The Huguenot Thief

by L. K. CLEMENT

  His huge antebellum home dwarfed Richard’s small brick Georgian-style cottage. The billionaire sent an underling in a black limo from the airport, flown in from where Jack didn’t know and didn’t ask. The young man carried two smart phones that did not stop ringing, buzzing, or pinging the entire time he pretended to inspect the job site. Of course, there was nothing to inspect yet, and Jack suspected the employee would make a few more unscheduled visits to make sure nothing marred the perfection of the house his employer never visited. With Amarintha’s house between Richard’s home and the billionaire’s, both in size and in location, the three houses would

  resemble the baby bear, momma bear and papa bear of Charleston dwellings.

  Today Richard was sitting on his porch steps with the New York Times waiting near a big thermos of coffee, a ritual the man had started on Jack’s first day on the job site. Jack would walk up the steps and sit. Richard would hand the paper carefully to Jack, a paper he seldom had the time to look at, along with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and then comment about the top stories in the paper, stories that had little bearing on Jack’s life in Charleston. This time, Richard waved Jack over after he had parked his truck. Jack ambled over, took the cup of coffee, and sat down on the front porch steps.

  “Well, sure is a fine day for breaking ground,” mused Richard.

  “Yes, sir. I’m hoping for a few more weeks of this weather so we can get the house dried in.” Jack sipped his coffee, knowing that there would be many days where he would have no time to sit and talk to this genteel man.

  Richard looked up and down the street at all the other homes. “I’m surprised this lot didn’t get built when all those financial types were buying up everything. It has to be the only empty lot left around here.” He took a long draw of his coffee, smacked his lips as old men do, and then continued.

  “You know, I always wondered why that lady professor didn’t buy this lot. I saw her over here last fall more than a few times. I wonder whether anybody ever found out what happened to her.” The old man sipped his own coffee and scratched the little bit of chin whiskers he had.

  Jack went still, not certain he had heard correctly. “What do you mean—the lady professor? What lady professor?” His words came out harshly, and Richard turned and looked at him, his face showing hurt at the tone in Jack’s voice, an inflection Jack knew he had never used with the man.

  “Don’t you know what I’m talking about? She worked for the professor that was murdered on the bridge by that crazy driver in the garbage truck. Never caught the guy.”

  “I’m sorry, Richard. I guess you don’t know, but it’s my wife that is missing.” Jack dropped his head. Tugging the brim of his cap, he rubbed his eyes.

  “Oh my, I’m sorry.” Jack looked up to see in Richard’s face both sympathy and unabashed curiosity.

  “She . . . she just went to work and never came back. Nobody saw her after an early morning meeting with her boss. It’s been four weeks, and I have no idea what happened.”

  Richard took another sip of his coffee.

  “Son, I’m real sorry. I didn’t know that was your wife. When her picture was on the news, I called the police and told them I had seen her walking around Queen Street a couple of times, but I guess the detective I talked to didn’t think it meant anything.” Richard stopped talking and stared down the road where a Mercedes sedan idled at the corner of Queen and Church streets.

  Jack was silent, remembering how he had badgered Detective Edson to put Kate’s picture on the television, something he wished he had not done. A rash of crank calls to both the police station and their house had not offered any new information, and some of the calls had been frightening, the callers claiming to have Kate and offering to return her for money. “Wait a minute, Jack, the day she, you know, the day she—”

  “Disappeared?” Jack asked flatly.

  “Yes, what day was that?”

  “April 10.”

  Richard stared at the Mercedes idling at the stop sign. “Excuse me, son. I need to look for something.”

  Jack watched Richard open his screen door and heard him opening desk drawers and rummaging through them. Just then, the subcontractor responsible for the foundation drove up, pulling a huge auger on a trailer.

  “How are you, Buck?”

  “Well, not too bad. Glad to see business picking up.” Buck was a middle-aged man with the permanently reddened look of someone who has worked outside for decades. Jack had worked with him on many jobs. He knew Buck was reliable, good, and fast—though not cheap. Not with this exotic equipment. The auger, which looked like a giant flathead screwdriver, was going to make it possible to drill holes for the foundation piers anchoring the house.

  A young man stepped out of the truck and asked, “Well, we ready?” He was pale and skinny with a shaved head and a blond soul patch that looked like dirt. He started backing the trailer into the location of the piers, beginning with the rearmost one. The auger used a loud diesel engine, and Jack knew they’d have complaints about the noise. Jack walked over to the stakes the surveyor had hammered into the ground.

  “Ok,” he shouted. “Here is the foundation marked out. You’re scheduled for three hours, right?” Buck spit and nodded. The kid got out of the truck and carefully lowered the big auger into place. Buck would pile the dirt on the lot, and Jack would offer it free to another builder. On the peninsula, with ever-present flooding, contractors always needed dirt to shore up the ground’s constant migration to the sea.

  The big engine roared, the drill came down, and the drilling commenced. The din did not push Kate from Jack’s mind, but it did silence the needling, ever-present belief that Kate was in danger and he was helpless to save her.

