Bristol House (23 page)

“Indiana Jones,” Geoff said.

Cohen smiled. “Without the jungle.” He looked at his watch again. “There’s a further point that shouldn’t be forgotten. The items these congregations possess”—he tapped the stack of documents—“are all valuable in and of themselves. Even if they’re ancient forgeries made in the sixteenth century—which has to be a possibility—they are exquisitely made according to the descriptions, and now at least five hundred plus years old.”

“So they’re worth a fortune today,” Geoff said. “You’re thinking perhaps that’s what Philip Weinraub is after? Some museum-quality artifacts.”

“Rubbish,” Maggie said. “He’s a billionaire. Gold and silver are available without this enormous carry-on.”

“He can also afford to finance the rebuilding of the Temple,” Cohen said. “Or at least make a good start. And if he could not, others could.”

“But money isn’t the sticking point,” Annie said. “They have to rebuild on the Temple Mount.”

Cohen nodded. “Exactly. Which raises two problems. For one thing, Jews hold that the Holy Temple was literally the home of God on earth, and the location is described in great detail in the Torah. It must be there and nowhere else.”

“Except,” Geoff said, “apparently they don’t know where ‘there’ is.”

“The exact location is in dispute,” Rabbi Cohen agreed. “But it’s either under the Dome of the Rock or under the mosque known as the Al Aqsa.”

“And if the Israelis try to make the Arabs leave the top of the Temple Mount so they can find out . . .” Maggie shuddered.

“It will mean war,” Cohen said. “Nothing less. Now, it’s getting late, and we haven’t got to what Maggie and I want to tell you.” He reached into his briefcase and produced yet another stack of papers.

17

“As you know,” Rabbi Cohen said, “we determined fairly quickly that the numbers in the documents contained a code.”

“Because,” Maggie said, “while ninety-nine percent of what you originally gave me, Annie, is an accurate translation, some of the numbers are different in English from what they are in German.”

“Right away,” Cohen said, “we suspected we were looking at a code similar to one we’d worked on before, based on kabbalah. One element of which is a sophisticated system of numerology.”

“But,” Maggie said, “if you assume a connection to the kabbalistic system of
gematria,
kabbalah’s numerology, you have to deal with the fact that in Hebrew there are no numeric symbols. Only letters. You have to switch from your numbers to the Hebrew letters, rather than the other way around, as happens with most codes.”

Both of them seemed, Annie thought, to grow younger as they spoke. And Cohen kept putting his hand over Maggie’s, maintaining the connection while he spoke. “So,” he said, “Maggie and I began with what we knew, and while it was time consuming, it was not particularly difficult.”

“Except,” Maggie said, “that when we were sure we had the alphabetical equivalent of every one of the coded numbers, all we had was gibberish.” She reclaimed her hand so she could put her glasses back on and pick up one of the papers. “If I read to you ‘m-d-x-x-x-v,’ it means nothing, right?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “But if I show it to you like this”—she pushed a piece of paper across the table so they could see the letters
MDXXXV
—“what do you think?”

“Roman numerals,” Annie and Geoff said together.

“Yes,” Cohen said. “After all this effort, we come up with the Roman numerals for 1535, a date already mentioned frequently in the documents.”

“The year connected to this so-called Jew of Holborn and his bequests,” Maggie said. “Which we already knew.”

“It’s also the year when the first Carthusian monks were executed at Tyburn,” Annie said. “Do you think that’s relevant?”

Cohen waved away the question. “What’s relevant is it’s almost nine o’clock. I’ll have to leave soon, so let me tell you what I can. With most codes you keep unraveling the skein, and however tangled and complex the threads may be, usually they will guide you from one thing to the next in some sort of progression. Occasionally what I call the physical logic fails. In those cases, to unlock the puzzle you need a leap of the imagination, a flash of insight.”

“The sort the Pole had in 1939,” Geoff said.

Maggie and Rabbi Cohen nodded in unison. Annie looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. What Pole?”

