The Marks of Cain

45

2:58

2:59

3:00

There was no sign of him. David glanced warily at the station clock.

3:02

3:03

3:04

Angus was by his side, saying nothing — for once. The tension evident in his face. Amy looked pensive to the point of depression.

What did she know? She had been noticeably different since they landed in Amsterdam and made their way across Germany, to Nuremburg Station where they had agreed to meet Simon. Why? Maybe she now suspected he was Cagot, or maybe she was merely reacting to his changed mood, his sudden intense anxiety. His distant chilliness, his violent moodswings, as he ransacked himself for answers or solace or quiescence.

He'd stopped making love to her. He couldn't do it any more. Once they had been rough, playful, sharply passionate. And now? He could see himself biting her, that white female flesh, and drawing blood.

It was an abyss, and he had to look into it, he had to reach far inside his soul, to get a hold of his essential self. Because he needed his last reserves of equanimity, for the crucial hours ahead. The crucial days, the crucial minutes.

3:07

3:08

3:09

Maybe Simon wasn't coming. They had sent one email from Amsterdam, and had got one quickly in return: Yes.

There had also been one other email in David's inbox, a very surprising email — from Frank Antonescu. His granddad's old lawyer in Phoenix had been doing some research of his own, and, through a contact at the IRS — who apparently owed him a favour — had eventually, 'after a lot of grafting and grifting!' worked out where the money came from.

The Catholic church.

The money was, Antonescu wrote, 'Paid not just to your grandfather but to a number of people immediately after the war. It was known as "Gurs money". I have no idea why. The fellow at the IRS was similarly mystified.'

So that was another joist of an answer — in the rising structure of a solution. But the full edifice would only be revealed when they got to Zbiroh. And found the Fischer results.

3:16

3:17

3:18

Was Simon ever coming? Maybe something terrible had happened to him. Maybe Miguel had got there first.

'There!' said Amy.

A slightly scruffy, breathless, freckled, fair-haired man of about forty came running along the concourse. He stared at Amy and David -

'David Martinez!'

'Simon Quinn?'

The older man, the Irish journalist, glanced at the three of them, and smiled, shyly.

'You must be Amy. And you…'

'Angus Nairn.'

Hands were shaken, formal introductions made. But then David and Simon looked long and hard at each other and the absurdity of their formality became apparent to both of them — at the same time.

They hugged. David embraced this man he had never met — like a lost brother. Or like the sibling he'd never had.

And then the tension, the spiralling terror of the situation, recrudesced. Amy reminded them, as she had reminded them repeatedly for the last three days:

'Miguel is still after us…'

Amy's fear of Miguel seemed to have grown since they fled Namibia. And maybe, David surmised, that was adding to her depression. The relentlessness of their pursuer was destroying her will. Perhaps she was actually resigned to Miguel's triumph. He always found them in the end; maybe the Wolf would find them this time, and finish the job.

Unless they got to the data first.

They went quickly to the hire car.

Angus was in charge of the map. He directed them out of the suburbs of Nuremburg, into the undulating countryside, and onto the Czech border. As they went, Simon confessed: he told them of his brother being held by the Society. Kidnapped and brutalized.

Even from the driver's seat, David could see the grief in Simon's eyes. The grief — and the guilt. No one spoke for a good few minutes when Simon finished his confession. The fate of this man, Tim, was also in their hands.

It was too much.

The frontier approached. The old Iron Curtain. In nearby fields, useless and rusting, stood derelict watchtowers and old coils of barbed wire. But the contemporary border was just one bright glass office — entirely empty. They didn't even have to show passports.

Simon spoke:

'Why Nuremburg? Why meet there?'

Angus explained that they wanted to convene in a big anonymous city, across the border from the Czech Republic. To confuse anyone who might be following.

Simon nodded.

'And this castle?'

'The map shows it's in a town called Zbiroh. But the entrance is two miles away, a little village called Pskov. Some kind of tunnel. The tunnel itself leads from a synagogue in Pskov.'

Again Simon nodded. His demeanour was enormously subdued.

They drove on. The Czech side of the border was a notable change from the German prosperity next door. Everything was a little more hunched, grubby, and humble. And the road to Plzen was lined with thirty-something women in tiny skirts and blonde wigs.

Angus explained:

'Prostitutes.'

'Sorry?'

'Came here for a conference a few years back, in Prague. The women here are working girls…the punters come over from Germany. Truck drivers and businessmen. They also sell gnomes.'

