The Tenth Chamber (31 page)

And fortunately, Champigny-sur-Marne was a scant twelve kilometres from the centre of Paris.

Max Rouby was a charming sort of man, in many ways an older version of Hugo, and Luc had to shrug off the unsettling transference. The curator was more than happy to extend a professional courtesy, one museum man to another, and put his minuscule staff at Luc’s disposal. Luc was given a table in a private archives area and a homely young woman named Chantelle began to dolly in the pertinent cardboard boxes.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’re looking for any documentation of a Resistance raid against a German train in the vicinity of Ruac in the Dordogne in the summer of 1944. It was carrying a lot of cash and maybe art. Is there an index?’

‘That’s why it was sent here but unfortunately we haven’t got to it yet. It won’t hurt for me to thumb through it today. It’ll make my job easier later on,’ she said helpfully.

They dove in. As they sorted through wartime memos, diaries, newspaper clippings, black-and-white photos and personal diaries, Chantelle told him what she knew about the lending museum.

Henri Queuille was an important post-war politician who had been active in the Resistance in the Corrèze area during the occupation. When he died, his family bequeathed his house to the State for the purpose of remembering and honouring the Resistance efforts in the region, and in 1982 both Mitterrand and Chirac attended the inauguration of the museum. The family archives served as the backbone but over the years the museum swelled with deposits and gifts from other local archives and family estates.

It was slow going. Luc was impressed at how meticulously the Resistance had documented their activities. Whether from pride or a military sense of discipline, some of the local operatives wrote voluminously about plans and results for, what turned out to be, posterity.

The first twenty boxes had no mention of the Ruac raid. Chantelle was going through box 21 and Luc was rifling box 22 when she announced, ‘This looks promising!’ and took the files over to Luc.

It was a notebook with the seal of a lycée général in Périgueux, dated 1991. It appeared an enterprising student had done a project on the war, interviewing a local man who had been a Resistance fighter. The man, a Claude Benestebe, who was in his late sixties at the time of the exchange, recounted a raid on a German train a mile from the station at Les Eyzies. From the very first page, it sounded like Luc’s incident. He began to page through Benestebe’s oral history while Chantelle took the lid off the next box.

Luc looked through the rest of the file but there was nothing else of interest, nothing about the Raphael painting. But the discovery of a tangible link to Ruac gave him the enthusiasm to keep pressing on to the last box.

In the late afternoon, Chantelle left the research room to fetch two cups of coffee. The overhead fluorescents were now brighter than the light streaming through the windows. There were only two boxes left and when he was done, he’d get a taxi back to Paris and meet Isaak. Box 29 was largely filled with a photo archive, hundreds of glossy shots printed on the heavy paper of the day. He moved through them quickly, as if he was dealing cards at a poker game, and the moment the girl came back with coffee was the moment he saw the photo with the hand-written caption printed in black ink on the white border, G
EN. DE
G
AULLE IN
R
UAC CONGRATULATING THE LOCAL MAQUISARD UNIT,
1949.

De Gaulle towered above the others. He was dressed in a dark business suit, squinting into the sun over the photographer’s shoulder. Behind him was the village café looking much the same as it did now. He was flanked by six people, five men and a woman and was shaking hands with the oldest man.

Luc’s eye was drawn immediately to the old man. And then another young man, and then the woman.

‘Coffee?’ Chantelle asked.

He couldn’t respond.

Because Chantelle disappeared.

And the room disappeared.

It was him and the photo. Nothing else.

The old man looked strikingly like the mayor, Bonnet. The young man looked like Jacques Bonnet. The woman looked like Odile Bonnet.

He stared some more, from face to face.

He shook his head in confusion. The resemblance was uncanny.

Paris was glowing in the twilight. From Luc’s taxi he hardly noticed the Eiffel Tower alight in the distance. With all the rush hour traffic, he had just enough time to get back to his hotel before Isaak came to pick him up but now he wished he hadn’t made the appointment.

He had thinking to do, facts to sort through, puzzle pieces to assemble. He didn’t need idle chit-chat. He’d be better off sitting in his room with a clear head and a clean sheet of paper. He’d be seeing Colonel Toucas the next day. He wanted to lay out a coherent theory, not ramble on like a nut. He wanted to be back home; if he hadn’t already missed the last train he would have preferred travelling tonight.

