The Sixth Key(59)

‘You were in the trunk of the Tourster?’ she said, ignoring his various misfortunes and concentrating on what interested her.

‘Yes, and rather an undignified end it would have been too if someone hadn’t done-in the man who was about to cremate me!’ he said with passion, seeing an image of it before his eyes.

‘I saw the dead man,’ she said.

‘And you screamed, I know.’

‘The dead man was going to kill you?’

‘I don’t know but there was a can of gasoline on the floor not far from the body. Lucky for me someone came along and stopped him with a knife to the throat. I dare say I might have ended up the same way, had I not been in the trunk.’

Rahn felt for his jacket and realised he wasn’t wearing it. He had taken it off before lying down. He got up and the world was a plaything of his vertigo. He had to wait for it to stop before he could pick his slow way through the mess and up the stairs with Eva following him.

The bed had been overturned and Eva helped him to move it. Underneath, he found his jacket but the pockets were empty. Monti’s notebook was gone and so was the list. He looked about and found his wallet. It was untouched and his papers were still in it, together with something else, the card the Russian Grigol Robakidze had given him at the Schloss on Lake Malchow. There had been something about Black Swans and if he was ever in any trouble he was to call the number on that card. But he remembered Deodat’s note: Don’t trust anyone!

He found his lucky fedora – it was badly out of shape but he put it on his head, glad to have it back. He took a change of clothes, stuffed them into a small leather bag and went to Deodat’s room. It had been similarly treated. He told Eva they should go but through the miasma in his head he remembered something and took himself to the library. Some of the books had been tossed out of their comfortable beds, quite a few looked to be missing, but not Éliphas Lévi’s book. He found the original list, still tucked away inside it.

He put the list in his pocket and went looking for the pendulum clock. There it was, the ugly thing. For some reason he was glad to see it.

‘So, are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ Eva asked.

‘It’s rather complicated and you’ll have to hear it along the way, I’m afraid.’

‘Along the way to where?’ she said.

He put the clock under his arm and his mind fell into a palsy. What was he to do? Eva was watching him warily. He must look and sound quite mad. He drew himself together and said, ‘My dear Mademoiselle Cros, might I ask you to drive me to Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet, if you will be so kind? I’m really not up to it as you can see.’

‘Of course, are we going to see Abbé Grassaud?’

‘Yes, I believe he may know quite a lot about this entire loathsome affair.’

Once they were well on the way, he told Eva what she didn’t know. She listened to all of it heavily, driving a long time in silence; thinking things through, he supposed.

‘So, you are a Nazi, Monsieur Rahn!’

The look in her eye made him sigh. He hated unpleasantness, but he was sick of being judged by all and sundry. ‘I’m an author and a historian but I’m not a Nazi!’ he snapped. ‘I admit I was seduced by the possibility of having the means to continue my work, but that’s all. I despise everything they stand for!’

‘You said you came here to look for something?’

‘It’s a long story, but in short the SS want me to find a grimoire, a book of black magic written by Pope Honorius called Le Serpent Rouge. I saw a man in Paris who knew something about it and he gave me a notebook that belonged to another man, a man who visited a priest here in Languedoc some months ago. The notebook contained information that has led me to surmise that he wasn’t only looking for the grimoire, but also for a key missing from it. It’s all rather sketchy and complex.’

‘A key? You mean like the key to the tabernacle?’ ‘No, in grimoires a key is something that unlocks a secret – that enables one to conjure a spirit. It can be a verbum dimissum, that is, a magic word, or it can be a sign.’

‘What sort of pope writes a grimoire of black magic?’

Rahn nodded. ‘A diabolical one! Can you see now why I don’t like churches?’ He put a hand over one eye and then over the other to see if his vision had improved. ‘You don’t happen to know the symptoms of a brain haemorrhage, do you?’

‘What?’

‘A brain haemorrhage, when it bleeds in the brain – the symptoms, do you know them?’

She shrugged. ‘Headache, dizziness . . .’ She didn’t seem particularly interested.