Shadow Ritual (7 page)

He looked around, searching for the movie producer, but she was nowhere to be seen. Half the guests had left, and Jaigu had also disappeared. He was probably writing his report for the ambassador and busy undermining his colleague.

Marcas had turned toward the cloakroom when he heard Pink Martini’s “U Plavu Zoru,” a heady mix of violins, congas, and chanting. He recognized the warm, sensual voice of China Forbes, the group’s vocalist. Marcas closed his eyes to savor the moment.

His reverie didn’t last long. He opened his eyes to the sight of Zewinski standing in front of him, hands on her hips. She was blocking his way.

“We’re needed.”

“We?”

Zewinski held out a crumpled paper. “Yes, we. You and me. The cursed couple. The spook and the hoodwinker, if you prefer. Here. You do know how to read, don’t you?”

Marcas began scanning the fax, bristling at her repeated use of the word “hoodwinker.” The term was a reference to the blindfold a Freemason wore during his initiation, when he acquired knowledge and moved from darkness to light. Marcas put the insult out of his mind and read the missive. “The above-mentioned police officer will make himself immediately available to the consular authorities. He will fully cooperate with the head of security.”

Great. Marcas thrust the paper back at her. “I presume you aren’t responsible for this.”

“You are clever, aren’t you? If it were up to me, I would have my men toss you out of the embassy. It seems that your friend Jaigu told the brass that you were here.”

“Listen, let’s not play games,” Marcas responded. “Neither you nor I want to spend any more time together than necessary. I’ll send you a report tomorrow certifying that I didn’t see anything upstairs. You’ll keep your investigation, and I’ll be left alone. I’ll go back to Paris and that will be that.”

“Deal,” she said, smiling for the first time. “And of course, not a word to your friends at the lodge.”

“That goes without saying. Besides, if I described you to them, they wouldn’t believe me. So much kindness and grace in a single person is the stuff of dreams.”

“It will be a pleasure not to see you again, Inspector.”

“Same to you.”

She shot him a biting look and headed toward a group of guards near the kitchen doors.

Marcas started to leave but changed his mind. Instead, he moved closer to the group. Jade’s voice was raised. She looked furious. One of the men pointed at Marcas. She rolled her eyes.

“What now?” she said.

“Here’s my card. I’m staying at the Zuliani in case you need me,” he said, flashing her a smile.

She looked him up and down. “You’re too kind, but I don’t think I’ll need you or your card. Just drop your letter off at the embassy.”

He surveyed the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. The butler is coming to. He was knocked out, apparently by one of the waitstaff hired for the evening. With any luck, he’ll be able to describe her. Good night,” she said, turning her back on him.

Marcas shrugged and took off for the cloakroom. The spook and the hoodwinker—he liked it. It was just possible that she had a sense of humor.

The vision of the young woman’s body came back to him. Who was twisting the Hiram ritual, a key Freemason observance? Who would push provocation so far as to execute another person in that way? The reenactment of Hiram’s death in Freemason rites was a parable full of philosophical meaning. So what was the message the killer or killers were trying to send?

The murderer had to have inside knowledge. The witness mentioned a woman—a Mason-killing woman. It was grotesque and worrisome. His head spinning, Marcas left the embassy and hailed a cab at the end of the street.

He was fatigued and confused. But in the backseat of the cab, his brain rebooted. He analyzed, compared, and reconstructed the scene. Inside the embassy, a young woman’s life had come to a tragic end. Whether he liked it or not, she was a Freemason sister, and her homicide was now his problem.

The taxi stopped at his hotel, which was in one of the few quiet neighborhoods in the Eternal City. It had long, narrow streets that cars avoided, sidewalks lined with lemon trees, and vast villas built during the fascist era.

Once in his room, he pulled out a leather-bound notebook and leafed through it to an empty page. He carefully opened the red-lacquer pen his son had given him for Father’s Day and set to work.

