by James Becker
“Now, this is all guesswork, unsupported by a single shred of verifiable evidence, but it does provide a plausible explanation for what happened when the siege of Montse’gur ended. But what happened next on the mountain is in the historical record.
“Once the fortress was deserted, the crusaders, acting on the specific instructions of the Pope, tore it apart in a desperate search for some object, some ‘treasure.’ But whatever it was they were looking for, they clearly didn’t find it, because they dismantled the castle, quite literally stone by stone. It’s not generally known, but the citadel that now stands at Montse’gur was actually erected early in the seventeenth century, and no part of the original Cathar castle now remains at the site.
“For the next half-century, Rome ordered all traces of the Cathar heresy to be expunged from the landscape. As well as executing every parfait they could lay their hands on, the crusaders also continued their search for whatever had been secreted at Montségur, but without result. Eventually, memory of the ‘treasure of the Cathars’ passed into the mists of legend. And that’s the story of Montse’gur as we know it today: a mix of historical fact, rumor and conjecture.”
“But what the hell has that got to do with a six-hundred-year-old farmhouse on the side of a hill in Italy?” Bronson asked, waving his arm in frustration.
“It’s all in the inscription,” Angela explained. “The first verse of the Occitan poem can be interpreted as a specific reference to the end of the siege.”
She read Goldman’s translation of the verse from her notebook:
“ ‘From the safe mountain truth did descend
Abandoned by all save the good
The cleansing flames quell only flesh
And pure spirits soar above the pyre
For truth like stone forever will endure.’
“The second line could describe the surrender of the garrison of Montse’gur, and the third and fourth the mass execution when the Cathars were burned alive. But I think the expressions ‘truth did descend’ and ‘truth like stone forever will endure’ refer to the escape of the four remaining parfaits, carrying with them some document or relic upon which the core of their faith—their unarguable ‘truth’—relied. Whatever the object, it was so compelling in its implications that Cathars would rather die at the stake than renounce their beliefs.”
“And the second verse?” Bronson asked.
“That’s just as interesting, and again some lines seem to refer to the Cathars.”
Again, she read the verse aloud:
“ ‘Here oak and elm descry the mark
As is above so is below
The word becomes the perfect
Within the chalice all is naught
And terrible to behold.’
“The expression in the second line was commonly used by the Cathars, and the
‘word’ referred to in the third line could be the ‘truth’ that guided the beliefs of the parfaits. The first line’s nothing to do with the Cathars, but I think it’s possible that the reference to the two species of tree indicates a hiding place.”
“And the last couple of lines? About the chalice?”
“I’m guessing—I’ve been guessing all along, but now I’m really guessing—that they mean the object was secreted in some kind of a vessel—a chalice—and that it’s dangerous.”
Bronson began to reduce speed. He was approaching Vierzon, where the autoroute divided, and turned southeast for Clermont-Ferrand.
“So what you’re suggesting,” Bronson said, “is that the Cathars had some kind of relic, something that confirmed their beliefs, and that quite probably would have been seen as dangerous by other religions? And the Pope started the crusade to recover or destroy it?”
“Exactly. The Albigensian Crusade was instigated by Pope Innocent III—and rarely was any pope so misnamed—in 1209.”
“Right. So you think the Pope knew about this relic and believed it was secreted somewhere at Montse’gur? And that was why he ordered the different treatment of the Cathars and garrison there, and why, after the massacre, his crusaders demolished the fortress?”
“Yes. And if my reading of these verses is right, I think we may well find that the Cathar treasure was hidden somewhere in Mark’s house in Italy!”
II
Back at their hotel near Gatwick, Mandino and Rogan had spent hours using their laptops to study the search strings the intercept system had recovered from the Cambridge cybercafe’s.
They seemed to have exhausted all their other options. They’d waited outside Angela Lewis’s building, but her apartment lights had remained switched off, and neither her phone nor her doorbell was answered. Bronson’s house was just as obviously deserted, and Mandino had now realized that both of them had disappeared. The intercept system was all they had left.
The biggest problem they’d faced was the sheer volume of information they had to work with. Carlotti, Mandino’s deputy who’d remained in Italy, had sent them three Excel files. Two contained the searches input at the cybercafe’s he believed Bronson had visited, while the third and much larger file listed the search strings from the other half dozen Internet cafés within the five-mile radius which Mandino had requested.
He and Rogan ran internal searches for words they knew their quarry had been looking for, including “LDA,” “consul,” “senator” and so on. Each time either of them got a hit, they copied the following fifty search strings and saved them in separate files.
Just doing that took a long time, and at the end of it they were really no further forward.
“We’re not getting anywhere with this,” Mandino said in irritation. “We already knew that Bronson had probably worked out what the additional letters meant on the Latin inscription. What I haven’t found yet is anything that looks like it might refer to the second inscription.”
Rogan leaned back from his laptop. “Same here,” he said.
“I think what we need to do is try to second-guess Bronson,” Mandino mused. “I wonder . . .”
