Confessor

by John Gardner

  Only the cognoscenti, like Big Herbie, caught movement from the line of oak trees and the hedge forward of the trees.

  They marched away, feeling that Gus had been done proud. Herbie also felt, very strongly, that Gus was physically present. He did not inquire of others if they felt that Gus was there that afternoon—chuckling away at everyone—lest he be thought lacking two sandwiches short of a picnic. But feel it he did.

  The next morning he settled down to work, opening the inch or so of Gus’s manuscript and beginning to read:

  I have spent most of my adult life with crossword puzzles. Not the kind of puzzles that have neat patterns of black and white squares, and intelligent clues for One Down or Six Across. My crossword puzzles have usually begun with a couple of clues, a blank sheet of paper, and myself sitting opposite someone who is a clue in himself—or occasionally, herself.

  Great opening stuff, Herb thought. Then the telephone rang and Worboys was on the line. “I got something, Herb.”

  “Not catching, I hope?”

  “The watchers got something. It’s really weird. Two guys paid Gus a visit around midnight. We have it on tape, and a lot of the sound is there as well. I’m driving down now so we can watch it together. Oh, yes, I’ll be bringing someone with me.

  “Who’s someone?”

  “I can’t keep them off any longer, Herb. I presume you got the other news? Bitsy, I mean?”

  “Oh, yeah. Big drama queen stuff. Told me she’d do anything just to stay close to the operation.”

  “See you in a couple of hours.”

  Drama queen stuff it certainly had been. She had brought the matter up just, after the funeral. “Herb, they offered me some other god-awful job. They’ve told me that if I want to stay on this I have to be downgraded. Chief cook and bottle washer. Well, I’ve been doing safe houses for a long time—that and catering for visiting firemen—so I’ll do it for a real op. You’ll eat very well, I promise, and you need good food, Herbie. You’ve got a lot of your old color back already.”

  “Sure, Bits. You’re very good, and home cooking’s just what we need. When it comes to nourishing food, you’re the tops,” he lied.

  The Detective Chief Inspector from the Anti-Terrorist Plod, known as SO 13 in Scotland Yard’s vocabulary, was in a different class.

  Worboys had his own key, and he gently called out “Hallo, anyone at home?” from the hall.

  Herbie heard him first and was out of Gus’s study before anyone else knew there were strangers in the house.

  He did a double take, for there was Worboys looking a shade too prosperous in a Whitehall suit—navy, double-breasted, with a minute white stripe—cream shirt and a blue-and-white polka-dot tie. He wore a rose in his buttonhole and was accompanied by a young woman—well, in her late thirties, but looking twenty-nine. Medium height, short dark hair nicely done, pleasant face, not chocolate-box pretty: the nose was a trifle too sharp, her mouth had a slight overbite. However, the eyes were large and brown and she was blessed with a dazzling smile, calculated to put a confirmed misogynist at ease. She moved with the kind of authority born of discipline, and carried a small suitcase, which she put down carefully in the hall.

  “Herb, this is Detective Chief Inspector Rebecca Olesker of SO 13. DCI Olesker, Eberhardt Lukas Kruger. Answers to Herbie, Herb, Big Herb …”

  “And Mr. Kruger sometimes.” Big Herb was pissed at Worboys. Why the hell had he not told him that the Anti-Terrorist cop was a woman?

  “Just as I sometimes answer to Ms. Olesker, Mr. Kruger.” The overwhelming smile was like a trick from Special Effects. “But I’d prefer Becka, Becky or Bex. I prefer Bex, actually.”

  “Like I prefer Herb, Bex.” His giant paw completely covered her hand.

  “Well, we’ve got that over with. There’s a room for the DCI, isn’t there, Herb?”

  “Bitsy was doing something about that. Muttered something about another mouth to feed.”

  “Well. Good.” Worboys was full of bounce, cocky with the look of a man who had just been proved right against all odds.

  “You won the pools, Tony?” Herb still looked at Bex Olesker, giving her a cheeky wink.

