by Cindy Dees
I blinked. Right. Her stolen object.
“In the midst of all this strife, a few other religions—old religions—struggled to hang on. But, vilified by both Protestant and Catholic alike, they had a hard go of it.”
I frowned. “Old religions? You mean pagan religions?”
Elise sighed. “If you will. I cannot confess to being fond of the term pagan. It has such negative connotations, thanks to our Christian friends during the Reformation. But yes. Pagan religions. Some female-centered and some male-centered. A few of them survived by allowing themselves to be absorbed by Protestants or Catholics. Some of the old religions went underground, some were destroyed by lovely inventions like witch hunts, and some just faded away.”
Elise stopped talking. I waited for a moment, but it appeared that she’d said all she wanted to say. “So, what is my starting point?” I asked.
“I just gave it to you. Look to the old beliefs. The old ways. The ones that survived the crucible of the Reformation.”
That steel rod was back in my spine all of a sudden. I snapped, “Will you, just for once, stop babbling mumbo jumbo and give me a straight answer?”
One of her eyebrows arched delicately, and I could swear that was amusement making the corner of her mouth twitch like that.
Whatever. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?”
“The thing you seek is old. Very old.”
“Pagan?” I demanded.
A single reluctant nod. And then her lips pressed together in a stubborn line. She clearly wasn’t planning to tell me another thing about her stolen thingamajiggie. And sure enough her next words, delivered lightly, were, “Have you eaten lunch? I’m a bit hungry.”
Now that she mentioned it, so was I. “I haven’t eaten,” I answered stiffly.
Elise stood up. “I’ll go ask Violette to make us a bite to eat.”
Madame Trucot’s first name was Violette? That old battle-ax? I snorted. It was like naming a pit bull “Precious.” Elise stepped out of the room, and I seized the opportunity to take a look at the pedestal upon which the late departed “old, pagan item” had stood.
It had been dusted recently, so that was no help. But, as I examined it from just the right angle, a faint shape on the wood caught my eye. I bent down to take a better look at it. Bingo. Whatever had stood upon this pedestal had protected the wood beneath it from fading slightly, probably because of exposure to sunlight. It had left a slightly darker impression on the top of the pedestal than the surrounding wood. I whipped out my handy-dandy digital camera, which in my line of work, I never went anywhere without.
Quickly, I photographed the pedestal from several angles, praying that one of them would pick up the faint outline in the wood. The outline was oval in overall shape, but with small squiggles all the way around it. At one end of the rough oval, a second shape touched it, a perfect circle about the diameter of an American half dollar. So. I wasn’t looking at anything round and regular in shape like an urn or container of any kind. Probably a statue of some kind, then.
I heard someone coming, and I rushed back to my chair, perching on it just as Elise swept back into the room.
“If I might impose on you,” I asked, “would you consent to show me a bit of your art collection?”
Elise and I spent the next hour wandering around her penthouse, while she told me about her various masterpieces. Interestingly enough, she made no reference whatsoever to the magnificent tapestry in the front hallway. When I made to ask her about it, she hastily—and effectively, I must confess—distracted me by handing me an original Beethoven score. And I mean original. With notes crossed out and scribbles in the margins by the composer himself. Good grief. This thing was absolutely priceless.
My state hovered somewhere between shock and awe by the time Madame Trucot called us to the rooftop conservatory and wheeled in a serving cart. She laid out poached salmon en croute, fresh salads and mango slices. Man. It sure made my usual peanut butter and jelly on wheat bread look lame. Even if peanut butter was an exotic specialty food in this part of the world.
We ate quietly in the conservatory’s lush greenery, savoring the delicious meal. Afterward, Elise took me over to one of the tall wrought-iron and glass windows to enjoy the view. The Eiffel Tower rose up majestically, not far away. I appreciated Elise’s respect for silence. A fountain burbled among the tropical plants behind us, and traffic noises drifted up faintly from below.
And then a new sound shattered the quiet. Glass exploding.
A giant spiderweb of crazed cracks bowed the window inward, but the pane held. It took a moment for me to register that Elise was lying flat on the ground. A single thought pierced my brain. Oh, shit.
Robert emerged from the surreal, artificial daylight of the Chunnel into the bright sun of a French afternoon. Squinting, he handed over his passport to the French border guard and fixed his gaze on the guy’s pillbox hat. It looked rather like a large, flat coffee tin perched on top of the man’s head.
It had taken him nearly an hour to drive through the thirty-one mile long English Channel tunnel stretching to the north behind him. It was huge inside, a couple stories tall. But the idea of the vast, crushing weight of water above had done a number on his head. Nope. Not a fan of being buried alive. He took a deep breath of the salty air.
The border guard gestured him in to a guard shack to fill out customs forms. Robert parked Penny and filled out the questionnaire. Name, address, destination, purpose, no import items to declare. He stood in a short line, handed over the form and waited while the customs official—a woman whose jacket buttons strained over her barrel-shaped torso—typed in his information.
He went back outside, pulled on his helmet and swung his right leg over his bike as his identity entered the French electronic highway.
