The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  Forty-six

  4:51 P.M.

  This was a different path from the one they’d taken earlier. Jac and Robbie had agreed at least on this: they didn’t want anyone to know there was a passage to the underground city from within the mansion’s garden. So Robbie had charted an alternate course using a manhole on a quiet street in the fourteenth arrondissement, an entranceway used by many cataphiles.

  The trio of amateur spelunkers had just made their sixth turn into the sixth tunnel. The underground was damper than it had been this morning. Quieter, if that was even possible. The smells were more disturbing. Jac wasn’t sure if the dampness exaggerated them or if she was becoming more sensitive to them.

  Jac’s anxiety level was also more acute. Was it having the nun with them? Or anticipating narrow passageways and flooded tunnels—edges she would have to conquer?

  They started up a steep, narrow stairway made of rough-hewn rocks.

  “This reminds me of the stories my parents told me about hiding in caves in the mountains of Tibet before they left during the 1959 exile,” said Ani Lodro.

  Jac noted that the petite nun was incredibly agile. That in itself wasn’t surprising, but she was wearing amber robes under her jacket that were tucked into her knee-high boots.

  When Jac had taken a TV crew into Tibet in search of the Shangri-la myth of a lost paradise in the shadow of a white crystal mountain, she’d met many holy men and women and found them peaceful and inspiring. That trip was one of the highlights of her career. She’d been so far away, in a place so devoid of modern invention, that she could almost convince herself that the myth she was chasing was real.

  In that rarefied air where her lungs struggled, where the land stretched out in patterns that had not changed for hundreds of thousands of years, Jac had wondered if there were really was a Shangri-la. And whether, if she found it, she would ever leave.

  The catacombs they were trekking through were similar to that holy place in some ways. The silence. The isolation. Out of range and out of all communication except with fellow travelers. And once again Jac was chasing a myth. This time her brother’s. The effort was no less intense, but the sense of futility was greater. Robbie had fought her so hard about not selling their two most popular scents, and yet he was being so stubborn about the pottery. Malachai Samuels had upped his offer since coming to Paris. The amount he was willing to pay might be enough so that they’d have to sell only Rouge.

  Instead Robbie was willing to risk his own life to give the Dalai Lama these fragments of a dream.

  They turned into a new tunnel. The stones on either side were slicked with water. The lights from their helmets shone silver on the rough limestone.

  “Can I ask you something, Ani?” Jac asked the holy woman.

  “Of course.”

  “Is my brother right? Do you agree the Dalai Lama will have a use for this gift?”

  “I’m only a courier. It’s not for me to interpret.” She spoke French, and Jac was sure it was her native tongue. Her head was shaved—the stubble black. Her features were Asian. More Chinese, Jac thought, than Tibetan. “Do you have doubts about the wisdom of your brother’s wishes?”

  “From what I know about the problems of your people, it will be like bringing a splinter of the cross to the Pope.”

  “That may be.” The nun was behind her, so Jac couldn’t see her face, but she sounded as if she were smiling. “But saviors are not always who we expect them to be. And power comes in unexpected ways.”

  The tunnel ended in a simple and elegant twelve-foot arch. Beyond it was a high-ceilinged chamber with a stone altar in the center.

  According to the map, this was where Robbie should be waiting for them, but they found no sign of him.

  “Did we make a mistake? Take a wrong turn?” Jac asked Griffin.

  “We’re in the right place. Look.” He pointed to the cross of skulls above the archway and the stone plaque beneath them that read, “Croyez que chaque jour est pour vous le dernier. Horace.”

  “Robbie’s notes said there’d be an inscription from Horace here. What does it say?” Griffin asked.

  “Believe that every day that dawns is your last,” Jac said, reading the ancient Roman poet’s words.

  “So true,” the nun murmured.

  “Do you think something’s happened to Robbie?” Jac asked Griffin.

  “No. I’d guess that he ran into other explorers. He wouldn’t want to risk having anyone follow him here. He’d stop and wait. Be cautious.”

