The Babylon Rite (21 page)

She smiled – anxiously and worriedly – but she smiled. ‘Well done. Come on, let’s go see my sister. She’s been doing her own research; we need to compare.’

They ran through the alleys out on to High Holborn and Nina hailed a taxi. ‘Thank you,’ she nodded at the taxi driver, as they climbed in. ‘Thornhill Crescent. In Islington.’

The condor stared at her. It was dead, and hanging upside down. Next to it was the dried foetus of a llama, its eyeball poached and screaming in the skinless carcase.

Jess spat the taste of the rough nylon hood from her mouth. The hood now lay crumpled on the dirty floor; it had been whipped away by a lustrously dark, luridly tattooed man, with a necklace of shark’s teeth and an Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt. The man was barefoot and muttering and smoking a spliff of dark jungle tobacco, and tightening the bonds that strapped Jess to the chair on which she had been forced to sit.

She knew immediately where she had been taken: because they hadn’t gone far, and the environs were distinctive. Evidently, she had been dragged into the witches’ market, a corner of the town market where shamans and
curanderos
and
brujas
came from many miles around, to trade potions and spells and malevolent juju. Ironically, the Mercado de las Brujas was where she had been headed. But now she was here as a hostage.

Jess struggled. ‘¿
Qué estoy haciendo aquí?
’ What am I doing here?

The man ignored her, and just kept muttering. ‘
Ñqupaykunaq yuyay champi …
’

These words were Quechua. The man in the little stall, shielded from the rest of the market by plastic sheets and curtains, was speaking Quechua. Probably he didn’t even understand Spanish. Nonetheless she tried again.
‘¿Por qué? ¿Por qué me has secuestrado?’
Why have you kidnapped me?

It was pointless. She heard a small voice behind her, in the gloom. Jess caught a glimpse of other dark faces in the background; staring at her and whispering.

The man in the sweatshirt smelled of condor. And dung. And rainforest. And sex. As if he hadn’t washed in several weeks. It was a primal smell of jungle and mountain, Quechua and Inca. He was obviously a curandero, one of the mountain shamans, down from his Andean village to do his weekend business, hawking talismans and voodoo dolls to the local wizards.

Jess tried to pacify her terrors, to rationalize them. She knew these people: the real Peruvians, the country-folk and mountain-dwellers, the descendants of the Moche and the Chavin and the Cham Cham who believed and practised the ancient magic. They were not usually killers. If anything, they were all too inert and passive, ruefully resigned to the terrible forces of nature – drought and El Niño, white men and dictatorships.

But her rationalizations only got her so far. And then they gave out entirely. Jess was terrified.

And now something was happening. The curandero in the Abercrombie sweats had reached into a smelly plastic tank – to pull out a large wriggling lizard, almost a foot long.

The lizard writhed and yawned in his hand. With the air of someone who had done this many times before, the man took a lazy puff on his foul-smelling cigarette, shifted the butt in his mouth, exhaled pungent smoke through clenched yellow teeth, then stuck a knife in the animal. A pitiful, wheezing cry emanated from it. The curandero lifted up the lizard, which was now bleeding copiously from the half-gutted belly.

Hamuy kayman llank anaykita ruway!

The tone was abrupt: it sounded as if he was ordering someone into action. A boy stepped nervously from the shadows, and reached around Jess. She flinched at his touch. The feel of his grimy infant fingers on her tee shirt, under her denim jacket, was chillingly unpleasant. The boy lifted up her T-shirt, exposing her naked stomach.

The curandero hoisted the thrashing lizard over her stomach and dribbled copious warm blood from its riven gut so that the blood fell on her bare skin, like drops of melting red wax from a candle. The urge to clean it off
immediately
was unbearable.

‘
Para, por favor. ¿Qué estás haciendo?
’ Stop. Stop. What are you doing?

No reply. The shaman had his eyes closed. He circled the dying, writhing lizard, sprinkling its hot reptilian blood on Jess’s arms and thighs now. Then he vigorously squeezed and twisted the creature as if he was squeezing the last drops from a wet rag, flicking tiny drops of darker blood all over her breasts and her belly. At last he flung the dead reptile to the dirty floor.

