Crucified (23 page)

In the realm of divine art, the depth of your pockets counts.

You can't have your own private Vatican on a shoestring budget.

So what does heaven look like?

To one side of the Art Historian hung
New Jerusalem.
The heavenly city, the size of the moon, was made of see-through gold and precious stones, as it was in Revelation 21. No need for the sun when the glory of God shone through, casting off a rainbow of dazzling colors. Its water crystal clear, the River of Life flowed from the throne of Christ. The faithful at his feet would spend eternity listening to the lessons he would share. To augment the aura of this heavenly vision, the artist had mixed the paint with prisms that flashed rainbows if the light was right.

On the other side of the dying man hung
The Tree of Life.

Here, there was no death, crying, mourning, or pain. The eyes of the blind could see; the ears of the deaf could hear. The lame could leap, and the mute could shout for joy. Because all were pure creations, the rules of physics were gone. People could dance through locked doors and travel anywhere. With hate, grief, and trouble removed, love, joy, and peace reigned supreme.

Eating was pleasure, not necessity, and in this new Garden of Eden there grew a tree of life that bore twelve kinds of fruit each month. Shame equaled sin, so the fig leaves were no more, and the artist had rendered each naked body in erotic detail.

This was the painting the Art Historian swiveled his chair to face.

You'd think that with that to look forward to—instead of this blood disease, with its symptoms of fatigue, weakness, weight loss, bone pain, enlarged organs, and anemia—the Art Historian would yearn for the rejuvenation of heaven. But he had too much money in the here and now, and his faith in the afterlife wasn't strong enough to chance everything on a single roll of the dice. That's why he wanted to find the Holy Grail, even if he had to sell his soul to grab it.

A bird in the hand . . .

Before flying to Germany for the resurrection of the
Ace,
Lenny Jones had emailed the surviving crewmen and the relatives of the dead to say that he was bringing his grandfather's archive with him. On the night Balsdon was gutted by the Judas chair, the Legionary had found that email among the navigator's papers. Balsdon's archive recorded his suspicion that Jones was the double agent. Not only was Jonesy new to the crew, but he was also one of the three who never came home.

Wrath.

Ack-Ack.

Jonesy.

Earlier on in the same day that Wyatt, Liz, and Sweaty arrived in Germany, the Legionary—pretending to be a reporter—had greeted the
real
Lenny Jones at the airport.

Lenny told his soon-to-be killer that he was a stranger to the others. The Legionary clubbed him on the way to the hotel, then stored the body in the trunk to dump later. Because there was nothing in Trent Jones's archive to confirm Balsdon's suspicion that the mid-upper gunner was the Judas agent, the Legionary had assumed Lenny's identity and met the others the following day. When it turned out that none of them had brought archives of their own to Germany, the priest and the Art Historian abandoned the ploy. That's when Lenny's body was dumped in the river and left to float downstream, its face pulverized by hammer blows to hamper identification. Having left a secret note for Sweaty at his hotel, the Legionary and the Art Historian had trekked to London and waited for the old airman to join them.

"Did you tell the others?" was the first question the Legionary had asked.

"Against my better judgment, no," said Sweaty "What makes you think Jonesy was the Judas agent? And why the cloak-and-dagger routine to get me here?"

"I doubt you'd voice it in public—not with the others there—but I think you suspect that my granddad was the secret agent."

"Your note said you have proof."

The Legionary introduced him to the Art Historian.

"
I
have proof," said the older man. "A client offered to sell it to me at my gallery. It's a photograph of Trent Jones in a Nazi uniform. To check its authenticity, I traced Lenny to Germany and phoned him night before last."

"So that's why you left?" said Sweaty.

The Legionary nodded. "You're the last surviving member of the
Ace'
s crew. I was told the photograph is grainy and could be a fake. My mother was too young to remember her dad, so I need your confirmation if I'm to go public with my granddad's secret identity. If you can't say it's him, the puzzle remains."

"Show me the photo," said Sweaty.

"It's in my safe," said the dealer. "I don't know why Balsdon was killed, but I don't want to be next. I've kept this strictly need-to-know: Lenny and you."

"Where's the safe?"

"My gallery. Central London."

"Come on," the Legionary had said, picking up Sweaty's suitcase. "Let's have a look. Then I'll buy you lunch."

So now the Art Historian sat at his George III mahogany partner's desk, exhausted from his trip to the airport. People bustled to and fro on the street in front of the gallery. The sign on the door informed customers he was closed, but the dying man kept watch all the same.

The Art Historian listened.

But he couldn't hear shrieks from below.

The London under London was like a living organism.

From Roman times, its arteries had borne the city's fluids, its lungs had enabled it to breathe, its bones had given support, its muscles had endowed strength, its nerves had transmitted signals, and its bowels had disposed of wastes. Those infrastructures were long-forgotten rivers, underground railways, tunnels and tubes, pipes and passages, neo-gothic sewers, crypts and cellars—like this vault—that twisted and turned, layer on layer, through the netherworld of Hades or hell.

There was a constant hum of noise. The gurgling of water from taps and flushed toilets. The whoosh of underground trains snaking from station to station. The
fzzzzz
of electrical pulses surging through billions of wires. During the Blitz of the early 1940s, frightened Londoners had huddled in this dank, murky bomb shelter beneath the gallery like slaves in the hold of a ship while Hitler's Luftwaffe rained firebombs down on their homes.

Now, all it harbored was a captive old man.

Another turn of the screw . . .

Another crack of bones . . .

