She glanced out the window, taking in a nearby river as she drove on past, and then, as she came around a bend in the road, she got a glimpse of the monastery for the first time.
It sat on the edge of a high promontory, like a castle guarding the mountain approach. In fact, it looked sort of like a castle, fashioned of stone that shone in the bright sunshine, with high crenellated towers and several balconies that jutted out from the protective walls.
More twists and turns in the road kept the monastery from view, until about fifteen minutes later when she found the way forward blocked by a locked set of wrought-iron gates. They were twice her height and barred entrance to the property. A small bell hung off to one side and with no better idea of how to get the attention of those she had come to see, she drove up next to the bell, grasped the rope and gave it a solid yank.
The bell rang crisp and clear. Several minutes passed, long enough that Annja was thinking about giving it another pull, when the front door of a small shack on the other side of the gates that she hadn’t noticed before opened and a man dressed in the brown robes and sandals of a Benedictine monk stepped out. He came down the walk and stood on the other side of the gate from her, a questioning expression on his face.
When he didn’t say anything after a moment, Annja volunteered through the gate, “I have an appointment to see the abbott.”
The monk raised his eyebrows and then mimed seeing some ID, still without saying anything.
The monk was under a vow of silence, she realized. Annja dug her driver’s license out of her backpack and then got out of the car so she could hand it over to him. He glanced at it, compared the picture on it to her face and then triggered a switch that opened the gates electronically. He handed her a photocopy of a hand-drawn map to follow.
She drove through the gates and continued onward through the trees for a few hundred yards until she emerged into an open space, a parking area roped off on her right with the bulk of the monastery rising up on her left.
She parked the car and got out, surveying the massive structure in front of her. She’d expected something small, innocuous, not this sprawling behemoth of a monastery that seemed to occupy every square inch of the promontory on which it was built.
Some kind of warning must have passed from the guard shack to the monastery itself, for another brown-robed monk was waiting for her on the front steps.
He watched her without saying anything as she got out of the car and approached along the walk. It was only when she actually reached the top of the steps that he let a smile settle on his face and stepped forward with his hand out.
“Good morning, Miss Creed. I’m Brother Samuel.”
Annja shook the offered hand, a relieved smile on her face. For a minute there she’d thought he, too, was under a vow of silence. “Pleased to meet you,” she told him.
“The abbot has asked me to escort you to his office in the chapterhouse.”
He turned and entered the complex, Annja at his heels. Just inside the front door was a long central hall with offices on either side. Typical office sounds reached her ears even through the closed doors—the ringing of phones, the clack of computer keyboards, muffled voices, even the sound of a kettle whistling away somewhere.
They passed through a set of double doors at the end of the hall and found themselves outside once more in the cloister, a large square area of ground open to the sky and surrounded by covered walkways on each side split repeatedly by arched openings known as arcades. The soaring heights of the cathedral rose up over the walkway directly opposite them and Annja was struck with the desire to wander through the interior and see what the centuries-old church looked like. Brother Samuel, however, turned right and Annja had to hurry along to catch up with him.
He noticed her interest in the church, and began pointing out some of the details around her. “This part of the claustral complex contains several of the most highly trafficked areas—the cathedral, the administrative offices, the chapterhouse and, of course, the living quarters.”
They came to the end of the walkways and he pointed out across the grounds to another set of buildings. “Over there we have the kitchens, the storehouses, the infirmary and the guest quarters.”
He turned left this time, so that they were headed toward the cathedral once more, but they had only gone a few yards before they found themselves standing at a plain, unadorned door.
The monk knocked and then led her inside.
The room she entered was a simple office that contained only a desk, two chairs and a kneeler for prayer. A cross hung on the wall behind the desk, over the head of the wizened old man seated at the desk.
Smiling, he rose and extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Miss Creed. I’m Abbot Deschanel. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Thank you. And thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
“Happy to help. Tell me, how is Professor Reinhardt?”
“As impetuous as ever,” she replied, correctly sensing that Abbott Deschanel was looking for confirmation that she did, indeed, know Bernard Reinhardt personally. She couldn’t imagine what anyone would gain by faking such a relationship, but that didn’t mean someone wouldn’t try to do it, she supposed. Bernard came across in casual meetings as a steady-as-a-rock type of personality. It was only once you’d worked with him a bit that you began to realize just how impulsive he really was. The business with the spray-on packing foam was just one example.
Her answer must have satisfied the abbot, for he gestured for her to take the seat before his desk as he sank back into his own.
“So how can I help you?”
“Well, it’s a bit of a complicated story actually,” she began, and then laid it all out for him. How the section of the catacombs had been discovered and what the Metro workers had found lying within. How she and Professor Reinhardt had been asked to manage the excavation and what they had found once they had moved the body to the museum. How she’d been confronted in the tunnels and how the remains had been stolen from the museum the night before.
“Sewn into Captain Parker’s shirt was a small scrap of paper. Written on it was the name of this place, Berceau de solitude.”
The abbot sat watching her without any change of expression.
“And so I thought, maybe, I mean it’s been a long time, more than a hundreds years, I know, but still…”
Get to the point. You’re rambling, she told herself.
She took a deep breath. “I thought maybe you’d have some record of him coming here,” she finished in a rush.
A small smile slipped over the abbot’s steady facade.
“Well,” he said, “that’s quite a story. Quite a story.”
I can feel a “but” coming on, Annja thought.
“But I’m not sure I understand. We’re just a poor community of brother monks. Why would a man like that have come here, of all places?”
Abbot Deschanel’s tone was light, the question a relatively innocuous one, but Annja felt goose bumps rising on her arms nonetheless.
He knows something.
Trying to keep the eagerness out of her voice, she replied. “I honestly don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“If I had such information, and I’m not saying I do— I’m just speaking hypothetically at this point—what would you do with it?”
Annja suddenly felt as if she were standing on a precipice. Something about the way the abbot held himself, the slightest change of tension in his frame, betrayed the importance of her answer.
Say the wrong thing now and you can kiss your answers goodbye.
She’d told him the truth about everything so far, and that seemed the wisest course of action.
“I had the body of a man I believe to be Captain Parker back in the laboratory at the museum. He was the victim of a gunshot wound, his remains previously lost in the depths of the Paris catacombs until their discovery yesterday. And yet a man claiming to be the very same Captain Parker survived the war, held public office and eventually died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy. Clearly one of them was not who he claimed to be. I’d like to solve that mystery.”