Eva sighed. ‘I need to sleep.’
She was right, there was nothing they could do until morning.
She took the bed and he settled down valiantly in the lumpy, uncomfortable chair. She blew out the candle and he heard her undress in the darkness and get into bed. To be so near to a woman reminded him of his last night with Etienne.
Etienne had always been her nom de guerre. They had met in the circles of Antonin Gadal and thereafter had seen one another occasionally, but it had been four years or more since she had vanished without a trace, and he had stopped thinking about her until recently. Once again, he thought how the motives of women were inscrutable and he wondered how a man could build on such quicksand.
The last time he saw Etienne it was in Berlin where she had come to write an editorial on National Socialism for La République. They had celebrated the New Year in grand fashion by going to The Femina Club on Nurnberger Strasse; a club usually frequented by men looking for feminine company. Etienne, true to form, had hung on his arm dressed in a suit and tie like Marlene Dietrich, her hair combed through with pomade. Dressed this way, she hadn’t made too many heads turn when they sat down to order a bottle of Sekt, and to conspire about which girl they would invite to the table. There were pneumatic tubes that criss-crossed the room and carried messages, or presents, from patrons on one side, to girls on the other side – all one needed was money and good eyesight. But it had been nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, and they had laughed afterwards. Towards the night’s end, as they were walking back to the hotel, Etienne paused to look at him, and Rahn thought she looked almost vulnerable, a strange androgynous creature with the round blue eyes of a hunted doe. She had said to him, ‘One day I will leave and you will never see me again . . . You will forgive me, Otto, won’t you?’
At the time he had laughed it off and later they had made love affectionately, tenderly. In the morning, however, he woke to find he was alone. He never saw her again.
The Countess P’s clock on the table chimed ten times. He sighed and brought his mind to the present. If he was to be of any use to Deodat he had to sleep. Tomorrow he would think about the Rotas wheel, Pierre Plantard, Monti, De Mengel, Abbé Cros, the church, the fish pond, the key to the tabernacle, a symbol to ward off evil, a list of priests, Abbé Grassaud, Gélis bludgeoned to death and the only evidence being a packet of cigarette papers . . . cigarette papers . . . Etienne had been involved with Marxists and she had smoked Russian cigarettes . . . like Pierre Plantard. He remembered the cigarette paper left beside Gélis’s body, a Russian brand? He wondered who had killed Gélis and why, and then he remembered the inspector, Beliere. Madame Sabine must have arrived home by now to find the house a shambles, a dead man in the barn and he and Deodat gone! Surely she would have called the gendarmerie at Carcassonne and that meant that tomorrow the inspector, who reminded him of Professor Moriarty, would be on their trail like a bloodhound on a scent. Then again, for whom was the inspector really working?
His eyes grew heavy . . . He thought of the satanic grimoire of Pope Honorius and the missing key sought by a shadowy circle of powerful men – those bankers Deodat had mentioned– sitting in an underground room, smoking Russian cigarettes, making decisions about the fate of the world. He saw their faces: Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, Freemasons, Jesuit priests, black magicians . . .
Outside the wind howled, and the trees rapped on the windows in time to the old woman’s words: ‘Penitence – remember that!’
THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD
30
Nothing is What it Seems
‘You do not comprehend?’ he said.
‘Not I,’ I replied.
‘Then you are not of the brotherhood.’
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’
Venice, 2012
‘Is it true about those brotherhoods?’ I interrupted the Writer of Letters.
He contemplated the fire a moment, tenting his fingers, his face striated by shadow and light. Something about that face, the singular angle of the nose, the mouth and chin, struck me as deeply familiar. I had the sudden sense that he was a mirror and that I was looking at myself. The feeling vanished the moment he spoke.
‘The first Lodge in Paris, the French Grand Lodge, wasn’t started by Frenchmen, it was founded by British merchants. Did you know that?’
I told him that no, I had not heard of it.
‘It is interesting, isn’t it? In fact, the British founded Lodges all over Europe in the eighteenth century, weaving a web capable of disseminating occult and political impulses. Of course, once a web like this has been spun, it takes only the whisper of one word to set everything in motion.’ He threw a log into the fire and gave it a poke. ‘For instance, who do you think was behind secretive revolutionary groups like the Carbonari and the Jacobins?’