“What’s around the world about New York?” asked the nephew, reaching for a stuffed prune cake, one of many dishes on the long white linen tablecloth, arrayed like a convoy, heaped with cakes, and fish, and sweets, and fruits, and all the religious condiments, such as the sweet and the sour dishes to portray both the joy and the bitterness of the flight from Egypt.
“From London it’s around the world. Go ahead, Claire,” said Esther.
“I believe this captain is after something he has never seen, a relic so powerful that it was deemed in 1588, the year, by the way, that Britain defeated the Armada, too valuable to be shown. It had to be disguised and locked away.”
“What?” asked the nephew. Even Artie leaned forward on his elbows.
“A poorish bowl,” said Claire.
Everyone waited for Claire to continue.
“Well?” asked Esther.
And Claire shrugged. She didn’t have the answer. What dinner bowl could have been so important? Did it have something to do with St. George, an important British saint? She didn’t know. And thus began a guessing match around the table that left Claire feeling somewhat ashamed of herself. She had contributed to the general carnival atmosphere when she had really wanted to share in the seder. Passover was part of her religion, too.
This seder was the reason Easter and Passover occurred in the same season. The seder was what Christians called the Last Supper. Christ had come to Jerusalem just for this ceremony. Everything at this table was now part of Christianity because of what happened from that meal on.
The matzohs the Modelsteins ate represented what was for Catholics the eucharistic wafer that Christ had said would be His body. The cup of Elijah Uncle Mort used was the cup Christ had used to establish the new covenant. It would hold His blood He had promised to shed, His blood like the wine in the cup for the redemption of all mankind. The only things that were different at this seder table were the forms of the dinnerware, she thought. The plates would not have been so flat or uniform. Probably made of clay, common. Nothing nearly so grand. Humble ware.
She looked over at the silvery cup of Elijah. They didn’t have goblets then. The one Uncle Mort used was an imitation of later European styles. Jews would have drunk from something resembling more of a bowl … Suddenly, Uncle Mort spilled the blood red wine on the white tablecloth, and Claire didn’t know if it was because she was shouting.
“Oh my God. Oh Jesus mercy. Oh no,” she cried, pushing herself away from the table. And she knew. She knew everything. She knew what the dates meant and why so many had died, why she and Arthur had to die if she made one false move. She sat there trembling at the Modelstein seder table, shaking her head, saying to herself what she had said on hearing of her father’s death.
“No. No. No.”
XXVI
If he gives way to fear, he is not in company of true knights.
—WALTER MAP
Queste del Saint Graal, 1225
Claire refused to answer questions, accept help, or move. Artie, who had never seen Claire frightened before, now witnessed her face whiten and her hands tremble. Esther wanted to call a doctor.
But Claire, straining to the extent of her discipline, forced herself to stand. Arthur’s hand was there to help her. The cup of Elijah had been spilled in the turmoil of her scream and the blood red wine stained the white tablecloth.
She would not look at it. She asked Arthur to help her to a bathroom, and even as she left, she heard the shocked mumbling begin.
She motioned Artie to come into the bathroom, where she tried to steady herself with two glasses of water that came right back up.
“No,” she said.
“Claire. What?” Artie asked, steadying her with his strong arms.
“Tell everyone I got sick,” said Claire. “And let’s go. We’ve got to go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Do you love them?” she asked, turning up from the sink, facing him. Her blue eyes were reddened and wide, but her lips were hard and tight. She was determined. “Do you love them, Arthur? Answer me.”
“Sure,” said Artie.
“Then tell them I’m sick,” she said, dampening a washcloth to clean her face. “Just tell them.”
“What are you afraid of?” asked Artie.
“Tell them.”
“Hey, you’re the lady who’s not afraid of death.”
“No, Arthur, I’ve never not been afraid of death,” Claire said, trying to get her breath, trying to get her wits, trying not to let the terror seize and shake her again. “I didn’t know we were in danger before.”
“How? Who? What?”
“Not here.”
“If we leave now, that perfect impression you made is blown. Forget it with my sister.”
“If you care about them, about their living, we’ve got to leave now. Let me get cleaned up.”
“Do you really think all my relatives’ lives are endangered?”
“Arthur, I don’t know how you can seriously bother to ask that question. A few lives? Where have you been?” For the first time Artie saw real disappointment in him in her face. He never wanted to see it again.
“What should I tell them?” he asked.
“Just tell them I got sick, an ulcer, anything.”
“Claire—”
“Do it … please,” said Claire, and she breathed deeply, trying to stop the trembling. She had to think. Panic would do no good. It would feel emotionally valid, but it would be destructive.
Waiting for Arthur to return, she went through several ramifications of what they were up against. Every conclusion came down to the fact that they were helpless and there was no place to hide anywhere in the world. There was nowhere they could turn. They had no friends they would not endanger more by sharing what she knew, no government they could trust for certain.
She refused to tell Arthur what was wrong, even when they drove away from the house. She didn’t trust the car. They knew it was his car, just as they knew it was always parked near her apartment, which was bugged. She put a finger to her lips and held up a hand. Because of the apartment, they were practiced now at signaling these things. She could have just suddenly changed the conversation, and he would have known. Ten minutes from the house, she turned on the radio loud and told him to pull over at the earliest convenience.
