by Unknown
It was an uncomplicated room.
“This is our only shot,” Arthur said. “If it’s not here, there isn’t any other place around conceivably from the fifth century.”
“Then let’s get to work,” Claire said.
They started with the altar, searching behind it, pushing and pulling at its limestone slabs but it was solid and weighed a ton or more. The walls were next. The two spent the better part of twenty minutes meticulously rapping at the plaster with their knuckles, trying to detect a hollow.
When they’d exhausted that they turned to the floor.
“Help me roll up the rug,” Arthur said.
As they knelt, their backs to the altar, Griggs rose up and spied them through the grate in the window then quickly dropped from sight.
Claire lightly tapped the tile stones while Arthur stood back, taking a longer view, sweeping the stones with his light.
Hers went out and she swore. “I broke it.”
He laughed. “What did you think would happen?”
As he bent to help her up, he pulled back his hand and shined his beam on a spot.
“Look!”
She saw it but he’d already found another and then two more.
Four shallow indentations in two adjacent tile stones.
“Lie before Christ and find the Grail,” she whispered.
“Hand-and footholds,” he said, breathing faster. “Take my light and shine it there.”
He had a ballpoint pen in his pocket and he used it to probe the mortar between two tiles. Then he scraped at another stripe separating two different stones.
“The first one’s softer, more crumbly. Let me give it a go.”
He flopped on his belly and felt the coolness of the stones through his shirt.
The altar and cross were before him.
He felt for the grooves with his feet and found them, bearing down with his toes.
Then he grasped the handholds.
“They would have been shorter,” he complained.
“You want me to try?”
“I think I’m stronger.”
He held his breath and bore down, pulling with his fingers while maintaining a counterforce with his toes.
Nothing happened.
Grunting, he tried again.
Was there a faint cracking sound?
He doubled his effort, feeling his face flush and ears burn.
There was movement—a small movement of one of the tiles.
One more.
He’d lifted weights when he played rugby. As he had always done while pressing out the last implausible rep, he gritted his teeth. An animalistic growl emanated from his core.
Suddenly the stone under his torso shifted then fell away, partly dropping into a void.
Claire shouted out in surprise, “Are you all right?”
Arthur found himself angled downward, his head below the surface of the floor. Startled, he scrambled to his feet.
“The light,” he said. “Shine it down there!”
He saw the way the simple trapdoor had been constructed. The stone, which slid back, had been resting on a half-inch lip: once the false mortar gave way, it moved a little more than half that distance until it dropped down.
He got Claire to help him lift the stone clear of the hole. They propped it against the rolled-up mat.
The hole under the stone was only large enough for three shoe boxes.
Shining his light on it, he felt bitter disappointment welling up. It was empty.
He swore.
“No wait,” Claire said, pointing. “Look.”
Then he saw it in the corner, a small yellow square of paper.
He reached for it and unfolded it.
There were three words, a florid signature, and a date.
Ho he trobat!
A Gaudí, 1883
“What does it mean?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know but let’s hurry up and get this floor put back together.”
They maneuvered the tile back in its place and lowered the stone back onto its lip, snatching away their fingers lest they be crushed.
As they worked, Griggs watched them through the grated window.
Arthur cautiously went outside for a handful of dirt to replace the pseudo-mortar.
A soft rustling gave him a start but he thought it only the trees, swaying in the freshening wind.
The patch job done, he stamped on the cracks and declared it as good as they could make it. They unrolled the mat and left the chapel and now stood under the towering cypresses, their tops painted yellow by moonlight.
Arthur had a translation app on his mobile phone and typed in the three-word message.
It was Catalan.
I have found it!
Arthur whispered, “It was here!”
Griggs had withdrawn about sixty yards to higher ground, propping himself against a waist-high wall at the boundary of the monastery.
He raised his rifle and sited through the sniper scope. With small, practiced movements Griggs clicked on the laser and clicked off the safety.
Hengst appeared at his side. “What the hell are you doing?”
“He found something,” Griggs said.
“Is it the Grail?”
“I don’t care. It’s time to put him down.”
“Not unless we’re sure it’s the Grail.”
Griggs placed his finger on the trigger. “Fuck off.”
Arthur and Claire were outside the chapel whispering to one another when suddenly she gasped at the red dot dancing over Arthur’s temple.
Before she could react, Hengst grabbed the stock of the rifle and pulled it from Grigg’s cheek. The sound of the suppressed shot was imperceptible but the heavy bullet crashed and sparked into limestone.
“Get down!” Claire cried, reaching for him.
“What was that?” Arthur said, falling to the grass with her.
“There was a laser on you!”
Griggs maintained a hold as Hengst lunged, using the butt of his rifle to deliver a blow to the other man’s face. Hengst grunted and crumpled to the ground.
Repositioning himself further along the wall, Griggs started to reacquire his target through the scope.
“Where the hell are you?” he muttered.
Arthur and Claire were near the door of the chapel, shielded from Griggs by the building.
