CHAPTER LXIX
Cornelie Gruner regarded the woman before him as she skimmed idly through one of the books on his desk, bending the corners hard enough to leave marks. He disliked seeing a book mishandled, even under such circumstances as these. When she licked her fingers to turn the pages, he was forced to intervene.
“You should be more careful with that,” he said.
“Why, is it valuable?”
Gruner thought this was the kind of question only an uncouth individual would ask, but then, judging by her accent, the woman was American. In his experience, Americans had a tendency to confuse price and value, equating the latter solely with the former. She had also so far failed to introduce herself, which he regarded as compounding her rudeness.
“It belonged to a man named Maggs,” he said. “The overwriting in it is said to be the work of a djinni.”
The book was a copy of Molitor’s Tractatus De Lamiis, originally published in 1489, although the edition currently being abused by the woman dated from 1561, with a contemporaneous binding, which was most unusual; the other copies Gruner had seen were all rebound in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Such an edition was worth about €3,000 to the right collector, but Gruner would never have parted with this one, although to the inexpert eye it appeared to have been sorely disfigured. The original Latin text was virtually unreadable, obscured as it was by script in another, older language.
“And what is a djinni?” said the woman. She sounded bored.
“A spirit, or demon, from Islamic mythology.”
“You mean a genie, like in Aladdin?” She was laughing now. “You’re telling me that a genie wrote in this?”
“So Maggs said.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Unfortunately, he died before I was born, but I have spoken with a man who claimed to have met him. He said that Maggs’s entire torso and lower body were covered in a similar script, like a living book. Maggs claimed that the djinni used one of its fingernails as a nib, its blood for ink, and Maggs’s skin for vellum.” Gruner paused for effect, before adding, “As a consequence, I tend to wear gloves when I handle that volume.”
The woman closed the Tractatus and set it aside. While she tried to appear unconcerned, Gruner noticed that she rubbed her right hand clean against the leg of her trouser suit, and her lips moved as though to rid her mouth of some nasty taste.
“You’re a very odd man,” she said.
“And you have the advantage of me,” he replied, “as I know nothing of you.”
“My name is Armitage.”
“And what do you do, mevrouw Armitage—aside from intimidating old men in their places of business?”
“I am a federal agent of the United States government, stationed as a legal attaché at our embassy in The Hague.”
“The FBI? I was not aware that the Bureau had jurisdiction overseas.”
“Congress has given us extraterritorial jurisdiction to protect U.S. citizens and U.S. interests abroad.”
Armitage rattled off the reply like a candidate responding to a particularly unchallenging test question. Gruner found her to be somewhat arrogant.
“Fascinating,” he said, almost managing to sound as though he meant it. “Do you have identification?”
Armitage produced her badge and ID, and slid it across the desk to Gruner. He examined it critically.
“When even fakes are so convincing,” he remarked, “how can one be certain of what is real?”
“Oh, you’re being too modest. I hear you’re quite the expert on falsification.”
So that was it: a fishing expedition. Let Armitage dangle her line. She would catch no fish here.
“FBI shields are outside my area of competence.”
“I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, then.”
“You do seem most sincere.” He returned the black leather case to her. “And how do I impinge upon American interests in the Netherlands, Agent Armitage?”
“By your assistance of Atol Quayle in his hunt for the Fractured Atlas.”
Gruner did not immediately respond to the allegation. He was unfamiliar with the general behavior of U.S. federal agents, but he did not believe they brandished their weapons without cause. If Armitage was indeed what she claimed to be, and Gruner had no particular reason to doubt her, she was behaving in a most unusual manner.
“The Fractured Atlas is a myth,” he said at last, “and Atol Quayle is long dead.”
“Or long lived,” said Armitage. “It depends on whom one asks.”
For the first time since she had identified herself, Gruner began to feel actively worried by the woman.
“Was he the one who claimed to have met Maggs?” Armitage continued. “I can’t think of anyone else that might have.” She ran a finger along the spines of the books on Gruner’s desk. “Is the Atlas mentioned in all of these?”
Gruner saw no advantage to lying.
“Some of them.”
“Quayle thought he’d traced the final pages, didn’t he? He believed the Atlas was complete, but he was wrong. Now, with your help, he’s trying to figure out what he might have missed.”
“I’m afraid you have your stories confused,” said Gruner, “which is not unusual when it comes to the Atlas. Myths tend to accrue obscuring layers, and the Fractured Atlas may be one of the greatest myths of all. The lawyer Atol Quayle was among those who devoted many years of their lives to the search for it, but without success. That hunt goes on, though, and I am not ashamed to admit I am among the seekers. After all, it’s not illegal.”
“But why devote all that effort to what you claim is a legend?”
“Because every great myth has a truth at its heart. I would like to know the truth behind the Fractured Atlas.”
Armitage, who had been holding the gun casually for a while, now leveled it at Gruner with more purpose. No one had ever pointed a gun at him before. He was not finding it an edifying experience.
“Mr. Gruner, where is Atol Quayle?”
“Dead.”
“Try again.”
