by J. G. Sandom
“Thank you, Nigel. I appreciate that.”
“I think when people face death together, it gives them a special closeness, like soldiers in the field. Perhaps you’ll think I’m maudlin, Joseph, but ever since the robbery I’ve felt, well, almost responsible for you.”
“You shouldn’t feel that way. I’m the one who owes you.”
“Maybe so, but I do, Joseph. I was wondering,” he added. “Do you think I could come with you to Paris, to see the countess? It’s a lot to ask, I know, but perhaps I could take notes or something. I’ve never been to Paris.”
Koster stopped eating. “I don’t know, Nigel. The invitation’s for one. What would I tell her?”
“Tell her I’m your friend. I am, aren’t I?”
“Of course you are. That’s not the point. Look, you could go to Paris anytime.”
Lyman tried to look pathetic. This was wrong, all wrong, he thought. Each lie was like a paper cut. It had never bothered him before, yet he felt that this charade was somehow different. This time he was but one of many using Koster, each for his individual pantomime, each with his own amorphous end. There was the River Itchen stretching far before him, from Winchester to Amiens, but when she finally ran her course and all was said and done, which bank would he be standing on? Which side?
“You’re right,” Lyman said at last. “I could go later. But to be honest with you, Joseph, it’s more than just Paris. My life isn’t like yours. You’re an international writer. You live in New York.” He laughed softly. “I run a fishing tackle shop in a small suburban town.”
“Sounds great to me.”
“Oh, it is in some ways. I have a lot of things to be thankful for. I realize that. But excitement isn’t one of them. That’s why I came abroad. And now, ever since I met you, all manner of exciting things have started happening. That robbery. Your book. And now this gospel mystery. I’ve never met a countess in my life.”
“Neither have I. Look, Nigel. I understand how you feel. If it were up to me I would say sure. It’s the least I can do. But it isn’t up to me. It’s her invitation. Maybe if everything goes well, we can both go back there together another time.”
Lyman nodded sullenly. “I understand. You’re right. It would be senseless to jeopardize it all with me hanging on your shoulder.”
Koster pushed his plate away. “Of course,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t appreciate you helping me out here, in Amiens.”
Lyman brightened immediately. “Do you mean that?”
“Sure I do. Your French is excellent. You could screen some historical documents for me, do measurements. That sort of thing. If you want to, that is.”
Lyman nodded and he heard something tear inside him. “I suppose I should see that missal first then, the one your cousin the archbishop gave you. What are you doing after dinner?”
Koster laughed.
It was too late for coffee and neither relished a dessert so they asked the waiter for the bill and started back toward the hotel. A thin mist had rolled in from the river and the street fell in and out of view. The neon hotel sign was like a smear of lipstick on the collar of the night.
The concierge was nowhere to be seen, and Koster joked about the new security measures which had been posted on the bulletin board beside the counter. They climbed the stairs like tardy schoolchildren, laughing behind their hands, threatening to set the concierge’s wife on one another at the slightest sound.
Lyman collapsed into a chair without even taking his coat off as soon as they entered Koster’s room. Everything was so quiet now. Not a car stirred in the streets. Not a footfall. Only the mist rolled gently by, soundless outside the window. Quiet.
The American approached from across the room. Lyman turned, and there was but a moment’s pause, like a single synapse sparking, and the hands of Joseph Koster became the stubby digits of Musel.
Lyman felt a chill run up his back. There was no doubt about it now. Captain Musel had sent a copy of the missal to Superintendent Hadley in London. Hadley, or whoever had killed him, had passed it on to Scarcella. Scarcella had given it to the archbishop, and the archbishop to Joseph Koster.
The American took another step. The stack of papers yawed in his arms, and the black brand shifted into view once more. No doubt at all. It was the same file, the photocopy sent to London by the Amiens Police, with those same three lines bisecting every corner like a growing crack along the edge.
Chapter XIV
PARIS
September 23rd, 1991
KOSTER STOOD IN THE FRONT GARDEN OF THE RODIN Museum, staring at the statue of “The Thinker,” wondering at the way in which the great bronze head tipped forward on his fist, like the blossom of a week-old rose. How many tourists had walked by and seen within this touchstone, along this troubled brow, a symbol of their own uncertainties? The brochure said it was the face of Dante, pondering his own inferno just across the garden—another sculpture carved by Rodin called “The Gates of Hell.” But only twelve years earlier a younger Joseph Koster had stood exactly in this spot, and looked up at a face which he had sworn then was a model of his own.
He had been studying architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne. The school had been his mother’s notion, a respite from the termination of his mathematical career, a replacement really. That had been the idea anyway, and he had worked hard, trying to readjust to this second adolescence. Then the school board had announced the yearly competition, the medal with the little bear. The entire school had spent a sleepless week pursuing what for Koster was forgetfulness. He handed in his project with reluctance, only to find—to his surprise—that he was in the final running for the prize, and according to his friends and teachers both, the likeliest to win. His entry was the most inventive they had seen in years. All that remained was the construction of a model, and the medal would be his.
