by Glenn Cooper
Hugo clucked knowingly at the sight of devastation and presented his card. Hugo was a small, compact man in his forties with no excess body fat. His nose was broad but otherwise his features were chiselled and quite handsome. He looked elegant, perfectly coiffed and urbane in a closely fitted and buttoned brown sports jacket, tan slacks and an open-necked white shirt made of the finest Egyptian cotton which shimmered against his skin. He had the musky scent of good cologne. The abbot, on the other hand, wore traditional loose robe and sandals and gave off the odours of a sausage lunch and sweaty skin. It seemed like a time warp had brought the two men together.
‘Thank you for coming all the way from Paris,’ Dom Menaud offered.
‘Not at all. This is what I do. And when the archbishop calls, I run.’
‘He is a good friend to our order,’ the abbot replied. ‘We are grateful for his help and yours. Very little was burned,’ he added, gesturing around the room. ‘It’s all water damage, and smoke.’
‘Well, there isn’t much we can ever do about flames but water and smoke: these can be rectified – if one has the correct knowledge and tools.’
‘And money.’
Hugo laughed nervously. ‘Well, yes, money is an important factor too. If I may say, Dom Menaud, I am pleased I can converse with you so normally. I haven’t worked with Trappists before. I thought there might be, well, a vow of silence that was followed here. I imagined having to pass notes back and forth.’
‘A misconception, Monsieur Pineau. We endeavour to maintain a certain discipline, to speak when needed, to avoid frivolous and unnecessary discussion. We find that idle chat tends to distract us from our spiritual focus and monastic pursuits.’
‘This concept suits me fine, Dom Menaud. I’m eager to get to work. Let me explain how we do business at H. Pineau Restorations. Then we can survey the task and set ourselves an action plan. Yes?’
They sat at the reading table while Hugo launched into a tutorial on the salvage of water-damaged library materials. The older the book, he explained, the greater its water absorbency. Material of the antiquity of the abbey’s might absorb up to two hundred per cent of its weight in water. If a decision was taken to address, say five thousand water-laden volumes, then some eight tonnes of water must be removed!
The best method for restoring soaked books was to freeze them followed by a process of vacuum freeze drying under carefully controlled conditions. The outcome for parchment and paper might be excellent but, depending on the specific materials and the amount of swelling, bindings may have to be redone. Fungicidal treatments were essential to combat the spread of mould growth but his firm had perfected successful approaches to killing the microbes by introducing ethylene oxide gas into the drying cycles of their industrial-sized freeze-drying tanks.
Hugo answered the abbot’s well-reasoned questions then broached the delicate subject of cost. He prefaced the discussion with his standard speech that it was invariably more cost-effective to replace volumes that were still in print and apply restoration techniques only to older irreplaceable ones. Then he gave a rough estimate of the typical price tag per thousand books and studied the abbot’s face for a reaction. Usually at this stage of his sales pitch, the curator or librarian would start swearing but the abbot was impassive and certainly did not spew oaths.
‘We’ll have to prioritise, of course. We can’t do everything but we must salvage the sacred history of the abbey. We will find a way to pay. We have a roofing fund we can tap. We have some small paintings we can sell. There’s one book, an early French translation of St Benedict we’d be loathe to part with but…’ He sighed pathetically. ‘And you can help too, Monsieur, by offering us a price that reflects our ecclesiastical status.’
Hugo grinned. ‘Of course, Dom Menaud, of course. Let’s have a look around, shall we?’
They spent the afternoon poking through the piles of wet books, making a rough inventory, and setting up a ranking system based on the abbot’s assessment of historical value. Finally, the young monk brought them a tray of tea and biscuits and the abbot took the opportunity to point out one small book wrapped in a hand cloth. It was set apart from the others at the far end of the reading table.
‘I’d like your opinion about this one, Monsieur Pineau.’
Hugo thirstily slurped at his tea before putting on another pair of latex gloves. He unwrapped the towel and inspected the elegant red-leather bindings. ‘Well, this is something special! What is it?’