“I feel like a walk, Arthur,” she said.
Several miles onto the New Jersey Turnpike, he turned into a small rest area with wood benches. New York City many miles away blinked its mass across the Hudson River. There were trees and benches here, and Claire sat down at one of the wooden tables.
“Are you all right, honey?” asked Artie.
“I’m rational. Listen, I am going to be brief and I am never going to repeat this or mention it again. You’ve got to understand this now, before we return to the car. The poorish bowl, the last element in Harry Rawson’s list, is the holiest relic in Christendom, the Holy Grail. During the middle ages, thousands of armored men and entire countries sought that thing. No matter what you or I might think, that is the only explanation for why people are dying, and why Harry Rawson, whose family could not have owned the Tilbury, is killing people for it. It belongs to Great Britain. It has since at least 1588, the year they rose to power, and they lost it in the year that began their decline, the date of what I believe must be a phony Scotland Yard report, undoubtedly prepared for Rawson’s visit to the United States.”
“I can have that checked out.”
“No. My God, when I think I asked you to do that! Absolutely not. When I think of how close I came, I think we are lucky to be alive now. The moment Great Britain believes we know that the poorish bowl is the Grail, I think Captain Rawson will have to kill us.”
“For just knowing?” asked Artie. He hit the wood table set out for motorists to take respite. Traffic whizzed twenty yards away, people who knew where they were going. Everything moved so quickly. He was still trying to fathom the Holy Grail. All he had rea
lly known before was that it was a symbol for unreasonably looking for something impossible to find. And here he was in a turnpike turnoff hearing about it in one sudden, too fast lump.
“That was the only reason they would kill. Why not buy the information? Do you really think a few million dollars mattered to a country?”
“Just to know?” asked Artie. “Just to know?”
“There was no reason he had to kill that Swiss businessman, who would have sold the nails from his mother’s coffin for a price.”
“Gruenwald was tortured to death. He wasn’t bought,” said Artie.
“But if he could have been bought, why was he tortured?” asked Claire.
“Okay, something he didn’t know about, which might have been who sold him the sapphire. He wasn’t part of that world.”
“But Norman Feldman was that world. So why was he tortured?”
“Norman wouldn’t have cooperated. He could be stubborn. I could see him not telling anything just for not telling.”
Claire threw up her hands. They had only the small window of safe time for her to get Arthur to understand what he absolutely had to know if they were to survive.
“Normally, you’re the first to see danger. Why are you resisting, Arthur?”
“The Holy Grail. Big deal. This isn’t Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and stuff like that. This is today. Harry’s a captain in the Argyle Sutherlanders, not Lancelot. I mean just for knowing about it, Claire? So we know. Big deal.”
“The reason they were tortured was because they wouldn’t tell him something, and the reason they didn’t tell him was because they didn’t know, and what they didn’t know was not where was the ruby, or the sapphire, but the last thing, the poorish bowl. Just to know that he asked put them in danger. I’m sure of it.”
“You can’t be sure,” said Artie. But it was more hope than conviction. She held his hands, and the wind played with the little curly wisps of her hair escaping from the bun, in the darkness, and the quick passing lights gave a sudden flat whiteness to her face, a face of grace and charm, of delicate lips and a perfect nose, and, damnit, a mind that could look at torture and file away all its pertinent details when the likes of McKiernan and Marino were talking about curses. That thing in her head that could codify a death scream was saying things Artie did not want to believe were happening.
Anyone else in the world would be less believable, including official Washington or official anywhere. His little Claire was more official for breakfast than the police manual.
Artie looked away at the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike.
“Arthur, listen to me. I am not talking about how you think. You happen to be an American. You don’t believe in those things. But in Europe there are enough people who do. You should have been in the church of Saint Julian with me. You can believe these things have power. Now I am not going to argue whether the poorish bowl is the Grail or not. It’s what people in Britain believe, what the Queen believes.”
“I don’t know what the hell a queen believes,” said Artie.
“And neither do I, to be precise. But someone who sent Captain Rawson on this mission must understand it does not take that many people believing a civilization is over to bring it down, especially not in a country like Great Britain. Through the history of empire, they had that bowl. When it vanished, so did the empire. So did their greatness. From Tilbury field to that Scotland Yard report, do you think it is not worth a few more lives to protect a nation’s stature? That island is going under over there, unless of course you happen to be unaware of anything but the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears.”
“You don’t know,” said Artie. “You can’t be sure. I mean how did you get to the Grail in the first place? We’re sitting at the damned table. You’re making a great impression and then screams. What’s happening, Claire?”
“The Holy Grail, Arthur, is the cup Christ used at the Last Supper. It was a seder like the one we just left. That cup you still call the Elijah cup was the one he raised to announce the coming of Christianity. The middle ages thought it was the most powerful thing left in this world. The poorish bowl your friend from the Royal Argyle Sutherlanders still said he wanted for family tradition.”
