The Pharaoh's Secret

55

Paul and Gamay were on the ground and in a rental car shortly after the sun came up. Using a database of county records, Gamay found an address for Camila Duchene and acted as navigator while Paul drove streets that seemed half as wide and twice as crooked as necessary.

Following the lane as it bent, twisted and turned back on itself was bad enough; doing so in a car he had to be shoehorned into, while zipping in and out of patches of fog, made it that much more difficult. When a truck passed them going the other way, Paul edged to the shoulder and took out a few badly placed shrubs.

Gamay shot him the look.

“Just doing a little landscaping,” he said.

Finally, they arrived near the center of town. Paul parked in the first lot he could find. “Let’s walk the rest of the way,” he said.

Gamay opened the door. “Good idea. It’ll be safer for everyone. Including the plant life.”

With address in hand, they walked up a wet cobblestone lane toward what looked like a small castle. Two curved towers of stone, connected by a stone wall, blocked the path. An archway in the center of the wall allowed them through.

“Portes mordelaises,” Gamay said, reading the sign on the wall.

They passed under the arch, feeling as if they were entering a medieval city, and, in a way, they were. They’d now reached the oldest section of Rennes and the Portes mordelaises was one of the few remaining sections of the ramparts that had once walled in the city.

They continued up the narrow lane until they arrived at the address. It was a little early, but as Paul knocked on the door he smelled fresh bread baking. At least someone was awake in the house.

“I just realized how hungry I am,” Paul said. “Haven’t eaten a thing in twelve hours.”

The door opened and a white-haired woman of perhaps ninety stood there. She was smartly dressed, with a shawl around her shoulders. She pursed her lips, studying the two Americans.

“Bonjour,” she said. “Puis-je vous aider?”

Gamay replied, “Bonjour, êtes-vous Madame Duchene?”

“Oui,” she said. “Pourquoi?”

Gamay had rehearsed a speech in French regarding Admiral Villeneuve’s letters. She gave it slowly.

Madame Duchene cocked her head to the side, listening. “Your French is quite good,” she said in English, “for an American. You are Americans, aren’t you?”

“We are,” Gamay said, well aware that American travelers in Europe often had a bad reputation.

Instead of sending them away, Madame Duchene smiled and waved them in. “Come, come,” she said. “I was about to make some crepes.”

Gamay glanced at Paul, who was smiling broadly. “I swear, you were born under a lucky star.”

The aroma in Madame Duchene’s kitchen was heavenly. In addition to the bread that she’d already baked, the smell of fresh apricots, blueberries and vanilla danced about the room.

“Please, sit down,” Madame Duchene said. “I don’t get many visitors, so this is a pleasure.”

They sat at a small table in the kitchen as the older woman went back to the counter. She began cracking eggs, pouring flour and whipping up the batter from scratch. She spoke as she worked, looking back at Paul and Gamay occasionally.

“My first husband was American,” she said. “A soldier. I was fifteen when I met him. He came with the Army to toss out the Germans… Blueberries?”

“Madame Duchene,” Gamay interrupted. “I know it may seem strange, but we’re in a great hurry—”

“Blueberries sound wonderful,” Paul said, interrupting.

The look came his way once more. Twice as stern this time. Paul seemed unaffected. “No need to be hasty,” he whispered as Madame Duchene went back to work. “We have to eat at some point. And somewhere. Might as well be here.”

Gamay rolled her eyes.

“Blueberries are good for you,” Madame Duchene added without turning around. “They’ll help you live a long life.”

“Not if your wife kills you first,” Gamay muttered under her breath.

Paul grinned at the joke. “Tell me more about your husband,” he asked of their host.

“Oh, he was tall and handsome. Like you,” she said, turning around and looking at Paul. “Had a voice like Gary Cooper. Not quite as deep as yours, though.”

Gamay sighed. If another woman was going to flirt with her husband, she figured a ninety-year-old French lady who made crepes was about as safe as it got. Beyond that, Gamay herself was famished. And assuming Paul could be charming enough, they might get Camila Duchene’s story more easily and completely if they did it his way.

After breakfast, the story came out. “My grandfather had the letters,” Madame Duchene said. “He never really spoke of them… Something to do with the shame of having someone stabbed to death in your ancestral home… And Villeneuve was not famous in a way that anyone wanted to remember him.”

“But you tried to sell them, didn’t you?” Gamay asked.

“Years ago. Financial troubles. We were losing everything. After my husband died, things fell apart. There was a craze for historical things back then. Anything and everything from Napoleon’s era. If you had a butter knife he once used, you could get ten thousand francs for it.”

“And that reminded you of the letters?” Paul guessed.

“Oui,” she said. “I thought if they could be sold at an auction, we could be saved. But it wasn’t to be. We were accused of being forgers and frauds and no one gave us the benefit of the doubt.”

“We have other letters that Villeneuve wrote to D’Campion,” Paul said. “If the writing matches, they would help prove that your letters were authentic.”

