The Babylon Rite Read online

  TOM KNOX

  The Babylon Rite

  About the Book

  The Babylon Rite is a work of fiction. However I have drawn on many real historical, archaeological and cultural sources for this book. In particular:

  The ancient Knights Templar preceptory of Temple Bruer, Lincolnshire, England, has long had a reputation for evil and hauntings. In the nineteenth century, a local antiquarian, Reverend Oliver, discovered medieval skeletons entombed in the walls; he concluded that these victims had been tortured, and then buried alive.

  The little church of Nosse Senhora de Guadalupe, in the Algarve, southern Portugal, was the private chapel of Henry the Navigator, one of the first great European explorers. The meaning of the sculpture in the ceiling has never been explained.

  The Moche culture (pronounced Mot-Chay), which flourished in the deserts of north Peru in the fifth to ninth centuries AD, is perhaps the most peculiar of all pre-Columbian civilizations. One of the stranger aspects of Moche religion was a complex ritual known as the Sacrifice Ceremony.

  This book is dedicated to my brother Ross, for his endless good humour, for his stoicism and his equanimity, and for generously sharing with me his very small cup of masato beer, made from chewed manioc and human spit, in Belen Floating Market, Iquitos.

  ‘It seems that a new knightly order has recently been born in the Orient. They do not fear death; instead, they long for death.’

  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in praise of the Knights Templar, AD 1135

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Trujillo, Peru

  2. Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

  3. Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

  4. Pan-American Highway, north Peru

  5. Braid Hills, Edinburgh

  6. The Hinnie Tavern, Edinburgh Old Town

  7. The Huacas, Zana, north Peru

  8. The Bishops Avenue, London

  9. Morningside, Edinburgh

  10. East Finchley, north London

  11. Tomb 1, Huaca D, Zana, north Peru

  12. Morningside, Edinburgh

  13. Interview Room D, New Scotland Yard, London

  14. Huaca El Brujo, Chicama Valley, north Peru

  15. The Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London

  16. Lothian & Borders Police Headquarters, Edinburgh

  17. TUMP Lab, Zana, north Peru

  18. Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

  19. TUMP Lab, Zana, north Peru

  20. Mornington Terrace, Camden Town, London

  21. The Angel Inn, Penhill, Yorkshire

  22. The American Christian Hospital, Trujillo, Peru

  23. Highgate, London

  24. Temple Bruer, Lincoln Heath

  25. Outskirts of Chiclayo, north Peru

  26. Barbican, City of London

  27. Temple, London

  28. Mercado de las Brujas, Chiclayo, north Peru

  29. Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London

  30. Canonbury Square, Islington, London

  31. Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London

  32. Witches’ Market, Chiclayo

  33. Clapham, south London

  34. Huaca D, Zana, Peru

  35. Clapham Common, London

  36. Huaca D, Zana, Peru

  37. Domme Castle, France

  38. Rodez, France

  39. The Museo Larco, Lima, Peru

  40. Tomar, Portugal

  41. Rua Pablo Dias, Tomar, Portugal

  42. The Radisson Hotel, Lima, Peru

  43. The Embassy of the United States, Lima, Peru

  44. Radisson Hotel, Lima

  45. Iquitos, Amazonia, Peru

  46. The Amazon, Peru

  47. MV Myona cargo ferry, Amazon River, Peru

  48. Pankarama Settlement, Ucayali River, Peru

  49. Ucayali River, Peru

  50. Riverplane, Ucayali, Peru

  51. Le Casa de Carlos Chicomeca Monroy

  52. Tepito

  53. The City Complex of Teotihuacan, Mexico

  54. Toloriu, the Catalunyan Pyrenees

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By Tom Knox

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Trujillo, Peru

  It was a very strange place to build a museum. Under a Texaco gas station, where the dismal suburbs of Trujillo met the cold and foggy deserts of north Peru, in a wasteland of concrete warehouses and sleazy cantinas. But somehow this sense of being hidden away, this strange, sequestered location, made the Museo Casinelli feel even more intriguing: as if it really was a secret museum.

  Jessica liked coming here, whenever she drove down to Trujillo from Zana. And today she had remembered to bring a camera, to gather crucial evidence.

  She opened the door at the rear of the garage and smiled at the old curator, who stood, and bowed, as courteous as ever. ‘Ah, Señorita Silverton! You are here again? You must like the, eh, naughty pottery?’ Her shrug was a little bashful; his smile was gently teasing. ‘But I fear the keys are in the other desk … Un minuto?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Pablo disappeared into a room at the back. As she waited, Jessica checked her cellphone, for the fifth time today: she was expecting an important call, from Steve Venturi, the best forensic anthropologist she knew.

  A week ago, she had arrived in Trujillo – taking a break from her studies amongst the pyramids of Zana; she’d brought with her a box full of fifteen-hundred-year-old Moche bones. This package had in turn been despatched to California, to her old tutor in UCLA: Venturi.

  Any day now she would get Steve’s answer. Was she right about the neckbones? Was her audacious insight correct? The anxiety of waiting for the verdict was increasingly unbearable. Jess felt like a teenager awaiting exam results.

  She looked up from the silent phone. Pablo had returned from his vestibule flourishing two keys, one big, one small. As he offered them, he winked. ‘La sala privada?’