Sweaty was transported from this purgatory of pain back to the Second World War. Once more, his head was sheathed in a leather helmet and oxygen mask, and he seemed to be strapped into his wireless operator's seat, except that his arms and legs were tied. Somehow, this chair had been jettisoned from the
Ace
and had landed in the tube, bringing Sweaty face to face with that obnoxious wartime creation of London Transport—smug, sanctimonious "Billy Brown of London Town."

This same poster had taunted Sweaty during the war, when he and Balls had railed it down to London on a break to binge in bars and chat up girls. Instead, an air raid had forced them to scramble into the underground with droves of weary Londoners, each person paying one and a half pence for a tube ticket to save his life. With suitcases to pillow their heads, hundreds of poor wretches stretched along the tracks, eating from shopping baskets or sipping from bottles of milk and ginger pop as they tried to ignore the stench of plugged latrines.

Subconsciously, these cave dwellers feared being buried alive, for all had heard of the bomb that exploded above Balham Station, bursting a water main that drowned sixty-odd people.

In a pit, reduced to raw survival, what could be more intolerable than Billy Brown of London Town? In placards plastered everywhere, that despicable cartoon character dogged these fearful people with exhortations delivered in insufferable verse.

Down below the station's bright,

But here outside it's black as night.

Billy Brown will wait a bit

And let his eyes grow used to it.

Then he'll scan the road and see,

Before he crosses, if it's free.

Remembering when lights are dim

That cars he sees might not see him.

Another turn of the screw . . .

More cracking of brittle bones . . .

The old man couldn't help it. . .

Sweaty let out a scream . . .

And the scream shot down the elephant-like trunk of the oxygen mask, where it was recorded before it burst out and echoed around the concrete confines of this bunker. Squeezing his skull was another device from the Inquisition, also stolen from the tourist-trap museum up in York.

Another turn of the screw . . .

"Talk!"

And another shriek . . .

Unlike Balls and Jonesy, the radioman had not gathered an archive during the war. His memories were all stored in his brain, so his torturer was using the Inquisition's headcrusher to squeeze them out. The device looked like a skullcap—the zucchetto that crowns popes, cardinals, and bishops—with a propeller on top. The propeller was a crank with thin threading, so it took a lot of twists to screw the skullcap down toward the metal bar under Sweaty's chin.

Twist. . .

His clenched teeth were grinding to dust in the mask, and he choked with every gasp.

Twist.. .

Sweaty's skull was cracking along its fault lines.

Twist. ..

His eyes bugged out of their sockets and the blood vessels popped one by one.

Whoever was turning the screw, it wasn't Lenny Jones.

There was no doubt in Sweaty's compressed mind that he had fallen into the hands of the monster who had impaled Balls Balsdon on the Judas chair. He'd let his guard down because the Lenny Jones he'd met in Germany had seemed benign.

He'd reminded Sweaty of those evangelicals who knock on your door because God has ordained them to save your soul.

People like that had always given Sweaty the minor creeps, but he'd never expected to uncover a demon like this!

"Lenny" wasn't insane.

His curse went
deeper
than that.

The relentless squeeze of the headcrusher was focusing Sweaty's bugged eyes on the poster that had irked him so much during that London air raid . . .

He never jostles in a queue,

But waits his turn. Do you?

Sweaty had so hated Billy Brown of London Town that he'd used his pencil to scratch out his own pithy slogan . . .

You annoy so much, you really do.

I wish you dead. Do you?

Only in the moment before his head exploded did Sweaty come to realize that this little fucker with the pointed nose looked like Dennis the Menace's dad.

"You can talk through clenched teeth," the Inquisitor yelled in his helmet-covered ear.

Twist. . .

"Talk!"

Twist. . .

"Talk!"

Another turn of the screw . . .

Until . . .

Sartre wrote, "Hell is other people."

Sartre was wrong.

Hell was the last thing Sweaty saw before oblivion.

Hell was Billy Brown of London Town.

+ + + 

The Art Historian perked up when he heard footsteps climbing the stairs from the cellar.

"Well?" he asked of the shadow in the doorframe.

"Nothing."

That was disappointing.

Only when the shadow slipped into the glow of the gallery did the Art Historian gasp with shock, involuntarily crossing himself from brain to gut and shoulder to shoulder. One glance at the Legionary's face—all splattered with blood and brain matter, and pierced with shards of skull—and his doubts about his faith evaporated. Surely, he was face to face with Satan.

Now, more than ever, he had to find the Holy Grail and extend his existence on earth, since he knew for certain that when he died, he would be damned to hell for what he had set in motion by summoning the Secret Cardinal to New York.

"Who's next?" snarled the Legionary.

      
FRANCE, 1944

As he did every day in this all-or-nothing struggle with the Allied forces that had beached in Normandy on D-day, a month and a half ago, Field Marshal Erwin "the Desert Fox" Rommel visited the battlefront. His old adversary in North Africa, Bernard "Monty" Montgomery, would soon try to smash his way out of the frustrating bottleneck at Caen in a push toward Paris, and that had to be stopped. After talking strategy with his frontline commanders in the First SS Panzer Corps, Rommel got into his car for the long drive back to his chateau. It was after four in the afternoon on July 17. The air was hot and heavy. So was enemy action along the highway.

Allied warplanes owned the air. The road was strewn with burning trucks and other vehicles, some with dead drivers still behind the wheel. The route was also cluttered with Frenchmen fleeing in horse-or ox-drawn carts flapping white cloths they hoped would spare them from the wrath of airborne cannons and machine guns. As Rommel's car roared by, raising clouds of dust, those who recognized him doffed their hats.

In the rear sat two officers and an air sentry looking out for planes. The field marshal sat with the driver, a road map on his knees. His faraway stare suggested he was planning the next day's battles, but actually he was thinking back to his glorious triumph two years ago under a broiling African sun . . .