Da Easter Bunny Code - Chapitre Un

[realthog]

Here it is! The knuckle-whitening opening chapter of Da Easter Bunny Code, the finest heretical thriller that Dan Brown never wrote, suffused though it is with the inimitable poesy of diction of the master riveter himself. Sort of thing.

The blurb for this monstrosity -- the book they tried to ban! -- can be found at http://realthog.livejournal.com/6036.html and the Prologue bit at http://realthog.livejournal.com/7386.html.

But under the cut is where the real excitement begins to throb!

Chapter 1

Cardinal Josef Lebowski was dead. There could be no question of that.

The body was sprawled, face-up, on the tiled floor of one of the below-ground galleries in the Louvre, the famous Parisian art museum founded in its original form as a utilitarian fortress by Philippe-Auguste in the ninth century and suffering various conversions until François I decided in the sixteenth century to demolish it and build a grand palace in its place, which construction was not in the event completed until 1810, after the French Revolution of 1789, with the Pyramide added as recently as 1989 for the purpose of linking all the various parts of the museum, which has some 50,000 square metres of gallery space.

These thoughts were running through the mind of Inspector Gaston Cluedeaux of the Surete as he gazed down at the corpse of the late cardinal. Lebowski had been a charismatic figure, never long out of the newspaper headlines, which was how the Louvre nightwatchman who had discovered the grisly scene, Jambert, had recognized him at once. A less illustrious corpse could well have been left until the morning for the cleaners to deal with, but instead Jambert had rushed out onto the rue de Rivoli, the main street that runs past the imposing façade of the Louvre, and hailed the flic on the corner. That flic, Luc-Chien Escargau by name, had hurriedly followed Jambert to the scene and, confirming the identity of the deceased, had radioed for help.

The end product of this radio communication had been the summoning of Inspector Gaston Cluedeaux from the long and richly deserved hot bath he had been enjoying at home with a bottle of the red wine called Beaujolais and a sprightly young red-headed cabaret dancer from St-Germain. Well, and the sprightly young red-headed cabaret dancer's friend, if truth be told. Not to mention a live marmoset, about a gallon of spaghetti bolognese, and several strategically placed ostrich feathers. It had been a very crowded bath, but an enjoyable one for all that.

The Surete inspector grimaced, thinking he could have killed Cardinal Lebowski for having been the cause of the bath's interruption had not someone already done it for him.

Now he was looking at Lebowski's corpse – the man's very badly mangled corpse. Quel dommage!

There was something very mysterious about the body, thought Cluedeaux now, screwing up his eyes against the bright lights the scene-of-crime officers had brought in here.

"You touched nothing, Escargau?" growled the inspector for the tenth time.

"Rien, sir," said the young flic nervously. He was a fresh-faced fellow who looked to be scarcely out of his teens. Cluedeaux wondered sourly if he'd yet started having to shave.

"Bon," said the older man, conveying in the single syllable a mixture of acceptance, disbelief, and perhaps something more.

Then who, thought Cluedeaux, could have arranged the body like this? Unless it was Lebowski himself who did it. But surely . . . surely that must be impossible! What could have possessed him to . . .? And yet I cannot ignore the evidence of my senses, my leetle grey cells, or my vaunted ratiocinative powers.

Cluedeaux knelt down beside one outflung arm and began recording his impressions in the mental notebook he carried with him everywhere.

The cause of death was obvious: a shotgun blast to the head, probably from a distance of no more than a metre or two. The cardinal's skull had been smashed by the impact of the countless lead pellets, and brain matter had been spattered over the floor, walls and ceiling for several metres around. Death must have been almost instantaneous . . . but only almost. During his last few agonized seconds of life, relying upon his severely depleted brain and probably his spinal cord as well, Lebowski had been highly active. He had removed all his clothing, flinging it aside to where it now lay in untidy heaps on the gallery floor, and then he had carefully positioned himself, nude, with his legs straight but his arms outstretched, almost as if he were adopting the crucified position of the Lord he had served in life.

Cluedeaux's eyes narrowed, and he leaned even closer.

There was more.

The palm of each of the cardinal's hands contained a small, ragged, grey-white crescent, held in place by the curled-over middle finger. For some incomprehensible reason, Lebowski had, even during his dying anguish, gnawed the fingernails from his index fingers.

Those index fingers themselves were in the pointing position, and automatically Cluedeaux's eyes followed the imperative direction first to one side and then the other.

It was almost as if the cardinal had deliberately pointed at the two pictures which hung to either side of his corpse.

But surely that could not be so!

