Bristol House (36 page)

“She doesn’t have to want what Weinraub wants. It could just be about money. If she—hold it. Text coming.” He pulled his phone from a pocket. “It’s from Clary.”

“Is he still in France?

“Yes.” He was staring intently at the message.

“What does he say?”

“That he’s come up empty on the connection to the Rabin assassination. But he wants us—or at least me—to come to Strasbourg right away.”

“Us,” she said instantly. Then, seeing his face: “It’s not negotiable, Geoff.”

“Okay.” He was scrolling through the message again.

“Why does he want us there?” Annie demanded.

“According to Clary, so he can demonstrate that Philip Weinraub is not a Jew.”

28

Dom Justin

From the Waiting Place

I woke in the still blackness of a summer’s night to a whisper in my ear: “It is over. Rise and follow me.”

A creature sat beside my bed, hooded and hunched over. Death had come to claim me, and my stained soul would go straight to hell. I opened my mouth to scream. Instantly a bony hand was clamped over my lips.

“Are you mad? Noise will finish us. Come, we must hurry.”

The creature moved to the door of my cell, and I got up and went with him, following him down the stairs and out to the cloister walk and then into the courtyard, along the very route I had traveled nights without number: my secret way out of the Charterhouse. I heard no sound, and nothing moved around us. The night was black as pitch and close with the heat that had so far marked this strange July. Sweat poured from me, but still I shivered and trembled. “Who are you?” I demanded, thinking I should not go so willingly to eternal damnation.

He paused, still with his back to me, and said softly, “Do you not know me? I am the Speckled Egg.”

I opened my mouth to ask the countless questions that had so long preoccupied me, but they clogged in my throat and none could find a voice.

In moments we were in the small courtyard that led to the door that was never locked. “Go,” he said. “Hurry to the house of the Jew and his daughter and warn them. She is known to have whored herself and conceived a child. The order has been signed. You are all three for the fire.”

“Wait,” I protested, the quandaries of the past few years once more asserting themselves in my mind. “How do there come to be quail’s eggs in this place where there are no quails? And how did one come to me on a night when Master Cromwell did not summon me, and—”

The one who claimed to have such authority as to send me from this place where I was vowed to spend my entire life sighed a deep sigh and said, “Ah, Justin, you are still not able to give up your will to your Creator, but instead trouble yourself with the things of this world rather than those of the next. Thomas Cromwell knows nothing of how you are directed to do his bidding, only that you are. As for the eggs, they come through the generosity of a woman in the town, a Mistress Grindal, who keeps the small birds. She is one of us. And it was I who sent you to the Jew that particular night. A voice came from heaven and told me to do so.”

More important than the answers to my questions was a far more extraordinary truth. Though the figure yet kept his back to me, I was certain I recognized his voice. “What is meant by ‘one of us’? And in the name of Almighty God, if you are the man I think you are . . . how can you be holy enough for heaven to speak in your ear, yet align yourself with a scheme that for four years has made a mockery of the integrity of this place?”

Just then, as if my guardian angel would perform one last task of his assigned custodianship, a ray of moonlight showed me in the distance the cloud of dust raised by a number of oncoming horsemen.

“Hurry,” the shrouded figure said.

I did not move. I knew by then it was not the angel of death who stood near me, though he still hid himself in the shadows of the night, but I required confirmation if I was ever to make sense of all that had transpired since I came to the Charterhouse. “I shall not go until I know who you are.”

My companion raised his hand and pushed back his cowl, and I saw the old and saintly Dom Hilary standing before me.

“You are the Speckled Egg—I would never have believed—”

“The unexpected hidden in the ordinary is the surest disguise, Justin. It is a point worth remembering.”

