Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  She got sleepy before dawn and went back into the bedroom with the lone mattress in it and went to sleep. When she woke up, right there in her living room was a life-sized picture of the cellar and, from wall to wall, the time in which it had been created. She was not wandering around in space anymore. She had a beginning. Dad’s cellar had a time and a place, and she was going to find it, find all about it, even who sold it to him.

  VII

  You are aware that this quest was undertaken to glean some knowledge of the mysteries of the Holy Grail, which Our Lord has promised to reveal to the true knight who shall transcend in chivalry and virtue his fellows past and future.

  —WALTER MAP

  Queste del Saint Graal, 1225

  A jeweler’s graver, a short triangle of a blade at the end of a round wood pommel, dug into her soft gold waist. It cut ugly wedges into the elegant scrollwork of Simon Sedgewick, most late of London’s Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. With short hard chops, like tears around an eye, it gashed away from the blue Poseidon, never toward, until the magnificent stone stood raised away from the cellar, as though set high in a wound.

  Drops of perspiration fell from the cutter’s forehead to his hand, and he ignored them. He delicately severed the last gold tendons to the blue stone with a dental probe, plucking out the sapphire into a soft white bathroom towel.

  In the same way, the Christ’s head ruby left the Tilbury’s breast, and the diamonds left her base one by one, revered and treasured by the hands that desecrated the scrolling and carelessly chipped the jade lions when getting into the cellar’s bosom. Even her adornments of topaz brilliants suffered as fulcrums for tools, and yet this was the only time since the cellar left the tent in Tilbury field that this work of Goldsmith Simon Sedgewick was appreciated.

  All the great stones were held by bezels, thin strips of gold with seats for the gems, cross sections of which looked like wires shaped like the letter L. For centuries now, machines had made them, but the ones in the cellar were perfectly crafted by hand, first flattened by some other metal, then cut so perfectly that only the jeweler’s loupe showed a human hand had almost matched a machine, which never could, on the other hand, produce such intricate grandeur as the scrolling on this awesome monument of gold.

  Even more revealing of the talent that had made this cellar was evidence that the sapphire and ruby were removed once by different hands, hands less careful than those that had set them. It might have been to replace them with less valuable stones, but even under the fluorescent lights, even in their original places, the ruby and sapphire virtually screamed their magnificent worth.

  Poseidon with his familiar crown and trident sat on a backless throne, well carved, perhaps too well carved because some of the sapphire had to be removed to make that raised image. The Christ’s head, Christ in thorns and apparently weeping, was crude but crude with purpose. It left the ruby with maximum stone.

  For some reason the diamonds had not been removed. This was clear in the careful way they remained in their bezels, without a ripple or a bubble in their gold settings, most clearly seen in a cross section, when they, too, were shorn.

  Even gouged of her major gems, the cellar stood with the dignity Simon Sedgewick’s pride of work had given her in Tilbury Field. But she could not withstand the thin German blade that hacked her into quarters, more manageable for the acetylene torch waiting to melt away the last sign that she had ever been an English cellar.

  Perhaps the cutter worked too quickly, now that the major cash gems were free, but he found his blade spewing pink powder for a while before he noticed it. He withdrew the saw and wedged in with the graver. This was not a frame set into the solid gold, because it held up nothing. It was a fired clay of some sort, easily seen as the gold came off, protected by a cloth that fell away when exposed to the air. He cracked several topaz brilliants cutting toward that strange thing in the center.

  What was it doing there? He freed it easily because kiln-fired clay did not adhere to gold. It took some crude hacking to get to it, but finally it was out, missing a little chip he had just made. Of common kiln-fired clay, the bowl was a little larger than his palm, with some sort of undistinguished black lacquer at the base. The bowl had no reason to be there structurally, and yet it was there, right in the middle, almost as though it had worn the cellar itself. So as to protect that bowl, the gold around it had been folded plates, not melted into form like the rest.

