The Cairo Diary (5 page)

They walked back via the north and the east, but Marion couldn't quite work out where she was. They walked back down rue Grande as far as the little parish church, behind which lay a staircase, which one must climb in order to walk around the edge of the cemetery. Opposite the headstones stood a row of tiny, one-story houses. Sister Anne patted Marion warmly on the back, by way of goodbye, and walked off, leaving her protégée to enter her new lair.

*   *   *

Marion pushed the door shut and leaned back against it.

She let out a long breath before opening her eyes again.

The entrance hall was narrow, flanked by a staircase that led up to the bedroom. This was her home.

She must get used to that idea. For a few weeks, minimum.

She hadn't yet taken the time to really explore, to get the measure of the place, and that was going to be her program that evening.

She placed the key on the hall table, walked past the wall of the kitchen, and entered the living room,
her
living room.

A long, tall window ran almost the entire width of the room, right at the back, divided vertically by slender beams that gave it a medieval feel. A sofa stood at a right angle underneath, opposite a cabinet hiding the television and hi-fi system. The place had clearly been fitted out as a not always successful compromise between an ancient house and modern comfort. But the view was pleasant. The pointed slate roofs and the redbrick chimneys led down in a gentle slope to sea level, toward the south and the entrance to the Mount, toward the causeway that led off into the distance, cleaving the gray expanse until it finally rejoined the land.

The attics and the pointed windows of the lofts were all dark. One lone ribbon of white smoke rose from a chimney lower down in the village, and was immediately dispersed by the wind.

Marion laid her coat on the sofa and sat down beside it, her hands folded behind her head. Noticing that she was covered in soil, she got up again rather quickly, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth in annoyance.

It must be around six. She wasn't hungry, just in need of warming up. There was a bath upstairs, a chance to relax, and why not take the time to take a little care of herself? How long was it since she had done that? Taken two hours in one evening for herself, for her body, to smooth cream over her blemishes, exfoliate with the aid of gel, wax away excess, slather, rub, sound out, and improve its appearance so she felt good? Make herself a new skin.

Yes, that was what she needed, in order to find herself again.

Marion leaped to her feet and climbed the steps, which creaked under the carpet that covered them. The staircase led directly into the bedroom, which had no door; a double bed, a sofa with a low table, a wardrobe, a few shelves, and a dressing table were sufficient to fill it. Three mansard windows opened up, two to the south onto the same view as the picture window downstairs, and the other to the north, onto the little cemetery.

The two suitcases were lying on the ground, underneath the shelves, waiting to be emptied. Marion crouched down to take out a pair of clean underwear and her dressing gown, then headed for the bathroom.

She turned her head as she got up, her eyes sweeping the room very swiftly. From right to left, linking the pieces of information with a blurring sensation.

Sofa … low table … lamp … pile of magazines, placed there through Sister Anne's good offices … beige carpet … bedside table … night-light … bed … sheet of paper … other bedside table … other wardrobe … carpet … and the door leading to the bathroom.

Marion had already taken two steps when she stopped.

Sheet of paper?

This time her attention was drawn back to the bedspread.

It wasn't a sheet but a vellum envelope bearing a single word:
Mademoiselle.

Her heart started thudding in her chest, and she opened her mouth to breathe. What message lay inside?

She closed her eyes, immediately reassuring herself. Those who wished her ill in Paris were the type to strike, not leave her an envelope.

Marion's fingertips felt her split lip.

If they had found her, she would no longer be standing.

It was Sister Anne or one of her companions who had left this. Nothing more.

Marion nervously pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She didn't like the attention. The envelope hadn't been there when she woke up; she had made the bed before leaving and could swear to it. If she must spend the coming weeks here things must be made clear: That they gave her shelter, so be it, but she would demand a certain privacy, beginning with the place she lived. She didn't want people to be able to come in here behind her back.

She picked up the envelope and opened it.

Inside she found a piece of cardboard on which was written in beautiful black handwriting:

Do you like playing games?

45 35 51 43 22 11 12 43 24 15 32/41 24 15 43 43 15 25 11 51 34 15

I shall say only one thing to help you: There are twenty-five of them, although one may add another, which would be the double of its predecessor, aligned in a square, 12345 across and 12345 down.

Yours.

Marion blinked and reread the note.

“What is this bullshit?” she murmured.

Her first reflex was to lift her head and look through the curtains to see if anyone was spying on her from the cemetery opposite. It was built on a terrace, which brought it up to the same height as the upper floor. The house was separated from it only by an enclosed alleyway between the buildings and the cemetery wall.

Nobody.

It was particularly dark outside.

Marion lit the lamp beside the bedroom sofa and sat down on the cushions.

What did this mean? All these figures …

“Fine, okay … you want to play.… What is this? A kind of welcoming ritual? Hazing?”

