‘He told me that Aehrenthal had managed to get his hands on Almásy’s papers. A few weeks earlier he’d met Aehrenthal in Jerusalem. Aehrenthal was in high spirits. He could barely restrain himself from laughing, and kept telling my friend that he was close to finding the Holy Grail. About a week after that, Aehrenthal headed for the Libyan desert. He employed half a dozen Tuareg guides. Word got around that he was planning to finish Almásy’s expedition, the search for the lost Persian army. But weeks passed and nothing was heard of him or his guides, and people thought he’d headed into the empty places, that he’d joined Cambyses’s soldiers, that he’d never be seen alive or dead again.
‘But then he popped up in Tripoli. He had grown gaunt and more arrogant, he had been lashed by desert winds and emerged like a prophet or a man chased by demons. What he had seen he would not say, and perhaps he had seen nothing. He did not speak of a discovery, and he brought nothing out with him. But anyone who met him at that time said he was a changed man.
‘My friend – the man I spoke to you about – went to Tripoli and met him. He offered to buy anything Aehrenthal had brought out of the sands, but he was turned down flat. Aehrenthal said there was nothing, not even bones or fragments of bones. No chariots, no harnesses of horses or camels, no armour, no spears, no swords, no axes. Just sand. But he let something slip: that he was looking for men in England, old men, men who’d been in the desert with Almásy, or without Almásy – it was never clear which. My friend asked about the Grail, asked what Aehrenthal had meant, but this time the man was silent.
‘He went back to Austria soon after that, where he visited several organisations and met with various people. Then he returned here and took up residence in the castle where Miss Usherwood was kept prisoner. That is his headquarters now; the Austrians are too watchful, their security services keep a close eye on his comings and goings. Here, things are more relaxed. Of course, there are plenty of old Nazis in Austria, and a great many new ones, but the state watches them. Here, in the forests of Transylvania, he can plot his plots and weave his webs.’
Ethan got to his feet. He wanted to walk and stretch his legs. Tiredness enveloped him, and though he expected little comfort in a monastic bed, he wanted to lie down and close his eyes, longed to be wrapped in sleep.
‘I still don’t understand what Aehrenthal wants to achieve, what his ambitions are exactly. I can see he hopes for some sort of Nazi revival, and that he plans to use the relics as symbols, as rallying points for his great endeavour. But why this obsession with Sarah? He has what he wanted from us, why does he have to waste time with her?’
Father Iustin stood as well and walked to the fireplace, where the embers still held a certain degree of heat.
‘Ethan,’ he said, ‘I’ve been avoiding this question, but I don’t think I have the right to hold it back from you. He wants Sarah, but he will have you just as readily. You know something he does not, and he will stop at nothing to extract it from you.’
‘The location of Wardabaha.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But he has the relics. He can display them, open a museum to hold them, make a documentary about how they were found.’
‘He wants much more than that. We only found out about this a year ago, and we weren’t certain until…’ He hesitated and reached out to take a poker with which to stir the embers into a little life. ‘Well, quite honestly, not until you arrived this evening. There had been certain rumours, but what you and Sarah have told me seems to settle the matter.
‘Until a few years ago, Aehrenthal was interested only in his Novo Ordi Templi and the various neo-Nazi groups he belonged to or was in contact with. He had ambitions to find the sacred relics from an early stage; that’s why he became a biblical antiquarian in the first place. Every time a relic was mentioned on the grapevine, he would hare off after it. He has a collection of fakes in his castle up there.
‘Then he got wind of your grandfather and his discoveries. Almásy gave him that. Almásy had met several of your grandfather’s crew while they stayed in Cairo after the discovery. If it hadn’t been for the war and their being sent off on further raids it’s highly likely one or another of them would have done some sort of deal with Almásy to relocate Wardabaha. They might well have gone out there with him, and he might have made his name by bringing out the…the relics your grandfather chose to leave behind. Then the war ended, Almásy died, several of the original LRDG patrol died as well, and it was all forgotten.
