The Truth

by Peter James

  He wanted the coming new millennium to start with this same hope.

  Fergus Donleavy knew he’d find him here at the Serpentine any morning after Mass. ‘Happy New Year,’ he called when he was still some distance behind the priest.

  As Freer turned, Fergus caught those familiar de Niro looks. ‘Fergus! Happy New Year to yourself. I was just this moment thinking about you. Now there’s a coincidence!’

  Fergus shook his proffered hand, grinning broadly. ‘I can explain it to you in mathematics, if you have a couple of hours to spare.’

  Freer replied, warmly, ‘You can explain coincidence to me in mathematics all you like, but it won’t kill the magic or the mystery. And don’t tell me it has for you.’

  Still grinning, Fergus raised his eyebrows. Then he hunched inside his jacket. It was a cold morning. ‘So you do still come here every day. The habit of a lifetime.’

  ‘There are worse places.’

  Fergus glanced at the clear water of the pond, with its isolated patches of wafer-thin ice, the acres of sparkling frosty grass stretching away into the distance, the majestic trees. He breathed in the clear, tangy air, listening to the birdsong. Yes, there were worse places than this. ‘I need to talk to you, Euan.’

  Freer tossed another handful of corn. The ducks were sorting themselves out now: there was enough corn to go round, there always was, but they never remembered that. He responded in his soft lilt, without taking his eyes from the ducks, ‘I think I know why.’

  Startled, Fergus dug his hands into his jacket pockets and waited for the priest to continue.

  ‘Last summer, when you came to see me, Fergus, you talked about a baby, as yet unborn.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had a presentiment about this baby, didn’t you?’ He threw more corn.

  Fergus nodded. A traffic helicopter clattered high overhead.

  ‘You aren’t alone,’ the priest said. ‘I’m hearing this from other sources.’

  ‘Good ones?’ Fergus asked.

  ‘The Vatican is concerned,’ Freer replied quietly. ‘Many church leaders around the world are reporting that dreams and visions are disturbing their flocks, and they are all the same dreams, the same visions.’

  ‘The approach of the millennium brings out all the cranks,’ Fergus replied.

  ‘So, are you a crank, Fergus?’ Freer turned with a sardonic smile to face him.

  ‘Am I?’

  Freer left the question hanging. ‘What do you see when you look at these ducks?’

  The frivolous streak in Fergus tempted him say, ‘Pancakes, spring onions, chopped cucumber, hoisin sauce,’ but he resisted. This wasn’t a time for humour. He studied them: some were mallards, some had different markings. He wasn’t sure what Freer wanted him to say. Finally he said, ‘Innocence? Some kind of pecking order? Some kind of dependence on a priest who gives them their daily corn?’

  ‘You don’t just see ducks? Pure and simple?’

  Fergus smiled. ‘What do you think the ducks see when they look at us?’

  ‘Uncertainty. I give them the corn and that gives them reassurance. They know me, I’ve been coming here for years, I’ve seen generations of them come and go, but let me try to touch one, to do one thing out of the normal, and this is what happens:’

  Freer demonstrated. He knelt and tried to stroke one, and in a crackle of wings and quacks like klaxons, they were gone. Some dived into the water and paddled away, others took flight.

  Fergus was still not sure what the priest wanted him to say. ‘Survival?’ he ventured. ‘They will only trust the familiar so far, but no further?’

  ‘Yes, the familiar.’ Freer nodded. ‘There are boundaries, demarcation lines between what is familiar to them and what is not. If I step over that line and do something out of the normal, they panic and are gone. That’s how they survive, like much of the animal world, by taking flight from danger. So why don’t we do the same, Fergus?’

  ‘Because we’re at the top of the food chain and we don’t have these responses any more – we’ve evolved out of them. We tend to stand our ground, fight our corner.’

  This wasn’t the answer Freer was after. ‘If these ducks feel a threat, they can scurry off to a different part of the pond. Or they can go to another pond. They only have a problem when they’re breeding, bringing up their young. Most of the time they have their mobility and can move away from what threatens them.’ He emptied the last of the corn from his satchel on to the ground. ‘Make an analogy between the duck pond and our planet and you can see why we human beings are different, Fergus. We don’t have another planet we can hop off to. We have to stay and confront what threatens us.’

