Kassim insisted on driving the car despite the pain in his injured leg. They left Pau, heading north towards the address which Kassim had discovered so easily from the hotel register in Granada. As he drove, Kassim rehearsed Salem in their cover story. He kept it very simple, rightly mistrusting his brother’s ability to lie.
The gun in the briefcase on the back seat was almost as well travelled as Kassim himself. Made in the Uzi factory in Israel, it had been shipped to a bonded warehouse in Rotterdam, part of a small consignment of silenced weapons. From there, it had been sold by a Jewish arms dealer in New York to an ex-CIA man based in Tripoli who was making a perilous fortune as a front man for Colonel Ghaddafy. His brief was to obtain embargoed goods that could not be purchased openly by the Libyans; terrorist weapons like silenced Uzis fell clearly into that category. With an EUC or end-user certificate specifying that the weapons were for the Special Force of the Sultan of Oman, the crates had been shipped from Rotterdam on a Greek-owned vessel flying the Panamanian flag. At night off the Libyan coast a fast patrol boat had intercepted the ship for what the crew thought was a Customs check. Only the master with his altered ship’s manifest and a bundle of dollars in his pocket knew what the Libyans had wanted. From Tripoli a dozen of the Uzis found their way to Ireland as a gesture of support for the Provisional IRA from Colonel Ghaddafy. From there, this particular weapon had travelled inside an HGV fuel tank to France as a fraternal present from the Provos to Basque liberationists.
The guns were now being sold by ETA, subject to acceptance of the sample and to due payment, to the Sons of the Islamic Jihad, as Kassim’s comrades were known in revolutionary circles. They wanted the Uzis for a complicated scenario which would end in the assassination of a Hezbollah leader thought to be too accommodating to Tel Aviv. Both the man and his family were to be gunned down in front of witnesses by men wearing Israeli uniforms and armed with Israeli weapons that fired Israeli bullets. All of which explained why the money to pay for the Uzis had to be untraceable. Which in turn – had Salem but known – was the reason why Kassim had been sent by his revolutionary brothers to hunt for Queen Eleanor’s gold.
Chapter 2
‘Hi!’ Merlin parted the bushes. ‘Am I intruding?’
Leila was lying on a blanket in the late morning sunshine, soaking up warmth like a cat. The unkempt shrubs in her wildly overgrown garden made a perfect windbreak. ‘Not you,’ she yawned, happy to see him. ‘I was just bozing.’
‘Another word for the dictionary?’
‘I meant to say dozing and boozing but I’ve done too much of the second to pronounce the first.’ She pulled herself up on one elbow and took a good look at Merlin. He had obviously not slept or shaved. There were smudges of tension around his eyes and his mouth was a tight, angry line. No trace of the famous Freeman smile today, she thought. ‘There’s some wine in the bottle, Merl. Help yourself. Looks like you could do with it.’
Merlin poured a glassful of the local red wine, took two cigarettes from her pack, lit them and passed one to Leila.
‘You’re smoking again?’ she queried.
He raised the glass in a silent toast and noticed for the first time the bruise above her left eye.
‘What happened?’
She touched the swelling and winced. ‘A lover’s tiff. Dom found out and got excited.’
‘He hit you?’
‘Let’s say I walked into his fist. I think it was meant for the other guy but I’m not sure. Afterwards the two of them sat up all night drinking whisky together and telling each other what a two-timing bitch I am. But you don’t look very interested in my problems. I hear you and Jay split up too.’
The cigarette was the hundredth Merlin had smoked that morning, or tasted like it. After a couple of drags he flicked it away into the bushes and cleared some wet leaves from a plastic garden chair so that he could sit down. ‘How did you know?’
‘She got back here late yesterday, driving that red machine of hers like a bat out of hell.’
‘While I was sitting in Madrid airport, waiting for a connecting flight. And did Jay talk to you?’
‘A few terse sentences. Jay is not one of the weepers of this world, Merlin, old boy.’
‘What was the message of those terse sentences?’
Leila squinted at him through her smoke. ‘It sounded like a repeat of one I’ve heard before.’
