City of Swords

by Alex Archer

  The wastewater rose higher over Annja’s feet. She was in desperate need of the police, Roux and a hot bath…. Her heart pounded. A good cleansing.

  She dropped the lantern at the base of the ladder and started to climb.

  Chapter 33

  “I’d prefer not to make a habit of this, Annja. Visiting you in the hospital.”

  Roux stood by the curtained partition to Annja’s E.R. bed. She sat on the edge, staring at the cast on her arm the nurse was hooking a sling to. Annja’s face was covered in small bandages, as was her right hand. There were more beneath the gray sweatpants and navy sweatshirt a policewoman had loaned her after Annja had stumbled into the station and told the story about the warehouse, the swordsmen and the liquid nerve gas.

  They’d believed her. She looked as if she’d been through a war, and had two stolen swords as evidence. More than that, her celebrity gave her credibility; the commander on duty was a regular viewer of Chasing History’s Monsters. At her insistence, they’d let Annja clean the stink of the underground off in their locker-room shower before driving her to the hospital.

  “I’d prefer not to see you battered and bloodied so often.”

  “You don’t look so good, either,” she replied, with a warm smile. Roux’s face was scraped and his hands crisscrossed with scabs. She suspected he had worse wounds under his ragged clothes. “Glad you’re all right.”

  He shrugged, looking older to her than ever. Tired. She wanted to ask him if Lawton’s men had really tried to kill him, thought they’d killed him. Did they pitch him in a river? Bury him? How had he survived it?

  “I’m getting out of here in a few minutes,” she said. “I’m not waiting for the doctor. I’m not wait—”

  “No arguments.”

  The nurse looked at her. “You should wait, miss. The doctor will be back in a little while to give you instructions and prescriptions for antibiotics.”

  Annja didn’t say anything.

  “Here’s a pamphlet about managing your cast. You said you’re American? Your doctor will have to take this off in three to six weeks. It’s all there in the pamphlet.” She pressed it into Annja’s hand.

  When the nurse left, Annja slid off the bed, slipped into a pair of tennis shoes—provided by a second policewoman with her size feet—and dropped the paper in the wastebasket.

  “I’m not waiting for the doctor.”

  “No argument,” Roux repeated. He followed her to the parking lot.

  “The police, you told them about the warehouse,” Annja said. She didn’t ask it as a question.

  Roux nodded. “It was one of four warehouses in the area. When I…”

  “Recovered?”

  “I went back to the area. I wasn’t awake when they moved me.” He paused again, and Annja filled in the gap. Roux must have come to nearby and found the warehouse district. “Only four buildings were large enough for it to be where we were held. I contacted the police—”

  “I didn’t see you at the station I went to. I—”

  “I didn’t go there in person, Annja. But I learned later that you had.” His brow was creased in concern.

  Had Roux thought they’d killed her? Had he worried that he’d lost two women he’d sworn to protect?

  “I didn’t know about the nerve chemicals at the time,” he told her. “I didn’t know anything about what was in the warehouse.”

  “It was under the warehouse.” And how did he know about it now? She hadn’t mentioned it to him, only to the police. He obviously had contacts in the department hierarchy that were willing to spill secrets.

  “The nerve gas is real. I saw it. Maybe I should have brought a canister with me, I don’t know. Lord, but I hope they get it all. Nine crates. What the hell was he going to do with them? What if there were more? What if he had more someplace else? What if—”

  Roux turned to face her. “Annja, while you were in the hospital, the police found the warehouse.”

  She held her breath.

  “They didn’t find any liquid nerve gas in the tunnel below. Just empty crates.”

  Annja’s knees started to buckle and her mouth worked. “Dear God.”

  “The police are still there. A sergeant I know will let us in.” Roux pointed to a car, small and sleek. Annja wondered if it was his or a rental. “They’re still searching.”

  She hurried toward the vehicle, her mind churning with ugly possibilities. Were Lawton and his paladins going to wipe out every non-Christian in Rouen? If she had her laptop…cell phone…anything, she could search the internet to find temples and gathering places, Muslim and Buddhist leaders, people she could alert. Hopefully, the police officials were already looking into that.