  “Maybe. Who knows? We won something.” He lifted a videocassette and shook it like a trophy.

  “We all going to see it?”

  “Let Bex settle in. She’s seen it, and I’m leaving this copy with you so you can cozy up and watch it together, discuss the wicked ways of the world.”

  Ginger and Bitsy appeared out of nowhere. Herbie knew they had been listening and had come in on cue. He took over and introduced her as DCI Olesker—“but prefers to be called Bex.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Olesker. I show you to your room?”

  Bitsy bridled. “Oh, no. I’m the housekeeper, Ginger. Let me do the honors.”

  Bex did the floodlight smile, bestowing it in equal proportions on both Bitsy and Ginger. “That would be nice. I’ll see you later, then, Mr. Kruger.”

  “Herb,” he corrected, thinking that her voice could saw and weave around poetry: an actor’s voice.

  She gave him a little wink. “Nice to be working with the pros.”

  Herbie curbed his wandering thoughts and turned his mind to things that mattered, lingering for a moment as the SO 13 officer walked away with Ginger and Bitsy.

  “Very good,” Worboys said quietly when she was just out of earshot. “One of their best.”

  “Give me her history later. I want to see the product.”

  “I warn you it’s weird as hell, and the sound’s a bit tricky. We don’t get it all, but what we do get is pretty macabre.”

  They drew the blinds and sat in front of the TV. Side by side, like friends at the movies. “You want a choc-ice?” Herb asked.

  “No, I’ll wait for the main feature. Here we go.”

  There was a moon and they had the infrared on, so the picture, while fairly sharp, was a grainy black and white. Not great definition, but the grave was instantly recognizable. In the lower left-hand corner there was the date, with a clock running. It said 12.23.31, the last two digits clicking off the seconds—time going by in the fast lane.

  Two shapes moved up the path towards the grave. They walked on the grass verge, gliding so like ghosts that Big Herbie felt his skin crawl. They wore what looked like old duffel coats with the hoods up. The light made them appear as dark monks, highlighted against the sky.

  The first words between them were incoherent, partly because whoever was doing the sound had not locked on, and the mikes had obviously brushed against the hedge.

  The two figures stationed themselves on either side of the mound of earth, which merged into the darkness.

  “You start.” That was clear. Male voice. Age impossible to tell.

  “All right.” Another male who moved his head upwards and began to speak. The mikes were still not right, it was just a babble of sound as the audio operator struggled with his controls, finally bringing the words into focus, like a camera adjustment. Then, very clearly:

  “Claudius Damautus is not gone. He has simply preceded us in mounting a stage upon which all of us must someday play a role. He has read a script which still remains unseen by those of us on this side of tomorrow’s curtain. We join his loved ones in feeling that he has outsoared the shadow of our night and come so close that he may walk softly within our thoughts …”

  More static, rustling leaves probably, drowning the words until:

  “We men of earth have here the stuff of paradise.

  We have enough,

  We need no further stones to build the stairs to the Unfulfilled.

  No other ivory for the doors, no other marble for the floors.

  No other cedar for the beam and dome of man’s immortal dream.

  Here on the common human way is all the stuff to build a heaven.

  Ours the stuff to build eternity in time.”

  This last was spoken by the second man. The first raised something high above the grave,
and as the figure turned, it looked like a small stick. He took up the words again: “Since time immemorial, this has symbolized the power through which the miracles are consummated …” More interference until: “His knowledge of the inner secrets of this timeless craft developed under the shield of this instrument. Without its master to control it, this is devoid of its vital force. It becomes but a stick of wood which others would sully were they to employ it.”

  The figure’s hands moved again, a knee came up and there was a crack as he brought the shape down across the knee, then leaned forward to push two halves of whatever it was into the soft earth of the grave.

