Bristol House (31 page)

“Called right after I hung up. Clary’s champing at the bit—can’t wait to get started. Makes it more interesting, he said.”

Annie wasn’t sure, but there seemed no point in arguing. “Okay. What about my sketchbooks?”

“I’ve got the one with the original drawings of the monk.” Geoff flipped through them quickly. “The one with the stippled code in the drawings of the London houses, and the Tudor facade of the Charterhouse. Plus the ‘old master’ on the single sheet.” He tapped the sketchbook in which Annie had put the drawing they’d now identified as Rob Franklin. “Is that everything?”

“I think so.”

“Good. We should put them somewhere secure.”

“Where?”

“How about this. Ta-da! Otherwise known as a tasteful trumpet fanfare.” He touched something under the frame of the rather ordinary seascape hanging on the wall across from the foot of the bed. Frame and picture swung aside to reveal a safe.

“Jesus God Almighty,” Annie said. “I don’t believe it.”

“I know. Pretty corny.” He sounded sheepish.

“That’s an understatement.”

He was twisting the dial of the safe. “I was almost too embarrassed to ask the company to install it this way. But I’ve wanted it all my life. Since I was a kid in Portsmouth, watching old movies on the telly with my dad. Call it a form of fantasy football. Or Geoff’s excellent adventure.”

“And of course no thief would ever think to look there.”

“I never expected to have anything really important to protect. What money I don’t spend is invested, and my cash is in a bank like everyone else’s.”

The safe door swung open. All Annie could see were a few papers and a corner of the frame of what she took to be the picture of Emma that had been on the night table. It had disappeared after the second night they’d spent together.

He put the drawings in the safe, along with the computer printouts and the faxed copies of the Weinraub naturalization papers. “These things”—he pointed to the papers that were not part of the latest deposit—“are Maggie’s Kindertransport documents and my father’s death certificate. You’ve already met Emma.” He closed the door and twisted the dial again, then swung the painting back into place. “I’ll share the combination with you, just in case.”

She felt the same chill she’d felt a couple of hours earlier, when Clary Colbert said the intruder she’d drawn was Rob Franklin, and she had known—intuitively, instinctively, immediately—that he was right. “Did Maggie give you her documents when you had the safe installed?”

“No. Maggie, as you have no doubt deduced, is a world-class pack rat. She gave me those things six months ago when her breast cancer was diagnosed. An early bestowal of the legacy, as she put it.”

“Oh no. I thought sometimes she looked particularly thin and tired, but . . . damn!”

He’d gotten into the bed beside her by then, and he drew her close, but in a way that felt more like mutual comfort than sex. “I’ve done my share of cursing the Fates,” he said. “Maggie will have none of it. She points out she’s eighty-two her next birthday. A good run, she calls it. Particularly for a little Jewish girl born in Hitler’s Germany.”

“Can’t they do anything?”

“They removed the lump. That’s all she’d allow. A case might be made for chemo or radiation. Maggie won’t hear of it. And the gods seem to be on her side—so far so good.”

Annie bit her lip and didn’t say that the last time she’d seen his mother, she’d looked really ill. She concentrated on Clary instead. “Are you sure about sending Clary to Strasbourg? It sounds like we’re deliberately putting him in harm’s way.”

Geoff rolled onto his back and clasped his hands behind his head, looking not at her but at the seascape that disguised his fantasy football safe. “Am I sure? That is a question I have had to ask myself on a number of occasions. Look, frequently what I do is merely a high-class form of muckraking. Occasionally it produces useful results. That’s my justification. As for the people I hire to follow the trails I can’t follow myself—mostly I suppose they do it for money. It’s not my business to second-guess how they choose to earn a living.”

“Is Clary doing it for money?”

“Once upon a time, maybe. Not now. His father died in the earthquake in 2010. Apparently he’d been politicking in the poor part of town. Clary inherited the numbers of a couple of Swiss accounts.”

“Then why does he go on working with Rob Franklin, since he obviously can’t stand him?”

“It’s complicated, and I suspect I don’t know all the details, though I do know Clary’s spent a small fortune on Haitian relief efforts. Apart from that, he needs to be his own man. And I think the idea of teaching medieval French literature makes him gag. Not the literature, the teaching part.”

“That I can understand.”

