God's Formula (14 page)

Ian Fleming, deeply asleep in the rear of the truck, was awakened by the barrel of a rifle tapping on his right temple.

“Do not make a sudden movement, Monsieur,” a male voice said. “It will be your last.”

Fleming nodded.

“Get on your knees with your hands behind your back.”

Stiff and groggy, the Englishman did as he was told.

“Don’t turn around,” the man said as he slipped a blindfold over Fleming’s eyes and tied his hands together with a rope. Then Fleming felt the barrel of the rifle pressing hard into the back of his neck, prodding him to his feet.

As he was rising unsteadily, trying to keep his balance in the dark, Fleming heard another male voice outside the truck. “I have the woman. She was in the woods.”

The large circular cavern was lit by pitch torches in cast iron holders at ten-foot intervals on the perimeter wall. John Ronald Tolkien, sitting under one of these torches, his hands and feet chained to iron rings in the stone wall behind him, looked up to see a large jagged opening in the domed ceiling some fifty feet above. Sooty smoke from the torches drifted slowly up toward this opening and disappeared into it. In the center of the room was a circular pedestal, perhaps a foot above the ground, perhaps fifty feet in diameter. Around it, at six foot intervals, were stone columns that appeared to have some kind of scriptural verses etched into them from top to bottom. Each verse was separated by a cross with curling edges, like flowers spreading their petals to the sun. The columns rose about twenty feet and were topped with a stone dome that contained similar carvings on its underside. A crude, rectangular stone altar stood in the center of the pedestal. The pedestal, the columns, the altar, and the domed ceiling all glowed a dull, sickly green as the light from the torches reflected off of them.

Gazing around, the professor could see the arched, doorless entrances to several dozen anterooms along the perimeter wall. All were dark, except one directly across from him that was lit from within by torch light. The tunnel had ended in that room, and it was to that room that the three Elvish princesses had vanished after securing him in his present position. The two younger ones emerged from it now, carrying rifles. He could see now that the women were not Elvish princesses, but girls no older than fourteen or fifteen. Girls who, despite their rough peasant garb, were every bit as beautiful as the Elvish princesses he thought them to be when they first appeared to him.

One stepped forward with a large, old skeleton key, which she used to unlock the ring bolts on Tolkien’s hands and feet. “Come with us,” she said when this task was completed. “We have found your friends.”

John Ronald Tolkien was not alone in the torch-lit ante-cave for long, barely enough time to scan the wooden crates that lined two walls and the stacked cots that lined the other two, to rub the blood back into his wrists and ankles, and to settle his sore rear-end onto the thick old carpet that covered the stone floor, before the queenly young woman—whom he had earlier confused for a character in the novel he was writing—entered, bowed slightly, and then gracefully descended into a lotus-like position facing him.

“Who are you?” the woman said.

“Who are
you
?” he replied.

“Philippa Esclarmonde.”

The forbearance, indeed, the serenity in the young woman’s voice, surprised Tolkien. He had expected a rebuke. He was her captive, after all.

“And you are?” she said.

“John Tolkien.”

“Where did you get this, Monsieur Tolkien?” She had extracted the Mother and Child locket from a pocket and now handed it to the professor.

“As I told Father Raymond before I was so rudely abducted,” Tolkien replied, looking at the locket and handing it back, “from Father Alain LaToure in Paris.”

“Do you know where Father LaToure got it?”

“No.”

“Do you know what it signifies?”

“No.”

“They are both dead.”

“Both dead? Who…?”

“Father LaToure was killed by the Germans two days ago. Father Raymond leapt to his death this evening.”

“Child…” Though her voice was still serene, there was no mistaking the pain in Philippa Esclarmonde’s beautiful eyes.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Child…”

“Please, Monsieur Tolkien. The German army is here in force. They were looking for Father Raymond. Why are you here?”

“I am English as you have surely gathered. I am an agent of the crown, on a mission to find two boys, two German boys. After talking to Father LaToure, I was told by a man in a theater that the boys had been taken to Foix by a Madam and Monsieur Foret.”

“English?” said Philippa Esclarmonde. “You spoke a strange language when we first met. Was it Latin, or perhaps it is a code language?”

Tolkien took the thick, cardboard-covered schoolboy’s mini-notebook that Philippa handed him. “What is it?” she asked. “We found it in your jacket pocket.”

“It’s a dictionary,” the Englishman answered.

“A dictionary? Written by whom?”

“By me.”

“In what language?”

“Elvish.”

“Elvish? What is Elvish?”

“A language spoken by elves.”

Philippa Esclarmonde had the clearest dark brown eyes Tolkien had ever seen. She closed them now, as if to better concentrate on the strange new piece of information he had conveyed. “One of the boys uses the same language,” she said, opening her eyes. “The one called Conrad.”