  “What should we do?” she asked.

  It wasn’t Griffin who answered, but the nun. “We wait.” Her voice was resigned, suggesting she knew how to do it well.

  A half hour later, when there was still no sign of her brother, Jac suggested they start looking for him.

  “We can’t. We have no idea where he is,” Griffin said.

  “He’s down here. We know that,” Jac said.

  “There are over five hundred miles of tunnels. Hundreds of chambers, thousands of passageways. We could be ten feet away from each other and miss each other entirely.”

  “What if he’s hurt? What if whoever is after him found him down here?”

  “How? No one knows he’s here but us,” Griffin said.

  Jac turned to the nun. “Who did you tell you were coming here?”

  “I had to tell my superior, who is setting up the meeting. The head lama at the Buddhist center here in Paris. But we all want to help your brother, mademoiselle.”

  “Besides, Jac, I told only Ani to meet us at the boutique—I didn’t tell her where we were bringing her.”

  “But you told her to wear rubber boots and bring a warm coat. In the spring. On a sunny day.”

  “Even if someone figured out where we were going from those clues, there’s no way they could come down here and happen on Robbie. They’d still need this map.”

  Jac wanted to argue but knew he was right; it wasn’t enough information.

  “So then where is he?” she asked.

  “He’ll be here,” Griffin said reassuringly.

  “A half hour more and then promise me we can start looking for him. There might have been cave-in. Or what if the police were down here in search of illegal adventurers and found him?”

  “Then Marcher would have called you.”

  “Not if Robbie didn’t tell them who he was.”

  She looked over at the nun, who sat cross-legged on the dirt floor. Her eyes were closed. The expression on her face suggested she’d traveled deep into meditation.

  Jac tried to take the nun’s lead and relax. She sat down, back up against the rock. Griffin joined her and took her hand. In this place, in this moment, with the anxiety flowing through her veins, his touch electrified as much as it ever had. From the beginning, Griffin made her feel that she was moving closer and closer to an edge. Exhilarated and afraid.

  After he’d left, she sometimes wondered at how serene she was without him. So why had she missed him? Why had she still yearned for the unsettling excitement?

  The sense that, come what may, she was supposed to be with him. Only subsided. Like a sleeping bear, hibernating through the long, long winter.

  “You’re really not worried?” she asked Griffin after another five minutes.

  “I’m concerned. I’d be crazy not to be. But I have faith in Robbie. And I don’t think anything has happened to him.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when Robbie still hadn’t arrived, Jac dipped her finger in some muddy water and drew a partial moon with a star inside its crescent on the archway.

  “Write 16:30, return 17:30,” Griffin said. “That way, if he gets here and we’re not back yet, he won’t go off in search of us.”

  “Where are we going to look?” the nun asked.

  “We should try to go back to the chamber where we met him yesterday. Can you find that on the map?” Jac asked Griffin.

  He studied the chart, then folded it up again. “This way,” he nodded and s
et off.

  The route twisted and turned but was a relatively easy one until they arrived at a chamber filled with four feet of bones—not artfully arranged, just thrown on top of each other. Discarded like junk.

  In order to get to the exit on the other side of the cavern, they were going to have to walk across the bones.

  “Is this the room Robbie told us about yesterday?” Jac asked Griffin.

  “It appears so.”

  “I can’t do it,” Jac said. “I can’t just walk across these people’s bones like this.”

  “They aren’t here,” the nun said with equanimity. “You’re just looking at the shells of people who have moved on.”

  “We can go back. Do you want to, Jac?” Griffin asked.

  Jac closed her eyes. Thought about her brother. Shook her head. “No. Let’s go.”

  He held out his hand, and she took it.

  They started across the sea of calcium sticks and stones. Jac couldn’t stand the sound of the shifting and grinding.

  “You do this all the time, don’t you?” Jac said to Griffin. “You go into tombs and ancient burial grounds and deal with the dead as nothing more than history’s debris. How do you get so inured to it?”

