Sion Crossing

by Anthony Price

  “But I do have a rather miserable life. Always having to say ‘no’ to steamed pudding seems to sharpen my tongue. So I’m not very popular with my subordinates.” He sighed. “And they still call me ‘Fatso’ behind my back.”

  “But that’s not fair!” Her eyes clouded. “You’re just … comfortably plump, Oliver.” She eyed him critically. “Besides, you shouldn’t take any notice of it. If you’re not a Filifer, then so much the better for you—being a Filifer is no fun, anyway.” She smiled at him. “If you’re a Patapouf—then be a happy Patapouf—”

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Latimer, involuntarily.

  “Oh no—!” She was instantly embarrassed. “That doesn’t mean what you think it means! I’m sorry! It means—”

  “I know exactly what it means, Miss Cookridge.” His surprise equalled her embarrassment.

  “No—”

  “Yes!” It was quite extraordinary. In twenty years … or it must be less than that, but it must be nearly that … but in all the years which counted, anyway … he had never come across this, which was his own Top Secret Life, shared with nobody. “Patapoufs et Filifers—published in English in 1968—Fattypuffs and Thinifers, Right?”

  “Golly!” She looked at him incredulously. “Gosh! I didn’t know all that! In English—?”

  “Yes.” He joined her incredulity. Physically she was, of course, a perfect Thinifer—a sharp spaghetti-girl, of spires and minarets and flagpoles. But she lacked the Thinifer’s intolerance. “You’ve got the original French version—the Maurois? Where did you get that?”

  “My father gave it to me. He bought it in Paris.” She blinked at him. “And there’s an English version?”

  “A beauty.” Latimer nodded. It was after all a children’s book, the story of the Great War between the Fat and the Thin, with its happy ending. It was only real life which was unhappy. “I’ll find you a copy, when I get back to London, and I’ll send it to you, Miss Cookridge.”

  She blinked again. “Lucy—please … Would you?” She smiled lopsidedly. “Well, then—you should know—it isn’t so easy to be a … Thinifer?” She shook her head. “I was a model for three years, so I know, Oliver.”

  He stared back at her.

  “I’ll bet you never thought of that—what it’s like being a bean-pole.” She returned the stare. “I used to be scared I’d just never stop growing. You know the first thing I used to do at parties?”

  Latimer shook his head.

  “Sit down. Then boys would come up to me. But the moment I stood up—the only ones who survived that experience were the basket-ball players. And when you’ve dated one basket-ball player you’ve dated them all, believe me. Being a Filifer is no fun, I tell you.”

  It occurred to Latimer that she had actually told him something about herself, which he had been amateurishly slow to explore. “So you became a model. But that sounds rather exciting—not to say glamorous, even?”

  “Huh!” For the first time she used her height to look down on him deliberately. “I guess you don’t know much about modelling? Do you?”

  “No.” Latimer quailed for a moment. He had never been so critically over-looked by any woman for so long. But that, of course, was what she’d more or less said only a few seconds before: shorter males avoided taller females, so he was just another case-history. “No. But I read the colour supplements.” He felt himself unquailing: as André Maurois had demonstrated, the Fattypuffs were easy to defeat, but utterly unconquerable. “But you don’t model anymore?”

  “No.” Her mouth tightened. And, in any conventional sense, it wasn’t a pretty mouth—it was too wide for convention. And she wasn’t really pretty either; but models didn’t have to be pretty, they had to be striking, with no breasts but good bones—preferably cheek bones and collar bones, so far as he could recall from the colour supplements—and Miss Lucy Cookridge had a total of four of those, undoubtedly. Even, she rather reminded him of someone, who must be one of the colour supplement favourites, at whom he had never really looked very closely.

  But now she was not going to help him to any further revelation about her past, after the basket-ball dating and the modelling.

  “So what did you do after that?”

  The mouth tightened again. “I nursed my father.”

