Miranda kept deflecting my questions, promising to explain everything once we were in Avignon, but with each deflection I found myself growing edgier. Now that my panic about her health had been resolved, I resented being manipulated — tricked and scared into coming — and I hated being kept in the dark. “It’s not a good idea to talk in the car,” Stefan finally interjected when I launched another inquiry. “We might have bugs.”
“He means it might be bugged,” Miranda explained.
“I knew what he meant,” I snapped.
“Ouch,” she said.
“Sorry,” I grumbled. “I’m tired from the trip — I can never sleep on planes. And somebody tried to barbecue me yesterday. So I’m kinda cranky at the moment.”
“Barbecue you?” She sounded slightly concerned but mostly amused.
“Barbecue,” I repeated. “What’s the French word? Flambé?” I told them the story, and ended by leaning forward, putting my scorched head between the front seats.
Miranda rubbed the stubble. “Wow, that’s crispy. I’d say you just used up another one of your nine lives.”
Stefan took a glance, then looked in the rearview mirror. “Is there any possibility that the barbecue chef — the guy who was shooting at you — followed you to France?”
The thought had not occurred to me before. “Why? Is someone tailing us?” I turned and looked out the rear window and saw half a dozen cars behind us on the busy highway. How would we know if one of them was following us? “I doubt that the guy shooting at me had any idea who I was. And he certainly wouldn’t have any way of connecting me to you, and to Avignon.” But despite my confident words, Stefan’s question had planted a seed of doubt in my mind, and it was already germinating into anxiety.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Miranda said. “And I know you’re exhausted. And of course you have a right to know what’s going on here. Please trust us and be patient a little longer. Relax and enjoy the countryside.”
I tried. But with Stefan’s eyes darting to the mirrors again and again, my jangled nerves refused to settle. “You still seem worried that we’re being followed,” I finally said. “Do you think someone is tailing you?”
“Non,” Stefan said curtly.
“There might have been a car following us in Avignon this morning,” Miranda added. “But Stefan managed to lose it before we got out of the city.”
Stefan held up a hand for silence. The farther we drove, the louder the silence became.
An hour after leaving Marseilles, we crossed the Rhône — a beautiful river, almost as lovely as the Tennessee — and then Stefan abruptly whipped off the highway and onto a two-lane road. As soon as he’d made the turn, he and Miranda checked behind us again, then shared a look of relief at the emptiness of the road. Through tiny villages and past farmhouses and barns, the road followed the river upstream. After a few miles, we turned onto another highway that took us eastward, to another bridge spanning the river. On the far bank stood a low hill ringed by an ancient wall and crowned by tiled rooftops and massive stone towers, all glowing in the golden light of Provence.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“Avignon,” Stefan announced. “City of the popes. Once the richest and most powerful city in Europe.”
CHAPTER 3
Avignon
The Present
Stefan threaded the fiat through a portal in the ancient wall and into the old part of the city, navigating between stone buildings that were already old by the time the Mayflower set sail from England. Crooking to the left, the street burrowed into an underground parking garage carved deep beneath the hill. Stefan spiraled up several ramps, parking on the topmost level near a long pedestrian tunnel. Emerging at the end of the tunnel, we blinked and squinted our way into dazzling daylight.
We had surfaced on a large plaza, a couple of hundred feet wide but several times that long. Fronting the plaza, looming above it, was an immense castle, its high stone walls punctuated by even higher towers. “Le Palais des Papes,” Stefan said. “The Palace of the Popes.”
The façade of the palace was easily twice the length of a football field, the stone walls were forty or fifty feet high, and the towers at the corners — one of them within spitting distance of the cathedral — soared high above the walls. With its crenellated battlements, the structure looked designed to withstand a military siege. “Palace of the Popes? Looks more like Fortress of the Popes.”
“A mighty fortress is our God,” Miranda quipped.
Slightly to the left of the highest, most formidable tower of the palace rose a more graceful, less militant spire, this one topped by a twenty-foot gold statue of a woman wearing a tiara of stars. “Who’s the gilded lady with the stars in her crown?”
“The Virgin Mary, of course,” Stefan said. “That’s Avignon Cathedral. The house of God.”
“How come God’s house is so much smaller than the pope’s palace?”
My question drew a smile from Miranda.
From across the river, the palace had appeared immense but also fanciful — Euro Disney, or maybe PopeLand. Up close, though, it loomed over the square, hulking and intimidating. I didn’t know a lot about Catholicism, but I associated it with saints and stained glass. This, though, was not the architecture of inspiration and aspiration; this was the architecture of subjugation and domination.
We entered the palace by way of an imposing central gate, a portal through which a steady stream of tourists flowed. Once inside, we stepped behind a large display and ducked down a cordoned-off staircase. It led deep into the palace, to a vast chamber whose darkness seemed to clutch at the narrow beam of Stefan’s flashlight.
The beam brought us to an iron grille made of bars thicker than my thumbs, fastened with a hefty padlock. Stefan retrieved a pair of keys from a cord around his neck — keys that made me think of Saint Peter, the heavenly gatekeeper. Leaning against the grille, Stefan wrestled it open on groaning hinges, then motioned us inside and closed the gate behind us. He stooped to the floor and flicked a switch in a long cord that stretched somewhere into the darkness, and a string of dim bulbs, jury-rigged to the damp wall, revealed a crumbling stone staircase that descended through a rough-hewn tunnel.
Reaching awkwardly back through the gate, Stefan replaced the lock and clicked it shut behind us, locking us in, then led us forward. As we edged down the steep, uneven steps, we seemed to be descending not merely into the depths of the papal palace, but through the layers of time itself: one century deep, two centuries, three, four, five, six centuries into the past.
The stairs ended in a short horizontal hallway; at its far end, another padlocked gate of heavy iron guarded the entrance to a cavelike room whose dimensions I couldn’t discern for the darkness. This gate was even heavier than the first, and it took Stefan and Miranda both to tug it open. Inside the chamber, stout stone pillars and Gothic arches supported a low, vaulted ceiling. A lone bulb — the last in the string of lights rigged in the stairway — illuminated a small arc of the rough floor and the nearest pair of columns. Stefan turned to study my face as I surveyed the room. “Probably too far from the dining hall to be the wine cellar,” I said. “Was this a crypt? A dungeon?”
He shook his head and smiled, evidently pleased tha
t I’d guessed wrong. “La chambre du trésor,” he answered. “The treasure room.”
“And was the treasure room half empty or half full?” I was joking, but he took it seriously.
“Totally full. Complètement. This room was overflowing with gold and silver and jewels. Millions’, maybe billions’ worth.”
“Hmm. I never really thought about the net worth of the pope,” I said.
“The pope did, for sure,” he shot back. “The popes of Avignon were richer and more powerful than any of Europe’s kings or emperors. Charlemagne ruled half of Europe. The popes ruled all of Europe. Tout entier.”
“But they didn’t exactly rule,” I pointed out. “Not the way Charlemagne did.”
“Non?” He cocked his head, lifting an eyebrow. “Tell me, how was it different?”
“Well, the popes didn’t have an army.”
“Bool-shit,” he scoffed. “Who were the Crusaders and the Knights Templar if not the pope’s warriors? They were sent to the Middle East to add the Holy Land to the empire of the Holy Father. L’impérialisme, plain and simple.”
“You’re putting a mighty cynical spin on the Church,” I said.
“Mon Dieu, just look at this place where we are working. The biggest Gothic palace in Europe. The epicenter of money and power.”