Meanwhile, how about a brief change-of-scenery from the flat fields of southwestern Iowa?
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CHAPTER 19
It began as a brilliantly sunny, crisp spring day in the mountains of the central Pyrenees, despite the snow crunching underfoot (this might be Spain but many were surprised it still looked like winter in this small, isolated part of the world); the abbey, suspended on a steep mountainside, still gleamed in the mid-afternoon sun. It was on such a day twelve centuries ago defenders of the faith lost their lives in battle against the Infidel when Charlemagne repulsed the invading Moors not for the last time above Roncesvalles. High above a valley tucked between these impressive peaks separating France from Spain, the abbey of Santiago de los Mártires – St. James of the Martyrs – honored the ten thousand souls lost that infamous day. It had all been recorded by a witness, watching from these very rocks, in a great poem written in old Basque.
The great man who watched from these rocks today was neither a witness nor, despite his imposing appearance, even a priest, his stately robes in black and pewter-dark silver, its dark blue stole notwithstanding. He stood centered in the splendid windows of this splendid room behind him, looking over the splendid view across the valley. Silver hair beneath a jaunty black velvet cap worn like a beret (how French) belied his age and signified his respectability. A scholar, he'd been dubbed “The Vulture” because he feasted on dead books.
The room had its own magnificence, part of the splendid library amassed here over the centuries with seemingly miles of packed shelves burrowing deep into the mountain's caves, purportedly founded by St. James himself. Initially a reading room, it was also suited for scholarly convocations such as the great Prospério Kárax was ready to convene. Grand desks and magnificent chairs with modernized lamps (installed in the 1920s) swept upward from where he stood, tier upon tier, an amphitheater for scholars discussing the finer points of the world's accumulated knowledge.
The view itself reminded Kárax, despite a thousand years of faith, not everything you believed was based on fact, and as a scholar he was a stickler for facts and nothing but the facts. He was the one who'd recently discovered the battle commemorated here never happened, a 10th Century poem mistranslated into “fake news.”
The problem had been the belief of those who didn't feel they needed to read the fine print and assumed, on the basis of that belief, who was who and what referred to what. The great Tale of the Ten Thousand Martyrs and the Death of Santiago had only been known in a Castilian translation. The poem, originally written in a long-forgotten 10th Century Vasconian dialect of Basque, now completely indecipherable to modern Spaniards, is a footnote only because it predated France's Song of Roland by a century.
The poem detailed a battle near the Roncesvalles Pass where the conflict celebrated in the Roland epic was fought in 778, a clash between the Franks under Roland's uncle Charlemagne and the invading Moors. But in 801, in another battle, the Basques, allied with local Moorish generals, fought the Franks to maintain their fragile independence.
Our intrepid Castilian friar, inflamed by his faith's intensity, failed to realize his unfamiliarity with Vasconian syntax, leading to grammatical presumptions that only later proved to turn Basque and Moorish martyrs into Catholic ones. When the Church built this abbey to commemorate the ten thousand martyr's souls, the mistake was quite literally “set in stone.” But, as Kárax later discovered, after researching the facts which had come down to us, that was not the only lie: the whole poem was a lie – fiction. That battle had never taken place.
The “Santiago” of the Basques' tale was not St. James (a.k.a. Santiago), the former Apostle who'd settled on the Atlantic coast not far to the west, but a well-respected nobleman of ancient Basque lineage. Real or not, he was regarded as a hero among the Basques much as Roland became a hero to the French. Our anonymous 15th Century Castilian translator never questioned whether an apostle of Christ could have founded a library only centuries ago or had literally carried the cross against the Infidels to lead Charlemagne's army.
Whether the original was meant as a fanciful tale to inspire the beleaguered Basques at a dark time or was propaganda to convince their enemy they had once been defeated, we may never know, but for whatever reason Homer composed his Iliad, was it meant to be taken as fact or merely to entertain listeners?
Kárax, researching the Basques' tale once prominently displayed in the abbey's library before it disappeared in the 1780s (stolen or misplaced?), found it hidden in its own remote private vault for over two centuries. After years spent translating it, he finally published it, controversially causing much embarrassment to both the Church and, particularly, the abbey. It also added considerable fuel to the Rationalists' argument about the factuality of the Bible as the Word of God as opposed to ideas transcribed centuries later by men protecting their interpretations of it.