  “I’ve never seen a mummy or a skeleton or a fragment of anyone’s remains without being conscious that this once was a person who had a family. A life, hopes, failures. If I lost that . . . I’d be some kind of monster.”

  They’d reached the chamber’s exit. Six steps led down to another enclosure.

  When the first light from Griffin’s headlamp shone on the space, Jac gasped. Flying buttresses, columns, an altar, pews, everything constructed with bones. An astonishing work of art. A chapel to the dead, using the dead to create beauty. In alcoves where there would have been stained-glass windows in an aboveground church were mosaic narratives created with fragments of broken bones. Bones had even been used to create a replica of the rose window in Notre Dame.

  But for all its beauty, the room stunk. The stench assaulted her. Nowhere else in the tunnels had Jac smelled anything this repulsive. She knew what it was, but she couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t be smelling decomposing flesh; these bones were centuries old.

  Jac shone her light onto the wall and leaned in close. Carved into the rock was a legend, identifying the remains as having come from the cemetery of Saints Innocents. Beneath that were six columns listing hundreds of names. Reading down the list, Jac sensed what she was going to find before she found it. And yet when she saw the letters she was astonished.

  L’Etoile.

  Jac did the math. Her grandfather had been born in 1915. If his father had been in his twenties then, he’d have been born in the late 1880s. So her great-great-grandfather would have been born around 1860. And his father would have been born in the 1830s or 1840s. The sixth generation back would have been born in the 1820s. So the L’Etoile here went back seven or eight generations.

  She touched the incised letters.

  The air in front of her waved. Jac smelled frankincense and myrrh. She inhaled more deeply and detected lotus and almond. And something else, elusive and beyond her reach: the odd fragrance from Robbie’s pottery.

  She knew it. Recognized it.

  Ghostlike creatures appeared to materialize out of the darkness. Marie-Genevieve as a young girl with Giles. Whispering to each other. He was saying he’d created the perfume for her as a parting gift.

  Jac leaned in to smell it but instead smelled the river in Nantes where the Jacobite soldiers expected Marie-Genevieve to die by drowning.

  “Jac? We should go.”

  The images dissolved.

  Jac turned to Griffin. She wanted to tell him. Then she remembered the nun. She couldn’t talk about it in front of a stranger.

  Finally, five minutes later, they found Robbie in the chamber where they’d met him yesterday.

  “What a relief,” Jac said. She went to her brother and hugged him for a long moment. The last few hours had been nerve wracking.

  “What took you so long?” he asked, almost mischievously.

  “Did you run into trouble?” Griffin asked. “Is that why you changed the plan?”

  Jac noticed the nun had hesitated and remained in the shadows.

  “Just a group of chatty cataphiles I couldn’t quite escape from. Sorry about keeping you.”

  They were in a circular enclosure. At the far end was a drop-off. Jac wasn’t sure if their headlamps couldn’t penetrate that far or if there was a void. The scent coming from there was damp. Somewhere in that blackness, water dripped on rock.

  “Friends?” Jac asked.

  “A bunch of artists who come down once a month to create new wall art,” Robbie explained. “They invited me to see what they’d done and it took me forever to get away from them. So are you two alone? Didn’t you bring—”

  Griffin gestured to the shadows.

  “Yes, Robbie. This is Ani Lodro. Ani, Robbie L’Etoile.”

  Robbie stepped forward. The nun remained where she was. Immobile. But her eyes were shining with a softness Jac hadn’t seen before. By her side, Ani’s right hand twitched as if it had started to reach out of its own accord and she’d held it back.

  Robbie was staring. Wearing an incredulous expression.

  “Is it you?” Robbie’s voice was low. Intimate.

  They knew each other?

  “All your lovely hair?” Robbie reached out to touch what wasn’t there. Then he caressed her shaved head. An intensely personal gesture.

  “I’m a nun now.” Ani’s voice was so soft Jac almost couldn’t hear her.

  “What happened? I waited to hear from you, and when I didn’t I contacted the retreat. They wouldn’t give me any information.”

