The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  They looked at her in the semi-dark, perplexing, questioning, bewildered. ‘Señorita …’

  This was foolish, and Jessica knew it. She was chiding them for what? Saving her life? They were doing their job and they had done it well.

  ‘Señorita?’

  She calmed, a little. ‘I … soy … Lo Siento. I am sorry – I was scared …’

  They dismissed her words with a wave: they wanted her out of the huaca straightaway.

  Stumbling over the bones, she obeyed: following them slowly out of the antechamber, and down the passageways, making the long retreat out of the huaca. No one spoke: the only sound was the scrape of boots in mud, the whisper of dust disturbed.

  She steeled herself for what she was about to see as she approached the quadrangle of light that was the pyramidal exit: Dan’s body, prone in the Zana dust. But as she reached the fresher air, her apprehension was replaced by confusion. The body was already gone: only the bloodstains remained.

  The tallest policemen, a handsome English-speaking man with a gentle smile, touched her mud-dusted shoulder. ‘Your friend is already in an ambulance.’

  ‘He is alive?’

  ‘No. I am sorry, no. He was killed, but we must examine the body.’

  Jessica resisted the surging sadness, the tears she hadn’t cried. ‘What about the killers?’

  ‘They escaped. Someone from the village, from Zana, called us, they heard the shooting. Please—’ He gestured at one of three police cars, their red lights flashing absurdly, in the desert air. ‘We would like you to come to Chiclayo, and make a full statement. Is that permissible?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jessica shrugged. She was exhausted to the point of indifference; numbed by it all. ‘Of course.’

  The questioning, in Chiclayo police headquarters, lasted four hours. It was polite, efficient, depressing, and repetitive. Towards the end Jessica found her mind wandering, gazing at the maps and mug-shots on the wall of the grubby office. What was she going to do now? TUMP was obviously finished. Her life was probably in danger. She didn’t especially care. Her lover, Dan, was dead: at the moment when he’d told her he loved her, almost exactly as she’d realized she probably reciprocated his feelings, he had been taken from her.

  Death had a cruel sense of humour.

  The police drove her back to Zana to collect her stuff. They expected her to move out of town for her own safety, she had to pack at once.

  The police car stopped near the town plaza. Jessica alighted, reassuring the police that she could drive back to Chiclayo on her own. But they insisted on escorting her. She yielded to their protection, and agreed she would meet them at the lab in three hours. Then they could follow her Hilux to Chiclayo.

  Jessica began her walk to the lab, and her little apartment next door. But as she walked, another enormous wave of melancholia almost knocked her legs away. The sadness was like a sack of rocks, as if she was hauling eighty kilos of grief on her back.

  She needed to pause and think. Finding a broken bench in the town square, Jessica sat down, under fraying palm trees with gangrenous trunks.

  Taking a can of cherry cola from her bag, she cracked it open, and drank. She was also hungry, but she had no food. Drinking the cola, she stared up the road. It terminated after two blocks with a rubbish-filled maize field, and then came the huacas. With the little children. And the bloodstains. The sadness was unbearable.

  She stood and tossed the can in a bin, and began her walk to the lab. But a small black child was in the way, kicking a football against a wall of the grimy Panateria Tu Casa. A peeling wall poster for Inca Kola, El Sabor de Peru!, flaked a little more paper onto the dirty street each time the ball thumped.

  ‘Ola, Eduardo.’

  The kid stopped, and turned, and grinned at Jessica. He was the son of the cleaner at the archaeology lab, at the other end of town. Jess often saw him running late to school, in shoes so battered he might as well have gone barefoot. She would never see him again. Eduardo answered, eagerly, ‘Buenas dias, Senorita Silverton!’ Another kick of the ball, ‘¿Quieras jugar?’

  Do you want to play?

  Jess smiled, sadly, and turned down the offer. ‘No, gracias. Los estadounidenses somos muy malos jugando al fútbol.’

  I am an American, we are useless at soccer.

  The boy grinned, and Jessica said goodbye, feeling herself stumble on the finality of the word – adios, adios – then she walked quickly to the lab.

