Bristol House (51 page)

“Annie,” Si Cohen said, “is a bargain at any price.”

Someone called Yossi’s name from the kitchen, and he excused himself and left. “Just as well,” Geoff said. “Otherwise I’d have to kill him. Because of that header.”

“He means,” Cohen explained to Annie, “that Spurs, the team I support, played Portsmouth, the team Geoff supports, in the cup semifinal. And it was Yossi who put Portsmouth out of the competition with a goal in overtime. The absolute best header of last season. Everyone agrees.”

Annie had no idea what the FA Cup was. But she was definitely developing opinions about English football. “Not in my view,” she said. “Someday I’ll tell you about the greatest header in this or any other season.”

Geoff grinned and hugged her closer. “It’s not a header because of where it lands. It’s a ball you hit with your head rather than your feet.”

The sports banter dried up and blew away, as such talk always did at funerals. “Geoffrey,” Cohen began, “I don’t want to pry, but . . .”

“We said the prayer,” Geoff said. “Not five minutes after I got there.” He explained about Maggie knowing the words. Si Cohen smiled when he heard that. Geoff skipped what Maggie had said about Cohen’s wife.

Yossi returned, carrying a plate he held out for the rabbi’s inspection. “I told the group simple food and that hard-boiled eggs were traditional. So Atkins”—he nodded in the direction of the big man Annie had met before, the one who owned the restaurant across from the Temple—“brought hard-boiled quail eggs in, and I quote, ‘champagne aspic layered with ribbons of parsley and a balsamic vinegar reduction.’ A
goyisher kop,
but the guy can cook.”

You didn’t have to be Jewish to get it. Even Annie laughed.

“Quail eggs,” Simon Cohen said after Yossi left, “we will talk about later. Whenever you have time, Annie darling. Maybe Sunday for tea.”

***

The spooks were not so accommodating. Under the circumstances, they were willing to wait until after the funeral, but the next day Dr. Kendall and Mr. Harris were expected at the ordinary-looking high-rise on the South Bank side of Vauxhall Bridge. The building, as all London knew, where the spies were.

Annie and Geoff were debriefed separately. Annie got someone who, according to the brass plate on the desk of an otherwise featureless room, was called Malcolm Fallsworthy. “Please sit down, Dr. Kendall.”

She did so. And smiled and waited. Her plan was to answer his questions as honestly as she could without volunteering anything; the goal being to avoid discussing the Carthusian in the back bedroom of Bristol House. If the monk came up despite her best efforts, she would depend on Rabbi Hazan and Einstein and T. S. Eliot and the river. Play the academic card and drown him in speculative analysis. Make it sound absurd for him to say
You’re a drunk and you’ve been hallucinating and I have your rap sheet right here, so tell me why I should believe a word you say.

“Now,” Fallsworthy said, “please tell me how you became involved with Philip Jeremiah Weinraub.”

Annie went through the approach from the Shalom Foundation, ending with the fact that she had made arrangements to arrive in London the beginning of May.

“Canceled your contract, you mean.” Fallsworthy was stating a fact, not asking a question. “With . . . the Davis School.” That last after a glance at his notes.

“Yes.”

“I see. I presume that was because Weinraub was particularly eager for you to start on his project immediately. Any idea why that might be, Dr. Kendall? The haste, for one thing. You in particular, for another.”

They had come immediately to a slippery slope, but she saw no possibility of avoiding it. “At the time I had no idea why the need for speed. I now believe it was because Weinraub had insider knowledge. I think that’s why, after I’d been working in London three weeks, he showed up at the Connaught Hotel and began to apply real pressure. It makes sense only if he’d become aware that the pope was much sicker than the Vatican was publicly admitting. So there was going to be a conclave sooner rather than later.” They had found Weinraub’s packed suitcase in the tunnel, ready for his trip to Rome. It contained a perfectly tailored white cassock and matching beanie, along with the last word in modern-day Vatican chic, pointy-toed red shoes. His papal delusions were thus a matter of record.

“As for why me . . .” Annie bit her lip, then plunged. “I haven’t managed to do anything important professionally in some years. I think Philip Weinraub believed he could manipulate me and that I’d be so grateful for the opportunity to do possibly noteworthy research, I wouldn’t ask awkward questions.”

“Which did not, however, turn out to be the case.”