He did have one powerful weapon in his armory. The book he held in his safe in Rome contained the first few lines of the Latin text of the lost relic. More important, it had a potentially useful couple of pages that detailed the Vatican’s attempts to trace the document’s location through the ages.
“The house in Italy,” he asked, turning to face Rogan. “Did you find the exact date it was built?”
His companion shook his head. “No. I did a search in the property register in Scandriglia, and turned up several records of sales, but they were all quite recent.
The earliest reference I could find was a house shown in that location on a map of the area dated 1396, so we know it’s been standing for at least six hundred years.
There was also an earlier map from the first half of the fourteenth century that doesn’t show any building on the site. Why, capo?”
“Just an idea,” Mandino said. “There’s a section in that book I was given by the Vatican that lists the groups that might have possessed the relic through the ages.
The likely candidates include the Bogomils, the Cathars and Mani, who founded Manichaeism.
“Now,” Mandino went on, “I think that Mani and the Bogomils were too early, but the Cathars are a possibility because that house must have been constructed shortly after the end of the Albigensian Crusade in the fourteenth century.
“And there’s something else. That crusade was one of the bloodiest in history—thousands of people were executed in the name of God. The Vatican’s justification for the massacres and wholesale looting was the Pope’s determination to rid the Christian world of the Cathar heresy. But the book suggests that the real reason was the growing suspicion by the Pope that the Cathars had somehow managed to obtain the Exomologesis.”
“The what?”
“The lost relic. Pope Vitalian called it the Exomologesis de assectator mendax, which means ‘The confession of sin by the false disciple,’ but eventually it became kno
wn inside the Vatican just as the Exomologesis.”
“So why did they think the Cathars had found it?”
“Because the Cathars were so implacably opposed to Rome and the Catholic Church, and the Vatican believed they had to have some unimpeachable document as the basis for their opposition. The Exomologesis would have fitted the bill very well. And the Albigensian Crusade was only half successful. The Church managed to eliminate the Cathars as a religious movement, but they never found the relic. From what I’ve read, the crusaders probably came close to recovering it at Montse’gur, but it somehow slipped through their hands.
“Now,” Mandino continued, “looking at the dates— which seem to fit—I wonder if a Cathar placed the second inscription in the Italian house, or perhaps even built it.
We know from what Hampton told us that the verses were written in Occitan. Why don’t you try searching for words like ‘Montségur,’ ‘Cathar’ and ‘Occitan,’ and I’ll check for Cathar expressions.”
Mandino logged onto the Internet and rapidly identified a dozen Occitan phrases, and their English translations, and then turned his attention to the search strings.
Almost immediately he got two hits.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Here we are. Bronson—or someone at that cybercafé—looked for ‘perfect,’ and then the expression ‘as is above, so is below.’ I’ll just try
‘Montse’gur.’ ”
That didn’t generate a hit, but “safe mountain” did, and when he checked, Mandino found that all three searches had originated from a single computer at the second cybercafe’ he believed Bronson had visited in Cambridge.
“This is the clincher,” he said, and Rogan leaned over to look at the screen of his laptop. “The third expression he searched for was a complete sentence: ‘From the safe mountain truth did descend.’ I’m certain that refers to the end of the siege of Montségur, and it also implies that the Cathars had possessed the Exomologesis—their
‘truth’—and managed to smuggle it out of the fortress.”
“And the searches are all in English,” Rogan pointed out.
“I know,” Mandino agreed, “which means that Bronson must have obtained a translation of the inscription from Goldman almost as soon as he got back to Britain.
If he hadn’t been hit by that taxi, we’d have had to kill him anyway.”
They searched for another half hour, but found nothing further of interest.
“So what now, capo?”
“We’ve got two choices. Either we find Bronson as quickly as possible—and that doesn’t look likely to happen—or we go back to Italy and wait for him to turn up and start digging in the garden, or wherever he thinks the Exomologesis is hidden.”
“I’ll book the tickets,” Rogan said, turning back to his laptop.
III
“You’re kidding,” Bronson said.
“I’m not,” Angela retorted. “Look at the dates. You told me that the Hamptons’
house was built roughly in the middle of the fourteenth century. That was around a hundred years after the fall of Montse’gur, and about twenty-five years after the last known Cathar parfait was executed.
“And once in Italy, their first priority would have been to secrete their ‘treasure’—the ‘truth’ they’d managed to smuggle out of Montségur at the end of the siege—somewhere safe. They needed a permanent hiding place, somewhere that would endure, not just a hole in the ground somewhere. I think they decided to hide the relic in something permanent, or as near as possible, and one obvious choice would be a substantial house, probably in the foundations, so that routine alterations to the property wouldn’t uncover it.
“But they also wouldn’t want to bury it beyond recovery, because it was the most important document they possessed, and they must have hoped that one day their religion would be revived. So whoever hid the relic would have needed to leave a marker, a clue of some kind, that would later enable someone, someone who understood the Cathar religion and who would be able to decipher the coded message, to retrieve it. If I’m right, then that was the entire purpose of the Occitan inscription.”