Koster looked down across the path. Despite the daring of his plans, the model had been perfect in its lifelessness alone, like a beautiful stillborn child with the suitable number of fingers and toes.
He had left by train for Paris the following day, without waiting to hear the results of the competition. It was something he had been planning to do for weeks in order to complete a paper for another class. And upon his arrival, as he made his way through the Rodin Museum, it had finally occurred to him that there was a price to pay for his love of mathematics. It was like having an alien god, or a synesthesia. Numbers were an addiction to him, with their own demands and sacrifices, their own aesthetics, their own unfailing truth as distant to the world as he was.
A sudden gust of wind picked up his reverie and carried it away. Koster started to walk slowly around the side of the museum toward the garden at the back. Beech trees lined the path. Lovers sat on crescent benches, holding hands. A thin old woman in a plain black smock pushed a pram along the flagstones. There was a man with a cherrywood pipe, a hippie and a pair of young Americans who would never, ever speak to one another again. Koster sighed. How would he ever find the countess in this crowd? And what did a countess look like anyway?
That morning he had rushed down from the station to the rue de Varennes only to discover through a sharp, metallic intercom that the countess had already gone out for her morning walk. He was to meet her in the garden of the Rodin Museum, just down that street and to the left. But now that he had finally arrived he realized the absurdity of the task. The garden was packed with people. Koster stopped. There. Over by the entrance to the museum. He craned his neck. Down the path, across the forecourt, a tall dark man was starting up the entrance steps.
Nick! he thought. It looked just like his publisher, Nick Robinson. But what the hell was he doing here?
Koster started back along the flagstone path toward the museum. The man on the steps hesitated for a moment, patting the pockets of his jacket as if he were searching for a key chain or a pack of cigarettes. Koster picked up his pace.
The man seemed to sense his app
roach. Although he was still a hundred yards away, Koster saw him hesitate at the entrance, and then turn slightly to the side as if he’d heard a sound behind him. There—for a moment—was the thick black hair, the strong nose, the Scottish jaw. Then Robinson turned suddenly away, and vanished through the door.
Koster ran across the forecourt, up the steps and into the museum. A party of Japanese tourists filled the foyer. He looked desperately about, but Robinson, or whoever it had been, was no longer in sight. Koster made his way straight through the crowd and into the next room. A pair of stone lovers embraced forever in one corner. It seemed impossible, Koster thought, but the man had simply disappeared.
He walked over to the window. On a nearby pedestal, a pair of hands reached up into the air. Koster could not help marveling at the delicacy of the arching fingers, the way they came together at the fingertips as if in prayer. The sculpture was called “The Cathedral.” He recognized the form immediately. In prayer, the hands were shaped exactly like a Gothic arch. He was moving to examine them more closely, when he noticed the reflection of a man in the window glass. He turned, started to speak, and stopped.
It was that man who looked like Robinson. Or was it? He was wearing the same dark jacket, and from behind he looked a little like the publisher. Koster frowned. Wait a minute, he thought. This wasn’t the man he’d spotted earlier. Now he couldn’t be sure.
He turned and walked back through the foyer to the front door. It had grown warmer; the sun was trying to find an opening in the clouds. He moved along the path which circumscribed the large rococo museum.
It seemed a little silly now, he realized, to think Nick Robinson would even be in Paris. He’d just talked to him on the telephone. And certainly, if Robinson had been planning to fly over, he would have called and let Koster know.
Koster dallied for a moment on the path. Barely fifteen yards away a blue-haired lady in a herringbone suit posed on a granite bench. She had an air about her that repelled intrusion. A brooch gleamed on her thin lapel. A string of pearls hung round her neck. She certainly looked like a countess.
“Excuse me. You,” a woman said behind him.
Koster turned. He was blocking the flagstone path and the old woman with the pram was trying vainly to slip by. “Oh, sorry,” he said.
“Well, come on,” she added, plowing by him. “If we stop now he’ll wake up, and that’ll be the end of peace for all of us.” She paused for barely a moment. “You are Joseph Koster, are you not?”
A muffled cry rose from the pram and she looked down in horror. “You see, I told you.” She shook the pram furiously. “My grandson. He spent the first month of his life strapped to a camel hump and now he’s never happy.” Then they were gone, the thin black back retreating with the pram along the path, like digits down a number line, and Koster in pursuit.
Her dress looked homemade. She had a slight limp in her left leg. Her pointed features jutted from the black scarf covering her head. “Countess de Rochambaud?” he said, as he finally matched her pace.
“Call me Irene. I rarely use the title unless I have to. But perhaps you like formality.” She threw him a sidelong glance. Her eyes were shiny as pebbles at the bottom of a brook. “Yes, I’d say you do. No matter. Have you been to Paris before?”
Koster fought to keep up. “Three or four times. My family used to live in Italy. And I went to school in Lausanne for a year.”
“Lausanne,” the countess repeated. It was clear she found the idea distasteful. “But you’re American, aren’t you? Why did you travel so much?”
“My father’s a cellist. He was with the Roman Philharmonic.”
