by Jackson, Gil
The phone went dead; Major Mahon smiled sensed foreboding.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 21 – 1997
Hamilton felt like shit. He had a headache belonging to three people: Nauseas, Groggy, and Queer. All of whom he disliked. His eyes felt they had been strobed by a car engine timer for hours on end. And apart from his body feeling as if it had been trampled by an elephant with attitude the rest of him felt OK — he was at least coming round which he supposed was a blessing apart from the face that was looking down on him, Sister Annie Carter. He remembered now, and took a swing at her and missed by a mile. He had little strength in his arms and she had easily arrested his assault. He tried again, but she had him.
‘I’m not the enemy’.
‘Can I be the judge of that?’ he snapped back at her without thinking but gave no further resistance. He was going to have to think this through. He remembered two guys having jumped him, and injecting him. He was conscious; he couldn’t move himself properly. Bundled into a car and driven off. An accident with another vehicle. A shooting. The black driver had a bullet in his forehead. The driver unconscious after impacting the windscreen. Blood — he remembered that — everywhere. He remembered wondering if any of it was his, it was, but not all of it.
‘It’s as well we came for you when we did, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so rough on you if you’d not told Max Stenna about our lady, your newspaper office has more bugs in it than a flea circus convention, did you know that? — I said it would be dangerous but you’ve got to know everything haven’t you? And if that wasn’t bad enough we’ve had to kill again. You’ve a great deal to thank Max for, not to mention your grandmother.’
‘Grandmother! What’s she to do with any of this?’
‘Never mind that now, you’re safe and they’re called Cromwell’s.’
‘Cromwell’s? What kind of fanciful story have you fucking concocted now? You of this fucking planet, ma’m?’
‘Oooo! If you’re going to continue with your blaspheming I’ll put you out again.’
‘OK! OK! But put yourself in my place.’
‘At this moment in time?’
He nodded.
‘You rest. Sleep and I’ll be back. You’ll be perfectly safe where you are.’
‘I don’t call being with you particularly safe.’
She smiled. ‘Live with it, you’re being held by professionals.’
The door closed. He tried to move his arms again, but anything more than lifting them a couple of inches was a strain. Against his better judgment — for he needed energy — he decided on sleep, closed his eyes and was away with the fairies in seconds.
* * *
Father Milligan was speaking on his phone when Annie Carter walked into his office. He looked up at her. His face told her nothing. ‘Someone tried to kill Hamilton Fitch after he left here.’
‘You’re not serious? ... For what reason? ... Is he?’
‘Scratches. You any idea who might be behind it?’
‘None at all. Have the police been informed?’
‘No, I thought it might be prudent under the circumstances to keep it to ourselves for a while.’
‘Very wise decision. Where is he now?’
‘Charlie’s. Anyway, what of the girl, any sign of life yet?’
‘Nothing. We’re holding our breath. Perhaps she doesn’t know she isn’t dead!’
Annie Carter spoke authoritatively. ‘Not surprising, it has afterall been a long time. She’ll wake in her own good time I expect. Hard to imagine someone like her playing games. Let’s hope she doesn’t decide to take up residence.’ She paused trying to make sense of something that she had tried to make sense of since she was seconded to this second coming. ‘It’s difficult though, Father. All of this. We keep faith in beliefs that have little foundation, and question those same beliefs when they become flesh. Why us? Why are we the ones to be touched by revelations as fundamentally important as this’ You’d think, He’d want to speak with the leader of the race, wouldn’t you?—’
‘Tch tch, heresy, Sister, you could be thrown out of the order for remarks like that. Who’d you think He’d contact, the President, the Queen of England? In the known cosmos the size of which no of us can get a handle on, none of us is particularly important. She happened on our doorstep. And I’m as lost as the next man. This is no Independence Day film. Sometimes, I wish I’d never had my eyes opened in this. Second coming? I was perfectly happy living in ignorance and harmony with nature and for that I find the strength that the likes of Charlie O’Hare, that’s suffered this all his life, all the more remarkable.’
