“He told me he was,” said Thomas, surprised out of his defiance.
“Yes,” said Tivary. “It is interesting, is it not? He pretended to be the one thing that would draw the greatest attention. But, according to the police, he was not a winemaker. Not even a wine dealer.”
“So he was killed by mistake?”
“I do not think so,” said Tivary. He was half smiling and considering, as if sampling an intriguing glass of wine. “I think he was probably killed for what he was, not for what he pretended to be.”
“What was he?”
“The police say Gresham was indeed from California, but he was not involved in the wine industry. He was involved in another business entirely, one in which California is second to none in the world.”
“Movies,” said Thomas, becoming very still. “He was a producer.”
“Précisément,” said Tivary.
CHAPTER 55
Blackstone had talked to someone in movies about Love’s Labour’s Won. Escolme had said so. She had been looking for ways to make the most possible profit off the newly revealed play, and films had obviously figured large: this despite the relative failure of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which was widely considered the low point of his career. But a new film of an old play was one thing, and the first film of a newly discovered play was something entirely different. It would market itself into the record books.
So Blackstone had talked to Gresham. Perhaps she had revealed something about the provenance of the original manuscript as a way of attesting to its authenticity. He had come looking for it. On his own? Because someone at his studio wanted proof that the script was genuine before they made a commitment to another Shakespeare film? Perhaps. He doubted there would be many script doctors in Hollywood who could reliably say whether something was or was not Shakespeare based solely on a handwritten copy. Whatever she had shown him was clearly not enough. He was looking for the original.
“Please,” said Tivary. He offered Thomas a flute of pale golden champagne.
“I’m not really a champagne drinker.”
“Please,” said Tivary again.
Thomas shrugged, took it, and sipped. It was dry and intoxicating, alive with flickers of festivity and celebration.
“Yes?” said Tivary, smiling broadly, his eyes on Thomas’s.
Thomas swallowed and couldn’t help returning something of the old man’s smile.
“Yes,” he said.
Tivary gave a little cough of a laugh and gestured with his index finger triumphantly.
“Good,” he said, as if Thomas had conceded some point in an important debate. “Now, this Gresham,” said Tivary, “is not the first to go wandering my cellars with no good reason. Only the first to die. Most of the spies come from other houses we know, and most of them are not so rude or clumsy to go wandering the caves like that. I had word about this Gresham—and yourself—from my colleagues at Taittinger in Reims because I have been looking out for such people. In the last few months there have been several. So I ask myself: what are they looking for? I think you know, Mr. Knight. I think you know because you are also looking for this thing, are you not?”
Thomas considered the man seriously, but said nothing.
“Come this way, please.”
The old Frenchman’s gait was stiff, his strides short, and he strutted a little like a bantam rooster. Still, he moved quickly and Thomas, his physical opposite in many ways, had to jog to catch up, thudding through the delicately furnished room like the proverbial china-shop bull.
They left the room and went back the way Thomas had come, past the elevator, to the double doors at the far end of the hall. Tivary unlocked them with a tiny brass key from his waistcoat and trotted inside. He waited for Thomas, then shut and locked the door behind him.
The room was the architectural mirror of the one they had just left, though this was red instead of blue, and the furnishings seemed less designed for sunny and elegant entertainment. It was darker, more lived in, and the desks were heaped with papers and other clutter. The walls were hung with paintings—more portraits—and the credenza and bookcases were laden with framed photographs, mostly black and white, many sepia with age. Thomas glanced at them politely as Tivary turned his back to the room in order to fiddle with the dial of a safe.
“I asked you if you knew what they were looking for, these others,” said Tivary.
“Perhaps,” Thomas conceded, staring at the elderly man’s back.
“Very good,” said Tivary, turning, pleased to face him. “And for your honesty you will be rewarded.”
He leaned on the handle of the safe and the door opened.
CHAPTER 56
“Mister Knight,” said Tivary, “are you familiar with Charles de St. Denis, Marquis de Saint Evremond?”
Thomas stared as the little French man stood up. He was beaming, his disarming blue eyes bright with amused excitement. In his hand was a stained leather folder bound with ancient scarlet ribbon. Thomas’s breath had caught. He nodded but could think of nothing to say.
“Voilà,” said Tivary, reverently laying the folder on the desk, considering it for a moment, and then busying his clever fingers with the bow. In a second the two ends fell untied. Tivary gave Thomas an expectant look.
“Be my guest,” he said.
Thomas smiled, suddenly nervous, and stooped to the leather folder. Gingerly, holding only the edge between thumb and forefinger, he opened it.
The folder contained two pouches. The one on the left contained what looked to be a letter in fine and florid script. The other contained a small book about the size of a paperback, but much slimmer. An old book. Instantly, Thomas knew he was looking at a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century quarto, or a damn good forgery.
“Is it . . . ?” he faltered.
“A play,” said Tivary. “Yes.”
“By Shakespeare?”
Tivary’s eyes fluttered and something complex passed through his mind.
“No,” he said. “See for yourself.”
