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

by Rob Swigart

  “The back? Looks like it’s all sculpture.”

  She laughed, and again Lisa noticed how musical her laugh was, and how white and even her teeth.

  “Don’t be fooled,” Sylvaine said when her laughter subsided. “There are paintings back there, too. As I said, no one’s been down here in a long time. Rooms like this are hard to clear out. All the objects have to be listed, cataloged, and investigated, just in case. Sometimes we have to search for families, find heirs, return the art. There’s no budget for that. In the end, no one can be bothered. Not even that dealer yesterday wanting to look through our storage.”

  Lisa, holding a catalog card, looked up at Steve.

  He was leaning over a large, awkward Mediterranean landscape. “Dealer?” he said, elaborately casual.

  “Yes. Asked at the ticket window if it was possible to examine the storage rooms.”

  “Looking for anything specific?”

  “No, just expressed an interest in the sixteenth century. I only thought of it because that’s the period you’re interested in. Kind of a coincidence, no?”

  Steve stood back to show Lisa the last painting. “Well?”

  She replaced a card and took out another before looking at it. She shook her head,.

  “Size might help,” Sylvaine suggested.

  “We don’t know the size, only the name.”

  “Then I imagine you’ll be here for some time; there are probably hundreds that haven’t been cataloged. I’ll leave you to it. But please, Étienne, don’t take anything without talking to me first.”

  “If we find the painting…”

  “I might be able to arrange a loan. After all, bankers are notoriously trustworthy. But there are protocols, you know.”

  “Yes, we do,” he muttered, staring at the second group of paintings. Before the older woman reached the door he called over his shoulder, “This dealer, what did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. I told the office to turn him away. Want me to ask?”

  “If you don’t mind. It could be important.”

  After Sylvaine left they worked in silence. An hour later Lisa closed the last file drawer and wiped her forehead. “Nothing. We could be here for days at this rate.”

  Steve straightened and stretched his back. “Yup,” he said in his very best Gary Cooper voice. “But do not forsake me, oh, my darlin’.”

  “Don’t be silly. We have to find a way to speed this up.”

  The door opened and Sylvaine looked in. “Mediterranean.”

  “Excuse me?” Lisa said. “You mean the man who asked yesterday, the dealer?”

  “Not a man,” Sylvaine said. “Josie was busy, lots of tourists for March, but the request was odd and the woman waited around for my answer. Josie thought by her looks and accent the woman was Cypriot, perhaps. Or Lebanese.”

  “Young? Old?”

  “Too young to be a dealer, Josie thought. She assumed the request came from someone else. The girl wore a headscarf, but wasn’t Muslim. Josie also noticed the girl’s necklace, a peculiar cross with a snake climbing it.”

  “Like a caduceus?”

  Steve looked from one to the other during this exchange.

  Sylvaine shrugged. “Could be, I suppose. I didn’t see it. When Josie asked, the girl left without saying anything. Josie says that’s why she remembered as much as she did, because the girl’s behavior was suspicious. How’s the hunt going?”

  Steve shook his head. “It’s going to take some time.”

  “We close at 1745.”

  “We’ll be ready,” Lisa said.

  After the door closed behind Sylvaine, Steve stared at Lisa.

  “We’ll find it,” she repeated. “We have to.”

  They flipped through landscapes, portraits of forgotten worthies, obscure saints, depictions of crucifixions and miracles, temptations and martyrdoms. They finished the left side and started on the right. At 4:15 they finished that as well.

  Lisa scratched her scalp, looking thoughtfully at the crammed sculptures toward the far end. Like the paintings, they were covered with a thick layer of dust. “That’s all that’s left.” She lifted a statue of the Virgin and moved it away. Half an hour later they had two lines of sculptures all the way to the door, and a path to the back wall. Amongst the statues of virgins and saints, Roman copies of Greek statues, gargoyles and busts of anonymous burghers, they found several small paintings. Some had fallen on the floor. They gathered and discarded them all.

  “Have we wasted the day?” Lisa wondered in a rare moment of self-doubt.

