The Sixth Station (32 page)

“
Is
a belief? As in the present tense?”

“Of course.”

“You mean they still exist?”

“Everywhere.”

“But…?”

“No buts.

“The Baphomet, my father believed, was not a skull but a banner imprinted with the face of Jesus.”

“You mean like the Shroud of Turin?”

“Yes, like the Shroud but not the Shroud.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the Shroud couldn’t contain blood or DNA or any of it because it is a negative image—the way you’d see an image in an old negative of a photo. It was transferred from something else. This banner, if it were the Baphomet, would have to be like a photograph’s print as opposed to the negative.”

“I read something, or maybe it was on the History Channel, about the Shroud being a negative image and that it was impossible for anyone at that time to produce such a thing back then.”

“True. But the image I’m referring to would have to be a positive image—something upon which the Shroud may have lain.

“A painting?”

“No. Perhaps an oxidation transfer or something of that nature. Have you heard of the ‘Veil of Veronica’?”

“Yes. I remember something about a woman who wiped Jesus’ face as he carried the cross and his imprint was left on her veil. Right?”

He took a long swallow of wine, looked over the rim, and said, “It’s celebrated in Catholic churches as the Sixth Station of the Cross”

“Holy shit! Sorry. That’s such an inappropriate expression right now.”

He laughed. “I’m a soldier. I think I’ve heard worse.”

A cloud began to lift. “Let me ask you something. Demiel said to me at the UN that day, ‘Go forth for I am six.’ Do you think that’s what he could possibly have meant?”

He didn’t respond.

“But coming from a long line of agnostics, I always heard that the story of the Veil was apocryphal.”

“The story perhaps, but probably not the fabric. If it exists,
it
could hold the blood of Christ.”

I remembered the test tube then. “If?”

“If.”

“Now that you bring up ‘blood,’ there’s something you should hear.”

He leaned in closer.

“The priest gave me a test tube of blood. He said it had been taken from the clone baby.”

Finally Yusef registered real excitement—or what would pass for real excitement on someone who never showed emotion.

“He, or somebody,” I told him, “had it—you won’t believe this—in a carpet shop in Istanbul.”

“That sly old bastard! He kept it from them all that time.”

“Who?”

“Headquarters, of course.”

“Not that again.”

“Tell me. Where in God’s name is that shop? Could you find it again?”

I hesitated to tell him the rest, but did. “No. It’s gone.”

“What do you mean,
gone
?”

“The tube fell out of my bag and onto the floor and got crushed when it landed under, under, ah, my boot,” I said sheepishly.

“Your boot? Where?”

“Inside the Meryemana in Turkey.”

“That floor is made of stone. It could be washed up without a trace.”

“A bunch of monks came in. They must have taken care of it.”

A look passed over his face, and he seemed to understand something immediately.

“Forget it. It’s gone now.”

“How do you know? Wouldn’t the monks have wanted it?”

“No. They didn’t want it to exist in the first place. And the old damned fool shouldn’t have been keeping it around like a trophy.” He slammed his fist on the table. “Damn!”

“Well, that makes the search for Jesus’ blood drops a little more difficult,” I ventured sarcastically.

Either my sarcasm went right over his head or he was having none of it.

“A little?” he said.

“Maybe you should have been more on top of it, Mister Guardian.”

If looks could kill. Oh wait. He has a gun—he doesn’t need a killer scowl.

As though he hadn’t just been furious, he calmed down and said, without affect, “The source still has to be found—to compare to Demiel’s DNA. Before they kill him.”

“You’re sure they’re going to execute him?”

He looked at me as though he were looking straight through some bonehead blonde. “Doesn’t this Headquarters place have samples?”

“Probably. But even so, that wouldn’t prove that it’s
His,
you see. And they won’t interfere. There was never to
be
any interference to change the divine plan. It was all to play out as it is destined to play out.”

“No interference?” I was almost shouting. “These sons of bitches cloned a baby, for God’s sake! Isn’t that interfering on an extreme level?”

