Bristol House (45 page)

“Here, take this.” Josef hacked off a portion of the crisp and fragrant meat of one of the pigs, speared it on a sharpened stick, and offered it to me. “It is good, I promise you. I just had some myself.”

I shook my head. Josef thrust the meat closer, wafting it under my nose. “Just taste it,” he urged. “I think it needs more cinnamon. The master insists we use enough so everyone knows how rich he really is. Why not? This isn’t Lombardy, and here there is no sumptuary tax.” With this he threw back his head and laughed, showing a mouth with only three teeth, as yellow as buttercups in an English meadow.

Josef held the skewer with its cap of luscious meat so close to my mouth, the fragrant grease dripped down my chin, though I tasted nothing of it. “I am not hungry,” I said. “Besides, I have work to do.” With that I fled the kitchen and returned to my little room and the stack of silver trenchers that already shone, but which in obedience to the command of the majordomo I was polishing again.

A few minutes later Josef appeared at my door. This time he carried a jug and a beaker made of fired clay, though we were surrounded by the golden goblets that would later be offered to Jacopo’s guests. “A drink, Englishman?” He nodded to the piles of plate. “You do thirsty work.”

I took the wine he offered—that being the usual beverage of this place where ale was reserved for the masters of the establishment—and drank it down, grateful for refreshment I was not forbidden to accept. When my cup was empty, Josef refilled it, and I drank again as greedily as before. “Thirsty work,” I agreed. “The wine is good.”

“Good enough for these Lombards,” he said, refilling my goblet yet again.

Thomas Cromwell had trained me well. No opportunity to gain information was ever to be ignored, because what you learned might someday serve a purpose you did not yet imagine. “I take it you are not a Lombard?”

“Me? Indeed I am not.”

“A man of Strasbourg perhaps?” I asked.

Josef shrugged. “Yes and no. My mother’s people come from here, but my father’s people are from Avignon far to the south. I was born there.”

“And do you then prefer Avignon to Strasbourg?”

“Truth,” he said in a manner suddenly turned solemn, “is to be found in Avignon.”

The hair rose on the back of my neck, but however desperate I was to probe his meaning, by now my bladder was brimming full and I could hold back no longer. I had to piss or burst, and as there was in my workroom no hearth or chamber pot where I might do so, I rushed to the small courtyard just beyond the door. I had still my cock in my hand when I realized that Josef had followed me outside. “And there’s the proof,” he said, coming close to the wall at which I directed my stream and looking as intently at my member as might any whore. “You may travel with a Jewess, and you may refuse to eat pork, but you are not disfigured as they disfigure their sons, so you are not one of them. Forgive me, Dom Justin. I had to be sure.” Then he fell to his knees beside me.

I was by then rearranging my garments and secreting my member, but for a moment I thought he was a cursed pervert about to perform an unnatural act upon my person, and I jumped back. Then, as it were, his words spoke themselves again in my mind. “You called me Dom Justin,” I whispered, almost overcome with surprise.

“We were told the Jewess traveled with a priest of the True Obedience of Avignon, but we had to be sure.” He had not risen from his knees. “I beg you, Dom Justin, give me your blessing.”

I could refuse no man a simple benediction, and I raised my hand and traced the sign of the cross above his head. Then, before either of us could speak further, we heard the sound of the returning household.

It was nine o’clock and a full summer moon had risen by the time all the guests departed and the servants went to their beds. I was ready for mine, as much to think about what had happened earlier as to sleep. In the hubbub of the feast, I’d had no time to try and piece together the many parts of the puzzle. It seemed I still would not be able to do so. I was just putting away the last of the goblets when Josef again appeared at the door of my workroom. He did not speak, only beckoned to me while looking right and left as if to be sure he was not observed.

I opened my mouth to tell him the next day would be time enough for talk, but he immediately turned and went into the small courtyard where we had spoken earlier. My curiosity prevailed, and I followed him.

