Bristol House (20 page)

Colbert put on the gloves—they were snug, but they stretched sufficiently so he could fit into them—and lifted the laptop onto the dining room table. “You usually leave it on or shut it off?”

“Depends,” Annie said. “But I know I shut it off last night.” She’d done so quickly, in a mix of anger and disappointment, after she’d seen that both flights from Damascus had landed close to their scheduled arrival times.

“Okay,” Colbert said, “it’s off now.” He turned it on. Blue lights flickered, and Annie’s screen saver appeared, geese flying across a pond in a scene of infinite tranquillity. “This will take a while,” he said.

“Coffee or tea?” Annie asked.

“Coffee, thanks.” Then, apologetically, “Except if it’s instant I’ll have tea. Sorry, but—”

She smiled. “The Yanks have landed. It’s not instant.”

“And I’ll bet you’ve got ice.”

“Of course,” she said.

“There is a God. Coffee over ice then. Three sugars. Splash of cream if you’ve got it.”

***

“Nothing yet.” Clary Colbert had spent the better part of twenty minutes fiddling with the laptop while Geoff and Annie sat quietly nearby.

“Have to reboot,” Colbert said. This time when he turned it back on, he hit a few function keys as soon as the laptop activated. No geese appeared, only a black screen headed by some lines of white machine code. DOS, Annie realized, the gobbledygook that once upon a time had been the ordinary way for human and machine to communicate.

Geoff was apparently thinking the same thing. “Give it up for Bill Gates,” he said.

“You hear that, Annie?” Colbert asked. “My man Geoff here’s been infected. No more hip, hip rubbish. Been hanging around me for a while, and now he says ‘give it up.’ Like a homeboy, a brother from the ’hood.” He was keying in various commands as he spoke, producing a stream of unreadable data that continuously crawled up the screen and disappeared into cyberspace. “In a just world,” Clary said, “Steve Jobs would have cleaned Gates’s clock because—oh baby . . .” He leaned in close and hit a button that froze the current screen in place. “Baby, baby, baby, what have we here?”

15

Clary Colbert’s face was a few inches from the DOS gibberish on Annie’s laptop screen. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “Nice, simple, effective. Might have been perfect, except at the last minute our intruder fucked up.”

He sat back, turning the laptop slightly so Geoff and Annie could better see the text. “See that? Right there.” He pointed a white-gloved finger at the last few lines.

Annie shook her head. “No, sorry. What are we looking at?”

“We’re idiots,” Geoff said. “You’ve got to spell it out, Clary.”

“Whoever came in here last night was after what’s on your computer, Annie. No doubt about that. And he had a smart way to get it. Just plug in a stick—a USB data key, a flash drive—and download the works. It’s an obvious choice. I thought of it first thing. If you do it right, there’s no way to prove it. So it could have been perfect. Except it takes a while. You’ve got a three-hundred-and-twenty-five gigabyte hard drive on this machine, and a hell of a lot of your stuff is graphics.”

Annie nodded. “I deal in historical architecture, old pictures, JPEGs of ancient documents. I’ve been thinking I need a bigger-capacity drive.”

“You can wait awhile if you want,” Colbert said. “Your disk is only sixty percent full. But that’s still a shitload of data. Your visitor”—he peered more closely at the screen—“must have needed multiple keys and better than half an hour to get everything uploaded. I can’t identify previous switches because he did them right. But—and bear in mind I’m guessing here—the last upload must have seemed like it was taking ages. And after so much time, he was feeling antsy. Probably figured any minute you’d come back with the cops. So he fucked up.”

“Fucked up how?” Geoff asked.

“Soon as he was done, he yanked the last stick out of the USB port right here.” Colbert pointed to a connection portal on the side of the laptop. “Normally that shoots a dialogue to the screen. ‘Unmount USB key?’ The first few times he responded, and everything was fine. On the last go-round, the sucker didn’t wait to see the question and hit Enter. My guess is he was shitting himself by then. He just yanked the stick and turned the machine off because that’s how he found it. Only Annie’s running Windows 7, so that slam-bang shutoff triggered an entry in the events log.” The gloved finger indicated a line of text. “‘At 4:29:06,’” Colbert read aloud, “‘Sony flash drive blah, blah, blah’”—indicating a long string of numbers—“‘disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.’ And that is that. Proof positive. Annie’s been screwed over.”