“No.” He left it at that and continued: “But the source blood has to be found now and it has to be compared to Demiel’s, and done in a way the world will believe.”

“I thought there was to be no interference.”

“This wouldn’t have been interference—just proof.”

“Jeez, I’m sorry I stepped on the blood after being drugged—or whatever the hell that demon priest did to me.”

“Don’t be. It was wrong to begin with.”

But marrying a child of thirteen after abducting her and impregnating her with a clone is right? Lunatics.

“I never worry about what I can’t change,” he said icily. “No?”

“I
guess…”
I said, even though I completely believe the opposite. “So even if I could find this head—which may not even exist—you’re telling me two different stories. One is about Cathars and one is about Templars.”

“The Templars, I believe, put the object into the possession of the Cathars, who were—are—the most trustworthy people on earth. The Templars used the Cathars
literally
as their safety-deposit box.”

“But weren’t the Templars the bankers for the nobility or something?”

“And in turn the Cathars were the Templars’ bankers, so to speak. Yet, ironically enough, the Albigensian Crusade was begun by Pope Innocent the Third, who in 1208 exhorted all Christian knights to expunge the ‘Provençal heretics’ from all the lands of Count Toulouse.” He made a sweeping motion with his hand around the room.

“It was all about wiping out the Christian sects that did not adhere to the wanton filth of the Vatican. He justified this because he declared he was ‘below God but above man, who judges all things but who no one judges.’ It almost worked, too.”

“Almost?”

“Almost. Many of the Templar Knights ended up converting to Catharism and went to their deaths for it.”

“Are you one of the ‘almost’ who remain?”

He ignored me. “Thus, the reason so many Templar Knights walked willingly into the fire
with
the Cathars: Their mere presence and the chaos it created in the king’s troops diverted attention from the four escapees. Those Knights Templar died as men of honor—at the end. Thus the mystery of the so-called Cathar treasure.”

“The one that also may or may not exist.”

“The one that does exist.”

“How did I know you’d say that? What’s
your
job, then?”

“To protect you on the trail.”

“But you don’t know what trail I’m supposed to even be on,” I said, getting more exasperated by the second.

“Each of us who were part of the Great Experiment had been given only the information necessary to complete our jobs. Too much information in one person’s hands was too dangerous, of course.”

“Need to know?”

“Correct. But
that,
Ms. Roussel, I promise you, is where the blood from which my son, or the boy who came to be
as
a son to me, was created.

“Find it and match the DNA, and you’ll save his life.”

“Even if I were somehow to find it—impossible, by the way—before the end of the tribunal, how am I supposed to get Demiel’s DNA to prove a match?”

“Too bad you washed your face,” he said in all seriousness. “You are the one he chose to kiss.”

“Sorry. I’m funny like that.”

“But that is the very DNA that belongs to the Divine Being who is today on trial.”

“You mean the DNA contained in the embryo that was put inside that child, your
wife
?” I said, my sarcasm beginning to overtake my reporter’s cool.

Don’t forget the disgusting thing he did.

As though he hadn’t noticed, he simply stated the facts. “Contrary to what He’s being falsely accused of, the boy grew up as the kindest, most loving person I’ve ever known. At six years of age, He began to have the ability to heal with his touch.
Never
would He be capable of an evil deed. But the point of the new resurrection would be to see if history would be forced to repeat itself, and of course, it has.”

“So I heard from the priest. Nice way to play with a human life—and thousands of other human lives, I might add.”

“No sense in trying to convince you of what the facts will show.”

“Okay, so what about the, ah,
marriage
?” I winced even to think of it.

“
She was Cathar Perfectae.”

“Meaning—what?”

He answered me by waving his hand, as though that explained away whatever the heck he’d done to her.

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“The nun was her guardian. She was a child who became a woman, and we each had our roles to fulfill. But she of course has a higher purpose. When Demiel came of age, she took the veil, as was expected.”

“The veil?”

At that he pushed his chair back, as though he hadn’t just hit me with several weapons of mass destruction.

