Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  Where

  Dead Men

  Meet

  Where

  Dead Men

  MEet

  Mark Mills

  Copyright © 2017 by Mark Mills

  E-book published in 2017 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover and book design by Kathryn Galloway English

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher,

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Library e-book ISBN: 978-1-5047-3217-8

  Trade e-book ISBN: 978-1-5047-3659-6

  CIP data for this book is available from

  the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  “Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again

  Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.”

  —Samuel Butler

  England

  Chapter One

  Had Sister Agnes been less devout, she would have lived to celebrate her forty-eighth birthday.

  Not that celebrating such milestones had ever come naturally to her. She had no difficulties with Easter, steeping herself in Christ’s selfless Passion, living His suffering as best she could; but even His birthday seemed trivial by comparison, never mind her own. If she played along, it was purely for the sake of the children, whose small faces lit up like beacons whenever Sister Beatrice produced from the orphanage’s ancient oven one of her chocolate cakes, its sponge as dense as brick (and almost as tasteless).

  There had been no birthday cakes at the Carthusian nunnery where Agnes took her sacred vows at the age of nineteen. No, there had been seemingly endless hours of prayer and silent meditation within the confines of her tiny cell and meals handed out through a hatch to limit the distraction of human contact. The devotional rigors of the order had ultimately proved too much for her, and despite the passage of the years, and the gratifying sense of purpose that three decades at St. Theresa’s Orphanage had brought her, she had never quite been able to shake off the feeling that she had somehow fallen short in the eyes of the Lord.

  This was the reason she still rose dutifully from her bed at midnight, as she had back at the nunnery, to offer a prayer to Our Lady. It was also the reason she heard the dim but distinct sound of breaking glass—a bright tinkle, not unlike the Angelus bell—cutting through the silence of the sleeping building.

  Nearing the foot of the main staircase, she paused, straining her ears, wondering if perhaps she had imagined the sound, somehow brought it into being. No. Another noise, different from the first—a vague sort of shuffling. Someone was definitely at large on the ground floor. One of the children, up to no good? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

  The light leaking beneath the door to Mother Hilda’s study lay like a silver thread in the deep darkness of the corridor. The floorboards groaned beneath her feet as she approached and pressed her ear to the door. Silence. She thought about knocking, but she had never known Mother Hilda to be up at this hour, so she entered unannounced.

  She had time just to take in the filing cabinet that had been forced open, and the scattering of gray folders in the tight pool of light thrown by the desk lamp, when a hand clamped around her mouth.

  The man must have heard her coming and taken up a position behind the door. “Ssshhhh,” he soothed, his lips close to her ear. “Don’t make a noise. I don’t want to hurt you. Do you understand?”

  Trembling, she nodded. The door closed behind her, and she found herself being forced toward the overstuffed armchair near the fireplace. “Sit down,” said the man, removing his rough hand from her mouth. She looked up at him only after she had drawn the woolen shawl around her shoulders, against the draft from the broken window.

  He was short, with a thin, eager face and lank, sandy-colored hair receding at the temples. She had seen a pistol before—her grandfather’s service revolver from his time in the Crimea, the one with which he claimed to have dispatched eight Russians in a single afternoon—but she had never had one pointed at her.

  Scared before, she now felt strangely calm, unthreatened. She was under the protection of someone infinitely more powerful than this desperate little man in a gabardine overcoat.

  “If it’s money you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place. We barely have enough to feed ourselves.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The orphanage. How long?”

  She detected something in his accent now—a faint foreign clip that she might have been able to identify had she traveled the world more widely.

  “Almost thirty years.”

  “That’s good,” he replied. “A boy was left here in 1912. A baby, left on the steps.”

  Her heart gave a sudden lurch. “So many of them come to us that way.” The lie tripped off her tongue with an ease that surprised her.

  “It was winter. January.”

  “If you say so.”

  She remembered. How could she not? She was the one who had heard the urgent knocking and hurried to the entrance door. There had been a shallow blanket of snow on the ground, and the tracks in it had led her eye to a tall, shadowy figure standing some distance away in the twilit gloom of the driveway. Only when the man turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness did she notice the small bundle at her feet: her own little Moses, swaddled in a crocheted blanket—asleep, peaceful, and untroubled, even then. His gift to her.

  “I need a name,” said the man.

  “Do you have any idea how many children pass through our hands?”

  “I also need to know where he is.”

  She saw the many letters from Luke neatly bundled in the box beneath her bed, and her curiosity finally got the better of her. “Why?”

  The man hesitated. “I have a message from the person who left him here.”

  There was a shared acknowledgment in the look they traded: that a message carried by a man who came skulking in the night, gun in hand, was not a message worth receiving.

