Cradle of Solitude (5 page)

She tried a different approach.

“I'm sorry, Doug. I'd be happy to discuss the ghost shark episode with you when I get back to the States,” she told him, ignoring the fresh round of chuckling that erupted from the other side of the room.

“I want a favor.”

“What?”

“I'd be happy to put you in touch with my contact at the Smithsonian, but it's going to cost you a favor.”

I know I'm going to regret this, she thought. She sighed. “What is it?”

“Oh, no. I don't mean right now. Just sometime in the future. You'll owe me a favor, that's all. Deal?”

“Owe you a favor? Are you out of your mind?”

“It was good talking with you, Annja. Enjoy the rest of your vacation and I'll—”

“Fine,” she said, biting off her anger along with the end of the word. She knew she shouldn't have laughed at the chupacabra thing but owing Doug a favor? No good could possibly come of this.

“What do we need the Smithsonian to do for us?” Doug asked.

Gritting her teeth, she said, “I need to have a letter authenticated.”

“Why didn't you just call them up and ask yourself? It shouldn't take more than a few months.”

Annja was shaking her head. “It's not that simple, Doug. I'm helping the French police with an investigation in the catacombs—”

“Whaaat? The catacombs? You're running an investigation in the catacombs and you didn't tell me? I'll send a crew over immediately.”

“It's not like that, Doug. There's nothing here of interest to the show. The authorities stumbled on the skeleton of a man in a Civil War uniform and—”

He interrupted her again. “Wait, I thought the catacombs were full of skeletons. What difference does it make that they found one in a French uniform?”

“The American Civil War, Doug, not the French. The French didn't have a civil war.”

How he managed to run a show about historical subjects with such a limited view of world history constantly astounded her, but he took her correction in stride, seemingly without a second thought.

“American, okay, got it. Union or Confederate uniform?”

“Confederate. But that's really beside the point.”

He didn't seem to hear her. “This is good, Annja, real good. We can turn this into a world-class episode, just leave it to me.”

Knowing Doug, he'd find a way to suggest that the Paris catacombs were full of Civil War zombies, getting ready for the second rise of the South. Leaving it to him was the last thing she intended to do.

“Doug, we're not doing an episode on this. I just need the letter authenticated.”

“Who's it from?”

“The letter?”

“Yes, of course the letter. Try to keep up, Annja.”

I swear, one of these days I'm going to run him through with my sword, she thought. “Jefferson Davis.”

“Confederate President Jefferson Davis?”

Maybe he did know something about history, after all. Either that or he was quick with Wikipedia.

“The one and the same.”

There was silence for a moment. “Annja?”

“Yes, Doug?”

“Let me be sure I've got this straight. You discovered a skeleton, dressed in the uniform of a Confederate soldier, carrying a letter from President Davis, in the midst of the Paris catacombs and you don't think there's anything of interest there for the show?”

Annja had to admit he had a good point.

In the end, Doug agreed he would use whatever cachet the show had to get someone at the Smithsonian to examine the letter as quickly as possible. In return, she agreed to send over a copy of the video footage they'd taken to date so that it could be cleaned up and potentially used in an episode about discovering the skeleton at a later date.

Once that was settled, they agreed to check in with each other if anything significant developed and ended the call.

Not thirty seconds after getting off the phone, Annja realized that she probably could have just called up the embassy and asked Billy Garrison to get it done for her, given that she was officially working on a government matter, anyway.

But that would, of course, require talking to him and he'd have wanted to get together to discuss the situa
tion in more detail, say, over dinner and drinks, and she'd have felt obligated to do so in order to get the letter properly authenticated and…no. Doug was the better option.

Owing Doug a favor couldn't be all that bad, could it?

After a moment, she decided that, yes, it could be all that bad. Doug was the guy who had once asked her to pretend to be dead for a few weeks to milk the sales of the commemorative DVD set he'd put out when she'd been incorrectly reported dead.

Dutifully ignoring Bernard's chuckles, Annja got back to work.

