by E. M. DAVEY
“Yep.”
“That would be why the letters have little errors in them, it’s no wonder you’re having problems.”
“I see.”
“Why didn’t you take a photograph?”
“My phone ran out of battery,” said David.
“Are there any more sentences?”
Another calculation. “Yes. Actually, I could do with some help on those too.”
David sent her the passage, and as the storm roiled unabated they translated the handbook of an Etruscan soothsayer.
Know that these things must be done to divine the will of the gods:
The fulguriator commences lustratio, great sacrifice of appeasement.
The boar-piglet is offered, to cleanse and purge.
The priest sacrifices to Tages, mysterious being, half-boy, half-sage, who sprang from the earth.
He sacrifices also to Vegoia, who taught us how to interpret lightning.
“Lightning!” exclaimed Kanisha, touching the last word on the screen. “Trutnvt …”
“Trutnvt,” David repeated, a cold fondness in his pronunciation of the word.
Kanisha skimmed through the inscription. The term was all over it.
On his head, the fulguriator places the sacred hood, square and fringed.
With his staff, he demarks the visible heavens into sixteen parts, one for each of the dark gods.
Nine gods are they who through the sacred lightning.
Tin, lord of them all, throws three of bolts of lightning.
The benign lightning shall serve as a warning.
The lightning that does both good and harm, and this needs the approval of Dii Consentes, the pitiless ones.
Finally, the lightning of destruction.
Kanisha’s skin had turned porcelain – it made her hair seem darker, her citrine pupils more colourless. She translated the final sentence carefully.
“Bring forth lightning,” she whispered. “Bright, shining, free from alloy.”
She was answered by a detonation right overhead.
*
When the lesson was over Kanisha made a cup of tea. She took a sip, then upon reflection tossed it down the sink. Instead she poured a hefty Jameson’s, peering at herself in the mirror. In the flickering light her image was phantasmal.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
It wasn’t the lightning that had shaken her. It was the inscription.
Trutnvt.
Kanisha sipped her whiskey and laughed. Ah, the touching naivety of the amateur archaeologist! For the Etruscan word trutnvt is only known to modernity from the epitaph of a single Etruscan, who lived at a town called Pesaro on the Adriatic. Apart from that – and by sheer bad luck – not one example of the word for lightning has been discovered by archaeologists. David’s passage ought to be the most famous in the field, an equal of the Zagreb Linen. This was the most explicit description of Etruscan lightning ritual she had read. So David was lying. Either her pupil had fabricated it, or it hadn’t come from the National Archaeological Museum of Umbria, but somewhere else entirely.
And this was undoubtedly a passage from the Disciplina Etrusca. Not the first book, which dealt with the examination of livers. Nor the second, concerning the founding of cities. It was from the third, the Libri Fulgurales. Book of Thunder.
A final explosion rattled her window panes.
60
“I don’t know why things changed,” Jenny murmured.
Jake glanced up from his espresso, the morning clatter of the Imperial War Museum café retreating.
“But I’ll try to do things differently. I’ll try to bring back the – the old me.”
This can’t be happening. Can it?
“Jenny, I –”
“I’ve been such an idiot,” she continued unrelentingly.
“But you haven’t,” he gushed, leaning forward and gripping the table. “It’s only natural. We’ve been through some terrible experiences …”
“You’re joking!” she interrupted. “They almost caught us in Cambridge. They nearly got us in Vienna too. They actually did get me in Bangkok. None of this would have happened before. But they seem to know where we are, whatever I try.”
Oh. I’m the idiot.
Jake necked his espresso, taking grim satisfaction from the bitter kick in the throat that made his head want to click sideways.
Their first fifteen hours in London had been spent on the move, meandering through the West End as Jenny planned her pounce on their destination: eyeing up the prize as a cat might a morsel within swiping distance of the cook. They’d had three hours sleep – first Jake, in a corridor at St Thomas’s Hospital, then Jenny at an all-night café in Soho. It was odd being back in London, Jake’s home for ten years, and he noted how mental habits of old reasserted themselves. Foremost among these was the masochistic appraisal of happy couples (with concomitant feelings of despair). The boyfriend on the Tube, kneading a lock of his girlfriend’s hair and gazing at the back of her skull while she looked away, bored, her profile Grecian and imperious. And at Tottenham Court Road Station a Jamaican girl with rich skin tones and long slender legs, chic leather jacket, russet Afro haircut. Jake hadn’t needed to see her face to know she was smoking hot, but as they overtook he cast a sly glance at her bloke. Pot-belly, skin-tight white polo neck, head like a meatball.
Why not me?
And all the time he heard Jenny’s footsteps beside him, each click reminding him of what had been.
When Jake looked up from his empty espresso cup Jenny had tears in her eyes. He was astonished. He had only seen her cry twice – on the death of her mother and during her rescue in Jerusalem, when her mind was addled with drugs.
“What is it?” he said.
