Bristol House (11 page)

I had sins enough to feel no confidence about how I would fare in that reckoning, but I reasoned it might go better with me if I had at least saved some of what the gentiles had taken from the Holy City, and from me and my fellow Jews. That hope—divine forgiveness—is why I had the audacity to give no true treasure to Master Cromwell but only the occasional copy of one of the remarkable things I found. My forgeries were so cleverly crafted, he believed them to be genuine and kept me in place to continue to search on his behalf. I did not, however, fool myself about what would happen if he ever discovered the ruse, or for any reason became convinced he had no further need of me. In those days agony beyond description lurked always just over my shoulder.

•

8

It had clouded over in Coram’s Fields. Annie thought that’s what Geoff meant when he said, “Here comes trouble.”

“I brought an umbrella.” She reached for her tote bag.

“Not that. We’re nobbled.” He nodded toward a uniformed security guard approaching them with a look of purpose.

“I don’t understand,” Annie said.

“No adults,” Geoff explained, “are supposed to be in Coram’s Fields unless accompanied by a child.”

The guard was a few steps away. The boy with the white-blond hair, the one Geoff had originally kicked the soccer ball to, appeared at Geoff’s shoulder. “Can I play a bit longer, Dad?”

“Sure, as long as Mum here doesn’t mind.”

“Not a bit,” Annie said.

The guard hesitated, then turned away. Geoff and the boy slapped a high five. The boy left. “Better get away while we can,” Geoff said. “Who knows, they may bring back hanging.”

“And drawing and quartering.” Annie gathered up her things and they headed for the exit.

Geoff turned to wave at the kids playing soccer, but they’d gone back to their game and didn’t notice. He wrested her Davis School tote bag from her grip, then pretended to stumble under its weight. “What do you have in here besides an umbrella, bricks?”

“Sketchbooks,” Annie said, “and lots of maps. I was planning a stroll along the banks of the Fleet.”

About then the heavens opened. They dashed for the nearest pub, a rather dingy place on Lambs Conduit Street. “I expect this one dates from around merry old 1972,” Geoff said.

“Doesn’t matter as long as the roof doesn’t leak.”

Annie slid into a booth, and he went up to the bar and came back with a squat, fat bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon, a pint of ale, and a plate of anemic-looking crustless sandwiches. “They don’t do
citron pressé.
This is the best I could manage.” He handed over the soda and nodded toward his beer. “Okay?”

“Of course okay.” When she was drinking, one of her coping mechanisms was to tuck a few bills in various pockets. That way wherever she was when she sobered up, she’d maybe have enough cash to get somewhere else. The habit lingered. She found a ten-pound note in her jeans and offered it to him.

Geoff waved the money away and picked up one of the sandwiches. “Cheese and pickle. The only thing on offer. You do know the Fleet’s an underground sewage ditch these days, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it was a major waterway in 1535. That’s when the man I’m trying to trace, the one called the Jew of Holborn, lived here. I think he was a craftsman, perhaps a goldsmith who needed to plunge his finished pieces into water to cool them quickly. He’d probably live close to the riverbank, where he’d have access.”

“I take it he really was a Jew—it wasn’t only a nickname?”

“Apparently so,” Annie said. “Though it was illegal for Jews to be in England in the early fifteen hundreds.” She reached for a sandwich. It looked like supermarket cheddar smeared with dark brown relish, and the bread hadn’t been fresh for two days. She put it back and dug into the depths of her tote. “The Shalom people have collected a number of 1535 references to him.”

Geoff took the papers, riffled through a few, then gave them back. “German,” he said. “Maggie tried, but I can’t read it.” He picked up one of the sandwiches, made a face but started eating.

“I can’t read it either.” Annie flipped a few of the sheets and offered the documents a second time. “Everything’s been translated.” Geoff ignored the papers and kept looking at her. She put them on the table and reached for the soda. Then, after a long swallow: “The papers are a collection of letters—answers to a questionnaire—from synagogues in cities that are in France or Germany today but in 1535 were part of the old Rhenish Palatinate.”

Geoff took another sandwich. “These are terrible.”

“I thought they must be. Why are you eating them?”

“I’m ravenous. It’s too miserable out there to leave and look for something better. About that translation.” He indicated her papers. “Who did you get to do it?”

