The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel Read online

  She looked away as she parsed what I’d said, looking for any trace of insincerity or condescension, I imagined. Finding none—for there was none to be found—she smiled. This time, if there was wistfulness or poignancy in her smile, I couldn’t see it. And I was looking mighty close.

  The candles were burning down and the night was getting cool by the time we left La Mirande. I wished I had a jacket to wrap around her shoulders; I considered wrapping an arm around her, but there was something fragile, something…sacred, somehow, in the air around us, and I didn’t want to risk disturbing it.

  Thank you, I said silently to the universe, or to God, or to the river of life. Thank you.

  THE NEXT MORNING, STEFAN—LOW ON SLEEP AND high on irritation—was still struggling to install and debug the motion detector. I offered to help, though the offer was neither sincere nor particularly useful, given my ineptness with electronics. Blessedly, Stefan declined and actually shooed us away, which meant that I had Miranda to myself again. When we emerged from the palace onto the plaza, I felt almost giddy with freedom—a middle-aged schoolboy playing hooky. “What shall we do, Miss Miranda?”

  “Let’s pretend we’re tourists,” she said. We dashed to Lumani. We arrived there in search of a guidebook; we departed with not only a guidebook but also a car: In a gesture of remarkable trust and generosity, Jean and Elisabeth loaned us their car, so—ensconced in an aging Peugeot and armed with a tattered English-language guide to Provence—we set out. Gingerly, for it had been years since I’d driven a car with a clutch, I eased us into the street and along the base of the ancient wall, which bristled with watch-towers every fifty yards. I checked the mirror often to see if we were being followed. Unless an eleven-year-old girl on a bicycle had been trained as an assassin, we were in the clear.

  We started with a detour through the town across the river, Villeneuve-les-Avignon. Villeneuve meant “New Town,” Miranda translated; it was a name that had been accurate once upon a time, but that time was a thousand years gone. During the thirteen hundreds, Villeneuve, which was not so tightly cramped as Avignon, became a wealthy suburb of the papal city, and fifteen cardinals built palaces there, though none, as far as we could see, had survived. What had survived were two monumental structures: a 130-foot tower that once controlled the western end of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, back when the bridge spanned the entire river; and a massive fortress that encircled the town’s hilltop. Both the tower and the fortress had been built to send a clear message to the uppity people of Avignon: The pope might hold the keys to heaven, but the king’s earthly army could break open the city gates on an hour’s notice, if papal push ever came to sovereign shove.

  From Villeneuve we took narrow country roads, Miranda navigating with the guidebook and a large-scale Michelin map on her lap. As the tires sang on the asphalt, my heart hummed along, and I felt lighter and freer than I had since my arrival. Ten miles or so north of Avignon, Miranda pointed to a ruined fortress on a hilltop. “Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” she announced. “It translates as ‘New Castle of the Pope.’”

  “All these ancient places with modern-sounding names,” I commented. “I guess five hundred years from now, people will say the same thing about New York, huh?” I threaded my way up through the village and parked beside the ruins. The structure had been built in the early thirteen hundreds, according to the guidebook, and had survived the ravages of time and the elements for six centuries. Unfortunately, it had not survived the ravages of Hitler’s soldiers. During World War Two, German troops filled the castle with dynamite and blew it up, destroying all but an L-shaped section of wall and tower.

  Clambering along the edge of the ruins, we had a good view of the broad plain below, which was filled as far as the eye could see with vineyards, the neat rows of vines lined with river rocks. “The rocks capture the heat of the sun,” Miranda read, “to keep the vines warm at night.” Both the castle and the vineyards were the legacy of Pope John XXII, the second of the Avignon popes. “He was well known for his love of wine,” she went on, “and also for his sour disposition.” She laughed. “After he drank it, I guess it turned to vinegar in his soul.”

  As we made our way back to the car, I noticed a stone staircase burrowing into the hillside, ending at a door set deep in the foundations of the fortress. I nudged Miranda and nodded down toward the doorway. “Pope John’s wine cellar?”