  Jessica’s Spanish was still pretty mediocre, and for that reason she and the kindly curator normally conversed in English – but she understood that phrase well enough. The private room.

  ‘Si!’

  She took both keys from Pablo and saw how he noticed her slightly trembling hand. ‘It’s OK. Just need a coca.’

  Pablo frowned. ‘La diabetes?’

  ‘I’m OK. Really.’

  The frown softened to a smile. ‘See you later.’

  Jess descended the steps to the basement museum. Fumbling in the darkness, she found the larger key, and opened the door.

  When she switched on the light it flooded the room with a reassuring glow, revealing an eccentric and exquisite treasure trove of ancient Peruvian ceramics, pottery, textiles and other artefacts – gleaned from the mysterious cultures of pre-Colombian Peru: the Moche, the Chan Chan, the Huari, the Chimu.

  The light also shone on a dried monkey foetus, grimacing in a bell jar.

  She tried not to look at it. This thing always creeped her out. Maybe it wasn’t even a monkey, maybe it was a dried sloth, or some human mutation preserved as a gruesome curio by Jose Casinelli, forever offering the world its sad little face.

  Briskly she walked past the bell jar, and bent to the glass cabinets, the vitrines of pottery and treasures. Here were the stone pestles of the Chavin, and here the exquisite burial cloths of the Nazca in faded violet and purple; to the left was a brief, poignant line of Quingnam writing, the lost language of the Chimu. She took out her new camera and adjusted the tiny dial to compensate for the poor-quality light.

  As she worked, Jessica recalled the first time she had come her
e, six months ago, when she had begun her sabbatical: researching the anthropology of the pre-Columbian Stone Age in north Peru, making a comparative study of religious cultures across ancient America. Back then she had been almost a total ingénue, unprepared for the shock she was about to encounter: the high weirdness of pre-Inca Peru, most especially the Moche. And their infamous ‘naughty pottery’.

  It was time to visit the sala privada.

  Taking out the smaller key, she opened the creaking side-door. A further, darker, tinier room lay beyond.

  Few people came to the tiny Museo Casinelli, fewer still entered la sala privada. Even today a distinct aura of embarrassment surrounded the principal contents: the Moche sex pottery, the ceramicas eroticas. They were certainly too shocking and explicit to be shown to children, and conservative Peruvian Catholics would regard them as obscene works of the devil and be happy to see them smashed. Which was why they were kept in this dark and private antechamber, deep inside the secret museum.

  Jess knelt, and squinted, preparing to be shocked all over again.

  The first row of pots was asexual, merely distressing: on the left was a finely-crafted pot of a man with no nose and no lips, fired in exquisite black and gold. In the centre was a delicate ceramic representation of human sacrifice, with dismembered bodies at the foot of a mountain. And over here was a man tied to a tree, having his eyes pecked out by a vulture. Carefully, she took a photo of the last example.

  Disturbing as these ceramics might be, they were just normal mad Moche pottery. The next shelves held the real deal: the ceramicas eroticas.

  Working her way along them, Jess fired off dozens of photos. Why did the Moche go to the trouble of crafting erotic pottery like this? Sex with animals. Sex with the dead. Sex between skeletons. Perhaps it was just a metaphor, maybe even a joke; more likely it was a dreamtime, a mythology. It was certainly repellent, yet also fascinating.

  Jessica took some final photos, using the camera flash this time, which reflected off the dusty glass of the vitrines. As she concluded her task, her thoughts whirled. The Museo Casinelli had done its job, as it always did; and the feeling was very satisfying. It really had been a good choice of hers, last year, to come out to north Peru, one of the final frontiers of history, maybe the last great terra incognita of archaeology and anthropology, full of unknown cultures and untouched sites.

  Jessica shut off the lights and retreated. Upstairs, Pablo was trying to text something into his phone. He abandoned the effort, and smiled at her. ‘You are finished?’

  ‘Si! Gracias, Pablo.’

  ‘Then you must go and have some glucosa. You are my friend and I must look after you. Because you are the only scholar who comes here!’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Well. It is nearly true! I had some visitors last week, they were quite uncouth! Philistines seeking out … thrills. And they were unpleasant. Asking stupid questions. Everyone always asks the same stupid questions. Apart from you, Señorita, apart from you!’

  Jess smiled, returned the keys, and stepped out into the polluted grey air of Truijllo.

  The city greeted her with all its noise and grime. Guard dogs howled behind fences of corrugated iron; a man was pushing a glass trolley full of quails’ eggs past a dingy tyre shop; a blind beggar sat with a guitar on his lap – it had no strings. And above it all hung that endless grey depressing sky.

  It should really all be lovely, Jessica thought, here at the equator. It should be tropical and sunny and full of palm trees, but the strange climate of north Peru dictated otherwise: this was a place of clouds and chilly sea-fog.

  Her cellphone rang; immediately she reached into her bag. She’d expected it to be Steve Venturi but the screen said it was her boss at the dig at Zana, Daniel Kossoy, who was also the overall leader of TUMP, the Toronto University Moche Project. And, as of last month, also her lover.

  ‘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 …?’

  2

  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 t
hen, 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.