by J. G. Sandom
“Sure,” said Koster, reaching for the box. “That’s the labyrinth, the one at the cathedral.”
Grabowski nodded. “According to my friend, this is a copy of a letter sent by a scholar named Thierry of Chartres to one of the original builders of the Amiens cathedral. See for yourself.” He lifted a stack of papers from the box. “The letter is actually a kind of dedication written directly into the margin of what appears to be a Gnostic Christian prayer book, a missal apparently given by Thierry as a gift to the builder in Amiens. Because of the legitimacy of the prayer book and its dedication, my friend believes—and I agree with him—that the Book of Thomas the Contender is still hidden somewhere in the Amiens cathedral, just as the old legends describe.”
“I don’t get it,” Koster said. “I mean I’m not saying you’re wrong, but what would a medieval architect be doing with a Gnostic prayer book? In those days masons learned from other masons, traveling around the countryside, not from schools. Especially not the school at Chartres.” He studied the drawing which Grabowski had placed before him. “These calculations,” he said. “They’re the measurements of the labyrinth, right?”
Grabowski grinned. “I thought they’d interest you. According to the missal, the location of the Book of Thomas the Contender is somehow tied to the labyrinth itself. Not physically, mind you. It’s not just hidden underneath the central plate or something. It’s mathematical.”
Koster stiffened in his chair.
“What’s the matter,” Grabowski said. “What is it?”
“These numbers aren’t medieval. Look at the way they’re shaped. I think your friend at the library is pulling your leg.”
“What? What do you mean?” Grabowski turned the sheet around. A moment passed and then he added casually, “Of course. This is a modern sketch. I only brought it along because of the measurements.”
“Oh. Well, thanks, but I already have them.”
The archbishop’s face clouded over. He shrugged his heavy shoulders and began to gather the papers in a pile. Koster watched the way his hands worked. They were the hands of an old man—spotted, worn, and seamed—and he chided his own stony heart. Grabowski had only been trying to help. It had been a gesture. It deserved better.
“You know,” he said, “for a while now I’ve been thinking that the labyrinth could be some kind of mathematical symbol, a numerical metaphor for the cathedral. Like a matrix.”
Grabowski smiled wearily. “I thought you might be interested.” Then he turned away. “Joseph, what happened between me and your parents was a long time ago.”
“I guess so,” Koster said. He stared out at the Place Fiquet. A man in an olive-colored raincoat was leaning up against a car, reading a newspaper. The commuters were thinning out. The sun had almost fallen.
“Look, it’s probably none of my business,” Koster added tightly, “but you could have flown back for Martha’s funeral. You knew how Catholic she was. Grandma was always so proud of you. Her nephew the archbishop, the mayor of the Vatican City. She kept asking for you at the hospital. Dad was really upset. He said you were only interested in maintaining your position at the Vatican.”
“It was a busy time.”
“I guess you had your reasons.”
“Please, Joseph, I didn’t come here to fight. You may not believe me, but when a pope dies everything comes to a halt at the Vatican. Everything shuts down. I know Aunt Martha asked for me. I’m sorry. I wanted to go. But the Church needed me, Joseph. There had to be some continuity. You must understand that.”
Koster tried to find the words with which to frame his anger but there was nothing there. His passion was ungrounded, an echo without source, like the light of a distant star long since extinguished. “I suppose so. I guess you were just doing your job.”
It was an argument a quarter century old, and not even his.
“A job I still believe in,” Grabowski said. “Despite everything. And it’s a job that you can help me with.”
“Me?” Koster laughed. “Look, I’m not exactly the most diligent Catholic anymore.”
“Maybe not, but I’m sure you realize that what you’re doing will be helpful to the Church. The Notre Dame cathedrals are absolutely unique—the way they’re built, the way they reflect our love for God.”
“For Our Lady, really.”