‘In truth, I don’t know. I didn’t even know we had it. One of the firemen found it inside that wall. The cover was stuck. I didn’t force it.’
‘A good decision. It’s a cardinal rule unless you really know what you’re doing. It’s very saturated, isn’t it? Look at the green smudge on the edges of the pages here and here. And here’s a spot of red. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are coloured illustrations. Vegetable-based pigments can run.’
He applied light pressure to the front cover and remarked, ‘These pages aren’t going to come apart without a good freeze-drying but I might be able to lift up the cover to see the flyleaf. Are you game?’
‘If you can do it safely.’
Hugo retrieved a leather clutch from his briefcase and unbuttoned it. It contained an assortment of precision tools with points, wedges and hooks, not unlike a small dissection or dental kit. He chose a tiny spatula with an ultra-fine blade and started working it under the front cover, advancing it millimetre by millimetre with the steady hand of a safe cracker or a bomb defuser.
He spent a good five minutes freeing the entire perimeter of the cover, inserting that spatula a centimetre or so all around, and then with gentle traction, the cover peeled away from the frontispiece and hinged open.
The abbot leaned over Hugo’s shoulder and gasped audibly as together they read the boldly written inscription on the flyleaf, rendered in a flowing and confident Latin script: Ruac, 1307 I, Barthomieu, friar of Abbey Ruac, am two hundred and twenty years old and this is my story.
TWO
Midway between Bordeaux and Paris, from his first-class compartment of the TGV, Luc Simard was waging a pitched battle between the twin interests that perpetually consumed him: work and women.
He was seated on the right-hand side of the carriage in the row of singles, working on revisions to one of his papers under peer review at Nature. The flat green countryside whizzed past his tinted windows but the scenery went largely unnoticed as he struggled to find the right English phrase to frame his amended conclusions. As recently as four years ago, when he was living in the States, this language block would have been inconceivable; he found it remarkable how rusty these skills became when they went unused, even for a bona fide bilingual speaker such as he.
He had noticed the two lovely ladies, seated side-by-side on the left of the carriage a couple of rows ahead who kept turning, smiling then chatting among themselves just loud enough for him to hear,
‘I think he’s a movie star.’
‘Which one?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe a singer.’
‘Go ask him.’
‘You.’
It would have been breathtakingly easy to gather up his papers and invite them to the cafe car. Then, inevitably, an exchange of numbers before they disembarked at Montparnasse station. Maybe one of them, maybe both, would be available for a late drink after his dinner with Hugo Pineau.
But he absolutely had to finish the paper then fully prepare a lecture before he returned to Bordeaux. He didn’t have time for this impromptu meeting and had told Hugo as much, but his old school chum had begged – literally pleaded with him – to make time. He had something to show him and it had to be done in person. He’d promised that Luc wouldn’t be disappointed and in any event, they’d have a blowout dinner for old time’s sake. And, oh yes, first-class travel and a good room at the Royal Monceau, courtesy of Hugo’s firm.
Luc settled back to his paper, a study of population kinetics among European hunter-gathere
rs during the Glacial Maximum of the Upper Paleolithic. It was incredible to think that as late as thirty thousand years ago there’d only been some five thousand humans in all of Europe, if his team’s calculations were correct. Five thousand souls, a number precariously close to zero! If these few hearty ones hadn’t found sufficient refuge from the numbing cold in the protected havens of the Perigord, Cantabria and the Iberian coasts then neither of these giggling young ladies – or anyone else – would be there today.
But the women were relentless with their whispering and their glances. Apparently they were bored or maybe he was simply too ruggedly irresistible, with his thick black hair spilling over his collar, the heavy two-day growth on his jaw, the pencil dangling like a cigarette from his lips, the cowboy boots extending rakishly from his tight jeans into the aisle. In some ways he looked like a much younger man, but his need for reading glasses balanced the image nearer to the forty-four-year-old professor he was.
