by David Taylor
Brennan shook his head. “I was never at Canonbury Tower. You must have imagined it.”
“What about Wolfenbuttel? It had to be you I ran into me outside the Herzog August.”
“Jawohl mein herr, installing security cameras. Some stuff I’d nicked from a warehouse in Hanover. But the whole thing was a waste of time. I’d given up and was going home when I bumped into you – quite literally. Luck of the Irish you might say. Thought I’d stick around and see what you got up to and it brought me here.”
“How did you manage to track my movements in Venice?”
“That was simple. I saw which hotel you checked into, broke into your room while you were out and attached miniature GPS tracking devices to all of your clothes. There’s one on that lightweight thing you’re wearing.”
Brennan pointed to Freddie’s jacket and, sure enough, there was a tiny bug nestling in the lapel. How had he failed to notice it?
“So here we are having this friendly chat,” Brennan added, “before we get down to business. You must tell me all about your fear of water.”
Once again he had switched topics without warning.
“How do you know about that?” Freddie asked.
“There is very little I don’t know about you,” Brennan retorted, “even down to your preference in ladies underwear.”
Cheryl kept spare pairs of knickers in his bedroom cupboard. He hated the idea of someone else touching them.
“You should try exposure therapy,” the Irishman was saying. “It’s the best way of dealing with a phobia. What you really need is a therapist whom you can trust.”
Always happy to receive a bit of advice from an enemy, I’m with you all the way. Perhaps you know a good therapist. You sound as if you could use one.
“You know, Shaun, you’re a truly amazing character. You beat me up, threaten me and claim to care for me, all at the same time. Tough love, I suppose. So why don’t we settle this in a civilized manner, sort things out over pasta and a decent bottle of red wine?”
Brennan gave a short laugh. “Nice try! You Oxford chaps really take the biscuit. You seem to think every problem can be solved at the dinner table.”
“Not at all, I’m not that naïve but, as you say, we have a lot in common. Isn’t that worth exploring?”
“Now you’re using sophistry. You seem to forget I was brought up by Jesuits.”
“How could I forget something I never knew in the first place?”
This got under the Irishman’s skin. “You’re twisting my words,” he growled. “I’ll tell you what your precious university means to me – a lot of stuffed shirts upholding out-of-date core values and students with a breathtaking sense of entitlement who get to Oxford because their parents have money or breeding. Deep down, you lot still think the nation owes you a living.”
“That’s the trouble with you Irish, you live in the past,” Freddie retorted. “As for the implication that I’m somehow connected to Britain’s ruling elite, well, that’s a load of crap and well you know it. I’m non-conformist, always have been.”
Brennan waved an admonishing finger in his direction. “That’s right, you don’t toe the line. No one can trust you, including me. I’ll be taking that book off you now.”
Stay calm, Freddie thought, and keep him talking. “What do you plan to do with it?”
“What do you think? Sell it to the highest bidder of course. Unless I’m very much mistaken that wee book you’ve got there is political dynamite. It will blow a hole in one of the most popular and enduring British myths. William Shakespeare, the Stratford born playwright, is the common man made good and an icon for a superior culture. Just imagine those English Literature scholars squirming in their seats when they have to admit that Shakespeare had a partner. That will give pleasure to my Irish soul and improve my bank balance at the same time.”
“You really are a mass of contradictions. You talk like an Irish nationalist and you claim to be working for the IRA, yet all you’re really after is money.”
“And that doesn’t interest you, Dr Brett? We’re both greedy. The fact that I’m planning to double-cross my brothers in arms doesn’t alter the fact that the Bacon treatise has amazing propaganda value. Now hand it over. I’ve watched out for you. It’s your turn to do something for me.”
Brennan was claiming to be his partner in crime. He had done Freddie’s murders for him and wanted the codex in return. It was beyond reason, an insane proposition. Freddie choked back his disgust and wondered what to say next.
“I’d be intrigued to k-know whether you studied Shakespeare at school?” he asked weakly.
