by Gregg Loomis
“Give me a day or two. I have a lot of memories to search.” He checked his watch. “In the meantime, join me for tea and I’ll show you something most visitors here don’t see.”
Jacob started to protest that he had to be getting back to London but thought better of it. The stronger bond he could form, the more likely he was to get the information he sought.
“I’d be delighted.”
In silence, the two men retraced their steps until Isaacs took a left turn toward the eastern or right side of the main house. Following the gravel path, they were almost to the rear of the mansion when the Marquess stopped abruptly and pulled a ring of keys from his pocket, crossed over the grass, inserted one into a small wooden door with iron fittings and pulled it open. From the size of the space Jacob could see, he would have guessed he was looking at a maintenance closet, a place where garden equipment or the like was stored.
The Marquess beckoned. Just as Jacob reached the open door, an inner wall swung open, leaving him gaping at a spiral stair.
“Leads to a priest hole,” his host said as if that explained everything.
“Priest hole?”
“During Elizabeth’s time and even into the Jacobean era, being a practicing Catholic was a distinct liability if not a danger. Celebrating the mass could subject the participants to serious forfeitures. A second offense lead to prison. Attempting to convert a Protestant to Catholicism could and did get priests hung. So, the Catholic nobility built small hidden rooms in which the priests who secretly conducted masses might hide. This priest hole is just off my study two floors up. The carpenters found it only ten years ago while repairing what we thought was a leak in the frame of a window.”
Closing the door behind them, the two men groped their way upward in darkness until Isaacs opened a door and the staircase flooded with a mixture of light and shadow. At the top was a small room, perhaps ten by ten.
“Would have been difficult to celebrate mass in these close quarters,” Jacob observed.
“They didn’t. Best we can tell, the secretly Catholic Cavanaugh family actually worshipped in a room up under the eaves, one that could easily be stripped of the iconography. The priest, the implements of the sacraments and his robes could all be hidden here.”
Isaacs turned a latch and the far wall, swung open, a wall lined with shelves containing folded linen. It opened into a room fifty by twenty. The ceiling was, by Jacob’s estimate, at last thirty feet with the Virgin or some saint ascending into what looked like a brilliant sun. Two walls were lined with book cases, the third being floor to ceiling windows. On the fourth was mounted a rosette of arms: Pikes, halberds, cuirasses and swords stretched out from a single armored breastplate like flower petals. Surrounding the martial display were pistols and muskets, a collection of matchlock, wheel lock and flint lock.
Isaacs pointed proudly. “All used by guards here.”
Jacob shook his head. “And you don’t let the tourists see this?”
His host grinned. “In the first place, the display isn’t original to the house. My father’s decorator did it when we found all this stuff in the attic. Can you imagine the liability issues if, say, one of those pikes fell on someone?” He gestured toward a rather modern desk and a series of file cabinets. “Besides, I rather fancy having this room to myself. Now, about tea. . .”
Jacob was giving closer inspection to the arms. He picked a bell-barreled flintlock musketoon from the hook that held it, weighing it in his hands. “Looks more like a musical instrument, a trumpet, than a weapon.”
His host nodded. “But deadly at short range. Most people traveling by carriage had a coachman on top with one of those, sort of like your Old West shotgun on a stage coach. Same reason, to discourage highwaymen. The thing would be loaded with old nails, rocks, whatever was available. Could bloody well cut a man in half at twenty feet.”
Jacob was checking it out. “Do you realize this blunderbuss is loaded?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. Would take a conscious effort to set it off, now wouldn’t it? Between that and the age of the powder, a miracle would also be required.” He indicated a pair of wing chairs. “Have a seat. I’ll ring for tea. Sugar or lemon? Cream or no?”
26.
