The Sixth Key Read online

  Rahn wanted to tell him that he didn’t know who he was or what had happened to the legend he had created for himself, as an adventurer, a writer and historian. Everything had fallen to pieces the moment those shots were fired.

  When the gentleman spoke, he said, ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Terribly sorry,’ Rahn said, ‘just a dream.’ He looked out at the grey day and it stared back at him.

  ‘You were saying something in your sleep,’ the man ventured.

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Oh yes, you said, “The children.”’

  Rahn laughed nervously. ‘Did I? Strange . . .’

  The man adjusted his glasses. There was something familiar about him.

  ‘Do you have children?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Indeed. That is good, in times like these.’

  In times like these! There was a world of meaning hidden in such a phrase. It said all there was to say.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked as plainly as if he had said, What do you think the weather will do now?

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He felt his temple for a fever.

  ‘You’re in a bit of a pickle, Herr Rahn.’

  Rahn sat up. ‘I’m terribly sorry, have I met you before?’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’

  ‘I don’t remember, I’m afraid . . .’

  ‘I’m not surprised. After all, we weren’t formally introduced. One could say it was just a brief encounter.’

  ‘When did we meet?’

  ‘Last night.’

  It took a moment for this to sink in. He had seen this man before. This was the man with the scar on his cheek! The man who had given him that knife when he was standing in the pit!

  ‘I am a friend,’ the man said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Rahn’s heart was pounding. Was this a trap, one of Himmler’s trials to gauge his loyalty?

  ‘I can offer you . . . restitution.’

  ‘I’m sorry but I—’

  ‘Do you want to make good what you’ve done? I am here to offer you an alternative. You don’t have to say yes or no right away. Perhaps you think this is a test, but I’m here to tell you that no, it isn’t. We understand your caution and we advise you to trust no one. For now, all you have to do is go to France and continue as instructed – to hunt for that grimoire. I wish you luck on your hunt. Keep your ears open in Paris and you will soon learn more. Perhaps you still have a chance to do something fine for the world.’

  The train began to slow down. The man stood and tipped his hat slightly and left the compartment, leaving his newspaper behind. Rahn picked it up and a card fell out.

  On it was written a single word:

  Serinus

  7

  Sancho

  ‘Tell me thy company and I will tell thee what thou art.’ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

  Rahn changed trains in Berlin and from there his journey was therapeutic. With each hour that passed, Weisthor, Wewelsburg, and the memory of that chamber of blood became, at times, unreal to his mind, like a distant point, a pause at a station that one soon passes, thinking how good it is that one doesn’t live there. But something told him that he could only put aside the horror temporarily. Sooner or later he would have to face it and he wondered whether he could live with the guilt. For now, he leant on those words spoken by the man on the train – that he might still have time to do something fine for the world. This thought kept him sane.

  Sometime in the night his papers passed inspection and he boarded another train for France and its fields, its houses, its farms, mountains and vales, vines and trees. Nothing had changed in that beloved country and he found this profoundly reassuring. In Paris, he dozed again in his hotel until he was well enough to go out to find coffee and food. He walked about the old city with convalescing affection, hearing his own footsteps on the leaf-littered pavements as if they belonged not to him but to a disembodied ghost. Paris! Embalmed by history, happy among its Napoleonic monuments and its obelisks, its cathedrals, its squares and streets; its river meandering in a seductive pulsing of life.

  As soon as possible he contacted his friend Alexis La Dame on the number La Dame’s mother had given him. La Dame was pleasantly surprised. Rahn asked him for a favour: Could he gather information on a certain individual called Vincent Varas? They agreed to meet and that was that. In the meantime, the galleries and the restaurants, jazz clubs and bookshops reclaimed him.

  On the day of their meeting, Rahn looked in the mirror to shave and found himself taken aback. He saw a thin man with high cheekbones jutting out of a pale face. Gone was the look of one for whom the entire world is a riddle waiting to be solved and in its place was a sad resignation – a spectre of death looming behind the façade of life.