  He put it aside quickly. He did not have time for it now. He freed the rest of the gold in manageable chunks and lit the acetylene torch. The ugly sulphur smell in the small room nauseated him, but the work was quick. He only needed 1,800 degrees to melt gold, and the blue flame of the acetylene far exceeded that. He held the chunks with a ring clamp, a design from ancient Egypt, still used to this very day. In four thousand years nothing better had been invented. Two separate bars of wood were bound in the middle by a simple ring. When a wedge pressed in one side, it clamped down the other side. No screws, no gears, one simple thrust of a wedge in one end and the gold was held in the other.

  He held the gold over a large, specially treated block of charcoal. The gold melted into yellow rivers that flowed down the funnels of the charcoal into one-ounce molds. He had to be careful. Molten gold could go right through flesh and bone like a burning penny through butter.

  In such a way, ounce by ounce, did the cellar disappear into its sellable parts. More than eight hundred single ounces of gold, six yet to be cut gem-grade diamonds, a blue sapphire of roughly one hundred and fifty karats, and an awesome pigeon’s blood ruby of at least eighty.

  Lying among the jade lions and topaz pieces waiting for disposal was the strange piece of clay. These were the least worthy items, not worth the bother on the slight possibility one might be recognized.

  The room now reeked of sulphur as he wrapped the ruby in one felt bag and the sapphire in another, and the diamonds first in wax paper and then in boxes. Of all the stones, the ruby was the most delicate. A drop on a table could shatter it.

  He dumped the jade lions and the topazes and the pink-baked clay into a canvas sack, ready to hammer into rubble, but as the hammer raised, he wondered just who could identify a bowl in the center of a mass of gold? And clearly, the bowl had been set in some special way, otherwise something as crude as that clay would have been like a common pebble in a crown. There had to be some reason behind it, and if that were the case, it might have a worth in itself. Or it might be nothing. In any case, unlike the jade lions and the square-cut topazes, it was certainly not going to be remotely identifiable because it had to have disappeared from human sight centuries before the invention of the camera. And certainly the bumptious Vern Andrews didn’t know of it. He didn’t even know it was a saltcellar he was selling.

  The clay bowl came out of the canvas bag and was placed to the side of the valuable pieces. With a crack the hammer came down on the jade and topazes and lapis lazuli, once bright as summer rain, smashing rhythmically until there was only the soft sound of sand. The cutter rushed to get out of the foul-smelling room. The gems were now viewable in proper light, and most sellable. Treasures freed after centuries.

  Claire Andrews almost ran from the stone lions in front of the New York Public Library. She had passed here once with her father and had said that some day she would like to go in, just to see what it was like.

  Now she had to go in, and she felt the city was swallowing her. She couldn’t count the people who passed her as she stood in the mild autumn day at the base of the steps that went on several layers above her to that mass of a building, that thing so large its shelves expanded every year by miles, greater than the distance of the entire Carney shopping district. And this by the spines of the books. She knew that fact. She had read it somewhere.

  What frightened her most, perhaps, was that everyone who passed did not know her. She had wanted all her life not to be treated well just because she was a McCafferty or Vern Andrews’s daughter. And here she h
ad it more than anywhere in the world. She was nobody. She didn’t even have a library card.

  What would happen if she made a fool of herself trying to find a book on saltcellars? What if there weren’t any? What if there never had been? Ridiculous. If anyone knew anything about them, that knowledge had to have been written down somewhere, and if there were a place in the world that would have a good lead, she was looking up at it.

  Did it matter that she would make a fool of herself? Of course it did. It mattered to her. But didn’t people make fools of themselves all the time in libraries? And how different was this from Ohio State? She knew how to research. You couldn’t get out of Ohio State without knowing how to use a library. And how different was State’s library from this? And what was she really afraid of?

