The Sixth Key (7 page)

‘Inside is your last name, today’s date, and
my own signature. You see how I have faith in you, Rahn – even before you
bring me your genealogy? Keep the ring safe. It is the visible sign of your
devotion to our community’s inner code and your loyalty to the Führer and his
ideals. However, you must not wear it until you have made the final oath to
replace the Christian cross with the Swastika – only then will you be
wedded to this order. But remember, Herr Rahn, even now you are united with us
in such a way that you can never resign. Do you understand?’

The group returned to the castle and Rahn was
shown to a room where he spent what was left of the awful night unable to
sleep, sitting on a bed vacantly waiting for the dawn. When it came, he was
taken by car back to the station where he caught the next train out of
Paderborn for Berlin.

As the train left the station Rahn opened the
window and threw the Death’s Head ring as far as he could into a field. He
recalled a fairytale about a man who was so good he allowed one mosquito to
bite him. He thought, ‘Poor little mosquito, let him suck until he is full,’
and the mosquito was so happy with the man it then told all the mosquitoes in
the city. Soon the sky grew black with mosquitoes wanting to taste the good
man’s blood and they bit and bit and sucked and sucked but they couldn’t get
full because there were so many of them, and in the meantime the man had died.

Rahn had given his blood to the Nazis and he
could throw that ring all the way to the moon but it would make no difference
now. He was forever tainted with their madness.

Somehow he knew he wouldn’t get out of this
alive.

On the train, Rahn dozed and had a dream in
which he was floating in blood. It woke him with a start and to his surprise he
found that someone was sitting beside him reading the Völkischer Beobachter.
The man closed the paper and folded it neatly. He was wearing a blue suit, a
hat to match and a party pin in his spotless necktie. He looked like a
respectable middle-class gentleman who lived a middle-class life in a modest
house in Berlin with his plain Bavarian wife and his fine Aryan children. What
would he say if he knew the madness of the man he called his Führer?

The man looked at Rahn now as if to say, Who
are you?

Rahn wanted to tell him that he didn’t know
who he was or what had happened to the legend he had created for himself, as an
adventurer, a writer and historian. Everything had fallen to pieces the moment
those shots were fired.

When the gentleman spoke, he said, ‘Are you
alright?’

‘Terribly sorry,’ Rahn said, ‘just a dream.’
He looked out at the grey day and it stared back at him.

‘You were saying something in your sleep,’ the
man ventured.

‘Was I?’

‘Oh yes, you said, “The children.”’

Rahn laughed nervously. ‘Did I? Strange . . .’

The man adjusted his glasses. There was
something familiar about him.

‘Do you have children?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Indeed. That is good, in times like these.’

In times like these! There was a world of
meaning hidden in such a phrase. It said all there was to say.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked as
plainly as if he had said, What do you think the weather will do now?

‘I beg your pardon?’ He felt his temple for a
fever.

‘You’re in a bit of a pickle, Herr Rahn.’

Rahn sat up. ‘I’m terribly sorry, have I met
you before?’

‘Well, yes and no.’

‘I don’t remember, I’m afraid . . .’

‘I’m not surprised. After all, we weren’t
formally introduced. One could say it was just a brief encounter.’

‘When did we meet?’

‘Last night.’

It took a moment for this to sink in. He had
seen this man before. This was the man with the scar on his cheek! The man who
had given him that knife when he was standing in the pit!

‘I am a friend,’ the man said.

‘I don’t understand.’ Rahn’s heart was
pounding. Was this a trap, one of Himmler’s trials to gauge his loyalty?

‘I can offer you . . . restitution.’

‘I’m sorry but I—’

‘Do you want to make good what you’ve done? I
am here to offer you an alternative. You don’t have to say yes or no right
away. Perhaps you think this is a test, but I’m here to tell you that no, it
isn’t. We understand your caution and we advise you to trust no one. For now,
all you have to do is go to France and continue as instructed – to hunt
for that grimoire. I wish you luck on your hunt. Keep your ears open in Paris
and you will soon learn more. Perhaps you still have a chance to do something
fine for the world.’