  “You’re the Pythia,” he answered seriously. “You tell me.” After a pause he said, “Why?”

  “Why are we trying to find this possibly imaginary child?” She thought it over, staring around the room at the shelves of medieval bric-à-brac, dozens of objects— small vases, candle stands, lanterns, reliquaries, but no more paintings.

  With an impatient gesture with her hand, she said, “Because Frédo was afraid for his friend; because Ophis Sophia attacked us; because prophecy is our business; and perhaps above all, because I have a feeling. Look at that, will you?” She pointed at a shelf beside the door.

  He turned. “What?”

  “That lantern.”

  “What about it? I’m not an art historian, but it looks like an ordinary Medieval lantern, metal, with horn panels. Come on, we looked at those shelves when we started.”

  “I know. Look at it again.”

  “All right, but…” He took it down. “Oh. You knew!” He showed her the panel that had been facing the wall. It was about five inches square and filled by a miniature painting. “Woman with infant. Not too different from thousands of Madonna and child paintings from the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” he observed.

  Lisa said, “Except across the bottom is a decorative Latin banner proclaiming the title: Miraculous Child.”

  “We should have found it sooner,” he snarled, suddenly angry. “Sorry. I’m mad at myself for not noticing. We were looking for a painting, not a lantern. Now what?”

  “Now we look to the light.”

  Steve laugh was deep and his eyes crinkled with delight. “You are the Pythia!”

  “As if you had any doubt!”

  “As if I had any doubt.” He slid the panel from the lantern and held it up to one of the hanging bulbs. “Nothing I can see. I guess that would have been too easy. What frequency light did they use in fifteenth century Edessa? Candles. Tallow? Let’s go see Sylvaine.”

  She was collecting her things when they came into her office. “Did you find it? We’re about to close.”

  Steve held up the lantern.

  “A lantern? Hmm, fifteenth century, probably, and quite ordinary. What of it?”

  He showed her the horn panel with its miniature Madonna.

  “Now that is curious.” She adjusted her glasses. “This is it? Miraculous Child? Rather banal, I’m afraid, worthless, really. Besides, you said it was a copy. True, this panel looks a bit newer than the others, which is only a little odd. What’s more odd is that I’ve never seen a lantern with a miniature like this. It would cut the light.” She straightened. “So, what makes it special?”

  “We’re not sure,” Steve said with a slight shrug. “Apparently the painter— the copyist— was a distant ancestor of our client. We were asked to find and authenticate it, if possible. Some family legend. We’d like to borrow it overnight for analysis. Non-destructive, of course.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “It would be most helpful to our client. And of course to the bank.”

  Lisa had been watching this duplicitous exchange with admiration.

  “Non-destructive? No chips or samples taken? Promise me.” Sylvaine peered more closely at the painting. She straightened. “And useful to the bank, which has been generous… I repeat that I believe it’s a waste of your time, but as long as you bring it back….”

  Steve kissed her cheek. “You won’t regret it.

>   “I’d better not, lover,” she murmured. He rolled his eyes and she laughed. “Now get out of here. It’s closing time.”

  Steve slipped the horn panel back into the lantern and they left. The tourists were gone and dusk was falling over the Latin Quarter.

  “What now?” Lisa asked, brushing dust off her skirt and sleeves.

  “Now we look to the light, as you said. I know someone who knows his optics. Unless you think we can find the original?”

  “Doubtful, now. Perhaps later.”

  “I’ll give him a call, make sure he’s there.”

  Steve stepped back under the chestnut tree to call.

  Lisa stared fixedly at the miniature painting.

  He touched her shoulder. She didn’t move. “We’ll take the Metro,” he said. “Let’s go.” Still she didn’t move. “What is it?”

  She moved the tip of her finger over the mother’s wide face. Her finger, nail dark as dried blood in the twilight, was trembling. The infant in the picture was looking at something beyond the frame. The young mother’s face, tinged with gray, either from the lighting, the age of the painting, or a special artistic palette, seemed to hint at some kind of mental slowness, but the melancholy gaze she directed at the child was suffused with fierce determination and a quality of relentless and stolid endurance. This was not a woman to be trifled with.