“Besides, there’s his wife. He adores her. She’s a teacher in Brixton, cares passionately about educating the underclass. Being married to an independently wealthy scholar would ruin her image. Or so Clary thinks.”

“How about being a widow?” Annie asked, half sitting, propping herself on her elbows. “What would she think of that? If you’re right about Weinraub—”

“Clary can take care of himself. He spent all his summers and holidays in Port-au-Prince. Even for a little rich boy, a place like Haiti tends to concentrate the mind. Besides, it’s worth doing. Can we stop talking about this business for a bit?”

He tugged her back into his arms. She started to pull the sheet up, but Geoff stopped her hand with his. “Don’t. I love to look at them. You have exquisite breasts.”

His fingers caressed her left nipple, but both hardened in response. So much for comfort rather than sex.

***

“The vanishing point,” she told Geoff the next morning over coffee, “the connection between Weinraub’s fanaticism and the ghost’s concerns . . . I’ve been considering it all night.”

“Really? And all the time I thought—”

“I’m serious, Geoff. Somehow the topography of Tudor Holborn is the key. There are no speckled eggs in the flat, so maybe ‘here’ means Holborn.”

“As in, that’s where you’re supposed to seek the speckled egg.”

“Yes.”

“Fair enough. Next question. What exactly is this speckled egg? We’ve settled on a quail’s egg because of the cardinals, but—”

“Also the man selling ‘High-Class Provisions’ had quails and quail eggs in his window. Don’t forget him.”

“I wish I could. All right, including the bloody high-class provisioner who doesn’t actually exist. My point’s still valid. How do you know your ghost is talking about a quail’s egg?”

“I don’t know. And you’re right, there are probably other kinds of speckled eggs. I’ll check. Then I’m going to look for some kind of specialist collection that may have more info about Holborn in the fifteen hundreds. Old maps are just the kind of thing wealthy collectors go after.”

“Wouldn’t Jennifer know?”

Annie made a face. “I’ve a mind to take a short holiday from Jennifer. At least until I get my head around the notion that it was her husband who broke into my flat and scared me half to death.”

“Do a Nexis search,” Geoff said. “You have my password.”

“It could take some time. I can pay you back, but not until—”

He waved the offer away. “Anything that sheds some light on all these weird goings-on is fine with me. Take as much time as you need.”

***

She hit the remote that turned on the radios as soon as she walked in the door. The BBC immediately informed her that despite today’s sunshine, it was so far the coldest summer on record. Annie talked back, suggesting they tell her something she didn’t know.

She glanced to her right. The drawing room looked exactly as she’d left it, cozy throw blanket slung over the couch, daisies and baby’s breath in a charming Chinese vase. At the far end, the door to Mrs. Walton’s office was closed. So was the one she was facing, which led to Mrs. Walton’s bedroom. She always left those two doors closed, a gesture toward not violating her landlady’s personal space.

She turned and walked a few steps down the corridor to the bedroom she thought of as hers. That door was open. Annie glanced at the mural, then deliberately turned her back on the mystifying art. The rest of the room was cheerful and familiar. Clear morning light poured in from the window facing Southampton Row, and lots of her stuff was scattered about, including an azure-and-gold-striped shopping bag inscribed “Give ’Em the Boot.” She’d bought not boots but a pair of red patent-leather stilettos, the footwear equivalent of a Wonderbra. Fuck-me shoes. Which was why it didn’t matter that she had nothing to go with them. She didn’t plan to wear anything with them. The thought of Geoff’s reaction caused a little shiver of anticipation.

She dropped her tote on the bedroom chair, thought about taking off her sweater, and decided against it. The flat was colder than outdoors. Annie took her laptop from its case, carried it into the dining room, and set it on the table. In seconds the tranquil flight of geese was soaring across her screen. She checked her e-mail first thing. The most recent message was from Maggie. She had not cc’d her son. “Re the disappearing cardinals,” Maggie wrote, “it occurs to me the common thread could be age rather than youth. Younger people take more chances. More likely to choke to death. Check additional obits/data for the plus-seventy geezers. I think that’s the anomaly.”

Annie wasn’t sure, but maybe it was worth a look. She added a third thing to her list of research topics. Types of speckled eggs, Tudor map collections, and death notices of cardinals over seventy. Geoff was in for an expensive morning. Maybe not the eggs, though. An ordinary Google search should work for that.