But as Kárax explained in his translation's lengthy introduction, aside from pointing out he spoke fluent Basque from his mother's side, both the original poem and its misguided misinterpretation had places in the world. And we should not be tempted to see the existence of one as the reason to destroy or deny the other. Like the age-old argument between Science and Faith, Kárax explained Science answered questions about the “How” for the Rational, and Faith answered questions about the “Why” for the Irrational – and Mankind needed them both.
It took a millennium for Medieval Europe, locked in its faith-induced Dark Ages, to find the blinding light of the Renaissance. Kárax warned, “one hopes the next time it will not take so long.”
Hence, his decision to gather the most respected scholars in their fields to create the Casaubon Society's “Library of All Knowledge.”
“Dr. Kárax?” The voice intruded on his meditation: one of his assistants had coughed gently but made no impression. “The first set of visitors has arrived.” He stood high at the top's main entrance.
“Excellent, Mr. Tench.” Kárax, turning from his spot at the window, stepped over to his podium. “If you could wait. Please?”
He suggested everyone should be “processed” first, registered and assigned to their rooms, monks' cells serving as part bedroom and part private studies. “They may also prefer to take some refreshment after their journeys.”
It was over a harrowing hour's ride up the tortuous road from the Pamplona airport but a good chance for his guests to view the mountain stronghold they were entering, seemingly vast, definitely forbidding. Some, used to life “on the ground,” might find the view, dangling off the face of a cliff, too literally breath-taking.
The Abbey of Santiago of the Ten-Thousand Martyrs (it seemed cruel to change its name following his discoveries) still amazed him. He'd first seen it as a boy coming to mass with his grandmother. How they had built it a thousand years ago was beyond his comprehension, a stone nest built by gigantic prehistoric wasps.
From the top's entrance, you walked downward, hoping the bottom wouldn't fall away.
After sorting his papers at the podium, Dr. Kárax climbed up the steps to greet his awaiting guests in the “lobby.”
These were the first thirty scholars invited to partake in the Casaubon Society's initial assembly, setting about the fundamental business and necessary guidelines in preparation for the main work on the project housed here. Aside from an indispensable resident staff to cook, clean and do laundry (monks, yes, but hardly scholars could be considered self-sufficient), the abbey could accommodate one hundred such members attending such a special conference. Six assistants wandered about, handing out their “welcome packets” and “designated numbers” identifying assigned rooms and desks in the reading room.
Prospério Kárax stood in the doorway to the abbey's Grand Hall, its walls covered with Gothic paintings representing the Christian interpretation of what was deemed a significant event in the history of the Church. The fact everything about it was wrong neither amused nor saddened him, but only pointed out the importance of his project.
He wandered about and greeted old friends, introduced himself to ones he'd only talked to on-line, his academic robes at odds with turtlenecks and tweed jackets, business suits with or without ties, even a few younger ones in blue jeans and sneakers, each one gawking about at a place they didn't think looked very monastic. The monks' cells were larger than they'd assumed, the beds modern and comfortable, and most pleasantly the prospect of vellum, ink made from berries, and quill pens replaced by internet wifi. And the food...! The place had clearly been updated since Art Deco electric lamps were placed on the library's desks in the 1920s, or centralized air and heating installed to control the environment and protect the books. The library, begun so long ago, had eventually replaced those medieval monks' constant prayers and hourly meditations as the abbey's raison-d'etre.
But these scholars – and more as could be added before summer sessions began – had a duty as sacred as any monk's. From their own research and what they can find stored here at Santiago's, hundreds of thousands of books written since the 1500s, they must glean the knowledge in every field previously compiled by mankind. Gathered into succinct volumes with cogent summaries and factual details, the complete collection must be purely abstract with no personal interpretations. In the process, despite disparate viewpoints, maybe no one would kill each other.
Once enough greetings had been exchanged among colleagues, some warm, others professionally polite, and the conversational din began to die down, Kárax nodded to his assistants to open the doors into the Reading Room. They filed in in groups of six, each assistant guiding their scholar to an assigned desk, each one facing the window.
