The Café du Parlement occupied a narrow wedge of real estate between a defunct bookbinder's shop and a pawnbroker's on the Rue de la Monnaie, a street that had once been the financial heart of the capital and was now a museum of its own decline. Its windows were fogged with decades of steam and cigarette smoke, its brass fittings green with neglect, and its clientele consisted almost entirely of minor functionaries from the nearby Palais de Justice who came to drink coffee and complain about their salaries in voices too exhausted to be bitter. It was, Korda reflected as he pushed open the door on the third evening after receiving the shadow file, precisely the kind of place where secrets went to die of old age.
Lena Voss was waiting for him at the table in the back corner, as she had promised. She had chosen the position with professional care: her back to the wall, a clear sightline to both the front entrance and the kitchen door, the table itself positioned so that no one could approach her from behind without casting a shadow across the oilcloth. She was reading a newspaper and eating a hard-boiled egg with the methodical precision of someone who had learned to take nourishment where and when she could. She did not look up when Korda sat down across from her.
"You took longer than I expected," she said, folding the newspaper. "I was beginning to think you'd decided to stay buried."
"I almost did." Korda placed the shadow file on the table between them, along with Brandt's letter. "But dying declarations have a way of resurrecting the dead."
Voss picked up Brandt's letter and read it slowly, her expression unchanged. When she finished, she placed it carefully back on the table and signaled the waiter for another coffee. The waiter, a skeletal man with the resigned air of someone who had been serving the same customers for forty years, brought a second cup without being asked. He did not look at either of them. The café's regulars, Korda understood, had long ago perfected the art of not seeing things that might later require them to testify.
"Brandt's death is convenient," Voss said. "Too convenient. Pancreatic cancer is difficult to induce, but not impossible. There are substances that mimic its effects. I've been investigating the medical wing at Montfaucon for the past year. Three other inmates with connections to the Duvall case have died there in the last eighteen months. All of them from cancers that were diagnosed late and progressed with unusual speed."
"You think Brandt was murdered."
"I think Brandt was silenced. There's a difference." She reached into her bag and withdrew a second file, thicker than the first and bound with a rubber band. "This is what I've been able to gather on the Carnaval Society. Do you know the name?"
Korda shook his head. The name had appeared nowhere in the shadow file, and he had never encountered it in his years at the Procureur's office. It sounded harmless, almost frivolous: a social club for wealthy eccentrics who liked to dress up and dance. But Voss's expression suggested otherwise.
"The Carnaval Society was founded in 1957," she said, "during the final years of the Valdorian military government. Its charter members included two generals, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the rector of the National University, and the archbishop's private secretary. Its stated purpose was the preservation of traditional Carnival customs and the organization of the annual Shrove Tuesday parade. It was registered as a cultural organization and granted tax-exempt status by the Ministry of Culture. For thirty years, it did exactly what it claimed to do. It organized parades. It commissioned masks. It published scholarly monographs on the history of Carnival in the Valdorian highlands."
"And then?"
"And then, in 1987, it ceased to exist. Officially. Its registration lapsed, its offices were vacated, and its archives were transferred to the National Library, where they were promptly misfiled and lost. No one noticed, because by that time the Society had stopped organizing parades anyway. The Carnival had been taken over by the municipal government. The Society simply disappeared from the public record."
Korda turned the pages of the file, scanning photographs and photocopied documents. The photographs showed a building he recognized: the Hôtel de Villeroy, a decaying eighteenth-century mansion on the Rue des Capucins that had been shuttered for as long as he could remember. The documents were more troubling. They were minutes of meetings, typewritten on onionskin paper, bearing the letterhead of the Carnaval Society and dated as recently as three years ago. The attendees listed in the minutes included names that Korda knew from his time at the Palais de Justice: a sitting judge of the Court of Cassation, a deputy minister of the interior, the chief of the State Security Bureau's counterintelligence division, and Tristan Kappel, who had been a junior prosecutor when Korda was convicted and was now the Procureur-Général of the Republic.
"The Society didn't disappear," Korda said. "It went underground."
"It went into the shadows." Voss leaned forward, her voice dropping. "The official Carnival is a tourist attraction. The real Carnival, the one the Society preserves, is something else entirely. It takes place in private residences and abandoned churches and the basements of government buildings. Attendance is by invitation only. The masks are commissioned from a single family of artisans in the mountains who have been making them for two hundred years. And the rituals—" She hesitated, and for the first time Korda saw something in her face that looked like fear. "The rituals are not what you would call cultural preservation."
"Then what are they?"
"I don't know yet. But I know that every person who has tried to find out is either dead or in prison or too frightened to speak to me. There's a word they use, the people who know about the Society. They call it 'the Vestry.' Do you know why?"
Korda thought of the torn notebook page in his pocket, the three words written in Steiner's hand: "The Vestry approves." He shook his head.
"Because in the old cathedrals, the vestry was the room where the priests put on their robes before the service. It was the threshold between the profane world and the sacred one. The place where ordinary men transformed themselves into instruments of divine will." Voss tapped the file. "The Carnaval Society believes, or claims to believe, or claims as a pretext to believe, that Carnival is the one night of the year when ordinary men can transform themselves into instruments of something else entirely. Not divine will. The opposite of divine will. The shadow that God casts when He turns His face away."
