Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  Claire turned the pages. Everyone could hear the book creak.

  “This is Latin,” said Claire.

  “The only language for the educated then.”

  “Queen Elizabeth spoke six languages fluently,” said Claire. She was whispering. In this room, one did not have to talk loudly. Claire imagined orders being given for a thousand plots against a thousand friends and allies in this room, each whispering in some other castle of a thousand other plots against the Desinis.

  She imagined great works of art being commissioned and people dying young of diseases they could not cure. Of superstition and genius, of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and of Cellini and the delicate work of art that was his saltcellar.

  And she turned the pages until on reaching one she sat down gasping.

  There in the fine pen strokes of an Italian count dead for centuries was the cellar she had seen in Dad’s basement back in Carney. That was lucky. The polished diamonds as round little tubes at the base. The great ruby with Christ’s head implanted on a thick bosom of gold. The jade lions even more graceful than she remembered—perhaps the count’s innate sense of art overcoming his need for accuracy. And the Poseidon sapphire, Poseidon so well drawn and called, of course, in this manuscript, Neptuno, the Roman version being Neptune. She put a photocopy of her crude drawing from memory next to it. Considering the years, the ages, it was recognizable enough.

  “Yes,” said Claire. “Arthur, look.”

  Artie leaned over from his chair.

  “That’s it. That’s the Tilbury. That’s Dad’s. They’re the same,” she said.

  He nodded. He was thinking hotel. If she had shown him a mushroom next to a wildebeest, he would have nodded. He thought of soft, warm Italian beds, with sheets and pillows, and lots of sleep, perhaps waking up to some very special kind of breakfast.

  “What do you think, Arthur?”

  “Good. Very good,” said Artie. “That’s it. We got it. Let’s go.”

  “Signora, could you tell me what the count says? I don’t know Latin.”

  “He says this is the great jeweled gold piece of Elizabeth, without form, without purpose, but which she showed him as a sign of her nation’s power. He proposed to her a question about the form of power, that without purpose and direction, which Bologna could help provide, power could be formless, and her answer was typically English, that power didn’t need form or Bologna at too high a price.”

  “What was the price?”

  “He doesn’t say.”

  “Does he say anything else about the Tilbury Cellar, the power perhaps?”

  “That it was called Tilbury and crafted there, within the smell of the sea that had protected the pride of England.”

  “Was he insulted?”

  “I sense that. We were an older house than the Tudors, after all.”

  “Is there any mention of the reasons for the jewels?”

  Signora Desini said she was sorry, but no. They were difficult times, and he would put nothing in paper that he did not expect someone to steal a look at. There were even greater Desinis than Count Orofino, the Desinis being one of the exceptional families of Europe, older than the Hapsburgs, did Claire know?

  When Claire and Artie drove down from the hill from which the Desinis had ruled almost since the cross became a symbol of worship and not execution, Artie said, even as his body dozed, “She’s married to that family.”

  “Is that what you thought?” asked Claire.

  “Sure. What’d you think?”

  “I was thinking, why sleep in a hotel when you can sleep on a plane to Britain?”

  “No,” said Artie.

  “We know it’s the Tilbury. We know we’ve seen it. We know for certain that there can’t be three similar cellars with the same stones, the same placement even. Therefore, my father’s cellar was originally called the Tilbury. What happened to it and why, I want to find out. We’ve never been so close, Arthur.”

  “The hotel,” said Artie, who wondered how Claire could sidestep Rawson’s claim so easily. He knew she had to have some kind of an answer and he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted a bed, sheeted, pillowed, and fluffed and warmed from his body, possibly even hers also.

  “What if you were in the army, and you were close to winning the major battle—would you go to sleep?”

  “I understood those things about the army and warfare, Claire, when I chose to be a policeman instead of a paratrooper, or whatever.”

  “I’m surprised you even became a policeman.”