‘I think Wardabaha remained a distant dream for Aehrenthal for many years. Then two things came together. He found out where your grandfather lived. And he read about cellular cloning. Or perhaps it happened the other way round. I don’t think the link occurred to him for a long time.’
‘I don’t understand. Cellular cloning? Like sheep?’
Iustin rubbed his hands together. He too wanted bed, but he knew he would not sleep tonight.
‘He wants to find the bones of our Lord. He hopes there will be tissue on them. He will extract the DNA. He will grow his own Christ, he will create a baby that will grow into the Christ child, and the child will grow to be a man, and the man will be Aehrenthal’s creation. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. He will be a Christ who hates Jews, who despises blacks, who preaches Aryan supremacy. And his first act will be to announce a second holocaust.
‘Long before that his followers will have started to gather at his feet. Aehrenthal will summon them, and they will summon others. Aehrenthal has the relics. There’s no point in our looking for them in Romania: he’ll take them with him to Libya, to rejoin them with the tombs. Soon he will have the bones of the entire family of Christ, the bones of some of his early followers, the bones of their children, and whatever is left of their possessions.
‘There will be a new Reich, and Egon Aehrenthal will be its Führer.’
He put the poker back in its place. The burning embers had turned to ashes. Here and there lumps of blackened wood lay twisted and misshapen.
‘It’s time we went to bed,’ Iustin said. ‘We both have a lot to do tomorrow.’
22
The Road to Nowhere
They left the following morning long before dawn. Ethan drove in the darkness while the others slept. He’d been given a map, together with an address and instructions. The address was in his head, but he had to stop from time to time to consult the map by torchlight. Driving on again, he peered into a tunnel formed by the car’s headlights, as though it carved its way through stone. Sometimes rain fell, sometimes balls of ice, sometimes snow.
They headed east for a short space, then turned south on a road that passed through Radauti. A little further brought them to the main road between Siret and Suceava. As they reached the outskirts of Suceava, the first light of dawn penetrated the darkness, and by the time they got there they could see the great bell tower of St Demetrius form itself like a ghost to see them past. Ethan pressed on for Falticeni.
Ilona had started to come round.
‘God, it’s cold. Where are we?’
‘We’ve passed Suceava and are on our way to a place called Falticeni.’
‘Falti-cheni.’ She pronounced it for him. ‘Where’s Father Iustin?’
Ethan changed down a gear to get traction on a slippery slope. The lights of other cars were passing them now.
‘He decided to stay behind. I’ve got the name of someone in another monastery, outside a town called… I really can’t pronounce this one! Pi-at-ra Neemt?’
‘Not bad. Piatra Neamt.’ She repeated the place-name slowly. ‘Do we have time to stop in Falticeni?’
‘We have to leave this good road after that. Maybe a short break.’
‘Falticeni’s not much of a place, but many writers and artists have lived there. There’s a museum full of works by Ion Irimescu.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘You English know nothing. Irimescu was a great sculptor. He lived to one hundred and two. We’re very proud of h
im in Romania.’
Ilona wakened Sarah as Ethan found a parking space off the main road. They had come a long way from Sancraiu, but Ethan knew that Aehrenthal’s order had eyes and ears across the country. They would have to watch every step of the way until they reached their destination.
Back in Putna, the toaca had begun to sound. In the ‘bell tower’, a young monk prepared to summon his fellows to the divine service. A long wooden board, the toaca hung from the rafters, facing the monk. He held two metal mallets in his hands, and slowly began to strike the board with them. What started as staggered bangs slowly acquired rhythm and form and speed. The simple strokes gave way to a stunning complexity of instrumentation as the monk’s hands spun and danced, bringing the dead wood to life, sending out a pattern of blows and counterblows through the freezing air. He never missed a beat, never lost control of the rhythm.
Throughout the monastery grounds, monks and nuns turned from their breakfasts or their morning tasks and started towards the church to pray. The music of the toaca rose in the cold air, loud and persuasive, driving away sleep, quickening hearts and minds, blow falling upon blow in fast succession, like rivets driven into the steel heart of winter.
