“Card twenty-one in most sets is the World card, or perhaps more accurately, the end of the world card. In the older tarot sets, it depicts the Christ of the Apocalypse, and is the last card in the tarot suite. There are many theories about its origin—indeed, about the origin of the entire suite.”
“I’m familiar with the general story—some people think they began as a card game, others as a method for divination,” Maryse said.
“Yes, yes,” Grammont sniffed and straightened in his chair. He looked at them like a man with a toothache. “And others think differently. It is purely a matter of academic interest.”
“And yet you attended the Rome conference last year and moved that the record of the conference be suppressed.”
Grammont did not appear startled. “I’m not accustomed to dealing with the police. I thought I was doing a courtesy for a friend. Mr. Mortimer.”
“We made it clear that it is a police matter, Monsieur.”
“Of course.”
“We’re conducting a serious inquiry here. We have reason to believe these cards have a connection to a major crime; that’s why we need to know as much as we can about them.”
“Yes, yes. Where to start?”
“Perhaps we can start with the reasons behind your motion at the Rome conference?”
“I can’t imagine what the tarot conference can have to do with criminals. But if you must know, I felt that the proceedings were…what is the word?…sensational. Embarrassing.” He went silent for a moment and contemplated his hands.
“All right,” he continued. “To many, my profession is…not serious. Tarot has been the focus of fakery for so long that its origins have attracted every kind of crank and charlatan. Card fifteen, for example. The devil’s card. No end of absurdities about that one. As a substantive scholar, I find that sort of thing anathema. And now I have become, perhaps, too sensitive on the subject.”
“What can you tell us that’s sensitive about card twenty-one twenty-one?”
Disdain crossed his face. “You are undoubtedly familiar with the Medieval Crusader orders—the Templars, the Knights of Malta.”
“Yes.”
“The Templars were so called because they held the site of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as their headquarters. For centuries, they apparently practiced a series of secret temple rituals which they claimed to have learned from the Jews. Then the Templars were broken up by papal command in the early fourteenth century, their treasure confiscated, and their rituals suppressed. For a hundred years afterward, the craft survived underground in a number of forms.
“One of those forms may have been the tarot cards. Some evidence—most of it circumstantial, in my opinion—indicates that the tarot might originally have been a mnemonic device to perpetuate the memory of the Templar rituals. The cards were to have been coded in such a way that the authorities would not recognize their significance.”
Maryse broke in. “And this was what they talked about at the Rome conference? Why would it be so controversial that you would want it suppressed?”
“Because I don’t want to be associated with this kind of thing. Because the Templars belong to the world of space aliens and superstitions. The discussion was premature. It is important to protect ourselves from the media until the evidence is clear…if that day ever comes.”
“And card twenty-one?”
“Was apparently the culmination of the ritual, according to this theory. A knight representing an angel accompanied the initiates through various ordeals—symbolized in the other cards—and at last they met the high priest, who accepted them into the order.”
Ari had been quiet to this point, listening to the assertive tremor in Maryse’s voice more than to the conversation. But now something connected.
“Wait. You say the Templar rituals came from the Jews?”
Grammont gave him a remote look. “That is one theory.”
Ari was about to speak, but then sat back in silence.
Maryse took the box of cards from her bag and gave it to Grammont. “What do you know about this particular set?”
Grammont looked it over, smiling thinly with recognition. “De Viéville created an unknown number of tarot sets. This set belonged to the Knights of Malta for 150 years until Napoleon took possession of the island; therefore, it is known as the Malta Deck. It was auctioned to a private party some years ago.”
“Jean-Baptiste Mortimer,” Maryse said.
“Yes. He was very keen to have it, along with certain other artifacts. A Clementine Vulgate, I believe.”
“Mr. Grammont, thank you for your valuable time.” Maryse stood abruptly and collected the box from his hand. Ari, lost in his thoughts, was startled; the interview was apparently over. Grammont arose, shook hands correctly with both, and shut the door sharply behind them.
“Maryse, I’ve got to talk something through with you,” Ari whispered as they made their way around the research floor.
“Half a minute.” He was surprised at her determined tone.
She sat down at an empty computer station and began typing on the light board, downloading to her GeM the screen content as it raced past. At one point she paused and examined a menu of items from a catalog. She zoomed in on the images of several items—they looked like old books. Then she scrolled on again, finally settling on one screen, and looked over her shoulder at Ari.
On the screen was a brilliant photograph of Jean-Baptiste Mortimer in formal dress and silky red robes. Around his neck hung a spiked cross. “Chancellor of the Order of Malta, 2017-2022” read the caption.
“I’m going back to Chartres,” she said. “Tonight.”
Lion Gate Street, Old City, Jerusalem, 1930h
Talal Bukmun inched through a tunnel under the dark warren of streets in the Old City. He pushed up on a grate and pulled himself into the shop that belonged to the son of the old woman. It was one of scores of nearly identical tourist souks that crammed the alleys of the Muslim Quarter. Although night had come, it was lighter inside the shop than in the tunnel, so he could make out jumbled stacks of cheap kippahs and t-shirts, clay lamps, menorahs made of tin and Holy Families of greasy olive wood; and he could smell the carpet of dust that covered it all.
