The First Face of Janus

by Valentine, Phil

  “What’s going on?” she asked in French.

  The man answered in French.

  She looked back at Crow with shock in her eyes then asked the man something else.

  Rosenfeld’s blood ran cold. She turned to Crow.

  “What is it?” he asked desperately.

  “The priest,” she said.

  “Father Simonin? What about him?”

  “There, inside the church,” she pointed, “he just committed suicide.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Crow grabbed Sidney’s hand and jerked her in the opposite direction, running back toward the hotel. They dodged pedestrians and dogs on leashes. They bolted through Clock Square between the tourists and down the side street past a sign that read ‘Palais des Papes’ with a white arrow beside it. They dashed up the uneven cobblestones and rounded the corner on the street of their hotel. Crow came to a sudden stop and pulled Rosenfeld back as her momentum carried her past him. She looked up at him. He was pointing. Coming out the front doors of the hotel was Marcus Foster placing his sunglasses on his nose. Crow pulled them both back around the corner.

  “Dammit! How the hell did he find us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Is our car out front?” Rosenfeld asked.

  Crow closed his eyes then opened them and peeked around the corner for as long as he dared. He pulled himself back. “I don’t see it.”

  The sound of the engine caused them to instinctively move to the side of the narrow passage, then they both realized it at once. Their car was coming up the cobblestone street. They ran down a few yards in front of the vehicle, waving until the attendant stopped.

  “We’ll take it here, if you don’t mind,” Crow said, plopping several bills in the startled man’s hand.

  They turned the corner in the Mercedes without being noticed. They were almost past the hotel when Rosenfeld looked back at Marcus Foster who was intently canvassing the entire area. Their eyes met for a brief moment. He rushed to his car.

  “He saw us!” Rosenfeld shouted.

  Crow eyed his rearview mirror. “Yeah, I see him. We gotta hope we get to that damn bollard in time.”

  Directly across the street taking it all in beneath the towering walls of the Palace of the Popes stood the bald man with the black eye patch. Rosenfeld looked back and caught him staring.

  Old Town Avignon is hazardous enough to navigate by automobile on the best of days, much less at the height of tourist season. Marcus Foster drove his little Fiat away from the curb and awkwardly through a group of sightseers coming up the cramped street in front of the hotel. He laid on the horn. Like stubborn geese, they were slow to move. Foster nudged them aside with his bumper. Some slapped his hood in rage as he passed.

  Crow was already screaming down the precarious street as fast as he felt was possible in his larger Benz. Pedestrians scattered when he startled them around each bend of the road that arched ever slightly to the right. There was no sidewalk along most of the route, and tourists plastered themselves up against the massive palace wall to avoid being smashed. Within seconds, the bollard was right in front of them in the middle of the roadway designed to keep any and all vehicles from coming up the one-way street. Crow skidded to a halt in front of the call box and hit the button for the hotel on the intercom.

  “La Mirande,” the voice said.

  “Benson Crow!” he shouted. “We need the bollard moved. We’re in a hurry.”

  “Of course, Monsieur Crow.”

  Crow looked in his mirror. No sign of Marcus Foster yet, but he knew he couldn’t be far behind. The bollard wasn’t moving.

  “Now!” Crow shouted.

  Rosenfeld looked behind them. Foster was hitting the last bend, the headlights of his Fiat were flashing. “There he is! I think he wants us to stop,” she said.

  Crow didn’t wait for the bollard to lower completely. As soon as he thought he could pass, he scooted over it and turned right. He hit the gas in mid-turn and his car straightened up.

  Foster’s car reached the intersection a few seconds later and the bollard had already begun to rise. It caught the Fiat at the very rear bouncing the little car up against the wall of the building in front of him while Foster tried to negotiate the right turn. He regained control almost hitting a blond-haired young man pulling a stack of cardboard in a metal-frame cart who waved angrily at him and shouted obscenities. A man who had begun to cross the street carrying a ladder jumped back out of the way, but the momentum of the ladder sent it crashing to the street just where the Fiat had passed.

