Bristol House (52 page)

“Presumably.” Annie tried for another deflection: “About Bea Walton—”

“No reason whatever to connect her to Weinraub. I expect she will find your story quite a surprise. Dine out on it for years.”

It sounded like a dismissal. Annie started to get up.

Fallsworthy waved her back to her chair. “Just another question or two, Dr. Kendall. It is not unthinkable that your professional expertise should have taken you to the point where you recognized the real intentions of Weinraub and his followers, but how did you know they were using the old tunnels as a meeting place?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then why did you go down there?”

“It was accidental. I already explained—”

He cut her off. “We are, of course, aware of the activities of Mr. Harris’s late mother, her connection with Bletchley in the 1940s. And those of Rabbi Simon Cohen.” Fallsworthy looked again at his notes. “I believe you are acquainted with Rabbi Cohen. So perhaps he told you—”

“Rabbi Cohen would never do anything that violated any kind of government secret. You cannot believe—”

“I assure you, Dr. Kendall, we are not accusing Rabbi Cohen of anything. The existence of those tunnels has been public knowledge for the last few years, reported in at least one newspaper. My question relates to your . . . adventure the other night. As I understand it, Mr. Harris left you”—another glance at the papers on the desk—“at ten to two in the morning because he’d been called to the bedside of his very ill mother. A minute or two later you impulsively decided to follow and ran after him, leaving number eight Bristol House unlocked.”

Annie nodded, sure her misery showed on her face. Even the impulsive part sounded accusatory.

“Subsequently,” he continued, “you returned to close up Mrs. Walton’s flat, with the intention of afterward going to 29 Orde Hall Street and meeting with our people. Why didn’t you do that?”

“I intended to. But as I was leaving the apartment, I heard someone coming up the stairs.”

“Quite late for a weeknight, wasn’t it?”

“I thought so. I became frightened. I got into the elevator, but it wouldn’t start. I forgot that the gate is temperamental, and I pushed all the buttons before I thought to fix it. As a result, once I got it going, the elevator didn’t stop at the lobby. It went down to the basement.”

“And then?”

“Then I thought I heard the footsteps again. So I ran through the nearest unlocked door. It led to the old coal cellars. I believe they’re used for resident storage these days.”

“And from there”—Fallsworthy was looking at his notes again—“to a service passage that opens into an alley near the junction of Southampton Row and Theobald’s Road.”

“Yes, but the gate was locked.”

He looked up. “You’re quite sure of that?”

“I am entirely sure. I was desperate to get out. I couldn’t because, as I said, the gate was locked.” A little knot of panic was starting to form in her stomach. She tried to ignore it.

“Dr. Kendall, according to the building management, that gate is never locked from the inside. The fire laws don’t permit it.”

Fallsworthy was giving her what she thought of as his spook look. An intense, unwavering stare. This time she couldn’t suppress the blush. “I’m not lying. I tried every way I could to get the gate open. It was locked.”

“Yes, well, suppose we let that pass for now. Next point.” He consulted his notes yet again. “Please tell me how you managed to get from the service passage to the much deeper tunnel that led to . . . the prior installation.”

“I didn’t actually ‘manage’ anything. It simply happened. The wall collapsed as I was running back to try and get out through the lobby.” She was not going to mention the hand on her shoulder.

“Collapsed,” Fallsworthy repeated. “Am I to take that to mean with no help from you?”

“Of course with no help from me. I didn’t bring a pickax down there. The entire thing was unplanned. And frankly terrifying.”

“Climbing down a slide of rubble of that nature in the dark, Dr. Kendall. A small woman like yourself—it must indeed have been terrifying.”

“Rubble?” There was no rubble, only sand. That’s why she didn’t break every bone in her body.

“Rubble,” Fallsworthy repeated. He took an iPhone from his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and passed it to her. It displayed a picture of jagged boulders below a gaping hole in a stone wall. “This was taken soon after you were brought out of the tunnels, Dr. Kendall.”

Annie couldn’t summon a response. She had slid down a slope of sand. She only had to close her eyes to feel it again exactly as it had happened.

“. . . structural engineer’s report,” Fallsworthy was saying, “only two months past. The wall was judged entirely sound.”

She had to say something. “I can’t help that.”

“You insist, however, that you got into the tunnels by accident. Because a wall collapsed?”