  “Oh?” Senator Cookridge was someone else he still didn’t know enough about, although he knew more now than he’d known during that awkward passage in the Oxbridge. “I didn’t know he’d been ill—?” Then suddenly he knew who they were talking about.

  “Not my step-father.” The wide mouth twisted. “My real father, Mr Latimer—Oliver, I mean …” she broke off.

  “Oh.” If she expected him to know who her real father was—if that was what that pause inquired of him, to reveal that knowledge—he must disappoint her. “Oh?”

  “He was ill for a long time.”

  “Yes?” He could see that she wanted him to say something more than that. But now that he knew who had researched the Sion Crossing mystery he wanted her to do the talking.

  “Yes.” She looked through him for an instant, and then at him. “He was a marvellous man.”

  Her expression reassured him that she had accepted his ignorance. The next time he phoned back across the Atlantic he could ask the duty officer to find out about Senator Cookridge’s step-daughter’s father; because, the way ruling élites the world over worked, it was odds-on that this relationship had adjusted itself within a restricted circle of names—the more so because she had expected him to know who her father was.

  “He was?” He half smiled at her before quoting.

  “‘The Knight’s bones are dust,

  ‘And his good sword rust;—

  ‘His soul is with the saints, I trust.’”

  She looked at him curiously for an instant, almost as though she was about to frown, so that he began to be afraid that he had made some crass misjudgement. Then her expression blanked over. “I don’t suppose you would have known him?”

  He had been revising his earlier guess as she spoke, for even if the Senator had known the man whose wife he had married there was more than one catchment area of acquaintance to consider: the Senator had been successful in business and domestic mid-western politics long before he had come to wield power in Washington. But that question seemed to confirm his guess after all.

  “No.” Even though this was painful for her he had to follow his luck, pressed by instinct and habit. “He was in the government service? What was his name?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. He would have been before your time, Oliver.”

  “Perhaps.” He started to shake his head self-deprecatingly, but his eye caught the papers on the corner of the desk. For one fraction of a second the rhythm of the shake was disturbed, during which his brain received the eye’s message and decoded it; and then he caught the rhythm again. “Perhaps.” He cocked his head at her. “But perhaps not, you know.”

  She frowned. “You know … of him, you mean?”

  “No, not of him. But I think I’ve met him, in a way.”

  “In a way?” That mystified her. “Where? And when?”

  There was no point in mystification for its own sake, not when he was so close to certainty. “Last night—this morning.” He gestured to the papers on the desk. “Here.”

  She looked down at the papers.

  “This is his work, isn’t it?” he continued as her eyes came back to him. “He gave it to you, all this?”

  “Yes.” She sounded almost defiant. “How do you know?”

  He could hardly point to the tell-tale pen-marks of a dying man. “Oh … your step-father strikes me as a man of action, and I’ve no doubt he’s highly intelligent. But a scholar he’s not—and I know that there are scholars who are also men of action … but I know that type, too … No, he’s not a scholar.”

  She breathed out slowly. “You were just guessing then?”

  “Guessing?” The ache in his head p
ulsed. What he needed was a breath of air: it was odd how airless this air-conditioned coolness seemed. It would be so easy to show her those underlinings, but that would recall their pain. “There’s a sort of guessing that has its place in scholarship, you know. It’s like a ladder in snakes-and-ladders … only then you have to go back and check all the squares you’ve jumped, to find out what’s in them. If you’re a true scholar, that is.” He offered her a half-smile. “Sometimes what one thinks is a ladder turns out to be more like a snake.”

  She considered that inadequate simile briefly. “And what had he found—my father … ? A ladder or a snake?”

  Latimer relaxed slightly. She was no longer pursuing the origins of his inspired guess. “I can’t say yet, for sure. I haven’t had enough time yet … And I’m not sure that everything’s here—is it? There must have been a lot more than this—originally?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well …” Now she was really putting him to the test “… I don’t believe he started out researching Sion Crossing.” A twinge of irritation jogged Latimer’s headache. “Do I have to tell you what you already know? If he gave you all this …”

  She smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. “I want to know how good you are, Oliver—if you’re as good as my step-father says you are.”

