The Magdalene Cipher (37 page)

Freeze
came out, not as a word, but as a bellow of angry surprise—because here was Roscoe's killer, turning toward him with an automatic in his hand. And the man next to him, turning, too, but slower to react—the Suit, with the bags under his eyes even bigger now than they were in McLean.

Dunphy's first shot went through the window behind them, but the next two caught the clubfooted man in the shoulder, spinning him around and down. The Suit got off the next shot, but missed, then lost his legs when a bullet tunneled into him through the navel. Dunphy was firing like a madman with his back to the wall, pulling the trigger as fast as he could, not really thinking to aim, just spraying the room with as much lead as the Glock could throw—until, quite suddenly, it went
click click click.
And Dunphy thought, Now I'm dead. Ohhh, Clem . . .

For a moment, it seemed as if the very possibility of sound had been sucked from the room. Wisps of blue smoke hung in the air, and a weird, almost electrical, smell was everywhere. Then Dunphy heard the Suit whimpering on the floor, holding his stomach in his hands, rocking from side to side, keening. A few feet away, Watkin wept in terror beside the door, squatting on the Chinese carpet, hands clasped behind his head, as if he were expecting a nuclear attack. Closer to Dunphy, the club-footed man lay on his back with a scowl on his face, blood pumping slowly from a hole in his eyebrow.

Dunphy took a deep breath—his first in thirty seconds—and let the empty clip drop from the Glock to the floor. Inserting a new one, he worked the slide, then shoved the gun into the waistband under his jacket.

Finally he cleared his throat. “Clem? Clem?!”

She came out of the other room looking like a raccoon, with black circles under her eyes from where the mascara had run. She took in the smoke and the dead man, Watkin sobbing and the other guy shivering with pain. She saw the blood and staggered. Finally, she rose up on her tiptoes and moved toward the door, trying not to get her shoes wet.

“Clem.” He went to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“There was so much shooting,” she muttered, tears streaming. “So much!”

“Don't let him kill us!” Watkin begged.

“Stay out of this,” Dunphy told him, then turned back to Clem. “They came in like the DEA,” he explained. “Everything went off at once.”

“Just don't hurt them anymore, okay?” she asked.

“I won't. I didn't. I mean, they did it to themselves. All I did was shoot them!”

He didn't know if she believed him or not, and when he thought of it, what he said didn't make any sense, anyway. So he did what he had to do.

Grabbing Watkin by the collar, he shoved him toward the couch. “Sit!” Then he went to the desk and jerked the phone out of the wall. Remembering the cell phone, he glanced around and saw it on the floor. Picking it up, he laid it on the desk and smashed it with the butt of the Glock. Finally, he collected the other men's guns and dropped them in his briefcase. Snapped the locks and turned to leave.

“I need an ambulance,” the Suit remarked.

Dunphy nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.” Then he started for the door.

“For Chrissake, man—
look
at me! I'm—I'm an
American!
” The Suit drew his hand back from the mess around his stomach and, as he did, Dunphy saw the blood pulse, as if a part of the guy had come unplugged. Then he clapped his hand over the burble and said, “I think I'm dyin'.” There wasn't any rebuke in his voice. If anything, it was filled with wonder.

Dunphy nodded. Thought back to McLean. The Suit, standing there with that strange little smile. Cop lights flashing outside. Roscoe dead in a pair of fishnet stockings that the Suit had helped to put him in. “Yeah, well,” Dunphy said, “it happens to the best of 'em.”

Chapter 28

They found a cab a few blocks away and took it to Sainte-Clothilde, which was the first place that occurred to Dunphy, and nowhere near their hotel. With barely a glance at the church's spires, they sought out the Métro a few blocks away and descended into its womb. Half an hour later, they emerged in the rain at Mutualité and crossed the river to their hotel
.

Clem was surprisingly cool. She opened a Campari soda and dropped to the sofa beside the telephone
.

“Clem,” Dunphy began
.

She shook her head. “You don't have to explain.”

“They came through the door—”

“I know. You said. Like DNA.”

“No. Not like DNA—”

“It doesn't matter,” she told him. “I still love you. I just have to get used to the fact that I'm sleeping with the Grim Reaper.”

He didn't push it, perhaps because he knew she didn't really blame him—not after Tenerife. He opened a bottle of 33 and fell into a chair
.

After a while, Clem said, “Now what?”

Dunphy shook his head. “I don't know.” He sipped his beer and thought about it. “I think we know as much, right now, as we'll ever know and—it's not enough. It doesn't buy us a way out. It just gets us in deeper. So . . .”

She watched him for a long moment, and when he didn't finish the sentence, she asked, “What?”

“I think we ought to forget about it. Just turn around and walk away. We've got some money, good ID. We'd be all right.”

“But if we do that—” Clem began
.

“I know. They win. So what?”

She didn't say anything for a while, just closed her eyes and sipped her Campari soda. Finally, she looked at him and said, “Well, that's not right. We're not going to do that.”

