Quest
Page 50
“Five million,” said Rawson. “Without Artie.”
“You knew the terms.”
“All right. You will have him when I have our mutual bowl safe.”
She felt something in her want to dance joy before the heavens, and yet something else, that calculating reason that had brought her through to this, told her that any relaxation could lose Arthur if, indeed, he still were alive. She had to be very careful to get him through now. There was still danger if Great Britain didn’t know exactly what she wanted.
“No,” said Claire. “You’re going to have to bring him here. I want to see him. I want to hold him. A promise will do no good. I’m not selling his life. I don’t want your bloody five million. You heard my price.”
“There is going to be some difficulty getting him. He is alive. He has been injured.”
“How much?”
“He has all his functions. He is in pain. You really shouldn’t have put him in that spot you know. He really was not equipped to kill me.”
Poor Arthur. He had tried to do it his way. He had panicked. She could strangle him if she didn’t love him so much.
“He is going to be here within three hours, or there is no deal.”
“That’s impossible.”
“There are no negotiations on this point, Captain.”
“My dear Miss Andrews.”
“You’re losing time,” she said. If she had that gun Arthur had given her, she knew she could kill this man now. Although she wouldn’t. It was as though all her most violent feelings were only whispers far off, while her mind worked this thing.
“There is a problem in getting him here. I would have to for discretionary reasons use my embassy. There might be some difficulty there,” said Rawson.
At that moment, Claire Andrews knew she had him. He might try something more, but he was done for. There was nothing more.
Now, the moment he admitted possible lack of support from his own people, he had given up negotiating and was pleading. No matter what he said from here on, it would be begging. There was even another offer of higher money and a threat to let Arthur die, but it was all meaningless.
Eventually he got on the telephone with his embassy and described some New York basement and Arthur’s condition, including, to Claire’s horror, nails in Arthur’s arms and one leg.
“It does not kill. Only if they’re upright so the arms won’t let them breathe does it kill. You damned well better know. He’s all right. I have that arranged here. You can check out my priorities.… Well, I did have them.… It really is up to you, old boy. I am here. I have what I was sent for; I employed my commission with the judgment I used all my life. If at this time, it seems inappropriate … you’re wasting time.”
Captain Rawson hung up. Claire Andrews said they would both wait in the publisher’s office.
“Arthur will have to go to a hospital, I believe. May I smoke?”
“No. I don’t like smoke,” said Claire.
“Someone here smokes a pipe. I can smell it.”
“I don’t,” said Claire, and it was then that Captain Rawson rose and gave Claire Andrews a stiff and formal salute.
“I congratulate you,” he said.
She did not answer, but turned away, embarrassed that someone would say something like that after all this blood and suffering. They waited three and a half hours in silence, and she didn’t let him smoke and she didn’t let him leave and every once in a while she locked eyes with him and it was not Claire Andrews who blinked.
When Captain Rawson took the clay bowl later that afternoon, apparently under some sort of detention by his own embassy staff, she did say good-bye.
It was agreed, with an abject apology from the British Embassy, that Her Majesty’s government would make any amends required. It was requested that Miss Andrews and Mr. Modelstein not press charges, that Her Majesty’s government wished to settle this matter of utmost embarrassment discreetly. Claire knew the words and it was not that she didn’t believe them; she didn’t care whether the Brits meant them or not. Arthur had been flown to Ohio with a British doctor in a private plane, accompanied by embassy officials. He was here. He was alive. He was going to be well.
She told them to leave and take their damned clay cup with them.
Artie did not have to be hospitalized, but he did have to stay in bed, and the bed he stayed in was Claire’s in her mother’s house, which posed a problem for Mrs. Andrews.
New York City was one thing, but Carney was another.
“Everyone’s doing it, Mother.”
“We’re not everyone.”
“I am.”
“No. You’re not.”
“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” asked Claire.
“No, but we should have. You just never brought anyone home to sleep in your room,” said Lenore, laughing. “Not my fault you were so inactive.”
Artie met Mrs. Andrews with his wrists bandaged and his foot encased in something stiff, all done expertly by a British doctor.
She thought Claire’s Arthur was so brave in not wanting to talk about his injuries. He was the strong silent type. Claire knew otherwise. Arthur didn’t want to talk about it because it made him sick.
“At least you found out how truly brave you were,” Claire’s mother had said.
“I coulda done without it real nice,” said Artie.
Claire promised no one would bring it up again, but she knew one day Arthur would have to talk about it.
In England Sir Anthony Witt-Dawlings had one last assignment. A piece of rounded orangish clay, in a bowl shape, was given him with instructions to tell no one and to deposit it in the Round Tower at Windsor. No one was quite sure what to do with it after all. He returned it to the passage in the Round Tower, which he had once given Captain Rawson permission to enter, and not knowing in which cell exactly to place it, he stumbled with a search beam past several cells until he found one whose heathstone floor seemed to have been hacked at recently, disfiguring an engraving. It was the cell Captain Rawson had presumed he had made safe for England’s secret. On a dark stone pedestal a faint round mist of gold reflected the beam, the Tilbury’s golden fingerprint, taken over four centuries.
Sir Anthony put the poorish bowl in the middle of the faint gold circle and left it for as many more centuries as Windsor would choose.