“That too. The point is that the more people begin to appreciate the cathedrals, the more they’ll try to understand the driving force behind their original construction, the reasons they were built. That’s why I brought you these papers. Think what would happen if the Book of Thomas the Contender were actually discovered. Think about it. It would set off an unprecedented wave of interest in all the Notre Dame cathedrals. It would be invaluable, both historically and materially. We would, of course, pay you for the gospel. That’s only fair. And eventually your work might help unearth the Gospel of Thomas as well, the one they say is buried underneath the Chartres cathedral. Why, the Persian Cup alone is supposed to be worth millions. You’d never have to build another shopping mall again. And best of all, Joseph, think of the challenge. For eight hundred years the labyrinth of Amiens has remained unsolved, a curiosity, a tourist attraction. Eight hundred years! That’s six hundred years before Goldbach even stated his conjecture. Isn’t that what you were working on before, in college?”
“How did you hear about my work on Goldbach? You’re not a mathematician.”
Grabowski smiled sadly. “Just because we never talked doesn’t mean I never took an interest in you, in all my family.” He dropped the papers onto the table. The drawing of the labyrinth seemed to skate across the surface, like the pointer of a Ouija board, a corner coming to rest in front of Koster’s cup of coffee.
Koster looked down at the numbers on the drawing, the perfect symmetry of content in the jagged form. Eight hundred years, he thought, glancing back at the archbishop. Then he grinned and said, “How do I get in touch with you?”
Chapter XIII
AMIENS
September 22nd, 1991
AS HE WATCHED THE RIVER SOMME RETREAT BELOW his feet, Lyman thought that if it hadn’t been for Teddy Bashall and that five-pound rainbow they had poached with bread crumbs from the River Itchen, he would never have become a policeman. But they had gone out that day, Lyman from his narrow street lined with low flint walls, the houses rubbing shoulders like gray mares, each one the same save for the vibrant colors of their doors; and Bashall from the padded drawing rooms and studies, through the well-worn corridors and sandstone arches of the college. They’d lived a tie-length’s distance, but when they met that day by chance on the balcony of the Review, equally bored by a jungle movie, equally careful with their cigarettes, they both knew with the certainty of children that eventually they would be friends. All that had mattered then was an excuse, a sympathetic interest, and fishing was the natural choice. Already Lyman had known that a man who fishes has no past, no future. There is only the fisherman and his fish, with a moment’s lifeline in between.
They had found a cool, moss-covered bank, spotted with a hint of oak roots, where the river was but seven yards across. A field stretched out behind their casting arms and up ahead, along the other bank, a pair of willows and a girdle of impenetrable sedge grass quivered in the breeze, then vanished as the fly sank to the center of the earth and stopped.
When the farmer found them they were walking slowly back along the Itchen toward town, in single file between the cow field and the river, their rods dangling from their weary fingertips, the bag round Bashall’s neck weighed down with grayling and that one thick rainbow trout, bulging with roe and out of season. They didn’t even try to run. They waited for him without speaking and he took them to the college warden who lived—and this was used against them later, as a mark of hubris—within spitting distance of the crime scene. The farmer did not say more than a few words. He didn’t need to. With a shake the trout fell from the bag, a sequin flash of scales, and Lyman realized they were fin
ished. The farmer hung his head. The fish lay in the grass, already stiffening, the spine curved in an arc as if she were preparing for one final lunge at life.
Bashall was barred from the College Junior Fishing Club. It was at worst a troublesome affair for him. His family owned a trout beat on the River Test and every other year he visited a great-aunt up in Scotland where he hunted grouse. But Lyman was a different matter. He was a local boy. He needed to be taught a lesson. They planned to cane him, until the warden’s wife took pity on his dark requesting face and pointed out the legal complications. So instead they called the Winchester Police and Lyman waited in the warden’s study, the wooden shelving stuffed with books and magazines on fishing, with improbable trophies of exotic birds, with hunting scenes and that bay window by the desk through which he watched the back of Teddy Bashall grow smaller as the boy withdrew across the fields.
