Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  A dove flew through the chamber, and Jack looked up, watching it flap around before finding its way back out into the courtyard. The view above could have changed little since the seventeenth century, and it gave him a fleeting sensation of João at that moment when he too had stood here, but it still gave him no sense of what he might have endured in the cells or how he had dealt with what lay ahead of him. He put his hand on one of the stones of the wall beside him, pressing against it to try to feel the history, and then pushed off, looking at Maria. “Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?”

  She gestured toward a small room off to the side. “The curator has kindly allowed us to use her office. We have an hour before the custodian locks the place up. I have something I need to tell you, something you will hardly believe, but before that, I want to hear where you have got with the evidence from the Schiedam and from Tangier.”

  * * *

  Almost an hour later, Jack finished talking and poured himself another coffee from the espresso machine that Maria had put on the table in front of them. He had filled her in as fully as possible on the finds from the wreck, on the story of Pepys in Tangier and on everything else that had led them to the stage they were at now.

  Jeremy’s phone vibrated and he took out his tablet, calling up something on the screen. He stared at it, tapped it a few times, then lowered it, evidently still pondering what they had just been discussing. “About Pepys,” he said. “It makes me wonder whether securing this treasure was the main reason he was sent to Tangier. I mean,” he said, putting down the tablet and leaning forward, “his trip to Tangier was at very short notice, right? One day he was happily writing up ledgers at the Admiralty in London, and the next he was with a naval squadron in the middle of the English Channel. He wasn’t even told their destination and the plan for evacuating Tangier until they were well away at sea. I get that it was all incredibly hush-hush, very sensitive, because King Charles didn’t want his own people or his enemies to get wind of a backdown. The evacuation could only be presented as a fait accompli, done and dusted, when it was all over. But maybe, just maybe, all that cloaked an even more secret mission for Pepys himself, something that even he didn’t feel able to write about.”

  “Pepys did wear another hat as a negotiator,” Rebecca said. “He had the skill to pull something like this off.”

  “It’s an intriguing idea,” Jack said. “In those final few months while Tangier was still English, it would have been essential to maintain a posture of strength to keep the Moors from overwhelming the place. For King Charles to have suffered a military defeat of that magnitude would have been humiliating and damaging, especially at a time when he was facing the possibility of war and religious strife closer to home. The besieging army of the Moroccan sultan had already overwhelmed the outlying forts and defenses of Tangier, and both sides would have known perfectly well which way the pendulum would swing and how quickly it would happen were there to be an all-out Moorish assault. On the other hand, the appearance of a negotiated settlement, an arrangement for a transfer of power, would allow the English to leave with their arms intact and their heads held high, and to present the evacuation to the world as a decision based solely on the failure of the colony to attract sufficient trade.”

  “I think something odd was going on in addition to that,” Jeremy said. “On one occasion in his diary Pepys lets slip that he’s preparing for a night-time mission to meet a Moorish prince in the desert, but then we hear nothing more about it.”

  “Maybe there was yet another layer to all this,” Rebecca said. “Maybe the Knights of Malta really did give up a great treasure to the Moors, and King Charles had come to know of it. Maybe Pepys was sent from England to negotiate for it, offering some concession, perhaps a curtailment in the English plans to demolish the fortifications.”

  “It’s possible,” Jeremy said. “We know that the English handed over large quantities of their remaining gunpowder to the Moors, in return for the Moors backing off and not attempting to take the city before the evacuation was completed. Those negotiations were very hush-hush, as a deal of that nature would not have gone down well with the people at home at a time when Barbary corsairs were raiding the south coast of England and enslaving people taken from the towns and ports there. So with all of that negotiation already going on, what I’m suggesting is that Pepys was in pole position to pull off some other secret deal as well, without being unduly noticed.”

  Jack took out a handwritten sheet from a folder in his bag. “I wanted to wait until now before reading this out. Before leaving for the flight this morning, I was going through my material on the Brandão family. As well as the contemporary documentation from the Inquisition archives, there’s this sheet written by my great-grandmother shortly before she died. It had been several generations since any of her ancestors had called themselves Jews, but her memory of that tradition was still strong. Here’s what she wrote:

  “‘My great-grandmother, Rebecca Rodrigues Brandão, was from a Portuguese Jewish family who fled to London at the time of the Inquisition. Originally her ancestors had lived in Spain, but they had fled to Portugal following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. They were so-called Christian Jews, the descendants of Jews who had fled Judaea at the time of the Roman conquest, who maintained their Jewish faith but were sympathetic to Christian teachings. In the early years in their mountain villages in the Pyrenees they provided safe haven for Christians fleeing the persecution of the Roman emperors, and later for other Christians persecuted by the Roman church itself. It was said that they also guarded the greatest relic of Christ, and that they passed that on to the Knights of Malta for safekeeping when the Jews were forced to flee to Portugal. That relic was the Holy Chalice, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper.’”

  Jack put the paper down and sat back. “So there you have it. A family story, told hundreds of years after the events it describes, by an old person herself generations beyond a time when her ancestors even called themselves Jews.”