A shutter was chained across the opening to the street. He struggled with the key, but he was used to working in the dark and soon had one slat of the shutter open—just enough to admit a man. Then he sat down to wait in a corner behind a kiosk hung with postcards that announced “The Holy City” in several languages. He pulled a handful of fusty dates from his pocket and munched on them in the blackness, tossing the pits noiselessly down the open shaft of the tunnel.
He was deeply angry with himself. Three years he had hidden in holes across Iran and Syria, slowly making his way back to the land. And then this morning he had been fool enough to talk into a GeMphone—here, where the Zionists’ ears were wide open. And for what? For vengeance. He doubted the man he had talked to would betray him: there was too much at stake for them both. But he folded his 9-millimeter under his arms and close to his heart.
His heart was now empty except for his shame. It was the only thing left to him. As a boy he had watched his two sisters die, cremated in an Israeli fire attack during the Intifada. His brothers were dead, one from an intermediate distribution frame (IDF) bullet straight to the eye and another from a withering disease in a refugee camp in Gaza. His parents and grandparents had lived out their miserable lives in that camp, thrown off the grassy little olive orchard his family had farmed for a millennium. Jews lived there now.
But not for much longer. The Day of Requital would come. The trees of his own stolen orchard would cry out, “Muslim, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!” This was what he lived for; no man who was a man could accept less.
And the pig who had used the weapon he had provided to wreck the sacred mosq
ue was worse than the Jews. He would kill that man quickly, without discussion.
Thoughts of death—clean death—brought him close to God. Even from this drain he could still hear the muezzin’s call at sunset, and he had prayed there before beginning his slow crawl toward the heart of the city. Here, crouched in this heap of infidel rubbish, he was nearer the Haram al-Sharif than he had been in many years. He longed to cleanse himself, to pray the salat on the carpets of Al-Aqsa, to stand in the air on the Mount with a few real brothers. It was only a breath away, but it might have been on the other side of the world. Still, he did not feel so ashamed this close to the sacred mosque.
The shop had slowly brightened to his dark eyes. Something stirred the air, and Talal sat up expectantly.
In the opposite corner of the shop, a cupboard slid open and a lean figure all in black spun out of it. Talal recognized the face in the same instant that the life exploded out of him.
Chapter 5
Wednesday, October 6, 2027
Parvis of the Cathedral of Chartres, 0715h
Ari Davan gazed up at the royal west portal of the Cathedral of Chartres. There again graven in the stone above the door were the four guardians surrounding the priestly figure of the Christ—an ox, a lion, an eagle, and a winged man. On one side a demon led a queue of chained souls off to hell; on the other, an angel welcomed another group of souls to Paradise. Between them, another angel held a scale for balancing the good and bad deeds of the souls. Defiant, the devil held the scale down with one hand in hopes of cheating a few more souls. Far above the portal, the two towers of the cathedral loomed asymmetrically against a sky blown clear except for a skein of rose-pink cloud that tied the towers together. For the third time in a week he felt like praying.
Before that it had been a very long time, perhaps a year, since prayer had even occurred to him. He was no atheist. Atheism was too simple, too strident; he had never considered it. But he realized now that his religion had eroded to a very thin integument, and he wondered how much longer it would hold up.
He pulled the hood of his new anorak over his head and spoke silently what prayer he could remember. It came easily but with gaps. He could imagine what his father would say to see him bowing in front of a Christian shrine like this, or, from the opposite extreme, what his friends would say. But somehow it didn’t matter to him. This was a majestic place.
His prayer ended in fragments. He heard echoes in the stone wall overhead as the breeze swept along the tracery and searched the hollow places in the ancient carvings.
Why was he here, for the second day, sitting on grass in the blistering cold of northern France when he should be in Queen Helena Street working on this case?
He thought about the night before. Unable to face another day in the same suit, he had bought a pullover, anorak, and jeans in a station shop. He had insisted on staying at the Chartres gare hotel, where he collapsed from fatigue while Maryse went up the hill to stay with Mortimer in the rue Percheron. He knew they had a lot to discuss, and he needed sleep. But he had showered and put on fresh clothes; and found his way back here almost by instinct.
He had talked quietly all evening with Maryse in the flickering darkness of the train. Something had merged for them both. He remembered the sheen of her eyes as she studied her GeM and insisted that the answers were in Chartres after all; and his anxiety to talk out with her what glimmers he had seen in the cards was the only thing that kept him awake. That and the woman herself.
She was not a girl. Close to forty, near his own age, he suspected. A Catholic, almost a nun apparently, remote from his own world. But on this cold hill he felt a natural sort of warmth inside…an excitement bound up in the strange tapestry they were weaving together.
She had told him a little about Mortimer, about his career in the Foreign Legion and then the Knights of Malta, an ancient fraternity of prominent Catholics that did charity work. For a few years as Grand Chancellor of the Knights he had been responsible for the order’s government relations. It all sounded benign enough.
“So why the rush back to Chartres?” he had asked.