  “Looks more like Pope John’s dungeon to me.” She was right. The steps were narrow, steep, and crumbling; the arch of the doorway was low; the door itself was recessed a couple of feet into the thick stonework. “Holy heretics, Batman,” she muttered. “This place feels haunted. Let’s get out of here.”

  As the Peugeot clattered and corkscrewed back down through the town, Miranda announced, “I’m starving. How about lunch?”

  “Sure. Can you make it back to Avignon?”

  “I can make it back to that little café we passed two seconds ago. Look, there’s a parking place. On the right. Here, here, here.” I whipped the car into the spot, forgetting to push in the clutch, and we lurched to a stop as the engine stalled. “Smooth, Dr. B.”

  “Thanks. Anybody ever tell you you’re bossy?”

  “Nobody who valued life and limb,” she said, and I laughed.

  The café, La Maisouneta—“Provençal dialect for ‘The Little House,’ I think,” Miranda said—was as humble and homey as La Mirande had been elegant and expensive. The handful of other customers seemed to be locals, not tourists: a rumpled young couple with a toddler crawling beneath the tables; a stocky older woman, her hair in curlers; a middle-aged man in paint-spattered coveralls. The menu was scrawled on a blackboard behind the counter, but most of the dishes on it were unavailable, the hostess informed Miranda. Lunchtime was just ending, and the kitchen had run out of everything except salad and something called reblochon, a traditional local dish consisting of melted white cheese with a potato on the side. “White on white,” I muttered. “Sounds terrific.”

  It was terrific, in fact. The dish had been baked until the top of the cheese was golden brown and crispy, and it was garnished with crunchy bits of salty ham. It was, I decided, nearly as special as my first night’s feast of Corsican lamb stew.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t the food that was special; maybe what was special was stumbling across this hole-in-the-wall café on a steep cobblestone street in an ancient town, sitting across a stained checkerboard tablecloth from Miranda. She was speaking, but I had no idea what she was saying; instead, as I watched her mouth move, I was thinking what a lovely woman she was; I was wishing I weren’t her boss; wishing I were twenty years younger. Suddenly she stopped talking, stared at me, and waved her hands like semaphore flags.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I knew it,” she sighed. “You had that lost-in-space look on your face. Where’d you go?” Hope and terror surged in me—Should I tell her? Has she guessed?—but she shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. So, I was just saying that the Romans crucified thousands of people, but only one set of crucified remains has ever been definitively identified. Found in an ossuary in Jerusalem in 1968. Totally a fluke. One of the heels still had a nail in it; the nail had hit a knot in the wood, and it bent, so when the body was taken down, the nail yanked out a chunk of wood.”

  I chewed on the information while chewing on a bite of cheese-slathered potato. “When did you study up on crucifixion?”

  “Right after Stefan showed me the bones.” I regretted my question; I didn’t want Stefan sharing the café table with us, even figuratively. Luckily, he merited only a passing mention. “It was uncommon to nail people to the cross,” she went on. “Rope was more common.”

  “Rope?”

  “Sure. You just tie the wrists to the crossbar.” She spread her arms wide, her hands slightly above shoulder height, tilting her head sideways and slightly down, though not enough to hide the playful smile on her face. “Asphyxiation’s the cause of death, right, if you’re hanging on a cross by
your arms for hours?” I nodded, feeling a bit short of breath myself. Miranda made even crucifixion look miraculously fetching. Get a grip, Brockton, I scolded inwardly.

  “So…uh…” I struggled to put together a sentence. “Do you think the gouge marks in our bones are fake, then? Made by a medieval-relic forger who didn’t know that nails weren’t generally used in crucifixions?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. But then again, what good’s a fake relic if nobody knows about it? The point of relics—the cynical point, at least—was to attract pilgrims. Not a lot of pilgrims visited the pope’s treasure chamber, I’m thinking. Besides, they’d’ve needed X-ray vision to see it. Makes no sense.” Just then she got a text message. When she read it, she frowned. “Well, crap. Stefan says he needs me to help him test the motion sensor.”

  I suppressed a sigh. He had elbowed his way to the lunch table after all.

