The Sixth Key (34 page)

The three of them sat in the Peugeot hugging their coats to keep
out the cold. Earlier, they had left the
boulangerie
via the back exit and circled around to La Dame’s auto, whereupon they had
driven off, leaving the black Citroën behind them. La Dame’s driving had been
fast and jerky, and Rahn was glad when he stopped near a high overgrown patch
alongside the old road near
Campagne-sur-Aude
,
where they were afforded some cover. The wind had died down and a few scattered
opalescent packets of mist drifted over the lowland fields but Rahn paid them
no mind, he was turning it instead to the contents of the note.

MITTO TIBI

NAVEM

PRORA PVPPIQVE

CARENTEM

PALIM

‘What does that mean?’ La Dame said.

‘It’s Latin: I send you a ship without stern
– or prow – backwards.

‘Odd,’ La Dame answered.

‘It’s a rebus, La Dame, a Roman puzzle. Deodat
and Cros were fond of bewildering each other with them. Deodat and I had been
talking about rebuses the day he was taken, that’s how we came to the relevance
of the word sator. Let me see . . . a ship . . . navem. Without stern or prow,
without beginning or end . . . is navem without N or M . . . ave!’

‘Ave?’ La Dame said, popping an unlit Cuban
into his mouth.

‘It means greetings. I send you greetings . .
. backwards . . . or
back-to-front greetings.’ ‘Odd,’ La Dame said
again, stroking his beard. ‘That’s what it means!’ Rahn said, suddenly
illuminated.

‘What?’

‘Ave backwards is Eva.’ He turned to her.
‘You, mademoiselle!’

‘Me?’ she said.

‘Yes, you! I suggest that whoever has Deodat
has made him write something that I could recognise as having been written only
by him, and Deodat, the crafty man that he is, has written me a warning in Latin.
A warning against you! You must be in on it!’ He formulated his theory as he
spoke. ‘Madame Dénarnaud intimated that you were not what you seemed. And now I
realise why Abbé Cros appeared to act strangely around you. He was fearful,
that’s why he waited until you were out of earshot to whisper to Deodat that he
wanted something from the church. That’s why he wrote down sator, and not
tabernacle, because he figured you wouldn’t know what it meant. Everything
you’ve told me has been a lie, isn’t it true?’ He was elated at having solved
two mysteries with one stone – the mystery of the Latin note and the
mystery of the girl – but at the same time he was also affronted for
being treated like a fool. And then it struck him. ‘You’re just like
The Woman
!’ he said, aghast.

La Dame began a solemn nod of agreement.

‘What woman?’ Eva said, indignantly.

‘
The
Woman
!’ La Dame said to her. ‘Irene Adler! “A Scandal in Bohemia”?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

La Dame leant in, savouring her attention.
‘Well, she was the only woman, nay the only person, ever to have outwitted
Sherlock Holmes. Whenever Sherlock spoke of Irene Adler it was always under the
honourable title of
The Woman
.’

‘Honourable! I wouldn’t say that!’ Rahn
blurted out, annoyed. He proceeded then to take up the reins of the
conversation. ‘This leads me to ask two questions, mademoiselle: who are you,
and whom are you working for?’

She paused, glanced at the two men calmly, and
said, devoid of emotion, ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions, Otto. It isn’t what
you think.’

‘No?’ Rahn said.

‘No. You see, some time ago I moved into the
house with Cros. He had no family because he was an orphan,’ she said. ‘He was
also paralysed, couldn’t speak and, to make matters all the more simple for me,
he lived a long way from the township of Bugarach. No one asked questions and
no one came to visit him, except for your friend Deodat Roche, and Abbé
Grassaud. Who was to know that I was not his niece, returned from Paris to keep
an eye on him?’

‘I would appreciate it, mademoiselle, if you
would just get to the point,’ Rahn said, realising his feelings were hurt.