“No one. Shalom arranged—” She saw his expression and broke off. “They sent me the digital copy first. The German wasn’t translated then. And I know what you think, but—”

“I don’t think anything yet. Go on.”

“As you probably know, the Shalom Foundation was set up to study Northern European Jewry from the Middle Ages to the Second World War.”

“I know that’s Weinraub’s story,” he said.

“It’s true,” Annie insisted, tapping the sheaf of papers to make her point. “This is documentation of a study conducted over the last couple of years. They went looking for Jewish memorabilia that might still be in the hands of congregations that survived the Nazis.”

There was half a sandwich left. “Last chance,” he said. Annie shook her head. He picked it up. “I take it some things were found.”

“Yes, some remarkable Judaica. Often old and rare, because that’s what people took the greatest care to hide.”

“That part makes sense.”

“It all does,” she insisted. “When the questionnaires they sent out came back, there were five stories with a remarkable commonality. In each case, the item was identified as a gift from a man living in London in 1535.”

“Your Jew of Holborn,” Geoff said.

“Exactly. Two of the synagogues have contemporary proof of provenance, sixteenth-century inventories. The other items show up in later documentation but still pretty early. And in every case the attribution is the same. A gift received in 1535 from the Jew of Holborn. The same wording passed down through each congregation’s history.”

“In German.”

“Of course. Old German, obviously, given the dates.”

“Which you can’t read, but not to worry, your Shalom Foundation took care of that and had a translation done for you.”

“Yes.”

He took a few seconds, then nodded toward her papers. “Seems odd Weinraub would give someone without German a research assignment based on the information in those documents.”

Annie put everything back into her bag. “I read Latin,” she said. “And I’m fluent in Italian.”

“Fair enough. It just seems—” He broke off.

“Go on. Say it.”

“Okay, it seems Weinraub is taking advantage of the fact that you’re a lovely and highly intelligent female who happens to be particularly . . . fragile.”

“
Fragile
being code for a drunk.”

“That’s not what I meant.” And when she didn’t respond: “Look, connecting the dots is part of my job. I’ve learned not to jump to conclusions, but sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. If Philip Jeremiah Weinraub picked an architectural historian who for ten years has done nothing in her field, and who doesn’t speak the language of his source documents, he has a reason. He’s a nutter, but he can afford to hire anyone he wants for this task.”

“So why choose the deeply flawed Annie Kendall?”

This time he didn’t contradict her. “I take it you replied to an advert he ran somewhere. What do you know about the other applicants?”

“Nothing,” she said. Then before he could comment: “I thought you were after Weinraub for plotting an assassination. What makes him a nutter? To use your term.”

“
Extremist
is probably a better word. I know he’s given money to various Israeli groups who want to restore the worship of biblical times. Rebuild the Second Temple and Jew it the old way. Sacrifice sheep and goats and the occasional cow.”

“And,” she said quietly, “given that the ruins of the Second Temple are under one or another of two of Islam’s holiest sites . . .”

“Exactly. How the Israelis are supposed to get control of the place to do their ‘rebuilding’ doesn’t bear thinking about.” He swallowed the last of his ale and pushed the glass away. “Look, I’m not religious. I couldn’t care less how anyone wants to worship. Stare at the sun, dance beneath the full moon, drink chicken blood—it’s all the same to me. But none of that applies in the Middle East. It’s a tinderbox, and I think Weinraub is playing with matches.”

Annie took a long drink of her soda. A tinderbox capable of setting fires all over the world, forcing people to jump out of hundred-story windows, getting them blown up on the commute home from work. “You were asking about my job with Shalom,” she said. “I didn’t answer any ad. Last March the foundation wrote and invited me to talk to them about a project. A month later I was told I could have the job, but I had to start immediately. So I walked out of the Davis School and pretty much straight onto a plane.”

Sidney’s voice played in her head.
You have a contract, Annie my girl. A sober citizen does not leave her employer in the lurch.
Say you’ll do it, but in June, not May.

Weinraub had insisted she be in London by May 1. The time, he’d said, was right. She hadn’t asked right for what. Philip Weinraub said jump, and she said how high.