  “Leave it with me,” she replied. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The man grunted, then tucked the pistol away in the pocket of his overcoat, and for a moment she thought she had worn him down with her dignified resistance.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have much time.”

  He produced an object from his other pocket. Shaped like a policeman’s truncheon, it appeared to be made of leather.

  She would have been less afraid if she had seen some malicious intent in his eyes, but all she detected was an emptiness that spoke of weary resignation, even boredom.

  Her last thought before it began was that this was a test, a kind of penance, and that she would show herself equal to the suffering He had endured.

  France

  Chapter Two

  “Luke! Where’s that coffee?” came the cry through the closed door separating their offices.

  “Coming, sir.”

  Luke flicked a switch on the intercom console and lowered his voice. “Diana, coffee for His Highness, and don’t spare the horses … I forgot to say before.”

  “Tut-tut.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Don’t feel you have to,” came back her lazy drawl of a reply.

  Diana appeared in his office a few minutes later, carrying a tray. Today, she had her hair pinned back behind her ears, which, like everything
else about her, were petite and perfectly formed. She knew what he thought of her ears. There was a time not so long ago when he had been allowed to tell her such things.

  “Shall I do the honors?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll take it through. I need to go over some papers with him.”

  Diana placed the tray on his desk. There was a letter propped between the coffeepot and the sugar bowl. “This just came for you.”

  He was surprised to see his father’s crabbed handwriting: Luke Hamilton, the British Embassy, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes.” He tilted his head at the tray. “And thank you.”

  He waited for her to leave before tearing open the envelope.

  My dear Luke,

  It is with a heavy heart that I’m writing to you so soon after my last letter, and I’m very sorry to say that you will find nothing dreary or rambling about this one …

  Luke knew he was walking, but the ground felt dull beneath his feet, as though the paving stones were made of India rubber. The other pedestrians seemed to flit around him like phantasms.

  Not just dead … murdered … bludgeoned to death. How was it possible? How could anyone …? Sister Agnes, of all people. And for what? Some candlesticks and a handful of other near-worthless trinkets?

  Grief and impotent rage scrambled his thoughts. The first person he had ever known, ever loved—his mentor and guide for the first seven years of his life. She had taught him to read and write, taught him the names of the trees and the birds, taught him right from wrong, scolding him when he strayed and praising him when he excelled. She had wiped blood from his knees, snot from his nose, tears from his eyes; and when the influenza tried to take him, she had sat at his bedside in the sanatorium and laid cold compresses on his burning body to keep him from slipping away.

  Where was the logic? Where was the justice? Where, he asked himself, was her God when she needed him? He knew what she would have replied: that the book was already written, and even if we could not see our place in the story, we could be sure that it was a good book with a very fine ending.

  Not such a fine ending for her, though. And very nearly a rotten one for Luke, too, when crossing Avenue George V.

  Lost in a somber trance, he looked the wrong way as he stepped off the pavement, and was almost struck by a speeding lorry. Shaken by the close call, he found a vacant bench in some welcome shade and fumbled a cigarette between his lips.

  A moment of distraction … a blur of hurtling steel … certain death mere inches from the tip of his nose. What unsettled him most, though, was that for a split second, it wouldn’t have mattered.

  Paris had been moving to the beat of the Exposition Internationale since the beginning of the year, when the first pavilions had begun to spring up along the banks of the Seine. The site of the World Fair (as most people called it) lay at the heart of the city, straddling the lazy bend in the river between the Pont de la Concorde and the Pont de Grenelle.

  This was Luke’s third visit. His first had been in late May, to attend the official opening of the British pavilion, a fashionably cuboid building that looked like a large packing case dropped beside the Pont d’Iéna by a passing giant. After the interminable speeches, they had strolled around the exhibits, champagne flutes in hand, cooing politely to those involved while privately pondering the scale of the disaster.

  This was supposed to be a showcase for the very best that Great Britain had to offer the world in 1937, and yet, the first display to greet visitors was a selection of suitable clothing to be worn while out shooting. Next came a baffling array of squash rackets and cricket bats. And so it continued. There was almost no nod to the country’s rich industrial and technological heritage. Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought that forty million Britons frittered away their time in sport and country pursuits. Bizarrely, and unlike many of the other pavilions, it had no garden—the very thing for which the British were known (and affectionately mocked) by their continental cousins.

  “It’s a national bloody disgrace,” was Wing Commander Wyeth’s muttered verdict, and for once Luke had found himself agreeing with his boss. “I mean, what kind of message are they trying to send to our friends over the way?”

