Gospel Truths

by J. G. Sandom

  “Hello,” he said. “Hello, can you help me, please?” Lyman’s French was effortless and quick, with barely a trace of English accent.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for a locker.” He reached into his coat pocket and removed the little red key.

  The teenager shuffled over. “Bus station,” he said. “Through those doors.”

  “Thanks.” Lyman tipped his hat and headed out across the room.

  The doors to which the boy had pointed opened onto a narrow concrete bridge which spanned a vast garage half full of city buses. The air was sweet and cloying from their fumes. Lyman hurried across the bridge and through a door on the other side. The bus station was virtually deserted. A solitary pair of businessmen sat together smoking cigarettes. Posters of faraway places only made the room seem more colorless and drab. There was a thick glass ticket booth in one corner, and on the far side at the back, almost out of sight, a line of lockers flush against one wall.

  Lyman crossed the room casually. It took him only a moment to find the familiar number: 02. He put his tartan overnight case on the floor and reached into his pocket. The key looked too big at first. But it slipped easily into the lock, and turned without the slightest hesitation. The cylinder clicked once. The door swung open. It was empty.

  Lyman stood quietly for a few moments, staring into the vacant locker, remembering the glint of glasses as Sir Giles and Cocksedge and the Lemur had all toasted him at Dorret’s Wine and Ale, slamming the metal door shut on the gnawing fear he nursed that something wasn’t right. And now to find it empty. But what had he expected, after all this time? He strode across the terminal toward the ticket booth.

  “Excuse me,” he said sharply.

  “Wait in line.”

  Lyman turned. He had neglected to notice two old women pulling baskets. They looked appalled and Lyman apologized, stepping in behind them. It was only a moment before he was by the ticket window once again.

  “Excuse me. Those lockers,” he said, hooking his thumb across his shoulder. “What happens if I forgot something in them?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  The girl in the window was chewing bubble gum. “How long ago did you leave it?”

  Lyman considered for a moment. Pontevecchio had been killed in June of 1990. “A little over a year.”

  The girl began to laugh. “A year!” She threw her head back and Lyman could see the pink bubble gum in her mouth like a pearl. “I’m sorry,” she said, and began to laugh again. “If someone forgets a bag,” she added soberly, “we send it over to the police station.”

  “I see. How do I get to the police station?”

  The girl gave Lyman a map of Amiens, marking a section with a tiny x. “There,” she answered, pushing the map toward him through a slit in the bulletproof glass. “Next.”

  Lyman picked up his bag and angled toward the front door of the terminal. It opened onto the Place Fiquet. A monstrous stone tower dominated the cobbled square like a misplaced American skyscraper. More buses idled in the streets. Schoolchildren milled about. Commuters hurried off to work, their faces hidden by umbrellas.

  Lyman hailed a taxi and jumped in. The car swung out into the thoroughfare toward the police station, and the farther they drove, the more convinced Lyman became that Amiens was, sadly, a rather ugly little town. He had read in his guidebook that through the city to the north ran the River Somme, a battleground for two world wars, and he realized that this was probably why the town was so much 1950s brick and concrete. The rest of Amiens had been destroyed in bombings, rebuilt to dispossess the past, like that giant watchtower off the Place Fiquet.

  The streets began to narrow and a few old houses cried out from between the fast food restaurants, hinting of the ghostly tiers which suddenly appeared before the cab—the cathedral portico, and high above, the gargoyles shimmying up the stonework through the rain.

  The police station was located only a few hundred yards from the cathedral, across a small park. Lyman paid the driver and trundled up the steps.

  It was dark and cool inside the police station. He took his hat off and began to shake the wetness from the brim.

  “May I help you?”

  Lyman turned. A young policewoman was staring out at him from behind a window in the wall.

  “I’ve come about something left in the lockers, at the coach terminal.”

  “I see.” She picked up a receiver. “Name?”

  “Nigel Lyman.”

  “Inspector Lyman?” She hesitated. “From England?”