Dr. Isaac Edwards, the oldest of those attending, a Swiss-born archaeologist nearing 85, was led to his desk in the back row's center, with fewer steps to walk – the place was, alas, not “handicap-friendly.”
Dr. Françoise Belbeau, a still energetic French philologist past 80, didn't like being placed in the next row in front of Edwards (she mumbled, “at least I won't see his miserable head nodding away”).
Dr. Isiphambano Esiseningizimu, the South African astronomer, was confused to find himself in the very front, seated right before the podium.
As others filed in, furrowed brows at the randomness of it became smiles of awareness as they realized the seating wasn't arbitrary but divided into distinct areas, neither alphabetical nor by age or expertise, but by their continents of origin, by their ethnic and cultural backgrounds, despite their universal recognition: a microcosm of the globe.
Once everyone was in place, Kárax began by joking perhaps the Norwegian climatologist based in Antarctica should be seated with him at the podium, looking up at the rest of the world. Everyone applauded.
There was an amount of business to get through, what he called their orientation, which would be followed by a tour of the premises, especially the “bowels” of the Abbey, the library caves where it was, he warned, possible to become lost, but everyone had a badge it their packets whose GPS tracked their whereabouts.
“As a boy visiting here once a year, I was convinced getting lost was a major part of the monks' plan, a way of teaching perseverance over fear and increasing their reliance on God.”
Not that they would need to wander around the maze of hallways searching out a particular book in a particular cave. “Each of you will bring one assistant with you this summer, and between them and my own staff, all you need is to request a particular volume by checking the computer's digital card catalog.
“You can work in here during the day or in the more private confines, literally and figuratively, of your individual rooms. Wherever you choose, there's one rule above all else, like any good monk or scholar. This is a library: there's a Rule of Silence. Or at least a 'Respect' for Silence. No loud conversation.”
Another rule, at least during the daytime, was not to disturb any other scholars in their rooms or at their desks. “If you want to socialize or discuss work, there's the Sala or 'Lobby.'
“After dinner, we'll meet back here to discuss the day's events where discourse is considered healthy but heated argument is not. This is primarily for general concerns, rather than specific individual discoveries and epiphanies. Of course the chapel is open for meditation if you wish it; we've also made arrangements for other faiths as well.
“All meals, speaking of housekeeping, are served in the Abbey's refectory at set times for breakfast and dinner; pick up your 'brown-bag lunch' after breakfast, and eat in your rooms or in the Sala. All dietary and medical needs are included on your badges: don't lose them! And do not go outside, wandering around alone.
“Whatever you do in your own rooms, here, when you're using your computers, it's work. 'Thou shalt not view Social Media nor live streams, neither shall you You-Tube' – and definitely 'thou shalt not porn'!”
Opening a different folder, Kárax thumbed through his notes before starting in on how their purpose was to amass all the world's knowledge about different subjects, each volume pertaining to the various scholars' specialties. An editor with more generalized experience would collate these, cross-reference them, prepare indices, flagging whatever needs more explanation or less intuition. Once completed, the whole collection of volumes will be available on-line with translated copies distributed to major libraries around the world. The idea is somewhere, somehow, at some future time, someone will discover them.
One of his assistants, Mr. Sturgeon, who liked to cook, saw it as a recipe book where the past could be reconstructed but offering the creative option of using these or those suggested ingredients.
“It's like 'hitting the metaphorical Reset Button,' not burying the past but allowing some future someone to start over from scratch.”
These volumes, collating numerous reports by numerous scholars of often differing viewpoints, would therefore contain whatever scientific data's necessary to support them, whenever applicable – otherwise, it would be labeled as opinion and footnoted appropriately. The most important thing was to be both thorough and thoroughly scientific, not guided by our own beliefs or popular prejudices.
“It's not meant to be contradictory for the sake of frustrating the reader but to offer the future all the evidence we ourselves gathered from the past so they can make their own deductions.”
The premise was to create something from which future scholars could, by considering the implications, create new visions for a Second Renaissance that's a synthesis of current beliefs rather than reconstituting the present Normal, an already conflicted world with all its imperfections and dissensions, ready to self-destruct again in a few short centuries (or less).