  Lisa’s voice was strained and urgent. “I know this woman. I was hanging under that boulder at the Rochers des Souris when I saw this broad gray face and square teeth. She’s alive now, today, and she’s suffering, Steve. Her time is coming soon and she suffers horribly. We have to find her before Ophis Sophia. She needs our help.”

  He nodded. “Then we’d better move.”

  Steganograph

  They emerged from the Bibliothèque François Mitterand Metro station into sultry evening darkness and walked to the new campus of the Université de Paris Diderot not far from the national library. Beyond the campus the Seine flowed sedately.

  “So what’s his name, this friend who’ll show us the light?” Lisa’s somber expression belied her easy tone.

  “Panagiotis Skordas,” Steve said. “He’s from Thessaloniki.”

  “Skordas?” Lisa repeated. The light changed and they crossed the street. “Greek for garlic.”

  “Everyone calls him Pan, which I’m pretty sure he’d prefer to Garlic. He claims to be a kind of playful god, which may be true. He’s the best there is at what he does.”

  “Optics.”

  “He’s the man to find messages hidden in images— it’s his expertise, a… classified specialty.”

  She nodded. “So he’s a cryptographer, which means some kind of spook. Or helps spooks, perhaps the Brigade de renseignement et de guerre électronique? Cyber terrorism, cybercrime.”

  “Most amusing, Mlle. Emmer, but I won’t dignify with a reply. That information’s also classified.”

  “We’re the Delphi Agenda, Steve. There are no secrets, not from us.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  “Of course, that’s what makes our current predicament so frustrating, but it will become clear.”

  “Mostly, as I said, what Pan does, for us and as you suspected, other agencies, is steganography— finding or hiding messages in images, very popular these days with certain jihadist groups who like to hide messages in movies on popular porn sites.”

  “Is that so? What does that tell us about sexual repression in the internet age?”

  “I’m not going to touch that one. I will only say that Bruno was a clever devil, but as far as we know he didn’t use pornography.”

  She sniffed.

  They walked across a bridge over a sloping grassy plaza toward Les Grands Moulins. Beyond, the new university buildings were islands of serenity sandwiched between the rue Marguerite Duras and the Quai Panhard et Levassor along the river.

  The entrance to the physics building was on a narrow street perpendicular to the river. Oddly, even after the spate of recent terrorist attacks, there was no special security. They walked straight to Pan’s ground floor office.

  The Greek physicist leaped to his feet with an effusive shout. “Steven, paidi mou!” He was short, stocky, round-faced, and thickly bearded. Dark ringlets merged with the beard and framed a prominent bald patch. His crisp blue eyes shimmered with good humor. His office windows looked across the quay onto the river. The lights of passing automobiles and a barge tied up at the Port de Tolbiac punctuated the darkness outside. “Now, you must be Lisa!” he shouted, knocking a stack of journals from a chair. “Lovely, lovely.” Without waiting for replies, he shoved the magazines loosely together with his shoe and wheeled the chair forward. “Please, please, sit, sit.”

  “Thanks, Pan.”

  He grinned, showing a mouthful of wildly disordered teeth. “Good, good, you know my name, I know your name. Now, my friends, let me see this painting you’ve brought me. It conceals a puzzle, yes?”

  Steve held out the lantern. Pan squinted at it, moving his head back and forth. “Good one,” he murmured with a satisfied nod. “Sixty percent transparency, more or less. This lantern would never illuminate one’s way through dark streets at night, certainly, so this painting is definitely of great significance. Just quick look at the colors suggests cobalt, potassium, arsenic, cadmium, copper… so many lovely elements, metals. Yes, Étienne, it’s as interesting as you said. British? The work of an alchemist worthy of Paracelsus himself, late sixteenth century, no doubt about it, British, yes. Don’t see a message, though.”