  Freer turned away from the pond and started walking slowly. Fergus kept by his side. ‘I believe in the Virgin Birth, you believe Jesus was brought by astronauts, that’s fine, Fergus, I’ve never had a problem with that because we both believe in something. We believe that a human was born, or an alien arrived, who was a force of good. Yes?’

  Fergus was hesitant. ‘In a manner, yes.’

  The crystals of frost were sparkling all around them, and the air to Fergus seemed alive with birds singing. There was an intensity to this singing, almost an urgency: they were singing today as if there might not be a tomorrow.

  Freer walked in silence and then said, ‘So if you can, in a manner, accept the concept of a force of good, can you, in that same manner, accept the concept of a force of evil?’

  ‘I came and talked to you about this last summer,’ Fergus reminded him.

  ‘I know, but you’re still a scientist.’

  ‘And this somehow demeans me?’

  ‘I’m not saying that, no, not at all, the reverse. You are rational. Scientists come with a lot of baggage. What I’m hearing requires you to ditch that baggage. Can you? Can you cope with something that would be wholly irrational to science – at least, science as we understand it now?’

  ‘Give me a left-luggage locker that’s big enough.’

  Freer had the grace to smile. ‘You’ll still know it’s there, you’ll be thinking about it, you’ll be influenced by your need to make models of everything, to make experiments, to see everything repeated in a laboratory. Can you really liberate your mind from all of those constraints?’

  ‘Religion asks why. Science asks how. I don’t think there’s such a big gap between science and religion, Euan. I don’t think it matters how Jesus arrived or even who he really was. The thing that matters is what he did and his legacy. It’s the influence he had, the charisma. He had a power that people believed – and still believe.’

  ‘And acted upon.’

  ‘Yes, and still do. What exactly are you hearing, Euan? Tell me.’

  Freer walked on a few paces then stopped. ‘There are a lot of prayers going on around the world. In the wrong places. The wrong kind of prayers.’

  ‘What kind?

  ‘It’s nothing specific, nothing I can hang my hat on, but it’s making me and a lot of other people very uncomfortable. Desecration of churches, a sudden rise in dark rituals. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Like I said, it’s the millennium. All the weirdoes are having a field day.’

  Freer shook his head. ‘This goes way beyond that. There’s a concentration, a focus.’

  ‘Sure, the millennium.’

  ‘There’s your baggage again. You can’t leave it – you have to have a peg you can hang things on before you can feel comfortable.’

  ‘OK, let me ask you something. It’s why I’m here.’

  ‘I guessed the coincidence of your being here had an underlying causal factor.’ The priest smiled. ‘Ask me.’

  ‘The name Sarotzini?’

  Freer frowned.

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Emil Sarotzini? Of course. Who doesn’t?’

  ‘Have you heard it recently?’

  ‘He’s dead, Fergus. He died a long time ago, I don’t remember when exactly, back in the forties.’

&n
bsp; ‘Did he have any children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Yes. That is one mercy.’

  ‘Euan.’ Fergus hesitated. ‘Is there any possibility he could still be alive?’

  Freer gave Fergus a strange look. ‘No. And even if he was, he’d be –’ Freer thought. ‘He’d be way over a hundred, a hundred and ten, maybe more.’

  Fergus fell silent. He was thinking back to his conversation at lunch with Susan Carter, when she’d said, ‘Mr Sarotzini was adamant that I see him and no one –’ Then the way she’d stopped, as if she’d said something she should not have.

  For the past month, since that lunch, Fergus had been trying to find an Emil Sarotzini. His researcher had checked the phone directories of just about every country in the world. She’d checked the register of births, and the electoral rolls.

  The last Emil Sarotzini, or indeed anyone of the name Sarotzini for which any record existed, committed suicide in Florence, Italy, in 1947, the day before he was due to be indicted by a war crimes tribunal on a raft of charges of crimes against humanity. This Emil Sarotzini had exterminated two thousand Italian Jews who had sought the help of the Vatican during the war. It was a deal he had personally brokered with Hitler, and even if it had not been actually sanctioned by the Vatican, there was controversy over whether it had tried to intervene.

