Bristol House (8 page)

“The Trappists are thought to be one of the strictest orders in the church, but compared with the Carthusians, they’re playboys. A charterhouse is a collection of small houses, each occupied by one hermit monk who mostly does all his praying on his own and even grows much of his own food in a small garden. They only leave the monastery once a week. Every Thursday the hermits come out of their little houses and take a walk.”

“Now you are joking.”

“I’m not. It’s true. They stroll along two by two and talk. Every fifteen minutes they change partners. The weekly walk was started by Saint Bruno when he founded the order in the eleventh century. Five thousand feet up a French mountain, incidentally, at La Grande Chartreuse. In the mouths of English speakers,
Chartreuse
became
Charterhouse,
so today that’s what their monasteries are all called.” Annie stood up. “More coffee?”

“Yes, thanks.”

She took his empty mug and started down the hall toward the kitchen. The radios were playing softly as she passed, murmuring in unison about the death of a prominent Roman Catholic cardinal in Holland who as a young man survived imprisonment by the Gestapo but at eighty-eight choked to death in a bizarre accident involving a quail egg. It occurred to Annie that she’d never seen a quail egg. Or a live quail, for that matter.

It was after seven. She should probably offer to make something to eat. But not only did she have nothing so gourmet as quail, her shopping had not anticipated dinner for two. She had one pork chop and one chicken breast. Maybe he’d like a cheese sandwich.

It was deep dusk outside—a bit early for such a blueberry sky. Perhaps a storm was coming. The kitchen was dim and full of shadows. Annie turned and reached for the light switch. The movement gave her a direct view down the short leg of the hall.

Her heart accelerated until it was a drum thudding in her chest. “Geoff, come here.”

Her voice sounded—even to her—far away, distant, and apparently not loud enough. She tried again. “Geoff, I’m in the kitchen. Come. Right now, please.”

She heard him running down the hall in the semidarkness.

“Look.” Annie pointed to an intense bright light shining from under the closed door of the back bedroom.

Dom Justin

From the Waiting Place

We walked and talked as if that May afternoon in the year of Our Lord 1535 were an ordinary Thursday. Instead it was the day the man we Carthusians call the Venerable Father, our prior, had been most cruelly martyred and went to paradise. Also the day when the funnel of wind had come down and pulverized the cobbles outside our monastery church. Looking back, I have no doubt many thought that remarkable phenomenon a sign of heaven’s displeasure with the actions of the king, but even among ourselves such was our caution in those times that no one gave voice to the idea.

Dom Casper, however, could not hold back his tears when he spoke of the martyrdom of the Venerable Father, but the others—and I myself, who had certainly the least right to do so—talked more of the glory than the suffering. Dom Hilary, who always knew more than the rest (as if God himself spoke to Hilary on account of his superior virtue) told what he’d heard from Fra Herman, one of the brothers of our order who got about the countryside, unlike us monks who are vowed to almost total silence and solitude.

Dom Hilary said that, according to Herman, immediately the deed was done, a woman of the town ran straight to the house of the lay brothers and told them she’d been near enough to hear the Venerable Father’s last words. It was after he had been hanged and cut down, and after his belly was slit and his entrails pulled out, and while the knife was poised to enter his chest. According to this woman, he said, “Good Jesu, what will ye do with my heart?” Then, so the woman said, his heart was cut apart from him, and he gave up his spirit.

Dom Augustine, who was always a bit simple as well as contrary, said it was an odd thing to say. But I pointed out it was a mark of the Venerable Father’s certainty that his heart was going to Our Blessed Lord, since he had offered it so many years ago when first he entered the Charterhouse.

It was astonishing how easy it was for an imposter like myself to sound like a pious Carthusian. Meanwhile, as we walked and talked of paradise and martyrdom, I thought of how earlier that day, though to my knowledge there were no quails kept anywhere in the monastery, another of the creature’s eggs found its way to my cell. As always, the appearance of the speckled quail’s egg meant I was that very night commanded to visit the Jew of Holborn.

•

“Tell me again what you saw,” Geoff said.

