Bristol House (3 page)

What the hell. An extra night at a hotel without a ghost wasn’t such a bad thing. Lunch. “Let’s try the restaurant first,” Annie said.

***

It was late enough that there were a number of empty tables, and the remaining diners were mostly settling up and getting ready to leave. Jennifer and her guest were shown to a choice spot by the glass wall overlooking what for a couple of centuries had been the famous round reading room and was now once more a central courtyard beneath a soaring glass dome. “I get a ten percent staff discount,” Jennifer said. “Shall we treat ourselves to a bottle of something decent?”

“Sorry, I don’t drink,” Annie said. “You go ahead, however.”

“I’ll do just a glass, then.” And after the waiter had come and gone: “You mentioned you’re here on your own. Maybe you’d like to come out with my husband and me sometime. See a bit of—oh, hello! What are you doing here?”

A man had come up behind Jennifer and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “I should say I was hoping to catch a glimpse of you. Truth is, I’m showing some visitors the glories of London.”

Annie knew her jaw had dropped and that she was staring. If Jennifer noticed, she didn’t let on. “Annie, this is the famous Geoffrey Harris, who chews up politicians and spits them out on prime-time TV. Geoff, this is Dr. Annie Kendall. She’s an architectural historian from New York. Over here for a bit doing research for the Shalom Foundation. Definitely much too clever for you.”

Annie mumbled something, all the while continuing to stare.

Geoffrey Harris was quite good-looking: dark hair, high cheekbones, and a strong chin with a pronounced cleft. He didn’t have a tonsure, not even a bald spot; otherwise he looked exactly like the monk she’d seen in the back bedroom of number eight Bristol House.

3

Wednesday morning Annie wrestled her luggage into the flat, closed the door behind her, and stood for a moment in the long hall.

Listening to silence.

Her suitcases were on wheels, but stuffed so full, they were difficult to maneuver. She jockeyed both of them and her tote bag and handbag into what was to be her bedroom. This time, at least at first sight, the unusual art wasn’t quite so overwhelming. Maybe because it was ten a.m. and the light was slanted toward the wall with the bed and its charming crewelwork coverlet, not the imposing black and white mural.

The spread was much too nice to use as a platform for unpacking. Annie folded it and put it in the chest’s bottom drawer, then hoisted the first of her suitcases onto the bed. Half an hour later all her things were hung up or folded away, and she reached for the tote bag.

It was large and roomy and blazoned with the name Davis School, the last place she’d worked before coming to London. Her laptop was in it, along with a number of other things, including the sketchbook with the drawings of what she’d seen in those few extraordinary moments on Monday afternoon. Annie pulled out the sketchbook, found the drawing that showed the monk’s head and face from a number of angles, and propped it against the pillows. Next she retrieved her laptop.

She’d Googled Geoffrey Harris the previous afternoon, as soon as she’d left Jennifer Franklin and gone back to the Two Princes. There were dozens of hits. He was, as Jennifer said, quite well-known. His program seemed to be a kind of exposé, like
Dateline
or
60 Minutes
back home, but focused on elected officials and their activities. She’d found a number of magazine and newspaper articles written by or about him, and transcripts of at least three dozen interviews he’d conducted with every notable politician and statesman of the last half-dozen years, mostly skewering them for something they had or hadn’t done. The only personal information she uncovered was a story from four years earlier saying Harris’s wife had been killed in a car accident.

Annie had captured a head shot from his Web site. She sat on the bed with the laptop on her knees and pulled it up. He looked slick, supremely assured, and not just good-looking but magnetic. Dark hair, light-colored eyes—maybe gray, maybe blue—and a cleft in the chin. She looked again at the sketchbook. No doubt whatever. The man she’d met at the British Museum didn’t just look like the monk she’d drawn before she’d ever seen him. The man was a dead ringer for the ghost.

She had spent a fruitless hour imagining Harris had impersonated the monk, thinking she’d been thrust into the middle of some elaborate scam that involved both him and Mrs. Walton—otherwise how had he gotten into the apartment? If so, she had to be the mark, as it were, the person being scammed. Why? She had neither money nor influence, nothing anyone could possibly want. Like most conspiracy theories, it was absurd.

