Highbinders (8 page)

But the underground had remained my specialty and I had delighted in giving detailed, even painstaking instructions to visiting Americans on how they could best go down to Kew in lilac time, or east to Upminster on the District Line, or west to Uxbridge on the Piccadilly, or even the Metropolitan.

The first appointment that I had made for that afternoon was at an address that I vaguely recalled as being on the dingier outskirts of Maida Vale. So just to kill time and determine whether I still retained my London tube lore I strolled through Mayfair to Oxford Circus and caught the Bakerloo Line to the Maida Vale station where a news vendor told me that 99 Ashworth Road wasn’t far at all, just a couple of streets down Elgin Avenue and to my right.

As a neighborhood, Elgin Avenue was on the skids. There was a two-block stretch of funky-looking shops and then, to the west, row after row of red brick flats that seemed bent on nudging each other toward slum status although it might be another ten years before they all got there.

Ashworth Road was a little better. It was a short street lined with trees and well-tended gardens and prim-looking semidetached houses that probably were built just before the first world war. It was a quiet neighborhood, for some reason too quiet, until I realized that there was none of the stuff that normally serves to gauge a residential neighborhood’s vitality. There were no abandoned tricycles on the walk, or forgotten teddy bears, or waiting prams. It was a street without children, a street of drawn curtains, bolted doors, and aging but well-dusted cars, including a small Bentley that I guessed to be at least forty years old.

I decided that it was a street from which the young had fled while the old stayed on. I was its lone pedestrian that afternoon as I walked down the cracked sidewalk, the leather heels of my black loafers banging out into that quiet that belonged in a small town, not a big city. As I walked I thought I could detect the rustle of a drawn curtain here and there and I assumed that suspicious old eyes were watching to see what house I stopped at. I may have been that month’s excitement on Ashworth Road.

Roses were the flowers there. Dark red roses that nodded in the warm May afternoon from behind chest-high brick walls and iron fences. They were the only friendly thing in sight and the front yard of the house at 99 Ashworth Road had its full share of them.

It was hard to tell how old he was, the man who answered my knock. He could have been a desiccated fifty or a not bad seventy. His was a dried, pinched face, tight and somehow unforgiving, and so deeply wrinkled that I wondered how he shaved.

“St. Ives,” he said, as if calling some long forgotten roll. And then after a pause, “Philip.”

“That’s right,” I said instead of present. “Doctor Christenberry?”

He nodded and started to open the door wider, but thought better of it. “You understand about the consultation fee?”

“Ten guineas.”

“Yes. That’s correct. Ten guineas.” He opened the door just wide enough for me to slip past him. He wore old, stained gray flannel trousers, carpet slippers, a gray coat sweater that was buttoned up wrong, and a tieless shirt that may have been white at one time, but which was now a sort of grayish yellow. He said, “How do you do?” as I came in and I noticed that he smelled.

The man whom the smell belonged to was Julian Christenberry and he had his doctorate from Heidelberg plus an M.A. and a F.S.A. from somewhere else, and according to the Assistant to the Master of the Armouries at the Tower of London, Doctor Julian Christenberry knew more than anyone else in the world about medieval armor and weaponry, unless I went to Oakeshott, who unfortunately was no longer available.

The small foyer that I found myself in was furnished with two stiff chairs, three awful paintings, and four suits of plate armor that stood stiffly about not doing much of anything other than collecting dust, except for the one whose right mailed fist held an old black hat, a gray scarf, and an umbrella.

“I think we’ll be more comfortable in here,” Christenberry said and pushed through a door that led to a sitting room that turned out to be a dim place with drawn curtains, one lighted floor lamp, and the kind of furniture that you would expect to find on Ashworth Road. Two lumpy-looking, overstuffed chairs hunched toward a fireplace that contained an electric heater. There was a couch slipcovered in a faded, flowery print. A dull brown rug covered most of the floor. A massive desk faced the curtained windows and was littered with pieces of paper that looked like bills. Here and there, rickety tables held big vases choked with roses.