She smiled, the lines it revealed adding to the beauty of her eyes. “I’m afraid that won’t help much,” she said. “I gave them away.”

Gamay’s heart sank. “To whom?”

“To the library. Along with a stack of old books. And the paintings.”

Paul glanced at his watch. “Any chance this library would be open yet?”

Madame Duchene stood and looked at the wall clock. “Any moment now,” she said. “Please, wait and I’ll pack you a lunch.”

The library which Camila Duchene referred them to, a four-story building, specialized in rare books and French history. It loomed up through the gray morning fog beside the canal that ran through central Rennes. Once a river, its bed had been walled in centuries ago to prevent flooding and allow for construction. Like many rivers in the old cities of Europe, there wasn’t much natural embankment left where it passed through the center of town.

Inside the library, Gamay and Paul found the staff reserved but helpful. Once they’d verified who the Trouts were, a proctor was assigned to help them. He took them to a section near the back of the building and led them to the items Madame Duchene had donated.

“The papers were given little credit,” he explained. “The paintings were not valued highly either. They seem to be amateurish re-creations of battle scenes. No one believes Villeneuve painted them because he wasn’t an artist and because they’re not signed.”

“Then why keep them?” Gamay asked.

“Because those are the conditions under which they were donated,” the proctor said. “We are to keep them for a minimum of one hundred years or return them to Madame Duchene or her heirs. And since their provenance could not be completely discredited, it seemed wise to accept them rather than allow them to end up elsewhere.”

Paul said, “Nothing like finding out something you gave away at a yard sale is worth a fortune.”

“Yard sale?” the proctor repeated, projecting the type of academic disdain the French seemed to have perfected to its highest form.

“Where you get rid of all your junk,” Paul said. “People have them all the time in America.”

“I’m sure they do.”

Gamay tried not to laugh and kept busy leafing through the books. One was a reference work on Ptolemaic Greek, the particular kind of Greek found on many trilingual inscriptions in Egypt. Which seemed promising, since Villeneuve and D’Campion were supposedly working on translations. The other was a treatise on war written by a French author she’d never heard of. Fanning through the pages, she found no notes or loose papers stuffed inside.

“What about the letters?” Gamay asked. “The writings?”

The proctor pulled out another book. This one was thin and had a modern cover that resembled a photo album. Inside, between sheets of plastic, were two-hundred-year-old papers covered in faded swirling ink lines from a fountain pen or even a quill.

“There were five letters,” the proctor explained, “a total of seventeen pages. They’re all in here.”

Gamay pulled up a chair, took a seat and switched on a light. With a notepad at her side, she began to read through the letters. It was slow-going, since they were in French and written in the style of the day, which seemed to avoid anything close to short and concise sentences.

As Gamay began her translation, Paul asked, “May I see the paintings?”

“Certainly,” the proctor said.

They moved farther down the aisle, where the proctor used a key to open a large cabinet door. Inside were a dozen framed paintings of different sizes. They were arranged in vertically slotted racks.

“Villeneuve did all of these?”

“Only three,” the proctor said. “And, I remind you, there’s no proof they were his.”

Paul understood the warning. Still, he wanted to see what Villeneuve might have done.

The proctor slid out the first of the three paintings, simply framed in hardwood, placed it on an easel and went back for the other two. All the frames looked old and worn.

“Original frames?” Paul asked.

“Of course,” the proctor said. “They’re probably worth more than the art.”

Paul switched on a light and studied the works. They were done in heavy oils, thick with brushstrokes, with badly matched colors.

The first painting was a three-quarter view of a wooden warship. The perspective wasn’t done with any kind of accuracy and the ship looked almost two-dimensional.

The second work depicted a street scene, a dusty alleyway at night, being filled with dark fog. Doors with odd discolorations were shut tight. Not a person in view. In the far upper right-hand corner, he saw three triangles out on what looked like a distant plain.

The third painting depicted several men in a longboat, pulling hard on their oars.

After studying the paintings for a minute, Paul understood what the proctor meant by amateurish. A shout from the front desk called the proctor away. “Coming, Matilda,” he replied. He turned to Paul. “I’ll be right back.”

Paul nodded. And as the proctor left, he returned to Gamay’s side. “Are you finding anything in the letters?”

“Not really,” she said. “I don’t think these even qualify as letters. They have dates but no signatures. They’re not addressed to anyone. And even at my level of French, it’s obvious that they’re rambling and circular in nature.”

“Like a journal?” Paul suggested.

“More like a madman working himself into a lather,” Gamay said. “Talking to himself, going over the same old grudges again and again.”

She pointed to the letter she’d been working on. “This one reads like an angry diatribe against Napoleon and his turning the Republic into a personal empire.”

She flipped backward through the book and pointed at another letter. “In this one, he’s calling Napoleon un petit homme sur un grand cheval—‘a tiny man on a large horse.’”

“That sounds like a good way to get yourself stabbed several times,” Paul noted.

