by Jim Hougan
“I think we’re on the list. And the Magdalene Society, too. When the words come up, Echelon kicks out the message they’re in, and the message is copied and sent to whoever gave them the words in the first place. But that’s not the end of it. Echelon is just one system. There are others. So, all in all, I’m amazed we’re still out here.”
Clem pulled the sheet up to her nose. “Scary,” she mumbled.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I! Sometimes, I think I liked you better as an Irish accountant, or whatever you were supposed to be.”
Dunphy turned away from the window. Crossing the room to the minibar, he opened a bottle of Trois Monts and sat down beside Clem on the bed. “I’m thinking, maybe there isn’t any point to this anymore. If we keep asking questions, they’re going to find us. And when they do, that’s it. So, maybe we should just sort of . . . disappear.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Into the sunset.”
“The sunset?”
“Okay, you don’t like the sunset. What about Brazil?”
“Brazil?!”
Her tone made him defensive. “We could get married.”
The idea seemed to alarm her. “Is this a proposal?”
Dunphy wasn’t sure. “I don’t know. I guess so. I mean—it’s a suggestion, anyway.”
“You mean, like, ‘Do you want to see Cats?’ ”
“No—”
“Of course,” she said, “if we were married, then we’d be Mr. and Mrs. Pitt.” She thought about that, then tested the sound aloud. “Hola! Yo soy Señora Peeet!”
“They don’t speak Spanish in Brazil,” Dunphy told her.
“I know, but I don’t speak Portuguese, so Spanish will have to do.” Suddenly, a daft smile played across her lips, and her voice sank to a silky, bedroom timbre. “Hello, my name is Veroushka Pitt, and I pay cash for everything.” Looking directly at Dunphy, she lowered her voice even further. “This is Veroushka Bell-Pitt, hiding out in Florianópolis!” She wrinkled her nose.
“So, what you’re saying is, no,” Dunphy said.
She shook her head. “What I’m saying is, we have this problem where everyone’s trying to kill you all the time, and I just think we ought to solve that before I go shopping for a trousseau.”
“And what if there isn’t any solution?” Dunphy asked. “Sometimes, you just have to walk away. And this is looking like one of those times. I mean, look at who we’re dealing with. These guys have been in business for a thousand years. They own the CIA. And what it looks like is, no matter how much we find out, there isn’t anything we can do. We can’t go to the police—”
“Why not?”
“Because this isn’t the kind of thing they do well. They write tickets. They look for car thieves. Sometimes they solve murders. But they never, ever, assign a special detail to the collective unconscious.”
Clem rolled her eyes. “We could go to the press.”
Dunphy shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I told you on the plane down to Tenerife. Whatever this is, it isn’t ‘fit to print.’ There’s no bad guy—no lone assassin. We’re up against a secret church, for Chrissake! And the more we find out about that church, the harder it gets for me to even imagine a way out. So you tell me. Where does that leave us?”
“In Paris,” Clem replied, and parted the bed. “Now come to mother.”
Dunphy frowned. “It’s momma,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s come to momma,” he replied. “Not come to mother. Only a Brit would think it’s come to mother.”
“Whatever,” she told him, and patted the bed a second time.
Georges Watkin worked out of an apartment on the second floor of an Art Nouveau duplex in the ninth arrondissement. Van Worden’s warning that Watkin “might be praying in a different church entirely” made Dunphy especially wary. Concocting a pretext, he telephoned the Frenchman to say that he was in Paris on behalf of the Church of Latter-day Saints, which was interested in retaining Watkin as a consultant on genealogical matters. Was Watkin interested? Would it be possible to meet?
Eh, bien! By all means! Watkin was free that very afternoon. Dunphy was not surprised. The Mormon Church is to genealogy as Hollywood is to film. Even if Watkin were independently wealthy, it was unlikely that he’d dismiss the prospect of such a meeting.
