The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Thirty-Six

When Ben bobbed slowly back up to the surface and opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was the bad watercolour landscape on the wall by the bed. The second thing he saw was a figure crossing the room. He blinked, still not fully awake, reality slowly returning. It wasn’t Luc Simon come to arrest him, two armed Interpol heavies guarding the door and more waiting outside in a car to whisk him away in manacles and leg irons. It was a female figure. Silvie. He watched her cross the room, backlit by the rectangle of bright sunlight that shone through the window. She was fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel that covered her from chest to mid-thigh. Her hair was dark with moisture and loose over her shoulders. She walked to the window, checked outside with a cautious glance, saw that all was quiet and then padded barefoot back to the bathroom to finish getting dried off.

Ben could see her holstered Glock flung carelessly down among the pile of clothes on the other bed. She hadn’t looked at it once.

Trust me.

He yawned and propped himself up on one elbow, then swung his legs off his bed and planted his feet on the floor, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and ruffled his hair, rubbed his face and yawned again. He looked at his watch. Nearly quarter to one in the afternoon. He’d napped far longer than he’d meant to.

Moments later Silvie came back, this time with her hair wrapped in a smaller towel and wearing a motel bathrobe.

‘You should have woken me sooner,’ he said.

‘I didn’t have the heart to. You were out for the count. Sleeping like a little boy.’

‘Thanks a million.’

‘Besides, I can’t have a partner stumbling about in a daze. We have work to do.’

He craved coffee. The room came complete with a jug kettle and a few sachets of instant stuff that barely qualified, but it would do. ‘What about you?’ he asked her. ‘Catch some rest?’

She shrugged, bending over the other bed and tossing her gun to one side as she snatched up pieces of clothing. ‘A little. Then I went out to get some things. There’s a Carrefour up the road.’

‘That’s tactically smart,’ he said. ‘Last I heard, hostages don’t generally walk around free. Or go off shopping in a hot car.’

‘Relax. I told the receptionist my phone battery was dead, asked her very sweetly to call me a taxi, for which I paid cash out of your little bundle. That’s a lot of money you’re carrying around.’

‘Spoils of war,’ he said, standing up and heading for the table where the kettle was.

‘I won’t ask,’ she said. ‘But it came in useful. I got us some more food, if you’re hungry. Got you some clothes, too.’ She pointed at a plastic bag on the floor. ‘Fresh jeans and a couple of shirts. Had to guess your size.’

‘I’ve been buying all my own clothes since I left the forces, but thanks anyway.’ He reached the table and reached for the kettle to check its water level before turning it on. Then stopped and frowned. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking down at the compact laptop computer that was sitting in the middle of the table, wired up to the landline phone socket.

‘Oh, I got us that too,’ she said nonchalantly, unwrapping the towel from her hair. It fell loose and thick over her shoulders and face, curling and lightening as it dried. It looked good. He could smell the apple scent of the shampoo she’d washed it with.

‘Why do we need a bloody computer?’ he asked. Perhaps he wasn’t wide awake yet, but it seemed like the strangest thing to him. Seven months living in a monastery, he’d almost managed to forget the abominable things existed.

‘You’re so old school,’ she said. ‘Everyone else has them, including the opposition, so why shouldn’t we? They’re kind of essential equipment now, you know?’

Ben shook the kettle, felt the slosh of water inside, thought about rinsing it out and topping it up with fresh but couldn’t be bothered, turned it on and ripped open three sachets of instant coffee and emptied them into a cup. She was only fifteen years younger than him, but she was making it feel like thirty.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking over what we talked about. Secrets and ghosts. I couldn’t get out of my head that maybe what Streicher knew about the monastery is key to understanding what he’s really up to. So while you were sleeping I ran a few internet searches based on simple keywords: the name of the monastery, the blind guy Streicher talked about, the mass grave you found.’

Ben poured hot water into his cup and stirred the contents up into a brown goo that vaguely resembled coffee. ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘Why is it that everyone under the age of thirty seems to think all the mysteries of the world can be solved on Google?’ He took a slurp of the scalding liquid and pulled a face at the taste of it.

