“Well, thank you for all your help,” he said sarcastically, wiping the back of his neck and forehead dry of sweat. “Did I mention that I had a heart condition and my doctor has recommended that I rest?”
“Then get another job,” Tacit retorted, swinging his legs over the edge of the wall of the water fountain along which he had lain, recuperating. He was in no mood to help move boxes. If anything, he would have spent the time peering through their contents, but seeing as there were so many boxes and he didn’t wish to arouse suspicion, he decided that an hour under the restorative sun would do him more good. Also the lead of Father Andreas’ brother was an unexpected turn up. “Come on, let’s go,” Tacit clapped, helping Isabella from the wall with a politely offered hand.
“Go where?” the caretaker retorted. “I’m going for a drink first. You didn’t play fair. If you’d offered to help, maybe I would have taken you there first. But seeing as you decided to lounge around waiting for me to finish my lugging, then you can damn well wait around while I do a bit of glugging.”
Tacit stepped up to the man and, towering over him, shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he grunted. “You’ve kept us waiting long enough. Let’s hop to it,” Tacit barked, tugging at the man’s coat sleeve.
The caretaker grumbled the whole way back to his house and that of Alessandro Dequois next door. When they arrived, at first they said that there must be some mistake. The house was a butcher’s shop.
“He lives above the shop,” the landlord gestured with his thumb. “And thank you again for your help,” he said, gruffly, shuffling off to his own door. “If I die of cardiac arrest, I’ll make sure you’re not asked to give last rites.”
“We should have helped him,” Isabella suggested, watching the man slam the door of his home shut behind him. “If only to get here sooner.”
“He clearly needs the exercise,” Tacit growled back. “And I needed that rest. Come on, let’s see what this brother knows.”
Isabella grabbed the pull handled bell to the side of the wide shop fronted window. Only silence returned the greeting. Tacit pulled the handle again, more forcefully this time.
“It doesn’t matter how hard you pull it,” Isabella chided. “It’s all on the same mechanism.”
Tacit muttered something dark under his breath. He shoved his hands into his pockets and peered into the window of the shop.
“Looks closed,” he mumbled, sniffing at something in his nose.
“Maybe he’s in mourning?” Isabella answered, looking up the street. “Gone away. Wouldn’t be surprised. If you’d lost your brother.”
The Sister stood back from the building and peered up its front towards the large bay window facing down onto the street. The curtains were drawn, the room beyond dark, deserted. She turned away, looking up the street. At that moment, a dark haired woman appeared at the far end of it. She took a few steps in and then, on seeing Isabella and Tacit outside Alessandro’s house, checked her step.
“Tacit!” hissed Isabella, the urgency of her tone spinning the Inquisitor to look.
Immediately, Sandrine took a couple of short steps back to the corner from which she had appeared, turned and vanished around it.
“After her!” cried Tacit, bounding up the street with his long thunderous strides. Isabella was moving with him but was lighter and swifter, running like a gazelle despite her heavy travelling robes. She flew down the street in front of him, skipping into the road down which Sandrine had slunk. At the far end of it, a hundred yards away, Isabella could see Sandrine dart right into a side street. She was quick.
Without pausing to think, pausing to look back for Tacit, Isabella shot after her, her arms pumping like pistons, her Sister’s habit gathered up and drawn tight to her body as she ran. She reached the side street just as Sandrine turned off it, far off in the distance. It was a narrow and cobbled lane. There was a collapsed building halfway along it; rubble spewed out across it. She set off down it, leaping the rubble in a single bound.
She could hear Tacit huffing hard behind her, his heavy footsteps clacking echoes between the houses. Isabella thrust her head down and found another gear in her legs, tearing into the street down which Sandrine had flown. Her heart beat. The wind whistled in her hair and past her ears. She felt alive and charged.
Then, unceremoniously, she thudded head first into a baker coming the other way, loaves and baskets scattering in all directions. They went down in a cursing, tumbling tangle, dashing knees and elbows, as they fell and rolled. Tacit appeared around the corner and recovered the Sister from the man with whom she had collided. He was shouting and cursing, but his words were swallowed up when the immense figure of the Inquisitor loomed over the top of him and swiped the Sister away.
“She turned right at the top,” Isabella cried, trying to find her rhythm again above the ache in her knee. Her lungs burnt, her arms and legs stung from the fall.
“She’s quick,” puffed Tacit, soaked with sweat.
They reached the turning and instantly stopped, hugging the wall for breath, trying to get oxygen into their tightening lungs. Ahead was a dead end. A row of terraced houses on the left and right led to a solid wall, as high as the houses either side of it.
They had her.
Breathing a little more gently, the pair wandered slowly into the cul-de-sac, their eyes wide, darting about them, their senses sharpened, looking to see any movements which might be the woman attempting to climb out of the dead end to freedom.
“You hear a door open?” Tacit demanded to know, looking along the row of terraced houses and their front doors.
Isabella shook her head.
“Me neither.”
He stood in the middle of the dark cobbled street, halfway between the junction and the dead end, and turned slowly around on the spot, peering about himself in every angle. Some trickery was at play. Either that, or Isabella had been wrong and the woman had not turned right at all. For Sandrine had vanished.