And Watkin was not wealthy. According to Van Worden, he was a lowly hack with aristocratic pretensions. He wrote articles about the Royals—everyone’s Royals—for the tabloid press in France and England. An authority on the Windsors, Hapsburgs, and Grimaldis, he supplemented his income by doing genealogical studies for private clients.
With the Glock resting in the bottom of his new briefcase, Dunphy arrived at Watkin’s office, accompanied by Clem. Buzzed in, they climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the genealogist stood outside the door to his apartment, beaming.
He was a short and overweight man with a childlike face. He wore a threadbare, but respectable, black suit whose shoulders glowed with wear. Beneath the jacket was a white shirt and regimental tie, the stripes of which betrayed the genealogist’s enthusiasm for soup. Scuffed shoes and a whiff of sweat completed Dunphy’s first impression of the man.
“Raymond Shaw,” Dunphy said, protecting his alias even as he shook hands. “And this is my assistant, Veronica . . . Flexx.”
Somehow, her double take went unnoticed.
The office itself was large and comfortable, if overheated, its walls lined with bookshelves filled to overflowing. Stacks of documents and rolls of parchment rested on heavy wooden library tables at either end of the room. Along the north wall, a bank of grimy windows glowed with the gray light of an afternoon that couldn’t wait to rain.
“Armagnac?” Watkin asked, pouring himself a glass.
“No thanks,” Dunphy said, dropping into a battered leather club chair. “We don’t drink, actually.”
Watkin gritted his teeth and sighed. “Of course! How stupid of me. I’m . . .” The genealogist’s voice dwindled to nothing, as if he’d lost track of what he’d been about to say, even as his smile segued into a look of surprise—or perhaps it was alarm. Whatever it was, it lasted only a second, and then he found his voice and was smiling again. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.
“No need to apologize,” Dunphy replied, wondering if he’d just hallucinated. “Why don’t you enjoy your drink, and I’ll explain what we’re after?”
The Frenchman sat down in the chair behind his desk, glanced at some papers, and nodded to his visitors to begin.
Dunphy had spent the morning in an Internet café not far from the Sorbonne. He’d run a search on Mormonism, made some notes, and composed a smarmy little speech that he hoped would be ingratiating. “It’s Peter that brings us here,” he said. “I don’t know if you’re a religious man, but Peter tells us that the Gospel was ‘preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.’ At the Church of Latter-day Saints, we believe that Christ suffered and died—not only for the sins of the living, but also for those of the dead. As you can imagine, this places upon us a very special obligation: to redeem the souls of those who have died—our ancestors in the spirit world. And as I think you know, we do this by means of a sacrament that is popularly known as baptism by proxy. Of course, before we can do that, we must first identify the ancestors in question—which is something we do using traditional genealogical methods.”
A complacent smirk from Dunphy. A beatific smile from Clem. A respectful, if distracted, nod from Watkin.
“We’ve been at this for quite a while,” Dunphy continued, “with each family working backward, one generation after another. We like to think that millions of souls have been saved. But as you can imagine—”
“The further back one goes,” Watkin suggested, “the harder it gets.”
“Exactly. And this is p
articularly so for Americans, whose generational roots—and records—are almost always on the other side of the Atlantic.”
Watkin nodded sympathetically.
“And that’s why Ms. Flexx and I are here. We’ve been asked to set up a research institute in Paris to facilitate genealogical requests made by Church members in the United States.”
“I see,” Watkin said. “And you thought—”
“We thought you might be able to help. Yes.”
Watkin nodded slowly and, Dunphy thought, a bit regretfully—which was not what he’d expected. Finally the Frenchman asked, “How did you get my name?”
It was a question that Dunphy had anticipated. Reaching inside his jacket, he removed a photocopy of the article that had appeared in Archaeus: “The Magdalene Cultivar.” “We were very impressed with an article you wrote,” Dunphy said, handing it to Watkin.
