Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  She put that thought away. Foix was no god, but a heretic and blasphemer who claimed the privileges reserved for the True God, omnipotent and omnipresent.

  At the bottom of the illustrated first page Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, regarded the City of God shimmering in the distance above the waters, while in the foreground deer and rabbits stood or lay down together in peace.

  She reached the west end of the cellar and touched the rough stone of the wall. Water dripped nearby, but she could see nothing in the shadows. She turned. The dim bulb half way back cast a somber circle of light over the instruments she and Defago would soon need again. She returned to the Judas chair, silhouetted against the greater darkness outside of the circle of light.

  Under the bulb was the scarred wooden throne where Rossignol had confessed, and in confessing, had tricked them. She tasted sour bile.

  It would not happen again. They would not let it.

  “You could not sleep, my angel?”

  Defago stood in the elevator recess, outlined against faint light, a shade wavering in semi-darkness.

  “No,” she answered. “I am restless.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re coming. Can’t you feel them? They’ll be here soon, today or tomorrow, perhaps. It’s almost over.” His voice was hollow, like one of the damned.

  He stepped forward, came toward her. Flesh gathered density around him, his features emerged in the light, and he was real again, a comfort.

  45.

  “Do you think it strange that I knew before you?” Lisa asked. They had left the taxi to walk arm in arm up the rue de Rennes, two lovers out for a pre-dawn stroll. She seemed her old self again.

  He laughed almost gaily. “Not any more. You’re the Pythia. Alain learned someone was coming to the safe house.”

  “Not the nun, certainly. Americans?”

  “Mmm, from the frequencies used. Homeland Security, he thought.”

  She stopped. “Alain listens to everyone’s radio traffic? Where does he find the time?”

  He laughed. “Oh, no, not everyone’s, and it isn’t Alain who personally listens, of course. Honestly, Lisa, I don’t understand it all – it’s as new to me as it is to you. But I think the organization Ted described for the Pythos, it’s like a shadow government. They are those who watch the watchers.” He lifted his shoulders with a grin. “At least that’s the way I understand it.”

  They went through the rue Bernard Palissy and were soon standing in front of Foix’ apartment building. It was the darkest time of night, and the quietest. Lisa whispered, “Do you think anyone’s watching, like the other day?”

  “Whoever it was, we lost him. I’m sure no one followed us.”

  She frowned. “If someone’s watching now….” After a moment lost in thought she swiftly punched in the door code: 2214.

  Steve followed her inside. “Are you worried?”

  She said, “No. If we’re being watched, so much the better. It’s going to end soon, Steve. I feel it now.”

  They took the stairs to the familiar rooms. The red light on the answering machine was blinking. “We need to get some sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

  “Not before you tell me what happened back there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play with me. You were someone else, someone named Neele.”

  Her eyes turned hooded and wary. “I can’t tell you, Steve.”

  “You have to.” He held her shoulders, his blue eyes cold as ice as he stared into hers.

  She felt his fury, his determination, and sighed. “It’s why I can’t have a relationship, a condition, a….”

  “Talent?” He asked.

  “A difference.”

  “Go on.”

  She took a deep breath. “It’s called a dissociative fugue state, a kind of amnesia. It happened to me five times when I was young. Since then… I would forget who I was, complete amnesia. The police found me once sitting by the creek near my home. I’d been gone for two days. I’m told when they asked me who I was I said Nancy Neele and that I was fishing.” She shook her head. “Until recently I have no memory of the episodes, but they could happen any time. Now it’s better. With Bruno I was there and I was not there. You have no idea how much I tried to understand what was happening. Doctors, therapists, mediums, even, my mother’s idea. Nothing helped. They were terrifying and unpredictable. And then Raimond.” She looked at her hands. “I can’t inflict that on anyone, Steve. So you see…”

  He interrupted with a brutal gesture. “I don’t see anything!” His voice gentled. “Why that name, Neele?”

  She slumped. “The mystery writer Agatha Christie suffered from it. She disappeared once for eleven days. They found her living under the name of Teresa Neele. Nancy Neele was the name of her husband’s mistress.”

  “Why would you take the same name?”

  “I don’t know. I must have read about it.” She looked down. “I read a lot.”

  “And why had you gone fishing?”

  “Something happened. I don’t know what. Something my mother did. She would never tell me what it was.”

  His laugh was without humor. “So it’s caused by stress, or shock?”

  Her smile was wan. “Steve, it’s why I agreed to become a papyrologist. Well, one reason, anyway. Raimond promised me it was a quiet, stress-free profession, reading old documents. The past was calm, you see. All over except for the documents. Or so I thought. You do see, don’t you?”

  “Our life has hardly been stress-free the past few days,” he murmured. “But it’s not important; you recovered quickly. I can live with it.”

  “I begin to control it, Steve. I was there with Giordano Bruno and it felt, for the first time, that I knew where I was and what I was seeing. Of course, that wasn’t the future, it was the past, but it was real.”

