The Simeon Chamber (27 page)

“And the journal?” said Sam.

Symington hesitated, as if he was about to divulge some family indiscretion. “The journal was the last in a long line of purchases that I negotiated on behalf of the committee. It was worked out through black market contacts I’d developed in Europe. During the Spanish Civil War I’d had the good fortune to meet a number of young, ambitious German Army officers, advisors to Franco and his military establishment. They dabbled in the art market themselves from time to time. While they had no real appreciation, they liked the money. Later when the Germans invaded Belgium, the Netherlands and France, these men knew there was a ready market in the West for any artworks their army plundered.”

Symington leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “Hell, it made no difference to the committee where the stuff came from, as long as the Chief didn’t know. It was easy pickins, particularly after this country entered the war in forty-one. The castle was boarded up and the Chief moved to apartments in San Francisco and New York. He came back only rarely.”

“Why did he leave?” asked Jennifer.

“Some would call the rich eccentric. I prefer to say they are fickle,” said Symington. “The authorities wouldn’t allow him to use any lights up on his Enchanted Hill. Hell, he would have lit the place up like a beacon for Japanese subs and aircraft. To Hearst it wasn’t worth having the place unless he could light it up like a Christmas tree. Anyway, it made it easy for us. 3

“I had the free run of the place. There was a skeleton staff in the house. They all knew me. None of them ever questioned my authority. We held meetings of the committee in the Chief’s own library upstairs. As a group they had the collective balls of a brass monkey. We even carved out a special storage area up on top of the hill here—a place no one would ever look—to stash the purchases until they were formally delivered to the Chief. It was perfect.”

There were footsteps at the other end of the cellar. Sam turned to see a slender woman in a sweater and long skirt approaching from out of the shadows.

“Mr. Symington?”

“Yes, Peggy.”

“I just wanted to remind you about your ten o’clock appointment. He isn’t here yet, but it’s almost ten.” The woman’s voice was not unpleasant, but cool in its efficiency.

“Fine, let me know when he arrives. I’ll talk to him upstairs.”

“Fine.” The woman turned and walked from the cellar.

“Never any visitors. Today I’m truly blessed.” Symington bowed his head in Jennifer’s direction, sarcasm dripping from the gesture.

“An art instructor from Los Angeles. He wants to study some of the Italian Renaissance pieces. Where were we?”

“The Drake journal,” said Sam.

“Ah yes. The final act of greed. In the summer of forty-two we received word that the Germans had found the book in France. I found out later through independent sources that they discovered it in the library of a fourteenth-century abbey—I was never able to find out which one. But it appears that the king of France may have parted Drake from his journal on his stop there before his return to England on his round-the-world voyage. The Germans offered it to the committee for a million dollars. It was an extravagant price. By the same token the committee knew it was worth every penny. They believed they could get twice that from the Chief. It was a real find. Drake holds a special appeal for some people in California—the first Englishman to set foot in the state. And we knew that Hearst would make it the centerpiece of his library.”

Symington tapped another cigarette 335

from the package on the table and corked it into the holder. “We weren’t sure the committee could siphon enough cash from the various newspapers to close the sale fast enough to avoid being discovered. Today I guess they’d call it a cash-flow problem. The full committee met upstairs in the Gothic Study. They voted to make the purchase. I was to tell the Chief I’d found the journal through sources in England. We all knew he’d never touch the damn thing if he thought the Nazis had anything to do with it. I set up a strawman seller in London. The committee gathered the cash and we made arrangements for the purchase.” Symington paused to light the cigarette and took several deep draws, expelling the smoke in perfectly formed rings.

He watched in silence as they drifted toward the vaulted brick ceiling of the cellar.

“What happened?” Jennifer shifted in her chair.

“It all collapsed,” said Symington in a matter-of-fact tone. “The journal was carried by a German submarine to a coastal freighter off San Francisco. The committee found a noted scholar, a man who was intimately familiar with Drake’s handwriting and the presumed contents of the journal, who could authenticate it. It shouldn’t have been necessary. We were supposed to have obtained some sample pages from the book for authentication but there was some difficulty. They never arrived.”