“What about the ‘no interference’ rule? Is that off the table now?”

“Not all of it, but some of it changed the minute he kissed you. Didn’t it?”

Without waiting for an answer, he stood up. “It’s getting late and we have to be up early in the morning. I’d like to get started no later than six
A.M
.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m afraid we really shouldn’t leave any later than that. The bill is paid. I will see you back to your hotel.”

“
This
is a hotel.
That
is a house. Since I managed to get through dinner without being killed or getting sick to my stomach, I figure there’s no sense in pushing my luck. I’ll see myself home.”

“No, you didn’t get through it. Your dinner, I mean. You didn’t eat.”

When I didn’t say anything further, he said, “A shame. It wasn’t poisoned.”

“A regular laugh riot, you are.”

“And I won’t kill you on the way up the hill, either. The locals are very picky about screaming and murder after nine
P.M
. You know how the French are. Anyway, there is something you must see in the morning, so you have to be alive.”

“You, mister, are a freaking weirdo.”

He took my arm again as I stood up—this time with just the half-nelson version of the death grip—and walked me back up to the house and up the rickety stairs. “I need to check your room.”

“No.”

“I need to check your room,” he said as though he hadn’t just said it and I hadn’t just refused. He dug the key right out of my red satchel and opened the door and went in. He checked every inch of the tiny room, which took longer than necessary.

“You can come in,” he said from inside
my
room. I walked in and we found ourselves standing very close to one another in the tiny space between the bed and the door. Suddenly I felt unexpectedly awkward—that way you feel after a first date has come to an end and neither person is sure what the vibe has been.

Ridiculous. Am I supposed to kiss him because he didn’t blow my brains out?

Well, maybe it was just
I
who was feeling unaccustomedly awkward. Clearly he wasn’t. He took my face in one hand and looked right at me. He leaned in and kissed me on both cheeks and then stayed almost pressed up against me—but not quite. It was close enough to feel his body heat but a millimeter shy of any part of him touching any part of me.

“I’ll be nearby. No harm will come to you.
Bonne nuit
.”

“Oh, yes, good night.”

Stop it! Pantera is old enough to be your, ah, cousin.

I realized that I was already upgrading him from old coot to hot, older male.

Stop
it! OK, but the fact that he didn’t shoot you before the fish course—or even after—
was
kind of charming. Jesus Christ!

30

I didn’t exactly have a nightgown with me, so as usual, I washed up and stripped down to a T-shirt and my good white cotton panties that I’d bought in a bag in the drugstore, and lay down on the bed.

Everything seemed wrong. The pillow was lumpy, the bed was springy, the room was too hot, too cold, too quiet, too too. I was crazy restless, and couldn’t sleep, so I decided to bore myself to sleep by perusing the pamphlets and books in the room. Yes, the L’Oustal did have tourist paraphernalia just like a regular hotel, except by the look of these they hadn’t been updated since the Middle Ages. Or at least the information hadn’t.

I read the pamphlets in French and quickly discovered there was basically nothing to do in Montségur except four things: Eat at the Hotel Restaurant Costes, which I had already done; have a family-style meal at L’Oustal, which I would do in the morning; go to the tiny museum, which was closed the next day; and/or climb Montségur, which I had no intention of doing. Ever.

Apparently you couldn’t drive up there and there was not even a towrope. If you wanted to get to the top, you hiked it—straight up. I couldn’t wait to never do that.

I’d just have to hope that my newest new best friend Y, Pan, Y’s “you must see in the morning” involved giving me the secret to the Cathar’s lost treasure, clearing my name through his various connections, and getting me the hell back home with all charges dropped.

Good luck with that, sister. Do not go getting your hopes up of Pantera coming up with any Hail Mary pass—literally—to save your sorry ass.

I found one book of sorts on the shelf, which was written in English. It was a photocopied version of what looked like information collected from Web sites, but with a similar title to every other book in the town. They didn’t seem to get much past the thirteenth century around there.