Tom Knox: The Babylon rite

‘Jess, hi. How’s Trujillo?’

‘All good, Dan. All fine!’

‘Where are you now, then?’

‘Museo Casinelli. Just left-’

‘Ah, the sex pots!’

‘The sex pots. Yes.’ She paused, wondering why Danny was ringing. He knew she could handle herself in the big bad city. Her silence invoked his real purpose.

‘Jess, have you heard anything from Venturi? I mean, we’re all on tenterhooks up here. Were you right? About the vertebrae? It’s like being in a cop show — the tension and excitement!’

‘Nothing yet. He did say a week at least, and it’s only been eight days.’

‘OK. Well. OK.’ A brief sigh. ‘OK. Keep us informed? And…’

‘What?’

‘Well…’ The pause implied unspoken feelings. Was he about to say something intimate, something personally revealing? Something like I miss you? She hoped not; it was way too soon in their miniature romance for any such declaration.

Briskly, Jessica interrupted, ‘OK, Dan, I gotta go. I’ll see you in Zana. Bye!’

Pocketing her phone, she walked to a corner to hail a taxi. The traffic was intense: fuming trucks loaded with charcoal growled at the lights; mopeds weaved between dinged Chevrolet taxis and crowded buses. Amongst the urgent chaos, Jessica noticed one particular truck, speeding down the other side of the road.

Going way too fast.

Jess shook her head. Peruvian driving wasn’t the best. It was normal to see trucks and buses tearing down highways as if they were the only vehicles in the world, taunting death. But this was something different.

She stared: perplexed. The truck was speeding up, accelerating, leaping over a kerb, horribly dangerous. Somewhere a woman screamed. It was heading straight for — straight for what, what was it doing? Where was it going? It was surely going to plough into the grimy houses, the tyre shop, the tired glass kiosk of the quails eggs seller The Texaco garage.

The truck was heading straight for the garage. Jessica gazed — rapt and paralysed. The driver leapt from his cabin; at the last possible moment someone grabbed hold of Jessica and pulled her to the ground, behind a low wall.

The crash of glass and exploding gasoline was enormous. Greasy fireballs of smoke billowed into the air. Jess heard dire screams, then frightening silence.

‘Pablo,’ Jessica said to herself, lying, shaking, on the cracked Trujillo sidewalk. ‘Pablo…?’

Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

Everything you could read about in the guide books was here, in Rosslyn chapel, the great and famous fifteenth-century chapel of the Sinclairs, ten miles south of Edinburgh. The bizarre stone cubes in the Lady Chapel, the eerie carvings of exotic vegetation, the Dance of Death in the arches, the inverted Lucifer bound in ropes, the Norse serpents twined around the Prentice Pillar. And all of it was lavished with alluring detail, teasing symbolism and occult hieroglyphs, creating a splendid whirl of conspiratorial intrigue in weathered old stone. Right next to a gift shop, which sold special Sinclair tartan tins of Templar shortcake, baked with special Holy Grail motifs.

Adam Blackwood sighed. His last assignment as a full-time feature writer for the Guardian, and it was on the mighty commerce of nonsense that was Rosslyn Chapel.

‘You OK?’

It was his friend, and long-time colleague, Jason the Photographer. With the usual sarcastic tilt in his south London accent.

Adam sighed.

‘No, I’m not OK. I just lost my job.’

‘Tchuh. We all lose our jobs.’ Jason glanced at his camera, adjusting a lens. ‘And you’re not dead, are you? You’re just thirty-four. Come on, let’s go back inside the chapel, this shop is full of nutters.’

‘The whole town is full of nutters. Especially the chapel.’ Adam pointed through the glass door at the medieval church. ‘Everyone in there is walking around clutching The Da Vinci Code, looking for the Holy Grail under the font.’

‘Then let’s hurry up! Maybe we’ll find it first.’

Adam dawdled. Jason sighed. ‘Go on then, Blackwood. Cough it up. I know you want to share.’

‘It’s just… Well I thought that at least this time, my very last assignment, I might get something serious again, just for the hell of it, a serious news story, as a parting gift.’

‘Because they like you so much? Adam — you got sacked. What did you expect? You punched the fucking features editor at the Guardian Christmas party.’

‘He was hassling that girl. She was crying.’

‘Sure.’ Jason shook his head. ‘The guy’s a wanker of the first water. I agree. So you’re a great Aussie hero, and I’m glad you decked him, but is it really so surprising they snapped? It’s not the first time you’ve lost it.’

‘But-’

‘Stop whingeing! You did a few decent news stories, amongst the dross. And they’re sacking journos all over the world. You’re not unique.’

This was a fair point. ‘Guess not.’

‘And you got a bloody pay-off. Now you can bog off to Afghanistan, get yourself killed. Come on. We still got work to do.’

They walked out of the shop into the forecourt. And stared once more at the squat stone jewel-box that was Rosslyn Chapel. A faint, mean-spirited drizzle was falling out of the cold Midlothian sky. They stepped aside to let a middle-aged lady tourist enter the ancient building. She was carrying a dog-eared copy of The Da Vinci Code.

‘It’s under the font!’ said Adam, loudly. Jason chuckled.

The two men followed the woman into the chapel. The Prentice Pillar loomed exotically at the end. A young couple with short blonde hair — German? — were peering at the pillar as if they expected the Holy Grail to materialize from within its luxuriously carved stone, like a kind of hologram.

Jason got to work. Tutting at his light meter, taking some shots. Adam interviewed a Belgian tourist in his forties, standing by the grave of the Earl of Caithness, asking what had brought him here. The Belgian mentioned the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code and the Knights Templar, in that order.

Adam got an initial glimpse of how he might write the piece. A light but sardonic tone, gently mocking all this lucrative naivety, this cottage industry of credulity that had grown up around Rosslyn Chapel. A feature that would explore how the entire town of Roslin, Midlothian, was living off the need of people in a secular age to believe, paradoxically, in deep religious conspiracies. No matter how absurd and embarrassing they might be.

He could start it with that GK Chesterton quote: ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything’.

Adam turned as a baritone voice resonated down the nave: one of the more pompous guides, holding a fake plastic sword, was pointing at the ceiling, and reciting some history. Adam listened in to the guide’s well-practised spiel.

‘So who exactly were the Knights Templar? Their origins are simple enough.’ The guide levelled his plastic sword at a small stone carving, apparently of two men on a horse. ‘Sometime around 1119, two French knights, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, veterans of the First Crusade, got together to discuss over a beaker of wine the safety of the many Christian pilgrims flocking to Jerusalem, since its brutal reconquest by the Crusaders of Pope Urban II.’ The guide’s sword wobbled as he continued. ‘The French knights proposed a new monastic order, a sect of chaste but muscular warrior monks, who would defend the pilgrims with their very lives against the depredations of bandits, and robbers, and hostile Muslims. This audacious idea was instantly popular: the new King Baldwin II of Jerusalem agreed to the knights’ request, and gifted them a headquarters on the Temple Mount, in the recently captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hence the full name of the Order: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or, in Latin, Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici. Ever since then, the question has been asked: was there also an esoteric reason for this significant choice of headquarters?’ He hesitated, with the air of a well-trained actor. ‘Naturally, we can never know. But the Temple Mount very definitely had a mystique: as it was located above what was believed to be the ruins of the first Temple of Solomon. Which,’ the guide smiled at his attentive audience, ‘is thought, in turn, to be a model for the church in which you stand today!’