Death Mask

by Alex Archer

  “Ah, that’s a shame.”

  The girl smiled and started back toward the door, balancing a tray of dirty cups.

  “I know this might seem like a stupid question,” Annja said. “But I don’t suppose you know where the Convent of San Francisco used to be?”

  The girl shrugged. “Sorry. Was it around here?”

  “I was really hoping so, but I can’t see anything to even suggest where it might have been.”

  “Well, it depends how old it is. Most of the buildings around the plaza were built in the 1800s, I think, and some of it is more modern than that. A lot of the old buildings that were here before that were demolished to make way for the new. There’s some kind of plaque on the theater—one of those historic-landmark things—but I can’t remember what it says. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Thanks, anyway,” Annja said. “I’ll go take a look.”

  The theater was closed, its front doors locked and everything inside dark. Even the box office. The plaque was on the wall beside the main door. It detailed how the Zorrilla had been built on the original site of the Convent of San Francisco.

  A dead end, Annja thought miserably, realizing how much time she’d wasted only to reach a standstill.

  She was already three hours down and all she had to show for it was a burlesque theater built on the site of an old convent. That wasn’t going to help Garin.

  Or was it?

  That very much depended upon what had happened to the convent and whether the theater had been constructed in its place or on top of its partial remains. She’d seen enough buildings that had been built directly on top of previous ones to know that there was a chance the foundations and any lower levels might—just might—have survived beneath the new one. There was an entire city beneath Chicago, for instance, not that you could access it. Annja had no guarantee that there was anything of the convent left, not even a few broken stones. There was a chance, though, and in the absence of any other leads, she was going to take it and hope the old builders had simply chosen to bury the convent, or the cellars and mausoleum level at least, rather than waste time and resources demolishing it. Hell, it was even possible the lower levels had been used in the construction of the theater’s foundations, but she doubted she’d be that lucky. Given the way her day had been going thus far, the place had probably burned to the ground.

  Hammering on the front door brought no response.

  She headed around the side of the building in search of the stage door, hoping there’d be someone inside the building who’d let her in, assuming she could make herself understood—though how convincing her Spanish would be was anyone’s guess.

  Unsurprisingly, though, the side door was locked, as were some larger doors at the rear where stage equipment was likely delivered.

  Having exhausted her options at ground level, Annja looked up. There was a small window ajar more than twenty feet above her, so she couldn’t simply make a jump for it, but there was an inviting drainpipe that would take her up to a ledge from which she could probably reach it. The drainpipe flaked paint and rust when she tested it, but she thought it might just hold her weight. She glanced back down the alleyway and into the plaza to be sure no one was watching her, then she shimmied up the pipe. A small boy turned in her direction, an ice cream in one hand, his mother holding the other one. He gave her a white-smeared smile and then disappeared, dragged out of sight by Mom.

  Annja hauled herself up, finding her first foothold in the grouting as she scrambled upward. Less than thirty seconds later, she was inching along the ledge. She pressed up against the glass and reached inside to open the window wide enough to flop inside.

  She found herself in a janitor’s cupboard, full to overflowing with the clutter of cleaning supplies—buckets, brushes and disinfectants all promising the reek of summer forests and autumn meadows, and enough toilet rolls to keep a small army clean and fresh. Annja managed to negotiate the obstacle course without sending the precarious piles of chemicals and cleaning fluids sprawling. The door opened—mercifully, it wasn’t locked—to reveal a heavily carpeted hallway. The carpet was one of those old red faux-Chinese patterns that cinemas and theaters around the world loved so much in the seventies. She wasn’t going to find anything ancient on this floor, so her first job was to locate the stairs. She followed a sign for the emergency exit, figuring it would offer the most direct route down. The stairwell was undecorated, showing the weeping brickwork of the old theater. It opened up onto the front of the auditorium, stage left.

  The auditorium was in near-absolute darkness; only a strip of low-level security lights was on, giving enough of a glow for Annja to approach the stage without falling over.

  She was certain there would be a space beneath the stage, and with luck, that would lead into the bowels of the theater, where she’d find the remains of the previous building...if they even existed. The curtain was down, so thick it gave no hint of the burlesque backdrop it hid.

  A door with a glowing sign displaying the word Salida took her in the right direction.

  Another door led her to the backstage area, where a flight of wooden stairs led down into the darkness below.

  No one challenged her as she moved through the old theater.

  She’d been reluctant to turn on additional lights in case they alerted anyone connected to the theater, inside or out, but once she started descending she had no such reservations about turning on the first light she found.

  Annja detected the faintest odor of damp as she reached the bottom of the staircase.

  The glow of the strip lighting failed to illuminate much beyond the stairs, but she saw a flashlight standing upright on a small desk close by. It didn’t take long to sweep the entire area with the beam. She made her way back among the scenery boards, playing the flashlight beam between them, searching for a sign, anything, that hinted at another way down, deeper. Cobwebs clawed at her face as she made her way into the gloom. Annja peered behind stacked boards, moving them so she could see behind them properly.