  She found Larry inside hastily packing away equipment.

  They looked at each other. And Jessica knew that anything they said would feel pointless and wrong.

  ‘What are you going to do, Jess? Go home to California?’

  Jessica sat on a stool. ‘Christmas in Redondo, with my mom?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe. You? What about you? And Jay?’

  ‘Still thinking. Jay’s already bought his ticket to Chicago. But I’m not sure.’ He picked up a Moche pot, then set it down. ‘The police say they might want us as witnesses pretty soon. So we’d just have to come back.’

  ‘They told me the same. I might go to Lima till the New Year. Lie low.’

  Larry pulled up a stool and sat beside her. ‘What a freaking mess! Poor Dan.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You must …’ His embarrassed eyes barely met her gaze. ‘I mean, Dan and you, it must be horrible …’

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about Dan.

  Larry seemed to understand. He stared at the window. ‘Just who the fuck are these people, Jess? Who is doing this?’

  Jessica did not reply; there was no reply. No one had any idea. The fridges hummed in the silence; she wondered idly what would happen to their contents. The Moche bones and skulls. The notion of these things made her faintly nauseous.

  Larry swivelled, and leaned closer, his voice lowered. ‘Jess … Did you, did you find the police kinda … odd?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Her colleague shrugged, his concerned face was darkened by a puzzled frown. ‘I thought they seemed … scared. Like they knew something, or sensed something, and it frightened them. Gut feeling, is all. But I definitely got the sensation they were trying to close this all down: close down the lab, get us out of the way, get shot of the whole business. They don’t seem keen to follow up leads. Like, Archibald McLintock, he must be crucial to this case, yet they weren’t interested when I told them. They were more interested in asking me when I was going to leave Zana, and go to Lima, or America. They just wanted me gone.’

  Jessica stared at him, absorbing the information. He was right: the cops hadn’t even asked her about McLintock. Why not? What were they avoiding? ‘But, Larry,’ she had to ask the obvious question, ‘what could be so bad it frightens the police?’

  37

  Domme Castle, France

  ‘Et ici, le graffiti du diable …’

  The guide was brisk to the point of rudeness, evidently keen to get the job done. And Adam could see why.

  A howlingly cold wind was scouring down the Dordogne Valley, surrounding the walls of ancient Domme, besieging the town on the rock. There were very few tourists in all Domme, as they had already discovered: the Hotel de Golf was shut, the famous ‘grotte’ was shut. The Café de Dordogne was so shut it looked as if it would never reopen. The only tourists for many kilometres were huddled here, in the castle. Doing the rudimentary tour.

  Adam tried to understand the fat female guide as she talked in relentlessly fast French. But he didn’t have enough of the language to even begin to understand.

  It wasn’t much of a castle anyway. More of a glorified medieval gatehouse with bulging walls and plain stone rooms These were the two large notoriously severe cells, in which dozens of Templars had been incarcerated for several years after the arrest of the entire Order in 1307.

  The squalor and stench would have been indescribable, Adam decided. Dozens and dozens of men locked in here for years.

  ‘Et voici un dessin, satirique, du Pape
, et ici Saint Michel, á droit.’

  The terrors of the knights would have been intense. Waiting in here, ragged and half-starved, half-crazed even, fearful of the jingle of the gaoler’s key, wondering if their turn had come to be taken for the torturing. To have their feet burned with hot irons, to be put to the rack.

  To be persuaded to slash your own face into ribbons.

  He glanced anxiously behind him at the big old wooden door where Nina was gazing closely at some of the medieval graffiti. Like a botanist inspecting an orchid. Then she turned and asked the guide a question, in French. Adam didn’t understand any of it, though he tried to overhear. He heard the name McLintock.

  The corpulent guide nodded, and answered. Nina frowned and nodded and then she looked at the graffiti. There was something in this conversation, something significant, maybe something worrying.