Amy queried this: 'Gnomes?'

The Scotsman pointed at a shop by the road. An entire rank of garishly painted garden gnomes was set up in front of the store.

'Because of some tax law, the gnomes are cheaper here, so again the Germans come over. For hookers and gnomes!'

He laughed drily. No one else laughed. But David was glad that Angus was laughing. The Scot was the only one amongst them who seemed to possess any positive energy, any real optimism. His intellectual need to know the Fischer results, his sheer curiosity, his selfish desire to know if he'd been right, was — rather ironically — keeping them all going.

But soon the car was silent, once more, as they sped along the motorway to Plzen. Angus had the map on his lap. Thick forests encroached. The drizzle was turning into proper rain.

'OK,' said Angus. 'Enough fucking brooding. Let's do something. Let's help Simon! Tell him the story so far. Poor guy's a freelance hack, he needs a story, to help with the mortgage. Let's pool everything we know.'

The mood in the car was so tense, so depressive, so frightened, David welcomed this impulsive idea. Talk. Just talk. Talk about anything. So they did: as David drove, they put together every segment of the puzzle, each adding their portion to the pot. And as they discussed, Simon scribbled in his notebook.

Then the journalist sat back. His voice was cracked with emotion, but at least he was managing to speak.

'OK. This is, ah, how I see it. What we know so far.'

David felt the flutter of his own anguish; he had an absurd fear that Simon would turn and point to him, and say You, of course, are a Cagot.

Simon began.

'The beginnings of the mystery go back three thousand years, when the Bible was being written in Babylon. At various places in the Book of Genesis, there are passages which hint at human beings other than Adam and Eve.'

Amy was staring out of the window. Looking at the cars behind and ahead, with anxious intent. Looking for red cars, maybe.

Simon went on:

'The problems caused by these insidious Biblical hints have always been with us. But they truly came to a head, in Christendom, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the persecutions of the Basques and the Cagots.'

He glanced at Angus. Then went on:

'The Basques are truly a breed apart, with a unique language, culture and society, unusual blood type, and so forth. Their race possibly dates back to pre-Indo-European times — 30,000 BC. They have long suffered persecution for being…different. These persecutions peaked with the witch burnings of 1610–1611, the so-called Basque Dream Epidemic.'

Their hire car was speeding past a tiny Skoda, an old car from the communist era. A farmer sat in the front with his fat wife at his side. The Skoda was doing thirty kph.

Simon continued:

'The case of the mysterious Cagots is similar — yet more severe. The Cagots are, or were, a crossbreed. They lived in the same region as the Basques. Indeed they probably descend from Basques who intermarried with dark Saracen soldiers in the eighth and ninth centuries. As such, they were, from the beginning, very isolated within Christendom — but with an additional and fatal taint of the infidel.

'So they were persecuted. And by the seventeenth century these repressions were reaching homicidal levels: Cagots were being nailed to church doors. One byproduct of this persecution and isolation was the intensification of genetic problems within the Cagot community — '

David interrupted: 'It wasn't their fault.'

Simon replied, with a puzzled frown, 'No, of course, it wasn't their fault. However, the reputation they had for psychotic tendencies, cretinism, even cannibalism, was, tragically, not entirely unjustified. Many Cagots were afflicted with various syndromes which led to bizarre and even repellent behaviour.'

Amy asked: 'That was why the King of Navarre instituted the tests — to see if the Cagots were truly "different"?'

'Yes. Moreover, primitive though science was at the time, it seems the King's doctors did observe the syndactyly, the web-footed deformity, and other physical manifestations of the Cagots' inbred genotype. They concluded that the Cagots were indeed different to the rest of humanity, in a very significant way.'

He flipped a page of the notebook.

'The discovery alarmed the Pope and his cardinals in Rome. The idea that God would actually be creating Serpent Seed, new kinds of men, different kinds of men, men who are not men, was pure anathema. It threatened the very basis of accepted Catholic doctrine that mankind is made in God's image. How can God have two images? Two kinds of children? Revelation of this truth would not only justify the worst persecution, of a Christian and European people — it would bring into question all of Catholic theology.'

'All Christian theology,' said Angus, 'for that matter.'

'This is why the church sought to end the persecution of the Cagots. For the very same reason the Spanish Inquisition decided to cease and suppress the Basque witch burnings. The Catholic elite wanted the "choir of Christendom" to remain "indivisible". The Basques and Cagots would be returned to the fold of humanity.'

