The School of Night (25 page)

He sees her. He stammers, he half rises, the book tumbles from his lap, he stoops for it, then jerks upright. All these actions betray him, but more than anything else, it is his eyes, the way they receive her image and bend it and absorb it and send it back.

So this is how love looks
, she thinks.
Not at all what I would have guessed.

 

LONDON SEPTEMBER 2009

32

I
SUPPOSE IT
doesn't speak too well for America's national security that, on the evening of September 23, 2009, a dead man was able to catch a flight to London.

Let me say this much in TSA's defense. By the time Alonzo Wax made it to Dulles International Airport, he was Solomon Spiegel. Very much in the land of the living, with a Social Security number and passport to prove it.

Consider this, too. Alonzo looked even less like his living self now than he had in the Outer Banks. True, the moonshiner's beard was gone, but his hair now rose from his head in a pompadour cliff, dyed butterscotch, and he was wrapped in a Big and Tall glen plaid suit, with a stripy-warp Van Heusen tie. You'd have pegged him for agribusiness.

All this artifice had now been crammed into an aisle seat in the fifty-eighth row of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340 bound for Heathrow. Alonzo hated flying economy, but Clarissa was footing the bill for the tickets, and even he didn't have the crust to demand business class. Particularly since it had been Clarissa who'd called the Dare County, North Carolina, police from an airport pay phone to tell them about a dead man buried in the sand.

Maybe that took more out of her than I guessed, because as soon as she got on the plane she swallowed two Ambiens, popped on her earphones, and watched a Sandra Bullock movie until her eyes went from tolerant to closed.

I draped a blanket over her and I was thinking about inserting one of the micropillows behind her head when, from the other side of me, Alonzo snarled:

“Do
not.
”

“What?”

“If you are even
thinking
at this moment that she's purty when she sleeps, I will strike you.”

I inched the top of my seat back by two inches.

“No one sleeps as purty as you, Alonzo.”

“Solomon,” he hissed. “And how would
you
know?”

He had a point there. I had never, to the best of my recall, seen him asleep. I had dozed off on him, though, hadn't I? Most recently in that Nags Head motel room, but something similar had happened at the tail end of one of our collegiate bull sessions. I woke at noon to find him frowning at me as if I were a misdelivered package.

“Think strategically,” I told him now. “We could give Clarissa slinky clothes and have her seduce You Know Who.”

Alonzo slipped the Virgin Atlantic eyeshades over his face. “If you are referring to Mr. Bernard Styles, I believe he prefers the tall assassin type.”

“What the hell is it with you and Styles?”

“Other than his stealing all my books. And the small matter of his wanting me dead.”

“I just mean it's my impression that collectors get along a little better than you two. Generally.”

“You persist in calling him a collector. This is maddening of you. Let me tell you how I first became aware of You Know
Whom.
I'd gone to London for one of Bloomsbury's auctions. As you know, I always make a habit of reviewing the merchandise the day before if possible. Only this time I wasn't alone. Trailing me across the floor was this young man—no, rat
fink
would be the mot juste. Wiry and smiley. Springy feet. Possibly he had been a satellite TV salesman but not a good one. Even worse at espionage. Everywhere I went, he followed, scribbling away in his wide-ruled theme book.

“I thought nothing of him, and then the next day at auction, I noticed that every item I placed a bid on—mirabile dictu—had another bidder. The same bidder. Pockets as deep as his effrontery. Before the day had passed, the mole's employer,
Mister
Bernard Styles, had snapped up every single volume in my crosshairs. This, I don't need to tell you, was beyond the pale.”

Alonzo waited until the next Bloomsbury auction. Sure enough, the same springy man showed up, and Alonzo led him on a merry chase, pausing before the most worthless items in the catalog. The next day, he had the satisfaction of watching Bernard Styles throw thousands of pounds at rubbish.

