The Sixth Key

by Adriana Koulias

‘It’s actually quite a sad affair,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘The sacristan committed suicide. He threw himself rather dramatically from the Pic de Bugarach. Things like that happen around here from time to time. Perhaps it was boredom or melancholy, who knows? You can’t imagine how difficult it was to find him. There was an exhaustive search that took nearly a week. When the body was found, well, I won’t go into it. It is too ghastly. At any rate, there was no sign of the keys on his person so it was assumed he must have put them away in a safe place before his demise. In the end the villagers nearly tore apart his small house but found nothing. So the church remains open until a new priest comes who can entice the locksmith here.’

  The church was squat, old and worn out, with a cemetery and a scattering of ramshackle houses to keep it company. Rahn parked the car in its shadow and they got out. Even outside, he could feel that familiar dread come over him. He spoke now more out of a desire to calm his nerves than out of curiosity.

  ‘Eighth or ninth century?’

  ‘The fifth, the time of the Visigoths, actually,’ she said, walking to the main entrance. ‘I see you know your history.’ There was a half smile. Was she mocking him? Her voice had that peculiar tone that left him unable to discern one way or the other.

  ‘Rahn is a Cathar historian and a philologist,’ Deodat informed her.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘You’ll be interested to know then, that this village was once a Gallo-Celtic fort. You wouldn’t think so now, would you?’ She opened the door with an air of irreverence. ‘The town became a Cathar settlement somewhere along the line.’

  Rahn hung back. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t felt a morbid fear of Roman churches. As a child, whenever his mother had forced him to go to church it had been a wretched trial. Bargains had been offered and refused, tears had been shed and punishments meted out, but he had remained obdurate. The black cross, the dead, contorted Jesus, the effigies of saints, the sarcophagi – all things that may have inspired another child to pious reverence – generated panic and horror in Rahn. And it had remained so. It was, therefore, with great effort that he entered the cold, damp, silent space whose acrid smell of smoke from the votive candles and whose pungent scent of laurel made him feel ill. He loosened his collar, feeling a cold sweat on his brow, and there was that familiar tremor in his hands. He steeled himself like a man about to go into a field of battle from which no man had ever returned unscathed.

  ‘The church was dedicated to Stella Maris, Our Lady of the Seas,’ Eva said, walking along the nave, her disembodied voice echoing from the short vaults. ‘But originally it was consecrated to Saint Anthony, the hermit.’

  ‘Why Saint Anthony?’ Rahn asked, keeping his mind on his feet, moving them one after the other.

  ‘There’s a hermitage of his not far from here. In Bugarach on Ash Wednesday there’s a procession led by a man dressed like a hermit wearing a horse collar around his neck with bells on it and carrying a cross that has pork sausages hanging from its arms. All rather rustic.’

  Eva looked at Rahn enquiringly. ‘You don’t look well, Monsieur Rahn.’

  ‘I don’t like churches,’ he said, rather sharply.

  Deodat took Eva’s arm and confided, ‘Our friend can walk into a cave without fear of crevices or lakes. He has no concern for bats, snakes or spiders and even rats are nothing to him, but put him in a church and he turns pale like this and looks like he’s seen a ghost!’ He laughed a small clipped laugh. ‘Imagine!’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said to Rahn. ‘Have you seen a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Freud would say,’ Deodat continued, in his element, ‘that a fear such as this displays the psychodynamic conflict between desire for and repulsion of the mother on the one hand, represented by the mother church, and the idealisation and fear of the father – who is really God on the other.’

  Rahn mustered his sarcasm and said, ‘Oedipus, of course! Nothing new in that.’

  Deodat, having had his fun, now appointed himself Rahn’s defence counsel. ‘The truth is, my dear, when one knows history, one cannot walk into a church unperturbed. In the final analysis, thousands were killed in a church not far from here at Béziers during the Cathar wars.

  Rahn continued Deodat’s line. ‘Roman churches are not places of asylum, nor are they holy. They are nothing more than prisons and execution chambers; traps for the unwary.’ He paused then, realising to his concern that he had unwittingly walked through the iron enclosures to the altar. But before his fear could take hold he noticed two plaques that seized his attention: one to the left of the crucifix, the other to the right. Both showed the Book of the Seven Seals.

