by J. G. Sandom
“This is ridiculous. I don’t go about accusing people just because their names sound suspicious.” Musel shot a hand into the air. “And what could Scarcella’s men have possibly wanted with Duval?”
“Perhaps he’d learned something about the labyrinth, or the gospel itself.”
“Which gospel? Enough!” The captain straightened in his chair. His hands fell against the armrests with a thud. The coils of fat around his neck extended as he stretched to his full height. “You’re peddling in sauerkraut, Inspector. ‘Perhaps’ will never get you closer to the truth.”
Lyman nodded. He crossed his legs. He ran a hand through his hair and said, “I suppose you’re right. Of course you are.” Then he sat back in his chair and pulled his coat together at the front. One of the plastic bone toggles was loose, he observed. He played with it delicately, turning it in his fingers. “But there’s one thing I do know,” he said finally, looking up. “The missal which you found in that picnic basket is the key to this mystery. That and Thierry’s letter.”
“So you keep saying.”
“What did Clermont tell you about them?”
“He sent them on to Paris for analysis.”
“But that was months ago. Surely there’s been some word by now.”
“Inspector Lyman, unbelievable as it may seem to you, I have other matters to attend to. Other cases. If you’re so convinced of their importance, why don’t you call Clermont?”
Lyman frowned. “I have. He never rings me back.”
“No doubt he’s busy too.”
“No doubt,” said Lyman tightly, as he stood. “Thanks for your time.” He started for the door.
“Inspector.”
Lyman hesitated. “Yes, Captain.”
“I suppose if I sent you packing, you’d just come back again, wouldn’t you?”
Lyman frowned. His hand hovered near the doorknob. “You don’t understand,” he answered quietly. “It’s not just Pontevecchio anymore. I don’t know.”
It was as if he bore the weight of a hundred fathoms on his back. No matter how he tried, Lyman could not shake the image of his son, floating in some dark compartment at the bottom of the South Atlantic. He shook his head. Guns and butter.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Scarcella. Every time he breathes I feel it. Every time he takes a step, I can feel it rubbing at me.”
There was that little girl in Terracina, cowering on the bed. There was George. He looked up.
“I don’t want any executions in my town,” Musel said flatly. “Is that clear? I don’t care who he is, or what he’s done. I will not permit it.”
Lyman opened the door but the captain called him back. “And, Lyman,” he said.
“Yes, Captain?” Musel began to fiddle with the papers on his desk. Lyman waited in the open doorway. “Yes, Captain,” he repeated.
“Good luck.”
Lyman pulled his collar up against the cold as he descended the steps of the Musée de Picardie and headed for the street. Clermont, the director, wasn’t in. He was somewhere in the public library next door. He was bloody out.
Lyman kicked a chestnut off the path before him and it spun along the grass and down into the rue de la République. A hole opened in the clouds above and he felt himself lean in without design, intrude upon a patch of sunlight on the far side of the pavement, out of the shadow and the cold, into a memory of Brighton and a high moor just above the cliffs near Roedean, just he and Jackie and the open sky, where he had told her for the first time of his love. Then it had seemed the kind of stark confession that one should only have to make one time for it to live up to its promise. He hadn’t known then it was but a single phrase of a continuous exchange, a daily test and confirmation of their marriage, a litany so regular that in the end it was the only thing that didn’t change.
Lyman rounded the hedge beside the street and the public library came into view. There was a little garden in the front with pale September flowers and a well-trimmed lawn. Lyman staggered up the path. A granite doorway opened onto an expansive corridor with a white marble floor and sinister, gilt-edged oils. To his right, a sign with an enormous arrow announced the Maison de la Culture. Lyman wondered if he should try that corridor first or head into the library itself, but it was the sound of voices which eventually enticed him past a stairwell into the reference section. Drawers lined the walls to his left. Ahead, a gray-haired woman with a pink sweater sat at a desk checking what appeared to be validation cards.
