by Janet Roger
The French doors had drapes drawn across the view. The workbench was a litter of typesheets, plans and photographs. The rest looked much as it had on one uneasy afternoon before New Year. Wet logs smoked in the chimney. Blanche the debutante glowed in her red dress, in a small, soft light of her own, and the same dark scent of old money clotted the air. A heel scuffed in the doorway and Guy Beaufort stepped into the room, dressed in country worsted with a watchchain and a spotted bow tie. His retriever ambled ahead and sneezed on the rug, and when he saw where the dog flopped Beaufort pointed me at an armchair under his wife’s portrait, where he could catch her wideawake look over my shoulder. Ten days ago, getting an audience had meant arm-twisting a friend of the family. Tonight, he’d telephoned my office with a personal invitation. I was interested to hear why.
Beaufort settled his chin on his bow tie, clasped the whisky glass to his stomach, and put on the hardball manner from Christmas night at the Waldorf as if nothing had happened in between. He pointed around his glass at the diary on the table. “What interest do you have in this?”
The diary’s cover glowed in the light from Blanche’s portrait. I made the mouth that says there are things you can get by without. “Less now than when Henry was in the frame for the City killings. I didn’t think your son had murdered anybody and Garfield’s journal might have helped his case. Or maybe not. At the time it seemed better to know which. It still might tell where Professor Garfield found his coliseum, and I’m curious about that, but without Henry’s help curious is as far as I get.” I reached for the glass and waved it at his bow tie. “I don’t know yet why I’m invited, only that it wouldn’t be to pass the cocktail hour. Let’s go on with Professor Garfield and those editions lining his study in Guildhall; the ones with Greek or Latin on the left side and a crib in English on the right. They’re handsome, but isn’t the crib strictly luxury? The kind of schooling a Beaufort gets, you wouldn’t need Greek or Latin translating any more than the professor did.”
Beaufort looked up across the table and didn’t disagree. I hunched forward over the liquor. “On Christmas Eve you took a call from Drake that put a stop on your work until he got the professor’s latest report. Edgar Levin says it made for a lousy Christmas, and probably it did. But you’re not the man to let that rest. Garfield was in Guildhall late that afternoon, a telephone message in his wallet says so. You went to see him there in his study with Homer and Horace.” A flame wrapped around a log and set shadows chasing along the hearth. “Levin left that part out. He didn’t want to give me the idea of you paying Garfield a heated visit just hours before he was murdered.” I shrugged. “Still, the possibility crossed my mind.”
Beaufort slid his whisky on the table, patted his breast pocket for eyeglasses and shunted the dog aside with his shoe. He was climbing in the high chair at his drawing board before he said, “My son is not here to assist you. He’s traveling with a mutual acquaintance. Tomorrow they arrive at Johannesburg, and from there intend to pay a visit to Sir Bernard.”
There are some things you wonder if you heard. I sat up, undecided which part sounded craziest: that the Beaufort family doctor had taken his son with her on the lam, or the way he said Sir Bernard as if we all rowed in the same eight. Either way, Johannesburg was four days’ flying by the clipper route, meaning the doctor had moved while Littomy was still putting a shine on the police story, and before he could change his mind Henry was gone. Africa, meet Kathryn Swinford. May the best man win.
He fitted the eyeglasses on his nose. “On the morning after his detective was killed, Littomy suspended Kathryn from duty and recalled Templeton from leave; first to perform the postmortems on his officer and the Allynson woman, then to review every examination she’d made in his absence.” He swung around to the bench and cast about for something. “Naturally, Kathryn was badly shaken. It was a humiliation and a threat. She made plans to leave immediately and brought Professor Garfield’s papers to me. Both she and my son tell me we are indebted to you, Newman. I dislike debts. We are not, as you say, here for cocktails.” He put on an angle light on the bench, found a pen and taped a sheet of drafting paper to his drawing board. I got out of the chair and went over, stood at his side as he started to draw and watched a landscape emerge that I recognized from the first swift, clean lines. No detail wasted. It was impressive. Beaufort talked as he worked. “Certainly I went to see Professor Garfield that afternoon. As the Corporation’s chief adviser, I felt entitled to understand his purpose.”
