The Inquisitor's Key (32 page)

“I probably should kill you, lad, but I won’t. If I wanted you
dead, I’d’ve let the reverend do the bloody bit. I don’t feel bad about shooting him and his ape—no penance needed for them two—but I don’t need more innocent blood on my hands. It’s asking for trouble, but I’ll be letting you go. I hope you don’t mind if I take a little souvenir with me, though.” He took the pistol from Miranda’s hand, then lifted his boot off her wrist. “Sorry to hurt you, miss. You strike me as a strong-headed lass, so I didn’t figure you’d listen if I just said, ‘Stop.’ I hope I’ve not done any serious harm.”

“I’ve got a bump on my head and maybe a sprained wrist, but I’ll be okay,” Miranda said. “Hurts a bit, but you saved me from the crazies, so if you promise not to kill me, I promise not to hold a grudge.”

He smiled at that—a smile that reminded me of the kind, comforting fellow who’d offered a friendly ear on the staircase at the library a few days and a lifetime ago. Looking at me, he cocked his head at Miranda. “She’s good in a pinch. I’d trust her with me back any day.” He tossed the preacher’s pistol over the railing, and it plunked into the water somewhere in the vicinity of the femur I’d lobbed a few minutes before. “Can I trust you two to sit here quiet-like till you can’t hear me scooter any longer?” I nodded; he turned and looked at Miranda, and she nodded, too. “Fair enough. After that, you can scream bloody hell and sic the coppers on me. If they catch me, it means I’ve lost me knack.”

He walked to the stone box sitting ten feet away, farther out on the bridge, where Reverend Jonah had left it. Lifting the lid from where I’d leaned it against the railing, he fitted it into place, but not before taking a quick look inside. Then he squatted and lifted the box, giving his right shoulder a shrug to keep the gun sling from slipping off.

“Those bones have brought bad luck to everybody that’s tried to latch onto them,” I said. “Are you sure you want them?”

He shrugged, and the box bobbed slightly. “It’s not up to me, lad. I’ve got orders.” He drew even with us, and as he did, he
turned toward us. “Good luck to you both. I’d keep wearing that medal, lad—it seems to be working for you.”

He turned away, and suddenly a bright mist of red sprayed from his back. Father Mike sank to his knees and set the ossuary down with a thud, as if taken by a sudden need to pray. Then he pitched forward across the top of it.

“Oh shit oh shit oh
shit,
” gasped Miranda. She ran to him and laid a hand on Father Mike’s shoulder as the life gurgled out of him. “Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

A man stepped from behind the corner of the tower at the end of the bridge and walked slowly toward us. “Hello, Docteur,” he said.
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle
.” The man was Inspector René Descartes.

“Inspector? How long have you been here?”

“Five minutes, maybe.” He shrugged. “In time to see the preacher and the muscleman die.”

My mind was whirling, spun by a trinity of fear, sadness, and anger. “You didn’t need to shoot the priest, Inspector,” I said. “He wasn’t going to hurt us.”

“But I did,” he said.

I was confused. “Did what?”

“I did need to shoot him.”

“Why?”

“Because he was taking the bones.”

“You could have just told him to put them down. He had his hands full. He was no threat.”

“He was a big threat, Doctor. Or a big problem, at least. Just as you and mademoiselle are.”

“I don’t understand, Inspector.”

“Do you know how much a French police inspector earns, Doctor?”

“No. Not enough, probably.”

“Enough for a one-bedroom apartment and a ten-year-old car and one week at the beach every August,” he said. “Do you know
how much I can sell these bones for? Three million U.S. dollars.”

“How? Who’s left to sell them to, Inspector? The crazy Protestant and the commando Catholic are both dead now. The religious market would seem to have dried up rather suddenly.”

