“Agreed. How about ‘Gibbous Baia’?”
They’d already devoted two fruitless hours to Romanian history in hopes of stumbling across an epiphany about the Baia area.
“ ‘Gibbous’ means a moon that’s between half and completely full.”
“Are we sure about that part?”
“Yes, a gibbous moon is—”
“No, I’m asking if that’s the only meaning.”
Sam thought for a moment, then frowned. “I’d assumed so. Maybe I shouldn’t have.” He picked up and shoved books around the desk until he found the dictionary. He found the correct page, scanned the entry, then clicked his tongue. “Dumb, Sam. . . .”
“What?”
“ ‘Gibbous’ also means ‘humpbacked.’ So Gibbous and Baia . . .”
Remi was already typing on the laptop. Though much of their in-depth references had come from library sites, their default starting point was good old Google. “Here . . . got something,” she said after a few minutes of reading. “Put the two together and you get this: Baia is part of a phrase—‘men of Baia.’ It’s a rough translation for the word ‘Bavaria.’ ”
“So, the Humpback of Bavaria?” Sam asked.
“No, no . . .” Remi tapped the keyboard again and scanned the search results. “Gotcha! Okay, Tassilo III, the king of Bavaria from 748 to 787, was installed on the throne by Pepin the Short, father of Charlemagne and grandfatherof Pepin the Hunchback.”
“Now we’re talking,” Sam replied. “So Tassilo and the hunchback’s grandfather, Pepin the Short, ‘keep safe the place of Hajj.’ ”
“Problem is I can’t find any connection between either of them, or Bavaria, to Mecca.”
“It has to be a metaphor or a synonym,” Sam replied.
“Yes, or maybe an Islamic artifact somewhere in Bavaria.”
Sam, now on his own laptop, did a quick search. “Nope, nothing jumps out. Let’s keep going. Try another line.”
“We’ll go back to the beginning: ‘Anguished House Fellows in amber trapped.’ We’ve already got the etymology and synonyms for ‘anguished,’ ‘House,’ ‘Fellows,’ ‘amber,’ and ‘trapped.’ So how do they all intersect?”
Sam plopped down in a chair and leaned his head back, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. “I don’t know. . . . Something about the line is familiar, though.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know. It’s right there. I can almost see it.”
They sat in silence for nearly a half hour, each wrapped in thought, their minds swirling with connections and possible connections.
Finally Remi looked at her watch. “It’s almost midnight. Let’s get some sleep and come back to it fresh in the morning.”
“Okay. It’s frustrating. I know I’m missing something, I just can’t put my finger on it.”
Four hours later as they lay asleep in Yvette’s guest suite Sam bolted upright in bed and muttered, “There you are!” Remi, a light sleeper, was instantly awake: “What? What’s wrong, Sam?”
“Nothing. I think I’ve got it.”
In their pajamas they returned to the study, turned on the lights, and powered up their laptops. For twenty minutes Sam sat at the keyboard, typing and following links as Remi watched from the corner chair. At last Sam turned around and smiled.
“It’s from a book I read in college— The Days of the Uprightby a guy named . . . Roche. He talks about the origin of the word ‘Huguenot.’ ”
“French Calvinists, right?” Remi asked. “Protestants.”
“Right. Pretty big group from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. Anyway, there are a lot of explanations for where the word ‘Huguenot’ comes from. Some think it’s a hybrid—from the German word Eidgenosse, meaning ‘confederate,’ and the name Besan çon Hugues, who was involved in early Calvinist history.
“The etymology most historians subscribe to comes from the Flemish word huisgenooten, which was what some Bible students in Flemish France were nicknamed. Huisgenootenwould gather secretly in one another’s homes to study scripture. The name translates as ‘House Fellows.’
Remi stared at him for ten seconds before murmuring, “Sam, that’s brilliant.”
“What would have been brilliant is if I’d come up with it eighteen hours ago.”
“Better late than never. Okay, so we’re talking about Huguenots.”
“Anguished Huguenots,” Sam corrected.
Remi stood up and went to their whiteboard and used the dry-erase marker to circle their list of synonyms for ‘anguished.’ There were dozens. No obvious connection between them and Huguenots jumped out at them.
“So, let’s talk about amber,” Sam said, turning to the second part of the line. “ ‘In amber trapped.’ How do you get trapped in amber?”
They brainstormed this for a few minutes before Remi said, “Let’s try this: What happens when something gets trapped in amber?”
“You die,” Sam offered.
“Before that . . . Immobilized.”
“Frozen in place.”
“R ight . . .” Head down, eyes closed, she paced back and forth. “Frozen in place . . . Like a snapshot.”
Sam, his head resting against the chair’s headrest, leaned forward. “Like a painting.”
“Yes!”
He spun around in his chair and started typing on the laptop. “Painting . . . Huguenots . . .” He scanned the search results.
“Anything?”
“Massacre,” he muttered.
“What?”
“ ‘Massacre’ could be, in a stretch, synonymous with ‘anguished,’ couldn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“Then how about this: a painting by François Dubois called The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.”
“What’s the context?”
Sam scanned the article, then summarized: “France, in 1572 . . . from August to October of that year Catholic mobs attacked minority Huguenots throughout the country . . .” Sam leaned back in his chair and frowned. “Anywhere between ten thousand and a hundred thousand were killed.”
“If that isn’t anguish I don’t know what is,” Remi murmured. “Okay, so combine that with Bavaria. . . .”
Sam leaned forward and began typing again, this time using for his major search terms “Dubois,” “Saint Bartholomew,” and “Bavaria,” in combination with “day” and “massacre.”
“Might as well throw in our synonyms for ‘Hajj,’” Remi said, then dictated from the whiteboard: “ ‘Mecca,’ ‘pilgrimage,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘pilgrim’ . . .”
Sam finished typing and hit Enter. “A lot of results,” he whispered, scrolling through the page. “Nothing obvious, though.”
“Let’s start subtracting and mixing words from the search.”
For the next hour they did just that, trying permutations of their search terms until finally, near sunrise, Sam found something interesting with the combination of “Saint Bartholomew,” “Bavaria,” and “pilgrim.” He said with a grin, “Lightbulb just popped on.”
“What?” Remi said, then leaned in and read from the screen:
“Saint Bartholomae’s Pilgrim Church, Bavaria, Germany.”
CHAPTER 45
SCHÖNAU, BAVARIA
Unbelievable,” Sam whispered.
He and Remi stepped to the wooden railing of the overlook and stared at the vista below. Finally Remi murmured, “I don’t think the word ‘beautiful’ even begins to capture this, Sam. Why did it take us this long to come here?”
“I have no idea,” he whispered back, then lifted his Canon EOS digital camera and took a picture. They’d been to Bavaria before, but never this area. “Even ‘breathtaking’ doesn’t seem to fit, does it?”