“And then—you found one.”
“I did.”
“The satire.” Greta sipped.
He tipped his head.
Sliding to the edge of her chair, Greta set her demitasse cup on Bensoussan’s desk, next to the framed photos of his family. “Tell me,” she said finally, “why did you come directly to us?” To Val, it was a very good question. “If you believe you’ve discovered a fake at the Morgan Library,” Greta scratched behind her ear in a gesture Val knew well, “why didn’t you go straight to the authorities at the library? Why,” said Greta, opening her hands wide, “did you go over their heads?”
Bensoussan heaved a noisy sigh and collapsed against the back of his seat. “Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Why come straight to you?” For a moment, he rocked softly, looking in turn at Marquez, Coelho, Allende, as if something was at stake Val could never understand. Finally, he spoke: “Security is tight in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department,” he said quietly, with a tight shake of his head. “With that in mind,” he announced, “if there’s been a fake inserted into the holdings,” he stopped rocking very suddenly, “I’m guessing it might be what we call an inside job.”
Val shared a cab with Greta, both of them silent on the way to the Flatiron Building. An inside job. What baffled her was not what was faked, but why. As the cab pulled over to the curb, Val started to reach into her purse, and Greta clamped her arm. “I’ll take care of it,” she said softly, her face suddenly looking all sixty-four of her years. It’s wrong to expect too much of Lancôme. Greta asked, “Can you look into the Bensoussan matter?” She shook her head in a weary way. “I can’t believe there’s much of a mystery here, Val, despite what the attractive professor said. Or that it’s an inside job. We’re talking about the Morgan Library. Even the custodians have world-class creds.”
Val opened the door while the bulky cabbie eyed her in the rearview mirror. “Set up a meeting at the Morgan, Auntie, and I’ll join you there.”
Greta gave her a long look, said quietly, “All right, we’ll start out together. But in the event there’s something to what Bensoussan says,” she raised her voice, tapping on the driver’s seat back in a sign to go tearing down Broadway, “for God’s sake, we’ve got to be discreet.” Val slammed the door and stepped away from the cab, wondering how she would suddenly develop overnight the kind of expertise that would enable her to eyeball a sixteenth century document and determine whether it was a fake.
Greta was deputizing her to investigate a possible forgery.
Bale needed her help in the matter of Adrian’s death.
Even James Killian, fake plumber to the stars, needed to brainstorm a new project.
As Val swung open the door to the Flatiron Building—too late for a sandwich from One East Ace—she felt seriously overestimated. The only unreasonable request Adrian Bale had ever made of her was to rush the stage together after a Nirvana concert.
James Killian was proving elusive, reported Ivy as she tapped her thin little biceps. Val’s assistant editor narrowed her eyes at the plate of cookies Val held out to her. “I’ll stay after him,” she added in a way that sounded like she wondered which of several mysterious acts the man could be up to. There was an eerie tenacity to Ivy that Val was discovering she liked. What followed was a companionable silence. They shot each other a look that to Val came straight off those old World War II posters about how loose lips sink ships. With a grim smile, Ivy grabbed a second cookie and slipped out of Val’s office.
During the afternoon, Val thumbed through a hard copy of a manuscript by a former Al-Shabaab member, submitted to her by one of her favorite literary agents, now edging closer to retirement. Was there commercial appeal to an exposé by a deserter terrorist? Probably, sadly. Was this the one to publish? Not without a whole lot of remedial help Val wasn’t keen to supply. When the office phone rang, and it turned out to be Lieutenant Cleary, Val was grateful for the interruption—until she heard what prompted the call. Adrian Bale’s phone was missing. Could Ms. Cameron shed any light on that? Ms. Cameron could not. Ms. Cameron was busy trying to reconstitute her liquefied insides into some semblance of organs.
“I didn’t think so,” Cleary said with some energy.
“Did you check her purse?” As if the thought wouldn’t have occurred to Homicide.
“On the floor next to the vic’s desk. We’ve got it.”
