Gospel Truths

by J. G. Sandom

  “And in the meantime,” Sir Giles said, slightly bored, “I assume that Randall here will follow up the home leads.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll have to coordinate from London.”

  “Good. That’s settled then. Here’s to some speedy answers, gentlemen.”

  Sir Giles lifted his glass. Cocksedge and Terry Randall followed suit, but Lyman hesitated. He watched them bring their cocktails up together.

  “How about it, Lyman,” Sir Giles said, noticing his empty hand. “Aren’t you going to join us?”

  Lyman looked across the table at their faces. They were all smiling at him. They were toasting him. He lifted the empty water glass before him and tapped it gently up against the Lemur’s beer. “Better not,” he said. “I should go home and pack.”

  Lyman left the pub and walked along the riverfront, trying to clear his head, trying to suppress the thought of stopping somewhere else along the way, just one to help him get to sleep. But the Lemur’s narrow face kept swimming into view—that delicate, protruding jaw.

  Eventually, when the cold began to creep into his joints, he found a bus and headed home toward Hendon. The bus was almost empty. It was Friday, after all, and the crowds were going into London, not out to Golders Green. An elderly couple sat in the back seat holding hands. Lyman kept thinking about his case, about Scarcella and the locker key, about his pending trip to France, and he almost missed his stop, stepping off into the shadows at the last minute. Gooseberry Close was a modest apartment complex consisting of three brick buildings of dubious architectural value, the smallest and oldest being Thurston Croft, where Lyman lived.

  He stopped outside the entrance to his building. His hands were in his coat pockets. He could feel the hardness of the little red key even through his glove. Then he looked up, slowly, as if he didn’t want to catch it all at once, leaning back, taking in the tent of stars and blackness high above. There was Orion’s Belt, and Gemini, but where were the Pleiades? Lyman had not seen a night like this one since the year before, when he and Crosley had gone fishing in the Lake District.

  He climbed wearily up the steps into the building. William Harris wasn’t in the hall and Lyman missed him, the cheery hello he could almost always count on when he met the caretaker’s son. Lyman pressed the button for the lift. Normally he would have walked, but tonight he only wanted to throw some water on his face and fall asleep.

  The lift descended into view; a vintage platform; a cage of brass and black enameled bars. Lyman stepped in and closed the accordion door behind him. Someone was cooking fish and he remembered it was Friday. The lift groaned upwards. As it ascended he could see the floors unroll one by one through the grillwork. He had almost reached his floor, the fourth, when the lift suddenly lurched to a stop, the wheezing of the metal sounding even louder in the darkness which pursued it like an echo. Lyman cursed.

  Blackout!

  He groped for the buttons on the panel to see if anything would happen. They were useless. Someone was shouting. Lyman paused, his back straightening instinctively against the grillwork of the lift. It wasn’t a shout. It was a whine of sorts, a cry.

  He reached up through the door. The lift was trapped between storeys, but at the top of the metal frame he could feel the cold stone of the fourth floor, his floor. It was absolutely dark. He took a breath to shout for help when something checked it in his throat. There was that whine again, a kind of muted howl, and it was then that Lyman realized it was George.

  He pulled himself up as high as he could, trying to see through the bars. People were starting to mill about on the floors above. He could hear their voices echoing down the shaft. Someone was shining a torch up from below. The whining stopped. Lyman heard a door click open on his landing. He squeezed his face against the bars, trying to see. A wedge of light cut through the darkness. A pair of slippers trimmed with maribou feathers appeared in an open doorway. It was Mrs. Wilson, Lyman’s neighbor, with a candle. A pair of black work shoes followed right behind. Then the soft glow of another candle blended with the first, the nimbus growing larger, taking in the bare feet of John Pollock from next door. Mrs. Wilson began to complain about the outage, about all that bloody noise. Pollock’s feet retreated into darkness. Lyman was about to call out once again when the door to his own flat opened. Mrs. Wilson moved away. Her husband wanted the candle. The dim reflected light bobbed up and down, then vanished.

