The first had occurred right after Napoleon’s troops had left Spain. A hundred Spanish brothers were decapitated for their support of the Frenchman’s ideas and their hostility to the monarchy. The second was during the Spanish Civil War, which pitted supporters of the republic against rebels led by General Francisco Franco, a sworn enemy of freemasonry.
Marcas would have to find his notes. He remembered something about executions in Seville, a pillaged lodge, and Freemasons discovered with their skulls cracked open. “Hiram” was written in blood on their foreheads.
JAKIN
The other pillar guarding the temple entrance,
a symbol of righteousness
14
Marcas awoke with a start, the image of Sophie Dawes’s body sprawled on the embassy floor in his mind. He got up and stretched, trying to shake the sadness he felt for his sister Freemason. The chain that united them had lost a link.
Marcas skipped breakfast and headed straight to the temple on the Via Condotti. A white-haired man who had to be at least ninety held the job of overseeing the archives at the Alessendro di Cagliostro Lodge. When Marcas asked for the records of violence against Roman Freemasons, the man brought out a faded green box filled with papers that had seen better days.
Marcas sat down in a deep leather chair and delved into the contents. The three blows to the body were too close to the legend of Hiram’s death to be a coincidence. He made his way through open-meeting reports and press clippings about fascist groups ransacking lodges during Mussolini’s reign. Then nothing at all until the Allies liberated Italy.
Frustrated, Marcas asked the old librarian about unexplained Freemason murders.
“My memory is not so good anymore,” the librarian said, scratching his head. He shuffled over to a chair and settled in. “I do recall that right before the Allies arrived, three lodge officers from Rome and Milan were found murdered in a mansion not far from the Coliseum. Their faces were smashed in.”
“Do you think it might have been the Blackshirts or the SS?” Marcas asked.
“A brother who was in the police told me he didn’t think either of them was responsible. The Blackshirts used other methods, and Hitler’s strongmen tortured their victims before executing them or just shot them and threw them in common graves.”
The old man was choosing his words carefully. He seemed to recover some deeply held energy as he talked about that dark time in history. No doubt it was a remnant of the courage and daring he had needed to survive.
The librarian handed Marcas another file that was even dustier. It was filled with press clippings from the nineteen thirties. One of the articles gave an account of the 1934 murder of a researcher, a Freemason who had been beaten to death. His skull was crushed. Next to the story, someone had written “Hiram?” in purple ink. Marcas made photocopies and opened his red notebook to jot down a list of similar murders.
1934. Florence, a brother.
1944. Rome, three brothers.
2005. Rome, a sister.
He thanked the old man and left the Roman lodge.
15
Bashir was driving a pickup he had borrowed from someone who owed him a favor. He had chosen his cover with care: Jordanian excavation-equipment sales rep. The bed of the truck was filled with rubble from a construction site. Among the rocks was the stone he had stolen from the institute.
When he reached the Allanby Bridge border crossing, a zealous Jewish border guard wanted him to unload the truck.
He’d expected this. At that moment, an associate who was following him in a car pulled out of the line of traffic and started honking. A swarm of Israeli army officers descended on the man, fingers on their triggers.
The border guard turned to see the commotion and then yelled at Bashir. “Get out of here. Go back to your country of dirty nomads.”
One obstacle down. When he arrived in Amman, he’d ditch the truck, change his clothes, and pick up his new identity: Vittorio Cavalcanti, a Milanese tourist going home after seeing the marvels of Jordan. He would have a large suitcase full of souvenirs, including the Tebah Stone.
16
“So, do we agree? Ms. Dawes experienced an unfortunate fall at the embassy in Rome. The administration will not comment on the incident.”
The French diplomatic system was working at full tilt the day after Sophie Dawes’s murder. Zewinski had brought the body back to France. The coroner’s office had contacted the family to come and identify her.
Three witnesses — all members of the embassy security team — had provided signed affidavits stating that Sophie seemed to have had too much to drink. She had lost her balance while going down the marble steps and had hit her head. None of the guests had seen anything, and no reporters had gotten wind of the accident. A life had been erased, a death touched up.
Sophie’s father was an elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease. He did not come to identify the body. A distant cousin was brought in at the last minute to sign the papers and then disappeared as just as quickly.
The body would be buried in two days without any ceremony in a cemetery in the suburbs of Paris.
Meanwhile, intelligence services were piecing together the victim’s short life. At the same time, agents were contacting the Grand Orient de France Freemason Lodge to let them know that one of their archivists had died in an unfortunate accident. The minister of the interior had already scheduled a meeting with a Grand Orient advisor, who was also a high-level civil servant.
The foreign office representative shot Pierre Darsan of the interior ministry a questioning look.
Darsan continued. “We need to make sure everyone keeps this under wraps. The gendarmes who witnessed the accident will be transferred to other embassies tomorrow.”
“What about Zewinski?”
“She did an expert job of handling things. We’ll debrief her and keep her on to investigate what really happened.”
“And the police inspector, Antoine Marcas? What was he doing there?”
“A coincidence,” Darsan said. “Apparently he was taking a few days off in Rome. He and our man Jaigu are friends. Since Marcas was at the reception, Jaigu pulled him in on the preliminary investigation. He could be useful. He’s a Freemason. Marcas should be boarding a plane back to Paris as we speak.”
“Can we count on him staying quiet?”
“I can make that happen.”
“Fine,” the foreign office representative said as he stood up. “Darsan, it’s your investigation now — unofficially, that is.”
As soon as the door closed behind him, Darsan went to the window. The room was silent, except for the muffled sound of traffic outside. He smoothed his mustache, a habit he had picked up in Algeria forty years earlier, and returned to his desk.
He lit a cigarette and opened Antoine Marcas’s file: forty years old, a homicide detective, a short stint in the anti-gang unit, commendations from his superiors, on the fast track toward becoming chief, then an unexpected spell in police intelligence services before suddenly requesting a transfer to a simple Parisian precinct. An additional page specified that during his stint in intelligence, he attended a certain Freemason lodge that also had several members who were involved in a money-laundering scheme. He was divorced, had a ten-year-old son, paid his child support every month, and spent his spare time writing articles about Freemason history.