The Showstone

by Glenn Cooper

  ‘Professor’s row. Might have figured.’ The detective looked up from his notebook. ‘You okay?’

  ‘It’s upsetting, I guess. My mother was murdered two weeks ago. Now this.’

  ‘Where did the murder occur?’

  ‘Manhattan.’

  ‘We live in a violent society. In my line of work you get used to it. What is it you teach?’

  ‘Religion.’

  The detective closed his pad. ‘I’m not big into religion myself but it seems to work for some folks.’

  Cal swiped his stinging eyes with his fist. ‘It comes in handy from time to time.’

  Barzani was lying on a bed in his boxer shorts watching a German Bundesliga soccer match on cable TV when his phone buzzed.

  ‘Hey boss.’

  ‘Are you still in Cambridge?’

  ‘Across the river in Boston. The only hotels I could get there were too expensive.’

  ‘You’re on an expense account, Tariq. Why are you so cheap?’

  ‘It is your money, not mine. I do not like to be wasteful.’

  George Hamid said he wished his other employees were as frugal. ‘I’ve been thinking about our situation.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m willing to risk it. We know now that the son has the mirror. It’s within our grasp. Listen, are you sure Donovan didn’t ask the shopkeeper about the 49th Call?’

  ‘He was motivated to give me the information. He told me about the mirror after the first punch. He didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about the call.’

  ‘All right, I’ve decided. Go there tonight and persuade the son to give you the stone. Press him about the call too. When you have the stone, kill him and come back home.’

  EIGHT

  Mortlake, England, 1582

  It was a rambling old house proudly sitting on the High Street, sandwiched between a sharp bend in the River Thames and St Mary’s Church behind it. To the tradesmen and craftsmen who rumbled by on their horse carts it appeared to be the house of a wealthy gentleman, but the truth was otherwise. Its owner was an impecunious scholar who obsessed day and night about making ends meet and securing the kind of royal patronage to provide a steady income to support his many and varied research activities. Yes, he had a wife and a growing number of children to feed and clothe, but every shilling and crown that made it into his purse – beyond what was needed for basic necessities, of course – was put toward the acquisition of books and manuscripts. Years earlier, when he was a young man, at a time when the Queen’s half-sister, Mary Tudor, sat upon the throne for her brief, five-year reign, he had lobbied Her Majesty to establish a grand royal library, but the scheme had never materialized. Therefore, he had taken it unto himself to amass an important personal library at Mortlake. He started with a handful of books but in time, his library outgrew the single room he had designated for the collection and his children outgrew their single bedroom. Not wanting to move house, he added to it by degree, purchasing small tenements on either side of the property, constructing rooms for books and studies, laboratory spaces for his experiments, and bedrooms for the children and servants. Not to be left out, his wife occupied a set of small rooms on her own account. Owing to the higgledy-piggledy way the house came together, the layout was something of a maze, and in the main, the only way to get from one place to another was by walking through the rooms of others. His own studies and laboratories, however, were sacrosanct. A child or servant – or even his wife for that matter – who wandered into the inner sancti could be expected to be severely reprimanded and very possibly lashed. At its peak, his library was the largest in England, with some four thousand books and a thousand manuscripts he had acquired in the course of his domestic and Continental travels. There were books on the celestial sciences, mathematics, cryptography, alchemy, cabalistic magic, philosophy, religion, and a large collection of anatomy texts and other medical subjects. These works fed the furnace of a burning, polymathic intellect and Dee was generally considered the most learned man in all of England, a skilled mathematician, philosopher, geographer, astrologer, alchemist, and practitioner of magical arts. In addition, his more than passing interest in medicine earned him the honorific title of Doctor Dee that he carried throughout his life.

  A library like his attracted scholars and dilettantes like flies to honey and the location of Mortlake proved expedient to the flow of intellectual commerce as the town was an ideal rest stop for learned nobles traveling between their great estates in the southwest and the royal palaces of Greenwich and Whitehall. Indeed, the library was so illustrious that Queen Elizabeth herself and her entire Privy Council had deigned to visit Mortlake in 1575.

