“She wanted to know how we ever could have ever employed anyone like that in her service. Or yours for that matter,” said Sir Anthony feeling the rage of his helplessness, and venting the force of his despair.
“For one, in the context of a feudal state like Banai, what Captain Rawson did was not out of order. Secondly, I assumed that in a different circumstance, such as return to the western world, Captain Rawson would put aside what he was known to do in Banai. Thirdly, when you send one man alone, you end up without any safeguards or checks. So that is how it was possible, and please do tell Her Majesty that on your return.”
“I am not to return to her service,” said Sir Anthony.
“Would you like me to open the window?” asked the little man.
“No,” said Sir Anthony. “It doesn’t really matter. Thank you.”
“Perhaps you should see a doctor now,” he said buzzing down the motor driven window with a switch.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Suicidal thoughts can be treated. I’ve seen this before.”
“Oh no. That’s not for me, thank you. Please do shut the window.”
“Why?”
“I think I am going to weep, possibly now.”
Captain Harry Rawson had no intention of answering the four messages left around the world from Witt-Dawlings. He was too close to getting the poorish bowl. He would return to England with it and without anyone knowing the Crown had ever wanted it.
He would deliver it casually. He allowed himself the luxury of imagining how he would do it. Bring it in a little paper box, and leave it on a table as they spoke, and then, almost as an afterthought, nod to Sir Anthony that ‘that was it, if the Queen’s secretary still wanted Britain’s Holy Grail.’
The cab stalled in the heavy dusty traffic of Cairo. The air was oppressive, and, of course, the car’s air conditioning didn’t work. If it weren’t new, only the basics worked in any car in these countries.
The driver apologized for the delay.
In Arabic, Rawson told him the delay did not matter and recited the old Arabic proverb that patience was faster than haste.
He knew the driver’s delight at sharing the language was totally fraudulent. This meant the driver had to watch how he swindled him on price, on what he might ask of a policeman, on what he might say to someone in the street. Certain nonsense would have to be eliminated, nonsense designed to engender a larger tip.
It was good to be in his second home again, and Rawson crossed his legs comfortably. Even though the suit was feather light and designed to breathe, he perspired profusely. The trick with this, as with the pain of a hangover, was just to ignore it.
The cracked leather seat of the taxi smelled of a thousand asses, accumulated gas, the garbage of the streets, and the stench that accompanied many cities of the Third World.
Rawson did not mind. He had come a long way. He had endured much and overcome much, and like any modern knight, his greatest sacrifice would be that it would all be unrecorded. No one had recorded at Balaclava what a man’s entrails looked like being pulled along by his fear crazed horse. It was all that and worse, and he had chosen it, and now without sword or Christian purity, but with skills learned in the Banai security headquarters and his ability to use a modern intelligence network, he was close to it.
The ruby dealer, out of persistence, or just the nasty brass of his last breaths, had given him the name of someone quite logical to have stolen the cellar from the art dealer. A fence in Brazil. It had taken a week to ferret that one out as an impossibility. The fence identified by the ruby dealer turned out not to have left Rio for a year. Why Feldman sought to delay, Rawson did not know, unless, of course, it was an old intelligence trick used by men who understood that when a man held your body, you had to provide something, so along with the accurate information, you salted your misleads. But a delay was all the old Jew had bought.
The problem in finding out who had really dealt with Feldman was that Feldman did not use names over the phone, not even of the person he was speaking to, but always assumed someone was listening. And this meant that the many people who did go to his office had to be identified laboriously. It became too much of a strain on an already increasingly skeptical intelligence network, skeptical inasmuch as it was becoming more reluctant to perform extensive work without some explanation.
Fortunately, or perhaps logically, Harry Rawson was not sure that the big ruby had to be paid for by someone. A stone so recently stolen was not going to be entrusted to Feldman by a thief on just a word. This was not some museum or the three known major ruby dealers doing business. This was a thief. Therefore Feldman had to have something for insurance, collateral, if it were not sold outright.
If Feldman had paid cash for the great ruby, Rawson might have taken much longer picking up the trail. But Feldman had paid in kind, in fact with a large ruby that he was known to have. When that surfaced in Cairo for sale, Harry Rawson knew he had his man.
