The Sixth Key (25 page)

In the bedroom Rahn paced up and down like a
caged lion in front of the small hearth. The fire glowed but its warmth was
meagre against the draughts spawned by the Devil’s Wind.

‘What do you make of it?’ Eva said.

‘Your uncle’s list has something to do with
the book of Pope Honorius or, as they call it, Le Serpent Rouge. As Deodat
would say, it is elementary.’

‘Really? Are you certain you’re not jumping to
conclusions?’

He told her the phone call to Paris had been
to a friend whom he had asked to look into Jean-Louis Verger. He informed her
of what La Dame had found out about the connection between Le Serpent Rouge and
the murder of an archbishop. He told her about the group Abbé Grassaud had
mentioned at the hermitage, which was known as the penitents; and that Verger
was rumoured to have belonged to this group at the time he committed the
murder.

‘And now I’m quite certain that Saunière also
had something to do with that group.’

‘What makes you think that?’

He stopped his pacing to look at her. ‘Because
when I was alone with Madame Dénarnaud, she said these words: “Penitence,
penitence – remember that!”’

‘I see . . .’ Eva said, from her chair near
the bed. ‘Who are these penitents?’

‘They’re a group of Jesuit priests who dabble
in rituals of black magic and human sacrifice. The interesting thing is, that
the sacrament had a special part to play in these rituals. All sorts of
terrible things were done to it, like mixing it with urine and excrement and forcing
people to consume it to rid them of evil spirits . . . or perhaps to do the
opposite.’

‘To inoculate them with evil spirits –
to possess them!’ she said.

‘Yes, that is what I have learnt.’

‘So, do you think that’s why my uncle
scratched that symbol into the tabernacle, to protect it?’

‘I think so.’

Her paleness made her lips look all the more
red. ‘He was afraid,’ she said.

‘Perhaps he wanted to make certain that when
his time came he would have a sacrament that was untainted.’

She turned to the hearth and fell quiet. ‘So,
you think the priests on the list formed a kind of—’

‘Conventicle?’ Rahn prompted.

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps – let’s look at the list again
and go through what we know, shall we?’ He took the list out of his pocket
along with the pencil and gave them to her. ‘If you would be so kind as to
write down what I tell you, it may help me to get some perspective.’ He resumed
his pacing. ‘Verger was executed in 1857 . . . can you add that date? Antoine
Bigou, we know nothing about yet except that he was a contemporary of
Saunière’s. Now, the next abbé, Grassaud, met Saunière in 1886 when he came to
Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet. I think he has a lot more to do with this than he
admitted. Saunière came here to this village in 1885 and sometime later he
found something; something so interesting that the Bishop of Carcassonne paid
for him to take it to Paris.’ He continued to pace. ‘We also know that Saunière
told two other priests of his discoveries: Abbé Boudet and Abbé Gélis. Gélis
wrote something in his diary about treasure and shortly after that he was
brutally murdered, in 1897. The next abbé is . . . ?’

‘Rivière,’ Eva said.

‘That’s right. He outlived Saunière. He’s the
one who refused to give him his last sacrament in 1915. He refused because of
something he’d apparently heard in Saunière’s confession and before he died he
told someone that Saunière had gone over to the Devil. What does that mean and
what did he hear?’ He paused to look at her. ‘All of these priests were
connected and they all seem to gravitate around Saunière – like the rings
of Saturn.’

He went to Eva to look at
the list again.

Jean-Louis Verger – Paris 1857

Antoine Bigou – Rennes-le-Château

~

A J Grassaud – Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet 1886

A C Saunière – Rennes-le-Château 1885

A K Boudet – Rennes-les-Bains

A A Gélis – Coustaussa murdered 1897

A L Rivière –
Espéraza refused last sacrament 1915

‘These five priests were contemporaries and
are set apart from the other two. Why? Perhaps they had a different
significance for Abbé Cros.’

‘Or perhaps those are the priests my uncle was
investigating?’ she said.

‘We don’t know that with any certainty yet.’

‘Do you think Saunière found the Pope’s
grimoire, Le Serpent Rouge?’ she asked.

‘Or else he found the missing key that we
spoke about before, the formula that is missing from the grimoires.’

She watched him take up his pacing again, with
a puzzled expression. ‘Do you know what this key is?’

‘I haven’t a clue, but everything we’ve heard
points to it having something to do with the Cathar treasure.’

‘If it’s been left out of the grimoires
intentionally, perhaps it is too evil?’