“Of course I did. It was a kind of penance for our sins.” Brennan’s forbidding eyes took on a misty, faraway look. “Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar stand alongside memories of catechism classes, fish-on-Fridays and the Angelus bell. The priests used to ring that bell and …”
It was now or never. Freddie whipped the half brick out of his pocket and hurled himself on his foe. Brennan staggered back with blood gushing from his temple. A second blow, this time to the chin, brought the Irishman to his knees. All the frustration Freddie had ever felt was channelled into the murderous fury of his assault. “Here’s payback for Oxford, you murderous thug,” he roared, lashing out wildly at his fallen opponent with his hardened clay knuckleduster. “See how you like it.”
His rage was liberating. He wanted to keep the fire alive inside of him, an all-consuming bloodlust that wiped away all thoughts of civilized conduct. Rewrite the laws of nature; let the unfit survive and the weak prosper. But this hubris was to prove his undoing.
Lunging forward without due caution, he was head-butted in the groin and doubled up in agony. The Irishman was back on his feet in a flash, snarling through clenched teeth, throwing punches from all angles. A powerful right hook smashed into Freddie’s jaw, causing his brain to ricochet, followed by a left to the kidneys that ripped all the breath out of his body. He fell forward, gasping, only to receive a vicious wallop in his already damaged ribcage. He saw bright lights and dropped the brick.
He tried to remember the boxing moves he had been taught at school but there was no place for Marquis of Queensbury rules in this makeshift ring. Brennan walked through his feeble left jab to administer more punishment. It was like trying to stop a juggernaut. The Irishman may be twenty years older, covered in blood and unable to see properly, but he fought instinctively, wading in with meaty punches to the jaw and solar plexus.
Panting for breath and in a dazed state of disbelief, Freddie backed away.
“You’re a fucking maniac,” he gasped. Reaching the edge of the canal, there was nowhere else to go. He was a trapped animal expecting the coup de grace.
Rain was beginning to fall as Brennan charged forward. Freddie swayed sideways in the faint hope that his opponent’s momentum might carry him over the edge. It was the last thought he had before Venice exploded, its buildings crumbling into an infinite darkness.
*
The soft patter of raindrops reawakens his senses: one after another, sometimes several at a time, these tiny droplets drum upon his skin while the great dream hovers overhead.
Does he know what awaits him? Is that why he is so reluctant to open his eyes, as he shuffles together the jagged shards of remembrance to form a picture, vague at first, but increasingly clear and troubling. A thumping headache has to be acknowledged; the feeling that the two halves of his brain are being wrenched apart to cause nausea and blurred vision.
He is floating weightlessly on a bank of freezing fog. That is his first impression as he takes a tentative peek at the night sky. He tries to speak and swallows a mouthful of evil tasting liquid that acts like smelling salts, restoring some measure of mental alertness. Spitting out the toxic fluid, he remembers the fight and realizes that one of Brennan’s blows must have knocked him into a canal that stinks of rotten eggs and pig’s swill.
His waterlogged lungs force him to vomit up froth and air bubbles an
d this, in turn, triggers a panic attack. He knows the symptoms only too well – dizziness and a rapid heartbeat.
Twisting his head in the dark, he can see no sign of his adversary. This at least is welcome news. So too is the proximity of a wharf with gondolas moored alongside it. He can swim to safety. But his arms and legs aren’t functioning properly. He wants them to cut through the water in a splashy front crawl or, failing that, to dovetail together in a more sinuous breast stroke but for some reason the message isn’t getting through.
He has never managed to overcome the phobia he’d first experienced as a schoolboy who couldn’t swim, thrashing around in the pool while his classmates held him under. I am not going to drown, he tells himself. It’s a silly irrational fear. Yet his muscles refuse to respond. They are numb and lifeless. This must be something else. A paralysis brought on by Brennan’s heavy punches. And to make matters worse, the tide seems to be rising. Wrong again, without the use of core and lower back muscles to keep his body stabilized, his saturated clothes are dragging him beneath the surface.