Maybe Geoffrey Harris had an identical twin. But why then no mention of such an interesting tidbit online? And even if he did, it simply shifted the parameters of the conspiracy, without making it any less farcical. The same objection negated the possibility of a true double who wasn’t a relation. Besides, Annie didn’t think the degree of resemblance that passed for an unrelated look-alike could fool her artist’s eye, much less her hand. She knew exactly what she’d seen, both at Bristol House and in the British Museum.

She was left with only one logical conclusion. Geoffrey Harris looked as he did because the monk was his ancestor. Meaning, however extraordinary, that the monk had once been real and that Annie Kendall had seen a ghost. Never mind that she didn’t believe in them.

That wasn’t all she had to process. Meeting Harris fewer than twenty-four hours after she saw the ghost was unlikely to be a coincidence. The monk was sending her a message, declaring his intentions. Very well, she would make hers equally clear.

Annie set the laptop on the bed, grabbed the sketchbook and her tote, and headed for the back bedroom. The door was still shut, exactly as she’d left it yesterday morning when she fled in a panic. There would be no more of that. She squared her shoulders, reached for the knob, turned it, pushed the door open, and went inside. The little bedroom felt musty, unused. The ghost was not there. Neither was the crucifix, nor the prie-dieu, nor the rest of the monkish paraphernalia. Instead she was once more looking at the items detailed in the inventory: a bed, a six-drawer chest, a desk, two lamps, and assorted books and decorative objects.

Her tote bag felt heavy in her hands, weighed down with her impulse buys of the previous day. She had a plan, but it seemed as insane as the ghost idea itself, belied by the total ordinariness of her surroundings.

Annie reached out a hand and touched the wall. It was unquestionably real. She knocked and was rewarded with the thud of solid plaster. There was no hollow ring, no suggestion of a sliding something-or-other that could be used to produce a Houdini-like illusion. What remained, the only conclusion that fit the data, was the same conviction she’d reached yesterday. The ghost existed. She had truly seen what she saw and what she drew.

That was remarkable, maybe earth-shaking, but she had neither the background nor the wherewithal to tackle the investigation of something so extraordinary. She had three months to do what the Shalom Foundation was paying her to do, and she had gambled everything on her ability to do it. A haunting, however real, was a distraction she could not afford. And there was another argument against investigating: she didn’t have credibility. Even if she came up with some kind of proof of her ghostly sighting—and it was hard to imagine what that proof might be—she’d still be dismissed as a crackpot, one more promising academic who’d destroyed her brain with alcohol.

Annie put the sketchbook and her tote on the bed and crossed to the window. It opened more easily than she expected, flying up almost as soon as she touched it. She leaned out. There was no vista. She was peering into a jumble of bricks and mortar, mostly the rear of other buildings.

What about the fact that the ghost had a living, breathing double? And that double was somebody really well-known who was walking around modern London? Nothing about it. There was no way she could conclusively prove she’d made the drawings before she met Geoffrey Harris.

Annie closed the window and returned to the bed. She opened the sketchbook to the first of her drawings, the one of the monk as she’d initially seen him, praying before the crucifix. She laid the picture on the bed. “Object of the exercise,” she said aloud, then paused for a long moment, listening for a response that did not come. After a few seconds, she took from her tote the three items she’d bought the day before and placed them in a careful row on the desk.

A small brass handbell.

A Bible.

A tall white candle.

She’d remembered seeing a candlestick among the decorative items in the room. In fact there were two. She chose the one made of carved wood. It stood about a foot high, and while it might not be old, it looked as if it were. When she inserted the candle, the assembly seemed both classic and imposing.

Bell, book, and candle.

She was, after all, John Kendall’s daughter. Small wonder she knew the tools of excommunication, and that no threat would be more horrifying to the ghost of a Catholic monk.

Annie put a small box of matches beside the candle, then added a copy of the official dictum of spiritual banishment and consignment to hell. She’d found the text, along with directions for conducting the ceremony, in a book called
The Roman Ritual,
the authoritative source on all Catholic rites, however arcane. Back when she was a student, she’d have had to visit a specialist library to consult the
Ritual.
These days it was available online.

