointed – ‘holding a crucifix that’s almost as tall as she is, and with an open book at her feet with a human skull on top of it. She’s often shown in paintings with a skull, and that’s usually a reference to John the Baptist, so that’s Johannite and Templar, the belief that John could only baptise Jesus if he was his superior. There’s a lot of symbolism here that certainly isn’t Christian, but I have no idea what it all means.’

  ‘And don’t forget what’s under your feet. The floor’s made of alternating black and white tiles, and it’s also thought that this same alternating pattern was used on the floor of the Temple of Solomon. Or it could represent a chessboard, and maybe even a game of chess between good and evil. The Templars were introduced to the game in the Middle East. Asmodeus over there by the door is definitely looking at the floor, or maybe at the board, as if he’s planning his next move, and the kneeling angel of that group of four is pointing at it with her left hand, as if she’s deciding which chess piece to move next. Then again, maybe it’s just another hint towards the dualistic nature of the world that the Cathars accepted, which was good and evil, black and white, or perhaps a hidden reference to the Knights Templar and their black-and-white battle flag, the Beauséant.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe all that’s true, or perhaps none of it is. I think you could spend weeks here just looking at the inside of the church and trying to work out what each bit of it means or is supposed to represent, and I’m not sure it would be any clearer when you’d finished.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘Look, everybody who’s come here to investigate this, from treasure hunters to investigative journalist and conspiracy theorists, has assumed that all these odd things we’re looking at actually mean something coherent, that they’re all clues to something, some master plan, or maybe hints to locate a hidden treasure. That there’s a purpose to it all. But just suppose that Saunière found something here in the church, or at least in the village, that completely destroyed his belief in the religion he served? Something that in his eyes utterly negated the core teachings of Christianity.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I have no idea. Say he found a coffin in the graveyard containing the bones of a dead man and absolute proof that it was Jesus Christ, which would mean there’d been no resurrection and that Jesus had not been the son of God. For a priest, that would throw Christianity straight out of the window in an instant. Suppose something like that happened. What would Saunière have done?’

  Bronson correctly assumed that was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer.

  ‘He couldn’t leave Rennes-le-Château because this was his home and his job, and he was probably already halfway through renovating the church. He might have been so annoyed at having been sold a fiction from the start that he began what you might call a campaign of subtle professional vandalism, doing things in the church that look like proper Christian symbols – the statues of Mary and Joseph, for example – and then adding a twist like the two infants to show that they’re not what they appear to be. He needed a font in the church so he picked a devil to hold it up rather than just a stone pillar. Things like that. Things with no purpose other than to confuse people, but not part of some overall plan. And we do know for sure that he ignored just about every order his superiors gave him for the rest of his life, which isn’t what you would have expected from an alleged man of God.

  ‘Okay, something like finding the body of Jesus would be a stretch, but – here’s an idea – suppose he discovered not the Ark of the Covenant, because we know that went elsewhere, but the broken tablets that God had inscribed for Moses on Mount Sinai and that Moses had smashed when he found his people worshipping a golden calf. Along with absolute proof that that was what he was looking at. That might have been enough to completely disillusion him about the Catholic Church, because he would have realised that the Old Testament was true and that the Jews really were God’s chosen people; that God had regularly spoken to the Jews through the Ark but had never spoken to any occupants of the throne of St Peter. Something like that could have been why the sign above the entrance to the church states that “this is a terrible place”, because he would have known that every time he stepped into the pulpit to preach, he was promulgating a lie, compounding something he absolutely knew was a fiction. He would have known that both the Catholic Church and Christianity had no validity at all.’

  ‘Actually,’ Bronson said, ‘that’s a very interesting idea. As I said, I’ve read a lot about this place, and I don’t think anyone has ever suggested something like that before. But there’s still the money to explain, which is a separate question altogether. Saunière was living on a salary of nine hundred francs a year, barely above starvation level, and in 1892 the surviving records show that he had a debt of more than one hundred francs and just over eighty francs in his bank account. But over the next decade, he accumulated astonishing wealth. In some months he was reportedly spending sums equivalent to more than fifty times his annual income.

  ‘His account books show that renovating the church, the cemetery and the presbytery took ten years, from 1887 to 1897, at a cost equivalent today to about four and a half million euros. But his far bigger expenses were building the Tour Magdala and the Villa Bethania and buying the land they stand on, which cost the equivalent of about ten million euros today, so that’s almost fifteen million euros on just those projects alone. And we have no idea how much he spent in total on his extensive travels abroad, his living costs or his collections. He bought lots of rare and expensive books – one source says he even employed a full-time bookbinder at one time – and collections of stamps, and if he got through the equivalent of another five or ten million euros it wouldn’t surprise me. So as a rough figure, this priest who was essentially bankrupt in 1892 managed to spend the equivalent of twenty or twenty-five million euros, possibly a lot more than that, over the next twenty-five years. That’s an average of about a million euros a year.

  ‘That money had to have come from somewhere, and the suggestion that he earned it all from simony, from mass trafficking, is complete nonsense, simply ridiculous. He kept detailed records, as he was required to do, and they show that he received about one hundred and ten thousand requests for specific masses during his thirty-two-year tenure here. He received a payment of between half a franc and one and a half francs for each one, so the maximum he could have earned from this practice – which pretty much every priest did as a matter of course at that time – was about one hundred and fifty thousand francs. That’s only a microscopic fraction of the money that we know he spent.’

  Angela shook her head. ‘That’s something else I have no idea about,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back outside. There’s something about this place that makes me feel uncomfortabl
e.’

  They left the church and Bronson pointed towards the gate that led into the cemetery. Above it, on the top of the arch, was a sculpture of a skull and crossbones, the skull looking rather unusual because it appeared to be smiling.

  ‘There’s a theory that the skull and crossbones symbol or flag dates back to the execution of the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, in Paris, when somebody stole parts of his skeleton after he’d been burnt alive, and that it became a symbol of the Templars after the dissolution of the order. So that may be another possible link.’

  ‘Or it may be nothing of the sort,’ Angela countered. ‘It all depends on what you believe and what you accept. Look, I could do with a drink and a nibble. Let’s find a cafe and forget Bérenger Saunière for the moment, because the one thing we definitely do know about him is that he had nothing to do with the Ark of the Covenant.’

  Chapter 37

  Campagne-sur-Aude, Aude, France

  The three men from Zeru hadn’t ended up in either Toulouse or Carcassonne, because one of the linguistic experts the organisation employed in Jerusalem had supplied a final copy of the decrypted and translated Occitan text.

  Once that had been read and understood, it hadn’t taken one of their historians in Israel very long to work out that CSA was almost certainly a reference to Campagne-sur-Aude and that COT meant Cotlliure, modern Collioure. Accordingly, Gellerman had been sent a text message and told to head directly to Campagne-sur-Aude.

  The message hadn’t included any orders or instructions or even any hints about what they should do once they reached the village. This was probably, he guessed, because nobody at Zeru had the slightest idea what they would find when they got there.

  He had no intention of driving through the night to reach their destination. Because the Inquisition, in the person of Luca Rossi and whichever other enforcers he had working with him, was involved, they needed to be well rested and alert before they got to the village, in case the opposition was already there. So they’d found a hotel on the outskirts of Cahors, where they’d spent the night, and had driven on to Campagne-sur-Aude that morning.