Wolff allowed himself a thin smile. “Strange, but no coincidence. It turns out that Kurt Stangl, the general in charge of the unit in Egypt in nineteen forty-two, was assigned to Paris during the German occupation. Naturally, this is logical. Charged with finding art and artifacts for his führer, where could he be more successful than in a city of art?”
Galina mounted a set of iron stairs to an upper level. “And his fate?”
“He was reported killed during the Allied liberation on August twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four.”
“Reported?”
Another smile. “His death was concocted by the German high command to put the Allies off the scent. He embarked to South America the next day, courtesy of a ratline.”
Galina scanned the bank of computer screens displaying live camera feeds from dozens of stations surrounding her headquarters, then activated all the auxiliary cameras.
“A ratline, yes,” she said. “As rats escaping a sinking ship.”
“Exactly,” he said. “The escape routes of highly placed officials of the Third Reich were planned early in the war. They would be smuggled to Spain and from there by ship to North or South America. Kurt Stangl, deputy head of the art procurement division, survived the invasion of France and vanished with, I should guess, uncounted stolen masterpieces. Our Ebner may shed light on which ratline Herr Stangl may have used. His great-uncle Wernher certainly knew of ratlines. There. Our colleague arrives.”
It was Galina’s turn to smile as Ebner’s face appeared on one of the cameras. He was accompanied by a hulking man in bandages.
She pressed a button on the console in front of her, and a few minutes later, the elevator door slid open. Ebner rushed across the floor to her, enfolded his thin arms in an awkward clutch of her shoulders, and backed away, his face crimson. Behind him lurked the bandaged man, Archibald Doyle.
“Ebner, I have missed your brilliant mind,” she said.
“Yes, yes, but look!” he gasped, scurrying to the computers. “You’ll not believe this.”
“Oy, you won’t,” Doyle said behind his bandages, scanning for a place to sit.
Ebner studied the monitors while figures darted and dashed across the Place, then isolated one in particular, the odd way it shuffled crabwise toward the camera.
Galina stared at the man—it appeared to be a man—approach the rear entrance to her headquarters. “Who haunts my domain? No one knows this place. Look, there are shadows trailing him. An army of ghosts attends their mad leader. . . .”
“No one but a hideous traitor to our glorious Order,” Ebner said. He adjusted the controls to produce a closer image of the man dragging his way toward them. The face resolved itself, the features clarified. “I have found Helmut Bern! He has made his way back to us and has come directly to Paris! From fifteen thirty-five!”
When Galina saw the sores, the wrinkles, the ravages of an endless journey . . . through time . . . acid dripped down her throat. “He comes to kill me.”
Wolff watched a second figure shuffle toward the camera. This other man’s visage was pocked and ashen like Bern’s and bore a look from beyond the grave, and yet in some ways it was a familiar face. Where had Wolff seen it before?
He removed his cell phone from the pocket of his leather coat and opened its image file. He swiped through hundreds of photos until he came to one dating from September 1936. It had been taken by the photographer Robert Capa in the hills of Somosierra, Spain.
And Wolff knew who the second man was.
“Miss Krause, I showed you this image once before. The boy in nineteen thirty-six and the old man here today are one and the same. It is Fernando Salta, the student lost in the mishap with the bus in Somosierra. He somehow made his way forward from eighteen hundred and eight, where Kronos Three deposited him. First he arrived in nineteen thirty-six, when this photo was taken, and now he has returned to the present with Bern’s help, undoubtedly in Kronos One. Such compassion these people have for one another.”
Galina closed her eyes. “Compassion enough to murder me? Ebner, find them, kill them. Markus, hunt the Kaplans. They are in Paris for another relic. Intercept them, and bring it to me. Go!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Paris, France
July 23
2:13 a.m.
“Hey, Wade?”
No answer.
“Hey, stinky head?”
No answer.
Convinced Wade was asleep, Darrell whispered, “So let me tell you how I hate skulls.”