  ‘You heard the story?’ Euan asked suddenly. ‘About Sarotzini’s cremation?’

  Fergus shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘He was in his coffin, in the oven, for two hours. When they took him out there wasn’t a mark on the coffin or on him. Not a singed hair.’

  ‘I’d heard something strange happened, but I hadn’t heard that. So what happened?’

  ‘The chaps in the crematorium were spooked. They wouldn’t put him in again so he was buried.’

  ‘They put a stake through his heart?’ Fergus asked.

  The clergyman smiled wryly. ‘Maybe that’s what was needed. More than a few people thought he was the devil incarnate.’

  They walked on a bit. A spaniel puppy raced towards them, barked, then raced away. Fergus heard the thin whine of a dog whistle. ‘He was an illusionist, Sarotzini, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was a lot of things.’

  ‘People are susceptible to miracles. Particularly in countries where religion is strong, right?’

  ‘The moving statue of Ballymena? Weeping virgins? Lactating Buddhas? Images of the Madonna mysteriously appearing on walls?’

  Fergus nodded. ‘Maybe the gas went out. He was an illusionist, wouldn’t be hard for an illusionist to pull a stunt like that, to feign death, spook a few crematorium workers, boost his mystique. Be a lot easier to turn off the gas than survive two hours at four hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. And create an urban myth in the process.’

  After a few moments, Freer said, ‘Why are you asking about Sarotzini? What’s your interest?’

  ‘I have a feeling, that’s all.’

  ‘A feeling?’

  They walked in silence for several paces. Then Fergus said, quietly, ‘Yes. I can’t give you a rational explanation why, but I think Sarotzini could still be alive.’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘Susan, what’s this doing here?’

  Standing in the hall with his coat on, John was staring at a pram. It was brand new, still in its wrapping, sporting large Mothercare stickers.

  Susan, in a chunky sweater and baggy jeans, came out of the kitchen, her hands covered in flour ‘Hi, darling,’ she said, going over to him, and kissing him. ‘’Scuse hands, I’m making pancakes.’ Pancakes drowned in maple syrup were her latest craving. ‘It’s a present. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who the hell’s it from?’

  ‘Mom. Well, I guess Mom and Dad – it just arrived this afternoon.’

  ‘Terrific,’ he said sarcastically, removing his coat. ‘Very thoughtful of them. Maybe we could change it for something slightly more useful, like a piece of furniture.’

  Susan looked at the pram, then back at John. She said nothing.

  ‘I’m sure Mothercare’ll take it back. Presumably that’s where it came from as it’s got their name on it?’

  ‘I – I guess.’

  ‘You can take it back tomorrow – you’ve got time now. Want me to put it in your car?’ He saw her hurt expression. ‘Susan, come on!’ He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her lightly on the forehead. ‘You don’t want to keep the bloody thing, surely.’

  She stared back at him, too choked to speak. Something about the pram, sitting in the hall, looked so natural, as if it belonged here. It made the house feel complete.

  ‘Susan, hello?’

  No response.

  ‘Susan, we don’t need a pram. As soon as the baby’s born, Mr Sarotzini is taking it away, that’s the deal. I’m sure he can get his own pram. I’ll put it in the car for you. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ she whispered.

  As John bent down to pick it up, she felt a sudden panic grip her, as if he was taking away something that belonged to her, that he had no right to take. ‘John –’ she began, but before she could say anything else the pain exploded inside her. She clutched her abdomen, let out a terrible scream and doubled up. She screamed again, then again, sank down onto her knees, curled up, screaming, screaming, screaming.

  John knelt down beside her. This was ripping him apart, seeing her suffering these terrible attacks. And this one seemed worse than ever. ‘Hon, darling, shall I call an ambulance?’