  “That’s right.”

  The woman began to talk excitedly into the receiver and suddenly Lyman heard the door behind him open and his name called out. A middle-aged policeman with short legs and a round belly approached him from across the room. “Detective Inspector Lyman? City of London Police?”

  “Correct.”

  “A pleasure, sir.” They shook hands. “Your office called this morning and told us you were coming. I am Captain Musel. Yes. Please follow me.”

  Musel snapped his fingers and a young corporal appeared from nowhere to snatch up Lyman’s overnight case. They made their way up a flight of wooden stairs to a large corner office overlooking the park, across which Lyman could see the transept of the great cathedral. Black-and-white photographs covered the white walls. They all featured Musel shaking hands with a variety of men. Musel with the mayor, Lyman guessed. Musel with the veterans’ delegation. Musel with the local bishop. A single tatty French flag stood in the corner by a brown file cabinet. The captain pointed to a wooden chair in front of his desk and Lyman sat down.

  Musel’s desk was at least eight feet long and four feet wide. It dominated the room, serving more to trivialize the French policeman than to enlarge him. “I had begun to think that you were never coming,” he said.

  Lyman was surprised. “I thought SAFAA was extremely helpful. They’re the ones who connected the key to Amiens.”

  “The key? What does the key matter? You already know the contents of the locker.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lyman shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

  Musel hunched over his desk. “Our report… on the locker. Let’s see, it’s been almost a year now. Normally we don’t bother much with lost property, at least not until two months or so have passed. But then we’re forced to open it, to see if there’s some identifying clue inside, a wallet or address book. We don’t have much room around here for storage, as you can see. The baggage piles up.”

  He walked over to the file cabinet and began to rummage through a drawer. “I know it’s in here somewhere. I reviewed it personally when London called this morning. Voilà!” Musel moved back behind his desk, flipping a file open in his pudgy hands. “A year almost to the day. As soon as I saw Pontevecchio’s name I thought it might be useful. That’s why I called. I’m sorry,” he said. “Am I going too fast for you? I was told you spoke French.”

  “It’s not that, Captain Musel. It’s just that I was not aware of any report sent up a year ago, or at any other time for that matter.”

  “But I don’t understand. Why are you here then? Why did I bother calling England all those times if they never even told you?” He dropped the file onto his desk. “I suggest you look this through,” he added crisply. “Corporal Berry outside can help you find an office for an hour or so. Please excuse me. I have work to do.”

  The interview was over. Musel held out his hand and Lyman shook it slowly. The young corporal reappeared from nowhere. Lyman picked up the case file, thanked the captain once more, and followed the corporal out the door.

  They walked in silence down the hall until they came upon a little office at the rear of the building which Lyman guessed had not been used in years. The corporal opened it with his passkey, assuring him that he would not be disturbed. Then he turned his back on Lyman and left.

  The office was pitch dark, despite a little window set high in t
he rear wall. Lyman flicked on a fluorescent desk lamp and waited for it to settle before he laid the case file on the desk before him.

  The first thing that he noticed was a letter, handwritten on blue airmail paper, and signed “Jacques Tellier” in a tiny, almost illegible scrawl.

  “Dear Mr. Pontevecchio,” the letter began. “If you are reading this, then you need only call the number at the bottom of the page and I will guide you through the drawings. I am sorry for this final inconvenience. But I have known Angelo Balducci many years, and he has taught me to be cautious.”

  Lyman sighed and began to take his coat off, unhooking the plastic bone toggles one by one. He had never heard of Jacques Tellier, the author of the letter, but Angelo Balducci was another matter. Lyman thought back to his first briefing with the Lemur in London. Balducci had been the smuggler responsible for secreting Pontevecchio into London, just before the Italian banker’s death.