Thomas hesitated, momentarily crushed with disappointment, but then his fingers gently prized the quarto from the leather folder and he was able to read the cover.
Volpone, he mouthed. “Ben Jonson’s Volpone?”
He opened the little book to the first page.
“To the most noble and most equal sisters,” he read aloud, “the two famous universities, for their love and acceptance shown to his poem in the presentation, Ben Jonson, the grateful acknowledger, dedicates both it and himself.”
He stared at it.
“Sixteen oh seven,” said Tivary, almost chuckling with delight at Thomas’s reaction. “Purchased by Saint Evremond, used as a source for his own play, Sir Politick Would-Be, and sent as a gift to his lord the King of France and Navarre. You see the letter?”
Thomas looked up. Tivary had removed the single piece of parchment from the other pouch and unfolded it. Thomas, half-dazed, looked from the letter to the pouch, aware of Tivary watching him closely.
The folder’s two pouches were both empty, but that only made the way they both bulged in the exact same way the more striking. Though the left one had held only a single sheet of paper, it was stretched into an outline perfectly matching that which had held the quarto. Unless Jonson’s play had been routinely moved from one side of the folder to the other over the intervening three-hundred-plus years . . .
“There was something else in here,” said Thomas. “Another play.”
“Quite,” said Tivary. “The letter to the king suggests as much. See?” he said, tapping the letter with his finger. “ ‘Les livres,’ plural. There was another book in the folder.”
“So where is it now?” said Thomas, fighting back the urge to scream the question.
“Alas,” said Tivary with a shrug that lasted at least three seconds, “we do not know. We think it came here from Versailles with the folder, but then . . . pouf!”
H
e gestured: into thin air.
Thomas felt his whole body sag as if some great pressure that had been holding him upright had suddenly been released.
“We have no details of what the folder contained,” said Tivary. “So we cannot say if the other book disappeared after it reached us, or before.”
Thomas looked for a chair and sank into it.
“More champagne, I think,” said Tivary, frowning. “Or perhaps, cognac would be more appropriate. You have had a minor shock. A . . . what? A letdown, no?”
“No,” said Thomas, trying to be polite. “A little. I had hoped . . .”
“That there was a Shakespeare play here,” he said. “So I see. But why?”
“I had thought . . . well, I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“You thought Saint Evremond had a play by Shakespeare,” said Tivary, apparently thinking aloud. “That would be valuable. But the Jonson quarto is also valuable, though perhaps not worth so much. Yet you clearly have no interest in the Volpone. So it is not simply about the value of an old book. Also, others have come looking for this missing play, so there is something special about it. What?”
“I thought—and others apparently thought—that there may be a play by Shakespeare that has otherwise been lost.”
“A new play by Shakespeare?” said Tivary, his eyes flashing again.
“New to us, yes,” said Thomas. He glanced around the room, not wanting to reveal the disappointment in his eyes. “But I guess not. Or if it ever was here, it has somehow . . . subsequently . . .”
Thomas stopped, his eyes fixed.
“Monsieur?” prompted Tivary, turning to see what Thomas was staring at.
On the edge of the credenza were a pair of yellowed photographs in a hinged silver frame.
“Who is that?” Thomas said.
“Mon grand-père,” said Tivary, smiling at the image of the slender man with the archaic mustache and the fat cigarette. “My grandfather. Etienne Tivary. He died before I was born . . .”
“No,” said Thomas. “The other man. The one in uniform.”
The man was tall. The uniform that of a First World War British officer.
“I do not know,” said Tivary. “A friend of my grandfather’s, I suppose. Probably stationed here during the war. There were barracks all over this region and soldiers used the cellars as places to get away from the . . . the bombs?”
“Shells?”
“Yes, the shells. There were trenches cut all through this area. For almost the whole war there was fighting here. Almost continuous. And the line between German and Allies moved. There were two battles of the Marne—the river—in 1914 and 1918. The Germans moved very quickly at first and took much of this region, but after the first battle, they were pushed back, just not far enough to stop them from shelling the area. For most of the war, my family lived in the cellars.”
“But this man is in two pictures with your grandfather and he looks different in each. They both do.” Thomas pointed. “In this one his hair is longer, and this one he has no mustache. So they knew each other for some time.”
“Why else would my family have kept his picture?”
As Tivary spoke, he was considering the back of the frame.
“Would you?” he said, offering it to Thomas. “My fingers are not as strong or steady as they were.”
Thomas twisted a pair of clasps and popped the black-velvet-covered back off the frame. One of the pictures was unmarked on the back, but the other had a simple inscription in faded pencil: Monsieur Etienne Tivary avec son ami, Captain Jeremy Blackstone, Janvier 1918.
Thomas reconsidered the smiling Englishman in the picture, the same face he had seen staring down at him from an oil painting over the fireplace in Daniella Blackstone’s sitting room. So now he knew the story of the missing play book, how it had found its way to France and then, three hundred years later, back to England. The circle was closed at last.