“Undead. Is that what you’d prefer me to say?”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“I’m trying to bring this conversation to a satisfactory conclusion for both of us.”
“That will require honesty.”
“Are you really an agent of the FBI?”
“Yes.”
“But I sense that you may not be here in an official capacity.”
“No.”
Gruner took a deep breath. He smelled himself. He’d grown so used to his own odor that he no longer noticed it very often, except perhaps in high summer. It came to him now, though. He thought his fear might be accentuating it.
“Quayle is in London. I have not met him in many years. He does not like to travel.”
“Yet you have supplied him with passports.”
“I assume that even he sometimes has cause to move across borders, however reluctantly.”
“How do you contact him? How do you supply his needs?”
“Through a courier.”
“Carenor.”
Gruner shrugged in place of a verbal acknowledgment.
“You already seem to know so much,” he said, “that I wonder why you’re bothering to question me at all.”
“I’m just confirming details. I didn’t really expect you to be helpful.”
“Then what next? Are you going to shoot me?”
He was smiling as he said it. He thought it might help: two reasonable people, laughing at the absurdity of such a thing.
“Yes,” said Armitage.
She stood, and Gruner shrank back in his chair.
“Your gun will make a noise,” he said. “People will come. My people.”
“Your people are bartenders and waiters.”
A heartbeat.
“Mors is not.”
“Is she here? I don’t see her.”
“If you harm me, she
will find you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re just a bookseller.”
“If I’m just a bookseller, why kill me?”
“To stop Quayle from completing the Atlas.”
“You don’t understand: the Atlas wants to be completed, if not by Quayle, then another. It will find a way.”
“But not through you.”
Gruner noticed that Armitage was holding a book in her left hand. The boards had been torn from it, leaving only the pages themselves, hundreds of them. He could not see the frontispiece, and so could not identify the work, but the vandalizing of it pained him, even now, at the very end of his life.
In a single quick movement, Armitage struck Gruner hard on the head with the butt of her pistol before thrusting the book at his chest. She placed the muzzle of the gun against its pages, and pulled the trigger once, because once would be enough. The sound was no louder than a heavy volume being dropped on a table. Gruner, she thought, should have known better.
Armitage lifted away both gun and book, the latter now further defaced by a hole. A second hole had been torn in Gruner’s many layers of clothing, from which blood was spouting. The old man’s eyelids fluttered. He tried to speak, but only more blood bubbled from his lips. She listened, but nobody came to investigate the shot.
While Gruner sat dying, Armitage cleaned down the surfaces she had touched, and placed in a bag the remnants of the book she had used to suppress the sound of the gunshot. After the slightest of hesitations, she added to it the copy of the Tractatus, because she noticed that some of the oils from her fingers had transferred themselves to the pages of the book, in one case leaving an almost perfect fingerprint. She checked the street before leaving, and found it to be empty, but still she waited a few moments after opening the door slightly, just to ensure that no one was about to emerge from the Oak. Thankfully, its door was closed against the rain, and she was able to depart unobserved.
Armitage walked quickly to her car, opened the trunk, and dropped the bag containing the two books on top of the body revealed within. She hadn’t intended to kill De Jaager’s girl, but the young woman had been watching Gruner’s property, and Armitage had been forced to take action. She’d just hit her a little too hard, that was all, but driving from Amsterdam with a corpse in the trunk of her car wasn’t an option. This stretch of canal was quiet and dark enough for her needs, and Armitage had deliberately reversed into the parking space with such an eventuality in mind. It was the work of seconds to dump the girl in the water, minus her identity card: Eva Meertens, twenty-three years of age, now sinking into the murk, although she’d rise to the surface again soon enough. Armitage was tempted to throw the books in with her, but decided against it. She’d probably burn them instead.
Just to be safe.
CHAPTER LXX
Parker’s flight to London City Airport took barely an hour, and the time difference meant that he landed just five minutes after leaving Amsterdam. He checked in to his hotel, left a message for the absent Bob Johnston, and was walking the streets of the city by 9:30 p.m.
And so, while the body of Eva Meertens descended slowly into dark waters, Parker moved through High Holborn and Chancery Lane, following paths previously taken by Quayle and his legal forebears. Thanks to Johnston, Parker was familiar with the long history of the firm of Quayle, but he remained unable to establish how the current bearer of that name fitted into the lineage, if at all. The Atol Quayle who had died in London in 1948 left no children, or none that he was publicly prepared to acknowledge, and Johnston had discovered no trace of brothers, sisters, nieces, or nephews—not even cousins, however distant. Atol Quayle appeared to be that rarity: an entirely solitary man.
Stranger yet, Johnston had encountered difficulties in establishing the precise nature of the processes through which the firm had passed from one Quayle to the next, despite inquiries to the Law Society. True, Johnston had unearthed references to this Quayle having studied in Cape Town, or to Quayle earning certain qualifications in Bombay, but it proved impossible to determine if this was actually true, the records in many cases being incomplete, or the firms at which apprenticeships were reputedly served, and training received, having long since ceased to exist. Even at the time, determining the bona fides of any of the Quayles would have been difficult. Either those institutions and individuals responsible for their education and legal apprenticeships were remarkably unlucky, many—in the case of the former—having been the victims of fires and floods that destroyed records, or—in the case of the latter—succumbing to the inevitability of mortality; or generations of Quayles had covered their tracks by claiming personal and professional histories that could not easily be verified.