“Speckled egg” got a quarter-million results in a fraction of a second. A large percentage of them, she quickly realized, referred to businesses that went by that name. She added “birds” and tried again. That got her down to a hundred thousand hits. After a few more detours—a school project in Oklahoma, a list that included birds she’d never heard of—she typed in “speckled egg” and “history.” Then, in a burst of inspiration, she deleted “history” and typed “Tudor.” Twelve thousand hits. She typed “speckled egg” plus “Anne Boleyn.” Twelve hits. Annie scrolled quickly through the abstracts. One was about Anne eating only quail eggs while she was pregnant. Annie was about to click on it when she spotted the seventh entry. “Heresies in Tudor Times.” She clicked on that and scrolled furiously, finally coming to the highlighted words, “Speckled Egg.” It was, she discovered, the name given to the leader of a schismatic sect calling themselves the True Obedience of Avignon. They originally broke with the official church in 1379 over the issue of which of two popes—one in Avignon and one in Rome—was legitimate. They “became particularly active in England,” she read, “during the upheaval over the divorce of Henry VIII and his remarriage to Anne Boleyn. They were not Protestants, but rather sedevacantists
.
” In other words, schismatics who claimed that the chair of Peter was empty. And one of the source documents for that information was a book on Christian heresies by John Kendall.

Every inch of her was tingling. This was it—she was sure of it. It was as if her father had dropped in to give her the information. This was the speckled egg the ghost meant. He was pointing her in the direction of a heresy known as the True Obedience of Avignon. She sent the link to Geoff’s e-mail account and looked for her cell so she could tell him it was on its way. The phone, however, was neither in the pocket of her jeans nor on the table next to her. It had to be still in the tote she’d left in the bedroom. She went back there, grinned when she looked at the bag with the red shoes, found her phone, and started to return to the dining room.

There was an almighty shove at her back.

Really strong.

Annie dropped the phone. It skittered across the floor. She stood frozen for a moment, astonishment roiling her stomach and rising in her chest. Why must these encounters always happen on his terms, never hers? “Look, Dom Whoever, I think I know now which speckled egg you meant, but what do you want me to do about it? Where am I supposed to seek him? I live in the twenty-first century, not the sixteenth. And if we’re both on some river of time, you’d better tell me how to navigate.”

She spun around while she spoke, expecting to see the ghost at each turn. He was not there. The bedroom was empty. She could not see anyone, nor feel anyone, and except for the radio voices, she heard nothing.

Nonetheless, something or someone had definitely pushed her. The proof was her cell phone lying on the floor some six feet away. Its trajectory had been halted when it came to rest in the corner between the mural wall and the doorjamb.

Annie walked over and bent down to get it. Her eyes fastened on the bottom-left corner of the mural. Logic dictated that any effort to study the incredible wall of art begin at the opposite end, over by the window. Even if she hadn’t given up because of the seeming impossibility of the task, it was hard to think when she’d have gotten to this section. The scenes she was looking at were in the most awkward possible position, at floor level and wedged into the corner beside the door. Only because she bent down to pick up her phone did she spot a series of unusual symbols at the top of a couple of contiguous scenes. At least that was how she first thought of them. After a few seconds, she realized the symbols were in fact letters written in some language that did not use the Western alphabet. She was pretty sure that language was Hebrew.

24

Annie lay on her belly on the floor, sketching the letters exactly as they appeared. When she finished each sequence, she ripped off the sheet and handed it up to Simon Cohen, who stood next to her. Geoff was in the dining room, meanwhile, looking for information on the Stephen Fox who had lived in this flat from 1930 to 1959. The man who, according to Mrs. Walton, had been a reclusive eccentric who prowled London by night, and by day made painting this mural his life’s work.

“That’s all,” she said, her finger hovering a quarter inch above the mural’s surface, tracing the section that included the Hebrew characters and searching for anything she might have missed. “The rest is trees beside a river. I think it’s the Embankment, over near Chelsea Bridge. No more words. Except . . . wait. Maybe I’m wrong.” Annie looked more closely, screwing the jeweler’s loupe back into her eye. “Here,” she said, pointing to the leafy branches of one tree. “More letters, but not in Hebrew. I think it’s a set of initials.
E.R.
”