Suddenly Isabella called, “Tacit! Here!”
She was looking down at a flagstone near to the far wall. The large grey coloured stone had been moved to one side, revealing a dark hole descending down into the darkness beyond.
Their eyes touched for the briefest of moments and then Tacit was heaving the large flagstone to the side to allow better access inside. They peered down into the gloom.
“Ladder,” said Isabella, indicating the rusted bars sinking down into the blackness.
There was a damp vague smell of mould which rose up from the depths.
“Must be the medieval tunnels Cardinal Poré spoke about,” said Tacit, his breath slowly gathering itself. He looked back up the street to the junction from which they had come. He passed the flat of his hand across his eyes, wiping sweat from them, and looked back into the blackness below.
“After me?” he asked, looking at the Sister and then back to the hole. She nodded and at once he clambered forward, dropping himself down onto the first rungs of the ladder, sinking slowly into the gloom.
Isabella watched him vanish into the yawning mouth. She hesitated for a moment and then lent forward to follow.
“It’s alright,” Tacit called wryly. “I won’t look up.”
It was almost pitch black in the tunnel. The ladder sank twenty feet down onto a hard chalk floor. The air was damp, cool, heavy with a musty smell of lichen and stale vegetables. From the light above they could make out the walls of the cavern, ten feet wide, roughly hewn from the chalk beneath the city. In front of them ran a narrow low tunnel, only darkness within it, only darkness beyond.
Tacit stepped forward and forced his way into it, his body almost too big for the opening to the tunnel. Isabella went after him, her more delicate frame more suited to the confines of the passageway.
Within a few steps, neither of them could see a thing.
“Completely black,” Tacit called back, his hand on the wall beside him, feeling his way. He stopped and hung his head, gathering his breat
h.
“We can’t go on, Tacit. It’s too dark. She must have left herself a lantern down here.”
Tacit peered on into the gloom. “Damn it!” he roared, and whacked a clenched fist into the smooth chalk of the right hand wall.
FORTY TWO
11:24. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14TH, 1914. ARRAS. FRANCE.
Isabella was still brushing the chalk dust from her clothes when Tacit wrenched on the door pull outside Alessandro’s house in a second and now even more heated attempt to try and raise some response from inside. The hand pull reminded Tacit of the bell used to announce guests at the residence of an old Father in Prague. Tacit had broken the Father’s front four teeth and his left arm the time the Father had laid a hand on his thigh when Tacit was fifteen. The Father later claimed he’d fallen down the stairs.
Isabella found herself smiling as she looked at him.
“You look like you’ve climbed out of the crypt,” she said, raising an eyebrow and a smirk.
Tacit scowled. “You shouldn’t say such things.”
“For the Lord’s sake. Does everything need to be so dark?” The tone of her voice caught Tacit by surprise.
“What’s there to lighten up about?” he replied, grumbling and dragging on the door pull again.
“Life! Look around you, Tacit.”
The Inquisitor peered about himself absently and then shook his head. His hand was back on the bell pull. “We lost our main suspect,” he moaned, dragging on the pull again. “That is nothing to cheer about.”
“Don’t you ever realise the beauty that’s around you?” asked Isabella, her face breaking with joy. Tacit caught sight of it, and didn’t like it. “Don’t you ever want to embrace what life is giving you?”
Tacit gave her a lean stare. “No,” he spat, shaking down the sleeve of his coat.
“What is it with you?” Isabella cried, surprising herself at her reaction to the Inquisitor’s dismissive attitude.
“We’ve chosen a path,” he answered, his hand still on the pull. “You’d be wise to remember that, Sister.”
“And why must the path be so dark, eh?” she hissed back, stepping towards him.
“You’re not an Inquisitor,” Tacit barked back, “you wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand people. I understand a little about life. Tell me, Tacit, when did it get so dark for you?”
The Sister was surprised to see Tacit turn his head away, as if he didn’t want her to see his face. “What is it?” she asked, looking to see what Tacit was hiding from her. She peered around his bulk and was sure she saw a pain in his eyes, a real human pain. “Tacit?” she muttered, coming forward with her hands raised to place on him. “I’m sorry if I’ve said anything …”
At once the Inquisitor’s face hardened. A blackness forged itself within it.
“Enough talk,” he snarled, heaving hard at the bell pull. “Like I said, you wouldn’t understand.”
A light from a lantern wavered at the far end of the butcher’s shop and a figure stepped slowly up to the front of the glass, drawing both Isabella and Tacit towards it. Alessandro stood behind the plate glass, dishevelled and unkempt, straining to see who was bothering him.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Alessandro?” Isabella called through the window.
“Who is it? What do you want?” The appearance of unexpected and unknown visitors when he felt at his most exhausted unnerved him.
“We’re here about your brother. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I’ve already spoken to the Church,” he answered.
“We’re not with them.”
“Then who are you?” he asked, looking them up and down and finding himself wondering if there was some carnival taking place in the city. “I’ve got nothing to say. And I’ve got none of his stuff, if that’s what you’re after.”
“Alessandro Dequois!” roared Tacit, his face tight against the glass. “Get this door open and save yourself having to buy a new one!”