“It did not.”

According to the
International Herald Tribune
and
L’Osservatore Romano,
the carabinieri used bomb-sniffing dogs. The explosives had been planted in the crawl space over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, directly above the pointing finger of God. The papers reported that a Swiss Guard and a senior member of the Vatican Secretariat of State, a Croatian priest, were being held for questioning.

“Can you explain, Dr. Kendall, exactly what this ‘noteworthy’ research was supposed to be?”

She told him about the Jew of Holborn and the Judaica scattered across Europe in his name. And she had the feeling he already knew a good deal about both. “I was to discover the source of the treasure.”

“Which Mr. Weinraub believed to be here in London.”

“Yes. I’ve come to believe he thought there was a Templar connection.” Every conspiracy theorist with an Internet connection wound up with the Templars. She was tossing him a well-chewed bone.

Fallsworthy did not take it. “Was there not one particular piece of Judaica in which Weinraub was particularly interested?”

“I can’t say exactly. He was demanding and insistent about a lot of things.” She was not going to give him Maggie’s ancient treasure. Nor would Geoff.
I never asked for it or expected it, Annie. But if we’re right and after five hundred years, maybe longer, I’m next in line . . . I’m not going to be the one to break the secret chain.
She wouldn’t mention the Agnus Dei either. Weinraub might talk about it, but what could he say? She gave it to me and it burned up in my hand. Without searing his flesh no less. Screw Weinraub. He could say whatever he wanted and it would simply be put down to the fulminations of a madman.

Fallsworthy tented his fingers and held them below his chin. Just like Rabbi Cohen—maybe they taught the gesture in spook school. “We have been watching Philip Jeremiah Weinraub for some time,” he said. “We were asked to do so by our counterparts in Israel. When Mr. Harris came in a few days ago, to talk about your suspicions concerning the Shalom Foundation and the Temple Mount, they fit with the thesis we had been formulating. Turns out, however, we were all wrong. Mr. Harris, the Mossad, the FBI, our associates in France—all of us were guarding, so to speak, the wrong barn. Meanwhile the horse was galloping off in the opposite direction. But you and Mr. Harris, Dr. Kendall, managed—one might say in the nick of time—to get it right. Can you tell me how you came to the conclusion that the target was Rome rather than Jerusalem?”

Because a ghost shoved me in the back so my cell dropped, and when I bent down to get it, the evidence hit me in the face.
No way she’d say that. Not if he took her to a dungeon and applied thumbscrews. “A lot of the clues played to my particular historical expertise,” Annie said. “And Geoff Harris has excellent political contacts. In the end, I expect we got lucky.”

“Luck does seem to have played a part.” Fallsworthy managed a thin-lipped smile. “Let’s move on. The PJ have also been watching Weinraub, and they—”

“The PJ?”

“The Police Judiciaire, our opposite number in France. Like us they surveil dissidents as a matter of course. Weinraub’s followers are, however, a very small group—at most a few dozen people worldwide. All are in custody now. They call themselves”—Fallsworthy looked again at his notes—“the True Obedience of Avignon. Any light to shed on that, Dr. Kendall? As an historian.”

She explained about the disputed conclave in 1377, and the Clement VII who was the antipope. “But that there would still be people willing to kill over that argument seems insane.”

The cardinals had refused to leave Vatican City as long as their conclave remained in official session. They were kept under guard in St. Peter’s while the search was conducted. Once the bomb was defused, they went back to business. White smoke from the Vatican that very morning. The Catholic Church had a new pope, a French cardinal as it happened. But from Paris, not Avignon.

“So it might seem,” Fallsworthy said. “But there were those two odd deaths of elderly cardinals, both of whom were left with quail eggs in their mouths. And a woman who was murdered in Alsace. It’s not immediately clear why she was killed, but she too was left with a quail-egg calling card. I’m particularly interested in what you can tell us about that, Dr. Kendall.” Fallsworthy shuffled the papers on his desk. “According to what you said when you first came out of the tunnel, that’s what Weinraub called himself—not the pope, rather the Speckled Egg.”

She’d been a blathering, burbling idiot, and she couldn’t now remember exactly what she’d said, only the feel of Geoff’s arms around her and the ferocious way he’d fended off the questions the two guys with him were hurling at her.
Later. She’s in no state to talk now. Unless of course you want to give me material for a great show about MI6 harassing a visiting scholar . . .
“That is what Weinraub said, Mr. Fallsworthy. That he was the Speckled Egg.”