Only then does the victim fully comprehend the seriousness of his situation. He loses all semblance of self-control and screams inwardly. He is in a state of shock.
He can feel himself sinking. Raising his chin above the surface he tilts back his head and gulps in as much air as possible before dropping below the static water line.
The submerged seconds spread out as he tries to hold his breath.
In the second stage of drowning the pain becomes unbearable.
His lungs are burning and his diaphragm has gone into spasm. He is blacking out.
Water floods into his bursting lungs. Hypoxia will follow and the heart stop pumping blood.
Death in Venice, he thinks, in ten feet of dirty water.
20 JULY 2014
White images flit through the cerebral cortex accompanied by whispers. Penso che stia svegliando adesso.
He registers the words and what they mean. They belong to this world rather than the next. Through badly swollen eyelids the patient catches a reassuring glimpse of his angel of mercy. She is wearing starched linen rather than the now familiar scrubs and the air is heavy with her sweet and musky scent. He can hear a machine pinging in time with his heartbeat.
The nurse takes his pulse and checks the IV drip. “Hello,” she says in English. “Lie still and take it easy. The oxygen level in your blood stream is still too low so I’m going to give you a mask.”
Freddie is greedy for her therapy. The gas makes him feel better, more alert.
His mind becomes elastic, stretching back to those harrowing moments in the water when strong hands grabbed his sinking body and a hollow voice told him to stop struggling before turning him onto his back. After that vague memories of being dragged out of the water and given the kiss of life. Slipping in and out of consciousness, he had heard Brennan ring for an ambulance.
“Couldn’t let you die, could I?” the Irishman whispered in his ear. “I’ve invested too much time in you for that. So where’s that book we were squabbling over.”
His sodden jacket pockets were searched and the treatise taken from its plastic covering. “Thoughtful of you to keep it dry for me. Now I really must be going. I don’t suppose we’ll meet again, Dr Brett, but I’ll be watching your career with interest. Such a pity we couldn’t be friends.”
Blackness again, fireworks illuminating the night sky and the sensation of being wheeled down a marble corridor, lifted off a gurney and into a hospital bed where nurses stick needles into him.
Now in the early morning light, Freddie is apparently out of danger and, according to the hospital doctor, fit enough to be interviewed by the police. He tells the officers a carefully constructed story. No, he didn’t know his attacker or why he’d rescued him from his watery grave: possibly because the man didn’t want a death on his conscience. No, he couldn’t say why he had been attacked or give an accurate description of his assailant: it had been too dark for that, although he had the distinct impression that the man was young and blonde, possibly of Slavic descent. And no, nothing has been stolen.
Nothing, that is, apart from a book that describes the working relationship between two of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever known.
THE BARD OF WINDING LANE
The river stank. It had been raining for weeks. 1594 was the wettest year in living memory.
Flexing his well-developed biceps the waterman rowed through the shoal of turds that testified to the regularity of Tudor bowels. Surrounded by a swirling mass of excrement, kitchen waste and drowned rats, the fastidious figure in the back of the cushioned wherry held a cambric handkerchief to his distended nostrils and took a firmer grip on the leather codex he was carrying.
The latest squall had eased off and the sun glimmered feebly through a smoky haze of morning mist, the better to see the garbage buckets London’s citizens were throwing into this foul broth; the same water they drew for household use and in which they washed their clothes.
The grandee was dressed in a fashionable pan-European way. The cloak was Spanish, the doublet German, the breeches Venetian, the hose French, while his black beaver hat was stitched from pelts imported by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Everything about him was costly: sable, cloth of gold, velvet grosgrain silk slashed with taffeta. His gloves flashed with amber while a silver pomander filled with oranges and cloves hung around his neck as a plague-deterrent and a pungent alternative to the stench of the city.
The waterman had hardly stopped talking since his passenger boarded his rowing boat. “Sweet Jesus, your shilling is hard earned sir, rowing against the tide when this boat should have two oarsmen and used to have, by heaven, until my brother was pressed by those whoreson puttocks last Tuesday.”
