Bristol House (35 page)

The church was silent and mostly empty. A lone official in a bright red cassock was doing something near the altar. Two middle-aged men knelt side by side in the left rearmost pew. They were holding hands. Annie felt like a voyeur and looked away. Behind her, footsteps echoed on the stone floor, and she turned to see Geoff approaching.

He was so good-looking he made her heart stop, and when he put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead, murmuring an apology for being late, she wanted to cry: because it had been so long since she’d let anyone in this close; because she’d never thought grown-up, responsible, sober Annie would be allowed to feel this way; but most of all because part of her didn’t think she deserved him.

***

“Medieval European maps,” Annie said, “were all drawn with Jerusalem at the center. And the center of the center was the round Church of the Holy Sepulcher, supposedly built over the tomb in which Jesus was buried. Ground zero for the Templars, as Jennifer called it. So, she said, all their churches followed that model.”

They were in a small restaurant and wine bar on Fleet Street called Temple Rest. Geoff, who knew the chef-owner, had insisted they both have the brawn accompanied by parsley salad. According to a menu that made provision for American tourists, brawn was headcheese. Authentic old British food, Geoff insisted, appropriate to the setting.

“And I take it,” Geoff said, “you reminded Jennifer that, Holy Sepulcher notwithstanding, the Templars are supposed to have built their first monastery over the ancient Jewish Temple.”

“On the Temple Mount. Yes. She didn’t bat an eye, but I could practically feel her vibrating.”

“It’s not conclusive, Annie.”

“I know, but—” Their food was delivered. Annie studied her plate. She’d thought headcheese would be—well, cheese. It was instead bits of meat and onion suspended in aspic. “Am I to assume this meat comes from some creature’s head?”

“Yes. It can be pig or calf or even cow. Jon uses prime steer. Black Angus from Scotland. One reason his brawn is so good. Try it.”

“I take it Jon is your buddy the chef.” Geoff nodded. Annie poked at the aspic with a tentative fork. “I have a prejudice against food that moves.”

“Try it,” he said again. “One bite. If you don’t like it, I promise you can have something else.”

“You sound like my father.”

“I assure you, my feelings for you are not at all fatherly. Go ahead—one bite.”

She put a small portion of the brawn in her mouth. The aspic instantly dissolved on her tongue, leaving behind the essence of steer. The meat itself was both meltingly tender and full of flavor, its beefiness followed by a burst of spicy, vinegary tang. “It’s delicious,” she said, scooping up another mouthful.

“Told you so. Now stop eating long enough to tell me the rest of what happened.”

“Jennifer showed me a watercolor from 1530, a primitive Holborn landscape painted by an amateur. In itself that’s remarkable, but hell, the whole archive’s awesome. That’s to be expected. Only I’ve been here almost two months, and my focus is incredibly narrow—Holborn in 1535, and she waited until now to show me that?”

“Professional jealousy,” Geoff said immediately. “Publish first. All that well-known academic vitriol.”

Annie shook her head because her mouth was full of parsley salad. The slightly bitter green was a perfect foil for the rich brawn. It had never occurred to her that parsley could be eaten pretty much on its own. “No. She was manipulating me. She has been from the first. It’s never been about the research. Not for her. She took a few days to produce the Scranton map, when you’d think it was the first thing she’d have shown me. Then she went away for a couple of weeks and left me to stew on my own. It’s all been deliberate.”

“Annie, you don’t know that.”

It was obvious that while Geoff had had no hesitation in attributing evildoing to Rob Franklin, he was less sanguine about putting Jennifer in the same category. “I do know it,” Annie insisted. “She knows personal things about me that only Weinraub could have maybe found out. So—”

She broke off because a large man with a long white apron tied firmly around an expansive waist appeared at their table carrying two glasses of wine. “I hope you weren’t planning to slip in and out without saying hello, Geoffrey my man. You can’t keep this ravishing redheaded creature a secret. My spies are everywhere.”

“Annie, this is my friend Jon Atkins. He’s responsible for the delicious food you have just inhaled. Jon, this is Annie, an American who objected to anything in aspic—what she called ‘food that moves’—until she had her first bite of your brawn.” He pointed to Annie’s empty plate. “You can see she changed her mind.”

