Lisa Emmer Historical Thrillers Vol. 1-2 (Lisa Emmer Historical Thriller Series)

by Rob Swigart

  The thought that she had failed to mention the Augustine she had purloined on her way out provoked a fit of that barking rasp. She ended the call, and her expression of tortured mirth vanished.

  3.

  The gray unmarked sedan hurtled along the boulevard Auguste-Blanqui, picked up speed as it approached the big intersection at Denfert-Rochereau, swerved around a bus, and took the turn onto Raspail on two wheels.

  Lisa, seated in the back beside Captain Hugo, clutched the door handle. She was still in shock. Professor Foix – dear, kind Raimond – was gone. As they slowed for traffic to allow them through the intersection with boulevard Montparnasse, she said, “How did you find me?”

  The car lurched forward.

  “Dr. Foix had left instructions with his bank you were to be contacted in case of his death.”

  “Banks aren’t open this early, Captain Hugo.”

  “Some banks never close, Mademoiselle. But that’s not all. He also left something that pointed to you.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A list of names and dates on his desk.”

  “And mine was one of the names?”

  “Not exactly. They were from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” He took a notebook from his inside jacket pocket, tore out a sheet and handed it to her. “Here is my copy.”

  She unfolded it and read in the policeman’s elegant, well-trained hand:

  Jean-Baptiste Lully, (1632-1687)

  William Inglot, (1554 - 1621)

  Alessandro Scarlatti (1659 - 1725)

  Tomaso Albinoni (1671 - 1751)

  Michael East (c.1580 - 1648)

  Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643)

  Thomas Morley (c. 1557 - 1602)

  Richard Edwards (ca. 1522 - 1566)

  Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 - 1764)

  “These are composers of early music, Captain Hugo. Raimond was very fond of early music, but I don’t see how they relate to me. They’re random. The order is neither alphabetical nor chronological.”

  “I didn’t see the connection with you either, at first. It was the banker…”

  “What banker?”

  “I told you, Mademoiselle, Dr. Foix’s banker. His name is not important at the moment. He was the one who notified us of Dr. Foix’s problem.”

  “He knew something had happened before the police?”

  “He is not a suspect, Mademoiselle Emmer, if that is what you are thinking. There was some kind of communication between Dr. Foix or his apartment and the banker. Something electronic. We have many puzzles, but this much is not in doubt. The banker is an important personage and quite above suspicion. As I was saying, he suggested there would be a list on the desk. He said…”

  She held up her hand. “Wait a minute.”

  Foix had a sly smile when he hid things from her. The corners of his eyes would tighten and he would look at her sideways, waiting. How often had she stopped whatever she was talking about, looked at him and said, “I know what you’re doing, Professor Foix”? Later, when she knew him better, it was, “You’re doing it again, aren’t you, Raimond?” She would shake her head and set to work uncovering whatever trick he was playing. Sometimes he wanted her to come up with just the right quote from Plato or Hesiod; sometimes he had created a hideous bilingual pun in Greek and English or French and Latin and had slipped it into the conversation so casually that at first she hadn’t noticed. Once he created an elaborate sentence in all three languages that could be taken two ways.

  Now it was as if he were in the front seat, half turned to look at her. She said, “There is a kind of order. The first letters of the last names, they spell out L-I-S-A-E-M-M-E-R.”

  The policeman smiled. “That is correct. It is an acrostic, I believe.”

  “Typical. But what do you think it means, Captain Hugo? Why would Raimond hide my name in this list? Why not just write it down?”

  “Perhaps he wanted to conceal your name from whoever shot him. He left the list in plain sight. Sometimes that’s the best place to hide things, isn’t it so?”

  They crossed the rue du Cherche Midi, turned right on the rue de Sèvre and left onto the rue du Dragon. A policeman saluted and hastily moved aside a barrier. Halfway down the block they pulled to a stop.

