Part One
CHAPTER ONE
1
Paris
0234 hours
The explosion shook the entire Place des Vosges as well as a good part of the Marais district. Had the thirty-six town houses, nine on each side of the square, been built with less sturdy material than the handmade bricks of four centuries past, the damage might have been greater. Even so, the antique glass had been blown out of every window of the largest of these stately homes, the former Hotel de Rohan-Guemenee, the second floor of which had been the home of Victor Hugo.
The only real damage, though, was to number 26, the source of the blast. By the time the pompiers from the 11th arrondissement, the district fire department, arrived twelve minutes later, the building was four stories of inferno. Saving the house and its occupants was not a possibility.
A line of gendarmes kept spectators a respectful distance from the blaze while others interviewed bathrobe clad residents. One man, an apparent insomniac, told the officers he had been watching a rerun of the past year's World Cup championship match when he had heard a crash of shattering glass followed by a flash of light brighter than any he had ever seen. Rushing to the window, he had nearly been blinded by the intensity of the blaze.
The glass, the policeman asked, could it have crashed when something was thrown through a window?
The man stuffed a fist into his yawning mouth, his interest diminishing now that the best part of the show was over. How does one distinguish between glass shattering when something is thrown into it rather than something being thrown out? He shrugged as only the French can, conveying uninterested ignorance as well as annoyance at a stupid question. "Je ne sais pas."
He turned to go back home, almost bumping into a middle-aged man in a suit. The spectator wondered what anyone would be doing in business attire at this hour. Not only dressed, but in a shirt freshly starched, jacket and trousers neatly pressed. He shrugged a second time and trudged homeward wondering if 'IV reception in the neighborhood had been affected by the fire.
The gendarme touched the brim of his cap with a nod, an almost involuntary sign of respect as he wished the new arrival, "Bon soir." A straightening of the back and an air of deference were obvious. It was not every neighborhood fire that drew the attention of the Department of State Security and Investigation, the DGSE.
The DGSE man gave the slightest of nods before staring intently into what was now a smoldering shell. Plumbing, twisted by the heat, poking into emptiness like supplicating arms. The adjacent homes exhibited an ugly black patina of soot as they stared onto the square with windows void of glass. Hot embers hissed with steam as firemen hosed them down. It was as if a shaft straight from hell had broken through the earth's surface where the townhouse had once stood.
"Any idea as to the cause?" the DGSE man asked.
The fireman was fairly certain the nation's security service would not be interested in leaking gas or a match carelessly dropped into the home's supply of kerosene. "No sir, none." He pointed. "The chief fire inspector is over there."
The security department man stood for a moment as though digesting the information before walking over to a short man almost swallowed by his flame-retardant uniform and knee-high boots. The impression was of a child playing in his parents' clothes.
The security man displayed a badge. "Louvere, DGSE. Any idea as to the cause?"
The fireman, too tired to be impressed by what was, after all, just one more bureaucrat, shook his head. "Whatever set it off, it had help from some sort of accelerant. I'd be surprised if it was an accident."
Louvere nodded in apparent agreement. "Ether in an adjoining unit, perhaps?"
The fireman gave a derisive snort. Ether was used in the process of turning cocaine powder into "rocks" of more potent crack. Few narcotic dealers knew (or cared) how to handle the highly volatile anesthetic safely. Misapplication of the heat necessary to the process could and did frequently result in spectacular results.
"In this neighborhood?" He swept a hand, indicating the pricey homes. A three-day tournament had been held here in 1615 to celebrate the marriage of Louis XII. The Place had been home to Cardinal Richelieu and other notables. Duels had been fought in the center of the square while spectators watched from the shelter of the arcades that fronted the buildings. In 1962 President de Gaulle had declared the Place a national historic monument. The prices of homes here, in the rare event one became available, were not set to be attractive to crack labs.
Louvere's eyes followed the fireman's gesture, taking in the perfect symmetry of the pink brick buildings. "I suppose not."
"Besides," the fireman said, "DGSE hardly bothers itself with the dope trade. What's your involvement?"
"Let's say it is personal. I have a friend, an old acquaintance in the States, who asked me to meet his sister, show her around Paris. She was staying with a schoolmate in number 26. Someone I had introduced her to called, said he had heard there was trouble here. So I came."
The fireman rubbed a grubby hand across his forehead. "If she was in there… Well, it will take our forensic people a few days to identify whatever's left, probably have to do it by DNA."
The security man sighed as his shoulders slumped. "I don't look forward to making that phone call." The fireman nodded sympathetically. "Give me your card. I'll personally see to it you get a copy of the report."
"Thank you." Louvere gave one final glance at the gaping cavern that only hours before had been one of the most desirable residences in Paris. Shoulders stooped as though bearing the weight of the world, he walked past the yellow fire trucks that seemed like living animals with each breath-like stroke of their pumps. A short way down the narrow street, a Peugeot was waiting at the curb.
2
Paris
Three days later
The driver reached over the seat to shake his passenger awake. The man in the backseat of the taxi looked even more worn than most Americans the cabby picked up at Charles de Gaulle after a transatlantic flight: clothes rumpled, shirt wrinkled, face unshaven. Once the man was awake, his eyes were the true sign of weariness. Red rimmed as though from a combination of grief and lack of sleep, they had a stare that seemed to focus on something a thousand miles away until he started counting out euros.
Stuffing the bills in his pocket, the driver watched the man enter a nondescript building across from the Place de l'Opera.
Inside, the American passed antique elevators to climb worn steps to the second floor where he turned right and stopped. In front of him was what appeared to be an unmarked old-fashioned glass door. He knew the single translucent pane was the hardest bulletproof glass available. Slowly he lifted his head to stare at the ceiling where he was sure shadows concealed a camera. Noiselessly, the door slid open and he entered a small chamber facing yet another door, this one made of steel.
"Oui?" a woman's voice asked through a speaker. "Langford Reilly to see Patrick Louvere," the man said in English. "He's expecting me."
As noiselessly as the first, the second door opened and Lang Reilly entered one of many offices of France 's security force. In front of him stood a man in a dark, Italian-cut suit. The shirt was crisp and the shoes reflected the ceiling lights. In years past, Lang and Dawn had joked that Patrick Louvere must change his clothes several times a day to look so fresh.
Louvere regarded Lang a moment through heavily lidded eyes, eyes that had always reminded Lang of a basset hound. "Langford!" he exclaimed, continuing in nearly accentless English as he embraced· his guest. "It has been, what? Ten, fifteen years? Too long for friends to be apart."
He stepped back, a hand still on each of Lang's arms. "You should have called. We could have sent a car." Lang nodded. "A cab seemed the quickest way, but thanks." The Frenchman dropped his hands. "I cannot tell you how sorry…"
"I appreciate that, Patrick, but can we get started?"
Louvere was not offended by what most of his countrymen would have considered brusqueness. Americans were famous for getting to the point. "But of course!" He turned and spoke to someone Lang could not see. "Coffee, please, Paulette. This way, Lang."
Lang followed him down a hall. It had been almost twenty years since he had last been here but other than newer carpet, as cheap and institutional as before, little had changed.
Happily, neither had his relationship with Patrick Louvere. Although their respective governments had frequent differences-the most vocal being the war with Iraq -the American and the Frenchman had remained steadfast friends. Patrick had gladly volunteered to do whatever he could for Lang's sister, Janet, during her visit with a former school chum in Paris. Since Janet was bringing her adopted son, Jeff, the Frenchman had insisted on taking the young boy into his own home daily to play with his own children while Janet and her friend prowled the shops of Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. It had been Patrick's phone call that had shattered Lang's world for a second time.
The DGSE man ushered Lang into the same office he remembered and slid behind a desk clear of anything other than a slender file folder. Almost immediately, a middle aged woman appeared with a coffee service and began to set cups on the desk. Although he felt he had consumed a tanker load of the stuff lately, Lang was too tired to protest.
"So, you are a lawyer now?" Patrick asked, obviously making conversation until the men could be alone: "You sue the big American companies for millions of dollars, no?"
Lang shook his head. "Actually, I do white-collar criminal defense."
The Frenchman pursed his lips. "White-collar? Criminal?" He looked as distressed as if he had been forced to mention the words "Australian" and "wine" in the same sentence. "You defend criminals with white collars?"
"You know, crimes that involve business executives. Nonviolent: embezzlement, fraud, that sort of thing."
"The kind of criminal that can pay your fee."
"Exactly."
The woman left the room, closing the door behind her, and Patrick slid the folder across the polished desk top. Lang looked at it without touching it. "Still no idea who or why?" Patrick shook his head sadly. "No, none. We found strong traces of aluminum, iron oxide and a nitrogen accelerant."
"Thermite? Jesus, that's not something some nutcase cooks up in his basement like a fertilizer bomb, that's what the military uses to destroy tanks, armor, something requiring intense heat."
"Which accounts for how quickly the building burned."
Patrick was avoiding the subject of Lang's main concern. The news, therefore, was going to be bad. Lang swallowed hard. "The occupants… you found…?"
"Three, as I told you on the phone I was certain we would. Your sister, her adopted son and their hostess, Lettie Barkman."
Lang had known it was coming, but the irrational part of his mind had held a flicker of hope that somehow Janet and Jeff had not been there. It was like hearing a death sentence at the end of a trial where the result was a foregone conclusion. It just couldn't be possible, not in a sane world. Instead of Patrick across the desk, he saw Janet, her eyes twinkling in amusement at a world she refused to take seriously. And Jeff, the child his divorced sister had found in one of those fever-ridden countries south of Mexico, Jeff with the brown skin, dark eyes and profile that could have been taken from a Mayan carving. Jeff with his baseball cap turned backwards, over-sized shorts and high-top sneakers. Jeff, Lang's ten-year-old best buddy and as close as Lang would ever come to having a son.
Lang did nothing to wipe away the tears running down his cheek. "Who would want to…?"
From somewhere Patrick produced a handkerchief. "We don't know. The Barkman woman was a rich American divorcee living in Paris, but as far as we can tell, she had no ties to political extremists. In fact, we can find no one among her friends who even knows what her politics were. Your sister was a doctor, a…"
"Juvenile orthopedist," Lang supplied. "She spent a month out of every year working in third-world countries where her patients couldn't afford medical care. Jeff was orphaned by an earthquake. She brought him home."
"She also was divorced, was she not?"
Lang leaned forward to stir his coffee. It gave him something to do with hands that seemed useless in his lap. "Yeah, guy named Holt. We haven't heard from him since they split seven, eight years ago. She kept his name 'cause that's the one on her medical degree."
"And obviously robbery was not a motive, not with the total destruction of the house."
"Unless the thieves didn't want anyone to know what was stolen."
"Possible," Patrick agreed," but Madame Barkman had an extraordinary alarm system with interior burglar bars. Part of having lived in your New York, I suppose. The place was like, like… like the place where Americans keep their gold."
" Fort Knox," Lang supplied.
" Fort Knox. I would guess the intent was to destroy rather than steal."
"Destroy what?"
"When we know that, we will be close to knowing who these criminals are."
The two men stared at each other across the desk, each unable to think of something appropriate to say, until Patrick leaned forward. "I know it is small comfort to you, but the fire was intense. They would have died instantly from having the air sucked out of their bodies if the explosion did not kill them first."
Lang appreciated the thought behind the effort and recognized it as a well-intentioned lie.
"The case is actually within the jurisdiction of the police," Patrick went on. "I don't know how long I can continue to convince them we have reason to believe it was the act of terrorists."
Lang wanted the case in the hands of the DGSE for two reasons. First, his friendship with Patrick was likely to evoke more than the routine effort to see the case solved. Besides, the French security force was one of the world's best. Second, the Paris police was a morass of political infighting. Peter Sellers's Pink Panther rendition of the inept Inspector Clouseau had some basis in fact.
Mistaking Lang's thoughts for uncertainty, the Frenchman continued, "Of course, every resource…"
"I'd like to go to the scene," Lang said.
Patrick held up his hands, palms outward. "Of course. My car and driver are yours for as long as you wish."
"And do you have any idea what they did the day before…?" Patrick touched the folder. "It is routine to check such things." Lang pulled the file over and opened it. With eyes stinging from tears as well as lack of sleep, he began to read.
3
Paris
The same day
Lang left his friend's office to go directly to the Place des Vosges. Being here, the last place Janet and Jeff had been alive, somehow brought him closer to them. He paused a long time in front of the blackened cave that was number 26. Head bowed, he stood on grass that had been scorched brown. With each minute, his resolve to see the killers exposed and punished increased. He was deaf to the sound of the grinding of his own teeth and unaware of the scowl on his face. Residents, delivery men and the curious increased their pace around him as though he were potentially dangerous.
"I'll get them myself if that's what it takes," he muttered. "Fucking bastards!"
A uniformed nanny behind him broke into a trot to get the pram and its cargo as far away as possible.
His next stop was to a mortician recommended by Patrick. The service was professional, cool and devoid of the oily faux sympathy dispensed by American funeral directors. He paid for two simple metal caskets, one only half-size, and made arrangements to have the bodies shipped back to the States.
He tried hard but unsuccessfully not to think about how very little of Janet and Jeff those European-shaped boxes would contain.
There was no rational reason to track his sister's last hours other than a curiosity he saw no reason to deny. Besides, his flight didn't leave till evening and he didn't want to impose on his friend's hospitality. Credit card receipts electronically summoned by Patrick provided a road map of Janet's last day. She had visited Hermes and Chanel, making relatively small purchases: a scarf, a blouse. Probably more interested in souvenirs than haute couture, Lang decided. He did little more than peer through windows at mannequins too thin to be real and draped in outfits that exceeded the average annual American income. The number of Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked curbside dispelled any doubts he might have had as to the extravagance of the goods inside the-shops.
The last credit card receipt led him to the Ile St. Louis. Overshadowed literally and economically by the adjacent Ile de la Cité and its towering Notre-Dame cathedral, the St. Louis was a quirky neighborhood in the middle of the Seine. Lang remembered eight blocks of tiny hotels, twenty-seat bistros and small shops filled with oddities.
Leaving Patrick's car and driver in one of the parking spots so rare along the narrow streets, Lang climbed out of the Peugeot in front of a patisserie, inhaling the aroma of freshly baked bread and sweets. He walked southeast along Rue St. Louis en L'IIe until he came to an intersection where the curbs were even closer, Rue des Deux Points. He was trying to match the address on the receipt but street numbers were either hard to see or nonexistent. Luckily, there was only one shop displaying the sign magasin d'antiquités, antique shop.
An overhead bell announced his entry into a space crowded with the accoutrements of civilization from at least the past hundred years or so. Oil lamps as well as electric ones were stacked on sewing tables along with piles of dusty magazines and flatware tied in bunches. Bronze and marble statues and busts of goddesses and emperors paraded up and down aisles covered in shag carpet and oriental rugs. Lang resisted the image of cobwebs his imagination created.
The single room smelled of dust and disuse with a hint of mildew. Careful not to dislodge a record player and recordings that Lang guessed dated from the 1950s, he turned around, looking for the proprietor.
"Salut!" A head popped up in front of an armoire. "Can I help you?"
Like most Parisians, the shopkeeper had an unerring ability to recognize Americans on sight.
Lang held up the copy of the receipt. "I'm looking for information."
An androgynous figure in black limped to the front of the shop. A wrinkled hand took the receipt and held it up to a light speckled with dust motes. Spectacles appeared from a pocket. "What do you wish to know?"
Lang thrashed around for a convenient story and decided upon at least part of the truth."Janet Holt was my sister. She was killed in that explosion over in the Marais a few days ago while she was visiting here. I'm just trying to find out what she bought while she was in the city."
"I'm very sorry." The tradesman pointed to the wall, or rather to a gap between two dark pictures of people in nineteenth-century dress. "She bought a painting."
"A portrait? Of who?" That would have been unusual.
The shopkeeper shook a gray head. "No, a painting of shepherds, of a field, perhaps some religious scene." That was more in keeping with Janet's taste. Lang started to ask another question and thought better of it. What did it matter what happened to the painting?
Judging from its source, it was doubtful it had either artistic or monetary value.
"That painting," the figure in black continued, "it had not been here long. In fact, a man came in right after your sister and was very upset it had been sold."
Years of searching out the unusual, of recognizing anomalies, sent up antennae long unused. "This man, do you remember anything about him?"
"Near eastern, perhaps Arab, dressed in nice but inexpensive clothes. He spoke very good French." Lang ignored the implicit accusation. "Did he say why he wanted the picture?" "No, but as you can see, I have many beautiful things for sale." Lang thought a moment. "You said you hadn't had the picture long. Do you remember where you got it?"
Again the shuffling of papers. "From London, Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera, Ltd. Number 12 Old Bond Street, London WIY 9AE We buy inventory from each other."
If it doesn't sell one place, try another, Lang thought. "Could I borrow a pen and some paper?"
He wrote the name and address down, although he could not have explained why he thought it was important. Perhaps because it was the first detail of Janet's last day that had been even slightly out of the ordinary.
"Thanks. You've been a big help."
Outside, Lang began to repeat his path in reverse. So someone had wanted the picture Janet bought. Could it have been the reason for Janet's death? But that made no sense. As Patrick had said, the house on Place des Vosges had been like Fort Knox. It strained the imagination to think someone had been so angry at Janet beating him to the purchase of a painting that he was willing to destroy it and her as revenge.
Still…
The buzzing in Lang's mind was becoming louder and louder. So loud that he was surprised to suddenly realize he really was hearing the sound. He turned in time to see one of the City's ubiquitous motor scooters increase speed and jump the curb. The driver, his features hidden in a full face helmet, must have been drunk or seriously ill, Lang thought.
The machine, still gaining velocity, was headed straight for Lang. As Lang shifted his weight to lunge into a doorway, the rider leaned towards Lang and sunlight flashed from his gloved hand. Lang threw himself away from the rider and felt something scratch his shoulder.
Furious at what he took for criminal negligence, Lang sprang to his feet ready to pursue and knock the driver off the machine's seat. The cause was hopeless. The scooter skidded around a corner and disappeared from sight.
"Monsieur!" The shopkeeper rushed outside. "You are injured!"
"No, I'm fine," Lang replied.
Then he followed the merchant's eyes to where a trickle of blood seeped from a slash in his shirt. The glitter of a blade, the intentional swerve from the street. Someone had come close to cutting his throat.
"We have crime, just like any city," Patrick said later that day.
Lang, his shoulder stiff under what he considered far too much bandaging; snorted. "Yeah, but this wasn't any snatch and run. The fucker wanted to kill me."
Patrick shook his head slowly. "Now why would he want to do that?"
That, thought Lang, was the real question.
1
Paris
0234 hours
The explosion shook the entire Place des Vosges as well as a good part of the Marais district. Had the thirty-six town houses, nine on each side of the square, been built with less sturdy material than the handmade bricks of four centuries past, the damage might have been greater. Even so, the antique glass had been blown out of every window of the largest of these stately homes, the former Hotel de Rohan-Guemenee, the second floor of which had been the home of Victor Hugo.
The only real damage, though, was to number 26, the source of the blast. By the time the pompiers from the 11th arrondissement, the district fire department, arrived twelve minutes later, the building was four stories of inferno. Saving the house and its occupants was not a possibility.
A line of gendarmes kept spectators a respectful distance from the blaze while others interviewed bathrobe clad residents. One man, an apparent insomniac, told the officers he had been watching a rerun of the past year's World Cup championship match when he had heard a crash of shattering glass followed by a flash of light brighter than any he had ever seen. Rushing to the window, he had nearly been blinded by the intensity of the blaze.
The glass, the policeman asked, could it have crashed when something was thrown through a window?
The man stuffed a fist into his yawning mouth, his interest diminishing now that the best part of the show was over. How does one distinguish between glass shattering when something is thrown into it rather than something being thrown out? He shrugged as only the French can, conveying uninterested ignorance as well as annoyance at a stupid question. "Je ne sais pas."
He turned to go back home, almost bumping into a middle-aged man in a suit. The spectator wondered what anyone would be doing in business attire at this hour. Not only dressed, but in a shirt freshly starched, jacket and trousers neatly pressed. He shrugged a second time and trudged homeward wondering if 'IV reception in the neighborhood had been affected by the fire.
The gendarme touched the brim of his cap with a nod, an almost involuntary sign of respect as he wished the new arrival, "Bon soir." A straightening of the back and an air of deference were obvious. It was not every neighborhood fire that drew the attention of the Department of State Security and Investigation, the DGSE.
The DGSE man gave the slightest of nods before staring intently into what was now a smoldering shell. Plumbing, twisted by the heat, poking into emptiness like supplicating arms. The adjacent homes exhibited an ugly black patina of soot as they stared onto the square with windows void of glass. Hot embers hissed with steam as firemen hosed them down. It was as if a shaft straight from hell had broken through the earth's surface where the townhouse had once stood.
"Any idea as to the cause?" the DGSE man asked.
The fireman was fairly certain the nation's security service would not be interested in leaking gas or a match carelessly dropped into the home's supply of kerosene. "No sir, none." He pointed. "The chief fire inspector is over there."
The security department man stood for a moment as though digesting the information before walking over to a short man almost swallowed by his flame-retardant uniform and knee-high boots. The impression was of a child playing in his parents' clothes.
The security man displayed a badge. "Louvere, DGSE. Any idea as to the cause?"
The fireman, too tired to be impressed by what was, after all, just one more bureaucrat, shook his head. "Whatever set it off, it had help from some sort of accelerant. I'd be surprised if it was an accident."
Louvere nodded in apparent agreement. "Ether in an adjoining unit, perhaps?"
The fireman gave a derisive snort. Ether was used in the process of turning cocaine powder into "rocks" of more potent crack. Few narcotic dealers knew (or cared) how to handle the highly volatile anesthetic safely. Misapplication of the heat necessary to the process could and did frequently result in spectacular results.