Marku Dobrogan stumbled into the open air, his eyes watering as they came into contact with the cold, his nose seizing up, his throat burning as if sprinkled with spices. Every morning he struggled against the temptation to turn round and head back into the dining hall for a few minutes more warmth. But he knew that if one of the older monks caught him showing such weakness, he’d be put to stand in the open for the rest of the day and sent off to attend divine service all night without supper. He’d known it would be a hard life in the monastery when he’d entered the novitiate, and with only a month left before he took holy orders, he hated to think that he might stumble towards the end.
His job every morning at this time was to refill the lights in the church, following the night’s devotions. He had a can of olive oil and a bag of candles. The lights inside were never allowed to dim.
Little light entered the church from outside. Some fell through the lantern tower, but there were no high windows, no stained-glass panels to bring light and colour into the building. That was achieved by candles and oil lamps. Huge banks of thick commemorative candles studded the nave and clustered around the pillars. There was an aura of piety so thick and complete that it filled the young monk’s lungs like a soothing smoke. Incense turned piety to fragrance, the scents of spikenard and hyssop, opoponax and sandalwood, onycha and myrrh. The church was wreathed in it still, the high roof and its saints lay hidden behind a thin, twisting veil.
Marku moved diligently here and there, following his morning routine, running prayers through his head to keep out the troubling thoughts that constantly threatened to intrude. As he filled one of the larger lamps about halfway down the nave, his eye caught sight of something. He wasn’t sure what it was at first, but he knew it was out of place. Someone had left a large object in front of the iconostasis, something black that blocked the gold of the icons.
Fearing that one of his fellow novices might get into trouble for leaving the object where it had no right to be, he walked further down to see if he could take it away himself, before anyone else came in and noticed it.
He rubbed his eyes to clear more early morning tears, and when he opened them he could see more clearly. Too clearly.
The young man’s screams could be heard above the hammering of the toaca, above the wind, above the cries of circling birds. He screamed and screamed until someone came at last. Kind hands went round his shoulders, and someone led him away.
They had torn Father Iustin’s cassock open at the back. Someone had lashed him with ropes to the iconostasis, and someone else, a strong man, had flogged him while a third man stood near enough to catch his words, if he spoke.
‘Where have they gone?’ the third man asked. ‘You know who I am, you know there is nothing you or your friends can do to stop me. I have what I need, I just need your friends to take me to the place the relics came from. I want the bones, you see, as I imagine you have guessed in your interfering mind. Just say one word, old man, and I’ll let you rest. I mean you no harm, but I will have what I came for. I do not mean to hurt you, but it is up to you if you suffer. Just one word, a direction, a hint. The whip in my friend’s hand is a flogging whip, and he will flog you with it until you are within an inch of your life. Unless you tell me where they have gone.’
He said nothing, so they stripped him and lashed him to the iconostasis, on the gate, between an icon of the Virgin and a representation of St John the Baptist, and they put a wad of cloth between his teeth, so he could not cry out, and the man with the whip spat on his bare back. It was all done quite calmly, without moral dread or fear of consequence. Egon Aehrenthal did not have a conscience, not even a flicker of one, and he had instilled in others a sense that a conscience was a weakness to be suppressed in them, just as the monks in Putna fought against lust and greed.
The first blow came down heavily, driven by controlled anger. Iustin’s skin cracked open and a gush of blood sprayed into the cold air. Aehrenthal watched as the beating went on, watched with fascination the crack and fall of the knotted lash, the spasms of pain that rustled like fire across the monk’s body, the open wounds that started to lace his back, the blood that kept coming even when he seemed already drained.
‘Stop,’ Aehrenthal said, raising his arm. The whip halted in mid-air and was lowered. Aehrenthal reached for the soaking wad and pulled it from Father Iustin’s mouth.