  ‘Ah! You’ve found the chief reason I brought you here, Rahn,’ Deodat said at his shoulder. ‘It isn’t often one sees the Book of the Seven Seals so well depicted on plaques.’ Deodat then pointed to a third plaque over a door on the right, leading to what might be the sacristy.

  Rahn smiled, despite himself. ‘For Heaven’s sake, it’s the Grail!’

  ‘There’s another one over there, too,’ Deodat said, pointing to a fourth plaque over an identical door on the left wall. ‘So you see, this may not be a Roman church after all.’

  ‘This is very significant,’ Rahn said, to himself. ‘The Book of the Seven Seals and the Holy Grail together in the same church implies some knowledge of the Cathar treasure.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Deodat said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eva came over to see, suddenly interested.

  ‘The treasure is purported to include both,’ Rahn explained. ‘Apparently they were brought here to the South of France for safekeeping, and the Cathars are thought to have been their guardians.’

  ‘What’s this statue, my dear?’ Deodat asked Eva.

  ‘That’s Saint Roch, patron of those afflicted by plagues. Apparently, he was saved from starvation in the wilderness by a hunting dog with a loaf of bread in its mouth, and so he is mostly portrayed with a dog.’

  Rahn turned to see. ‘Cerberus?’

  ‘Look at him,’ Deodat said, nodding towards Rahn. ‘See how he comes to life as soon as there is an allusion to the myths!’

  Eva smiled. ‘Myths?’

  Rahn went to the badly cast statue and looked it over. ‘The dog Cerberus is the guardian of the world of the dead. It was Hercules’ last labour to fetch the dog and to return it to the Underworld. Some say it’s a symbol for a guarded secret. There is an effigy of Cerberus as large as a house in the caves of Lombrives.’

  ‘Really?’ Eva didn’t seem suitably impressed.

  ‘I can attest to that,’ Deodat said. ‘Now as far as this one’s concerned, the bread in its mouth is likely to be an allusion to the manna that kept the Jews alive in the wilderness. And manna is also the same as the substance contained in the Grail, which fed the inhabitants of Montsalvache, the panem supersubstanialem, otherwise known as the bread of life. Now, look at this, Rahn!’ Deodat took himself to a side chapel. Above a little altar, there was a stained-glass window depicting two men turning a wheel in the sky, in which sat a crescent moon illuminating an ocean and a boat sailing away from a rising sun.

  ‘The symbol of destiny,’ Rahn said, wiping his brow. ‘The wheel of fortune in the tarot deck – this is quite extraordinary.’

  ‘Symbols are interesting.’ Eva came to take a look. ‘My uncle’s stroke has affected the speech centre in his brain, which not only disturbs his speech . . .’

  But Rahn wasn’t listening, he was thinking.

  The boat of Hercules travels to the Underworld towards the rising sun . . . the Underworld is the realm of death . . . the wheel of fortune represents each man’s destiny which ends in death . . . but this boat is travelling away from the rising sun, it’s moving away from death.

  ‘ ... it also affects his ability to understand the meaning of things.’

  The wheel . . . turns one way . . . and it reverses . . .

  ‘For instance, he would not know what a toothbrush
is, and would just as likely use it to comb his hair – he can’t connect the item with its purpose, so I guess he wouldn’t know symbols either, even words can come out back to front.’ She looked around. ‘I can’t think what my uncle could want from the church. What was that word he wrote down – Sator? Do you know what it means?’

  ‘Sator means sower, creator, reaper,’ Rahn said automatically, still thinking.

  ‘It’s Latin,’ Deodat informed her. ‘But I may have to look up what other meanings there are, then we may understand what Eugene was trying to tell us.’

  ‘My uncle told me about your library. Apparently it’s full of heretical texts, the most comprehensive in all of the Languedoc. You know, he does think very highly of you, despite what he calls your strange leanings.’

  ‘And I think fondly of him too, despite him being as stubborn as an old goat. Speaking of him, I think we should get you back. We’ve kept you from him long enough.’