‘All my fault, huh?’
‘Snap out of it, Merlin.’ Leila was not in a mood to humour him; she had her own troubles. ‘You always do the same goddam thing. You make a girl think you’re in love with her. Then you rush off on some damned news story and drop her flat. So what do you expect?’
‘Is that what Jay said?’
Leila inhaled and blew the smoke at Venus which had just appeared in the sky. ‘I’m making it up, extrapolating from my own great sorrow. To be honest, she said hardly a word.’
Merlin tried to interrupt but she continued talking: ‘All she told me was that she had walked out on you in Granada. Something about you leaving her to wait like Cinderella in a hotel room until midnight struck and you turned back into the green frog you really are.’
‘She said that?’
‘Did it sound like Jay? Come on, Merl, if the line drawing was hers, the full colour version is signed Leila Dor.’
Merlin was thinking. He had done little else since waking up in Granada the previous day and finding Jay gone. But he could not get anywhere on his own; he needed a patient pair of ears, preferably belonging to someone who knew both him and Jay very well.
He took the plunge: ‘Leila, can I take up a couple of hours of your time?’
‘To talk about your tangled love life? Sure, why not?’
Merlin was sitting with head bowed, staring at the ground between his feet. ‘I’m worried about Jay. How did she seem when you saw her yesterday?’
‘You want me to say she was pining for you?’
‘Just tell me what she was like. Was she her normal self?’
Leila thought about it. ‘Impatient is the word that comes to mind.’
Merlin stood up and gazed up river to where the chimney of Jay’s farmhouse showed above the trees.
‘She’s not there,’ said Leila. ‘They left – as the military say – at first light.’
‘They?’
‘The German Dr Whatsisname.’
Alarm showed in Merlin’s voice. ‘Kreuz came back here with Jay?’
‘No.’
‘Then what the hell d’you mean?’ Merlin grabbed Leila’s shoulder.
She broke his grip. ‘Jesus! That hurt, Merlin. What is it about me that makes men play rough?’
He knelt on the blanket beside her. ‘Just tell me what happened, Leila!’
She pushed him back from her. ‘Okay. I will, but calm down. Jay came back first. When I heard she was alone – the neighbours see everything in a place like this – I thought she might need a shoulder to cry on, so I called round to have a cup of coffee with her. But it was like she was trying to get rid of me. I stuck it out for maybe an hour of one-way conversation because I wanted to talk to someone about Dom and me splitting up. Then, peep-peep, up drove Dr Toad in his white BMW and I got a clear message to take my woes elsewhere.’
‘How did Jay react when Kreuz arrived?’
‘Like she had something important on her mind and no time to waste.’
‘Kreuz stayed at Chez Dominique?’
‘No. That was weird. He stayed the night at Jay’s house. The driver had a blonde girl with him who only spoke German. They stayed at the hotel. And they all left at dawn: Jay, Kreuz, the driver and the girl.’
‘Where’d they go?’
‘I did catch a name but it didn’t mean a thing to me.’
‘Fontevraud?’ Merlin guessed.
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s an abbey where …’
Leila nodded. ‘Jay said something to Dr Toad about when they got to the abbey. I think Fontevraud was the name.
I could be wrong.’
Merlin stood up again. He smashed his right fist into his left palm several times. The thought of Jay a hundred miles away with Kreuz – at Fontevraud of all places – brought back all the violent physical anger he had felt at Granada.
‘What’s up?’ Leila asked.
‘How long have you known me?’
She smiled, ‘I’ve used a lot of toothpaste since we used to sit talking all night in Greenwich Village, solving the world’s problems.’
‘And do you think I’m crazy?’
Leila looked up at him, taking in the set of his face and the tightly closed fists. ‘At times I do think you’re crazy, Merlin. How else can I account for a man who’s been so nearly destroyed by war, choosing to earn his living as a war correspondent?’
Merlin took a deep breath and felt some of the tension drain away. ‘Leila, I think you’re just about the sanest person I know.’
‘That doesn’t say much for the others.’