The chef put down the two glasses of wine, murmuring that they were compliments of the house, and extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Annie.”

“Annie doesn’t drink,” Geoff said, moving her wine to his side of the table. “Bitter Lemon’s her thing.”

Jon motioned for someone to bring Annie another soda. The three of them exchanged a few more pleasantries. Jon said Geoff must bring her to their next dinner—referring, she guessed, to some kind of club. Geoff said the next dinner was in fact scheduled to be at his house, and he definitely would invite Annie. Jon repeated that he was pleased to have met her and left.

“I gather the meeting is a cook-along,” Annie said. “Like a sing-along, but with pots and pans.”

“Something like that. But tell me what you meant. What kind of personal things does Jennifer know about you?”

Her stomach dived toward her heels, and she felt dizzy.

“What is it?” Geoff asked after a couple of seconds. “You look, forgive the term, ghostly pale.”

“Never a good blush when you need one,” Annie said. “Can we go somewhere more private?”

***

Geoff walked her back to the Temple precincts, to a small jewel of a park, empty despite the glorious summer day. “It’s not open to the public,” he explained. “One of the porters gave me a temporary pass while I was waiting for the barrister.”

They were sitting side by side, on a stone bench that rested on the heads of two openmouthed lions, looking at a fountain whose waters sparkled in the sunlight. “I told you about Zak Johnson, my ex-husband, being a biker,” she said.

“Yes, you did.”

“What I didn’t tell you . . . I—we—have a thirteen-year-old son.” She was gripping the bracelet with her right hand. “His name’s Aaron, for my twin, and he’s called Ari as well. At least he was when he was little.”

There was a long pause. She could see him processing the implications of why, in nearly two months of growing intimacy, she had never mentioned having a child. “I’m guessing,” he said finally, “you have no relationship with the boy.”

“None. His father has sole custody. I haven’t seen Ari since he was three.” What kind of mother loses the custody of her three-year-old toddler? A very bad one.

He reached out and put his hand over hers. “Annie . . .”

“Please don’t suggest that time will change things. Or that you know how I feel. Or that you understand.” The words were forced out of a throat choked with misery. “You don’t. You can’t.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ve never been anyone’s parent. I wanted kids, but Emma didn’t. Back when what became toxic assets were huge money-spinners, Emma was a senior trader at Goldman Sachs—and, according to her, much too busy to be pregnant. That’s what started the Christmas row that led to her storming out of the house.”

An explanation of the heavy baggage he’d mentioned weeks before, when he said being sorry went with the territory. “As in,” Annie said, “storming out and getting killed.”

“Exactly.” And when she didn’t say anything: “I’ve stopped beating myself up over it. The what-ifs take me all the way back to what if we’d never met. The whole line of thought is useless. I guess what I’m trying to say is not that I know how you feel, but I do get it.”

“I’ve tried,” Annie said. “I keep trying. Right after I got sober, I found Ari on Facebook. He refused to friend me. A few days later he took down the page. Until about a year ago I wrote him long chatty letters twice a week, trying everything I could think of to open a conversation. Each one came back unopened. These days I send postcards. At least you can’t send them back.”

“Maybe it’s your ex-husband who returned the letters.”

“I don’t think so. Zak never was vindictive. Besides, I tried calling once. I’m pretty sure Ari answered the phone, but he hung up as soon as I said who I was.”

She got up and walked over to the fountain, a cherub riding the back of a dolphin spewing water. Geoff came to join her. “Perfect innocence,” he said, nodding toward the sculpture.

“I’m not sure I remember what that felt like. Presuming I ever knew. Geoff, you might as well know the rest of it.”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“In AA,” she said, “one of the things we promise is to confess to our Higher Power and to at least one other person absolutely the worst thing we ever did when we were drinking.” She hesitated. “I’ve never told anyone this story.”

“Not even Sidney?”

“Not even him.”

He didn’t say anything after that, only waited for her to speak with that listening patience that made him so good at his job. “I was barely eighteen when I married Zak,” she began. “But I was already a drunk and long past innocence. I told you we didn’t live together because I was still in school, didn’t I?”

He nodded.