  Crow cursed the city officials who allowed parking on the right side of such a narrow street. More pedestrians leapt for their lives. If it were possible, the street became even more ridiculously narrow. He reached the stop sign at the corner of Rue de la Banasterie and Rue Petite Saunerie and promptly ignored it causing a cyclist to veer hard left into a boxed tree in front of a bakery and projectile on top of a table. Angry patrons enjoying a quiet espresso jumped from their chairs in anger.

  “Shit! Sorry!” Crow called out even though no one could hear him.

  Two seconds later, Foster was through the same intersection where Rue de la Banasterie becomes Place des Châtaignes.

  Crow hit the gas on the short straightaway. Stunned cafe patrons with mouths agape watched pigeons scatter and Crow’s Mercedes whiz by. At the next intersection, he started to turn right when Rosenfeld shouted, “One way!” Cars slammed on brakes where the cobblestones became asphalt. Crow lurched left then fishtailed left again around a brick island in the middle of the five-point intersection. A black Peugeot coming the opposite direction from a one-way street hit the brakes to avoid hitting him head-on and a green electric 7-seater Baladine, an odd-looking vehicle that was something between a taxi and a small bus, rammed into the rear of the Peugeot throwing its passengers into each other. Crow shot up Rue Armand de Pontmartin.

  Foster barely clipped a VW in the rear when he reached the intersection just over a second later, spinning the car around and out of his way. He made the sharp turn with tires squealing and streaked past the wrecked Peugeot and Baladine. He took the same street as Crow, which was still asphalt but extremely narrow. A white delivery truck hogged part of the street and Crow scraped two green rounded window grates on the right as he passed.

  Foster’s smaller Fiat passed with ease and he was now a mere second behind them.

  “He’s flashing the lights again,” Rosenfeld said.

  “Does he think I’m a fool? Like I’m gonna just pull over.”

  A car hit the brakes coming out of an alleyway. Crow adjusted quickly to the right then back straight and burst past. The driver was about to take his foot off the brake pedal when Foster flew by. The man screamed out his window.

  The road curved sharply to the left and Crow grazed the side of the building with the right side of his front bumper. The scuff marks already on the building indicated he wasn’t the first. Pedestrians scrambled for safety behind the permanent posts that marked the boundary between the threadlike street and the catwalk of a sidewalk. Foster made the curve with ease and was now on their tail.

  The road came to a dead end and Crow squealed right onto Rue Sainte-Catherine. Foster did the same but with more grace. Tourists fell all over one another getting out of the tiny street. On this straightaway the Mercedes had the advantage. Crow blew the horn and accelerated. A lady talking on her phone, oblivious to the rest of the world, was so startled she tossed her phone in the air and it bounced off Crow’s windshield. Before she could retrieve it from the street, Foster’s Fiat zoomed past and left it in pieces.

  Crow began putting space between himself and Foster’s glorified golf cart. Rosenfeld turned around to see the Fiat getting smaller. The lane curved to the right slightly, enough to put them out of sight for a brief moment.

  “Take a left here,” she shouted.

  Crow was already in motion to take the hairpin left onto Rue Bertrand. “Way ahead of you,” he said, fighting
the steering wheel with all his might.

  The tires screeched and skipped across the surface. The back end slid perfectly to head him back in almost the opposite direction up Rue Bertrand and he floored it. He had taken the turn just in time. His taillights vanished just as Foster straightened out of the curve and bore slightly to the right to follow the road he was on. Crow was nowhere in sight, but he immediately recognized the red sign with the horizontal white line dead ahead in front of him. Even if he didn’t know what it meant, the blaring horns of the oncoming cars told him he was going the wrong way up a one-way street. Blue smoke rolled from the Fiat’s back tires and Foster came to an abrupt stop. He banged the steering wheel with his fist. He reached in the pocket of his plaid shirt and unfolded the crumpled piece of paper again. Sánchez Muñoz.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “We’ve gotta find a place to regroup.” Benson Crow checked his mirrors obsessively. His mind struggled to process everything he’d just taken in.

  “You really think the priest was murdered?” Rosenfeld asked. “The man at the church said he killed himself.”