Marion had spoken out loud.

Her heart started to calm down.

She placed the card on the low table.

What now?

Her eyes scrutinized the succession of numbers.

It's a bloody riddle. A coded message …

And she had always loved this kind of mystery, ever since she was very small. Even crosswords fascinated her. In a certain way they were, in her eyes, semantic riddles, divided up.

So these few figures here …

Yes, she had to admit it: This intrigued her.

And so?

“And so, shit! If it occupies me,” she declared, getting up to fetch a notepad and pencil from her bag.

Whether this was the idea of Sister Anne or one of the brothers, that had no importance in itself.

“Let's see…”

They didn't look like coordinates, more like a coded message.

The figures were all grouped in pairs. One pair could designate one letter rather than one word; that seemed like the most logical explanation.

Marion closed her eyes to try and remember that word she had learned as a teenager.… It had haunted her mind for years.… A word with an
o
in it.… God, it was something everybody knew.…

“Esarintulo!”
she exclaimed.

The order of the letters most used in the French language. First the
e
, then the
s,
the
a
, and so on. She could try to link the most commonly recurring figures with the most used letter.

“That gives us…”

Marion counted. The forty-three and the fifteen appeared the most, four times each.
E
and
s
probably. The fifteen was in the middle and ended the message, whereas two forty-threes succeeded each other in the center. Two letter
e
s in the middle of a word? Unlikely. On the other hand, two instances of
s
were feasible. Marion opted for
s
as forty-three and
e
as fifteen.

Next, eleven and twenty-four appeared twice.

An
a
and an
r
?

Marion wrote down her first deductions in her notebook, leaving a cross for the unknown letters:

xxxSxAxSREx/xRESSExAxxE

Nothing obvious. Eleven letters in both words, she noticed. It was very short. Perhaps too short for Esarintulo to work properly.

On the spur of the moment, the sentence supposed to be a clue had seemed incomprehensible to her and she hadn't included it in her reasoning; now it was time to reintegrate it into the equation.

There are twenty-five of them, although one may add another, which would be the double of its predecessor, aligned in a square, 12345 across and 12345 down.

Twenty-five what?

Marion ran her tongue over her lips.

She drew a rectangle in her notebook. Starting at the top left-hand corner, she wrote 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 at equal distances apart, following the horizontal axis, as for a graph. She repeated the operation with the vertical, the y-axis.

“And now?”

There were indeed twenty-five boxes to fill, but with what?

There are twenty-five of them, although one may add another, which would be the double of its predecessor.

Her hand fell, hitting the sheet of paper.

“What bullshit!”

She tried to replace figures with letters.

“The alphabet!”

Double its predecessor was the letter
w
 … a double
v
. And from twenty-six you then went to twenty-five.

She filled the square in ascending order, the most logical.

Then she went back to the series of figures.

45 35 51 43 22 11 12 43 24 15 32/41 24 15 43 43 15 25 11 51 34 15

All she had to do was intersect the columns. One vertical and one horizontal coordinate gave a letter.

Following this method, the first, forty-five, that is four and five, could give either
t
or
y
. Since few words began with
y
, the first figure in each number must indicate the horizontal, the second the vertical. She started replacing each pair with its designated letter.

Her nails were black and the soil emphasized each crease in her fingers. Dark particles sometimes came away and soiled the paper.

TOURGABRIEL/PIERREJAUNE

6

A bluish light was falling on the bedroom now that the sun had vanished. All that remained was an amber-colored circle around the sofa and the little lamp.

“Gabriel tower, yellow stone,” Marion read.

She rested the notepad on her knees.

What exactly did they want from her? To drag her outside on a treasure hunt?

She lifted her eyes to the window. The cemetery had aged three centuries with the advent of darkness, its crosses becoming menacing, its lichen taking on the unpleasant appearance of sticky flesh, flowing from stone to stone. Far above, the abbey's mass sat atop its rock and watched over the little house.

Marion went and fetched the map Sister Anne had given her that morning, and unfolded it on the low table.

The Gabriel Tower was a structure that stood a little apart, on the western flank of the Mount.

A round tower, beside the water, which could be reached by two paths. One was impractical at high tide. It necessitated a circuitous route, leaving the village by the main gate to reach the fortification. The other was a little more complicated for a neophyte. It meant climbing to the top of the village, to the path that circled the abbey, then going down again by the one called “la montée aux Fanils” in order to reach the Gabriel Tower.

Nevertheless, with the aid of a map it shouldn't pose any problems.

Marion refolded the map and went down to get her coat.

Of course she was going to go, now that her curiosity had been aroused. What would she do otherwise? Take a bath and ponder for an hour on the reasons behind this little game? Pointless.

Pointless and irritating.

She adjusted her warm coat, swallowed a glass of water in a single gulp, and went out, taking care to lock the door firmly behind her.