She found the address in the telephone directory, listed under the “Museums” entry for the City of Paris. Watkin had said that Gomelez had lived in a mansion on the Boulevard des Capucines, and that his house had become an archaeological museum after the war
.

There was only one such museum in the Rue de Mogador, and it was listed as the Musée de 1'Archaeologie du Roi Childeric Ier
.

They took a taxi to the address, which was around the corner from the Place de l'Opéra. The museum was housed in a four-story Belle Epoque mansion whose massive iron doors were held open by large brass rings anchored to the granite walls on either side. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the length of the building in both directions, their wavy glass streaked with rain. Gargoyles leered. Drains gurgled
.

In the entranceway, a small sign memorialized the museum's hours. Dunphy checked his watch. They had about an hour
.

A gray-haired pensioner with a drooping mustache sat behind a carved wooden table, just inside the door. He was wearing a faded blue uniform and reading a Simenon paperback that was falling apart at the spine. Dunphy gave him twenty francs and waited while the man tore off a pair of ticket stubs, which he handed ceremoniously, and with a smile, to Clem
.

They weren't the only visitors. A clutch of schoolgirls moved through the rooms in a sort of giggling scrum, listening not at all to their teacher's lecture
.

It was really quite a remarkable museum, with an idiosyncratic collection that became progressively older as one moved from the lowest to the highest floor. The ground floor held fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century paintings, as well as heraldic devices, blazons, and coats of arms from half a dozen countries. Most of the canvases were of a pastoral kind, with moony shepherds crouched outside the tomb of Jesus, and knights at prayer upon a field of flowers
.

The first floor was devoted almost entirely to sacred buildings and, in particular, to those that housed statues of black Virgins. A translucent plastic box was affixed to the wall beside an architectural drawing of the great church at Glastonbury. The box held a sheaf of badly printed flyers that explained, in six languages, that statues of the black Virgin can be found throughout Europe and Latin America, with France alone having more than three hundred of them
.

“She is known to the Gypsies as Sara-la-Kali,” Clem read, “and to others as Cybele, Diana, Isis, and the Magdalene.”

Dunphy peered at the drawing and photographs. Besides Glastonbury, there were pictures of the Jasna Gora monastery in Poland; the cathedral at Chartres; the abbey church at Einsiedeln; and other temples and sanctuaries in Clermont-Ferrand, Limoux, and Marseille. There were sacramental objects, as well: stone reliquaries and marble reliefs, tapestries and robes
.

“Let's go up,” Clem said. “We only have twenty minutes.”

The second floor was devoted entirely to the Crusades and Knights Templar. There were fourteenth-century woodcuts of Jerusalem, a box of Templar regalia, lances, and swords, a Gnostic funeral stele, a triptych, and a diorama. The triptych's first panel showed Godfroi de Bouillon setting off upon the first crusade in 1098. Its second panel depicted the Crusader knights triumphant in Jerusalem a year later. The last panel showed those same knights digging beneath the Temple of Solomon
.

The diorama was less complex. It showed Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, being slowly roasted to death on the Île de la Cité in 1314
.

“That's where our hotel is!” Clem said
.

Clem wanted to read more about Molay and the Knights Templar, but there wasn't time. The museum would close soon
.

So they made their way to the fourth floor, where they were startled on the stairs to see what looked like a bear's head forged of gold, floating in the air above them. The metalwork, or whatever it was, was exquisite: you could count the hairs on its neck, Dunphy thought
.

“How do they do that?” Clem gasped
.

“It's a hologram,” Dunphy guessed, “or maybe it's done with mirrors. I don't know.” Reaching the top of the stairs, he waved his hand through the image, which seemed to ripple, and as it did, a door slid open to their left
.

Dunphy turned to his girlfriend. Most of the exhibits seemed to be off to the right in a sort of gallery that ran the length of the house. But the room to their left waited, and obviously, it was special. “Go ahead,” he said, nudging her toward the door. “You first.”

“No, that won't happen,” she replied. “And, anyway, you're the one with the gun. Have at it.”

Feeling like a little boy in a haunted house, Dunphy stepped inside the room, while Clem stood in the doorway, ready to bolt should he be decapitated or set upon by things with wings. After a moment, he called to her. “C'mon in,” he said. “It's neat.”

In fact, it took her breath away. In the center of the room was a dramatically lighted stone sarcophagus. Casks of wine and piles of grain were heaped against the limestone coffin, while pedestals of various sizes were ranged around it, reminding Dunphy of the standing stones he'd seen in the English countryside. Atop each pedestal was a lighted glass case in which ancient coins and gold and silver jewelry were displayed
.

A simple flyer, retrieved from a plastic box attached to one of the display cases, provided a potted history of the display. According to it, the sarcophagus was that of Childeric I, a Merovingian king whose tomb was found in the Pyrenees in 1789—the year of the French Revolution. According to the flyer, the sarcophagus was discovered in a cave beside a severed horse's head and a bear's head wrought from gold. A wreath of eagles' wings were mingled with the bones—which had lain undisturbed for more than a thousand years
.

