by Louis Bayard
“Perhaps you’ll recall what Thomas Harriot was studying between 1599 and 1600.”
* * *
In fact, Harriot was harkening to the same siren call that had lured so many other great minds onto the rocks. Leibniz heard it, too. So did Robert Boyle and Tycho Brahe. Isaac Newton went to his death dreaming not of gravity or calculus but of the philosopher’s stone.
For these men, alchemy was about more than turning lead into gold. It was about transformation. If they could alter the properties of inanimate matter, they might one day effect the same change in human matter. And then? Well, our last fleshly impurities would burn away like dross, and the whole earth would be left in a state of ecstatic perfection.
That kind of dream doesn’t loosen its hold on the dreamer. No wonder, then, that Harriot fired up the burners and hurled himself at immortality. There was only one problem.…
* * *
“It can’t be done,” I reminded Alonzo.
“What?”
“You can’t change lead to gold all by yourself. That’s why Harriot gave up.”
“Henry, listen. In optics, in astronomy, in physics, Thomas Harriot was years—decades—ahead of other scientists, okay? What’s to say, in this particular matter, he wasn’t a few centuries ahead?”
“Oh, I get it. Harriot just—what—whips himself up this honking pot of gold. Then he buries it in the ground. Like a fucking leprechaun. Never tells another soul about it, just lets it rot there.”
“He couldn’t risk it. In King James’s world, alchemy verged on heresy.”
“God, where to begin, Alonzo?”
“Solomon.”
“A gold atom, Solomon, has three fewer protons than a lead atom. You can’t make up that difference in some rinky-dink Tudor laboratory. You need—Christ, something like a particle accelerator. And even then, whatever gold you make is going to be worth far less than the energy you put into it.”
A light hum began to emerge from Alonzo’s nostrils, declining gradually into text.
“There are more things—”
“God.”
“… in heaven and earth—”
“Stop.”
“… than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Yeah, and guess what? Shakespeare didn’t know squat about particle physics. And with all due respect, neither did Harriot.”
Alonzo was silent after that, but I knew his silences. They generally held not an ounce of concession. As for me, my Benadryl was finally kicking in. I put on the eyeshade and pulled that thin acrylic blanket over me and eased the seat back another couple of inches.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “Alchemy.”
I didn’t let a single crack show in my skeptic’s face. What I failed to tell Alonzo was that, three days earlier, in a moment of passing distraction, I had glanced at Harriot’s original map. There was no particular reason to look. There was nothing on that page I hadn’t already seen a dozen times.
Only there was.
On the lower right-hand corner, rising up like a scar, lay a single word. Scratched in the thinnest of ink, visible only in this particular slant of late-afternoon light: pneuma.
Not Harriot’s hand, as best I could tell. It wasn’t even cursive: the letters sat isolated from each other, and the final a straggled nearly off the page.
For a long time, I stared at the page. I knew, at one level, I was simply looking at another word, the Greek word for spirit. Aristotle threw it around like candy.
But I knew I was looking at something else. The building block of medieval alchemy.
Pneuma was the active principle or vital force believed to dwell within all earthly matter. To transmute one thing into another, an alchemist like Thomas Harriot would have had to transform its pneuma—its portion of heavenly quintessence—becoming, in effect, a re-creator, sparking new forms from chaos.
Amazing to think now that, from this single string of letters, so many questions could swarm forth. Was Harriot still carrying out alchemical experiments after 1600? Did he stumble across something that never made it into the historical record? Could he actually have made the gold he was at such pains to hide? Or, at the very least, believed he had?
* * *
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, Harriot entered my dreams. It wasn’t a vision on the order of Clarissa’s—just your basic dog-and-pony show from the subconscious. There was the great man himself, head to toe in black, standing before his Bath-brick cottage. I could feel a faint nip in the air … I could hear a rustle of clouds overhead … and, oh, yes, the house was erupting with gold.