  A small group of the curious had gathered at the far end by the boulevard Saint Germain, but there was little for them to see. Another barrier kept them from coming closer. A few residents glanced at them curiously then hurried away. No one wanted to stay too close to the police.

  She knew the place well. Up on the fourth floor was that warm, comfortable duplex where she had passed so much of her time since she had moved to Paris to work with old papyrus. Though Foix had encouraged her to become one, he himself was not a papyrologist. Nonetheless his fund of knowledge was wide and deep. Everything Greek, and most things Latin, concerned him, as well as modern geopolitics, the science of climate change, the origins of the human species, philosophy, art, prehistory, Eastern meditation, the best way to prepare mi-cuit chocolate cake with crème anglaise, the proper way to equip the horse for a knight on crusade. He was no ivory tower egghead. He was prodigious, intelligent, and kind. Above all, he was harmless. It must have been a burglar.

  But if a burglar had killed him, why would he leave that acrostic of her name?

  Unless it wasn’t her name – perhaps those letters meant something else? She quickly realized they could be combined in many ways. Within a minute she had thought of more than twenty that made some sense.

  A policeman was on guard at the front door to the building. The door was open. The entry, with its three mailboxes on the left, and the stairs and elevator on the right, was unchanged. The mailboxes for the premier and deuxième étages were still labeled with the names of the businesses that occupied those floors, a trading company and a lawyer. She realized suddenly how strange it was that she had never seen anyone collect mail for these tenants. In fact the boxes should be stuffed with junk, but they had always been empty.

  The third mailbox was unlabeled. The post office knew Raimond Foix and had no need for a label.

  There was more here than she had thought: it struck her that these offices were fakes, that the two floors between the street level and Raimond Foix’s apartment had always been empty. The tabac on the ground floor really did sell cigarettes and Metro tickets. What else did it sell? she wondered.

  It made no sense. Raimond Foix was an old man with a deep, playful voice and a hypnotic way of speaking. He was affectionate and kind. He never raised his voice, yet people paid attention to him; he was as clear as the waters of the Castalian spring, completely transparent, without a hint of deception.

  The emptiness in her heart opened onto darkness. Shadows pooled in the corners. Someone had killed him, and this building now hinted at secrets.

  She closed her heart and looked away. These were not things she could solve, not now.

  Hugo called for the elevator. A light under the button began to flash. She heard the elevator start up three floors above. The weights lifted away as the machine descended. When it arrived and the door opened, questions followed her into the small box. The policeman pressed for the third floor (the French third floor, she thought, the American fourth). The door closed. She was pressed against Hugo’s side in the tiny space. They rose in silence. The questions rose with them.

  4.

  To the west, the remains of the crumbling thirteenth century Abbey of St. Théophile presented a vast, brooding pile under low, dark skies. Its once-ornate Gothic façade was chipped and rotten. Several of the pointed windows were boarded up, awaiting replacement of their stained glass. Of its northern wing only a few remnants of foundation, like rotting teeth in blackened gums, remained. It was a restoration project stalled for more decades than Brother Armand Defago’s seven and would remain forever stalled. This out-of-the-way ruin was not on the nation’s list of historic monuments, and h
ad no visitors. Neither did the town nearly dead of neglect across the river.

  To its east a modern warehouse surrounded by a rusted wire fence turned its blind face toward the scattered buildings on the other side of the gray waters. Here the yard was filled with decaying plastic bottles, shreds of Styrofoam and plastic bags, cigarette cartons, usually American, and countless empty wine bottles, barely visible in the early dawn light. Everything spoke of desolation and the despair of those who had fallen through the bottom of the welfare state. There was no fresh trash, however, and even Brother Defago thought perhaps the effect was a little staged.

  Ancient graffiti sprayed on the only smooth part of the low stone wall surrounding the abbey spelled something that looked like “SPIKE.” The faded paint caught a random ray of sun through a break in the cloud. The boy who had put the graffiti there had quickly discovered that this was an unfavorable place for spray cans. Word must have gotten out, because no rivals had appeared since to outdo him.

  Uncomfortable as it made him, often the circumstances of his mission forced Brother Defago to give up the traditional white habit and black cloak of the preaching friars. Today he wore a somber, ill-fitting suit, white shirt and black tie. He knew it made him look like a petty bureaucrat. Because of this, it served him better than a more elaborate disguise. Gone were the days when an inquisitor’s uniform could inspire dread and instant obedience. These days they had to work behind the scenes.

  He smoked a cigarette. As the light increased, flax fields in full bloom tinted the earth a pale blue. Low hills, broken by small copses of trees he could not identify from this distance, undulated toward a hazy horizon. Clouds scudded in from the west. In the distance he could hear the early high-speed train to Rouen. Otherwise there was no human sound.

  As he was grinding a second cigarette out under the sole of his leather loafers his cell phone rang. He flipped it open and listened. After a moment he closed it and walked up a broken pavement to the abbey door. With some effort he pulled at a chain and was rewarded by a hollow ringing deep within the building.

  The wait was longer than he would have wished, considering the urgency of his mission, but he was a patient man; one in his position had to be, after all these years. The flax fields, so tranquil and immutable, reminded him that nature continued its endless rounds, indifferent to man’s trivial distractions. There was no outward change in the world.

  Underneath, though, was an incipient tectonic shift. Those trivial distractions would prove to be earthshaking after all. The old enemy was nearly vanquished. Defago’s mission, and that of the many thousands before him, would soon be over.

  He stroked his cheek in satisfaction. It was an old habit: the scar was nearly invisible and few people noticed it any more, especially since it was neatly concealed under his graying beard.

  Still, that pulling sensation at the corner of his eye had never quite gone away. He felt it now, that downward tug, and dropped his hand with a sigh.

  Almost over!

  The door finally creaked open, and he stepped into the gloom.

  The man who had opened it was in his thirties, stolid, thick-muscled, and hideously ugly. His voice was a whispery rasp. “The Prior General is waiting.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Xavier,” Defago muttered.

  The cavernous interior reflected the condition of the outside. Cobwebs spanned many of the windows and filled the corners. Broken furniture – three straight-backed wooden chairs with woven straw seats, a few tattered modern tapestries, an old sofa against the south wall, and a row of empty bookcases – did little to occupy the hollow space. His footsteps echoed on the stone. He barely glanced at the dark opening to a narrow circular stone staircase that led to the basement.

  Brother Defago opened a door on the far side and entered an antechamber with two doors. One belonged to a small but efficient elevator. The other led him into a short corridor lined with cement. He walked along it, avoiding the deepest of the puddles, and stepped through another door into a narrow, warm room, simply furnished with two modern chairs and a desk against the wall. On the desk sat an older model computer, a bound paper agenda, and a set of Tarot cards laid out as if interrupted in the middle of a reading. There was no one at the desk. Defago sniffed at this apparent breach of security, not to mention theology, until the man who had opened the door followed him into the room, sat down and turned over a card, the four of cups: time to re-evaluate an all too familiar environment.

  This bordered on heresy, but Defago compressed his lips and said nothing.

  The door on the opposite side swung open. He stepped through and carefully closed it behind him.

  A heavyset, middle-aged man in a plaid shirt and neatly pressed designer jeans contemplated the river and the town on the other side through a barred window. The dawn light colored his face gunmetal gray. When the door clicked he turned. His face was wide, with cheekbones that jutted to sharp ridges. His prominent nose bent slightly to the left, clearly broken and badly healed long ago. The dark eyes were nearly lost in their pouches of fat. His lipless mouth twitched into something like a smile.

  He lowered his right hand. Defago dropped to one knee and kissed the plain gold ring. “Well?” the Prior General of the Secret Order of Theodosius purred. His smooth, liquid voice throbbed with power.

  “Consummatum est,” Defago said. “Foix is no more.”

  5.

  Lisa paused on the threshold of Raimond Foix’s apartment. Aside from the detective in shirtsleeves examining the parquet near the stairs the apartment appeared unchanged from the first time she set foot here four years earlier. She had expected disorder, things broken or out of place, blood and destruction, but the expensive reproduction of a Greek amphora near the entry door sprouted three ebony umbrella handles as always. The parquet that Marie, the housekeeper, kept so polished still perfectly reflected the harpsichord in the nook of the window overlooking rue du Dragon. Propped on its music stand was, as before, a facsimile of the 1591 edition of William Byrd’s My Ladye Nevells Book open to Sellinger's Round, one of Raimond’s favorite pieces. Behind it was a collection of Dowland Ayres for voice and lute. Was it only Tuesday she had been standing in this very spot, her hand on his shoulder, singing, In Darkness Let Me Dwell? He played his improvised accompaniment and looked back over his shoulder at her. He had been smiling at her, nodding when she reached for the high notes, when she repeated a phrase and he perfectly adapted to her own improvisation.

  The lyrics came back and she froze: “Thus, wedded to my woes, and bedded in my tomb/O, let me, living, living, die, till death do come.”

  He was gone, leaving only this eerie stillness: no music, no bustle from the kitchen. She would never again hear the modest cough he made when he wanted her attention. The twinkle in his eye was extinguished; his spirit had left the apartment. There would be no more tricks, no more wordplay, no more – love was the only word she could find.

  It was a place of death, and it returned, black opening in her heart, the ache in her belly. She had been Foix’s student, colleague and friend for nearly half her life. That emptiness, knowing he was gone…. Thirty-two years old and she felt like an abandoned child.

  Yet she wondered: had he known? Had he chosen that particular song?

  No, it was ridiculous. She was imagining it. He couldn’t have known.

  She wanted to dismiss the thought, send it away. She tried, while at the same time she found she was not surprised, as if she had known all along it was coming. This must be why she had wandered so far from her apartment this morning, why she had left her bed in the darkest hours of the night.

  No, it couldn’t be. She shook her head. “It seems normal,” she said aloud, her voice tight.

  “Yes,” Captain Hugo agreed, and there was something soft in his tone that showed he understood what she was feeling. “No sign of forced entry. Perhaps someone let them in, someone he knew?”

  Ignoring his sharp look she snapped, “Impossible! No one would
want to kill him.”

  Hugo spread his hands. “The impossible happens, Mademoiselle, more often than you might think. Please look again. Anything you notice would help us.”

  “There’s nothing, I tell you. He might have just left, though there would be sounds. Where’s Marie?”

  “The housekeeper? She arrived at seven-thirty. I’m afraid she’s taken this pretty hard. I had someone take her to the station for a statement.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Raimond?”

  He lifted his eyes. “Mademoiselle, I’ve been here since around four o’clock this morning. We’ve been conducting the preliminary investigation. I thought it best to let you see things as they were – you might notice something we would miss, as you are familiar with the victim and the room.”

  Again his look was sharp, and though she managed to ignore it again, a suspicion flooded her. Was she a suspect? Was he only interested in her reactions, what she would do when she saw Raimond’s body?

  “So you said. Upstairs?”

  Hugo nodded. “The study.” He led the way. The staircase turned left at the landing and ended up facing the door to the study. To the left along the landing was the door to his bedroom with its view of the street, and at the far end, the guest room. Both these doors were closed; only the shattered study door gaped open. A short, stocky policeman stood beside it scribbling in a small notebook. He snapped to attention and saluted when Hugo stepped onto the landing. Hugo nodded. “Anything?”

  “Le médecin légiste vient d’arriver, Capitaine.”

  “Très bien, Bernard.”

  Hugo stood aside.

  Lisa paused at the threshold. “I don’t know that term,” she said. “Médecin légiste.”