  Lisa cried, “But…”

  “Don’t worry, saying I don’t see doesn’t mean it’s not there. No, no, this will be most enjoyable, a challenge, usually the messages are concealed in digital material, but this, a real painting, po-po, a challenge, yes, but I hope a minor. It’s all a matter of ångstroms, you see, little waves of light, so tiny, but today we will see them, no problem.” He handed back the lantern. “Shall we?”

  He led them upstairs to a windowless but brightly lit laboratory lined with high-tech benches covered with lasers, spectroscopes, ovens, gasifiers, and other machines Lisa couldn’t identify, except most looked extremely destructive.

  Lisa set the lantern on a table and removed the horn panel. She stopped to stare at the woman’s face for a long minute, taking in the drooping eyelids, the poignant, melancholy, gap-toothed smile, the sense of compassion and foreboding in her expression. The swaddled child was still staring into some hidden dimension.

  The background of amorphous gray and brown rock and dark greenery shimmered behind the two figures. From somewhere above a light, perhaps the moon, brushed the hood of her cloak. Some might see a halo. With a sigh Lisa handed the painting to Pan, who locked it in a frame and slid the frame into one of the tabletop devices.

  “Be careful,” Steve warned. “The Cluny wants it back in one piece.”

  “Valuable, is it?”

  “Well…”

  “That’s what I thought. Just the same, we’ll do nothing destructive.” The machine hummed. A shadowed, rapidly shifting pattern of blotches and swirls flickered on a computer screen, barely recognizable as a mother and child. Images in various colors came and went, changing like a kaleidoscope. Suddenly, Pan stopped and stepped back. “There, you see?”

  “Can’t say I do,” Steve answered.

  “There.” Lisa touched a tiny scintillation of blue in the image.

  “Good, very good.” Pan nodded vigorously. “This color’s called smalt, cobalt oxide and potassium carbonate, and silica, of course. Sometimes other things. Cobalt, by the way, has an ionic radius of .745 ångströms. Supposedly, smalt wouldn’t be discovered for another century, not publicly, but alchemists knew secrets long before publication.” Pan continued lecturing while he adjusted the machine. “Johannes Trithemius wrote the first book on steganography. It wasn’t published until a century after his death since he was accused of dabbling in the occult, you see. The book finally appeared in 1606, six year
s after Bruno was burned at the stake, but there’s no doubt Bruno had read Trithemius in manuscript. He had the knowledge to do something like this.”

  Before Steve could interrupt his continuous flow of trivia, Pan straightened. “Those blue dots you see in the image only show up like this when properly illuminated. All a matter of finding the right wavelengths. Ångströms, you see?”

  He made another adjustment and a new constellation of bright points appeared across the top half of the painting.

  “Can you connect them?” Lisa suggested, adding, “I doubt it’s going to be so easy. Bruno was a subtle man.”

  Pan drew some red lines on the screen to connect the blue points, but nothing coherent emerged. He frowned and tried again, with the same result. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he muttered.

  He altered the source light again, and a rainbow flashed through the painting. New dots winked in and out of existence. “Well, well,” he murmured, looking at a spectrograph. “He was indeed a subtle man, far ahead of his time. Much alchemy here: a century before Newton he seems to have ferreted out some of the deeper secrets of optics. This blend of metals and salts… I’ve never seen it before.” He shook his head. “This could change the history of science.”

  “You can’t publish,” Steve said gravely.

  Pan looked up in surprise. “Whyever not? It could be important stuff.”

  “There are reasons, the most important being the absence of evidence to support you.”

  Pan tucked his chin into his neck and shook his head; it gave him an owlish look. “No evidence, you say?”

  “Goes back to the Cluny. Immediately. No copies, physical or digital, no record at all of its existence. It’s not even in the Cluny catalog and must stay that way.”

  Pan shrugged. “You’re a hard man, Steve Viginaire. There’s this painting. Well, never mind, I’m used to it. Of course Pan Skordas agrees.”

  The image stabilized around a dense smattering of scintillating points. This time they formed into letters, words, sentences. He turned to Lisa with a grin.