  The shadows gathered around her feet masked the step. Her heel caught, but she stopped herself before she went sprawling to the ground. She took more care as she moved on. There was another step only a few feet away. And another beyond that, turning slightly. She followed the spiraling steps, descending into a space below the theater’s storeroom.

  Her heart raced as she realized this space was much older than the Zorrilla itself—which had to be a good thing. Surely that meant the theater had been built on top of the old convent, didn’t it? The room before her extended far beyond the walls of the theater. Annja tried to orient herself with the world above. As best she could tell, the vast chamber seemed to lead away from the plaza, running beneath other buildings that now occupied the land where the convent had once stood. Meaning she was standing in whatever remained of the ancient building.

  Playing the light around the room, she spotted a passage. It was the only one. She followed it, but before she had moved too far along it, her way was blocked by a stone wall with a stout iron-banded wooden door set into it. A heavy iron ring hung as a handle.

  She pushed against the door. It didn’t give.

  Locked, or bolted from the other side? She put her shoulder against it and pushed again, harder this time. The door gave a little, the creak echoing through the low-ceilinged passage to the cavernous room behind her.

  Annja held her breath, sure the noise would summon someone, and counted to ten before she pushed again. No one came. She put all of her strength behind the next push. This time the rotten wood splintered and the rusted metal snapped, the entire frame giving way under the force. The door scraped open into the room beyond, releasing a rush of air that hadn’t been breathed for probably two hundred years or more.

  Annja paused on the threshold, shining the flashlight inside.

  The beam i
lluminated dust-and-cobweb-covered shapes that made no sense at first.

  Then Annja realized she was looking at bones covering every inch of wall from floor to ceiling. On and on, as far as the light shone, bones. Annja had visited the catacombs beneath Rome and other ossuaries in and around Vienna and Prague, but they never ceased to take her breath away.

  She paused while the dust of centuries—which she’d shaken up simply by breaking the seal of the door—settled again before she entered. It was an unconscious act of reverence. She lived for places like this and had no desire to disturb the dead if she could help it.

  She took a deep breath before she entered the chamber of bones.

  The long, narrow passage stretched deep inside this new—or rather, much older—section of building, reaching at least thirty feet ahead of her before another corridor crossed it. The walls of this second corridor were shored up with bones, as well. It was as if the entire catacombs had been constructed from bones, but of course there must have been stones somewhere beneath the skeletal remains, now yellowed and calcified with age.

  Annja’s footsteps echoed back to her as she advanced slowly through the passageway. She kept one hand held out in front of her face, brushing away the strands of cobweb before they smothered her face. So many bones, so many bodies piled atop one another, all of them becoming one in death, abandoned and long forgotten. She was sure no one even knew that they were still down there.

  The tunnel stretched far beyond the flashlight’s beam. She continued on, one step at a time, checking every inch of the damned place for a clue, for something that would link to the mask and give her a chance to save Garin. That was all she wanted. She’d already done the impossible and found the Convent of San Francisco, a building that hadn’t existed for the best part of two hundred years, but that wasn’t enough. She needed to find the mask. And if not the mask itself, something that would lead her to it. She was wasting her time. There was nothing here.

  She walked on, her boots grinding dust and grit into the stone floor with each step.

  She passed another intersection and another and she began to grasp the sheer scale of what lay down here.

  She was tempted to try one of the many passages branching off the main corridor, but knew that if she ventured off the central path, she risked walking into a labyrinth of bone and becoming disoriented. So she continued going forward, trying not to think about how many thousands of people must have died to make these walls.

  A few minutes later, Annja was grateful she hadn’t deviated from the main passageway.

  Bones gave way to rows of stone coffins set in alcoves in the walls.

  Coffins meant a more important kind of dead. She walked down the line, fingers lingering on the crosses and tracing the inscriptions that told the briefest stories of the lives they contained. The coffins held the remains of women who had held office within the convent. But the farther along the line she went, the more male names she encountered, until she realized she was standing before the tombs of men who had served the Inquisition.

  One coffin stood out because it didn’t bear the cross or any Christian blessing meant to serve the deceased in the next life.

  It bore only a single word: Morisco.

  That was the word the curator had used at the monastery in Ávila, the term for the Moors who’d converted to Christianity rather than fleeing the country from the Inquisition.

  But why would a Muslim, even one who’d changed his religion—in public at least—be buried in such an obviously Christian place? The curator had said the word was an insult, hadn’t he? She lingered in front of the stone sarcophagus. There was definitely something wrong about its presence here, amid the tombs of the Inquisitors and the sisters of the convent. It fairly screamed at her.

  Annja wasn’t going to learn its secrets just by staring at it, though. She needed to look inside. She placed the flashlight on top of the stone lid, then took a deep breath before pushing hard. She was rewarded with the sound of stone grinding on stone until it had opened a crack.