“Now,” she said into the quiet, “you can’t say I haven’t given you fair warning.”

***

When she first saw the flat, Annie had thought she’d use the back bedroom as an office. Under the circumstances, that no longer seemed practical. Instead she set up the tools of her trade in the dining room: her laptop, of course, along with a few notebooks, pens and pencils, a stack of sketchbooks, and—relics of a bygone age, in these days of smartphones with cameras—another of picture postcards. She chose one of the postcards and sat down to write. The sunshine of late morning was streaming through the window by then, illuminating the bracelet that was always on her wrist, even when she slept, even in the shower. As a piece of jewelry it was unimpressive and very simple, a thin gold chain that held in place a free-form script of three letters:
ARI
. As for what it represented—call it wearing her heart on her sleeve, or at least on her wrist.

Ari was short for Aaron. It had been her twin brother’s name. Also her son’s. She couldn’t send her twin postcards—he’d died of AIDS when they were seventeen. Her thirteen-year-old son, her twin’s namesake, was alive and in Chicago, though she hadn’t seen him since he was three.

The postcard she chose was a shot of Big Ben as seen from a Whitehall street. There was a red double-decker bus in the foreground, and next to it, really tiny, a guy on a motorbike.
If you look close, the bike could be an old Triumph, a T120,
she wrote, knowing—given who his father was—that Ari would find the historic bike more impressive than the famous clock.
Maybe 1960. What do you think?
Love you, Mom.
Beneath it she added the postal address and the notation
Staying here for three months.

She’d started trying to reach Ari four years before, when he was nine, as soon as she’d emerged from the alcoholic fog and faced the wreckage she’d made of her life. Finding him hadn’t been difficult. She’d been separated from his father when Ari was born, but it hadn’t occurred to her not to put Zak’s name on Ari’s birth certificate. Aaron Johnson, son of Zachary Johnson. So once she sobered up, it hadn’t been hard to find the pair of them. They were living in Chicago, where Zak had a radio show about biking, and wrote on the subject for a number of specialist magazines. Of course, the birth certificate had also made it easier for Zak to take Ari away.

Not that she didn’t deserve to lose him.

She hadn’t tried to explain any of that to Ari. There was no way to make a child understand such things, much less forgive them. Instead she’d tried to find some common ground with the boy she believed he was growing up to be. His father’s boy, bound to be more interested in motorcycles than in history. Letters at first; then, when they were consistently returned unopened, postcards. She’d never had a word in reply, but she refused to give up hope.

She took a stamp from the supply she’d bought as soon as she stepped off the plane at Heathrow and went out and dropped the postcard in the mailbox on the corner.

It was noon by the time she got back and sat down at the laptop and opened the digital copy of the documents Shalom had sent with her to London. Her brief was written at the top, succinct and almost word for word as Philip Weinraub, head of the Shalom Foundation, had stated it during one of their early meetings.

We believe, Dr. Kendall, that in the year 1535 or thereabouts a man known as the Jew of Holborn uncovered a remarkable trove of ancient Judaica, possibly from the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. We would like you to corroborate that fact and possibly even locate the source of the treasure. We realize nothing is likely to be left, but simply proving that such things found their way to England will be a remarkable coup.

Annie did not disagree. Indeed, it would be a coup capable of putting an academic career—even one as moribund as hers—in the fast lane. Which was why finding the Jew of Holborn trumped investigating a ghost, and why she had to resist the urge to keep running to the back bedroom to check the status of the things she’d left behind. In the matter of historical research, three months was not very long. It was time to get to work.

The previous month, when it looked as if she were going to get this job, she’d set herself a crash course, studying the artifacts of Jewish practice, what Weinraub had called Judaica. The first thing she’d learned was that according to the book of Genesis, Jewish identity was formed at the time of the covenant between God and Abraham, to be solemnly marked by the circumcision of all males. The worship Jews were to offer God was also described in biblical texts, and eventually those rites were carried out in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem.