The Gilded Madonna

by Garrick Jones

  “Made? Made from what?”

  He searched my eyes before answering. “I didn’t want to ever tell you, Clyde.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I knew how fond you were of him and—”

  “Fond of who?” I nearly shouted.

  “Johnny. Johnny Edgar, Clyde. They gave me his belongings to take home. As he had no family, I had the tiepins made from the gold outer case of his cigarette lighter. Clyde! Clyde!”

  I felt the room spinning and my knees gave way. Billy caught me around the waist and called out for his secretary, telling her to bring his bottle of scotch.

  I didn’t know why I wanted to cry, because deep down inside I was filled with cold, hard fear and shock, not sadness. It took me an age to be able to speak. Instead, I thrust the pages of Luka’s letter into Billy’s hand.

  “What’s this, Clyde? Come on, mate. Please talk to me.”

  “That man you asked about on the phone? The one you said you didn’t get to meet? His name’s Luka Praz, and that’s what he wrote and drew for me, two days before he’d even seen you. He’s a medium. No, that’s not right. He’s a psychometrist. He can tell things by holding them or touching them. He asked for the tiepin you gave me and he fell down in a fit. What he saw in his vision is what he’s drawn on the pages of the letter.”

  “Clyde, a psychometrist?”

  “Billy, how long have you known me? Have I ever been given to histrionics? I wouldn’t be here if there was stuff in there that only you and I could possibly know. He indicates in his letter there are things that relate to you. Things I don’t understand myself.”

  Johnny Edgar, the only member of “No Holes Barred” that didn’t make it home. It was Johnny I’d had a crush on in Africa, not Billy Tancred. I distinctly remembered the last time I saw him—sitting on a jerrycan, rolling a smoke. He hadn’t brushed his hair in a few days and it had spread in a ragged fringe over his forehead. “Smile,” I’d said to him, and he’d looked up at me from under his knotted eyebrows and given me a quick flash of his drop-your-pants grin. He and his squad of four were being sent to Al Qubah to sort out some locals who we’d heard were working hand in hand with our enemies, the Italians.

  “Do you remember the last time we saw Johnny, Billy?” I stabbed my finger at the drawing of an oblong with one corner missing, in its place a flat lozenge shape with rounded corners unmistakeably attached the body of the oblong with a thin chain. “He was sitting on a jerrycan, just like this drawing, joking about farting into the C.O.’s drinking water.”

  “This next drawing’s of a flower pot,” Billy said in amazement. “But this?”

  “It’s a marble of some sort,” I said. “Or a round glass sphere with a star in its centre.”

  “You never wanted to know, Clyde,” Billy said after an inordinate amount of time. The pages in his hand were shaking gently. I could tell what he’d seen on the page had affected him greatly. “And then you were gone, two days after we heard Johnny was killed.”

  “Know what? He was blown to bits by homemade shrapnel bombs made of plastique packed into terracotta strawberry pots and clay pomade jars.”

  “Filled with glass marbles.”

  “What?”

  “The five of them were shredded by shrapnel, Clyde. Not killed by the explosion. The jars were stored at the side of the road, next to the factory that made artificial star sapphires for the jewellery trade in Algeria. Glass with impurities, fashioned in such a way they made a six-pointed star inside when the light hit them the right way.”

  It was all I could do not to cry out in anguish. Catseyes, by any other name.

  “But this, Clyde. Cuba?” he said, slapping the drawing angrily with his hand. “What’s a country in the Caribbean got to do with Johnny, if you’re thinking all of this is linked to him.”

  “Look again, Billy. Read it carefully and think about it.”

  “Al Cuba? Sorry, I didn’t see the first word. It sounds like a man’s name, a movie gangster, but I don’t know anyone by that name, do you?”

  “Say it out slow and loud, Billy. For Christ’s sake.”

  “Al Cuba … Al Cuba … Holy Mary, Mother of God! It’s Al Qubah, not a person.”