She raised one brow very high. ‘Years ago,
Abbé Cros came to Paris. At the time I was working temporarily for his lawyers
as a secretary and so I knew everything there was to know about his affairs. He
was very wealthy, you know, but his wealth was transient: large sums of money
would appear and disappear in and out of his account, as if by magic, one might
say. I was also terribly intrigued by his funeral arrangements and his
elaborate design to keep anyone from knowing where he would be buried, even his
lawyers. The more I looked into this priest, the more I was convinced that he
had found a store of Visigoth treasure at Bugarach, and that he was planning to
bury himself with it.’

‘How do you know so much about the Visigoths?’
La Dame said.

‘I’m a student of archaeology, with a special
interest in them. I was just earning some money working as a secretary, before
coming here to work on my dissertation.’

‘So that’s why you knew so much about Bugarach
and its history,’ Rahn said.

‘That’s right. I’ve been studying it. I
guessed that the abbé’s wealth must have come from something he found, perhaps
in the church. When he fell ill I saw an opportunity to quit my job and come to
the south. Since he already knew me, it was easy for me to say that I had been
sent to sort out some of his more mundane affairs, to settle his books and pay
any outstanding bills. I fired his maid and hired a new one and from that time
on I became his niece.’

‘How did you know the key in the pond belonged
to the tabernacle?’ Rahn asked.

‘Just a hunch.’ She smiled. ‘When Abbé
Grassaud arrived unannounced to see Cros, I feared he might ask questions about
me, so I hid in a room nearby. I overheard Grassaud tell Cros he wanted the
list and if he didn’t give it to him he had ways of getting it – sooner
or later. Cros was very upset after Grassaud left and wanted to see Deodat.’

‘So Grassaud knew about the list, that’s why
he was so anxious to look at it. Cros suspected you by the time of our visit,
didn’t he?’ Rahn said. ‘That’s why he gave us the veiled clue.’

‘I didn’t need to know that word sator to find
the key to the tabernacle,’ she pointed out to his annoyance.

Irene Adler to the core!

‘Wait a moment, mademoiselle,’ Rahn said.
‘Didn’t Deodat know that Cros had no family?’

‘No. Cros kept that to himself all those years
in the seminary. Apparently he didn’t like to be pitied,’ she said.

Rahn seethed. ‘So, you’ve had your eye on the
treasure, haven’t you?’

‘Like you, perhaps?’ she answered icily. ‘But
unlike you, I don’t want it for myself. The Cathar treasure belongs in a
museum. Not in the hands of a brotherhood of greedy priests.’

Rahn sat up. ‘Which brotherhood?’

‘You and Deodat think yourselves very astute
but neither of you noticed one very important clue in the church at Bugarach.
In fact it was staring you right in the face!’

Yes, he remembered having a feeling that he
had missed something.

‘What did we miss?’ he said. ‘Come – out
with it!’

She smiled wider again. ‘You didn’t notice the
walls?’

The realisation hit him like a candlestick. ‘The
anchor and the snake?’

‘With one difference – the S in the
anchor is entwined with an R and topped with a crown. The Royal Serpent Rouge,
or Golden Crista, as some call it.’

Rahn stared.

Those eyes peeking out from their dark curtain
were smiling.

‘So Cros must have been a member of
Association Angelica!’ Rahn concluded. ‘And that is why he had those symbols
painted on the walls of his church!’

‘Wait a minute!’ La Dame’s unlit cigar played
at the corner of his mouth. ‘You’re both drawing rather a long bow. A symbol on
the wall of a church doesn’t automatically make its abbé a member of a secret
order. The symbol could have been there long before he arrived at Bugarach.’

‘That’s true,’ Rahn conceded, deflated,
looking out to the trembling trees.

‘All right, but what about that parchment the
madame gave you?’ Eva asked.

He took it out and looked at it. ‘I’m
convinced the master word is locked in the line that Saunière worked out.’

La Dame lit his cigar, took a puff and,
gratified, said, ‘Surely whoever encoded it wouldn’t have been stupid enough to
have placed the master word and the message in the same parchment?’