Korda remembered the balcony, the bells, the fifteen masks moving in their terrible choreography. He remembered the way the crowd had stopped fleeing and started watching, their costumed faces lifted toward the cathedral as if awaiting a benediction. He had spent ten years trying to convince himself that what he had witnessed was a spontaneous act of mob violence, a random eruption of the chaos that Carnival was designed to release and contain. But the masks had not been random. The choreography had not been spontaneous. And the crowd had not been watching in horror. They had been watching in reverence.
"Steiner is a member," he said. It was not a question.
"Steiner is a mid-level operative. He takes orders from someone higher. Someone who was in the square that night, wearing a mask, participating in the ritual. Someone who has been protecting the Society for decades, ensuring that no investigation ever gets close to the truth." Voss paused. "Someone who decided, the moment you ran down that spiral staircase, that you would be the one to take the blame."
The café door opened, admitting a gust of cold air and a man in a dark overcoat. He took a seat at the counter and ordered a coffee without looking in their direction. Korda watched him for a moment, then turned back to Voss.
"Why are you doing this? What's your interest in a ten-year-old murder and a disgraced prosecutor?"
Voss was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was quieter than before, stripped of its professional detachment. "My father was a journalist. He worked for the capital's independent newspaper, before it was bought and dismantled by a consortium with ties to the Ministry of the Interior. In 2006, he began investigating the Carnaval Society. He had a source inside the organization, someone who was feeding him documents. In 2007, he died in a car accident on a mountain road that he had no reason to be driving on. The police ruled it a mechanical failure. The brake lines had been cut, but the official report said they had frayed naturally."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Help me finish what he started." She pushed the file across the table toward him. "The Society's mask maker is still alive. His name is Matthias. He lives in a village called Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre, in the Verdon valley. He's blind, and he's old, and he doesn't speak to anyone anymore. But he still makes masks for the Society. He has a ledger, my father's source said, that records every commission he has ever received. Names, dates, payments. If that ledger still exists, it would tell us exactly who ordered the fifteen identical masks that were used to kill Armand Duvall."
Korda looked at the file, then at the window, where the rain had begun again and was streaking the glass with patterns that looked, in the dim light of the streetlamps, like the bars of a cell. He thought about Brandt, dying in a prison hospital, writing a confession that no one would read until he was beyond the reach of the people who had silenced him. He thought about the shadow file, and the surveillance photographs, and the memorandum addressed to "T.K." He thought about the Carnival, three weeks away, and the masks that would soon be unpacked from their wooden crates and prepared for another night of ritual and transformation.
"If I do this," he said, "if I go to Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre and find this ledger, what happens then? Even if we prove that Steiner planted the evidence, even if we prove that the Society orchestrated the murder, who's going to prosecute the Procureur-Général and a sitting judge and the chief of counterintelligence? The system that convicted me is the system that protects them."
"The system that convicted you is afraid," Voss said. "It's afraid of exposure, afraid of scandal, afraid of what happens when people start asking questions about what really goes on behind the masks. That fear is the only weapon we have. But it's a weapon that can cut both ways, and it's the only one I know how to use."
The man in the dark overcoat finished his coffee and left, passing their table without a glance. Korda waited until the door had closed behind him before he spoke again.
"There's a name on Steiner's list. Fourth on the list, after Duvall and me and someone named Cassian Holt. Your name, Lena Voss. Why would Steiner have your name on a list that was written three weeks before Duvall was murdered? You would have been—what, twenty-six years old? A student?"
Voss's face went very still. "I don't know. I didn't know about the list until you showed it to me just now. But my father's source inside the Society—his name was Cassian Holt. And he disappeared three days before my father's car went off that mountain road."
The rain beat against the windows. The café's regulars drank their coffee and did not look at anything. Somewhere in the distance, the bells of Saint Aldric's began to toll the hour, their bronze voices carrying across the rooftops of the capital like a warning or a summons or a prayer. Korda listened to them and thought about the masks, and the ledger, and the blind artisan in the mountains who held the names of the men who had killed Armand Duvall and destroyed Elias Korda and silenced everyone who had ever tried to tell the truth about what happened in the Cathedral Square on Shrove Tuesday 2009.
"I'll go to Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre," he said. "But first I need to see the man in the shadow file who knows about God's forgotten shadow. The psychiatrist. Neumann."
Voss nodded slowly. "Aldric Neumann. He was dismissed from the Academy of Sciences six years ago. He lives in a sanatorium in the northern provinces now, under a kind of house arrest that the government prefers to call medical supervision. Getting to him won't be easy."
"Nothing about this has been easy," Korda said. "Why should it start now?"
He stood, gathered the files, and left the café. The rain had softened to a drizzle, and the streets were empty except for the feral cats that prowled the alleys and the occasional police patrol that rolled past with its lights dimmed. The capital at night was a city holding its breath, waiting for something it could not name. In three weeks, the Carnival would arrive, and the breath would be released, and for one night the masks would come out of their boxes and the rituals would begin again, and no one would speak of what happened behind the closed doors and the shuttered windows and the places where God's face was turned away. But Korda would be there, and this time he would not be standing on a balcony. This time he would be on the ground, in the square, looking into the hollow eyes of the masks and searching for the shadows that lived behind them.
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