The Sixth Key

by Adriana Koulias

  I felt suddenly cold. Catastrophe?

  ‘I want to show you something. Will you follow me once more?’

  ‘Into that labyrinth of galleries – which one this time?’

  ‘No doubt you know of Alexandre Dumas’s work The Man in the Iron Mask?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He paused. His face was more concentrated than I had seen it before. ‘Well, you know, Dumas belonged to the Freemasons and in his books he was doing what many writers, painters and poets did in those days – he hid the truth behind allegory and colour. He wanted to show King Louis’s duplicity, his double face; and so he depicted the man in the iron mask as Louis’s twin brother. I will now reveal the true identity of the masked man and the secret that he held. A secret that a king was willing to do anything to gain.’

  39

  More than Meets the Eye

  ‘The devil, devil, devil!’ repeated La Fontaine; ‘what can I do?’ Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask

  Fortress of Pignerol, Italy, 1666

  The bishop carried the lantern before him into the dungeons of the old jail. The night was silent. The sound of his own steps on the stone flags and the metallic clink of the keys that were held tightly in the jailer’s calloused hands reverberated loudly in his ears. When the jailer came to a halt before a heavy oak door he seemed disconcerted and uncertain. He fumbled with those hands to find the one key among a score of identical keys that opened its lock. When the door finally came open with a screeching of rusty hinges, the Jesuit said to the jailer: ‘You may not be present during a prisoner’s confession.’

  The man began to argue but he was silenced when the bishop raised a hand.

  The Bishop said, ‘Go!’

  Chided the jailer nodded, allowing the Jesuit to enter the cell alone.

  He closed the door and waited a time to hear the dying sound of the man’s footsteps, ensuring that whatever passed between him and the prisoner would not be overheard. He turned his attention then to the man on the bed. He couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake. The man lay on his back unmoving. The Jesuit observed what he had already been told but it was still a shock to see the mask made of riveted iron.

  It was said to be padded with silk but despite the assurances that it had been designed to fit the prisoner perfectly, the Jesuit didn’t imagine that such a thing could be comfortable. The mask covered the prisoner’s head rather like a helmet and was clasped at the neck with a large lock, the key to which was kept on the governor’s key-ring. To attempt to remove the mask would doubtless cause injury to the skull, perhaps even death from a dislocation of the neck. There was sweat on the Jesuit’s brow; he did not feel as calm as the man in the mask appeared to be.

  The prisoner stirred. ‘Confessor, is that you?’

  ‘It is I, Aramis, Bishop of Vannes, at your service.’

  ‘Please, make yourself comfortable. I have only meagre furnishings, but they will do to rest your legs.’

  The bishop nodded, bowed and, placing the lantern on a table, sat in an old leather armchair near the bed. The mask reflected the light of the lantern in a glint of greys and yellows and oranges.

  ‘Firstly, I want to say that I have no regrets,’ the muffled voice said.

  ‘Nothing at all?’ Aramis was surprised.

  The man sat up to cough, allowing his head to take the weight of the mask. ‘No. I regret nothing,’ he said finally. ‘You will tell your friend D’Artagnan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was a gentleman in his treatment of me.’

  ‘Well.’ The Bishop wiped absently at nothing on his regal lap. ‘He was not happy to arrest you.’

  ‘No,’ the other man said. ‘He graciously allowed me to burn papers that would have further incriminated our order. Pity my brother’s letter did not burn as well!’

  ‘Do you regret the loss of your liberty?’

  There was a moment of contemplation. ‘Perhaps in the beginning this concerned me, but I have long been free of desire and have passed my days in peace.’

  ‘And the mask?’

  ‘A Jesuit who wears a hair shirt and who uses the strap on his back knows what it is to master the will. A member of the Company knows how to control the snake!’

  The Jesuit nodded, and although he had never truly been one of those men who liked to mortify the flesh – indeed indulging in it was more to his taste – he knew the signal well. The mention of the snake meant he must now show the sign. He rolled up his sleeve, sat forward and took the lantern from the table to illuminate the tattoo for the masked prisoner.