“Ah, but you forget the art market,” he said. He smiled ironically. “It seems the art dealer, Madame Kensington, has a very eager and very rich client, one who is happy to have another chance at the bones. It’s a shame that you threw away one of them, but I think the blood on the box—along with the story of the crazy preacher and the soldier priest—will make up for the missing bone. A collector who will pay three million dollars for the bones of Christ is surely the kind of person who appreciates a good story. Imagine that you are a billionaire. Imagine that you have these bones, the most special bones in the world, and that you can take them out and show them off to your most trusted friends. Imagine how attentively they will listen as you tell how much money and how much blood it cost to get them. The story itself is worth a million, yes? Maybe I should raise the price, Doctor; what do you think?”

“I think you’ve forgotten something. A week ago you called Felicia Kensington a piece of shit.”

“Ah,
oui,
she
is
a piece of shit. But she’s a gold-plated piece of shit, filled with diamonds.”

“So you’re a faker, a forger, too,” I said. “A counterfeit cop. You just pretend to care about truth and justice.”

He shrugged, then wedged the toe of a boot under Father Mike’s body and tipped him off the top of the ossuary. “Okay, let’s go. My colleagues are slow, but even they will be arriving soon, after this many gunshots. Doctor, will you be so kind as to carry the bones?”

I squatted, then hoisted the box. “Father Mike was letting us go. Are you?”

“Ah, sorry,
non,
Doctor. The false priest gave you false hope. I give you the sad truth.
La triste vérité
. If you live, things will
be very difficult for me. I wish I didn’t have to kill you, but I do. Don’t take it personally.”

“I take it very personally, Inspector.”

“
Quel dommage
. Too bad. But do as you wish.”

Just ahead, something bright and orange caught my eye: the safety mesh spanning the gap in the railing. We were almost to the gap, and a desperate idea formed in my mind.

“Inspector, I need to shift my grip; I’m about to drop this, and I doubt that your client will be happy if it gets broken. Let me just set it on the railing for a second.”

“
Non
. Not on the railing,” he said. “I saw how you balanced it on the railing to trick the preacher.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll set it on the ground,” I said, “but I need to do it now. It’s slipping.” Without waiting for him to give permission—or deny it—I squatted and set down the ossuary, with the thunk of stone on stone. “Whew,” I said, straightening up and bending backward to stretch. I interlaced my fingers, stretched my arms, and pushed my palms outward to crack my knuckles.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Come on.”

“Okay. I’m ready. That helped.” I squatted again and worked my fingers under the ends of the ossuary. “Miranda, can you give me a hand? Just till it’s up?”

“Why don’t you let me carry it awhile?” Miranda squatted on the other side of the box and wedged her fingers under as well. I felt her fingers graze mine on the underside of the box.

“No, I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just help me lift—that’s the hardest part. Remember, lift with your legs, not your back.” I tapped one of her fingers, a gesture I desperately hoped she’d interpret as a signal. Her eyes met mine, and when they did, I rolled mine upward as far as I could, raising my eyebrows at the same time. “Okay, on three,” I said. “One. Two.
Three!
”

With all the strength I had, I straightened my legs and flung myself backward, shouting “
Push!
” as I did. Miranda shoved hard on the box, accelerating my backward fall. With my momen
tum, Miranda’s push, and the ossuary’s weight, I slammed into Descartes with the force of a linebacker. He grunted heavily and tumbled backward, my weight driving us both toward the gap in the railing. I felt momentary resistance as the orange safety mesh snagged us and stretched; we hung like that, suspended over the water, for an agonizing instant—the detective’s arms windmilling for balance, grasping for anything solid—and then, with a crack as sharp as a gunshot, the plastic snapped and we fell: Descartes underneath, my body against his, and the stone box clutched to my chest. We did a backward flip in the air, and the centrifugal force of our spin sent pale bones cartwheeling into the black sky. We fell surrounded by them, as if we were inside some macabre snow globe of mortality.

Descartes hit the water flat on his back, and the double impact—first from hitting the water, then from being slammed by me—forced the air from his lungs like a punch in his gut. I’d braced myself as best I could, taking a deep breath and tensing my stomach muscles against the ossuary’s weight.