472 Lafayette Drive
Atlanta, Georgia
7:25 EDT
The Same Day
Strains of Benny Goodman’s clarinet leading Stompin’ at the Savoy filled the room with 1940’s swing. Lang would have to turn it down when Gurt got downstairs but he was enjoying it at dancehall level now. A rhythm almost impossible to resist, Lang tapped a toe as he poured a healthy dose of single malt scotch into a glass. He stooped to scoop from the ice maker below the bar. Either the music or a wet glass caused the latter to slip from his fingers, smashing into the unforgiving hardwood floor. Glass fragments and, worse, a generous helping of ten year old Laphroaig splattered.
“Fuck!”
“Fuck?”
Lang spun around to see Manfred, freshly scrubbed and ready for dinner. And recently and quietly come into the den along with his four-legged frequent companion in crime, Grumps. Lang and Gurt had made every effort to shield the child’s seven-year-old-ears from profanity. The little boy had trouble with remembering his homework assignments but once he heard a four letter word, it was forever embedded in his vocabulary.
Gurt was not going to be pleased.
“Fuck?” Manfred asked again.
“Old German word,” Lang desperately improvised. “Means, ‘I spilled the drink.’”
Manfred seemed to accept that as Lang went into the kitchen to find the broom and dustpan.
He was returning just as Gurt came downstairs, barefooted as she was wont to do in the warmer months. She crossed the room toward the bar where she had every reason to think a bottle of white wine was chilling.
Lang saw the danger at once. “Gurt. . .”
Too late. She stepped on a shard, immediately hopping on the uninjured foot. “Fuck!”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Manfred repeated.
“Nice job,” Lang said with a minimum of irony. “not likely he’ll forget that anytime soon.”
But first things first.
He helped Gurt to the couch. “I’ll get a bandage from the medicine cabinet.”
“How about a glass of white wine first?”
Minutes later, Lang had used tweezers to remove a microscopic grain of glass from the wounded foot, swab with antiseptic and apply a Band-Aid. Gurt was sipping a medicinal Riesling and the King of Swing was into Stars Fell on Alabama.
Gurt got to her feet and limped into the kitchen. She lifted the top of a pot and the unmistakable aroma of Bavarian white cabbage teased Lang’s nose. The sweet/sour flavor was one of his favorites.
“The grill is ready?” She wanted to know.
In warm weather almost all the family’s meals were prepared in whole or part on the charcoal grill. It kept some of the heat out of the house and, true or not, both Gurt and Lang felt that charcoal grilling added extra flavor. Manfred and Grumps were indifferent, the former being under interdict against leaving anything on his plate no matter what manner of preparation and the latter grateful for scraps also no matter the source.
In the confusion of the spill, Gurt’s injury and his escape from blame in adding to Manfred’s vocabulary, Lang had frankly forgotten to light the charcoal.
He had also forgotten to turn on the TV. Braves versus Nats tonight, Minor versus Strasburg. He turned on the flat screen. So far, no score.
“This is cooking dinner?” Gurt was standing in the kitchen doorway.
She had little patience for the national pastime, a game she viewed as having all the drama and action of a chess match. Lang had tried to explain that the slow movement was part of the appeal: A fan could catch the first inning or so, prepare dinner and return without having missed a whole lot. She neither understood nor cared; the game’s maze of complicated rules frustrated rather than entertained: Three strike
s and you are out unless the batter’s bat tips the ball unless the catcher catches it. The infield fly rule baffled her only slightly more than why stealing anything, a base included, should be laudatory. And why should there be only three strikes but four balls?
At least in Fussball, soccer, the action was constant, she maintained, if the scoring minimal and most often on a penalty kick.
Lang headed out toward the apron of the backyard pool. The minute he left the room, the crowd’s roar told him he had missed something. The Webber was closed emitting smoke from the hood’s vent. For a moment, Lang questioned his own sanity.
“I did it.”
Across the pool was Leon Frisch. A former meth addict and petty criminal, Leon had experienced a less than enjoyable encounter with Gurt a year or so past. In the county jail, he had gotten religion, returned to seek her forgiveness and in the process taken a bullet intended for Lang during a home invasion by hoodlums on the payroll of a rogue pharmaceutical company. Gurt had taken him on as a project and Leon had demonstrated an unrealized ability to fix just about anything containing moving parts. In addition to a semi-permanent handy man, he had effectively become major domo of the household, Manfred’s part-time playmate and Grumps’ major benefactor. Black, six feet with a full beard, Leon had an intimidating appearance that belied the gentle soul underneath.