Wade’s response to this was a heavy snore. He’d been snoring lightly for pretty much the whole last hour that Darrell had lain on his bed, not sleeping. Instead, Darrell had scanned every inch of the ceiling of Marceline’s safe house at least a dozen times and was delighted to discover not a single skull-shaped stain anywhere across the entire surface of the whole thing.
“Especially now, I hate them. Skulls.”
Wade slept on.
“You see, the tiny room on the ship where Lily and I— Oh, wait. You know what? I never told you, but it wasn’t two cabins. It was one cabin. You’d say, ‘Whoa, dude!’ But I’d say, ‘Not whoa, dude!’ Lily called it a prison. We were ‘in prison’—her words for it—and she says we were there longer than we really were. I think she’s up to five years now. Anyway, there were two bunks. I took the top, because when Lily saw that we’d be sharing the same cabin—‘Sharing, OMG, no way!’”—he knew it was a bad imitation of her voice—“she said she didn’t care and would rather be dead, then plopped down on the bottom bunk anyway. So I took the top, right? Isn’t that what you would do?”
Wade snorted twice very loudly, then settled back into low, rhythmic breathing.
“That’s what I thought,” Darrell said. “But when I climbed to the upper bunk, the ceiling right over my face had this gross brown stain shaped like a skull with bloody jaws.”
Wade rustled, stopped, turned over, started sawing again.
“I tried sleeping one night with my head at the other end of the bunk, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the skull would eat my toes when I wasn’t looking.
“‘As if you need to look to know when someone’s eating your toes!’ Lily told me.
“So I switched around again and decided to stare the skull down. Hard to do, by the way. Skulls nearly always win. Their eyeholes never close. Anyway, that’s why I hate skulls. Oh, by the way,” Darrell added as softly as he could, “Lily’s pretty awesome, which I know you know, but still.”
Because Wade’s snoring was so heavy and regular, Darrell was sure he hadn’t heard a single syllable. It was like confessing to an empty room, the safest way he knew to talk these days. Lily had made him swear never to speak about “the cabin.” So when he did speak, he had to do it to no one. Which he did probably once every few hours. Not that he learned anything about Lily because of “the cabin,” other than that she could get a lot madder at herself than he’d ever seen her be to anyone else.
Was that a good thing to know about Lily? He wasn’t sure.
He guessed he should know Lily better by the time they were smuggled off the ship than when they were smuggled on, but he wasn’t sure about that, either.
One thing, at least, he was pretty sure of.
He missed whispering to her in the middle of the night when neither of them could sleep. But if she heard him say that, she’d probably snap something like “Darrell, just look at the ceiling and be glad there isn’t a skull on it.”
Which, looking up now, he was.
The following morning, Marceline Dufort swung by in a fish delivery truck and took Becca and Sara to a doctor, who after a long exam prescribed an antibiotic and rest. Did Becca actually feel better? Not so much, but she felt she put on a pretty good show for the doctor, who, maybe because she was French, didn’t pick up on Becca’s act. Either way, the insistent voice in her mind kept repeating, “Floréal Muguet. Find Floréal Muguet,” and she was pretty sure the others needed her to make that happe
n.
“I feel good,” she told Sara, who was always eyeing her, in a kindly and mothering manner. “And I’ll rest when we know more, but until then we should really keep going.”
When Wade was alone with her, he asked, “Do you really feel better?”
“Do I look better?” she asked.
“You look like you’re trying to look better.”
“Good enough.”
“Maybe, but you sigh once, and I’m blowing your cover and calling nine-one-one.”
“I think the number’s different in France, but okay. Until then . . . Floréal Muguet.”
Becca decided that the first step was to find the best library in Paris and look up whoever Floréal Muguet might be. In Austin she’d go to the Faulk Central Library, no question. In New York, the Morgan Library & Museum, because of their connections there. In London, the British Library, naturally. They had the whole world inside its walls.