"In this neighborhood?" He swept a hand, indicating the pricey homes. A three-day tournament had been held here in 1615 to celebrate the marriage of Louis XII. The Place had been home to Cardinal Richelieu and other notables. Duels had been fought in the center of the square while spectators watched from the shelter of the arcades that fronted the buildings. In 1962 President de Gaulle had declared the Place a national historic monument. The prices of homes here, in the rare event one became available, were not set to be attractive to crack labs.
Louvere's eyes followed the fireman's gesture, taking in the perfect symmetry of the pink brick buildings. "I suppose not."
"Besides," the fireman said, "DGSE hardly bothers itself with the dope trade. What's your involvement?"
"Let's say it is personal. I have a friend, an old acquaintance in the States, who asked me to meet his sister, show her around Paris. She was staying with a schoolmate in number 26. Someone I had introduced her to called, said he had heard there was trouble here. So I came."
The fireman rubbed a grubby hand across his forehead. "If she was in there… Well, it will take our forensic people a few days to identify whatever's left, probably have to do it by DNA."
The security man sighed as his shoulders slumped. "I don't look forward to making that phone call." The fireman nodded sympathetically. "Give me your card. I'll personally see to it you get a copy of the report."
"Thank you." Louvere gave one final glance at the gaping cavern that only hours before had been one of the most desirable residences in Paris. Shoulders stooped as though bearing the weight of the world, he walked past the yellow fire trucks that seemed like living animals with each breath-like stroke of their pumps. A short way down the narrow street, a Peugeot was waiting at the curb.
2
Paris
Three days later
The driver reached over the seat to shake his passenger awake. The man in the backseat of the taxi looked even more worn than most Americans the cabby picked up at Charles de Gaulle after a transatlantic flight: clothes rumpled, shirt wrinkled, face unshaven. Once the man was awake, his eyes were the true sign of weariness. Red rimmed as though from a combination of grief and lack of sleep, they had a stare that seemed to focus on something a thousand miles away until he started counting out euros.
Stuffing the bills in his pocket, the driver watched the man enter a nondescript building across from the Place de l'Opera.
Inside, the American passed antique elevators to climb worn steps to the second floor where he turned right and stopped. In front of him was what appeared to be an unmarked old-fashioned glass door. He knew the single translucent pane was the hardest bulletproof glass available. Slowly he lifted his head to stare at the ceiling where he was sure shadows concealed a camera. Noiselessly, the door slid open and he entered a small chamber facing yet another door, this one made of steel.
"Oui?" a woman's voice asked through a speaker. "Langford Reilly to see Patrick Louvere," the man said in English. "He's expecting me."
As noiselessly as the first, the second door opened and Lang Reilly entered one of many offices of France 's security force. In front of him stood a man in a dark, Italian-cut suit. The shirt was crisp and the shoes reflected the ceiling lights. In years past, Lang and Dawn had joked that Patrick Louvere must change his clothes several times a day to look so fresh.
Louvere regarded Lang a moment through heavily lidded eyes, eyes that had always reminded Lang of a basset hound. "Langford!" he exclaimed, continuing in nearly accentless English as he embraced· his guest. "It has been, what? Ten, fifteen years? Too long for friends to be apart."
He stepped back, a hand still on each of Lang's arms. "You should have called. We could have sent a car." Lang nodded. "A cab seemed the quickest way, but thanks." The Frenchman dropped his hands. "I cannot tell you how sorry…"
"I appreciate that, Patrick, but can we get started?"
Louvere was not offended by what most of his countrymen would have considered brusqueness. Americans were famous for getting to the point. "But of course!" He turned and spoke to someone Lang could not see. "Coffee, please, Paulette. This way, Lang."
Lang followed him down a hall. It had been almost twenty years since he had last been here but other than newer carpet, as cheap and institutional as before, little had changed.
Happily, neither had his relationship with Patrick Louvere. Although their respective governments had frequent differences-the most vocal being the war with Iraq -the American and the Frenchman had remained steadfast friends. Patrick had gladly volunteered to do whatever he could for Lang's sister, Janet, during her visit with a former school chum in Paris. Since Janet was bringing her adopted son, Jeff, the Frenchman had insisted on taking the young boy into his own home daily to play with his own children while Janet and her friend prowled the shops of Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. It had been Patrick's phone call that had shattered Lang's world for a second time.
The DGSE man ushered Lang into the same office he remembered and slid behind a desk clear of anything other than a slender file folder. Almost immediately, a middle aged woman appeared with a coffee service and began to set cups on the desk. Although he felt he had consumed a tanker load of the stuff lately, Lang was too tired to protest.
"So, you are a lawyer now?" Patrick asked, obviously making conversation until the men could be alone: "You sue the big American companies for millions of dollars, no?"
Lang shook his head. "Actually, I do white-collar criminal defense."
The Frenchman pursed his lips. "White-collar? Criminal?" He looked as distressed as if he had been forced to mention the words "Australian" and "wine" in the same sentence. "You defend criminals with white collars?"
"You know, crimes that involve business executives. Nonviolent: embezzlement, fraud, that sort of thing."
"The kind of criminal that can pay your fee."
"Exactly."
The woman left the room, closing the door behind her, and Patrick slid the folder across the polished desk top. Lang looked at it without touching it. "Still no idea who or why?" Patrick shook his head sadly. "No, none. We found strong traces of aluminum, iron oxide and a nitrogen accelerant."
"Thermite? Jesus, that's not something some nutcase cooks up in his basement like a fertilizer bomb, that's what the military uses to destroy tanks, armor, something requiring intense heat."
"Which accounts for how quickly the building burned."
Patrick was avoiding the subject of Lang's main concern. The news, therefore, was going to be bad. Lang swallowed hard. "The occupants… you found…?"
"Three, as I told you on the phone I was certain we would. Your sister, her adopted son and their hostess, Lettie Barkman."
Lang had known it was coming, but the irrational part of his mind had held a flicker of hope that somehow Janet and Jeff had not been there. It was like hearing a death sentence at the end of a trial where the result was a foregone conclusion. It just couldn't be possible, not in a sane world. Instead of Patrick across the desk, he saw Janet, her eyes twinkling in amusement at a world she refused to take seriously. And Jeff, the child his divorced sister had found in one of those fever-ridden countries south of Mexico, Jeff with the brown skin, dark eyes and profile that could have been taken from a Mayan carving. Jeff with his baseball cap turned backwards, over-sized shorts and high-top sneakers. Jeff, Lang's ten-year-old best buddy and as close as Lang would ever come to having a son.
Lang did nothing to wipe away the tears running down his cheek. "Who would want to…?"
From somewhere Patrick produced a handkerchief. "We don't know. The Barkman woman was a rich American divorcee living in Paris, but as far as we can tell, she had no ties to political extremists. In fact, we can find no one among her friends who even knows what her politics were. Your sister was a doctor, a…"
"Juvenile orthopedist," Lang supplied. "She spent a month out of every year working in third-world countries where her patients couldn't afford medical care. Jeff was orphaned by an earthquake. She brought him home."
"She also was divorced, was she not?"
Lang leaned forward to stir his coffee. It gave him something to do with hands that seemed useless in his lap. "Yeah, guy named Holt. We haven't heard from him since they split seven, eight years ago. She kept his name 'cause that's the one on her medical degree."
"And obviously robbery was not a motive, not with the total destruction of the house."
"Unless the thieves didn't want anyone to know what was stolen."
"Possible," Patrick agreed," but Madame Barkman had an extraordinary alarm system with interior burglar bars. Part of having lived in your New York, I suppose. The place was like, like… like the place where Americans keep their gold."
" Fort Knox," Lang supplied.
" Fort Knox. I would guess the intent was to destroy rather than steal."
"Destroy what?"
"When we know that, we will be close to knowing who these criminals are."
The two men stared at each other across the desk, each unable to think of something appropriate to say, until Patrick leaned forward. "I know it is small comfort to you, but the fire was intense. They would have died instantly from having the air sucked out of their bodies if the explosion did not kill them first."
Lang appreciated the thought behind the effort and recognized it as a well-intentioned lie.
"The case is actually within the jurisdiction of the police," Patrick went on. "I don't know how long I can continue to convince them we have reason to believe it was the act of terrorists."
Lang wanted the case in the hands of the DGSE for two reasons. First, his friendship with Patrick was likely to evoke more than the routine effort to see the case solved. Besides, the French security force was one of the world's best. Second, the Paris police was a morass of political infighting. Peter Sellers's Pink Panther rendition of the inept Inspector Clouseau had some basis in fact.
Mistaking Lang's thoughts for uncertainty, the Frenchman continued, "Of course, every resource…"
"I'd like to go to the scene," Lang said.
Patrick held up his hands, palms outward. "Of course. My car and driver are yours for as long as you wish."
"And do you have any idea what they did the day before…?" Patrick touched the folder. "It is routine to check such things." Lang pulled the file over and opened it. With eyes stinging from tears as well as lack of sleep, he began to read.
3
Paris
The same day
Lang left his friend's office to go directly to the Place des Vosges. Being here, the last place Janet and Jeff had been alive, somehow brought him closer to them. He paused a long time in front of the blackened cave that was number 26. Head bowed, he stood on grass that had been scorched brown. With each minute, his resolve to see the killers exposed and punished increased. He was deaf to the sound of the grinding of his own teeth and unaware of the scowl on his face. Residents, delivery men and the curious increased their pace around him as though he were potentially dangerous.
"I'll get them myself if that's what it takes," he muttered. "Fucking bastards!"
A uniformed nanny behind him broke into a trot to get the pram and its cargo as far away as possible.
His next stop was to a mortician recommended by Patrick. The service was professional, cool and devoid of the oily faux sympathy dispensed by American funeral directors. He paid for two simple metal caskets, one only half-size, and made arrangements to have the bodies shipped back to the States.
He tried hard but unsuccessfully not to think about how very little of Janet and Jeff those European-shaped boxes would contain.
There was no rational reason to track his sister's last hours other than a curiosity he saw no reason to deny. Besides, his flight didn't leave till evening and he didn't want to impose on his friend's hospitality. Credit card receipts electronically summoned by Patrick provided a road map of Janet's last day. She had visited Hermes and Chanel, making relatively small purchases: a scarf, a blouse. Probably more interested in souvenirs than haute couture, Lang decided. He did little more than peer through windows at mannequins too thin to be real and draped in outfits that exceeded the average annual American income. The number of Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked curbside dispelled any doubts he might have had as to the extravagance of the goods inside the-shops.
The last credit card receipt led him to the Ile St. Louis. Overshadowed literally and economically by the adjacent Ile de la Cité and its towering Notre-Dame cathedral, the St. Louis was a quirky neighborhood in the middle of the Seine. Lang remembered eight blocks of tiny hotels, twenty-seat bistros and small shops filled with oddities.
Leaving Patrick's car and driver in one of the parking spots so rare along the narrow streets, Lang climbed out of the Peugeot in front of a patisserie, inhaling the aroma of freshly baked bread and sweets. He walked southeast along Rue St. Louis en L'IIe until he came to an intersection where the curbs were even closer, Rue des Deux Points. He was trying to match the address on the receipt but street numbers were either hard to see or nonexistent. Luckily, there was only one shop displaying the sign magasin d'antiquités, antique shop.
An overhead bell announced his entry into a space crowded with the accoutrements of civilization from at least the past hundred years or so. Oil lamps as well as electric ones were stacked on sewing tables along with piles of dusty magazines and flatware tied in bunches. Bronze and marble statues and busts of goddesses and emperors paraded up and down aisles covered in shag carpet and oriental rugs. Lang resisted the image of cobwebs his imagination created.
The single room smelled of dust and disuse with a hint of mildew. Careful not to dislodge a record player and recordings that Lang guessed dated from the 1950s, he turned around, looking for the proprietor.
"Salut!" A head popped up in front of an armoire. "Can I help you?"
Like most Parisians, the shopkeeper had an unerring ability to recognize Americans on sight.
Lang held up the copy of the receipt. "I'm looking for information."
An androgynous figure in black limped to the front of the shop. A wrinkled hand took the receipt and held it up to a light speckled with dust motes. Spectacles appeared from a pocket. "What do you wish to know?"
Lang thrashed around for a convenient story and decided upon at least part of the truth."Janet Holt was my sister. She was killed in that explosion over in the Marais a few days ago while she was visiting here. I'm just trying to find out what she bought while she was in the city."
"I'm very sorry." The tradesman pointed to the wall, or rather to a gap between two dark pictures of people in nineteenth-century dress. "She bought a painting."
"A portrait? Of who?" That would have been unusual.
The shopkeeper shook a gray head. "No, a painting of shepherds, of a field, perhaps some religious scene." That was more in keeping with Janet's taste. Lang started to ask another question and thought better of it. What did it matter what happened to the painting?
Judging from its source, it was doubtful it had either artistic or monetary value.
"That painting," the figure in black continued, "it had not been here long. In fact, a man came in right after your sister and was very upset it had been sold."
Years of searching out the unusual, of recognizing anomalies, sent up antennae long unused. "This man, do you remember anything about him?"
"Near eastern, perhaps Arab, dressed in nice but inexpensive clothes. He spoke very good French." Lang ignored the implicit accusation. "Did he say why he wanted the picture?" "No, but as you can see, I have many beautiful things for sale." Lang thought a moment. "You said you hadn't had the picture long. Do you remember where you got it?"
Again the shuffling of papers. "From London, Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera, Ltd. Number 12 Old Bond Street, London WIY 9AE We buy inventory from each other."
If it doesn't sell one place, try another, Lang thought. "Could I borrow a pen and some paper?"
He wrote the name and address down, although he could not have explained why he thought it was important. Perhaps because it was the first detail of Janet's last day that had been even slightly out of the ordinary.
"Thanks. You've been a big help."
Outside, Lang began to repeat his path in reverse. So someone had wanted the picture Janet bought. Could it have been the reason for Janet's death? But that made no sense. As Patrick had said, the house on Place des Vosges had been like Fort Knox. It strained the imagination to think someone had been so angry at Janet beating him to the purchase of a painting that he was willing to destroy it and her as revenge.
Still…
The buzzing in Lang's mind was becoming louder and louder. So loud that he was surprised to suddenly realize he really was hearing the sound. He turned in time to see one of the City's ubiquitous motor scooters increase speed and jump the curb. The driver, his features hidden in a full face helmet, must have been drunk or seriously ill, Lang thought.
The machine, still gaining velocity, was headed straight for Lang. As Lang shifted his weight to lunge into a doorway, the rider leaned towards Lang and sunlight flashed from his gloved hand. Lang threw himself away from the rider and felt something scratch his shoulder.
Furious at what he took for criminal negligence, Lang sprang to his feet ready to pursue and knock the driver off the machine's seat. The cause was hopeless. The scooter skidded around a corner and disappeared from sight.
"Monsieur!" The shopkeeper rushed outside. "You are injured!"
"No, I'm fine," Lang replied.
Then he followed the merchant's eyes to where a trickle of blood seeped from a slash in his shirt. The glitter of a blade, the intentional swerve from the street. Someone had come close to cutting his throat.
"We have crime, just like any city," Patrick said later that day.
Lang, his shoulder stiff under what he considered far too much bandaging; snorted. "Yeah, but this wasn't any snatch and run. The fucker wanted to kill me."
Patrick shook his head slowly. "Now why would he want to do that?"
That, thought Lang, was the real question.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Delta Flight 1074: Paris-Atlanta
10:35 P.M. EDT
Lang was exhausted, yet unable to sleep. Without seeing it, he stared at the comedy being shown on the 777's overhead screen. A combination of grief, curiosity and fear of flying had kept him squirming despite the wide seat and ample legroom of first class.
Eyes open or shut, he kept seeing replays of Jeff and Janet. Then a man on a motor scooter with a knife in his hand.
Coincidence? His earlier training had taught him to distrust seemingly unrelated events. But who would want to kill a woman who devoted her life to her adopted son and other small children across a troubled globe? For that matter, who would want Lang himself dead?
An old grudge? He couldn't think of any that would have survived fifteen years. "Get you something?" The flight attendant had put on a smile along with fresh lipstick.
Lang shook his head. "I'm fine, thanks."
But, of course, he wasn't.
He forced the thoughts of Janet and Jeff from his mind as a parent might send unruly children outside to play. Thinking of the two metal boxes in the plane's cargo hold wasn't going to get him any sleep. Think of something pleasant, something soothing…
Had it been only two nights ago, just hours before that phone call from Patrick?
He had spent the evening with Father Francis Narumba. They had dined at Manuel's Tavern, a funky bar that was a hangout for students, politicians and the self-proclaimed local intelligentsia. It boasted a warm if seedy collection of wooden booths and worn bar stools. The food had never been great and the atmosphere less, but it was a place where a black priest and a white lawyer could argue in Latin without anyone noticing.
Lang and Francis had their own campaign to keep alive the language of Virgil and Livy. Both were victims of a degree in the classics, Lang because he was too stubborn to be pushed into business school, the priest because the language had been required in seminary.
Their friendship was based on mutual need: there were too few people· around who viewed history as something older than last week's People magazine. Although Lang tended to consider anything that happened after the first sack of Rome as current events, Francis had an astonishing recall of the medieval world. The Catholic Church's role in that world provided a fertile field for friendly argument.
The priest had listened politely as Lang blew off more than a little steam about the inefficiency of the Fulton County prosecutor's office, a matter motivated by more than the purely altruistic concern of a good citizen.
Having a client under indictment for over a year wasn't good for business, particularly the client's. An indictment works as a hardship, since in the public eye the accused is presumed guilty until proven otherwise.
"If the DA is as incompetent as you say, how'd he get the office?" Francis asked, regarding a badly overcooked filet of salmon. He shrugged at the hopelessness of Manuel's cuisine. "Fabas indulcet fames."
Latin aphorisms were a fiercely competitive game of one-upmanship.
Lang had ordered a hamburger, something requiring effort to screw up. "Hunger does indeed sweeten beans but you'd have to be pretty hungry to enjoy that," he said. "In answer to your question, the DA owes his job to who he knows, not any ability, Ne Aesopum quidem trivit."
"He has not even thumbed through Aesop?"
Lang was pouring from a pitcher of room temperature beer. "Believing in all those saints makes you literal. More liberally, he doesn't know zip."
The priest sipped from a glass that had to be as tepid as Lang's. "Damnant quod non intelligunt." They condemn what they do not understand.
After dinner, Lang lost the coin toss for the check for the third straight time. Sometimes he thought Francis had special help in such matters.
"Janet and Jeff okay?" Francis asked as they walked to the car.
His interest was more than polite. Since her divorce, Janet had, paradoxically, become a staunch Catholic, active in Francis's parish. Lang suspected she believed that the church's position on remarriage might impede another poor choice. Jeff's very foreignness made him special to Francis, a native of one of Africa's less desirable homelands. Lang reached in his pocket for the key to the Porsche. "Both fine. Took Jeff to the Braves' opener last week."
"Looks like you could afford -a real car instead of this toy," Francis grumbled as he contorted himself into the passenger seat.
"Enjoy the ride or take MARTA," Lang said cheerfully. "By the way, Janet got Jeff a dog last week, the ugliest mutt you'll see at the annual blessing of the animals."
"Beauty is, as the saying goes, only skin-deep."
Lang turned the key in the ignition. "Yeah, but ugly goes all the way to the bone. I think Janet picked the dog out as being the least likely to be adopted from the pound."
Before reaching the part where Lang got home, he dropped into a dreamless abyss. He didn't regain consciousness until the same flight attendant, with the same smile, shook him awake and reminded him to raise his seat back for landing.
2
Atlanta
Two days later
Lang thought he had grieved as much as a man could.when Dawn died. The lingering illness, the agony of watching the woman he loved slip away had, he thought, seared his soul against further loss.
He was wrong.
As he watched the two caskets, one only half the size of the other, being lowered into the red Georgia day, he lost the stoic exterior southern custom required of men. Instead, he wept. First wet eyes, then tears he made no effort to staunch. If anyone thought less of him for his anguish, screw 'em. He was not weeping only for Jeff and Janet, of course. He was crying for himself just as much. The last of his family gone. The thought filled him with loneliness he had never known existed.
He had lost friends and acquaintances before; any adult had. He had also known a few guys, fellow employees, who had perished in the occupational hazards of his former work, too. And he had lost Dawn, but he had had months to anticipate the inevitable. But his younger sister and nephew had been snatched away with a suddenness and in a manner that was incomprehensible.
The funeral had an air of unreality, something staged for his consumption alone. He watched the service as though witnessing someone else's bereavement, perhaps in a film. But he was no mere spectator to the anguish that chewed at him like an animal gnawing its way free from a cage.
The holes that would receive Jeff and Janet were next to the marble with Dawn's name on it, not yet weathered, the inscription as sharp as the loss he felt every Sunday when he placed flowers on the impersonal hump of earth. He would have two more graves to visit as Jeff and Janet shared eternity with Dawn on this same hillside.
Instead of hearing the words Francis read from the prayer book, he replayed every video game he had shared with Jeff, saw again every gold-starred homework assignment. He missed them both, but the death of a child was the bit of evidence that condemned the universe, that denied a sparrow-watching god.
By the time the mourners, mostly neighbors or Janet's medical peers with a scattering of parents of Jeff's friends, had finished their sincere if meaningless condolences, his grief had metabolized into fury. Whoever had done this would pay in spades. No matter how long it took, how much time was required, how far he had to travel, he would find him. Or them.
They had screwed around with the wrong family. He had no experience in law enforcement but he did have a unique repertoire of acquaintances, people who had access to information unavailable to police. If he had to call everyone of them to find the guilty party, he'd do it.
The anger was strangely comforting. It brought order to an otherwise senseless world. He imagined the taste of revenge against persons unknown, ignoring the growing impatience of the cemetery's crew. His lingering at graveside was postponing the removal of the Astroturf that had concealed the mound of raw dirt from sensitive eyes, the return of the backhoe that would push the mound of soil onto coffins that had remained closed during the service.
