Suddenly I felt a chill as I remembered Miranda’s barely intelligible words when Reverend Jonah had let me talk to her. “The key is to get the bones,” she’d said. Twice. My God, she must have meant this key. But what door, what hiding place, did this key unlock? It must not be a door at the palace, because Stefan’s master key — which Descartes and his men had a copy of — was different from this. What else had Miranda said during that important, frustrating, garbled call? She’d clearly been trying to tell me something else important, but much of the message had been mangled by the poor reception. She’d told me not to get greedy like Stefan, and then she’d said something about Stefan being interrupted. But then she’d added something odd, something I hadn’t understood: She’d told me to “be interruptible.” I’d been trying to ask her what that meant when Reverend Jonah had snatched the phone away from her and slapped her. “Be interruptible.” Turning the key over and over in my hands, I stared absently at it and repeated the words slowly, as if they held some magic, some mantra. “Be interruptible. Be interruptible. Interruptible.”
And then, tearing open my door, I raced down the stairs, flung open the wooden gate of the inn, and sprinted through the twisting streets, past the floodlit façade of the Palace of the Popes, beneath the outstretched arms of the cathedral’s gilded virgin and oversized crucifix, and down a zigzag ramp to the northern edge of the city wall, toward the dark waters of the Rhône.
I’d just reached the base of the Bénézet bridge — the bridge of Incorruptible, Interruptible Saint Bénézet — when my phone rang. It was Reverend Jonah. “Now or never, Professor,” he hissed.
“Now,” I said. “Right now, by God. But you have to bring her to me. The bones and I are at Saint Bénézet’s Bridge. Walk up the sidewalk from the south side of the bridge. If I see anyone with you but Miranda, I’ll throw the bones off the bridge and into the river.”
What bones? The rhetorical question posed by Descartes still applied. I didn’t have the bones yet, didn’t know for sure they were here. But they had to be here. There was no other explanation that fit…and no time to look anywhere else.
“And if I see anyone with you, I’ll shoot the girl,” he countered. “If you have any doubt about that, remember what happened to your colleague.”
“What about the Sixth Commandment, Reverend? ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Or did God say you could ignore that one, when he took you up to Heaven for your private sneak preview of the Apocalypse?”
“We’re all sinners, Doctor. Some of us, by the grace of God, are forgiven sinners. That’s the only difference. I’ve sinned many times in my life. I’ll probably sin many more. But I am cleansed and made spotless by the blood of Jesus Christ. By the miracle of grace. And when the trumpet sounds — soon, very soon — I will stand with the righteous. Because I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord! Make straight his path!’ Unworthy as I am, Doctor, I am God’s chosen instrument.”
His words — and his fervent, escalating intensity — filled me with dread, but I knew better than to show fear. “And so am I, Reverend,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster, or could pretend to. Growing up, I’d been surrounded by fundamentalist Protestants — Southern Baptists, Primitive Baptists, even a few snake-handling Holy Rollers. I cast my mind back to that subculture and its language, hoping to speak to the preacher in words that would carry weight with him. “I’m the Lord’s instrument, too. Listen to the Spirit, Reverend, and you’ll know it’s true. I found the bones. I escaped the snares you’ve set for me. And now I charge you — as Jesus charged the woman caught in the act of adultery—‘Go and sin no more.’ Forgiveness requires repentance, Reverend, and repentance isn’t true — it’s a lie — if you’re already plotting the next sin. So bring her to me in ten minutes, and do it with a pure heart. I charge you in the name of Him you serve.”
“Don’t you dare presume—” he began, but I hung up. It was a risk, I knew, but then again, I was playing a high-stakes game of chicken with a madman. Doing anything was a big risk…but doing nothing would be a bigger risk. Seven hundred years after he’d said them, Meister Eckhart’s words still rang true: “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” In this case, I felt sure, the price of inaction would be Miranda’s death.
I rang Descartes. The phone rang and rang, then finally rolled to voice mail. Christ, I thought, he’s in the basement of one of those thick stone towers. Those signal-proof towers. After the voice-mail announcement finished — the only part I understood was the name, “René Descartes”—I blurted, “Inspector, it’s Brockton. I know where the bones are. I’m meeting the preacher in ten minutes. Saint Bénézet’s Bridge. Hurry. But whatever you do, don’t spook him, or he’ll kill Miranda.”
A massive wooden door sealed the portal at the base of the tower that anchored the stone bridge to the rocky hillside. The door had an ancient-looking iron lock. By the light of my cell phone, I wiggled the key into place and turned. The lock resisted; I twisted harder, praying I didn’t snap the ribs off the spine of the key. Still it resisted, so I applied more force, and more prayer…and the lock yielded. Hurling my weight against the door, I bulled it open and then raced up the stone stairs and out onto the top of the bridge. Fifty yards ahead was the crumbling little chapel where Bénézet’s incorruptible remains had lain for hundreds of years, until the French Revolution dethroned the dual monarchies of king and church.
At the door of the chapel, I repeated the same sequence: light, key, prayer, force. Again, just as I was expecting the key to snap, the lock turned and the door opened.
The chapel’s interior was pitch-black. The cell phone’s display had offered plenty of light to see a keyhole, but it made a mighty feeble searchlight. On hands and knees, I searched the perimeter of the chapel. I found rat carcasses, pigeon droppings, and a few scraps of paper and plastic that the mistral had whirled through the window openings. But I did not find a stone ossuary.
I did, however, find another door, a small door set into one of the chapel’s side walls. I stood up, found an iron handle, and opened the door. It opened onto a staircase that descended to a lower leveclass="underline" a low-ceilinged chamber that must have been the chapel’s crypt. This must have been where Bénézet’s body had lain until it was spirited away by nuns for safekeeping. Could this be where Stefan had hidden the ossuary — an ironic in-joke by the arrogant archaeologist?
On a simple stone altar in the center of the crypt was Stefan’s last laugh: the ossuary, its inscribed cross and lamb plainly visible even by the faint light of my phone. Without even lifting the lid to make sure the bones were inside, I slid the box off the slab and staggered up the stairs to the top of the bridge.