  The prisoner did likewise.

  ‘Who knows you have come here?’ the masked man said.

  ‘No one except your jailer and he has been well paid.’

  ‘If you were found here, you would soon see the glint from the king’s axe.’

  Aramis smiled. ‘I should like to see them try! But we were wise, I think, to wait until you were moved here, to Italy.’

  ‘There is yet a musketeer in you, I see!’

  ‘I never could make up my mind – monk or knight. It has always bothered my friends.’ He paused a moment. ‘I am glad to see you alive.’

  ‘The king’s judges would not condemn an innocent man to death, so Louis made certain that I would be tortured this way for the rest of my life and for this reason do I choose to be at peace. In this way, you see, I wrest from him his victory over me.’

  ‘What will you tell me?’

  The masked man gestured to the door and Aramis got up to ensure that the hallway was empty.

  When he returned the prisoner began: ‘Poussin, the celebrated painter, has secreted something of import in his painting of the shepherds. When Louis asked me to send my own brother to Rome to speak with Poussin, I saw an opportunity to learn what it was that he had secreted. No doubt you know of the letter he sent me and that I am in this prison because I would not divulge its meaning. This is what I am to tell you, before I die.’

  ‘Does it concern the treasure of the Cathars, which we have awaited?’

  ‘Indeed. The painting tells the history of the treasure. In it there is a woman, Mary Magdalene, the first guardian of the treasure. After her death it was passed from woman to woman until the fall of Montsegur in 1244, whereupon it was passed to three known guardians: the man who took it from Montsegur, a troubadour; Nostradamus; and the family Perillos. These three guardians are the shepherds depicted in that painting by Poussin. But it does not only give the history, it also gives the solution to the cipher that was created by the family Perillos to guard its whereabouts.’

  ‘How did Poussin learn of it?’

  ‘The painting was commissioned by the family. You see, they could not have known that Poussin was one of us. At any rate the hidden clue is connected to a tomb in the painting on which is inscribed the words Et In Arcadia Ego. They mean: and in the sacred box lies the ego or the word – the master word.’

  ‘The master word that reveals the cipher?’ Aramis could hardly contain his excitement.

  The masked man, Nicholas Fouquet, King Louis XIV’s old minister of finance, wheezed in the darkness. ‘Come closer, Aramis, and I shall tell you . . .’

  The Bishop leant in until the iron of the mask touched his cheek.

  ‘It is . . . Mo—’

  But at that very moment the door burst open. It was the jailer flanked by a number of guards.

  ‘Bishop!’ The Captain of the Guard came into the room brandishing a blade. ‘You are to come with us!’

  40

  A Box, a Tomb and a Word

  ‘It came upon me like a flash of lightning. I had got the clue. All you had to do to understand the document was to read it backwards.’

  Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth

  Campagne-sur-Aude, France, 1938

  The three of them sat in the Peugeot hugging their coats to keep out the cold. Earlier, they had left the boulangerie via the back exit and circled around to La Dame’
s auto, whereupon they had driven off, leaving the black Citroën behind them. La Dame’s driving had been fast and jerky, and Rahn was glad when he stopped near a high overgrown patch alongside the old road near Campagne-sur-Aude, where they were afforded some cover. The wind had died down and a few scattered opalescent packets of mist drifted over the lowland fields but Rahn paid them no mind, he was turning it instead to the contents of the note.

  MITTO TIBI

  NAVEM

  PRORA PVPPIQVE

  CARENTEM

  PALIM

  ‘What does that mean?’ La Dame said.

  ‘It’s Latin: I send you a ship without stern – or prow – backwards.

  ‘Odd,’ La Dame answered.

  ‘It’s a rebus, La Dame, a Roman puzzle. Deodat and Cros were fond of bewildering each other with them. Deodat and I had been talking about rebuses the day he was taken, that’s how we came to the relevance of the word sator. Let me see . . . a ship . . . navem. Without stern or prow, without beginning or end . . . is navem without N or M . . . ave!’

  ‘Ave?’ La Dame said, popping an unlit Cuban into his mouth.