A gentle hand touched his shoulder. His thoughts scattered as Francis patted him on the back. Lang had asked him to officiate not only as Janet's priest and friend but also as his own friend.
"Lang, you need to be thinking of Janet and Jeff, not revenge."
Lang sighed. "That obvious, huh?"
"To anyone who looks at your face."
"I can't just walk away, Francis, forget what happened. Someone did this, killed two innocent people. And don't tell me it was God's will."
The priest shook his head, staring at the two graves. "I assume you asked me to perform the service because you wanted to involve a higher force than yourself. I…"
"Oh, bullshit!" Lang growled. "Your higher force was notably absent when needed."
He instantly regretted the remark, the result of grief and anger as well as a sleepless night or two. Although Lang professed no particular faith, there had been no need to belittle someone else's.
"Forgive me, Francis," he said. "I'm a little raw right now."
If the priest had been offended, he didn't show it. "Understandable, Lang. I also think I understand what you're thinking. Wouldn't it make more sense to let the French police handle it?"
Lang snorted derisively. "Easy enough for you to say. To them it's just two more homicides. I want justice and I want it now."
Francis studied him for a moment, large brown eyes seeming to read his thoughts. "Just because you survived one risky occupation doesn't mean you're qualified to track down whoever did this thing."
Lang had never told Francis about his former employment. The priest was smart enough to guess that a lawyer who had attended law school in his thirties and had a blank spot almost a decade long in his resume likely had a past he didn't want to discuss. Francis had surmised the truth or something very close to it.
"Qualified or not, I have to try," Lang said.
Francis nodded silently and turned his head to stare down the gentle slope before giving his usual parting shot. "I'll be praying for you."
Lang managed to tweak his mouth into a grimace that didn't quite reach a smile as he gave his usual reply. "Can't hurt, I guess."
It was only as he watched Francis walk down the slope that Lang realized he had made a commitment to himself. Not a promise born in fury, not some feel-good resolution to be forgotten, but a commitment.
How he was going to fulfill it, he had no idea.
3
Atlanta
An hour later
Lang went from the funeral to Janet's house. He would have to put it on the market, of Course, although he was avoiding doing so. Janet had worked hard as a single-income parent for this place where she could give her son a home of his own. It was a part of both of them with which Lang was reluctant to part.
The grass needed cutting, he noted sadly, a condition Janet would never have tolerated. In back, he almost wept again when he saw the swing set he and Janet had erected two years ago. The effort had consumed most of a hot summer afternoon and a cooler of icy beer. Only last month, Jeff has confided to his uncle that he was too big now to play on swing sets like little kids.
Lang unlocked the door, noting that the place had that stuffiness that unused places seem to acquire. Telling himself that he needed to make a thorough inspection, he wandered upstairs and down, winding up in Janet's living room. He smiled wanly. It was far neater than he had ever seen it. The walls were covered with her paintings: mournful saints, dour-faced martyrs or bloody crucifixions. Janet collected religious art and Lang was the one who had started it.
Years before, a defector from one of the Balkan countries had brought with him part of his art collection, paintings he had no doubt stolen from some Communist banned church and was selling with an enthusiasm only a recent convert to capitalism could muster. The pictures, as Lang recalled, were of a bloody and recently severed head of John the Baptist and an equally gory body bristling with arrows. Saint Sebastian, he supposed. The colors were remarkable, the style early Byzantine and the cost at the London auction quite reasonable. In light of Janet's recent conversion to Catholicism, the gifts had seemed appropriate. Or at least the source of a good laugh.
They were a bigger hit than Lang had contemplated, igniting an interest that would last the rest of her life. Janet was not a particularly religious person, her Catholicism notwithstanding. She did, however, enjoy the portrayals of the sundry saints in all their miseries of martyrdom. It was the only sort of art, she explained, she could really afford. Impressionists and their contemporary progeny far exceeded her finances. There was enough church art on the market to keep the price of even some of the earlier pieces within her range.
She also got a certain amount of pleasure out of Lang's not always successful efforts to translate the Latin that frequently appeared in the paintings.
He understood the interest in collecting. In his various travels, Lang had managed to gather together a small group of objects connected to the classical world he found so fascinating: a Roman coin with Augustus Caesar's image on it, an Etruscan votive cup, the hilt of a Macedonian dagger that might have belonged to one of Alexander's soldiers.
He was locking the front door when the mail truck pulled up to the curb. Lang watched as the postman stuffed the mailbox and drove off.
Sara, Lang's secretary, had come by the past few days to collect the mail, mostly a stream of advertising flyers that seemed to proclaim that life, for the buying public, continued as though nothing had happened. The irony of Janet's existence being reduced to bits on some huckster's mailing list was a bitter one. As her executor, there were a few bills which Lang intended to pay before saying farewell on her behalf to AmEx and Visa.
The mailbox contained a postcard announcing a sale at Neiman's, the midtown neighborhood paper and an envelope with the name "Ansley Galleries" printed on it. Curious, Lang opened it, extracting a computer-printed letter informing "Dear Customer" that the gallery had been unable to reach anyone by phone but the job was complete. Ansley Galleries was a small storefront down around Sixth or Seventh Street, a few minutes from where he was standing. There seemed no point in having Sara make an extra trip.
The teenaged girl behind the counter had spiked purple hair, lipstick to match, a butterfly tattooed on her neck and a ring through her left eyebrow. Looking at her made not having children of his own easier to bear. She glanced at the letter, then at him; Her jaws stopped masticating a wad of gum long enough to ask, "You're…?"
"Langford Reilly, Dr. Holt's brother."
She looked back down at the letter in her hand and then back at him. "Jesus! I read in the paper… I'm sorry. Dr. Holt was a sweet lady. Bummer."
He had had enough condolences for a lifetime, let alone today. Still, it was nice of the kid. "Thanks. I appreciate that. I'm taking care of her estate. That's why I'm picking up…"
He pointed to the paper in her hand.
"Oh! Sorry! I'll get it for you."
He tracked her progress between the shelves behind the counter by the sound of popping gum.
When she returned, she had a package wrapped in brown paper. "Dr. Holt sent this from Paris, had us frame and appraise it for insurance." She tore off a small envelope that had been taped to the paper. "This is a Polaroid of the painting and the appraisal. You'll want to keep them somewhere safe and we'll keep a copy." She put both envelope and package on the counter and consulted a sales slip. "That'll be two sixty-seven fifty-five, including tax."
Lang handed her his plastic and watched her swipe it through a terminal as he stuffed the envelope into his inside coat pocket. What was he going to do with some piece of religious art? Selling it was out of the question; Janet had bought it in the last hours of her life. He would find a place for it-somewhere.
He signed the credit card receipt, wadded it into a pocket and took the package under one arm. Stopping at the doorway, he let his eyes acclimate from the dark of the shop to the bright spring light outside.
Something out there was not quite right, out of place.
The old sensitivity which made him habitually aware of his surroundings had become so much a part of him that he no longer noticed it, like a deer's instinctive listening for the sound of a predator. His mind noted the doorman of his condo standing on the left instead of the right side of the door, a jalopy in an upscale neighborhood where Mercedes and BMWs belonged.
It took a second for him to realize he had stopped and was staring at the street and another to realize why. The man on the other side, the derelict who appeared to be sleeping off the demons of cheap wine in the paper-and glass-littered doorway of one of the neighborhood's empty' buildings. He sat, facing Lang, eyes seemingly closed. The worn camo jacket, tattered jeans and filthy, laceless sneakers were in character. The man could have been one of the city's thousands of wandering homeless. But how many were clean-shaven with hair cut short enough not to hang below the knit cap? Even assuming this one had recently been released from a hygiene-conscious jail, it was unlikely he would be here so close to noon when the church down the street was giving away soup and sandwiches. Also, he had gone to sleep in a hurry. Lang was certain the bum had not been there when he arrived at the gallery, yet he had found a suitable spot and dozed off in two or three minutes. Even the gut-corroding poison purchased with dollars panhandled from guilty yuppies wouldn't knock him out that quickly. Of course, Lang told himself, he could be mistaken. There were plenty of beggars in Midtown and he could have failed to notice this one. But it was not likely.
Raising a hand as though to shade his eyes, Lang left a space between his fingers, keeping the sleeper in view as he walked to where the Porsche was parked. The knit cap slowly turned. Lang, too, was being watched.
In the car, he circled the block. The man was gone. Lang reminded himself that paranoia doesn't necessarily mean someone really isn't after you.
1
Delta Flight 1074: Paris-Atlanta
10:35 P.M. EDT
Lang was exhausted, yet unable to sleep. Without seeing it, he stared at the comedy being shown on the 777's overhead screen. A combination of grief, curiosity and fear of flying had kept him squirming despite the wide seat and ample legroom of first class.
Eyes open or shut, he kept seeing replays of Jeff and Janet. Then a man on a motor scooter with a knife in his hand.
Coincidence? His earlier training had taught him to distrust seemingly unrelated events. But who would want to kill a woman who devoted her life to her adopted son and other small children across a troubled globe? For that matter, who would want Lang himself dead?
An old grudge? He couldn't think of any that would have survived fifteen years. "Get you something?" The flight attendant had put on a smile along with fresh lipstick.
Lang shook his head. "I'm fine, thanks."
But, of course, he wasn't.
He forced the thoughts of Janet and Jeff from his mind as a parent might send unruly children outside to play. Thinking of the two metal boxes in the plane's cargo hold wasn't going to get him any sleep. Think of something pleasant, something soothing…
Had it been only two nights ago, just hours before that phone call from Patrick?
He had spent the evening with Father Francis Narumba. They had dined at Manuel's Tavern, a funky bar that was a hangout for students, politicians and the self-proclaimed local intelligentsia. It boasted a warm if seedy collection of wooden booths and worn bar stools. The food had never been great and the atmosphere less, but it was a place where a black priest and a white lawyer could argue in Latin without anyone noticing.
Lang and Francis had their own campaign to keep alive the language of Virgil and Livy. Both were victims of a degree in the classics, Lang because he was too stubborn to be pushed into business school, the priest because the language had been required in seminary.
Their friendship was based on mutual need: there were too few people· around who viewed history as something older than last week's People magazine. Although Lang tended to consider anything that happened after the first sack of Rome as current events, Francis had an astonishing recall of the medieval world. The Catholic Church's role in that world provided a fertile field for friendly argument.
The priest had listened politely as Lang blew off more than a little steam about the inefficiency of the Fulton County prosecutor's office, a matter motivated by more than the purely altruistic concern of a good citizen.
Having a client under indictment for over a year wasn't good for business, particularly the client's. An indictment works as a hardship, since in the public eye the accused is presumed guilty until proven otherwise.
"If the DA is as incompetent as you say, how'd he get the office?" Francis asked, regarding a badly overcooked filet of salmon. He shrugged at the hopelessness of Manuel's cuisine. "Fabas indulcet fames."
Latin aphorisms were a fiercely competitive game of one-upmanship.
Lang had ordered a hamburger, something requiring effort to screw up. "Hunger does indeed sweeten beans but you'd have to be pretty hungry to enjoy that," he said. "In answer to your question, the DA owes his job to who he knows, not any ability, Ne Aesopum quidem trivit."
"He has not even thumbed through Aesop?"
Lang was pouring from a pitcher of room temperature beer. "Believing in all those saints makes you literal. More liberally, he doesn't know zip."
The priest sipped from a glass that had to be as tepid as Lang's. "Damnant quod non intelligunt." They condemn what they do not understand.
After dinner, Lang lost the coin toss for the check for the third straight time. Sometimes he thought Francis had special help in such matters.
"Janet and Jeff okay?" Francis asked as they walked to the car.
His interest was more than polite. Since her divorce, Janet had, paradoxically, become a staunch Catholic, active in Francis's parish. Lang suspected she believed that the church's position on remarriage might impede another poor choice. Jeff's very foreignness made him special to Francis, a native of one of Africa's less desirable homelands. Lang reached in his pocket for the key to the Porsche. "Both fine. Took Jeff to the Braves' opener last week."
"Looks like you could afford -a real car instead of this toy," Francis grumbled as he contorted himself into the passenger seat.
"Enjoy the ride or take MARTA," Lang said cheerfully. "By the way, Janet got Jeff a dog last week, the ugliest mutt you'll see at the annual blessing of the animals."
"Beauty is, as the saying goes, only skin-deep."
Lang turned the key in the ignition. "Yeah, but ugly goes all the way to the bone. I think Janet picked the dog out as being the least likely to be adopted from the pound."
Before reaching the part where Lang got home, he dropped into a dreamless abyss. He didn't regain consciousness until the same flight attendant, with the same smile, shook him awake and reminded him to raise his seat back for landing.
2
Atlanta
Two days later
Lang thought he had grieved as much as a man could.when Dawn died. The lingering illness, the agony of watching the woman he loved slip away had, he thought, seared his soul against further loss.
He was wrong.
As he watched the two caskets, one only half the size of the other, being lowered into the red Georgia day, he lost the stoic exterior southern custom required of men. Instead, he wept. First wet eyes, then tears he made no effort to staunch. If anyone thought less of him for his anguish, screw 'em. He was not weeping only for Jeff and Janet, of course. He was crying for himself just as much. The last of his family gone. The thought filled him with loneliness he had never known existed.
He had lost friends and acquaintances before; any adult had. He had also known a few guys, fellow employees, who had perished in the occupational hazards of his former work, too. And he had lost Dawn, but he had had months to anticipate the inevitable. But his younger sister and nephew had been snatched away with a suddenness and in a manner that was incomprehensible.
The funeral had an air of unreality, something staged for his consumption alone. He watched the service as though witnessing someone else's bereavement, perhaps in a film. But he was no mere spectator to the anguish that chewed at him like an animal gnawing its way free from a cage.
The holes that would receive Jeff and Janet were next to the marble with Dawn's name on it, not yet weathered, the inscription as sharp as the loss he felt every Sunday when he placed flowers on the impersonal hump of earth. He would have two more graves to visit as Jeff and Janet shared eternity with Dawn on this same hillside.
Instead of hearing the words Francis read from the prayer book, he replayed every video game he had shared with Jeff, saw again every gold-starred homework assignment. He missed them both, but the death of a child was the bit of evidence that condemned the universe, that denied a sparrow-watching god.
By the time the mourners, mostly neighbors or Janet's medical peers with a scattering of parents of Jeff's friends, had finished their sincere if meaningless condolences, his grief had metabolized into fury. Whoever had done this would pay in spades. No matter how long it took, how much time was required, how far he had to travel, he would find him. Or them.
They had screwed around with the wrong family. He had no experience in law enforcement but he did have a unique repertoire of acquaintances, people who had access to information unavailable to police. If he had to call everyone of them to find the guilty party, he'd do it.
The anger was strangely comforting. It brought order to an otherwise senseless world. He imagined the taste of revenge against persons unknown, ignoring the growing impatience of the cemetery's crew. His lingering at graveside was postponing the removal of the Astroturf that had concealed the mound of raw dirt from sensitive eyes, the return of the backhoe that would push the mound of soil onto coffins that had remained closed during the service.
A gentle hand touched his shoulder. His thoughts scattered as Francis patted him on the back. Lang had asked him to officiate not only as Janet's priest and friend but also as his own friend.
"Lang, you need to be thinking of Janet and Jeff, not revenge."
Lang sighed. "That obvious, huh?"
"To anyone who looks at your face."
"I can't just walk away, Francis, forget what happened. Someone did this, killed two innocent people. And don't tell me it was God's will."
The priest shook his head, staring at the two graves. "I assume you asked me to perform the service because you wanted to involve a higher force than yourself. I…"
"Oh, bullshit!" Lang growled. "Your higher force was notably absent when needed."
He instantly regretted the remark, the result of grief and anger as well as a sleepless night or two. Although Lang professed no particular faith, there had been no need to belittle someone else's.
"Forgive me, Francis," he said. "I'm a little raw right now."
If the priest had been offended, he didn't show it. "Understandable, Lang. I also think I understand what you're thinking. Wouldn't it make more sense to let the French police handle it?"
Lang snorted derisively. "Easy enough for you to say. To them it's just two more homicides. I want justice and I want it now."
Francis studied him for a moment, large brown eyes seeming to read his thoughts. "Just because you survived one risky occupation doesn't mean you're qualified to track down whoever did this thing."
Lang had never told Francis about his former employment. The priest was smart enough to guess that a lawyer who had attended law school in his thirties and had a blank spot almost a decade long in his resume likely had a past he didn't want to discuss. Francis had surmised the truth or something very close to it.
"Qualified or not, I have to try," Lang said.
Francis nodded silently and turned his head to stare down the gentle slope before giving his usual parting shot. "I'll be praying for you."
Lang managed to tweak his mouth into a grimace that didn't quite reach a smile as he gave his usual reply. "Can't hurt, I guess."
It was only as he watched Francis walk down the slope that Lang realized he had made a commitment to himself. Not a promise born in fury, not some feel-good resolution to be forgotten, but a commitment.
How he was going to fulfill it, he had no idea.
3
Atlanta
An hour later
Lang went from the funeral to Janet's house. He would have to put it on the market, of Course, although he was avoiding doing so. Janet had worked hard as a single-income parent for this place where she could give her son a home of his own. It was a part of both of them with which Lang was reluctant to part.
The grass needed cutting, he noted sadly, a condition Janet would never have tolerated. In back, he almost wept again when he saw the swing set he and Janet had erected two years ago. The effort had consumed most of a hot summer afternoon and a cooler of icy beer. Only last month, Jeff has confided to his uncle that he was too big now to play on swing sets like little kids.
Lang unlocked the door, noting that the place had that stuffiness that unused places seem to acquire. Telling himself that he needed to make a thorough inspection, he wandered upstairs and down, winding up in Janet's living room. He smiled wanly. It was far neater than he had ever seen it. The walls were covered with her paintings: mournful saints, dour-faced martyrs or bloody crucifixions. Janet collected religious art and Lang was the one who had started it.
Years before, a defector from one of the Balkan countries had brought with him part of his art collection, paintings he had no doubt stolen from some Communist banned church and was selling with an enthusiasm only a recent convert to capitalism could muster. The pictures, as Lang recalled, were of a bloody and recently severed head of John the Baptist and an equally gory body bristling with arrows. Saint Sebastian, he supposed. The colors were remarkable, the style early Byzantine and the cost at the London auction quite reasonable. In light of Janet's recent conversion to Catholicism, the gifts had seemed appropriate. Or at least the source of a good laugh.
They were a bigger hit than Lang had contemplated, igniting an interest that would last the rest of her life. Janet was not a particularly religious person, her Catholicism notwithstanding. She did, however, enjoy the portrayals of the sundry saints in all their miseries of martyrdom. It was the only sort of art, she explained, she could really afford. Impressionists and their contemporary progeny far exceeded her finances. There was enough church art on the market to keep the price of even some of the earlier pieces within her range.
She also got a certain amount of pleasure out of Lang's not always successful efforts to translate the Latin that frequently appeared in the paintings.
He understood the interest in collecting. In his various travels, Lang had managed to gather together a small group of objects connected to the classical world he found so fascinating: a Roman coin with Augustus Caesar's image on it, an Etruscan votive cup, the hilt of a Macedonian dagger that might have belonged to one of Alexander's soldiers.
He was locking the front door when the mail truck pulled up to the curb. Lang watched as the postman stuffed the mailbox and drove off.
Sara, Lang's secretary, had come by the past few days to collect the mail, mostly a stream of advertising flyers that seemed to proclaim that life, for the buying public, continued as though nothing had happened. The irony of Janet's existence being reduced to bits on some huckster's mailing list was a bitter one. As her executor, there were a few bills which Lang intended to pay before saying farewell on her behalf to AmEx and Visa.
The mailbox contained a postcard announcing a sale at Neiman's, the midtown neighborhood paper and an envelope with the name "Ansley Galleries" printed on it. Curious, Lang opened it, extracting a computer-printed letter informing "Dear Customer" that the gallery had been unable to reach anyone by phone but the job was complete. Ansley Galleries was a small storefront down around Sixth or Seventh Street, a few minutes from where he was standing. There seemed no point in having Sara make an extra trip.
The teenaged girl behind the counter had spiked purple hair, lipstick to match, a butterfly tattooed on her neck and a ring through her left eyebrow. Looking at her made not having children of his own easier to bear. She glanced at the letter, then at him; Her jaws stopped masticating a wad of gum long enough to ask, "You're…?"
"Langford Reilly, Dr. Holt's brother."
She looked back down at the letter in her hand and then back at him. "Jesus! I read in the paper… I'm sorry. Dr. Holt was a sweet lady. Bummer."
He had had enough condolences for a lifetime, let alone today. Still, it was nice of the kid. "Thanks. I appreciate that. I'm taking care of her estate. That's why I'm picking up…"
He pointed to the paper in her hand.
"Oh! Sorry! I'll get it for you."
He tracked her progress between the shelves behind the counter by the sound of popping gum.
When she returned, she had a package wrapped in brown paper. "Dr. Holt sent this from Paris, had us frame and appraise it for insurance." She tore off a small envelope that had been taped to the paper. "This is a Polaroid of the painting and the appraisal. You'll want to keep them somewhere safe and we'll keep a copy." She put both envelope and package on the counter and consulted a sales slip. "That'll be two sixty-seven fifty-five, including tax."
Lang handed her his plastic and watched her swipe it through a terminal as he stuffed the envelope into his inside coat pocket. What was he going to do with some piece of religious art? Selling it was out of the question; Janet had bought it in the last hours of her life. He would find a place for it-somewhere.
He signed the credit card receipt, wadded it into a pocket and took the package under one arm. Stopping at the doorway, he let his eyes acclimate from the dark of the shop to the bright spring light outside.
Something out there was not quite right, out of place.
