“I wondered if maybe he was meeting you. A moonlight rendezvous in the chapel of the Templars.” She didn’t say anything, but I noticed the muscles of her jaw working. Reluctantly, I reached for the black iron knob, hoping that it would not turn in my hand. But it did. The chapel’s heavy wooden door swung inward, and Miranda and I stepped inside.
The air was cool in the stone interior—cool, pungent, and coppery. It was a mixture of smells I knew only too well. “Maybe you’d better wait outside,” I told Miranda.
“Hell, no.” I knew there was no point arguing with her.
A maroon velvet drape separated the entryway from the soaring, vaulted space of the chapel itself. As I held the curtain aside, Miranda stepped through, and I followed half a step behind.
She gasped and reached back for me, her fingers digging into my arm. Then she turned and buried her face in my chest.
Congealing on the stone floor was a pool of blood, already black at its rim, still red at the center. High overhead was the arched metal truss that supported the theater lights. Suspended horizontally from a cable and pulley at the center of the truss was a short wooden beam. And nailed to that beam—like some modern-day minimalist crucifix—was the nude body of Stefan Beauvoir.
PART II
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
CHAPTER 21
FOR A LAW-ENFORCEMENT AGENCY THAT HAD LOCKED its doors and taken a holiday, the French Police Nationale now responded with impressive speed and force. Barely five minutes after Miranda had dragged a startled French passerby into the gruesome chapel—a desperate measure, but that’s what it took to persuade him we had a true emergency—I heard the two-note clarinet warble of a French siren. It was soon joined by another, then a third, then a fourth. The cacophonous quartet crescendoed and then died as the caravan of police cars screeched to a halt in the narrow street outside. Eight uniformed officers charged toward us through the passageway and across the courtyard. Miranda and the passerby waved them into the chapel as I held the door. When they saw Stefan’s body hanging in midair, his face a mask of agony, two of the officers crossed themselves; one, a close-cropped young man who couldn’t have been a day over twenty, staggered back to the doorway and vomited, barely missing my shoes.
A wiry, forty-something man with the crisp bearing of a former soldier took charge, ordering two of his underlings to cordon off the area. It wasn’t hard to do; they simply taped off the ten-foot-wide mouth of the corridor that led to the street. The words stretched across the opening were in French—ZONE IN-TERDITE—POLICE TECHNIQUE ET SCIENTIFIQUE—but the yellow-and-black tape spoke the universal language of crime scenes.
Talking in rapid-fire French with the man who’d placed the emergency call, the officer in charge—Sergeant Henri Petitjean, according to the ID bar on his chest—divided his attention (that is to say, his piercing glare) between the shell-shocked man, Miranda, and me. The unfortunate Passerby, who had probably been anticipating a leisurely Sunday-morning café au lait and baguette, was doing a lot of exasperated shrugging and indignant pointing—the shrugging at the policeman, the pointing at us; eventually, he gave a dismissive wave of his hand and turned to leave. In a flash, the policeman spun him around, pinned him to the wall, and made it crystal clear that he was not going anywhere except to one of the courtyard café tables, where he ordered the shaken man to sit.
The soldierly sergeant turned to us. “Monsieur et madame. Parlez-vous fran?ais?”
I knew enough French to know that he was asking if we spoke French. I also knew enough to say, “Non, pardon. Anglais?”
He glared at me, then turned his hawkish eyes on Miranda. “Madame?”