  Dee was holed up in the book-filled room with the best early light the morning a highly anticipated visitor rapped on the door with the brass head of his walking stick. At fifty-five, Dee was old but spry. He wore his long gray beard in the pointy style favored by academics and certain men of the cloth, and because his face was extremely narrow with hollowed-out cheeks, the beard gave him the look of some sort of giant sea bird with a great spear of a beak.

  When the rapping persisted, Dee called out, ‘Jane, will you ask why Robert is not seeing to the door?’

  His wife called back, ‘I believe he is in the garden in the privy.’

  Dee yelled that he would come down himself. It would not have been proper for Jane to receive the visitor. He marked his page with a bookmark and closed the leather-bound text he had been annotating with marginalia. His threadbare black scholar’s cloak, the same one he had first worn as a junior fellow at Trinity College in Cambridge during the reign of King Henry VIII, billowed as he flew down his staircase and when he got to the front door, he paused to catch his breath, not wanting to appear anything less than serene.

  The visitor was a young man, younger than Dee had been led to believe, only a year past his twenty-fifth birthday, he would soon ascertain.

  ‘Ah, Mr Talbot, I presume,’ Dee said.

  The accent was by and large, cultured, although perhaps too practiced, as if honed well after childhood. ‘At your service, sir. I hope I was expected.’

  ‘Yes, of course, please come in. Mr Clerkson told me the time you would arrive and you are punctual.’

  ‘I strive to be so.’

  Talbot was not tall, not short, but he ran to fat, with black hair that overflowed his collar. When he removed his overcoat, moist from a cold March drizzle, Dee saw that he wore a gown resembling an artist’s with hanging sleeves that had slits to free one’s hands for work. Framed by a beard that was almost as black as his hair, his clear, bloodless complexion made his crudely carved face seem all the more white. He used a stick to walk, favoring his right leg – whether he had been injured or palsied from disease, Dee could not tell. As he hung his coat on a peg, Dee asked him if he had trouble finding the place.

  ‘As Clerkson advised, I inquired as to the position of the church then looked for the largest house about. And here I am.’

  ‘Very good, very good. Others simply have asked for the location of Doctor Dee’s famous library.’

  ‘I would not be so impertinent as to bandy about your name.’

  Dee’s manservant appeared, wiping his hands on his breeches.

  ‘There you are, Robert. Is your horse tethered at the front, Mr Talbot?’

  ‘It is. The tawny mare.’

  ‘Robert, take it to the stables, dry it, and give it some hay. Please follow me to my study, Mr Talbot, so that we might converse. I have a small but pleasant fire going.’

  At the top of the stairs Dee unlatched a door and led the young man through a book-lined room but he had to pause when Talbot stopped dead to peruse the spine of one of the volumes.

  ‘Dear Lord, is that really a copy of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia?’

  ‘It is, indeed, and much read and studied, I might add. You know it?’

  ‘I have only read accounts of the central theses,’ Talbot said. ‘Wherever did you obtain
it?’

  ‘In Louvain, actually, where the great Agrippa wrote the text. I resided at the university for a time when I took my leave from Cambridge. I could ill afford the book, but I could equally ill afford not purchasing it after deciding I might never have another opportunity. It was during my travels in those bygone years that I acquired a good many important books that were to become central to my library and thus my life’s work.’

  ‘During this sojourn you studied with Frisius and Mercator, did you not?’

  Dee’s mouth cracked open in a self-deprecating smile. ‘You are well versed in my background, Mr Talbot.’

  ‘Might I ask a burning question?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Is it true that Queen Elizabeth commissioned you to consult the stars to determine the most propitious time for her coronation?’

  Dee looked down in modesty. ‘I did play a part in the affair. Come along now.’

  Dee’s study had a large writing table spanning two windows that fronted onto the High Street. As it was a gray day, Dee had positioned two table-top candelabras to throw off much-needed light, but the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, crammed with bound books and manuscripts, were shrouded in shadows. A small fire took the chill off the air, but did little to make the room brighter. Against the opposite wall, with only enough room to squeeze past to retrieve a book, sat another long table, this one filled with alchemical glasswork and vials of colorful solids and liquids.