“I do.”

Fallsworthy reached down and brought up a plastic bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon, three-quarters full, but the top was screwed on tight. “One of our people found this at the base of the collapsed wall. We’re told you drink a lot of this particular beverage, Dr. Kendall.”

“Yes. I had a bottle in my pocket when I fell. Afterward it was gone.”

“This bottle?”

Annie shrugged. “I suppose it could be.”

They were both silent for a few seconds. Then: “Very well,” Fallsworthy said. “One last point if I may. How did you manage to get your mobile to work from that depth? Calling Mr. Harris the way you did—that was extraordinary.”

“That part’s easy.” Annie felt the knots in her stomach relax a tiny bit. “I didn’t have a phone with me. I stumbled into the room with the telephone switchboard. I suppose it was part of what you call the prior installation. There was a phone there, an old one with a dial, and I used it. I called Mr. Harris rather than emergency services because I didn’t know how I could expl—”

“Just a moment. Are you telling me you made the call to Mr. Harris’s mobile from a landline in the tunnel? A phone you discovered in the old telephone exchange room?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Dr. Kendall, there has not been a working landline in that installation in over forty years.”

41

“So maybe,” Rabbi Cohen said, “Einstein and my old friend Hazan are right. Maybe time bends.”

“And it bent enough for me to call Geoff,” Annie said.

“And snapped back into position immediately thereafter,” Geoff added. There was a certain amount of derision in his voice, despite the fact that the call log on his iPhone had no record of the call Annie knew she’d made and he knew he’d received.

“Have either of you a better explanation?” The question came from Timothy O’Hare, who, it transpired, served on an interfaith board with Simon Cohen and had been invited to join what Geoff was calling the wrap party and Cohen Sunday tea.

“I wish I did have a better explanation,” Annie said. “Since I don’t, I expect I’m going to be on the MI6 watch list for the next hundred years. Or at least until I go home next week.”

“We can’t prevail on you to stay?” Cohen asked.

She could feel Geoff’s eyes on her. They had been circling the subject for three days, neither of them saying anything definitive about what was between them or what the future might look like. It was not something likely to be settled in Rabbi Cohen’s study. “I would love to stay,” she said, “but I can’t afford it. I don’t think Philip Weinraub is going to be paying my salary from his jail cell. I’ll have to come back at some point to testify at his trial, but meanwhile I have to go home. I think I can get a job at MIT.”

Sidney had e-mailed about a slot at the university’s humanities library.
Doesn’t pay a whole lot, but don’t forget rent is considerably cheaper around here than in New York.

When she told him, Geoff’s only comment was that he’d heard it was bloody cold in Boston.

“I’m also going to write a couple of articles about my work here,” Annie added, “but that will take a while. Meanwhile, a girl has to eat.”

“Exactly so,” Rabbi Cohen said. “Try one of the scones. I baked them myself.” The room was as cluttered as always, but on this occasion Cohen had produced a tea tray—sturdy mugs, not Maggie’s fragile flowered cups and saucers—and a plate of scones, as well as a bowl of thick cream and another of strawberry jam. “The one thing that was always down to me,” he said. “Even before Esther got sick, I baked scones every Sunday.”

“I’m impressed, Rabbi,” Geoff said. “You’ll have to consider joining our food group. We’ll be short a member after I poison Yossi.”

“Scones, I’m afraid, are the extent of my repertoire. So, Annie, where do we start?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe with the question I’ve been asking myself since this all started. Where exactly is the monk I’ve seen? And how come he could reach out to me?”

Rabbi Cohen looked at the clock on the mantel. “We’ve got an hour or so, Timothy. You can explain the nature of the universe in sixty minutes, I’m sure.”

“I think,” the priest said, “Dr. Kendall already knows as much as I could tell her about that. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Page one of every Catholic catechism. Believing it is a good deal more difficult than knowing it.”

“I interviewed a Protestant minister once,” Geoff said, “who in between breathing flames and shouting about the Catholic whore told me there is no mention of purgatory in the Bible.”

“None,” Father O’Hare conceded. “It’s a theological construct. Because our human ideas of justice demand it, and because what we believe of God’s mercy makes it likely. An opportunity for the soul to be cleansed of sin. Personally, I believe in a God who gives second, third, and fourth chances. Probably more. Whether purgatory is an actual place . . .” He shrugged.