‘I agree with you, La Dame, this is not how
it’s usually done, the master word or combination of words is usually kept
separate from the cipher for obvious reasons. However in this case the family
Perillos may have feared it would become lost or forgotten over time and so,
they could have encrypted it in the cipher as insurance. That’s what I would
have done . . . Let’s see if I’m right.

‘Now, Saunière had
deciphered this much:

Jevousle gue cetindice dutres or qui apparti entaux seign
eursderen nes etce stlam ort. Lefeur evele

I bequeath to you this
clue to the treasure that belongs to the lords of Rennes. It is death. Fire
reveals it.

La Dame nodded. ‘But, my dear Rahn, I thought
you said that all those priests have already tried every word in that deciphered
part to crack the code but to no avail. What do you propose to do?’

‘It could be something
very simple,’ Rahn said, ‘so simple it was overlooked. It is death . . . fire
reveals it – that has to be a clue! But what kind of clue, I don’t know.
This is the rest:

XOTDQTKWZIGSDGZPQUCAESJ

XSJWOFVLPSGGGGJAZ
MQTGYDCAXSXSDRZWZRLVQAFFPSDAPW MITMZSKWZHRLUCEHAIIMZPVJSSI
POEKXSXDUGVVQXLKFSVLXSSWLI PSIJUSIWXSMGUZVVQZRVQSJKQQYWDQYWL

‘It’s getting desperately
cold, Rahn, why don’t we go to a hotel? You’ll think better by a warm fire, I
assure you.’ La Dame was rubbing his hands together. ‘The mademoiselle would
like to go somewhere warm, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not particularly,’ Eva answered.

‘I know it’s cold, La Dame, but you must steel
yourself, we have to solve this puzzle,’ Rahn said, obstinately. ‘Before
something else happens.’

‘Let me see if I understand you,’ La Dame
said. ‘You, my friend, are going to attempt to solve a puzzle in the discomfort
of a car with daylight dwindling and temperatures dropping; a puzzle that no
one has solved in fifty years, even though they may have sat in comfortable
rooms, in front of fires with entire libraries at their disposal? By the time
you work out the frequency of the distribution of the letters in the cipher,
we’ll all be dead.’

‘I know, so we have to work out the master
word and fast.’

‘If only Arthur Conan Doyle were here, now
there’s a genius,’ La Dame said. ‘Remember “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”,
Rahn? A cipher of stickmen, each representing a letter of the alphabet –
quite brilliant!’

Rahn looked up from his calculations, feeling
querulous. ‘I still think Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” is by far the finest piece of
fictional literature written on the subject.’

‘Totally improbable, dear Rahn.’ La Dame shook
his head. ‘A gold bug that when suspended through a skull, points the way to
treasure – ha ha!’

Rahn narrowed his eyes. ‘It was quite
scientific and you obviously missed the point.’

Eva cut in, with a degree of impatience: ‘Are
you going to argue all afternoon, or are you going to solve the cipher?’

‘All right,’ Rahn said. ‘Look . . . Fire may
not be the word but I think it’s a clue. Let me think, there is a fire trial in
all Mithraic initiations, a candidate dies to the earth and is born to the
spirit, which is fire. This was illustrated in the mysteries by jumping over
fire, or running through a fire-lit forest, or over hot coals . . . fire . . .
fire . . . fire . . . death . . .’

‘But as I’ve already pointed out to you, the
word fire was used by Saunière, and it didn’t work,’ La Dame repeated.

‘What about the Pentecostal fire?’ Eva
offered.

‘Or the fire of Hell and eternal damnation?’
La Dame threw in.

‘Wait a minute – death, Hell or
Purgatory! That makes sense. Purgatory,’ Rahn said, excited. He took the piece
of paper with the list and a pencil he had in his pocket and began to write
purgatoire, over and over without a break between words.

‘The one good part of that story about the
bug, mademoiselle,’ La Dame said, ‘was the bit about the chemical preparations
. . .’

Meanwhile, Rahn drew a Vigenère Square.

‘There are preparations,’ La Dame went on,
‘that are visible only when subjected to the action of fire. Remember, Rahn?’

‘What?’ Rahn said, annoyed at his
interruption.