Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7)

by Scott Mariani

  The last drawer Ben tried was the bottom left. It was stiffer than the others, and he had to give it a jerk to open it. The drawer was comparatively empty. As it slid open, a handsome old ebony fountain pen rolled to the front. The drawer contained a few other miscellaneous items like a spare pair of bifocal spectacles, a box of ink cartridges for the fountain pen and another of paper clips. Among the junk was a slim leather wallet containing the dead man’s passport and national identity card. Shining his torch on the pages of the passport, Ben found the Israeli customs and United States Immigration stamps in the back, showing the dates of Lalique’s visits. He hadn’t been anywhere else out of Europe in the eight years since the passport had been issued.

  It was interesting information, as far as it went – which wasn’t nearly far enough and didn’t tell Ben anything he hadn’t already known. He was beginning to worry that he wasn’t going to find anything helpful here. He put the passport and ID card back in their wallet, replaced them where he’d found them and pushed the stiff drawer firmly shut. There was a soft rumble and clunk as the fountain pen rolled to the back of the drawer and came to a rest against the rear partition.

  Ben was about to move away from the desk – frustration rising as he thought about where to look next – when he stopped. Hold on, he thought. Something odd there. He opened the drawer again. The fountain pen rolled forwards again to the front. He shone the torch inside, then reached in with his hand, all the way so that his fingers touched the back partition. It was a deep desk and he could get his arm into all the other drawers right up to the elbow. Not this one. For some reason, the bottom left drawer appeared to be about four inches shorter.

  When Ben tried to slide the drawer out completely, he found that something was preventing it from coming free. Groping blindly around inside, his fingers touched against a little spring catch. When depressed, it allowed the drawer to be removed completely from the desk.

  And now Ben saw why the drawer was shorter than the others. At the back was a hidden compartment, four inches deep. He smiled to himself. Good old police inefficiency could be a blessed thing sometimes.

  The secret compartment contained just two items. One was a pocket-sized artist’s sketch pad, the other a little address book. Curious, Ben picked up the sketch pad first and opened it. On the first page was a rough version of Lalique’s drawing of the horses; on the second an early draft of one of his landscapes. Thinking he’d hit another dead end, Ben flipped one last page before giving up.

  The next sketch was something very different. It was a simple pencil line drawing of an object that was unmistakably a sword, but one of a kind Ben had never seen before. A strange-looking weapon, plain and simple in design, with a definite Middle-Eastern style to its peculiar sickle-shaped blade and curved hilt. He was by no means an expert, but from the proportion of handle to blade he guessed the real-life sword wasn’t huge, perhaps three to four feet long overall, not much larger than some big machetes he’d seen.

  Ben turned over another page and found another sketch of the same weapon, this time drawn in more careful detail, down to the tiny inscriptions running the length of the blade. He peered closely at them, but couldn’t make them out.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. This had to be the sword.

  As Ben was staring at the drawing, he heard the sound again. This time, it definitely wasn’t the wind. Somebody was moving about in the house. Approaching the cellar. He killed the flashlight and ducked behind the desk. There was nowhere else to hide.

  The cellar door opened and the light came on. Footsteps sounded on the stone staircase. Peering cautiously over the top of the desk, Ben saw that it was Madame Lamont. She was wrapped in a dressing gown, her grey hair tousled and her feet encased in furry slippers. He half expected to see a .38 in her hand. Small woman, big trouble.

  But as the housekeeper reached the bottom of the steps, Ben heard her singing to herself and realised the old woman was half drunk. She must have been boozing all evening and then passed out for a while in her room; now she’d come looking for some more. Madame Lamont shuffled across the floor in her slippers, making her way to the little table between the wine racks. She settled herself in the chair, ripped the cork out of the bottle and poured a brimming glassful, which she knocked back in a gulp.

  Hell, Ben thought. So much for the dead man’s last drink. What was he going to do? The old dipso could be here for hours. He didn’t have time to wait for her to drink herself unconscious again.

