The Alchemist's Secret (24 page)

‘None that I know,’ Anna said.

‘So the notebook and this recording are all you have?’ Ben asked her.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘That is all.’

Then it was a waste of time coming here
, he thought bitterly.
That was my last chance.

Anna was gazing thoughtfully at the rubbing of the dagger blade. An idea was forming in her mind. She couldn’t be sure, but…

The phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and went to answer it.

‘So what do you think, Ben?’ Roberta said quietly.

‘I don’t think this is leading anywhere.’

They could hear Anna on the phone in the next room, talking in a low voice. She sounded a little flustered. ‘Edouard, I asked you not to call me any more…No, you can’t come here tonight. I have guests…no, not tomorrow night either.’

‘Me neither,’ Roberta said. ‘Shit.’ She sighed and got up from her chair, started pacing aimlessly across the room. Then something caught her eye.

Anna finished her call and returned to join them. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said.

‘Problems?’ Ben said.

Anna shook her head and smiled. ‘Nothing import ant.’

‘Anna, what’s this?’ Roberta said. She was examining a magnificent medieval text hanging in a glass frame on the wall near the fireplace. The cracked, browned parchment depicted an early map of the Languedoc, scattered with old towns and castles. Around the edges of the map, blocks of old Latin and medieval French text had been highly coloured and ornamented by a skilled calligrapher. ‘If this is an original scroll,’ she said, ‘it must be worth a packet.’

Anna laughed. ‘The American man who gave it to me thought it was priceless, too. Until he found out that the thirteenth-century Cathar script he’d paid twenty thousand dollars for was a fake.’

A fake?’

‘It’s no older than this house,’ Anna said with a chuckle. ‘About eighteen-nineties. He was so
pissed off-
is that the right expression?-that he gave it to me for nothing. He should have known. As you say, a genuine item in that condition would have been worth a small fortune.’

Roberta smiled. ‘We Yanks are suckers for anything more than three hundred years old.’ She moved away from the framed scroll and looked across at the tall, wide bookcase, running her eyes along the hundreds of books in Anna’s collection. There was so much here-history, archaeology, architecture, art, science. ‘Some of this stuff is so interesting,’ she murmured. ‘One day when I get time…’ She remembered she had a little book of Post-it notes in her bag, still out in the car. ‘Excuse me for a moment, will you? I want to write down a few of these titles.’ She trotted out of the room.

Anna moved close to Ben. ‘Come, I’d like to show you something,’ she said. He stood up, and she took his arm. Her hand was warm on his skin.

‘What do you want to show me?’ he said.

She smiled. ‘This way.’

The two of them walked out of the french window and down the long garden. At the bottom, a rocky path led up to the open countryside and after they had scrambled up a short slope Ben found himself looking out at a magnificent sunset panorama. He could see for miles across the mountains of the Languedoc, and above it all the sky was a cathedral-rich canvas of shimmering golds, reds and blues.

Anna pointed across the valley and showed him two distant castle ruins, serrated black outlines perched miles apart against the sky on high mountain peaks. ‘Cathar strongholds,’ she said, shielding her eyes against the falling sun. ‘Destroyed by the Albigensian crusade in the thirteenth century. The Cathars and their ancestors built castles, churches, monasteries, all across the Languedoc. They were all crushed by the Pope’s army.’ She paused. ‘I’ll tell you something, Ben. Some specialist historians have believed that these places have a deeper significance.’

He shook his head. ‘What kind of deeper significance?’

She smiled. ‘Nobody knows for sure. It was said that somewhere in the Languedoc there lies an ancient secret. That the relative positions of Cathar sites give the clue to finding it, and that whoever could solve the puzzle would discover great wisdom and power.’ Her dark hair was blowing in the gentle evening breeze. She looked beautiful. ‘Ben,’ she said tentatively. ‘You haven’t told me the whole truth. I think you’re looking for something. Am I right? Something secret.’

He hesitated. ‘Yes.’

Her almond eyes sparkled. ‘I thought so. And it has something to do with alchemy, with the legend of Fulcanelli?’