“Excuse me,” Lyman said. “Do you know Monsieur Clermont, of the museum?”
The woman looked up with one eye. “Audio room B,” she answered, pointing lethargically.
“Thanks.” He crossed the room toward a series of bookshelves which jutted from the opposite wall. A few children leaned against them, chatting quietly. Rooms A and B were set right next to one another. He knocked three times and entered.
Clermont was sitting alone in the corner of the win-dowless room with a pair of headphones on his head, listening with his eyes closed, playing with a pencil. Lyman shut the door. The curator remained motionless, so Lyman sat down quietly beside his cubicle and waited. He noted the drooping mustache, the heavy round earlobes hanging just below the hairline, the eyebrows forging an alliance. Clermont must have been fifty or so, Lyman thought, somewhere in the middle. His clothes were younger. He had a blue silk kerchief up one sleeve.
Without warning, Clermont opened his eyes and snatched the headphones from his head.
“Oh, sorry,” Lyman said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Clermont regained his dignity. He reached over and switched off the cassette recorder.
“Excuse me, but is your name Clermont by any chance?”
Clermont sat up in his chair. “Yes. Why? Do I know you?” He straightened his tie.
“No, we’ve never met. Although I’ve tried to reach you several times by telephone. The name’s Nigel Lyman. It was about that Masonic missal which you gave to the Countess de Rochambaud.”
The curator looked at his watch. “Yes, I got your messages. I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been very busy. We’re mounting a new exhibition. He started to rise but Lyman dropped a heavy hand across his shoulders and the man sank back into his chair.
“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind answering just a few more questions.”
Clermont’s back went limp. “Look, what do you people want from me? I told you. I don’t know anything.”
“I’m sorry?”
Clermont glanced up. He looked desperate, Lyman thought. He looked bloody terrified.
“What are you talking about?” Lyman said. “What people?”
Clermont stood up and laughed, a shy laugh, slate thin. “It’s getting late. I have an appointment.”
“What people?”
The curator began to move across the room. “I don’t know anything,” he repeated. Then, suddenly, he made a quick dash for the door.
Lyman grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him up against the wall. “What people?” he repeated.
“You’re not the only one around here asking questions.”
“What do you mean? Who? Who else?” Lyman said. “When?”
“Just a few weeks ago.”
“What did they look like?”
The curator struggled in Lyman’s grip. “I don’t know.”
Lyman leaned against him harder, bringing his face close. “Remember,” he said with such finality that Clermont settled.
“He was dark. He was tall and dark. Dark eyes. Dark hair, combed back. Spanish or Italian.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked me about the missal. Just like you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I told him that I didn’t have it. I didn’t. I’d already sent it to the countess.”
“Was he surprised?”
“Surprised! He threatened to kill me.”
Lyman smiled. Clermont’s feelings were
so transparent, so immediate. Nature had given him a victim’s face. He was the one with the weak knee, the one cut leg out of all the thousands on the jostling African plain.
“Why exactly did you send the missal to the countess?”
“Please, I’ve already told you everything I know.”
Lyman tightened his grip. “It’s a simple question,” he said. “You had this remarkable document in your possession, obviously a rare prize, a once-in-a-lifetime find, and you decided to give it away. Why?”
“I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t want that missal here. I had a pretty good idea what it meant, and I didn’t want any part of it.”
“So you sent it to the countess.”
“Yes, why not? She’s the expert. I thought, let them fight it out if they want to. It was none of my business. That’s what I told him.”
Lyman felt his heart jump. Let them fight it out, he thought. But who? The countess and the stranger, the man with the dark hair and Latin voice? Two fronts, two sides, he thought, remembering what Koster had told him of his meeting with the countess in Paris. Each thing has its shadow, she had said. Something like that. Rome had its Carthage, and Freemasonry its 14.
“Let them fight it out,” Lyman repeated slowly.
