The Tenth Chamber Part 1

Tenth Chamber, The.

by Glenn Cooper.

PROLOGUE.

The Perigord Region, France, 1899.

The two men were breathing hard, scrambling over slippery terrain, struggling to make sense of what they had just seen.

A sudden late-summer rain burst had caught them by surprise. The fast-moving squall moved in while they were exploring the cave, drenching the limestone cliffs, darkening the vertical rock faces and shrouding the Vezere River valley in a veil of low clouds.

Only an hour earlier, from their high perch on the cliffs, the schoolmaster, edouard Lefevre, had been pointing out landmarks to his younger cousin, Pascal. Church spires far in the distance stood out crisply against a regal sky. Sunbeams glanced the surface of the river. Wholesome barley fields stretched across the flat plain.

But when they emerged blinking from the cave, their last wooden match spent, it was almost as if a painter had decided to start again and had brushed over his bright landscape with a grey wash.

The outbound hike had been casual and leisurely but their return journey took on an element of drama as torrents of water cascaded onto the undercliffs, turning their trail muddy and treacherous. Both men were adequate hikers and both had decent shoes but neither was so experienced they would have chosen to be high on a slick ledge in pelting rain. Still, they never considered returning to the cave for shelter.

'We've got to tell the authorities!' edouard insisted, wiping his forehead and holding back a branch so Pascal could safely pa.s.s. 'If we hurry we can be at the hotel before nightfall.'

Time and again, they had to grab on to tree limbs to steady themselves and in one heart-stopping instance edouard seized Pascal's collar when he thought his cousin had lost footing and was about to plunge.

When they arrived at their car they were soaked through. It was Pascal's vehicle, actually his father's, since only someone like a wealthy banker could afford an automobile as novel and sumptuous as a Type 16 Peugeot. Although the car had a roof, the rain had thoroughly drenched the open cabin. There was a blanket under the seat that was relatively dry but at the cruising speed of twelve miles per hour, both men were soon s.h.i.+vering and the decision to stop at the first cafe they came to for a warming drink was easily taken.

The tiny village of Ruac had a single cafe which at this time of day was hosting a dozen drinkers at small wooden tables. They were rough stock, coa.r.s.e-looking peasants, and all of them, to a man, stopped talking when the strangers entered. Some had been hunting birds, their rifles propped up against the back wall. One old fellow pointed through the window at the motor car, whispered something to the bartender and startled cackling.

edouard and Pascal sat at an empty table, looking like drowned rats. 'Two large brandies!' edouard ordered the bartender. 'The quicker the better, monsieur, or we'll be dead of pneumonia!'

The bartender reached for a bottle and twisted out the cork. He was a middle-aged man with jet-black hair, long sideburns and calloused hands. 'Is that yours?' he asked edouard, gesturing out the window.

'Mine,' Pascal answered. 'Ever seen one before?'

The bartender shook his head and looked like he was inclined to spit on the floor. Instead he asked another question. 'Where've you come from?'

The patrons in the cafe hung on the conversation. It was their evening's entertainment.

'We're on holiday,' edouard answered. 'We're staying in Sarlat.'

'Who comes to Ruac on holiday?' the bartender smirked, laying down the brandies.

'A lot of people will come soon enough,' Pascal said, offended by the man's tone.

'What do you mean by that?'

'When word spreads of our discovery, people will come from as far as Paris,' Pascal boasted. 'Even London.'

'Discovery? What discovery?'

edouard sought to quiet his cousin, but the strong-willed young man was not going to be hushed. 'We were on a naturalist walk along the cliffs. We were looking for birds. We found a cave.'

'Where?'

As he described their route, edouard downed his drink and gestured for another.

The bartender scrunched his forehead. 'There's lots of caves around here. What's so special about this one?'

When Pascal started talking, edouard sensed that every man was staring at his cousin's lips, watching each word fall off his tongue. As a teacher, edouard had always admired Pascal's powers of description, and now, listening to him waxing away, he marvelled again at the miracle they had stumbled on.

He closed his eyes for a moment to recall the images illuminated by their flickering match lights and missed the bartender's quick nod to the men seated behind them.