The old sensitivity which made him habitually aware of his surroundings had become so much a part of him that he no longer noticed it, like a deer's instinctive listening for the sound of a predator. His mind noted the doorman of his condo standing on the left instead of the right side of the door, a jalopy in an upscale neighborhood where Mercedes and BMWs belonged.
It took a second for him to realize he had stopped and was staring at the street and another to realize why. The man on the other side, the derelict who appeared to be sleeping off the demons of cheap wine in the paper-and glass-littered doorway of one of the neighborhood's empty' buildings. He sat, facing Lang, eyes seemingly closed. The worn camo jacket, tattered jeans and filthy, laceless sneakers were in character. The man could have been one of the city's thousands of wandering homeless. But how many were clean-shaven with hair cut short enough not to hang below the knit cap? Even assuming this one had recently been released from a hygiene-conscious jail, it was unlikely he would be here so close to noon when the church down the street was giving away soup and sandwiches. Also, he had gone to sleep in a hurry. Lang was certain the bum had not been there when he arrived at the gallery, yet he had found a suitable spot and dozed off in two or three minutes. Even the gut-corroding poison purchased with dollars panhandled from guilty yuppies wouldn't knock him out that quickly. Of course, Lang told himself, he could be mistaken. There were plenty of beggars in Midtown and he could have failed to notice this one. But it was not likely.
Raising a hand as though to shade his eyes, Lang left a space between his fingers, keeping the sleeper in view as he walked to where the Porsche was parked. The knit cap slowly turned. Lang, too, was being watched.
In the car, he circled the block. The man was gone. Lang reminded himself that paranoia doesn't necessarily mean someone really isn't after you.
CHAPTER THREE
1
Atlanta
That afternoon
Lang knew Sara, his secretary, would have alerted him to any emergency in his practice. It was as much as to occupy his mind as to see things for himself that he went to his office, a suite high in one of downtown Atlanta's taller buildings.
She had been full of teary condolences at that morning's funeral, and Lang expected Sara to begin weeping again. She had, after all, known Janet and Jeff well. To his surprise, she greeted him with, "Kennel called. Janet left this number as an emergency contact. The dog, Grumps, been there over two weeks. Want me to pick it up? What kind of a name is 'Grumps' anyway? What ever happened to Spot or Fido?"
"Name Jeff picked out, I guess." Lang had no idea what he was going to do with one large, ugly dog. But Grumps had been Jeff's friend and he sure as hell wasn't going to see the animal sent to the pound. Actually, when he thought about it, having the mutt around might be like having a little part of his family back. "No thanks. I'll pick him up on the way home."
He sat down behind a desk covered with files bearing Post-Its.
Once he had retired from his previous occupation, he and Dawn had agreed the law was an appealing second career. His small pension plus her salary saw him through school. The idea of working for someone else was unappealing. Upon graduation, he set out his own shingle and began working the phones with old acquaintances for clients.
Word spread. His practice became profitable, enabling Dawn to quit her job and open the boutique of which she had always dreamed. No longer subject to the unpredictability of his former work, he was home almost every night. And when he wasn't, his wife knew where he was and when to anticipate his return.
They pretty much had it all, as the Jimmy Buffet song says: big house, money to do what they wanted and a love for each other that time seemed to fuel like pouring gasoline on a fire. Even after five years, it hadn't been unusual for Dawn to meet him at the door in something skimpy or nothing at all – and they would make love in the living room, too impatient to wait to get to the bed.
It had been embarrassing the evening Lang brought a client home unannounced.
The only real cloud on their horizon was Dawn's inability to get pregnant. After endless fertility tests, they arranged for an adoption that had been only months away when Dawn began to lose both appetite and weight. The female parts that had refused to reproduce had become malignant. In less than a year, her full breasts had become empty sacks and her ribs looked as though they would break through the pale skin with the next labored breath. This was the first time Lang realized the same universe that could give him a loving, helpful wife could dispassionately watch her degenerate from a healthy woman into a hairless skeleton in a hospital bed where her breath stank of death and her only pleasure was the drugs that temporarily took away the pain.
As the cancer progressed, he and Dawn spoke of her recovery, the things they would do and places they would go together. Each of them hoped the other believed it. He, and he suspected she too, prayed for speed to reach the end that was inevitable.
Lang suffered in the certain knowledge of her mortality and in the irrational guilt that he was unable to give her comfort. He had more time than anyone would have wanted to prepare for her death.
As he remembered, he wondered which was worse: the torture of certain death or the sudden snatching away of his sister and nephew.
At least for the latter, he could dream of revenge, of getting even with the powers that had caused their deaths. That was a satisfaction he would never have for Dawn.
Over the years since his retirement, he had diminishing need to use his former contacts. How many of his old cohorts remained, he wondered as he groped in a desk drawer. His fingers found the false back and he slid a wooden panel out of place. Behind it was a small booklet which he pulled out and opened on the desk. Who was left? More importantly, who was left that owed him a favor?
He dialed a number with a 202 area code, let it ring twice and hung up. Somewhere, Lang's own phone number would appear on a computer screen. In less than a second, that number would be verified with Lang's name and location. That is, if the number he had called still belonged to the person he hoped he was calling.
Within a minute, Sara buzzed him. "There's a Mr. Berkley on the phone, says he's returning your call."
Lang picked up. "Miles? How they hangin', ole buddy?"
The reply took a split second longer than an ordinary call. The call had been routed through one of a number of random relays scattered around the globe and was completely untraceable.
"Jus' fine, Lang. How th' hell you doin'?" Through the years, Miles Berkley had clung to his southern drawl as though it were a prized possession.
"Not so good, Miles. I need some help."
Lang knew his words were being compared to old voiceprints. Or verified by some technology that had come along since his departure.
Pause.
"Ennythin' I can do, Lang…"
"There was a fire in Paris three days ago, looked like thermite was used." "So I heard." Miles still read local papers. Anything abnormal, anything that might be the precursor to possible activity of interest, was noted, examined and catalogued. Miles apparently had the same job.
Grateful for that bit of luck, Lang asked, "Any military stores missing? Any ideas where that shit came from, who might have weapons like that on hand?"
"What's your interest?" Miles wanted to know. "Think it might be a client of yours?"
"It was my sister, her friend's house. She and my nephew were in it."
There was a pause that was too long to attribute solely to a relay. "Shit, I'm sorry, Lang, Had no idea. I can see why you'd wanna know but we don't have zip so far. No breakins at military installations, no inventory missing, far as we know. 'Course about ennybody could walk off with half the Russian arsenal without the Ruskies knowin'. Your sister into something she shouldna been?"
"Nothing more than her kid, her medical practice and her church. Hardly criminal."
"That makes it tough to guess at a motive. Say, you're not thinking of coming out of retirement, are you? Hope not. Whoever these bastards are, they're likely to be pros. No way you can take 'em on by yourself, even if you knew who they were."
"Wouldn't think of it," Lang lied. "You can understand my interest. Any chance you can keep me posted, you find out anything?"
"You know I can't do that, not officially, anyway. Asshole buddy to asshole buddy, I'll see what I can do."
For several minutes after he hung up, Lang stared out of the window. He had just begun and already he was at a dead end.
2
Atlanta
Later the same day
Park Place was not a very original name: the developer of Lang's condo building had taken it right off the Monopoly board. There was no Boardwalk nearby. Putting up a high-rise that looked like a stack of square checkers probably was not a new idea, either. Having a doorman in a comic opera uniform was, however, a first for Atlanta and a bit rich for any place south of New York's Upper East Side.
When Lang got home, Richard the doorman wasn't as much an amenity as an obstacle. He was inspecting Grumps with the same expression he might have used for garbage dumped in the building's marble foyer. The dog's wagging tail and imploring brown eyes did little to diminish the disdain.
Grumps didn't much look like a pet of the affluent, Lang grudgingly admitted. The dog could have been claimed by almost any breed, with his shaggy black coat and white face. One ear was pointed, the other folded over like a wilted flower. Straining at the end of his new leash, Grumps was sniffing a bow-fronted boulle chest that Lang had long suspected might have been the genuine article. Had the dog not already anointed the boxwoods outside, Lang would have been nervous about the Abkhazian area rugs.
He figured a fifty would turn contempt to gratitude and he was right.
"He was my nephew's," Lang explained apologetically as he handed over the folded bill. "I didn't know what else to do with him."
Richard pocketed the money with a smoothness of one accustomed to residents' largess beyond the Christmas fund. No doubt he was aware of Janet and Jeff's deaths. Like all the building's employees, he seemed to know what was going on in the lives of those he served.
He winked conspiratorially. "Looks like he weighs under ten pounds to me."
The condominium association's rules forbade pets in excess of ten pounds, a weight Grumps clearly exceeded five or six times.
"The gift is to make sure your powers of estimation don't deteriorate," Lang said with a wink.
"Count on it. Can I help you with the package?"
Richard was referring to the wrapped painting Lang had under the arm that wasn't holding the leash. Lang thanked him but declined, in a hurry to reach the elevators before any of his more realistically sighted neighbors appeared.
Once the dog had inspected every inch of the condo, verifying that he and Lang were the only living creatures present, he slumped into a corner, staring into space with one of those canine expressions that is subject to multiple interpretations. Lang would have guessed he missed Jeff.
A good feed would cheer him up. But what to feed him? Lang had neglected to stop by the store for dog food, even had he known what brand Grumps preferred. Guiltily, Lang transferred a pound of hamburger from the freezer to the microwave. His offering received no more than a polite sniff. The mutt really did miss his young master.
"You don't want to eat, it's okay with me," Lang said, instantly feeling foolish for trying to strike up a conversation with a dog.
Grumps's only acknowledgement was shifting his mournful brown eyes in Lang's direction. Lang sat on the sofa and wondered what he was going to do with a dog that Wouldn't eat and a painting he didn't want.
Grumps began to snore. Swell. Nothing like a dog for companionship.
Lang gazed around the familiar space. The door from the outside hall entered directly into the living room. Across from it, floor-to-ceiling glass framed downtown Atlanta. To his right were the kitchen and dining area. On his left was the door to the single bedroom. Most of the available wall space was occupied by built-in shelves loaded with an eclectic selection of books that demanded more space than the small suite had to give. He had been reduced to buying only paperbacks because he could not bear to' discard hardbacks but had no place to put new ones.
What little wall space remained was given to oversized landscapes by relatively unknown impressionists, paintings he and Dawn had purchased together. His favorite, a reputed Herzog, hung in the bedroom where its rich greens and yellows could brighten the mornings.
The art was among the very few things he had kept after the sale of the house he and Dawn had hoped to fill with children. Most of her antiques were too large for the condo, their fussiness too feminine for his taste and the association too painful. He had kidded himself into believing the hurt would be diminished by getting rid of things familiar.
Shedding the furniture had been an epiphany in a sense, though. It had led him to recognize furniture, clothes, appliances as mere stuff, objects rented for a lifetime at most. Dawn's death had made him acutely aware of the futility of material possessions: they were only things you had to give up in the end. Not that he had become an ascetic, shunning worldly delights. But if he could enjoy the better restaurants, live in the place of his choice, drive the car he wanted, the rest was excess baggage.
Lang had replaced antiques with contemporary pieces of chrome, leather and glass, retaining only two items, both predating his wife: a golden oak linen press, which housed the television and sound system, and a small secretary, the pediment of which bore the carved lazy eights that were the signature of Thomas Elfe, Charleston's premier cabinetmaker of the eighteenth century. Behind the wavy, hand-blown glass was his small collection of antiquities and a few rare books.
He forgot Grumps's snores for the moment while he considered the brown paper package leaning against the wall by the door. Might as well have a look.
He found pretty much what he had expected: a canvas of about three by four feet depicted three bearded men in robes and sandals. They appeared to be examining an oblong stone structure. The two on either side held sticks or staffs while the one in the middle knelt, pointing to an inscription carved into the rock, "ETINARCADIAEGOSUM". Latin. "I am in Arcadia" was Lang's tentative interpretation, but that left over the "sum." Why would there be a superfluous word? An incorrect translation was the answer that first came to mind. But he couldn't make sense of the words any other way.
The fourth figure, a woman richly dressed, stood to the right of the men, her hand on the shoulder of the one kneeling. Behind the figures, mountains dominated the landscape, chalky hills instead of the verdant foliage of most religious pictures. The geography seemed to converge on a single gap, a rugged valley in the hazy distance.
There was something about that gap… He turned the picture upside down. The space between the mountains now resembled a familiar shape, roughly similar to the profile of Washington on a quarter. A small peak made the long nose, a rounded hill the chin. It was a stretch, but that was what it looked like.
The painting had no meaning he could see, Biblical or otherwise. He crossed the room to where he had tossed his suit jacket across a chair and took the appraisal out of the pocket, putting the Polaroid on the secretary: "Les Bergers d'Arcadie, copy of the original by Nicholas Poussin (1593-1665)," read the note from Ansley Galleries.
Did that mean the work was a copy of Poussin's work or that Poussin had made the copy? Had the copy been made between 1593 and 1665 or had the artist lived seventy-two years? Whichever the case, the appraiser at Ansley Galleries had put a value of ten to twelve thousand dollars on the painting which Lang assumed included the two-hundred-buck-plus frame he had paid for. Whether the value was real or merely a feel-good for a customer, he could only guess.
No matter. It wasn't going to fit easily here. He stepped back to take another look before moving the painting from beside the door. Where could he put it where it wouldn't be in the way in the small apartment? Nowhere, really.
He set it on the fold-out desk of the secretary, stood back and stared at it again. Bergers – French for shepherds, perhaps? That would explain the staffs or crooks but not the woman who was far too well-clad to herd sheep. Arcadie? Acadia? A name given to part of Canada by eighteenth-century French settlers, wasn't it? He was almost certain. When the English expelled them, they had immigrated to the nearest French territory, Louisiana, where they became known as Acadians or 'Cajuns. Longfellow's epic Evangeline and all that. But the British hadn't conquered Canada by 1665, had they? And what the hell did Canadian shepherds have to do with anything?
Curious, he searched the bookshelves until he found a historical encyclopedia. The province in Canada had been named for a part of Greece. Great. Now he had shepherds that were Greek instead of Canadian. Lots of help that was.
Leaving the puzzle of the painting on the secretary, he took the appraisal and Polaroid into the bedroom and put them in the drawer of his bedside table, making a mental note to take them to his lock box next trip to the bank. Exchanging his suit for a pair of jeans, he headed back into the living room as he buttoned up a denim shirt.
3
Atlanta
The next day
When Lang got home from work the next day, he noticed scratches on the brass plate of the lock on his front door, small marks that an untrained eye would never have noticed. Squatting so his eyes were level with the doorknob, Lang could tell that these were no random marks left by a careless cleaning crew. Each tiny scrape led to the opening of the lock. Someone had tried to pick the mechanism.
Lang stood. He had almost succeeded in dismissing the incident on the Ile St. Louis as a botched robbery attempt. But not quite. Someone from his former life? It was still unlikely they would have waited this long to conclude whatever business they might have had. Besides, he was in America, not Europe. As if that still made a difference.
The more important question was, had they succeeded and how many were "they"?
Lang made himself swallow hard, giving himself time to dissipate the outrage of having his personal space violated. Bursting in on one or more possibly armed burglars might make for a great scene from a Bruce Willis movie but it wasn't a move towards a longer, healthier life.
Call the cops? He was reaching for the cell phone on his belt and paused. The Atlanta police? It would take them forever to arrive and if there was no one in his unit, he'd look like a fool.
He turned and went back to the elevators.
At the concierge desk in the lobby, he waited until the pimply-faced kid in the ill-fitting uniform finished making a phone call and turned to him.
Lang shrugged with an embarrassed smile. "I locked myself out."
"Your number?" The kid was already looking under the desk for one of the skeletons. With the number of geriatric residents, Lang's problem was not unusual.
On the ride back up, Lang felt a twinge of guilt. If burglars were in the apartment, there was some possibility they were armed. Maybe he should have summoned the law after all. Involving this young man in a possible robbery, exposing the lad to potential physical harm, wasn't a nice thing to do. Conversely, facing one or more red-handed felons alone was stupid. Heroes died young.
Accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the wealthy, the concierge never asked how Lang had managed to engage the dead bolt from outside in the hall. Instead, he pushed the door open and gestured Lang inside. "There we are, Mr. Reilly."
Lang's eyes were searching the small space.as he handed a folded bill over. "Thanks."
"Thank you, sir." From the tone, Lang must have given him a larger tip than he had anticipated.
Lang noticed nothing unusual until he turned to face the interior wall. The painting was gone. He hurriedly glanced around in the unlikelihood he had misplaced it. How do you lose a canvas that big in an apartment this small? You don't.
He took two steps, stopping at the counter that separated kitchen from living room. Enjoying the coolness of Mexican tiles on his stomach, Grumps looked up and yawned.
"Great guard dog you are," Lang muttered as he started to turn towards the bedroom.
He stopped again. Beside Grumps was a large grease spot. The intruders had occupied the dog with something to eat. As verifying the fact, Grumps burped loudly.
"Excuse you, bribe-taker. You better hope they didn't lace that hunk of meat with rat poison."
Unabashed, Grumps stretched and belched again.
At first, the bedroom seemed untouched.
Then Lang noticed that one of his silver hairbrushes was on the side of the dresser opposite where he normally left it. A photograph of Dawn faced the room at a slightly different angle. Someone had been careful but not careful enough.
Stepping around the bed, Lang opened the single drawer of the bedside table. The Browning nine-millimeter he had carried for years was where he kept it. Besides the gun and a box of ammunition, the drawer was empty.
Lang was certain he had put the Polaroid and appraisal of the picture there for temporary safekeeping. Who would steal a Polaroid?
The memory of the smoldering ruin in the Place des Vosges was his answer: someone who wanted to leave no trace of that picture.
He shook his head. Stealing the painting and the photo…
Lang took a quick inventory of his home. A few items were an inch or so out of place but nothing else was missing. Perhaps the disappearance of the three items made a sort of illogical sense. The thief had been unhurried but left the sterling silverware, a pair of gold cuff links and studs, and the pistol. The purpose of the break-in had clearly been the Poussin and all evidence of it.
Why?
Lang had no idea but every intention of finding out.
1
Atlanta
That afternoon
Lang knew Sara, his secretary, would have alerted him to any emergency in his practice. It was as much as to occupy his mind as to see things for himself that he went to his office, a suite high in one of downtown Atlanta's taller buildings.
She had been full of teary condolences at that morning's funeral, and Lang expected Sara to begin weeping again. She had, after all, known Janet and Jeff well. To his surprise, she greeted him with, "Kennel called. Janet left this number as an emergency contact. The dog, Grumps, been there over two weeks. Want me to pick it up? What kind of a name is 'Grumps' anyway? What ever happened to Spot or Fido?"
"Name Jeff picked out, I guess." Lang had no idea what he was going to do with one large, ugly dog. But Grumps had been Jeff's friend and he sure as hell wasn't going to see the animal sent to the pound. Actually, when he thought about it, having the mutt around might be like having a little part of his family back. "No thanks. I'll pick him up on the way home."
He sat down behind a desk covered with files bearing Post-Its.
Once he had retired from his previous occupation, he and Dawn had agreed the law was an appealing second career. His small pension plus her salary saw him through school. The idea of working for someone else was unappealing. Upon graduation, he set out his own shingle and began working the phones with old acquaintances for clients.
Word spread. His practice became profitable, enabling Dawn to quit her job and open the boutique of which she had always dreamed. No longer subject to the unpredictability of his former work, he was home almost every night. And when he wasn't, his wife knew where he was and when to anticipate his return.
They pretty much had it all, as the Jimmy Buffet song says: big house, money to do what they wanted and a love for each other that time seemed to fuel like pouring gasoline on a fire. Even after five years, it hadn't been unusual for Dawn to meet him at the door in something skimpy or nothing at all – and they would make love in the living room, too impatient to wait to get to the bed.
It had been embarrassing the evening Lang brought a client home unannounced.
The only real cloud on their horizon was Dawn's inability to get pregnant. After endless fertility tests, they arranged for an adoption that had been only months away when Dawn began to lose both appetite and weight. The female parts that had refused to reproduce had become malignant. In less than a year, her full breasts had become empty sacks and her ribs looked as though they would break through the pale skin with the next labored breath. This was the first time Lang realized the same universe that could give him a loving, helpful wife could dispassionately watch her degenerate from a healthy woman into a hairless skeleton in a hospital bed where her breath stank of death and her only pleasure was the drugs that temporarily took away the pain.
As the cancer progressed, he and Dawn spoke of her recovery, the things they would do and places they would go together. Each of them hoped the other believed it. He, and he suspected she too, prayed for speed to reach the end that was inevitable.
Lang suffered in the certain knowledge of her mortality and in the irrational guilt that he was unable to give her comfort. He had more time than anyone would have wanted to prepare for her death.
As he remembered, he wondered which was worse: the torture of certain death or the sudden snatching away of his sister and nephew.
At least for the latter, he could dream of revenge, of getting even with the powers that had caused their deaths. That was a satisfaction he would never have for Dawn.
Over the years since his retirement, he had diminishing need to use his former contacts. How many of his old cohorts remained, he wondered as he groped in a desk drawer. His fingers found the false back and he slid a wooden panel out of place. Behind it was a small booklet which he pulled out and opened on the desk. Who was left? More importantly, who was left that owed him a favor?
He dialed a number with a 202 area code, let it ring twice and hung up. Somewhere, Lang's own phone number would appear on a computer screen. In less than a second, that number would be verified with Lang's name and location. That is, if the number he had called still belonged to the person he hoped he was calling.
Within a minute, Sara buzzed him. "There's a Mr. Berkley on the phone, says he's returning your call."
Lang picked up. "Miles? How they hangin', ole buddy?"
The reply took a split second longer than an ordinary call. The call had been routed through one of a number of random relays scattered around the globe and was completely untraceable.