  Looking at himself, he recalled how, as a child, when dark clouds scurried over the horizon in autumn and there was the sense of an impending storm, he and his friends would gather in the forest near his home. They would wait and, when the storm came, feeling their hearts in their chests and the wind in their lungs, they would run through the trees in the rain, flying over the ground, weightless, invulnerable, using lightning as swords, playing at being Michael slaying the dragon, with a feeling of sovereign protection in their hearts. Michael always triumphed, the good had always won and Rahn had always been on the side of the good! Now he no longer knew which side he stood on, nor what ground he walked. He understood that this meant he had lost his innocence, as clichéd as this sounded.

  He tried to put these thoughts aside as he approached the intersection of St Germain des Prés and rue Bonaparte where the Café de Flore was situated, to plan roughly what he was going to tell La Dame. He would likely be sitting at their usual table near the window reading the paper but in any case Rahn could have found him in a crowd: the combination of straw-coloured mop of hair; gold beard; suit and tie; cigar in one hand and brandy balloon in the other, was unmistakable.

  They’d met eight years before as extras on the set of a Pabst picture, filmed on the border of Austria and Poland, called Vier von der Infanterie. But, as it turned out, they discovered the happy coincidence that they had met once before, albeit very briefly, at an obscure bookshop in the rue Montmartre, where they had both been in search of the same, very rare Mexican edition of Don Quixote. So, after the day’s filming, they took themselves to an old pub run by a one-eyed madame, where, compelled by Dionysian inebriation, they drank toast after toast to the memory of Miguel de Cervantes. When they ran out of money, they turned to warm beer and after singing a number of discordant songs, Rahn announced that he was leaving to look for the Holy Grail in the caves of southern France and La Dame was welcome to come along. La Dame, citing years of working with his brother, a mining engineer and geologist, as credentials, said he would be only too happy to assist. La Dame, in fact, turned out to be rather good with a lamp and rope, and even taught Rahn French, interpreting for him until he was proficient.

  And so for the next two years La Dame played Sancho Panza to Rahn’s Don Quixote, and their friendship, having survived cold nights and wet caves and the inevitable frustrations, disappointments and dangers of treasure hunting, had grown as comfortable as a pair of old shoes.

  Those endless, careless days now seemed to Rahn like another life. In his pocket sat Weisthor’s envelope and the card from the man on the train, side by side, as if to underline to him how much things had changed. Even so, he would have to go on as if nothing had happened until he could figure things out.

  He was about to cross the street when he had a strange feeling. He looked around but saw nothing out of the ordinary, and put it down to his mind playing tricks. Still, the feeling remained with him until a sudden downpour interrupted his thoughts and forced him to make a run for it. Once inside the café, he removed his soaked black coat and his fedora and looked around. It was early and the café was quiet. In one corner, a man ate an omelette, his poodle beside him on its own chair, lapping at
a bowl of soup. At the far end of the room two lovers sat entwined, kissing. Behind the bar, the waitress argued with the manager and threatened to leave, both ignoring a middle-aged blonde, perhaps a femme de la nuit, asking for a glass of wine. All in all, an average afternoon.

  As expected, La Dame was at his usual table by the window and when he looked up from reading the Paris-Soir, he cried, ‘Rahn!’

  He was shorter than Rahn but more athletic and so when they embraced warmly it was rather a mismatched affair.

  ‘The reason for your unreasonable treatment of my reason so enfeebles my reason that I have reason to complain of your beauty!’ he said, quoting Cervantes and bowing graciously.

  ‘And the high Heavens, with which your divinity divinely fortifies you with stars, makes you the deserver of the desert that is deserved by your greatness!’ Rahn returned with a courteous bow.

  ‘I took the privilege, knowing your tastes.’ La Dame sat down and poured Rahn a glass of brandy with one hand while he puffed on the cigar he held in the other, a Hoyo de Monterrey, purchased, as usual, from the oldest tobacconist in Paris near the Louvre in the rue Saint Honoré. La Dame liked Cuban cigars, fast women and expensive clothes because it made him feel less Swiss, which in France was another word for prosaic, or, as some would say, l’ordinaire.

  ‘I see you still possess your vices,’ Rahn said, sitting down.

  ‘Consistency, my dear Rahn, is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Who said that?’