The painting to the corpse's right side showed a young woman in an outmoded bonnet with, behind her and clearly moored at a dockside, a pleasure steamer of some kind. Squinting, Cluedeaux could make out the engraved gold nameplate affixed to the carved wooden frame with four imitation-brass cross-head screws:

Jessica at the Coney Island Ferry

BENJAMIN "BUGSY" SIEGEL

The inspector's bushy eyebrows rose above his pocked cheeks. He had not realized that the notorious gangster responsible for turning Las Vegas into a gambling mecca had also been a painter, far less a painter of sufficient stature to have works displayed in the Louvre.

But what of the other painting to which the deceased prelate appeared to be pointing? This showed a table with assorted foodstuffs arranged upon it. The little plate identified it as

Still Life with Bun

JEAN-BAPTISTE COROT

Cluedeaux's forehead wrinkled. If the paintings were trying to tell him something, they were failing to succeed. And yet, and yet . . . It was as if they were speaking but behind a very thick oaken door, so that he could hear the muffled sound of voices yet not make out any of the words.

As he stood once more, his knees creaking arthritically, the floodlights caught the tiled floor near Cardinal Lebowski's shattered head at an angle Cluedeaux had not noticed before.

The investigator sucked in his breath.

The cardinal had performed one final incomprehensible act before death had seized him into its clammy embrace.

He had scooped from the bowl of his own open skull a little of the remaining brain matter – ze leetle grey cells, as Cluedeaux liked to think of it – and painted two erratically meandering shapes, placed such on the floor that they reminded Cluedeaux of the way clowning children hold two fingers up behind each other's heads when being photographed. But these shapes were far larger than any fingers could be. In fact, they almost made Cluedeaux think of . . .

"Escusez-moi, inspecteur," said Escargau.

Whatever thought it was that Cluedeaux had been about to think fled the confines of his mind.

"Oui?" he snapped testily.

"I 'ave been going, 'ow you say, through the habillements of the snuffed-it 'oly rouleur, and 'ave discovered this."

The flic held out a torn slip of paper, and Cluedeaux irritably took it from him.

In what the inspector intuitively guessed to be Cardinal Lebowski's own handwriting there were written a few cryptic words:

Roger Lapin, bar at Hôtel d'Angleterre, 21.30 tonight.

It was clearly an appointment the cardinal had made while still alive. But was it an appointment he had kept? If he had, why had he come to the Louvre afterwards? And how, anyway, had he managed to sneak past the astonishing state-of-the-art security in place at the museum, consisting not just of nightwatchman Jambert and his doughty truncheon but also of countless Betamax-B video surveillance cameras (manufactured by Spigot et Cie. at their fourteen-hectare ultra-modern factory just three point two kilometres outside Lausanne) that covered every cubic millimetre of the galleries, not to mention the complex of randomly shifting laser beams that criss-crossed the rooms at ankle height, designed to make any intruders trip and fall as their shoelaces were burned through?

The mystery was just as deep if Cardinal Josef Lebowski had not kept his appointment with the sinister-sounding Roger Lapin, whoever he might be. For, in that case, why had the prelate come to the Louvre before going to the Hôtel d'Angleterre? Cluedeaux's own bitter experiences told him that this was, in the ordinary way, to get the proceedings the wrong way round. While it was true one might feel the strong urge for a few stiff drinks after visiting the Louvre, especially the modernist galleries, any man of sense – and the evidence that Cardinal Lebowski had been a man of sense was on the floor and walls – knew the only wise course of action was to fortify oneself in advance.

Cluedeaux's eyes narrowed yet narrower.

"Escargau," he snarled, "what is the time?"

"Le temps, monsieur?"

"Mais oui, idiot! Did I not speak in French?"

"Ah. Oh. Eh bien." The youth made a performance out of consulting his wristwatch. "It is, 'ow you say, les dix heurs plus vingt-cinq of what the English they call minutes."

Twenty-five past ten, translated Cluedeaux inwardly, furiously. And the good cardinal was scheduled to meet this Lapin rogue at nine-thirty! Less than an hour ago. There is every chance the man is still there, waiting. After all, it is the privilege of the blessed to be a little late for appointments, and so one waits for them far past the due hour . . .

"Escargau!"

"Monsieur?"

"Despatch a man at once – better still, go yourself as well – to the bar of the Hôtel d'Angleterre!"

"The one in rue Jacob?"

"The very one!"

"At numero quarante-quatre?"

"Yes, yes!" Cluedeaux's impatience was growing like a powerful thunderhead in an ominously grey sky as seen over the Chattanooga Sound. "The Hôtel d'Angleterre at number forty-four rue Jacob! Vite, man! Vite!"

"It shall, 'ow you say, be done."

Escargau set off down the corridor at a sprint in search of a part of the museum where his cell phone would function.

Too late Cluedeaux remembered that the Louvre's high-tech security system had been turned off only in this and surrounding galleries.

There was a sudden smell of burning shoelace and a crash that rattled the paintings on the walls.

"C'est la vie," muttered the inspector philosophically as he turned to resume his inspection of the body.