  Al Qubah, the town in which Johnny and our friends had been turned into mincemeat by collaborators. Locals fighting alongside the Italians and against us, men that stashed homemade grenades at the side of the street in the market and then exploded them when our friends got close enough to be sure to take a direct hit and be killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In the end, I was glad I’d gone to see Billy. After asking his secretary to cancel his next meeting, he’d sat on the floor with his arm around me.

  The one thing about Billy few other men had was his ability to store fear, or panic, or sorrow, or anger away in a small compartment somewhere inside him until he had time to deal with it. It was what had made him one of the best soldiers I’d ever met, and a lieutenant colonel before the age of thirty. The chain of command always had to be strictly enforced when someone with a rank went down. The gaps had to be filled, and there was nothing like the battlefield during a war to promote a capable soldier or officer without the rigmarole that went on during peacetime. Billy was a captain while I was still a lieutenant, based solely on his extremely cool head and capability to take command while under fire and under duress.

  He’d calmly talked through the facts as I’d presented them to him. Luka had described himself as a person who never forgot anything. He could easily have leafed through the magazines “Green Eyes” had purchased without taking real notice of what was on the page—even just checking the periodical was all there, that no pages had been ripped out. The Australian War Digests were photographic magazines, thrown together like news bulletins, carrying contemporary accounts of what our soldiers were up to during the war—an Australian version of the American magazines, Life and Time.

  I remembered the young man and his assistant from the Australian War Digest who’d been assigned to our battalion and our company in particular, and who’d been told to evacuate when we’d come under heavy shelling. Both had refused to leave and their dugout had taken a direct hit. Despite being injured, the photographer had continued to take snaps all the way through the heavy Italian gunfire and the accompanying waves of German Stuka bombings.

  Until we got our hands on copies, Billy had suggested that it would not be unlikely the magazine had reported on the “terror attack” and the tragic deaths of my friends. They were infrequent enough to be of interest, and in the early days of the war there hadn’t been the strict censorship that was enforced during and after the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. In fact, I’d learned there had been a page two column in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days after the incident, reporting the deaths of the five local boys.

  “Every picture of every soldier taken in the North African campaign shows jerrycans everywhere, Clyde,” Billy had said. “You remember, surely? If they weren’t for water, they were for petrol, or kerosene, or heavy vehicle fuel.”

  Billy had left me for a moment and then had returned to the room with the volume of his Geography of the World, in which he’d found the reference to Al Qubah, the town was listed as being one of the centres for production of moonstones and other semi-precious stones for costume jewellery. It wasn’t a leap of faith to imagine that if there had been an article in the magazine, perhaps a good journalist who did his research may have mentioned the fact. It’s something I would have done, for sure.

  It was all conjecture until we could get our hands on copies of the two issues Green Eyes had purchased.

  “Luka said he was a human computer, am I right, Clyde?” Billy had asked.

  “Those were my words, Billy, but yes. There’s one thing that bothers me about the whole affair though.”

  “What?”

  “Even though Luka’s mind might have been able to link all of these t
hings to the deaths of our boys at the hands of Arab collaborators, how the hell did he connect Johnny Edgar to me through the tiepin you had made from his cigarette lighter casing?”

  Billy had shrugged and then said, “Who knows, Clyde. But can I tell you something? Something that’s made me less of a sceptic than you are?”

  I’d leaned my head on his shoulder, a place it had rested more times than I could remember since I’d first met him almost twenty years ago, and told him to speak.

  “After I left you in Rome, in forty-four, we made our way up the east coast of Italy, reconnoitring the Germans’ positions and fortifications, making contact with partisans and generally causing mischief. As you know, until a few years ago, I was still pretty religious. Roman Catholicism is something that’s engraved into your soul as a child. When we got to Arezzo, I was lying in bed—well, I was actually sleeping rough under a hedge—when I had a vision in my dream. It was the Virgin Mary, hovering in the air above me, telling me to go to what I thought she said was Lavender.”

  “Lavender?” I’d asked. “That’s not an Italian word … lavanda?”