  “Amazing,” Rebecca said, picking up the paper and scanning it. “The Holy Chalice. The greatest lost treasure of Christendom. Do you believe this?”

  “All I can say for sure is that if the cup existed, it did not make its way back to King Charles in England or we’d surely have known all about it. For a king facing a divisive religious war, to have the Holy Chalice raised above his head might have given him more strength than the greatest army, at least in his own eyes.”

  “The Inquisition would have loved to get their hands on it too,” Jeremy said. “Just spiriting it out past the agents of the Inquisition in Tangier and Portugal would have been challenging enough. That’s consistent with a picture of extreme secrecy, and also with Pepys using a merchant such as Brandão, who came from one of the families that had safeguarded the treasure in the first place. As for its disappearance, Pepys might have been an unswervingly loyal servant of the Crown, but on a personal level he would have been appalled by the idea of King Charles using such a relic for his own nefarious purposes. If you read his Tangier diary, you get the sense that the older Pepys, a few stages beyond the bon viveur of his youth, was inclining more toward the ideals of the Puritans, to a vision of purity and sanctuary that many sought in the New World. Perhaps he conspired to get the relic to a new place of safety a long way away, where it would remain out of the clutches of anyone in Europe, even his sworn liege King Charles.”

  “This is all speculation,” Jack said. “It could be one of the most incredible stories we’ve ever uncovered, but there just aren’t enough hard facts to go on. Stories of the Holy Chalice abound, and at the moment we have to think that my great-grandmother’s account is another one of those.” He pointed to the tablet in front of Jeremy. “Was there something you wanted to show us?”

  “Ah, yes.” Jeremy picked the tablet up again. “Do you remember how Pepys drew that Maltese cross sign on the page of the diary that I found in the Oxford archive? We looked at
it in your office in Cornwall before coming out here.”

  “Absolutely. Go on.”

  “Well, just out of interest, I had the sheet put through phase-contrast X-ray imaging at the Institute of Palaeography, the same machine we used to reveal faded writing on the Roman scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, you remember? I had to call in a favor from the Curator of Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library to let me do it, but judging by the result just sent to me, it looks as if it might have been worth it. I think old Sam Pepys was in a bit of a state the morning he wrote about the pox and all that, and really regretted it later on and tried to erase it. What I’m looking at here might be nothing, but as we said when we talked about this before, he didn’t usually doodle, and if he had—in a momentary lapse of judgment—drawn something of significance to do with the Chalice, he might accidentally have left us a clue. I mean, looking at that symbol and those letters, I’m pretty sure of it. Those are ancient Roman and Greek.”

  “Jeremy, I think we’d like to see it?” Rebecca said.

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” He turned the tablet round and passed it to Jack, who angled it so that Rebecca could see it too. Magnified in the middle of the screen was the sign of the fish, as used by early Christians in Rome, flanked by an alpha and omega in capital letters. “Fascinating,” Jack said. “Maria, this is right up your street.”

  She took the tablet and stared at it. “Dios mío,” she said quietly. “Then it is true, and no longer speculation.”

  “You said you had something to tell us,” Jack said. “Is now the time?”

  She nodded slowly, putting the tablet back on the table. “Especially now that I have seen this. But before then, I need to go outside where I can get cell reception and make a call. I won’t be long.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Maria returned and sat down, taking a deep breath and holding it, as if she were bracing herself. Then she exhaled forcibly and looked at Jack. “Okay. Are we ready?”

  “Fire away.”

  She took a quick gulp of her coffee and began. “Unlike your Sephardic ancestry, which is so far back that a Jewish tradition disappeared generations ago, mine is much closer, with my grandmother having been a practicing Jew. As a result, I know a lot about my Sephardic background from oral transmission, and I have a very particular connection with this story. Just like your Brandão ancestors, back at the time of the Roman Empire my ancestors were Christian Jews as well, living in northeast Spain. The story of the Holy Chalice, of how the community hid it and it then ended up with the Knights of Malta, was part of my grandmother’s family tradition too, passed down through the generations.”

  “Did they know where it went after that?” Jack said.

  She paused, looking intently at him. “What I am about to tell you was a sworn secret in my family for generations. Since my teenage years I have volunteered at a remote community in the High Andes of southeastern Bolivia. I help tend the animals, repair walls and buildings, do domestic chores. The reason I go there, and why my mother and grandmother went there before me, is that the people in the community are my distant cousins. We are all descended from a small number of people who escaped the destruction of a similar community in the Amazon forest of Brazil in 1685. The community had been set up by Father António Vieira, a Jesuit who had helped the Jews of Portugal and who was himself persecuted by the Inquisition. Father Vieira survived, and with those few others re-established his community in Bolivia, where it has remained free from persecution ever since. Those who destroyed his original community were an organization called the Altamanus, also known as the Black Hand, who traced themselves back to the Praetorian Guard of the Roman emperors, and who had been seeking the Holy Chalice ever since. They are the people I believe are on your trail now.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jeremy said. “Are you saying that Father Vieira had the Chalice?”