‘I will stop this now,’ he said, ‘if you say just one word. A person, a place, a hint. You have suffered enough. Jesus barely withstood thirty-nine lashes. You have had a dozen.’
But all this time, though the priest’s lips moved, all that came from his mouth were the opening words of Ave Maria.
Aehrenthal rammed the wad back in the old man’s mouth. The priest would have to break soon, he thought, for he didn’t look capable of withstanding the full weight of the biblical lashing. He nodded and the whipping started again.
It went on like that for over seventy lashes, and in the end Aehrenthal knew he would get nothing from the priest, but had him lashed anyway as a symbol of something or other, he didn’t know or care what. Father Iustin died between one stroke and the next, and his back was torn to shreds, the skin gone from it and a red, bleeding mass left underneath. They left him like that and walked from the church as if they had just attended midnight prayers.
That was how the acolyte found him, like meat hanging in a butcher’s shop. A symbol of sorts, but no one could rightly say of what.
They drove south to Piatra Neamt, in the northern part of Moldavia, the main town of the Eastern Carpathians. From the town, they headed north-west for seven kilometres before turning right onto the main road from Piatra Neamt to Bicaz. A few minutes later they reached their destination, the Bistrita monastery.
Inside, they asked for another monk, Father Gavril Comaneci. They were shown into a bleak, unheated room and told to wait. Ten minutes or more passed, then a monk with a long white beard and hair growing from his ears and nostrils came in. He asked what business they had with Father Gavril, and Ilona said something long and persuasive. The monk frowned several times, then nodded and left.
More minutes passed. This time a different monk appeared. He was aged around forty and wore a black beard. His little round hat stank of fish glue, and his hands were stained with paints. Comaneci was an artist, and he was currently engaged in a complete repainting of the frescoes throughout the monastery. Interrupted in his work, he looked irritable. He had eyes with peacock-blue irises, and a look that went through anyone he fixed them on. Ilona stumbled as she tried to explain who they were and what had brought them there.
But Father Iustin’s name was enough. The moment it was spoken, Comaneci stopped Ilona and switched to English, telling them to accompany him.
As they left the unwelcoming welcom
e room, Ilona remembered that she still had not been able to get in touch with home. Her mobile battery had been drained, and she had left her charger behind. Father Gavril showed her to the monastery office, where the one and only telephone was kept. She rang home. She knew her parents would be worried about her. They would think she had simply disappeared, or imagine something bad had happened to her when she last went onto the mountain. Everyone knew that Aehrenthal kept several thuggish types up at the castle, and there had been cases – all unproved – of rape.
The phone went on ringing for ages. She thought it odd, knowing that someone was usually around after Christmas. Her mother spent most of her time at home anyway. A minute passed, then another. Ilona put the phone down. Puzzled, she decided to ring her grandmother, who lived two streets away. She lifted the receiver again and dialled the local code, 265, then her grandmother’s number. The old woman (in fact, she was in her late fifties) had lived alone since her husband Petrica passed away five years earlier.
This time someone answered the phone within seconds. But it wasn’t her grandmother.
‘Hello?’ said Ilona. ‘Who is this?’
‘Ilona? Is that you, Ilona?’
‘Yes, who—?’
‘This is Cosmina Bratianu, dear. Your gran’s next-door neighbour. Were you trying to get her?’
‘Is something wrong with her? Don’t say she’s been taken ill. She was fine when I saw her last—’
‘It’s not that, dear. It’s not illness, but…she’s staying with your other grandparents. I’m looking after her house. Ilona…’
Ilona noticed that the woman’s voice was shaking. She had known her all her life, not well, but well enough. She didn’t sound right at all.
‘What’s all this about?’ she asked.
‘Ilona…you must brace yourself. I have very bad news for you…’
Later, when Ilona had been put to bed in the infirmary to be treated for shock, and a doctor had been sent for from Piatra Neamt, Gavril took Ethan and Sarah to the studio where he kept his materials and worked on anything portable that needed his attention. He found them seats and put them round a trestle table covered in a paint-smeared tarpaulin.
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