Chapter 21

November Twenty-seventh

Arthur entered the farmhouse after an absence of several days to find Jean and Woodard playing chess while Dorothy and Huffhamner watched. Susan was nowhere in sight, but he could sense her presence nearby. All eyes turned to follow him as he walked across the room, and he nearly laughed at the notable increase in tension.

Without preamble he asked, "May I speak to you for a moment in private, Jean?"

As he rose to his feet, Jean slid his queen across the board. "Checkmate, mon ami," he said lightly, "but you are improving. Next time you will beat me, non?"

After following Arthur out onto the porch he asked guardedly, "Oui?"

Turning to face him, Arthur said, "During my appointment the other night, I learned that an old associate of yours, Himmler, may have had a collection of ancient clay tablets. Would you know anything of this?"

Staggering backwards as if from a physical blow, Jean replied slowly, "It was not Himmler, a man who I never met, who had the tablets, but Fraulein Lieber, the monster also known as Amunet."

His eyes glittering with interest, Arthur said, "Show me."

Long buried memories pushed abruptly to the surface, and Jean found himself back in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside the center of Paris. During the first year of the German occupation, Jean, then a wealthy and petulant young man of leisure, had played at the game of resistance, mostly by providing an occasional safe house for his more ambitious and dedicated countrymen.

The resistance had been a thorn in the Germans' side. So much so that, in mid-1941, Amunet, grand mistress of the Ahnenerbe, popularly called the Bureau of the Occult, was sent to root them out. She arrived in the dead of night and promptly moved herself and several truck loads of possessions into a home that had previously been the residence of a prominent Jewish businessman. The following night, she had walked through Jean's front door, and, without saying a word, had taken him for her own.

He had never understood why Amunet, who had once intimated that, as a child, she had watched Cleopatra's pleasure barge cruise the Nile, had not simply exterminated them all immediately. He had no doubt whatsoever that she had possessed the power to do so. Instead she had collected a number of minor players, like him, and forced them to perform a variety of seemingly innocuous acts. He still often wondered if she had been playing a game of espionage so deep as to be beyond his comprehension, or if nearly two thousand years of life had robbed her of her sanity and reason.

The memories of the next year sped by in a blur, as Arthur skimmed through the abuses and tortures that Amunet had inflicted on Jean's body and mind. They only slowed on those few occasions when she had shown him her prize possessions: the tablets that she kept wrapped in layers of silk and burlap and sealed in heavy steel chests. She had claimed that they contained the secrets of life itself, and had shown them to him not out of any affection, but to emphasize how pointless opposition to the regime she served was.

On the evening of March 3, 1942, she had summoned Jean and those like him to her mansion, a common occurrence. Well after midnight, he had been crawling down the basement stairs, seeking a dark corner in which to curl up while his latest set of injuries healed, when he heard the drone of aircraft overhead. The world had exploded around him, and he had been buried as the floors above him collapsed. He had still been struggling to free himself when dormancy claimed him.

It had taken a good part of the following night to extricate himself from the rubble, a task made exceedingly difficult by the fact that his left forearm had been exposed to sunlight while he slept. He had emerged into chaos.

Hundreds of his countrymen still scoured the area, searching for survivors both in the remains of the nearby Renault factory that had been the Briton's true target and in the surrounding neighborhoods that had been the victims of the poor accuracy of the time's munitions. Cradling the blackened, skeletal remains of his hand, he had poked through the ruins until he found her; the corpse only recognizable by the heavy silver ankh she had worn around her neck.