‘Now, Father, Charlie might not be an academic, but he’s as educated as any.’
‘I know that, of course, I know that, Good Lord, the man can hold the highest in the land in theological conversation, it’s not that, it’s his damned immovability of faith I find so difficult to comprehend.’ He looked around and whispered, ‘He could reprimand the Pope! as a prelude to doing something about child abuse within our order first.’
She shook her head expressing her eyebrows.
* * *
Hamilton showered and dressed. Found a drinks cabinet; mixed himself orange and lemonade to flush through what he had been given, and surprisingly felt pretty good. Settling into a large leather chair he looked around the room. It looked like it belonged to a schoolteacher. There were banks of books in library shelves that filled the wall. By his side, a table with a reading lamp and a copy of his newspaper with a story by Max Stenna. He casually picked it up and gasped at the story that filled the front page; two and five. It was a fire at a company called Ocean International. Five employees perished; part of one of the building reduced to a shell. It went on about it being founded by Frederik Spannocs, an example of the American dream, with quotes by the man himself: Rags to riches. My story. Ocean International being his proud boast for the enrichment of the American way of life. The paper was dated July 27. His mouth opened and he looked at his watch. July 30. He had lost three days of his life somewhere and couldn’t think what could have possibly have happened to him since.... That’s all it was, surely, when he left Max Stenna’s office.
There came a knock at the door, and a woman of housekeeping appearance opened it.
‘Mr. O’Hare would like you to join him for dinner, if you’re feeling up to it, Mr. Finch.’
‘Mr. O’Hare. Who is Mr. O’Hare?’
‘Why this is his house, sir.’
‘I’d as soon leave his house.’
She smiled. ‘And I’m sure you will, but I think Mr. O’Hare would like to see you first. Dinner will be served in five minutes.’
She closed the door, and he hurriedly tidied himself before letting himself out of the room that he had by all account spent the last three days. The housekeeper was waiting outside and directed him to the dining room where a smiling man, standing against the fireplace turned to greet him. He had a ruddy complexion and red curly hair and came over and introduced himself. Hamilton judged him to be in his sixties although he looked younger even though he had an imperceptible stoop and limp. He judged his clothes to be English in their cut although it was English in the style of the twenties. Certainly nothing that he had seen recently.
‘I’m Charlie O’Hare, Mr. Fitch.’
Hamilton held out his hand to him. ‘Am I pleased to meet you, Mr. O’Hare?’
He smiled and took his hand. ‘That remains to be seen. I’ve heard a lot of you, Mr. Fitch. I’ve followed your journalistic career with interest. I take the New York Post, and admire your honesty. You’ve quite a thing about children, haven’t you Mr. Weinberg?’
His face turned to anger. ‘What’d you mean? What are you talking about?’
Charlie carried on unmoved by his outburst. ‘Well. You’re against children’s beauty competitions. In fact you wrote an article on that underlining the dangers of such events and citing the JonBenet Ramsey murder case as an example of the corrupting influences su
ch events have on their followers.’
‘I believe they do.’
He nodded. ‘That is what I said, Mr. Fitch, what did you think I meant?’
Hamilton gathered in his emotional outburst, apologised. That was not like him to lose it.
Charlie brushed it aside. ‘Quite understandable under the circumstances I didn’t make my self plain.’
‘Yourself, Mr. O’Hare, you do have me at a disadvantage as I’m currently being held by people I’m not altogether sure of.’
‘That could be an advantage, although you are safe enough — for the moment at least.’
‘For the moment. Don’t you go getting my hopes raised, will you?. Perhaps you’d like to tell me something of yourself — like for instance, you’re not American, English perhaps? Am I in England?’
‘No, Mr. Fitch, you’re not in England. English! You could get a bullet in your kneecap for saying that where I come from, no, I was born in Wexford County in Ireland and came here as a child. I am like you a native New Yorker, so I am.’