‘That is a very good assumption. I have a
sense things will be clearer when we learn something about this Abbé Bigou, the
man who sits at the top of the list with Verger. It seems to me that he had a
very important part to play in the mystery surrounding these priests.’

But Eva wasn’t listening. She was taken by her
own thoughts and he had a moment to observe her more closely. She was taller
than most women and thinner than was generally considered the ideal, but there
was no angularity in her frame and it gave her a look that was almost elf-like.
Her face was fine boned and symmetrical, her eyes large and widely spaced, her
short hair reflected the firelight in reds and golds. She needed protection,
someone who knew what he was doing, and right now Rahn felt more like Sancho
Panza than Don Quixote, more like Watson than Holmes. Deodat was right –
what good was knowledge without the wisdom to use it? Maybe Satan knew him too
well and had surmised that he was good when it came to imponderables but a poor
detective when it came to real life.

Eva sighed. ‘I need to sleep.’

She was right, there was nothing they could do
until morning.

She took the bed and he settled down valiantly
in the lumpy, uncomfortable chair. She blew out the candle and he heard her
undress in the darkness and get into bed. To be so near to a woman reminded him
of his last night with Etienne.

Etienne had always been her nom de guerre.
They had met in the circles of Antonin Gadal and thereafter had seen one
another occasionally, but it had been four years or more since she had vanished
without a trace, and he had stopped thinking about her until recently. Once
again, he thought how the motives of women were inscrutable and he wondered how
a man could build on such quicksand.

The last time he saw Etienne it was in Berlin
where she had come to write an editorial on National Socialism for
La République
. They had celebrated the
New Year in grand fashion by going to The Femina Club on Nurnberger Strasse; a
club usually frequented by men looking for feminine company. Etienne, true to
form, had hung on his arm dressed in a suit and tie like Marlene Dietrich, her
hair combed through with pomade. Dressed this way, she hadn’t made too many
heads turn when they sat down to order a bottle of Sekt, and to conspire about
which girl they would invite to the table. There were pneumatic tubes that
criss-crossed the room and carried messages, or presents, from patrons on one
side, to girls on the other side – all one needed was money and good
eyesight. But it had been nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, and they had
laughed afterwards. Towards the night’s end, as they were walking back to the
hotel, Etienne paused to look at him, and Rahn thought she looked almost
vulnerable, a strange androgynous creature with the round blue eyes of a hunted
doe. She had said to him, ‘One day I will leave and you will never see me again
. . . You will forgive me, Otto, won’t you?’

At the time he had laughed it off and later
they had made love affectionately, tenderly. In the morning, however, he woke
to find he was alone. He never saw her again.

The Countess P’s clock on the table chimed ten
times. He sighed and brought his mind to the present. If he was to be of any
use to Deodat he had to sleep. Tomorrow he would think about the Rotas wheel,
Pierre Plantard, Monti, De Mengel, Abbé Cros, the church, the fish pond, the
key to the tabernacle, a symbol to ward off evil, a list of priests, Abbé
Grassaud, Gélis bludgeoned to death and the only evidence being a packet of
cigarette papers . . . cigarette papers . . . Etienne had been involved with
Marxists and she had smoked Russian cigarettes . . . like Pierre Plantard. He
remembered the cigarette paper left beside Gélis’s body, a Russian brand? He
wondered who had killed Gélis and why, and then he remembered the inspector,
Beliere. Madame Sabine must have arrived home by now to find the house a
shambles, a dead man in the barn and he and Deodat gone! Surely she would have
called the gendarmerie at Carcassonne and that meant that tomorrow the inspector,
who reminded him of Professor Moriarty, would be on their trail like a
bloodhound on a scent. Then again, for whom was the inspector really working?

His eyes grew heavy . . . He thought of the
satanic grimoire of Pope Honorius and the missing key sought by a shadowy
circle of powerful men – those bankers Deodat had mentioned–
sitting in an underground room, smoking Russian cigarettes, making decisions
about the fate of the world. He saw their faces: Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Russians, Freemasons, Jesuit priests, black magicians . . .

Outside the wind howled, and the trees rapped
on the windows in time to the old woman’s words: ‘Penitence – remember
that!’

THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD

‘Is it true about those brotherhoods?’ I interrupted the Writer
of Letters.

He contemplated the fire a moment, tenting his
fingers, his face striated by shadow and light. Something about that face, the
singular angle of the nose, the mouth and chin, struck me as deeply familiar. I
had the sudden sense that he was a mirror and that I was looking at myself. The
feeling vanished the moment he spoke.

