The Pilgrim Conspiracy

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  ‘You’re right,’ Fay said.

  ‘But this sort of thing isn’t confined to the past,’ Mark said. ‘The same sort of founding myth is being used again today. You can see the same elements in the Jewish people returning to the promised land of Israel, the myth of the empty land, the problem of how to deal with the people who already live there, and the old stories being used to justify the new invasion.’

  Peter had stopped being amazed by how easy it was to debunk stories from the Bible once you started looking into them. The Exodus story had gone on to form modern Israel’s national myth. To a large extent, it was used to justify the state’s existence: ‘God promised this land to us. It says so in our Bible.’ It was the ultimate mix of fact and fiction.

  ‘Just one more thing,’ Mark said, ‘and then I’ll shut up about it. As well as that weird thing about Moses and his basket, there’s something else I’d not really given much thought to until recently: what about all the gold that these supposedly poor slaves were able to take out of Egypt and into the desert? I read in one of Maarten ‘t Hart’s books that you’d need to melt down an incredible number of earrings to make a golden calf that was no bigger than a field mouse. And since the melting point of gold is a thousand and sixty-four degrees Celsius, you’d need a furnace to melt them. And then you’d need to make a mould of a calf to pour the molten gold into. Would the Israelites have had that sort of advanced technology in the desert? It’s not something you could just make with a chisel! Afterwards, Moses grinds the golden calf into a powder, scatters it on the water and makes the Israelites drink it. How did Moses manage to grind the gold down to a dust so fine that it didn’t sink?’

  ‘Questions, questions … So many questions.’ Judith laughed and topped up her wine glass. ‘But anyway, everyone, whether we’re supposed to take all those stories literally or not, I’m about to start a new chapter in my own story. And that’s something you can all take literally.’

  They all stood up, which gave the moment a note of solemnity that Judith hadn’t intended.

  ‘Well,’ Judith said, ‘today, we’re saying a toast to life here, but tomorrow …’ Before she continued, she took a drink from the wine in her overfull glass, spilling some of it onto the table. ‘But tomorrow, I’ll be toasting life in Boston.’

  ‘L’chaim.’

  To life.

  Fay’s phone had been pinging with messages all evening. ‘Sorry, everyone,’ she said. ‘I’m getting so many messages. It’s not usually like this.’ She looked at her phone’s screen. ‘That’s … odd,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ Peter asked.

  ‘A message about Jenny and her husband Herman,’ she said, putting her phone back down on the table. ‘Jenny’s a member of Loge Ishtar too. So is her husband,’ she explained. ‘Do you remember them, Peter? There was a woman at the open evening who jumped up from her seat while we were doing the interviews.’

  ‘Yes, I remember her.’

  ‘When we were electing a new chairman,’ she said to Mark and Judith, ‘she was one of the candidates, but she wasn’t elected. And now her husband, Herman …’ She shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘Go on,’ Peter said. ‘What about him?’

  Fay regained her composure. ‘It turns out that Herman was arrested yesterday. On suspicion of Coen’s murder.’

  PART TWO

  THE NEW WORLD

  BOSTON

  Chapter 25

  Judith had gone to the library, so Peter had the apartment to himself all morning. They had planned to meet up after lunch and finally do the Freedom Trail, a walking tour around downtown Boston. It passed by the local landmarks that were associated with the American War of Independence of 1775 to 1783.

  Peter had been in America for almost three weeks – he was due to fly home in just two days – but this was the first chance they’d had to take the tour. He’d flown to Washington and stayed there for two days, but nothing had come of his plan to visit New York. He had enjoyed spending time in Judith’s company so much that he hadn’t wanted to leave.

  As he tidied up the apartment, he listened to – more than he actually watched – a talk show on TV. He had noticed on his first day in Boston that Americans were absolutely crazy about talk shows. You could watch one at any time of the day if you wanted. A ticker running along the bottom of the screen kept you informed of the latest news. An endless stream of alerts, disasters, murders, shootings and traffic accidents flowed past the viewer on a bright yellow bar, like an overprotective mother constantly warning her children about every imaginable calamity.

  Every fifteen minutes, a weatherman or woman would appear to give an update on recent meteorological developments. It was a constant bombardment of information that was regularly interrupted by commercials. According to the calculations Peter had made for his own amusement, the adverts lasted just as long and sometimes even longer than the programmes themselves.

  The word ‘apartment’ was possibly too grand a description for Judith’s open-plan kitchen and living room, bathroom and bedroom. But she had been lucky enough to get a place on the Harvard campus itself, in a building reserved for researchers from other countries. Although the units were clearly intended to be single occupancy, a blind eye was turned when visitors had guests to stay for a while. Peter slept in the living room on a sofa bed that he neatly made and folded away again each morning.

  Judith always got up before him, taking a shower before going back to her bedroom, wrapped in a beach towel and surrounded by a cloud of steam. They had formed a tacit agreement on the day he’d arrived that Peter would wait until Judith was back in her room before he got up and took a shower himself. By the time he emerged from the bathroom and padded barefoot into the kitchen, Judith would be making coffee and topping slices of bread with cheese or ham. It had become a sort of polite ballet for grown-ups in which they carefully danced around each other without touching.