  Lyman heard the sound of footsteps to his left. A torch flashed on, and he saw a pair of dark brown wing-tipped shoes move steadily away from his apartment door, so close that he could have reached up through the metal grate and touched them. They hesitated for a moment, and then started down the stairwell.

  Lyman dropped to the floor of the lift. He tried to make out the landing below, but it was just too dark. No one had come out into the hallway as they had above. It remained pitch black, even as the figure came around the stairwell. Whoever he was, the man with the wing-tipped shoes had turned his torch off on the stairs. Lyman tried to make his face out in the shadows but it was useless. Then the silhouette was gone, an echo in the stairwell, and no more.

  The lights came on as suddenly as they had dimmed. The lift wheezed upward and stopped at the fourth floor. He opened the metal door and moved cautiously across the landing. It was too bright now, too ordinary. The door to his apartment was locked.

  The first thing that he noticed when he swung it open was the thin red streak which ran along the off-white carpeting the whole length of the corridor. Books and pictures and magazines were strewn across the floor. He stepped across them crouched and ready, although he knew with a dull, uncompromising certainty that he had come too late. Each room he passed was the same. The dining table had been split across the middle, its back broken. The tiles in the bathroom were shattered. They had unscrewed all the piping. They had pulled the outlets from the walls.

  He picked a knife up from the floor beside the kitchen door and stepped across the wreckage, trying to ignore the side rooms, trying to fix his eyes on that thin red thread which wound its way across the broken crockery, the books burst open, from one room to the next, until he finally saw the body of the dog half covered by the bureau in his bedroom. George was still moving, licking at himself. Lyman kneeled beside him and it was only then that he saw the way the dog’s jaw hung off to the side, the flesh stripped from the teeth and the red tongue trying to lick away the flow of blood. A puddle of vomit and blood and broken glass circled his head.

  There was a sudden sound and Lyman swung about, the long knife gleaming in his hand. William Harris stood in the doorway. Lyman lowered the knife. “You should know better, William,” he said. “I could have hurt you.”

  “Christ!” The caretaker’s son stepped uncertainly into the room. “What happened to George?”

  Lyman held a hand out to keep him from the dog. “They fed him something,” he said. “It’s too late, William. There’s nothing we can do.”

  The boy knelt on the ground, looking from the dog to Lyman and then back again. “I heard him howling,” he said. “I was coming to have a look when the lights went out. I was on my way.”

  “Of course you were,” said Lyman gently. “The blackout was probably a signal.”

  “Just like Mrs. Van der Meer’s. Except she didn’t have a dog. Two robberies in two nights. They must be balmy, Inspector Lyman.” The boy moved back from the dog, pushing himself to his feet. There were bloodstains on his knees. “But you’ll catch them. Won’t you? You’ll find them.”

  “William,” Lyman said. “Why don’t you go down to your father’s and ring the police?”

  The boy could not tear his eyes away.

  “You’ll be fine, William,” Lyman urged him soothingly. “Leave me alone for a minute. Tell your father.”

  Finally the boy turned away and headed out the door. Lyman could hear him scrambling over the fallen books and paintings.

  When he was finally alone, Lyman reached his hands out and began to scratch
George gently about the neck and head. The dog was barely conscious. He kept licking at his mouth, trying to keep the blood which trickled from the small cuts in his gums from flowing back and choking him. Lyman cradled his head. “Oh, George,” he said, almost inaudibly. Then he ran his hands about the dog’s neck, twisting it with a sudden downward motion, until with a snap, the animal jerked once and settled.

  Lyman stood, wiping his hands on his haunches. He walked over to the window overlooking the little garden which the residents of Thurston Croft had planted the year before. Through the darkness he could see a few great poplars swaying near the schoolyard, the thick hedge by the roadside, the flash of taillights as they passed by openings in the foliage. Above, the same stars swung about the house. He could feel that small nub in his pocket, now familiar. He could visualize its shape, the three serrated edges and the final guide. He leaned through the window, looking for the impossible figure in the shadows, like a hungry owl, his fingers squeezed about the sill. It hadn’t been just another robbery. They had come for Pontevecchio’s key.

