The Saint Returns (24 page)

“Stop!” she cried at last; and he
stopped and turned,
with
raised eyebrows.

“Am I that bad? It’s an old Tirolean
song—perfectly re
spectable. I thought it went well with the scenery.”

“I can’t go on . .
.so
fast,” she panted shamelessly.

“Must be the thin air at this
altitude,” Simon said, with devastating concern. “I should have
remembered—it can
get the greatest athletes down at first.”

She called him something unkind in Russian and
flopped down on a pile of cut wood to rest.

“It can’t be much further now,” he
said, after giving her a minute to catch her breath. “When we get there,
just don’t
say anything till I’ve decided what line to take.”

“Don’t you know what you are going to
say?”

He shrugged.

“Only vaguely. It depends on what
reception we get.
But
I have great faith in my ability to improvise. It hasn’t
failed me yet.”

They came again to the stream they had crossed
down in the meadow; here it had its source, gushing like a
miraculous
fountain from the rocks. Then, almost without
warning, the cold
stone of the monastery rose in front of
the Saint and Smolenko. Whatever was
inside the encir
cling walls could not be
seen from where Simon and
Tanya stood. Gates of massive hardwood braced
with
hand-wrought iron were solidly closed,
and the only
means of communication with the inside appeared to be a
rusty bell with a pull-rope of plaited cowhide.

“Shall we?”

The Saint rang the bell, and for a long time
there was
no sound but the twittering of birds and the whisper of
an afternoon breeze in the pine
needles. Then, like something entirely unearthly, the voices of melodiously
chant
ing men came from within the walls.

“They sound like professionals,”
Simon said.

Tanya gave him a wry look.

“They are, of course,” she said. “Professional
parasites
on superstitious ignorance.”

“Oh, dear comrade, let’s not go into
that.”

He rang again, vigorously, hoping to make the
bell
heard over the monkly devotions.

“It might be more polite to wait till
they’ve finished,
but they’re liable to go on for hours,” he
explained.

“From what little I know about this
order, they’re ex
tremely hard on themselves. Don’t show their faces or
say
anything except prayers, except for one brother who
has a dispensation to conduct any
essential business. Dig their own graves and sleep in coffins and scourge
themselves twice a day.”

“Charming,”’ said Tanya.

There was a rattling sound inside the thick
gate, and a sliding board about a foot long and six inches high slid back to
show a cowled and black-veiled head. The head said nothing, just hovered there.

“Gruss Gott,”
said the
Saint. “May we come in?”

The monk pressed his eyes to the opening as if to see
whether or not there were others in the party.

“Grass Gott”
the head
replied in a voice much less
sepulchral than its visible source.
“There is not much to
see.”

“I was told that visitors were always
welcome if they
made
a contribution,” Simon said mendaciously.

“The contribution is always twenty
francs. For only
two, that would be ten francs each.”

“I should be glad to give it to such a
deserving order.”

The open panel slammed shut. There were
clanking
noises on the other side of the portals, and a moment
later one of them creaked
partially open. The monk stood
with his hand
silently extended, palm upwards, until Si
mon placed the requisite coins in it.

“I am Brother Anton. The Brotherhood are
at their de
votions
in the chapel, as you hear. It will be several hours
before they come out, and of course I cannot allow you
to disturb their meditations by entering that part
of the
building. But I will show you
what little else I can.”

He gestured for them to follow, and together
they
crossed the open courtyard, which had a stone well with
bucket and
pulley in the center, and small but profusely
growing vegetable
gardens around the sides.

The cloister was built of stone so old that
its surface
was pitted and often crumbling. Here and there an Al
pine flower
had found a home in some niche or crevice,
and velvety green moss
grew on the roof shingles. As
Simon saw, led and lectured by Brother Anton,
the place
was in the shape of a square, with the chapel and library
comprising
one side, the monks’ cells two sides, and the
refectory and kitchen
the fourth side. In the center, by the well, was a small inner quadrangle
quartered by
crossing walkways and possessed of two stone benches
and a
stagnant birdbath.

Simon and Tanya were allowed a brief look at all areas
except the chapel, from which continued to come
the
sound of harmoniously chanting
male voices. In the
kitchen a lone monk, cowled and veiled, stood watch
over
a gigantic pot on the wood-burning
stove. He turned to
look at the
visitors without noticeable reaction and then
went back to his cooking. From the pot came a familiar
but somehow inappropriate aroma which Simon could
not
immediately pin down. His mind was busy with other
things.

One of the attributes of a supremely alert
intelligence such as the Saint’s is the ability to see the relationship
between
apparently unrelated facts. As he listened po
litely to Brother
Anton’s historical notes and pretended
to study the
architectural details of the ancient building,
his thoughts were
hours ahead. He was noticing the in
teresting but seemingly irrelevant fact
that the pump in
the kitchen, the well in the courtyard, and the source of
the stream outside the walls were in a more or less direct
line.

