by Ross Thomas
“You’re a journalist, are you?” he said after a while.
“A reporter.”
“What paper did you say you worked for?”
“I didn’t say, but it’s The New York Times.” I crossed my legs elegantly, the way that I thought a Times man might.
“Hmm,” he said. “They should be able to afford ten guineas. No need to feel sorry for them.”
“No need,” I said.
He twisted to his left and poured the tea. “What do you take?” he said.
“Sugar. One lump.”
He passed me my cup. Then he offered the plate of four cookies. “Biscuit?”
“No, thank you.”
He seemed relieved. He snatched up the one with the pink icing and crammed it into his mouth, chewing noisily.
I sipped my tea. It was weak. “Very good,” I said.
“You mentioned over the telephone that you were interested in medieval weaponry,” he said. “Don’t know why you should be. No one else is today.”
“I’m putting together an article on some of the lost and missing treasures of the world which lately seem to be popping up. For instance, about three years ago the Boston Museum of Fine Arts suddenly acquired a gaggle of gold treasures from the Bronze Age, from Turkey probably. Then there was that Raphael portrait of the Duchess of Urbino that the same museum got and had to give back to Italy. More recently has been the uproar concerning what they’re calling the Great Calyx Krater mystery. That was the Greek vase done by the Athenian artist Euphronius. It went for a million dollars and turned up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.”
“Can’t see how any of this has to do with armor,” Christenberry said.
“I’m coming to that, if you’ll bear with me. What we’d like to do is to anticipate some of the treasures that might pop up. The Peking Man, for example. That disappeared in China just after Pearl Harbor. Now there’s talk that it might turn up any day.”
“Not much interested in paintings,” Christenberry said. “Ignorant about them really. Greek pots, too. I seem to recall that the Peking Man’s nothing but old bones.”
“But priceless,” I said.
“Can’t see why. The world’s nothing but a graveyard filled with old bones.”
“That’s just one example,” I said. “We’ve also heard rumors that several other lost or missing items are about to surface. They’re just rumors though and I’m trying to check them out. For instance, I’ve got a line on somebody who claims to know the whereabouts of the crown of the Infante Fernando. Another lead I have to follow up on is that somebody’s holding the gold and silver shield of Ruy Diaz de Bivar. You know, El Cid.”
“I know,” Christenberry said drily.
“I thought you might,” I said. “And then there’s another persistent rumor that keeps cropping up about something called the Sword of St. Louis.”
I watched him as I spun my tale. His lips had twisted themselves into what I took to be a sneer until I got to the Sword of St. Louis. Then they clamped themselves down into a line so tightly closed that I thought I might have to pry it open.
But after a moment he sipped his tea and popped another cookie into his mouth. “You are off on the wrong track, young man. Indeed you are.”
“How?”
“The Infante Fernando had no crown. I’ll spare you the details, but if you’d done any research at all, you’d know that. There was no crown.”
“All right,” I said.
“As for the Cid having a shield of silver and gold, that’s utter rot. He was a fighting man and an excellent one. He certainly wouldn’t have burdened himself with an overly elaborate shield. Where could you have heard such rubbish?”
“Around,” I said. “What about the Sword of St. Louis? Is that rubbish, too?”
Those thin lips clamped themselves together again. He had wet gray eyes, as nervous as quicksilver, and they darted around the room as though looking for the escape hatch until they finally lit on something—something reassuring, I thought, a Basilard dagger perhaps.
“It was a bastard sword,” he said in a low voice.
“A what?”
“A bastard sword. That meant that it had a hand-and-a-half hilt. One could wield it with one hand or both, if the action called for it. Fine steel, too, it was. Not razor sharp, of course; none of them was, but it took an edge that can’t be matched on any of today’s knives.”
“So it existed,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. There’s no doubt of that. It’s far too well authenticated.”
“Including the diamond as big as an egg in the pommel?”
His eyes started skittering around the room again. “So you’ve heard that, have you?” he said, not looking at me.
“I’ve heard.”
“Rock crystal most likely, if that. Swords were damned democratic things in medieval times. There was a brotherhood then among knights which made the simplest of them the equal of kings. A knight was as good as his sword and not many indulged themselves in fancy trimmings.”
“So you don’t believe there was a diamond?”
“If Louis had had a diamond as large as you claim, he probably would have used it to help finance his Crusades.”
“Maybe it was his mad money,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“His emergency fund. Maybe he kept it tucked away in the hilt of his sword.”
Christenberry tried on his yellow smile again. He didn’t wear it well. “I suppose we’ll never find out though, will we?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hear that the thing’s turned up here in London.”
“Impossible,” he said. “I would have heard.”
“That’s what I thought. I heard that it went for twelve-and-six in a shop on Shaftesbury Avenue back in thirty-nine and that the present owner just recently found out what he had.”
“Twelve-and-six,” the old man whispered. “My God, twelve-and-six.”
“How much do you think it would be worth now?” I said. “With the diamond.”