The Frenchman took a pair of reading glasses from his jacket pocket and adjusted them on his nose. Then he cleared his throat and looked at the papers in his hand. There was no obvious reaction. If anything, he seemed, somehow, stuck. His face slackened as he stared at the story he’d written, lips moving over the words in the first paragraph. Finally he looked up. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
Dunphy had been waiting for that question, as well. “It was sent to one of our genealogists in Salt Lake City—he passed it on. I’m not sure what magazine it was in. . . .”
“Everyone said the work was first-rate,” Clem remarked, sensing Watkin’s discomfiture.
“Oh, no question,” Dunphy agreed.
Watkin looked from one to the other. “It wasn’t widely circulated,” he mumbled.
“Oh?”
“No,” Watkin replied. “There were very few copies printed. It was a . . . special-interest publication. Written for a very special audience. Not the public. So . . . it was quite rare.”
“Well, then, I think we should count ourselves lucky to have seen it!” Dunphy told him. “And lucky to have found the man who wrote it!”
Watkin nodded slightly, still obviously distracted.
“It was so cleverly done,” Dunphy remarked.
“What was?” Watkin asked.
“The article,” Dunphy replied.
“So witty,” Clem added, crossing her legs with a zip of nylon. “The way you wrote about the Merovingian line—”
“As if it were an exercise in viticulture!” Dunphy finished. “Wherever did you get the idea?”
Watkin’s distraction was now gone. His eyes snapped from Dunphy to Clem, and back again. Then, he seemed to relax—and began to play along.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was just an idea. I wrote it as an amusement.” He paused and then plunged on. “So! You’re interested in the Merovingians?”
“Absolutely,” Dunphy replied.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Clem exclaimed.
“I wonder if there are any of them still around,” Dunphy mused.
“You’re not alone,” Watkin said with a smile. “Would you like to see the genealogies Napoleon commissioned? Not the originals, of course, but—”
“Hell, yes!” Dunphy exclaimed, and instantly regretted it. “Sorry. Sometimes, I get . . . overexcited.”
Watkin shrugged. “They’re in the next room,” he said. “I’ll just go get them. . . .”
When he’d left, Dunphy grimaced, and Clem leaned in. “I think you fucked up, your holiness.”
Dunphy agreed, but there was nothing to be done. Getting to his feet, he walked to the window and glanced outside. A light rain had begun to fall, and the street was slicked and glistening. “It’s raining,” he said as he made his way around the room, studying the shelves of books for clues to Watkin’s strange demeanor.
Newsletter of the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History.
Manuscripts Catalog of the Franco-Judaic Archives.
Documents Relating to the History and Settlement of Towns along the Dadou and Agout Rivers (with the Exception of Réalmont), 1330–82.
UFOs over Biarritz!
“Uh-oh,” Dunphy muttered, but continued with his stroll around the room, arriving finally at Watkin’s desk. There, two things caught his eye. The first was a red diode glowing on Watkin’s telephone, indicating that someone (almost certainly Watkin) was using line one in another room. The second thing to catch his attention was a photograph of himself.
This was a passport-sized picture attached to a memorandum from the director of the Security Research Staff, Harold Matta. Aghast, Dunphy read the memo, which identified the man in the photograph as John Dunphy, aka Kerry Thornley, aka Jack. The memo described Dunphy/Thornley as
armed and extremely dangerous. Mr. Dunphy is believed to be traveling with a female companion, using false identification. Subject impersonated a federal official in Kansas, wounded a federal agent in London, and breached security at a SAP facility in Switzerland, where Andromeda-sensitive MK-IMAGE documents were stolen after two members of the archival staff were viciously assaulted. SRS safari teams are TDY to our embassies in London, Paris, and Zürich. If sighted, notify the team closest to you.
Oh, shit, Dunphy thought. What the hell is a safari team? And the answer came back: It’s just what you think. Removing the picture from the memo to which it had been attachéd, Dunphy took the photo back to his chair. Sitting down, he flashed the picture to Clem and whispered, “We’re fucked.”
“What?!”
“We can give it maybe ten minutes,” he said, shoving the picture into his jacket pocket. “Then we have to get out—he’s already on the phone.”