  Talbot made a show of inspecting the vessels and asked playfully if any of them contained the philosopher’s stone.

  Clearly, Dee did not detect the lighthearted nature of the comment for he replied, ‘I can assure you, sir, that should I have made that discovery, you and the rest of the world would have heard about it. Might I trouble you to add a log to the fire?’

  Talbot stooped to accomplish the task and when he did, his hair fell forward, revealing an anatomical peculiarity. The tops of his ears were missing.

  Dee had the young man take a chair by the improved fire and he turned his writing chair to face him.

  ‘I am remiss,’ Dee said. ‘Do you desire a libation?’

  ‘Perhaps some water.’

  Dee bellowed for Robert but when there was no reply he mumbled that he was probably in the stables. He next called out for his wife, who shortly afterwards knocked gently on the study door. She was a small, pretty woman, almost three decades her husband’s junior. Her hair was severely pulled-back and her high-necked dress was as drab as a bucket of oats. The only color about her came from naturally pink cheeks and luxuriously blue eyes.

  ‘Mr Talbot, may I introduce my wife, Jane? Jane, this is the young man I spoke of.’

  Talbot sprang to his feet and grabbed a small hand, hesitantly offered, bringing it to moist lips. While he planted his greeting, she seemed fixated on the same abnormality of his ears her husband had noted.

  ‘I am most pleased and enchanted to make your acquaintance, madam,’ Talbot said.

  ‘And I yours,’ she said, reclaiming her hand.

  ‘Might you have one of the girls bring up a pitcher of water?’ Dee asked her.

  ‘Of course. Nothing else?’

  ‘That will suffice,’ her husband said.

  ‘May I compliment you on the beauty of your wife, sir,’ Talbot gushed when she had left.

  ‘I had very little to do with her natural attributes,’ Dee said. ‘That was entirely the work of our Lord.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the young man said quickly.

  Dee was anxious to attend to business. ‘My colleague, Mr Clerkson, recommended you to me.’

  ‘I am grateful to him for his kind attentions. The opportunity to make the acquaintance of an illustrious man such as yourself does not often arise.’

  ‘Might you enlighten me as to your background?’

  Talbot leaned forward and eagerly recounted his personal story. His people were of the Uí Maine clan of Connacht in Ireland, but he was born in England, in Worcester. An able student, he gained entry to Oxford University, where he studied Greek and Latin and divinity.

  ‘Of course, I was not destined to be a scholar such as yourself and other distinguished gentlemen,’ he said. ‘My aptitude, alas, was not sufficient for a career in scholarly pursuits.’

  ‘And how have you occupied yourself since your Oxford days?’

  ‘I have tried my hand in business, sir. Importing goods from the Low Countries, for the most part, and selling them on to the trades.’

  ‘Have your ventures been profitable?’

  ‘Enough to live on but if I may be frank, not enough to elevate myself sufficiently.’

  ‘Sufficiently toward what end?’

  ‘To afford a comfortable house, to marry a woman approaching the gentility and beauty of Mrs Dee, if I might be so bold.’

  ‘I see. But I haven’t asked you here for your business acumen, have I? You are here regarding an entirely different skill.’

  ‘So I was given to understand.’

  Dee’s servant girl knocked and was allowed to enter. She nervously placed a tray with a jug of water and two glasses onto a table, gave a little curtsey, and withdrew.

  Dee poured for his visitor and said, ‘Please tell me about your gift. When did it first become manifest?’

  ‘When I was quite young, perhaps ten years of age. I was by myself on the bank of the River Severn in Worcester. It was late in the afternoon and the river was free of boatmen. When I had tired of skipping stones I sat and gazed upon the water. There must have been no wind and the current must have been imperceptible for the surface was as smooth and clear as pond water. Suddenly, I heard a low murmur, a most gentle and soothing voice, seemingly far, far away and then, in the water, I saw him.’