From the eaves, from the windows, through the doorways, out of the very earth. Bars and coins and scepters and diadems, piling higher and higher like wheat in a granary. And in the midst of that profusion, Harriot stood grimacing in apology.
“I can’t seem to make it stop,” he said.
33
THEY WERE WAITING for us when we left customs.
And with such an air of expectation that I actually looked to see if they were holding welcome signs: HENRY CAVENDISH. CLARISSA DALE.
No welcome, though, in their attitude. Or in their clothes: black bespoke suits, tropical wool, and black loafers polished down to the aglets. The smaller of the two men was ruddy and pitted; he tapped his left toe like a filly in a paddock and eyed us from a slight angle as if he’d caught us stealing his cable signal. The other was closely shaven, frappuccino-colored, big as a Visigoth, with a stone-lidded countenance that parted suddenly to reveal a chorine’s grin.
“Welcome!” he called. “How was your flight?”
Clarissa was the first to stop … then me … but the Visigoth was already making straight for Alonzo.
“Mr. Spiegel.” (The thinnest lacquer of irony over that bogus name.) “I’m Agent Mooney. And this is Agent Milberg. And we’re—oh, wait, hold on!”
Fumbling through his pockets, he extracted a laminated badge.
“Very sorry. Interpol.”
“Interpol,” repeated Alonzo faintly.
“Now you’re in safe hands, Mr. Spiegel, please know that. We’ve no desire to make a public display. No perp walks.”
“No handcuffs,” his comrade added.
“That’s not how we roll, is it? All we’re after is a bit of a chat, upon conclusion of which you may be on your merry way. Rejoicing in London’s many sights and sounds.”
Alonzo had rebounded enough now to give his chest a pouter-pigeon swell.
“I’m a very busy man.”
“I knew you would be.”
“Kindly tell me the theme of this chat.”
“Can’t go into it.”
“Where is it to take place?”
“HQ, of course. Everything on the up and up, you’ll see.”
And then he clapped his hands together and, in the voice of a camp counselor, cried:
“Shall we?”
“My friends,” remonstrated Alonzo.
“Oh!” The Visigoth wheeled around on us. “They can come, too!”
“ ’Course they can,” added Agent Milberg.
* * *
Only in England could we have been taken into custody so politely and neatly. Not a voice raised, no pleasantry overlooked. We gathered our bags from the carousel, rolled them to the curb, blinked in the light of early morning, and then climbed without protest into a state-of-the-art Lincoln Town Car, black clearcoat, with power lumbar and programmable memory seat and leather upholstery so pristine it recoiled from our touch.
Clarissa camped herself in the middle of the back seat. Of the three of us, she was the only one not taking things in a spirit of resignation.
“I’ve never been to England before,” she said, “but given that we’re just a few miles from London, and given that you gentlemen are Interpol, ten bucks says you’re taking us to the Secretariat.”
Her wager barely seemed to clear the headrest. It was left to Agent Milberg, slouching against the passenger-side door, to mutter:
“ ’S right
.”
“Oh, no, no, wait,” said Clarissa, waving a finger. “The Interpol Secretariat is in Lyon. Lyon, France. God knows what I was thinking.”
She fell silent, but there something dangerously tensile about her now, like a balloon bending before the pin’s first prick. I don’t know why, but I chose that exact moment to look out the window. Expecting, naturally, to be heading eastward on the M4 toward London. When, in fact, we were northbound on the A312 Trunk Road. Making for parts unknown.
And that’s when I realized Clarissa wasn’t addressing her remarks to the two agents. She was speaking to me and Alonzo. She was raising the alarm.
“Well, anyway,” she said, “this has been very educational for me. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I seem to recall that Interpol agents aren’t authorized to arrest people.”
More silence from the front seat. At last, Agent Milberg, tipping his head a couple of inches our way, mumbled:
“Change of regs, isn’t it?”
“You must be right. There must have been a recent change in the regulatory structure of Interpol. Which I was not aware of, apologies.”