  Rahn sniffed the brandy; the note was comforting. ‘Oscar Wilde.’

  ‘You look wretched!’

  ‘Thank you.’ Rahn took a good sip and let the fruity fire sit on his tongue a moment. ‘And you, my dear La Dame, look a little portly.’

  There was a flash of panic in La Dame’s eye and his hand explored his middle to test the veracity of the vile statement.

  Touché! Rahn thought.

  There was a narrowing of the eyes and a shaking of the index finger of the hand that held his cigar. ‘You almost had me believing it!’ he said, with a smile, straightening his tie and biting into the cigar with a virile ferocity. He took a glance at his reflection in the mirror opposite and sat back, satisfied that he cut a good shape. ‘I’ve been working at teaching imbeciles to think logically, a task that, I have to say, is starting to lose its lustre. At this rate I’ll die of boredom before I’m forty.’ He watched Rahn drink the remaining contents of his glass down in one gulp with amusement and blew smoke rings in the air. ‘Hold on, Rahn! That’s expensive, you know.’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  La Dame raised a lazy brow. ‘Well, in that case . . . bottom’s up!’ He drank his glass in one gulp too and set it down for a top-up.

  Rahn poured another for both of them, then held up his glass and looked at La Dame through the golden liquor. ‘Nice colour . . .’ He sniffed it. ‘Oak casks, extra old; Napoleon or Vieille Réserve; aged at least six years. So you haven’t been cheap, La Dame, but you haven’t spent all the rent money either!’

  ‘How can you know so much from one mouthful, Rahn?’

  Rahn ignored him. ‘Do you know how they tested brandy in the old days? They put gunpowder in it and set fire to it. If the gunpowder took, the brandy was good.’

  La Dame sat back. ‘How you manage to retain so many completely useless but terribly impressive facts in that head of yours simply astounds me. Lucky for me, I have my looks to fall back on.’ He sighed. ‘This is good, isn’t it? Just like those nights at the Leila in Montmartre! The only difference is we’re not waiting for the bartender to turn around before running out of the place without paying. Things do change, thank goodness. But we did have rather a lot of fun, didn’t we? Drinking brandy and la Fée Verte.’

  Rahn nodded. ‘Yes, I also remember those days with fondness.’

  ‘That reminds me of Etienne – have you seen her lately? Are you and she, still . . . you know?’

  ‘We were never an affaire de coeur,’ Rahn said, ‘but I keep expecting her to turn up wearing a suit like the old days, carrying a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a gun in the other.’

  ‘I’ll take the absinthe . . . She was rather odd.’

  La Dame had a fashion of calling everything ‘odd’ and seemed to live amid a legion of oddities.

  ‘A Marxist with good taste is a rare species,’ he continued. ‘Speaking of Marxists, you certainly did send me on a chase! And exceedingly odd it was too!’

  Rahn sat up. ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘Actually—’ He warmed his words with another swallow of brandy. ‘There was a bit of hole-and-corner work involved. This Vincent Varas is an alias for a man called Pierre de Plantard who works for a group called Alpha Galates, which has some connections to the French Union. They have a nasty periodical called Vaincre, which they use to disseminate their anti-Freemason, anti-Marxist, anti-Jew, anti-everybody diatribe. Alpha Galates purports that its secrets come from ancient Atlantis. Moreover, they’re more Catholic than the pope and are expecting the so-called Apocalypse sooner rather than later, after which there will be the creation of a New Jerusalem – where, incidentally, there are no Jews but only good Roman Catholics.’

  Rahn sighed. ‘How big are they?’

  ‘As far as I can gather, there are only a handful of members and this Plantard is only a boy really, no older than nineteen, but there are others. The interesting thing is that behind Alpha Galates there is another group run by a man called Gaston De Mengel.’

  ‘So,’ Rahn said, ‘that’s the connection.’

  ‘What connection?’

  ‘I’m here at De Mengel’s suggestion.’