He inked a broad river across the foot of the sheet and a bridge in the bottom right corner, then added the wharf and a garrison fort, and the grid of streets and buildings on the river’s north bank. Signed and framed I might have bought it for my office wall. Beaufort stopped there and eased back on the high chair out of the beam from the angle light. “Professor Garfield obliged me. He said he meant to extend his search for an amphitheater inside the City wall. It struck me more as a pipe dream than a serious proposal. As archaeology it was wholly perplexing.”
The dog yawned. Probably I didn’t look wonderstruck either. Beaufort peered at both of us over his eyeglasses and thought about how simple he could keep it. It wasn’t the pipe dream that bothered him. It was why Garfield would go looking there at all, when every Roman amphitheater was always found outside, not inside, a city wall. He reached along the bench for a wad of documents hanging off a tag like a mandarin’s fan. “Garfield was systematic. He recorded every drawing, measurement, site map and photograph that came his way. I have his catalogue here, completed until the very last. Moreover, in his diary he listed a half-dozen of those catalogue numbers only days before he died. Without, however, explaining the meaning of his list.”
Maybe the list in the professor’s diary wasn’t explained, but Beaufort had pulled the half-dozen records anyway. They were the ones tagged together in the paper fan in his hand. He said in his opinion they told a story, and since his son had a fixed idea that the Beaufort family owed me, if I wanted the story I could have it. The slipper hound lifted an ear, wetted his nose and inched nearer the hearth.
Right up until Christmas Eve, Michael Garfield’s year had been on a roll. London’s Roman fort had made his name overnight and anybody else might have relaxed in the glow, but according to Beaufort all it did was give the professor one more big idea. The Luftwaffe’s area bombing hadn’t just led Garfield to a buried Roman fort, it had shown him the fort’s foundations were older than the Roman wall itself, and by a century or more. In case I didn’t get that straight off the bat, Beaufort said in Garfield’s circle that little nugget had made bigger waves than the Cold War.
To begin with, not even the professor realized what it meant. But when the first snowfall stopped his excavations and Henry left town for the holiday, he had time alone to think. When he did, he saw that a thing he’d always taken as given, he could be getting wrong. The nickel dropped that if Roman London had a garrison fort before it had a city wall, then what if it had an amphitheater too? And if it did, what had he been doing all these years looking for it outside a wall that the Romans hadn’t even built yet; before there was any outside or inside? The idea made him dizzy. It sent him poring over site records he’d always ruled out and listing them at the end of Drake’s report. Then, two days before Christmas, he came across a handful that stopped him in his tracks, wrote their catalogue numbers in his diary and dropped his original report in the wastebasket, obsolete. Beaufort’s hand swept over his bird’s-eye drawing, north across the Thames, of a riverside Roman settlement before it got its wall. The way it had looked to Garfield when he had his epiphany. He went slack on the high chair and raised me an eyebrow. I grunted I was keeping up. So did his dog.
The excavation records that made Garfield sit up were from six of his own trial sites that had looked ordinary at the time, close by each other but otherwise unconnected. All six had hit a band of rough stonework foundation at the same level, four feet wide and set on
two strings of Roman red tile. Against that, the foundations were in the wrong place to be interesting, and anyway every one of them lay in an odd alignment nobody could explain, not even the professor. The things you miss seeing are the things that aren’t supposed to be there. The sites had been logged and let go. At first I guessed Garfield would be kicking himself, then realized he’d be too cock-a-hoop up to care. So cock-a-hoop he made new drawings of all six sites in hours, measured angles between the alignments, projected the angles into a curve and saw that his fragments of foundation were anything but unconnected. His calculations showed they were one small part of an oval, and no ordinary oval at that. When this one was standing it had been more than three hundred feet long and not a lot less wide. There was no curved structure in the Roman world, Beaufort said, that got even close to that. Not unless the professor was looking at his coliseum.