“Well, the day after that, I received a summons from His Nibs. Most anxious to make amends. Poured my tea for me, did everything but rub my corns. Was I swayed? I was not. ‘The next time you want my opinions,' I said, ‘you can pay for them like everybody else.' He said, ‘Very well, how much?' ‘To
you
,' I said, ‘I am not for sale.'”

“Don't you ever wonder what would've happened if, you know…”

“What?”

“You'd made a little nicer with him, that's all.”

“That is not the recommended approach with reptiles. You keep them in full view and keep a sharp edge handy.”

Within another minute, the lights around us began to go out, one by one. I leaned back toward Alonzo.

“So if you and Styles had such bad blood from the get-go, why did he let you into his collections? Why were you even in touch with him?”

“You should know this by now, Henry. Collectors never burn bridges. It is never in our interest to do so. Upon further reflection, I decided to throw Styles a few bones. He responded with a few more bones. An entirely specious cordiality ensued. And if it meant enduring his rather vulgar civility, then…” He stifled a yawn. “Well, in the end, it has all proved worth it.”

Worth it
, I thought. Lily suffocated in a vault. Amory buried in the Carolina sand. Alonzo a felon and an international refugee. Me, very possibly, a suspected murderer.
Worth it.

“Here's what I still can't figure out,” he said. “If Harriot didn't find his gold in Virginia, where did he find it? He never left England again; he virtually never left his house.”

“Maybe Ralegh gave it to him. Or Northumberland. I mean, both those guys were in trouble at some point. The Crown was confiscating their assets. Maybe they wanted to keep something around for posterity.”

“But on the map, Harriot calls it ‘
my
treasure.' You're not suggesting he kept the money for himself?”

If he had, I thought, he would have earned himself some fierce enemies. And the record showed none of that. Ralegh, in his will, referred to Harriot as a “trustye & faithfull frinde” and, in a strangely sweet gesture, bequeathed him “all such blacke suites of apparell as I haue in the same house.” As for Northumberland, one of his first acts on leaving the Tower was to purchase a monument to Harriot's memory. If they ever felt betrayed by their old teacher, they did a good job of hiding it.

“I suppose there's one other possibility,” Alonzo drawled.

“Which is?”

“Perhaps you'll recall what Thomas Harriot was studying between 1599 and 1600.”

*   *   *

In fact, Harriot was harkening to the same siren call that had lured so many other great minds onto the rocks. Leibniz heard it, too. So did Robert Boyle and Tycho Brahe. Isaac Newton went to his death dreaming not of gravity or calculus but of the philosopher's stone.

For these men, alchemy was about more than turning lead into gold. It was about transformation. If they could alter the properties of inanimate matter, they might one day effect the same change in
human
matter. And then? Well, our last fleshly impurities would burn away like dross, and the whole earth would be left in a state of ecstatic perfection.

That kind of dream doesn't loosen its hold on the dreamer. No wonder, then, that Harriot fired up the burners and hurled himself at immortality. There was only one problem.…

*   *   *

“It can't be done,” I reminded Alonzo.

“What?”

“You can't change lead to gold all by yourself. That's why Harriot gave up.”

“Henry, listen. In optics, in astronomy, in physics, Thomas Harriot was years—
decades
—ahead of other scientists, okay? What's to say, in this particular matter, he wasn't a few centuries ahead?”

“Oh, I get it. Harriot just—what—whips himself up this honking pot of gold. Then he buries it in the ground. Like a fucking leprechaun. Never tells another soul about it, just lets it rot there.”

“He couldn't risk it. In King James's world, alchemy verged on heresy.”

“God, where to begin, Alonzo?”

“Solomon.”

“A gold atom,
Solomon
, has three fewer protons than a lead atom. You can't make up that difference in some rinky-dink Tudor laboratory. You need—Christ, something like a particle accelerator. And even then, whatever gold you make is going to be worth far less than the energy you put into it.”

A light hum began to emerge from Alonzo's nostrils, declining gradually into text.

“
There are more things
—”

“God.”

