The Sixth Key by Adriana Koulias

Author:Adriana Koulias [Koulias, Adriana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Mystery, Historical, Thrillers
ISBN: 9781863256858
Amazon: B00AKR5QN4
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

27

A Friend in Need

‘Hell is paved with priests’ skulls’

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

‘La Dame, it’s me! I don’t have much time and I can’t talk openly,’ Rahn whispered into the phone in the hall of the presbytery while Eva kept the young priest distracted in conversation in the sitting room.

‘Rahn!’ La Dame sounded excited. ‘Burn my beard! Listen, you won’t believe what I’ve found out about Jean-Louis Verger! Simply the most incredulous and odd things!’

‘What?’

‘Apparently he was an interdicted priest. Do you know what that means?’

‘No.’

‘He was under investigation by the Inquisition. That was back in 1856, but here’s the clincher: a year later he murdered the Archbishop of Paris, one Marie Auguste Dominique Sibur, in broad daylight!’

‘What?’

‘Yes indeed! According to reports it was the only murder of its kind. It looks like Verger was an opponent of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and also wanted to put an end to celibacy for the clergy – a cause any man in his right mind can understand. But as you might guess it did not go down too well with his peers. The story goes that on the first afternoon of the novena of Saint Genevieve in January 1857, he entered a church while it was full of worshippers, and boldly walked up to the archbishop to thrust a rather long knife into his gut, crying out “Down with the goddesses!” He was found guilty, of course, but here’s the important point – the verdict was pronounced on the seventeenth of January.’

‘The seventeenth of January?’

‘Odd, isn’t it? That’s the same day as the feast day of Saint Sulpice.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at, La Dame.’

‘Well isn’t that the same date that’s on the notebook of that Monti fellow?’

‘Of course! Yes!’ Rahn remembered.

‘Well, at any rate he was sentenced to death but right to the end he was convinced that Napoleon was going to pardon him. I guess he was convinced that the sun rises in the west too. Now, here’s another interesting thing: have you heard of Éliphas Lévi; they called him the Magus?’

‘Yes, I know of him.’

Deodat had hidden Cros’s list of priests in a book written by Éliphas Lévi.

‘Well, Verger met with him a year before he killed the Archbishop of Paris.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, he went to see Lévi looking for – wait for it, Rahn, are you ready? A grimoire. Yes! He wanted to conduct a magic ritual apparently, and needed one.’

‘Don’t tell me . . .’

‘I think you’ve guessed it. He was looking for The Grimoire of Pope Honorius III – Le Serpent Rouge!’

Rahn was speechless.

‘Lévi couldn’t help him but Verger didn’t give up. He must have continued asking around because he found one at a bookseller in Paris.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, Lévi wrote a book called The Key of the Mysteries, in which the entire affair is discussed. In that book he says he discovered, long after Verger was executed, that the man had found and obtained a copy of the grimoire from an antiquarian bookseller that Lévi knew.

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