  Judith spent most of her days in the cavernous Widener Library, a dream come true for any academic, whatever their field. It was the university’s flagship library and housed more than three and a half million volumes on almost a hundred kilometres of shelving. Many of the books were housed in vast underground rooms that stretched beyond the walls and under the campus lawns outside.

  Harry Elkins Widener, after whom the building was named, had been an avid book collector and a Harvard graduate. In the spring of 1912, he went to England with his parents to purchase rare books, but they had the misfortune of making the return journey on the Titanic. He and his father drowned in the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. His mother survived and donated two million dollars, an unbelievable sum at the time, to Harvard for the construction of a library in their memory.

  Judith had organised a visitor’s pass for Peter, so over the last few weeks, he’d been able to spend time working next to her on his laptop in one of the reading rooms.

  Back in Leiden, he had parted warmly with Fay, but an unmistakable feeling of distance had crept in between them, perhaps even a certain coldness. Neither of them had mentioned it, but Peter had known – and he was sure the same went for Fay – that these three weeks in the States would be decisive for their relationship.

  How much will we miss each other, he had wondered. What conclusions might we come to when we’re away from each other for so long?

  They emailed and texted each other regularly throughout the day. Often, their messages were little more than businesslike reports of what they had been up to, but now and then, there was a glimpse of their relationship’s former sparkle, the warmth and gentle teasing that they had taken for granted for so long.

  Before he turned off the television, Peter sat down to watch a news report about two men who had disappeared while on a fishing trip in Plymouth Bay a few days earlier. Fishermen had found their empty boat bobbing in the sea. The sea had been calm that day, and according to the police, it was unlikely that the men had been swept overboard. They suspected foul play.

&
nbsp; Footage of a large fishing vessel towing the little boat into Boston Harbor was shown over and over, like the trailer for an upcoming movie.

  Peter closed the door to Judith’s apartment behind him and then strolled along the paths that took him over the campus’s perfectly manicured lawns. Students milled about all around him, hurrying to lectures with books under their arms, or studying and chatting on the innumerable chairs that seemed to be permanently set up outside. Joining the throng were hundreds of tourists trailing behind the students who were giving them guided tours of the campus.

  Leiden is a great city to be a student, Peter thought as he watched the young people around him with a pang of envy, but what a dream come true it would be to study here.

  He had arranged to meet Judith near the enormous statue of John Harvard, the university’s founder. The statue’s left shoe gleamed like gold, as though a fastidious shoeshine had spent decades concentrating on just that one spot. Countless people had touched the statue’s foot over the years because it was thought to bring good luck. It was said that children who touched it would get a place at Harvard one day, so many visitors lifted up their little ones to perform the traditional ritual.

  Peter arrived at the statue early and took a seat on one of the nearby chairs. The walking tour would end at the campus, and afterwards, he had an appointment with the Freemasons who were based in an imposing building on the edge of Boston Common, the city’s central park. Fay had got in touch with the lodge for him, and they had immediately offered to give him a tour.

  He had arranged to meet up with Tony Vanderhoop the next day for a visit to Plimoth Plantation, an open-air museum where a seventeenth-century village had been recreated as it would have looked during the time of the Pilgrims.

  He smelled her familiar perfume before he saw her.

  Peter felt someone come up behind him and plant a kiss on his cheek.

  Judith.

  She laughed, delighted that she had been able to surprise him.

  He grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

  She was wearing a flower-print summer dress that showed off a hint of cleavage. Around her neck was the silver Star of David necklace that seemed to light up whenever it caught the sunlight.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They headed for the campus exit. According to tradition, students could only pass through the main gate twice: once on their first day as Harvard freshmen and a second time on graduation day. During the rest of their time at Harvard, they used the smaller gates on either side, as Peter and Judith did today.

  Inside the subway station, people were posing for photographs under the HARVARD sign. Someone had put a pram underneath it to take a photo of their baby, as if the sign might have the power to preordain their child’s future.

  What would Arminius and Gomarus have said about this idea of predestination, Peter wondered with amusement.

  South Station, Boston’s central station, was just four stops away. They bought coffee at the Starbucks on the concourse.

  ‘Have there been any developments in Leiden?’ Judith asked. ‘With the murder, I mean. I have to admit; I’ve barely given it a thought since I arrived.’

  ‘Fay mentioned it in an email earlier this week, actually,’ Peter said. ‘Herman is still in custody, waiting for his trial. It’s been about six weeks now. Apparently, he doesn’t want to talk, so there haven’t been any new developments as far as that goes.’

  ‘Any sign of a motive?’

  ‘There’s speculation in the media that it could have been a crime of passion. Herman wanted to prove his love to Jenny by showing her that he’d do anything for her. That he’d even be willing to commit murder for her by assassinating the man who stopped her from becoming chairwoman.’