The water closed swiftly over us, the momentum of our fall and the weight of the stone box driving us downward. Plunging through the cold blackness, the light fading fast above us, I felt Descartes struggling and clutching and scrabbling at me, as if I were a tree or a ladder he would climb to safety. I also felt the edges of the plastic webbing clawing at my hands and face as the loose ends fluttered and swirled around us.

I had no more than a few seconds of air in my lungs, and I was plunging toward the river bottom, entwined with a drowning man and thirty pounds of stone. In desperation, I slammed my head backward, making solid contact with the inspector’s face. His grip slackened long enough for me to twist free. I still had hold of the ossuary, clutching the edge of one end in my left hand.
Let it go,
a voice in my head screamed.
Let it go. Pull him to the surface.

I ignored that voice. I redoubled my grip on the ossuary, and
with my other hand I grabbed a fluttering end of plastic mesh and wrapped it around the box. Then, fumbling for the other end of the mesh, I cinched it around Descartes’s foot. Only then, having trussed him to a stone anchor, did I push myself away and begin a desperate, breathless ascent. I felt his fingers clutch at my legs and then slip away as I kicked upward and he descended.

Only the faintest glimmer of light showed overhead, and as I flailed toward it, running out of air, the light began to dim. My last thought, as my mouth opened and my lungs filled with water, was for Miranda.
Keep her safe,
I thought—no, I prayed. Then:
It is finished. Now.

And then there was blackness.

SIRENS WAIL AND TIRES SCREAM TO A STOP ON THE
pavement at the base of the bridge. Eight men leap from the caravan of police cars, running toward the stairs, weapons in hand.

One of the officers cries out and points upward, and the others look just in time to see a figure—a young woman—climbing onto the railing of the bridge and scanning the water below for ripples, bubbles, anything. She balances there briefly, arms stretched wide, as if Jesus and Mary, Savior and Virgin, manifested at one and the same time. Then she sees something; she does not hesitate, but hurls herself headfirst, as heedless as a seabird that spies a flash of silver scales in the water. She cleaves the surface with scarcely a splash, and the policemen stand transfixed, staring at the widening circles that are the only evidence of what they have just witnessed. Long moments pass; one man clutches his partner’s arm; another crosses himself.

At last the waters stir. The woman breaches, gasping and
coughing and retching in the river. With one arm she pulls for the bank; with the other, she encircles the lifeless body she has harrowed from the depths.

She drags him onto the bank and presses water from his lungs, then—holding the shattered silver medallion he wears around his neck—she covers his mouth with hers and exhales, breathing into him the breath and prayer of life.

The man—Brockton—stirs, and groans, and lives again.

Spoiler alert: This explanatory note refers to key details of the book’s plot. If you haven’t finished the book and don’t want to risk spoiling the suspense, stop reading now …
if
you’re strong enough to resist temptation.

Avignon—the city of the popes—is both faithfully and lovingly portrayed in this book. First settled by Celts several centuries before Christ, Avignon was forever changed in 1309 when Clement V, the first French pope, settled there with his court to avoid the perils of Rome, which was in the grip of a deadly feud between two powerful clans. Over the next seven decades, the Avignon papacy—called “the Babylonian captivity” by critics who believed that Rome was the only legitimate location for the papal palace—transformed Avignon from a small, sleepy town of some 5,000 to a booming, wealthy, and cosmopolitan city of 50,000. Avignon became the crossroads of money and power in medieval Europe. Kings, emperors, and other movers and shakers came to Avignon to seek papal favors, to apply political pressure, and to
revel in luxuries that far surpassed those at the Parisian court of King Philip of France.

No surprise, then, that fourteenth-century Avignon was also a crossroads of artistic talent. Within Avignon’s walls, popes, cardinals, and nobles rubbed shoulders with gifted painters and poets. Several famous figures from Avignon’s glory days play prominent roles here in this book. Nothing here contradicts the historical record, though their actions in these pages do—admittedly, exuberantly and occasionally wickedly—go considerably beyond the bare-bones record history offers us.