One more furtive smile from the prettier of the two girls, the one on the aisle, broke down his wavering resistance. He sighed, put away his papers, and in three long strides he was standing over them. All he needed to say was a friendly, ‘Hello.’
The girl on the aisle bubbled over, ‘Hi. My friend and I were wondering who you are.’
He smiled. ‘I’m Luc, that’s who I am.’
‘Are you in films?’
‘No.’
‘Theatre?’
‘Not that either.’
‘What then?’
‘I’m an archaeologist.’
‘Like Indiana Jones?’
‘Precisely. Just like him.’
The girl on the aisle peeked at her friend then asked, ‘Would you like to have a coffee with us?’
Luc shrugged and thought briefly about his unfinished work. ‘Yes, of course,’ he answered. ‘Why not?’
THREE
General Andre Gatinois was taking a brisk stroll through the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, his habitual lunch-time routine on fair days. Keeping lean into his fifties was proving nettlesome and he found it increasingly necessary to skip lunch and walk a few kilometrers instead.
The cemetery, the largest in Paris, was the most visited and arguably the most famous in the world, the resting place for the likes of Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Moliere. Much to Gatinois’s irritation, it was also home to Jim Morrison, and he personally complained to the cemetery administrator whenever he noticed another addled Doors fan had spray-painted a TO J IM sign complete with arrow on a piece of masonry.
The cemetery was only a kilometre or so from his office on Boulevard Mortier in the 20 th arrondissement, but to maximise the amount of time in greenery, he had his driver take him to the main cemetery gate and wait there until he was done with his constitutional. The number plates on his official black Peugeot 607 guaranteed the police wouldn’t bother the idling chauffeur.
The cemetery was huge, some fifty hectares, and Gatinois could vary his route endlessly. On a sunny late-summer day, the masses of leaves overhead were just starting to turn and were rustling pleasantly in the breeze. He walked amidst a throng of visitors, although his fine blue suit, military-style hair and stiff posture set him apart from the jeans and sweatshirts of the scruffy majority.
Lost in thought, he found himself somewhat deeper than usual in the grounds so he picked up his pace to make sure he’d be back in time for his weekly staff meeting. A particularly large ornate tomb on a knoll made him slow and stop for a moment. It was open-walled, Byzantine, housing side-by-side sarcophagi adorned by a medieval man and a woman in marble repose. The tomb of Heloise and Abelard. The twelfth-century star-crossed lovers who so defined the notion of true love that, for the sake of national homage, their bones were sent to Paris in the nineteenth century from their original resting place in Ferreux-Quincey.
Gatinois blew his nose into his handkerchief. Eternal love, he scoffed. Propaganda. Mythology. He thought of his own loveless marriage and made a mental note to buy a small gift for his mistress. He was tired of her too, but in his position, he was obligated to subject each dalliance to a full security check. Although his colleagues were discreet, he felt somewhat constrained: he couldn’t chop and change too frequently and still maintain his dignity.
His driver passed through the security cordon and let Gatinois off in an internal courtyard where he entered the building through a huge oak door as venerable and solid as the Ministry of Defence itself.
La piscine.
That’s what the DGSE complex was nicknamed. The swimming pool. Although the name referred to the nearby Piscine des Tourelles of the French Swimming Federation, the notion of swimming laps, working your tail off but remaining in the same place, often seemed apt to him.
Gatinois was somewhat of an anomaly within the organisation. No one inside the Directorate-General for External Security held a higher rank, but his unit was the smallest and in an agency where opacity was a way of life, Unit 70 was the most opaque.
Whereas his departmental peers within the Directorates of Strategy and Intelligence commanded vast budgets and manpower, stood toe-to-toe with their counterparts in the CIA and other intelligence agencies worldwide and held star status within their ranks, his unit paled in comparison. It had a comparatively small budget, only thirty employees and Gatinois worked in relative obscurity. Not that he ever lacked for resources – it was just that the amount of funding he required was dwarfed by the Action Division, for example, with their global network of spies and operatives. No, Gatinois achieved what he required on a fraction of what other groups needed. In truth, much of his unit’s work was accomplished by contractors in government and academic labs who had no idea what they were actually working on.