The train began to slow down. The man stood
and tipped his hat slightly and left the compartment, leaving his newspaper
behind. Rahn picked it up and a card fell out.

On it was written a
single word:

Serinus

Rahn changed trains in Berlin and from there
his journey was therapeutic. With each hour that passed, Weisthor, Wewelsburg,
and the memory of that chamber of blood became, at times, unreal to his mind,
like a distant point, a pause at a station that one soon passes, thinking how
good it is that one doesn’t live there. But something told him that he could
only put aside the horror temporarily. Sooner or later he would have to face it
and he wondered whether he could live with the guilt. For now, he leant on those
words spoken by the man on the train – that he might still have time to
do something fine for the world. This thought kept him sane.

Sometime in the night his papers passed
inspection and he boarded another train for France and its fields, its houses,
its farms, mountains and vales, vines and trees. Nothing had changed in that
beloved country and he found this profoundly reassuring. In Paris, he dozed
again in his hotel until he was well enough to go out to find coffee and food.
He walked about the old city with convalescing affection, hearing his own
footsteps on the leaf-littered pavements as if they belonged not to him but to
a disembodied ghost. Paris! Embalmed by history, happy among its Napoleonic
monuments and its obelisks, its cathedrals, its squares and streets; its river
meandering in a seductive pulsing of life.

As soon as possible he contacted his friend
Alexis La Dame on the number La Dame’s mother had given him. La Dame was
pleasantly surprised. Rahn asked him for a favour: Could he gather information
on a certain individual called Vincent Varas? They agreed to meet and that was
that. In the meantime, the galleries and the restaurants, jazz clubs and
bookshops reclaimed him.

On the day of their meeting, Rahn looked in
the mirror to shave and found himself taken aback. He saw a thin man with high
cheekbones jutting out of a pale face. Gone was the look of one for whom the
entire world is a riddle waiting to be solved and in its place was a sad
resignation – a spectre of death looming behind the façade of life.

Looking at himself, he recalled how, as a
child, when dark clouds scurried over the horizon in autumn and there was the
sense of an impending storm, he and his friends would gather in the forest near
his home. They would wait and, when the storm came, feeling their hearts in
their chests and the wind in their lungs, they would run through the trees in
the rain, flying over the ground, weightless, invulnerable, using lightning as
swords, playing at being Michael slaying the dragon, with a feeling of
sovereign protection in their hearts. Michael always triumphed, the good had
always won and Rahn had always been on the side of the good! Now he no longer
knew which side he stood on, nor what ground he walked. He understood that this
meant he had lost his innocence, as clichéd as this sounded.

He tried to put these thoughts aside as he
approached the intersection of St Germain des Prés and rue Bonaparte where the
Café de Flore was situated, to plan roughly what he was going to tell La Dame.
He would likely be sitting at their usual table near the window reading the
paper but in any case Rahn could have found him in a crowd: the combination of
straw-coloured mop of hair; gold beard; suit and tie; cigar in one hand and
brandy balloon in the other, was unmistakable.

They’d met eight years before as extras on the
set of a Pabst picture, filmed on the border of Austria and Poland, called Vier
von der Infanterie. But, as it turned out, they discovered the happy
coincidence that they had met once before, albeit very briefly, at an obscure
bookshop in the rue Montmartre, where they had both been in search of the same,
very rare Mexican edition of Don Quixote. So, after the day’s filming, they
took themselves to an old pub run by a one-eyed madame, where, compelled by
Dionysian inebriation, they drank toast after toast to the memory of Miguel de
Cervantes. When they ran out of money, they turned to warm beer and after
singing a number of discordant songs, Rahn announced that he was leaving to
look for the Holy Grail in the caves of southern France and La Dame was welcome
to come along. La Dame, citing years of working with his brother, a mining
engineer and geologist, as credentials, said he would be only too happy to
assist. La Dame, in fact, turned out to be rather good with a lamp and rope,
and even taught Rahn French, interpreting for him until he was proficient.

And so for the next two years La Dame played
Sancho Panza to Rahn’s Don Quixote, and their friendship, having survived cold
nights and wet caves and the inevitable frustrations, disappointments and
dangers of treasure hunting, had grown as comfortable as a pair of old shoes.