***

“It’s got to be Weinraub. Who else would give a damn what’s on your computer?”

Clary had gone back to work. It was Geoff who posed the question.

“No one else. But why? Why did Philip Weinraub send me here, then send some thug to scare me half to death so I’d run out? The thug could have simply stolen the computer. Why didn’t he do that?”

“I’m guessing,” Geoff said slowly, “because then you’d know something had happened. Weinraub suspects you of stringing him along, which is what you said you were doing, right?” Annie nodded glumly. “But he doesn’t want to tip his hand all the way, let you know something’s up and maybe he already has the stuff you’re not giving him. So he hires some thug to get what’s on your computer without your knowing he has it.”

“Then why all the walking up and down the hall? Why did Weinraub’s thug make enough noise to wake me up? He even left the elevator so I could conveniently take it. What was all that about?”

“No idea,” Geoff admitted. “But I’m guessing he wanted you out so you wouldn’t catch him while he was fooling around with your laptop. A wrinkle of his own, something he maybe didn’t tell Weinraub about before or after.”

Annie looked doubtful. “It doesn’t sound—”

“Tell me a better idea.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Okay, let’s leave that,” Geoff said. “More to the point, what does Weinraub have now that he didn’t have before? Exactly.”

“The Bastianich drawings,” she said. She felt sick, violated even.

“Okay, now he knows about the ‘Jews’ houses.’ What does that give him really?”

“It’s more than just the houses. I wrote up an explanation of the code.” Geoff looked blank. Annie realized she hadn’t filled him in. That was supposed to have happened over dinner the previous evening, before things got romantic. “While you were gone, I figured out that both drawings are hiding a secret.” She brought them up on the screen and launched into an explanation about the code in the stippling, and what she suspected about Richard Scranton, the probable artist.

“So now,” Geoff said when she was finished, “Weinraub’s got the pictures and an explanation of the code. Rabbi Cohen’s analysis as well?”

She nodded. “I’m well trained. I always write up my notes while they’re fresh. Shit.”

“Okay, but what does all that really give him?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know where the drawings fit in the big picture. They prove there was a clandestine Jew or Jews in London in exactly the period we’re interested in, but that’s something historians have long suspected. And Weinraub’s already convinced it’s true. What he knows now—his new information—is that I deliberately kept information from him, despite the fact that he was pressuring me.” She had mentioned that pressure when she told him about the meeting at the Connaught and Weinraub’s subsequent phone calls.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Why didn’t you tell Weinraub about the drawings when he first asked for a progress report.”

“Hang on,” she said, “I’ll show you.”

Annie went into the drawing room and returned with her bag. The letter from Frau Wolfe was in it. “The only reason this wasn’t on my computer,” she explained, passing him the envelope, “is because the only contact data I could find for three of the five congregations that have the ancient Judaica are postal addresses.”

His eyebrows shot up in a gesture exactly like Maggie’s.

“I thought I was going over ground that had already been covered,” she said. “Doing academic due diligence. But it seems I’ve been opening a whole new can of worms. Read it. That’s better than my explaining.”

“Crazy,” Geoff said when he’d read Frau Wolfe’s note. “Why would he lie about the source of the information? She says they did once have this
kaf
thing, and it came from the Jew of Holborn. So she’s backing up what have to be the most important points of the story as far as Weinraub’s concerned.”

“I’d have thought so,” Annie agreed. “But I haven’t yet heard from the other two synagogues. Meaning it has to be possible that Frau Wolfe’s memory isn’t accurate.”

Geoff nodded. “Definitely possible.”

“But even if that’s true,” she added, “Weinraub is paying my salary. That’s his real leverage, and I’m sure he knows it. If he thought I was holding out on him, he could simply deliver an ultimatum. Come clean, or he makes good on his threat and fires me. Why arrange a break-in? It’s insane.”

“For most people maybe. Not for Philip J. Weinraub. Devious is what he does. How many times has he called you today?”

She had checked the messages on her cell a short time before. “Five times. Geoff, last night—how do you think the guy in the ski cap got in here?”

