Only Val’s disturbed former boss, who pulled Killian’s work out of the slush pile, would find any redeeming social value in such trash. For Val, who was then stuck with it, it took trashy to know trashy, and although Killian himself seemed all right, aside from his cockiness, Plumb Lines was finally no better than the crap it described in rollicking prose. Small print run, small format, an impulse buy near supermarket checkouts, swift remaindering, and she’d be done with it.
Still, she thought, eyeing the new proposal, Val had to give Killian credit—he could be on to something marketable with this craft beer industry exposé. In a rare moment of expansiveness that she thought later might have something to do with the heightened emotions of Adrian’s memorial service that morning, she shot Killian a quick email. Interesting proposal. Meet for a drink tomorrow to discuss? Then she forwarded the file to Ivy League Ivy, with the quick tag, If I acquire it, will you handle it? Better yet, given authorship, can you handle it? From her office two doors down from Val’s, Ivy shot back right away, Are you kidding? Killian? I’d consider it a job perk!
With that, Val laughed hard as she slipped out of her moccasins, and then reached into her lowest drawer for her emergency stash of Chanel No. 5. After quick dabs on her wrists and behind her ears, she grabbed her handbag and turned off her desk lamp. The little click that, for Val, set apart daylight from nighttime. On weekends, she actually missed it. As Val rode the elevator down with two employees whose names she didn’t know, only that they were recent hires in the IT department, her phone chirped. Sliding it out of her bag, she saw a text from James Killian.
How’s today for that drink?
Val thumbed, Can’t. Tomorrow is soonest.
When and where?
Where are you staying? she texted back. They could at least meet somewhere convenient.
But he dodged it. I can meet you anywhere.
Val gave him the address of Old Town Bar on 18th Street, where she had landed with Bale that first night, and added four thirty p.m. It felt important to meet him during the work day. When nothing came back from James Killian, she assumed they were on, and Val picked up the pace to the subway. At Times Square, she shouldered her way onto the 1 train, which she rode to 72nd Street. Swept along in the human current she emerged back onto the street, then hurried the two blocks to Noi Due, Tali’s choice.
When she caught sight of Antony Bale leaning on the metal railing leading down to the entrance to the kosher café, her heart lifted before he even turned to see her and raise a hand in greeting. Wordlessly, they stepped into a hug just as Tali herself showed up wearing a long black skirt, red boots, and a quirky hooded leather coat of many colors.
Gravely, she shook hands. “Follow me, lucky people,” she then said, bounding down the stairs and holding open the front door to the café. After she pushed together two of the small, bare-bones tables and plopped herself down across from Bale and Val, she pushed back her hood with a flourish. A star-crossed heroine from a Victorian novel, thought Val, hiding a smile. Stuck in her mass of dark hair were little fake jeweled hairpins. Referring to the server as Chaim, she annotated the menu for Val and Antony Bale, who suggested she order for all three of them. Pleased, Tali raised a hand to summon a server, and Chaim, who was clearly enjoying the girl’s presence, ambled over.
Tali folded her hands and glanced ruminatively at the ceiling. Then she declared, “A bottle of Chianti for my friends—the Bartenura, naturally, if you still have it?” Jotting, Chaim inclined his head. “And an iced tea for me.” Tali went on, “We’ll begin with the caprese, please, Chaim, followed by two large Brancato pizzas.”
“The Brancato is off the menu,” Chaim murmured.
When Tali fixed him with a look of deep disapproval, he said, “I’ll see what I can do.” Widening his eyes at nothing in particular, the server departed.
“The Brancato,” Tali leaned across the table, spreading her hands as though no explanation was necessary, “has the roasted red peppers and eggplant, so—”
Bale and Val nodded solemnly.
At that moment a teenage boy in black pants, white shirt, apron and crocheted yarmulke with the Mets logo, slid to the table two over from them where diners had just departed, and started to clear the place of the dirty plates. Tali sucked in a breath, pressed her lips together and kicked at Val underneath the table. The busboy glanced over. “Oh, hi, Tali,” he said, and went back to work.