  He meant the Germans and the Soviets, whose pavilions stood on the other side of the bridge, facing one another across the wide avenue running down to the river from the Palais de Chaillot. No stumpy packing cases for them, but two soaring testaments to self-belief. There was a rumor doing the rounds that Albert Speer, the architect of the German scheme, had somehow laid his hands on the Soviets’ plans, thereby ensuring that the German pavilion stood taller by a good margin, topped by a giant Nazi eagle unfurling its wings. The Soviets had responded by crowning their pavilion with a monumental sculpture of a worker and a peasant woman brandishing a hammer and sickle at their neighbors over the road.

  The visual confrontation of National Socialism and Stalinist Communism wasn’t lost on anyone; and when viewed from the Palais de Chaillot, with the Eiffel Tower looming behind, the impression was of two bullies squaring off in the school playground while the teacher looked on helplessly. It was a sight to bring a smile to your lips, even as it sent a chill down your spine.

  During his second visit to the Fair a few weeks ago, Luke had made a tour of both pavilions and been pleasantly surprised to find nothing more ominous on show than a shared message of peaceful progress through the happy marriage of science and art. According to Diana, the same couldn’t be said of the Spanish pavilion—recently opened, almost two months late—where she and a friend had dropped in over the weekend. “Prepare yourself for something a little different,” she had warned him as he was leaving the embassy earlier.

  He had glimpsed the building on his last visit: a flimsy glass-and-steel structure that looked as though it wouldn’t fare too well in a high wind. Tucked away behind the German pavilion, it had been crawling with workmen racing to put the finishing touches to the place. These now included, Luke could see, a large photographic mural high on the facade, showing some troops drawn up in serried ranks. Below it was a stark declaration in French that ended with these words: we are fighting for the independence of our homeland and for the right of the spanish people to determine their own destiny.

  An attractive couple leaving the pavilion passed in front of him, their young son at their heels, absorbedly picking his nose.

  “Disappointing,” was the man’s verdict. “Not at all in the spirit of the Fair.”

  The woman pushed a wayward lock of hair from her face. “Darling, they are at war with each other.”

  “Do you want to be reminded of that? Because I certainly don’t.”

  The civil war in Spain was raging more fiercely than ever, with General Franco’s nationalist troops now holding half the country and moving with increasing brutality against anyone who resisted the military coup. The future of Spain was trembling in the balance, and the republican government clearly saw the Fair as a showcase for highlighting the deadly serious problems at home.

  Luke had some idea what to expect as he stepped inside the building, because he had skimmed a French newspaper’s snooty review of the vast painting that occupied almost an entire wall of the ground-floor entrance area: “Mr. Picasso’s trademark trickery is not just on full display, it has attained whole new heights of self-importance …”

  He stood and stared, unable to think straight, although he knew immediately that the art critic was a fool. It wasn’t simply the painting’s enormous size, twice the height of a man and well over twenty feet long; he had never seen another work of art like it. In fact, he had never seen anything quite like it. There was nothing for the eye to settle on more than momentarily—no obvious structure, no shape that allowed you the comfort of recognition. Even the horse’s head wasn’t a horse’s head; it was a howl of pain with some
sort of obscene pointed object protruding from the mouth.

  The subject was Guernica, the Basque town bombed to rubble by General Franco back in April. Luke knew the grim details more intimately than most, for it went with the job. He had scoured the intelligence, pored over the reports from the embassy in Madrid (strangely nonjudgmental in their tone). However, the painting had almost nothing in common with the photos he had flipped through of the blasted buildings and the bodies heaped up in the streets and the lucky living standing around in sorry clumps.

  This wasn’t the stilled storm of the aftermath; it was the moment of devastation itself: forms fragmented into facets, shattered then scattered across the canvas in dull monochrome shades of black, white, and gray—willfully unvivid, which somehow served to heighten the horror. It was hell on earth, a man-made hell that seemed to reach beyond its subject, embracing all of man’s inhumanity to man.

  He couldn’t drag himself away, and it was a good few minutes before he realized why this was. She was on the left-hand side of the painting, just below the bull’s head, her own head thrown back toward the heavens in a broken-toothed, screaming plea for mercy.

  She had a ponytail, as did Sister Agnes.

  “It’s coming.”

  Luke glanced to his right, realizing only then that the comment had been addressed to him. “Excuse me?”

  The man had a full head of stiff silver hair, cropped close at the sides, and his kind, lucid eyes shone with a youthful vigor despite his advanced years. “For all of us,” he continued in French. “This is our future.”

  “You think?”

  “You don’t?” The man turned his attention back to the painting. “German and Italian planes doing Franco’s dirty work? The fascists are uniting, and they have started practicing on women and children. You think they can stop themselves now?”

  “Are you a Communist?”