A metallic clunk made him look up. The bartender's lip was curled.

Was he smiling?

When Pascal's blond head started spraying blood, edouard only had time to say, 'Oh!' before a bullet ripped through his brain too.

The cafe smelled of gunpowder.

There was a long silence until the man with the hunting rifle finally said, 'What shall we do with them?'

The bartender started issuing orders. 'Take them to Duval's farm. Chop them up and feed them to the pigs. When it gets dark, take a horse and drag that machine of theirs far away.'

'So there is is a cave,' one old man said quietly. a cave,' one old man said quietly.

'Did you ever doubt it?' the bartender hissed. 'I always knew it would be found one day.'

He could spit now without soiling his own floor. edouard was lying at his feet.

A gob of phlegm landed on the man's b.l.o.o.d.y cheek.

ONE.

It began with a spark from a mouse-chewed electrical wire deep within a thick plaster wall.

The spark caught a chestnut beam and set it smouldering. When the old dry wood broke out in full combustion the north wall of the church kitchen started spewing smoke.

If this had happened during the day, the cook or one of the nuns, or even Abbot Menaud himself, stopping for a gla.s.s of hot lemon water, would have sounded the alarm or at least grabbed the fire extinguisher under the sink, but it happened at night.

The abbey library shared a common wall with the kitchen. With a single exception, the library did not house a particularly grand or valuable collection, but it was a part of the tangible history of the place, just as much as the tombs in the crypt or the markers in the cemetery.

Alongside five centuries of standard ecclesiastical texts and Bibles were chronicles of more secular and mundane aspects of abbey life: births, deaths, census records, medical and herbal books, trading accounts, even recipes for ale and certain cheeses. The one valuable text was a thirteenth-century edition of the Rule of St Benedict Rule of St Benedict, the so-called Dijon version, one of the first translations from the Latin to Old French. For a rural Cistercian abbey in the heart of the Perigord, an early French copy of their patron saint's tome was special indeed, and the book had pride of place in the centre of the bookcase that stood against the burning wall.

The library was a generously sized room with tall leaded windows and a grouted stone floor of squares and rectangles which was far from level. The central reading table required s.h.i.+ms to prevent it from wobbling and monks and nuns who pulled up to the table had to avoid s.h.i.+fting their weight lest they bother their neighbours with clopping chair legs.

The bookcases which lined the walls and touched the ceiling were centuries old, walnut, chocolatey in colour and polished with time. Billows of smoke poured over the top of the cases on the afflicted wall. Had it not been for Brother Marcel's enlarged prostate the outcome that night might have been different. In the brothers' dormitory, across the courtyard from the library, the elderly monk awoke for one of his usual nocturnal visits to the water closet and smelled smoke. He arthritically shuffled up and down the halls shouting 'Fire!' and before all that long, the SPV, the volunteer fire brigade, was rumbling up the gravel drive to the Trappist Abbey of Ruac in their venerable Renault pumper.

The brigade served a coterie of Perigord Noir communes along the River Vezere. The chief of the brigade, Bonnet, was from Ruac and he knew the abbey well enough. He was the proprietor of a cafe by day, older than the others on his crew, with the imperious air and ample gut of a small-business owner and a high-ranking officer of the SPV. At the entrance to the library wing he blew past Abbot Menaud who looked like a frightened penguin in his hastily donned white robe and black scapular, flapping his short arms and muttering in guttural spasms of alarm: 'Hurry! Hurry! The library!'

The chief surveyed the smoke-filled room and ordered his crew to set the hoses and drag them inside.

'You're not going to use your hoses!' the abbot pleaded. 'The books!'

'And how do you suggest we fight this fire, Father?' the chief replied. 'With prayer?' Bonnet then shouted to his lieutenant, a garage mechanic with wine on his breath, 'The fire's in that wall. Pull that bookcase down!'

'Please!' the abbot implored. 'Be gentle with my books.' Then, in a flash of horror, the abbot realised the precious St Benedict text was in the direct path of the encroaching flames. He rushed past Bonnet and the others and s.n.a.t.c.hed it off the shelf, cradling it in his arms like an infant.