  The second man continued. “Let us join in a closing moment of meditation: May we render a worthy tribute to our friend Claudius Damautus, by picking up the burdens he has laid down …” Again, and for whatever else was said, the mikes went crazy with static and even some other odd and uncanny sounds. They were almost certainly made by the equipment and the hedge, but Herbie felt the cold tingle as the short hairs stood up on the back of his neck. It was as though Worboys had set the stage on purpose, and the sounds, like animal cries and the creaking of branches, continued to play over whatever was being said. Presently the sound just turned into white noise, and the camera followed the two monklike creatures as they walked softly away from the graveside.

  The tape flickered, then went black. Cut to credits, Herbie thought. Words were leaping around in his head. Claudius Damautus. Claudius Damautus. Augustus Claudius Keene. His father was a history scholar. Roman Empire, part of the dossier had said. Who in hell was Claudius Damautus?

  “What you make of it, Herb?”

  “What they put in the grave?”

  Worboys slid a hand inside his beautifully cut jacket and produced a thin packet of tissue, around six inches long. Carefully he unwrapped it.

  It was made of wood, lacquered shiny black, with an inch or so of white tip at each end. Cracked in two. The jagged crack fitted together to make a piece of wood around a foot long.

  Herbie heard Willis Maitland-Wood’s voice again: “We knew about it, about his expertise—the old Chief and myself—because he demonstrated it to us on many occasions. You see, we all belonged to the same club at one time, and I’m not allowed to disclose any more than that.”

  “Masonic? One of those odd secret societies? Funny handshakes? Rituals? What you think, Herb?”

  “I don’t think funny societies. I think something different. I think a society, or even societies. But not funny in the sense you’re thinking, Tony. You know what this is?” He lifted the two pieces of wood. “You must’ve seen one. Is magic wand, Tony. Magic wand, like with the magic tricks you see in clubs, or with Paul Daniels on TV. Or David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, all those great people.”

  “Oh, you mean conjurers?” Sneer. Curve of the lip.

  “I think they prefer to be called magicians. You see David Copperfield do the flying?”

  “Actually, no. Don’t really go in for that kind of stuff.”

  “You never seen Copperfield fly? Should be ashamed. Sits there, wide-eyed, says he’s always dreamed of flying, then he does just that. He flies. Amazing. People all round him. Flies into a glass box. They put the lid on. Still flies. No wires. No strings. Then he flies over the audience. Picks up a girl and flies with her in his arms. Last he flies up and a falcon flies out onto his wrist. Moved to tears, and unashamed. Wonderful.” After the one operation they had given him a couple of years ago, Herbie had gone on vacation to the United States. He did not like gambling, but he still went to Vegas—mainly to see Siegfried and Roy. Copperfield had been playing at Caesars Palace, so he had taken in that show as well. Big Herbie Kruger had been a magic buff from before his secret life. His father had taken him to see the Great Bagheera on his tenth birthday. He had even had a Zauberkästen—a magic set—on that day. There was a time when Big Herb’s great ambition was to be like the Great Bagheera and perform miracles.

  “It’s all a fake.” Worboys was still sneering.

  “Maybe. But me? I believe, because great magicians do impossible things. I believe, and what have we got here? We got ourselves a dead magician here, Tony, that’s what we got. The Great Gus Keene: Magic and wonders. Smoke and mirrors, that’s what we got.”

  9

  BIG HERBIE WANTED TO start questioning people: the widow Keene to be precise—but the powers-that-be had said no, not yet.

  “For heaven’s sake, Herb, let the poor girl adjust. You’ve already had a little time with her.”

  “Not enough. The first time she was coming to terms with things. The second was a quick ID of personal effects.”

  “Give her a few days,” Worboys told him.

  “Is correct to talk with her now, straight off.” Herb was frustrated, and feeling grim enough about the necessary inquisition. To him, this was mere procrastination.

  “You don’t think she was hand in glove with the buggers who did this, Herb, so what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that you made me a bloody detective, so I got to do it correct. I got to ask her if Gus was on edge; if there were phone calls in the night; suspicious cars along the road, or footpads near the scene. We don’t even know what he was doing in Salisbury that night. Have no clue about the other guy seen with him by the roadside. Carole could shed light. Open a window. I need her now.”