Gatinois had to be content with the knowledge, reliably passed to him by his superior, the DGSE director, that the Minister of Defence, and indeed the President of France himself, were often more interested in updates about Unit 70 than any other matter of state intelligence.
Unit 70 had its suite of rooms in a nineteenth-century block within the complex. Gatinois favoured it over the other modern cookie-cutter buildings and always resisted relocation. He preferred the high ceilings, intricate mouldings and wainscoting of the quarters even though the toilets were bulkier than their modern equivalents.
His conference room had grand proportions and a brilliant crystal chandelier. Following a brief visit to his personal bathroom to adjust his grooming, he swept in, nodded to his staff and took his place at the head of the table where his briefing papers awaited.
One of his rituals of self-importance was to keep his people waiting in silence while he scanned their weekly status report. Each department head would deliver a verbal summary in turn, but Gatinois liked to know what was coming. His principal aide, Colonel Jean-Claude Marolles, a short, haughty man with a careful little moustache, sat to his right, rolling the barrel of his pen back and forth between thumb and forefinger in his typical skittish fashion, waiting for Gatinois to find something to criticise.
He didn’t have long to wait.
‘Why wasn’t I told about this?’ Gatinois asked, peeling off his reading glasses as if he intended to fling them.
‘About what, General?’ Marolles replied with a touch of weariness that set Gatinois off into a rage.
‘About the fire! What do you mean, “about what?”’
‘It was only a small fire at the abbey. Nothing at all happened in the village. It doesn’t appear to have any significance.’
Gatinois was not satisfied. He let his unblinking eyes settle on each of the men around the table in turn until he found Chabon, the one in charge of running Dr Pelay. ‘But, Chabon, you write here Pelay told you that Bonnet himself attended the fire and mentioned that an old book was found inside a wall. Is that your report?’
Chabon replied that it was.
‘And what was this book?’ he asked icily.
‘We don’t know,’ Chabon replied meekly. ‘I didn’t think it had relev
ance to our work.’
Gatinois welcomed the opportunity for histrionics. He took his inspiration from the chandelier, which reminded him of a burst of fireworks. Often, their work had the quality of watching paint dry. It was easy for them to get complacent. It was easy for him to get complacent. It had been a solid six months since the last noteworthy breakthrough and his frustration at the torpid pace of his assignment and his long overdue advancement to a larger ministry job was ready to boil over.
He started softly, seething, and let his voice rise in a smooth crescendo until he was bellowing loud enough to be heard down the corridor. ‘Our job is Ruac. Everything about Ruac. Nothing about Ruac is unimportant until I say it’s unimportant. If a kid gets chicken pox I want to know about it! If there’s a power cut in the cafe I want to know about it! If a goddamn dog shits on the street I want to know about it! An old book is found in the wall of Ruac Abbey and the first reaction of my staff is that it’s not important? Don’t be idiotic! We can’t afford to be complacent!’
His people looked down, absorbing the pounding like good soldiers.
Gatinois stood up, trying to decide whether he ought to stamp out and leave them sitting there contemplating their fates. He leaned over and slammed his fist onto the polished wood. ‘For God’s sake, people, this is Ruac! Pull your fingers out and get to work!’
FOUR
H. Pineau Restorations had its offices on Rue Beaujon, off Avenue Hoche just blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. It was a high-rent district that Hugo had chosen for its prestige value. To keep costs manageable he leased only a small suite of rooms for his staff headquarters. He lived in the 7th arrondissement with an elegant view of the Seine, and on a nice day, he would walk to the company puffing away on a cigarillo. He encouraged clients to come by so he could show off his tasteful assortment of antiques and pictures, not to mention his stunning red-headed secretary.