  ‘It means greetings. I send you greetings . . . backwards . . . or back-to-front greetings.’ ‘Odd,’ La Dame said again, stroking his beard. ‘That’s what it means!’ Rahn said, suddenly illuminated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ave backwards is Eva.’ He turned to her. ‘You, mademoiselle!’

  ‘Me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you! I suggest that whoever has Deodat has made him write something that I could recognise as having been written only by him, and Deodat, the crafty man that he is, has written me a warning in Latin. A warning against you! You must be in on it!’ He formulated his theory as he spoke. ‘Madame Dénarnaud intimated that you were not what you seemed. And now I realise why Abbé Cros appeared to act strangely around you. He was fearful, that’s why he waited until you were out of earshot to whisper to Deodat that he wanted something from the church. That’s why he wrote down sator, and not tabernacle, because he figured you wouldn’t know what it meant. Everything you’ve told me has been a lie, isn’t it true?’ He was elated at having solved two mysteries with one stone – the mystery of the Latin note and the mystery of the girl – but at the same time he was also affronted for being treated like a fool. And then it struck him. ‘You’re just like The Woman!’ he said, aghast.

  La Dame began a solemn nod of agreement.

  ‘What woman?’ Eva said, indignantly.

  ‘The Woman!’ La Dame said to her. ‘Irene Adler! “A Scandal in Bohemia”?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  La Dame leant in, savouring her attention. ‘Well, she was the only woman, nay the only person, ever to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes. Whenever Sherlock spoke of Irene Adler it was always under the honourable title of The Woman.’

  ‘Honourable! I wouldn’t say that!’ Rahn blurted out, annoyed. He proceeded then to take up the reins of the conversation. ‘This leads me to ask two questions, mademoiselle: who are you, and whom are you working for?’

  She paused, glanced at the two men calmly, and said, devoid of emotion, ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions, Otto. It isn’t what you think.’

  ‘No?’ Rahn said.

  ‘No. You see, some time ago I moved into the house with Cros. He had no family because he was an orphan,’ she said. ‘He was also paralysed, couldn’t speak and, to make matters all the more simple for me, he lived a long way from the township of Bugarach. No one asked questions and no one came to visit him, except for your friend Deodat Roche, and Abbé Grassaud. Who was to know that I was not his niece, returned from Paris to keep an eye on him?’

  ‘I would appreciate it, mademoiselle, if you would just get to the point,’ Rahn said, realising his feelings were hurt.

  She raised one brow very high. ‘Years ago, Abbé Cros came to Paris. At the time I was working temporarily for his lawyers as a secretary and so I knew everything there was to know about his affairs. He was very wealthy, you know, but his wealth was transient: large sums of money would appear and disappear in and out of his account, as if by magic, one might say. I was also terribly intrigued by his funeral arrangements and his elaborate design to keep anyone from knowing where he would be buried, even his lawyers. The more I looked into this priest, the more I was convinced that he had found a store of Visigoth treasure at Bugarach, and that he was planning to bury himself with it.’

  ‘How do you know so much about the Visigoths?’ La Dame said.

  ‘I’m a student of archaeology, with a special interest in them. I was just earning some money working as a secretary, before coming here to work on my dissertation.’

  ‘So that’s why you knew so much about Bugarach and its history,’ Rahn said.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve been studying it. I guessed that the abbé’s wealth must have come from something he found, perhaps in the church. When he fell ill I saw an opportunity to quit my job and come to the south. Since he already knew me, it was easy for me to say that I had been sent to sort out some of his more mundane affairs, to settle his books and pay any outstanding bills. I fired his maid and hired a new one and from that time on I became his niece.’

  ‘How did you know the key in the pond belonged to the tabernacle?’ Rahn asked.

  ‘Just a hunch.’ She smiled. ‘When Abbé Grassaud arrived unannounced to see Cros, I feared he might ask questions about me, so I hid in a room nearby. I overheard Grassaud tell Cros he wanted the list and if he didn’t give it to him he had ways of getting it – sooner or later. Cros was very upset after Grassaud left and wanted to see Deodat.’