“Well, without any further serious ado, let us begin our tour of this magical and mysterious Abbey before it gets dark, so we can, fittingly, view a magnificent sunset from the Main Entrance's portico.”
Kárax sighed at the conclusion of his remarks that it might be too idealistic to hope for, this rescuing the world's accumulated knowledge to save humanity in the event of some new Dark Age, but he admitted, as others apparently agreed, nodding as he spoke, “if one doesn't try, failure will be the only outcome.”
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The end room of the Express Motel had only been empty for three days, sealed off as a crime scene despite what happened there over thirty years ago wasn't considered a crime even then. Sheriff Betty Diddon unlocked the door and hesitated, hit with this odd sense of something she wasn't sure how to describe. Had previous occupants of what Masterman considered his best room, the only single-bed occupancy in the place, felt something weird here? It wasn't so much “weird evil” as just “weird unsettling,” maybe borderline nasty. She hadn't expected anything. Unlikely she'd smell a dead body or find Trazmo's corpse hidden under the floorboards beneath a bed which looked like it had never been placed anywhere else in the room. If the man wasn't murdered here, it's unlikely the room would be haunted by his ghost: but what about John Buck's?
She closed the door behind her and let her eyes adjust gradually to the natural light before finding the switch, then realized this had been the first time she'd ever had an unidentified male victim, this “John Buck,” associated with Buck Masterman's motel (“allegedly associated”), and she found the coincidence more amusing than she should. No wonder some of the townspeople she'd talked to about this case were confused, particularly the slower witted types like her deputy, Roger, and her name-calling, high school nemesis, now town councilman, Dickie Longbottom.
Hiking up her belt again, she straightened her posture in the hope she could stretch the shirt's fabric before it'd rip, and practiced her best John Wayne impression as she strode across the floor. She looked around the room – what did she expect to find? What possible evidence could there still be after three decades?
“Even this damn case is a hand-me-down, just like my damn uniform,” she groused, turning around, peering into the closet (“nothing...”). She kept requisitioning money for a new uniform but the board was adamant. There was never money in the budget to outfit someone “with your measurements” for a new, form-fitting uniform since the county commissioners were convinced she'd never be re-elected if Councilman Longbottom had his way. Too tall, too broad-shouldered, and too female compared to their collection of past sheriffs, she'd just have to deal with it.
So this morning, after she again complained how her uniform was never a comfortable fit, especially across the chest and around the waist, discomfort reinforcing her perception as a second-class woman and Native American, Roger suggested maybe John Buck had to deal with this, too, a taller man wearing a shorter man's pants and boots.
Initially, Diddon looked at him as if to say “where did that come from” or, as her mother said when something made no sense, “what's that got to do with the price of eggs?”
But he was right. Forced to wear something “off the rack” rather than tailor-fit, she must put up with what's available. “Who'd be forced to wear something 'off the rack' when nothing else's available? Somebody who found them. Somebody who'd been given them, maybe from a charity. Maybe some vagrant who was passing through town...?”
She was reluctant to consider her deputy “a genius” for suggesting something that put some of her own gray cells into motion, especially when nothing involving innate intelligence had lurked behind what he'd said, but she had to, even reluctantly, give him some credit, make him feel for a moment he had contributed something worthwhile. Even before she patted him on the back, it occurred to her it might have no impact on solving the case, but it did give her some insight into their current victim's potential identity.
And what was it that annoying Kerr's assistant had told her yesterday afternoon? (The only thing that could've made the experience worse was running into the old professor himself, him with that smugger-than-thou delivery.) How Kerr wondered if the original reports indicated any evidence had been found in the ceiling around the room's overhead light. Reality rather brusquely reminded her, striding off to Masterman's office for the key, Kerr was no longer involved in this investigation: the body wasn't Trazmo's and there was no reason to keep him apprised.
Except her Better Policeman Self kept pointing out, “but yeah, there is, right?” There's Trazmo's belt buckle and there's Trazmo's boots. The problem is, they're on the wrong body. “How'd they end up there?” There's that much of a connection but until she can identify this body, there's not much chance of solving that mystery.