  “I have yet to be apprised of the moment I vowed to give up sleep for an NYPD badge.”

  “It’s so important, Arthur.”

  “So am I.”

  “Of course you are,” said Claire and kissed him, and then snuggled into him and then asked exactly how much sleep he was going to need before he felt rested.

  They were delayed getting to the hotel by a procession for St. Julian. Artie slept as Claire watched, the music from the little band providing more cacophony than rhythm. She could feel the excitement of the townspeople. On the platform borne on the shoulders of men dressed in black came a gold foot with jewels.

  “What’s that?”

  “Da foota Blesseda Sainta Julian,” said the driver.

  “Not his real foot? His real foot?”

  “Si. Da foota. Julian, he giva da foota to his people. You wanta baby, pretty lady? Touch da foota.” The driver turned around, explaining with his hand. Claire had read about relics of pieces of saints’ bodies, but she had never seen one before. The driver kept explaining how powerful it was. Perhaps because he repeated it so much, Claire started to feel that maybe the remnant of the saint’s body in the gold and jewels actually could do things. Of course, it couldn’t. This fervent Catholicism was so different from her Presbyterian faith.

  She told the driver to follow the procession. It ended at a church. The people sang and clapped their way in. She didn’t know whether she could trust the driver or the people, so she took Arthur’s wallet and passport from his jacket and told the driver to tell Arthur she had them if he woke up.

  She made her way into the rear of the church. The gold-encased foot now rested on its platform before the altar. She wondered what Christ would do if he saw people in his name worshiping a gold-encased foot. They went up one by one and touched the gold foot, kissed it. Some touched and kissed their hands.

  Claire could not imagine her Catholic friends doing such a thing. She had been to a Catholic mass at Ohio State, and she could not remotely imagine the intelligent, highly rational priest at the Newman Center involved in anything like this.

  It was scary. It was so pagan. She was glad she was Presbyterian. She would rather follow Reb Schnauer and cut off her hair, and even take a subordinate role as a woman, than worship the gold-encased foot of a corpse. How crude. How frightening that people would do it. She found herself moved forward in the line shuffling ahead. People were saying things to the foot up front. She was going to be put in front of that thing. What could she do?

  Would she laugh out loud at these poor people? She didn’t want to insult them. But it was so funny. Asking the foot of a dead person to help them. What would Arthur say? If Julian were so powerful, why was he dead? Arthur would say that. She hoped she wouldn’t laugh.

  She would be polite. She would nod politely, not to the foot, but to the priest. Perhaps she would say thank you. What would she do if someone tried to press her hand to the foot in mistaken sympathy for her, as though she were ignorant. Would she firmly but politely not allow her hand to touch it? Why was she so bothered when she had seen people do worse? Because she was in it. She was very much in it, now, moving up to the gold-encased foot.

  For a moment she thought she would turn her head away, but that would be acceding to some sort of supernatural power. It was only a piece of a dead person, which would have been buried had it been in Carney.

  Thus thinking, she allowed herself to be moved amid the incensed air, along the
nave of the church to the front, where a woman bowed and kissed the gold encasing the shape of a foot, leaving Claire in front of it, pure glistening gold with baguette cut emeralds and small beads of cabochon sapphires, about two karats each, implanted in the base beneath it. In that casing were bones centuries old from a man canonized by his church, one who, it was proved, had done some sort of miracle. A priest stood beside the foot wiping off with white linen where the woman had just kissed that worn big toe.

  Everyone had touched it.

  Help me find the answers, Claire begged in thought, as she bent down kissing the toe.

  She couldn’t help herself. She was just drawn to its power. Like any superstitious peasant. It had been there. Visible. Touchable. Kissable. And thank God, no one had seen her do it. Arthur was still asleep in the car when she returned.

  “Itsa’ powaful,” said the driver.

  “Yes,” said Claire.

  He went on about the strength of St. Julian’s foot, how it made Bologna great, greater than Naples, Milan. What did they have, he asked, in the way of powerful relics? He answered his own question in clear English.