  Dee unclasped his hands and leaned forward. ‘What did you see, tell me?’

  Talbot also leaned in so that the two men were intimately close. ‘He wore a white robe and a crown of flames. It was as if he was standing within the river, looking at me from below the surface.’

  ‘Did the murmur become a language that you could decipher?’

  ‘It did. When it became clearer, it was apparent he spoke in Latin. Alas, I was only just beginning to engage in my Latin studies in school, so the meaning was mostly obscure. However, I did understand him to speak his name.’

  ‘And what was it?’

  ‘Hamaliel.’

  ‘Most consequential!’ Dee exclaimed. ‘Hamaliel is the angel of the month of August and the governor of the zodiacal sign of Virgo.’

  ‘The month I was born and my star house.’

  ‘This was a powerful and auspicious connection, Mr Talbot. Tell me, is there a proclivity to scrying within your line?’

  ‘My father has told me that my dear departed mother had the gift.’

  ‘Have you had repeated contact with this angel – with your scrying?’

  ‘Indeed I have. From that youthful day I learned that I might summon Hamaliel and other entities by gazing upon all manner of reflective surfaces.’

  ‘To what effect?’

  ‘I am ashamed to say that my aspirations have not been, on the main, lofty. Oftentimes I have asked for guidance in matters of commerce and love.’

  ‘And what say you of the guidance received?’

  ‘I would say, dear Doctor, that what success I have achieved, I lay at the feet of Hamaliel. However, Clerkson has told me that your aspirations are on a very much higher plane. Might I inquire further?’

  ‘You may indeed. Plainly, my interests are spiritual, Mr Talbot. Ever since my Cambridge days, I have immersed myself in the study of Kabbalistic and linguistic principles. I am convinced that by the study of ancient languages, including the very form of their letters and hieroglyphs, that one might get closer to the original language of God Almighty. And I have hoped that these contemplations might lead me to discover the divinely inspired hidden meanings that might inform our knowledge and understanding of our universe.’

  ‘Anoth
er question, Doctor Dee. How does this pursuit relate to the practice of scrying?’

  ‘The central question, Mr Talbot! Let me take you back to the origins of my interests in scrying, to a time some twenty-five years ago. I had returned to Cambridge following my period in Louvain and Paris.’

  ‘This was when Queen Mary was on the throne, was it not?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I do not wish to divert your discourse but was this the time you ran afoul of the monarchy by assisting Princess Elizabeth.’

  Dee’s shoulders drooped. ‘A difficult time it was. Mary had recently married Philip of Spain. If Mary died without issue, Philip would have no claim to the throne and Elizabeth would ascend. The Princess asked me to divine the future that awaited her and what I saw from her horoscopes did indeed come to pass. Mary’s pregnancy was false and when she did die of a tumor, the throne belonged to Elizabeth. But before that occurred, a member or members of Mary’s Privy Council had me arrested and taken to the Tower. I thought I would be released quickly but a child of one of my accusers went blind and I was wickedly accused of malicious conjuring.’

  ‘Is it true you were tortured?’

  ‘I do not wish to revisit that unhappy time.’

  ‘I do apologize, sir. My curiosity knows no bounds and it leads to impertinent questions and interruptions.’

  ‘I admire and encourage curious minds, Mr Talbot. But allow me to return to your central question. In the year of our Lord 1555, I began to concentrate on the study of optics and light. Since the body of Christ can assuredly move through solid objects, it stands to reason that angelic spirits of Christ’s realm can become manifest in this world. I thus began my experiments with techniques for summoning spirits into crystals. Yes, scrying is an ancient art, and I was not the first practitioner, but I believe I did make strides in applying mathematical rules of perspective to the endeavor. Vision occurs when beams of light emitted by the soul through the eyes encounter physical objects. When reflected from highly polished surfaces such as crystals or pools of water, as in your youthful experience, those beams may set the soul, particularly in men such as yourself who have a particular gift, into a reflexive sort of spiritual awareness and rapture, allowing visions of angelic messengers to make their appearance.’