Jennifer’s parchments, thought Sam.

“Anyway, our man was on board the freighter when the package arrived. He was in the process of examining the journal when it all unraveled.

We were double-crossed by the man you mentioned earlier —Raymond Slade.”

Symington rubbed his hands together and leaned his elbows on the table. “Slade was a man whose loyalty was only as good as the last dollar used to purchase it. We discovered later that in addition to his brisk black market trade he’d been selling information on ships movements both to the Germans and the Japanese. Not what you would call trustworthy, but he had all the right connections.

“Slade was second in command of an antisubmarine blimp that flew out of Treasure Island.”

“We know,” said Sam.

“What you probably don’t know is that he was supposed to keep military patrols out 337

of the area of rendezvous until our man could authenticate the journal and transfer the money. Instead, the blimp flew in over the freighter and sent the German sub running for cover. Then he turned a machine gun on the freighter while his partner went down on a ladder, boarded the ship and at pistol point took the million dollars in cash and the journal.”

“He had a partner?” said Jennifer. “Do you know who he was?”

Symington shook his head.

“And that’s the last anybody ever saw of the two of them?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” said Symington. “A week later I was contacted by telephone. It was Slade.”

They heard a sound at the head of the stairs as the door opened. “Mr. Symington, your appointment is here.”

“Fine, Peggy. I’ll be right up.”

Symington stood behind the table. “Slade called because he wanted to sell the journal to the committee. He wasn’t satisfied with the million he’d already stolen. He wanted another quarter of a million for the book.”

Sam looked at Jennifer. An expression of calm resignation had come over her face, as if Symington’s story had confirmed some deeply guarded secret. The announcement that Slade had survived the demise of the airship seemed to puncture some bubble of anxiety for Jennifer Davies.

“Could you describe Raymond Slade?” she asked.

“What’s to say? He was an ordinary looking man.”

“Is Raymond Slade alive?” Sam directed the question to Symington, but watched Jennifer Davies. She rose from her chair and walked away from the two men.

“I’m sure I would have no idea,” said Symington.

“Do you think you could identify him if you saw him today?” she asked.

“If he’s alive and if the years have not ravaged him too much, I suspect I could. I’ll never forget the grin on the bastard’s face the last time we met. It was a week after the blimp went down. We met to negotiate the terms for the purchase of the journal. He 339

had the committee stretched over the barrel of a cannon, and he knew it. He’d taken a million dollars from us, but we couldn’t go to the police. The committee was desperate to cover the money. One of the newspapers in the East missed a payroll. We all knew that Hearst would be onto us within days unless we could effect a quick sale of the journal and get him to pony up the cash. I don’t know how they did it, but the committee scraped together another $250,000 and a rendezvous was set.”

“What happened?” asked Sam.

“The Chief did us in. As rehearsed i laid it on thick. I told him we’d made a marvelous find in England, a treasure on a parallel with the Rosetta Stone—the journal of Sir Francis Drake’s round-the-world voyage.”

Symington began to laugh. “You know what he said? You’re not going to believe this. He told me it would have to wait for a couple of months because he’d overextended his art budget. It seems he’d purchased several suits of armor from a dealer in New York and he was low on cash. Can you imagine?” Symington laughed. “The old man suddenly had an art budget. After thirty years of plundering every safe in his company for petty cash to feed an insatiable appetite for art, suddenly and without warning he’d gone on the wagon. He had a budget!” Symington’s face was gripped in a mocking grin, his scornful laugh echoed off the walls of the chamber. “As I said earlier, Mr. Bogardus, beware of the rich, for they are fickle.

“Within a week he knew that money had been embezzled. And like a hound sniffing blood he cornered the members of the committee. One by one they talked, each implicating the other.”

“What did Hearst do?”

“He fired them.”

“That’s all? You mean he didn’t bring criminal charges?”