  “You bloody bastards,” he shouted suddenly, the anger welling up inside him. “Fuck you, you bastards.” Then he turned away, embarrassed.

  One thing at least, he realized, looking down. He wouldn’t have to find a kennel now, before his trip to France.

  Part II

  The dodecahedron was used to embroider the

  universe with constellations.

  Plato

  The Sicelica by Timaeus

  Chapter VI

  AMIENS, FRANCE

  September 3rd, 1991

  THE CATHEDRAL OF AMIENS WAS LIKE A CRYSTAL GROWING all around him and Joseph Koster realized, as he let his eyes climb up the arcade and triforium, that through it he could see the constant elemental clash between the vertical and horizontal, the scramble upward to the heavens, the fall to dissolution. At Beauvais just north of Paris, the vault of the cathedral had collapsed in the thirteenth century, its height so great, so arrogant perhaps, that some had called the accident a Gothic flight of Icarus. But here at Amiens the vault soared more than a hundred feet, lifting the people with it, stretching the walls until they folded paper thin into the sky.

  Koster moved into the nave. He was a lean man in his early thirties, with long blond hair and a stiff, uncertain stride. His face was narrow, his eyes deep set. He wore an ice blue anorak which hung about his body, and a pair of tight black jeans. As he walked, he noticed that the floor of the cathedral was an arabesque of lines, black and white knots and Indian swastikas of stone. There was an octagonal labyrinth at the center of the nave. It was a whirlpool of black tiles against white granite, broken into quadrants, revolving to a central copper plate. Everywhere was light—within the aisles, in the crossing transept arms, and in the distant choir. He paused for a moment and stared down at the labyrinth. A dozen names were inscribed in the copper plate, or was it brass? He couldn’t tell. He felt his eyes drawn up again, directed skyward by the strings of stone which climbed beyond the arcade piers, beyond the arched triforium to form the vault itself.

  “No flash,” a guard in blue called out.

  Near the southern entrance a tourist with three cameras slung about his neck glanced sheepishly at his wife. Americans, Koster guessed, as he started toward them. It seemed to be a tour of some sort. There was another middle-aged couple, probably English, and a barrel-chested bearded man. “Wait a few more minutes,” the bearded man advised. “The guards all take their morning nap about this time.” Then he began to laugh, as if he had some object in his chest which he were trying vainly to dislodge.

  “Excuse me,” Koster said. “Is this a private tour?”

  The large man with the beard twirled suddenly, his hands aflutter. “Private?” he said. “Exclusive, perhaps. But never private. I am only the unofficial guide, alas. Not sanctioned by the state. My name is Guy Soury-Fontaine.” He thrust a stubby hand at Koster. “You are welcome to join us. It is my first and only English tour today.”

  Koster felt his hand jerked up and down. The American with the cameras was smiling. No doubt he recognized a fellow countryman, an ally who could help him stare down any foreign guard. The English couple kept their distance.

  “We shall start outside,” the guide said as he shuffled off. “Where Man did.”

  They headed through the double doors of the west facade and out into the open. Soury-Fontaine drove Koster and the tourists down the steps like sheep, while he remained above them with his back to the cathedral. “This last and perhaps greatest of the High Gothic cathedrals,” he boomed, “was begun in 1220 by Robert de Luzarches, when the little town of Amiens had but twelve thousand poor inhabitants. She was the skyscraper of the Middle Ages, so eminent that each and every person in the town could fit within her walls.”

  Koster knew much of the material already, but he could not share the guide’s unbridled adulation of the west facade. To him it lacked proportion somehow. Two galleries had been thrown up on top of one another, a stained glass rose squeezed badly between tiers, jammed in below the cornice at the top. It simply didn’t work.

  The big guide spoke English fluently, his accent thick enough to charm the tourists, but finally a background hum, a natural pitch. He was dressed in a light brown cardigan which was badly pilled and stretched drum-tight along his shoulders and the ample arching of his stomach. His beard needed a trim. The collar of his shirt was popping up a little in the back. In all a rather shabby guide, thought Koster, and yet there was an animation in Soury-Fontaine’s hands and face which seemed to radiate about him, almost in spite of how he looked.