  She was not ever going to be more afraid than last night, knowing she was alone for the first time, the realization that made people grownups. There was nothing up ahead of her that could possibly be worse than the 3:00 A.M. of the night before in that bare apartment with only herself.

  Could she turn back? Go back where? It was all gone. Dad was gone. Back was Carney. And she couldn’t go there, and she couldn’t make herself move up the steps to the cavernous mouth of that library with the thousands of people all around, none of whom knew her. Or cared.

  She wanted to be able to stand there forever, not going back to Carney, but not going forward either. She waited for someone to jostle her, perhaps try to pick her up, and thus motivate her to move. But no one did that for her.

  People weren’t even looking at her as strange for just standing there between the big cement lions of the New York Public Library.

  And then she moved a single step because she already knew she had taken the first step before. It was last night when, instead of being overwhelmed by the infinity of a blank wall, she pasted up a piece of paper, and in doing so she had attacked it. Claire Andrews of Carney, Ohio, in her twenty-eighth year mounted the high steps of the New York Public Library, clutching her notebook and purse from pickpockets she was sure abounded in New York City.

  She went through a turnstile and a check of her bag going in, and then she was confronted by more cavernous hallways, and she had to ask someone where the reference library was.

  The words stuck in her throat. She never remembered stammering before, but she was doing it now, even speaking to a guard. It took her twenty minutes to find the main reference library—God, there was more than one—and another five minutes waiting in line to speak to a librarian while her palms sweated and her mouth felt dry, and she was sure she was perspiring.

  “I wonder if you might help me look for this thing I’m looking for,” she said when she got to the front of the line. The man wore eyeglasses. He had a nameplate on his checkered shirt that said Grassi.

  “I’m not from New York, but I rent an apartment in Queens,” she added. “I don’t have a card yet.”

  “Whadya lookin’ for?”

  “Saltcellars. The cellars salt goes into. They were an old form of salt holders.”

  “I know what saltcellars are,” said Grassi. He sent her to a room that had card files that seemed to stretch hundreds of yards. She had to walk to the S’s. People read on pale oak tables illuminated by quiet green covered lights. There were twenty drawers of just the letter S.

  She pulled open the drawer, and it came out in her hand because it was meant to be leafed through on adjacent tables.

  Claire Andrews, she told herself, are you insane? Do you think the New York alphabet is different from the one you had in Carney?

  Her fingers moved through the cards, at first uneasily, but then she found her first reference. There was no book on saltcellars, but there was a book on medieval dinnerware that had two chapters on saltcellars, which led her to another book on sculptors who made them.

  She filled her notepads, found the copying machine, waited in line, and got reproductions of saltcellars.

  The Cellini cellar was like a bowl with an incredibly graceful Neptune on it. She remembered the carving on the blue stone as being Poseidon, which was Neptune. Neptune was the Roman version of Poseidon. She wondered if there were any connection. There didn’t seem to be. This Cellini cellar seemed graceful, a thing of delicate and magnificent form.

  Dad’s cellar was a big trunk of gold.

  There was nothing in the Italian section remotely like it. But saltcellars definitely were European, according to the books. The German saltcellars seemed like boats, boats of salt for the table.

  Was it possible Dad’s piece was not a saltcellar? After all, she had only heard that it was one from Geoffrey Battissen. Would he have lied about that, too?

  She waited on line to get a book on English silversmiths. There never seemed to be lines like this in Carney, and if there were lines she always knew the person behind her or ahead of her. She was glad she didn’t have to talk to anyone. There was too much on her mind. Too much to think about. Too many steps to organize. Why was the line moving so slowly?

  “Hey. What’s holding it up?” yelled someone. She was glad he did.

  Finally she got her book, Bernard Hughes on English silversmiths. On certain utensils, she noticed scrollwork similar to that on Dad’s piece. Unlike the Italians, who made their scrollwork an integral part of the form, British smiths seemed to ignore what they were working on and just layered their scrolls over whatever shape the saltcellar took. Realizing she had observed this, she wondered if she were becoming an art expert. She had never been an expert in anything before. Of course she wasn’t. One observation did not an expert make, but it did an expert begin, until, of course, some expert told her otherwise.