“My hair.” A few strands of sunlight were in Jenny’s fingers. “It’s falling out. Must be the stress. It’s not that I’m vain, you know that, right? But Jake – I’m not sure how much longer I can carry on like this. I’m just not.”
“It happened to me too,” he said. “In Thailand.”
“It what?”
“My hair started falling out, whole clumps of it. I guess it was stress too. And – well, losing you, frankly.”
“But it’s not falling out any more?”
Jake’s hand went to his skull. “Erm – no. Not now you mention it.”
Her eyes whizzed across his frame. “Do you still have the clothes you had in Thailand?”
“All of them. Why?”
Jenny’s hands ran down her own body, fingers quivering, as if something about it disgusted her.
“Did you leave anything behind?”
He frowned, remembering that dreamlike escape: waking on the far side of the island, sunburn on his face. “Shoes,” he said. “I left without any shoes on.”
Jenny tore off her trainers, inspecting the soles like a jeweller with a loupe. There was a pinprick on the heel. She begged a knife from the kitchen and gouged at it. A grain of something rolled onto the table top. Something metallic, with an oily, multi-coloured sheen. She reared from the table as though it was a hissing scorpion.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I feel sick.”
“What is it?”
“How could they be so wicked?” she whispered. “So callous …”
“What is that thing?”
“It’s how they’ve been keeping track of us – and slowly poisoning us too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s polonium 210, Jake. I’m radioactive.”
61
Di Angelo admitted defeat at Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. Only one of his team could still walk – it had proved impossible to tail Frobisher in a city of alleyways and multitudes, of snickets and sliding doors. He sat on a bench and called Virginia, asking to be patched through to the director of the CIA. The hold music was the New World Symphony. A Georgian terrace hemmed in one side of the gardens, now a hall of residence; the students ambling out looked no more than children. The
daylight was pallid, yet the tulips hummed with colour, yellows and purples and reds. Brits did gardening well, he had to admit it. A cross-legged statue of Gandhi levitated above the blooms, daffodils laid in his arms. The road on the far side looked familiar from somewhere; suddenly it came to him. This was where the bus had exploded on 7/7, he remembered it from the news. Interesting juxtaposition – the Great Soul and the slaughter of office workers. That said, Gandhi was no stranger to terrorism.
“Sir? The director notes the urgency of your call and asks you to phone back in twenty minutes.”
“Huh?”
“I’m sorry, sir. The Vice President’s with us today and there’s a presentation going on. Have a good day, sir.”
Di Angelo dialled a number he knew by heart.
“This is the Carlson residence.” The voice was courteous, weary yet unbowed. Prematurely old.
“It’s Damien, sir.”
“Damien. Good to hear from you, son.”
Di Angelo could picture Andy Carlson Senior’s big round belly clothed in the habitual short-sleeved check shirt: proper granddaddy material. Wire-frame aviators like his own, but from the first time around. He heard the creak of a chair, an exhalation of breath pushed out by the diaphragm.
“How’s Andy, sir?” said di Angelo.
“Oh, same as ever, no better, no worse. Sleeping a lot.” His voice trailed away. “Mandy’s gotten him a trendy new haircut. Her friend’s daughter did it as a favour. Guess he looks real cool. Not that Andy cared about that kind of thing.”
They talked about bedsores; discussed the progress of neurology; assured each other he might yet recover. Di Angelo promised he would visit New England next time he was in the States; the older man said he knew he would and gamely tried to find out where di Angelo was deployed, vivacity in his voice for the first time.
Di Angelo glanced at his wristwatch. “Sir – it’s been good talking to you. But I’ve another call to make.”
“You’re a good man, Damien. None of his other friends come around any more, you know that?”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Andy deserves better.”
“Not even his old girlfriend. She’s got herself a new man, not that I hold that against her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Damien …” a reluctance entered Carlson’s voice. “I want to ask you something, son.”
Sudden intensity.
“Did you ever feel anything for my boy that went beyond friendship?”
Di Angelo froze on the bench.
“It’s the twenty-first century and all. Gays even allowed in the army now.”
He heard the old man sigh, pictured the mottled shaving rash on his throat.
“Oh, I know Andy wasn’t that way inclined,” Carlson continued. “A new girl on his arm every week, that was my boy. But son – I just want to know.” He swallowed. This was difficult for him to say. “Son, if that’s how you felt, if that’s how you feel – well, Mandy and I don’t mind.”
Di Angelo breathed out. “Thank you, sir.”
“Andy would be proud of what you’re doing, if he could still think. Fighting for freedom. I never got the opportunity, me. Too young for Vietnam, too old for I-raq. All those years under the flag, and I never got the chance to do my bit for America.”
Another sigh; di Angelo sensed the old man’s ribcage heaving up and down. Deep in the house he heard the chime of a clock, the one in their hallway.
Carlson was meandering on. “Oh, I know people ain’t too sweet on the I-raq war nowadays. But I still like to think …”
“Yes, sir?”
“I like to think my boy died – because he may as well have died that day, it’s sure as heck no life he’s got now – well, I like to think that he died doing his duty.”