Beaufort spread out the records Garfield had listed in his diary: plans and sections of six small excavations, an ancient map of a City Ward, the oval geometries of a buried coliseum, a photograph taken from the air. He pulled the map closer and traced the line of one of its streets with the wrong end of his pen. “Professor Garfield compared his projections with a four-hundred-year-old plan of the City, the earliest we have. The western Roman Empire had collapsed more than a thousand years before, yet the curve of this medieval street exactly follows the line he calculated for his coliseum. Our sixteenth-century mapmaker calls it Ketton Street. To later Londoners it was Cat Eaton. Today we know it as Gresham Street, barely a hundred feet south of the Roman garrison fort.” It wasn’t yet case proven, but when the snowfall eased and Garfield took his last flight over the City, he saw its street pattern with different eyes. Beaufort tapped his pen on the aerial shot and slid his glasses down his nose. “This also is his, I take it. His catalogue lists five photographs taken on his final flight, all five showing the same feature on the ground. We have them here, though none bears any date or catalogue number.”
It’s the way an expensive schooling teaches you to ask a question. I said, “They’re his. Printed off his negatives. The professor’s killer took the originals from his body.”
Beaufort let that go around. He said in that case, the feature Garfield went to photograph that day from the air had been a church; more exactly, the church on Gresham Street he saw every working day from his office window on Guildhall Yard. He meant St. Lawrence Jewry, named for the quarter’s medieval Jewish ghetto and burned in the blitz. Always, Beaufort said, it had been an archaeologist’s puzzle, as obvious now as when it was whole. The church had been standing all of eight centuries with its north side built out of square, and as Garfield laid out his geometries, he saw the reason why. It had been more than a medieval off-day. His calculations said that when its builders cleared their site, they’d struck the same line of ancient masonry as his own six trial excavations, then decided they could clip costs by using it for their own foundations. When the snow eased, the professor wanted pictures from the air that would let him show it. Beaufort made a tracing of the curve of Garfield’s coliseum and placed it over the aerial shot. The north wall of the ghetto church fitted exactly the line of the Roman arena, older by a thousand years.
I thought along the unraveling line of Beaufort’s story, about its ovals and alignments and old Jewish ghettos, forgotten excavations and strings of red tile. It had Garfield written all through it like Brighton rock. Garfield who drove Henry crazy with his everlasting fussing. Garfield who tied City grandees in knots. But it left something we hadn’t settled. I leaned over to put a finger on the curve on the old map. “This is Gresham Street?”
“Quite. Even today it follows the contour of the Roman arena.”
“So Garfield’s coliseum…?”
“Lies approximately thirty feet beneath Guildhall Yard.”
And there it was. The reason Garfield hired Gerry Fulton to fly him over the City on a snow-white afternoon. The reason he dumped a report going nowhere to start another that Drake’s committee couldn’t refuse. The proofs were in a handful of records listed in his diary. The photographs from the airplane were his illustration. And the magic of it was, the professor’s coliseum had been sitting outside his office window all along. Legionaries had drilled there, gladiators had fought and died, right under his wheels every time he parked his car.
Beaufort screwed the top back on his pen, thought about squaring the papers on his bench then thought again. He straightened the spotted bow tie and tugged on his shirt cuffs while the last note died. You thought he might mop his brow and milk the applause. I put in a cigarette and said: “Without Garfield’s diary nobody else will ever find it.”
He was ready to climb down off the high chair and checked himself, pushed aside the angle light and settled back in. It didn’t take much adding up. Garfield had been temperamentally reckless, surrounded by bright young men and inclined to mix pleasure with business. Such things make for crowded and unsubtle private lives, and his diary could give away plenty besides the keys to his coliseum. Enough to make him dangerous to have known, and not only for Henry. Willard’s nose for blackmail had told him so. Guy Beaufort could do better than that. He could read it in the original.