Geoff put his hand over hers. She tingled, acutely sensitive to his touch. The more he touched her, the more she responded.

“Annie,” he said, “look at it from their point of view. Whatever they sent you here to find, it’s been waiting five hundred years. The urgency doesn’t make much sense, does it? Unless the point was to make you more . . . vulnerable.”

“You mean more easily manipulated.”

“Something like that.”

“All I could concentrate on,” she admitted, “was that the assignment seemed tailor-made for me.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Tailor-made.” He reached for his phone. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. Will tomorrow be okay?”

9

“Sit down, darlings. Geoffrey, tell me why you brought me this gorgeous creature.”

“Her name’s Annie Kendall. Annie, this is Maggie Harris née Silber, who among her many distinctions is my mother.”

They were in a section of North London called Primrose Hill. Trendy, Geoff had explained on the way over. People like Jamie Oliver and Kate Moss and Jude Law regularly moved in and out of Primrose Hill. “Maggie bought her flat in the nineties when it was a hell of a lot less expensive. It went through the roof in the early 2000s, then cratered with the rest of London property. Now it’s a gold mine again.”

The gold mine—five rooms on two floors—was in a short street off Regent’s Park Road and crammed with overstuffed, chintz-covered furniture. And books. And vases full of flowers. “Don’t be fooled by all this,” Geoff said. “Maggie’s posh flat used to be a grocer’s shop. So my dad had the last laugh.”

“He means because Jack Harris, my husband and Geoffrey’s father, also had a grocer’s shop, and I worked there until the day he died. I hated it. Sit near me, Annie.” Maggie patted a wing chair upholstered in a riotous assortment of roses. Geoff chose a pink-and-white-striped love seat. The cushions were so plump, they seemed to envelop him.

“I really and truly loathed that shop,” Maggie said. She was busy with delicate flowered cups and saucers and a matching fat-bellied teapot. “So when poor Jack dropped dead behind the counter, I put up the closed sign and telephoned the estate agents before I rang Geoffrey, who was up at Cambridge at the time. The property was sold within five minutes of Jack going into the ground. I went from the graveyard to the solicitor’s to sign the papers. Milk and sugar, Annie?”

“Just milk, thanks, Mrs. Harris.”

“Call me Maggie. Everyone does, even Geoffrey. You’ve seen that mausoleum he lives in? Imagine doing that to a nice Victorian terrace house. I think women are happy to go upstairs to his bedroom because at least it has walls. Sorry, am I being indiscreet?”

“Of course you are,” her son said. “When are you not?”

Maggie sat back and put her feet on a tasseled velvet hassock. She was nearly eighty-two, according to Geoff, white haired, not as tall as her son, and very thin, wearing pearls and a silk caftan of an intense sea blue that matched her eyes. “I am indiscreet when it suits me,” Maggie said. “And you are an American, Annie Kendall. I like that. Tell me about yourself.”

“In due time,” Geoff said. “I brought Annie to hear your story.” Then, turning to her: “Maggie was shanghaied in 1945 by the WAC, the American women’s army corps as it was then. She wasn’t yet sixteen.”

“That’s because it was the Americans who found me,” Maggie explained. “Bill Donovan ran the American OSS in World War Two—you call it the CIA today. He got the idea of testing the older children of the Kindertransport, the Jewish children Britain managed to rescue shortly before the actual start of the war. Geoffrey told you about my being part of that?”

Annie nodded.

“In 1944 the Yanks started looking for the
Kinder
who had been a bit older when they were brought to England, so they might actually read and write German. If they had retained those skills, along with the English they must have learned in the years since they arrived, they could be extremely useful.”

“I’m guessing as spies,” Annie said, looking with a certain amount of incredulity at the elegant woman opposite.

“Of course,” Maggie said with a chuckle. “But perhaps not the sort you’re thinking of. Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair had set up what they called the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. That’s where they broke the Enigma code in ’39. Do you know about that?”

“I think so,” Annie said. “It was the code that, once they broke it, let them know everything the Germans were doing.”

Maggie smiled. “Almost everything. Anyway, Sir Hugh wasn’t convinced the idea would work, but he agreed to give it a chance. I was nine years old when I came to England, so naturally I was on Colonel Donovan’s list.”