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39

Ben was in a sombre mood the next day as he wandered aimlessly through the dusty streets of Saint-Jean. His search had slammed into a dead end.

When he’d phoned Fairfax two days earlier he’d held back from mentioning that the manuscript might have been destroyed. He’d been hoping that Anna Manzini would be able to tell him something positive. That had been a stupid false impression to give the old man. Now everything looked black, time was dragging by and he had no idea where to turn next.

In a square next to an ageing World War One memorial statue was the village bar, a one-roomed affair with a tiny terrace where leathery old men sat like reptiles in the sun, or played games of pétanque in the empty square. Ben walked in, and the clientele–all three of them, playing cards in a shady corner–turned to look as the tall, blond stranger appeared. He nodded them a sullen greeting, which was returned with grunts. At the bar, the proprietor was sitting reading the newspaper. The place smelled of stale beer and smoke.

He noticed a Missing Persons poster on the wall.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? MARC DUBOIS, AGE 15.

He sighed. Another one. That’s what I should be doing–helping kids like that. Not hanging around here wasting time.

Leaning on the bar, he lit a cigarette and asked for his flask to be refilled. They only had one type of whisky in the place, an especially vile fluid the colour of horse urine. He didn’t care. He ordered an extra double measure of the same and sat on a bar-stool, gazing into space and sipping the burning liquor.

Maybe it’s time to give up this fiasco, he was thinking. This job had never been right for him, from the start. He should have stayed objective. His first impression had been right. Fairfax, like all desperate people who want to save someone they love, had fallen victim to his wishful thinking. So there was a good chance the Fulcanelli manuscript was lost–so what? It was probably all bullshit anyway. There wasn’t any great secret. Of course there wasn’t. It was all a fantasy, all myths and riddles and fodder for gullible dreamers.

But could he say that Anna Manzini was a gullible dreamer?

Who knows–maybe she is?

He slid his empty glass along the bar, tossed some coins on the pitted wooden surface and asked for another double. He’d already finished that one, and started on another, when the three old card players in the corner looked round at the sound of running footsteps.

Roberta burst in, looking flushed and excited.

‘Thought I’d find you here,’ she said. She was out of breath, as though she’d run all the way from Pascal’s cottage. ‘Listen, Ben, I’ve had an idea.’

He was in no mood for her enthusiasm. ‘Tell me about it some other time,’ he muttered. ‘I’m thinking.’ He was–thinking about picking up his phone and telling Fairfax it was over. He’d wire him back his money, give up and go home to his beach.

‘Listen, this is important,’ she insisted. ‘Come on, let’s go outside. No, don’t finish that. You look like you’ve had enough already. I want you with a clear head.’

‘Go away, Roberta. I’m busy.’

‘Yeah, busy drinking yourself into a stupor with that gut-rot.’

‘Gut-rot is what happens to you when you drink it,’ he corrected her. He pointed at the glass. ‘This is rot-gut’, he said emphatically.

‘Either way,’ she grunted impatiently. ‘Look at you. Call yourself a professional?’

He shot her a ferocious look, slammed the glass down on the bar and slid down off the stool.

‘This had better be very, very good indeed,’ he warned her as they stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight.

‘I think it is,’ she said, turning to face him with an earnest look as she got her thoughts in order. ‘OK, listen. What if the manuscript Klaus Rheinfeld stole hadn’t been destroyed?’

He shook his head, confused. ‘What are you raving about? Pascal saw it in pieces. It was ruined in the storm.’

‘Right. Now, remember the notebook, Rheinfeld’s notebook?’

‘What about it?’ he grunted. ‘This is what you drag me out here for?’

‘Well, maybe it’s more important than we thought.’

He furrowed his brow. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just listen, OK? Here’s my idea. What if the notebook was the same thing as the manuscript?’

‘Are you crazy? How could it be? They gave it to him at the hospital.’

‘I don’t mean the actual notebook, stupid. I mean what’s written in it. Maybe Rheinfeld copied the secrets down into it.’

‘Oh right. From inside a secure hospital, after he’d lost the original? What did he do, channel the information? I’m going back inside.’ He turned impatiently to go.

‘Shut up and listen to me for once!’ she shouted, grabbing his arm. ‘I’m trying to say something, you pigheaded bastard! I think Rheinfeld could have remembered it all and written it down later in his notebook.’

He stared at her. ‘Roberta, there were over thirty fucking pages of riddles and drawings, geometric shapes, jumbled-up numbers and bits of Latin and French and all kinds of stuff in there. It’s not possible to remember all that in perfect detail.’

‘He walked around with it for years,’ she protested. ‘Probably living rough, with no money. It was all he had. He was fixated on it.’

‘I still don’t buy that anyone could have that kind of memory. Especially a fucked-up alchemy nut,’ he added.

‘Ben, I did a year of neurobiology at Yale. Granted, it’s unusual–but it’s not impossible. It’s called eidectic memory, also known as photographic memory. It’s usually lost by adolescence, but some people retain it all their lives. Rheinfeld had an OCD, from what I can gather–’

‘OCD?’

‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,’ she said more patiently. ‘He had all the symptoms, kept repeating actions and words for no apparent reason–or for no reason that anyone could understand except him. Now, it’s been known for compulsive neurotics to have uncanny powers of memory. They can store huge amounts of detail that you and I would never be able to remember. Difficult mathematical equations, detailed pictures, enormous chunks of technical text. It’s all on scientific record going back almost a century.’

Ben sat on a bench. His mind was quickly clearing of the whisky fog.

‘Think about it, Ben,’ she went on, sitting next to him. ‘They gave Rheinfeld a notebook to write down his dreams–that’s a standard part of psychotherapy. But instead, he used it to preserve the memories he was holding inside, keep a written record of the information that he’d stolen and then lost. The psychiatrists couldn’t possibly have known what he was doing, where the stuff was coming from. They probably dismissed it as lunatic gibberish. But what if it was more than that?’

‘But he was crazy. How can we trust the mind of a madman?’

‘Sure, he was crazy,’ she agreed. ‘But mostly he was obsessive, and the thing about obsessives is, they’re crazy about details. As long as the detail he wrote down was close enough to the original, what matters isn’t his craziness but that the notebook might contain a perfect, or near-perfect, replica of the documents that Jacques Clément didn’t burn because they’d been passed to him by Fulcanelli.’

He was silent for a few moments. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Of course I’m not sure. But I still think we should go back and check it out. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?’ She looked at him searchingly. ‘Well? What do you say?’