“A bright light.” Minutes had gone by, but Annie’s voice still quivered. “White. Shining from under this door.”

Geoff opened it. Nothing in the small bedroom looked disturbed. “What do you mean by a white light?”

“Not ordinary. As if . . . phosphorescent.” It was a relief to find the right word.

He stepped across the threshold and flicked the light switch. A desk lamp went on. “Not even a fingerprint in the dust,” he said.

Annie stayed where she was, leaning against the wall. Her heart was no longer racing, and she could breathe, but there was a rushing sound in her head. Everything seemed to come through a filter between herself and the known universe. “You’re sure you didn’t see it?”

Geoff shook his head. “Sorry, I really didn’t.”

The white glow had still been there when he joined her in the doorway to the kitchen. It had faded while they walked toward it. “Maybe it was a lightning flash,” Annie said. It was pouring now. They could see the rain beating against the bedroom windows.

“This is English rain,” Geoff said. “It’s polite and quiet. No thunder and no lightning. At least not usually.”

Anyway, a flash of lightning would not have produced a sustained glow, and she had seen the light for many seconds. But she couldn’t let it go. “It could have been,” she insisted.

“I suppose.”

He sounded as if he were indulging a frightened and unreasonable child.

Annie turned and walked down the hall, putting on all the lights as she passed. She heard Geoff close the back bedroom door and come after her. In the drawing room she sat on the sofa, facing into the corner, her shoulders hunched over. The springs gave when he sat next to her. Annie clenched her hands in her lap.

“You can’t stay here, Annie. Come back to my place tonight. Tomorrow we’ll see about finding you somewhere else to live while you’re in London.”

“No.”

“You’re being ridiculous. How can you stay here? You’re trembling.”

“I’ll be fine.” She had four radios and a universal remote. What better defense against visits from the beyond? The rain looked to be coming in the open window. Annie got up and closed it.

“Annie, I want to help you.”

“Why?”

“Why not? And why are you being so stubborn?”

“I’m not stubborn, just practical.” The sense of everything being distant was dissolving. And the rushing sound in her head was gone.

“How is it practical to stay in a flat that scares you out of your wits?”

“It’s not the flat.” She turned. “And I’m scared, but not the way you mean. I can’t run away. There’s something I’m supposed to find out or . . .”—she hesitated—“accomplish. Some connection.”

“With what?”

“My job, what I came here to do. A connection with the Jew of Holborn. I would rather that were not true because it complicates things, but I’m convinced it is.”

“I take it you mean the job Weinraub sent you here to do.” His expression changed, got harder.

“Weinraub’s got nothing to do with this. Okay, he’s the one who gave me the assignment. But that only makes him the—I don’t know, the proximate cause. The instrument.”

“I still can’t see how staying here is—”

“Look,” Annie said, “maybe you’re smarter than I am. Or luckier. Or you had better judgment. Whatever—my life hasn’t gone the way yours has. I don’t have a fabulous career or live in a gorgeous house where everything is exactly the way I want it to be. But what I do know is how to hang tough. I know about that.”

The words were pulled out of her. She had certainly not meant to say that much. And if she told him more—if she tried to explain how booze had been first a lover whose embrace made the pain go away, then a scourge that robbed her of herself, but in the end left a place where she could pour molten steel—what were the chances he would understand?
It’s not that civilians don’t want to get it, Annie my girl. Only that they can’t.
Sidney O’Toole was usually right about stuff like that.

Annie made her choice and took a deep breath. “I’ve already been through the worst that can happen to me, Geoff. I’m an alcoholic. A recovering alcoholic,” she amended. “I’ve been sober for four years.”

“I know.”

“What?”

“I know you’re a recovering alcoholic. I’d pretty much figured it out by the time we had coffee at Chloe’s.”

The mark of Cain. The word
drunk
tattooed on her forehead. “How? Because I don’t drink?”

“That was one of the clues. Also, before you went to work for Weinraub, you were teaching in a third-rate girls’ school, despite the fact that by the time they made you Dr. Kendall, you’d gone through half a dozen professional journals in a blaze of peer-reviewed glory.”