  Nestled under a green shaded light on a long wood table, she found an interesting segment on maker’s marks. Every bit of English gold and silver had to have the maker’s mark since King Edward established the London Assay office in 1377. The marks were lions, leopards, and things like that. But she would have remembered seeing an engraving like that at the base. She tried to remember if she had seen anything like that on Lucky when Dad showed it to her. He had turned it around several times because she was curious about it, wondering if it made some sort of noise or lit up. A lion or a leopard or any engraving like that she would have remembered at nine. Dad’s cellar didn’t have it. And then she turned a page, and they were staring at her, undeniable, blatant, the British saltcellars. Trunks of gold with scrolls. Several of them in the Tower of London on display, others belonging to royalty, and a scant few in private collections. Some had roofs over the salt bowls. Some had bells. But all of them stood massive, trunklike, heavily scrolled. She had found the home of Dad’s cellar. Unmistakably England.

  Suddenly, someone was standing over her.

  “I’m sorry. We’re closing,” said the young man with Grassi on his shirt.

  “Already? Is it three?”

  “It’s five forty-five.”

  “Oh,” said Claire. “Well, what do you know? Almost six. Thank you. What time do you open?”

  “Ten. Do you need some help?” asked Grassi. He wore eyeglasses and had a sweet face.

  “Thank you, no,” said Claire.

  “Can I walk you to the exit? I’m leaving myself.”

  “Sure,” said Claire. She gathered up her notes. It had been a wonderful day. It had been a day of days. She would have the whole evening to cherish what she had done. The big thing was not finding England. The big thing was taking that first step up toward the library. After that England was inevitable. After that, it was all inevitable. She was going to find that time and place where Dad’s cellar was made and track down who had sold it where until that time and that place where she proved he came into possession of it honestly. For some reason the young man escorting her to the door thought she had said she would go out with him.

  “Oh, thank you for asking. That’s so kind,” said Claire. “But no. No. I’m busy.”

  “What about tomorrow night?”

  “I’m busy with work.
I don’t want to go out with you. That’s not too harsh, is it? You don’t think that’s harsh?”

  “Nah,” said the young man. She had hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt him. She wouldn’t have hurt him. But then again, she didn’t have time. Of course she had been too harsh. Was she becoming a New Yorker? Was she living a life where she didn’t have time for people’s feelings now?

  Claire stopped the train of thought, right there. She wanted to share the triumph of her day. Dad would have loved to have heard of this day she had had for herself. Anyone who cared about her would have. She did. She wanted to scream “Hooray for me.” Back home she made a mark on the wall covering the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and tacked up a map of Europe on which she circled England. On the very first day, she was sure she had discovered the saltcellar’s time and place.

  But she did not know the ages she was going to have to explore before she would understand about the cellar her father had possessed for two-score years. Parts were far older than England and even the date ascribed to the birth of the Messiah. And it was newer too, as new as the autumn night, and the cold of the winter yet to come in other cities of the world.

  Artie Modelstein was lying in bed with Trudy, watching a football game between his feet, feeling her comfortably asleep next to him, satisfied that they had, as she had said, “reconnected on significant levels again” when the phone rang.

  Whether his skin could transmit messages he couldn’t know. But Trudy was awake on Claire’s voice.

  “I’m in New York for good now, and I have established a base,” came the twangy cheerleader voice so sure of its own energy that it expected the world to jump with it. “I want you to have my telephone number. I think we can best coordinate if we know what everyone is doing. I’ve discovered some absolutely exciting things.”

  “Look, it’s eleven P.M.”

  “I’m sorry. What’s a good time to get you?”

  “At the office. Maybe ten … in the morning.”