After examining the sack coat, Annja turned her attention to the pistol and sword Parker had been holding when he'd died.

The gun was a single action revolver, which she recognized as a Colt 1851 Navy Revolver from the engraving of a naval battle on the cylinder. The gun had been popular at the time of the Civil War. Her research told her that famous Navy Revolver users included Wild Bill Hickok, “Doc” Holliday and General Robert E. Lee.

Drawing back the hammer, she discovered that three of the six chambers still held percussion caps, indicating that they were loaded and ready to fire.

Apparently Parker's enemy hadn't been the only one who'd gotten a shot off at the fateful meeting, she thought.

She emptied the revolver, carefully storing the percussion caps, bullets and powder in separate vials, eliminating the chance of an accident while she examined the weapon.

When she was finished with the revolver she turned
her attention to the sword. Since she'd miraculously inherited Joan of Arc's famous sword, bladed weapons had become a passion for Annja and she immediately recognized this one as a Shelby cavalry sabre, named after General Joseph O. Shelby, leader of the Iron Brigade. When the Confederacy fell, Shelby, one of the few Confederate generals who had never been defeated in combat by Union troops, took his entire command to Mexico rather than surrender. The cavalry sword he'd carried throughout the war, a common enough model produced by the Ames sword company, was renamed in his honor after the war.

The blade was about forty inches in length and bore the CSA, or Confederate States of America, inscription, as did the brass guard. The grip was leather, wrapped with twisted brass wire. The entire weapon seemed to be in excellent shape and Annja gave it a few experimental swings through the air to get the sense of it. It was well-balanced, though shorter and lighter than the weapon she was used to using.

Putting the weapon back down on the examination table, she moved over to the rest of Parker's clothing.

He'd been wearing leather cavalry boots rather than the usual leather brogans, but Annja wasn't surprised by this, as Confederate footwear had been notoriously bad. The boots were in fairly good shape, but didn't tell her anything new about their owner. The same was true for the regulation trousers that she examined next.

The shirt was a bit more interesting, if only because it held the evidence of the gunshot that had ended Parker's life. There was a bullet hole in the front of the shirt, just to the left of the sternum, but no corresponding hole on the back. This meant the bullet hadn't passed completely through his body, as she might have
expected at such close range, but had remained lodged somewhere inside his chest. It was a good reminder that modern weapons were far more powerful than those of a hundred years ago and she told herself to keep that in mind as she examined the evidence of Parker's demise.

Annja wished they had the bullet to examine, as it might have been able to tell them something about the gun that had been used. That could have narrowed their avenues of inquiry a bit, but she'd been unable to find it among Parker's remains.

It's probably on the floor of the antechamber. Maybe I'll go back and try to find it later, she thought.

Annja was about to put the shirt aside when she noticed an odd double stitch along one of the seams. She ran her fingers over the cloth at that point and felt something there, just beneath the surface.

It was small, no more than an inch long and less than a quarter-inch thick, and it hadn't gotten there by accident. Whatever it was, someone had taken a bit of trouble to hide it inside the seam of the shirt.

“I think I've got something,” Annja said, and when Bernard came back over to her station as he had done before, she showed him what she had found. They both agreed that it merited further investigation. They photographed the shirt from a variety of angles, wanting to preserve a record of its condition before they altered it in any way, and then they x-rayed it, as well. The latter was inconclusive, however; it showed the object and confirmed its rectangular shape, but it didn't provide any information as to what it might be.

They were going to have to take a look for themselves.

Scalpel in hand, Annja carefully cut each of the threads that held the seam closed and then, using the
flat of the blade, she lifted the edge of the cloth, revealing what was hidden inside—a folded piece of paper. Annja held the pocket of cloth open with the scalpel while Bernard used a pair of tweezers to tease the paper free of its hiding place and move it onto its own examination plate.

With the aid of a low-power magnifying glass Annja could see that two edges of the paper were evenly cut, while the others were ragged, indicating it had been torn from a larger source.