He nodded, and couldn’t help but smile at her razor-sharp perceptiveness. ‘I was looking for a manuscript,’ he admitted. ‘I think Klaus Rheinfeld knew about it, and I’d been hoping he could help me. But it looks like I was wrong.’

‘Perhaps
I
can help you,’ she said softly. ‘We must meet again. I think we could work together on this.’

He said nothing for a moment. ‘I’d like that,’ he said.

Roberta had come back from the car to find the house empty. She heard their voices carrying on the wind, and looked out of the french window. She saw Ben and Anna climbing back down the slope towards the garden. She could hear Anna’s chiming laugh. Her slim figure was silhouetted against the sunset. Ben offered her a hand. Was it her imagination? They seemed to be getting on very well.

What do you expect? Anna’s gorgeous. She’d be hard for any man to resist.

‘What kind of thoughts are these, Ryder,’ she said to herself. ‘What do you care, anyway?’

But then she realized. She did care. A terrible thing was happening to her. She was falling in love with Ben Hope.

Ben was in a sombre mood the next day as he wandered aimlessly through the dusty streets of Saint-Jean. His search had slammed into a dead end.

When he’d phoned Fairfax two days earlier he’d held back from mentioning that the manuscript might have been destroyed. He’d been hoping that Anna Manzini would be able to tell him something positive. That had been a stupid false impression to give the old man. Now everything looked black, time was dragging by and he had no idea where to turn next.

In a square next to an ageing World War One memorial statue was the village bar, a one-roomed affair with a tiny terrace where leathery old men sat like reptiles in the sun, or played games of
pétanque
in the empty square. Ben walked in, and the clientele-all three of them, playing cards in a shady corner-turned to look as the tall, blond stranger appeared. He nodded them a sullen greeting, which was returned with grunts. At the bar, the proprietor was sitting reading the newspaper. The place smelled of stale beer and smoke.

He noticed a Missing Persons poster on the wall.

He sighed. Another one.
That’s what I should be doing-helping kids like that. Not hanging around here wasting time.

Leaning on the bar, he lit a cigarette and asked for his flask to be refilled. They only had one type of whisky in the place, an especially vile fluid the colour of horse urine. He didn’t care. He ordered an extra double measure of the same and sat on a bar-stool, gazing into space and sipping the burning liquor.

Maybe it’s time to give up this fiasco
, he was thinking. This job had never been right for him, from the start. He should have stayed objective. His first impression had been right. Fairfax, like all desperate people who want to save someone they love, had fallen victim to his wishful thinking. So there was a good chance the Fulcanelli manuscript was lost-so what? It was probably all bullshit anyway. There wasn’t any great secret.
Of course there wasn’t.
It was all a fantasy, all myths and riddles and fodder for gullible dreamers.

But could he say that Anna Manzini was a gullible dreamer?

Who knows-maybe she is?

He slid his empty glass along the bar, tossed some coins on the pitted wooden surface and asked for another double. He’d already finished that one, and started on another, when the three old card players in the corner looked round at the sound of running footsteps.

Roberta burst in, looking flushed and excited.

‘Thought I’d find you here,’ she said. She was out of breath, as though she’d run all the way from Pascal’s cottage. ‘Listen, Ben, I’ve had an idea.’

He was in no mood for her enthusiasm. ‘Tell me about it some other time,’ he muttered. ‘I’m thinking.’ He was-thinking about picking up his phone and telling Fairfax it was over. He’d wire him back his money, give up and go home to his beach.

‘Listen, this is important,’ she insisted. ‘Come on, let’s go outside. No, don’t finish that. You look like you’ve had enough already. I want you with a clear head.’

‘Go away, Roberta. I’m busy.’

‘Yeah, busy drinking yourself into a stupor with that gut-rot.’

‘Gut-rot is what happens to you when you drink it,’ he corrected her. He pointed at the glass.
‘This
is
rot-gut’
, he said emphatically.

‘Either way,’ she grunted impatiently. ‘Look at you. Call yourself a professional?’

He shot her a ferocious look, slammed the glass down on the bar and slid down off the stool.

‘This had better be very, very good indeed,’ he warned her as they stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight.