He jotted down the ritual used by the killer and reviewed his recollections of similar slayings he had heard about in his research of Freemason history. The scholar who had related these stories—the worshipful master at the Trois Lumières Lodge and a specialist in Spanish history—had died ten years earlier. He had recounted two series of attacks against Freemasons one hundred years apart. Marcas had no idea how much truth there was to the stories or if they were just amplifications of the various persecutions brothers had been subjected to over the centuries.

The first had occurred right after Napoleon’s troops had left Spain. A hundred Spanish brothers were decapitated for their support of the Frenchman’s ideas and their hostility to the monarchy. The second was during the Spanish Civil War, which pitted supporters of the republic against rebels led by General Francisco Franco, a sworn enemy of freemasonry.

Marcas would have to find his notes. He remembered something about executions in Seville, a pillaged lodge, and Freemasons discovered with their skulls cracked open. “Hiram” was written in blood on their foreheads.

JAKIN

The other pillar guarding the temple entrance,

a symbol of righteousness

14

Marcas awoke with a start, the image of Sophie Dawes’s body sprawled on the embassy floor in his mind. He got up and stretched, trying to shake the sadness he felt for his sister Freemason. The chain that united them had lost a link.

Marcas skipped breakfast and headed straight to the temple on the Via Condotti. A white-haired man who had to be at least ninety held the job of overseeing the archives at the Alessendro di Cagliostro Lodge. When Marcas asked for the records of violence against Roman Freemasons, the man brought out a faded green box filled with papers that had seen better days.

Marcas sat down in a deep leather chair and delved into the contents. The three blows to the body were too close to the legend of Hiram’s death to be a coincidence. He made his way through open-meeting reports and press clippings about fascist groups ransacking lodges during Mussolini’s reign. Then nothing at all until the Allies liberated Italy.

Frustrated, Marcas asked the old librarian about unexplained Freemason murders.

“My memory is not so good anymore,” the librarian said, scratching his head. He shuffled over to a chair and settled in. “I do recall that right before the Allies arrived, three lodge officers from Rome and Milan were found murdered in a mansion not far from the Coliseum. Their faces were smashed in.”

“Do you think it might have been the Blackshirts or the SS?” Marcas asked.

“A brother who was in the police told me he didn’t think either of them was responsible. The Blackshirts used other methods, and Hitler’s strongmen tortured their victims before executing them or just shot them and threw them in common graves.”

The old man was choosing his words carefully. He seemed to recover some deeply held energy as he talked about that dark time in history. No doubt it was a remnant of the courage and daring he had needed to survive.

The librarian handed Marcas another file that was even dustier. It was filled with press clippings from the nineteen thirties. One of the articles gave an account of the 1934 murder of a researcher, a Freemason who had been beaten to death. His skull was crushed. Next to the story, someone had written “Hiram?” in purple ink. Marcas made photocopies and opened his red notebook to jot down a list of similar murders.

1934. Florence, a brother.

1944. Rome, three brothers.

2005. Rome, a sister.

He thanked the old man and left the Roman lodge.

15

Bashir was driving a pickup he had borrowed from someone who owed him a favor. He had chosen his cover with care: Jordanian excavation-equipment sales rep. The bed of the truck was filled with rubble from a construction site. Among the rocks was the stone he had stolen from the institute.

When he reached the Allanby Bridge border crossing, a zealous Jewish border guard wanted him to unload the truck.

He’d expected this. At that moment, an associate who was following him in a car pulled out of the line of traffic and started honking. A swarm of Israeli army officers descended on the man, fingers on their triggers.

The border guard turned to see the commotion and then yelled at Bashir. “Get out of here. Go back to your country of dirty nomads.”

One obstacle down. When he arrived in Amman, he’d ditch the truck, change his clothes, and pick up his new identity: Vittorio Cavalcanti, a Milanese tourist going home after seeing the marvels of Jordan. He would have a large suitcase full of souvenirs, including the Tebah Stone.

16

“So, do we agree? Ms. Dawes experienced an unfortunate fall at the embassy in Rome. The administration will not comment on the incident.”