  “Rouen…”

  “That does seem to be where he plans to create his City of God,” Roux said.

  “Why Rouen?”

  Her question went unanswered.

  A pair of officers on duty outside the warehouse demanded Annja and Roux stay back. There was a barricade on the street, an assortment of police cars and SUVs, and a large van that a man in a white hazmat body suit stood beside. There were dogs, too, a trio of German shepherds sitting dutifully by a police car, unleashed.

  At Roux’s insistence, one of the officers retreated inside the warehouse, returning a few minutes later with a sulky look on his face and waving the two in. “Just don’t touch anything,” he said. “We’re dusting. Understand?”

  “Clear like crystal,” Roux replied.

  The place sent shivers through Annja. In the center sat the pile of wood where they’d started to burn her. A dozen officers moved slowly through the cavernous room. Some took pictures. Others were dusting surfaces for fingerprints. One was in the rafters. A woman who had some authority, judging by her uniform and the patch on her sleeve, came down the spiral staircase, her footsteps echoing. She looked to be in her late thirties or early forties, prim, pressed and all business.

  “You can go up,” she told Roux, her eyes twinkling.

  Annja detected a comfortable familiarity between the two. Perhaps this was Roux’s source on the Paris police department…perhaps something more. She decided not to ask as she passed by, detecting the scent of Calvin Klein’s Euphoria. She took the stairs two at a time.

  “Look, but don’t touch anything,” the policewoman called after her.

  An icy feeling settled in Annja’s stomach as she reached the top. The door was not what one would expect to find in a warehouse, not when everything below was cement, corrugated steel and aluminum. It was a black door that looked like the lid of a coffin, with a wreath of dead flowers hanging on it.

  “The place of a madman,” she whispered. “Don’t touch anything, huh?” Well, she had to touch the black doorknob to go in. Her fingers closed on it and she waited a beat. Roux wasn’t coming up the stairs. A glance over the rail showed him still talking to the policewoman.

  Annja took in a deep breath and went inside.

  The room looked like a small art gallery, the furnishings scant but opulent. Brocade cushions padded high-backed chairs carved out of bleached wood; candelabras were filled with fresh candles. Annja stepped onto a thick rug that was shot through with metallic threads. A velvet rope stretched across one section of wall, perhaps to keep Lawton’s visitors from getting too close to the paintings. The walls were dark maroon, which helped show off the portraits that hung everywhere. The place was completely incongruous with the warehouse under it.

  The largest painting, directly opposite the door she’d entered and lit from above in an ornate gilded frame, was of a well-dressed, middle-aged man with black curly hair past his shoulders. There was a hint of white at his temples and lines around his eyes.

  All the dark pictures looked as if they’d been rendered by Old Masters, reminding Annja of Rembrandt’s self-portrait. The men and women were dressed expensively—from the 1300s through perhaps 1500. But the large portrait of the black-haired man clearly held the place of honor in the room. She went behin
d the velvet rope for a closer look.

  “Charles Lawton.” The portrait was supposed to be of Charlemagne, according to the words imbedded in the frame, but the resemblance to Lawton was unmistakable. It wasn’t the same man she’d seen in Paris, in the lecture hall or ordering her burned—Lawton didn’t have someone paint Charlemagne with his own face on it—but it was close. The painting looked authentic, and Annja searched her memory for other portraits of Charlemagne she’d seen.

  “Dear God. Oh, dear God.”

  Chapter 34

  That’s what had been niggling at the back of her brain when she’d first seen Lawton at the auction in Spain, a sense of familiarity. She had seen him before…an echo of him in any event, in images of Charlemagne.

  So unless Lawton had hired a plastic surgeon to make himself look like Charlemagne, he could pass for the historic figure’s son or brother. Descendant, definitely.