A few words had been written on the small slip of paper in a hurried scrawl. Using the magnifying glass, Annja read them aloud.

“Berceau de solitude.”

Annja didn't need Bernard to translate. She knew the words were
Cradle of Solitude,
but she hoped he might have some insight on what it meant, because she didn't have a clue.

“Only place I know by that name is a monastery in the Pyrenees,” he told her.

“A monastery? Can you think of any reason it might be connected to our mysterious friend here?” she asked.

“Not particularly. If memory serves, it started out as a convent in the early 1500s, was abandoned about a hundred years later and then was bought by a sect of Benedictine monks just before the French Revolution. They've been running the place ever since.”

Benedictine monks. She couldn't think of any obvious connection between the religious order and the Confederacy, but it wasn't her area of expertise. Still, there had to be a connection, for no one went through the kind of trouble Parker had to hide a piece of paper if it wasn't important.

The monastery was the key to this mystery.

She was sure of it.

“Is it far from here?”

Bernard shrugged. “Four, maybe four and a half hours by car. There's a train that runs in that direction, as well, but you'd have to find transportation up the mountain. Not much sense in going, though.”

“And why's that?”

“It's closed to the public. Outside visitors have to be approved in advance by the abbot and the process takes several months. I spent some time there a few years ago examining one of the books they have in their library and I remember the process being an absolute nightmare to get through.”

“So you've met the abbot?”

“The abbot, hmmm. Abbot Deschanel. Yes, I have. A charming man, actually.”

“Would he remember you?”

“I should think so,” Bernard told her. “We spent several evenings discussing a variety of topics over a glass of wine or two and I…” He paused, finally putting two and two together. “Oh, no.”

Annja smiled at him sweetly. “What?”

“You want me to call over there and try to get you in to see the abbott without going through the standard process.”

“You'd do that for me?” she replied, letting her eyes go wide and feigning innocent surprise.

Bernard laughed. “I'm supposed to believe that the idea never even occurred to you, right?”

“You can believe what you want. But now that you've brought it up I think it's an excellent idea.”

“It's been more than a hundred years, Annja. What do you expect to find?”

She shrugged. “I don't have any idea. But I'm sure
something will occur to me once I'm there. There has to be a reason that Parker went through all the trouble of hiding the name of the monastery inside the seam of his shirt. That doesn't just happen by accident.”

Bernard considered that statement. “You think he knew he was going to run into trouble,” he said slowly, thinking it through, “and he took precautions in case he did?”

“I do. And I think somewhere in that monastery is the answer to just what kind of trouble he was expecting. If we know that, we might be able to figure out just what he was doing here in France in the first place. Isn't that the point of all this?”

She knew she was stretching things a bit. The authorities hadn't been all that clear on exactly what they wanted her and Bernard to do. Identify the body if at all possible, sure, but given the state of the skeleton they probably didn't expect them to have all that much success. Turning the skeleton over to the museum had pretty much achieved what the police had most likely wanted to achieve, which was passing the buck on to someone else. Now that the skeleton wasn't in the catacombs and potentially slowing down the construction of the Metro tunnel, the details really weren't all that significant to the police.

But they were to Annja. Now that she was involved, she was determined to find out all she could about Captain Parker's fate, if indeed the skeleton really was his.

She thought it was. Regardless of how outlandish the idea sounded when said aloud, at this point she was all but convinced that she was right. She wasn't sure why she felt that way, as the evidence was scant at best, but something deep inside rang true at the thought. That meant tracking down what had actually happened to
him might possibly lead them to the missing Confederate treasure, as well. And
that
was definitely a prize worth pursuing.

In order to do that, she had to get inside the monastery.

“So you'll do it?” she asked.

Bernard, however, wasn't convinced. “I'll give it some thought,” he said.

Deciding she wasn't going to get any more out of him at this juncture, Annja let the matter rest for the time being. She'd hit him up again before leaving that afternoon once he'd had a chance to think it over.

In the meantime, she had a lot of work to do.