Unbeknownst to him, his name triggered an alarm in an obscure computer subroutine and sent a message to an obscure office in Lyon, France, and was then routed to an even more obscure computer on a desk in an apartment in Paris.
By the time he hit the road again and pointed Penny’s nose southeast to Paris, the presence of Robert Fraser, former art thief and felon, was duly noted by the powers-that-be in Interpol…and by one other person to whom the name Robert Fraser was of greatest interest.
I dropped to my knees beside Elise. “Are you all right?” I cried. I raked my gaze down her body, looking for blood. What the hell had just happened? It had sounded like a gunshot, but the window hadn’t broken. Whatever had struck couldn’t have been a bullet.
Elise was breathing. But she was out cold. There was no apparent blood. I couldn’t find an entrance wound or even the tiniest hole in her clothing to indicate she’d been shot. Perhaps in ducking a possible bullet, she’d lost her balance and hit her head.
“Madame Trucot!” I shouted. “Elise is hurt. Call an ambulance! And call the police!”
I heard a wail from the kitchen that assured me the housekeeper had heard me. My fingers pressed to the pulse in Elise’s narrow wrist, I waited there, monitoring her heartbeat for lack of anything else useful to do.
Madame Trucot raced to join us in a few moments, brandishing a wicked-looking sawed-off shotgun. And she handled it as if she knew exactly what to do with it. She peered out through the conservatory windows, but to her apparent disappointment spotted nobody to shoot back at.
There was a faint pounding from behind us. The doorbell rang continuously as if someone were leaning on the button, and I heard faint voices shouting over the strident ringing of the door chimes.
“That’s the police,” I told Madame Trucot, who’d spun around defensively. “Go let them in.”
She nodded and ran for the front door. Rudy and the police swarmed into the apartment, filling the conservatory with their blue wool and urgent questions. I wasn’t able to tell them much. One of their men did a preliminary check on Elise and came to the same conclusion I had. She must have hit her head when she fell to the ground.
A m
inute or so later, a team of medics rushed in and verified our finding. Elise had a substantial goose egg forming on the back of her head and no other apparent injuries. Thank God. I sagged into a chair in my relief as they gently transferred her onto a stretcher and took her away.
But my relief was short-lived. About two minutes later, an investigator dug a lead slug out of what turned out to be laminated, bullet-resistant Plexiglas.
She’d been shot at, after all.
And that changed everything. So much for this lady being a crackpot with whacked theories. Somebody was, indeed, trying to kill her. And one of the prime reasons to kill a person like Elise would be to silence her. All of a sudden, I had to take this woman seriously. And I gotta say, that gave me the willies.
I answered the barrage of questions that the police threw at me, but I could tell them very little. They declared the bullet they had recovered to be a relatively small-caliber slug, which meant the shot had to have been fired from close by. Most of the police dispersed to the apartment buildings across the street, and in surprisingly little time, the apartment was quiet once more.
After assuring myself that Madame Trucot would be all right there by herself, I headed out.
I had my starting point. Now I had to go use it.
Chapter 5
O ld. Pagan. And a statue. I knew just who to talk to next. My friend Catrina Dauvergne, a curator at the Cluny Muesum and an expert on things medieval. And she’d made a few comments before that led me to think she knew a fair bit about pre-Christian beliefs. Just last month she had held an exhibition at the Cluny of images from a medieval cult of women from southern France. I had been there in my capacity as an Interpol cataloguer, though, and didn’t actually pay all that much attention to the descriptions of the cult’s significance. What I remembered most about that night was the fire alarm that forced the Cluny to be evacuated mid-exhibit, and a man dying afterward under rather questionable circumstances. The whole thing had been hushed up very heavily.
I was slouched in the back of a taxi, caught behind a parade of grizzled veterans from the French Foreign Legion, who were marching down the Champs-Elysées, when my phone rang. I dug it out and flipped it open.
“Agent Reisner,” I answered when I saw the call came from the Lyon office of Stolen Cultural Property.
“Ana. Littmann here. I wanted to let you know that a major art thief has just entered France and gave Paris as his final destination. Name’s Robert Fraser. He supposedly hasn’t been active for several years, but he’s been linked to some international heavy hitters in the past. Maybe he’s coming to town to pick up our lost object and pony it to somebody. How’s the investigation coming, by the way?”
That was the reason he’d really made this call. To check up on me. “I’ve figured out that the stolen object is an old pagan statue.”
As Littmann commenced dithering in delight, I dropped the other shoe. “Oh, and someone took a shot at Madame Villecourt about fifteen minutes ago.”
His dithers turned into an alarmed squawk. “A gunshot?”
I was tempted to let him sweat for a few seconds, but I was kind. “She wasn’t shot, but she hit her head on the floor when she ducked. She’s unconscious. Should have arrived at Val de Grace Hospital by now. She should be fine, though. Turns out her conservatory is made of bulletproof glass.” As I said the words aloud, it occurred to me to wonder why. Next time I saw her I’d have to ask.
Littmann gasped like a dying fish. Sounded like he might need hospitalization soon, himself. I left him to his asthma attack and hung up since my cab had arrived at the Cluny. He could figure out how to tell the president that someone had tried to assassinate Elise. I had work to do.