“If we try to get back to the dormitory, he’s going to have a clear shot at us,” Arthur said.
“We can’t stay here!”
“I’ve got to go for him,” Arthur insisted, panting.
“No!”
“Here. Take the note and the car keys. If I don’t come back, get away from here tonight. Go back to France. Forget this ever happened.”
“Arthur …”
He got up into a crouch, felt her hand dropping off his shoulder and moved to the corner of the chapel. Then, after a few bolstering breaths, he sprinted toward the perimeter wall.
Griggs continued scanning the walkways from the chapel to the buildings. He was just about to make a move toward the chapel when Arthur spotted him twenty-five yards away, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Arthur found an egg-sized rock and threw it into the darkness. It landed with a thud to Grigg’s left, drawing his attention.
Arthur ran toward the sniper as fast as he could, his mind icy, in survival mode.
Griggs heard him a moment before Arthur was on him and wheeled his rifle around, a fraction too late. Arthur rammed a shoulder into the man’s hard gut, the momentum from the charge toppling him.
Arthur heard cursing. With balled-up fists he tried to pummel the man on the ground into some kind of submission but Griggs wasn’t going down so easily. He still had a hold of the rifle and with a sharp upward jab thrust the mounted scope into Arthur’s tender ribs.
As Arthur gasped and doubled over, Griggs started to his feet. If he rose it was over. He would have pushed the barrel against Arthur’s head and jerked off a fatal round. Art
hur scrambled up first and desperately swung his fist into the side of the other man’s head.
His hand exploded in pain. It was like punching a brick wall and didn’t seem to stop Griggs from rising. Arthur half expected the fellow to shake off the punch and laugh but something different happened.
Griggs stopped moving. His rifle slid from his hands. Without uttering a sound he teetered and fell backward over the wall, tumbling five hundred feet down the mountain, his lifeless body coming to rest in a dense thicket of forest.
Arthur heard tree branches snapping. He peered over the wall, seeing nothing but a chasm.
He ran back to the chapel where Claire met him with frantic sobs.
“Thank God! I was so scared.”
“Come on,” he said, pulling her toward the dormitory. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Hengst rubbed his swollen cheek and walked over to the wall where Griggs had gone over. He holstered his pistol, its suppressor still warm from the 9 mm round.
Grigg’s sniper rifle was lying in the grass near the wall. Hengst picked it up and put it on safe.
“Sweet.”
#
Jeremy Harp was awakened by his mobile phone at 3 A.M. He clicked on the bedside light. His wife was in a separate room.
“Harp here,” he answered hoarsely, confused by an interrupted dream.
“Dr. Harp, I’m sorry to wake you but there’s been a development.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m sorry, it’s Peter Hengst. Griggs tried to kill Malory. I had to shoot him.”
“Griggs, you shot Griggs?”
“Yes.”
“Is he dead?”
“He is.”
“And Malory is all right?”
“Yes. And none the wiser.”
“I knew I couldn’t trust Griggs to stand down. Bastard. Where are you?”
“Still in Montserrat. I think Malory found something. In a small chapel on the grounds.”
Harp closed his eyes tightly and asked, “Was it the Grail?”
“I don’t think so. I heard Malory say something like, ‘it was here.’”
Harp opened his eyes in disappointment. “Okay, clean up any mess. You’ll know what to do. Keep following them. I expect you know what this means?”
“No sir, what?”
“It means you’re promoted. You’re my new head of security.”
24
They drove in stunned silence, the dark mountain receding in the rearview mirror.
Finally, Arthur said, “I killed someone.”
“You had no choice.”
“I didn’t think I hit him that hard.”
He gripped the steering wheel so tightly it hurt his bruised hand.
“Do you want me to drive?” she asked.
“I’ll be okay. I need to focus.”
“Was it the man who killed your friends?”
“I’m not sure. It was dark. He had a beard. It could have been.”
“Then maybe he was the one who killed Tony too.”
“Maybe.”
“Then I’m glad he’s dead. Hopefully, that’s the end of it. Hopefully, you won’t be followed anymore.”
“Interested parties,” Arthur said in a monotone. “That’s what he said that night. This isn’t over, Claire. There’s more than one of them. It won’t be over till we find the Grail.”
As he drove along the deserted highway, he tried to put the thoughts of the tumbling man out of his head and concentrate on what they’d found.
Antoni Gaudí.
He knew little of the man beyond the barest of bones. He was an architect; the genius behind some of Barcelona’s most important buildings.
I have found it!
They’d have to go to Barcelona.
The road was clear. It seemed sure there was no one following them. But he’d been sure that they weren’t followed to Montserrat.
He passed Claire his phone. Its screen glowed in the dark as she read out descriptions of centrally located hotels in the city. Arthur chose one and Claire rang the hotel. A night clerk told them they could check in before dawn.
They arrived at the Gothic Quarter just off Las Ramblas. The Hotel España had struck Arthur as an auspicious choice since, by its description, it had been designed by one of Gaudí’s contemporaries, Lluis Domènech.