  “But if this letter reaches other hands,” the scrawl continued, “then let the world know that Pontevecchio and the Church have murdered me. Balducci just arranged for us to meet in Klagenfurt. It was Pontevecchio who agreed to buy the Book of Thomas the Contender, and the old Masonic missal. I have only had time to translate a small part. I am a poor scholar, without experience, and now there is no time. But this I know with certainty—the labyrinth is the real door. The entrance that I found is just a secondary shaft, for ventilation. And if you understand Amiens, then Chartres will surely follow. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas will be yours.”

  The letter ended abruptly. At the bottom of the page Lyman noticed a telephone number with an exchange he did not recognize. He turned the letter over.

  Underneath, bound by a thick elastic band, appeared to be a photocopy of a small book, with the words NUMBER 2—MASONIC MISSAL neatly marked in red on the top page. Lyman slipped the elastic band off and began to flip through the pages.

  The missal was handwritten in a curious florid script, in a kind of Latin which Lyman had never seen before, and the pages had been badly marked in copying, with three lines bisecting the same corner throughout the entire stack.

  Upon closer inspection, he noticed that someone had inscribed a few additional lines directly in the margins of the missal’s first four pages. And not only were they written in a different hand, but they were in an entirely different language—a kind of archaic French, Lyman guessed. Just after them, scribbled on a few separate sheets of white paper, someone had added what appeared to be a translation.

  Lyman labored through the tiny words, confused less by the modern French translation than by the devious scrawl which marked it as the writing of Jacques Tellier once again. The more Lyman read, the more he realized that the lines which ran across the top of the missal’s first four pages were a kind of salutation, as if the ancient book had been given to a friend.

  Read from your Book of Thomas the Contender, the twin who knows himself, and think of me in your new Temple, a plumb line to your sides for these last years. Accept this missal as a token of my love. Remember all that Bernard and I have taught you, and return one day to the bosom of our Lady.

  The language became more and more arcane, ending in a sweep of black ink. Tellier had circled a group of words, just as they were circled in the missal itself.

  The School will suffer in your absence. Now is the time that you should be in Chartres. Bernard has proven that the manuscript the Count of Dreux bought from the Levanter comes originally from Edessa. Its pages bear the oldest Logoi we have seen in Aramaic, predating those in Luke and Matthew, with a reference added later to the plot which Piso, legate of Syria, launched against the Emperor before the persecution. It is even older than your Thomas the Contender which Papias, bless him, copied from the sayings of Mathaios. For it calls the Logoi “devarim” in the incipit like the book of Sirach, while it honors gnosis and the many paths to the Grand Architect. The manuscript was preserved inside a wondrous golden cup with a hinged top which the Levanter called Chaldean, with all manner of precious stone and inlay on its twelve sides, lapis lazuli and rubies, diamonds from the East, an object of inestimable value. It is the original Book of Jude, called Thomas the Twin, the brother of James and of our Savior, the Apostle of Edessa to whom the Lord gave gnosis. It is the Gospel of Thomas.

  The note was signed “Thierry of Chartres, Lent, anno Domini 1138.”

  Lyman dropped the papers onto the table and glanced once more through the missal itself. The salutation by the mysterious Thierry of Chartres had been written directly in the margins of the first few pages, immediately above the Latin text. Thierry had even drawn some sketches of his Chaldean cup. Parchment must have been scarce in the twelfth century, and this little act of conservation somehow legitimized the missal to Lyman. Yet it was just a photocopy, Lyman realized, and badly marked at that. Where was the original? And who was Jacques Tellier? What was his connection to Balducci, the man who had smuggled Pontevecchio into London? And what did either of them have to do with this medieval missal?

  He replaced the elastic band around the sheaf of papers. There were only two objects left in the file: a slim report, and a kind of map. No, it wasn’t a map, Lyman realized. Despite the roughness of the drawing, it was clearly the floor plan of a building. And not just any building. It was the Amiens cathedral. At the center of the drawing was a perfect replica of the cathedral’s maze. Lyman had seen the same shape printed on a dozen different postcards at the Amiens train station—a black path between white borders, the quadrants rolling in a perfect octagon. Someone had scribbled numbers all along the drawing, measurements of lengths and angles, and Lyman realized from the stunted shapes of the numerals that they were probably the handiwork of Jacques Tellier. But what had Tellier been calculating, and why?