It was as if the great god of the river had suddenly forgiven him when the police van halted on the shoulder of the road and out stepped Uncle Jack. He looked the model of the English bobby, his back straight as a pikestaff. But when the warden let him in and Lyman saw his uncle’s face for the first time, it was obvious he had nothing left to count on. Uncle Jack was using his sergeant’s voice. He acted as if they’d never sat across from one another at the kitchen table, never shared a pint in secret or gone to football championships together. The warden relayed the facts once more. The farmer cursed and nodded. Then with a tug at the elbow the apology slipped out. But Lyman talked without conviction. He could not understand the point of an apology when it was the river he and Bashall had offended, when the fish had been avenged by her own beauty.
Uncle Jack led Lyman out into the van. The warden frowned beyond the wire grillwork as they started down the road. The river vanished from the rearview mirror. Lyman pressed himself into the seat, between his uncle and another constable named Peter Partner. A lorry came and went and suddenly the van filled up with laughter and the two men shoved him to the floor with shouts of “criminal” and “thief.” Uncle Jack squeezed him like a loaf of bread. “Well, Peter,” he added with a grin. “What shall we do with him? Hang him? Cut him up for bait?” The van swerved and they both laughed again. “Christ, what next? You were lucky this time, Nigel, I’ll say. What did your friend get?”
“Expulsion from the College Junior Fishing Club.”
“Well, isn’t that justice.” He laughed ironically and it was then, in the space of that one open sound that Lyman knew what he would be, no matter what. Then his life had stretched before him as uncharted as the world beyond the river and the county line, pulsing with possibility, and justice too had seemed a clean and easy thing.
Lyman pulled the collar of his coat up and headed back across the bridge toward the hotel. It was getting late, and he had yet to finish his report to London.
A pair of German tourists bickered in front of the cathedral as he strode past. They were what the French called routards, either a decade late or early with their tattered blue jeans patched with peace signs. Perhaps they were pilgrims, Lyman thought, as he watched them counting their centimes.
He hurried on, his head down testing out inventions, trying vainly to fill out the last few days with something they would readily accept at home. The Lemur had been calling every day. Even Cocksedge, in a rare but not unprecedented move, had rung him up the night before. But how much could he tell them, and what did they already know?
The night before, Lyman had received another call from Dotty Taylor. She had taken Hadley’s orchids over to Smythe at Scotland Yard, and pharmacology had confirmed Lyman’s worst fears. The plant did indeed exude a peculiar alkaloid, one of extraordinary power. The first exam had shown up positive for cocaine, a similar alkaloid, but the second test had come back negative. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.
Lyman had immediately called another friend named Baker who worked at the coroner’s office. He asked him to test a sample of Pontevecchio’s blood, but Baker refused—at least at first. Where were the official forms? he had asked. Why hadn’t protocol been followed? To test the blood would require most of the supply remaining in Pontevecchio’s file, and there was no way now to get another sample without an exhumation. But Lyman eventually prevailed. He and Baker had spent many an evening at a certain flat in Soho, just above a Greek café. And Baker was a married man.
Lyman needed to know. He needed to prove to himself that what he feared the most was untrue. But as he waited for the test results, all he could think of were the words which David Ellison had used in describing Pontevecchio’s death. “One of them took a box out,” the Yorkshire vagabond had said. “It must have been a knife or something because while the other two were holding him, the third one pulled his trousers part way down and stuck it in him, right there, in the groin. Bloody savages.”
And then Pontevecchio had died. It was perfect. Where better to inject an alkaloid than in the pubic hair, where the puncture mark would be impossible to see? And what better poison to employ than one no instrument had yet been programmed to detect?
It was the work of a professional. And Hadley had always been professional.
Lyman walked on past the cathedral, back toward the hotel. He was tired and fed up. He had spent the entire afternoon arguing with the Amiens police, trying vainly to elicit some support, some access to intelligence. In the end Musel had refused to even see him, and it was only when the captain’s shadow—Corporal Pini—ran into Lyman on the stairs by chance, that he had learned the reason why. They had finally heard from Interpol, it seemed, two days before. The man who had fallen to his death from the Hôtel de la Paix had been identified as Aldo Barbieri, a part-time paid assassin and friend of Marco Scarcella.