He ought to cancel.

He called Isaak.

‘What are you, telepathic?’ Isaak said. ‘I’m just working on a translation for you.’

‘You did it earlier. What do you mean?’ Luc asked.

‘The new one!’ Isaak exclaimed. ‘The Belgian guy’s been busy. He’s finished! Margo forwarded his email an hour ago. I wanted to have it ready for you by dinner.’

‘Look, about dinner. Do you mind if we postpone? I’ve got some urgent work.’

‘No problem. What about the translation?’

‘I’m stuck in traffic. Could you read it to me over the phone? Would you mind?’

‘Luc, whatever you want. Let’s do it now.’

‘Thank you. And Isaak, before you start, what was the last key word?’

‘That’s what got me excited. It’s one of those words that get a medievalist’s heart beating. It was TEMPLARS.’

Bernard of Clairvaux had been dead for a very long time but a day did not pass without someone at Ruac Abbey thinking about him or mentioning his name to make a point or punctuate a prayer.

He took his last breath in 1153 at the age of sixty-three and in near-record time he was canonised when, in 1174, Pope Alexander III made him Saint Bernard. The honour both thrilled and saddened his brother, Barthomieu, who was still troubled to live in a world without Bernard’s weighty presence.

On the occasion of his brother’s sainthood, Barthomieu journeyed to Clairvaux with Nivard, now his sole surviving brother, to pray at Bernard’s tomb. They did so with trepidation. Would any of Bernard’s contemporaries at Clairvaux be alive and remember them? Would their secret be exposed?

They thought not, but in the event some old monk might look them over suspiciously or try to engage them in conversation, they would remain aloof and would keep their heads cloaked in hooded anonymity.

This was an exchange they would not entertain:

No, they would not permit that conversation.

Their secret was closely held. No one outside the tight confines of Ruac Abbey knew. Over the years, the abbey had involuted, turning increasingly inward, an island unto itself. Partly, this was due to their doctrinal shift towards Cistercianism, in homage to the teachings and filial ties to the ever-more influential Bernard. The outside world held only temptation and sin. Bernard taught that a good monastic community needed only the sweat of its members to tend to earthly needs and heavenly prayers to Christ and the Virgin Mary to preserve them spiritually. But in increasing measure, the monks at Ruac were losing synchronicity with their secular brethren at Ruac village and for that reason, they needed to tuck themselves away.

Once a week, sometimes twice, they would brew their Enlightenment Tea and retire to the solitude of their cells or, if the evening was fine, a blanket of ferns beneath a favourite oak. There they would drift away to another place, another time, another plane, one which they were certain, brought them closer to God.

For a time, Barthomieu had fretted over Bernard’s hostility. His distant words were still fresh.
‘The Devil visited evil upon us last night. Do you have any doubt of this?’

He had waggled an accusatory finger.
Wicked! Wicked!

Bernard was a supremely learned man, infinitely more so than he. With Abélard he shared the honour as the most intelligent man Barthomieu had ever known. Popes turned to him to settle disputes. Kings. But in this matter, as Barthomieu ultimately convinced himself,
he
was in the right – it was Bernard who was short-sighted.

Nothing about the tea robbed Barthomieu of his ardour for Christ. Nor did it sap his resolve to pray and work towards spiritual purity. In fact, it increased his physical and spiritual vitality. He awoke every morning to the timbre of chapel bells with love in his heart and a spring in his step. And they bore their forays into distemper stoically enough, taking the bad with the good, and endeavouring not to cause each other harm.

He and Jean the infirmarer and herbalist preached the virtues of the tea among the abbey’s monks and soon it was widely used by all as a vitality tonic and spiritual chariot. The monks did not talk freely about their personal experiences but on the days large batches were prepared, they lined up eagerly for their rations. Even the abbot held out his personal chalice before scurrying off to the privacy of his abbot house.

And as the years went by, Barthomieu and the others noticed something creeping up on them, almost imperceptible at first but inescapable in the fullness of time. Their beards were remaining black or brown, their muscles stayed taut, their eyesights stayed keen. And in the delicate matter of their loins, despite their vows of celibacy, they retained the extravagant potency of their youth.