So perhaps there were two forms of Masonry after all. Two sides. Yes, he thought. It had all seemed so perfectly timed. The abraxas in the book. The way the countess had turned to that particular page, at that particular moment. And hadn’t Mariane said the abraxas were worth as much as fifteen thousand francs? The same amount as in Jacques Tellier’s passbook. The very same.
“I understand. You didn’t want to get between them, is that it?”
“That’s right.”
“Between the stranger and the G.L.F.”
“Of course. That’s why I sent it to her. I knew it would make her happy. And besides, she’s been supporting the museum for years.”
Lyman nodded. Now it began to fit. It was the countess who had bought the abraxas from Tellier. She was the mysterious G.L.F. who had paid that fifteen thousand francs.
“Listen to me, Clermont,” he said, poking the curator in the chest. “I want to know about the G.L.F.”
“What about it?”
“What do they do exactly? Who are they?”
“But I don’t understand. I thought you said…”
Clermont began to struggle once again. Lyman spun him around. He wrenched the curator’s left arm up into a half nelson and pushed his face against the wall. “Forget what you don’t understand,” Lyman said. “Just tell me about the G.L.F.”
“Okay, okay. It’s no big secret anyway. It’s the Grande Loge Féminin. They’re based in Paris. The countess is a kind of matriarch to the lodge.”
“You mean they’re Masons too?”
“Yes, dammit, let me go.”
“What kind of Masons?”
“You’re breaking my arm.”
“Tell me.”
“They’re Speculative Masons, that’s all I know. A women’s lodge. The Countess de Rochambaud’s their leader. She promised to protect me. That’s why I gave her the missal.”
So there were two fronts, thought Lyman. Or three, if you counted the archbishop as an outside player. Yet something still bothered him, something which Madame Kung had said about Maurice’s death in Austria.
Who could have turned that sign around on the hotel door in Lech, and why? Who could have known what they were doing to Maurice in that room other than Barbieri and McKenzie? And if one of them had turned the sign, one of Scarcella’s own men, it could only mean that he had wanted someone to walk in on the interrogation, that he had welcomed an intrusion. Then he was more than Scarcella’s man. He was working with his own agenda, or one belonging to another of the players. But who? The G.L.F.? Did the countess have a mole within Scarcella’s camp?
Lyman sighed. Perhaps he was just peddling in sauerkraut, as Captain Musel had said.
He released Clermont and stepped away. “I found you once,” he said. “Remember that. I can always do it again.”
Clermont began to rub his arm. He didn’t say anything. He simply stood there, glowering at Lyman.
Without another word, Lyman turned and headed out the door. He walked back through the library with his chin down, watching the floor, trying to piece together what he’d learned, trying to find a pattern. When he reached the entrance he stood for a moment on the steps of the library and looked up at the sky. A pavilion of black clouds had gathered to the west, but at least it wasn’t raining. Not for two days now. He pulled his hood up just a little at the back and started down the steps.
Scarcella, he thought. Grabowski. The Countess de Rochambaud. Yet there was a difference, he knew. The countess was manipulating Koster—that much was clear now—but it was doubtful she had been involved in the Pontevecchio incident. After all, Clermont hadn’t sent her the Masonic missal until three or four months after the hanging in London. Lyman smiled. It seemed the man in the wing-tipped shoes had left a modest legacy. Based on Clermont’s description, it was likely that the curator’s foreign visitor and Barbieri were the same. Barbarosso. Barbieri. The man with the wing-tipped shoes. How strange, Lyman thought. He had collected all his names, yet the man who had fallen from the balcony of the Hôtel de la Paix remained a stranger.
He crossed the street and headed back toward the hotel. A vegetable shop with an outdoor stand caught his eye as he walked by. Lyman had never seen such monstrous squash, bloated and oddly colored, fuchsia and olive green. The peas were expensive. He leaned across and squeezed a melon.