She had Googled him, and he had Googled her. Only he’d done so with a great deal more efficiency. Her life wasn’t on display online the way his was. He’d had to dig deep.

He waited, probably until he was sure she’d figured it out. “I checked you out,” he admitted after a few seconds. “It’s what I do.”

“‘Chew them up and spit them out,’ as Jennifer put it.”

“Not usually people I meet socially. But Jenny mentioned the Shalom Foundation, so I knew you worked for Weinraub. That meant you had my full attention.”

“For God’s sake, Geoff—that business with Philip Weinraub and Rabin was, what—twenty or so years ago? And you’re still chasing his shadow? Who are you, Inspector Javert?”

“Weinraub made billions from those hedge funds he used to manage. He retired a few years back, but he remains active in some deeply suspect groups involved in Israeli affairs.”

“Sorry to belabor the point,” she said quietly, “but you have no proof.”

“You’re right,” Geoff said. “I have none. That’s my problem. I thought we were discussing yours. Staying here despite how the place makes you feel—that seems mad to me.”

“I know it’s a cliché, but you just don’t understand. I don’t know that you ever could.”

“Try me,” he said quietly.

She hesitated, gathered herself. “Everything that’s happened to me . . . No, that’s not right. Everything I did to myself, I had to undo. Piece by little piece. Publicly and out loud. Making myself totally naked. I cannot tell you what that kind of seeing, that kind of nakedness, does. AA thins you, it hollows you out, but it does not leave you more fragile. It leaves a kind of tensile strength. Am I making any sense?”

“Quite a bit of sense.”

“The strength,” she insisted, feeling still the need to persuade, “that’s the takeaway. It’s why however I feel about what’s happening here—and I admit it’s scary—I cannot quit.”

“I’m not asking you to quit. Simply to choose a different venue for the engagement.”

Annie shook her head. “Shalom has paid three months’ rent in advance. What would I tell them? A ghost chased me out? As you said before, in professional terms this assignment is the best thing that’s happened to me in ten years. If I can pull it off, I can write up my findings and publish. And that may set me on the way to better things. So I’m not going anywhere.”

Annie turned so he wouldn’t see the flush that stained her cheeks and busied herself with Mrs. Walton’s CDs, choosing one at random and shoving it into the player. John Coltrane’s unmistakable tenor sax competed with the sound of pelting rain beating on the windows.

Geoff stood up. “I think I’d best be on my way. Annie, you’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Fair enough, I’ll let myself out.” He started for the door, then turned back. “Annie—”

She looked at him expectantly.

“I think you’re very brave.”

Something about the way he said it—rather like the end of a story. She perceived a considerable amount of finality in the sound of the door closing behind him.

7

Most of Wednesday she didn’t get out of bed. The white light shining beneath the door had been vivid and completely apparent to her, but Geoffrey Harris, who had appeared seconds later and while it was still bright, had not seen it.

The only conclusion was that the ghost was speaking—or appearing, or chanting, or shining—directly to Annie Kendall. Whatever the monk wanted, and regardless of whether the direct line of sight between his ancient Charterhouse and the back bedroom of this flat was what made his visitations possible, his intention was to communicate with her. Moreover, in the past week he’d proven he was in charge. He came and went as he pleased. The phenomena that accompanied him could open windows and fling solid candlesticks across the room, even whirl her around until she lost consciousness, then leave his calling card in the form of red scrape marks on her body. This ghostly monk was not something she could study, not something or someone she could tame with her intelligence or the power of scholarship. Rather he had so far managed to control their encounters. If she gave in, followed wherever the ghost wanted to lead her, where would she end up? Not, she suspected, with the solution to the mystery she’d come to London to solve. Not with anything she could publish in a scholarly journal and thereby earn the renewed respect of her peers.

Days like this she always went back to the custody hearing, to Zachary Johnson’s statement to the judge, the words that ever since were permanently entwined in the double helix that was the Annie-ness of Annie. “Her apartment reeked of urine and feces. There was no food in the kitchen, and the only bottle of milk in the refrigerator was sour. My son was wet and hungry and alone, crying in a crib he shared with one tattered blanket.”