"Jus' fine, Lang. How th' hell you doin'?" Through the years, Miles Berkley had clung to his southern drawl as though it were a prized possession.
"Not so good, Miles. I need some help."
Lang knew his words were being compared to old voiceprints. Or verified by some technology that had come along since his departure.
Pause.
"Ennythin' I can do, Lang…"
"There was a fire in Paris three days ago, looked like thermite was used." "So I heard." Miles still read local papers. Anything abnormal, anything that might be the precursor to possible activity of interest, was noted, examined and catalogued. Miles apparently had the same job.
Grateful for that bit of luck, Lang asked, "Any military stores missing? Any ideas where that shit came from, who might have weapons like that on hand?"
"What's your interest?" Miles wanted to know. "Think it might be a client of yours?"
"It was my sister, her friend's house. She and my nephew were in it."
There was a pause that was too long to attribute solely to a relay. "Shit, I'm sorry, Lang, Had no idea. I can see why you'd wanna know but we don't have zip so far. No breakins at military installations, no inventory missing, far as we know. 'Course about ennybody could walk off with half the Russian arsenal without the Ruskies knowin'. Your sister into something she shouldna been?"
"Nothing more than her kid, her medical practice and her church. Hardly criminal."
"That makes it tough to guess at a motive. Say, you're not thinking of coming out of retirement, are you? Hope not. Whoever these bastards are, they're likely to be pros. No way you can take 'em on by yourself, even if you knew who they were."
"Wouldn't think of it," Lang lied. "You can understand my interest. Any chance you can keep me posted, you find out anything?"
"You know I can't do that, not officially, anyway. Asshole buddy to asshole buddy, I'll see what I can do."
For several minutes after he hung up, Lang stared out of the window. He had just begun and already he was at a dead end.
2
Atlanta
Later the same day
Park Place was not a very original name: the developer of Lang's condo building had taken it right off the Monopoly board. There was no Boardwalk nearby. Putting up a high-rise that looked like a stack of square checkers probably was not a new idea, either. Having a doorman in a comic opera uniform was, however, a first for Atlanta and a bit rich for any place south of New York's Upper East Side.
When Lang got home, Richard the doorman wasn't as much an amenity as an obstacle. He was inspecting Grumps with the same expression he might have used for garbage dumped in the building's marble foyer. The dog's wagging tail and imploring brown eyes did little to diminish the disdain.
Grumps didn't much look like a pet of the affluent, Lang grudgingly admitted. The dog could have been claimed by almost any breed, with his shaggy black coat and white face. One ear was pointed, the other folded over like a wilted flower. Straining at the end of his new leash, Grumps was sniffing a bow-fronted boulle chest that Lang had long suspected might have been the genuine article. Had the dog not already anointed the boxwoods outside, Lang would have been nervous about the Abkhazian area rugs.
He figured a fifty would turn contempt to gratitude and he was right.
"He was my nephew's," Lang explained apologetically as he handed over the folded bill. "I didn't know what else to do with him."
Richard pocketed the money with a smoothness of one accustomed to residents' largess beyond the Christmas fund. No doubt he was aware of Janet and Jeff's deaths. Like all the building's employees, he seemed to know what was going on in the lives of those he served.
He winked conspiratorially. "Looks like he weighs under ten pounds to me."
The condominium association's rules forbade pets in excess of ten pounds, a weight Grumps clearly exceeded five or six times.
"The gift is to make sure your powers of estimation don't deteriorate," Lang said with a wink.
"Count on it. Can I help you with the package?"
Richard was referring to the wrapped painting Lang had under the arm that wasn't holding the leash. Lang thanked him but declined, in a hurry to reach the elevators before any of his more realistically sighted neighbors appeared.
Once the dog had inspected every inch of the condo, verifying that he and Lang were the only living creatures present, he slumped into a corner, staring into space with one of those canine expressions that is subject to multiple interpretations. Lang would have guessed he missed Jeff.
A good feed would cheer him up. But what to feed him? Lang had neglected to stop by the store for dog food, even had he known what brand Grumps preferred. Guiltily, Lang transferred a pound of hamburger from the freezer to the microwave. His offering received no more than a polite sniff. The mutt really did miss his young master.
"You don't want to eat, it's okay with me," Lang said, instantly feeling foolish for trying to strike up a conversation with a dog.
Grumps's only acknowledgement was shifting his mournful brown eyes in Lang's direction. Lang sat on the sofa and wondered what he was going to do with a dog that Wouldn't eat and a painting he didn't want.
Grumps began to snore. Swell. Nothing like a dog for companionship.
Lang gazed around the familiar space. The door from the outside hall entered directly into the living room. Across from it, floor-to-ceiling glass framed downtown Atlanta. To his right were the kitchen and dining area. On his left was the door to the single bedroom. Most of the available wall space was occupied by built-in shelves loaded with an eclectic selection of books that demanded more space than the small suite had to give. He had been reduced to buying only paperbacks because he could not bear to' discard hardbacks but had no place to put new ones.
What little wall space remained was given to oversized landscapes by relatively unknown impressionists, paintings he and Dawn had purchased together. His favorite, a reputed Herzog, hung in the bedroom where its rich greens and yellows could brighten the mornings.
The art was among the very few things he had kept after the sale of the house he and Dawn had hoped to fill with children. Most of her antiques were too large for the condo, their fussiness too feminine for his taste and the association too painful. He had kidded himself into believing the hurt would be diminished by getting rid of things familiar.
Shedding the furniture had been an epiphany in a sense, though. It had led him to recognize furniture, clothes, appliances as mere stuff, objects rented for a lifetime at most. Dawn's death had made him acutely aware of the futility of material possessions: they were only things you had to give up in the end. Not that he had become an ascetic, shunning worldly delights. But if he could enjoy the better restaurants, live in the place of his choice, drive the car he wanted, the rest was excess baggage.
Lang had replaced antiques with contemporary pieces of chrome, leather and glass, retaining only two items, both predating his wife: a golden oak linen press, which housed the television and sound system, and a small secretary, the pediment of which bore the carved lazy eights that were the signature of Thomas Elfe, Charleston's premier cabinetmaker of the eighteenth century. Behind the wavy, hand-blown glass was his small collection of antiquities and a few rare books.
He forgot Grumps's snores for the moment while he considered the brown paper package leaning against the wall by the door. Might as well have a look.
He found pretty much what he had expected: a canvas of about three by four feet depicted three bearded men in robes and sandals. They appeared to be examining an oblong stone structure. The two on either side held sticks or staffs while the one in the middle knelt, pointing to an inscription carved into the rock, "ETINARCADIAEGOSUM". Latin. "I am in Arcadia" was Lang's tentative interpretation, but that left over the "sum." Why would there be a superfluous word? An incorrect translation was the answer that first came to mind. But he couldn't make sense of the words any other way.
The fourth figure, a woman richly dressed, stood to the right of the men, her hand on the shoulder of the one kneeling. Behind the figures, mountains dominated the landscape, chalky hills instead of the verdant foliage of most religious pictures. The geography seemed to converge on a single gap, a rugged valley in the hazy distance.
There was something about that gap… He turned the picture upside down. The space between the mountains now resembled a familiar shape, roughly similar to the profile of Washington on a quarter. A small peak made the long nose, a rounded hill the chin. It was a stretch, but that was what it looked like.
The painting had no meaning he could see, Biblical or otherwise. He crossed the room to where he had tossed his suit jacket across a chair and took the appraisal out of the pocket, putting the Polaroid on the secretary: "Les Bergers d'Arcadie, copy of the original by Nicholas Poussin (1593-1665)," read the note from Ansley Galleries.
Did that mean the work was a copy of Poussin's work or that Poussin had made the copy? Had the copy been made between 1593 and 1665 or had the artist lived seventy-two years? Whichever the case, the appraiser at Ansley Galleries had put a value of ten to twelve thousand dollars on the painting which Lang assumed included the two-hundred-buck-plus frame he had paid for. Whether the value was real or merely a feel-good for a customer, he could only guess.
No matter. It wasn't going to fit easily here. He stepped back to take another look before moving the painting from beside the door. Where could he put it where it wouldn't be in the way in the small apartment? Nowhere, really.
He set it on the fold-out desk of the secretary, stood back and stared at it again. Bergers – French for shepherds, perhaps? That would explain the staffs or crooks but not the woman who was far too well-clad to herd sheep. Arcadie? Acadia? A name given to part of Canada by eighteenth-century French settlers, wasn't it? He was almost certain. When the English expelled them, they had immigrated to the nearest French territory, Louisiana, where they became known as Acadians or 'Cajuns. Longfellow's epic Evangeline and all that. But the British hadn't conquered Canada by 1665, had they? And what the hell did Canadian shepherds have to do with anything?
Curious, he searched the bookshelves until he found a historical encyclopedia. The province in Canada had been named for a part of Greece. Great. Now he had shepherds that were Greek instead of Canadian. Lots of help that was.
Leaving the puzzle of the painting on the secretary, he took the appraisal and Polaroid into the bedroom and put them in the drawer of his bedside table, making a mental note to take them to his lock box next trip to the bank. Exchanging his suit for a pair of jeans, he headed back into the living room as he buttoned up a denim shirt.
3
Atlanta
The next day
When Lang got home from work the next day, he noticed scratches on the brass plate of the lock on his front door, small marks that an untrained eye would never have noticed. Squatting so his eyes were level with the doorknob, Lang could tell that these were no random marks left by a careless cleaning crew. Each tiny scrape led to the opening of the lock. Someone had tried to pick the mechanism.
Lang stood. He had almost succeeded in dismissing the incident on the Ile St. Louis as a botched robbery attempt. But not quite. Someone from his former life? It was still unlikely they would have waited this long to conclude whatever business they might have had. Besides, he was in America, not Europe. As if that still made a difference.
The more important question was, had they succeeded and how many were "they"?
Lang made himself swallow hard, giving himself time to dissipate the outrage of having his personal space violated. Bursting in on one or more possibly armed burglars might make for a great scene from a Bruce Willis movie but it wasn't a move towards a longer, healthier life.
Call the cops? He was reaching for the cell phone on his belt and paused. The Atlanta police? It would take them forever to arrive and if there was no one in his unit, he'd look like a fool.
He turned and went back to the elevators.
At the concierge desk in the lobby, he waited until the pimply-faced kid in the ill-fitting uniform finished making a phone call and turned to him.
Lang shrugged with an embarrassed smile. "I locked myself out."
"Your number?" The kid was already looking under the desk for one of the skeletons. With the number of geriatric residents, Lang's problem was not unusual.
On the ride back up, Lang felt a twinge of guilt. If burglars were in the apartment, there was some possibility they were armed. Maybe he should have summoned the law after all. Involving this young man in a possible robbery, exposing the lad to potential physical harm, wasn't a nice thing to do. Conversely, facing one or more red-handed felons alone was stupid. Heroes died young.
Accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the wealthy, the concierge never asked how Lang had managed to engage the dead bolt from outside in the hall. Instead, he pushed the door open and gestured Lang inside. "There we are, Mr. Reilly."
Lang's eyes were searching the small space.as he handed a folded bill over. "Thanks."
"Thank you, sir." From the tone, Lang must have given him a larger tip than he had anticipated.
Lang noticed nothing unusual until he turned to face the interior wall. The painting was gone. He hurriedly glanced around in the unlikelihood he had misplaced it. How do you lose a canvas that big in an apartment this small? You don't.
He took two steps, stopping at the counter that separated kitchen from living room. Enjoying the coolness of Mexican tiles on his stomach, Grumps looked up and yawned.
"Great guard dog you are," Lang muttered as he started to turn towards the bedroom.
He stopped again. Beside Grumps was a large grease spot. The intruders had occupied the dog with something to eat. As verifying the fact, Grumps burped loudly.
"Excuse you, bribe-taker. You better hope they didn't lace that hunk of meat with rat poison."
Unabashed, Grumps stretched and belched again.
At first, the bedroom seemed untouched.
Then Lang noticed that one of his silver hairbrushes was on the side of the dresser opposite where he normally left it. A photograph of Dawn faced the room at a slightly different angle. Someone had been careful but not careful enough.
Stepping around the bed, Lang opened the single drawer of the bedside table. The Browning nine-millimeter he had carried for years was where he kept it. Besides the gun and a box of ammunition, the drawer was empty.
Lang was certain he had put the Polaroid and appraisal of the picture there for temporary safekeeping. Who would steal a Polaroid?
The memory of the smoldering ruin in the Place des Vosges was his answer: someone who wanted to leave no trace of that picture.
He shook his head. Stealing the painting and the photo…
Lang took a quick inventory of his home. A few items were an inch or so out of place but nothing else was missing. Perhaps the disappearance of the three items made a sort of illogical sense. The thief had been unhurried but left the sterling silverware, a pair of gold cuff links and studs, and the pistol. The purpose of the break-in had clearly been the Poussin and all evidence of it.
Why?
Lang had no idea but every intention of finding out.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Atlanta
The next day
Lang was waiting at Ansley Galleries when it opened the next morning. The same purple-haired girl was behind the counter with the same bored expression.
"Our copy?" she asked. "Good thing we keep copies of all our appraisals, like I told you. You'd be surprised how many people keep 'em in the house. There's a fire or something and both the art and the appraisal's gone."
"And the Polaroid," Lang asked, "you said you keep an extra of it, too?" She nodded, chewing a wad of gum. "Yeah, the Polaroid, too."
He smiled weakly and shrugged, a man embarrassed by his own ineffectiveness. "Dumb me. Can't remember where I put the envelope with them in it. Be happy to pay for copies." The gum snapped. "No problem."
A minute later she was back. The copy of the photograph,. though not in color, was remarkably clear. He handed her a twenty.
She shook her head. "Happy to help. You lose that, we'll charge for the next set of copies."
Outside, he pretended to search his pockets for car keys while he checked up and down the street. If there were watchers, they were out of sight.
2
Atlanta
An hour later
"High Museum as in art museum?" Sara asked incredulously. "You want me to get the number of the art museum?"
Lang settled behind his desk, speaking through the open door. "What's the big surprise? I go to the museum, theater, ballet, et al, regular culture vulture. You don't remember my getting tickets for you for the opening of the Matisse exhibit?"
Sara shook her head without a gray hair moving out of place. "Lang, that was years ago. And it was one of your clients who got the tickets."
"Just find out who the director is, okay?"
Two hours later, Lang parked in the MARTA lot behind what appeared to be white building blocks dumped into a random pile by a giant child. The contemporary edifice had to be one of the ugliest in a town not known for its architectural treasures. Lang's theory was that Sherman's destruction of the city a century and a half before had given Atlanta an atavistic insensitivity to structural aesthetics. The High Museum was named for the donors of the site, the High family, not for any preeminence in the art world. In fact, the concrete and glass housed a collection surprising only in its modesty when compared to similar institutions in comparable cities.
Lang passed by the circular ramp inside the main hall and took an elevator to the top floor. Exiting, he passed a modern mural on canvas that an alert janitorial crew anywhere else would have recognized as a painter's drop cloth and hauled outside to the Dumpsters. At the end, he found a door marked "Administrative Offices."
Lang had the impression he had stepped through Alice's looking glass. Hair of every color, rings in every visible orifice, clothes from Star Wars. The clerk at Ansley Galleries had been conservative in comparison.
A young woman with half her head shaved and polished, the other covered by Astroturf-green hair, glanced up from the computer terminal on her desk. "May I help you?"
"I'm Langford Reilly. I have an appointment with Mr. Seitz."
The woman jabbed a dagger-length fingernail painted an ominous black. "In there." She picked up a phone. "Mr. Reilly's here to see you."
A man stepped from a doorway. Lang wasn't sure what he had expected but Mr. Seitz wasn't it. Instead, he was normal looking. Well-tailored dark suit, red power tie, shiny black wingtips. He was slender, just under six feet tall Early forties, judging by the dove-wings of gray over his ears. His chiseled face had recently seen the beach. Or the inside of a tanning booth.
A gold Rolex competed in dazzle with jeweled cuff links as he extended a manicured hand. "Jason Seitz, Mr. Reilly."
"Thanks for seeing me on such short notice," Lang said.
"Quite a colorful crew you have here."
His eyes followed Lang's stare. "Art students. We try to 47 hire from the art school," he said as if that explained the costumes. "Won't you step this way?"
They entered an office that was as traditional as the employees outside were weird. Seitz indicated a leather wing chair where Lang could admire the wall of photographs: Seitz shaking hands with or hugging local business leaders, politicians and celebrities. He slipped behind a dining room table-sized desk littered with snapshots of paintings, sculptures and some other objects Lang didn't immediately recognize.
Seitz leaned back, made a steeple of his fingers and said, "I usually don't have the pleasure of meeting with people I don't know, but Ms…"
"Mitford-Sara Mitford, my secretary." Seitz nodded. "Ms. Mitford was quite insistent, said it was urgent. Fortunately, I had a cancellation…"
His gaze had the practiced sincerity of someone used to soliciting money. It fitted nicely with the favor he wanted Lang to know he was doing him.
"I really appreciate your taking the time. I'm sure running this place keeps you busy."
The museum director smiled. Lang would have been astonished had he shown anything but perfect teeth. "Actually; the board of directors runs the museum. I am their humble servant."
"Yeah. Well…" Uncertain how to respond to the ill fitting humility, Lang opened his briefcase and leaned forward to hand the copy of the Polaroid across the expanse of mahogany. "I was wondering if you could tell me about that."
Seitz frowned, squinting at the picture. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Les Bergers d'Arcadie, Nicholas Poussin. Or at least a copy of it."
Seitz nodded. "Mid-seventeenth-century French, if I recall. The original of that picture hangs in the Louvre. What specifically is it you want to know?"
Lang had what he thought was a plausible explanation. ''I'm not sure. That is, I'm a lawyer and I have a case involving…"
The director held up his hands, palms outward. "Whoa, Mr. Reilly! The museum is not in a position to authenticate art for individuals. As an attorney, I'm sure you can understand the liability issues."
Lang shook his head, eager to calm what he recognized as a bad case of legal anxiety syndrome. "I apologize. I didn't make myself clear. All I want is to learn the history of the painting, what it's supposed to depict."
Seitz was only marginally calmed. "I'm afraid I can't be of much help." He whirled his chair around, removing a book from the antique table behind him that served as a credenza. Thumbing through it, he continued. "I can say, I think, that what you have there is a picture of a copy, and not a particularly authentic copy, either. Ah, there… Not quite the same, is it?"
He was pointing to a photo of a similar picture. At first Lang saw no difference. He looked more closely. The background was smoother; there was no upside down profile of Washington.
"Religious art, late Renaissance, not my specialty," Seitz continued, shutting the book with a thump. He brought Lang's copy closer to his face. "Those letters on the structure, they look like Latin."
Lang moved to look over his shoulder. "I think so, yes."
"Obviously, they mean something. For that matter, the whole painting may well be symbolistic. Artists of that era often had messages in their paintings."
"You mean, like a code?"
"Sort of, but less sophisticated. For instance, you've seen a still life, flowers or vegetables with a bug or two, perhaps a wilted blossom?" Lang shrugged noncommittally. It wasn't the sort of art he would remember.
"It was popular about the time Poussin painted. A certain flower or plant-rosemary for memory, for example. A beetle might be reminiscent of an Egyptian scarab, symbolic of death or the afterlife or whatever."
Lang went back and sat down. "So you're saying this painting has a message of some sort." This time it was the director who shrugged. "I'm saying it's possible."
"Who might know?"
Seitz slowly spun his chair to face the window behind him and gazed out in silence for a moment. "I don't really have an idea." He flashed the Rolex. "And I fear we're running out of time."
Lang didn't budge from his seat. "Give me a name, if you would. Somebody likely to be familiar with Poussin, preferably somebody who might be able to decipher whatever symbolism there might be. Believe me, it's important. This is no academic exercise."
Seitz turned back to stare at him, a frown tugging at his mouth, no doubt because he wasn't used to being delayed. Then he returned to the row of books from which he had taken the first one before snatching another one up and paging through it, too.
"It would appear," the art director said, "that the leading authority on Poussin and on late Renaissance religious art, too, is a Guiedo Marcenni. He's written quite a lot about your man Poussin."
Lang pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase. "And where do I find Mr. Marcenni?"
The frown had become a sardonic smile. "Not 'mister', but 'Fra'. Brother Marcenni is a monk, an art historian with the Vatican Museum. Vatican, as in Rome." He stood. "Now I really must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Reilly. One of the young ladies will show you out."
He was gone before Lang could thank him. Thank him for nothing. Lang was more puzzled than ever.
3
Atlanta
That evening
Lang was so absorbed in his thoughts that he almost missed the elevator's stop at his floor. Still thinking, he took the few steps to his door and stooped to pick up the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He froze, key in hand.
"FIRE GUTS MIDTOWN DISTRICT," the above-the-fold headline screamed. An aerial view showed a pillar of smoke towering from a block of one-story, flat-roofed buildings. The one in the middle was – had been – Ansley Galleries.
Lang let himself in and dropped into the nearest chair, oblivious to Grumps, who was more than ready to go outside.
A fire leveled an entire block of Seventh Street early this afternoon as the result of a faulty gas stove, according to Capt. Jewal Abbar, Chief Investigator for the Atlanta Fire Department.
Three shops, Ansley Galleries, Dwight's Interiors and Afternoon Delites, were totally destroyed. Other establishments in the popular in-town shopping area were severely damaged.
Abbar said there were no serious injuries, although several people were treated at Grady Memorial Hospital for smoke inhalation. Maurice Wiser, manager of Afternoon Delites, a vegetarian restaurant, was quoted as saying the stove exploded when turned on.
Lang didn't finish the article, but dropped the paper and stared at the wall. It was possible, he conceded, that the stove exploded in an amazing concurrence of accident and coincidence. Just as it was possible someone had firebombed the house in Paris, he had nearly had his throat slit, and his highrise had been burglarized just to steal a painting-and a copy at that. Now the gallery that had kept a copy was also a fire casualty.