The rain lashed down again, soaking them in seconds, and the river quickened in response. It seemed to be a living thing, an elemental force that caught the skiff and sent it spinning towards the shore. Francis Bacon wriggled miserably on his cushioned perch, fighting off sickness by conjuring up Tarquin’s ‘hot burning will’ that took him past ‘night-wandering weasels’ into Lucrece’s bedchamber where ‘tears harden lust.’
He and Will were writing Lucrece’s rape in septets. The seven-line stanza or ‘rime royal’ was a superb vehicle for narrative poetry. Their first book-length poem, the erotic comedy of Venus and Adonis, had been such a best-seller their publisher had asked for more. While the boatman chattered on, his customer was carried away on a rhyming tide of ‘ababbcc’. Francis opened his eyes to find the boatman staring at him. Honest John Trubshaw was not used to being addressed in verse.
From the bear garden came the savage barking of dogs and the over-heated shrieks of an audience baying for blood. He took an iron pocket-watch out of his doublet. By now the royal physician must be on his way to Tyburn. He imagined Lopez, an aesthetic white-bearded figure with thinning hair, his bony arms lashed to a hurdle, dragged to a traitor’s death. Seeing the world from a horizontal position just above the ground, looking upwards, watching clouds scudding across the sky, feeling rain on his cheeks, terrified of what was to come. Ugly, contorted faces blotting out the sky, touching, jeering, spitting, until the hurdle halted before the scaffold. Rough hands untying the victim, pushing him up the ladder steps to the gibbet. The mighty roar as the frail Portuguese Jew was stripped of his last shreds of dignity and spun in the wind. Hung, drawn and quartered, his agony prolonged to please the mob.
The doctor was a statistic - one of eight hundred executions a year. Violent death was, after all, one of London’s most familiar features. The city was like ancient Rome – brutal, licentious and debauched. Not that he should grumble. That’s why Titus Andronicus had done so well.
The pull of the current grew stronger as London Bridge loomed up before them. Once again Francis thought of heads. Heads spiked on Bridge Gate, staring blindly out to Southwick; some fresh enough to supply the crows with tongues and flesh and jellied eyeballs, others reduced to
grinning skulls. Only the pates of high-born traitors were displayed here as a reminder of Tudor vengeance.
“God ’a’ mercy, the Tyburn butcher must have carved up that fucking Marrano by now and not before time, if you ask me.” The boatman said this to provoke a response but his fare paid no attention. Well, fuck him and his dainty manners!
Would foul-mouthed John Trubshaw, a Thames waterman of twenty years standing, have been impressed to learn he was rowing a former Lord Keeper’s son down the Thames? Probably not, for Trubshaw despised all nobility, particularly those dandies that kept catamites. In his opinion these rich sodomists should be castrated or have red hot pokers stuck up their bums. That would teach them.
The wherry was running better now and Francis could hear ferrymen crying ‘Westward Ho!’ as if inviting passengers on a grand voyage to the Americas instead of a penny ride across the river. In spite of its squalid contents the Thames was a noble artery, a moving forest of masts. He watched a Venetian galley inching its way through a flotilla of small craft while, further off, a boat discharged its cargo of barrels onto a wharf by means of a skeleton wheel and pulleys. Every day thousands of vessels fought for space here. The Thames allowed for the speedy transit of goods. Without it, London’s trade would be jolting unprofitably along pot-holed roads and cart tracks thick with thieves.
And rising above the river traffic was one of the finest sights in England. With its sixty foot high arches and solid stone piers London Bridge was an engineering marvel. Built in the reign of Henry II the bridge had only one weakness. By accumulating debris and silt, its brushwood starlings had drastically narrowed the distance between the bridge’s piers until every tide created a vortex of white water that was dangerous to approach. It was still possible to ‘shoot the bridge’ but only when the tide was exactly right. In practice, the Thames watermen kept their distance.