I looked across at Blanche’s portrait. A light had gone out of her eyes and the ingénue air with it, until all she had left was a spare, nervous smile for what she saw coming. I nodded over at her picture. “You’ll bury the professor’s diary the same way you buried Blanche’s friend. That was the gist of the talk I got in the Nile Room. Whatever it takes to protect your son. The thing is, protecting Henry is what Kathryn Swinford thought she was doing all along. She still does. It’s why she got him out of the country. She has no idea yet that you cut her loose, does she?”
Beaufort twisted around from the drawing bench. His eyes followed mine to Blanche’s stricken look in the portrait on the wall. “Littomy knew his stand-in examiner was never going to bend evidence to make the police story stick. For that he needed Templeton back and a reason to fire his deputy that would guarantee her silence. So he made you an offer: give him enough on his temporary examiner to get her cashiered and in return he’d lose Henry’s file. She was trying to keep your son out of a police frame for murder, and you gave Littomy every move she made. You’re the only one who could have.” Over by the armchair his dog moaned, and didn’t like what it heard any more than Blanche did. I half sat on Beaufort’s workbench where I could look in his eye. “Betraying a friend of the family was just a necessary step. You didn’t think twice about it. One step more and Henry is home free. Go ahead. We can both watch it burn.”
Beaufort peeled off his glasses with the look that said he always thought I might catch up in the end. He stepped down from the chair, collected Garfield’s diary from the cartwheel table and carried it to the hearth, then leaned in over the beech logs to slot it in the flames. We watched its marbled covers char and curl, then turn bright, liquid gold without catching light. Michael Garfield’s diary melted in front of our eyes, his coliseum dreams with it, and when Beaufort looked up I was halfway through the door. I stopped it with my shoe. “That afternoon while you waited for Garfield in his office you took down a copy of Homer from a shelf, then put it back next to Horace. Horace was a Latin. Homer was Greek. The professor never mixed the two. My bloodhound said to mention it.” I pulled my toe out of the door and let it swing shut.
Ernest was at the end of the hallway. All evening he’d been looking down in the mouth. I folded my cigarette in an ashtray on a stand and he helped me into my coat. “You’re going to miss her, Ernest.”
“We shall indeed, Mr. Newman. If I may venture to say, Miss Kathryn performs an improving effect upon all members of the household.”
I took my hat and Ernest lifted down a telephone from its oakwood box on the wall. He set it beside the ashtray, then lifted the receiver the regulation six inches from his ear. I answered the back of his head while he steadied himself to d
ial. “She does at that, Ernest. She does at that.” When the cab ground up the drive, he had the cord reeled in, the telephone dusted and locked back in its box on the wall.
Alekhine in the Endgame
The rain had slowed to chill, fitful drizzle. Liverpool Street was jammed with crowds homebound for the weekend. I got out of a taxi at the rail station entrance and walked back along the traffic to the Great Eastern. Its frontage was touching the clouds. I climbed the hotel steps, went in through the main entrance, crossed the foyer and looked in at the barbershop door. Louis was standing at the street window surveying passersby, waiting on trade from the hotel’s late arrivals. He glanced over when I walked in and didn’t look surprised. I stood while the bell danced on the doorframe, not even sure why I was there. “I came late, not to put a scare in your customers.”
The left side of my face still had the look of pie filling. Louis took it in and didn’t argue the point. He came over to the door to the hotel lobby and switched the Open sign to Closed, then went to the street door and did the same. “Day’s done, Mr. Newman, I’ve been expecting you. Take a seat and a hot towel. Can’t say you’ll look any better, but your face will want to thank you.” He set the chair almost flat and loosed my collar, laid on the dry heat of the towel and wound it around my teeth to mingle with the bruises. We didn’t talk. Louis collected his copy of the day’s Courier, stood close by the chair and read whatever caught his eye, in murmurs like stories at bedtime. The hotel hummed softly, and when time came to change the towel, he said in the same lullaby, “It’s a curious thing, Mr. Newman. You remember Irene who that young fellow Terry got fired? Well, she visited the hotel yesterday to see a girlfriend here, and the friend says Irene got a new employment in the City. But what I hear, how she came by it makes no sense. You hear anything, Mr. Newman?”