So many things were falling into place.
“Do I need to tell you that that’s highly classified information?” Taylor said.
“No.” But then why had he divulged it?
“And that you’re in a position to do your country a great service?”
Ah, here it comes, Lucas thought. “What service is that?”
“Ever since that incident at the stadium, you and Dr. Einstein have become acquainted.”
“Barely.”
“It would really help us out if you could tell us what you talk about.”
“What we talk about? I’ve met with him once. You really think we discussed the theory of relativity?”
“No. I don’t. But does he ever say anything about, say, the war?”
“He says he hopes we win very soon.”
“What’s he say about our allies?”
“Our allies?”
“Yeah, you may have heard of them. England. France. Russia.”
The penny dropped. For years, Einstein had been accused by some newspapers and radio commentators of being soft on the Soviets and Communism. Now Lucas knew what Taylor was fishing for, and what he was being asked to do. “You really want to know what we talked about? We talked about the Battle of Monte Cassino.”
“Why that one in particular?”
“Because I’m an art history professor, and the destruction of the monastery was a tragic loss to the art world.”
“Anything else happen?”
“Yes.”
Taylor looked hopeful.
“He bummed a cigarette. It’s against his doctor’s orders.” The letter he’d seen from President Roosevelt, hinting at Nazi progress on some dangerous scheme, he decided to keep to himself. There was one thing, however, that Lucas wanted before he left.
“But I’ll tell you what I can do. I might be able to help you out with those papers,” he said, casually gesturing at the contents of the blue folder. “If there’s anything important in them, I can let you know.”
Taylor seemed to mull the offer over from every angle before saying, “Okay,” and handing them over. “They’re sure as hell unintelligible to me.”
On his way out, Taylor warned him not to leave town without notice, and the police chief chimed in. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
“Good, I could use a spare.”
The cop at the bottom of the stairs laughed, then stopped when Farrell glared at him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Because there were no spare offices on campus — some of the buildings had been closed to conserve fuel for the war effort — Simone had been assigned a carrel in the sub-basement of the main library. It was not much bigger than a clothes closet, with a gray metal desk bolted to a gray metal wall, surmounted by gray metal bookshelves. Even the wooden chair was dreary, with a worn-out padded green seat. To make it all a tiny bit more congenial, she’d taped some family photos, faded and curling up at the edges, to the walls. The sliding door, with a narrow window the size of a shoebox, opened onto a long, poorly lit corridor, lined with racks of books from floor to ceiling.
Slumping back in her seat and stretching her arms, she surveyed the dusty volumes and monographs and scholarly publications cluttering her desktop. Every one of them had been something her father was consulting, and while it was comforting to know that his eyes had coursed across these same texts and his fingers had turned these same pages, it was also maddening. Somewhere in all of this, there were answers — answers to what the ossuary had held, to what powers it might still retain, and even to what might have caused her father’s death. So long as the critical blue folder was unaccounted for, however, Simone had her doubts about the “accidental death” ruling, and she was determined to follow every lead to its logical, or even illogical, conclusion.
No matter how weary she became — and there were times she found herself staring blankly into space — she would not give up.
Several times already she had found little scraps of paper that contained notes written in his distinctive hand, slipped into one of the old leather-bound volumes, revealing that he had intended to begin work at that spot again the next day. Each one of these notes she kept in a separate binder, though the most striking of all was a transcription of a prophecy from an ancient account of Christianity’s earliest saints; the book itself had come from the personal library of one of the university’s eighteenth-century presidents, the Scottish clergyman and theologian, John Witherspoon. Though the sentiments sounded like something from the book of Revelations, the words were attributed to none other than “the Holy Desert Anchorite,” a reference, quite plainly, to Saint Anthony of Egypt.
“And there, in the barren soil of sand, home to snakes and scorpions, the seeds of destruction shall be planted and grow.”
The next few lines were smudged beyond deciphering, as a blue mold had infected the book, and it appeared her father had given up trying to parse them.
But then the transcription had resumed with “… rising from the desert, like a pillar of fire, burning the eyes of those who behold it and laying waste to all that lives upon the earth and to all that ever will, unto the tenth generation.” Again, there was a missing phrase or two, followed by, “And even the clouds shall burn.”
Despite its poetry, the passages were similar to what could be found in much of the patristic literature, the dire warnings and apocalyptic visions of the early prophets and martyred saints. Her father had scrawled “St. A’s Fire?” at the bottom of his transcript, and though Simone knew that this term normally referred to the skin disease associated with the swineherd, she wondered if her father had not uncovered a second, and possibly even more powerful, meaning.
One other thing grew plain, too. Her father had evidently become fixated on the idea of demonic transmigration. There were the expected Catholic texts from the Rituale Romanum, containing the rites and guidelines for major exorcisms, but also a host of more arcane materials whose origins ranged from India to Egypt. She found passages copied from the Zohar, the Jewish mystical text of Kabbalistic teachings, describing the ways in which a demon could secretly slip into a victim’s soul, and how it could only be dislodged by a minyan reciting Psalm 91 three times; if the rabbi then blew a certain melody on the shofar, or ram’s horn, the sound would in effect “shatter the body” and shake the evil spirit loose.
Even the Muslims had their methods for disposing of wandering demons. The prophet Muhammad instructed his followers to read the last three suras from the Koran — the Surat al-Ikhlas (the Fidelity), the Surat al-Falaq (the Dawn), and the Surat an-Nas (Mankind) — and drink water from the holy well of Zamzam.
What none of these faiths — even the Hindu — did was doubt for one moment the existence of dark spirits, or their ability to jump from one living presence to another.
Demons were considered parasites, infinitely malleable and indefatigable, hitchhikers of the soul, and as she read, Simone could see that her father had been trying to unify all this material in some way, with many arrows and notes and cross-references. Just seeing his handwriting on various scraps of paper, stuck inside some of the books, stiffened her resolve to complete the work that he had begun. Inadvertently, she found herself clutching the medallion she now wore around her neck.
She was just about to start in again — what had he meant by writing “sigil/Saturn/containment” and underlining it three times? — when she thought she heard a noise in the corridor.
The creaking of a library cart’s wheels.
She had put in a request for a twelfth-century map of Mesopotamia, kept in the Special Collections Department, and she hoped that this was a library assistant finally delivering it to her carrel. But the creaking seemed to pass her by, and it was already receding into the stacks when she unlocked her door and popped her head out into the corridor. She could just see the back of someone in a long overcoat — small and dark, with his head down — pushing the cart into an aisle down the way.