They had examined the front door as soon as they arrived. There was no sign of breaking and entering. And though Annie was sure that when she fled, she’d left open the door from the office to the outside corridor, they had found it closed and locked. Even the chain was back in place. “Has to have had a key,” Geoff said quietly.

“A key! Where would he get a key?”

“You can’t have any idea who Mrs. Walton may have given keys to.”

She nodded in misery as much as agreement. “That’s true.” Then: “Oh—”

“What?”

“This flat, the way I found it—”

“Jesus,” he said quietly. “I forgot. Your Mrs. Walton is the aunt of Weinraub’s PA.”

“His personal assistant, yes. Sheila MacPherson arranged everything. So that’s one more way I’ve been their patsy from the beginning.”

Geoff’s answer was to leave the room. Annie followed him. “Where are you going?”

“One other possibility has occurred to me.” He headed down the hall.

“The back bedroom,” she said.

“Yes. It’s the only room in the flat that has a rear-facing window. Let’s presume a cat burglar, just for a moment, to cover all the possibilities. Even at four in the morning, no one would climb up the front of a building in full view of Southampton Row.”

“Climb up—Geoff, that’s crazy. We’re three stories above the ground.”

“A lot of things are crazy,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they don’t happen.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

Geoff put his hand on the doorknob. Annie shut her eyes. Not knowing was worse. She opened them.

There was nothing to see but a perfectly ordinary little bedroom, obviously not in daily use. Geoff went over to the window. “Locked from the inside.” He drew a finger along the sill. “Dust. Undisturbed for at least the three weeks you’ve been living here. Maybe longer. Your monk isn’t very tidy.”

“Don’t.”

“Sorry. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

“Wait.”

“He’s here? The monk?”

Annie shook her head. “No. I was just thinking . . . That window looks east, doesn’t it?”

He took a moment to orient himself. “Yes, it does.”

She had been spending a great deal of time with London maps of late. “Charterhouse Square is due east of Southampton Row,” she said.

Geoff nodded. “So it is. But there haven’t been any monks there for five hundred years.”

“I know. I was just . . . sight lines, that sort of thing.”

“C’mon,” he said again. And once back in the dining room: “You’ve got to have the locks changed. We’ll call a locksmith, but it’s after four now. Probably won’t happen until tomorrow, unless you pay a fair bit extra. You can stay at my place tonight.”

She didn’t argue the practicalities. They were not what was troubling her. “Geoff, presuming it’s Weinraub, why is he bothering? I’m here, I’m doing what he wants. It’s all so . . . extreme.”

“That’s his MO. Extreme means something different to Weinraub than it does to you and me.” Then, after a few seconds: “Look, I probably overstepped, but the reason I went to Jerusalem . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got a number of contacts there. I made some inquiries. There’s a group called the Temple Institute who are getting together all the stuff you’re supposed to need to perform the official rites of worship in the Jewish Temple. They have, for example, people growing special sorts of plants from which they can extract special sorts of fibers to make into thread, out of which they will weave special sorts of cloth to make the correct robes for the priests. Who can’t enter the Temple without them.”

Annie shook her head. “There was nothing on my laptop about special cloth or priests. Weinraub wouldn’t expect there to be.”

“I know. That’s my point. The Temple Institute people want nothing to do with the Shalom Foundation. They say Weinraub’s ideas go too far. Even for them, Annie. Even for people using ancient methods to weave cloth for garments in which to dress a priest who is going to conduct ritual sacrifice at an altar that hasn’t existed for two thousand years. For them, Philip Weinraub is too extreme.”

Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn

From the Waiting Place

Three days running I closed my mind to what I imagined as the entreaties of the girl’s mother, and took the leather strap to Rebecca, and put a leash around her neck and chained her like a dog to a post. Still my daughter refused to swear on her soul to do what she was bidden, marry Timothy Faircross. Finally, thinking she must surely have had enough to break her to my will, I set her free to clean up the mess she had made for reason of not having access to the outdoors for so long (the stench being as offensive to me as to her). Rebecca at once lunged for the hearth, screaming that the stinker would not want a blind wife, and I stopped her just in time from grabbing up a smoldering ember and burning out her own eyes.