  Ani didn’t say anything but lowered her head, unable to meet Robbie’s gaze.

  “What happened?” he asked again. “I searched and searched. For such a long time.”

  “I’m sorry . . . my training . . . my mentor felt my being with you had interfered. I had to honor him . . . I wanted to honor what we had also, but I couldn’t find a path that allowed me to do both.”

  The nun’s whisper held so much pain Jac turned so she wouldn’t have to look at the expression on her face.

  “And now you’re here,” Robbie said. Not as if he were astounded by the coincidence but rather as if he’d expected it.

  Ani straightened her shoulders as if she were shaking off the blow of seeing him. In a normal speaking voice, with an almost impersonal tone, she said, “I have news for you. From His Holiness.”

  Now Robbie bowed his head slightly.

  “He would be very pleased to accept your gift.”

  “That’s wonderful news. Especially being brought by you.”

  After four days down here in hiding, he was a mess. His beard had grown in. Multiple scratches left thin lines of dried blood on his hands, cheeks and neck. And there were dark circles under his eyes. But a beatific peace suffused his face.

  Jac was amazed by the transformation.

  “When will I be able to see him? Where is the meeting going to take place?” Robbie asked.

  Ani shook her head. “I’ve been instructed to take the gift to him.” She held out her cupped hands.

  Before Robbie could say anything, Griffin said: “That’s not what you told me.”

  She turned. “We had first thought we would be able to arrange an actual meeting. But because of security measures, that’s no longer going to be possible. I didn’t know that when I talked to you, Professor North.” She returned her gaze to Robbie. “I’ll give your treasure to His Holiness myself. I’ll be sure that he gets it.”

  Robbie shook his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  The nun was surprised. “But you know me.”

  “It’s been too long a journey. Too many centuries have protected it. I’m sorry. I can’t give it to anyone but him.”

  “Robbie,” Jac said. “Give it to her. Then it’s safe and you ca
n come out and go to the police and explain what happened. The worst of this will be over. The shards won’t be your problem anymore.”

  “Einstein said that he wasn’t so smart; he just stayed with problems longer.” Robbie turned to Ani. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way, but I can’t give the pottery to you. It would be putting you in danger that is mine to bear.”

  “Robbie,” Jac said, exasperated. “This is crazy.”

  “Your sister’s right. There’s no way that you’re going to be given access to His Holiness. I’ve been instructed to take the gift to him. Please, may I have it?”

  Robbie shook his head.

  “Please.” The nun seemed to be begging.

  “I really can’t.”

  Ani reached out and grabbed his hands. “Please,” she repeated.

  “I just can’t.”

  Jac heard the nun make a sound like an animal in pain. The she shoved Robbie with stunning force and swiftness. As he fell on the ground, Ani turned toward Jac. While Griffin reached out to Robbie, Ani grabbed Jac around the waist and pulled her away from the two men.

  Jac was startled by the strength of this tiny woman. Effortlessly, she was dragging her to the end of the cavern, opposite where Robbie lay, Griffin next to him. Robbie’s face was bleeding.

  The operation had been executed so quickly and was so unexpected that neither Griffin nor Robbie realized what else had happened in the shadows.

  “I am going to have to insist that you give me the pottery shards,” Ani called out. “There’s no other way to ensure the safety of your sister.”

  Forty-seven

  As the two men looked into the shadows, their helmets illuminated the scene. Jac watched shock register on their faces as they understood she was in grave danger.

  “Ani? What are you doing?” Robbie asked. “Let go of my sister!”

  “I need you to give me the shards. Now.”

  “I thought I knew you.”

  Ani shrugged as if his comment didn’t matter. But the woman’s body trembled against Jac’s back.

  “This doesn’t have to end in disaster. I have a gun and I have a rope. Which I use is your choice. Let’s consider the most civilized scenario: I take the treasure, tie you all up, leave you here, and then once I’ve delivered the gift intended for His Holiness, I’ll call the police and tell them where you are.”