Val took a big, noisy breath. “I see the problem. Why would she call her brother and then call me…and not have the phone right there with her on her desk?”
“According to the cell phone records, the call to you was the final one, at 7:08 a.m.” On the other end of the line, Val could hear Cleary thumbing through papers. “And according to security, camera five was shot out at 7:16. Was the victim getting ready to leave the office? No.”
“No,” said Val, trying to think like Adrian. “Besides, she had lots to interest her just then. An urn, a Euphorbia milii—”
“Possibly a visit from you,” added Cleary.
Val nodded slowly. “Adrian wasn’t going anywhere,” she agreed. Suddenly, she remembered: “Find My Phone,” she said, excited. “Adrian had the Find My Phone app on her phone. Will that help?”
Cleary sounded skeptical. “If the killer hasn’t disabled it already.”
“But maybe not—”
“I guess it depends on the strength of her passcode.”
With that, Val shivered. “She didn’t use a passcode,” she said softly, picturing Adrian waving her away whenever Val pushed her on it. Oh, my life’s an open book, she’d insist, not caring how trite and even a little brainless it sounded, I’ve got nothing to hide. No dark history. Not that Val knew. Not that Adrian herself knew. But she must have figured in someone else’s dark history, because now she was lying on a slab in the morgue.
“No passcode?” The lieutenant was shrill. Then she went on to tell Val that, in that case, everyone on Adrian Bale’s contact list was now known to the killer. Val’s heart rippled as Cleary went on, “And considering you were the last person she called,” she paused for effect, “and the content of the message, someone out there might take a special interest in you, Ms. Cameron.”
“My aunt will be so pleased,” she said lightly. But Val had already made the connections. Whoever killed Adrian Bale had stolen her phone, stolen the finest specimen of a crown of thorns plant, and knew Adrian was talking to Val Cameron about it. The question for the killer, then, had to be how much more did Val Cameron know beyond what was in her dead friend’s message?
By the time she left work that afternoon, she had wrangled her fears into that airtight, impermeable mental box where she tossed the most repellent things, locking them up tight, and pushing them into a shadowy corner of her mind until she was prepared to look at them. Which was usually never. What was left cerebrally was what she liked to think of as the light of reason. Humming and highly transparent. She had gotten over her fear of bats, cancer, and the possibility of her high school diary falling into the wrong hands.
By five forty-five that afternoon, as she saluted the faithful guard and sailed out into windy Broadway, she realized there was no way in hell she was going to disable herself in the matter of Adrian’s murder by hysterical worry about the killer. Right now she had too little information to defend herself. Maybe—it struck her with a tiny pop of joy—even too little information to incriminate herself in the eyes of the killer. That alone was an incentive to roll up her sleeves. But she still noticed she kept herself very much to the center of the subway platform, and when the N train pulled in, she warily eyed the other commuters.
She jogged up the subway stairs at 53rd Street and walked the three long blocks over to Fifth Avenue. The front steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral were swarming with people. Catholics who had attended Mass were sidestepping tourists snapping selfies with some part of the cathedral in the backg
round. The wind snapped coat hems and loosened scarves. Val caught sight of Bale as he stepped outside, looking preoccupied. One hand flipped his coat collar up as he looked over the heads of the gawkers. She waved like she was signaling a rescue plane. In some ways, maybe she was.
When Bale beckoned to her, she hurried up the steps. She could tell they weren’t going anywhere. Not yet. “How are you doing?” she asked as he shook her hand. “Did you get some sleep?”
He rolled his eyes and shot her a wry smile. “Finally. You?”
“Same.” Suddenly cold, she clutched at her coat.
Today he was dressed in charcoal gray pants and a white collarless shirt that managed to look clerical. Maybe it was the black, light wool scarf wrapped once around his neck. Despite what he said about sleep, his eyes looked tired. But something else as well. Bale tipped his dark head toward the cool and cavernous interior of the cathedral. “There’s something I want to show you.” He steered Val around a middle-aged mother wheeling what could have been a forty-year-old daughter with atrophied legs, propped up in a state-of-the-art wheelchair, their eyes sparkling.