  “That’s what I thought first, lavender, washing, the word is the same for both meanings. But then, in the morning, I went to confession and told the priest what I’d seen. He told me the mother of Jesus was telling me to go to La Verna. I’d never heard of it, Clyde, but it’s the place where St. Francis received the stigmata—”

  “And?”

  “And so I ordered my men to meet me at Urbino in five days, and I made my way there. I can’t tell you what it was like, Clyde. It truly was mystical, not religious. When I was on my knees praying, it felt like something in the earth under the tiny Cappella della Stimmata was swirling away, directing energy from deep down below and up through my body. I’ve never forgotten that moment, Clyde, because the roundel on the wall, made by Andrea della Robbia hundreds of years ago, spoke to me.”

  “Spoke to you?”

  “Yes, Clyde, I know it sounds stupid, but a voice spoke in my heart and when I turned around to look at the beautiful blue-and-white ceramic plaque, the Virgin seemed to lean forward and blessed me, like priests do during Mass. She told me my mother had joined my father in heaven and She was watching over them and keeping me safe.”

  “You didn’t know your mother was dead at the time?”

  Billy had shaken his head and had taken his handkerchief from his pocket to blot his eyes. “I’d had a letter from her five weeks before, Clyde, in which she wrote about the weather, her new austerity cooking classes, the plans for the anniversary of Dad’s passing, and just day-to-day stuff. Said she’d been to the doctor, who’d told her she’d never been healthier. I didn’t find out she’d died until we moved into Florence with the liberation forces a month later and the message was waiting for me at military command. I know this vision, or whatever you want to call it, sounds fanciful, but believe me I had absolutely no idea she’d had a stroke while she was watering the geraniums on the balcony of the flat and had fallen over into the garden, two floors below. Mercifully, she was dead before she hit the ground.”

  “Is there no way anyone could have hinted, and perhaps you’d stored it in the back of your mind, Billy?” I’d asked.

  “No, Clyde, you see she suffered the stroke on the very day I’d had the dream telling me to go to La Verna, three days before the Blessed Virgin Mary had spoken to me in the chapel.”

  *****

  I didn’t go straight back to the office. I was too disturbed after my visit to Billy and what he’d told me of his own “mystical” experience—in all the years I’d known him, he’d never lied. He might have lied by omission, but had never told me a falsehood. I couldn’t begin to understand how he could have learned of his mother’s death in the way he had. It disturbed me, mainly because I had the same feeling about what Luka Praz’s letter had revealed. And I was still in shock after learning the details of Johnny’s death—especially the likeness of moonstones and artificial star sapphires and their similarity to the Catseyes used in the Silent Cop killings.

  I had no doubt now, after all I’d learned, that the murderer was somehow targeting me and it had to do with Johnny Edgar in some way. The photograph I’d received of the four of us sitting on the motorbike, and now these other connections, had my mind going at ten to the dozen, and not in a pleasant way. I was becoming more and more convinced that the Bishop kidnapping was a red herring, intended to draw my attention away from the vicious slayings of men in public toilets.

  When I’d asked Billy why he’d never mentioned the artificial sapphires, he’d told me he didn’t learn the details for months afterwards, and only when he’d pressed our C.O. for details. Besides, when we’d next seen each other, I’d been in a P.O.W. camp for years and talking about Johnny Edgar had been the last thing on my agenda. When I’d proposed that maybe some of the other men had known about the glass marbles, he’d assured me that no one, apart from the British recovery squad and his C.O., knew anything more than the improvised bombs being in terracotta pots.

  It was like me to dwell on tiny details like those. I kept wondering how Luka could have possibly known about the glass spheres, a detail known to only a few. I could understand why Billy had never mentioned it, because just before I’d left his office, I’d pressed him to tell me everything he knew. I wish I hadn’t—Johnny’s squad had been so shredded, the Pommies who’d recovered the bodies had written in their official report that they’d had to peel strips of flesh from the steel telegraph poles opposite where the explosion had taken place.

  My legs had felt so weak while walking down the stairs, I’d had to stop on one of the landings and sit for a few minutes to recover my composure.