The kitchen was heavy with the faint smell of rot and nicotine, the residue of animal blood staining every surface. A small rickety table, one leg damaged, stood in the centre of the room with two equally wonky, and seemingly broken, chairs. Alessandro pulled at his shirt and explained that he lived alone.
“Ever get visitors?” asked Tacit, noticing the large bottle of cognac, partially drunk, and two glasses beside it.
Alessandro said nothing about Sandrine.
“No,” he said.
“I heard you were quite the socialite,” replied Isabella, walking over to the far side of the kitchen and resting her weight against the side of the sink. The caretaker had heard of Alessandro’s political views, of his well attended gatherings, and had passed this information on to the Inquisitor and Sister. “Quite the radical, I was told.”
Alessandro put his heavy eyes onto Isabella and then onto Tacit. “What is this?” he asked. “What’s this all about? My brother dies of a heart attack and you come round, whoever you are, and start insulting and intimidating me?”
Isabella and Tacit’s eyes met. Alessandro caught the sign between them.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?” he demanded, his hands suddenly clenched tight together.
“Is that what they told you?” asked Isabella, resting back on her elbows. “The Cathedral?”
“About the heart attack? Yes. Why?”
“Mister Dequois,” grunted Tacit, “I suggest you sit down.”
FORTY THREE
AUGUST 24TH, 1914. PARIS. FRANCE.
They talked long into the night, Cardinal Bishop Monteria barely pausing for breath as he unveiled his plans, Cardinal Poré listening to his every word, his eyes growing wider as the night grew darker and the Cardinal Bishop’s vision became more daring and clearer. For most of the time Poré sat in silence, his hand fixed to his chin, his mouth dry, his wine standing untouched to the side in his goblet. How could he think about drinking at this time when such revelations were being unveiled. Only occasionally did he interrupt Monteria’s flow, interjecting with suggestions of his own, raising occasional doubts, posing questions, both of faith and logistics.
But mostly he found himself congratulating the Cardinal Bishop on his audacious vision. “It is brilliant!” he muttered, when at last Monteria finished talking, tears coming to his eyes at the wonder of such a plan. “A Mass for Peace to bring all the peoples of the world together!” he exclaimed, candlelight flashing in his glistening eyes.
“To leave a lasting legacy for all to remember,” replied Monteria gently.
“We have no time to waste.” Cardinal Poré could feel the urgency rise like an energy inside him.
“Leave all the arrangements at Notre Dame to me,” said the old man, reaching for his wine to clear his parched throat. He paused and looked hard at Poré. “Are you sure I can rely on you to carry out your side of the bargain?”
“Don’t worry,” Poré replied, lowering his head so that shadows gathered in his eye sockets, “leave everything else to me.”
FORTY FOUR
11:31. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14TH, 1914. ARRAS. FRANCE.
Alessandro was truthful when he said he rarely received guests, but he was fond of visits from one of his friends, Paul Govain, a political sparring partner from the market with whom he shared a common interest – if rarely a similar view – in anything to do with the politics of the day. Debates between them would take place long into the night over a meal or just drinks, about politics, the market, the war. The two rickety chairs in the kitchen served a purpose – too uncomfortable to constrain thinking or encourage sleep. He explained this to the Inquisitor and Sister, as he went off to find a third chair and one sturdy enough to hold the bulk of Tacit. He returned a few minutes later brandishing a large oak chair with ornately sculpted arm rests.
“My thinking chair,” Alessandro said, setting it down next to Tacit. The Inquisitor sat in it and looked like a pious judge. He took off his black ca
pello hat and placed it on the table in front of him.
The coffee pot began to sing, filling the kitchen with its sweet rich aroma, masking the rancid stench of week-old meat from the kitchen tops and shop below. Alessandro removed the pot from the hob with a cloth and set it on a stone mat on the table.
“Would you like me to do that?” asked Isabella, watching the young man gather white chipped cups and a sugar bowl, rattling them with his trembling, tired hands. Tacit peered out of the window onto the Arras skyline. The bright hot weather was beginning to change. Bad weather was starting to move in. He could hear the sound of distant gunfire, the dull thud of exploding shells somewhere along the front. The Germans had found their voice again. He wondered if Arras would shortly be in their sights once more.
Alessandro shook his head at the Sister’s offer of help and put the cups down on the table. “Can you hear them?” Alessandro asked, collecting some small spoons from a drawer. “The shells? At the front? Boom, boom. I thought I’d heard the last of them.” He set himself down at the table and poured the coffee into the three cups. It looked as strong as death. “Hope you like it black? I’ve no milk or cream.”
“No, black is fine,’ Isabella replied.
“Been no milk for the last week. All this boom boom. Stopping supplies, I suppose. Not much of anything anymore. And I’ve not been out. Not for the last, I don’t know, how many days or so.” He shook his head and set the coffee pot down on the stone. He rubbed his eyes and then closed them for a while, lost in private thought.
“So,” he said, drawing the word out as if expelling the weight of misery from inside him by doing so. “Tell me then, what’s going on? What has happened? Don’t treat me like a fool,” he added, firmly.
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