The fire captain roared after him melodramatically: 'I can't do my job with him interfering. Someone, take him out. I'm in charge here!'

A group of monks who were gathered around took hold of their abbot's arms and silently but insistently pulled him away into the smoke-tinged night air. Bonnet personally wielded an axe, drove the spiked end into an eye-level bookshelf, right where the Dijon version of the Rule had been a few moments earlier, and yanked back as hard as he could. The axe ripped through the spine of another book on its way to the wood and sent sc.r.a.ps of paper fluttering. The enormous bookcase tilted forward a few inches and spilled a small number of ma.n.u.scripts. He repeated the maneouvre a few times and his men imitated him at other points along the wall.

Bonnet had always struggled with reading and harboured something of a hatred for books so for him, there was more than a little s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure in this venture. With four men simultaneously hooked on, they wrenched their axes in unison and the large bookcase leaned, and in a torrent of falling books that resembled a rock slide on one of the local mountain roads, reached its tipping point.

The men scrambled to safety as the case crashed down onto the stone floor. Bonnet led his men onto the back of the fallen case which rested atop piles of volumes. Their heavy boots crashed onto, and in Bonnet's case, through the walnut planking as they made their way to the burning wall.

'Okay,' Bonnet shouted, wheezing through his exertions, 'Open up this wall and get some water on it fast!'

When the dawn came, the firefighters were still hosing down the few remaining hot-spots. The abbot was finally let back inside. He shuffled in like an old man; he was only in his sixties but the night had aged him and he appeared stooped and frail.

Tears came when he saw the destruction. The shattered cases, the ma.s.ses of soggy print, the soot everywhere. The burned wall was largely knocked down and he could see straight through into the kitchen. Why, he wondered, couldn't they have fought the fire through the kitchen? Why was it necessary to destroy his books? But the abbey was saved and no lives were lost and for this, he had to be grateful. They would move forward. They always did.

Bonnet approached him through the rubble and offered an olive branch. 'I'm sorry I was harsh with you, Dom Menaud. I was just doing my job.'

'I know, I know,' the abbot said numbly. 'It's just that... oh well, so much damage.'

'Fires aren't dainty affairs, I'm afraid. We'll be away soon. I know a company that can help with the cleanup. The brother of one of my men in Montignac.'

'We'll use our own labour,' the abbot replied. His eyes were wandering over the book-strewn floor. He stooped to pick up a soaking wet Bible, its sixteenth-century boards and leathers already possessing the ever-so-faint sweet smell of rekindled fungi. He used the folds of his habit sleeve to blot it but realised the futility of the act and simply placed it on the reading table, which had been pushed against an intact bookcase.

He shook his head and was about to leave for morning prayers when something else caught his attention.

In one corner, some distance from the piles of pulled-down books, was a distinctive binding he failed to recognise. The abbot was a scholar with an advanced degree in religious studies from the University of Paris. Over three decades, these books had become his intimates, his comrades. It was akin to having several thousand children and knowing all their names and birthdays.

But this book. He'd never seen it before; he was certain of that.

One of the firefighters, an affable, lanky fellow, watched closely as the abbot approached the book and stooped to inspect the binding.

'That's a funny-looking one, isn't it, Father?'

'Yes, it is.'

'I found it, you know,' the fireman said proudly.

'Found it? Where?'

The fireman pointed to a part of the wall that was no longer there. 'Just there. It was inside the wall. My axe just missed it. I was working fast so I threw it into the corner. Hope I didn't damage it too badly.'

'Inside the wall, you say.'

The abbot picked it up and straight away realised its weight was disproportionate to its size. Though elaborate, it was a small book, not much larger than a modern paperback and thinner than most. Its heft was a result of waterlogging. It was as soaked and saturated as a sponge. Water leaked onto his hand and through his fingers.

The cover was an extraordinary piece of leather, distinctively reddish in hue with, at its centre, a beautifully tooled depiction of a full-standing saint in flowing robes, his head encircled by a halo. The binding was embellished with a fine raised split-cord spine, tarnished silver corners and endbands, and five silver bosses, each the size of a pea, one on each corner and one in the middle of the saint's body. The back cover, though untooled, had five identical bosses. The book was firmly held closed by a pair of silver clasps, tight around wet leaves of parchment.