“And so,” Brother Anton was
concluding, “for five cen
turies, for those who joined us here, the
world ended at that door through which you entered.”

“But one worldly thing still comes out
through it,” Si
mon said, “but for which we might never
have heard of
this place. Is it possible to see the manufacture of
Grand
Abrouillac?”

He was curious to know whether the cenobite
was
frowning or smiling under his veil in response to that
additional request.
           

“To see the place, but not to see the
method,” was the
reply. “Therefore, to see very little.
But come this way.”

“We must not stay long,” Simon
said pointedly, looking
at his watch. “We have friends below in
the village who
will come up looking for us if we do not return for
supper.
I don’t want them to start worrying about us.”

“It will take only a minute to see what
I am permitted
to
show,” the monk said.

He led the way down stone steps made smoothly
concave by scores of years of sandaled treading. Now they were in a basement
whose only windows were narrow
grated slits near the ceiling at the level of
the ground
outside. The walls were lined with the spiraled bottles
such as Simon had seen in Mol
è
ire’s office. Jars of herbs and unidentifiable
liquids gathered dust on other shelves.
Pungently
spiritous casks and vats stood about the floor
and were racked in tiers
along one wall. There was a big wood-burning stove at one end of the room with
a flue extending into the ceiling.

“Central heat?” Simon inquired.

“Yes. It becomes very cold here even in
summer. Only
a few hundred meters above us is always snow.”

“No point in mortifying the flesh that
much,” Simon commented in English.

“Bitte?”

“I suppose it would be bad for the brew
to freeze.”

The Saint touched a kind of thick wooden
faucet in the
wall, from behind which came a faint gurgling sound.

“The mountain spring water which is one
of the secret
ingredients?”

“Sie haben recht.
The water
is most important.”

The monk took a bottle from one of the
shelves.

“If you wish to take a bottle with you, it is forty francs
here, much less than outside.”

Simon took a bill from his pocket and pressed
it into
the man’s hand.

“Danke sehr, Bruder.
For your
holy work.”

“Vielen dank.”

“Bitte.”

As they started up the stairs, Simon
indicated a large
ceiling
fan which had been almost invisible from directly
below because of a kind of false ceiling hung under it.

“You have installed some other modern
comforts, I
see.”

“Ach, ja.
The fumes, you know.
In the old days the
brothers
used to become quite drunk while working here,
merely from breathing.”

“All good things must come to an end, I
suppose.”

“All good things and all bad
things,” the monk said,
and quickly showed them the way out of the
cloisters to
the main doorway.

Simon had gone with Tanya only a few yards
out of
sight of
the walls when he took her arm and said: “Excuse
me just a moment.”

He knelt down and put the bottle of Grand
Abrouillac
between two rocks and covered it with pine needles.

“As much as I love good liquor, I love
life more, and
I’m
in no mood to be poisoned, exploded, or shot in the
head.”

She stared.

“You do not think …”

“I do think. And I wouldn’t take any chances with any
thing that came out of that crypt. Now let’s go on
and
make plenty of noise as we recede
into the sunset.”

Twenty seconds later he stopped again. From
above drifted the singing voices of the Brotherhood.

“Why do we wait?” Tanya whispered.

“To listen. I’m a student of bird calls
and other forest
noises.”

The vigil produced results more practical
than aes
thetic. After about two minutes the voices of the choris
ters
stopped abruptly in mid-syllable, even in mid-note,
to say nothing of
mid-phrase.

The Saint and Tanya looked at one another.

“No wonder our friends sounded so
professional,” Simon said. “They were.”

“A gramophone record.”

“Right, my dear. The invisible
Brotherhood is just
about as genuine as everything else in that joint. Did
you notice
those vegetable plots? Weeds bigger than the
cabbages. Nobody’s
bothered to cultivate them for days
—or weeks.”

He took Tanya’s hand, and they went on down
the
path.

“So”
she said, “you
think they make our equipment
there?”

“Seems very likely. There could be all sorts of hidden
chambers. I was studying that possibility, too,
but we
can’t be sure until
tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight. When I come back for another
look around.
I’ve never liked these conducted tours. By the way,”
he
added with a quizzical frown, “what do you think that
was they
were cooking in the kitchen?”

“I don’t know,” she answered
absently. “Kasha? Rice?”

Suddenly Simon stopped and looked at her.

“Rice,” he said, and threw back his
head and laughed.

8

A half-moon was just riding high enough to illuminate
the snow on the great peaks above as the Saint
began his
return climb to the
monastery. Everything was silvered,
the
sky was clear, and the air was keener than it had been
in the daytime. The cold wind’s stimulus to his
walking
speed helped to nullify the
reductive effect of his dinner
(there
was no menu and no choice) of goulash, noodles,
and red cabbage.