If all of that were coincidence, the Poussin made the curse of the Hope Diamond look like a lucky shamrock.
Instead of coincidence, he saw an emerging pattern, frightening in its simplicity: Whoever possessed that picture, or knew something about it, was in jeopardy. Including Lang.
But why? The original Poussin, the one in the Louvre, must have been seen by millions. The slightly different background in Janet's copy, then, was the reason someone wanted that particular painting. And if they wanted it badly enough to commit indiscriminate murder and arson for it…
Lang knew four things: They were intent on erasing every trace of that painting, they didn't care who got hurt, they had an international intelligence system as good or better than most police forces, and they were well prepared for the task.
The last two observations were the most frightening. Intelligence and preparation indicated a professional and a professional indicated an organization. What sort of an organization would burn and kill just to destroy a copy of the Poussin? An organization that had a very strong interest in whatever secret the canvas held.
His train of thought was derailed by Grumps's insistent pacing. "Okay, okay," he said. "Gimme a minute."
He went into the bedroom and opened the drawer in the bedside table. He took out the Browning. Easing back the slide, he confirmed there was a round in the chamber. He checked the safety and stuffed the weapon into his belt. From now on, it was going to be like the credit card: Don't leave home without it.
Tomorrow he would have to go apply for a permit. But for the moment, being caught without the gun had more dire consequences than being caught with it.
As Lang left the apartment with Grumps on a leash, he stopped in the hall to leave two telltales. The first was a tiny strip of plastic tape stretched between the door and jamb, a device any professional would anticipate and find fairly easily. Then he licked his hand and wiped it on the knob, sticking a hair to the brass. Virtually impossible to see and it would fall loose at the slightest touch.
If his reasoning was anywhere near correct, he could expect company soon.
4
Atlanta
A few minutes later
When Lang and Grumps came back in, he nuked a frozen enchilada in the microwave and fed Grumps the dog food he had finally remembered to buy. From the sounds of voracious eating, Lang judged he had made a good choice.
Lang's meal was laced with so many chilies it could have constituted an act of war by the Federal Republic of Mexico. He scraped his leftovers into Grumps's bowl. The dog gave him a reproachful glare and retreated to a corner, Lang's offering untouched. Apparently Lang was more a connoisseur of canned dog food than international cuisine
Lang selected a tubular steel chair· with minimal padding, one in which it was unlikely he would be very comfortable, putting it just to the side of the door to the outside hall. As the door opened, the chair would be behind it. Then he moved a three-way lamp to the other side of the entrance, its lowest setting enough to silhouette anyone coming through the doorway but dim enough not to spill into the hall outside. He put the Browning in his lap, although he didn't intend to use the automatic unless he had to. He wanted answers, not bodies.
Then he began to wait.
There wasn't enough light to read. So he just sat, observing Atlanta's skyline. Far to the south, he could see jets, pinpricks of light, as they approached or departed Hartsfield-Jackson International. Somewhere between Lang and the distant airport, beams of searchlights aimlessly crisscrossed the night sky. He resisted the impulse to check the luminous dial of his watch. Time passes more slowly when you keep track of it.
Maybe he was mistaken; maybe he was in no danger. Maybe, but unlikely. Whoever had obliterated the place in Paris and started a fire in Midtown wasn't likely to spare him. The only question was when it would happen.
Well after what Lang estimated was midnight, past the time he usually turned out the lights and retired, he detected, or imagined, something from the floor beside him, not so much a sound as an undefined interruption of clinging silence. A growl from Grumps, increasing until Lang put a comforting hand on the furry head. The dog had taken Lang's rebuke after the burglary to heart.
Lang stood, silently moving the chair aside and putting the Browning in his belt again. Caterpillars with icy feet were marching up and down the back of his neck where muscles were tightening in anticipation. Years had gone by since he'd last had that feeling. He had missed it.
A series of soft clicks came from the door. Lang was glad he hadn't had time to install a new lock. The replacement would have alerted whoever was on the other side of that door that the occupant knew the intruder could gain entry, make him even more cautious than committing a burglary would.
Lang tensed and tried to breathe. deeply to relax mind and muscles. Tension begot mistakes, his long-ago training had taught. And mistakes begot death. Tension and training were both forgotten as the door slowly opened inward, a square of darkness against the pale, buttery light of the lamp.
Lang resisted the impulse to lunge and throw his weight against the door, pinning the intruder against the jamb. Too easy for him to escape into the hall. Or shoot through the door. Instead, Lang waited until he could see the entire form of a man, a dark mass, arm extended as it entered and quietly shut the door. Something glittered in the man's hand.
A weapon, Lang was certain. He felt the fury for Janet and Jeff boil up in his stomach like bile. But he made himself wait.
Wait until the intruder turned from closing the door. Then Lang moved, pivoting to face him. Before Lang's brain even registered the shock on the invader's face, Lang's left hand came down like an ax against the other man's right wrist in a move designed to shatter the small. fragile carpal bones. Or at least knock a weapon loose. Simultaneously, Lang smashed 'the heel of his open right hand into the throat. Done correctly, the blow would leave an opponent helpless, too busy trying to force air into a ruined larynx to resist.
Lang was only partially successful. Something clattered to the floor and there was a gasp of breath as the man, still a solid dark form, staggered backwards. Lang's weight had shifted with his attack and he followed through, pirouetting to put his full bulk behind a fist aimed at where he gauged the bottom of the intruder's rib cage would be, the place where a blow to the solar plexus would double him over like a jackknife.
Lang hit ribs instead.
Lang's opponent lurched sideways, stumbled over the mate to the chair in which Lang had been sitting, and sprawled onto the floor. Lang flipped the light switch.
The man on the floor, scrabbling to his feet, was dressed in black jeans and a black shirt, with leather gloves. He was about Lang's size, his age difficult to guess. He backed away, reaching into a pocket as he measured the distance to the door.
Lang thumbed the safety off the Browning as it came out of his belt and he assumed a two-handed shooting stance. "Don't even think about moving, asshole."
There was a click as a switchblade flashed in the light. The stranger lunged forward clumsily, his legs still shaky from Lang's punches.
Like a matador evading the charge of a bull, Lang sidestepped, spun and brought the heavy automatic down across the back of the man's skull with all the fury accumulated since the night Janet and Jeff had died. On one level, Lang wanted to split his head open even more than he wanted answers.
The impact reverberated through the Browning and set Lang's hands trembling. The stranger went down like a marionette when the strings are cut.
Lang stamped a heel into the hand holding the knife, forcing the fingers open. A kick sent the weapon skidding across the room. Lang straddled his unwanted visitor's back, his right hand pressing the muzzle of the Browning against the man's cranium while his left explored pockets.
Nothing. No wallet, no money, no keys, no form of identification, the absence of which was a form of ID itself. Professional assassins carry nothing that yields information as to their own persona or those who hire them.
There wasn't even a label on the inside neck of the T-Shirt. But there was a silver chain around the man's throat, the sort of plain strand that might carry a woman's locket or lavaliere. Lang bunched it in his hand to snatch it free.
The guy bucked and rolled violently, tossing Lang aside like an unwary bronco rider. Lang rolled up on his knees, the Browning in both hands again. "Give me an excuse, asshole."
The intruder shakily got to his feet, his eyes darting to the door at Lang's back. Lang thought he was going to rush him, make a try for the hall outside. Instead, he spun, staggering for the glass door that separated the living room from a narrow balcony outside.
Lang got to his own feet in a hurry. "Hey, wait, hold it! You can't…"
But he could. With a crash, he went through the glass and over the edge. The room's light played off knifelike shards to make patterns on the ceiling as Lang struggled with the latch to the sliding glass door. There was no need, he realized. Lang simply stepped through the jagged hole the man had made. He heard traffic twenty-four floors below and the tinkle of the remaining broken glass falling from the door frame.
People were already gathering in a tight bunch below, six or seven of them obscuring all but a leg twisted at an impossible angle. Lang recognized the uniform of the night doorman as he looked up, pointing an accusing finger. In the landscape lights, his mouth was an open, black "0."
Lang went back inside to dial 911, only to learn a police car had been dispatched along with an ambulance. He returned the Browning to its drawer before conducting a hurried inspection of the living room. Two chairs were overturned, the rug in front of the entrance bunched as though from a scuffle. The switchblade glistened evilly from under an end table. In front of the couch, the light caught another knife, this one a broad dagger with a curved blade and a narrow, decorative hilt. A jimbia, the knife carried bare-bladed in the belts of nomadic Arabs, a weapon worn as commonly as a westerner wore neckties.
It wasn't until he was on the way to answer the insistent buzzing of the doorbell that he noticed something shining from the folds of the wrinkled rug.
"Coming!" Lang shouted as he stooped to pick it up.
The silver chain. It must have spun free when the intruder threw Lang off his back. He held it up. A pendant swung from the thin strand. An open circle about the size of a twenty-five-cent piece was quartered by four triangles meeting in the center. Lang had never seen anything exactly like it, yet it seemed vaguely familiar, perhaps very similar to something else.
But what?
He shoved it into his shirt pocket to consider later and opened the door.
Three men were in the hall, two of them were in uniform. The third was a wiry black man in a sport coat who was holding out an ID wallet.
"Franklin Morse, Atlanta police. You Langford Reilly?"
Lang opened the door wide. "Yep. Come in."
Morse took in the disheveled room at a glance. "Wanna tell what happened?"
Lang noticed the two uniforms had spaced themselves so that, should he try, he could not attack both at the same time. Standard procedure when you don't know if the person being interviewed is the perp or not.
Lang shut the door. "Sure. Have a seat?"
Morse shook his head. "No thanks. Crime scene crew'll be here any minute. So, Mr. Reilly, let's hear it."
Lang related what had happened, omitting any reference to the pendant he had found. He didn't want to have to surrender the only clue to what he suspected was an organization far beyond the understanding or reach of the local cops. He saw no reason to mention the early warning of the invasion; either. The last thing he wanted was to provoke further interrogation based on what would be perceived as some nut's conspiracy fantasy.
As he finished, there was a knock at the door. Morse opened it, admitting a balding white man with futuristic looking photographic equipment and a young black woman with a suitcase. Lang felt marveled at how quickly they made themselves at home.
As though agreeing with someone Lang hadn't heard, Morse nodded to him. "Broke in here with two knives and winds up taking the quick way down rather'n stay in the same room with you, Mr. Reilly? That your story?"
"And I'm sticking to it."
"Hard to believe perp'd kill hiss'sef like that rather'n take th' collar. Way the courts work, wasn't even facing major time. Sure you didn't use some kinda persuasion to throw him out, jujitsu him through the glass there? You sure as hell be justified, him breakin' in here like he did."
Lang shook his head. "Nope, like I said, I knocked the knife outta his hand, hit him a lick on the back of the head and he dropped the other one. He jumped through the glass door."
Morse ran a hand across the bottom half of his face. "You about the baddest ass I've seen. Where you do your workouts, Parris Island? Where you learn to handle a man with a knife?"
"Navy SEAL," Lang said. The story was as verifiable as it was false.
Morse eyed him with renewed interest. "SEAL, huh? Thought them guys were career. You don' look old enough to take retirement."
"Was in Desert Storm in '90, took a raghead bullet clearing Kuwait City harbor."
Morse's crime scene crew was poking around the room, moving objects on the secretary with pencils, inspecting the bottoms of furniture. Lang couldn't even guess what they hoped to find. Grumps watched with declining interest.
"Lemme get this straight." Morse was consulting his note pad. "That dog growls, you hear somebody foolin' with th' lock. 'Stead 0' callin' 911 then, you jus' wait for him to come in. Like, meybbe you want to bust him yo'seff?"
Lang straightened the rug with his foot. "I told you: there wasn't time. If I'd been on the phone instead of ready for him, there's a good chance the homicide would be here instead of down there."
Morse's eyes were searching the room again. "You got a phone in the bedroom. All you had t' do was lock yo'seff in an' call the police."
Lang chuckled, although he couldn't put much humor in it. "That's what you'd do, put your life in the hands of the local 911 operators, same ones let a man croak of a heart attack last month while they argued about whose jurisdiction he was dying in? I'd be better off calling the San Francisco police."
"Okay," Morse admitted with a raised hand. "Meybbe all the bugs ain't worked out yet."
"Yet?" Lang asked, incredulous. "System was installed in '96. The 'bugs' are the mayor's friends, sold it to the city."
"You own a firearm the detective wanted to know.
The change of subject almost caught Lang off balance just as he surmised it was supposed to. It was standard practice for the Atlanta cops to confiscate, or at least hold as long as possible, every handgun they could find on whatever excuse they could manufacture. This wasn't a time to be unarmed.
"You got a warrant?" Lang parried.
Morse sighed. "Not only you dangerous to be around, you a smartass, too. You want a warrant, I can get one."
He apparently intended to bluff it out.
"From whom, the Wizard of Oz? You got zip for probable cause."
Morse gave Lang a glare. "Okay, keep your artillery. We ain't gettin' ennywhere this way. You ever see this dude before?"
Lang set the overturned chair upright and sat in it, motioning Morse to the other. "Never."
The policeman sat as he shook his head. "You sure? Ain't easy believein' perp goes to all the trouble to sneak into the buildin', come up here jus' to kill a stranger. You tellin' me ever'thin'?"
"Sure," Lang said. "Least I can do to assist our law enforcement personnel."
Morse grunted. "'Nough wise-assin'." He grew serious. "you mus' think I'm some kinda stupid, I'd believe a guy come up here t'kill a perfect stranger an' wind up taking a long walk off a short balcony. You know somethin' you not tellin'. You know it's a crime, lie to the police?"
Lang's hand touched the pocket with the pendant in it.
"You think I'm being less than candid?"
Morse leaned forward. "You know somethin' you not tellin'."
The bald photographer and the woman with the suitcase were standing by the door, their investigation complete.
Lang went to the door and opened it. "Detective, I give the police every bit of credit they're due." He extended a hand. "Nice to have met you, although I can't say much for the circumstances."
Morse's grip was strong, consistent with what Lang would have expected of the lean body, like a runner's. It was easy to imagine the detective winning a foot race with a fugitive.
"We may well be back."
"Anytime."
5
Atlanta
Later that night
Lang was too tense to sleep. Instead his mind spun in what seemed like endless circles.
Was the pendant a clue or simply a bit of personal jewelry? Lang was unaware he was shaking his head no. A man who didn't even carry a wallet would hardly wear an individualized item.
Unlikely Lang was dealing with a sole person. A lone individual would have a hard time conducting twenty-four-hour surveillance, a harder time planning the theft of military thermite.
And why would a reproduction of a painting by a minor artist be worth the lives of whoever possessed it? Whoever they were, they had the fanaticism of zealots, a willingness to die for something Lang did not understand.
Yet.
It was all too bizarre. Perhaps it involved wackos, nutballs who had a serious if irrational grudge against that picture and anyone who had anything to do with it.
Lang had already made up his mind to find out.
If there was an organization, people other than the body on the pavement below his condominium, responsible for Janet and Jeff, he had to know or be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life. And given the murderous nature of these people, that might not be very long. Besides, if others were involved, Janet and Jeff demanded he get even.
Lang knew precious little to begin with, but he was fairly certain the answers were not in Atlanta. He was due a little vacation anyway.
Once at the office, he had Sara begin preparing requests for a leave of absence in each of his cases. He had to specify the time, so he gave himself a month. He didn't have to state where he was going, though. Just as well. He wasn't certain.
He wasn't certain what he would be searching for, nor for whom. What did the painting have to do with it? Was the pendant significant?
He was certain of only one thing: The vendetta had begun.
THE TEMPLARS:
THE END OF AN ORDER
An Account by Pietro of Sicily
Translation from the medieval Latin by Nigel Wolffe, Ph.D.
1
THE CROSS AND THE SWORD
The crimson cross on his surcoat was elongated, emulating the huge sword that required both hands to wield, yet the cross he cherished was the small one of equal arms, the one in the silver circle he wore about his neck, the one described by the four equal triangles.
But I confuse my sequence in hastily composing these, my last notes. I shall commence again, this time at the beginning.
I, Pietro of Sicily, write of these things in the Year of Our Lord 13101, three years after my arrest and false accusation and the false accusation of my brethren of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon and the issuance of the Papal Bull, Pastoralis praeminentia, which commanded any Christian monarch to seize our lands, our chattels and all other goods in the name of His Holiness Clement V.
In past years, to write of myself would have constituted pride, a sin in the eyes of God. Now I am unsure there is sin and, heaven help me for my blasphemy, if there is God at all. The events of which I write or those that have led me to apostasy are those I set out herein, not because I, God's humble servant, deserve note but because I have observed that the powerful write the histories and those who have caused the downfall of my brothers are powerful indeed.
Although it is not important, just as I am not important, I was born to a serf of a minor lord in Sicily in the fourth year of the reign of James II of Aragon, King of Sicily2. I was the youngest of six children, the one whom my mother died birthing. Unable to support his family, my father took me to a nearby house of Benedictine friars that they might succor me, raise me in the faith and benefit from such labours as they, and God, might choose for me.
Would that I had cleaved to our founder's admonition that, to attain purity, one must "seek solitude, submit to fasting, vigils, toils, nakedness, reading and other virtues."3
The monastery was given largely to farming, close enough to the town to see the three towers of a new castle built on heathen ruins. Like all such institutions, it was dedicated to intercession for its patrons and the souls of its benefactors and caring for the poor.
I was taught skills beyond those known to villeins of my birth: the making and reading of letters, the understanding and speaking of Latin and Frankish and the knowledge of mathematics. It was at this last skill that I, with God's help, became most proficient. By my twelfth summer, I kept the accounts for the cellarer:4 the volume of grapes and olives harvested, the number of loaves made, the poor donations from those who sought our prayers, even the quantity of plates fired in the kiln.
It was also that summer I was to end my novitiate,5 becoming a full member that fall. If only I had. not succumbed to the sin of ambition, I would be there yet· and would not be facing the cruel fate that awaits me.
It was in August when I saw him, Guillaume de Poitiers, a knight on a magnificent white horse and the most beautiful man I had ever seen. I had been outside the monastery walls, measuring the quantity of sheep dung to be put on the vegetable garden, when I looked up and there he was.
Despite the heat of the day, he wore full armour, including a hauberk,6 underneath his flowing white surcoat which was emblazoned front and back with the blood-red cross-pattee, announcing to all that he had been to and returned from the Holy Land. His garments thereby proclaimed him to be a knight of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the most fearsome and holy soldiers of the Church.
On his left hip was strapped a long dagger of a design foreign to me, with a curved blade wider than the hilt, which I later learned was a weapon of the heathen Saracens. On his right was a very short knife.
His esquire, mounted on an ass, led two other horses, mighty creatures far larger than the beasts I had seen. Across their backs were strapped a lance, a long, two-edged sword, and a Turkish mace, as well as a triangular body-shield which was adorned by a crimson cross also, this one squarish with perfect triangles for arms.
I followed as he rode through the open gate into the cloister, dismounted and knelt before our poor abbot as though he were paying obeisance to the pope himself. He asked for a night's shelter and food for his man and animals. He requested these for himself last, after his horses and esquire, as was proper for men of God as were we and was he.
As he knelt in supplication, I noted his hair was long and unkempt, his armour beginning to rust and his robe and cape covered with the dust of travel. Travel he had, as I was ro learn later. He had survived the fall of Acre, the last Christian city in the Holy Land, the year after my birth. With the former residents of Jaffa, Tyre, Sidon and Ascalon, he and his remaining brethren had fled in Venetian ships along with Grand Master Theobald Gaudin who brought with them such treasure and relics as the Order had.
Guillaume had waited in Cyprus for the papal pleasure of Boniface VIII, thinking that once again it would please God to send the Knights to cleanse the infidel from Jerusalem.7
When it became apparent this would not take place soon, he was ordered to return to his original monastery in Burgundy. He was on his way there when I saw him.
Risking the sin of jealousy, I managed to kneel next to him at Vespers that evening, the better to admire the accoutrements I have described. I could not but notice the sun's dark mark on his face and a star-shaped scar at his neck, a wound his esquire told me he received from a heathen arrow and survived only by God's grace.
It was then I observed the circlet of silver encompassing what I had first perceived as four triangles. It was only later he explained to me the triangles described the equal arms of the Templar cross, symbolizing the Holy Rood with the equality of all the Poor Brothers of the Temple of Solomon. It was the only adornment the Order allowed its members.
He also noticed my interest in his scar, for after the last prayer, he touched the discolored skin and said, "Only the low-born kill at a distance, young brother. Knights look into the souls of their enemies."
"Souls?" I said, curious. "The heathen, the accursed of the true God, have souls?"
At this he laughed, drawing the attention of Brother Larenzo, a devout man and prior of the abbey. "He is human. young brother. And do not forget, those figures you use in your calculations instead of Roman letters come from the infidel as do your calculations of the seasons. He is a worthy foe. And, at least for now, he holds all the Outremer,8 having ousted the best Christendom could muster."
Brother Larenzo was making no. effort to conceal that he was listening to the conversation. I was already the subject of his ire since silence and meditation after Vespers is the rule. I had had more than one beating at his hands for sacrilege, so I replied, "But surely Christ's Church will ultimately prevail."
Guillaume laughed again, to the prior's great annoyance. Laughter was as rare inside these walls as the wealth we had all foresworn. "The trouble is not with Christ's Church, it is with Christ's kings and princes. They fight among themselves instead of uniting against the nonbelievers. They are wont to worry more about the power of rival sovereigns than domination of the very home of Jesus by heathens." Here he moved his hand in a rough estimation of crossing himself. "Many such kings even fear us, the Poor Knights of the Temple."