  “They gotta shit. Who they got? Saint Gennaro? He’s shit.” It was like someone going down a baseball lineup.

  Arthur slept eight hours and ate two meals and wanted to see more of Bologna before they left. Claire said they could come back on a longer vacation sometime. She almost said honeymoon. Did she want to marry him?

  Artie ate again on the plane to London. He asked why Claire didn’t suffer jet lag.

  “I do. I just don’t let it get to me,” she said to him.

  In London, the only available room was in the Brittania Hotel, expensive, but with a good desk and telephone service. They got an official custodian at Windsor Castle, who explained that while they might visit those rooms open to the public, the Tilbury vault was not one of them.

  “Well, I don’t believe it’s there,” Artie heard her say as he lay on the bed, watching her lean over the desk. She had the white-handled telephone pressed to her ear and she was writing down things.

  He stripped to his shorts and T-shirt and put his hands behind his head. When he thought she was looking at him, he waved and smiled broadly.

  She ignored him.

  “I can prove to you it’s not there,” she said into the phone.

  There was another pause. Artie took off his shorts and waved those. She ignored him.

  “Well, how do you know, if you haven’t seen it? Yes, I would like to talk to him.”

  Artie stood up in bed, nude from the waist down.

  Claire turned away to the wall. “All I am asking is to speak to someone who has seen it, that’s all. I want nothing else. Yes. I will wait.”

  Artie took off his T-shirt and threw it at Claire’s head. She caught it, put it on the desk, and folded it with one hand as she talked.

  “I didn’t think you had. Yes, I would. I would be most happy to speak to him. Absolutely …,” said Claire. She held out Artie’s folded shirt for him to take.

  “These people are such jerks. I do believe now that something worth millions could well be lost. No one has seen it. No one has seen it. And they say it’s there. How do they know it’s there, right?”

  “Look at me,” said Artie.

  “Here’s your shirt,” said Claire.

  “Hey, look at me.”

  “Arthur, please. Later.”

  He waited with the shirt in his hand, an arm’s reach from her and she didn’t even know he was there. She was on the phone again, now calling people fools directly. Artie made out that she was talking to someone in the British government.

  “Listen, I know I saw the Tilbury Cellar in New York City. Now what’s going on here? What kind of a shell game are you playing? You’re damned right I’m calling you a liar, and she’s a damned liar, too.”

  Claire slammed down the phone and cried. Finally, she looked at Artie.

  “They’re such damned liars and idiots. And she is the worst liar of them all. It is so frustrating. I am run around and around and around. Arthur, believe me, if there is one big liar in the world it’s her. She’s behind it. I’m sure. To hell with all of them.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “The Queen. I couldn’t even get past some damn clerks.”

  “Of England?”

  “They didn’t even bother to lie well, Arthur. That’s what’s so frustrating. I catch them in lies, and they just repeat them.”

  Artie put on the shirt, and he put on the pants, and gently he eased Claire away from the telephone to a couch. She started to talk and he put a finger to her lips.

  “You’ve been up for two days, dear,” he said softly. “Even super Saint Claire Andrews has to rest. I know you will consider a need to sleep like the rest of us a sign of special moral weakness in yourself. But the human body needs it. Even yours.”

  He held her in his arms even as she talked away, but when he felt her hair against his face, he knew she had finally succumbed. He carried her into bed, where she slumbered half a day, and when she woke up they made love in the big soft bed with all of England outside, quite chill, and quite distant from their beautiful room and beautiful lives.

  She moved her cheek along his and whispered, “Why would they lie?”

  Artie got out of bed and got dressed and pointing a finger at her head, said, “Enough.”

  “Arthur, we’re so close to the answers. My father died over this. I’m so close to the meaning of the Tilbury. How many cellars in the world would have those stones, identical, let alone being placed identically?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Not when we’re making love.”