She was tall enough to push the tile back and clear the opening around the casing for the light fixture, but, not seeing anything, just barely tall enough to reach in and grope around. She strode over to the small dressing table, picked up the lone, spindly chair, then placed it directly under the light. Sitting on it was one thing but she wondered if it would sustain her weight standing on it. It could easily tip over as collapse underneath her. (Where did Masterman buy this crap, anyway?)
It didn't help her self-confidence, alone in the room, falling off the chair, maybe hitting her head on the bedpost before passing out. She'd arranged to meet Roger for lunch: he'd find her, eventually.
She slid the tile back and heard it clunk against something, a resonant sound hitting wood, not metal – a wooden crossbeam?
It also gave a little bit, so presumably it wasn't a crossbeam. Did it move maybe an inch before she stopped? She reached in and started to feel around, unsure what she had discovered.
Her hand brushed against something wooden, smooth, polished, not an old beam, not some metal part of the light fixture, either. And not, she sighed with relief, the skull that was her next choice.
A small wooden memento box included a room key, a wallet with outdated cards and driver's license for Phillips T. Hawthorne.
Diddon nearly fell off the chair when she gasped, “How is this possible?” This box lay hidden undisturbed for thirty-some years. “How many times would someone have had to change a burned-out light bulb?” And yet no one, apparently, had ever noticed this, especially since it was only a few inches away from the fixture. No doubt about it, she thought, stepping down to get an evidence bag, this definitely put this whole case in a different light, so to speak, even if it didn't quite crack it open.
She also thought it wouldn't add any stars toward Masterman's hoped-for Michelin Rating if this speaks to his cleaning crew's capabilities (wasn't this place renovated at least once since 1983?) or their less-than-satisfactory housekeeping. It almost made her want to rip up the flooring to see if there was a body buried under the bed.
Diddon didn't want to imagine what it was like if she'd stayed here, back in the spring of 1983, never aware a dead person might be decomposing a couple feet beneath where she'd slept. (Quite frankly, she wasn't keen on imagining what past occupants of these rooms had been doing in that same bed, regardless.) Maintenance crews might overlook this beautifully hand-carved box hidden up in the ceiling but customers or cleaning crews would've certainly smelled the pungent decomposition of a body wafting up from under the floor, right?
If he – or someone else: the murderer? – hid this box in the ceiling, Trazmo didn't just wander out and get lost in the storm. It was put there for a reason, wouldn't you think? If Trazmo was going out for a walk or just down to the diner, he'd've taken his room key along, right? No, he'd put it there, Trazmo or the murderer, she continued to think as she walked around, glancing up at the light from different angles – because he'd planned on coming back for it later.
And what exactly was it that made that old fool, Dr. Kerr, think she ought to look there in the first place, like that young fool, his assistant, suggested to her, not very subtly? They needed to have her discover it if... if they'd planted it there? Perhaps on orders from their client, Tom Purdue?
Diddon dragged the undamaged chair out of the way, then reached up to slide the ceiling tile back into place, reminding herself she'd done this, coincidentally, in Kerr's room Monday night after he'd arrived. “Maybe that's what gave him the idea,” she thought, stepping back as her phone rang – Roger, again – “a convenient hiding place.” But when would they have gotten into the room and planted it there? “That would've been the easy bit,” she assumed, given Kerr or his assistant would no doubt be expert lock-pickers.
“Yeah, Roger...?”
“Sheriff,” he said, more excitedly than usual (it didn't take much to excite the boy, she considered, like the time he'd found a dead 'possum near that break-in last month), “glad I caught you. You should get out here soon as you can – somethin' odd's goin' on...”
“And what is that, Roger: another dead 'possum?”
No, okay, so it wasn't that, but he wasn't being very cogent, typical of Deputy Dett, and he certainly sounded flustered. Even his mother'd always said, it wasn't a question of having a screw or two slightly loose, it was more like Roger'd always been short a few, ever since that childhood accident years ago.
“Okay, Rodge, I'm on my way. And where, by the way, is 'here'?”
Sliding the new evidence bag under her arm, she quickly locked up. “Yup. Seems odd things're goin' on everywhere 'round here.”
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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