‘Seriously, I need to talk to you before I kill someone.’
Leila looked at Merlin’s anguished, angry face for a long moment before she said, ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’ She pulled him down onto the blanket beside her and sat listening as the words poured out of him, telling her about his first instinctive reaction to Kreuz, how each time he saw the man he felt a surge of unreasoning anger so strong that it made him feel physically sick.
He told her his fears that Kreuz seemed to have some hypnotic hold over Jay and ended: ‘I don’t even know the guy but whenever I’m near him, I can feel myself doing and saying everything wrong, acting like a real asshole and alienating Jay when I want to help her. If Kreuz excludes me from the conversation, I sulk like a moron instead of pushing in and grabbing my share. If he gets between me and Jay, I get so angry that I drive her towards him. If he outwits me, instead of using my brain, I want to smash his face in. I can’t remember any person I ever met who made me feel this way. I could kill that guy with my bare hands and feel good about it afterwards.’
Leila ran her hands through his hair. ‘You do need to talk to someone, Merl.’ She stood up and looked at the paint on her hands which had left a yellow smear in his hair. ‘The world can do without another masterpiece. I’m all yours. Take as long as you want.’
‘Where are you going?’ he called after her.
‘To get a couple more bottles. By the look of you, it’s going to be a long talk, so we might as well get drunk.’
Some of the tension lines had gone from Merlin’s face. He scrambled nimbly to his feet. ‘No time for that. I think we ought to get mobile.’
Chapter 3
In the first week of March the abbey of Fontevraud was empty of tourists. The streets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings, which had replaced most of the original architecture, had the deserted, two dimensional look of a film set. In the square where they parked the cars, just in front of the abbey entrance, Kreuz met an archaeologist he knew, who was in charge of some excavations in the abbey church. Invited into the site caravan, he discussed the finds: small bits of pottery and yellowed bones, pieces of carved stone reused from former buildings, tiles and a coin or two. Jay stayed only a few minutes before excusing herself and heading for the abbey church where lay ‘the stone that is hollow’.
Her feet seemed to know their way. They took her quickly through the later buildings to the oldest part of the abbey, the nuns’ kitchen and the cloisters that led to the church itself, all of which had been built in Eleanor’s day. Jay wanted to stop or, even better, to run away, but with each step she had less control over her own movements.
The cold damp air of the cloisters transformed Jay’s breath into puffs of steam. She wondered how many places had been alluded to in how many sirventès. Was Canterbury, where it had all begun, named in another poem which had not been found? And Oakham Castle too? Had Eleanor perhaps left hundreds of sirventès, scattered in old manuscripts, carved on church and castle walls, most of them now lost forever? Jay had the image of a vast spider’s web spun for the fly that was herself, Jay French. No matter into which strand she had blundered, she would have been held fast while the vibrations of her entrapment travelled through the whole structure to alert the spider who had been waiting for so long.
She had expected the abbey church to be as deserted as the rest of the buildings but as she turned the iron handle of the huge oaken door the midday siren sounded from the fire station in Fontevraud town and a dozen students and archaeologists downed their brushes and trowels in the trenches that dissected the floor of the church to depart noisily for lunch, leaving Jay alone. At the far end of the nave, near the altar, lay the tombs of Eleanor, Henry Plantagenet and Richard Coeur de Lion. She followed the scaffolding-and-plank walkway that spanned the excavations and stood gazing down on Eleanor’s effigy. It was a lifeless, stylised death mask. The aged queen’s face was thin and reposeful, the gaze directed devoutly at an open prayer book held in her strong hands.
Jay heard Kreuz’s voice in the cloister calling her name and moved swiftly behind a column to be out of sight. Two pairs of men’s footsteps came through the doorway into the church, sounding hollowly on the planking. There was a murmur of voices, the archaeologist wanting to show his visitor something of interest which had been unearthed that morning. From snatches of the conversation that reached her, Jay gathered that he and Kreuz were arguing about dating different medieval techniques of stone carving.