He shook his head. “Priceless,” he said.
“Nothing’s priceless, Doctor Christenberry. The Rosetta Stone’s only insured for a million pounds.”
He shrugged. He wasn’t really listening to me. He was thinking of the bargain that had gone for twelve-and-six on Shaftesbury Avenue in 1939. “Two million pounds,” he said. “Three million perhaps. The French would pay three million. Twelve-and-six! Oh, dear God, think of it. Twelve-and-six. They didn’t tell me that.” He looked up sharply to see if I had heard.
“How much did they pay you?” I said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know who. But how much did they pay you to authenticate it?”
His wet eyes went roaming again. “I’m a poor man. The world pays you nothing while you work and then it pensions you off with a pittance and oh, God, I get so hungry sometimes why can’t I just die.” He was starting to snuffle. He pulled at his nose a couple of times. It was the only unwrinkled spot on his face except his eyes, and if they had seemed wet before, they were flooded now.
“They wanted you to authenticate the sword, didn’t they?” I said.
“Yes,” he said between snuffles.
“Did you?”
He waved an angry arm. “I don’t have the proper equipment anymore. I sold it. I told them that. They said they’d be satisfied with just my opinion. They said I knew more about the sword than anybody else and God knows they were right. I spent years and years and a tidy sum ferreting out every scrap of information there was about the wretched thing. Years I spent and now you tell me that it went for twelve-and-six.” His voice rose. “I could have been there! I could have been there in Shaftesbury Avenue that very day. Oh, God, why wasn’t it me?”
“And was it what they thought it was?” I said.
Some hiccups interrupted his snuffles. But he nodded anyway. Then he stretched out his hands. “I held it right here—right in these ver
y hands.”
“How much did they pay you?”
The hiccups and snuffles died away. “My pension. They paid me a sum equal to my pension for a year. Five hundred pounds. That’s what I have to starve on. Isn’t that a princely sum?”
I took out my wallet again. He watched me. I counted out five ten-pound notes onto the arm of my lumpy chair. He watched that, too.
“Who were they?” I said.
He licked his lips as though he could taste the ten-pound notes. “You’re going to give me that money, if I tell you?”
“That’s right.”
“They swore me to secrecy.”
I sighed, took the wallet out again, and added another ten-pound note to the pile.
“Was the diamond in the pommel?” I said.
He nodded.
“Who were they?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. They were two men. They wouldn’t tell me their names.”
“Young or old?”
“Younger than I—but getting on. In their sixties, I’d say.
“Did they look alike?”
He nodded. “They could have been brothers. One was harder looking than the other.”
“And you got a good look at the sword?”
“I spent two hours on it. Two lovely hours. It was in surprisingly good condition. Much better than I’d have expected.”
“Anything else about it? Anything unusual?”
He shook his head. “No, not really. Except on the hilt just below the pommel. I didn’t see it until I used the glass. It looked as if somebody had scratched his initials into it—into the gold.”
“Were the initials NN?”
He looked surprised. “Yes, they were. Now may I have my money?”
I rose and handed it to him. “Thank you, Doctor Christenberry. You’ve been a lot of help. I’ll find my way out.”
I don’t think he really heard me. He was already counting the money. I went through the door into the foyer and closed it. Then I opened and closed the door that led to the street, but I went back and pressed my ear against the thin panel of the foyer door. I didn’t have to wait. He was already dialing the phone.
“This is Christenberry,” he said. “He only just left. I told him what you told me to tell him. Now may I have my money?”
I slipped out the front door and walked up to Elgin Avenue, caught a taxi, gave the driver an address on Harley Street, and thought about what I had heard and overheard in the house at 99 Ashworth Road. As I thought about it, I decided that it may have been what I was supposed to have overheard.
Chapter Eleven
IF YOU ARE GOOD enough and, for all I know, smooth enough, you can join the Royal College of Surgeons, hang out your shingle on Harley Street, and call yourself Mister instead of Doctor, which is the same logic that the British fell back on when they started calling their private schools public.
I had met Daniel Defoe about a dozen years before, just after he had opened his office on Harley Street and started calling himself Mr and sending out his bills in nice round guinea figures. I had met him at an all-night poker game where he had informed me that yes, he was descended from the writer; that he was Defoe’s great-great-great nephew or something, and that no, he didn’t believe that I had filled my flush. He had been right and he had won nearly enough in that particular pot to furnish his reception room. He also had become our family doctor, if Harley Streeters can be considered such, and my former wife had gone to him several times for various mild complaints while I had gone to him once with an ingrown toenail, just to make sure that he didn’t lose the common touch.
We hadn’t seen each other for three or four years, not since the last time he had been in New York, and so we spent fifteen minutes catching up on whatever gossip we still had in common and in my admiring his newly decorated consultation room.
“I can see that a lot of thought as well as a few buckets of tonsils went into all this,” I said. “You driving a Rolls yet?”
He smiled. He could charge an extra five guineas for that smile alone. “Since last year, I call it my Vasectomy V-8.”