Those endless, careless days now seemed to
Rahn like another life. In his pocket sat Weisthor’s envelope and the card from
the man on the train, side by side, as if to underline to him how much things
had changed. Even so, he would have to go on as if nothing had happened until
he could figure things out.

He was about to cross the street when he had a
strange feeling. He looked around but saw nothing out of the ordinary, and put
it down to his mind playing tricks. Still, the feeling remained with him until
a sudden downpour interrupted his thoughts and forced him to make a run for it.
Once inside the café, he removed his soaked black coat and his fedora and
looked around. It was early and the café was quiet. In one corner, a man ate an
omelette, his poodle beside him on its own chair, lapping at a bowl of soup. At
the far end of the room two lovers sat entwined, kissing. Behind the bar, the
waitress argued with the manager and threatened to leave, both ignoring a
middle-aged blonde, perhaps a femme de la nuit, asking for a glass of wine. All
in all, an average afternoon.

As expected, La Dame was at his usual table by
the window and when he looked up from reading the Paris-Soir, he cried, ‘Rahn!’

He was shorter than Rahn but more athletic and
so when they embraced warmly it was rather a mismatched affair.

‘The reason for your unreasonable treatment of
my reason so enfeebles my reason that I have reason to complain of your
beauty!’ he said, quoting Cervantes and bowing graciously.

‘And the high Heavens, with which your
divinity divinely fortifies you with stars, makes you the deserver of the
desert that is deserved by your greatness!’ Rahn returned with a courteous bow.

‘I took the privilege, knowing your tastes.’
La Dame sat down and poured Rahn a glass of brandy with one hand while he
puffed on the cigar he held in the other, a Hoyo de Monterrey, purchased, as
usual, from the oldest tobacconist in Paris near the Louvre in the rue Saint
Honoré. La Dame liked Cuban cigars, fast women and expensive clothes because it
made him feel less Swiss, which in France was another word for prosaic, or, as
some would say, l’ordinaire.

‘I see you still possess your vices,’ Rahn
said, sitting down.

‘Consistency, my dear Rahn, is the last refuge
of the unimaginative. Who said that?’

Rahn sniffed the brandy; the note was
comforting. ‘Oscar Wilde.’

‘You look wretched!’

‘Thank you.’ Rahn took a good sip and let the
fruity fire sit on his tongue a moment. ‘And you, my dear La Dame, look a
little portly.’

There was a flash of panic in La Dame’s eye
and his hand explored his middle to test the veracity of the vile statement.

Touché! Rahn thought.

There was a narrowing of the eyes and a
shaking of the index finger of the hand that held his cigar. ‘You almost had me
believing it!’ he said, with a smile, straightening his tie and biting into the
cigar with a virile ferocity. He took a glance at his reflection in the mirror
opposite and sat back, satisfied that he cut a good shape. ‘I’ve been working
at teaching imbeciles to think logically, a task that, I have to say, is
starting to lose its lustre. At this rate I’ll die of boredom before I’m
forty.’ He watched Rahn drink the remaining contents of his glass down in one
gulp with amusement and blew smoke rings in the air. ‘Hold on, Rahn! That’s
expensive, you know.’

‘I’ll pay.’

La Dame raised a lazy brow. ‘Well, in that
case . . . bottom’s up!’ He drank his glass in one gulp too and set it down for
a top-up.

Rahn poured another for both of them, then
held up his glass and looked at La Dame through the golden liquor. ‘Nice colour
. . .’ He sniffed it. ‘Oak casks, extra old; Napoleon or Vieille Réserve; aged
at least six years. So you haven’t been cheap, La Dame, but you haven’t spent
all the rent money either!’

‘How can you know so much from one mouthful,
Rahn?’

Rahn ignored him. ‘Do you know how they tested
brandy in the old days? They put gunpowder in it and set fire to it. If the
gunpowder took, the brandy was good.’