  ‘Really? And you didn’t know that he and another man called Monti ran that group?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, the group behind Alpha Galates is called Groupe Occidental D’etudes Esoteriques. They are highly secretive and dedicated to bringing peace to the world . . . and the Eiffel Tower is also made from Meccano! Whatever the case, this Monti was apparently Péladan’s pupil. You know Joséphin Péladan – the Rosicrucian?’

  ‘Yes, I know of him, I acknowledged him in my book. You know – the book you never read?’

  La Dame ignored Rahn’s sarcasm and said happily, ‘The plot thickens, Rahn! Some months ago, the Masonic Grand Lodge published an article denouncing Monti. It said he was a fraud and a supposed Jesuit agent and soon after he winds up dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Dead as a doornail, dear Rahn! And his close associate, a certain Dr Camille Savoire, apparently rushes to his side, examines him and claims that he has been poisoned – his body was apparently covered in black spots.’

  ‘Let me see if I have the gist,’ Rahn said. ‘Alpha Galates is a front for another society started by De Mengel and Monti, Groupe Occidental D’etudes Esoteriques. Some months ago Monti was murdered because he was a fraud and a spy.’ Rahn tried to think through the brandy fog. ‘Could it be more complicated?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, it could – I told you it was bloody marvellous! This Dr Savoire supposedly took up the vacated chair left by Monti and he runs the society now, along with this De Mengel fellow. So Plantard, or Vincent Varas, or whatever you want to call him, must be working for them. But the word is, there is a little friction between De Mengel and Savoire.’

  ‘And Plantard is caught in the middle? That’s good to know.’ Rahn raised his glass. ‘You’ve done well. I think you’ve missed your calling – you should have been a private eye or journalist, not a minor professor of science!’

  La Dame shook his head dismissively. ‘Too uncomfortable, Rahn. All those nights standing in the rain, waiting for something to happen. Not my style.’

  ‘Alright, but how did you find out so much?’

  ‘I have one or two friends in the periodicals.’ La Dame took a long puff of his cigar. ‘So, are you going to tell me what this is about and why you need to see this Pierre Plantard?’

  Rahn heard La Dame but he was distracted by that feeling a
gain – that they were being watched – and found himself scanning the room. ‘I don’t quite know how to start,’ he said, with a strange laugh that sounded nervous to his ears. ‘It’s all rather a long story really. But to cut it short, I have a new publisher.’

  ‘A new publisher?’ La Dame puffed away. ‘Congratulations, that’s wonderful. This calls for a celebration!’ He poured two more glasses and regarded Rahn with an admiring eye. ‘That explains why you’re dressed like Clark Gable. You’re clearly not the man who left Ussat-les-Bains hounded by creditors! So, who in God’s name is it?’

  Rahn looked at La Dame; his smile behind that gold beard was all eagerness. The last thing Rahn wanted to do was drag his friend into this messy business. He drank down his brandy before tackling an unpleasant abridged confession, which now seemed to him, all things considered, to be unavoidable.

  ‘When I saw you in Munich, do you remember me telling you that I had an appointment in Berlin?’

  ‘Yes, a mysterious telegram – and money if I remember correctly?’

  ‘Well, who do you think sent it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Marlene Dietrich?’

  ‘Cold, La Dame,’ he said. ‘Take another guess.’

  ‘Well, I’ll look for an antithesis then. Was it the pope?’

  ‘Close. Hitler’s Black Pope.’ He leant forwards and whispered, ‘It was the Reichsführer, Himmler.’

  When La Dame’s disbelief turned to comprehension he laughed. ‘You’re not serious, Rahn!’

  Rahn shot him a look.

  ‘Could it be true? What did he want? I was just reading about that weasel. I have to say, people here are talking about nothing else these days – Hitler and his cronies. Wasn’t he a chicken farmer? I dare say! I wouldn’t want to see him coming for me with an axe. Are you going to let me prattle on, or are you going to tell me what he wanted?’

  Rahn’s smile was weak. ‘Himmler made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous?’

  At that moment a man entered the café: medium build, medium height, wearing an expression that was so benign, so plain and commonplace that it made an immediate impression on Rahn. The man sat down and began to roll a cigarette. Rahn tried to remember that saying from one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated Sherlock Holmes tales and found it: There is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.