Fallsworthy looked at him for a moment, then went on. “Two clerics,” he repeated, “and one rather ordinary Frenchwoman in a tiny Alsatian village. I know what you told our people about the old cardinals, but the woman . . .”

“I don’t know.” Annie stared him down. And hallelujah, she didn’t blush. Maybe because she was keeping quiet about the little she did know to protect Clary and his unorthodox arrangements with the French police, Judiciaire or otherwise. “You said Weinraub had only a small group of followers. Do you know who actually did all this killing?”

“Assassins for hire mostly,” Fallsworthy said.

“But not in my case,” she said quietly. “I promise you. He was definitely prepared to kill me himself.”

“Fired and missed at least once. We know that, Dr. Kendall. It is precisely why we were immediately able to charge him and put him in prison. As for the change in modus operandi, you arrived with no warning and he perceived you as an existential threat. In the main, however, he outsourced his killing. Not surprising, since we now know he had longstanding connections to tap into. Mr. Harris was quite right, incidentally, Weinraub was born Philippe Wein.”

Annie did not say that she’d never doubted Geoff’s information, or point out that he obviously had better sources than the world’s cops. Either that or he tried harder. She nodded and didn’t comment. Fallsworthy went on speaking. “The Weins are an old Alsatian family. Financiers of many generations. But they were tarnished by associations with the Nazis in the forties, and a decade later they were connected to money laundering for a notorious French criminal ring operating out of Marseilles. Apparently soon after that scandal broke, Philippe Wein’s parents moved to New York. Ten years later Wein senior was making a great deal of money on Wall Street. We believe that provoked him to change his name.”

Annie contrived to maintain a blank expression. He was ignoring Weinraub’s years of masquerading as a Jew and associating himself with the Temple radicals—to the point of attracting the attention of the Mossad—but she didn’t want to go there either.

“Apparently,” Fallsworthy was saying, “the channels between French organized crime and the Wein family remain open. Given that plus his wealth, it wasn’t difficult for Mr. Weinraub to find his contract killers, even some with bomb-planting expertise and a reach into Rome.”

At last, an explanation for the trips to Strasbourg. Geoff had been puzzling about that. Annie did not intend to explain it to MI6—they could do their own police work. “This surveillance you tell me was ongoing,” she said. “How come it never turned up the fact that Weinraub was hiring hit men?”

“I doubt anyone watching him made exactly that connection.” Fallsworthy was doing his best not to sound defensive. “It was, after all, two Roman Catholic cardinals who died, and the proprietor of an Alsatian grocery shop. In the case of Weinraub, the danger was supposed to be of an incident at the Temple Mount. As I understand it, you thought that as well, Dr. Kendall. Until something changed your mind. Can you tell me what that something was?”

“Pure happenstance. I dropped my cell phone and had to bend down to get in.” She blurted out the words and realized she had walked right into it. Nothing to do but keep going. She explained how the clue in the mural made them realize the focus of the Shalom Foundation was Vatican City, not the Temple Mount. “According to what I overheard, Weinraub knew the clue in the mural existed, but not exactly where it was or what it meant.”

“Ah yes, the mural. That seems to be at the heart of your involvement in this affair, doesn’t it, Dr. Kendall?”

“It seems so.” Maybe she could learn to control the blushes. Think of something else, like a guy trying not to have a boner.

“And you were living in the Bristol House flat as a result of a suggestion from”—he consulted his notes—“a Miss Sheila MacPherson, Mr. Weinraub’s secretary in New York.”

“Yes. The flat’s owner, Mrs. Walton, is her aunt. I’ve been wondering about the two of them. Are they members of Weinraub’s group?”

“No. Weinraub reached out to Miss MacPherson as he did to you. In her case, he brought her to New York from Edinburgh. It seems Sheila MacPherson is one of those people who believe the Jews must return en masse to the Holy Land so that the Second Coming of Christ can take place. She thought she was helping speed that day by working for the Shalom Foundation. What she was actually doing was enabling her employer to place you in the Bristol House flat. Presumably”—he looked up—“Mr. Weinraub believed your skill set to be what was wanted there.”