“You do a lot of those?”
“I’ve suddenly become the bloody authority. It’s a two-or three-quid operation, you know. But nobody wants that. There’s something about the family jewels that demands the expert’s touch. So I pop them into hospital overnight, in a private room, of course, snip away for five minutes, send them a bill for a hundred guineas, and they’re delighted. I did more than two hundred of the things last year. Quite a few chaps from Scotland Yard for some reason.”
“Cops get a lot of free ass,” I said.
“Do they really?”
“They say they do anyway.”
Mr Defoe looked at me. It was his diagnostic look, I thought. He had a handsome, strongboned face, the kind that women adore and men don’t mind. His eyes were a large dark brown with a hint of pain in their depths, which all fine doctors have, and even some bad ones. His hair was carefully tousled and getting just a little gray and I found myself wishing that I had something wrong with me that he could take a look at. A bad hangnail would do.
“Are you over here on holiday or are you on one of those odd jobs that you do now and again?” he said.
“I’m working.”
He smiled once more. “Does it hurt?”
“Only in the mornings when I have to get up.”
“I suppose I should envy you, Philip, but I still like what I’m doing so marvelously well that I don’t have time.”
“I don’t want to take up any more of it,” I said. “Although I thought we might have dinner before I go back.”
“Or a game,” he said.
“If you can round up some fish.”
“No trouble. What else is on your mind?”
“Somebody slipped something into my drink the other day.”
“What happened?”
“Cramps. Then nausea followed by a terrific high. Euphoria, really. Then I blacked out.”
“You weren’t drinking a great deal, were you?”
“It was my only drink all day.”
“What was it, Scotch?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice any taste?”
I thought back. “It might have tasted a little bitter, but I’m not sure.”
“How much do you smoke now?”
I shrugged. “Three packs a day.”
“Dear God! What can you taste?”
“Salt. I can taste salt.”
“Well, I can tell you what it could have been, although I can’t be certain.”
“Of course.”
“Morphine.”
“Would that do it?”
He nodded. “I think thirty milligrams—a half-grain—might do it and you might not notice it if the Scotch were bad and the taste buds ruined, as yours seem to be. You wouldn’t have built up any tolerance for it either and that could have produced the symptoms you described.”
“I was just curious.”
“Did you like it?”
“What?”
“The euphoria.”
“Sure,” I said. “I was crazy about it.”
Mr. Daniel Defoe nodded gloomily. “I was afraid you might be,” he said.
At eleven o’clock that night the deep voice behind me said, “Well, well, well, well, well. If it isn’t Philip St. Ives, the honest messenger boy.” He made me sound like an Horatio Alger novel. The worst one.
I turned. He was still as tall as he had always been, around six-foot-seven, but a lot heavier, at least 250 or 275 pounds. It’s hard to guess accurately when it gets up that high.
His name was Wesley Cagle and his chief claim to fame was that he had once played football for Princeton and later the St. Louis Cardinals. Tight end, I think, but he hadn’t been much good as a pro and had lasted only two seasons. Years back, I had done a column on him when he had gone to work for Meyer Lansky as a “public relations consultant.” He hadn’t liked the colum
n much, which was probably because I hadn’t liked him much, and it had showed.
“You’re fat, Wes,” I said because it was the first nasty thing that came to mind.
He slapped his gut which bulged against the studs of his dress shirt. He wore his dinner jacket well, which is something that few really big men can do without looking like an extra waiter. Only a few pounds,” he said. “They give me a touch of dignity, which is something this joint can use.”
I looked around. Shields Gambling Emporium was a gaudy, glittering place with rows of heavy chandeliers, lots of red plush, dark mahogany, brass spittoons, and anything else that would make it look as though it had begun operation in 1894. In the background I could hear the gambling sounds: the slap of cards, the croupiers’ drone, the spinning balls, and the clicking chips.
“What do you do here, Wes, shave the dice?”
“I’m what is known as the deputy managing director.” He made a small bow. “Welcome to Shields, Mr. St. Ives, and I hope you lose your teeth. Drink?”
“Why not?”
We went over to a bar where a well-dressed gray-haired man stood, a drink in his hand, and tears streaming down his cheeks. I moved farther on down the bar and Cagle followed.
We ordered drinks and Cagle nodded toward the gray-haired man at the bar. “He dropped a thousand that he doesn’t have or can’t afford so I bought him a drink.”
“Well, that’s what you get for going to Princeton. Decent instincts.”
The fat hadn’t yet reached Cagle’s face. It was still mostly planes and angles and handsome enough if you don’t mind a thrice-broken nose. When he smiled, I saw that he had either had his teeth capped or had got some brand new ones.
“I got a call about you today,” he said. “From an old friend.”
“It must have been one of mine then. You don’t have any friends. Not old ones anyhow.” I don’t know why I needled him. He seemed to be trying to be nice and if he got tired of that, he could always hammer me into the rug with one hand.