I had no interest at that time in his philosophy of secrets. “Dom Hilary, hear my confession. Otherwise, if I die, it is with deadly sin on my soul, and I will burn not just once but for all eternity. The girl, the Jew’s daughter, I gave in to—”

Hilary raised his hand and cut off my words. “There is no time.” He made the sign of the cross above my head. “Make an act of contrition and accept that I give you absolution in the name of Christ. And know,” he said, after the blessing was done and his hand had dropped, “that five years ago when I began this business that made me Master Cromwell’s accomplice, I thought to protect all we have here. And to protect the Truly Obedient Priesthood, as I am sworn to do. Instead I have brought the peril on us more quickly. May God have mercy on us both, though perhaps you will need it more than I. If you survive this threat, Justin, you must quit England. Your journey will be fraught with danger, though I will try to send you help along the way. Mistress Grindal for one, in the place east of here known as the Hollow Way, will hide you if she must. There are others—I will arrange it. Now hurry, take this and go.”

He thrust a parcel toward me, but I did not take it. “Wait—” Despite the obvious menace indicated by the oncoming horsemen, I could not resist the new question his words raised in my mind. “What is the Truly Obedient Priesthood? How does it differ from the ordinary sort?” Even then, newly shriven of my terrible sin, though I had not confessed it—or so Dom Hilary had said, though that strange way of gaining absolution would come to weigh heavier on my conscience than had the sin itself—it was in my mind that there might be a sort of priest not bound to a lifetime of celibacy as are all the rest. In the face of death by fire, my thoughts yet turned to the notion that I might licitly possess the Jew’s daughter. Such is Jezebel’s power when a man turns from righteousness to lust.

Dom Hilary smiled, knowing my thoughts, as it seemed he had so often in the past. “You are a priest forever, Justin. And a Carthusian sworn to celibacy and obedience, as are we all. But you, my son, are more. You are a priest in the True Obedience of Avignon.”

All at once I remembered what I had read in one of the many books I had studied in the Charterhouse. How in 1378 there was a dispute among the cardinal electors at the conclave to choose a new pope, and some broke away and set up in Avignon a man they called Clement VII, who became the first antipope of the Great Schism that lasted for fifty years. “Avignon,” I said. “You speak of the antipope?”

Hilary’s hand shot up, and he slapped my cheek with more force than I could have imagined such an old man to have. “I speak of the true papacy. The antipope is he who today sits in Rome and all who come after him.
Sede vacante,
” he said, speaking the Latin words for empty chair, “
sede vacante.
Peter’s throne is vacant, and the church of God has no true pope. But thanks to you and to me and to others of our obedience, someday a true pope will return to Rome. Now go—already I fancy I can smell the bubbling fat beneath your charred skin.”

By this time we could hear the pounding hoofs of the king’s soldiers. Once more Hilary thrust the parcel toward me. It was wrapped tightly in an old piece of sacking and tied with rope. “Practical things,” the old man said, “but look carefully, and you will find within a rare and blessed secret. It will protect you from even dangers such as this.” The sounds of the approaching horsemen grew louder. I took what Hilary gave me and ran.

Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn

From the Waiting Place

And so the time in Holborn ended in the shadow of a cloud of greasy smoke and the echo of agonized screams. One night the monk came and roused my daughter and myself from our beds with the words I had so long dreaded: “We are for the fire! Even now they come to arrest us. We must hide!”

Mistress Juryman had done her work well and swiftly. No such announcement as I had imagined was required. The banns proclaiming the coming marriage of Timothy Faircross to my daughter had not yet been posted, but at Henry’s court news flowed like water, filling every crevice and cranny of its own accord. The Juryman woman had only to whisper what she knew—perhaps to her husband, perhaps to another—and Thomas Cromwell heard it. That day, the same day the court returned to London, he signed the order. We were to burn. All three of us. His lackey the so-called Dom Justin included.

When that midnight summons came, my first thought was that there was no place in all the kingdom where we could hide from such a fate as awaited us and from such power as had decreed it. Then I thought of the pit. It had protected the Templars’ hoard for three hundred years. Perhaps it might shield us for a few days.

In that moment and at that place, I did not ask myself what might happen afterward.

•

“He’s definitely not a Jew,” Clary said.