  He jabbed a finger toward the sumptuous facade. Mrs. James Dawson, who proved to be Australian, and not English after all, began to pepper him with questions. Soury-Fontaine only smiled with greater force-fulness. Here was an eager student. It did not matter to him that in twenty minutes she would probably be sitting in an air-conditioned bus, a dozen chateaux left to see, the cathedral far behind. His hacking laugh became a mark of punctuation. His eyes, the color of mutton gravy, pitched side to side as he vainly sought an entrance.

  “Not at all,” he said at last. “You must remember who these people were. Imagine being a pilgrim. You have been traveling for weeks, perhaps months or even years. Finally you arrive—tired, covered in lice, footsore. Perhaps you are sick, which is why you came on this pilgrimage in the first place. Perhaps you are dying. But it doesn’t matter because you have finally arrived. The cathedral stands before you. Clean, not like it is now, but new. The portal statues tell you stories as you climb the steps. You open the door and, suddenly, the dancing lightbeams stream about you from the stained glass windows. It is like heaven on earth, a mirror of the heavenly Jerusalem.” His right hand curled into a fist.

  Mrs. Dawson was unconvinced. “Whatever do you mean? What stories?”

  “The cathedral is a book in stone,” Soury-Fontaine replied. “Most of the people of the Middle Ages couldn’t read. They relied instead on the statuary, on the glass. All of these figures are symbols. The way they are placed means something. The clothes they wear. The number in each grouping.”

  He pointed at a line of figures by the central door. “Six men on either side of Christ,” he said. “A dozen altogether. Would you care to hazard a guess, Mrs. Dawson, as to who they are?”

  “The twelve apostles, I suppose,” she answered cagily. Her husband rocked on his heels. He was enjoying this.

  “You see, you knew already. Even what they carry has significance. That third one on the left, the fellow with the T square in his hand, is Thomas. How do I know? Because Thomas is the patron saint of builders. That one over there is Peter.”

  Soury-Fontaine boomed on. Koster took in the canopy of stone, the figures on the tympanum and lintel. He wondered what they had looked like in their painted youth, before the elements and time had stripped them of their brilliant colors. The guide had called the church a book in stone, but Koster thought she must have seemed a comic
book of sorts back in the Middle Ages, all gilded and dissembled, the stone cheeks rouged, the eyebrows penciled.

  He looked up. The tympanum gave way to arches, more statues tucked in granite envelopes, that rose of hopeless complication, more arches still, and from the cornice—strung like a web between two tiers—a solitary figure peering down. Koster wondered what the little crowd of tourists looked like from that height, and it was only then that he finally understood what he had only glimpsed out of the window of the airplane three days earlier: the distance in between two worlds; the mile on empty mile of gray-blue North Atlantic. He had arrived. He was in France, in Amiens. The months of dreaming and delay were finally over. The cathedral was no longer framed by printed words, nor by the neat white borders of the Kodak slides which he had borrowed from his architectural firm’s extensive library. She was right there before him. Live, and in color.

  “Oy.” Someone was poking at his ribs. It was Mr. Dawson. “We’re off to see the stalls now,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You could circle Queensland with the choir stalls I’ve seen this month. It’s a wonder they have any forests left in France. Aren’t you with us anymore?”

  “Right.” Koster followed him up the steps and into the cathedral.

  The tourists huddled together at the center of the nave, just beyond the outer border of the labyrinth in the floor. The words of the guide echoed in the vastness of the cool cathedral. Votive candles burned, each flame a spark of expectation. The stone rose steadily.

  “Well,” Mrs. Dawson sighed. “According to my book, it’s only because most of the windows have been shot out by cannon fire that we can even see the maze.”

  The guide’s broad shoulders sagged. He ran a hand through his beard and stared up at the ceiling. The pause lengthened to a silence. Then he dropped his hands and began to rub them in the air, as if washing them in a sink. “It is a labyrinth, Mrs. Dawson,” he said precisely. “Not a maze. A labyrinth has but one passage, convoluted though it may be. A maze has several.”