In addition to these things, the room held one other. This was a verdigris-tinted crystal ball, about nine inches in diameter, which rested in a glass case on a golden stand. The stand had been fashioned in the shape of a hand, with the crystal balanced upon the fingertips. Drawn to the globe, Dunphy and Clem did what everyone does when confronted with a crystal ball: they gazed into it. And as they did, the tremulous image of an old man welled up within the glass, but upside down, so that he was at first unrecognizable. Dunphy cocked his head. The old man cleared his throat. Clem yelped
.

“Hurry up, please, it's time!” the man said, his voice soft and coaxing
.

Clem's nails were dug into Dunphy's arm—until they realized who it was: the old building guard, come to chase them out. He was smiling and out of breath from the long climb up to the fourth floor
.

Clem's fingers relaxed. She took a deep breath and bathed the guard in her sweetest smile. “Is it really five?” she asked
.

He shrugged. “Almost, mademoiselle.”

“But there's so much to see,” she entreated
.

The guard nodded sympathetically. “And I think you have not yet seen the bees, eh?”

“What bees?” Clem asked
.

The guard nodded once again in his courtly way and beckoned them to his side
.
“Ici.”
He was standing next to an old armoire
.
“Regardez.”
Taking out a ring of keys, he selected one of the larger ones and, with it, turned the lock on the armoire. Slowly, he pulled open the doors, and as he did, a set of lights came on within. And then the guard stepped back
.

Before them was a floor-length coronation robe that glittered with the light refracted from the wings of a thousand bees, handcrafted in gold. “Napoleon's coat,” the guard explained. “For when he becomes emperor.”

“The bees—”

“Yes! Of course, the bees! The bear! They are sacred, eh? For the Merovingians!”

Dunphy and Clem nodded
.

“So Napoleon puts them on his coat—and people think, ‘Ah, he is a Merovingian!' ” The guard paused and smiled. “But, no, he is not. And I know what you think—one tiny bee? Who would notice? No one! And she is worth more than my pension, this little bee. So, I hear the voice—”

“What voice?” Clem asked
.

The old man tapped a finger against his temple. “And she says, ‘Luc, you are a poor man, why do you not take one little insect for your family?' But if I do that?” He shook his head and laughed to himself. “Luc is no fool.”

“How long have you worked here?” Dunphy asked
.

The guard reached down with his palm flat, until it was about two feet above the floor. “Since I am a child. Even before the house was a museum.”

“You mean . . .”

“It was a house,” the guard told him. “And all these things were . . 
.
privé
a”

“Whose house?” Clem asked, knowing the answer
.

“Monsieur Gomelez. It is his foundation that pays for this. L'Institut Mérovée.”

“And did you know Gomelez?” Dunphy asks
.

“Of course,” the guard replied. “My father was his valet.”

“What happened to him?” Dunphy asks
.

The old man shrugged. “The war came. He is not well. So he is taken to a safe place. But . . . he does not come back.” With a smile to Clem, he closed the doors to the armoire and locked them. Together, they made their way out of the room and began to descend the stairs
.

“When you say he was
taken
to a safe place?” Dunphy asked
.

“He had friends. Powerful friends.”

“But where did he go?” Clem asked. The guard paused on the stair and thought for a moment. “Well, to Switzerland, of course. Somewhere in Switzerland.”

Flying was out. And trains, too. After what had happened at Watkin's apartment, the French police would be looking for him, the border guards alert. Which put them in a bind. They couldn't stay, and they couldn't go
.

They drank espressos under the awning of a tourist trap on the Champs-Elysées, while Dunphy considered their options. The problem was the border. Clem could rent a car and take them to it, but they'd never get across. Dunphy's picture would be nailed to the gate at every border crossing in France. Briefly, then, he considered a disguise, but dismissed the notion. There was something about wearing a disguise that, no matter what the circumstances, made you guilty of whatever it was that you were hiding from. And there was also the clean-underwear factor. If someone was going to kill him, he wasn't going to die in an ill-fitting wig or, worse, dressed as a Muslim woman. Which left only one way to get across the border
.

It was a long drive, almost 350 miles on the A6, south to Mâcon, then east toward Annecy. They left just after midnight in a rented Audi and drove through the night, arriving in the Haute-Savoie shortly after dawn. The sky was the color of flames, and they didn't need to see the mountains to know that they were in the Alps: every breath told them as much. The air was crisp, cold, and bright; washed down with strong coffee and crunchy croissants at a workmen's café on the fringes of Annecy, it was about as refreshing as a good night's sleep
.

After breakfast, they drove through the mountains to Évian-les-Bains, a legendary spa on the south shore of Lake Geneva. There, Dunphy rented a small suite with a large terrace that looked out across a broad expanse of lawn toward the lake below and, in the distance, on the lake's other side, Lausanne
.