“Saw you had the tray of chicken out,” he continued. “Figured you didn’t intend to leave it for the squirrels.”
Lang immediately noted the aroma of cooking meant mixed with the acrid smell of charcoal. One of the few totally American dishes Gurt had embraced was Southern barbeque, Chicken or pork. Tonight featured the former done in a brown sugar, tomato paste, Italian dressing and Worchester sauce combination, a recipe favored by his first wife.
Leon held up what looked like a small ball. “And I found this in the pump system. Looks like the one Grumps likes to carry around. Guess he dropped it.”
Lang noted the pool’s pump was no longer emitting an asthmatic wheeze. “I didn’t even know you had turned off the system.”
Leon grinned, tossing the ball up and down. “That’s what you pay me the big bucks for: Not to inconvenience. I shut it down and took apart the lines this morning while no one was at home.” He stopped fooling with the ball. “And that’ll cost you part of that chicken.”
Lang grinned. “We had planned on it, particularly since it looks like you’ve done most of the cooking.”
Leon shoved the ball into a pocket of his cargo pants. “And for that, I’ll share a bit of information: The same car has been parked out front on the street for the last hour or more. Two white dudes.”
Lang’s hands stopped halfway to lifting the Weber’s top. “An hour? Why didn’t you say something?”
Leon shrugged. “It’s a public street, dude. ‘Sides, I was in the garage, sharpening up the electric clippers. The hedges gonna need attention in the next week or so. Dudes were there when I went in, there when I come out.”
Most Ansley Park streets bore No Parking signs, a defense against those working in nearby office towers who would clog the oak shaded avenues for free rather than pay for a parking lot.
Probably nothing, Lang thought. But over the years he and Gurt had acquired a list of enemies, people who for varying reasons might wish them ill enough to seek to cause trouble. Seven years ago, Lang had nearly been killed when his high-rise condominium had been blown up as had been his car. Someone had taken a shot at him in a restaurant in Underground back when such a thing still existed. Paranoia, experience or a combination, his present home here in Ansley Park had enough security devices, both passive and active, to make Fort Knox look like a burglar’s dream come true. Even so, no one could be one hundred percent safe one hundred percent of the time.
Lang pointed to the set of barbeque tools hanging by leather tongs from the handles of the Weber’s top. “Make sure dinner doesn’t burn, will you?”
He stepped back inside the kitchen where Gurt was taking dishes out of the cabinets. Lang never understood. They used the same set every night unless there was some special reason. Why take dinner plates, salad plates, glasses, serving dishes and whatever from the dishwasher, arrange as to size and stack them in a cabinet when the entire process would be reversed and repeated tomorrow night? Same reason, he supposed, Gurt gave for making up the bed every morning: “Suppose I was in an accident. I wouldn’t want people to think I was a slovenly house keeper.”
What people? Wouldn’t an accident make dishes and beds a minor problem?
Tonight wasn’t the time to resurrect the issue. He stopped in the kitchen long enough to tell her what Leon had seen.
Dinner forgotten for the moment, she began a well-rehearsed drill. She stood before a panel behind a painting and pushed a button. Steel screens silently slid into place behind already curtained windows. A switch that could encase the den’s doors in iron was armed. Once set off, no one not armed with welding tools could get in or out. A safe room or a prison, depending on its occupants.
In the meantime, Lang pulled open a desk drawer, extracting a Glock 40 in a holster. He checked the magazine and made sure a shell was in the chamber before sliding the holster onto his belt and throwing on a light jacket to conceal the weapon. He heard multiple dead bolts click into place as he shut the front door and walked across the front porch.