‘Stop …’

Her voice was weak with fear. The curandero bent down and blew cigarette smoke over her chest and face, talking and muttering as he did, blowing more smoke on the lizard-blood pooled in her navel; then more hot smoke in her face, chanting and smoking, and blowing, his breath soiled with the smell of green soup.

Her attention was diverted to her own legs: Jess gazed down in horror.

The little boy was doing something
down there
. Rolling up her jeans, to expose her ankles. She gazed in urgent terror as he reached up and dipped his fingers in the blood on her stomach; then used it to draw lines around her ankles, like a surgeon marking the lines of incision.

Were they going to cut off her feet at the ankles?

Jessica screamed as loud as she was able.

The curandero sighed, took a fetid cloth and rammed it in her mouth. Jessica screamed, but silently now, muffled and helpless. The curandero’s boy had finished drawing blood circles on both her ankles. Straining against her bonds, Jess tried to cough out the cloth, but it was no good. They really were going to do it: they were going to cut off her feet, like the mad and terrible Moche.

Lifting a tobacco-stained finger, the curandero ordered the boy back into the shadows. Then he took up the long vicious knife he had used to gut the lizard.

Jessica rocked violently back on the chair, trying to fling herself away, without success. She was stuck here, in this terrible shack, stuck with the painted caiman skulls, the meek little statues of Jesus, the bowls of raw coca paste.

She felt the first touch of the blade on her ankles. A shy and tentative gesture, explorational. Jessica closed her eyes and waited for the driving pain as the metal cut into her skin.

And then her bones.

Hannah McLintock scrolled through the page on her laptop. The room was getting dark, as afternoon declined into twilight; her blonde Celtic hair was illuminated by the glow of the screen. Adam sat back and watched as the two sisters leaned nearer to the computer on the kitchen table.

The older sister spoke. ‘So the porch at the church was covered with these Green Men? Like tiny gargoyles?’

Adam nodded. ‘Yes, and there were about fifty of them. And it’s the only chunk of the ancient Temple left, on the exterior. We know your father went there to look at the church. But he couldn’t get inside. So
that’s what he must have come to see.
The Green Men in the porch. There are, of course, Green Men at Rosslyn too.’

Hannah nodded, distracted. And scrolled down her screen a little more. Then she sat back, with an air of
et voilà!
‘Here it is, in
Wikipedia
. The Green Man.’

‘Read it out,’ suggested Adam.

Hannah obliged. As she did Adam glanced around the dimly-lit kitchen. The fridge was large and brushed and steel. Fashionable cookbooks filled a shelf, next to tall glass vessels full of obscure pasta. The selection of olive oils was intense. A glamorous party invitation was stuck by magnets to the fridge door.

It was all very eloquent, and it said: this is a nice prosperous house. The home of a young, attractive, privileged metropolitan London couple, a couple doing well, a couple maybe thinking of having children.

And where did Nina fit into all this? The unmarried unattached younger daughter, with her drinking and her dark, dark hair.

Adam could discern the dynamic between the sisters. There was a strong bond there, but also perhaps a tiny bit of resentment. Nina was the prettier one: she was certainly the more damaged and neurotic, the more fragile.

Hannah was attractive but more stolid, more sensible perhaps; yet she had already made a slight and apparently jesting remark about Nina being ‘Dad’s favourite’. Adam had also noticed a definite bickering underlying their mutual sadness at their father’s death, Hannah apparently feeling that their father’s final illness, the cancer he had kept quiet, entirely explained his suicide.

The older sister finished her recitative from
Wikipedia
. ‘So we know the Green Man is a common architectural motif. Originally pagan. We know that they represent, probably, a wild man of the woods, a fertility figure, or even a pre-Christian heathen god like Woden. Commonly they have leaves for hair and beards, and sometimes shoots growing from their mouths, eyes, and noses. They are found—’ she checked the screen, ‘—across Europe. They date from the eleventh century to the twentieth. Some of the earliest can be seen in Templar sites in the Holy Land.’

Nina sat back on the kitchen stool. ‘What does that tell us? Cube root of fuck all.’

Adam gazed at the dark black rectangle of kitchen window, smeared with snowmelt. Who was out there, pursuing them? The serious anxiety was actually a flavour in his mouth: as if he was sucking a key. Sour and metallic. And the winter night was so dark.