  We’d planned to finish our day another twenty miles north, at the city of Orange, whose immense Roman amphitheater was already a millennium old when the cornerstone was laid at the Palace of the Popes. But Miranda felt obliged to help Stefan. And the truth was, my heart wasn’t really in playing tourist. Except for my delight in having Miranda to myself, I was just killing time—drumming my fingers on the stage sets of history—while waiting to hear from Joe Mullins. Waiting to see the face of the man whose bones had been entombed in a wall seven centuries before.

  Would it be the face of a medieval murder victim—or the face of Jesus of Nazareth?

  CHAPTER 7

  CHTEAUNEUF-DU-PAPE

  1327

  A FAINT SHEEN OF PERSPIRATION BEDEWS THE FOREHEAD and fleshy upper lip of Jacques Fournier—Cardinal Jacques Fournier, for the past week now—as he’s ushered into the pope’s chambers. The journey from Avignon to the countryside castle has taken an entire sweltering day, but a papal summons is a mark of high favor, and a private audience is a rare privilege, especially for a young, freshly hatted cardinal.

  Pope John XXII hunches on a wooden throne by a window that overlooks vineyards—his vineyards—spreading across the wide valley. His desiccated, dyspeptic face is crosshatched with wrinkles, and the liver-spotted hands clutching the arms of the chair bear an unsettling resemblance to the carved talons that serve as the throne’s four feet. A papal claw slithers forward by an inch, and Fournier kneels—no easy task for a man of his bulk—to kiss the Fisherman’s Ring on the old man’s bony third finger. Despite his conspicuous contempt for earthly luxuries, the young cardinal’s eyes linger on the massive gold signet. John XXII’s monogram is simple yet regal, and the embossed image of Saint Peter hauling a net aboard a small wooden boat portrays to perfection the hard, humble work of fishing for the souls of men.

  “Rise, my son,” the pope rasps, “for there is work to be done.” Fournier lumbers to his feet, puffing with the effort, and inclines his head to listen. “Your zeal for the purity of the faith is exemplary. Your inquisition rid us of the Cathar heretics in Montaillou, and we are most grateful.”

  “Your Holiness honors me beyond all deserving,” Fournier murmurs. “I pray that we have seen the last of the Cathars. But we must remain vigilant.”

  “Quite so, Jacques, quite so. And not just against the Cathars. The Father of Lies sows seeds of evil everywhere. This is why I have elevated you and brought you to the papal court. We must guard Christ’s holy church against those who would destroy it from within.”

  “It is my privilege as well as my duty, Holy Father.”

  The pope moves his hands to the lap of his silk robe and twists the gold ring. “How closely have you followed the problem with the Franciscans?”

  Fournier inclines his head, his plump sausage-fingers interlaced. “I know that one faction, the Spirituals, preach that our Lord and his followers lived in poverty,” he says. “And that we should all do likewise.”

  “They’re happy to live in housing they say belongs to me,” snaps the pontiff. “Happy to consume food and wine they say belongs to me. And happiest of all to denounce me for possessing these things that sustain their lives of precious purity.” He is sputtering with anger, spraying drops of spittle that sparkle in the slanting afternoon light.

  Fournier shakes his head sadly. “They do Your Holiness an injustice. And now…but perhaps it is not my place to speak of it.”

  “To speak of what?” The aged head snaps up, the eyes blazing.

  “One hears…reports, Holy Father.”

  “What kind of reports?”

  “The Franciscans’ minister general, Michael of Cesena, grows bolder. He openly calls Your Holiness a hypocrite, a hedonist, and a heretic.” The pope’s fingers scrabble at the arms of the chair. “Forgive me if I speak too frankly,” Fournier continues, “but now Michael is said to be conspiring with Louis of Bavaria to destroy you. Their goal is to put a Franciscan on the papal throne. Perhaps none other than Michael himself.”

  “Spawn of the Devil,” the old man rages. “Sons of Satan. They must be brought to heel.”

  “Louis might prove difficult to rein in, but would Your Holiness consider summoning Michael to Avignon for…questioning?” The pope’s glittering eyes bore into Fournier’s; the cardinal bows deferentially. “I stand ready, of course, to serve in any capacity you think helpful.”