CHAPTER 57
He couldn’t be sure, he supposed, but Thomas felt he had an edge on the competition now, including those who had beaten him to the Demier cellars, because they still thought the book was there. He had no idea how Daniella’s grandfather had first seen the lost play or how he had come to take it back to his family in England. Was it a gift from the Tivary family, the returning of a work of English literature to its homeland in the hands of a man they had come to like and trust? Or had the English officer stumbled on the play in one of his many visits to the château, perhaps when the rightful owners had been moved off by the imminence of the fighting? Had he simply stolen it? Thomas couldn’t say, and with everyone from that increasingly remote period dead, he doubted he would ever know for sure.
He called Kumi from an ivory-colored phone in Tivary’s office, to let her know he was going back to England and that, yes, she should plan to join him there, if she felt up to the journey.
“I can sleep on the plane,” she said. “I’m actually quite looking forward to it. A glass of wine. Quiet. A dumb movie or three. I’ll be fine.”
“I can meet you at the airport,” Thomas said.
“I have a connection to Birmingham,” she said. “Let me get you the details.”
After he had hung up, Thomas gave the contact information for his Kenilworth guest house to Tivary, and then returned to his hotel. The local police might want to speak to him at some point, but thus far they did not have his name and because Thomas had nothing material to tell them, he hoped that he could be back in England before they started asking about him. He called Polinski and left the short version of what had happened on her voice mail, glad he didn’t have to listen to her skepticism.
Thomas wasn’t sure about Tivary. He seemed both trustworthy and trusting, something that would have been inconceivable only an hour or two before. Too trusting? Thomas, Tivary had said, had been tracked down and cornered on suspicion of industrial espionage, but his being pursued by Tivary’s men had also given him an alibi for Gresham’s murder, so once it became clear that Thomas was no spy, the champagne house had no further interest in him.
And they probably don’t want to complicate the murder of one American with accounts of assaulting another . . .
That too. Thomas figured he should tell the local police what he knew, but he felt too driven to get back to Kenilworth to bear the idea of sitting around in some local police station trying to explain stories of lost plays and a pair of Chicago murders in wooden French. He’d talk to the British police, and doubtless Polinski would want to yell at him, but he would deal with that later. Now he was racing, his mind turning almost as fast as the wheels of the rented Peugeot that bore him back to Calais and the Chunnel. Thomas thought of Tivary as he drove: those bright, intelligent eyes, the easy, old world charm, and he hoped the old man was what he seemed. The presentation of the half-empty folder could have been merely a show designed to send him on his way, the lost Shakespeare play still sitting in the safe where it had been left.
But then why show him the folder at all? Tivary had nothing to gain by producing more evidence that the play had actually been in his family’s possession. If it did not turn up elsewhere, that folder would inevitably bring Thomas—or someone—back to the château. Unless it was just about buying time, and Tivary knew that he would be able to cash in on his secret before Thomas came back . . .
Unless, unless, unless.
The ideas turned over in Thomas’s head, questions chasing each other, branching off into new questions like the tunnels of the Demier cellars. But he never let his pressure off the gas pedal because in his gut he felt sure that the play had left the land of its fictional characters and returned to the home of its author. Daniella Blackstone had been many things, but she would have to have been a special kind of fool to have claimed ownership of a book whose whereabouts she did not know exactly. Her grandfather had brought it home. He must have.
The place-names flashed through his mind as he drove, and whenever he strayed from the autoroute he sa
w war memorials. They were everywhere. He knew of the fields of stone crosses and stars, but these local memorials were almost as potent, at least when you got used to how many there were. In the first battle of the Marne, the famous Anglo-French victory that stopped the German advance short of Paris (thanks, in part, to the commissioning of six hundred Parisian taxicabs that shuttled thousands of reinforcements to the front), more than five hundred thousand men were killed, almost ten times as many as the United States lost in the entire Vietnam War. And mind-eluding though such a number was, it was really only the beginning, because the Marne victory was so exhausting for both sides that all they could do was dig in and shell each other for the next four years up and down the largely static front. The troops sat for months in rat- and disease-infested trenches, often half submerged in water, waiting for the enemy to blow poison gas at them or pin them down with thousands of high-explosive shells. Then the trench raids would come, the soldiers pouring over the top with gas masks and bayonets as the machine guns opened up. It was as good an approximation of hell as Thomas could imagine.
He thought of Henry V moving among his troops in disguise on the eve of Agincourt, and the bitter truths the king overhears from his soldiers as they consider their fate. If their cause is just, they say, then even their deaths have value. “But if the cause be not good,” says one, “the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left . . .”
It was a harrowing speech.
He thought again of Ben Williams, who had wanted to be a teacher, and felt an urge to lay flowers in his memory at one of the monuments to soldiers fallen before him.
He didn’t. He kept driving.
Because the thing burning hottest in his mind was Thomas’s flashbulb memory of Gresham’s blood-splashed corpse in the tunnels and the unsettling conviction that being cornered by Tivary’s men had saved him from the same fate. Someone had been stalking those stone passages, someone who had been on the same trail as Thomas, someone ready to kill to get the play.
What Time Devours Page 22