The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Silvie nodded. ‘He was obsessed with it. It’s something important to him, and now here it is. Salvator l’Aveugle wished for a thousand years of pestilence to descend on his tormentors, the villagers, their children, and all the way down the line, as punishment for what they’d allowed to happen to an innocent man.’

Ben went on drinking the bad coffee as he listened, trying to decide whether this was getting them anywhere.

‘Now, these were medieval times,’ Silvie said. ‘An era of widespread superstition and ignorance, especially in the Christian West, while in the Islamic world and the Far East science and mathematics were light years ahead. Curses and prophecies of doom were ten a penny across Europe back then. People really did fear them, and if by pure coincidence one of them appeared to come true, they were very quick to fall for it wholesale. Like if some clergyman told the people God was angry with them, and the next thing their crops were washed away by a bad storm or blighted by a drought, this would be taken as cast-iron evidence that the clergyman really did have word from the Lord. All about luck and timing.’ Silvie smiled grimly. ‘And you couldn’t ask for better timing than Salvator’s curse. I mean, this was 1348.’

‘So what’s so special about 1348?’ Ben said, not getting it.

‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said. ‘Apart from the fact it was the year that the Black Death first swept through France, taking with it about half the population. Just months after Salvator’s curse was still literally ringing in their ears, the people began to drop dead like leaves off a tree. An isolated community, way up in the mountains with little to no contact with the outside world, wouldn’t realise that the rest of the country, in fact the whole of Europe, had it just as badly as they did. Easy for them to remember Salvator’s words as he burned alive, and to assume the plague was a visitation on them, God’s punishment for their sin of colluding in an innocent man’s execution. Too late to repent, though, when everyone around you is dying. Some of the local villages died out completely. So did most of the clergymen who’d attended Salvator’s execution. Roucyboeuf gives some pretty vivid accounts of the bodies heaped up in mounds, the plague dead being loaded on carts while the living prayed for Divine mercy. They were so overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and the sheer number of dead and dying, the bishop decreed that the victims should be entombed in a mountain cave beneath the nearby monastery. No prizes for guessing which monastery we’re talking about?’

Ben said nothing, just grimly nodded.

‘Not just the dead, but the living, too,’ Silvie went on. ‘Anyone thought to be infected was taken and thrown in alive with the hundreds of corpses. No mention of them being chained up, but it figures, doesn’t it? Afterwards, the cave was walled up and became a mass tomb. Anybody left alive inside would have died a slow, agonising death.’

Ben put down his unfinished coffee and tried not to think too hard about what it must have been like for them down there. In the pitch darkness. The stench of the dead all around them. The squeak and scuttle of the rats. The moans of the dying and the weeping of those awaiting the same inescapable fate.

‘The chronicle goes on to tell the story of Eloise,’ Silvie said. ‘She was the leader of a group of heroic nuns who had been trying to help the sick, and who for their troubles were taken and walled up along with them. The legend tells how Eloise’s screams could still be heard echoing down the mountainside long after the mouth of the cave was sealed up.’

Every place has its secrets from the past. Even here, some things remain that ought to be forgotten. Ben remembered Père Antoine’s words. So this was the shameful episode in local history that the old monk had been so unwilling to reveal. It explained why he’d become cagey when Ben asked about the walled-up crypt. It explained the scores or even hundreds of men, women and children whose bones Ben had discovered under the monastery.

But it still didn’t explain everything. Far from it. All it did was open the door to more questions.

‘Not a bad morning’s research, hmm?’ Silvie said.

‘It’s a start,’ Ben said. ‘As far as Streicher’s concerned, it doesn’t take us anywhere.’

‘I don’t agree. It has to mean something, if we can just figure it out. We know he was obsessed with the curse.’

‘But we don’t know why,’ Ben said. ‘Why would that be his reason for launching a raid on the monastery all these centuries later? What’s the connection with the gold? Did the chronicle mention anything about that?’

‘Nothing,’ she admitted.

‘None of it makes sense,’ he said. ‘Why would the church authorities seal hundreds of plague victims inside their own treasure vault, knowing they were sealing off their gold with it?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t know it was there.’

‘In which case, Streicher couldn’t have known about it either. Not from the story of Blind Salvator, and not from the writings of this Jehan what’s-his-name?’

‘Maybe there’s more in the chronicle,’ Silvie said. ‘Something that we’re missing.’

‘You said you read the whole thing.’

‘Just what’s viewable online,’ she said. ‘There could be more of it that isn’t yet digitised. France has an awful lot of history. We’re still working on the National Archives. It’s a big task that will take years, decades even. Meanwhile, there are still hundreds of kilometres of shelves of original ancient documents that can only be accessed physically, in person.’

He looked at her, sensing her intention. ‘We’d have to travel to Paris,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So Streicher is in Switzerland,’ Ben said.

‘This could be the key to understanding his plan.’