  Descendant of Charlemagne, student of Charlemagne and scholar of the man, too. Lawton had apparently built his life around his ancestor. But why try to build his City of God now? Why not a decade ago or a decade in the future? Was there something important about this timing? Or had he been laying the groundwork for a long while? And why was Annja’s sword so damn important to his collection?

  She turned away from the portrait, but the image of Charlemagne still burned in her brain, except that he had Lawton’s white hair. She grabbed her head in frustration and stared at the opposite wall. By the door she’d entered was another striking portrait, this nearly as big as Charlemagne’s, but in a less ornate frame. In fact, it looked as if the weathered wood could crumble at any moment.

  “Not possible.” But somehow she knew it was indeed possible.

  Annja had seen images of Joan of Arc. She’d once stood inches from a statue of Joan rendered by the French sculptor François Rude.

  But this version of Joan she stood staring at had been in many of Annja’s dreams and nightmares, sometimes dressed just as she was in this painting. According to historians, only one portrait was painted of Joan with her sword, and it was lost, likely destroyed in a fire. But it hadn’t been destroyed. Annja knew that this was it. A little brass plaque affixed to the frame read Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans.

  Charles Lawton, who had the money to buy ancient swords, finance this warehouse operation and who knew what else, had the lost painting hanging on his wall. It was beautiful, Joan was beautiful, and Annja found herself drawn to the face. Annja looked nothing like her, though Roux had thought she must be related somehow.

  The Joan in the painting wore a boy’s white shirt, open to midway down her chest, showing off a scar. Through the ages, white had served as an emblem of purity, and here it stood in stark contrast to the dark pants she had on, frayed around the cuffs. She wore men’s boots of an old military style. On the ground in front of her was a white banner, again symbolizing her purity. A fleur-de-lis, the French emblem, could be seen on a fold of it.

  Her hair was cut short and she could have passed for a boy…probably did on the battlefield.

  The sword was in her lap, her right hand holding the pommel. It was Annja’s sword—exactly the same. Annja let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. A cross, likely bronze from the color of the old oils, rested in Joan’s lap as well, partially obscured by the sword. There was an engraving on the cross, but Annja couldn’t make it out. The paint had spiderweb-fine cracks in it.

  The signature of the artist was also obscured. Would restoration reveal the engraving and the artist? Behind Joan, the image of Saint Catherine’s Church in Rouen was hazy, as if a fog lay across the land. What Annja at first had thought were a collection of sticklike trees were actually French soldiers.

  She knew the story of Joan of Arc by heart. What she hadn’t learned in history classes in school and college she’d gained through her own studies. The patron saint of France had brought the nation together at a critical time and swung the Hundred Years’ War in her country’s favor.

  After a moment, Annja crossed to a display case that contained an ink-drawn map on a piece of parchment. A pencil notation at the bottom read Circa 1400. Annja had to lean close to make out the details. It was of a village called Domremy. Joan was raised there by her parents—historians think she was twelve or thirteen when she claimed to have heard celestial voices. Sometimes they came with visions of saints: Margaret of Antioch, Michael the Archangel and Catherine of Alexandria. These voices persisted, urging her to help the dauphin to become king of France. She managed to convince him of her divine mission to save the country and was handed troops to command. Later, however, when the dauphin became king, he refused to support her military operations against the English.

  Bourguignon soldiers captured her and sold her to their English allies, who in turn gave her to an ecclesiastical court in Rouen. Another map in the case revealed that city in 1400. Joan was held there for more than a year, tried for heresy and finally condemned to death. The sentence was commuted, but later reinstated by a secular court. Joan was burned at the stake in the Old Market Square of Rouen, highlighted on the map by a pen drawing of a campfire.

  Annja remembered the feel of the fire licking against her and seeing Lawton’s determination through the smoke. Mostly she remembered her terror.

  There were other items in the glass case, an old, old book opened to a page of text: “Twenty-five years after the inconceivable slaying of the Maid of Orleans, the church retried her case. This time, they pronounced her innocent.” It would be hundreds of years later, in 1920, that she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV.