‘Can we have a light on?’

‘Sorry,’ Hannah said. ‘I got carried away, I didn’t realize, yes of course.’ Her accent was almost perfectly English, the Scottishness long since departed. There was a stark contrast with Nina: blonde and brunette, English and Scottish. But he could also sense the sincere love between the sisters
as well
: their hugs and kisses on meeting had been unabashed.

Soft bright light flooded the kitchen; Adam gazed at a photo perched on top of a breadmaker: a recent holiday photo of Hannah and her boyfriend with palm trees behind them. He was as blonde as her.

‘Where is … ah …’

Hannah followed his gaze to the photo. ‘My fiancé? Nick? In Paris working, but he’s back tomorrow.’

Adam felt the barometer of risk twitching further towards danger. The fiancé was away. So he was the only man in the house. If anything
happened
he would have to defend them.
Follow the notebooks to the daughter.

But this was absurd; he chided himself; what was really going to ‘happen’? They were in an agreeable house in an agreeable Georgian suburb of north London, a fashionable district with delis and restaurants and gastropubs serving Portuguese custard tarts. The idea of brutal violence erupting into this nice kitchen with its different kinds of balsamic vinegar was purely surreal.

Yet so was the notion of an academic being killed because of what he discovered about the Templars.

Nina was using Hannah’s laptop now, pointing at the screen, and going through it all again. ‘So. The Templars were obsessed with Green Men. And Dad was aware of this. But what did the Green Man mean to the Templars?’

Adam gave the obvious answer. ‘That they worshipped something pagan, pre-Christian? Or at least elements of this? Maybe
that
is the big secret?’

‘Something like that,’ Nina agreed.

Hannah was making coffee. She voiced her thoughts with her back to them as she filled the cafetière with grounds. ‘The Templars were accused, of course, of worshipping the devil, in their trials, weren’t they?’

‘Yes. Baphomet,’ Nina said. ‘Baphomet. That was the name of the god they were meant to idolize. A head. A grotesque wee head. Wasn’t it? I’ll have mine black, Han.’

‘Wait,’ said Adam. He took out his notebook. ‘Let’s write down
everything
that links the Templars to pagan worship, in a proper list.’ He clicked his pen. As he did so, a shadow passed across the window. Adam stared – alarmed. But it was just people coming home from work, momentarily blocking the streetlight.

The cafetière filled, Hannah turned back. ‘Wasn’t there something about weird rituals in their initiations?’

Adam wrote a sentence in his notebook. ‘We know the Templar rites were deeply secret. They were held at midnight, or before dawn, which got people intrigued. And your dad mentioned the initiation rites at Rosslyn.’

Nina looked at Adam. ‘So. What did happen? At these rites?’

‘We don’t know for certain. People have been that asking since the Templars emerged. The King of France was so obsessed with finding out that he actually installed a sleeper agent in the Templars, who was meant to report back. But the man went native and refused to tell the King. Which was one reason the French King was so enraged by the Order he finally took vengeance on them. That’s the legend anyway. Could be garbage.’

Hannah plunged the cafetière. The dark grounds roiled and agitated in the coffee liquor, like tiny trapped living creatures. ‘What about … the gay sex thing?’

Adam answered again. ‘Yes. That’s also … curious. We know the Templars were accused of committing strange homosexual acts during their rituals. Novice knights supposedly had to kiss the “base of the spine” of the superior knight. They were accused of conducting sexually perverse rituals, almost a Black Mass, drinking wine to get drunk, then … well, fellating each other. Anal sex. Gay orgies basically.’

‘So they were gay, so what?’ Nina accepted her coffee from her sister. ‘Lots of these monastic orders were gay – young men sworn to chastity, living in dormitories in a desert, it would be amazing if they weren’t a bit that way.’

Adam agreed. ‘The sexual angle is interesting, but it’s not necessarily or even remotely
pagan.
And, besides, many other heretical sects were accused of homosexuality and blasphemy, quite unjustly. It was a standard way of demonizing unwanted communities. What else?’

‘Cats.’ Nina said. ‘The Templars were alleged to worship a cat. There is a cat gargoyle at Temple Bruer.’

Adam wrote. ‘What else?’