Bronson shifted his attention from the unwinding autoroute in front of him and glanced across at his ex-wife. Her cheeks were flushed pink with the excitement of her discovery. Although he’d always had enormous respect for her analytical ability and professional expertise, the way she’d dissected the problem and arrived at an entirely logical—albeit almost unbelievable—solution, amazed him.
“OK, Angela,” he said, “what you say does make sense. You always made sense. But what are the chances that the Hamptons’ second home in Italy was the chosen location? It just seems so—I don’t know—unlikely, somehow.”
“But treasure—real treasure—turns up all the time, and often in the most unlikely places. Look at the Mildenhall Hoard. In 1942 a plowman turned up what is probably the greatest collection of Roman silver ever found, in the middle of a field in East Anglia. How unlikely is that?
“And what other explanation can you offer for the carved stone? The dates fit very well; the stone would seem to be Cathar in origin, and has been in the house since the place was built. The fact that the inscription’s written in Occitan provides an obvious link to the Languedoc, and the contents of the verses themselves only make sense if you understand the Cathars. There’s also the strong likelihood that a Cathar
‘treasure’ was smuggled out of Montségur. If it was, it had to be hidden somewhere.
So why not in that house?”
18
I
“At last,” Bronson muttered, as he steered the Renault Espace down the gravel drive of the Villa Rosa. It was well after midnight and they’d been on the road since about eight that morning.
He switched off the engine and for a few moments they just reveled in the silence and stillness.
“Are you going to leave it here?” Angela asked.
“I don’t have any option. Mark locked the garage before we went to the funeral, so the keys are probably somewhere in his apartment in Ilford.”
“House keys? You do have house keys, I hope?”
“I don’t, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Mark always used to keep a spare set outside the house. If that’s missing, I’ll have to do a bit of breaking and entering.”
Bronson walked around the side of the house, using the tiny flashlight on his key ring to see his way. About halfway along the wall was a large light-brown stone, and immediately to the right of it what looked like a much smaller, oval, light-gray rock.
Bronson picked up the fake stone and turned it over, slid back the cover and shook out the front-door key. He walked back to the front of the house and unlocked the door.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked, as he put their bags in the hall. “Scotch or brandy or something? It might help you sleep.”
Angela shook her head. “Tonight, absolutely the only thing I need to get to sleep is a bed.”
“Listen,” Bronson said. “I’m worried about the people who are looking for us. I think we should sleep in the same room while we’re here, for safety. There’s a twin-bedded guest room at the top of the stairs, on the right. I think we should use that.”
Angela looked at him for a few seconds. “We are keeping this professional, aren’t we? You’re not going to try to crawl into bed with me?”
“No,” Bronson said, almost convincingly. “I just think we should be together, in case these people decide to come back here.”
“Right, as long as that’s clearly understood.”
“I’ll just check that all the windows and doors are closed, then I’ll be up,” Bronson said, bolting the front door.
With both Jackie and Mark gone, it seemed strange to be back here. He felt a surge of emotion, of loss and regret that he’d never see his friends again, but suppressed it firmly. There’d be time for grief when this was all over. For now, he had a job to do.
Bronson woke just after ten, glanced at Angela
still sleeping soundly in the other single bed, pulled on a dressing gown he found in the en suite bathroom, and walked down to the kitchen to make breakfast. By the time he’d brewed a pot of coffee, found half a sliced loaf in the Hamptons’ freezer and produced two only slightly burnt slices of toast, Angela had appeared in the doorway.
“Morning,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Still burning the toast, I see.”
“In my defense,” Bronson replied, “the loaf was frozen, and I’m not used to the toaster.”
“Excuses, excuses.” Angela walked over to the worktop where the toaster sat and peered at the two slices. “Actually, these aren’t too bad,” she said. “I’ll have these, and you can burn another couple for yourself.”
“Coffee?”
“You have to ask? Of course I want coffee.”
Thirty minutes later they were dressed and back in the kitchen—apart from the bedrooms, it was the only place in the house where all the furniture wasn’t covered in dust sheets. Bronson put the translation of the Occitan inscription on the table.
“Before we start looking at that, can I just see the two carved stones?” Angela asked.
“Of course,” Bronson said, and led the way into the living room. He dragged a stepladder over to the fireplace and Angela climbed up to examine the Latin inscription. She ran her fingers over the incised letters with a kind of reverence.
“It always gives me a strange feeling when I touch something as old as this,” she said. “I mean, when you realize that the man who carved this stone lived about one and a half millennia before Shakespeare was even born, it gives you a real sense of age.”
She took a final look at the inscription, then stepped off the ladder. “And the second stone was directly behind this, but in the dining room?” she asked.
“It was, yes,” Bronson replied, leading the way through the doorway, “but our uninvited guests removed it.” He pointed at a more or less square hole in the wall of the room, debris from the extraction process littering the floor below.
“And they took it to try to recover the inscription you’d obliterated?”