'And this castle?'
'The map shows it's in a town called Zbiroh. But the entrance is two miles away, a little village called Pskov. Some kind of tunnel. The tunnel itself leads from a synagogue in Pskov.'
Again Simon nodded. His demeanour was enormously subdued.
They drove on. The Czech side of the border was a notable change from the German prosperity next door. Everything was a little more hunched, grubby, and humble. And the road to Plzen was lined with thirty-something women in tiny skirts and blonde wigs.
Angus explained:
'Prostitutes.'
'Sorry?'
'Came here for a conference a few years back, in Prague. The women here are working girls…the punters come over from Germany. Truck drivers and businessmen. They also sell gnomes.'
Amy queried this: 'Gnomes?'
The Scotsman pointed at a shop by the road. An entire rank of garishly painted garden gnomes was set up in front of the store.
'Because of some tax law, the gnomes are cheaper here, so again the Germans come over. For hookers and gnomes!'
He laughed drily. No one else laughed. But David was glad that Angus was laughing. The Scot was the only one amongst them who seemed to possess any positive energy, any real optimism. His intellectual need to know the Fischer results, his sheer curiosity, his selfish desire to know if he'd been right, was — rather ironically — keeping them all going.
But soon the car was silent, once more, as they sped along the motorway to Plzen. Angus had the map on his lap. Thick forests encroached. The drizzle was turning into proper rain.
'OK,' said Angus. 'Enough fucking brooding. Let's do something. Let's help Simon! Tell him the story so far. Poor guy's a freelance hack, he needs a story, to help with the mortgage. Let's pool everything we know.'
The mood in the car was so tense, so depressive, so frightened, David welcomed this impulsive idea. Talk. Just talk. Talk about anything. So they did: as David drove, they put together every segment of the puzzle, each adding their portion to the pot. And as they discussed, Simon scribbled in his notebook.
Then the journalist sat back. His voice was cracked with emotion, but at least he was managing to speak.
'OK. This is, ah, how I see it. What we know so far.'
David felt the flutter of his own anguish; he had an absurd fear that Simon would turn and point to him, and say You, of course, are a Cagot.
Simon began.
'The beginnings of the mystery go back three thousand years, when the Bible was being written in Babylon. At various places in the Book of Genesis, there are passages which hint at human beings other than Adam and Eve.'
Amy was staring out of the window. Looking at the cars behind and ahead, with anxious intent. Looking for red cars, maybe.
Simon went on:
'The problems caused by these insidious Biblical hints have always been with us. But they truly came to a head, in Christendom, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the persecutions of the Basques and the Cagots.'
He glanced at Angus. Then went on:
'The Basques are truly a breed apart, with a unique language, culture and society, unusual blood type, and so forth. Their race possibly dates back to pre-Indo-European times — 30,000 BC. They have long suffered persecution for being…different. These persecutions peaked with the witch burnings of 1610–1611, the so-called Basque Dream Epidemic.'
Their hire car was speeding past a tiny Skoda, an old car from the communist era. A farmer sat in the front with his fat wife at his side. The Skoda was doing thirty kph.
Simon continued:
'The case of the mysterious Cagots is similar — yet more severe. The Cagots are, or were, a crossbreed. They lived in the same region as the Basques. Indeed they probably descend from Basques who intermarried with dark Saracen soldiers in the eighth and ninth centuries. As such, they were, from the beginning, very isolated within Christendom — but with an additional and fatal taint of the infidel.
'So they were persecuted. And by the seventeenth century these repressions were reaching homicidal levels: Cagots were being nailed to church doors. One byproduct of this persecution and isolation was the intensification of genetic problems within the Cagot community — '
David interrupted: 'It wasn't their fault.'
Simon replied, with a puzzled frown, 'No, of course, it wasn't their fault. However, the reputation they had for psychotic tendencies, cretinism, even cannibalism, was, tragically, not entirely unjustified. Many Cagots were afflicted with various syndromes which led to bizarre and even repellent behaviour.'
Amy asked: 'That was why the King of Navarre instituted the tests — to see if the Cagots were truly 'different'?'
'Yes. Moreover, primitive though science was at the time, it seems the King's doctors did observe the syndactyly, the web-footed deformity, and other physical manifestations of the Cagots' inbred genotype. They concluded that the Cagots were indeed different to the rest of humanity, in a very significant way.'
He flipped a page of the notebook.
'The discovery alarmed the Pope and his cardinals in Rome. The idea that God would actually be creating Serpent Seed, new kinds of men, different kinds of men, men who are not men, was pure anathema. It threatened the very basis of accepted Catholic doctrine that mankind is made in God's image. How can God have two images? Two kinds of children? Revelation of this truth would not only justify the worst persecution, of a Christian and European people — it would bring into question all of Catholic theology.'
'All Christian theology,' said Angus, 'for that matter.'
'This is why the church sought to end the persecution of the Cagots. For the very same reason the Spanish Inquisition decided to cease and suppress the Basque witch burnings. The Catholic elite wanted the 'choir of Christendom' to remain 'indivisible'. The Basques and Cagots would be returned to the fold of humanity.'
'Yet there were, still, elements in the church that adhered to the bigoted, Curse of Cain philosophies. Especially amongst the lower clergy, the local peasantry, and some of the more rigorous church orders, like the Dominicans.
'Ever eager to avoid schism, the Vatican agreed to a compromise. The relevant and most controversial documents — relating to the witch burnings, and the blood test on the Cagots, and the ensuing papal conciliations — were not destroyed: they were secretly housed in the ancient archives of the Dominican University in Rome, the Angelicum. Centuries later they were carefully rehoused in a brand new monastery in central France.'
'Purpose-built,' Angus interrupted, 'by a far right architect, as a safe place to hide these documents. Correct?'
'And a masterpiece of functionality,' Simon replied. 'So offputting it sends people mad.'
Amy was still gazing out of the window. Her cardigan had fallen from her shoulder, exposing her bare suntanned skin. Gold and soft, and yielding.
David fixed his eyes on the road. Simon lifted his notes.
'Back in 1907 a brilliant young German anthropologist, Eugen Fischer, arrived in the desolate, diamond-rich German colony of Sud West Afrika, now Namibia. He was following in the footsteps of his hero, the great British scientist — and founder of modern eugenics — Francis Galton.
'What Fischer found amazed him. By studying the khoisan — the 'Bushmen' of the Kalahari, and their close cousins, the Basters, a crossbreed between Bushmen and Dutch settlers, Fischer discovered that in the very recent past mankind had…possibly speciated.'
Amy said nothing. David said nothing. Angus was wearing a distant smile. Simon continued:
'The process of speciation — the dividing of one species into new species — is of course crucial to evolution. Yet the process is itself ill defined. When does a new breed or strain of an organism become a subspecies, and