‘You’ve lost a little of your Irish?’
‘Oi’s let u in too alittle secret, Mr. Fitch, every noight afore I goes to me bed, oi takes me salf outside and oi shouts out at the top’o’me vice: Tup o the marning, tup o the marning to yu. That way, oise don’t forget me roots and I keep a little of me Irish. And I’ve another secret, Mr. Weinberg.’ The door opened and the housekeeper came in with a large tureen and placed it on the table. ‘Please sit yourself down. Irish stew, thank you, Mrs. Donnelly, I’ll manage.’ He opened a cupboard and took out a bottle and two glasses. ‘The best kept secret in the world, Irish malt, Mr. Weinberg, to help the digestion, you’ll take a tumbler with me?’
He served them both ladles of the stew into deep bowls. And he leading the way: dunking crusty bread into the broth, biting a piece, spooning the broth into his mouth and sipping the malt whiskey. Hamilton followed suit and found the combination of all three both nourishing, warming, and something that he could get used to. They ate in silence until they had finished and Hamilton nodded and self-consciously at first, smiled at his host before his face took on a more serious look. He’d not forgotten he’d been abducted and losing three days’ in the process and was rather anxious to know the reason why?
Charlie O’Hare pre-empted his thoughts and poured malt. ‘You’ll want to know what’s going on, Mr. Fitch, I’m sure.
He began of how a man by the name of Frederik Spannocs had created a $15 billion a year business on the back of child trafficking and their sexual exploitation. Of child trafficking to people with minds and understanding that saw nothing particularly wrong with it. Put Satan on the back-burner, and there isn’t. How it had attracted the attention of powers outside of our understanding — the young woman in a coma — You’ve seen her? And how she in her turn had attracted the interests of others. Those others — scientists, academics, and religious maniacs — are planning on preventing her from achieving that same destruction of him in what, we regard as the mistaken belief by them that they will have the answer to life, by the likely enticement of her guardian for the want of a better name: The Resurrectionist, the entity made human, seen after the crucifixion of the Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth, and His salvation to a life at its hands, after what is regarded in many faith’s as: Life after Death.
‘And how do you know all of this, Mr. O’Hare?’
His anger and rage was up. ‘Because she speaks to me, and takes from me.’
He tried to humour him. ‘She speaks to you? Come on Mr. O’Hare, you’ll have to do better than that. I take it that this is all documented. And while I think about it, you orchestrated the meeting between myself, a Carmelite Sister with connections to the Vatican’s Secret Archives, who also happens to be a member of the FBI. Why am I so important to these plans?... And who are you really, Mr. O’Hare?’
‘Me ... Arnold H. Weinberg ... I am the man your grandmother had in mind when she said, Have nothing to do with anyone from the FBI.’
PART THREE
CHAPTER 22 – 1997
‘Well, that might have been the reason your grandmother gave you, Hamilton, but I’m afraid it goes deeper than that. Your life was in danger, still is. Your grandmother — with the greatest intention in the world and one whom I respect — changed your name, but like I said to her at the time it will make you none the less vulnerable. The fact that you haven’t been bothered yet is purely that there had not been a need to. But I know who you are and so do others. Those original threats that your grandmother tried to protect you from — and succeeded when you were growing up — could be about to emerge, and I would be failing in my duty to your family knowing that I didn’t warn you in spite of the sadness that it may once again bring to your grandmother. For unhappy woman, she has been too long.’
* * *
Sarah Weinberg’s reaction at that time was no more than to be expected given the circumstances. All that she had come to expect from the enforcement agency: that her family had been so badly let down by; and although it had been nothing to do with Charlie personally she took it to be such; two generations had been caught up in his obsession with child abuse, and for what? She had cried out Lord our God, we turn now to You once more to cry out our longing of all men and women for a beginning of the wholeness we call peace ...; who for the first time in her life realised there may be no one there to hear her; lost control at her son David, and his wife Ruth’s funeral — of what was left of them. Rabbi Len Levi called for the resurrection of the dead: Blessed art Thou, O Lord who callest the dead to life everlasting; whereupon she tore at her clothes collapsed and was taken to hospital leaving her loved ones in the hands of hevra kaddishah.