  Frustrated, he turned to scrutinize the graffiti. All the interior walls of Domme castle were covered with it. His reading of McLintock’s book had told him the graffiti had been carved into the stone by the Templars – with their teeth: their own rotten, fallen-out teeth. Because they had no knives, no metal tools. To carve symbols in stone with your teeth meant real, determined purpose. The graffiti assuredly, therefore, meant something.

  But what? To Adam the graffiti just looked like random scribblings, inane doodles, squares and runes, grail bearers and cartoon popes, all of them surprisingly coarse, but then maybe that was to be expected.

  Etched with human teeth.

  His mind drifted back to Temple Bruer. More brutal and strange graffiti, in another cold and threatening place. The fear lurked, and stirred. He wanted to get going. Always keep moving, that was their mutual agreement. Their pursuers still had the notebooks. Once they realized that his and Nina’s protective custody in Britain was a sham, just a paragraph in the press – and that could happen at any time – they would come after them. Fast and ruthless.

  Gesturing vividly, he gained Nina’s attention, made a car-steering motion with two hands. She acknowledged, and swivelled, and raised a finger: one more minute.

  Nina used the minute to converse with the guide. The fat Frenchwoman tutted and sighed, she was evidently keen to escort them all out of the chilly dungeon that was Domme castle, probably so she could hurry home to a nice hot lunch. But she dawdled at Nina’s insistence, answering her questions.

  The dialogue was quick, and intense. Nina’s white face seemed paler than ever. Shocked? Then the guide shrugged as if to say, I know nothing else. And they were led from the building.

  As they walked quickly to the car, parked beyond the town walls, he gave in to his frustrations. ‘So, what was all that about? What did she say? The guide?’

  ‘She recognized me.’

  ‘You? Jesus!’

  ‘Not in that way. She recognized my accent, and my name. And she remembered Dad’s visit.’

  Adam opened the car door and slid inside. She did the same. He buckled his belt. Trying to calm the jitters. ‘How could she remember your dad, out of thousands of tourists?’

  ‘Because my Dad spent three whole days examining the graffiti. And he was obviously a scholar and he asked the guide lots of questions.’

  The diesel engine rumbled as Adam urgently turned the key, and they drove fast, away from Domme. The D783. East.

  ‘OK. What did he want to see?’

  ‘The guide recalled him asking about certain images.’ Nina was writing in Adam’s notebook as she spoke. Adam notched up another gear, driving even faster, and listening to her words. ‘He was particularly interested in all the images of the Grail. And that odd one with the woman carrying the long cup or the yard arm thing.’

  Adam had seen that. ‘An alembic? Yes. Isn’t that what they call it? Kind of a long-necked vase?’

  ‘We know the Templars had associations with the Grail,’ she said, ‘but I don’t understand.’

  Adam braked, abruptly, at a junction. ‘Nina? The map. Which way? I’ve no idea where I am.’

  She reached for the atlas. ‘Drulhe. Drulhe … it’s barely visible. Totally remote.’ Her finger rested on a page. ‘Take the D801 to Gourgatel, we have to cross the autoroute, the A20.’

  ‘How far? How long?’

  She pouted, pensively, held the atlas up, to get the best of the frail winter light. ‘Two hours. Three, maybe?’

  He scrutinized the sky. They had just enough time to get to Drulhe today and see it in daylight. But only if they drove very fast.

  As they drove, in tense and mordant silence, he thought of the sense of remoteness he’d felt at Temple Bruer, lost on blasted Lincoln Heath. So many Templar preceptories were hidden away, Penhill too. Why? What were they hiding? What did they do there, in their Babylon rites? Something to do with sex? Something brutal and pagan, related to the Green Men? Something with a Grail? But why the buried skeletons?

  The answer was out there, in the ether. Adam felt like he was dialling an old shortwave radio. Picking up stray voices, snatches of foreign tongues, a jaunt of hissing music, and then glimpses of English: a phrase or two, glimpses of something that made some kind of sense.

  And then it was gone and the message fuzzed out like a radio station lost on the motorway, and Nina said, ‘No, Adam. South at Foissac, the D45. Adam!’