  Istanbul

  Chapter 13

  “I’m finished, you bastard,” Kate said towards the speaker in the workroom. She slumped in the chair, her eyes on the walls of her prison. She swiveled listlessly in the office chair, proud of her achievement, yet overwhelmed with fatigue and depression.

  Ten feet from the whiteboard, she could see innumerable hairline horizontal lines, black against the white background. Standing two feet from the walls, a visitor would see organized rectangles with names, dates, locations, and nationalities. The south wall began with the oldest, dating to 300 AD, with the lineage lines moving counterclockwise to the last contemporary units. The images showed an enormous family tree of relics.

  A closer look showed, superimposed on these trees, odd icons of faces, body parts, and non-living objects. These icons formed their own lineage charts, showing the original whole relic, say a body, and the many ways it had been broken apart. And, broken apart they had been.

  The dry academic record of what had happened to a dead saint’s remains belied the true horror of the event—fistfights over body parts, theft of the same, and accusations among devout believers, all scrambling to hit the holy relic jackpot. The entire room resembled a marble wall, a visual record of the reliquaries stored in the Monastery of the Pantocrator during the Crusader sack of Constantinople.

  The breakthrough was her analysis of the palimpsest, the remnants of earlier writing on a few of the parchment pages. The scribes had scraped the parchment and reused it, a common practice before the widespread use of paper, as parchment was time-consuming to make. In ancient times, this would have been all but impossible to decipher, but using the special photographic analysis program on the computer, Kate was able to decipher the previous notations. She knew that other researchers would have seen the palimpsest as well, but the almost hidden writing was in a code, a code using the ancient Roman, not the Byzantine, calendar as its key. Initially Kate ignored the writing, believing it to be unrelated, but she persevered and found the story hidden in the parchments, a story almost too incredible to be true.

  Twelve reliquaries had been deliberately seeded with disease.

  In 1204, Crusader kni
ghts had sacked Constantinople, ripping reliquaries from churches and piling them in a monastery until the loot could be divided. While in the Pantocrator Monastery, a Byzantine monk had opened the reliquaries and inserted scabs from a pox victim, skin from a cow that had died of what the monk called murrain, a word Kate did not know, and blood from a plague victim.

  Five of the twelve, now at the Vatican, contained bones of St. Paul and other apostles, and presumably, each one had one of these toxic materials. Another five reliquaries, purchased by King Louis in 1239, were in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and were purported to contain pieces of the Crown of Thorns and the Robe of Christ. The last two of the twelve artifacts were sent to an insignificant convent in France. One of them did not have disease material inserted into it. In coded language, the priest identified this reliquary as unholy. The coded text indicated that this particular object had caused healing in a Mussulman, a word used for Muslims at the time and therefore was “of Satan, and Satan hath no better agent on Earth than the treacherous Franks.”

  The codex was clear about the motive of such medieval treachery—revenge on France for Frankish Christians looting and destroying Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade.

  These twelve reliquaries were the ones Bunin wanted, and given his willingness to kidnap an American citizen as well as blackmail a Turkish professor, Kate was certain he wanted them for a malicious purpose. Did he want to deepen the existing schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches by announcing that reliquaries held by the Vatican were contaminated? Was there a group in Russia that believed that exposing this secret could provide ammunition for whatever unconventional catechism they espoused? Even if Bunin made the information public, Kate wondered whether anyone would believe it. It was impossible to imagine that the Vatican, or whoever had legal ownership of the reliquaries, would allow an examination. She was deep into her thoughts, attempting to divine what Bunin wanted, when the door opened.

  Bunin. This was the first time she had seen him in almost two weeks.

  “Dr. Strong, how are you?” He was wearing, of all things, a yellow leisure suit. He looked like a toxic banana.

  “I have finished. Let me go home.” Kate couldn’t stand; she felt too weak. “I have identified the fakes, the ones you wanted. Kate gestured to the boards. “There they are.”

  Bunin nodded his head and left. She unexpectedly felt disappointed, as he left without even a look at the intensive detective work she had completed, immediately followed by scorching shame that she even desired praise from her captor.

  An hour later, he returned with Atay in tow. The two of them talked in low voices as they studied Kate’s intricate charts. Atay took out a professional Nikon camera and took pictures of the walls. Kate did not know how long the two men stayed. She did know that she was in the bipolar roulette wheel described so long ago to her: red/black, red/black, red/black. Throb. Throb. Throb. Frightened and exhausted, she dragged herself to her bed and fell asleep.

  Charleston

  Chapter 14

  Thompson groaned and stretched his back. God, the work was tedious—and maddening given that from his porch he could see several blocks of King Street’s restaurants, bars, and art galleries, none of which he had time to enjoy. He had sent copies of what covered his desk to Detective Edson the day after Adam Chalk’s death, but his case file was now going to the FBI, and Thompson wanted to review it once more. The file contained hundreds of pieces of paper: bank statements, cell phone records, office phone records, printouts of URLs Kate Strong had visited, and emails from her personal and work accounts. Even her PhD thesis was somewhere on the table, although what that would tell him, he didn’t know.

