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.”
“A mighty fortress is our God,” Miranda quipped.
Slightly to the left of the highest, most formidable tower of the palace rose a more graceful, less militant spire, this one topped by a twenty-foot gold statue of a woman wearing a tiara of stars. “Who’s the gilded lady with the stars in her crown?”
“The Virgin Mary, of course,” Stefan said. “That’s Avignon Cathedral. The house of God.”
“How come God’s house is so much smaller than the pope’s palace?”
My question drew a smile from Miranda.
From across the river, the palace had appeared immense but also fanciful—Euro Disney, or maybe PopeLand. Up close, though, it loomed over the square, hulking and intimidating. I didn’t know a lot about Catholicism, but I associated it with saints and stained glass. This, though, was not the architecture of inspiration and aspiration; this was the architecture of subjugation and domination.