Would that I had listened with a sharper ear to this last! Had I heeded it and all it implied, I would not now be facing the fate that awaits me, a stake surrounded by brush to be lit.
I confess again to the sin of pride when this brave knight who had so valiantly served the cause of Christ chose to accompany me, rather than the abbot, to the refectory for the evening meal. I could feel all eyes upon me as I genuflected before the crucifix behind the abbot's table to give thanks.
Once seated, our guest gave his bowl of porridge a look of disgust. "No mead" he asked, interrupting the reading from the lectern.9
The entire room went silent, so shocked were we that anyone less than a nobleman would expect to find meat, even more so in a weekday supper.
The abbot was an elderly brother, his voice little more than a wheeze across toothless gums. He coughed, making an effort to be heard from the dais where he shared a table with the elder and governing brothers.
"Good brother," he said, "Christ's last meal was only bread and wine. How much more nourishing is this? Be thankful, for there are many who have not even this simple repast."
Once again Guillaume gave that laugh as he raised his clay cup of watered wine. "You are right, good abbot. I am thankful for this meal and for the hospitality you afford a poor knight returning from the service of Christ."
Satisfied, the old abbot continued to gum the mush of cereals that was our lot more often than not.
Without lifting his eyes from his bowl and spoon, Guillaume muttered to me, "I did not expect the killing of the fatted calf but even the laziest of men can snare a hare and I have seen countless roe in the forest hereabouts."
Fascinated by words that would have earned me a beating for impertinence if not sacrilege, I asked, "And you Templars have hare or roe with weekday suppers?"
"And with the noon meal also. Or beef or pork. Mush like this does not sustain a man's body." "It does keep his soul, however," a brother on the other side whispered.
Guillaume shoved his bowl away hardly touched. It is a rich man who passes up food. Or a foolish one. "Souls do not fight the Saracen, bodies do."
After the meal, the order's rules required a retreat to the chapel for confession and then to individual cells for private prayer before Compline.10 I had been given a dispensation to work in the order's small counting room. The olives were near harvest and it was necessary I calculate how many boissel11 the order would have to press into oil for sale. I was completing my initial figures on a slate and preparing to transfer them to the permanence of sheep parchment when I became aware of Guillaume.
He gave me a smile filled with perfect teeth and entered to look over my shoulder. "These figures of the infidel, you understand them?"
I nodded. "You do not?"
He looked at them from one angle, then another, frowning. "A knight does not trouble with figures or letters. They are for priests and monks."
"But you are a member of a monastic order."
Again the laugh. "This is true, but a special order. You note I do not wear sackcloth that stinks 'and crawls with vermin, and that, dusty from travel, I bathe. The Knights of the Temple do not live like other monks."
"You certainly are not reputed to accept Our Lord's command to turn the other cheek, either," I said with unaccustomed boldness.
"Nor do I believe the meek shall inherit the earth. I do not believe our Lord ever said such a thing. It is cant, false dogma to keep serfs and vassals subservient."
Such talk made me uneasy, for it bordered on heresy. Yet he was a knight whose neck bore physical witness of his willingness to die for Church and pope.
"Obedience," I said, "is one of the basic vows of our order."
"And without it, chaos would result," he said. "An army marching to more than one set of orders cannot survive the enemy. It is meekness I deplore, not obedience."
This made me feel more comfortable.
"Besides figures, you also can understand written language?"
"If it is in Latin or Frankish and written boldly," I said modestly.
He seemed to withdraw within himself for a moment before he spoke again. "You have not taken your final vows here?" I had no idea why he asked but I answered truthfully, "I have not."
"My order needs men such as yourself."
I was astonished. "But, I am not noble-born, know nothing of arms such as you bear."
"You do not understand. For every knight, there must be provisioners. For every temple, there must be those who can count money and goods, scribes who can read and write languages. It is this post you can most surely fill. Come with me to Burgundy."
He might as well have suggested I visit the moon. I had never been more than a day's travel by foot from where I now sat.
"I cannot," I said. "These are my brothers who need me to do God's work."
A smile, not entirely devout, tugged at his lips. "I have learned that God usually gets what He wants, no matter the efforts of man. I am offering you three meals a day, two of which have meat. You will never go hungry. You will sleep on a clean bed, wear washed clothes that are not a nation of lice, fleas and ticks. You will do calculations of figures the likes of which you have never dreamed. Or you may remain here, as mean, dirty and hungry as any beast. Either way you will serve God, of that I am certain."
God nearly struck me dumb. I could not answer. Had I prayed, sought His guidance as I should have, I would have realized He was trying to tell me to remain. But, like many young men, the idea of such luxury turned my head.
"I leave right after Prime,"12 Guillaume de Poitiers said, "before washing myself and before light, please God. You may share my esquire's ass. Or you may remain here, serving God in a lesser manner and a great deal more squalor."
The next morning, I left the only home I could remember, a cell only large enough for a straw mattress, with a ceiling so low I could not stand in it.13 Since poverty is one of the vows of the Benedictines, I took with me no possessions other than the rude sackcloth gown I wore. And the things that infested it. Would I had chosen to endure the vile life to which I had become accustomed.
Translator's notes:
1. All dates have been converted to the Gregorian calendar for the convenience of the reader.
2. 1290.
3. Actually, this directive came from St. Cassian. St. Benedict (ca. 526) founded the first order of monks who lived in a community rather than alone.
4. The monk in charge of provisions for the monastery.
5. The word used by Pietro is Middle Latin, noviciatus, which means the place where novices are trained. It is doubtful a rural monastery would have such a luxury.
6. A tunic of chain mail. The full battle dress of a Templar knight is described by surviving copies of the French Rule. In addition to what Pietro describes, it would have included: helmet (heaume), armour protecting shoulders and feet (jupeau d'armes, espalliers, souliers d'armes).
7. The City of Jerusalem fell to the Sultan of the Baybars in 1243. It is doubtful Guillaume or any of his contemporaries had ever even seen the Holy City, although it was the avowed goal of the Templars until their dissolution in 1307.
8. The name both crusaders and Templars gave to the Holy Land, which they viewed as simply another country under the reign of the Pope.
9. The Bible was read at all meals.
10. The last mass of the day, usually said right before bed.
11. It is assumed this Frankish word is the origin of the English bushel. The exact quantity denoted is lost to antiquity.
12. An early morning mass, usually around five A.M. The first masses of the day, Matins and Lauds, were said shortly after midnight. After Prime came Terce, then Nones, Sext, Vespers, etc., for a total of six a day.
13. Many monastic cells were intentionally constructed so the occupant was always bowed when in it, thereby enforcing the virtue of humility.
1
Atlanta
The next day
Lang was waiting at Ansley Galleries when it opened the next morning. The same purple-haired girl was behind the counter with the same bored expression.
"Our copy?" she asked. "Good thing we keep copies of all our appraisals, like I told you. You'd be surprised how many people keep 'em in the house. There's a fire or something and both the art and the appraisal's gone."
"And the Polaroid," Lang asked, "you said you keep an extra of it, too?" She nodded, chewing a wad of gum. "Yeah, the Polaroid, too."
He smiled weakly and shrugged, a man embarrassed by his own ineffectiveness. "Dumb me. Can't remember where I put the envelope with them in it. Be happy to pay for copies." The gum snapped. "No problem."
A minute later she was back. The copy of the photograph,. though not in color, was remarkably clear. He handed her a twenty.
She shook her head. "Happy to help. You lose that, we'll charge for the next set of copies."
Outside, he pretended to search his pockets for car keys while he checked up and down the street. If there were watchers, they were out of sight.
2
Atlanta
An hour later
"High Museum as in art museum?" Sara asked incredulously. "You want me to get the number of the art museum?"
Lang settled behind his desk, speaking through the open door. "What's the big surprise? I go to the museum, theater, ballet, et al, regular culture vulture. You don't remember my getting tickets for you for the opening of the Matisse exhibit?"
Sara shook her head without a gray hair moving out of place. "Lang, that was years ago. And it was one of your clients who got the tickets."
"Just find out who the director is, okay?"
Two hours later, Lang parked in the MARTA lot behind what appeared to be white building blocks dumped into a random pile by a giant child. The contemporary edifice had to be one of the ugliest in a town not known for its architectural treasures. Lang's theory was that Sherman's destruction of the city a century and a half before had given Atlanta an atavistic insensitivity to structural aesthetics. The High Museum was named for the donors of the site, the High family, not for any preeminence in the art world. In fact, the concrete and glass housed a collection surprising only in its modesty when compared to similar institutions in comparable cities.
Lang passed by the circular ramp inside the main hall and took an elevator to the top floor. Exiting, he passed a modern mural on canvas that an alert janitorial crew anywhere else would have recognized as a painter's drop cloth and hauled outside to the Dumpsters. At the end, he found a door marked "Administrative Offices."
Lang had the impression he had stepped through Alice's looking glass. Hair of every color, rings in every visible orifice, clothes from Star Wars. The clerk at Ansley Galleries had been conservative in comparison.
A young woman with half her head shaved and polished, the other covered by Astroturf-green hair, glanced up from the computer terminal on her desk. "May I help you?"
"I'm Langford Reilly. I have an appointment with Mr. Seitz."
The woman jabbed a dagger-length fingernail painted an ominous black. "In there." She picked up a phone. "Mr. Reilly's here to see you."
A man stepped from a doorway. Lang wasn't sure what he had expected but Mr. Seitz wasn't it. Instead, he was normal looking. Well-tailored dark suit, red power tie, shiny black wingtips. He was slender, just under six feet tall Early forties, judging by the dove-wings of gray over his ears. His chiseled face had recently seen the beach. Or the inside of a tanning booth.
A gold Rolex competed in dazzle with jeweled cuff links as he extended a manicured hand. "Jason Seitz, Mr. Reilly."
"Thanks for seeing me on such short notice," Lang said.
"Quite a colorful crew you have here."
His eyes followed Lang's stare. "Art students. We try to 47 hire from the art school," he said as if that explained the costumes. "Won't you step this way?"
They entered an office that was as traditional as the employees outside were weird. Seitz indicated a leather wing chair where Lang could admire the wall of photographs: Seitz shaking hands with or hugging local business leaders, politicians and celebrities. He slipped behind a dining room table-sized desk littered with snapshots of paintings, sculptures and some other objects Lang didn't immediately recognize.
Seitz leaned back, made a steeple of his fingers and said, "I usually don't have the pleasure of meeting with people I don't know, but Ms…"
"Mitford-Sara Mitford, my secretary." Seitz nodded. "Ms. Mitford was quite insistent, said it was urgent. Fortunately, I had a cancellation…"
His gaze had the practiced sincerity of someone used to soliciting money. It fitted nicely with the favor he wanted Lang to know he was doing him.
"I really appreciate your taking the time. I'm sure running this place keeps you busy."
The museum director smiled. Lang would have been astonished had he shown anything but perfect teeth. "Actually; the board of directors runs the museum. I am their humble servant."
"Yeah. Well…" Uncertain how to respond to the ill fitting humility, Lang opened his briefcase and leaned forward to hand the copy of the Polaroid across the expanse of mahogany. "I was wondering if you could tell me about that."
Seitz frowned, squinting at the picture. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Les Bergers d'Arcadie, Nicholas Poussin. Or at least a copy of it."
Seitz nodded. "Mid-seventeenth-century French, if I recall. The original of that picture hangs in the Louvre. What specifically is it you want to know?"
Lang had what he thought was a plausible explanation. ''I'm not sure. That is, I'm a lawyer and I have a case involving…"
The director held up his hands, palms outward. "Whoa, Mr. Reilly! The museum is not in a position to authenticate art for individuals. As an attorney, I'm sure you can understand the liability issues."
Lang shook his head, eager to calm what he recognized as a bad case of legal anxiety syndrome. "I apologize. I didn't make myself clear. All I want is to learn the history of the painting, what it's supposed to depict."
Seitz was only marginally calmed. "I'm afraid I can't be of much help." He whirled his chair around, removing a book from the antique table behind him that served as a credenza. Thumbing through it, he continued. "I can say, I think, that what you have there is a picture of a copy, and not a particularly authentic copy, either. Ah, there… Not quite the same, is it?"
He was pointing to a photo of a similar picture. At first Lang saw no difference. He looked more closely. The background was smoother; there was no upside down profile of Washington.
"Religious art, late Renaissance, not my specialty," Seitz continued, shutting the book with a thump. He brought Lang's copy closer to his face. "Those letters on the structure, they look like Latin."
Lang moved to look over his shoulder. "I think so, yes."
"Obviously, they mean something. For that matter, the whole painting may well be symbolistic. Artists of that era often had messages in their paintings."
"You mean, like a code?"
"Sort of, but less sophisticated. For instance, you've seen a still life, flowers or vegetables with a bug or two, perhaps a wilted blossom?" Lang shrugged noncommittally. It wasn't the sort of art he would remember.
"It was popular about the time Poussin painted. A certain flower or plant-rosemary for memory, for example. A beetle might be reminiscent of an Egyptian scarab, symbolic of death or the afterlife or whatever."
Lang went back and sat down. "So you're saying this painting has a message of some sort." This time it was the director who shrugged. "I'm saying it's possible."
"Who might know?"
Seitz slowly spun his chair to face the window behind him and gazed out in silence for a moment. "I don't really have an idea." He flashed the Rolex. "And I fear we're running out of time."
Lang didn't budge from his seat. "Give me a name, if you would. Somebody likely to be familiar with Poussin, preferably somebody who might be able to decipher whatever symbolism there might be. Believe me, it's important. This is no academic exercise."
Seitz turned back to stare at him, a frown tugging at his mouth, no doubt because he wasn't used to being delayed. Then he returned to the row of books from which he had taken the first one before snatching another one up and paging through it, too.
"It would appear," the art director said, "that the leading authority on Poussin and on late Renaissance religious art, too, is a Guiedo Marcenni. He's written quite a lot about your man Poussin."
Lang pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase. "And where do I find Mr. Marcenni?"
The frown had become a sardonic smile. "Not 'mister', but 'Fra'. Brother Marcenni is a monk, an art historian with the Vatican Museum. Vatican, as in Rome." He stood. "Now I really must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Reilly. One of the young ladies will show you out."
He was gone before Lang could thank him. Thank him for nothing. Lang was more puzzled than ever.
3
Atlanta
That evening
Lang was so absorbed in his thoughts that he almost missed the elevator's stop at his floor. Still thinking, he took the few steps to his door and stooped to pick up the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He froze, key in hand.
"FIRE GUTS MIDTOWN DISTRICT," the above-the-fold headline screamed. An aerial view showed a pillar of smoke towering from a block of one-story, flat-roofed buildings. The one in the middle was – had been – Ansley Galleries.
Lang let himself in and dropped into the nearest chair, oblivious to Grumps, who was more than ready to go outside.
A fire leveled an entire block of Seventh Street early this afternoon as the result of a faulty gas stove, according to Capt. Jewal Abbar, Chief Investigator for the Atlanta Fire Department.
Three shops, Ansley Galleries, Dwight's Interiors and Afternoon Delites, were totally destroyed. Other establishments in the popular in-town shopping area were severely damaged.
Abbar said there were no serious injuries, although several people were treated at Grady Memorial Hospital for smoke inhalation. Maurice Wiser, manager of Afternoon Delites, a vegetarian restaurant, was quoted as saying the stove exploded when turned on.
Lang didn't finish the article, but dropped the paper and stared at the wall. It was possible, he conceded, that the stove exploded in an amazing concurrence of accident and coincidence. Just as it was possible someone had firebombed the house in Paris, he had nearly had his throat slit, and his highrise had been burglarized just to steal a painting-and a copy at that. Now the gallery that had kept a copy was also a fire casualty.
If all of that were coincidence, the Poussin made the curse of the Hope Diamond look like a lucky shamrock.
Instead of coincidence, he saw an emerging pattern, frightening in its simplicity: Whoever possessed that picture, or knew something about it, was in jeopardy. Including Lang.
But why? The original Poussin, the one in the Louvre, must have been seen by millions. The slightly different background in Janet's copy, then, was the reason someone wanted that particular painting. And if they wanted it badly enough to commit indiscriminate murder and arson for it…
Lang knew four things: They were intent on erasing every trace of that painting, they didn't care who got hurt, they had an international intelligence system as good or better than most police forces, and they were well prepared for the task.
The last two observations were the most frightening. Intelligence and preparation indicated a professional and a professional indicated an organization. What sort of an organization would burn and kill just to destroy a copy of the Poussin? An organization that had a very strong interest in whatever secret the canvas held.
His train of thought was derailed by Grumps's insistent pacing. "Okay, okay," he said. "Gimme a minute."
He went into the bedroom and opened the drawer in the bedside table. He took out the Browning. Easing back the slide, he confirmed there was a round in the chamber. He checked the safety and stuffed the weapon into his belt. From now on, it was going to be like the credit card: Don't leave home without it.
Tomorrow he would have to go apply for a permit. But for the moment, being caught without the gun had more dire consequences than being caught with it.
As Lang left the apartment with Grumps on a leash, he stopped in the hall to leave two telltales. The first was a tiny strip of plastic tape stretched between the door and jamb, a device any professional would anticipate and find fairly easily. Then he licked his hand and wiped it on the knob, sticking a hair to the brass. Virtually impossible to see and it would fall loose at the slightest touch.
If his reasoning was anywhere near correct, he could expect company soon.
4
Atlanta
A few minutes later
When Lang and Grumps came back in, he nuked a frozen enchilada in the microwave and fed Grumps the dog food he had finally remembered to buy. From the sounds of voracious eating, Lang judged he had made a good choice.
Lang's meal was laced with so many chilies it could have constituted an act of war by the Federal Republic of Mexico. He scraped his leftovers into Grumps's bowl. The dog gave him a reproachful glare and retreated to a corner, Lang's offering untouched. Apparently Lang was more a connoisseur of canned dog food than international cuisine
Lang selected a tubular steel chair· with minimal padding, one in which it was unlikely he would be very comfortable, putting it just to the side of the door to the outside hall. As the door opened, the chair would be behind it. Then he moved a three-way lamp to the other side of the entrance, its lowest setting enough to silhouette anyone coming through the doorway but dim enough not to spill into the hall outside. He put the Browning in his lap, although he didn't intend to use the automatic unless he had to. He wanted answers, not bodies.
Then he began to wait.
There wasn't enough light to read. So he just sat, observing Atlanta's skyline. Far to the south, he could see jets, pinpricks of light, as they approached or departed Hartsfield-Jackson International. Somewhere between Lang and the distant airport, beams of searchlights aimlessly crisscrossed the night sky. He resisted the impulse to check the luminous dial of his watch. Time passes more slowly when you keep track of it.
Maybe he was mistaken; maybe he was in no danger. Maybe, but unlikely. Whoever had obliterated the place in Paris and started a fire in Midtown wasn't likely to spare him. The only question was when it would happen.
Well after what Lang estimated was midnight, past the time he usually turned out the lights and retired, he detected, or imagined, something from the floor beside him, not so much a sound as an undefined interruption of clinging silence. A growl from Grumps, increasing until Lang put a comforting hand on the furry head. The dog had taken Lang's rebuke after the burglary to heart.
Lang stood, silently moving the chair aside and putting the Browning in his belt again. Caterpillars with icy feet were marching up and down the back of his neck where muscles were tightening in anticipation. Years had gone by since he'd last had that feeling. He had missed it.
A series of soft clicks came from the door. Lang was glad he hadn't had time to install a new lock. The replacement would have alerted whoever was on the other side of that door that the occupant knew the intruder could gain entry, make him even more cautious than committing a burglary would.
Lang tensed and tried to breathe. deeply to relax mind and muscles. Tension begot mistakes, his long-ago training had taught. And mistakes begot death. Tension and training were both forgotten as the door slowly opened inward, a square of darkness against the pale, buttery light of the lamp.
Lang resisted the impulse to lunge and throw his weight against the door, pinning the intruder against the jamb. Too easy for him to escape into the hall. Or shoot through the door. Instead, Lang waited until he could see the entire form of a man, a dark mass, arm extended as it entered and quietly shut the door. Something glittered in the man's hand.
A weapon, Lang was certain. He felt the fury for Janet and Jeff boil up in his stomach like bile. But he made himself wait.
Wait until the intruder turned from closing the door. Then Lang moved, pivoting to face him. Before Lang's brain even registered the shock on the invader's face, Lang's left hand came down like an ax against the other man's right wrist in a move designed to shatter the small. fragile carpal bones. Or at least knock a weapon loose. Simultaneously, Lang smashed 'the heel of his open right hand into the throat. Done correctly, the blow would leave an opponent helpless, too busy trying to force air into a ruined larynx to resist.
Lang was only partially successful. Something clattered to the floor and there was a gasp of breath as the man, still a solid dark form, staggered backwards. Lang's weight had shifted with his attack and he followed through, pirouetting to put his full bulk behind a fist aimed at where he gauged the bottom of the intruder's rib cage would be, the place where a blow to the solar plexus would double him over like a jackknife.
Lang hit ribs instead.
Lang's opponent lurched sideways, stumbled over the mate to the chair in which Lang had been sitting, and sprawled onto the floor. Lang flipped the light switch.
The man on the floor, scrabbling to his feet, was dressed in black jeans and a black shirt, with leather gloves. He was about Lang's size, his age difficult to guess. He backed away, reaching into a pocket as he measured the distance to the door.
Lang thumbed the safety off the Browning as it came out of his belt and he assumed a two-handed shooting stance. "Don't even think about moving, asshole."
There was a click as a switchblade flashed in the light. The stranger lunged forward clumsily, his legs still shaky from Lang's punches.
Like a matador evading the charge of a bull, Lang sidestepped, spun and brought the heavy automatic down across the back of the man's skull with all the fury accumulated since the night Janet and Jeff had died. On one level, Lang wanted to split his head open even more than he wanted answers.
The impact reverberated through the Browning and set Lang's hands trembling. The stranger went down like a marionette when the strings are cut.