‘I think it is,’ she said, turning to face him with an earnest look as she got her thoughts in order. ‘OK, listen. What if the manuscript Klaus Rheinfeld stole hadn’t been destroyed?’

He shook his head, confused. ‘What are you raving about? Pascal saw it in pieces. It was ruined in the storm.’

‘Right. Now, remember the notebook, Rheinfeld’s notebook?’

‘What about it?’ he grunted. ‘This is what you drag me out here for?’

‘Well, maybe it’s more important than we thought.’

He furrowed his brow. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just listen, OK? Here’s my idea. What if the notebook was the same thing as the manuscript?’

‘Are you crazy? How could it be? They gave it to him at the hospital.’

‘I don’t mean the actual notebook, stupid. I mean what’s written in it. Maybe Rheinfeld copied the secrets down into it.’

‘Oh right. From inside a secure hospital,
after
he’d lost the original? What did he do, channel the information? I’m going back inside.’ He turned impatiently to go.

‘Shut up and listen to me for once!’ she shouted, grabbing his arm. ‘I’m trying to say something, you pigheaded bastard! I think Rheinfeld could have remembered it all and written it down later in his notebook.’

He stared at her. ‘Roberta, there were over thirty fucking pages of riddles and drawings, geometric shapes, jumbled-up numbers and bits of Latin and French and all kinds of stuff in there. It’s not possible to remember all that in perfect detail.’

‘He walked around with it for years,’ she protested. ‘Probably living rough, with no money. It was all he had. He was fixated on it.’

‘I still don’t buy that anyone could have that kind of memory. Especially a fucked-up alchemy nut,’ he added.

‘Ben, I did a year of neurobiology at Yale. Granted, it’s unusual-but it’s
not
impossible. It’s called eidectic memory, also known as photographic memory. It’s usually lost by adolescence, but some people retain it all their lives. Rheinfeld had an
OCD
, from what I can gather-‘

‘OCD?’

‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,’ she said more patiently. ‘He had all the symptoms, kept repeating actions and words for no apparent reason-or for no reason that anyone could understand except him. Now, it’s been known for compulsive neurotics to have uncanny powers of memory. They can store huge amounts of detail that you and I would never be able to remember. Difficult mathematical equations, detailed pictures, enormous chunks of technical text. It’s all on scientific record going back almost a century.’

Ben sat on a bench. His mind was quickly clearing of the whisky fog.

‘Think about it, Ben,’ she went on, sitting next to him. ‘They gave Rheinfeld a notebook to write down his dreams-that’s a standard part of psychotherapy. But instead, he used it to preserve the memories he was holding inside, keep a written record of the information that he’d stolen and then lost. The psychiatrists couldn’t possibly have known what he was doing, where the stuff was coming from. They probably dismissed it as lunatic gibberish. But what if it was more than that?’

‘But he was crazy. How can we trust the mind of a madman?’

‘Sure, he was crazy,’ she agreed. ‘But mostly he was obsessive, and the thing about obsessives is, they’re crazy about details. As long as the detail he wrote down was close enough to the original, what matters isn’t his craziness but that the notebook might contain a perfect, or near-perfect, replica of the documents that Jacques Clément didn’t burn because they’d been passed to him by Fulcanelli.’

He was silent for a few moments. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Of course I’m not sure. But I still think we should go back and check it out. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?’ She looked at him searchingly. ‘Well? What do you say?’

Anna couldn’t concentrate on her work. Still unable to come up with a satisfactory plot for her historical novel, she’d been reduced to sketching out a rough draft of the author’s introduction. It should have been easy-she knew the subject so intimately. But the words just wouldn’t flow. Now a new distraction had formed in her mind to add to the writer’s block that had been troubling her for so long. Each time she tried to focus on the page in front of her, after a couple of minutes her mind began to stray and she found herself thinking about Ben Hope.

Something was niggling her. Something buried at the back of her mind. What was it? It was distant, hazy, like a half-forgotten word hovering teasingly on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t crystallize into clear thought. She glanced down at Rheinfeld’s notebook, lying at her elbow on the desk, the dagger blade rubbing slipped between its pages. Maybe there was more to the notebook than she’d ever thought. The markings…