“No. Call it pride, ego—whatever. He wasn’t about to permit a public bloodletting. He was very conscious of his reputation both as a businessman and a collector. He also knew that some of his competitors, other newspaper publishers, would have a field day at his expense. His reputation was worth more than money. To admit that he had been taken, not once, but many times over a long period—it was too much. Of 1

course you have to remember that there were few men with a reach that could match his in those days. To earn the wrath of William Randolph Hearst was to be condemned to a life of obscurity, not only in publishing but in the world of politics and business generally.

“For me he reserved a special fate. i was unceremoniously hauled off the hill by private security and told I could never return. Hearst ordered me to a menial post at his paper in the city. I had little choice in the matter. My instinct told me that he wouldn’t prosecute, but if I quit, if somehow I crawled out from under his heel, who knows what he would have done? For nine years I toiled in one insignificant position after another, never allowed to rise above the level of a minor functionary.” A benign smile overtook his expression. “But even Hearst found it impossible to speak from the grave. I fared a little better after the old man’s death, but by then this had all been locked behind boarded windows.” He gestured to the house above. “It seemed that even in death circumstances conspired to carry out his will.”

Symington started toward the door. “As pleasant as this has been, I’m afraid we’ll just have to continue this conversation at another time.” His tone was bathed in sarcasm.

“Mr. Symington, did you ever hear the name James Spencer?” Jennifer blocked his path around the desk.

He shook his head. “Am I supposed to know the man?”

“He was my father. He was on the blimp that day —the day it returned without its crew.”

“Ah. I see.” Symington arched an eyebrow. “Slade’s confederate.”

“We don’t know that,” said Sam. “It may well be that this Slade killed Spencer before the blimp ever arrived at the ship.”

“Well, as I said, I don’t know the man.” He pushed his way past Jennifer and toward the stairs.

Sam took his arm. “Where’s the journal?”

The old man turned, his eyes showering Bogardus with contempt as they settled on the hand clutching his arm. “Your guess is as good as mine. I never saw it.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Frankly, I don’t care.”

“Either we get the journal or we 3

talk to the state,” said Sam. “Your choice.”

Suddenly Symington’s expression turned pragmatic. “What assurance do I have that you’ll stop with the book—that you won’t bleed me dry?”

“We have no interest in anything but the journal. Whatever else you’ve done over the years is between you, your conscience and the state.” Somehow Sam knew that the first two were of absolutely no consequence to Arthur Symington.

“All right.” It was a small price to pay if it would silence them. “Wait here. I’ll be back in less than an hour and we can talk further.”

“We’ll be here.” 10

The electrically charged particles were injected into the gun for their trip around the circular course of the small accelerator. Nearing the speed of light they would hurtle toward the point of impact. There the particles would be smashed, severing electrons from protons and revealing the molecular structure of the scrapings that Tony Murray had lifted from the parchments.

Edward Lefever was not a nuclear physicist, just a struggling graduate student in the history department. For extra cash to support his wife and two children he traveled once each week to Livermore, where he worked in a grants program pioneering the use of the cyclotron as a method for authenticating ancient artifacts.

Forty years earlier the particle accelerator had produced the scientific breakthrough culminating in the development of the nuclear bomb. For the first time scientists were allowed to see inside the atom by smashing its component parts.

Now they were finding new and different ways to use the accelerator. The project on which Lefever worked was particularly exciting to historians and archaeologists. For decades they had been relegated to handwriting analysis or in some cases radiocarbon dating for the authentication of rare documents. The latter two methods were fraught with serious deficiencies. Analysis by so-called handwriting experts was subject to error and conflicting expert opinions. While scientific to a point, it ultimately relied on subjective judgments as to points of similarity and difference in pen strokes. 345

Computer analysis and forensic examinations of paper and ink enhanced reliability, but the method was by no means conclusive.

Radiocarbon dating was developed in the late 1940’s, but that method too was flawed. Keyed to a trace element, carbon-14, which bonded chemically with oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, the process had severe limitations. To Lefever and his colleagues, the shortcomings of the process were many. The method was applicable only to organic matter, and dating of any object was possible only within broad time parameters. While it proved sufficient for geologists and archaeologists, it was often inadequate for historians interested in the relatively brief span of human civilization.