But why go to all that trouble? Parker did not hold the legal profession in very high esteem—he made an exception for Moxie Castin, and one or two other lawyers, although only reluctantly, and with the expectation that they must eventually disappoint him—but he thought an imposter would surely have been exposed by his lack of knowledge. Then again, Parker had read Bleak House, in which Dickens displayed an opinion of lawyers that was even lower than his own, and if the novel’s depiction of the nineteenth-century legal system was even remotely accurate, someone with a sufficient degree of arrogance and cant, and a modicum of legal knowledge, could conceivably have hidden himself away amid its arcane machinery.
But would generations of frauds have managed to ensure the kind of longevity, and therefore success, that the firm of Quayle had enjoyed in London? It seemed unlikely. It was just one more oddity to add to a growing collection linked to the Quayle name.
Even though Parker was close to the heart of London, he passed comparatively few people on these streets. It appeared that this area only truly came alive when the courts were in session, and at the close of day the lawyers abandoned it, ascending from the whole filthy business into cleaner reaches, their black robes fluttering behind them like the wings of crows. But by walking this city that was foreign to him, Parker was attempting to render it less alien, and familiarize himself with aspects of a case that had roots buried deep in the past. By circuitous routes he came to Whitechapel, and found the address at which the book scout Maggs had been killed, allegedly by John Soter, near to which the body of the bookseller Wenham Dunwidge, father of Eliza, was discovered; and the bar where the prostitute named Sally Campion was last seen drinking before she, too, seemingly became one of Soter’s victims. What had been a tenement in Maggs’s time was now a block of expensive apartments, but the bar retained its identity, if not its former reputation as a staging post for hookers, and traded on its connections to Jack the Ripper, who had selected one of his victims from its clientele. Parker found no mention of John Soter in the framed reproductions of newspapers that decorated the pub’s walls, only the Ripper. He thought the proprietors were missing a trick.
Finally, he returned to the legal byways of the city, and the offices of Lockwood, Dodson & Fogg, formerly the site of Quayle’s firm. The structure was fairly anonymous when viewed from the front: a glorified glass box with some decorative work at rooftop level. Parker had sourced a satellite image of the area, but zooming in on the LDF building hadn’t revealed very much, other than a small outdoor area at the rear, and what looked like parts of an older structure, possibly retained for historical reasons, standing slightly apart from its modern neighbor.
Two security guards sat behind a desk in the main lobby, which, with its uncomfortable furniture and bad abstract art, could have been designed to discourage dawdling by visitors. A total of five businesses were listed as tenants, but three of them, according to Johnston, were subsidiaries of LDF itself, which had developed the property. The final tenant was a financial management company, of which Emily Lockwood and Carolyn Dodson, Parker knew, were both directors. Of the third partner, Giles Fogg, Johnston had found little mention. Further digging revealed that Fogg was terminally ill and unlikely to survive the year. Parker wondered if the partnership would have to o
rder new stationery.
One of the guards was watching Parker as he examined the nameplates beside the revolving doors. The guard didn’t bother getting up from his chair to establish the reason for the interest, but didn’t look away, either. Parker wasn’t concerned. He’d be visiting LDF in person soon enough, and when that happened, he could make any formal introductions required. In the meantime, he kept his face angled slightly from the camera above the door. He had no idea if questions about Quayle would be welcomed by LDF, but didn’t see any reason to spoil the surprise.
He made one full circuit of the property, but the value of the effort was limited by the fact that this was one of the few office buildings he’d seen in which all the lights weren’t burning, despite the absence of anyone working inside. Parker could never quite figure out why someone wasn’t employed just to turn off the lights at night in big offices, or why they weren’t retrofitted for motion activation if security was one of the concerns. LDF, as owners of their own block, appeared more inclined to cut down on unnecessary costs, although it did lend the premises a brooding aspect, a handful of lit rooms excepted. The courtyard was hidden behind a high wall, and the older construction at the rear, or the part of it visible to Parker, appeared appropriately antiquated. If the LDF building was essentially a modern glass box, this other edifice was an archaic brick one.
Parker left LDF, and found a bar called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. So far, he hadn’t managed to do anything that made him feel like a tourist in London, and drinking somewhere with “Ye Olde” in its name seemed to fit the bill, and more. He entered the small chamber to the right of the main entrance, and ordered a glass of red wine.
He had just taken a seat when his cell phone rang, and Bob Johnston’s number appeared on the display. Parker, Louis, Angel, and Johnston were all in possession of a clean set of burner phones for communications between the four of them—cheap Novias that, unlike smartphones, would be difficult to trace, as long as they were careful about their use. Parker also had a second burner, the number of which he had shared with Rachel and with Moxie Castin, to whom Parker’s professional calls were being redirected in his absence.
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