A heavy silence. The old man swallowed again. This was as close as he could come to tears.
“I think so too, sir,” said di Angelo.
“Son?”
“Yes, sir?” A catch in di Angelo’s throat he was unused to.
“You can keep on visiting us, son. Me and Mandy would like that.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Suddenly there were tears in his eyes, and the colours of the daffodils were diffracted into a thousand shards, as if he were peering through a kaleidoscope.
“Sir?” he managed.
“Yes, Damien?”
“It means a lot to me. You saying those things.”
“You just carry on doing your bit for freedom and goodness, son. That’s all we ask.”
*
Di Angelo phoned Virginia again and this time he got patched through right away.
“Damien.” Robert Ardrey’s voice sounded polished somehow, like aluminium. “Progress?”
“I’ve lost them again,” he said. “It’s goddamn hard with only two of us. Do you have any updates for me?”
“Someone’ll be in touch when we get something. I hear the weather over there’s taken a turn for the worse?”
“Storms yesterday. More predicted for this afternoon. When am I getting my reinforcements?”
“He’ll be at your disposal shortly.”
“Robert –”
“Sir.” A slice to this interjection.
“Sir. Respectfully, sir, I hope it’s the right kind of operative.”
“Explain yourself.”
“You keep giving me clever people. I don’t need clever people. I’m a clever person. I need deadly people. No more thinkers. Your thinkers have been getting their ass whooped, it’s embarrassing. We’re America for Chrissakes.”
Robert Ardrey considered this.
62
Like a shark swishing closer as it calculates when to bite, Jenny had been circling an institution that makes the Great Library of Alexandria look like a council book van. A place holding 150 million titles, four hundred miles of shelves – and the papers of a statesman who in the Victorian age was as much of an institution as Queen Victoria herself. Confident in her spy-craft once more, at last Jenny felt they could approach this monument to erudition.
With its modern red brickwork and sloping roofs, the British Library reminded Jake of an overgrown Scandinavian leisure centre. Clouds still stretched from each of London’s tangled horizons, the stratus rumpled into banks like hard wet sand on a beach. The only two people in the manuscripts room were old men; neither glanced at them. Within half an hour the first portfolio was brought up. For once, handwriting in a period before the typewriter was not their enemy – Palmerston’s script was considered an exemplar of taste and cultivation.
1861. to the President of the Board of Trade.
My Dear Milner Gibson,
It is wise when the weather is fine to put one’s house in watertight condition against the time when foul weather may come on. The reports from our manufacturing districts are at present good; the mills are working, and the people are in full employment. But we must expect a change towards the end of next autumn, and during the winter and spring of next year. This year’s crop must be less plentiful than that of last year.
Yours sincerely,
Palmerston.
“The weather references are pretty pointed,” said Jenny.
“Do you know what I think we’ve got here?” said Jake.
“Go on.”
“A day to day example of the auguries being consulted.”
“Remarkable document.”
They surfed through the life and times of Britain’s most buccaneering Prime Minister.
“Here’s another augury,” said Jake. “At a – er – rather higher level.”
It was a letter from Palmerston to Queen Victoria.
New Year’s Day 1861.
This autumn and winter have been productive of events which future years are not likely to repeat. The capture of Peking by British troops; the union of Italy; and the approaching dissolution in America of the great northern Confederation by secession of the southern States. These are events full of importance for th
e future. Speaking confidentially to your Majesty with regard to the future, Lord Palmerston would think himself doing better service by recommending the House of Lords for Mr Gladstone …
“A summary of the year’s events and a flavour of things to come,” said Jenny. “All of the predictions accurate, of course.”
“And there’s that man again,” said Jake. “Gladstone. And with regard to the future, Palmerston wants him put out to pasture in the House of Lords. Where he can’t do too much damage.”
“What was the Queen’s reply?”
He pointed out a sentence with a white-gloved hand.
There is nothing but clouds and causes of deep anxiety.
Here was a Palmerstonian prophecy for his Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell.
September 13, 1865
My Dear Russell,
Russia will, in due time, become a power almost as great as the old Roman Empire. She can become mistress of all Asia, except British India, whenever she chooses to take it; and when railways shall have abridged distances, her command of men will become enormous, her pecuniary means gigantic, and power of transporting armies over great distances most formidable.
“Deadly accurate once again,” said Jenny.
“Because he knew what would come to pass,” said Jake. “But to hoi polloi? Palmerston must have smacked of genius. Like Hitler in the thirties. Check this out – it’s a speech the local MP for Northamptonshire gave at a banquet where Lady Palmerston cut the first sod for a new railway.”
The noble lord seems to be always engaged in the game of chuck-farthing, and it is invariably ‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’ Whenever it comes up ‘head’, the noble lord very properly has all the credit. I do not mean to say that he is guilty of unfair play, but the people, it is evident, are determined to give him all the halfpence.
“So those outside the cabinet had no idea,” said Jenny.
“No. They could only marvel at the rise and rise of British power.”
“Here’s another,” said Jenny.