Tali managed to grunt something by way of response in the boy’s direction, then added, “Oh, hi,” with studied indifference, turning away with a bored little hair fling. Then, to Val, she mouthed, “Sruly Levinson,” with a desperation that would have fit nicely with the news the Pharaoh’s army was half a league behind them.
Val gave Sruly Levinson the eye, and was struck by the fact that the boy had height, broad shoulders, features more comely than most teenage boys’, and a small acne issue that looked like it would clear up with no trace. When she turned back to Tali and shot her a discreet thumbs up, the girl uttered a tsk of great disdain, and said, “Parents,” leaving Val to wonder when she had crossed the line into parenthood. Next to her, Antony Bale was biting his lip and smoothing out a print-out of the best shot Val had taken with her iPhone of the slim scrap of Hebrew.
Tali gave it a quick glance as the iced tea and Chianti arrived. Giving her drink a vigorous stir with her straw, Avital Korngold Situations raised her glass and toasted, “L’chayyim,” which Bale and Val echoed, and the girl pulled the print-out closer to her as she sipped.
“Very nice,” said Bale of the wine.
“Of course.”
“How do you know it?” he went on, keeping his expression neutral.
She nodded. “You mean because I’m thirteen? It’s the one my mom likes,” explained Tali. “And she has excellent taste.” As the café got busy, when Chaim set the caprese down on the table with three small plates, then left, she whispered that Chaim’s father was her social studies teacher, a pious fellow who could describe all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution but couldn’t seem to identify a good body soap. She suddenly sat back in her chair and looked at Bale and Val. “Is that loshon hora, do you think? The evil tongue?”
Bale looked at Val, his eyes settling on her lips. “What do you think, Valjean?”
Val inhaled, turning to their thirteen-year-old Hebrew translator. “Did you say it to be hurtful?”
Tali considered. “No,” she answered slowly, “but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t, I suppose.” She pushed her fork at the share of caprese she had lifted onto her own small white plate. “In my defense,” she added with some spirit, “I only meant it to be informative.”
Val smiled at her. “Isn’t that the rationale of all gossips?”
When Tali gasped and shot her a look that suggested she was judged and found wanting, Bale scrutinized his forkful of mozzarella topped with basil, and said, “I think the measure here is whether the information was necessary.” Popping his bite of caprese into his mouth, he added, while Tali studied him, “If it isn’t necessary, then—” He pointed his fork at the girl.
“—then it’s idle. And it’s loshon hora. Yes,” she said in a grownup way. “I see your point, Antony.” The arrival of the Brancato pizza cheered her up immediately. “Yay, Chaim, todah rabah! Thanks a lot.” The caprese forgotten, the handsome busboy crush forgotten, the girl helped herself to a fragrant wedge. “I’ll have to take on more cases to make up for it.” Val was impressed as Tali helped herself to two sizeable bites before she wiped off her hands with great zeal and pulled the Hebrew sheet closer to her.
“It’s pretty faded,” she commented, then pointed with one finger, “and you can see where it’s been damaged, right?”
“Will you need more time?” asked Val quietly. Alice Lorton’s one-week grace period was never very far away from her thoughts. How long could she wait before—
“Not at all,” said the girl. “I translated it right away.” Then she dabbed at her lips with a clean napkin.
Val and Bale exchanged a quick look. “And?” prompted Val.
“Understand it’s a—a—” she snapped her fingers trying to snatch the elusive idea, “sentence fragment, so what you’ve got here is cut off in the middle of the sentence.” She narrowed her eyes at them. “Is this all you have? It would really help if—” She left it unspoken.
Bale swirled his wine. “We have translations of what we believe comes from the rest of the fragment, but we don’t know yet which is correct.”
“Oh, well, that’s at least something, then. Excellent!” She beamed. “And you should know it isn’t Hebrew. Well—” she temporized, her eyes shooting to the ceiling—“the alphabet is Hebrew, actually, but the language is Aramaic.” When Val looked at her quizzically, Tali went on, “The language spoken by the people.” Tali’s eyes sparkled. “It’s extremely old, I’d say. Quite a find.”
