I had no more than a few seconds of air in my lungs, and I was plunging toward the river bottom, entwined with a drowning man and thirty pounds of stone. In desperation, I slammed my head backward, making solid contact with the inspector’s face. His grip slackened long enough for me to twist free. I still had hold of the ossuary, clutching the edge of one end in my left hand. Let it go, a voice in my head screamed. Let it go. Pull him to the surface.
I ignored that voice. I redoubled my grip on the ossuary, and with my other hand I grabbed a fluttering end of plastic mesh and wrapped it around the box. Then, fumbling for the other end of the mesh, I cinched it around Descartes’s foot. Only then, having trussed him to a stone anchor, did I push myself away and begin a desperate, breathless ascent. I felt his fingers clutch at my legs and then slip away as I kicked upward and he descended.
Only the faintest glimmer of light showed overhead, and as I flailed toward it, running out of air, the light began to dim. My last thought, as my mouth opened and my lungs filled with water, was for Miranda. Keep her safe, I thought—no, I prayed. Then: It is finished. Now.
And then there was blackness.
CHAPTER 43
SIRENS WAIL AND TIRES SCREAM TO A STOP ON THE pavement at the base of the bridge. Eight men leap from the caravan of police cars, running toward the stairs, weapons in hand.
One of the officers cries out and points upward, and the others look just in time to see a figure—a young woman—climbing onto the railing of the bridge and scanning the water below for ripples, bubbles, anything. She balances there briefly, arms stretched wide, as if Jesus and Mary, Savior and Virgin, manifested at one and the same time. Then she sees something; she does not hesitate, but hurls herself headfirst, as heedless as a seabird that spies a flash of silver scales in the water. She cleaves the surface with scarcely a splash, and the policemen stand transfixed, staring at the widening circles that are the only evidence of what they have just witnessed. Long moments pass; one man clutches his partner’s arm; another crosses himself.
At last the waters stir. The woman breaches, gasping and coughing and retching in the river. With one arm she pulls for the bank; with the other, she encircles the lifeless body she has harrowed from the depths.
She drags him onto the bank and presses water from his lungs, then—holding the shattered silver medallion he wears around his neck—she covers his mouth with hers and exhales, breathing into him the breath and prayer of life.
The man—Brockton—stirs, and groans, and lives again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: ON FACT AND FICTION
Spoiler alert: This explanatory note refers to key details of the book’s plot. If you haven’t finished the book and don’t want to risk spoiling the suspense, stop reading now … if you’re strong enough to resist temptation.
Avignon—the city of the popes—is both faithfully and lovingly portrayed in this book. First settled by Celts several centuries before Christ, Avignon was forever changed in 1309 when Clement V, the first French pope, settled there with his court to avoid the perils of Rome, which was in the grip of a deadly feud between two powerful clans. Over the next seven decades, the Avignon papacy—called “the Babylonian captivity” by critics who believed that Rome was the only legitimate location for the papal palace—transformed Avignon from a small, sleepy town of some 5,000 to a booming, wealthy, and cosmopolitan city of 50,000. Avignon became the crossroads of money and power in medieval Europe. Kings, emperors, and other movers and shakers came to Avignon to seek papal favors, to apply political pressure, and to revel in luxuries that far surpassed those at the Parisian court of King Philip of France.
No surprise, then, that fourteenth-century Avignon was also a crossroads of artistic talent. Within Avignon’s walls, popes, cardinals, and nobles rubbed shoulders with gifted painters and poets. Several famous figures from Avignon’s glory days play prominent roles here in this book. Nothing here contradicts the historical record, though their actions in these pages do—admittedly, exuberantly and occasionally wickedly—go considerably beyond the bare-bones record history offers us.