  The pope nods. “Bring them here.” Reaching into a pocket of his cassock, he rummages ineffectually. “There are cells beneath us,” he rasps. “Also in the bishop’s palace in Avignon.” Finally he extracts a pair of keys and hands them to Fournier. Not quite the keys to heaven, thinks Fournier, but the papal dungeon is a starting place.

  He takes the keys and takes his leave. On his way out, though, he hesitates, then turns. “Your Holiness, I beg your pardon. My conscience would trouble me if I did not mention another matter. I’m also hearing disturbing reports from the archbishop of Cologne.”

  “Do Michael and the Franciscans foment trouble in Cologne, too?”

  “No, Holy Father, not Michael; someone else. Someone far more subtle, and perhaps far more sinister. He does not bother to criticize you, Holy Father. This man dares to criticize God Himself.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Avignon

  The Present

  “I HAVE AN IDEA FOR YOU,” ELISABETH SAID, SETTING my morning glass of blood orange juice on the table in Lumani’s garden. “For your—how do you say it?—zhondo?”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “For my what?”

  “Your zhondo. Your dead man with no name. Your mysterious bones.”

  “Oh, my John Doe.” I smiled, but I was puzzled and concerned. How did she know about the bones? I’d been careful not to discuss the case with Elisabeth and Jean, given Stefan’s skittishness and my new paranoia. “Did Stefan or Miranda tell you about him?”

  “Non, pas du tout. Not at all. It’s simple to guess. I look you up on Google after you arrive. I do this to learn about every guest. Most of the time, I find nothing. But you—you are a famous bone detective!”

  “Not so famous.”

  “Ah, monsieur, you are wrong. Too humble. So. A bone detective comes all the way to Avignon. Pourquoi? Because someone has found mysterious bones, oui? You and your friends, you arrive wearing badges from the Palais des Papes that day. So I think, ah, they are working at the Palais; this is where the mysterious bones are found. You see? Simple.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Elisabeth, you’re a better detective than plenty of police officers I know.” She seemed to like that, but she wasn’t finished yet, apparently, because she raised her index finger and wagged it at me. “So, mysterious bones at the Palais. Oui? Oui.” She nodded, pleased to have answered her own question. “Whose bones? Someone from the time of the popes. Someone important. Someone whose death the pope needs to hide, oui? Oui.”

  “Are you really an innkeeper and artist, Elisabeth? Or are you an undercover cop?”

  She laughed. “Artists, we have big imagination.”

  “And you can imagine who th
is John Doe is?”

  She looked self-conscious for the first time. “Maybe yes, maybe no. But there is a mystery in Avignon at the time of the popes. An important man comes here. He has powerful enemies. And he disappears.”

  I was starting to get intrigued. “And who was this important man?”

  She smiled, happy to have me on the hook, and then drew a deep breath and launched into her story. “In the early thirteen hundreds,” she began, “there was a popular and powerful preacher in Germany, a Dominican friar named Eckhart. Jean. John. Johannes, in German. You have heard of him? Meister Johannes Eckhart?” She cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows.

  “I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know anything about him,” I admitted. “Tell me.”

  “Ah. Well, he was brilliant. My cousin is a Dominican, and he tells me about this. Eckhart was a great…théologien?”

  “Theologian. It’s the same word in English.”

  “Ah, bon. Eckhart studied in Cologne with Albertus Magnus—Albert the Great—and with Thomas Aquinas, the two most brilliant men of the time. Then he taught theology in Paris. But”—she raised a finger for emphasis—“he was also a great preacher. Very much loved. The Dominicans were the best preachers. They took the message out to the people.”

  “The evangelists,” I said, nodding. “So what happened? You said he had powerful enemies?”

  “Yes. One is the archbishop of Cologne. He is jealous because he is not so popular like Eckhart. So. He accuses Eckhart of heresy. Ah, but Eckhart fights back. He appeals directly to the pope, Pope John Twenty-Two. And in 1327—Eckhart has sixty-six years at this time—he walks from Cologne to Avignon, eight hundred kilometers, to make a defense.”