And just like that, the locks went down on either side of us.
My initial reaction, oddly, was relief. We weren’t being arrested. I wasn’t in immediate danger of prison. Because these guys had as much to do with law enforcement as I did.
And yet we were just as surely in their power, were we not?
No point in presuming they were unarmed—those black suit jackets could conceal any manner of pistol or revolver. No point, either, in trying to phone for help. We were in a foreign country, in a foreign car, bound for God knows where. Not to put too fine a point on it, we were fucked.
And at first, when I saw the fluttering of Clarissa’s fingers against her thigh, I assumed she was drinking from the same well of distress. Only gradually did I see that those fingers were alive with intention.
Which is to say, she was texting.
And with the fluency of a girl in eleventh-grade American history, glancing down every now and then to track her progress. It took her no more than a minute to draft and send the message, and I didn’t even have time to wonder who the hell was receiving it, because in the next moment Alonzo’s phone vibrated into life.
He peered down at the screen, gave Clarissa a single questioning look, and deleted the message with two pulses of his finger. Then, with great ponderousness, he swept the back of his arm across his forehand.
“Sorry,” he said. “Would you gentlemen mind? The air conditioner?”
Clarissa gave it twenty seconds.
“Alonzo,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Not good,” he said, pressing his hands to his temples and softly swaying. “Not … mouth…”
“Mouth what?”
“Tingly.”
A shorter beat this time.
“Jesus,” whispered Clarissa.
The trembling began in Alonzo’s head. Then it passed, inch by inch, down the column of his neck, radiating out to his arms and fingers, until the very air seemed to be vibrating.
Agent Milberg half turned his head.
“Got the shakes, does he?”
“If by shakes”—Clarissa made a studied effort to calm herself—“if by shakes, you mean hypoglycemia, then yes, he does have the shakes. Alonzo, I need you to tell me. When did you last take your insulin?”
Insulin.
“Last night,” he muttered between tremors.
“Last night? Jesus—”
And with that I swung into action.
“It’s my fault,” I said.
Clarissa snapped her head toward me.
“What are you talking about?”
“I told him not to pack his insulin kit in the carry-on.”
“Why?”
“Come on, you know how weird airport security can be about needles.”
“Oh, that’s great, Henry. Wow, your advice was—thank you so much for that. Alonzo, listen to me. Where are the syringes?”
He grunted. The shaking had spread now to his torso.
“Where?” Clarissa asked. “Just tell me where.”
“Luggage…”
Clarissa sat back up. Heaved out a river of air.
“Shit.”
Impossible to say how much of our histrionic display had filtered to the front of the car. Agent Milberg was moved enough to say:
“Be there in no time.”
“Um…” Clarissa tweezed her fingers around the bridge of her nose. “See, here’s the deal. That’s not soon enough.”
And, getting no response, she added, in a brittle voice:
“Would you please look at him?”
When at last Agent Milberg consented to turn around, this is what he beheld: a two-hundred-and-forty-pound man (conservatively estimated) with half-shut eyes and blanched face, quivering all over like an aspen in a thunderstorm.
“I don’t want to be alarmist,” said Clarissa. “And it’s not like you asked, but I feel I should tell you he’s on the verge of a diabetic coma. Which is kind of serious.”
“Alonzo,” I murmured, reaching for his shoulder. “It’s all right. Hold on.”
“He needs his insulin, okay? We need to stop the car.”
The first stirrings of disquiet appeared in Agent Milberg’s dour face. He cast a glance at Alonzo, then his partner, and slowly turned back around.
“Look,” I said. “If you want this man to die right here, in the back of your car, that’s fine. I doubt Interpol would be too happy about it.”
And, getting no reply, I lifted my voice into a more strained register.
“He’s worth a lot more alive than dead.”
Still no answer. I was just getting around to my next tack when I heard Agent Mooney ask, in a low voice:
“Where’s his kit?”