“…
in heaven and earth
—”

“Stop.”

“…
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
”

“Yeah, and guess what? Shakespeare didn't know squat about particle physics. And with all due respect, neither did Harriot.”

Alonzo was silent after that, but I knew his silences. They generally held not an ounce of concession. As for me, my Benadryl was finally kicking in. I put on the eyeshade and pulled that thin acrylic blanket over me and eased the seat back another couple of inches.

“Jesus,” I muttered. “Alchemy.”

I didn't let a single crack show in my skeptic's face. What I failed to tell Alonzo was that, three days earlier, in a moment of passing distraction, I had glanced at Harriot's original map. There was no particular reason to look. There was nothing on that page I hadn't already seen a dozen times.

Only there was.

On the lower right-hand corner, rising up like a scar, lay a single word. Scratched in the thinnest of ink, visible only in this particular slant of late-afternoon light:
pneuma
.

Not Harriot's hand, as best I could tell. It wasn't even cursive: the letters sat isolated from each other, and the final
a
straggled nearly off the page.

For a long time, I stared at the page. I knew, at one level, I was simply looking at another word, the Greek word for
spirit
. Aristotle threw it around like candy.

But I knew I was looking at something else. The building block of medieval alchemy.

Pneuma
was the active principle or vital force believed to dwell within all earthly matter. To transmute one thing into another, an alchemist like Thomas Harriot would have had to transform its
pneuma
—its portion of heavenly quintessence—becoming, in effect, a
re
-creator, sparking new forms from chaos.

Amazing to think now that, from this single string of letters, so many questions could swarm forth. Was Harriot still carrying out alchemical experiments after 1600? Did he stumble across something that never made it into the historical record? Could he actually have
made
the gold he was at such pains to hide? Or, at the very least,
believed
he had?

*   *   *

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, Harriot entered my dreams. It wasn't a vision on the order of Clarissa's—just your basic dog-and-pony show from the subconscious. There was the great man himself, head to toe in black, standing before his Bath-brick cottage. I could feel a faint nip in the air … I could hear a rustle of clouds overhead … and, oh, yes, the house was erupting with gold.

From the eaves, from the windows, through the doorways, out of the very earth. Bars and coins and scepters and diadems, piling higher and higher like wheat in a granary. And in the midst of that profusion, Harriot stood grimacing in apology.

“I can't seem to make it stop,” he said.

33

T
HEY WERE WAITING
for us when we left customs.

And with such an air of expectation that I actually looked to see if they were holding welcome signs:
HENRY CAVENDISH
.
CLARISSA DALE
.

No welcome, though, in their attitude. Or in their clothes: black bespoke suits, tropical wool, and black loafers polished down to the aglets. The smaller of the two men was ruddy and pitted; he tapped his left toe like a filly in a paddock and eyed us from a slight angle as if he'd caught us stealing his cable signal. The other was closely shaven, frappuccino-colored, big as a Visigoth, with a stone-lidded countenance that parted suddenly to reveal a chorine's grin.

“Welcome!” he called. “How was your flight?”

Clarissa was the first to stop … then me … but the Visigoth was already making straight for Alonzo.

“Mr.
Spiegel
.” (The thinnest lacquer of irony over that bogus name.) “I'm Agent Mooney. And this is Agent Milberg. And we're—oh, wait, hold on!”

Fumbling through his pockets, he extracted a laminated badge.

“Very sorry. Interpol.”

“Interpol,” repeated Alonzo faintly.

“Now you're in safe hands, Mr. Spiegel, please know that. We've no desire to make a public display. No
perp
walks.”

“No handcuffs,” his comrade added.

“That's not how we roll, is it? All we're after is a bit of a chat, upon conclusion of which you may be on your merry way. Rejoicing in London's many sights and sounds.”

Alonzo had rebounded enough now to give his chest a pouter-pigeon swell.

“I'm a very busy man.”

“I knew you would be.”

“Kindly tell me the theme of this chat.”