‘The first Lodge in Paris, the French Grand
Lodge, wasn’t started by Frenchmen, it was founded by British merchants. Did
you know that?’

I told him that no, I had not heard of it.

‘It is interesting, isn’t it? In fact, the
British founded Lodges all over Europe in the eighteenth century, weaving a web
capable of disseminating occult and political impulses. Of course, once a web
like this has been spun, it takes only the whisper of one word to set
everything in motion.’ He threw a log into the fire and gave it a poke. ‘For
instance, who do you think was behind secretive revolutionary groups like the
Carbonari and the Jacobins?’

‘Are you suggesting the English were behind
the French Revolution?’ I was incredulous.

‘Would that be so preposterous?’

‘For one thing, it would rewrite history.’

‘And would you consider that a bad thing?’

I smiled. ‘Who knows?’

‘The truth is—’ he looked at me
pointedly, ‘—the English Lodges were also behind the American
Revolution.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ I told him. ‘It
wasn’t in the interest of the English to lose America.’

‘Who said they lost anything?’ The fire in the
hearth blazed now as if he had conjured the flames. He then said, quite
fittingly, ‘From the ashes was born the phoenix – the replacement of a
physical aristocracy with a spiritual one: an aristocracy of the Lodges working
behind the façade of democracy. In other words, the Lodges were the puppet
masters of the new world. It is well known that Benjamin Franklin was a Mason,
as were most of the founding fathers. Now . . . many of these men had fine
intentions but there were also those whose intentions were not fine; those who
wanted to gain power over the many on behalf of the few by using a means that
lies hidden in the Lodges.’

‘What means?’

‘The power of magic.’

I considered this.

‘Why do you look so amazed?’ He laughed, but
it was cold and cheerless. ‘Every time you go into a church you are exposed to
ceremonial magic: incense, song, mantras; they’re all magical, any priest will
admit it, and so are the rites and rituals of the Masons. Now, I’m not
suggesting they’re all the same. There are white, grey and black ceremonies.’

‘And the book of Pope Honorius?’

‘It is the blackest, in some respects.’

‘Because it mixes the rituals of the Catholic
mass with the rituals of black magic?’ I asked.

‘What you have to understand is that white
magic doesn’t trespass on human freedom – it is based upon the premise
that human will is free, but because the will lies asleep in the human being,
it can be seized, pulled out and manipulated by the black magician – an
example of this is hypnotism. Now, this will in the human being is also a form
of energy – a form of magnetism. A similar type of magnetism is found in
the Earth. Have you heard of kundalini?’

‘The yogis achieved enlightenment through it,
am I right?’

‘That’s right, they called it the fire that
works upwards from the base of the human spine to the head – like a fiery
snake. A similar fire, or magnetism, runs upwards from the centre of the Earth
and becomes trapped within those great mountain ranges that are aligned towards
the magnetic north. Rahn was working on a report written by De Mengel about
grid lines and ley lines of energy – places where magnetic forces become
exceptionally strong. Black magic rituals connect these forces in the Earth
with the same forces in the human being, and you can’t imagine the untold power
this gives to the magician capable of manipulating it.’

‘I remember something about the Templars and
the building of churches . . .’

‘The Templars built their churches on
locations they knew were potent, magnetically, hoping to redeem the rising
forces of the Black Mother.’

I sat forward, amazed. ‘The Black Mother . . .
is that why there are so many churches devoted to the Black Madonna –
Chartres for instance?’

‘Yes, didn’t you know that?’

‘You are opening up a universe to me,’ I
admitted.

‘Those who built these churches understood
that the Black Mother is the Earth’s kundalini – this is what makes a
place like Wewelsburg powerful.’

I was speechless, breathless. I wanted to
laugh out loud like Rahn. At least to shout ‘Aha!’ I didn’t, of course.

‘Even Matteu didn’t realise how close he had
come with his Song of the Grail, which portrays how Esclarmonde de Foix sealed
the Grail inside a mountain. But to understand that we have to move onto
another gallery, and this one is called The Abbot. The abbot of the monastery
of Saint Lazarus.’

I sat up, surprised and puzzled. ‘I know that
monastery! I’ve written a novel about it!’

‘Yes . . . of course you have,’ he said, with
raised brows. ‘You also had the Grail locked in a mountain, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t understand where this is going.’

‘You will.’