CHAPTER ONE
2903 Words
CHAPTER ONE
Professor Remi Laurent shuffled her lecture notes and prepared to finish her class on medieval religious symbolism. The usual collection of bored undergraduates sat arrayed before her. Unfortunately, this class could be used to fulfill the undergraduate art history requirement, so it attracted more than the usual quota of utterly uninterested freshmen.
At least she enjoyed the anticipation of some great Italian cuisine and her boyfriend’s expert lovemaking later in the evening. For a middle-aged man, Professor Cyril Mullen was remarkably virile and uninhibited. Being with him made her feel like she was in her twenties again, except for the constant badgering about setting a wedding date. She got more torn about that with every day.
Do your job and worry about that later, she told herself.
“All right, let’s look at the next slide,” she said, trying to ignore the several students who held their phones beneath their desks and were busy texting.
Remi turned on the last slide of her PowerPoint presentation.
“Let’s talk a bit about the symbolism of color in Renaissance painting. We’ll be getting more into this next time, but I wanted to give you a taste today. Meaning was not only determined by the symbolism of color itself, but practical matters such as the cost of the pigments. Take blue, for example. Here we have the Martinengo Altarpiece painted by Lorenzo Lotto around the year 1516. The Virgin Mary holds the baby Jesus and is flanked by various figures, including an adult Jesus with stigmata.
“Note the greatest use of blue is on the Virgin Mary’s dress. The only other figures wearing blue are the adult Jesus and the two angels flying above. Blue was reserved for the holiest figures at this time because blue was the most expensive paint. It was made from lapis lazuli, which had to be imported all the way from Afghanistan.”
A hand shot up. Remi recognized an archaeology student, an intelligent young woman who actually did the assigned reading.
“Isn’t lapis lazuli what the ancient Egyptians used to decorate the mask of Tutankhamun?”
It wasn’t really a question. More of a statement. The student was always overly eager to show off her knowledge.
Remi forgave her. At least the young woman had some knowledge.
“Yes, it was. Lapis lazuli was used extensively in ancient Egypt. I can’t speak to the symbolism of it in that culture, though. A bit before my time.”
She laughed at her little joke. None of her students did.
One young man near the back of her class raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Did you read about that killer who was after the cryptex?”
Remi tensed. That crazed man had murdered several people in his quest for the medieval device and came within moments of unlocking its secrets.
She had helped bring him to justice, and that action had given her more pride and sense of accomplishment than any of her academic laurels.
Luckily, it hadn’t brought her any media attention. Yet.
“Yes, of course I heard about it,” she replied, nervously brushing back her hair.
“Did they, like, call you or anything?”
“No, why would they?”
“Well, like, you’ve talked about the cryptex a lot. You’re a total expert, right?”
“I don’t know much about the case. Only what I read in the news. I suspect the FBI caught him through their usual methods.”
Such a bringing in an expert civilian advisor, she thought with pride.
“So you didn’t get involved in the case?” the student pressed.
“No.” Remi turned to the screen again. “Now the important thing to remember about the Renaissance is that symbolism was sometimes constrained by cost, and that artists had to work within certain practical parameters while still needing to express as much meaning as they could. We’ll see that artists of the period became adept at introducing many layers of meaning into their works. That’s all for today—” a rumbling of closed books and shifting chairs drowned out her next words, so she turned up the microphone.
Feedback screeched through the speakers. Her students winced.
Remi smiled. Not as effective as a new piece of chalk on a blackboard, but good enough.
“Please read chapter five for next time.”
The students paused. When they saw that she wasn’t going to say any more, they rushed for the door, many already pulling out their phones.
Remi sighed and packed away her papers. Every lecture here made her miss the Sorbonne even more. The students there were the best of the best, already well read and eager to learn more.
But she shouldn’t complain, Remi thought as she followed the last of her students out of the lecture hall. Georgetown paid well, gave her travel grants for her research, and she got to be with Cyril.
It also indirectly led to her involvement in an FBI case, something she never would have dreamed she’d ever get involved with. That’s what the student had been referring to.
She scanned the crowd for that student, hoping he wouldn’t stop her in the hall and ask her more questions. Remi had never been very good at lying.
To her relief, she spotted the back of his head a good fifty meters away. He was hurrying out of the building as quickly as the rest of them.
Tension eased from her, replaced by anticipation as she hurried upstairs to her office. Done with her last class of the day, she could get back to her real vocation—figuring out the secret of the cryptex.