Except for the walls, the room and its furniture seemed to be much like the man who lived there, worn and used up, not quite good enough to sell but not bad enough to throw out. The walls, however, were covered with items designed to bash heads, break bones, sever limbs, and knock out teeth. There were swords of all kinds, long ones and short ones, wide and thin, curved, straight, and wiggly. There were wicked daggers and stout war axes. There were harpins and catchpoles and partizans and halberds and poleaxes. There were maces and spiked flails and cudgels and even a caltrop or two.

It was quite a collection and I told Christenberry so. He nodded and smiled with yellow teeth. “And all designed with a single purpose,” he said. “To hurt. To maim. To kill.” The idea seemed to please him momentarily—until he thought of something less cheerful. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I’ve had to sell off the really good pieces. One by one I’ve sold them off to provide a bit of bread and meat for my table.”

I felt that I could take a hint as well as anyone so I brought out my wallet and handed him two five-pound notes along with a fifty-pence piece. “Ten guineas,” I said.

He pocketed the money hurriedly, apparently afraid that I might change my mind. “I suppose you’ll take tea?” he said, as if trying to be gracious, but knowing that he wasn’t very good at it.

“If it’s no bother.”

There were some tea things and an electric kettle on a table next to one of the lumpy armchairs and he started fooling around with them. On a plate by the kettle were four vanilla cookies, one of which had pink icing. The kettle was already starting to whistle and he gestured me to the chair opposite him. He took a single tea bag, dropped it into the pot, and then poured in what seemed to be about four cups of water. We sat there and waited for it to steep. He had his eyes half closed and his mouth half open and I wasn’t sure whether he was about to say something or doze off.

“You’re a journalist, are you?” he said after a while.

“A reporter.”

“What paper did you say you worked for?”

“I didn’t say, but it’s
The New York Times
.” I crossed my legs elegantly, the way that I thought a
Times
man might.

“Hmm,” he said. “They should be able to afford ten guineas. No need to feel sorry for them.”

“No need,” I said.

He twisted to his left and poured the tea. “What do you take?” he said.

“Sugar. One lump.”

He passed me my cup. Then he offered the plate of four cookies. “Biscuit?”

“No, thank you.”

He seemed relieved. He snatched up the one with the pink icing and crammed it into his mouth, chewing noisily.

I sipped my tea. It was weak. “Very good,” I said.

“You mentioned over the telephone that you were interested in medieval weaponry,” he said. “Don’t know why you should be. No one else is today.”

“I’m putting together an article on some of the lost and missing treasures of the world which lately seem to be popping up. For instance, about three years ago the Boston Museum of Fine Arts suddenly acquired a gaggle of gold treasures from the Bronze Age, from Turkey probably. Then there was that Raphael portrait of the Duchess of Urbino that the same museum got and had to give back to Italy. More recently has been the uproar concerning what they’re calling the Great Calyx Krater mystery. That was the Greek vase done by the Athenian artist Euphronius. It went for a million dollars and turned up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.”

“Can’t see how any of this has to do with armor,” Christenberry said.

“I’m coming to that, if you’ll bear with me. What we’d like to do is to anticipate some of the treasures that might pop up. The Peking Man, for example. That disappeared in China just after Pearl Harbor. Now there’s talk that it might turn up any day.”

“Not much interested in paintings,” Christenberry said. “Ignorant about them really. Greek pots, too. I seem to recall that the Peking Man’s nothing but old bones.”

“But priceless,” I said.

“Can’t see why. The world’s nothing but a graveyard filled with old bones.”

“That’s just one example,” I said. “We’ve also heard rumors that several other lost or missing items are about to surface. They’re just rumors though and I’m trying to check them out. For instance, I’ve got a line on somebody who claims to know the whereabouts of the crown of the Infante Fernando. Another lead I have to follow up on is that somebody’s holding the gold and silver shield of Ruy Diaz de Bivar. You know, El Cid.”

“I know,” Christenberry said drily.

“I thought you might,” I said. “And then there’s another persistent rumor that keeps cropping up about something called the Sword of St. Louis.”

I watched him as I spun my tale. His lips had twisted themselves into what I took to be a sneer until I got to the Sword of St. Louis. Then they clamped themselves down into a line so tightly closed that I thought I might have to pry it open.