Francesco Petrarch—the prolific poet and philosopher whom some historians call “the father of humanism”—bitterly criticized the Avignon papacy and the Babylonian captivity, even as he lived off the tithes and other proceeds collected by the “whore of Babylon.” Petrarch’s decades-long adoration of the unattainable young noblewoman, Laura—an infatuation that continued even after she died during the Black Death of 1348—is one of history’s most famous unrequited romances. Petrarch wrote reams of sonnets to and about Laura; even at the time, though, some critics wondered if he was more in love with the idea of being in love—more smitten with himself as tragic hero—than with the actual, flesh-and-blood Laura: a woman whose lips he never even kissed.

Painter Simone Martini did, indisputably, paint a small portrait of Laura for Petrarch. Alas, that portrait—the world’s first commissioned portrait, say art historians—has been lost; if it could be found, it would surely fetch millions on the auction block at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Little is known about Simone’s personal life. He married into a family of Sienese painters; he and his wife, Giovanna, moved to Avignon in 1335 or 1336, and the couple had no children. When Simone died in Avignon in 1344, he left behind surprisingly few works from his time there, besides four frescoes (now undergoing restoration) in the portal of Avignon Cathedral and the sinopia studies for two of those frescoes: the powerful portraits of Mary and Jesus, that I—like Brockton
and Miranda—found myself captivated by within the Palace of the Popes.

The Palace of the Popes, Europe’s biggest Gothic palace, was begun in 1335 by Pope Benedict XII, who—prior to becoming pope in 1334 and taking the name Benedict XII—was named Jacques Fournier. In his six years as a cardinal in Avignon, Fournier was indeed known as le Cardinal Blanc, the White Cardinal, because of the white Dominican habit he always wore, even after he was entitled to far more sumptuous vestments. Fournier is a fascinating and (to me, at least) frightening study in contrasts. Immune to most of the temptations of luxury (except, apparently, food and drink), he built the fortress-like papal palace at least partly to safeguard the 17,500,000 gold florins amassed by his shrewd predecessor, Pope John XXII.

During Fournier’s years as a cardinal in Avignon and, earlier, as a bishop and inquisitor in southwest France, he was driven—I’d say obsessed, in fact—by the pursuit of heresy and the prosecution of heretics. Fournier became bishop of Pamiers in 1317; the following year he embarked on a systematic and thorough inquisition in the mountain village of Montaillou, whose entire population, astonishingly, had been arrested and charged with heresy a decade before, in 1308. Fournier reopened the matter and spent the next eight years interrogating villagers, shepherds, widows, and others whom he suspected of holding heretical views. He kept meticulous transcripts of his interrogations; Latin translations of those transcripts—called the “Fournier Register”—are bound in three immense volumes that are housed in the Vatican Library (Latin manuscript number 4030). Fournier judged many of Montaillou’s inhabitants to be guilty of heresy, although he condemned “only” five to be burned at the stake. One of the five was Agnes Francou, the widow who is mentioned in chapter 17; Fournier interrogated Agnes repeatedly in 1319 and 1320, and eventually condemned her for refusing to swear an oath of truthfulness (despite the fact that Agnes pointed out to him, with
some scriptural authority behind her, that “God has forbidden all swearing”). Several English-language translations of Fournier’s interrogations—including his sessions with Agnes—can be found on the website of Professor Nancy Stork (http://www.sjsu.edu/people/nancy.stork/courses/c4/), a medievalist who teaches a course on Fournier at San Jose State University. A rich portrait of daily life and inquisitorial interrogation in Montaillou is presented in the book
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (what a great name, Emmanuel Le Roy: Emmanuel means “God With Us,” and Le Roy means “The King”!). Ladurie’s book, which is considered a pioneering ethnographic study, is based on the Fournier Register: the wealth of information Fournier gleaned from the “heretical” villagers of Montaillou. I feel an obligation to be crystal clear about a key difference between historical fact and this work of fiction: Although Jacques Fournier—the inquisitor who became a pope—was obsessed with heresy, and put at least five suspected heretics to death, the medieval murder attributed to him in these pages is purely speculative.