In Paris, it was the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The giant national library was split up at several sites across the city. Less than an hour after filling her prescription, they entered the François-Mitterrand Library, an enormous and fairly new complex bordering the river. On each end of a great open space stood a tall L-shaped tower.
Using her connections in the archivist community, Sara arranged entry to the Department of Philosophy, History and Human Sciences, the division that covered the history of France. They passed through several detectors, opened their bags for inspection no less than four times, and soon found themselves deep inside the humanities library, a suite of large spaces one floor below street level.
“Let’s look at this logically,” Wade said when they settled around a large worktable. “Floréal Muguet is not a modern name, right? You don’t go around naming your kid Floréal, do you? Floréal Muguet, please rise?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Darrell. “I don’t even know if it’s a girl’s name or a boy’s name.”
“So, okay,” Wade said. “The first thing we can do is a computer search. Lil—”
Lily waved from across the room. Like a homing device, she’d spotted the public computers and was already wiggling the mouse against the pad. “Galina, here we come.”
As they hovered over her, she typed “the clock of Floréal Muguet” into a search menu.
Page after page appeared. Most were generic sites about clocks and flower shows. After teasing out link upon link to little result, she tried the words individually.
“Huh,” she said. “The word Muguet actually means either ‘thrush,’ which is a kind of bird, or ‘lily of the valley,’ which might mean me, but probably refers to the flower.”
“Birds and flowers,” said Darrell. “Great.”
“There’s a bit about the French Revolution, too,” she added.
“That could mean something,” Sara said. “Maybe follow that thread a little more. . . .”
“I’ll keep messing around.” Lily backtracked and branched off in other directions.
Wade paced around the worktable, keeping his eyes on Becca, who read through a general history of the Revolution. “When was the French Revolution?”
“Roughly seventeen eighty-nine to seventeen ninety-nine,” Becca said.
“Okay. And what was the date of . . .”
“My birthday?” said Darrell. “September twenty-third. The first day of fall. I thought I had told everybody about a hundred times. Next time you forget, please don’t.”
“Forget what?” Wade said with a smile. “No, listen. Does everybody remember the tomb in Berlin? The ‘house of Kupfermann,’ where we found the dagger that led us to Bologna and Carlo and the diary? All those grave markers going down into the crypts were marked ‘seventeen ninety-four.’ Every one of them, from the same two or three days. April, I think.”
“I remember,” said Becca. “We thought it might be a plague or disease or something that killed all those people at the same time.”
“But what if it wasn’t?” Wade said. “I mean, if what we saw was a Guardian crypt, maybe they were victims of a war on Guardians.”
Darrell turned from watching Lily at the keyboard. “Interesting. A secret war that doesn’t turn up in history books.”
Lily looked up from the keyboard. “People were being executed here at the same time. Hundreds were put to death by guillotine during the Revolution.”
“Right,” said Sara. “Maybe the killings here and there were connected?”
“You mean like a purge?” said Becca. “Like Galina is doing right now?”
“And keeps on doing,” Darrell murmured under his breath. “This can’t end soon enough.”
Lily stood up, bent over the keyboard, her nose practically touching the screen. “I think I found something. It turns out that Floréal Muguet is not the name of a person at all. It’s a date in the weird French Republican calendar.”
“They invented their own calendar?” asked Wade.
“I remember reading about that,” Sara said. “For just a few years, though.”
“From seventeen ninety-three to eighteen hundred and six,” Lily said. “It had three weeks in a month.”
“Three weeks a month?” said Darrell. “Lucky school-kids.”
“Each week had ten days,” said Lily.
“I take it back.”
“So what date was Floréal Muguet?” Becca asked.
“Uh . . . Okay. Floréal refers to the month beginning April twentieth. And Muguet is the seventh day of that month, so April twenty-sixth. And seventeen ninety-four is the first year there was a Floréal in the calendar. So, Floréal Muguet is probably April twenty-sixth, seventeen ninety-four.”