“Impossible,” said Tolkien. “No one speaks elvish. It’s…it’s fictional.” The English professor and would-be novelist smiled inwardly, and ruefully, at his reluctance to admit that the language he had been working on for the past ten years was indeed fictional, produced wholly from his imagination. To him it could not have been more real.

“I did not say he speaks it,” Philippa replied.

“Well, then,” said the professor, “are you trying to trick me? Do you suppose Conrad and I are Nazi colleagues sent to capture the strategically insignificant town of Foix? That our plans for conquest are contained in my notebook?”

“No,” Philippa answered. “I do not.” She reached across and lightly touched the back of the professor’s hand. “I believe all that you have said.”

“I’m not in the habit of lying,” Tolkien replied, looking down at the spot where Ms. Esclarmande had touched him.

“My English is primitive,” the young woman said. “Forgive me.”

“Mademoiselle…”

“Why are you writing an elvish dictionary?”

“I write stories about elves and trolls and wizards.”

“As well as working for your king.”

“Yes.”

“Are you making troll and wizard dictionaries as well?”

“No, but perhaps I should.”

“Where do you find the words?”

“I make them up.” John Tolkien smiled, openly and wryly. Even Edith had never teased him so about the incredibly outré stories he wrote. Part guerrilla warrior, part other-worldly elvish princess, there was something deeply endearing about Mademoiselle Philippa Esclarmonde, the twenty-year-old beauty sitting so serenely across from him.

“Tell me about the man in the theater,” Philippa said, breaking into these barely-formed thoughts.

“He was bearded, a train engineer,” the Englishman replied. “He gave me the locket and told me to contact Father Raymond.”

“And your two comrades?” the woman asked. “Who are they?”

“Where are they?”

“We have them. Who are they?”

“The man is also a British agent. The woman…”

“Yes?”

“Adrienne Archambeau, a Frenchwoman. An agent of Le Deuxieme Bureau.”

“A spy.”

“Yes.”

“She is not French.”

Professor Tolkien did not respond immediately. He had observed Mademoiselle Archamnbeau as carefully as he could during the time they had traveled together. Not French, indeed.

“What is she, then?” he asked finally.

“Satan’s whore, perhaps.”

“Child…”

“I am not a child, Monsieur Tolkien.”

“I apologize.”

“Who are the two boys?”

“If you will let me speak to my comrade—”

“He is unconscious. He tried to escape. I ask again, who are these boys?”

“They are German youths seeking refuge.”

“From what? From whom?”

“The Nazis.”

“Why?”

“One is a Jew, the other has information that will help the Allies win the war.”

“Or the Germans.”

“Correct.”

“What kind of information?”

“A formula to make a weapon, a bomb that could blow up an entire city, Paris, London.”

“A boy of fifteen has such a formula?”

“His father was a scientist. He gave it to him.”

“We have searched him thoroughly. Both of them. They have no formula.”

“What about the Forets?”

“Madame was killed on the road south. Stukas bombed and strafed their column. Monsieur—you wrestled him in the tunnel last night—knows nothing of a formula.”

“You must let me speak to the boys.”

“Perhaps I will.”

“And my comrade. How is he?”

“He will live. He had a knife hidden, very ingenious. He cut his ropes and stabbed one of my men. Another hit him with his rifle butt.”

One of my men.
Could this child—he could not help but think of her as a child, a very ancient child, as illogical as that sounded—be a guerrilla leader of some kind?

“You are partisans, I assume,” said Tolkien. “We are on the same side. You must let me take the boys to England.”

“There are two thousand German troops going door-to-door above our heads right now,” Philippa Esclarmonde replied. “All roads in and out are blocked. They have set up check points at the border crossings. Heavily manned checkpoints, with tanks.”

“They want the boys very badly.”

“Yes, enough to torture Father LaToure. His mutilated body was dumped at his church in Montparnasse. It is the German’s way of showing what happens to people who oppose them.”

Tolkien was still holding his dictionary. He looked at it, turning it over. Pencil scribblings, some intact, some partially erased, some crossed out, filled every cranny of both the front and back cover. He remembered making some of these—crude, unsuccessful efforts to make a letter or a phonetic symbol of the Nazi swastika—on the day of the massacre in Sevres. What would the elvish word for evil be, for the wormlike thing that eats away a man’s soul?
His mutilated body
. My dear, dear, angry—ferociously angry—and courageous Father LaToure. He might never come up with that word. Perhaps there was no word for it in any language.

“You heard him say mass?” Philippa asked.

“Yes,” Tolkien answered, “I did.”

“He must have told the Germans about Father Raymond,” Philippa said, “but we are safe here.”

“Where are we?”

“There are miles of caves under Foix. Some have not been entered for eight hundred years. We are in one of them.”

“Are there weapons in these boxes?” Tolkien gestured toward the boxes lining the cave’s walls.

“Weapons and food in tins, but we can’t stay here long.”

“Why not?”

