Bristol House (25 page)

“I don’t think so either. I’ll check. But there’s more. I’ve heard from the other two congregations. The ones in Offenburg and Metz.” She was clutching both letters as she spoke.

“Wow. What do they say?”

“Metz has an active congregation and an official archivist, and somebody gave her my inquiry. She says they do indeed have a small bronze
bazekh
—that’s a pan for carrying hot coals—and a very early document that says it was a gift from the Jew of Holborn. Then she says that she’s very curious as to how I heard about this, since no one has inquired about it in”—Annie juggled her cell and the letter so she could get the words exactly right—“‘in many dozen years.’”

“Let me guess,” he said quietly. “You got pretty much the same response from Offenburg.”

“Yes. A rabbi wrote me. He says he keeps the records, such as they are, because they no longer have a synagogue in the town—too few Jews after the war. So years ago they sent all the treasures they managed to save from the Nazis to Israel. But he remembers the copper basin, the
mizrak,
and that it was said to be ancient and to have come from London in the early fifteen hundreds.”

“And stop me if I’m wrong—he knows nothing about the Shalom Foundation’s recent questionnaire.”

“Exactly. ‘About your Foundation I know nothing.’ That’s a direct quote.”

***

According to the information department of the Royal Horticultural Society at Kew, there were no almond trees growing in any public park in London. “Our weather is not suitable for
Prunus dulcis,
Dr. Kendall. It thrives in a Mediterranean climate. Perhaps in a private London conservatory. I could circulate a request among our fellows, if you wish.”

“No, thank you. That won’t be necessary.” She was standing in front of the mural as she spoke. However cacophonous the jumble of vignettes, one impression was clear and overwhelming. These were outdoor scenes, public spaces. What had Mrs. Walton said? . . . Stephen Fox used to prowl the city by night and paint by day. There was no warm and humid glass house intimacy here. “Thank you,” she said again. “I appreciate the help.”

Rabbi Cohen’s comments were considerably more apt. “In Exodus we learn about Aaron, who was the brother of Moses and the first priest. His badge of office, his rod, was an almond branch that burst into bloom overnight. Besides, in Hebrew an almond branch is
shaqed.
Which also means ‘watching.’ Many of the things in the ancient Temple are said to have been engraved with almond blossoms.”

“Do you think that’s what the
A
’s in the code stand for, Rabbi? Almond trees or almond blossoms?”

“It’s possible. But it doesn’t feel likely, Annie. So much intricate encoding for something so general. But what definitely doesn’t make sense—you say Weinraub knew of the mural’s existence before he came.”

“Absolutely. That’s why he came. He wanted to get a look at it.”

“So maybe the mural is important to whatever his agenda may be. But if so, why did he send you to London? It was Weinraub’s secretary who arranged for you to stay in her aunt’s flat, wasn’t it?”

Annie said it was.

“That means if Philip Weinraub already knew of the mural’s existence and wanted to see it, he could easily have arranged to visit without having you move in. Instead he sends you to London for three months. That seems to me very peculiar.”

“To me, too,” Annie agreed. “And there’s something else.” She told him about the three congregations she had contacted.

“So two of the pieces are already in Israel, where according to Geoffrey, Philip Weinraub has extensive contacts with people who would know the whereabouts of such things.”

“Yes. And why did he lie to me about Shalom recently discovering their existence?”

“I don’t know, Annie.”

“Neither do I. But I mean to find out.”

When she hung up, Annie Googled up a picture of an almond tree and walked the length of the mural carrying her laptop. Repeatedly. Back and forth. After ten minutes her eyes were watering and burning, and she had to give up.

Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn

From the Waiting Place

She was reprieved.

A terrible fever descended upon the city, and the king and his court went south to Hever Castle in Kent, where the Boleyn family no doubt beggared themselves spending on His Majesty all he had lavished on them earlier. Master Cromwell was known to have taken his odiferous secretary with him. Perhaps the fresh breezes of the Weald would make his presence less troublesome than was the case in the close air of London.

What this meant for the girl my daughter, though girl she no longer was, having spread her legs for the priested monk, was a chance to avoid a life as wife to the stinker and to die more easily than might otherwise be the case.

Rebecca wrapped herself in a black shroud and thick veil and went into the city to join the plague women, creatures whose faces were half eaten away by the pox, fit for nothing but to drag the bodies of infected dead to the places where they were burned. I did not expect to see my daughter again. She had not the mark of the pox that somehow protected the others, so she must catch the fever and die. But I had to agree that such a death was preferable to marrying the stinker and infinitely better than being burned alive. Because not even the master could blame me if I told him she died of the fever, I let her go.

So does Boré Olam shape the destiny of men with what appears chance but is in reality part of the divine plan. If the fever had not come to London just then, all might have been different. If King Henry’s father had not dredged the Fleet thirty years before, and in so doing drained some of the many wells that were built along its banks, the pit, which is accessible only at the bottom of one of the dry wells, would never have been found by me or anyone else. The Templars had been inordinately clever. They dug their secret chamber first, then dug the well above it, never thinking that a time would come when an English king would put at risk what the Templars had stolen from the Temple built by Solomon, King of Israel.

That much I knew, but how did it happen that on one occasion I stumbled and fell into that particular well, which had then run dry? And how was it that my fall was so cushioned by an accumulation of leaves and debris that I was unhurt? What drove me to paw through the waste until my fingers chanced on a stone that could be easily pulled aside, revealing the narrow opening through which I afterward regularly dragged myself? Beyond it was a larger space, and beyond that yet another—broader, but even less tall—where I was able to dig and occasionally uncover such wonders as I never dreamed existed. How did all that come to pass? The answers to those things only Boré Olam can know.