What that student didn’t know, what no one knew, was that as FBI agent Daniel Walker and the police led the killer away, she had taken her few precious moments alone with the device to unlock it, using the code the killer himself had discovered.
She almost ran down the hallway to her office, absentmindedly returning a greeting from one of her passing colleagues before nearly bumping into another, then closed herself inside and locked the door. She wanted no interruptions.
Remi turned on her computer, opened up a file misnamed “Family Photos” in order to fool any prying eyes, and scrolled down through subfolders labeled “Summer 2019” and “Farm Trips” to a folder labeled “Bridgette’s Eighth Birthday.”
She had no eight-year-old relative named Bridgette.
Opening it up, she came to the six photos she had taken on that night.
The first two were blurry, with the cryptex partially out of frame. She had been so nervous after finally opening it, she could barely control her phone.
The next four were clear and in focus. She opened one up.
Engraved on the ivory interior of the cryptex was a map. A little town stood next to a meandering river. A row of hills or mountains stood a bit to the right, angling across the map and giving the indication that the range continued off both ends.
Across the river from the town and a little downstream or upstream, was a spot marked with an X.
In the lower righthand corner was the floorplan of a church. Halfway down the nave was another X.
She leaned back and smiled. For several days she had spent all her waking hours—and many of the hours when she should have been sleeping—trying to figure out the location of this town and church. There was no label, no writing on the inside of the cryptex at all. Whoever opened the device was supposed to know what town and church it showed.
Remi, of course, did not. So she had spent countless hours searching on Google Earth as well as several old maps of medieval and Renaissance Europe to find a match.
It had been no simple task. Over the seven centuries since the map had been etched inside the cryptex, rivers had changed course, towns had come and gone, and churches had disappeared or been remodeled beyond recognition.
Remi had kept at it, studying, crosschecking, looking up the floor plan of every church she could that dated to the correct century.
Perseverance had won out at last.
She had found the church. It still stood in the Tuscan countryside not far from Florence. The river was still there with a slightly altered course thanks to a dam built by Mussolini in the late twenties, and the town still survived as well.
The Church of Saint Pantaleon of Nicomedia had been built in the early 13th century, dedicated to the patron saint of physicians. A convert from paganism in late 3rd century, when the Roman Empire was still persecuting Christians, he worked as a physician in the court of the Emperor Galerius Maximianus. He lost that job soon enough after he professed his faith and started worked miracles of healing. He was eventually martyred along with several other local Christians in the year 303.
What struck her most about this story was where he as from. Nicomedia was a city within the Roman Empire in what is now northwestern Turkey. All but vanished today, it had once briefly been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and a hotbed of early Christian activity.
Including the activity of another saint, Saint Adrian.
On their last case, they had caught a clergyman from the Monastery of St. Adrian of Nicomedia near Ravenna, northern Italy. Remi had discovered that this order of monks was dedicated to protecting the secret of the cryptex. Indeed, they had caught the man trying to steal it, which would have certainly been a sin if he hadn’t been trying to keep it out of the hands of a serial killer.
Now the cryptex was in the hands of the Vatican. She wondered whatever happened to that clergyman, who had been let go, and his ancient religious order.
She also wondered about the connection of Nicomedia. St. Adrian was martyred only three years after Saint Pantaleon, and in the same city. Had they known each other?
Remi pulled up the church’s saved location on Google Maps and studied it for the hundredth time. Yes, it must be the right place. The cryptex map was far from precise, but there was the same angle of the river and hills, the same relative location of town and church. It had to be the right one.
The only thing that made her doubt was that she did not have an accurate 14th century map of the church. The only published map she could track down was from a book from the early 20th century. Its reconstruction of the various phases of the church were all speculative. Excavations in 2007 had probably revealed much more information, but that excavation report had never been published, an irritating habit among archaeologists. To read the manuscript she’d have to go to the archives in Florence.
Remi planned to do just that. Once she figured out how to ask for and receive a week off, she’d go to Italy and track down the manuscript. She had taken a lot of time off for the FBI case, and she wasn’t really in a position to ask for more leave.
She’d have to find a way, though. This was her life’s work. After she had read up on as many details of the church and its construction as possible and earned freedom from teaching for a week, she’d go there and see what that X marked.