“Thing is, no matter how much I was drinking, I was always able to go to class and study, even get top grades. That part of my life—it was as if I walked through a looking glass into another world. Zak couldn’t disconnect that way. He had a small trust fund, and he picked up odd jobs, but pretty much he just drank and biked. We went on like that for a couple of years. Then when I was twenty, he announced he was leaving. Temporarily, he said. He was going to get sober or get dead. I told him I was two months pregnant. Zak said that was all the more reason to do what he had to do.”

She stopped speaking.

“It’s okay,” Geoff said after a time. “You don’t have to tell me any more.”

“Yes,” she said, “I do.” Deep breath. “I had no idea where Zak was when Ari was born, and I didn’t make any effort to find him. Didn’t see the point. As long as you set the bar pretty low, we were getting along. I was doing a combination master’s and Ph.D. program at BU, and I had a fellowship with a stipend. It was enough for a tiny walk-up apartment in what was a crummy part of Boston called Jamaica Plain. Back then the best thing about the neighborhood was that the woman next door loved Ari. Mostly she looked after him when I had to go to class. And I had backup babysitters. At least I think so. Frankly, I don’t remember a lot of how it was, because I was drinking so much by then.”

The hard part.

“Came the day I was supposed to present the defense of my dissertation. I know I had to be at the university at ten a.m. Apart from that . . . I don’t remember if the woman next door wasn’t there, or if some babysitter had let me down. I only know I went to my orals and did my usual brilliant job. But when I came home, my door had been busted down, and there were cops waiting for me, and a woman from Boston Social Services.”

No tears, but for a few seconds she couldn’t speak. Literally could not. The words were choking in her throat.

“I take it,” Geoff said quietly, “the social services people found Zak.”

She swallowed hard a couple of times, then found her voice. “No. He’d called them. He’d gone to Chicago and got off the booze, and he had a radio program, and he was writing articles for lots of biking magazines. And having found out where his wife and child were, he’d come back to get us.” She was crying now. No sobs, but big tears were rolling down her cheeks. “Zak Johnson walked right up to that stinking little apartment with his arms full of flowers and a teddy bear. Hollywood couldn’t have done it better. Only no one answered the door, and he could hear a baby bawling inside, so he broke in.”

She stopped speaking, wondered if she had to tell him what Zak told the judge, and decided she did not.

After a time Geoff said softly, “I’m guessing there was a subsequent hearing and Zak got custody.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“I know. That’s not what I meant. Okay as in ‘I understand.’” He didn’t try to touch her, just handed her his handkerchief and waited until she had blown her nose and wiped her eyes. Then: “Do you want to talk more about it? Maybe get some legal advice? I know a bloke in New York who—”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to fuck up Ari’s life any more than I already have. A big legal battle—it’s the last thing he needs. And I definitely don’t want to talk about it anymore. Can we please move on?”

“Yes, of course we can. This all started with Jennifer. Tell me what the link is.”

“She made a remark about peeing all the time because she’s pregnant. Then she said she supposed I remembered that. But there’s no way she should have known I ever had a child.”

“Public records,” Geoff said. “CVs . . .”

Annie shook her head. “It’s not listed anywhere obvious. I’ve never used the Johnson name. You’d need to find the birth records, and where would you start? When? Hell, you put the famous Geoffrey Harris spyglass on me, and you never discovered it.” She paused. “You didn’t, did you? You’re not just pretending this is a surprise?”

“Scout’s honor,” he said. “I didn’t know. You’re right, it certainly wasn’t obvious. And I dug pretty deep.”

“So do you think it’s likely Jennifer Franklin came up with that information on her own? Or that she had any reason to look in the first place?”

He hesitated a moment. “Not likely,” he admitted.

“But we know Weinraub set me up for this”—Annie waved her hand—“for whatever he’s after. And as you said from the first, he picked me because he figured I could be manipulated. So it was in his interest to find out everything about me. And he could pay to dig as deep as he wanted to.”

“You’re saying Weinraub is the one who found out about your son. And because Jennifer is working for him, he told her.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “That’s what I’m saying. But working for him how? Doing what? And why? What in God’s name does Jennifer Franklin want with some piece of ancient Judaica, mezuzah or otherwise?”