“There is a curse here.”

“Surely…”

“I will take you on a tour. You will see the bones.”

“No one has claimed the body?”

“No.”

Kurt Diebner and Josef Kieffer sat in what was until yesterday the mayor’s office in Foix’s grandiosely named Palais de Justice, a medieval stone building next to the church at the foot of Foix mountain. On a silver tray between them was a china coffee service and a platter of croissants and butter.

“Who are his relatives?” Kieffer asked.

“According to the mayor and others, three nieces and a nephew.”

“Where are they?”

“No one knows.”

“Where did they live?”

“With the priest in the rectory.”

“Incest?”

Kieffer knew that Diebner was not a soldier, and, more importantly, that he was afraid of him, which was a good thing and to be taken advantage of. But carefully. Diebner, a second rate scientist, had been made an SS officer by Himmler himself. Once found, Diebner would verify the formula they were seeking and bring it to Himmler. Though he would have enjoyed it, he could not afford to be too abusive to Herr Diebner. Not yet. Kieffer smiled now, a smile meant to signify the contempt that he and Deibner, that all true Nazis, shared for the Catholic church and their hypocritical fornicating priests.

Diebner, a confused look on his nonmilitary face, smiled tentatively back.

“Someone knows where they are,” said Kieffer. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes.”

“Have the mayor pick ten people.”

Kieffer smiled at the quizzical look on Diebner’s face.

“Line them up in the little square near the church,” Kieffer continued. “Tell the mayor that we will execute one a day, starting this evening, until someone tells us where these nieces are.”

“What happened to these people?” John Ronald Tolkien asked.

“We don’t know,” Philippa Esclarmonde replied.

“Who are they?”

“Cathars.”

They were standing, pitch torches in hand, at the threshold of a large, roughly circular cavern. The light from their torches licked at a sight that the Englishman would never forget: human bones in mounds reaching almost to the ceiling set at intervals around the cave’s perimeter. Suppressing his revulsion, and his fear, as he played his torch light around the room, Tolkien saw that many, if not all, of these thousands of bones were paper thin, many more splintered like shards of glass. They all seemed to be covered with amoeba-like rust-colored patches. Here and there a full skull stared at him from among this rubble. Pock-marked vertebrae and mottled pieces of fingers and toes were strewn among the larger bones like dice randomly thrown by Hades himself.

“Did they live here?” Tolkien asked.

“No, they lived openly, but in defiance of Rome. When they would not recant their beliefs they were hunted and killed. We believe that toward the end they used these caves as a base, from which they fought the pope and his armies.”

“What were their beliefs?”

“That good and evil are separate, equal Gods.”

“Dualism.”

“Yes, that all visible things are the works of Satan.”

“Not human beings, surely.”

“Yes, most of all human beings.”

“Heresy.”

“According to Rome.”

Tolkien and Philippa had taken a few steps into the chamber and were slowly casting their torchlight from mound to terrible mound.

“Were they starved to death?” Tolkien asked.

“There are miles of caves under Foix mountain. They would have known many secret entrances. They would have had access to plenty of food and water.”

“Your curse, then.”

“Not
my
curse.”

“Of course not, but nevertheless, it’s what you believe.”

“It’s what Father Raymond believed.”

“Is this how you found them?” Tolkien asked.

“The bones were everywhere,” Philippa answered. “Some in the center chamber, near the alter, some in the tunnels. Most were in the small side caves. We moved them all in here.”

“Who is we?”

“Father Raymond, my brother, my sisters, and me.”

“The Germans will search the caves surely.”

“The only entrance to this area is in the church. They will never find it.”

“How did you find it?”

“The Cathars were chosen by God to safeguard a sacred treasure.”

“A treasure? What kind of treasure?”

“We don’t know. Father thought it was a folio: a spell cast by reading from a sacred text.”

“
We
?”

“There are still Cathars here in Foix. Father Raymond was their leader.
Our
leader. My sisters and my brother and I are Cathars. About a month ago, Father Raymond found the entrance to these particular caves. He searched every day for the treasure, and then the Germans came.”

“And us.”

“You and your colleagues arrived first. We were watching you.”

“Are you still looking for the treasure?”

“No. We are going to use these caves as a base to fight the Germans.”

They stood now in the heart of the ossuary, surrounded by chest-high piles of bones. Tolkien raised his torch to take a last look around. When he did, he saw that the cave’s domed ceiling was quite low and that block script similar to that on the columns he had seen earlier in the main cave were etched along its lower perimeter. Most of it had been obliterated, not by oxidation but by the hand of man. Someone had taken something sharp and heavy and hacked away at the band of lettering that circled the room. The word
ferum
survived whole in one or two places, and the word
virid
in others. The Englishman had studied the classics when he first entered Exeter College at Oxford, and though they bored him, he certainly remembered his vocabulary.
Green iron
, he asked himself, what in the world could that be?