Arthur went to the ice machine down the hall from their room and iced his swollen hand.
“Do you think it’s broken?” Claire asked.
“I doubt it. I’ve broken a lot of bones playing rugby. As a rule of thumb, if it’s not sticking through the skin it’s not that bad.”
They were too tired to undress. For the next five hours they slept deeply and, were it not for Arthur’s phone alarm, would have slept well into the afternoon.
When they awoke they asked the concierge where they might find a good bookstore in the area. The Librería La Central del Raval was in a refurbished seventeenth-century church a short walk from the hotel. It was spacious, with a generous selection and a bustling café but after several minutes of futile browsing they decided they needed help navigating the Catalan.
The manager, who looked like a bushy-haired academic, offered to escort them to the Gaudí material.
“On his work, his architecture, we have this selection here translated to English. The best, in my opinion, is by the Gaudí scholar Esteve Vallespir, maybe not the best pictures but the most profound analysis. This one here has the best photos. It’s quite beautiful but it’s more of a coffee table book, not something to carry around.”
Arthur took both while Claire added, “We also need books on his life. We want to understand him too, not just his buildings.”
The manager nodded appreciatively. “Biographies, yes, this is the right approach to completely understand Gaudí. I think you’re not ordinary tourists. I have only two biographies in English. This one, written in English by a Dutch author, is quite excellent; and this older one, translated from Catalan, also has some useful insights I think.”
As the manager was ringing up the purchases, Arthur said, “You’ve been very helpful. Beyond the books, could you possibly steer us to someone in the city, a curator, a professor, someone we could talk with to get some questions answered?”
The young man scrunched his forehead. “Well, the one I can contemplate is the librarian at the Enric Casanelles Library at the Gaudí House Museum. It’s not open to the public but maybe you can place a call there.”
“You wouldn’t have the number, would you?” Claire asked.
“Maybe, somewhere,” he said, looking a bit harried.
“Do you think they speak English?” Claire smiled at him very sweetly.
The manager sighed. “Would you like me to speak to the librarian for you? She’s been to our store many times. I know her.”
“You’re amazing!” Claire said, making him blush.
In a few minutes the manager returned from his office smiling. The librarian, Isabella Bellver, would see them in the afternoon as a favor.
At the hotel they flopped on the bed, ordered some coffee and divided the books between them, spending the next couple of hours reading passages to each other.
“Gaudí was born in 1852, so in 1883 he was thirty-one.”
“After he graduated from the Architectural School in Barcelona he fell in with a group called the Modernists, who searched for the cultural identity of the Catalans through architecture.”
“It says that Gaudí discarded traditional architectural building blocks—cubes, spheres, and prisms—and replaced them with the geometrically warped shapes of things in nature such as flowers, bones, the stems of plants.”
“Listen to this. In 1883, he was recommended for a project to build a cathedral to honor the holy family, the Sagrada Família. Gaudí didn’t want to do it at first. He resisted taking it on but for some reason he changed his mind and worked on it until the day he died, forty-three years later. Work has been continuous since that
time and it’s still going on. It won’t be finished till 2026, believe it or not.”
“1883. You think it’s a coincidence?”
“Who knows?”
“Also about the same time he essentially became the family architect for Eusebi Güell, a rich industrialist, and he designed buildings and gardens for the family his whole career. We’re going to Parc Güell this afternoon. Gaudí and Güell lived in houses next to each other for a time. Gaudí’s house is the museum now.”
“After Güell died in 1918, Gaudí took no more outside commissions and worked exclusively on Sagrada Família. He eventually moved into his studio at the cathedral and lived there till his death.”
“In 1926, he was walking from Sagrada Família to take mass when he was hit by a cable car. The police thought he was a vagrant at first and took him to a charity hospital where he died a few days later. His funeral was one of the largest Barcelona had ever seen. There was a debate where he should be buried and in the end he received a special dispensation from the Church to be interred in the crypt in Sagrada Família.”
“In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, his workshop and archive at Sagrada Família were ransacked and most of his personal papers, architectural plans, and scale models were destroyed.”
When they were done they had extracted the essence of his life as if it were juice from a lemon; but it was merely a collection of facts, bringing them no closer to I have found it!
After lunch they flagged a taxi and headed north to the hill of El Carmel. Their appointment with the librarian wasn’t for an hour so they thought they might get to Parc Güell early and have a look around first.
At once, Claire grasped Arthur’s arm and pointed. The spires of Sagrada Família had come into view.
“Can we go there first?” she asked.
“We’ve got time for a quick look around but no more than that.”
The taxi driver let them off in the square beside the cathedral’s Nativity Façade and they arched their necks in wonder.
It was almost impossible to fathom the scale and complexity and audacity of Gaudí’s cathedral. Eight of the planned eighteen towers soared to dizzying heights against the pale blue sky, exceeded only by the construction cranes that rose higher. The Nativity Façade and its bell towers, the first section completed, was both familiar and alien at once. They seemed hard as the stone from which they were fashioned but soft as a confection melting in the sun.