At one of the marble fonts of Holy Water, Bale dipped his fingers and made a quick Sign of the Cross. It seemed so automatic. A child in The House of Bale, as Adrian used to call it. For Val, there wasn’t a day of her thirty-five years when she witnessed any sort of religious ritual that didn’t make her feel like Margaret Mead on Samoa noting the charming and primitive customs of the natives.
As he genuflected, and Val followed him briskly down the center aisle, the old feeling returned. She had been a child in The House of Bistritz where Greta had raised Val from the age of five, when her parents went down with Pan Am Flight 103 that fell over Lockerbie. All those vague, airy verbs and prepositions, she had come to realize, kept that child safe from any final reckoning about that part of her very young life: went, down, with, fell, over. They were soft words, words that held no true images as she grew, words she found in other stories where parents who disappeared didn’t even figure. The Israelites went down to Egypt. The quality of mercy fell on the gentle place beneath.
Words were potent magic, that much she knew, and they were all she needed to know of faith. Despite all those years of Friday nights with Greta, who lighted two candles—possibly all that was left of Bistritzes in a shtetl three generations ago. Growing up, Val had thought each candle was one of her own parents, Claire and Tom, who were gone—lost was not such a kind word, neither was dead—in an act that had nothing to do with beauty or magic or love. Those, those things were properly, as her atheistic aunt told her, the role of art in the world.
She picked up on Bale’s stride as they headed down the center aisle where she still smelled the pungent effects of the smoldering censer. It always smelled like sage to her, some crazy mix of backyard sprout and exotic off-world experiment. He led her straight to the altar, veering to the left of the nave. There, hanging just feet off the marble floor, was a great wood and alabaster Crucifix. Her eyes slid off toward the altar linens, which seemed safe enough. Beside her, though, Br. Antony Bale, Cellarer, was looking at the top of the Crucifix, his tired eyes narrowed. “Look, Val,” he told her. No matter how quietly, there was still a subtle echo in the vast chamber of St. Patrick’s.
She followed his gaze, up past the alabaster figure suspended on the wooden cross. Her eyes settled on the Crown of Thorns. This was a sculptor whose interpretation of that object was vivid and oversized. What was she doing here? Bale stepped closer to her, and said, “There’s your Euphorbia milii, Val. What Adrian called the finest example of one you’re ever likely to see.”
She lifted her shoulders. “I don’t understand.”
They looked each other in the eye. She could tell from his expression Bale was about to tell her something he had already decided to confide. But deciding it hadn’t made it any easier, for some reason. With that, he leaned in, his head turning until his lips were very close to her ear. “Not that one,” he said. “The first one.” He waited for her to catch up. “For two thousand years, the Crown of Thorns has been in the hands of the Carmelites. Sometime during this last week, it seems the boy Fintan stole it from its secret place in Burnham Norton Abbey.”
10
In a daze, Val sat across from Adrian’s brother at Eamonn’s Bar & Grill on East 45th Street. The atmosphere was warm and bright, with the right amount of bustle to block out the clamor in Val’s brain. Somehow a shepherd’s pie turned up in front of her which she wolfed down, unspeaking, with a trembling fork. She was pretty sure she had trailed a dab of mashed potatoes across her chin. She didn’t care, and neither did Bale, who was reflectively downing his fish ’n chips. How did they even get to Eamonn’s? For that matter, how did she get out of the cathedral?
Bale was slicing into his battered cod as he explained to Val the Crown of Thorns that had been removed from the corpse of Jesus when he was taken down from the Cross had been retrieved by two Essenes who had paid the Roman guards to look the other way while they cleared the area. Busy removing the remains of the two crucified thieves to a donkey cart, and even busier breaking up brawls down the hill from the site, the guards sought only to put this wretched day of high drama and foreign ways behind them…there, in the most godforsaken outpost of the Empire.