But after a moment he sipped his tea and popped another cookie into his mouth. “You are off on the wrong track, young man. Indeed you are.”

“How?”

“The Infante Fernando had no crown. I’ll spare you the details, but if you’d done any research at all, you’d know that. There was no crown.”

“All right,” I said.

“As for the Cid having a shield of silver and gold, that’s utter rot. He was a fighting man and an excellent one. He certainly wouldn’t have burdened himself with an overly elaborate shield. Where could you have heard such rubbish?”

“Around,” I said. “What about the Sword of St. Louis? Is that rubbish, too?”

Those thin lips clamped themselves together again. He had wet gray eyes, as nervous as quicksilver, and they darted around the room as though looking for the escape hatch until they finally lit on something—something reassuring, I thought, a Basilard dagger perhaps.

“It was a bastard sword,” he said in a low voice.

“A what?”

“A bastard sword. That meant that it had a hand-and-a-half hilt. One could wield it with one hand or both, if the action called for it. Fine steel, too, it was. Not razor sharp, of course; none of them was, but it took an edge that can’t be matched on any of today’s knives.”

“So it existed,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. There’s no doubt of that. It’s far too well authenticated.”

“Including the diamond as big as an egg in the pommel?”

His eyes started skittering around the room again. “So you’ve heard that, have you?” he said, not looking at me.

“I’ve heard.”

“Rock crystal most likely, if that. Swords were damned democratic things in medieval times. There was a brotherhood then among knights which made the simplest of them the equal of kings. A knight was as good as his sword and not many indulged themselves in fancy trimmings.”

“So you don’t believe there was a diamond?”

“If Louis had had a diamond as large as you claim, he probably would have used it to help finance his Crusades.”

“Maybe it was his mad money,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“His emergency fund. Maybe he kept it tucked away in the hilt of his sword.”

Christenberry tried on his yellow smile again. He didn’t wear it well. “I suppose we’ll never find out though, will we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hear that the thing’s turned up here in London.”

“Impossible,” he said. “I would have heard.”

“That’s what I thought. I heard that it went for twelve-and-six in a shop on Shaftesbury Avenue back in thirty-nine and that the present owner just recently found out what he had.”

“Twelve-and-six,” the old man whispered. “My God, twelve-and-six.”

“How much do you think it would be worth now?” I said. “With the diamond.”

He shook his head. “Priceless,” he said.

“Nothing’s priceless, Doctor Christenberry. The Rosetta Stone’s only insured for a million pounds.”

He shrugged. He wasn’t really listening to me. He was thinking of the bargain that had gone for twelve-and-six on Shaftesbury Avenue in 1939. “Two million pounds,” he said. “Three million perhaps. The French would pay three million.
Twelve-and-six!
Oh, dear God, think of it. Twelve-and-six. They didn’t tell me that.” He looked up sharply to see if I had heard.

“How much did they pay you?” I said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know who. But how much did they pay you to authenticate it?”

His wet eyes went roaming again. “I’m a poor man. The world pays you nothing while you work and then it pensions you off with a pittance and oh, God, I get so hungry sometimes why can’t I just die.” He was starting to snuffle. He pulled at his nose a couple of times. It was the only unwrinkled spot on his face except his eyes, and if they had seemed wet before, they were flooded now.

“They wanted you to authenticate the sword, didn’t they?” I said.

“Yes,” he said between snuffles.

“Did you?”

He waved an angry arm. “I don’t have the proper equipment anymore. I sold it. I told them that. They said they’d be satisfied with just my opinion. They said I knew more about the sword than anybody else and God knows they were right. I spent years and years and a tidy sum ferreting out every scrap of information there was about the wretched thing. Years I spent and now you tell me that it went for twelve-and-six.” His voice rose. “I could have been there! I could have been there in Shaftesbury Avenue that very day. Oh, God, why wasn’t it me?”

“And was it what they thought it was?” I said.

Some hiccups interrupted his snuffles. But he nodded anyway. Then he stretched out his hands. “I held it right here—right in these very hands.”