  ‘So Grassaud knew about the list, that’s why he was so anxious to look at it. Cros suspected you by the time of our visit, didn’t he?’ Rahn said. ‘That’s why he gave us the veiled clue.’

  ‘I didn’t need to know that word sator to find the key to the tabernacle,’ she pointed out to his annoyance.

  Irene Adler to the core!

  ‘Wait a moment, mademoiselle,’ Rahn said. ‘Didn’t Deodat know that Cros had no family?’

  ‘No. Cros kept that to himself all those years in the seminary. Apparently he didn’t like to be pitied,’ she said.

  Rahn seethed. ‘So, you’ve had your eye on the treasure, haven’t you?’

  ‘Like you, perhaps?’ she answered icily. ‘But unlike you, I don’t want it for myself. The Cathar treasure belongs in a museum. Not in the hands of a brotherhood of greedy priests.’

  Rahn sat up. ‘Which brotherhood?’

  ‘You and Deodat think yourselves very astute but neither of you noticed one very important clue in the church at Bugarach. In fact it was staring you right in the face!’

  Yes, he remembered having a feeling that he had missed something.

  ‘What did we miss?’ he said. ‘Come – out with it!’

  She smiled wider again. ‘You didn’t notice the walls?’

  The realisation hit him like a candlestick. ‘The anchor and the snake?’

  ‘With one difference – the S in the anchor is entwined with an R and topped with a crown. The Royal Serpent Rouge, or Golden Crista, as some call it.’

  Rahn stared.

  Those eyes peeking out from their dark curtain were smiling.

  ‘So Cros must have been a member of Association Angelica!’ Rahn concluded. ‘And that is why he had those symbols painted on the walls of his church!’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ La Dame’s unlit cigar played at the corner of his mouth. ‘You’re both drawing rather a long bow. A symbol on the wall of a church doesn’t automatically make its abbé a member of a secret order. The symbol could have been there long before he arrived at Bugarach.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Rahn conceded, deflated, looking out to the trembling trees.

  ‘All right, but what about that parchment the madame gave you?’ Eva asked.

  He took it out and looked at it. ‘I’m convinced the master word is locked in the li
ne that Saunière worked out.’

  La Dame lit his cigar, took a puff and, gratified, said, ‘Surely whoever encoded it wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have placed the master word and the message in the same parchment?’

  ‘I agree with you, La Dame, this is not how it’s usually done, the master word or combination of words is usually kept separate from the cipher for obvious reasons. However in this case the family Perillos may have feared it would become lost or forgotten over time and so, they could have encrypted it in the cipher as insurance. That’s what I would have done . . . Let’s see if I’m right.

  ‘Now, Saunière had deciphered this much:

  Jevousle gue cetindice dutres or qui apparti entaux seign eursderen nes etce stlam ort. Lefeur evele

  I bequeath to you this clue to the treasure that belongs to the lords of Rennes. It is death. Fire reveals it.

  La Dame nodded. ‘But, my dear Rahn, I thought you said that all those priests have already tried every word in that deciphered part to crack the code but to no avail. What do you propose to do?’

  ‘It could be something very simple,’ Rahn said, ‘so simple it was overlooked. It is death . . . fire reveals it – that has to be a clue! But what kind of clue, I don’t know. This is the rest:

  XOTDQTKWZIGSDGZPQUCAESJ

  XSJWOFVLPSGGGGJAZ MQTGYDCAXSXSDRZWZRLVQAFFPSDAPW MITMZSKWZHRLUCEHAIIMZPVJSSI POEKXSXDUGVVQXLKFSVLXSSWLI PSIJUSIWXSMGUZVVQZRVQSJKQQYWDQYWL

  ‘It’s getting desperately cold, Rahn, why don’t we go to a hotel? You’ll think better by a warm fire, I assure you.’ La Dame was rubbing his hands together. ‘The mademoiselle would like to go somewhere warm, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ Eva answered.

  ‘I know it’s cold, La Dame, but you must steel yourself, we have to solve this puzzle,’ Rahn said, obstinately. ‘Before something else happens.’