Then he went to the funeral of Captain Harry Rawson, Royal Argyle Sutherlanders, who upon his return to the Gulf was killed when trying to teach friendly troops the use of grenades.
In Carney, Claire Andrews received a package from the Ohio State archeology department and promptly bought a large can of green enamel paint the hardware store assured her would never chip but would wear for years.
In the basement where she had first seen the Tilbury Cellar, she opened the box from the archeology department and put aside the two-page letter of explanation. That could be handled later. Quickly, she reached into the packing and removed an orangish bowl with a lacquered dark bottom, reflecting faintly in small spots the glow of the basement light. Then with a cheap brush she lathered on the thick green paint over Great Britain’s Holy Grail, smothering it in ugly layers, making it unworthwhile for anyone to steal, a common, ugly sort of ashtray she intended to leave out on some table or desk.
It was hers and it was America’s for whatever it was worth. Captain Rawson had admitted he didn’t know what it looked like during the dinner back in New York. And if he did recognize he had a substitute, she would have sent for this from Ohio State archeology. But he hadn’t.
It felt dangerous, but in no way did it add to the risk. She knew that. She understood Rawson’s war for the Grail. There were no morals. No one was punished for lying and cheating, only losing. That was the sadness she felt for so much of this.
She put the green wet thing on a brick to dry. She would give it another coat in the afternoon. She would not hide it, but keep it out in the open and if someone stole it, they could have it. She had wo
n a greater prize than she had set out for. She had won herself.
The archeology department at Ohio State was more than helpful. They appreciated not only her donation to them, but also her interest in the field. They had supplied the clay bowl of the Roman period that went to Britain. It had come from a find in Israel. They were so common they were even sold in dozens of antiquities shops in that country.
As the paint dried, Claire read the letter under a bare light bulb. The clay, as they had told her informally on first sight, was the typical orange of the Roman occupation of Judea. But clay, as Claire had been told, could not be carbon dated. Fortunately, the black substance at the bottom of the bowl was organic and did date to 50 C.E., Christian Era, plus or minus fifty years.
Claire smiled. She had determined that if the clay bowl was dated at the time of Christ, then it was just a bare possibility this was the cup of the Last Supper, the Grail, this thing she had tracked in Jewish comments coming to England from Spain and Muslim comments coming to Spain from Jerusalem.
And this was because the saving of relics other than the bones of the saints only started several centuries after Christ’s death. The inclination to create a forgery at the time of Christ would therefore be less.
Of course, who would have saved it in the beginning? she wondered, putting down the first page of the two-page letter.
Those at Christ’s seder were all disciples who did not stand up to the Romans seizing Jesus. Would they rescue a cup? Judas had betrayed him. Peter denied him three times, and there was no indication any of the others did anything but flee in panic. Except there was one who doubted everything: Thomas, who had even put his fingers into Christ’s wounds to make sure the resurrection was not an illusion. He would have done it. He would have been curious about what there was to the mysterious words about the cup, that this would be the cup of the blood of the new covenant. He might have saved it to examine it, if the Gospels were accurate as to his behavior and the other events.
She glanced down at the green painted thing drying on the brick. Maybe, she thought. And then she turned to the second sheet from the archeology department. They were puzzled by their analysis of the bowl they had returned because human sacrifices in the Canaanite, Judean, later Palestinian area had ceased many centuries before. And yet in this bowl of 50 C.E. the dark stain in the bottom was that of human blood.
Claire tore up the letter in the basement, careful to save the pieces. She capped the paint and put the brush into turpentine so she would not have to buy another for the second coat and went upstairs to Arthur.
“Anything doing today?” asked Artie, glad to see her.
“Nothing,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful town but kind of dead, you know,” said Artie.
“Sometimes,” said Claire, and kissed him, and fluffed up his pillow. And later that day she burned the fragments of the letter in the compost pile behind the house where Jed had collected winter refuse to decompose in the flower beds of the big white Victorian house on Maple Hill.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Joan Mandarin and Jerry Lorig of the NYPD; Tarnia Prater of Great Britain; Chris Moylan of Roslindale; Ben Kupferman, Boston jeweler and sculptor; Ward Damio; Joyce Engelson; Sumner Dorfman; and, as always, my first editorial reader and advisor, P. K. Chute from South Portland, Maine.
A ruby dealer asked his name not be used.
About the Author
Richard Ben Sapir (1936–1987) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and he graduated from Columbia University. He worked as a journalist for the Associated Press before becoming a fiction writer. He was the coauthor, with Warren Murphy, of the Destroyer series of men’s action-adventure novels, which later became the basis for a movie titled Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Sapir’s first hardcover book was Bressio, followed by his favorite, The Far Arena. His novel The Body was adapted into a film starring Antonio Banderas and Derek Jacobi. Sapir’s fourth novel was Spies.
The author died shortly after submitting the manuscript for his final and highly acclaimed work, Quest, which his editors found to be so well written that no changes were made before publication. It was named an alternate selection for the Book of the Month Club. That same year, the New York Times called Sapir “a brilliant professional.”
Photo © Cindy Pitou Burton
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Patricia Chute-Sapir, the executrix of the estate of Richard Ben Sapir.
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2160-9
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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RICHARD BEN SAPIR
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