“He never made a big deal of it,” said Artie.
“If he did, darling, we would be dead,” said Claire.
“Do you know that for sure?”
“No,” said Claire. “But Harry Rawson was certainly ready to give me a lot of money just to find out what I knew. What could I know, Arthur? Tell me, what could I find out that the British intelligence couldn’t? I wasn’t chasing the gems, I was chasing information.”
“I don’t know,” said Artie.
“And my apartment was bugged, and people were asking about me in Carney, and someone looked through my computer, broke into the apartment just to find out what I knew.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” said Artie.
“What would you have done? Don’t get angry on me, Arthur. What would you have done? Honestly, would you have done anything? Could you have done anything?”
Artie sighed. She was right. He hated her for not telling him, but she was right. He glanced at the cars whizzing by and at the great city across the river, powered by electricity, with satellites overhead, with electronics controlling everything. Would anyone do those things for some superstition about a cup Christ used?
Claire spoke softly and convincingly, and in the end, of course, Artie had to acknowledge it was Claire Andrews, too reasonable Claire Andrews, who presented the facts.
“Arthur, I saw it through history. The Muslims would believe this Christian relic was a lesson because they constantly go about proving Christianity is flawed as well as Judaism. So they would say, ‘Look at this, what the Christians worship.’ And a Jew during the Inquisition might well signal silently his repressed contempt, ‘This is not a thing of God.’ And the jewels scream relic. Well hidden in a saltcellar, never allowed to be used by others, but hidden away like an atomic bomb. And shown once to a possible ally to show England’s strength. It’s a secret as old as Jerusalem, and one we would die for today as sure as in a Spanish court or English dungeon. I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m sorry. I wish it weren’t so.”
“I don’t mind living a kind of a scam, but this is with a gun at our heads. You know. I really don’t know what we can do,” said Artie.
“What you always said. What we’re doing now. We let it go by and never mention it again, and since our apartment is bugged, they will hear us never mention it, and because they will not stop, and because they can move easily throughout the world, they will find their Grail, and then the bugs will be gone, and we will live happily ever after.”
Artie thought about that a moment. “Sure,” he said.
They returned to the car, pausing for one long intense kiss, with the world whizzing by them in the flash of lights in the darkened night of their twentieth century.
“Okay,” said Artie softly.
“Okay,” said Claire.
Back at Claire’s apartment in Queens, they found a bread box–sized package left for them in the inner hallway of the building. It was wrapped in light purple paper. It was from a Mr. Smith in Geneva, Switzerland. Claire tried to place a Geneva researcher. She didn’t have one.
“I’m still sick from this evening,” she said, putting the package addressed to her on the kitchen table of her apartment.
“Want something for your stomach?”
“No. That combination of foods at the seder just tore out my stomach,” said Claire. “Going to bed?”
“Yeah,” said Artie. Knowing she said nothing about the package, he didn’t mention it either. They were going to have to be careful for a long time not to bring up random facts that would force them to backtrack obviously away from subjects. It was almost like pinochle. One did not introduce a new suit when the partner had the lead. And Claire had the lead, and he trusted her with it. He would trust her with anything, he realized
. More than any other detective, more than anyone, this pretty lady from Carney, Ohio, whom he loved.
He watched her unfold the tissue-light purple wrapping from a reinforced gray cardboard box. She did this slowly to avoid a loud rustle. She removed the cover, revealing, strangely enough, an English-language newspaper used as stuffing. In fact, this was one of the editions about the cursed cellar. It even had her name in it, and address, among the other leading notables such as the latest victim and Artie himself. She pulled aside the wrapping and immediately looked up to Artie, putting her finger over her lips.
Very carefully, careful not to touch the object itself, she lifted the paper, revealing a piece of baked clay with a dark splotch in the middle. It was rounded like a bowl. A large chip had been taken out of it, partly by a fine saw, the rest cracked away. It faintly reflected the overhead light in a few spots, showing it had once touched gold for a long time.
“I could go for a cup of tea. How about you, Arthur?” she asked.
“Nah, tea keeps me up. I’ll have some cocoa,” said Artie.
“Cocoa would be good,” said Claire, letting the poorish bowl back down into the box. Arthur enveloped her quickly so she would not fall off the chair.
“Do you want cream in your cocoa?” he asked.
“Cream would be good, Arthur,” she said, and she began to weep silently into Arthur’s broad shoulder.
Sir Anthony did not even wait for the black limousine with the darkened windows to slow down at the designated street corner. He flung open the door and before it was even shut, was yelling at the little man.
“You must stop Rawson now. You’ve got to help us stop him now. Withdraw him.”
“We’ll work with you on that.”
“This is awful. This is horrible,” said Witt-Dawlings, remembering now as he would forever the shock on the face of his monarch, the absolute raging disdain when she heard that indeed in all probability, the horrors were done by the man they had sent after the grail.
She didn’t care that it was the grail. More important than what it was, was what England was. What the monarchy was. Witt-Dawlings was to put himself into the hands of the Foreign Office, and order the intelligence people to recall that man at once.
Quest Page 46