  “Oh yes?” Well, what she was going to learn was that if Ministers of the Crown couldn’t make him lose his cool then ex-models didn’t stand a chance. “Why did he give you his papers?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay! He was in the government service, and honest men don’t make money that way—and his pension died with him … So it was his bequest to you—would that be it?”

  She didn’t like that: neither the mouth nor the eyes smiled at him this time.

  “So why did you then take it to your step-father?” He pressed on deliberately again. “Because you knew your limitations? Is that it? And you knew it would tickle his fancy?”

  The smile returned to the mouth. But the eyes were no longer neutral: they were Thinifer eyes, calculating distance and wind-drift and velocity, muzzle-to-target. “That’s bad, is it?”

  At least she was honest. And honesty deserved honesty. “Not at all!” He gave her back her own smile. “You’re quite right—and so is the Senator.” He was drawn to her honesty, even though he liked her less for it. “Doing him a favour suits me very well: he’s a man who pays his debts in full—that’s my guess, if you want another guess.”

  The Thinifer-look weakened. “And repaying debts is important, is it?”

  “It’s what makes the world go round.” He had been too slow to recognize this in the past: it had been what had given Audley the edge over him—the foolish belief that virtue was not its own reward, but would be rewarded with preferment. But now he was wiser. “Good for good, Miss Cookridge.”

  “And evil for evil? And eye for an eye?” She blinked at him. “And I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me ‘Miss Cookridge’.”

  “What should it be, then?”

  “My friends call me Lucy. And you still haven’t answered my original question—” She pointed at the papers.

  “What did he start with?” He shrugged. “I’d guess … he was writing a history of the Iowan regiments in the Civil War—” he raised an eyebrow “—he was from Iowa, I take it?”

  She nodded. “Cedar Rapids.”

  “Indeed?” She was assuming he knew where Cedar Rapids was, although it sounded as though it could be anywhere in America. “Yes … well, there’s the sketch of the introduction to such a book here. And it certainly seems to have been a very loyal state in 1861 …” He studied the different piles of paper for a moment “… It says here ‘her affections, like the rivers of her border, flow to an inseparable union’. So when Mr Lincoln called for a regiment of volunteers they gave him that in a single day, and over fifty before the end of the war, infantry and cavalry—well over 70,000 men, and all volunteers until the summer of ’64 … And it can’t have been an over-populated state exactly, in those days.” He looked up from the sheet of paper. “And 22,000 casualties—that would be about 30 per cent—including 13,000 dead … though I suppose more than half of those would have been from dysentery, eh?” He was supposed to be something of an expert, after all; and he remembered reading somewhere that in spite of the legendary Boer marksmanship three-quarters of the British dead in the South African War had been slain by typhoid, a much deadlier marksman evidently, so that was a pretty safe guess.

  “Yes.” She was a little over-awed by him in his expert’s rôle, as she had not been in awe of him before, as a Fattypuff stranger in a strange land. “But it was a very bloody war.”

  “Mmm …” He must keep her over-awed, if possible. “Barbed wire and machine-guns—a minor dress-rehearsal for 1914 … It’s all in Henderson, of course.”

  “Henderson?”

  Latimer had never thought that he would live long enough to be grateful to Paul Mitchell. “Colonel Henderson. British military historian in the late 1880s—Staff college, and all that. Author of the standard work on Stonewall Jackson—and a considerable expert on this war of yours.” Thanks to Paul Mitchell she wouldn’t push her luck in any Civil War tests now. “Yes … And so they put most of these loyal Iowan regiments on river-boats, and sent them south? And that would be … the Mississippi—flowing towards the separated Confederacy?”