The French diplomatic system was working at full tilt the day after Sophie Dawes’s murder. Zewinski had brought the body back to France. The coroner’s office had contacted the family to come and identify her.

Three witnesses—all members of the embassy security team—had provided signed affidavits stating that Sophie seemed to have had too much to drink. She had lost her balance while going down the marble steps and had hit her head. None of the guests had seen anything, and no reporters had gotten wind of the accident. A life had been erased, a death touched up.

Sophie’s father was an elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease. He did not come to identify the body. A distant cousin was brought in at the last minute to sign the papers and then disappeared as just as quickly.

The body would be buried in two days without any ceremony in a cemetery in the suburbs of Paris.

Meanwhile, intelligence services were piecing together the victim’s short life. At the same time, agents were contacting the Grand Orient de France Freemason Lodge to let them know that one of their archivists had died in an unfortunate accident. The minister of the interior had already scheduled a meeting with a Grand Orient advisor, who was also a high-level civil servant.

The foreign office representative shot Pierre Darsan of the interior ministry a questioning look.

Darsan continued. “We need to make sure everyone keeps this under wraps. The gendarmes who witnessed the
accident
will be transferred to other embassies tomorrow.”

“What about Zewinski?”

“She did an expert job of handling things. We’ll debrief her and keep her on to investigate what really happened.”

“And the police inspector, Antoine Marcas? What was he doing there?”

“A coincidence,” Darsan said. “Apparently he was taking a few days off in Rome. He and our man Jaigu are friends. Since Marcas was at the reception, Jaigu pulled him in on the preliminary investigation. He could be useful. He’s a Freemason. Marcas should be boarding a plane back to Paris as we speak.”

“Can we count on him staying quiet?”

“I can make that happen.”

“Fine,” the foreign office representative said as he stood up. “Darsan, it’s your investigation now—unofficially, that is.”

As soon as the door closed behind him, Darsan went to the window. The room was silent, except for the muffled sound of traffic outside. He smoothed his mustache, a habit he had picked up in Algeria forty years earlier, and returned to his desk.

He lit a cigarette and opened Antoine Marcas’s file: forty years old, a homicide detective, a short stint in the anti-gang unit, commendations from his superiors, on the fast track toward becoming chief, then an unexpected spell in police intelligence services before suddenly requesting a transfer to a simple Parisian precinct. An additional page specified that during his stint in intelligence, he attended a certain Freemason lodge that also had several members who were involved in a money-laundering scheme. He was divorced, had a ten-year-old son, paid his child support every month, and spent his spare time writing articles about Freemason history.

Darsan closed that file and opened Jade Zewinski’s. She boasted a remarkable career for someone her age with no family connections. She ranked in the top ten of her class at the military academy and did commando training, foreign intelligence, and two operations in the Middle East, followed by security in Afghanistan for visiting media and politicians. After that, she had been sent to Rome.

He went through another ten or so pages before a press clipping caught his attention. Her father had committed suicide after his business failed. Smiling, Darsan read the article twice. Apparently Jade Zewinski had at least one good reason to dislike the Freemasons. He closed the file and called his secretary.

17

A breeze carried the scent of the sea, which mingled with the fragrance of the pine trees. Five men and two women walked slowly, taking time to contemplate the beauty of the Croatian landscape just below the Hvar fortress. The tallest of them, a gray-haired man with a buzz cut, pointed to a small headland jutting out toward the sea, flanked by two crumbling stone walls rising from the rocky soil. To the left, near the cliff, a small chapel surrounded by three majestic yew trees bore a pale mineral sheen in the bright sunlight.

The group headed in the indicated direction, following an uphill path lined with aromatic herbs. It ended at a natural belvedere.

They sat down on a wooden bench facing the Adriatic Sea, which shimmered in the bright morning light.

One of them, a short sweaty man with a red face, turned to his neighbor and nodded toward the chapel, which was padlocked. “What a fabulous view. I’d love to live here. It’s perfect, an ode to the glory of nature. Why, then, did you leave that Christian building? We’ve owned this land forever and can do what we want with it.”