  “You’re the Pythia,” he said solemnly. “You will see the future when you’re ready.”

  She put her finger to his lips. “Shh. We need to sleep.”

  “Shouldn’t we check the answering machine?”

  She made a negative sound and fell onto Raimond Foix’s bed. In the seconds before she was asleep she felt the ghostly presence in the apartment of her old mentor.

  Then it was gone.

  The first thing she saw when she sat up was the red light blinking on the nightstand. The bedroom window shutters were closed and the room was dark. It was already after nine, which meant they had slept for five hours. They had deciphered Bruno’s message on the palimpsest parchment and now had some idea she should look for the Founding Document in the folio copy of Augustine.

  The second thing she saw was Steve Viginaire facing her, propped on one elbow. His eyes were in shadow but she could see what they were saying as clearly as she had seen Bruno, and without hesitating, without thinking, she reached for him, and he reached for her, and the world, the danger, everything, faded into a luminous darkness.

  An indefinite time later their breathing returned to normal. The room took shape around them.

  Steve sat up beside her and switched on the light. “I guess I know what you’re smiling about.”

  She feigned indignation. “You bastard, you slept with me. You took off my clothes, and you slept with me!”

  “Guilty as charged, but there was a sword between us until…”

  She saw the bandages under his arm. They were crimson.

  “You’ve broken it open again,” she cried in alarm. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “No need for tears. It’s all that exercise, no doubt.” He was grinning, but she had already vanished into the bathroom. She came back with a first aid kit and soon had laid out gauze, tape and antiseptic.

  He uttered an exaggerated shriek of pain when she applied the latter. This she ignored. He merely grunted when she pressed on the tape.

  She sat back and regarded him with a critical eye. “Not professional, I’m afraid, but effective. Cheerleaders do acquire some
skills. After all, cheerleading is dangerous, what with the risk of injury.”

  “You were a cheerleader?”

  “In high school, yes, and in college, almost. Raimond Foix diverted me.”

  “Ah.”

  “The Augustine,” she said. They had moved downstairs to the kitchen. She sipped her café au lait. “The nun has it. There’s no longer any way to avoid confronting the Order of Theodosius.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I do it?” she asked, but she knew now she could. She felt alive, filled with purpose. She would find the document, discover what she had to do, find a way to neutralize the Order, end this ridiculous war. This was the twenty-first century, not the fourteenth, or the fourth. The world had changed.

  Despite this new confidence she still had no clear vision of the future, no idea how it would happen. But it would. She cleared her throat. “Perhaps we should listen to the machine?”

  Back upstairs in Foix’s bedroom he paused to look at a black and white photograph on the dresser. It showed a young Raimond Foix looking over his shoulder at the camera with a slightly disapproving frown.

  “That the picture you told me about?”

  “Yes.” Lisa pressed Play on the answering machine.

  “This is a message for Lisa Emmer.” The voice spoke English with a Texas twang.

  She paused the message. “What do you think, man or woman?”

  “Hard to tell. Woman, I think.”

  “The nun? How did they know we’d be here?”

  Steve lifted his chin. “Probably didn’t. I’d guess they left messages everywhere we were likely to go. I’ll check with Alain later. Go ahead.”

  “I have something you must want,” the voice continued. “A Jenson folio edition of Augustine’s City of God, printed on vellum in 1475. If you’d like to discuss it, call.” The number began with zero-six. A cell phone.

  Lisa stopped the machine. “I wonder why she took it in the first place.”

  “Probably has a thing for Augustine,” Steve suggested. “Or she thought it was valuable.”

  “I don’t think it was greed, I think it was an impulse. I don’t think she knows why we would want it, though.”

  “Still, it’s a trap.”

  “Of course it’s a trap. They’ll kill us the same way they killed Raimond, but if they think we know something they’ll question us first. Look, it was Raimond Foix’s book, and like the Hesiod and the biography of Theodosius he put it out for me to find. If Bruno said the clue to the Founding Document was safe in the City of God, I’m sure he meant the book. Raimond had that copy because the previous Pythos passed it on, perhaps all the way back to Bruno at least. So we have to have it, whatever the risks.”

  “What is it about the book? If the secret’s in the text, we could just get a Latin copy and look it up.”

  “I don’t think it’s in the text. Augustine wrote in the fourth century, so unless he was a Pythos too, and that certainly isn’t likely, the actual text is out. Raimond’s copy has one of Girolamo da Cremona’s most beautiful opening illustrations, but Girolamo died in 1485, a century before Bruno, so there has to be something else in it. We won’t know until we can examine it.”

  Steve was still troubled. “They’ll want something in exchange. What?”

  “They’ll want to know what we know, but above all, they will want the Founding Document. And then to kill us.”

  He nodded assent. “We can’t let any of that happen.”

  She was feeling too good and almost laughed. “We won’t.”

  “So we call back?”

  The voice that answered was a man, not the caller’s, so it must be the monk. Lisa identified herself.

  “We will meet you at the race track at Chantilly,” the monk suggested. “In front of the stables.”