Val leaned closer to the girl. “Tali, we need to rely on your discretion for a while.” Then she went on. “Do you understand?”
“This isn’t your social studies teacher,” Bale said quietly.
Val added, “It’s really important.” They regarded each other in silence. “Once we have this scrap translated, it should help us piece together the rest of what we’ve got.”
Avital Korngold seemed to deflate a little. “I understand,” she whispered. Very slowly, she pushed aside her dinner plate, with her Brancato slices still uneaten, and Val watched her read the scrap in complete silence from right to left. Then, pursing her lips, she nodded slightly. One hand settled on the edge of the sheet, and the other trailed along under the words. “It says, and let what is brought forth from this place for all time be not agony and death but the words of Yohanan the beloved of—” Tali pulled her hands into her lap and looked silently at Val and Bale. When Bale spread his hands, waiting for the rest, Tali explained, “Oh, that’s where it breaks.” A little shrug. “That’s all you’ve got.”
Bale asked her to repeat it.
Val pulled out the translation Saul Bensoussan had given her and took down Tali’s translation of the Hebrew scrap—the opening line that had become separated from the rest of the ancient document, then slipped into a space between the shallow secret shelf and the false bottom of the red acacia box. As Tali gathered her things, talking about an Adele concert she was hoping to talk her mother into letting her attend, plus the clarinet lesson she was going to miss if she didn’t hit the road that very minute, Val and Bale exchanged a look.
With a kiss to Val and a handshake with Bale, Tali thanked them several times, then—with one final check for the whereabouts of Sruly Levinson—she took off. Val sighed noisily and turned to Bale. “The Hebrew scrap changes everything.” As she started to talk it through, he sat back and listened, nodding at Chaim when he dropped off a check. “Everett had to discover the main part of that document several years ago, before he was canned. When he went to translate what he had found, he had no idea it was incomplete,” she said, reading from Saul Bensoussan’s sheet. “Everett believed the document begins with ‘…the Son of God in this night among the olive trees of Gat Smanim. For he says what binds his feet, what pierces his flesh, what crowns his head—’”
“It sounds like a direct transcript of Christ’s words.”
Val got excited. “But it wasn’t, was it? The scribe was taking down the words of Yohanan, the beloved—”
“From there it flows directly into the rest. ‘—the words of Yohanan the beloved of the Son of God.’”
“John?” she tried.
Bale tipped his head. “Almost certainly,” he told her, reaching for his billfold.
Crossing her arms, Val stared at the sheet. “From there it gets murky, Antony. Who then is making the prophecy?” she asked tensely, leaning closer to him. “The ‘he’ is really unclear. Who exactly is providing the formula for life everlasting among the kingdoms of men, or whatever you want to believe? Jesus or John? Or John paraphrasing Jesus? It begins to feel like hearsay.” She glanced at Bale, who set a credit card over the check. “Bottom line? Guy Everett made dangerous plans based on a damaged document.”
Very slowly, Antony Bale, Cellarer, Burnham Norton Abbey, Sidestrand, Norfolk, U.K., turned the sheet to face him. Val watched something ripple in his expression. Finally, he tapped a phrase near the end of the translated document. “I didn’t catch this before,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“This phrase, Val,” he went on, “‘this is the might of Christ.’” Bale looked up at her. “The might of Christ.” He shook his fine, dark head, laughing softly. “I’ve had my share of Latin.”
“I can imagine.”
“‘The might of Christ’?” he told her with a smile. “In Latin it would be Robus Christi.”
Remembering the blue and gold flag rippling outside the entrance to 46 Gramercy Park West, she felt a chill on the backs of her legs. “R.C.?”
“R.C.” While Val’s mind flew across every fact, impression, statement and half-truth she had come across since the morning Adrian Bale left her a voicemail before she was murdered, she watched Antony, who sat very still, grow quiet. At that moment, all he looked was troubled. “Robus Christi,” he said so quietly she could barely hear him. “Val, I think Guy Everett built himself a whole infernal organization.”
28
The next day, Millard was under strict orders.
