“Shall we?”
The Saint rang the bell, and for a long time there was no sound but the twittering of birds and the whisper of an afternoon breeze in the pine needles. Then, like something entirely unearthly, the voices of melodiously chanting men came from within the walls.
“They sound like professionals,” Simon said.
Tanya gave him a wry look.
“They are, of course,” she said. “Professional parasites on superstitious ignorance.”
“Oh, dear comrade, let’s not go into that.”
He rang again, vigorously, hoping to make the bell heard over the monkly devotions.
“It might be more polite to wait till they’ve finished, but they’re liable to go on for hours,” he explained.
“From what little I know about this order, they’re extremely hard on themselves. Don’t show their faces or say anything except prayers, except for one brother who has a dispensation to conduct any essential business. Dig their own graves and sleep in coffins and scourge themselves twice a day.”
“Charming,” said Tanya.
There was a rattling sound inside the thick gate, and a sliding board about a foot long and six inches high slid back to show a cowled and black-veiled head. The head said nothing, just hovered there.
“Gruss Gott,” said the Saint. “May we come in?”
The monk pressed his eyes to the opening as if to see whether or not there were others in the party.
“Grass Gott” the head replied in a voice much less sepulchral than its visible source. “There is not much to see.”
“I was told that visitors were always welcome if they made a contribution,” Simon said mendaciously.
“The contribution is always twenty francs. For only two, that would be ten francs each.”
“I should be glad to give it to such a deserving order.”
The open panel slammed shut. There were clanking noises on the other side of the portals, and a moment later one of them creaked partially open. The monk stood with his hand silently extended, palm upwards, until Simon placed the requisite coins in it.
“I am Brother Anton. The Brotherhood are at their devotions in the chapel, as you hear. It will be several hours before they come out, and of course I cannot allow you to disturb their meditations by entering that part of the building. But I will show you what little else I can.”
He gestured for them to follow, and together they crossed the open courtyard, which had a stone well with bucket and pulley in the center, and small but profusely growing vegetable gardens around the sides.
The cloister was built of stone so old that its surface was pitted and often crumbling. Here and there an Alpine flower had found a home in some niche or crevice, and velvety green moss grew on the roof shingles. As Simon saw, led and lectured by Brother Anton, the place was in the shape of a square, with the chapel and library comprising one side, the monks’ cells two sides, and the refectory and kitchen the fourth side. In the center, by the well, was a small inner quadrangle quartered by crossing walkways and possessed of two stone benches and a stagnant birdbath.
Simon and Tanya were allowed a brief look at all areas except the chapel, from which continued to come the sound of harmoniously chanting male voices. In the kitchen a lone monk, cowled and veiled, stood watch over a gigantic pot on the wood-burning stove. He turned to look at the visitors without noticeable reaction and then went back to his cooking. From the pot came a familiar but somehow inappropriate aroma which Simon could not immediately pin down. His mind was busy with other things.
One of the attributes of a supremely alert intelligence such as the Saint’s is the ability to see the relationship between apparently unrelated facts. As he listened politely to Brother Anton’s historical notes and pretended to study the architectural details of the ancient building, his thoughts were hours ahead. He was noticing the interesting but seemingly irrelevant fact that the pump in the kitchen, the well in the courtyard, and the source of the stream outside the walls were in a more or less direct line.
“And so,” Brother Anton was concluding, “for five centuries, for those who joined us here, the world ended at that door through which you entered.”
“But one worldly thing still comes out through it,” Simon said, “but for which we might never have heard of this place. Is it possible to see the manufacture of Grand Abrouillac?”
He was curious to know whether the cenobite was frowning or smiling under his veil in response to that additional request.
“To see the place, but not to see the method,” was the reply. “Therefore, to see very little. But come this way.”
“We must not stay long,” Simon said pointedly, looking at his watch. “We have friends below in the village who will come up looking for us if we do not return for supper. I don’t want them to start worrying about us.”
“It will take only a minute to see what I am permitted to show,” the monk said.
He led the way down stone steps made smoothly concave by scores of years of sandaled treading. Now they were in a basement whose only windows were narrow grated slits near the ceiling at the level of the ground outside. The walls were lined with the spiraled bottles such as Simon had seen in Molèire’s office. Jars of herbs and unidentifiable liquids gathered dust on other shelves. Pungently spiritous casks and vats stood about the floor and were racked in tiers along one wall. There was a big wood-burning stove at one end of the room with a flue extending into the ceiling.
“Central heat?” Simon inquired.
“Yes. It becomes very cold here even in summer. Only a few hundred meters above us is always snow.”
“No point in mortifying the flesh that much,” Simon commented in English.
“Bitte?”
“I suppose it would be bad for the brew to freeze.”
The Saint touched a kind of thick wooden faucet in the wall, from behind which came a faint gurgling sound.
“The mountain spring water which is one of the secret ingredients?”
“Sie haben recht. The water is most important.”
The monk took a bottle from one of the shelves.
“If you wish to take a bottle with you, it is forty francs here, much less than outside.”
Simon took a bill from his pocket and pressed it into the man’s hand.
“Danke sehr, Bruder. For your holy work.”
“Vielen dank.”
“Bitte.”
As they started up the stairs, Simon indicated a large ceiling fan which had been almost invisible from directly below because of a kind of false ceiling hung under it.
“You have installed some other modern comforts, I see.”
“Ach, ja. The fumes, you know. In the old days the brothers used to become quite drunk while working here, merely from breathing.”
“All good things must come to an end, I suppose.”
“All good things and all bad things,” the monk said, and quickly showed them the way out of the cloisters to the main doorway.
Simon had gone with Tanya only a few yards out of sight of the walls when he took her arm and said: “Excuse me just a moment.”
He knelt down and put the bottle of Grand Abrouillac between two rocks and covered it with pine needles.
“As much as I love good liquor, I love life more, and I’m in no mood to be poisoned, exploded, or shot in the head.”
She stared.
“You do not think...”
“I do think. And I wouldn’t take any chances with anything that came out of that crypt. Now let’s go on and make plenty of noise as we recede into the sunset.”