  Madame Lamont was about to launch into her second glass when Ben came up behind her chair and hooded her with the cover of one of Lalique’s cushions. The old woman began to screech and struggle. If Jude could see me now, he thought grimly as he lashed her securely to the chair with the curtain tieback rope. But Madame Lamont was a tough old bird, and from the fury of her struggles, he didn’t think she was about to expire from a heart attack any time soon.

  Ignoring the muffled cries, Ben ran back to Lalique’s office and started leafing through the little address book that the priest had kept hidden in his secret compartment. Its pages were virtually empty, other than for a small handful of contacts that Lalique had entered by their first names only, either to conceal their full identities from prying eyes or simply because they were familiar to him. Under S, Ben found ‘Simeon’ listed alongside his Oxfordshire phone number; under W was the name ‘Wesley’, together with a number bearing the international prefix for the U.S.A. Flipping through the pages, the only other name Ben could find was someone called Hillel, with an Israeli number.

  Hillel. Could he have been the burly Middle-Eastern-looking man in the photo? If so, Lalique must have kept this address book solely as a record of the group of associates involved with the sword. Remembering the woman called Martha, Ben searched under M. There was no trace of her, which seemed to confirm his suspicions that Martha, whoever she was, must have been peripheral to the group.

  Across the cellar, Madame Lamont was still in full voice and she was fighting her bonds like a tigress. Ben’s knots were good. He was confident she’d settle eventually.

  Laying the address book aside he returned to the sketch pad. The fact that Fabrice Lalique had drawn the sword told him a number of things. One, it was a lot quicker and easier to take a photo than to do a detailed line drawing, however talented the artist. That implied to Ben that Simeon and his colleagues might have been unwilling to photograph the sword, in case the images fell into the wrong hands and aroused the wrong kind of curiosity. Had Fabrice perhaps sketched it without the others’ knowledge, maybe working from memory afterwards? Such extreme secretiveness begged even more questions. Just what was this sword?

  Two, it suggested that Fabrice must have been in the sword’s presence at some point. Had that been in Israel? In America? Where was it now?

  Three, given Lalique’s skill as an artist, Ben had to suppose that the drawings were a good likeness. With that in mind, it wasn’t the strange sickle shape of the weapon that perplexed him. It was its plainness, the absence of any kind of adornment. In his experience, and the experience of all history, when men killed one another in order to possess an object, it was generally because that object held some significant value. And value generally boiled down to hard cash. A sword of serious historical importance – perhaps once having belonged to a king or an emperor – could be expected to be heavily encrusted with precious stones and bear the flourishes of the most proficient craftsmen of its time. But this one had nothing of the sort.

  Maybe it was made of solid gold, Ben thought. It was impossible to tell from the sketch. But then, gold was just gold. Once melted down, it might as well have come from anywhere. Someone with the cash to hire professional gunmen and organise phone taps and elaborate fake suicides and accidents could buy all the gold they wanted. Why this particular sword?

  Ben still had too many questions, but he didn’t think he’d get any more answers here tonight. Pocketing the sketch pad and the address book, he picked up his fla
shlight and Lalique’s desk phone. He turned off the cellar light at the switch near the steps, then switched on the flashlight and walked back over to where Madame Lamont was still struggling to get free. He obliged her by liberating one hand, into which he pressed the phone. The old woman squawked obscenities at him as he removed the cushion cover from her head.

  ‘Call your grandson,’ he said in French, then headed up the steps and left the darkened cellar, shutting the door behind him. By the time the police arrived to rescue her, he’d be far away.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Jacques Rabier had fallen asleep on the tatty sofa in the kitchen and was snoring loudly as Ben returned to the farm. Ben could barely remember when he’d last slept himself. He sat down wearily at Rabier’s grimy kitchen table and took out his phone and the address book he’d recovered from Fabrice Lalique’s office. He flipped the address book open to the letter W, and dialled the number Lalique had written for the American called Wesley.