  Lyman removed the last piece in the file. It was indeed a report, tattered yet legible. He scanned the pages quickly.

  According to the file, in June of 1990, a small picnic basket had been abandoned in the locker marked 02 at the Amiens coach terminal. When no one came to collect it, it was transported to the Amiens police station for safekeeping. There it remained untouched until September of that year, despite the usual policy of inspecting abandoned property after eight weeks. When opened it was discovered that the picnic basket contained a bizarre collection of documents: a kind of medieval missal, replaced in this file by a copy, due to its delicate condition; the floor plan of the Amiens cathedral; and Jacques Tellier’s unusual letter, with its pointed reference to Pontevecchio.

  Captain Musel had recognized his obligations, and placed a call to England. The Pontevecchio hanging in London was still a featured story in the local press, and perhaps, Lyman thought, Musel had fantasized that he would solve the case from Amiens and rise, as Lyman himself had done, from regional obscurity to national attention. Whatever his motives, Musel was told by the City of London Police that the matter was already under investigation, and that he should send copies of the documents from the picnic basket to England and await instructions. The captain did just that, but no instructions followed. The original missal remained in his private safe. He called twice more over the next few months, each time conversing with the same man, and each time receiving the identical reply. The matter was already under investigation. He would be notified.

  Lyman closed his eyes and pushed his chair away from the desk. The hairs on the nape of his neck rose up, and it came to him out of the darkness that there was only one thing that policemen really feared, even more than dreams of death, or the faces of their wives and children grieving. As rooted as a child’s fear of unanswered cries, the power of this fear was like the power of the faith which had resulted in the building of the Amiens cathedral just across the park. You believed. You trusted. You relied on someone else to watch your back. And it had to be implicit, or it was valueless. It had to be a thing of faith.

  Lyman had broken that faith, at least in the minds of most of his division, when he had let young Crosley die. He had betrayed it, a
nd deep inside he hoped that it was only this which had prevented him from seeing clearly all that now seemed obvious indeed, and all that he had only sensed before: the key; the ransacking of his flat; his own assignment to the case after the Crosley incident. Lyman knew now, with a keen-edged certainty, that the faith had been betrayed in London long before.

  He rose slowly, slipping the file under his left arm. Then he turned the desk lamp off. It was still raining. He could hear it up against the little window, tapping.

  Captain Musel did not even rise this time as Lyman was announced. He simply pointed to the wooden chair across his desk and fiddled with his pen cap. Lyman sat down, the green file hanging from his hand.

  “Captain Musel, I know how this must seem to you,” Lyman said. “But I wonder if I might take you into my confidence. Somehow I feel that I can trust you.”

  Musel shrugged.

  “For some time now,” Lyman continued, “I have suspected a certain officer in my division of incompetence. Perhaps I should say we, Captain Musel, because this feeling is something which many of us in London share. I’m sure you understand. You’re a man of responsibility. You must know how one man can upset what otherwise would be an exemplary department.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “In the past, his failings have not dramatically intruded on his work. You could say that even his incompetence has been ineffectual. But now, thanks to you, I feel that I can act.” He paused. “There’s just one thing still troubling me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I must be absolutely sure that he’s the one responsible for the error, for failing to follow up on your calls. After all, I wouldn’t want to rush in on this thing half-cocked.”

  Musel began to swivel in his chair. “Inspector Lyman, your department’s housekeeping is not my responsibility. I have my own problems.”

  “Yes, of course you do,” Lyman answered sadly, nodding his head. He had to be careful not to overplay his hand. He would need Captain Musel. “Still, I would appreciate it if you could think back for a moment to the time when you first opened the abandoned picnic basket and found Jacques Tellier’s letter, the drawing and this so-called missal. It must have been quite a shock when you read Pontevecchio’s name.”