'Yet there were, still, elements in the church that adhered to the bigoted, Curse of Cain philosophies. Especially amongst the lower clergy, the local peasantry, and some of the more rigorous church orders, like the Dominicans.

'Ever eager to avoid schism, the Vatican agreed to a compromise. The relevant and most controversial documents — relating to the witch burnings, and the blood test on the Cagots, and the ensuing papal conciliations — were not destroyed: they were secretly housed in the ancient archives of the Dominican University in Rome, the Angelicum. Centuries later they were carefully rehoused in a brand new monastery in central France.'

'Purpose-built,' Angus interrupted, 'by a far right architect, as a safe place to hide these documents. Correct?'

'And a masterpiece of functionality,' Simon replied. 'So offputting it sends people mad.'

Amy was still gazing out of the window. Her cardigan had fallen from her shoulder, exposing her bare suntanned skin. Gold and soft, and yielding.

David fixed his eyes on the road. Simon lifted his notes.

'Back in 1907 a brilliant young German anthropologist, Eugen Fischer, arrived in the desolate, diamond-rich German colony of Sud West Afrika, now Namibia. He was following in the footsteps of his hero, the great British scientist — and founder of modern eugenics — Francis Galton.

'What Fischer found amazed him. By studying the khoisan — the "Bushmen" of the Kalahari, and their close cousins, the Basters, a crossbreed between Bushmen and Dutch settlers, Fischer discovered that in the very recent past mankind had…possibly speciated.'

Amy said nothing. David said nothing. Angus was wearing a distant smile. Simon continued:

'The process of speciation — the dividing of one species into new species — is of course crucial to evolution. Yet the process is itself ill defined. When does a new breed or strain of an organism become a subspecies, and when can it be termed a truly separate species? Geneticists, zoologists and taxonomists still argue this point; but no one denies that speciation occurs.'

Simon turned a page.

'But hitherto nobody had expected that speciation might have happened to Homo sapiens within the last few thousand years. As Angus says, some experts believe a small form of human might have evolved fairly recently in Asia — Homo floresiensis. Hominids like this might even explain those Biblical myths of non-Adamite humans, implied in the first verses of Genesis. A genuine folk memory of small, dwarvish, almost-men.

'But that is still ten thousand years back. And yet, as Fischer investigated the Khoisan and the Basters he became convinced that something akin to speciation was right now taking place in Africa: either the Bushmen were a new species, or they were close to becoming so.

'This discovery affirmed the racism already present in Fischer's thinking. Like many scientists of his time, Fischer believed without embarrassment in a hierarchy of human races, with whites at the top, and aborigines and black Africans at the bottom. He now put the Bushman even lower than that, beyond the family of man.'

David changed gear to overtake a big red lorry with Intereuropa written on the side. He asked: 'Yet this guy Eugen Fischer liked Jews? The Kellermans?'

'Yes,' Simon answered. 'Fischer was, ironically, no anti-Semite. He appreciated the friendship of other clever men, especially if they were wealthy and glamorous. He became friends with the Kellerman dynasty, German-Jewish diamond merchants making millions from the mineral-rich sands of the Namibian desert. This friendship was to prove crucial in the following decades.'

Another page was turned.

'Then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power. He had avidly devoured Fischer's books during his imprisonment as a young man. Now, as Der Fuhrer, Hitler had the means to employ Fischer properly. First, Hitler made Fischer a rector of Berlin University. Then, in 1940, he despatched Fischer to a new German concentration camp at Gurs, near the genetically fascinating Basque corner of France.

'Adolf Hitler had a job in mind for the great scientist. To validate Nazi race science. And so, in Gurs, Fischer was told to gather the most interesting human genetic specimens in one place, for intense medical testing: gypsies and Jews, French and Basques, Spanish and Cagots.

'By comparing the data derived from these subjects, with the data already derived from Fischer's Namibia research, the Fuhrer hoped that his prize scientist would provide a definitive, authoritative and genetically provable racial hierarchy: final evidence that Germans were at the top, and Jews were at the bottom.

'Fischer was gratifyingly successful in these endeavours. In the first year, ably assisted by some brilliant German doctors, he discovered DNA. The basis of all modern genetics.'

Simon closed his notebook.

Amy said: 'But what did Fischer discover then? In his second year at Gurs? The frightening and terrible discovery? What was that?'

Angus was no longer smiling, he was frowning.

'Well…that's the motherlode, the ultimate question. And that is what we are about to find out.' He scanned the rainy road ahead. 'If we don't die first.'