  Under a short sword on display, a plaque read Charlemagne’s First Weapon. Not God-touched, Annja suspected, else it would have been in the hands of one of Lawton’s paladins. There was a mounting for another sword, however, and it was empty. Was it meant for hers? Annja understood why the professor wished to have her sword. It didn’t contain the tooth or blood of some saint, or a piece of the Virgin Mary’s robe. But it had been wielded by a saint, Joan of Arc. And more than that, it had once belonged to Charlemagne, Lawton’s ancestor.

  Annja moved on, noting a few places where the residue from fingerprinting powder remained. She doubted the police knew how valuable some of the pieces in the warehouse were. Maybe they’d find more than Lawton’s prints. Maybe some of his followers were terrorists. If the police had found other clues here, they’d likely already gathered the evidence.

  Where was Roux? Still talking to the woman officer? Annja hoped he was trying to learn what the police had discovered. She continued her tour of the room, trying to take in everything, to place the people in the portraits on the walls, some of whom bore a resemblance to Charlemagne and Lawton… Relatives?

  She’d nearly passed by it, but her eye for detail was sharp. There was a place in the carpet that was rubbed, as if something had sat on it or been moved across it. She squatted and ran her fingers over the weave.

  “Don’t touch anything,” the police had told her. But they wouldn’t mind her messing with the carpet, wouldn’t even know it; they’d left her up here alone. She smiled. Roux was talking to the policewoman to buy Annja time to explore the place.

  “Interesting.” She traced the carpet depression back to the wall. “Really interesting.” Annja stood and studied it. There was an almost imperceptible break in the paint, at the edge of one of the unidentified portraits. She pushed on the wall, heard a click and smiled when it popped open. “A secret door. How utterly original, Dr. Lawton.” It would have been left open had the police found it, and the edges of the panel would have been dusted for fingerprints, leaving some residue left behind. She’d tell them about it on her way out—after she was done exploring.

  Annja slipped inside. The size of a large closet, the space had two file cabinets, a toilet and a sink. There were cleansers on the floor and feather dusters, probably used for keeping the gallery clean, and even a portable vacuum that looked to be battery operated.

  She started with th
e cabinets, pulling the bottom door out slowly, cringing when the metal made scraping sounds. For all the money he’d spent on the room and on the swords, Annja thought he could have afforded better file cabinets. She worked quickly. Roux wouldn’t be able to engage the policewoman in conversation indefinitely.

  Scanning documents, she found little of interest. Term papers mostly, which she would have thought Lawton would have kept in his office at the university. But maybe these were from particularly bright students, ones he could groom into followers. She selected one at random and stuck it behind her back in the waistband of the sweatpants, pulling the sweatshirt over it. In the top drawer she found nothing of note—records on the warehouse, taxes and the like…things the police might have an interest in, however. The second cabinet yielded more student papers. But a middle drawer caught her attention. The first few folders were filled with newspaper clippings and printouts from internet sites about famous swords, where they were being auctioned or exhibited. There were articles on Honjo Masamune, the Wallace Sword, El Cid’s Tizona and more. Behind these were blueprints. Annja tugged them out. The first was of the Wallace Monument near Stirling. Another of West Point in New York. A street map of Avignon was wedged between them and fluttered to the floor. The Louvre. Annja bit her lip. Charlemagne’s Joyeuse was on display in the Louvre.

  How did Lawton get such detailed blueprints? How did he come by anything? she mentally chastised herself. Blueprints for the Tower of London, with handwritten notes about monitors.

  “Son of a—” He was going after Joyeuse and the swords kept with the crown jewels. She knew he would—this was no great revelation, just a confirmation. Obsessed with Charlemagne, and with swords, the professor would insist on having his ancestor’s famous weapon. That he hadn’t gone after it earlier surprised her. Why not make that his first target? He’d managed break-ins at the Wallace Monument and other museums. Security at the Louvre and the Tower of London would be tenfold compared to what his paladins had previously tackled. Maybe it was the high-level security that had kept him away.