  He squealed the car right, noisily. He was driving way too fast now, making locals scowl and gesticulate, as their rented diesel Renault raced through each pretty stone village with its little boucheries and stooped old women, scowling on street corners by La Maison de la Presse, all those yellow signs with a scarlet quill.

  It began to drizzle as they reached Drulhe, which was utterly and defeatingly lost in the undulating green hills of Aveyron. They parked by the church. Nina fetched her father’s book from the back seat.

  There was virtually nothing in Drulhe. A sign at the church door, in four languages, admitted as much: Once part of extensive Templar properties in Aveyron, Drulhe church was very significantly rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and almost no traces remain of the knightly presence. Today the church is part of the Route of Milk …

  The Route of Milk? Some desperate and failing tourist gimmick. This place was so devoid of interest they’d had to invent some useless ruse to get people to come here and save depopulating rural southern France from terminal decline. But, then, why did Nina’s father come here, when there were so many more important Templar properties a few hours down the autoroute, like Saint Eulalie and Couvertoirade?

  Yet Archie McLintock had brusquely ignored them on his long odyssey across Europe, and he came to drear little Drulhe.

  That was it. Adam turned to Nina. ‘He came here.’

  ‘Aye. I know—’

  ‘No, Nina, he came here. He didn’t go to Chinon, or to Saint Eulalie, or to any of the really notable Templar sites. La Rochelle. Sergeac.’ He didn’t care if he was getting the pronunciation wrong. He grabbed the book rudely from Nina’s hands. ‘What does your father say about Drulhe in the book? Look! Nothing at all. It’s so insignificant he doesn’t even mention it. Whatever traces of the Templar there are here, he must, at first, have decided they were so unimportant that when he wrote the book, he didn’t mention the place. But then when he was putting together his theory – he came back here, not anywhere else.’

  She took the book back, clutched it to her chest.

  Adam pointed at the glass-fronted sign by the church door, spattered by the hesitant rain. ‘Look at what the sign says. “There are virtually no signs of the knightly presence”. What does that mean, Nina? That there is something here, some scant trace. And therefore whatever it is must be totally crucial. Because your dad drove through the endless bloody hills of Aveyron to get here, not anywhere else. Come on!’

  They went inside the church.

  And it was empty of the knightly presence.

  The entire church was devoid of signs. It was yet another typically disappointing French church interior, almost rebuilt during the nineteenth ce
ntury, scoured of accumulated meaning by the Revolution and French secularism.

  ‘Outside, then,’ she said.

  She was right. Whatever they sought had to be an exterior feature: like the door of Temple Church in London.

  The winter daylight was almost gone; the drizzle had hardened into solid rain. Everything was telling them to give up, there is nothing here, the knightly presence is undetectable. Drenched by the wet, they crept around the dull grey church. A man watched them from a parked car.

  Panic and fear were irrepressible but Adam repressed them, convincing himself: why shouldn’t this man watch them, out of sheer curiosity? What they were doing was bizarre, inching around an Aveyronnais church in the pouring rain, in frigid December, in a deserted village, looking at Victorian guttering as if it was the Ark of the fucking Covenant—

  ‘Adam!’ She reached for his hand, pointed. ‘Up there.’

  It was the tiniest slab of medieval stonework. Just a metre long, yellow and old, and inset into the nineteenth-century bricks. And into the stone the Templars or their masons had carved several symbols.

  The stone was so high up that Adam could barely see what was inscribed on it. He swore at his lack of binoculars. He looked again. It took him a few seconds to visually compute. On the right was some complex symbol. Squares in circles? He had no idea what that was. The middle symbol could have been a Grail, or maybe not. But the symbol on the far left was much more easily interpreted.

  It was a pentagram. An angular, five-pointed star.

  Nina was writing in the book, trying to shield its pages from the rain with her arm as she did so. Adam was thinking as hard as he had ever thought, and furiously searching the net on his phone.

  A pentagram, a pentacle, a pentagram. What did that symbolize?

  The wounds of Christ.

  The five senses, the symbol of health. The key of Solomon. Maybe the elements.

  And the devil. The pentagram symbolized the devil.