“Remember,” Maggie said, “we talked about Bletchley breaking what they called the Enigma code?” Annie nodded. “The key to the original Enigma code was based on the position of consonants on a typewriter keyboard, q-w-r-t-p, and the rest. But in ’39, after Allied code breakers figured out that much, the keyboard approach got them nowhere. Then a Polish mathematician remembered that Germans are very logical people, organized. So why presume they stayed with the illogical keyboard scheme? Why not the straightforward alphabet?”

“I take it he was right,” Annie said.

“Absolutely right,” the rabbi said. “The message key to the German code turned out to be the ordinary ABC’s. Once they knew that, Bletchley had cracked Enigma and could decipher every coded message they intercepted.”

“In fact,” Maggie said, “most codes are broken by understanding the internal logic of whoever made the code in the first place. They’re the outgrowth of a mind-set, a way of looking at the world. Great code breakers are able to put themselves in someone else’s head. You may think, for instance, that what we were talking about before, animal sacrifice and secret tunnels holding the original Ark of the Covenant, means Jews are not logical, but you would be wrong. Grant them their initial premise, and they are supremely logical. And for Jews who believe in kabbalah, all truth circles back to the Bible. True kabbalah is a system designed to find hidden meanings in what is believed to be the word of God.”

“And since we were already convinced,” Cohen said, “that the quest that brought Annie to London revolves around
korbanot,
ritual sacrifices, we needed also to take that truth into consideration. Maggie and I asked ourselves what would happen if we took the Roman numerals to represent not one thousand five hundred and thirty-five but a series of individual digits.”

“Our eureka moment,” Maggie said.

“Because,” Cohen explained, “if 1535 is to be read as one-five-three and five again, they can be referenced to the
mitzvoth
of Jewish law, the commandments to righteous behavior. And as I told you earlier, the first hundred and sixty of those
mitzvoth
are concerned with the nature of worship in the Temple, the only place ritual sacrifice can take place.”

“We isolated those commandments,” Maggie said, “and looked at them every way we could think of, but we still couldn’t see any sense.”

“Until,” Cohen said, “Maggie had her moment of inspiration”—another glance at the watch—“and I really must go, so I’ll be quick. In biblical Hebrew, vowels are implied but not written. A mark, like an apostrophe in English, is inserted to indicate that a vowel belongs in a particular position. Bringing us to our results. If you read the words of the specified
mitzvoth
in such a way that you pick up the first missing vowel in the first word, the fifth missing vowel in the second, the third missing vowel in the next word . . . one-five-three-five. You get the idea?”

They nodded.

“Good.” Cohen stood up and began gathering his papers. “Now you know as much as Maggie and I do.”

“But we know nothing.” Annie could taste disappointment.

Maggie patted her hand. “That’s pretty much what Simon means, darling. Wait a moment, and I’ll tell you what there is of the rest.”

Cohen put his papers into his briefcase. Maggie stood up and went with him to the door. He kissed her forehead. She touched his arm. He left, and Maggie returned to the table. “I might have known the cow wouldn’t let go,” she said. “Not even now.”

“I take it,” Geoff said, “the cow in question is Rabbi Cohen’s mortally ill wife.”

“Of course. All those years ago I told Simon I couldn’t be a rabbi’s wife, that it was a ridiculous idea and he should reconsider his decision. Then he met her, a rabbi’s daughter. Now she doesn’t just die, she lingers with bloody Alzheimer’s. You wait, she’ll see me out.”

Neither Annie nor Geoff said anything. Maggie wiped her eyes, put on her glasses, and picked up the papers. “We were talking about the vowels. They’re all we have, and each one is exactly the same. A-a-a-a and still more
A
’s. Follow the progression of the one-five-three-five code right through those first hundred and sixty biblical laws relating to the sacrifice in the Temple, and it’s repeated over and over, a-a-a.”

“What does it mean?” Annie asked.

“I have no idea. Simon doesn’t either. We were hoping you might.”

Dom Justin

From the Waiting Place

Sin destroyed my soul. For three days I sprinkled my food with ashes and wore around my thigh a cilice of spiked metal pulled so tight, it drew blood. Still my transgression hung like a millstone around my neck. I could not, however, find the courage to rid myself of my burden in confession.