“I like lots of chances,” Annie said. “But a place . . . I’m still working on Rabbi Hazan’s explanation of the nature of time.”

“If you mean Nachum Hazan, Dr. Kendall, he’s a good man.”

“Please, just Annie is fine. And that’s who I mean. You know about the river?”

“Einstein and T. S. Eliot,” the priest said. “I know.”

“Apparently,” Geoff said, “all you clerical types study the same primer.”

“I’ve heard Rabbi Hazan speak,” the priest said. “But the river and its bends is a metaphor for time, exactly as Annie said. It doesn’t speak to that which is eternal and outside of time.”

“Or,” Annie said, “how a solid wall collapsed into a pile of sand, which somehow became stony rubble by the time it had its picture taken. Or how I got a dial tone on a telephone that hadn’t been connected for forty years.”

“
Ex nihilo nihil fit,
”
Father O’Hare quoted.

Annie supplied the translation: “From nothing, nothing comes.”

“Precisely,” the Dominican said. “The idea of the river is immensely attractive and I would say logical, but where the river came from, and whether we’re all going to simply float on it forever in some endless journey, are questions the theory doesn’t address. Nor why, from wherever he is, your Carthusian monk decided to conduct what appears to have been a crisis intervention.”

“Perhaps I must reconcile myself to not knowing,” Annie said. “But Geoff does have something to add to our limited understanding of this business.”

“A bit,” he agreed. “I’ve had someone doing further checking in Strasbourg. It appears that on each of his trips there, Weinraub visited some old bishop. In his nineties now. According to my source, he was drummed out of the Catholic Church forty-plus years ago.”

“Ah, yes,” Father O’Hare said.

“You know of him?” Annie asked.

“Sorry”—the Dominican looked sheepish—“my lot are still expected to keep tabs on the dissenters. As for the bishop in Strasbourg, he was excommunicated in the late sixties because he insisted the Second Vatican Council taught heresy. He was one of the most vocal of the Sedevacantists for a few years. Then he just seemed to fade away.”

“K’ching,” Geoff said. “Another piece of the puzzle slots in. My New York sources tell me Weinraub’s parents became Sedevacantists in the sixties, also as a result of what they saw as the liberalizations of the Second Vatican Council. I’m guessing that either the bishop found them or they found the bishop. And between them they unearthed this largely defunct True Obedience outfit, including a number of its old documents, and declared it alive and well and themselves its head.”

“So,” Annie said, “the ex-bishop was probably the Speckled Egg for a time, during which tenure, I’ll bet he ordained Philip Weinraub.”

“And,” Father O’Hare said, “made him the Speckled Egg when the bishop felt he was too old to do the job. It’s a short jump from there to claiming Weinraub to be the next legitimate pope in the line established by the Antipope Clement VII.”

“According to Weinraub,” Annie said, “your old spy tunnels, Rabbi Cohen, were to be his twenty-first-century catacombs. I heard him tell Jennifer that his followers were going to flock to London and she was to lead them all down there. I’m not sure what they were supposed to do when they got there. Maybe wait for the Second Coming.”

“MI6,” Geoff said, “has been liaising with the Vatican. The conclusion is that it’s not much of a flock, just a couple of dozen nutters.” No one asked him how he happened to know what MI6 was thinking. “But what about Weinraub being circumcised in France?” he continued. “Was that to become a new requirement of the Catholic Church?”

“Unlikely,” Rabbi Cohen said. “That argument was settled a couple of thousand years ago. As soon as the Jewish Christians began allowing gentiles to join their church. Insisting on adult circumcision is not a good plan for growing your fan base. Timothy and I think it was a wrinkle added by Weinraub’s father uniquely for his son—part of grooming Philip Jeremiah to take over.”

“Precisely.” Father O’Hare helped himself to a second scone. “But anything that’s been around for hundreds of years—a whole mythology develops. Wein, or Weinraub if you will, and later his son, latched onto a number of its facets. Including the fact that there was supposed to be a mezuzah decorated with an almond branch, that it was of enormous importance, that some Jews somewhere in the old Rhenish Palatinate once had it, and that according to legend it would make its way back to England as a sign the true pope was about to be installed.”