“Oh, I see.” She stopped abruptly and pointed to a bench. “I think he’s asleep,” the countess said. “Let’s risk it.” She pushed the pram across the sloping lawn and sat down just as the baby began to cry again. In a moment she was on her feet, holding him in her arms, a mass of pastel blankets with a pink and pudgy fist. The baby continued crying. “Here, you try.”
“No, really,” Koster said, moving to defend himself. She laid the baby in his arms. Koster stepped back and there it was, the tiny face only a foot away, and in his own hands. The baby stopped crying immediately. Koster wrapped his right arm underneath the baby’s bottom for support.
“You see,” she crooned. “Children know these things. You can sit down now,” she added, pointing at the nearby bench. “Let’s talk about the Notre Dame cathedrals.”
They sat down next to one another and after a moment Koster said, “Was he really strapped to a camel’s hump?”
“I’m afraid so,” said the countess. “My daughter Louise insisted on continuing the caravan to Ain Salah. She’s impetuous that way. Always has been.” She pointed at the bundle in Koster’s arms. “Just like him. But, frankly, I wasn’t too worried. I was born near Tamanrasset myself and the Tuareg have been delivering their own babies for twenty-five hundred years.” She peered over the blanket at the baby’s face and Koster realized that the brusqueness and the nonchalance disguised a deep abiding love. The smile transformed her face, the smile of a clown, of a pretender. “We’re both a couple of damned Algerians.”
The baby squealed halfheartedly and Koster found himself rocking the bundle without thinking. A triangle of sunlight rushed like a phalanx through the cool wet grass, stopping at their feet. Somewhere a car honked.
“Monsieur Koster?”
“Yes.”
“What is it you wanted to ask me?”
“Ask you? Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “The cathedrals.” He looked up. They had not spoken for several minutes but he could not for the life of him remember where the time had gone. “It was about the Gnostics.”
“The Gnostics,” she repeated. “What about them?”
“I mean in relation to the Amiens cathedral.”
The countess frowned. “Please, if you’re talking about the legend of the Book of Thomas the Contender, I wish you’d just come out and say it. I don’t have enough time left to waste it anymore.” And then with a tilt of her head she said, “As you can see.”
He tried to protest but she raised a bony hand. “Some people think the Gnostics were simply Christian heretics—the most dangerous the Church has ever faced, to be sure—but still an aberration, a splinter group. They weren’t,” she said. “They were a grand mélange. Many of their beliefs were actually Babylonian or Chaldean, and many stem back even further to the Indian subcontinent, to the Brahmans. It’s important to remember that the time of greatest Gnostic development coincided with the opening of the trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East.”
Koster slipped the baby to his other arm. “But what about the cathedrals? What do the Gnostics have to do with them?”
“There is a line of knowledge,” she replied, “a tradition if you will, which stretches from the Babylonians to the Hebrews and beyond. Even Genesis fifteen refers to how the Lord brought Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. This tradition is a system of numbers.
“In ancient Babylon, astronomy was the province of the priests, the magi. They believed that numbers derived from planets and stars were divinely ordained. Because of the seven stars of the Pleiades, for example, the number seven became especially fortuitous. Just as the number forty, which corresponded to the number of days in the rainy season when the Pleiades disappeared, eventually became a number symbolizing deprivation.”
“Like astrology.”
“That’s right,” the countess said. “It was a way of fixing man in nature, the subjective in the objective. And when it combined later with the number theories of Pythagoras, it had a lasting impression on western numerology. Even the Old Testament is full of number symbols. It’s no accident that the feast of Lent is forty days long. So, for that matter, was Christ’s journey in the wilderness. And all of the medieval masons were familiar with these number systems. They knew them because of the medieval emphasis on Pythagoras and the Neo-Platonists. And they also knew them because they had thei
r own particular interest in numbers.”
“You mean as builders, as architects, right?”
“Yes and no. In the Middle Ages, masons were itinerant. They traveled about from one project to the next, working a few months or years here, a few there. But the roads were very dangerous. Bandits were everywhere. In the end they learned not to carry money with them on their journeys, but to rely instead on fellow masons for food and shelter. Soon a guild or brotherhood was born. What had been a way of protecting one’s person became a means of maintaining trade secrets. Masons only passed their knowledge on to fellow freestone masons, or freemasons, as they came to be known, since they worked with freestone—a kind of limestone, which is relatively soft and easy to work when first quarried, and then hardens with time and exposure to the air. So it was that when the Crusaders brought back new number lore from the East, the masons were quick to absorb it, and to pass it along—in secret. The line of the tradition spanned from the Magian Brotherhood in Babylon, through the Gnostics and the Manicheans, past the Paulicians and Catharists to the Templars and Freemasons of today.” The countess seemed to freeze. Her bright eyes focused on the museum in the distance. “Did you come here by yourself, Monsieur Koster?” she said.
“What’s that?” Koster followed her gaze, half expecting to see Nick Robinson hovering somewhere in the shadows. But all he could see was an elderly gentleman with a handlebar mustache, and a man in an olive-colored raincoat reading a newspaper. “Yes, why do you ask?”