  Crow shot her a sarcastic glance.

  They turned right on Rue Banasterie past Chapelle des Pénitents Noirs, Chapel of the Black Penitents, whose congregants comforted criminals sentenced to death and even accompanied them to the gallows making sure the condemned had a decent Christian burial. They exited the ancient city walls at Porte Saint-Joseph and melded into the four-lane traffic of Boulevard Saint-Lazare. They followed the Rhone River and eventually crossed it at Pont de l’Europe. This was the same Rhone that passed through Arles and was made famous in van Gogh’s Starry Night.

  Just outside Avignon the landscape opened up to vineyards and horses and old stone structures on a two-lane highway with rolling hills in the distance. They hit a roundabout and Crow went around the entire circle before taking a spoke off toward the tiny village of Saze, just to make sure Marcus Foster hadn’t managed to follow them. He didn’t see anyone at all and felt safe enough to pull over for a bite to eat.

  France looks quite different beyond the borders of Provence and the Rhone River. Saze looked like something out of a spaghetti western with stark, naked trees and tiled roofs. They stopped at a small pizza joint on the main square and sat down at one of the formica-covered booths. Crow put his computer tablet to the side and threw the car key fob on top of it. The smell of baked bread and tomato sauce became stronger each time the server passed through the metal swinging door to the kitchen. They ordered a pizza and a couple of soft drinks.

  “What am I missing here?” Crow asked. “What does Sánchez Muñoz have to do with the Custos Verbi?”

  “I don’t know,” Rosenfeld said. “Maybe Muñoz has something to do with Nostradamus.”

  “You studied this guy. Any connection to Spain that you can think of?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “What about his parents?”

  “No. They were French.”

  “And Catholic, I presume,” Crow said.

  “Yes. His father’s father—Nostradamus’ paternal grandfather—was actually Jewish but converted to Catholicism. Some say it was due, in part, to the Inquisition.”

  “The Spanish Inquisition?”

  “Well, the Spanish Inquisition was a little later, but it’s interesting you should say that. Nostradamus was falsely accused of heresy when he was about thirty-five. He made some off-handed remark about a religious statue or something. Agents of the Spanish Inquisition were after him for a time. He wandered through Italy for about six years.”

  “Hmm, interesting,” Crow said. “Grumbling mentioned the Inquisition in our discussion. Said Nostradamus was afraid of the Church, so he shrouded his predictions in verses. Is it possible the Custos Verbi sprang from those agents of the Spanish Inquisition?”

  “Doubtful. His controversial writings didn’t start for almost another twenty years, after he returned to Salon from Italy.”

  The pizza came and they each grabbed a slice. Crow took a bite, wiped his hands on a napkin, and opened his tablet. Using the restaurant’s Internet connection, he called up a search engine and looked up ‘Spanish Inquisition.’

  “All right, it says here the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478. On February 6, 1481, they burned six people alive. Doesn’t sound very Christian-like. These were mostly Jews who wouldn’t convert.”

  “Yeah, they ended up burning quite a few people they didn’t like,” Rosenfeld said. “I’m sure that was always in the back of Nostradamus’ mind when he was writing his quatrains.”

  “Let’s see, in 1483 Pope Sixtus IV named an Inquisitor General. His name was Tomás de Torquemada. He was over Aragon, which is in Northeastern Spain.” He mumbled as he read to himself, his fingers scanning across the face of the tablet. “OK, listen to this. It says here there were four tribunals in Aragon. They were in Zaragoza, Barcelona, Majorca, and Valencia.” Crow looked up at Rosenfeld. “Remember what the tour guide said back at the Palace of the Popes? Sánchez Muñoz was an envoy to the Bishop of Valencia under Benedict XIII. The tribunal was in Valencia. Simonin said to find the defender of the rock by the sea and we’d find our answer. Valencia is on the Mediterranean Sea. Valencia’s the common denominator.”

  “Quite a leap, isn’t it?”

  “It has to be Valencia,” he said.

  “And what about our tails,” she asked.

  “Tails?”