  Rahn was grateful to follow the others out of the church and once outside felt as if he had surfaced from a near drowning. But on the drive back to Maison de Cros he had the strangest sensation that he had missed something important in the church, and this caused him to drive in silence all the way to the turn-off, trying to think of what it might be. By then it was late afternoon and the sun was tilting its light over the unforgiving landscape, creating ominous shadows in various shades of purple. He looked for the black car but it was gone.

  When they arrived at the house there were a number of parked cars in the driveway and the housekeeper came bursting out of the great double doors in tears. After that Rahn and the others were swept up in a concert of cries, lamentations, imprecations and gesticulations that had no meaning whatsoever until they came to the garden, where they found the source of the mayhem – and, oh, what a frightful sight it was!

  14

  Murder Most Foul

  ‘My God!’ stammered he, unable to control his emotion,

  ‘What do you say – a crime?’

  Emile Gaboriau, The Mystery of Orcival

  The old abbé was lying on the grass. His clothes were saturated, his hair was plastered over a bloated face turned to one side, and his milky eyes stared wide and horrified, as if they had seen the face of the Devil himself. Rahn wondered if it was true that one could glimpse the image of the murderer frozen forever in the eyes of the murdered. He staggered a little to think on it, he had seen more death in one week than many men see in a lifetime and he was realising that his nature was a delicate one when it came to such things.

  There were several gendarmes walking around and in a moment two ambulance men arrived to place the old abbé on a stretcher and take him away. A sad sight, Rahn thought. The girl seemed in shock as she accompanied her uncle’s body into the house. At this point a short, pale little man walked towards them. He had thick brows and a wiry moustache that cut across his long pock-marked face like a dash.

  He lifted his crumpled Panama hat with the tip of a finger in greeting and said, ‘Good afternoon, messieurs, Inspecteur Guillaume Beliere, of the Brigade Spéciale of the Parisian Police Judiciaire.’ He took a crushed packet of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his jacket, revealing the gun at his belt. He shook one out and lit it without taking his eyes off Rahn. Rahn held the gaze and tried to hide his disquiet. The man seemed to be the antithesis of those detectives in the novels that he loved, like Gaboriau’s detective Monsieur Lecoq. Such a man analysed clues, employed the marvels of modern science and solved crimes by using logic and reason. Such a man, he imagined, never wore crumpled suits, and his sensitive probing fingers would be popping peppermint lozenges into his mouth, not holding a cigarette with a nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger, looking as if he had slept with an empty bottle of rum under one arm.

  ‘You knew the deceased?’ the inspector said after a perfunctory cough, looking from Deodat to Rahn.

  ‘The abbé was more than an acquaintance, he was a friend, actually,’ Deodat said, officious and annoyed. ‘He asked to see me and we came today but he was unwell. We were gone only a couple of hours.’

  The head tilted again and the brows arched slightly. He took a moment to think on it, while he let his entire weight rest on his heels. ‘Gone?’

  ‘To Bugarach, to visit the old church,’ Rahn put in.

  Those wet eyes fell on Rahn. The inspector smiled without showing his teeth. ‘For religious reasons?’

  ‘Not in the strictest sense,’ Rahn said.

  ‘No?’ The man squinted through the smoke, holding the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Can you tell us, inspector, what has happened here?’ Deodat brought his authority as a magistrate to bear on the moment.

  ‘A terrible accident, I’m afraid.’ But the flat tone suggested he didn’t find it quite so terrible. Perhaps he had seen worse ways to die. ‘The maid was inside answering the phone. When she returned, she found the abbé in the pond. He must have tipped the wheelchair over. No one knows how it happened. The poor woman couldn’t get him out. He was strapped to the chair and too heavy for her, you see,’ he said, taking a long drag of his cigarette. ‘A dead weight.’

  Rahn felt Deodat bristle beside him.

  ‘How in the devil could he have tipped the wheelchair?’ Deodat said. ‘The man was paralysed – he could hardly move his lips!’