“I’ll say,” she agreed, then flipped to another letter. “This one suggests that Napoleon is ‘destroying the character of France’ and that he’s ‘a fool.’ It says ‘I pledge him my services and he hardens his heart against me. Does he not know what I offer? The truth shall be revealed like the Wrath of God.’”

“‘Wrath of God’?” Paul repeated.

She nodded. “For doing bad things. Like tricking an old lady into making you breakfast by playing on her affections for her dearly departed husband.”

“It was worth it,” Paul replied. “Best meal I’ve had in weeks. But that’s not what I’m thinking about. Come, look at this.”

He brought Gamay to the paintings. “Look.”

She studied them for a second. “What am I looking for?”

“The Wrath of God.”

“Unless that’s the name of this ship, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Paul pointed to the street scene. “Wrath,” he said, “Old Testament — style. That’s Egypt. You can see the Pyramids as tiny triangles in the far background. The doors are marked with red. It’s probably supposed to be blood. Lambs’ blood. And the alleyway is filling with what I was thinking must be dust. But it’s not dust. It’s the last plague sent to Egypt when Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Israelites go. A plague that would come and kill the firstborn of everyone in Egypt who failed to smear blood on their doorjambs.

He pointed to the bottom. “Look here. Frogs. That was the second plague, I think. And there. Locusts. Also a plague.”

Gamay’s eyes widened as she saw what Paul was getting at. She retrieved the book of letters and began reading aloud. “‘La vérité sera révélée’—‘the truth shall be revealed’—‘à lui comme la colère de Dieu’—‘to him like the Wrath of God.’”

“Could he have been painting what he was writing?” Paul asked. “Or vice versa?”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I have an idea.”

She went back for the book of letters and began reading through one of them. “The vessel holds the power, the ship is the key to freedom.”

She pointed at the painting of the warship and then flipped to another letter.

“This one was the most coherent,” she said. “And based on the dates, it’s the last one in the series. From the context, I assume it was written to D’Campion, though, again, it’s not signed or addressed.”

She ran her finger along the text and began reading. “‘What weapon could be this way? he asks. It is nothing but superstition, he insists. At least, this is what his agents tell me. And yet, he asks me to prove to him all that I know. Even if he wants what we can bring him, he no longer wants to pay for it. They say I’m in his debt. A debt that must be paid. I fear it’s unsafe for me to even try, but where else have I to go? And, in truth, I now fear what the Emperor would do with this weapon in his hand. Perhaps the entire world would not be enough for him. Perhaps it’s best that the truth never come out. That it remain with you in your small boat paddling to the shelter of the Guillaume Tell.’”

She looked up, pointing at the third painting. “Small boat, paddling somewhere with great effort.”

“What are you thinking?” Paul asked.

“He had to hide what D’Campion sent him,” she said. “But he needed to keep it close at hand. Somewhere he could get at it.”

Paul could guess the rest. “Paintings, done with great haste, by a man who’d never painted a thing before. You think he hid the truth in the painting somehow?”

“No,” she said. “Not in the painting itself.”

She took the painting of the Plague Upon Egypt and turned it over. On the back of the picture there was heavy, coarse paper glued to the frame. Setting the painting down, she pulled a Swiss Army knife from her purse. “Hold this steady while I slit it apart.”

“Are you insane?” Paul whispered. “What about the Wrath of God for doing bad things?”

“I’m not worried about that,” she said. “We’re trying to save lives here.”

“What about the Wrath of the Proctor?”

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she said. “Besides, you heard him. He couldn’t care less about these paintings. He’d probably sell them to us for a song, if he was allowed.”

Paul held the frame steady as Gamay opened up the sharpest blade of the knife. “Make it quick,” he said.

Gamay began to separate the thick paper backing from the artwork, careful not to plunge the knife too deeply. When she’d gone all the way along the bottom, she reached up inside the frame.

“Well?”

She moved her hand along the inside of the bottom stretcher and then bent down and looked up into the gap. “Nothing,” she said. “Let’s try the others.”

With Paul now a willing accomplice, she separated the backing of the warship painting next. A quick check also found nothing.

“Guess the warship wasn’t the key,” Paul said.

“Very funny.”

Finally, she went to work on the painting of the small boat being rowed by the men.

“Hurry,” Paul said. “Someone’s coming.”

The clip-clop of shoes echoed off the tile floor, closing in on them. Gamay quickly closed the knife.

“Hurry.”

The proctor appeared at the end of the aisle and Paul hastily pulled the painting away from Gamay and slid it back into the rack. Instead of exclamation or rebuke, or even a look of shock, the proctor remained remarkably still.

Only then did Paul realize the proctor was stumbling stiffly forward, not even looking at them. He fell forward face-first with a knife sticking out of his back.

Another man appeared behind him. This man was younger, with slowly healing sores on his forehead and cheeks. He pulled the knife from the proctor’s back and wiped it coldly. Two more men moved in, flanking him.

“You can stop what you’re doing now,” the man with the sores said. “We’ll take it from here.”