La Dame sat back. ‘How you manage to retain so
many completely useless but terribly impressive facts in that head of yours
simply astounds me. Lucky for me, I have my looks to fall back on.’ He sighed.
‘This is good, isn’t it? Just like those nights at the Leila in Montmartre! The
only difference is we’re not waiting for the bartender to turn around before
running out of the place without paying. Things do change, thank goodness. But
we did have rather a lot of fun, didn’t we? Drinking brandy and la Fée Verte.’

Rahn nodded. ‘Yes, I also remember those days
with fondness.’

‘That reminds me of Etienne – have you
seen her lately? Are you and she, still . . . you know?’

‘We were never an affaire
de coeur,’ Rahn said, ‘but I keep expecting her to turn up wearing a suit like
the old days, carrying a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a gun in the
other.’

‘I’ll take the absinthe . . . She was rather
odd.’

La Dame had a fashion of calling everything
‘odd’ and seemed to live amid a legion of oddities.

‘A Marxist with good taste is a rare species,’
he continued. ‘Speaking of Marxists, you certainly did send me on a chase! And
exceedingly odd it was too!’

Rahn sat up. ‘What did you find out?’

‘Actually—’ He warmed his words with
another swallow of brandy. ‘There was a bit of hole-and-corner work involved.
This Vincent Varas is an alias for a man called Pierre de Plantard who works
for a group called Alpha Galates, which has some connections to the French
Union. They have a nasty periodical called Vaincre, which they use to
disseminate their anti-Freemason, anti-Marxist, anti-Jew, anti-everybody
diatribe. Alpha Galates purports that its secrets come from ancient Atlantis.
Moreover, they’re more Catholic than the pope and are expecting the so-called
Apocalypse sooner rather than later, after which there will be the creation of
a New Jerusalem – where, incidentally, there are no Jews but only good
Roman Catholics.’

Rahn sighed. ‘How big are they?’

‘As far as I can gather, there are only a
handful of members and this Plantard is only a boy really, no older than
nineteen, but there are others. The interesting thing is that behind Alpha
Galates there is another group run by a man called Gaston De Mengel.’

‘So,’ Rahn said, ‘that’s the connection.’

‘What connection?’

‘I’m here at De Mengel’s suggestion.’

‘Really? And you didn’t know that he and
another man called Monti ran that group?’

‘No.’

‘Well, the group behind Alpha Galates is
called Groupe Occidental D’etudes Esoteriques. They are highly secretive and
dedicated to bringing peace to the world . . . and the Eiffel Tower is also
made from Meccano! Whatever the case, this Monti was apparently Péladan’s
pupil. You know Joséphin Péladan – the Rosicrucian?’

‘Yes, I know of him, I acknowledged him in my
book. You know – the book you never read?’

La Dame ignored Rahn’s sarcasm and said
happily, ‘The plot thickens, Rahn! Some months ago, the Masonic Grand Lodge
published an article denouncing Monti. It said he was a fraud and a supposed Jesuit
agent and soon after he winds up dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Dead as a doornail, dear Rahn! And his close
associate, a certain Dr Camille Savoire, apparently rushes to his side,
examines him and claims that he has been poisoned – his body was
apparently covered in black spots.’

‘Let me see if I have the gist,’ Rahn said.
‘Alpha Galates is a front for another society started by De Mengel and Monti,
Groupe Occidental D’etudes Esoteriques. Some months ago Monti was murdered
because he was a fraud and a spy.’ Rahn tried to think through the brandy fog.
‘Could it be more complicated?’

‘Yes, indeed, it could – I told you it
was bloody marvellous! This Dr Savoire supposedly took up the vacated chair
left by Monti and he runs the society now, along with this De Mengel fellow. So
Plantard, or Vincent Varas, or whatever you want to call him, must be working
for them. But the word is, there is a little friction between De Mengel and
Savoire.’

‘And Plantard is caught in the middle? That’s
good to know.’ Rahn raised his glass. ‘You’ve done well. I think you’ve missed
your calling – you should have been a private eye or journalist, not a
minor professor of science!’

La Dame shook his head dismissively. ‘Too
uncomfortable, Rahn. All those nights standing in the rain, waiting for something
to happen. Not my style.’