“This is it,” I said. “I didn’t have time to pack. Besides, I didn’t think I’d be staying long.” He shrugged and smiled. It was a slight, cryptic smile, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s but a bit more coy, as if he enjoyed prolonging my suspense.
It was lucky my bag was small, because Stefan’s car—a Fiat Punto—was built for midgets. The engine was proportionately tiny, too. A few miles north of the airport, the car slowed to a crawl as the road angled up a narrow valley between rocky hills. When we finally topped out, we’d left the coastal plain for the rolling farmland of southern Provence.
Miranda kept deflecting my questions, promising to explain everything once we were in Avignon, but with each deflection I found myself growing edgier. Now that my panic about her health had been resolved, I resented being manipulated—tricked and scared into coming—and I hated being kept in the dark. “It’s not a good idea to talk in the car,” Stefan finally interjected when I launched another inquiry. “We might have bugs.”
“He means it might be bugged,” Miranda explained.
“I knew what he meant,” I snapped.
“Ouch,” she said.
“Sorry,” I grumbled. “I’m tired from the trip—I can never sleep on planes. And somebody tried to barbecue me yesterday. So I’m kinda cranky at the moment.”
“Barbecue you?” She sounded slightly concerned but mostly amused.
“Barbecue,” I repeated. “What’s the French word? Flambé?” I told them the story, and ended by leaning forward, putting my scorched head between the front seats.
Miranda rubbed the stubble. “Wow, that’s crispy. I’d say you just used up another one of your nine lives.”
Stefan took a glance, then looked in the rearview mirror. “Is there any possibility that the barbecue chef—the guy who was shooting at you—followed you to France?”
The thought had not occurred to me before. “Why? Is someone tailing us?” I turned and looked out the rear window and saw half a dozen cars behind us on the busy highway. How would we know if one of them was following us? “I doubt that the guy shooting at me had any idea who I was. And he certainly wouldn’t have any way of connecting me to you, and to Avignon.” But despite my confident words, Stefan’s question had planted a seed of doubt in my mind, and it was already germinating into anxiety.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Miranda said. “And I know you’re exhausted. And of course you have a right to know what’s going on here. Please trust us and be patient a little longer. Relax and enjoy the countryside.”
I tried. But with Stefan’s eyes darting to the mirrors again and again, my jangled nerves refused to settle. “You still seem worried that we’re being followed,” I finally said. “Do you think someone is tailing you?”
“Non,” Stefan said curtly.
“There might have been a car following us in Avignon this morning,” Miranda added. “But Stefan managed to lose it before we got out of the city.”
Stefan held up a hand for silence. The farther we drove, the louder the silence became.
An hour after leaving Marseilles, we crossed the Rh?ne—a beautiful river, almost as lovely as the Tennessee—and then Stefan abruptly whipped off the highway and onto a two-lane road. As soon as he’d made the turn, he and Miranda checked behind us again, then shared a look of relief at the emptiness of the road. Through tiny villages and past farmhouses and barns, the road followed the river upstream. After a few miles, we turned onto another highway that took us eastward, to another bridge spanning the river. On the far bank stood a low hill ringed by an ancient wall and crowned by tiled rooftops and massive stone towers, all glowing in the golden light of Provence.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“Avignon,” Stefan announced. “City of the popes. Once the richest and most powerful city in Europe.”
Chapter 3
Avignon
The Present
STEFAN THREADED THE FIAT THROUGH A PORTAL IN the ancient wall and into the old part of the city, navigating between stone buildings that were already old by the time the Mayflower set sail from England. Crooking to the left, the street burrowed into an underground parking garage carved deep beneath the hill. Stefan spiraled up several ramps, parking on the topmost level near a long pedestrian tunnel. Emerging at the end of the tunnel, we blinked and squinted our way into dazzling daylight.
We had surfaced on a large plaza, a couple of hundred feet wide but several times that long. Fronting the plaza, looming above it, was an immense castle, its high stone walls punctuated by even higher towers. “Le Palais des Papes,” Stefan said. “The Palace of the Popes.”
The fa?ade of the palace was easily twice the length of a football field, the stone walls were forty or fifty feet high, and the towers at the corners—one of them within spitting distance of the cathedral—soared high above the walls. With its crenellated battlements, the structure looked designed to withstand a military siege. “Palace of the Popes? Looks more like Fortress of the Popes.”