  I’d never had that compartmentalising thing Billy seemed capable of, but once an initial shock was over, I could get my bum into gear quick smart. So after sitting in my car and having a smoke, my head back, staring above at the clouds for fifteen minutes or so, I drove down to the Café de Wheels and ate two pie floaters, after which I strolled across the street to the pub and had a schooner while trying to sort out the myriad of confused threads in my head.

  After a while of sitting, staring mindlessly into the inch or two of beer that remained at the bottom of my glass, I drained it quickly and was about to ask for another, but then hesitated—I phoned Harry instead.

  “Where are you, Clyde?”

  “Come rescue me,” I said. “I’ve only had one so far, but I’m in the Tilbury Hotel in Woolloomooloo.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Two pie floaters.”

  “Greedy guts.”

  I laughed. “Harry, I think I’m about to go on a bender, but I’d prefer it if I didn’t.”

  “Go outside, sit in your car. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll have something to eat with you and then we can go to the pub together and you can cry into your beer and tell me whatever it is that’s brought this about.”

  I put my hand around the mouthpiece of the handset and turned my back on the bar. “I love you, Harry,” I said.

  “And I love you too, Clyde. Now, you saying that over the phone in a public place tells me whatever it is going through your head is serious. Go outside and wait for me, okay?”

  I did as I was told.

  *****

  “So Billy’s story about the Virgin Mary speaking to him was a way of telling you not to disbelieve, that strange and unexplainable things can happen to anyone?” Harry asked me half an hour later, tucking into his second enormous sausage roll, with a third yet uneaten in its grease-spotted, white paper bag.

  I reached over and brushed his tie. There were pastry flakes all over it. “Messy puppy,” I said.

  “I’ll see whether there’s a copy of both of those magazines in the military archives in the city, Clyde. However, for the time being you should work on the assumption that perhaps, no matter how the information came to you, or how much Luka’s drawings put the wind up you, that what he’s given you just migh
t be correct, and, therefore, perhaps your life could be in danger.”

  “I don’t really care about that, Harry—”

  “Well, I do, Clyde! I think I should cancel the weekend away.”

  “No! Don’t do that. You’re back on Sunday night. You have fifteen people who’ve paid five quid each for three days away in Capertee. I had to work wonders to get one of my mates to go up there on his weekend off work to teach them beginner self-protection skills and to help you out with the basics of bush survival. The killer has never struck within seven days, and I won’t be going anywhere that’s dangerous. If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have done it by now. He’s obviously trying to test me out in some way, trying to humiliate me over something to do with Johnny Edgar, but for the life of me I can’t think of any connection.”

  “Just run through it with me, Clyde. Pretend I know nothing about your relationship with Johnny. Tell me all you remember about the last week before he died and then the two days after you got the news and before you shipped out.”

  “Can we have a beer while we talk?”

  “No we can’t. You have to call Vince and tell him what’s going on. You’ll need a clear head for that. Can’t have you half sozzled in the middle of the day. There’s a lot to organise before next week if you want to recruit the guys you want to use as lures, to find time to follow up on whatever Luka tells you next, and—”

  “What do you mean, whatever Luka tells me next?”

  “When you arrange for him to see what he can learn about whoever stole his statue, after you let him hold it again.”

  “Aw, come on, Harry. Dioli would never agree to that.”

  “He will, if you make him agree.”

  “You’re assuming I believe there’s something to his psychometry.”

  “Well, you can’t hide the fact from me that what he says about being a human computational device has got you intrigued. I know you well enough to see you believe that bit at least. And, there’s that other thing—what you told me about your reaction to what you and Billy discussed. I can see you’re struggling to make sense of the connection between the jerrycan, the flower pot, the Catseyes, and the name of the town. Far too many coincidences for it to be random, wouldn’t you say? Come on, Clyde Smith. What’s holding you back from at least opening up your mind to the possibility that Luka does have some gift—even if you or I don’t understand it or want to accept there could be something more than cold, hard facts in life.”