The Essenes wrapped the Crown of Thorns, removed the nails from the dead flesh, and wrested the metal spear from the wooden shaft of the centurion’s forgotten lance. These holy relics, they figured rightly, were now extremely portable, and together the Crown, the nails, the spear had wondrous power, having pierced the temporary human flesh of what was now eternally divine. In penetrating the flesh, they penetrated the greatest secrets on Earth.
Had these objects merely hastened the death of Jesus?
Or had they hastened the Resurrection?
These were oral histories, he went on, and there are hasty labels and explanatory notes that have come down through the ages with the holy relics. The Essenes made off to Qumran with the three relics they had salvaged from the Crucifixion, where they kept them intact until the colony dispersed. But during those early years they devised a brilliant plan to keep those three holy relics—the Crown, the nails, the spear—safe from thieves and opportunists.
“Can you guess?” Bale smiled at Val.
She sat back. Finally: “I’d start a rumor that nothing had been gathered from the site of the Crucifixion. The nails had been melted down in a forge, the Crown had been incinerated, and the lance had been cleaned and stored in the Roman arsenal.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Bale. “If nothing exists, nothing is at risk.” Val folded her hands, pleased with herself. “Am I right?”
He smiled at her. “What you say makes sense, but,” here he lifted a cautionary hand, “it’s not what the Essenes did. In fact,” he wiped his mouth reflectively, “rather than state that the objects were lost forever, they did precisely the opposite.” At that, Val widened her eyes at him. What was he talking about? Bale leaned toward her across the linen-topped table that separated them at Eamonn’s. “They flooded the market. Over many years. They made several duplicates of each of the holy relics and sold them to the powerful and wealthy faithful at the dawn of what became the Catholic Church.”
“Sold them!”
“Hey,” he said, signaling for the waitress, “a hermit’s got to live.” These fine examples of Essene craft and craftiness have over the centuries enjoyed all-expenses paid travel across continents. From Jerusalem to Byzantium, the circlets and fragments and detached thorns and fragments of detached thorns have shown up in everything from part of the Czech crown jewels, and everywhere, including a church in Pittsburgh. The proliferation of this one holy relic has over two millennia done precisely the job the Essenes intended: taken either devout or thieving minds off the hunt for the true one.
“Which you have.”
“Which,” said Bale, pointing a spoonful of crème caram
el at Val, “the Carmelites have had, hidden, from their very beginnings on Mt. Carmel. Then in 1538 the troops of King Henry VIII pulled down Burnham Norton, and that’s when we lost the rest of the hardware.”
“The hardware?”
“The nails and the spear from the lance.” He leaned his elbows on the table and gazed at Val over his folded hands. “The abbey was plundered and someone cashed in on what was essentially a black market in religious relics.”
“What happened to them?”
He shrugged. “The nails could be holding up the sides of a sheep barn in Kent, for all we know.”
“Would that be so bad?”
He smiled, then looked away. “Actually, no. I’d rather hear that new purpose for the nails from the Crucifixion—some good solid use to preserve life—than to imagine them in the hands of…what would have to be a very strange collector.”
“But the Crown survived.”
“The poor, four old Carmelite monks left at Burnham Norton in 1538 managed to save the reliquary with the Crown and kept it hidden.” When a smaller version of the abbey was re-built with the original stones, late in the nineteenth century, the Crown of Thorns came back home.
For the Carmelites of Burnham Norton Abbey, it is a sacred trust to house the principal relic of the Crucifixion. “We bring it out for no holy days,” said Bale thoughtfully. “We erect no signs. We direct no pilgrims. We mention it in none of our meetings and none of our worship services. Which is why,” he shook his head tightly, “I can’t understand how Fintan found out about it.”
Val sipped her tea. “Do all the monks know about the relic?”
He pursed his lips. “All of the choir monks know we have it. Only two of them know where. Among the lay brothers,” he gave her a small smile, “I’m the only one.”
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 7