Now there were two scenarios, two possibilities to keep time with his footsteps as he walked. Either Hadley and his friends in London had sent a message off to Scarcella with the news of Lyman’s imminent arrival, or the former Venerable Master had yet another source of information here in Amiens, set up to watch for strangers with a certain small red key. In either case, the news of Lyman’s inquiries, and of Joseph Koster’s research, had somehow reached Scarcella. And who better to pass that information on than the captain of police? Lyman shook his head. A car whizzed by before him and he stopped short, just as the pavement dropped into the street. He was seeing faces in the dark. Perhaps Musel was just resentful. Perhaps, like most policemen, he harbored a simple jealous love for his responsibilities, for the town itself.
The light changed and Lyman crossed the Place Gambetta. The street was crowded with umbrellas, spinning. A chemist’s light flashed notice of a brand-new pain reliever. At least Musel had helped him with the car, he thought, if only indirectly. The day before, the captain of police had sent him with a tepid telephone recommendation to a Monsieur Poincarré in Traffic Control. Several blue Peugeots, it turned out, had indeed been licensed fairly recently as commercial vehicles. After some cross-checking and a call to the boy at Jacques Tellier’s antique shop, Lyman was fairly certain the one he was looking for belonged to a man named Maurice Duval, the president and part owner of a local construction company.
The more Lyman pushed, the more difficult it became. Musel had been right—Amiens was a quiet city, resentful of outsiders. And ironically it was the town’s size, the forced familiarity which made gossip such a ready coin to the citizens of Amiens, that also formed the stares and silent shrugs which greeted Lyman’s questions. Only a few fell gently to his charm, to his penumbral queries. From them he learned that the Duval Construction Company was owned both by Maurice and by his father, Charles-Philip. A moderately successful venture, the company specialized in renovations and was currently involved in a number of projects, including the renovation of the Bishop’s Palace near the cathedral. But something had happened not too long ago, something about which no one seemed quite certain. Perhaps there had been an argument between father and son. Some talked about a robbery, and some embezzlement. Most talked of m
issing funds. Indeed, the only fact that all agreed upon was that Maurice had finally left Amiens, and more—the knowledge coming like the clicking of a tumbler in a combination safe—that he had gone the very week of Tellier’s own disappearance.
Lyman stopped in front of the hotel and looked up at the balcony. That was where Barbieri had held on for his final moments. And that, he thought, looking down at the battered road, is where his moments had run out. Lyman frowned and entered the hotel.
There was no doubt about it now, he told himself. Barbieri had been Scarcella’s man. But if Scarcella was watching him, then it probably meant he hadn’t found Jacques Tellier—at least not yet. Lyman had already checked that foreign telephone exchange at the bottom of the note which Tellier had abandoned with the missal in the locker. But it had proved to be a small hotel in Klagenfurt, Austria, where they—of course—had never heard of Monsieur Tellier. No, thought Lyman. The antique dealer had gone underground. And if Scarcella had not found him, with all his men and resources, it was unlikely Lyman would alone.
He rang the little cowbell on the front desk and the concierge appeared across the dining room. “Monsieur Lyman,” he said jovially, stepping in behind the desk. “No messages today, I’m afraid.”
“Just as well. How about a telephone book?”
“Of course.” The concierge pulled it out from below the desk as if he had been waiting for the question. “Anything else?”
“No, no thanks,” said Lyman. Then, as an afterthought he added, “Actually, you can give me some change for the phone.” He pulled out his wallet and dropped a fifty-franc note on the counter. The concierge counted out the coins while Lyman looked through the book. There it was: Duval, C-P, Menuiserie-Charpente.
Jacques Tellier was underground, that much was certain, but perhaps Maurice Duval was somewhere to be found. “Thanks,” he said, taking up the coins.