  She nodded cautiously. “That’s right. And they sent the Confederate prisoners back up the river. There’s a great big Confederate POW cemetary on Rock Island, by Davenport.”

  “Is there now?” That was something to take back to England, to give to both Colonel Butler and Paul Mitchell, who shared a ghoulish obsession with war cemeteries and cenotaphs.

  “Yes.” Another nod. “Dad—my father … he pointed it out to me once. It’s in the middle of the Arsenal—hundreds and hundreds of these gravestones … maybe thousands, I didn’t count them … all in rows in the grass, each with rank and name, and company and regiment—all neat and tidy and forgotten.”

  “Indeed?” Latimer acknowledged her memory politely. That she was no Civil War expert herself was reassuring, even though it precluded further questions about the historical details in the papers. But maybe that was also just as well; and, in any case, he was much more interested in the more recently deceased than in the old dead of Rock Island … And even more interested in the living, who would by now be jetting somewhere between Paris and Rome on his whirlwind European fact-finding tour.

  But she was looking at him questioningly.

  “Yes … well—” He sorted quickly through what little he knew about ‘dad’, which amounted to little more than governmental service, long illness and this diversion from Iowan military history to a mystery at Sion Crossing “—your father was obviously a considerable scholar. But … I’d guess … not a professional historian?”

  “No. But the Civil War had always been his hobby, for as long as I can remember.” Her expression, although well-controlled, hinted at a mixture of happy and sad recollections. “I used to visit him … not very often. But we went on trips—mostly to places I don’t remember. Except Gettysburg, once.”

  “Gettysburg.” Even before his crash transatlantic course in the Civil War, by courtesy of Penguin Books and Professor Bruce Catton, Latimer had heard of Gettysburg: Abraham Lincoln had made a speech at the war cemetery there, which had been poorly received at the time and immortal thereafter. “Of course. ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’.”

  “Yes.” She drew a breath. “He read that to me there. He wanted me to learn it by heart. He said every American should know it.”

  “And did you?” She was softening up nicely.

  “Did I heck! Not then—” She caught herself. “Oliver … learning speeches on holiday—and touring old battlefields … maybe that’s okay for little boys, but it surely doesn’t wow little girls, I tell you!” She cocked her eye at him. “You don’t have any little girls
by any chance?”

  “Perish the thought!” The question caught him by surprise. “Neither little nor big—I’m not a married man—” In his turn he caught himself: to be a middle-aged bachelor these days invited the worst sort of suspicion in some people, which those words would seem to confirm. “Not that I’m against either variety—quite the contrary—absolutely the contrary … But I do see that … ah … battlefields might not be to every little girl’s taste. No—” Out of nowhere he remembered suddenly that David Audley had once boasted irritatingly of how much his daughter enjoyed being dragged across battlefields, and through castles and abbeys. Damn the man! And damn the daughter!

  “You’ve just remembered one,” said Lucy.

  Latimer blinked. “One what?”

  “Little girl.” She gazed at him sadly. “She must be remarkable. But I wasn’t.”

  Grr! thought Latimer. “I was thinking more of her father, actually.” He sweetened his face to contradict his feelings.

  “A friend of yours?”

  “A colleague.” He experienced a curious mixture of guilt and exultation. Audley would have enjoyed this little job, for it fitted him like a glove. And it should have been his, too! But for once he had taken something that was Audley’s.

  “But you like him—I can see that.” She misread his smile wonderfully.

  “He’s a remarkable man.” The unpalatable truth quite suddenly offered him an undeserved reward. “In fact, he’s probably rather like your father was—a natural scholar in the government service.” That made the next question equally natural. “What did your father do in the government service, exactly?”

  She waved a slender hand. “Oh … something in research—something to do with selecting people for voluntary service overseas I think. One of these Washington agencies with lots of letters spelling a word that isn’t in the dictionary—I never could get the hang of it. But he was darn good at it … until he got sick.”