The Sixth Key(19)

The train began to slow down. The man stood and tipped his hat slightly and left the compartment, leaving his newspaper behind. Rahn picked it up and a card fell out.

On it was written a single word:

Serinus





7


Sancho

‘Tell me thy company and I will tell thee what thou art.’ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote


Rahn changed trains in Berlin and from there his journey was therapeutic. With each hour that passed, Weisthor, Wewelsburg, and the memory of that chamber of blood became, at times, unreal to his mind, like a distant point, a pause at a station that one soon passes, thinking how good it is that one doesn’t live there. But something told him that he could only put aside the horror temporarily. Sooner or later he would have to face it and he wondered whether he could live with the guilt. For now, he leant on those words spoken by the man on the train – that he might still have time to do something fine for the world. This thought kept him sane.

Sometime in the night his papers passed inspection and he boarded another train for France and its fields, its houses, its farms, mountains and vales, vines and trees. Nothing had changed in that beloved country and he found this profoundly reassuring. In Paris, he dozed again in his hotel until he was well enough to go out to find coffee and food. He walked about the old city with convalescing affection, hearing his own footsteps on the leaf-littered pavements as if they belonged not to him but to a disembodied ghost. Paris! Embalmed by history, happy among its Napoleonic monuments and its obelisks, its cathedrals, its squares and streets; its river meandering in a seductive pulsing of life.

As soon as possible he contacted his friend Alexis La Dame on the number La Dame’s mother had given him. La Dame was pleasantly surprised. Rahn asked him for a favour: Could he gather information on a certain individual called Vincent Varas? They agreed to meet and that was that. In the meantime, the galleries and the restaurants, jazz clubs and bookshops reclaimed him.

On the day of their meeting, Rahn looked in the mirror to shave and found himself taken aback. He saw a thin man with high cheekbones jutting out of a pale face. Gone was the look of one for whom the entire world is a riddle waiting to be solved and in its place was a sad resignation – a spectre of death looming behind the façade of life.

Looking at himself, he recalled how, as a child, when dark clouds scurried over the horizon in autumn and there was the sense of an impending storm, he and his friends would gather in the forest near his home. They would wait and, when the storm came, feeling their hearts in their chests and the wind in their lungs, they would run through the trees in the rain, flying over the ground, weightless, invulnerable, using lightning as swords, playing at being Michael slaying the dragon, with a feeling of sovereign protection in their hearts. Michael always triumphed, the good had always won and Rahn had always been on the side of the good! Now he no longer knew which side he stood on, nor what ground he walked. He understood that this meant he had lost his innocence, as clichéd as this sounded.

He tried to put these thoughts aside as he approached the intersection of St Germain des Prés and rue Bonaparte where the Café de Flore was situated, to plan roughly what he was going to tell La Dame. He would likely be sitting at their usual table near the window reading the paper but in any case Rahn could have found him in a crowd: the combination of straw-coloured mop of hair; gold beard; suit and tie; cigar in one hand and brandy balloon in the other, was unmistakable.

They’d met eight years before as extras on the set of a Pabst picture, filmed on the border of Austria and Poland, called Vier von der Infanterie. But, as it turned out, they discovered the happy coincidence that they had met once before, albeit very briefly, at an obscure bookshop in the rue Montmartre, where they had both been in search of the same, very rare Mexican edition of Don Quixote. So, after the day’s filming, they took themselves to an old pub run by a one-eyed madame, where, compelled by Dionysian inebriation, they drank toast after toast to the memory of Miguel de Cervantes. When they ran out of money, they turned to warm beer and after singing a number of discordant songs, Rahn announced that he was leaving to look for the Holy Grail in the caves of southern France and La Dame was welcome to come along. La Dame, citing years of working with his brother, a mining engineer and geologist, as credentials, said he would be only too happy to assist. La Dame, in fact, turned out to be rather good with a lamp and rope, and even taught Rahn French, interpreting for him until he was proficient.

And so for the next two years La Dame played Sancho Panza to Rahn’s Don Quixote, and their friendship, having survived cold nights and wet caves and the inevitable frustrations, disappointments and dangers of treasure hunting, had grown as comfortable as a pair of old shoes.