In the time of which I speak, when all hid in their houses for fear of the fever and Rebecca went into the city to seek a martyr’s death among the plague women, I dared to go in broad daylight to climb down the well and through the antechamber into the pit itself. Once there I could not stand but had to lie full length. Over the years I learned to work in such a position, and I left the tools for digging in place. I had a small trowel and a tiny pointed dowel, of the sort smiths use when working precious metals. Also a pickax, though I resisted using it for fear of bringing the walls of earth down on my head. And always, even in those days when the rampant fever protected me from being observed, I was careful to dislodge no more dirt than I could carry away in my pockets and my satchel and sprinkle unobtrusively in the woods thereabouts.

At first during that fever time, my forays to the pit yielded no new treasure, but some days after Rebecca left, I came upon a seam of sand that occurred relatively dry in a place where everything else was sodden. I felt at once that I was close to a discovery of great importance, and I dug smaller and smaller handfuls of earth. After little more than an hour, I held in my hand a silver tube the same size as my middle finger, one end shaped to look like the precious tablets on which were written the commandments of Boré Olam, the other ridged to suggest the steps leading to the holy of holies, the place of the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple. Graven on the front was a flowering branch.

Living in hiding as Jews did in that Kingdom of England, none dared put on their doorposts the ancient symbol of our faith and of the protection of Boré Olam. Nonetheless, I at once recognized what the thing was. Indeed, if I had any doubt, it was dispelled by the Hebrew letter
,
shin,
etched on the back. This I knew stood for
Shomer Delatot Yisrael,
Guardian of the Doorways of Israel. I held in my hand a mezuzah, and one I believed to be truly unique. Surely it had been brought back as plunder from the site of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, else it would not be in that place.

There was a deep niche to one side of the digging place—it was not earth but stone and made not by me but by nature, guided I am sure by Boré Olam. In that place I had hidden all that I had so far found of the ancient treasure of my people. In front of those wonderful things, I had put the chest entrusted to me by the monks of the Charterhouse. Thus the bones of the man the monks claimed as a holy martyr guarded the sacred relics of we Jews whom the goyim despise. I put that most Jewish of
mezuzot
on top of the Christian’s bones..

•

19

Two nights after Weinraub’s visit to Bristol House, Geoff phoned to say he’d be tied up for the evening. “I have to go to a dinner for a retiring cameraman who used to be part of my crew. I shouldn’t be too late. Care to wait at my house?”

“No, thanks. I want to work on the list of cardinals.” They’d come up with a source that listed every Catholic cardinal who’d died in the last year and a half. There were twenty-seven, according to Nexis, a remarkable database that allowed subscribers to search the records of every periodical with an English-language edition, including the Vatican’s
L’Osservatore Romano.
Nexis could cost as much as three hundred dollars an hour to use—which was why Geoff had access to it and, in the normal way of things, she did not. But he’d given her his password, and she was working through obituaries for all twenty-seven, looking for any mention of quail eggs. If you meant to be thorough—and Annie did—it was slow going. Both Falcone and De Boer were said to have been distinguished and influential. Apart from that, the only commonality she’d discovered was that all were Catholics and dead.

She gripped her phone between shoulder and cheek and kept looking at the screen. “Come back here when you’re finished,” she said. “I’ll wait up.”

***

The next morning, Saturday, dawned gray, cold, and looking like rain. “Charterhouse Square,” Annie said. Geoff rolled toward her. It wasn’t much of a roll. The bed in Annie’s room at Bristol House was an old-fashioned double, so narrow by today’s standards as to seem quaint.

“What about Charterhouse Square?” he asked sleepily.

“Last night,” she said, “I finished the Nexis search. No more quail eggs in any of the obits.”

“You told me.”

She had, just before he began waltzing her up and down the long corridor and nuzzling her neck and they went on to other things. “After the cardinals,” she continued, “I signed out of Nexis, so you won’t need to take out a second mortgage to pay their bill, and went back to the book about the old Carthusians. It says there’s a belief in the order that the monks of Tudor times managed to save the bones of the martyred prior, but that they hid them so well, they’ve never been found.”

“Interesting, but I don’t think you’re likely to find them still hanging around in Charterhouse Square.”

“I know, but I want to go.” Another thing she’d done before he returned was spend about ten minutes sitting in the back bedroom asking questions. She’d gotten no answers.

“Okay, we’ll go. But can we have coffee first? Maybe even a croissant? I know a place that has amazing croissants.” He was meanwhile running his hand along her thigh. “On the other hand, it looks like a great morning for a lie-in. With benefits.”

Annie was already climbing out of the bed. “I’ll make the coffee,” she said. “I don’t have any croissants, but I can produce some toast.”

***

It was after ten when they got to Charterhouse Square. The weather was no better, and there was almost no one around. Annie and Geoff sat for five silent minutes facing the redbrick Tudor wall. According to the thick guidebook he’d found at Mrs. Walton’s and brought along, it was the only part of the old Carthusian monastery still standing.

The rain came. It fell in lashing sheets, and even the large striped umbrella Annie had brought did little to keep them dry.

Geoff turned up his jacket collar. “I’m thinking it might be time to go.”

“Can you tolerate a few minutes more?”

“The monk?” he asked eagerly.