  “Couple of days, Herb, eh? Just a couple of days.” He was not asking, but giving an order.

  Herb tried to put the bizarre scene at the cemetery from his mind and concentrate on the files and notes that Gus had left behind, but the more he tried, the more impossible it became. He had exhausted his choices regarding the files from the Registry mainframe. Even the ones into which he had peeked illegally had brought forth nothing of interest. In the end, though he did not like the idea of talking to Angus Crook, it was the only option left to him.

  “Want you to do a wee favor for me, Angus,” he said on the secure line, carefully using the word “wee” instead of “little” in order to reach across the language barrier. The problem was that the “wee” came out as “vee.”

  Angus grunted, so he tried a small threat, saying he could come down with the catchall piece of paper the Chief had signed.

  “Private lives,” he explained. “Things that don’t get in normal jackets. Trivia hidden from all the clowns who have no need-to-know.”

  “Their Blue Jackets,” Angus supplied.

  “Ja. Yes, that’s the kind of thing.” Herb knew the files were called Blue Jackets. You had to have about twenty passwords to get at them on the computers, and what they contained was usually of no value to anybody: little sensitive secrets; skeletons in family closets; peccadilloes that had no true bearing on how people conducted their professional lives; shame and scandal in de family. They even asked for certain small nuggets to be buried in the Blue Jackets, and sometimes the request was turned down.

  After all the fuss in what had once been the DDR, across the Berlin Wall when it was still standing, Herbie had asked for his major indiscretion to be buried in a Blue Jacket and they had said no way.

  “Whose Blue Jackets would ye be thinking of?” Angus asked with suspicion lacing his words.

  “Former Deputy CSIS Maitland-Wood, and the old Chief.”

  At the distant end Angus sucked in breath through his teeth as though he were about to say that to do this was more than his job was worth.

  “And Gus,” Herb added.

  “Can’t promise anything, ye ken.” Angus was back in his Rob Roy role.

  “You ken that if you ain’t doing it I shall come and thump you on your Scottish melon.” Herb hung up and waited, getting on with his reading.

  Gus’s manuscript was smooth and efficient, dealing with family, childhood and education in a matter of three pages, which spread into the mind through the eyes at witty breakneck speed. Before you knew it, Gus was in the military and taking a course on interrogation with Army Intelligence, giving the reader just eno
ugh to whet the appetite but not enough to reveal the true secrets of the Confessor’s art.

  There followed the story of his first interrogation, which, if you had known Gus, was relatively amusing. Some well-liked corporal working in immediate postwar Berlin—in a Quartermaster’s Office—had gone on leave, and then gone AWOL. He had been missing for a week when they discovered that about two hundred ration stamps—worth around five hundred sterling on the open market—had gone AWOL with the nice corporal.

  The Military Police had picked him up in some den of iniquity deep in the heart of London’s Soho. The corporal, impossibly named Tweets, who had always been thought of as a docile, rather shy man, had fought like a tiger and denied everything to the military cops. Gus was sent from his unit in Berlin to Aldershot, where they were holding Corporal Tweets, ready to do the inquisition. Armed with all the best psychological ploys, plus considerable evidence, he prepared to face his victim as a monk would prepare for his final vows.

  “Well, Corporal Tweets,” he began. “You know they’re going to charge you with theft, being absent without leave, selling government property and resisting arrest.” He thought it better to lay the case out straightaway, and now prepared to break the man down into small pieces of gibbering jelly.

  “Oh, yes, sir. I know, and that’s fair enough. I’m guilty on all counts. Don’t know what got into me. Never been to a court-martial before. Should be quite interesting.”

  Herbie chuckled over this, then his mind wandered again. Perhaps he should go through everything and check all files concerning Gus’s various brushes with the Provisional IRA and the newer FFIRA, for they still seemed the most likely perpetrators.