‘So where did Rahn go?’ I asked.
‘He made his way to a predetermined location near Söll where he was met by his friend Dietmar Lauermann, who had arranged a Swiss passport for him. Lauermann drove Rahn over the border to Italy, to a place where La Dame was waiting for him. Rahn’s death had been well publicised and so he was now free, not only of the Nazis, but of the brotherhoods as well.’
‘He and La Dame did break open that numbered bottle that La Dame had offered as a peace offering in the car just before they parted ways. That is how their friendship was revived. In truth, Rahn had never meant to hold a grudge against him, and besides, La Dame had won his esteem by helping to smuggle those Jewish youths over the border to Switzerland. He had earned Rahn’s respect again and La Dame, as a gesture of penitence, offered him something that touched his heart.’
‘The Mexican edition of Don Quixote?’
‘How did you guess? Yes, the one in that bookshop in Berlin, the very reason for their first meeting.’
‘And?’
‘We do know that Rahn went to France again to meet with Deodat. It was near a small village called Oradour-sur-Glane where he figured no one would recognise him. Incidentally, in 1944 a Nazi unit arrived at Oradour-sur-Glane supposedly looking for forbidden merchandise, or members of the resistance. The villagers were summarily rounded up and murdered, all in all, six hundred and forty-two men, women and children. These days the whole town is a memorial to those who died.’
‘Were they looking for Rahn?’
‘Who knows? The Nazis also sent a team to Montsegur and another, led by a man called Skorzeny, went to the Corbieres to search about in the mountains and caves. Perhaps they thought Rahn was hiding in them. In fact, legends told of him wandering about the mountains. But Rahn was long gone. He became an expert in disguise and he did live long enough to laugh out loud at all the conjectures about his death . . . Long enough to go to the cinema and to see himself portrayed as an American with a gun at his belt and a wry smile on his face. How he laughed! The scriptwriters even had their hero wearing a fedora and a leather jacket – just like that jacket Rahn had taken from the Pabst film set, but they didn’t know that it was La Dame who was afraid of snakes, not Rahn.
‘He also lived to learn from Deodat that Madame Dénarnaud had returned from her experience at the hermitage in a similar condition to that priest Albert Fonçay – the man who ventured into those tunnels under the hermitage years earlier. She had no recall of the events that had transpired that night in the gallery. Some say that the Cénacle placed her in an occult prison – as the American brotherhoods had done to Madame Blavatsky. Sometime later she willed the Villa Bethany and its grounds to a businessman from Paris, who agreed in return to look after her in her old age. Was he a member of one order or another, sent to keep an eye on her? Who knows? Whatever the case, she died at Rennes-les-Château after suffering a stroke. After that the businessman transformed the Villa Bethany into a hotel and the old cistern under the covered way of the Tour Magdala, into a restaurant, and began to attract tourists to the village.
‘Do you remember that sour-faced youth, Pierre Plantard? Well, he became a grand master of his own order, an order he concocted from thin air, which he called the Priory of Sion. Together with a certain Monsieur De Cherissy, Plantard encrypted parchments carrying some aspects of the truth hidden behind an entire smoke screen of lies. He then placed these parchments strategically within genuine documents at the Bibliothèque National and waited to see who would take the bait. There were a few who did, and as a result, a number of books were written which called much attention to Rennes-le-Château.
‘Monsieur Plantard now began calling himself a Saint Clair, and therefore from the lineage of Merovingians – the supposed true kings of France. These, he then postulated, were related to Jesus, making him a descendant of Jesus. What a load of nonsense!
‘At about this time another parchment was found at the Bibliothèque National, called Le Serpent Rouge. Yes, don’t look amazed. It is a poem containing thirteen stanzas, each devoted to one sign of the zodiac. If one reads it carefully one can discern Rahn’s entire adventure in the South of France locked between its lines. Moreover it was officially published on the seventeenth of January. At any rate its discovery caused a great stir. Unfortunately for the three men who co-authored the parchment – Louis St Maxent, Gaston de Koker and Pierre Feugere – they all died within twenty-four hours of each other, in different locations; all three supposedly committing suicide by hanging. An associate of theirs, a certain Janjua Fakharul-Islam, a Pakistani, was found a month before, lying at the side of the railway line near Melun. Apparently, he had fallen from the train travelling between Paris and Geneva, though no luggage belonging to him was ever found. Unnoticed by the gendarmes was a strange tattoo on the man’s right wrist, a serpent and an anchor – the sign of AA, as we know.’