He and Geoff and Annie were sitting in a dingy, low-ceilinged establishment that was part grocery and part café, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village west of Strasbourg. “Tell me again how you know that,” Geoff said.

Clary held up two fingers, folding them down as he made his points. “One, it turns out the Wein family of financiers were Catholics, pillars of the church. Two, and most important, Philippe Jérémie as he was originally didn’t have the whack job. They didn’t cut off the end of his prick when he was a baby.”

“It’s not the end,” Geoff said. “It’s the foreskin. No loss.”

Annie shook her head impatiently. “That’s hardly the point. Clary, how can you know whether Weinraub’s circumcised? And even if you do, it’s not definitive. Plenty of men who aren’t Jews are circumcised, so—”

“In the United States, maybe,” Clary said. “Rest of the world, not so much. Not in Europe. Not in the Caribbean either. First time I stood at a urinal in New Orleans, I was freaked out by all the whack jobs either side of me. Muslims do it. And definitely Jews. If you’re a member of the Chosen People, you get the whack job when you’re eight days old. Definitive as anything can be. Weinraub, or Wein as he was then, didn’t get it at that age and he’s not a Jew.”

Annie shot Geoff a quick glance, felt the blush start, and looked as quickly away. It hadn’t occurred to her that his being circumcised might be unusual for an Englishman. Maggie’s choice probably. Maybe one more thing she’d fought with her husband about.

“Okay,” Geoff said, ignoring Annie and speaking to Clary. “I’ll bite. How come you’re so sure about all this?”

“Because I talked to the woman who did the whack job on Weinraub forty-four years ago, when he was fifteen.” Clary smiled, enjoying their openmouthed stares. “She’s right over there,” he added, nodding toward the woman standing behind a beat-up wooden counter.

The woman was leaning on her elbows and staring at them. They stared back. She smiled—not, however, at the three of them. Geoff had her primary attention. “
Est-ce que vous voulez un autre gris, monsieur?
”

According to Clary,
un gris
was local parlance for the Riesling that made up most of the region’s wine production and just about all the everyday
vin de table.
He and Geoff had agreed that the stuff being poured here—there were three unlabeled bottles of white on a shelf behind the counter—was one step above cow piss. Nonetheless he motioned to his glass and Geoff’s. “
Deux autres
,” then, nodding toward Annie, “
et un autre citron pressé pour madame.
”

The woman poured a glass of fizzy mineral water from a green plastic bottle, squeezed half a lemon into it, and added a spoonful of sugar. She put the drink on a small, round tray, chose one of the half-full bottles of wine from the shelf, and carried everything to where they sat. The table, also small and round, was the only one in the place. The zinc top was scarred with the rings of God knows how many cups and glasses.

The woman took Annie’s glass and replaced it with the fresh
citron pressé,
then waited until both men drank the last of their wine before uncorking the bottle and refilling their glasses. “
Neuf euros,
” she said. The hand she held out was perfectly manicured. Her makeup was flawless, her short silver hair was expertly shaped, and she wore a good-looking linen blouse cut to flatter a shelflike matronly bosom while drawing the eye to slim hips, a short skirt, and decent legs and ankles accentuated by high heels.
Vive la France.
The phrase was maybe the only French Annie knew.

“
Neuf euros,
” the woman repeated. And when Geoff had counted out the coins: “
Merci, monsieur.
” Then, to Clary: “
C’est lui votre riche Anglais, non?
”

“
C’est le riche Anglais, oui,
” Clary said, then turned to Geoff. “You brought the money?”

Geoff nodded.

It was hot—France had what Annie thought of as normal summer weather—but Geoff was wearing his black leather jacket. He hadn’t taken it off because he had eight thousand pounds in small bills secreted in the jacket’s various pockets. Another two were in Annie’s shoulder bag because they had pushed the jacket into the category of attention-getting bulk. “See,” she’d said that morning when he gave her the money, “you do need me.” That had followed a telephone call during which Clary had explained to Geoff that he and Annie needed to bring a big chunk of cash to France.