‘Or it could be a complete blind alley,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking up a number,’ she said, stepping quickly over to the laptop and flipping up the lid. The screen flashed into life. She clicked a few keys. ‘French Ministry of Culture website. Contact details for the Archives Nationales centre in the Marais, in Paris. Here we go.’ She picked up the phone from the table, dialled the code for an outside line and quickly punched in the number from the screen.

‘I’m going for a shower,’ Ben said, and let her get on with making the call as he grabbed the bag of fresh clothes and headed for the bathroom. He could hear her talking as he locked himself in. The tiles and mirror were still steamed up from Silvie’s shower earlier. He undressed quickly, letting his dirty clothes fall to the floor. He turned the water up high, and as he waited for it to come to temperature he inspected his bruises. They were still livid, but less tender now. His hands hurt worse, and there were still a few bits of grit embedded in his palms. He stepped under the hot water and spent ten minutes blasting away the last of his weariness.

After his shower, he opened up the bag of fresh clothing and found that Silvie had also bought a pack of disposable razors and a can of shaving foam. He rubbed a squiggle with his finger in the condensation in the mirror above the sink, and gazed at himself. His burned cheek was red and felt a little tight. It would look worse before it looked better. There wasn’t a lot he could do about the patch of singed hair, either. But after washing away the last of the grease stains from his face and a careful shave, he decided that, all in all, he wasn’t looking too terrible. The clothes fitted him well, too. Silvie had a good eye.

When he walked back into the bedroom he found her dressed and sitting on the bed. Her hair was brushed and hanging loose down her back. ‘Hey, look at you,’ she said. ‘You don’t clean up too badly.’

He grunted. ‘Your phone call didn’t last long.’

‘It certainly didn’t,’ she said. ‘I used my credentials to get through to the head curator of the archives. Had him look up the chronicles of Jehan de Roucyboeuf, asked if they were available to view in their entirety. He was very helpful and efficient.’

‘And?’

She sighed. ‘And then he told me I couldn’t view them. Simply not possible.’

‘Too old?’ he asked. ‘Too fragile to expose to the air? Too valuable to handle?’

‘They’re missing,’ she said. ‘Listed as stolen during a break-in last April. Two nightwatchmen had shotguns stuck in their faces and were tied up and hooded while a gang of raiders ransacked a section of the archives. And guess what? Nothing else was taken. It was a targeted robbery. The cops have nothing. No clues, no suspects.’

‘Looks like someone else was interested in the same thing we were,’ Ben said.

‘Streicher,’ Silvie said. ‘Got to be. I told you, there’s something about all this. The chronicle forms part of his plans. I just wish I knew what, and how.’

‘If it does,’ Ben said, ‘we’ve hit a wall. There’s nothing more we can learn for the moment. Let’s get out of here. You’re going to take me to the Lausanne safe house.’

‘All the way to Switzerland in a stolen car?’ she said.

‘We have enough cash to buy another.’

She shook her head. ‘Not from a legitimate dealer, not without a paper trail. We’ll have to go searching for some backstreet chop-shop that’ll take your cash in exchange for a hunk of unroadworthy shit that’s liable to break down on the motorway and draw all kinds of the wrong attention.’

‘All right, partner,’ he said. ‘What do you suggest instead?’

‘I say we play to our strengths here,’ Silvie said. ‘Nobody expects a kidnapper and their hostage to walk about in the open. They expect us to move furtively, unseen, probably by night and in stolen cars or vans, with me trussed up out of sight in the back.’

‘And our strengths are?’

‘Like I said before, that we’re just a regular couple going about their business. We’re closer to Grenoble than we are to Briançon. We could get a train from there and be in Lausanne in a couple of hours.’

‘Tactically unwise to be seen in public,’ Ben said. ‘It’s taking a risk.’

She smiled. ‘And that’s something you would never do?’

For the second time that day Silvie worked her charms on the motel receptionist, who was persuaded to drag herself away from the TV to call up the local taxi service. As they waited for the cab, Ben moved the Toyota pickup and left it discreetly half-hidden right around the back of the motel, next to a row of garbage bins where it didn’t look at all out of place. The taxi driver turned up moments later, a cheery guy with a big overhanging gut, who loaded their luggage in the back of his Mercedes, commenting on the weight of the holdall and perfectly oblivious to what it contained. Ben returned the room key and settled the bill with Rollo’s cash. Then they took off in the direction of Grenoble.

Five minutes after they’d gone, the motel receptionist was bored with the comedy show she was watching. She idly reached for the remote control and surfed from channel to channel in search of something more exciting. Click. A romantic movie, two dead film stars kissing. Click. A Japanese cartoon about giant monsters battling it out. Click. A cereal advert featuring a toothy kid with a spoon in his mouth. Click. A newsflash, some big deal going on with a senior police officer looking serious and faces of wanted fugitives popping up on-screen. Click. A prehistoric Starsky & Hutch rerun, with pistols popping and big barge-like American cars screeching around the littered streets of Bay City, California.

Then she stopped, and frowned, and clicked back a step to catch the tail end of that newsflash, and frowned again, and her eyes opened wide.

‘Merde,’ she said out loud.

The couple from room twenty were on TV.