  Steve shook his head.

  Lisa said, “No.”

  The monk didn’t sound surprised. “Why not?”

  “Too far.”

  “Too far?” He laughed. “Or too deserted? You’re afraid?”

  She glanced at Steve. “We’ll meet in a public place.”

  Muffled voices conferred.

  “The Basilica of St. Denis?” the monk barked. “By the monument of Henri III in the royal necropolis at 1400. It’s public and not too far.”

  He waited just long enough for them to acknowledge before hanging up.

  46.

  While they were on the Metro to St. Denis the balmy weather had ended. They emerged at 1:10 into an inferno of an afternoon.

  The heat staggered them and they paused at the entrance to the Metro station. Around them was a pedestrian mall, with a cinema and dozens of small shops. From here there were two ways to make the short walk to the basilica, one through a passage between commercial buildings, and the other along the street.

  They chose the street, concluding they might get a glimpse of their adversaries.

  Steve, speaking in a mock travelogue voice, intoned, “In 250 A.D Denis, the first bishop of Paris and patron saint of the city, was beheaded at the Temple of Mercury, located atop the highest hill in Paris, ever after called Montmartre, the Mountain of Martyrs. Or so it is said. It is further stated that his faith was so great he picked up his severed head and walked several kilometers north, preaching all the way and finally dropped dead and was buried here, so they sainted him and named the town after him.”

  “Thank you, History Channel.”

  Traffic was light and few people were out shopping. Most were trying to escape into any place that promised conditioned air.

  They passed Alain, seated behind the wheel of a car parked under a tree in the lot across the road. He was studiously reading Le Monde. The headline announced the worst canicule in many years, with afternoon temperatures approaching 40 degrees Centigrade.

  There was no sign of the van from the rue Delambre.

  They crossed the vast and nearly empty plaza to gaze up at the gothic west façade. Gray stone and the rose window over the main entrance hinted at cool serenity. The three huge doors promised to open onto succor, healing. Above all the basilica promised relief from the heat. The church had been restored in the nineteenth century after the Revolution had damaged it and emptied the tombs. It was once again home to such royal bones as could be found and returned to the necropolis inside.

  Lisa shielded her eyes from the sun so she could see the sculpture above the entrance. It was surprisingly benign for a Last Judgment and only hinted at the other side of darkness. “Where do you think they are?” she murmured.

  “He’s military, very precise,” Steve replied. “He’ll plan carefully, but with tourists and police around I don’t think they’ll try anything violent here. I think they want to get us to trust them.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  They were doing their best to imitate a couple of tourists, and their conversation was covered by the international blend of others around them, but they were both tense and jittery.

  “Don’t act too interested,” Steve suggested, stopping in front of a poster advertising the St. Denis Music Festival. “The Augustine’s valuable, sure, and part of your inheritance so of course you’d like it back, but not that important. Maybe you’d be willing to pay something for it, yada yada yada, but it’s not that important. Let’s see what they want.”

  “They don’t want money, Steve. They’re true believers.”

  “I know. But if they think you believe they’re only after money it might keep them off balance. As far as we know, they believe you’re only Foix’s heir.”

  “What about Mirepoix? They already know I’m more. That’s why they attacked us.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean they know you’re the Pythia. You were meeting with members of Foix’s entourage, after all, to learn about his estate.”

  “They burned it down, Steve. They know.”

  He gave up. “All right, perhaps, but I think the fire was unintentional. If you pretend innocence we can at leas
t find out what they’re after. If they don’t yet know the book is the key, they might tip their hand. If they do know….”

  “If they do know they won’t fall for it. What happens if they call our bluff?”

  “We walk away. They want to finish us as much as we want to finish them. Without the Founding Document it’s a standoff. As long as it exists, they can’t be sure Foix was the only Pythos. Maybe the Founding Document set up a parallel Pythos somewhere else.”

  “Come on.”

  He laughed. “Why not? If we let that slip, they’d go crazy. Whatever happens, Augustine’s the bait and one way or another we’ll know what for soon enough.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “They want the Founding Document and if they think we can lead them to it, we’re safe until they have it.”

  He agreed. “Reasonably safe.”

  “I don’t think I like the sound of that.”

  “Neither do I.”

  The basilica echoed with footsteps and muffled conversation. Despite the small clusters of visitors spotted along the sides, the space had an empty feel. Metal fencing blocked off the vast central aisle, which was carpeted in blue and filled with chairs for the music festival. Though only the side aisles were open to the public, the exterior’s promise of serenity was fulfilled. Stained glass windows lining both sides just under the ceiling sent multicolored light flickering along the soaring columns, capitals and vaults of the nave. The windows above the choir behind the altar at the far end glowed pearl and rose and a faint aroma of sandalwood drifted on the cool air. Lisa and Steve smiled happily at each other.

  They bought tickets to the necropolis at the counter outside and for some time they wandered among the monuments, pausing to examine the sculptures over the elaborate tomb of François I and his wife Claude just inside.