Assuming it marked anything. Like so many churches, it had been expanded and restored several times over the centuries, and then modern archaeologists had come with their test pits and subsurface imaging. There was a good chance that whatever the cryptex had marked got dug up years ago, perhaps centuries ago.
No, don’t think like that. You’ve come too far, risked too much, to be put off now.
She pulled up some articles on early Renaissance Tuscany and started to read, giving herself more background into the ecclesiastic politics of the region at the time the cryptex had been made. As a researcher she knew that a broad base of knowledge could always help in unexpected ways. Since she had nothing more to read about the Church of Saint Pantaleon of Nicomedia itself, delving into the context in which it was built might provide some insight.
Excitement drove her on. Ever since that FBI case, she had found academic life, once so cozy and intellectually stimulating, a bit dull. Following the trail of the cryptex added some spice to her otherwise predictable days.
She kept reading.
The alarm on her phone buzzed. A quarter to seven already? She had promised to meet Cyril at seven. She had been so preoccupied with her studies recently that she had been late for several dates. That irritated her lover and a couple of times he had come to her office to find her.
She couldn’t have that. She didn’t want Cyril to see what she was doing.
Turning off her computer and locking up her office, she felt a sting of guilt for deceiving him. He was a good man, always kind and attentive to her, and a great father to the daughter he had with his first wife.
Their divorce had not been a clean one. Cyril rarely talked about it. Remi had never met Trisha, the ex-wife, and never wanted to.
Whatever the source of the breakup, at least Cyril had stayed devoted to his teenaged girl. Thursday evenings and every other weekend were what he called “sacred times” with her. Remi never saw him then.
Yes, a good man, and those were hard to find. You should appreciate them, and certainly never lie to them.
And yet, she thought as she walked downstairs past a janitor mopping the floor, something held her back from telling him the whole truth. While he didn’t mock her research into the cryptex, he didn’t exactly respect it either. He always tried to steer her toward “more serious fields of interest.”
Besides, she kind of liked having a secret. Not even Daniel Walker, the FBI agent she had worked with on the Cryptex Killer case, knew she had opened the cryptex and photographed it.
Just as well that she did open it, because the Vatican had bought the device from the museum where it had been discovered hidden inside another object. She didn’t know how many millions they gave the museum, but she would bet all those millions that no researcher outside the Holy See would ever get to handle the cryptex again.
Cyril waited for her outside the building, holding his briefcase. Unlike most academics, he didn’t carry a satchel or backpack, but a businessman’s briefcase. There had always been something businesslike about Cyril.
“Did you score any meth?” Remi asked, using one of the only American slang terms she knew.
“Excellent batch,” Cyril said. “One of my incisors fell out just five minutes ago.”
It was the old joke. Two nights a week Cyril, one of the most respected historians of his generation, volunteered at an adult literacy program, teaching rehab single mothers their ABCs. Despite her little joke, this work put Cyril on a pedestal in her eyes.
It also put her own problems in perspective. If these uneducated women could stop taking one of the street’s most addictive products, Remi should be able to solve a medieval puzzle.
Their fingers interlaced for moment before releasing. Then they walked down the path by the side of the quad together, close but not too close. In American universities, one had to be careful to keep up appearances.
Because of this, they kept their conversation professional, talking about the agenda of an upcoming faculty meeting and what they were researching at the moment. Remi found herself feeling guilty.
You love this man and you’re even planning on marrying him, she told herself. You need to tell him about your discovery. He’ll be excited. Happy for you.
Remi was not convinced about this last part. In fact, when she had told him she wasn’t researching the cryptex anymore, he had approved. Like everyone else, he thought her talents could be better spent elsewhere.
Remi worried about his reaction if she told him. No, when she told him.
She needed his approval for the travel funds to Florence, after all.
He wouldn’t say no, would he?
That’s uncharitable. He cares about you.
“You’ve grown quiet,” Cyril said.
Remi managed a smile. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk over dinner.”
“Yes we will,” Cyril said, his hand brushing hers. “We have some important matters to discuss.”
Remi’s heart beat a little faster, a mix of emotions going through her. He wanted to set a date, and she needed to bring up a sore point about her research.
But she had to. She had to get to the bottom of this.
“Butterflies?” Cyril asked with a smile.
“What do you mean butterflies?”
Cyril laughed. “American expression. Butterflies in the stomach. It means you’re nervous.”
“Yes. Butterflies in the stomach.”
But not for the reason you think.
- Writer