I looked up at the tan and gray facade of the Cluny Museum. It looked like, and in fact was, the outer wall of a medieval abbey, complete with jagged crenellations topping the wall. A guard at the low, wide arch that led to the main courtyard informed me kindly that the museum closed soon and perhaps I’d rather come back tomorrow. I smiled at him and stepped into the intimate cobbled courtyard, anyway. It was like my dream last night, ripping me out of my own time and flinging me back eight centuries to a time so vivid, so real, that I felt as if I was actually there.
The abbey dripped in gothic arches, dark slate roofs, stone fretwork, and the Cluny’s signature scallop shell designs brought back to medieval France by pilgrims to foreign shores. It even smelled old, with a faint musty odor of mildew permeating the stone walls around me.
Just inside the entrance, a large, incomplete circle with a dozen spokes was etched onto the wall. I glanced at the sundial. According to the shadow streaking across the partial bicycle wheel, it was quickly approaching 5:45 p.m. Closing time. Perfect. I wanted to talk to Catrina without interruptions.
I entered the museum proper, stepping into a room that had originally been part of the Roman baths over which L’Hôtel des Abbés de Cluny was built. The walls in here were stacked stone, the ceilings rounded vaults made for shorter folk than I, the windows tiny and high on the walls. A weighty sense of the place settled on me, and I could almost see men in leather sandals and togas strolling through this antechamber en route to the heated baths ahead. The sound of my footsteps was oddly muffled, lending the place an air of waiting mystery.
I stopped for a moment to look at the heads of the twenty-one kings of Judah, separated from their bodies at Notre Dame Cathedral during the French Revolution on the mistaken assumption that they depicted French kings. They might be statues, but there was an odd violence to looking at those rows of severed heads. Perhaps it was because the statues were defaced at the same time so many real people were killed that these stone visages connoted the victims of the French Revolution so vividly to me.
An odd shudder went through me as I pondered how many innocents were murdered in cold blood in that mad time. It was as if someone else shuddered inside my skin, too. A strange and disturbing sensation.
Perhaps my imagination was just running away with me. Or perhaps it was the age of this place playing tricks on me. I walked through another dim chamber displaying various medieval weapons and armor. The light was dim to preserve the colors of the cloth artifacts, and shadows danced upon the elaborately fanned, gothic vaults of the ceiling. I could almost hear the shouts of knights, the singing clash of steel on steel as I looked at the collection.
I felt a stirring behind me and turned around quickly. No one was there.
I felt the stirring again, this time accompanied by a vague sense of—excitement maybe, or elation. I was in the right place. Was that damned afterimage from my dream still tickling at my brain?
I strode determinedly through the museum, ignoring all vague feelings, past the magnificent stained glass windows and tapestries, past the statuary and triptychs and jeweled treasures, to a door marked Employees Only in five languages. It led upstairs to the staff offices. I ignored the warning to keep out and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Catrina’s office door was open.
I stopped in the doorway. “Hi, Catrina.”
She looked up, pleased. “Ana! Hello! What brings you here today?” She came around her desk and kissed me warmly on both cheeks, European-style.
“I’m afraid this is a business call,” I replied.
That effectively wiped the pleasure off her face. Curators of museums never liked it when Interpol came calling on business. “What is wrong?” she asked seriously.
“I need some information. About a statue. It’s old—predates the Reformation—and is not Christian.”
“Do you have a picture of it?”
I winced. “No. I have no idea what it looks like. All I have is this outline of its base. I think.” I pulled out my digital camera and pulled up an image on the teeny screen on its back of the outline on the pedestal in Elise’s library.
“Let’s print that and blow it up, shall we?” she suggested.
I handed over the camera, and Catrina pulled the proper cable out
of a desk drawer to plug it into her computer. In a trice the printer on the console behind her desk spit out an eight-by-ten photo of my outline. She used a magnifying glass and a magic marker to highlight the shape so she could see it clearly. The whole process took under two minutes.
The two of us stared down at the wavy oval with that odd little circle parked at one end of it.
“It looks like clothes to me,” Catrina pronounced.
“It looks like a squiggle to me,” I retorted. “What sort of clothes are that shape?”
She explained, “If the statue were of a person wearing long robes, their hems would fall on the ground in an irregular oval like that.”
The second she said it, something in me surged with triumph. Somehow, I just knew she was right. It wasn’t even a gut intuition. It was something else. Almost a—presence—in my head telling me that was it exactly. Clearly, if I was developing voices in my head, it was time for me to get more sleep and take a long vacation.
Clothes. Then that meant my statue was of a person. “Any idea how big this thing is?” I asked her.
“Let’s take it downstairs and compare it to a few statues in the collection.”
We went back down the narrow, dark staircase and into the museum. Visitors were making their way out in the wake of a loudspeaker announcement that the museum was closing. We walked against the flow of people to a room full of reliquaries, table-sized strong boxes, eating utensils, jewelry and other small trinkets of the Middle Ages.
Catrina used a key to open a locked panel on the wall. Inside the inconspicuous box, she keyed a long number into the electronic number pad there. A green light went on, and she swiped the magnetic card on a lanyard around her neck through the slot above the number pad.