  Four a.m. in France; it would be late afternoon to late evening in the States, depending on which time zone Wesley lived in. The dialling tone droned on until it eventually cut off. There was no answerphone. Ben shrugged and leafed back through the address book to H for Hillel. Again, he stabbed out the number and waited. It would be around dawn in Israel, so there was a good chance somebody would be up and about to take the call.

  After several rings, a woman’s voice replied in rapid-fire Hebrew. Thanks to his theology studies, Ben’s knowledge of biblical and classical Hebrew was sharper than his understanding of the modern language, and he missed most of what the woman was saying to him. He was a lot better at Arabic.

  ‘I was looking for Hillel,’ he said in English, and the woman switched to English with the same transatlantic twang of nearly everyone who’d learned the language outside of Britain. ‘This is Hillel’s Coffee House, Zion Square. He’s not here right now.’ There was music playing in the background, and a buzz of chatter and activity. Ben knew that these kinds of places were often open twenty-four hours a day. He’d been in a thousand coffee bars like it in his time, all over the Middle East and Africa, and he could well imagine the scene – the poky interior, fading decor, smoky atmosphere, harried waitresses run off their feet for twelve hours at a stretch.

  ‘Zion Square in Jerusalem?’ he asked, remembering the name from his last visit to the place.

  ‘Sure,’ the woman said nonchalantly. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Will Hillel be in later?’ Ben asked.

  ‘He doesn’t come in that often. Might pay a visit late afternoon. Who’s calling?’

  Ben ended the call without replying, and immediately started hunting for Hillel’s Coffee House online. Its colourful website quickly confirmed that it was a popular all-hours café in Zion Square, off Jaffa Road in downtown West Jerusalem, owned and run by Hillel Zada and his wife Ayala.

  When Ben saw the photo of the place he realised he couldn’t have been more wrong about it. The coffee house was as upmarket as any five-star restaurant in London, Paris or Rome. Its smiling owners were pictured standing in front of the bar, surrounded by glitzy decor that had quite obviously had a ton of money thrown at it. Ayala was in her fifties, tiny and trim, much-bejewelled, dark-haired with streaks of grey. Her husband was a large, burly guy around age sixty, decked out in a loud flowery shirt that had four buttons open and revealed two gold neck-chains, each as thick as a rope. An even chunkier gold identity bracelet dangled from one thick, hairy wrist.

  It wasn’t the first time Ben had laid eyes on the Israeli. He was the same man who’d been photographed in the group shot with Wesley, Simeon and Fabrice Lalique. ‘Got you,’ Ben muttered under his breath.

  A groan came from the sofa, and Ben turned to see that Rabier had woken up. ‘You’re back,’ the Frenchman muttered. ‘What time is it?’ He glanced at his watch and swore, then got up stiffly and yawned and stretched his way over to the surface where he kept his tray of shot glasses and one of his nefarious unlabelled bottles. ‘So how did it go? Did Madame Lamont give you any trouble?’

  ‘She was as good as gold,’ Ben said.

  Rabier filled two glasses, slid one across the table to Ben and sat down heavily in a chair with the other. He raised his glass. ‘Salut.’

  ‘Salut.’ It wasn’t really what Ben needed, but he took a sip anyway and felt a trail of fire melt downwards through his body. ‘Where’s Jude?’ he asked when his tongue regained sensation.

  Rabier smacked his lips and jerked his thumb at the ceiling. ‘In the spare bedroom. Sleeping like a baby, last I saw him.’

  ‘I’ll go and check on him.’ The bare wooden stairs were near the kitchen door. Ben climbed them softly and peered in through the door of the room where Jude was still fast asleep. He hovered in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, then quietly shut the door.

  ‘Out for the count,’ he said as he returned to the kitchen.

  Rabier smiled. ‘I have never seen anyone so exhausted.’

  ‘He’s been through a lot the last couple of days.’

  ‘You don’t look too fresh yourself, my friend. You should rest.’

  ‘There’ll be time for that later,’ Ben said.

  ‘Yes, in the grave,’ Rabier chuckled. ‘Then have another drink. This stuff of mine clears your head.’