God help me, I feared more the agony of the stake than the everlasting flames of Hell. And I knew there was in the Charterhouse such pollution of virtue as could compromise even the seal of the confessional. My coward’s reasoning said it was better to face the justice of the Gentle Jesus than the malevolent fury of my master, who—if he were to learn I had taken for myself the prize he intended for his fetid secretary—would fly into such a rage, he would swiftly sign the order that dispatched me to a gruesome death.

I thought it possible I would go to my grave with this sin on my soul. It made no difference that Rebecca was the temptress Eve to my weak Adam and hers was certainly a worse offense. We would burn alike for all eternity. And added to that terrible truth was a second mystery. Who sent me to commit my terrible transgression? Someone surely had, for on that night nothing was exactly as it had always been before.

On the day of my downfall, I had found a speckled egg in the basket containing my midday meal. That night, suspecting nothing, I went by the ordinary route to the house of the Jew. I arrived to find his door barred and tightly shut, though it was usual that on the night of a summons, it was left ajar so I could slip inside without attracting attention. I was surprised by the change of routine, but I persisted in my innocence and knocked.

Rebecca came, not the Jew himself. Plainly I had summoned her from her bed. Her hair hung free, and she wore a looser shift than usual, and I could not help but notice that her breasts, unbound, swelled beneath it. Moreover, I could see over her shoulder the embers of a dampened fire. As for the Jew her father, he was nowhere to be seen.

“I was summoned,” I whispered, looking over my shoulder, half-expecting to see the king’s soldiers coming to arrest us all.

“We had no word.”

I thought of the speckled egg and how every single time it appeared these last four years, it meant the same thing. “That’s impossible.”

“It must be possible because it is true.”

She moved closer to me. I could smell her and feel the heat of her breath. She lifted her face, and because a sliver of moon had risen, I could see she had been recently beaten. I had never seen her so before. “What happened?” I asked, feeling that all these departures from customary behavior began to indicate something truly evil afoot. “Is it your father who beat you? Why?”

“We cannot talk here.” She shoved me off the threshold as she spoke and pulled the door closed behind her. It was not late enough to be sure that none would be about and spy us, so I had no choice but to follow her into the copse between the house and the river.

We said nothing until we were hidden by the trees. Then she turned to me. “I am promised to Timothy Faircross. I must marry him because I cannot find the courage to burn.”

“What are you talking about?” I did not recognize the name, but the way she spoke, flatly and without emotion, seemed to me more terrifying than if she shouted, which she did seconds later.

“The stinker! The stinker! The stinker!” Rebecca screamed, and I realized she was to marry the pox-faced creature whose stench preceded him by ten yards. I had always to gag down my bile in his presence, though I was never more than a few minutes in his company. Rebecca was condemned to live with him in his house, and eat her meals in his company, and share his bed, and spread her legs for him, and bear his children.

I could not help but pity her, but when she continued to shout out her misery, I became terrified lest we be overheard and stepped in close and put my hand over her mouth. I meant only to protect us both, but she seized the opportunity to pull up the skirt of the sleeping shift and push her hips against me.

Then I was gone from my senses and allowed her to pull me to the ground and did all the rest as our mortal nature drives us to do. During the moments of my madness, I even gloried at the resistance her flesh offered and the fact that I, not the poxed Faircross, was the first to have her.

Only after I pulled away and felt the crushing weight of sin descend did I do what I should have done immediately. I recognized that somehow I had been deceived and ran from the place as if pursued by demons.

•

“In Art 101,” Annie said, “you learn about the vanishing point. It’s where the trajectory of two lines brings them together.”

She was sitting at the granite counter of the kitchen at 29 Orde Hall Street, watching Geoff fiddle with his espresso maker so he could get the caffeine fix he hadn’t had after the dinner of Chinese takeout at Maggie’s. “The vanishing point,” she said, “looks like this.”

Annie made some quick pencil strokes on a napkin, then turned it so he could see. She’d drawn a triangle, crisscrossed and overlaid with a number of lines. “These”—she used the pencil as a pointer—“are called orthogonals and transversals. This”—she indicated the long line she’d drawn across the triangle’s point—“is the horizon line, also called the distance point. And here”—the pencil tapped the place where the line and the triangle met—“is the vanishing point. Do you see?”