  “According to the tradition of our community, it was brought in secret to Port Royal by João’s son Lopo Brandão, who then sent it to Father Vieira’s care in Brazil. After the community there was destroyed, and fearful that the Altamanus might catch up with him again, Vieira decided to conceal it somewhere away from his new community in a place where outsiders would not dare to go. According to tradition, he had it placed deep in the mountain of Cerro Rico, the silver mine of Potosi, about three hours by llama from the new site of his community, the place where I go to visit. He had ministered to the Inca boys who worked as tied laborers in the mine, and they knew a deep place in some abandoned workings. Only they and Father Vieira would know its whereabouts. That sign of the fish, Jeremy, was a marker, carved secretly in the tunnels to show the way. It was also the sign said to have been on the leather bag holding the Holy Chalice, with those Greek letters too. Brandão must have told this to Pepys so that he knew the package was genuine, and Pepys then idly doodled it in his diary.”

  “Good God,” Jack said. “How long have you known all this?”

  Maria paused. “I was sworn to secrecy about this too, but I just called the present head of the community, Father Pereira, and he agreed that you should be told. With the Altamanus almost certainly on your trail, and the possibility that they might find enough clues to search for the community themselves, he wants the Chalice found and removed so that it can be taken to a new place of hiding, one known to fewer people. He is fearful that the Potosi story might be known by too many descendants of the community and reach other ears.”

  Jack leaned forward. “Can you get us there?”

  “Father Pereira will set up a contact for you at Potosi. Someone will take you into the mountain.”

  “Do you know who any of the Altamanus are?” Jack said.

  Maria nodded. “One of them. I’d suspected it for years, but then I saw the tattoo of the black hand on his palm the last time we met. That’s their sign, something we’ve known about and feared since the time of the Romans. He teaches at a seminary in Spain, but always shows up at conferences and seminars. His name is Fernando Salvador.”

  “You mean Professor Salvador?” Jeremy exclaimed. “He was at the Oxford conference last week. He gave that paper on images of the Last Supper in the early Christian catacombs of Rome, the one paper you couldn’t attend. It was a bit tedious, for such interesting subject matter.”

  “Don’t underestimate him,” Maria said. “But I didn’t attend for a reason: I can’t stand the man. He happened to be a graduate student working in Rome at the same time as me, in the Catacombs of Callixtus. He was focused on the paintings, while I was doing the epigraphy. I got to know that place so well because of playing an endless game of cat-and-mouse with him, trying to avoid working in the same passageways. I made a discovery there, something that unfortunately he saw and wanted: a cross made from two Roman pilum spear points fused together, shoved into a pile of plaster fragments in an empty burial niche, the remains of a painting of the Last Supper above it. Tradition has it that the Roman soldier Proselius gave a gravely wounded Christian woman a cross just like that when he realized that he couldn’t save her, and this might have been the very one. Father Pereira has it now, but at the time of its discovery it was a physical struggle to get Salvador off me. I threatened to scream and call the police, and eventually he backed off.

  “I’d already begun to realize that he had a kind of pathological obsession with early Church relics, as if that were the real reason he was researching in the catacombs, to find some list of treasures that he thought had been concealed there at the time the Holy Chalice was spirited away. I told him to read Church tradition, and to understand that when Proselius’s boss Laurentius talked about treasures, he was explicitly referring to the people of his congregation and not to some stash of holy relics. He then made a kind of pass at me, which was pretty revolting given that he’d had his hands at my throat not long before, and later got drunk at a dinner party at the Spanish School of Archaeology and started spouting some serious anti-Semitic rant at me and my friends. But having
said that, from an archaeological viewpoint he knows his stuff, and if there were any parallel to that Star of David symbol to be found, he’d know about it.”

  “He must be the one who called me at IMU,” Jack said. “Not a very adept spy.”

  “He’s an unpleasant piece of goods, but he’s not the one you’ve got to worry about. The Altamanus always recruits from a wide range of backgrounds: academics, soldiers, police, some big business names, all sharing a passion for their cause and for the objectives and methods of the Inquisition. There’s some big-time control dysfunction going on there, as well as the sadism. The current head of the six men who form the organization is thought to be a former high-ranking Stasi officer from East Berlin in the Cold War days, when the Stasi ran their own equivalent of the Inquisition.”

  “So these people really are hands-on, not just a bunch of fantasists,” Jeremy said.

  “Absolutely,” Maria replied. “By the 1680s, they had infiltrated the highest ranks of the Inquisition in Portugal, and were responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of so-called heretics being hunted down and burned at the stake. The Inquisition gave them a focus they had not had since the days of the Roman Empire, a cause they had yearned for over the centuries when neither the Church nor the state provided what they wanted. When the Inquisition came along, they took to it with a vengeance, and it became their sworn creed in just the same way that their Praetorian Guard ancestors had sworn blood loyalty to the emperors. Without the Altamanus, the Inquisition would not have lasted as long as it did, into the early nineteenth century. And it is the Altamanus that has kept the idea of the Inquisition alive, because they have been unwilling to relinquish something that gave them such a powerful raison d’être.”

  “How are they funded?” Rebecca asked.