“In his suitcase,” Clarissa said. “I can get it.”
“I can get it,” I said.
“Henry, please. You’re hopeless at finding things. It’ll take me half a minute, tops.”
Both of us stared at the back of Agent Mooney’s head, waiting for a sign. But the only sign came from the car itself, which, without warning, swerved onto the left shoulder, coming to a full stop in a cloud of gravel alongside a culvert.
“You’ve got one minute,” said Agent Mooney.
And as Clarissa began clambering over me to the door, he added, in an impish voice:
“My partner would be happy to assist you.”
This was a surprise to his partner, whose face squeezed down into shar-pei folds.
“Simon’s really very good at this,” the Visigoth went on, barely suppressing his glee. “Aren’t you, Simon?”
A low rumble issued from Agent Milberg’s chest as he shouldered his door open, stalked to the back of the car, and flipped open the lid of the trunk.
And now whatever fear I had kept at bay rushed back with a leering force. Clarissa could stall as long as she liked, but sooner or later, they would comb through the entire contents of Alonzo’s bag, and they would find no syringes, no needles, no insulin.
And that would be an end to all our chances.
As if he were divining my thoughts, Agent Mooney called back from the driver’s seat.
“I’d hate to think you were having us on now. When we’ve gone out of our way to be pleasant and agreeable.”
Rather than reply, I unbuckled my seat belt, took off my jacket, and flung it over Alonzo’s trembling bulk.
“Hold on,” I crooned. “Just a few more seconds.”
Only the seconds shaded into minutes, and the trunk remained steadfastly upright. And not a sound emerged.
“So tell me,” I said, hearing the thinness of my own tone. “Have you worked for Bernard Styles a long time?”
“Never heard of him,” said Agent Mooney.
“Oh, that’s funny, ’cause—you know, I can’t really think who else would want to talk to us.”
“Not for m
e to say, is it? Cripes! ” he snapped, giving the horn three light taps.
I could see his eyes ranging across the rearview mirror, the whorls of discontent on his smooth round face. He hummed under his breath. He danced his hands on the steering wheel. At last, when he could bear it no longer, he thumbed down the power window and turned his head to one side and yelled:
“Simon! We ain’t got all day!”
And in that instant, he came face-to-face with a gun.
A Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol, to be specific. Looking even larger than usual in the small white hands of Clarissa Dale.
“If you would,” she said, only slightly panting, “please step out of the car.”
“ ’Course I will. ’Course I will, sweetheart.”
Even as one of his hands moved to open the door, the other reached under his jacket.
“Disarmed him, did you, sweetheart? That was very clever.”
The folds of his coat billowed as he talked. Some intricate Braille-like maneuver … followed by a brief pause … and then his hand began slowly to reemerge.
“Easy does it,” I said.
Normally, I would have stood no chance against him—it took both my hands just to encircle his wrist—but in this case, the numbers were in my favor. There was Clarissa, armed, unblinking. Directly behind was Alonzo, sitting up now, rude with health. It took the Visigoth no more than a couple of seconds to calculate his odds. Then, with a curiously bashful smile, he loosened his grip on the gun.
A second later, it was resting, warm and bulbous, in my palm.
“Okay,” said Clarissa. “Let me explain how this works, Agent Mooney. You step out of the car. You stay on this side of the car, and you keep your head down. I don’t want any passing motorists taking pity on you. Is that clear enough?”
“Clear as a bell, love.”
Only it must not have been. The moment he stepped out of the Town Car, his head—by instinct, maybe—began to go vertical. For which presumption it received a clout from Clarissa’s gun. Stunned, the Visigoth sank, wobbling, to his knees.
“God, these things are heavy, aren’t they?” Clarissa said. “I’m not sure Interpol agents would be packing heat, either, but I could be wrong. What do you think, Henry?”
I couldn’t answer because I had just found Agent Milberg. Sprawled on the gravel. Not completely still but the closest thing.