Shadow Ritual by Eric Giacometti, Jacques Ravenne

in the morning. Then he caught up with Mareuil.
    “Anselme, it’s been a while,” he said. “What a surprise to see you here.”
    “Yes, it comes with my duties as special envoy,” Mareuil said. They had known each other for years.
    “Do your duties include withholding information?”
    “What makes you ask that, Antoine?” Mareuil said as the two of them neared the front entrance. “It looks like you’ll have your hands full with that woman partner of yours.”
    “Don’t change the subject.”
    “I’m just saying. You never know. Maybe you could soften her up. She’s a looker, and you need to get over that damned divorce.”
    Marcas glared at him. “Where was Dawes going? She was headed to Jerusalem, wasn’t she?”
    Mareuil stopped walking and turned to Marcas. He was silent for a moment and then cleared his throat. “Let’s grab a bite to eat,” he said. “I’ll explain.”
    “I suggest we go to the Left Bank. I know a place.”
    They exited the building and started walking toward the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie. Marcas liked to frequent a Catalan restaurant there. From the outside, it looked like a bookstore.
    “Good choice,” Mareuil said shortly after they were seated at their table. Factoids on the history of Catalonia were printed on the paper tablecloth. “I’ve never been here before.”
    Marcas dispensed with pleasantries and got straight to the point. “So, Anselme, tell me what you know,” he said.
    “Do you come here often?” Mareuil asked, apparently in no hurry to answer. He opened the menu.
    “Every so often. Excellent tapas. You should try the blood sausage too.”
    “Was your father Catalan?”
    Marcas scowled. “No, but he lived in Barcelona a long time. Let’s get down to business.”
    Mareuil, however, was still ignoring him. He was examining the wine display that filled an entire wall. “What kind of wine do they produce in Catalonia?” Without waiting for an answer, he changed the subject. “See Le Procope across the street?”
    “I mostly see the line of tourists waiting to get in.”
    “Oh yes, Paris and its famous sites. Le Procope has been there since the eighteenth century. It was one of the first places in town where you could get coffee and hot chocolate—but not too much, because it was considered an inflamer at the time of Voltaire. That was another way of saying an aphrodisiac.”
    “Are we really going to spend our time here talking about beverages in the Age of Enlightenment?”
    The waitress, a flat-chested woman with an angular face, walked over to their table. Marcas and Mareuil placed their orders, and Mareuil asked for a glass of tempranillo.
    “She shouldn’t pull her hair back like that,” Mareuil said as she headed to the kitchen. “Her face isn’t right for it.” He sighed and took a blue folder out of his leather briefcase. He opened it to a yellowed typewritten page. “In the nineteen fifties, a historian wrote up a report about the documents that were stolen during the war. Here, take a look.”
    Marcas took the report and started reading.
Part of our archives, like those of the Grande Loge de France, remained in France in the hands of the Vichy government’s Secret Societies Department. The majority of the documents, however, were sent by train to Berlin, where Nazi scholars picked through them. Political documents ended up with the Gestapo, which used them to identify people who opposed fascism during the period between the two wars.
The documents of a more esoteric nature were shipped to a special institute called the Ahnenerbe, founded in 1935 by Heinrich Himmler to look for traces of Aryan influence around the world. The institute had considerable means and employed up to three hundred specialists—the elite of the Nazi scientific community, including archeologists, physicians, historians, and chemists.
Ahnenerbe’s research was under the control of a secret society called the Thule, which had infiltrated the centers of