Two weeks’ in the David Ben Gurion Hospital; paid for by funds set aside by the Federal Bureau of Investigation saw her over the worst of a complete mental breakdown. So frightened was the two-years-old Arnold Hamilton Weinberg of these events: the loss of both mother and father; his grandmother’s distress; that he went into himself not speaking, staring at the ceiling rocking backward and forward like a polar bear that been caged too long. She had made up her mind that she would change his name. His faith she was prepared to deny fearing Nazism at work so unsure of herself was she.
‘You can’t be serious?’ Charlie had said.
‘That serious!’ she replied, grabbing the overcoat from over his arm, and looking at the label under the jacket hook. ‘Change it, change it, I will, to that, anything, I’ll change it.’
Charlie read Abercrombie & Fitch.
On her return from hospital and after being reunited with her grandson she had declared to Charlie that she wanted nothing further to do with him and the people he represented — she packed up and moved the two of them out of Albany to the east coast. He was devastated at her decision but accepted it and the reason she had made it. He had not heard from her since.
* * *
Here was her offspring though, 100 per cent pure gold Weinberg all wrapped up in a bespoke Jewish tailor’s name that was not immediately recognised as such. She’d not denied all.
‘I appreciate your cooperation,’ Charlie said. ‘And you do look like your father and your grandfather. I counted them good friends. Their deaths were a sad loss not only to your grandmother but to me also, as indeed was your mother’s.’
‘What happened to them, my grandmother didn’t go into the details?’
‘Fire bombed! Dutchie’s restaurant. Including a director of the FBI, and another good friend to us, Lt. Franklin Lomax. There were thirty-odd people in the restaurant that evening, and the only survivors were your mother, a kitchen assistant, and a wine waiter, and of course, myself. Outside on the street there were two dead and, I can’t remember, something like five injured. Many of them with first-degree burns, glass and debris wounds.’ Charlie said coldly.
Hamilton nodded: ‘I think it’s time you gave me the rest of story, Mr. O’Hare — all of it, including the part that makes you think that I could be put
in the erroneous position of breaking my grandmother’s heart more than it has?’
Hamilton’s recollections of these traumas were in the mists of time. Children are resilient. And he was warming to the man sitting opposite telling the story that he was his father’s partner. His red hair and personality were becoming infectious:
‘His name is Frederik Spannocs and he’s firebombed the record’s office of his own company Ocean International no doubt to destroy any incriminating evidence that we could use to help us bring him to book. Word is, he’s taking things into his own hands. He wants the destruction of the, Angel. But, first off, I want you to look at the contents of this envelope and before you make a final judgement as to its content remember it is tantamount to a witness statement. A record of events as seen by your grandfather, Frank Weinberg. I had no part in it, apart from countersigning it.’ He passed it to him.
Hamilton reluctantly took it, his mind in a complete turmoil but pulled back the flap from below a broken wax seal and removed the contents. Gave a cursory glance over it, turned to the second page and went straight to the signatories. He looked at Charlie O’Hare, pulled a chair out sat down again and began to read. Ten minutes later he had finished. Looked up in thought tapping his fingers on the table.
‘Well, this is some revelation — has my grandmother seen this?’
Charlie shook his head.
‘Your name is mentioned — Is it you?’
Charlie spoke yes with a facial expression.
‘You? My father’s partner? You said you were my father’s partner and his father’s before him, what Sarah’s husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. Well, there seems to be a slight chink in the armour of what you are saying here; and without knowing your date of birth, but, doing a rough calculation in my head with these figures, wouldn’t that make you, somewhat older than Methuselah?’ he said sarcastically.
Charlie laughed. ‘He was over 960 when he died, but yes, I take your point.’