“Because Jean-Baptiste Mortimer has a good deal more to explain.” She was silent for a moment, looking out the window of the train car at the graying autumn fields. Then she turned to him.
“There were two great Crusader orders—the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitallers. The Templars were suppressed in the fourteenth century and much of their property and traditions went to the Hospitallers, who eventually moved their headquarters to the island of Malta. Our tarot deck must have something to do with this long—and very secret—tradition. The deck belonged to the Knights of Malta, it was taken from them, and our friend in Chartres apparently went to great lengths, and great expense, to get it back.”
“You know how much he paid for it?”
“I looked it up on the library auction site.”
“And?”
“He could have bought any of several much rarer decks for what he paid for this one.”
“Maryse, Grammont said that card twenty-one shows a high priest in a red robe.”
“The Christ figure.”
“He said a ‘high priest.’ And he also said the Templar rituals came from the Jews.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“I don’t know what to make of it. If there is a connection. But when we were in the chapel in Rome, there was blood splashed on the altar.”
“Yes. I thought it was spray from the wounds.”
“No,” he shook his head. “Remember? It couldn’t have been. Neither of the injured men came near the altar. And the pattern of spray—it came from the wrong direction.”
“It came from one side of the altar.”
“You said it came from the north side.”
“So?”
He hadn’t been quite sure how to explain this, nor if his own recollections were true or made sense. He saw in his memory only sketches on a white board in his Hebrew school, he smelled the wool of the tallit and the leather of the scrolls.
He had wished he could talk with his father, who would know.
“Well,” he started, “it was like that in the Beyt ha-Miqdash, the Temple of Shlomo.”
“Solomon’s Temple.”
“Yes. The high priest on Yom Kippur—once a year—went into the temple to sprinkle the altar with the blood of the sacrifice. Always from the north side of the altar.”
“But that was 2,000 years ago, and it was a Jewish ceremony. What would it have to do with a Catholic pope?”
He shook his head. “That is exactly what I don’t know. But Grammont said that the Templars got their ceremonies from the Jews.”
“Are you suggesting that the assassination of the Pope was a ritual sacrifice?” Maryse had looked at him incredulously, but at the same time her eyes began to shine. She whispered a question. “Whose blood is on the altar?”
Eagerly, Ari started whispering questions into his GeM, looking for the database of crime scene reports on the assassination.
Maryse looked over his shoulder. “That data should be online by now. Keep going. There it is.”
In the privacy of their seats in the train car they risked projecting the screen on to the wall. Tables of numbers and terse data points shimmered past as Ari scrolled through it. Suddenly he stopped and they both studied the findings of the scene investigator.
“It’s in Italian,” he moaned. But Maryse, who had trouble speaking the language, had no trouble reading it.
“It’s his blood.” She looked perplexed at Ari. “The Monsignor’s.”
It made no sense. Why the Monsignor’s blood? Why was the assassin’s blood flung over the altar? There had been very little blood from the man’s head wound on the floor, only a few drops—almost as if it had been collected in some way. Unlike the swamp of blood where the Pope had fallen, unli
ke the dried river of blood that marked the Pope’s struggle through the gate and into the open air.
Ari found himself gliding in and out of this grisly reasoning, struggling against sleep and then half dreaming as the train hurried into nighttime. He saw again and again in his mind the blood as it fell in a mist over the altar of the Sancta Sanctorum, as if flung out of hand. Seven times. Were there seven distinct waves? The blood of the goat. Seven times, on the altar of the Ark of the Covenant. On the ark in the qodesh qodeshim.…
Then at once he was awake. Maryse dozed lightly next to him.
“The Sancta Sanctorum,” he whispered.
“What?”
“The Holy of Holies. That’s where the high priest went on Yom Kippur. Into the Holy of Holies.”
Now the sun rose in the cold, and the cathedral became a shadow that filled the brightening morning. The puzzle of the night before still confounded him; the clear air made him hungrier than ever for the answers. He got up, walked across the grass, and sat down on the steps of Mortimer’s house in the rue Percheron. Pulling his GeM from the pocket of his coat, he looked impatiently up at the house for signs of life.
The GeM flared on, and he started searching for information on Jean-Baptiste Mortimer. The old man’s story was everywhere. Born in 1952; semi-aristocratic French background. Read English and history at Oxford. Licence maitrise in arts and letters from the Sorbonne. Distinguished career in the Foreign Legion, with postings in West Africa, the Indian Ocean, peacekeeping duty in Lebanon. On the general staff he seemed to have had intelligence duties crossed with the duties of a diplomat, treating with the locals of a half-dozen countries. He also performed some enigmatic function as a chaplain.
But most of the data was about Mortimer’s role with the Knights of Malta. A member since 1978, he had been appointed Grand Chancellor some years before. Intriguingly, the Knights were considered a sovereign nation, with their own government under a Grand Master, their own state property, and even their own post office. Napoleon had deprived them of their island of Malta, and since then they had set up a “government in exile” on the via Condotti in Rome. The Knights’ headquarters building, like the Vatican, was treated as a mini-state within a state.
The Day of Atonement Page 24