‘Well, as it happens I didn’t do so badly,’ she said. ‘I turfed up this guy called Jehan de Roucyboeuf. Ever hear of him?’

Ben gulped down more of the coffee-surrogate and looked at her. ‘Any particular reason why I should have?’

‘He was a chronicler in fourteenth-century France,’ she said. ‘One of these itinerant scribes who used to go around writing about stuff they observed. Because so few people were literate in those days, the chronicles have actually become one of the most important sources for modern historians. Anyway, it so happens that this Jehan de Roucyboeuf’s writings tell, among other things, the story of what happened to Salvator l’Aveugle. Of course it’s all in medieval French, which is almost like another language.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Interested?’

‘Spellbound,’ he said, and took another slurp.

‘My, we are a grumpy one in the morning. You will be. Turns out Salvator was a friar who was travelling through France with the ultimate goal of joining the Franciscan monastery founded in Jerusalem in the 1340s by Roger Guérin of Aquitaine. The writer doesn’t say much about that, but I can fill in the blanks for us.’

Ben scowled at her. ‘I see, so you’re some kind of historian now.’

Silvie grinned back at him. ‘Top of my class at the Sorbonne. It was my first degree, before I studied law. And what Roucyboeuf says is dead right. Guérin did succeed, after a lot of negotiations and using funds provided by the King and Queen of Naples, in purchasing the Cenacle. You know, the room where the Last Supper was held?’

‘You’re not the only one who’s been to college,’ Ben said. ‘I am aware of what the Cenacle is.’

‘He also bought enough land around the holy site to set up a new Christian community there. Even though Jerusalem was occupied by the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate, political relations with the Christian West were favourable enough to allow it.’

‘All right,’ Ben said irritably, ‘so please tell me why this should possibly matter to us.’

‘Because it supports the integrity of Roucyboeuf’s chronicle,’ she replied. ‘It’s important for us to verify it checks out historically, since some of these old sources can be wildly off the mark when it comes to factual accuracy. The chronicle tells us that Salvator never made it to the Holy Land. In fact, he never even made it out of France. After becoming ill and taking refuge in a mountain village in the Alps near Briançon, he fell foul of church authorities, was eventually accused of all kinds of devil worship and witchcraft, and was sentenced to death by burning.’

‘Nice.’

‘According to the chronicle, the key evidence for his condemnation by the authorities was the seizures that would make him fall to the ground, writhing and speaking in tongues.’ She snorted. ‘Sure sign of demonic possession, naturally.’

‘I get it,’ Ben said. ‘Epilepsy. A lot of sufferers got a raw deal back in those days. Fear and superstition are a powerful combination.’

‘But reading between the lines, his medical condition just gave his accusers a handy pretext for getting rid of him,’ Silvie said. ‘The real reason for his execution was that he was outspoken against the Church and highly vocal about the papacy, which at that time wasn’t centred in Rome but in France, in Avignon. Salvator was a Franciscan, meaning he was sworn and devoted to a life of poverty in Christ, and it’s little wonder he nursed grievances against the religious establishment. The pope at that time, Clement VI, loved luxury and high living, and issued a papal bull in 1343 to justify his use of indulgences. Meaning, basically, cash for forgiveness. The Avignon papacy was notoriously corrupt, selling everything from remission from sins to high-ranking ecclesiastical office. Even holy relics were for sale to the highest bidder, to keep the senior church authorities in the luxury to which they were accustomed during this so-called “Babylonian captivity” period of the Church’s history.’

‘You found all this online in one session?’ Ben said, staring at her.

‘No, silly. Some of us were paying attention in history class. So, without actually spelling it out, the chronicle tells us that Salvator’s burning at the stake was really a political assassination, sanctioned simply to eliminate one of the Church’s critics.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Ben said. ‘But—’

‘Let me go on. Now, according to the chronicle, as the poor man hung there burning alive in front of the church authorities and all the villagers who’d gathered to see him die, he screamed out a terrible curse against them. Do you begin to see?’

The connection clicked like an electrical circuit in Ben’s mind.

‘You told me that Streicher talked on and on about a curse,’ he said.