  The inspector gave an uninterested sigh. ‘Who knows? Perhaps it was a fit or an involuntary spasm? The maid said he was a stroke victim, so this may have been another stroke. The clinical autopsy will reveal more. I will need to take your names.’ He turned to Rahn. ‘You, monsieur, you are a foreigner?’ Rahn felt the burning interest in those eyes. ‘Can I see your papers, your passport?’

  Rahn searched his jacket and brought them out of his wallet, dropping a card.

  The inspector picked it up and read it before giving it back. ‘Serinus?’ he said.

  The blood rushed from Rahn’s head. ‘A business associate.’

  ‘Serinus is the genus name of the canary, isn’t that so?’ The skin around those bloodshot eyes wrinkled.

  Rahn hadn’t thought about it and now he hesitated. ‘I believe you’re right, inspector.’

  ‘May I?’ He reached for Rahn’s papers.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So, from Berlin, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see, and you are staying here in the south for how long?’

  ‘A week or two.’

  ‘And your accommodation?’

  ‘He’s staying with me,’ Deodat put in, about to lose his formidable temper.

  ‘And you might be?’

  ‘Deodat Roche, Magistrate of Arques, that’s who I am! And I’d like to know, inspector, what you are doing here, so far from Paris and in my jurisdiction?’

  Inspecteur Beliere lifted that brow again, not at all perturbed. He touched his hat in deference and said, ‘Forgive me, magistrate, I did not know who you were. I am staying at Carcassonne for a small time, investigating something in connection to a group called La Cagoule. Have you heard of them?’

  ‘Of course,’ Deodat said, ‘everyone has heard of them.’

  ‘Yes, the journalists have made certain of that,’ the inspector said, blinking. He took a drag of his cigarette and let it sit a thoughtful moment in his lungs before spilling it out in a cloud around his face. He looked as if he was about to turn philosophical but instead he continued with a certain hesitation, ‘We have information that has led us here. In fact, it was by sheer coincidence that I was at the gendarmerie at Carcassonne when the call came in about the deceased. I had nothing else to do . . .’ He showed small, yellowed teeth. ‘ . . . so here I am!’ He looked at Rahn. ‘Are you Monsieur Rahn, the celebrated author?

  I think I have read your book!’

  This struck Rahn. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ the other man said, with a concentrated frown. ‘The Sons of Belessina, the Troubadours, Esclarmonde de Foix – the great Cathar Perfecta,
and Montsegur.’ He took one last drag, threw the cigarette down and stepped on it. ‘I’m rather fond of the Cathars and the Templars, it’s a little hobby of mine. I read in my spare time. There is more to us police than making arrests and filing reports, you know. I thought when reading your book that only a strange twist of fate could lead a German to know more than the French about their own history.’

  ‘One could look at it that way.’

  ‘You say in your introduction, if I’m not mistaken, that it was Péladan who inspired you? I find that very interesting. Wasn’t he a Rosicrucian, an occultist?’

  Rahn’s book had only sold five thousand copies and so, the fact that this man had read it, in itself, was an oddity. Moreover, out of all the things mentioned in his book, the inspector chose to touch on Péladan, for whom Monti had once worked. Rahn felt Monti’s notebook burning a hole in his pocket. This had to be the inspector’s calculated way of letting him know that he was aware of his visit to Pierre Plantard.

  ‘I should let you go now,’ the inspector said forestalling Rahn’s answer, ‘I must see to some . . . formalities, as you no doubt appreciate, magistrate.’

  ‘Thank you, inspector, I would like to be kept informed of anything you find in relation to this unfortunate accident,’ Deodat said.

  ‘Of course. In fact you can expect that I will call in on you soon, to notify you of my progress.’

  ‘That would be desirable,’ Deodat answered tersely.

  The man tipped his hat and lingered a little before turning to go. He paused then, as if he had just remembered something of great importance, and spun around wearing an enquiring face.

  ‘Might I ask why the deceased wanted to see you?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Deodat answered. ‘But I have a suspicion that it was in relation to an investigation.’

  ‘An investigation?’

  ‘It was before his illness. He was investigating the priests of this area – he had the sanction of the Vatican; I don’t know the particular details.’

  ‘I see. And he said nothing to you today?’