Free The Sixth Key by Adriana Koulias

wretched!’
    ‘Thank you.’ Rahn took a good sip and let the
fruity fire sit on his tongue a moment. ‘And you, my dear La Dame, look a
little portly.’
    There was a flash of panic in La Dame’s eye
and his hand explored his middle to test the veracity of the vile statement.
    Touché! Rahn thought.
    There was a narrowing of the eyes and a
shaking of the index finger of the hand that held his cigar. ‘You almost had me
believing it!’ he said, with a smile, straightening his tie and biting into the
cigar with a virile ferocity. He took a glance at his reflection in the mirror
opposite and sat back, satisfied that he cut a good shape. ‘I’ve been working
at teaching imbeciles to think logically, a task that, I have to say, is
starting to lose its lustre. At this rate I’ll die of boredom before I’m
forty.’ He watched Rahn drink the remaining contents of his glass down in one
gulp with amusement and blew smoke rings in the air. ‘Hold on, Rahn! That’s
expensive, you know.’
    ‘I’ll pay.’
    La Dame raised a lazy brow. ‘Well, in that
case . . . bottom’s up!’ He drank his glass in one gulp too and set it down for
a top-up.
    Rahn poured another for both of them, then
held up his glass and looked at La Dame through the golden liquor. ‘Nice colour
. . .’ He sniffed it. ‘Oak casks, extra old; Napoleon or Vieille Réserve; aged
at least six years. So you haven’t been cheap, La Dame, but you haven’t spent
all the rent money either!’
    ‘How can you know so much from one mouthful,
Rahn?’
    Rahn ignored him. ‘Do you know how they tested
brandy in the old days? They put gunpowder in it and set fire to it. If the
gunpowder took, the brandy was good.’
    La Dame sat back. ‘How you manage to retain so
many completely useless but terribly impressive facts in that head of yours
simply astounds me. Lucky for me, I have my looks to fall back on.’ He sighed.
‘This is good, isn’t it? Just like those nights at the Leila in Montmartre! The
only difference is we’re not waiting for the bartender to turn around before
running out of the place without paying. Things do change, thank goodness. But
we did have rather a lot of fun, didn’t we? Drinking brandy and la Fée Verte.’
    Rahn nodded. ‘Yes, I also remember those days
with fondness.’
    ‘That reminds me of Etienne – have you
seen her lately? Are you and she, still . . . you know?’
    ‘We were never an affaire
de coeur,’ Rahn said, ‘but I keep expecting her to turn up wearing a suit like
the old days, carrying a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a gun in the
other.’
    ‘I’ll take the absinthe . . . She was rather
odd.’
    La Dame had a fashion of calling everything
‘odd’ and seemed to live amid a legion of oddities.
    ‘A Marxist with good taste is a rare species,’
he continued. ‘Speaking of Marxists, you certainly did send me on a chase! And
exceedingly odd it was too!’
    Rahn sat up. ‘What did you find out?’
    ‘Actually—’ He warmed his words with
another swallow of brandy. ‘There was a bit of hole-and-corner work involved.
This Vincent Varas is an alias for a man called Pierre de Plantard who works
for a group called Alpha Galates, which has some connections to the French
Union. They have a nasty periodical called Vaincre, which they use to
disseminate their anti-Freemason, anti-Marxist, anti-Jew, anti-everybody
diatribe. Alpha Galates purports that its secrets come from ancient Atlantis.
Moreover, they’re more Catholic than the pope and are expecting the so-called
Apocalypse sooner rather than later, after which there will be the creation of
a New Jerusalem – where, incidentally, there are no Jews but only good
Roman Catholics.’
    Rahn sighed. ‘How big are they?’
    ‘As far as I can gather, there are only a
handful of members and this Plantard is only a boy really, no older than
nineteen, but there are others. The interesting thing is that behind Alpha
Galates there is another group run by a man