It was odd, he thought, how in the end we all remained unknown to one another, like legendary islands always distant but a few more leagues, always just across the horizon. He had never really known Jackie. He had never understood her hunger for the city, but he had used it to his own advantage. She had nursed her cool ambition and he had listened, late at night, over a few biscuits and a glass of milk, as her dreams grew one upon the other, like crystals, planning the next decade of advancement, planning his life, as if somewhere in the glint, in the gestures of her hands or the way she’d always end her paragraphs with “then they’ll see,” he would finally unmask her.
It was like his own son, Peter, who had always meant one thing to him, and something altogether different to his friends, to the boys at school, to his mother. It was as if there had been many Peter Lymans, each one discrete and separate, a digit in the sum of who he was, never complete until that final instant in that sinking battleship when they had all rushed in together at the end, all those countless Peter Lymans crying out in one unanswered voice.
We were all strangers in the end, he thought, always unknown to one another. Lyman stopped. A car honked at his heels. A pair of schoolgirls giggled.
It took him only a few more minutes at a desperate run to reach the Hôtel de la Paix. He barreled through the door and up into the open phone booth before the concierge could even say hello. Coins spilled everywhere as he emptied out his pockets. Come on, he told himself. Keep calm now. He picked up the phone and dialed.
This time Monsieur Zimmer wasn’t quite so nice, not quite so deferential. Lyman turned and smiled at the concierge as he waited for Madame Kung. Then, growing louder by the second, it seemed as though he could hear her footsteps sounding on the lobby floor before she finally picked up the receiver. “Hello,” Lyman said. “Hello, Madame Kung?”
“Yes?”
“Listen, I’m sorry to bother you like this. It’s just that I forgot to ask you something before.”
“Yes? What is it?”
“I was just wondering. Would you mind describing the gentleman in the room?”
“What, again?”
“No, I mean Duval. The man who was killed. Maurice Duval.”
“Oh. Not at all. Well, how do I begin? He was not too tall, I suppose. But he wasn’t short either. He had dark brown hair. With some gray in it, I think.”
“Yes. What else?
”
“To be honest, I never much cared for him. There was something, I don’t know, colorless about him. Maybe because he never went outside. He was always so pale, so thin, as if he were sick, as if he never saw the light.”
Lyman spun about. “Thank you, Madame Kung.” He dropped a hand over the mouthpiece. “Excuse me,” he shouted at the concierge. “Is Monsieur Koster in?”
“Hello. Hello.” Madame Kung’s voice echoed tinnily through the receiver.
“Yes, I’m sorry, Madame Kung.” Lyman slipped the phone between his ear and shoulder and began to search for another coin. “Thank you,” he continued. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“He’s over at the cathedral, Monsieur Lyman,” the concierge replied. Lyman nodded furiously.
“You’re welcome too, Madame Kung. Yes, goodbye.” He broke the connection and then turned back to the concierge. “Quick,” he said. “Get me the number for the Cartier Photo Shop, the one next to the cathedral.”
“Of course.” The concierge reached for the phone book behind the front desk and began to flip through the pages. “Here,” he said. “Ninety-three, fifty-seven, thirty-four. And by the way, your office called again. A man named Cocksedge. That’s the second time today.”
Lyman ignored him and dialed the number. A voice responded and he dropped his coin into the booth. “Hello. Hello?” he said.
“Cartier Photo.”
“Is Mariane Soury-Fontaine there?” he asked as calmly as he could.
“One moment.”
An eternity passed, and then he heard a rustle at the other end.
“Hello, this is Mariane.”
Lyman leaned against the phone booth, drawing the receiver close. “Mariane. Mariane, listen to me. It’s Nigel Lyman.”
“Oh, Monsieur Lyman. What a surprise.” Mariane’s voice was cool.
“Look, I don’t have time to explain. I want you to go next door to the cathedral and find Joseph.”
“Why?”
“Please, don’t argue with me. Just tell him to meet me in the basement of the Bishop’s Palace in about twenty minutes.”
“Look, Monsieur Lyman. I don’t know exactly what you have in mind, but as far as I’m concerned …”