Mr. Everett was committing himself to a silent, solitary retreat in the Robus Christi Chapel for an uncertain length of time and was not to be disturbed. Not for meals, baths, bedtimes, Alaric, household affairs, members of the High Council, or random disturbing women from any government agencies. When Millard widened his mismatched eyes at the last item on the list, Everett wondered if he had gone too far, but then let it go. It was, he squared his frail shoulders, the very least of what he was letting go.
Tightening the sash on the new white silk robe he had saved for the occasion was like signing an executive order. Where they stood together on the threshold of the connecting door between Everett’s home and the chapel, Millard gave his employer’s bare feet an inscrutable glance, murmured something that sounded like “Have a good time,” and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
Turning away with difficulty, Everett entered the Robus Christ Chapel on two canes. Sweat seemed to thicken on his skin but dribbled nowhere, and the pain, bad as it was, felt like it was tearing at the undersides of his flesh, scrabbling with claws, trying to free itself. Even the pain knew it was sinking along with this pathetic body. If Everett didn’t know for sure what lay ahead, he believed he would be howling in fear at the prospect of death. But the preparations kept him focused. With very little trembling, his fingers locked the connecting door and then Everett headed slowly to the place in front of the altar, where over the last two hours it had taken what was left of his strength to assemble the necessary objects. From the vault he had taken the lance, the nails, and the very precious Crown of Thorns, and arranged them on the dais. He had even lighted the beautiful blue and gold column candles, grateful for the butane lighter, because his eyes teared when it occurred to him he no longer had the strength to strike a match.
Who was there to watch over him in these final moments of this life?
He found himself wishing Alaric would come, out of the blue, unbidden.
He found himself for one single moment wishing Millard would break down the door.
And do what, exactly? Heal this body? Frustrate this prophecy?
As Guy Everett set aside his canes and settled himself on the dais in front of the altar, he decided to forgive himself for his loneliness. Despite the fact that even Jesus Christ, in his own extremity that final night in the Garden of Gethsemane, not far from sleeping disciples and one busy scribe, had companions. W
hat Guy Everett had, instead, was a semicircle of sacred objects, and in a moment of very faint memory, he felt like a child again, surrounded by playthings. His Etch-a-Sketch, his trolls, his Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. He started to reach for them, they were so very clear.
He fingered his well-worn translation of the prophecy that lay safely stored in the hidden drawer of the rosewood box on the table in his study next door. Safe. Across the millennia, across sands and rock and terrifying wide, deep oceans, this prophecy from the lips of Jesus Christ had come to rest in Gramercy Park. Every so often over these past few years, Everett would trigger the spring of the silent, sliding drawer and stare at the ancient leather, whispering his own Robus Christi prayers over the find that had lifted him these seven years ago straight out of the dreary throngs of men without purpose.
Had the Hebrew letters faded even farther into the ancient brittle animal skin? The Cameron woman who had badgered him on his own doorstep—he was beyond even her now, her and her insinuations that somehow part of the priceless ancient document had become detached from the rest. He hadn’t even checked. Within an hour, none of it would matter, ever again. Not the expenses over the past several years, not the necessary deaths in pursuit of the holy objects.
The time was quite close, he felt it in what was left of his body, and his eyes searched a dark corner near the ceiling. It shamed him that despite his remarkable destiny, he, Guy Everett, was still a little bit afraid of death. Maybe resurrection should come tagged with fear as well. Maybe even immortality. Could it grow tiresome? Would it prove to be a horror he never could have anticipated? Everett shuddered and did what he always did when troubled by his own weak thoughts. He studied the translation of the prophecy that a companion hand-chosen by Jesus Christ had inscribed carefully as the master uttered it, hours before his arrest and crucifixion.
With a small smile, Guy Everett closed his eyes. Binds his feet, pierces his flesh, crowns his head. Even as the Son of God foresaw the instruments of his own torture, he laid out a path to immortality through precisely those instruments. The nails, the lance, the Crown of Thorns. Right there, there, all around him, within reach of his dying fingertips. He had accomplished—with the help of Alaric, no denying, who was his warrior—the rarest and most priceless treasure hunt in the history of mankind.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 21