Lang stamped a heel into the hand holding the knife, forcing the fingers open. A kick sent the weapon skidding across the room. Lang straddled his unwanted visitor's back, his right hand pressing the muzzle of the Browning against the man's cranium while his left explored pockets.
Nothing. No wallet, no money, no keys, no form of identification, the absence of which was a form of ID itself. Professional assassins carry nothing that yields information as to their own persona or those who hire them.
There wasn't even a label on the inside neck of the T-Shirt. But there was a silver chain around the man's throat, the sort of plain strand that might carry a woman's locket or lavaliere. Lang bunched it in his hand to snatch it free.
The guy bucked and rolled violently, tossing Lang aside like an unwary bronco rider. Lang rolled up on his knees, the Browning in both hands again. "Give me an excuse, asshole."
The intruder shakily got to his feet, his eyes darting to the door at Lang's back. Lang thought he was going to rush him, make a try for the hall outside. Instead, he spun, staggering for the glass door that separated the living room from a narrow balcony outside.
Lang got to his own feet in a hurry. "Hey, wait, hold it! You can't…"
But he could. With a crash, he went through the glass and over the edge. The room's light played off knifelike shards to make patterns on the ceiling as Lang struggled with the latch to the sliding glass door. There was no need, he realized. Lang simply stepped through the jagged hole the man had made. He heard traffic twenty-four floors below and the tinkle of the remaining broken glass falling from the door frame.
People were already gathering in a tight bunch below, six or seven of them obscuring all but a leg twisted at an impossible angle. Lang recognized the uniform of the night doorman as he looked up, pointing an accusing finger. In the landscape lights, his mouth was an open, black "0."
Lang went back inside to dial 911, only to learn a police car had been dispatched along with an ambulance. He returned the Browning to its drawer before conducting a hurried inspection of the living room. Two chairs were overturned, the rug in front of the entrance bunched as though from a scuffle. The switchblade glistened evilly from under an end table. In front of the couch, the light caught another knife, this one a broad dagger with a curved blade and a narrow, decorative hilt. A jimbia, the knife carried bare-bladed in the belts of nomadic Arabs, a weapon worn as commonly as a westerner wore neckties.
It wasn't until he was on the way to answer the insistent buzzing of the doorbell that he noticed something shining from the folds of the wrinkled rug.
"Coming!" Lang shouted as he stooped to pick it up.
The silver chain. It must have spun free when the intruder threw Lang off his back. He held it up. A pendant swung from the thin strand. An open circle about the size of a twenty-five-cent piece was quartered by four triangles meeting in the center. Lang had never seen anything exactly like it, yet it seemed vaguely familiar, perhaps very similar to something else.
But what?
He shoved it into his shirt pocket to consider later and opened the door.
Three men were in the hall, two of them were in uniform. The third was a wiry black man in a sport coat who was holding out an ID wallet.
"Franklin Morse, Atlanta police. You Langford Reilly?"
Lang opened the door wide. "Yep. Come in."
Morse took in the disheveled room at a glance. "Wanna tell what happened?"
Lang noticed the two uniforms had spaced themselves so that, should he try, he could not attack both at the same time. Standard procedure when you don't know if the person being interviewed is the perp or not.
Lang shut the door. "Sure. Have a seat?"
Morse shook his head. "No thanks. Crime scene crew'll be here any minute. So, Mr. Reilly, let's hear it."
Lang related what had happened, omitting any reference to the pendant he had found. He didn't want to have to surrender the only clue to what he suspected was an organization far beyond the understanding or reach of the local cops. He saw no reason to mention the early warning of the invasion; either. The last thing he wanted was to provoke further interrogation based on what would be perceived as some nut's conspiracy fantasy.
As he finished, there was a knock at the door. Morse opened it, admitting a balding white man with futuristic looking photographic equipment and a young black woman with a suitcase. Lang felt marveled at how quickly they made themselves at home.
As though agreeing with someone Lang hadn't heard, Morse nodded to him. "Broke in here with two knives and winds up taking the quick way down rather'n stay in the same room with you, Mr. Reilly? That your story?"
"And I'm sticking to it."
"Hard to believe perp'd kill hiss'sef like that rather'n take th' collar. Way the courts work, wasn't even facing major time. Sure you didn't use some kinda persuasion to throw him out, jujitsu him through the glass there? You sure as hell be justified, him breakin' in here like he did."
Lang shook his head. "Nope, like I said, I knocked the knife outta his hand, hit him a lick on the back of the head and he dropped the other one. He jumped through the glass door."
Morse ran a hand across the bottom half of his face. "You about the baddest ass I've seen. Where you do your workouts, Parris Island? Where you learn to handle a man with a knife?"
"Navy SEAL," Lang said. The story was as verifiable as it was false.
Morse eyed him with renewed interest. "SEAL, huh? Thought them guys were career. You don' look old enough to take retirement."
"Was in Desert Storm in '90, took a raghead bullet clearing Kuwait City harbor."
Morse's crime scene crew was poking around the room, moving objects on the secretary with pencils, inspecting the bottoms of furniture. Lang couldn't even guess what they hoped to find. Grumps watched with declining interest.
"Lemme get this straight." Morse was consulting his note pad. "That dog growls, you hear somebody foolin' with th' lock. 'Stead 0' callin' 911 then, you jus' wait for him to come in. Like, meybbe you want to bust him yo'seff?"
Lang straightened the rug with his foot. "I told you: there wasn't time. If I'd been on the phone instead of ready for him, there's a good chance the homicide would be here instead of down there."
Morse's eyes were searching the room again. "You got a phone in the bedroom. All you had t' do was lock yo'seff in an' call the police."
Lang chuckled, although he couldn't put much humor in it. "That's what you'd do, put your life in the hands of the local 911 operators, same ones let a man croak of a heart attack last month while they argued about whose jurisdiction he was dying in? I'd be better off calling the San Francisco police."
"Okay," Morse admitted with a raised hand. "Meybbe all the bugs ain't worked out yet."
"Yet?" Lang asked, incredulous. "System was installed in '96. The 'bugs' are the mayor's friends, sold it to the city."
"You own a firearm the detective wanted to know.
The change of subject almost caught Lang off balance just as he surmised it was supposed to. It was standard practice for the Atlanta cops to confiscate, or at least hold as long as possible, every handgun they could find on whatever excuse they could manufacture. This wasn't a time to be unarmed.
"You got a warrant?" Lang parried.
Morse sighed. "Not only you dangerous to be around, you a smartass, too. You want a warrant, I can get one."
He apparently intended to bluff it out.
"From whom, the Wizard of Oz? You got zip for probable cause."
Morse gave Lang a glare. "Okay, keep your artillery. We ain't gettin' ennywhere this way. You ever see this dude before?"
Lang set the overturned chair upright and sat in it, motioning Morse to the other. "Never."
The policeman sat as he shook his head. "You sure? Ain't easy believein' perp goes to all the trouble to sneak into the buildin', come up here jus' to kill a stranger. You tellin' me ever'thin'?"
"Sure," Lang said. "Least I can do to assist our law enforcement personnel."
Morse grunted. "'Nough wise-assin'." He grew serious. "you mus' think I'm some kinda stupid, I'd believe a guy come up here t'kill a perfect stranger an' wind up taking a long walk off a short balcony. You know somethin' you not tellin'. You know it's a crime, lie to the police?"
Lang's hand touched the pocket with the pendant in it.
"You think I'm being less than candid?"
Morse leaned forward. "You know somethin' you not tellin'."
The bald photographer and the woman with the suitcase were standing by the door, their investigation complete.
Lang went to the door and opened it. "Detective, I give the police every bit of credit they're due." He extended a hand. "Nice to have met you, although I can't say much for the circumstances."
Morse's grip was strong, consistent with what Lang would have expected of the lean body, like a runner's. It was easy to imagine the detective winning a foot race with a fugitive.
"We may well be back."
"Anytime."
5
Atlanta
Later that night
Lang was too tense to sleep. Instead his mind spun in what seemed like endless circles.
Was the pendant a clue or simply a bit of personal jewelry? Lang was unaware he was shaking his head no. A man who didn't even carry a wallet would hardly wear an individualized item.
Unlikely Lang was dealing with a sole person. A lone individual would have a hard time conducting twenty-four-hour surveillance, a harder time planning the theft of military thermite.
And why would a reproduction of a painting by a minor artist be worth the lives of whoever possessed it? Whoever they were, they had the fanaticism of zealots, a willingness to die for something Lang did not understand.
Yet.
It was all too bizarre. Perhaps it involved wackos, nutballs who had a serious if irrational grudge against that picture and anyone who had anything to do with it.
Lang had already made up his mind to find out.
If there was an organization, people other than the body on the pavement below his condominium, responsible for Janet and Jeff, he had to know or be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life. And given the murderous nature of these people, that might not be very long. Besides, if others were involved, Janet and Jeff demanded he get even.
Lang knew precious little to begin with, but he was fairly certain the answers were not in Atlanta. He was due a little vacation anyway.
Once at the office, he had Sara begin preparing requests for a leave of absence in each of his cases. He had to specify the time, so he gave himself a month. He didn't have to state where he was going, though. Just as well. He wasn't certain.
He wasn't certain what he would be searching for, nor for whom. What did the painting have to do with it? Was the pendant significant?
He was certain of only one thing: The vendetta had begun.
THE TEMPLARS:
THE END OF AN ORDER
An Account by Pietro of Sicily
Translation from the medieval Latin by Nigel Wolffe, Ph.D.
1
THE CROSS AND THE SWORD
The crimson cross on his surcoat was elongated, emulating the huge sword that required both hands to wield, yet the cross he cherished was the small one of equal arms, the one in the silver circle he wore about his neck, the one described by the four equal triangles.
But I confuse my sequence in hastily composing these, my last notes. I shall commence again, this time at the beginning.
I, Pietro of Sicily, write of these things in the Year of Our Lord 13101, three years after my arrest and false accusation and the false accusation of my brethren of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon and the issuance of the Papal Bull, Pastoralis praeminentia, which commanded any Christian monarch to seize our lands, our chattels and all other goods in the name of His Holiness Clement V.
In past years, to write of myself would have constituted pride, a sin in the eyes of God. Now I am unsure there is sin and, heaven help me for my blasphemy, if there is God at all. The events of which I write or those that have led me to apostasy are those I set out herein, not because I, God's humble servant, deserve note but because I have observed that the powerful write the histories and those who have caused the downfall of my brothers are powerful indeed.
Although it is not important, just as I am not important, I was born to a serf of a minor lord in Sicily in the fourth year of the reign of James II of Aragon, King of Sicily2. I was the youngest of six children, the one whom my mother died birthing. Unable to support his family, my father took me to a nearby house of Benedictine friars that they might succor me, raise me in the faith and benefit from such labours as they, and God, might choose for me.
Would that I had cleaved to our founder's admonition that, to attain purity, one must "seek solitude, submit to fasting, vigils, toils, nakedness, reading and other virtues."3
The monastery was given largely to farming, close enough to the town to see the three towers of a new castle built on heathen ruins. Like all such institutions, it was dedicated to intercession for its patrons and the souls of its benefactors and caring for the poor.
I was taught skills beyond those known to villeins of my birth: the making and reading of letters, the understanding and speaking of Latin and Frankish and the knowledge of mathematics. It was at this last skill that I, with God's help, became most proficient. By my twelfth summer, I kept the accounts for the cellarer:4 the volume of grapes and olives harvested, the number of loaves made, the poor donations from those who sought our prayers, even the quantity of plates fired in the kiln.
It was also that summer I was to end my novitiate,5 becoming a full member that fall. If only I had. not succumbed to the sin of ambition, I would be there yet· and would not be facing the cruel fate that awaits me.
It was in August when I saw him, Guillaume de Poitiers, a knight on a magnificent white horse and the most beautiful man I had ever seen. I had been outside the monastery walls, measuring the quantity of sheep dung to be put on the vegetable garden, when I looked up and there he was.
Despite the heat of the day, he wore full armour, including a hauberk,6 underneath his flowing white surcoat which was emblazoned front and back with the blood-red cross-pattee, announcing to all that he had been to and returned from the Holy Land. His garments thereby proclaimed him to be a knight of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the most fearsome and holy soldiers of the Church.
On his left hip was strapped a long dagger of a design foreign to me, with a curved blade wider than the hilt, which I later learned was a weapon of the heathen Saracens. On his right was a very short knife.
His esquire, mounted on an ass, led two other horses, mighty creatures far larger than the beasts I had seen. Across their backs were strapped a lance, a long, two-edged sword, and a Turkish mace, as well as a triangular body-shield which was adorned by a crimson cross also, this one squarish with perfect triangles for arms.
I followed as he rode through the open gate into the cloister, dismounted and knelt before our poor abbot as though he were paying obeisance to the pope himself. He asked for a night's shelter and food for his man and animals. He requested these for himself last, after his horses and esquire, as was proper for men of God as were we and was he.
As he knelt in supplication, I noted his hair was long and unkempt, his armour beginning to rust and his robe and cape covered with the dust of travel. Travel he had, as I was ro learn later. He had survived the fall of Acre, the last Christian city in the Holy Land, the year after my birth. With the former residents of Jaffa, Tyre, Sidon and Ascalon, he and his remaining brethren had fled in Venetian ships along with Grand Master Theobald Gaudin who brought with them such treasure and relics as the Order had.
Guillaume had waited in Cyprus for the papal pleasure of Boniface VIII, thinking that once again it would please God to send the Knights to cleanse the infidel from Jerusalem.7
When it became apparent this would not take place soon, he was ordered to return to his original monastery in Burgundy. He was on his way there when I saw him.
Risking the sin of jealousy, I managed to kneel next to him at Vespers that evening, the better to admire the accoutrements I have described. I could not but notice the sun's dark mark on his face and a star-shaped scar at his neck, a wound his esquire told me he received from a heathen arrow and survived only by God's grace.
It was then I observed the circlet of silver encompassing what I had first perceived as four triangles. It was only later he explained to me the triangles described the equal arms of the Templar cross, symbolizing the Holy Rood with the equality of all the Poor Brothers of the Temple of Solomon. It was the only adornment the Order allowed its members.
He also noticed my interest in his scar, for after the last prayer, he touched the discolored skin and said, "Only the low-born kill at a distance, young brother. Knights look into the souls of their enemies."
"Souls?" I said, curious. "The heathen, the accursed of the true God, have souls?"
At this he laughed, drawing the attention of Brother Larenzo, a devout man and prior of the abbey. "He is human. young brother. And do not forget, those figures you use in your calculations instead of Roman letters come from the infidel as do your calculations of the seasons. He is a worthy foe. And, at least for now, he holds all the Outremer,8 having ousted the best Christendom could muster."
Brother Larenzo was making no. effort to conceal that he was listening to the conversation. I was already the subject of his ire since silence and meditation after Vespers is the rule. I had had more than one beating at his hands for sacrilege, so I replied, "But surely Christ's Church will ultimately prevail."
Guillaume laughed again, to the prior's great annoyance. Laughter was as rare inside these walls as the wealth we had all foresworn. "The trouble is not with Christ's Church, it is with Christ's kings and princes. They fight among themselves instead of uniting against the nonbelievers. They are wont to worry more about the power of rival sovereigns than domination of the very home of Jesus by heathens." Here he moved his hand in a rough estimation of crossing himself. "Many such kings even fear us, the Poor Knights of the Temple."
Would that I had listened with a sharper ear to this last! Had I heeded it and all it implied, I would not now be facing the fate that awaits me, a stake surrounded by brush to be lit.
I confess again to the sin of pride when this brave knight who had so valiantly served the cause of Christ chose to accompany me, rather than the abbot, to the refectory for the evening meal. I could feel all eyes upon me as I genuflected before the crucifix behind the abbot's table to give thanks.
Once seated, our guest gave his bowl of porridge a look of disgust. "No mead" he asked, interrupting the reading from the lectern.9
The entire room went silent, so shocked were we that anyone less than a nobleman would expect to find meat, even more so in a weekday supper.
The abbot was an elderly brother, his voice little more than a wheeze across toothless gums. He coughed, making an effort to be heard from the dais where he shared a table with the elder and governing brothers.
"Good brother," he said, "Christ's last meal was only bread and wine. How much more nourishing is this? Be thankful, for there are many who have not even this simple repast."
Once again Guillaume gave that laugh as he raised his clay cup of watered wine. "You are right, good abbot. I am thankful for this meal and for the hospitality you afford a poor knight returning from the service of Christ."
Satisfied, the old abbot continued to gum the mush of cereals that was our lot more often than not.
Without lifting his eyes from his bowl and spoon, Guillaume muttered to me, "I did not expect the killing of the fatted calf but even the laziest of men can snare a hare and I have seen countless roe in the forest hereabouts."
Fascinated by words that would have earned me a beating for impertinence if not sacrilege, I asked, "And you Templars have hare or roe with weekday suppers?"
"And with the noon meal also. Or beef or pork. Mush like this does not sustain a man's body." "It does keep his soul, however," a brother on the other side whispered.
Guillaume shoved his bowl away hardly touched. It is a rich man who passes up food. Or a foolish one. "Souls do not fight the Saracen, bodies do."
After the meal, the order's rules required a retreat to the chapel for confession and then to individual cells for private prayer before Compline.10 I had been given a dispensation to work in the order's small counting room. The olives were near harvest and it was necessary I calculate how many boissel11 the order would have to press into oil for sale. I was completing my initial figures on a slate and preparing to transfer them to the permanence of sheep parchment when I became aware of Guillaume.
He gave me a smile filled with perfect teeth and entered to look over my shoulder. "These figures of the infidel, you understand them?"
I nodded. "You do not?"
He looked at them from one angle, then another, frowning. "A knight does not trouble with figures or letters. They are for priests and monks."
"But you are a member of a monastic order."
Again the laugh. "This is true, but a special order. You note I do not wear sackcloth that stinks 'and crawls with vermin, and that, dusty from travel, I bathe. The Knights of the Temple do not live like other monks."
"You certainly are not reputed to accept Our Lord's command to turn the other cheek, either," I said with unaccustomed boldness.
"Nor do I believe the meek shall inherit the earth. I do not believe our Lord ever said such a thing. It is cant, false dogma to keep serfs and vassals subservient."
Such talk made me uneasy, for it bordered on heresy. Yet he was a knight whose neck bore physical witness of his willingness to die for Church and pope.
"Obedience," I said, "is one of the basic vows of our order."
"And without it, chaos would result," he said. "An army marching to more than one set of orders cannot survive the enemy. It is meekness I deplore, not obedience."
This made me feel more comfortable.
"Besides figures, you also can understand written language?"
"If it is in Latin or Frankish and written boldly," I said modestly.
He seemed to withdraw within himself for a moment before he spoke again. "You have not taken your final vows here?" I had no idea why he asked but I answered truthfully, "I have not."
"My order needs men such as yourself."
I was astonished. "But, I am not noble-born, know nothing of arms such as you bear."
"You do not understand. For every knight, there must be provisioners. For every temple, there must be those who can count money and goods, scribes who can read and write languages. It is this post you can most surely fill. Come with me to Burgundy."
He might as well have suggested I visit the moon. I had never been more than a day's travel by foot from where I now sat.
"I cannot," I said. "These are my brothers who need me to do God's work."
A smile, not entirely devout, tugged at his lips. "I have learned that God usually gets what He wants, no matter the efforts of man. I am offering you three meals a day, two of which have meat. You will never go hungry. You will sleep on a clean bed, wear washed clothes that are not a nation of lice, fleas and ticks. You will do calculations of figures the likes of which you have never dreamed. Or you may remain here, as mean, dirty and hungry as any beast. Either way you will serve God, of that I am certain."
God nearly struck me dumb. I could not answer. Had I prayed, sought His guidance as I should have, I would have realized He was trying to tell me to remain. But, like many young men, the idea of such luxury turned my head.
"I leave right after Prime,"12 Guillaume de Poitiers said, "before washing myself and before light, please God. You may share my esquire's ass. Or you may remain here, serving God in a lesser manner and a great deal more squalor."
The next morning, I left the only home I could remember, a cell only large enough for a straw mattress, with a ceiling so low I could not stand in it.13 Since poverty is one of the vows of the Benedictines, I took with me no possessions other than the rude sackcloth gown I wore. And the things that infested it. Would I had chosen to endure the vile life to which I had become accustomed.
Translator's notes:
1. All dates have been converted to the Gregorian calendar for the convenience of the reader.
2. 1290.
3. Actually, this directive came from St. Cassian. St. Benedict (ca. 526) founded the first order of monks who lived in a community rather than alone.
4. The monk in charge of provisions for the monastery.
5. The word used by Pietro is Middle Latin, noviciatus, which means the place where novices are trained. It is doubtful a rural monastery would have such a luxury.
6. A tunic of chain mail. The full battle dress of a Templar knight is described by surviving copies of the French Rule. In addition to what Pietro describes, it would have included: helmet (heaume), armour protecting shoulders and feet (jupeau d'armes, espalliers, souliers d'armes).
7. The City of Jerusalem fell to the Sultan of the Baybars in 1243. It is doubtful Guillaume or any of his contemporaries had ever even seen the Holy City, although it was the avowed goal of the Templars until their dissolution in 1307.
8. The name both crusaders and Templars gave to the Holy Land, which they viewed as simply another country under the reign of the Pope.
9. The Bible was read at all meals.
10. The last mass of the day, usually said right before bed.
11. It is assumed this Frankish word is the origin of the English bushel. The exact quantity denoted is lost to antiquity.
12. An early morning mass, usually around five A.M. The first masses of the day, Matins and Lauds, were said shortly after midnight. After Prime came Terce, then Nones, Sext, Vespers, etc., for a total of six a day.
13. Many monastic cells were intentionally constructed so the occupant was always bowed when in it, thereby enforcing the virtue of humility.
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