  She picked up the flashlight once more and shone it into the coffin.

  She could never have imagined what its beam revealed.

  6

  20:30—Seville

  Roux stepped onto the tarmac and into the sudden heat. It was fierce enough to drive the breath from his lungs after the unnatural cool of the air-conditioned private jet. He was glad to have something solid beneath his feet even though the flight had been relatively short. It certainly hadn’t been smooth. Long ago, he’d realized that as luxurious as the Gulfstream was, it was still just a tin can hurtling through the sky. It didn’t matter whether he owned it or an airline did, the plane was still going to get battered around by the elements on any given flight.

  The old man was a frequent flier.

  Although he kept an overnight bag on board, packed with the essentials of modern living, he left it behind. Sleep wasn’t on the schedule. Walking across the landing strip, he listened to Annja’s message. He returned her call, but it went straight to voice mail.

  “It’s Roux,” he said. “I’m in Seville. I’ll give you a call when I have news. Check in when you can.”

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket and pulled out his passport, ready to present it to the immigration officer. There would be no complications; there never were when you paid the kind of money he had to arrange this short-haul flight. A car would be waiting for him when he stepped out of the terminal. Money made the world go round.

  He wasn’t disappointed. Less than ten minutes after the cabin door had depressurized, Roux was sitting comfortably in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes Benz. He could have rented a car and driven himself, but it was just easier to take the driver.

  “Where to, sir?” the driver asked in flawless English. The company Roux had contracted had offered a selection of drivers able to speak a wide range of languages, anything to suit his needs. He learned forward, checking the man’s name against his license. Mateo.

  “First stop, the remains of the Castillo de San Jorge, Mateo, there’s a good man,” Roux said, assuming that the driver knew where it was.

  “Of course, sir. Is your interest in the Inquisition?” The driver had struck on the connection straightaway, but then no doubt everyone who visited the place had that particular interest.

  “One of many,” he said. “Do you know it well?”

  “I worked there as a tour guide during my studies. Unsurprisingly, people only ever wanted to hear the goriest details of tortures.”

  Roux smiled. “Human nature, my friend. And, you must admit, there’s plenty to keep them entertained.”

  “Oh, yes, but it was always more fun to make up something particularly awful, just to watch them squirm.” He laughed.

  Roux liked the man. Sometimes there was too much truth in the world. A guide having a little bit of fun at the expense of a few tourists wasn’t that big a crime...all things considered.

  “You’re more than welcome to come inside and revive your fledgling career as a tour guide,” he offered.

  “It’s your dime, boss,” the man said. “Doesn’t matter to me if I’m kicking back in the car waiting for you to come back, or if I’m giving you the grand tour of the ruins. Costs the same for you. But are you sure you want me making stuff up?” He grinned in the rearview mirror as he pulled into traffic.

  The journey was short, the private landing strip only a few minutes outside of town. The driver didn’t take any risks, waiting patiently for the lights to change before indicating and turning right, going against the flow. The entrance to what remained of the Castillo de San Jorge lay next to the market in the center of Seville, though the remains themselves were buried beneath the “new” market, close to the river Guadalquivir. New was a relative term. There’d been a market on the spot for over a century. Roux coul
d remember what it had been like before. Sometimes his longevity weighed heavily on him. He could look at the ever-changing world and realize just how little of it was actually permanent, and no matter how much it changed, none of those changes lasted all that long.

  It was going to be damp in the ruins, moist and clammy, especially where they butted up against the riverbed. There was no guarantee he’d even be able to get that far. He couldn’t remember what the Castillo de San Jorge had been like in the late 1800s when he’d last been there. There certainly hadn’t been a visitors’ center, though, or tour guides to answer his questions.

  Mateo dropped him at the entrance, then went to park the car.

  By the time he returned, Roux had worked his way through the selection of brochures without finding what he needed.

  The driver slipped his phone back into his jacket pocket as he approached. Roux nodded, assuming the man had taken a few minutes to chat with his employers or the significant other in his life. In the past fifty years or so, the world had changed so much he didn’t even automatically think “woman in his life” when he looked at a handsome guy like the driver.

  “Everything okay, boss?” Mateo asked. “You look...troubled.”

  “I’m reading about how the trials actually took place in the Town Hall.”

  “The Ayuntamiento? That’s right. But this is where the first auto-da-fé took place, making it very much the birthplace of the Inquisition. The first executions happened in Seville. Those poor souls who fell foul of the Inquisition were burned alive on a platform designed just for the purpose.”

  Roux sighed deeply. “There’s no end to the ingenuity of men who want to make others suffer.”

  “Spoken like a man who knows his stuff,” Mateo said. “Do you want to know what the real irony is?”

  “Go on, amaze me,” said Roux, expecting to hear one of those little lies the driver had used to spice up his guided tours.

  “The guy who designed the burning tables they called the quemadero was a Jew. He became a victim of the Inquisition himself.”