  She looked at him in terror, but she didn’t seem to be focusing. Her whole body contracted with a violent jerk and she let out a low moan. Her eyes closed and her face looked so pitiful that John was close to tears. ‘Darling?’ he said. ‘Darling? I’m calling an ambulance.’

  She reached out, got hold of his wrist with her floury hand. ‘Nnnn. Nnnnnn.’ She was breathing in short bursts, her face a deathly grey. ‘Nnno. OK. I’m OK, I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Hon, you’re not OK.’

  She shuddered. John, panic-stricken, thought she was dying. In the old days women frequently died in childbirth or through complications, it must still happen. Oh, God, please don’t let it. Not Susan, please not.

  He barely realised that he was praying.

  Then she gave his wrist an extra hard squeeze. ‘Please don’t call an ambulance. Call Mr Van Rhoe.’

  She opened her eyes and John stared right into them, frightened eyes with hugely dilated pupils. ‘Fuck Van Rhoe,’ he said. ‘OK? Fuck this creep. Months, this has been going on and he tells you it’s nothing, it’s just some tiny cyst. Well, I’m not having this any more, I don’t trust this guy. He may have the greatest reputation in the universe but you shouldn’t be having pain like this. I’m calling an ambulance.’

  ‘’S going – going now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded insistently. ‘I’m OK. It goes, it always goes. Please, I don’t want to go to hospital, please, John.’

  There was something in her voice that got to him. ‘Harvey Addison’s back from Barbados this week and I’ve booked an appointment for you for tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to see him. I don’t want any argument from you. If he says this pain is OK, then fine, end of story, but I want this second opinion and I want it from him.’

  Susan shook her head. ‘No, I’m OK, it’s not long now, three months, I can put up with –’

  And then her stomach arched out, she threw back her head and cried out in pain to the heavens. All she saw was a blur, then the pain came again, and this time it wasn’t just one knife twisting inside her, it was two knives, four knives, she didn’t know any more, she was losing count, and she could see John’s face and she could smell a trace of burnt rubber on his breath, and then this pain, she could feel this pain, it was coming again, like a furnace raging in her guts, melting her insides.

  She screamed so loudly it felt as if something had ripped loose in her throat
.

  And then she was lying down, feeling terrible nausea, she wasn’t sure where she was and she panicked that she was in hospital. But she wasn’t, she was on the sofa in the living room and she could hear John’s voice on the phone.

  He was saying, ‘I appreciate it, Harvey, very much. I made the appointment with your girl before Christmas – just wanted to double check. You know about it? Great. That’s very kind of you, they’re definitely getting worse. She won’t let me call an ambulance. How was your holiday? Good. And Caroline? Good. OK, four thirty tomorrow, at your consulting rooms. I’ll bring her over myself.’

  Harvey Addison’s consulting rooms were in a converted detached Edwardian house close to Hampstead High Street.

  The obstetrician turned into the driveway, parked in the forecourt bay marked with his name, checked his hair in the minor, and climbed out of the black Porsche Carrera that John Carter’s CD and on-line series, the Home Doctor, had paid for. He pressed the button on the key fob and the car beeped and winked its lights at him, confirming that the alarm was set.

  Although it was mild for January, he was still used to the warm Caribbean sunshine he had reluctantly left behind, and felt chilly. But he was in a good mood today: the jet-lag that had plagued him since arriving back from Barbados on Saturday had all but gone, and he was feeling fresh and alert.

  And some seriously good news had come in the morning post. A letter from the BBC. His ratings were increasing: 3.8 million, up from 3.2 million four months ago. For a daytime television show the figures were brilliant – hell, when it had been on BBC2, The X-Files in prime time only pulled 6.3 million.

  He strode quickly through the first few spots of an impending downpour, his cashmere coat and his coiffed blond hair flapping, and ducked in through the side entrance to avoid having to walk through the waiting room. He paused to glance at his reflection in the glass – the tan was still looking good – then went into his office suite and fixed Sarah, his receptionist and nurse, with a come-to-bed smile in those brilliant blue eyes of his. And she fixed him back with her brown eyes. An invisible wire cracked tight between them, and a smile ran down it both ways, colliding in the middle.