Darrell paced around the table. “And that’s it. The catacombs in Berlin are from the same time as Floréal Muguet. I bet that’s what ‘Floréal Muguet’ means. It refers to the secret war that was going on all across Europe. And somehow there’s a clock involved.”
Wade looked around suddenly. “Someone knows we’re here. I feel something.”
“Not Marceline?” said Becca.
He went over to the nearest window, looked out. “No, she’s standing outside the bakery van. I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing.”
“It’s never nothing,” Sara whispered, standing up from the table. “We leave now. Wade, good catch. We’re too involved in the search to be alert. Everyone, come on.”
“But we’re just starting,” said Becca. “We need to research so much more.”
Sara collected her things. “We have enough to start. Besides, there’s someone off the grid we can talk to about French history. Henri Fortier, the collector robbed by Oskar Gerrenhausen. He might help us, if we tell him what we know. He knows about old manuscripts.”
Darrell smiled. “I like it. When there are no Guardians, we have to deputize them.”
They headed off one by one, then separately ascended the stairs to street level and were soon back out on the embankment overlooking the river.
Marceline pulled up to them and they hopped in. “Where to?”
After a winding, roundabout drive through several neighborhoods, it was early afternoon by the time Marceline dropped them at the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte in the Latin Quarter.
Less than a block north of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the bustling square in front of it stood a neat storefront with discreet gold letters on its windows.
LIBRAIRIE FORTIER
Spécialiste des documents, lettres, gravures,
et livres de voyages anciens
du 15ème et du 16ème siècle.
The shop was locked. Its shades were pulled halfway down. A sign on the door said that it was open by appointment only.
“Now what?” Lily said.
“He’s in there,” said Becca, crouching. “I see him buzzing around inside. He’s a little man, elderly, very short.” She rang the bell, then knocked on the door.
A man with frizzy gray hair peeked out from under the shade and sho
ok his head. “Appointment only!”
“Can we make an appointment?” Darrell said through the window. “It’s important.”
The man jerked his shoulders up and down as if he were annoyed. Glaring at each of them through a pair of thick glasses, and spending the longest time on Sara, he seemed nervous. “Yes, no, when for?”
“For now?” Wade said.
The man muttered a long string of what might have been curses under his breath, then finally pulled up the shade just as a tall fierce-faced woman with a mop of gray hair emerged from the back of the shop. From the bulge under the arm of her sweater, it was obvious that she was packing a weapon.
“What for do you want my husband with?” she growled through the window.
“We must locate some documen . . . ,” Sara said. She then rifled through her bag, took out her ID from the University of Texas Archives, and pressed it against the window.
“My mom’s the real deal,” Darrell added.
The woman studied the ID card closely, then sneered and unlocked the door. As they entered, the man frisked the boys, and the woman frisked Sara and the girls.
“You see, I was some months robbed ago,” Mr. Fortier said. “It was not terrific—”
“We know,” said Wade. “Someone stole the Voytsdorf Ledger.”
“You—how—what? This was not the newspapers in!”
Lily nodded. “We know the thief was a man by the name of Oskar Gerrenhausen. He stole the ledger for Galina Krause, a very bad lady.”
“A very bad lady collector?” Mrs. Fortier asked.
“Sort of,” said Wade. “It happened like this. . . .”
Henri Fortier and his wife grew more astounded at each new part of the story. Finally, they both seemed satisfied that the Kaplans were not there to rob the shop.
“Back in office come,” he said. “Tell me what you seek for.”
While Mrs. Fortier cast her watchful eyes on them, her husband listened to their questions about Floréal Muguet. During Becca’s explanation about the Guardian crypt in Berlin, Fortier suddenly bounded up from his chair, rolled a small wooden step stool down a length of shelving, and began fishing around on the very highest shelf.