Many books and blogs have been written about the Shroud of Turin, Christianity’s most revered relic. I won’t attempt to summarize those here; suffice it to say that ever since its appearance in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Shroud has inspired both devotion and controversy. Those only intensified in 1898, when photographer Secondo Pia published the ghostly black-and-white photo negative he saw materialize in his photographic darkroom. That watershed moment marked the beginning of modern scientific scrutiny of the Shroud—scrutiny that culminated in 1988, when laboratories in Zurich, Oxford, and Tucson conducted independent C-14 tests to determine the age of the Shroud’s fabric. The Tucson lab put the linen’s age at 646 years, +/- 31 years; the Zurich lab, at 676 years, +/- 24 years; and the Oxford lab at 750 years, +/- 30. Averaging the three and taking the margins of uncertainty into account, the scientists
responsible for the tests concluded—with 95 percent statistical confidence—that the Shroud of Turin was made sometime between 1262 and 1384. Almost immediately, die-hard believers in the Shroud’s first-century authenticity—including scientific believers—began casting doubt on the findings. One theory that was offered claimed that a “bioplastic” coating on the fibers had skewed the results. Another, more creative theory claimed that the image had been formed by a burst of radiation at the moment of Jesus’s resurrection, and that the radioactivity had skewed the quantity of C-14 level in the fabric. Still another claim held that the fabric samples had been snipped from an “invisible patch” woven into the Shroud during a sixteenth-century repair. One scientist who criticized the C-14 findings wrote, “It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made.” In a similar vein, other believers have claimed, countless times, that there is no technique known to artists—in medieval times or even modern times—that can produce an image with all the properties of the ghostly image on the Shroud of Turin. That assertion is simply not true, as Dr. Emily Craig demonstrated nearly two decades ago.

Emily—a medical illustrator turned forensic anthropologist—is lifted straight from life and transplanted into chapter 3 of our story. In 1994, while earning her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee, Emily and UT textile scientist Randall Bresee published a peer-reviewed article in the
Journal of Imaging Science and Technology
(volume 34, number 1, 1994; available online at http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/craig.pdf) titled “Image Formation and the Shroud of Turin.” That article explained and demonstrated how a simple dust-transfer technique—using materials and techniques artists have used for thousands of years—could easily have been used by an artist to produce the image during the Middle Ages, the heyday of religious relics.

One other note on the Shroud of Turin: The passages in this book that discuss the Shroud figure’s stature and proportions
are, like Emily Craig, lifted from life. If the Shroud really were a direct, life-size imprint of Jesus’ body, Christ—more than six feet tall—would have been a veritable giant back in the first century, when people were far shorter than they are today. If Jesus had been a head taller than his followers and his foes, it seems odd that none of the Gospel writers bothered to mention that detail. Also factual are the unusual, storklike proportions—the long legs and short, narrow trunk—that Dr. Brockton observes in the figure on the Shroud.

Last but not least, Eckhart, our “zhondo”: Meister Johannes Eckhart—a prominent Dominican theologian and mystic—was indeed charged with heresy by the archbishop of Cologne around 1326. Eckhart appealed his case directly to Pope John XXII and walked 500 miles to Avignon to mount his defense. The pope put former inquisitor Jacques Fournier, le Cardinal Blanc, in charge of handling Eckhart’s case. After journeying to Avignon, Eckhart seems to have dropped from sight; all we know is that he died sometime before March 1329, when Pope John issued a papal bull criticizing a number of Eckhart’s teachings…and claiming that Eckhart repudiated his errors before dying.

The circumstances and date of Eckhart’s death are shrouded in mystery. So are the location and fate of his remains. What’s not in doubt is this: He was a renowned teacher and beloved preacher, but he was perceived as a threat by the high priests who held the reins of power; trumped-up charges were filed against him, and he died while trying to clear his name. As Miranda says,
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

—Jon Jefferson