The car was a mid-size Toyota Lang guessed was a rental, a guess confirmed by the small Hertz decal on the rear windshield. He made a show of inspecting the tag before walking over to the driver’s window and tapping on it.
It wheezed down.
“Excuse me,” Lang said politely, pointing to a sign, “but this is a no parking zone.”
As the driver turned, Lang could not miss the crescent scar circling
his neck.
“Well, aren’t we the perfect fucking policeman?” The voice dripped sarcasm.
There was no doubt the pair intended to be recognized.
Lang smiled sweetly as his right hand went under the jacket to rest on the butt of the Glock. He made sure the driver could see it. “Just being neighborly. You stay, sooner or later, the car will be towed.”
Not much of a threat considering how long they had supposedly been there.
“Is that so?” the passenger asked.
Standing beside the car, Lang couldn’t see his face but he would have bet the Weber it was the second part of the pair from Nassau.
Before he could reply, the driver cranked the engine and the car drove away leaving Lang on the sidewalk. He memorized the tag number, a futile effort he suspected. He was sure the Hertz’s records would show the rental had been to the British equivalent of John Doe.
Half an hour later, he, Gurt, Manfred and Leon sat at the dining room table. Grumps assumed his normal deployment beside the small boy, the most likely candidate to drop something from the table. An outdoor meal at the redwood-stained picnic table by the pool had been the original plan but, in view of the recent visitors, dinner inside seemed more prudent.
Even so, the TV in the next room was muted. Lang and Gurt might not agree on sports but they had accord on the subject of meals being subjected to television, a medium she was convinced damaged brain cells and he found annoying while trying to conduct civilized table conversation.
Gurt was refreshing her long stemmed glass of Gewurzttraminer as she observed, “The man this morning on the way to the courthouse, he wanted you to notice him.”
“What man?” Manfred asked.
Gurt favored him with a shake of the head, don’t interrupt the adults.
Lang was using both fork and knife to separate white meat from a half breast. “Good guess. For sure those guys parked out front waited until they were sure I knew they were there.”
“In-tim-i-dation.” Gurt pronounced the word syllable by syllable as she did many multi-syllabic English words. German was still her first language, but the accent became less noticeable as time passed. “Intimidation,” she repea
ted, “That was their purpose.”
“What’s ‘intimidation’?” Manfred wanted to know.
“Call it bullying,” Lang said, ever eager to increase his son’s vocabulary of non-obscene words, never mind interrupting adults. “It means to try to frighten someone.”
Then to Gurt, “I can assure you they meant more than just intimidation when I last saw them.”
Gurt cocked an eyebrow. “You did not tell me you had problems in Nassau.”
“It was your idea I owed Celeste going down there, remember?”
“We promised each other. . .”
Lang gave a shake of the head. Another mutual promise: Arguments, differences, whatever were not to held in front of their son.
Gurt shot him her we-will- discuss-this-later glance and resumed the previous conversation. “I suppose an attempt at in-tim-i-dation was all they dared. In Nassau, you were in their, er, Hinterhof. . .?”
“Backyard,” Lang supplied.
“Why backyard? Why is backyard special?”
Lang shook his head again, a matter of no consequence. “I suppose some one might think demonstrating they know where I and family live an obvious threat, one severe enough to butt out of that woman’s murder. But why do I feel they won’t stop there?”
The conversation was interrupted by Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
Lang pulled out his cell phone as he got up from the table. “It’s Jacob.”
He was in the den when he answered. “Yes, Jacob?”
“That suit you had made? It’s ready to pick up.”
“At the tailors?”
“Not at the same shop, no. The one in the Burnham Market”
“Burnham Market?”
“It’s on the map I gave you. Meet the Host.”
Jacob hung up.
Later that evening, Lang called up the map of London and surrounding areas Jacob had e-mailed him. It took nearly half an hour to discover Burnham Market was not a commercial enterprise. It was a town in East Anglica. He could only hope the conversation had been sufficiently obtuse to confuse any eavesdropper not party to the prearranged signals.