She sat on a stone bench that ran along the side wall and felt the cold of the unheated church enter into her. The two men climbed out of the trench, their voices growing fainter as they moved away and the heavy door at the end of the nave thudded shut, leaving Jay alone with her thoughts. She knew now what had caused her to stop playing at Canterbury, to black out at Bordeaux, and why she had fallen near ‘the heathen maze’ at Chartres. The same thing was happening now. She tried to stand up in a last desperate panic to leave the church but her body weighed a hundred tons. She had a fear that she was going to wet herself. Her eyelids were growing heavier and heavier. There was a flash memory of her father saying years before, ‘You’ll be asleep but you’ll still be able to hear my voice.’
*
They set out in Leila’s battered old deux chevaux, just back from the garage, because Merlin had decided that his camping van was too slow and too conspicuous. After stalling the engine three times before he had backed her car out of the garden and along the track that led to the main road, he wondered, ‘What is it about you Europeans that makes a car with a stick-shift and a small engine so attractive?’
‘If you’re rude about her, she’ll stop altogether,’ Leila warned. ‘Just be polite, if you want to get as far as Fontevraud.’
‘I can’t find top gear.’
‘You’re already in it.’
Merlin drove cautiously, getting the feel of the loose steering. To keep the car in a straight line it was necessary to keep his hands continually see-sawing the steering wheel. ‘You should have something done about this,’ he advised.
‘Never mind about my car. Tell me what’s on your mind.’
Merlin had forgotten what a good listener Leila could be. He went over all that had happened, trying to leave nothing out. At times Leila was so still that he thought she had fallen asleep. But then her heavy-lidded eyes turned on him and he saw that she was taking everything in and treating it seriously.
‘Did you ever hear a crazier story?’ Merlin finished, expecting her to say he was mad. ‘Or one with so many contradictions and coincidences, if that’s what they are?’ He fought the wheel around a bend and braked. At any speed above eighty kilometres an hour the car became uncontrollable.
Leila thought about it. ‘I never heard anything like this. But let’s see what possible explanations there are. Theory Number One is the obvious: Jay has some kind of crack-up.’
‘That’s what her father thought at Canterbury,’ said Merlin. ‘But it does not explain this.’
Leila patted his arm. ‘Relax, it was only a theory. You’re right, it doesn’t explain what you call the coincidences, like you being there to add Oradour and Châlus together to make Dürnstein or you hustling all the way to Austria so you could get there a few hours before the baron died, after which that lead would have been dead. Nor does it explain why Jay’s experiences have all occurred in places where Queen Eleanor is known to have been.’
‘There isn’t a rational explanation,’ he said. ‘God knows, I tried hard enough to find one.’
‘You say Jay’s never told you exactly what happens?’ Leila asked.
Merlin shook his head. ‘She’s very vague. At Canterbury, she said it was like there were hands pulling her fingers away from the keys of the flute to stop her playing. The other recollections at Chartres and Bordeaux were even more nebulous, although she was obviously distressed.’
‘Distressed!’ Leila snorted. ‘You’re a wordsmith. Is that the only adjective you can come up with?’
Merlin drove for a while in silence, recalling Jay at Chartres lying pale and shivering in the hotel bed, drained of all energy. He drove into the parking area of a wayside restaurant with a Routier sign and stopped among all the heavy trucks. ‘There was another incident, Leila.’ It was odd to be sitting there telling her about the midnight visit to his room at Old Sarum as he contrasted Jay’s wild unloving passion on that night with their other tender and affectionate love making.
‘What are you telling me?’ Leila asked. ‘That Jay is schizophrenic, that she becomes another person from time to time? I guess that’s Theory Number Two.’
Schizophrenia? No, it was the wrong label, Merlin knew. ‘These experiences only happen to Jay when she’s around one of these Eleanor sites. But that wasn’t the point I was going to make.’
‘For a normally lucid guy, Merlin, you’re not being very clear.’
He ignored that. Fists clenched with the effort, he was trying to snatch something out of thin air. ‘The point is that after each one of these events, Jay is completely drained of energy.’
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 27