  Ben somehow doubted that. He showed Rabier the sketch pad. The Frenchman gazed sadly at his dead friend’s artwork, then his brow furrowed as he turned the pages to the drawings of the sword. ‘What kind of sword is this?’ he murmured, scratching his beard.

  ‘One I don’t think you’ll find in the war museum in Paris. My guess is it’s eastern. Let’s see if we can find anything like it.’ Ben ran another web search on his phone, entering ‘middle eastern sword’ and clicking ‘images’.

  A host of material came up on the tiny screen. He scrolled down through dozens of pictures featuring Islamic shamshirs and mamelukes, wicked-looking Afghan warrior sabres and daggers; there were several images of scantily clad female belly dancers, some thin, some fat, performing with a variety of great curved scimitars balanced on their heads. He saw nothing that very closely resembled the sword in the priest’s sketches, the nearest match an ancient Egyptian sickle sword called a khopesh.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, returning to study the more detailed of Lalique’s two sketches. ‘Whatever it is, it’s old. Really old. Nobody’s used swords like this for a thousand years, or maybe even longer.’

  They sat and smoked a while, and talked about dead friends, lost wives. ‘My Brigitte was eaten by the crab, you know, cancer,’ Rabier said. Ben told him a little about Leigh. It felt good to talk. Finally, it seemed that even Rabier’s appetite for his homebrewed rocket fuel had abated, and he bubbled up a pot of espresso on the gas stove. Ben gratefully accepted a cup of the scalding coffee. ‘About your offer, Jacques. To look after Jude for a while. If it still stands …’

  ‘He can help me on the farm. There will be plenty to occupy him here. You were thinking of going somewhere?’

  Ben nodded. ‘This isn’t over yet. And it’s not going to get any easier or less dangerous.’

  Rabier reached across to a fingermarked drawer of the kitchen dresser, yanked it open and lifted out the black powder revolver. ‘Take it,’ he said, sliding the gun across the tabletop.

  ‘Thanks, Jacques, but I can’t take that where I’m headed. Nor the shotgun. You can hang onto it for me.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Toulouse airport, then Jerusalem via Paris. But say nothing about that to Jude. He’s liable to come after me and I don’t want him any more involved in this than he has to be.’

  Rabier grinned. ‘I have already forgotten. And now, my friend, I am going to bed.’

  ‘In which case I’ll say au revoir, Jacques. I won’t be here when you awake. And thanks again.’

  Ben napped for an hour on a lounger in Rabier’s living room, resting his head on a mildewy cushion and covered with an old b
lanket that smelled of mould. When he awoke and returned upstairs to the spare bedroom, he found Jude still sleeping off the trauma of the last two days. He said a silent goodbye and left.

  Ben slipped outside into the pre-dawn gloom to the Laguna, rolled quietly down the track to the road and set off on the eighty-mile journey to Toulouse airport. The snow had stopped and the roads were clear, piles of brown slush caked high at the roadsides. Traffic was heavy in the lead-up to Christmas.

  Ben regretted having gone off without offering any explanation to Jude, but it was the only way. He would have insisted on coming along. Ben had already placed him in too much danger, and the risks were mounting. The farm was the best place for Jude while Ben followed the trail. Thanks to Jacques Rabier, the only potential witnesses to the incident at the ruined church were now languishing under several tons of well-rotted manure. Nobody could implicate Rabier, and nobody could have any idea where Jude was. The Frenchman might be a bit crazy, but Ben trusted him.

  Twenty minutes from Toulouse airport, a strange irregular knocking sound started up from the back of the car. It paused for a moment, then started up again. Ben pulled off the busy road into a layby, got out and walked around the car. He could see nothing. Then he heard it again: thump, thump. Coming from inside the boot. Ben stared at the back of the car for a moment, then swung open the boot lid.

  Jude’s face peered up from inside. ‘You bastard, you were going to leave me behind, weren’t you?’ He jumped up and hopped out onto the slushy verge. Traffic whooshed past as he squared up to Ben at the roadside. ‘Now who can’t be trusted?’