The abbot sorted through first impressions: thirteenth or fourteenth century, potentially ill.u.s.trated, highest quality.

And hidden. Why?

'What's that?' Bonnet was at his side, thrusting his stubbled chin forward like the prow of a s.h.i.+p. 'Let me see.'

The abbot was startled by the intrusion into his thoughts and automatically handed over the book. Bonnet dug the thick nail of his forefinger into one of the clasps and it easily popped open. The second clasp was more stubborn but only slightly. He tugged at the front cover and just as he seemed to be at the point of discovery, the board stuck firm. The waterlogging made the covers and pages as adherent as if they'd been glued together. In frustration he exerted more force but the cover stayed put.

'No! Stop!' the abbot cried. 'You'll rip it. Give it back to me.'

The chief snorted and handed the book over. 'You think it's a Bible?' he asked.

'No, I think not.'

'What then?'

'I don't know, but there are more urgent things this morning. This is for another day.'

However, he was not cavalier about the book. He tucked it under his arm, took it back to his office and laid a white hand cloth on his desk. He placed the book onto the cloth and gently touched the image of the saint before hurrying off to the church to officiate at the Prime service.

Three days later, a hired car pulled through the abbey gates and parked in a visitor s.p.a.ce just as its dashboard GPS unit was informing the driver he had arrived at his destination. 'Thank you, I know,' the driver sniffed at the female voice.

Hugo Pineau got out and blinked from behind his designer sungla.s.ses into the noon sun which hovered over the church tower like the dot on an i. He took his briefcase from the back seat and winced with each step on gravel, irritated because his new leather soles were getting a premature scuffing.

He dreaded these obligatory visits to the countryside. Ordinarily he might have been able to p.a.w.n off the job to Isaak, his business development manager, but the wretch was already on his August vacation. The referral to H. Pineau Restorations had come directly from the Archbishop of Bordeaux, an important client, so there was no question of snapping to and providing first-cla.s.s service.

The abbey was large and fairly impressive. Set in a verdant enclave of woodlands and pastures, well away from the D-road, it had clean architectural lines. Though the church tower dated to the tenth century or earlier, the abbey, as it existed today was primarily built in the twelfth century by a strict Cistercian order and up to the seventeenth century periodically it had been expanded in stages. Of course, there were twentieth-century accoutrements in the realm of wiring and plumbing but the complex was remarkably little changed over hundreds of years. The Abbey of Ruac was a fine example of Romanesque architecture fas.h.i.+oned of white and yellow limestone quarried from the nearby outcroppings prevalent above the Vezere plain.

The cathedral was well proportioned, constructed in a typical cruciform plan. It was connected, via a series of pa.s.sageways and courtyards, to all the other abbey buildings the dormitories, the chapter house, the abbot's house, the manicured cloister, the ancient caldarium, the old brewery, dovecote and forge. And the library.

Hugo was escorted by one of the monks directly to the library, but he could have found it blindfolded; he'd sniffed enough days-old fires in his career. His mild attempt at small talk about the fineness of the summer day and the tragedy of the blaze was politely deflected by the young monk who delivered him to Dom Menaud and bowed goodbye. The abbot was waiting amidst the piles of sodden, smoky books.

Hugo clucked knowingly at the sight of devastation and presented his card. Hugo was a small, compact man in his forties with no excess body fat. His nose was broad but otherwise his features were chiselled and quite handsome. He looked elegant, perfectly coiffed and urbane in a closely fitted and b.u.t.toned brown sports jacket, tan slacks and an open-necked white s.h.i.+rt made of the finest Egyptian cotton which s.h.i.+mmered against his skin. He had the musky scent of good cologne. The abbot, on the other hand, wore traditional loose robe and sandals and gave off the odours of a sausage lunch and sweaty skin. It seemed like a time warp had brought the two men together.

'Thank you for coming all the way from Paris,' Dom Menaud offered.