  “We were finished.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  Artie turned from her and went outside for a walk in a cold March rain in a leafless park outside the hotel. He walked the dark paths under dripping dead-limbed trees, fuming, and when he got back to their room, Claire was dressed. She looked so adorable and fresh, and he couldn’t stay mad long, not when she was laughing.

  Fortunately, she did not review every last detail of her phone calls around Britain at that moment, but took him sightseeing. To the Tower of London no less.

  It was not a tower but a sprawling dark stone fort where the British had mangled various members of the populace who, now that they weren’t a danger to Crown and country, were considered heroes of history.

  Claire squeezed his arm as the Beefeater guide led them with a little group along the paths of the fort interior. For her, she said, it was like going home. She had read so much about England at the time the Tilbury was made, according to the scant information they let out.

  “You know Elizabeth wouldn’t stay here,” said Claire.

  “Who?” asked Artie.

  “Elizabeth the First. She was confined here for a while before she was Queen. This used to be a royal residence, but her mother was beheaded here so she never used it for a royal residence. She did her torturing here. In those days it was a common punishment. Today, torture’s only used by some governments to get information.”

  The dark stone walls, the walks, the ravens, the rooms where royalty had stayed and royalty had killed were all so close about her now. Like a great hunter she could get the scent of the quarry. It was so close and so far from that 3:00 A.M. alone with a blank wall in her Queens apartment. Those first marks had led her here. She had found this place and the time in infinity.

  At the building with the Crown jewels, she paused before a display of royal saltcellars behind glass. If one put jewels into the massive cylinders of ornate gold, one would have the Tilbury. There was the very same feel to them. She squeezed Arthur’s arm tighter. It was here. Every reason for it was right here. Near here. Somewhere here. Moving crowds pushed them on to where the crown of England was on display too, heavily jeweled, with that central red stone that later ages showed was not a ruby. She watched Arthur. She wondered if he were estimating the price of something like that for one of his jewe
ler friends.

  “What do you think it’s worth?” she asked.

  He cocked his head. “The way they use gold and jewels is different from anything I’ve seen. Those jewels in the crown represent power. Lots of fanfare. Knights and ladies, all that stuff. It’s a crown. Not a bracelet or earrings.”

  “You’re right. But it reminds me of something I saw in Bologna. A sense of holiness in the way people used jewels. I mean this crown and those cellars are different. And the people who made them knew they were different. And don’t get mad at me, but my father’s cellar, the Tilbury, reminds me more of the crown than those saltcellars.”

  “I was thinking that, too,” said Artie. “From your sketch.”

  She hugged his arm.

  In the building displaying English armor, Artie became depressed when he saw deadly crossbows, polished swords, and a wall of lances, hundreds of them.

  “Killing. That’s what it was. I should’ve known. The crown was window dressing. This is what it was. Killing. Harry Rawson was right. It’s a bloody history. Knights and ladies and jousts. Horseshit. They killed with these things.”

  “Didn’t you know that?” asked Claire.

  “I knew it. But when you see all this machinery polished and ready, you know it was gang warfare, and the toughest gang was the King’s. This place ruins England for me.”

  England got better for Artie when they walked along the Thames, past Waterloo Bridge, along the Victoria Embankment, looking at the steady opaque flow of the mud-dead river and the new boats moving quietly. Here was the sense of propriety that he liked, an order and a politeness in which, if a person minded his own business and did not pick fights, he could get along quite nicely without any of that lance and spear mayhem back in the Tower.

  His hand found hers, and they walked languidly without a destination, feeling the dampness, sharing the newness of things in this country, and the oldness, and the differences and the similarities, and it seemed so soon that they were on the Westminster Bridge and Big Ben was behind them, and Artie stopped and took Claire in his arms and kissed her with all the love he had. He said he would like to spend a month here sometime, and she agreed, and neither of them mentioned honeymoon.