Diego waited for me. As soon as I appeared, he fell to his knees, saying, “Pray God, a blessing from a priest of the True Obedience.”

“You too know this?” So great was my astonishment, I all but stammered the words.

“I was not sure. We knew only to look for a woman, a Jewess of uncommon beauty, and a man traveling with her. But we were given no distinctive way to recognize the man. It seemed possible that the perfidious Jews might have murdered our priest and substituted one of their own kind.”

I did not ask him whether, on the many nights he lay with her, he thought Rebecca perfidious, but asked instead, “Who is this ‘we’ of whom you speak?”

“Myself and a few others who are loyal. All were dispatched to wait and watch at different ports.”

“Dispatched? Who charged you with this errand?”

“The command came as do all others among our brotherhood, accompanied by the egg of a quail, thus from the one who, failing a proper pope, we think of as Christ’s voice on earth and call the Speckled Egg.”

Diego had remained on his knees throughout this exchange, waiting for my blessing. Finally I raised my hand and gave it to him, and only then did he stand up. At which point I asked, “Where is Rebecca?”

All pretense between us had been dropped, and the Lombard did not remark on my abandonment of the fiction that she was the mistress and I the servant. “She sleeps soundly,” he said. “I arranged a special draught in her last goblet of wine, but in the morning she will wake none the worse for it. Though if I had given her half again as much . . .”

His words trailed away, but I did not need to hear them to know what he meant. “Why would you consider such a thing? What has she done to you that you should speak thus?”

“Nothing,” he admitted. “And in the normal way of things, I bear her no ill will. But if it served the interest of the Speckled Egg . . .” Again he ended without finishing his words, though his thought was plain between us.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I know well the one you call the Speckled Egg.” When I said that, both he and Josef signed themselves with the cross. “It was never his intent to have any harm befall Rebecca.”

“As long as she knows nothing of who we truly are—indeed, who you are—then she has nothing to fear from us,” Diego said.

I did not bother to tell him how much Rebecca knew, for I was sure it would not make her future any more secure, a thing that was in my mind because I was starting to realize how uncertain it truly was. I knew she had entertained the hope that because Diego was widowed and because his daughters loved her and she them, Diego might marry her and so assure her and her child food and shelter in the years ahead. But the fact that Dom Hilary, in laying his charge upon Diego and whomever else he had sent to watch the ports, had labeled her a Jewess had apparently put that possibility out of reach. Diego was the sort of Christian who might use a Jewess as a whore but never consider her as a wife. “I go to the Charterhouse near Freiburg,” I said, aware that knowing me to be a monk and a priest of the True Obedience, these men had yielded to me a certain measure of authority. “I wish to be sure the woman and the child she bears will be taken care of after that.”

I blamed her for much, but I owed her more. And the child was—God have mercy on me—flesh of my flesh.

Diego nodded. “I will think of something,” he promised.

•

35

The woman in Alsace had her throat slit from ear to ear, and a quail egg placed in her mouth. Every time Annie thought of it, she shivered: “We killed her.”

“No, we didn’t.” Geoff held her tighter and nestled the down quilt closer around both of them. “She knew the risk and decided to take it. She had lots of choices, Annie. Most of them she made before we ever came on the scene.”

“But if she hadn’t talked to us, she wouldn’t have died.”

“Look, she understood that staying in that wretched village meant the people her husband warned her about knew where to find her. It was a bad choice, but it had nothing to do with us.”

“You’re saying she died because of where she was?” Annie made it a question. “Death by real estate? Location, location, lo—”

She stopped speaking. Countable seconds went by. Geoff was good about things like that. He waited. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said after a time.

“Location,” Annie said, finishing her original thought. “Geoff, why do we assume that
Aventine à Arc
is a reference to time? What if ‘Aventine Hill to the Arch of Titus’ referred to coordinates on a map?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” He grabbed the iPhone from the night table. Annie squirmed into a position where she could look over his shoulder. He brought up Google Earth and located the Arch of Titus. “That’s the easy part,” he said, manipulating the image with two fingers. “Shit. Aventine Hill’s too vague to be useful. It’s a section of the city, divided into a number of streets. We need an address. Any ideas?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s go downstairs. I need to see this on a bigger screen. And I need a sketchbook.” The red stilettos were by the bed where she’d kicked them off. Annie ignored them and shoved her feet into sneakers.