A moment later, a nervous-looking Watkin emerged with a bundle of charts under his arm. Spreading them out on one of the library tables, he weighted them down at their corners, using books. Dunphy and Clem joined him at his side.
“You’re looking at the ancestral charts of the Merovingians,” Watkin told them, “as prepared by genealogists working for Napoleon in the first three years of the nineteenth century.”
“The Long-Haired Kings,” Dunphy muttered.
Watkin put his lips together in a moue. “They’ve also been called the Grail Kings.”
“They’re like illuminated manuscripts,” Clem observed, pointing to the delicate traceries that crowded the margins of the charts. There were lions and cherubim, flowers and magi. And, in the middle, a latticework of relations, tracing a direct line back from the Napoleonic era to the Crusades, and from the Crusades to the Dark Ages, and finally, to Mérovée himself.
“It’s beautiful,” Dunphy remarked.
“You have no idea,” Watkin commented.
Dunphy scrutinized the names and was somewhat disappointed to see that none of them was particularly recognizable. Dagobert II. Sigisbert IV. Those, at least, had been cross-referenced in the Andromeda files—though he had no idea who they were, or might have been.
“Who’s Dagbert?” he asked.
Watkin winced. “Dah-go-bear. His father was king of Austrasia—”
“Which was what?”
“Northern France and parts of Germany. It’s an interesting story,” Watkin confided. “Like a fairy tale. When Dagobert’s father was killed, Dagobert himself was kidnapped by the mayor of the palace and hidden away in a monastery in Ireland. Apparently, they didn’t have the heart to murder him. After some years, the mayor’s own son became king, and Dagobert grew to manhood.”
“When was this?” Clementine asked.
“In 651. He retook the throne when he was twenty-three.”
“Then what?” Dunphy asked, thinking he had maybe five minutes left.
Watkin shrugged. “He died.”
“How?” Clem wondered.
“They slaughtered him while he slept—a lance through the eye.”
“Who did?” Dunphy asked.
“According to the histories? The henchmen of Pépin the Fat.”
“And in fact?”
A dismissive puff from Watkin. “The Vatic
an, of course.”
“What about this one?” Clem asked. “Who’s he?”
“Sigisbert,” Watkin replied. “The line continued through him.”
“For how long?” Dunphy asked, bringing the conversation around to the reason for his visit.
Watkin looked uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”
“Where are they now? Are any of them still around?”
Watkin shrugged.
“Oh, come on,” Dunphy chided. “Don’t tell me nobody’s taken a peek since Napoleon!”
Watkin smiled bleakly. “Well,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. The last was here, actually. In Paris.”
“No kidding,” Dunphy said. “Who was he?”
“A banker,” Watkin replied. “Bernardin something-or-other.”
Dunphy figured he didn’t have anything to lose. “Gomelez?” he asked.
The genealogist stared at him.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Dunphy exclaimed. He turned to Clem. “I knew I was right.”
“How do you know this name?” Watkin demanded.
Dunphy shrugged. “Internet. I surf a lot.”
“What happened to him?” Clem asked.
“To who?”
“Mr. Gomelez,” she said, and as she spoke, a car backfired on the street outside. Watkin jumped as if he’d been given a shock. Averting his eyes from his guests, he began to roll up the charts. “I think he was wounded in the war,” he said.
“Which war?” Dunphy asked.
“In Spain. He was a volunteer.”
Clem walked over to the window, pushed the curtain aside, and gazed out at the street. “He must be very old now,” she said.
Watkin shook his head and lied. “I think he must be dead,” he said. “This was a very sick man. And not just the war. He had—how is it called? Pernicieuse anémie?”
“Pernicious anemia?” Clem suggested.
“Exactly! And in the big war, when the Germans came, they make his house—a mansion in the Rue de Mogador—a hospital. No one sees him after that.”
“Even after the war?” Dunphy asked.
“As I said, he disappeared.”
“And the house—”
Watkin dismissed the question. “It changed hands. I think, now, this is a museum. For the archaeologists.”