  ‘That’s not a very strong motive, is it?’

  ‘People have been murdered for less. The media is saying that their marriage was in trouble. They’re making it out to be the desperate act of a man who wanted to show how much he loves his wife. But who knows? It does sound absurd, but like I said, there are some who would need even less reason to murder someone.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’

  ‘Because what’s more … I think Herman is really the only concrete thing they have. They still don’t know for certain who was there that evening. And it turns out that everyone they do know about has an alibi. They were all seen by someone.’

  ‘People could be providing alibis for each other, of course.’

  ‘Yes, that’s possible too.’

  They passed the sign for the Boston Tea Party Museum, which was entirely devoted to the American colonists’ protest against the taxes imposed on them by the British government. On December 16th, 1773, sixty men, who would later come to be known as the Sons of Liberty, stormed the English cargo ships docked in Boston Harbor. The ships were full of tea imported from China, which they threw into the water. This was a pivotal moment in the American Revolution in which the United States fought for their independence from England.

  Quite a revolutionary city, Boston, Peter thought as they made their way to the marina via the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a long park that curled around downtown Boston.

  ‘So it was the perfect murder,’ Judith said.

  ‘The perfect murders. Because there was the young man in the Galgewater too. They’ll find out who was behind it all, sooner or later. I’m sure they will. Although, I read a pretty comprehensive report about it in the Leidsch Dagblad that gave a bit of an update on developments in the case and it looks like all of their leads have been dead ends so far.’

  They had reached the waterfront now. On Peter’s first weekend in Boston, they had gone on a whale-watching cruise in a marine sanctuary where the whales came in search of food at this time of year. It had been awe-inspiring to see the mighty humpbacks rise ten to fifteen metres above the ocean then dive back beneath the waves, their broad tails languidly slapping the water’s surface.

  A mother and her calf had calmly swum past the exact place where he and Judith had been standing, as if they wanted to be admired. And, out of the blue, Peter had found himself welling up.

  As he’d wiped away his tears with the back of his hand, Judith had put her arm around him.

  ‘Now that’s why I love you, Peter,’ she had said. ‘Such a big, strong man, crying at the sight of a whale.’

  He had laughed and pulled her closer to him.

  They walked to the Old North Church, which wasn’t really the start of the Freedom Trail, but it was in a lovely Italian neighbourhood. Wandering through the narrow streets where the restaurants displayed their menus in Italian outside, they could easily imagine themselves in Italy.

  The church was quiet. Apart from an attendant at the door, they were the only people inside.

  The rows of seats on either side of the aisle were divided into low-walled wooden boxes like office cubicles. Judith took a photo of Peter in the pew that Teddy Roosevelt had once sat in, grinning like a football fan sitting in the team’s dressing room on his favourite player’s bench.

  The church was famous for the role it had played in the mythologised story of Paul Revere. Revere was a silversmith and amateur dentist who had been relatively unknown in his own time. But the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had immortalised him in the poem ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’. Written forty years after Revere’s death, it told the story of how he had ridden out alone to warn the revolutionaries that the English were coming.

  In the early days of the American Revolution, Revere helped to gather information about the British troops who were encamped in and around Boston. On the evening of April 18th, 1775, the sexton of the Old North Church hung two lanterns in the steeple to signal that the British troops were on their way to the towns of Lexington and Concord to confiscate the rebels’ weapons. Revere had told him to hang one lantern if the troops were approaching by land, and two lanterns if they were coming by sea.Upon seeing two lanterns glowing in the church, Revere immediately
mounted a borrowed horse and headed for Lexington and Concord with some of his comrades to warn the rebels. He made it to Lexington, but before he could reach Concord, he was intercepted and detained by the British. The other members of his party avoided capture and managed to reach Concord. Their warnings allowed the rebel militia to prepare for the first skirmishes in the American War of Independence.

  Peter and Judith left the church and walked to the Paul Revere House. They decided not to go inside but spent some time browsing in the gift shop next door.

  ‘I’ve always found the whole Paul Revere thing a bit baffling,’ Peter said when they left the shop. ‘Because there’s just no truth at all in that story about him riding out alone to warn the rebels. I mean, he was stopped before he even got to Concord. His anonymous comrades were the ones who raised the alarm there, but they aren’t mentioned anywhere in the poem. He didn’t gallop from village to village shouting, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” He was just one of many messengers. And on top of that, they actually spread the news discreetly because not everyone in the villages was against the British.’

  ‘But people still believe it.’

  ‘Yes, and people continue to believe it even though it’s demonstrably untrue. You’ve got to wonder why the myth is still being perpetuated.’

  ‘A country needs myths. We talked about that when we had dinner at La Bota. Something to bring people together, a communal story. You need a foundation to build on, even if it’s imaginary.’

  ‘That’s true, and I understand how it works, but it amazes me that they still teach this story to children at school. Look what we just saw in the gift shop: all the picture books, and quotes from the poem printed on mugs and T-shirts, even on the American flag.’