***

Geoff sat in front of his desktop computer. Annie was at the kitchen counter, sketching furiously, starting one drawing after another, frequently closing her eyes in frustration, then ripping off a sheet of paper and trying again. “I can’t get it.”

“Any chance you can tell me what ‘it’ is? I’m not having a lot of joy here myself.”

“I don’t know. But if I’m right, and location matters more than time, then the geography in the mural is important. But the thing’s screwy—nothing is where it really is in London. I’ve looked and looked, and there doesn’t appear to be any pattern or logical sequence. It’s all random.” She was still sketching at a breakneck pace. “I’m trying to get a handle on the little piece of the mural that has the Hebrew letters. When I was copying them for Rabbi Cohen, I said they were above a sketch of the part of the Embankment. Trees beside a river.”

“There are a considerable number of places in London with trees beside a river.”

“Exactly. I’m trying to remember the details, why I made that assumption, but they won’t come. I think it’s because I know what the Embankment looks like, and I’m trying to make that be what I saw, but I’m getting the feeling it’s not. Geoff, I want to go to Bristol House. I’ve got to see it again.”

“Now?” He glanced at his watch. “It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“Can you go back to sleep with all this hanging out there?” And when he shook his head: “Neither can I. So we might as well go now.”

***

“Wait,” Annie said as soon as they walked in. She had automatically picked up the remote, but so far she hadn’t switched on the radios.

“He’s here?” Geoff asked. “The monk?”

“I don’t know.” Then, after a long few moments: “No, I don’t believe he is. But if he means to find me, he will.”

“Jesus. Do you mind if we put on some lights? And the radios.”

Seconds later they were listening to the BBC telling them the Vatican had made public the fact that the pope was gravely ill and not expected to recover. Catholic dignitaries were beginning to gather in Rome.

“
Sede vacante,
” Annie said. “The chair really will be empty.”

They went into Annie’s bedroom, and Geoff dragged over a lamp so the lower-left corner of the mural was better lit. Then they lay on the floor, side by side on their bellies. “Right below here,” Annie said, “just underneath the Hebrew. That’s what I’ve been trying to get my mind around.”

Geoff peered at the section she indicated. “That,” he said, “is definitely not the Embankment.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. The bridges are wrong. You’d be looking at—” He stopped speaking but squirmed into a position where he could look still more closely at the mural.

“What?” she demanded. “What are you seeing?”

“That I’m a fuckwit. I should have thought of it right away. Look, over here.” He pointed to a grand-looking building in the middle of the scene. “This part of the mural isn’t London. It’s Rome. And unless I’m badly mistaken, this is the headquarters of the Knights of Malta on the Aventine Hill.”

Annie drew a long breath and held it. When she let it out, she said, “The Knights of Malta are officially known as the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John. In the fourteenth century, the pope gave them all the property of the disgraced Knights Templar.”

“And the Templars,” Geoff said, “were the blokes who established their first monastery on the Temple Mount. Leading to that ever-popular conspiracy theorists’ myth that they brought a shitload of treasure from the ancient Jewish Temple to London and stashed it somewhere yet unfound.”

“We’ve been over all that,” Annie said. “Right now it’s not the point.”

Geoff was running his hand along the mural, searching for more clues hidden in the close-packed, overlapping scenes. Annie smothered the impulse to tell him not to actually touch the work.

“What about this tree here?” he asked after a few seconds. “It could be an almond tree, couldn’t it?”

“Maybe. I’d need to find the horticultural drawings again to be sure. But it’s definitely different from the others, so it could be.”

“Any odds you care to name,” Geoff said.