  “Yeah, that creepy dude with the eyepatch was watching us as we left the hotel.”

  “The guy who was getting on the elevator when we were getting off?” Crow asked.

  “Yep. I saw him outside when that Marcus guy started chasing us.”

  “We can’t worry about either of them right now. They have no idea where we’re going.”

  “We don’t even know where we’re going,” she said.

  “Look, Sánchez Muñoz is the clue, right? Other than Avignon, which Simonin told me was not where we’d find the Custos Verbi, Valencia is the only other place that pops up. Sánchez Muñoz was an envoy to the Bishop of Valencia. It’s by the sea. I think Simonin was telling me we’ll find the Custos Verbi in Valencia.”

  “Unless they find us first.” Rosenfeld took a bite of the pizza.

  “Yeah, well, we need to keep moving. I don’t know how in the hell Marcus Foster keeps finding us, but it’s harder to hit a moving target.”

  They buckled in and Sidney Rosenfeld entered Valencia into her phone’s GPS. Seven hours away. Rosenfeld propped her bare feet up on the dash and stared out the window.

  “It’d break your legs if we had a wreck,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The air bag. With your feet up on the dash like that. Probably break your back, too.”

  “You love to tell me what to do, don’t you?” She neither expected nor wanted an answer.

  “Just trying to be helpful,” he said.

  “Is that what that is? ‘Cause it sure sounds like a control freak to me.” She folded her arms and looked out her window.

  “A control freak? Is that what I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. I’ll stop trying to help.”

  Rosenfeld rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  Crow drove in silence. It was supposed to be a relaxing getaway to Montreal. Get out of the country, Tom had said. Relax. Crow had most certainly gotten out of the country, but relax? He hadn’t relaxed for one second since he met the mysterious man in Montreal. He wondered if he’d ever relax again. He almost wished he’d been kept in the dark. Almost. He knew himself too well. He loved a good story, usually the kind that was the invention of his own imagination. In his wildest fantasy he could not have imagined a tale as intriguing as the one he was living. This was the type of story he sat up late nights trying to conjure. The problem with this tale was he couldn’t even imagine the ending. He’d never heard of anything like this before. The irony was the First Facers did know the ending. They co
uld see the future, or so they believed. The truth was written in the Unriddled Manuscript. More accurately, what was written was the future Nostradamus envisioned, and they could control events leading up to it. That’s how they worked with such precision. Crow couldn’t even control the present. Each step left him more confounded, more confused, more frustrated.

  But was their future real, or was their future what the First Facers made it? Crow couldn’t bring himself to believe that Nostradamus could actually see the future. He had to be a lucky guesser. No, it was more layered than that. He wrote in riddles, Crow surmised, not to hide his prophecies from the Church, but to keep them ambiguous enough that any future event would fit. Like some cheap palm reader who throws out generalities until she hits a nerve then exploits that tenuous connection. But Crow had to admit that some of Nostradamus’ predictions fit a little too snugly. Some were downright uncanny. It didn’t matter if he believed. They believed. The First Face of Janus was obsessed with that belief like so many religious zealots who killed to confirm others to their beliefs. This was their very own Inquisition. People like Nostradamus had been hunted down in his day. Now the First Facers hunted down anyone who stood in the way of their religion. These fervent beliefs made these people extremely dangerous. He had to stop them, not just for the sake of the lives involved, but for the sake of humanity’s future. If he could be the monkey wrench in the machinery, he could demonstrate to the First Facers that Nostradamus’ word was not infallible. If he could do that, perhaps he could bring an end to a half-millennium of prophecy wars.

  Crow’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He looked over at a sleeping Sidney Rosenfeld then pulled it out. A message from Kyle O’Hara.

  Last favor, dude. Yes, the observe is obviously Nostradamus and Janus. Reverse is the Nostradamus family crest. Soli Deo means God Alone. The eight-rayed wheel is a reference to his Hebrew origins, symbolizes the wandering of the Jews. The bird is either an eagle or falcon. No clue what that means. P.S. Get out while you can. P.S.S. Lose my number.