  Had he missed something? Logging onto his computer, he sent a message asking the technology team in France to pull the emails between Strong and her boss one more time and run an analysis on the contents. Maybe that would reveal some reason for her alleged kidnapping. He gathered the papers from the table and locked them in his briefcase. Time to head to the FBI and listen to the tape from the Istanbul office, the recording where the caller claimed Strong had been kidnapped. What help he could give the FBI and Charleston Police, Thompson couldn’t imagine, but he found himself wanting to stay in Charleston, a city he had grown to appreciate.

  Thompson’s stay in the city this time was a magnitude calmer than his first. Over twenty years ago, friends had dragged Thompson to a weekend football game in Charleston. After the game, in the euphoria of postgame celebration, Thompson and his best friend had flashed the money they won in betting on the game. They had promptly been robbed on the street. The other buddies left town without the unlucky two. Lacking any other acceptable options, Thompson and his friend slunk to the local sperm bank that paid for contributions.

  He laughed at the memory of the scruffy visit and wondered whether today’s students were ever that desperate for money. Not likely. The number of expensive cars on the streets near the College indicated that today’s college slackers didn’t need to resort to desperate measures to get funds. Any donation of bodily fluids was strictly for pleasure and completely voluntary.

  Charleston had been a good base for him. He’d befriended a few builders, including Jack Strong, and once Kate was cleared, Thompson had recommended Jack for a few projects, including the job for Amarintha Sims.

  Amarintha intrigued him in spite of her illness, a proverbial axe always hovering. He thought she was beautiful, even with a naked head, and knew she was brilliant, based on the little bit of research he had done about her work at the medical university. Most intriguing was how calm and funny she was in the face of circumstances that would cause many people to gulp tranquilizers.

  He especially enjoyed the days when he, Amarintha, and Richard sat on her soon-to-be next-door neighbor’s porch trading stories about Charleston. Richard, who had lived in Charleston for fifty years, had a huge repertoire of tales, including experiences connected to losing the Navy Yard, surviving Hurricane Hugo, and, now, the resurgent popularity of the city. Richard had educated Thompson on the many interpretations of “bless your heart,” and Amarintha had laughed at his surprise that the term wasn’t always used benevolently. Thompson and Richard hooted as she described the donors’ lab visits, her graduate assistants having mastered the art of describing the potential benefits of Dr. Sims’ research into organ regeneration. Bye, bye, Viagra.

  His cell rang. “Thompson Denton.”

  “It’s Sergei. Have you met with the FBI yet?”

  “I’m leaving shortly. I’ve been reviewing the case notes one more time.”

  “Actually, I’m glad that you have not yet spoken to them. The situation has changed. The FBI has asked for more of our assistance, and we are always ready to help Uncle Sam.”

  “What kind of assistance do they need from me?” Thompson tried to sound reluctant, but he felt an unexpected pleasure at the thought of sticking around a while longer. An image of Amarintha came to him. Perhaps he could stay until her house was finished. After he did whatever the FBI wanted, he could take some leave; he certainly had it to spare, and Amarintha might need help in the coming weeks.

  “The FBI is trying to consolidate all of its investigations into Anton Bunin into one large Task Force. Until we can definitely say Kate Strong is or isn’t involved, the Special Agent in Charge wants you to stay on the case.”

  Thompson said, “I know her. Brook Reynolds is decent and doesn’t seem to have as big an ego as some SACs I’ve met. Is she in Charleston? The field office is in the capital, Columbia.”

  “She’s in Charleston at a satellite office. She’s waiting on you before she calls the agent in Istanbul that got the tip about Kate Strong.”

  Chapter 15

  Standing in the lobby of a nondescript 1980s brick office building, Thompson wondered why the FBI leased space right in the middle of Charleston’s historical district. Although he had walked to the building, he knew park
ing had to be an ongoing problem given the congestion in this part of the city. He rode an elevator to the fifth floor, swiped a key card, and entered an unmarked door into a large expanse of office space divided by chest-high cubicles, with conference rooms around the perimeter. The space had a transient feel, the dreary, ash-colored cubicles undecorated with pictures, books, plants, or food—ubiquitous office décor around the world.

  Most of the cubicles were empty. A receptionist sat at a tall counter.

  “Good morning, Agent Denton,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Sally Heath had been trying to get Thompson’s interest for the entire time he had been working with the FBI, and although he wasn’t interested in her, he inwardly applauded her persistence.

  “I need to wand your attaché,” Sally said with a grin, pulling out an electronic wand from a drawer. She waved it at him in a vaguely sexual gesture.

  He gave Sally his slim leather case, and said, “Please tell Special Agent Reynolds I’m here when you’re finished.” The receptionist ran the electronic device over his case, handed it back to him with a frown, and then disappeared down the

  hall.

  She returned with Brook who said, “Come with me, Thompson. Detective Edson is already here.” Thompson followed the SAC to one of the secure conference rooms. The room was windowless, and had equipment to defeat listening devices.

  A young woman worked with an elaborate speakerphone on the small table. “Agent Reynolds, you’re good to go.” She scampered out.

  Detective Frank Edson and two junior FBI agents who Thompson had been working with on the Adam Chalk case were already seated.