There was a whole slew of rubies suddenly for sale, not as great as the Christ’s head, but most certainly of significant gem quality. All for sale in Cairo and all by Peter Thorsen, recently of Switzerland and recently of another name.
The taxi arrived at the exclusive address just outside the main city. Here large white buildings separated by luxurious distances straddled the Nile banks. Here the air was clean. Here were patios and white-coated servants and broom-swept streets for the cars. He took one look at the large single-story house with the iron gates and told the driver to return him to Cairo. He obviously had the wrong address, he said.
That night, at about 11:00 P.M., when parties were just getting going in such a rich neighborhood, Rawson returned in a rented car. The gate was locked, but there was a speaker system with a buzzer. He was surprised when it worked.
“Yes?” came the voice.
“I’m looking for Mr. Thorsen,” said Rawson.
“Who are you?”
“A mutual friend said you had some fine stones to sell.”
“Come back in the morning.”
“If you say so, but really, I hate to carry so much money on me. I was hoping, after all, to have gems to bring with me.”
“Drive in, but when you come to the door, stand away,” came the voice. The gate opened with a buzz, and Harry Rawson pushed it open, returned to his car, and drove through as the gate closed behind him.
He stood at the entrance. Electronic devices with camera eyes and possibly x-ray souls set into the entablature over the driveway scanned his body. The system was a crude German make. They were all so much alike, however. As soon as they were manufactured, every intelligence agency had their flaws catalogued. They were, in effect, only useful against local thieves and local police.
“Turn around,” came the voice, and Rawson did a small pirouette, humoring the man.
“Is that little penknife in your left pocket the only weapon you’re carrying?”
“I would hardly consider this a weapon,” said Rawson, taking the knife out of his pocket and opening the little blades, even the one with the scissors. The man apparently had infinite faith in electronics, the armor of the latter part of the twentieth century. Rawson knew the system could not detect nonmetal objects.
“All right,” said the man called Thorsen, and clicked open the door.
Thorsen sat with a .357 Magnum in front of him on an elegant little marble table. Rawson raised his hands, and Thorsen nodded him to a seat much more than an arm’s length away. Rawson shut the door behind him.
“I didn’t see your other pocket. What’s the bulge?” asked Thorsen.
“Nothing,” smiled Rawson, taking the box of two-inch hospital adhesive tape out of his left pocket and offering it for inspection right over Dr. Peter Martins’s gun, which was made suddenly useless by foolishly letting a well-trained British agent get closer to it than its former owner.
It was not a hard move, and he was surprised that Martins was so slow. He was sure now that this
was the one who had delivered that professional blow, but he had to make sure, as he had made sure with Feldman. It was not Feldman who had killed the art dealer with that alarmingly professional stroke.
Martins did little more than squirm as Rawson taped his hands to the arms of a chair; probably, like most he thought he could talk his way out. The purpose initially was to break the will, and talking was a waste of time. One made the subject sure the pain would go on forever, and then as a sudden arbitrary blessing, it would stop and the tape be removed.
Harry Rawson opened the knife and used the scissors to snip a cut between earlobe and jaw. He wiped the blade off on Dr. Martins’s shirt, put it back in his pocket, and slowly pulled the ear away from the cheek to maximize subject’s pain. Pull. Wait. Pull. Wait. Subject’s eyes widen, subject tries to bend with ear, to lessen tear, subject screams silently, pupils dilating full, body heaving in chair attempting to keep head still to preserve ear.
“Shh,” said Rawson. Release subject’s ear. “Shh.”
Establish authority over subject. “You will tell me things.” Subject nods head. Touch hanging ear. See pupils dilate.
“You will not scream.”
Eyes tear. Head nods slightly, trying not to move ear.
It had begun as it had begun so many times. Now the tape could be removed slightly from subject’s mouth. Information: Dr. Martins was the one who had killed Geoffrey Battissen with the professional blow. Not trained for that, but surgery. Graver was handy, so was back of head. More of an accident than anything else. Subject had set up Feldman as decoy. Subject had indeed found poorish bowl but had sent it off. By mail. To address and person now being named. Why her?
To save subject what he was enduring now.
And Rawson asked the question. He asked it in English. And he asked it in French. And the man groaned, and cried, and strained in his bonds, and Rawson forced himself to remember that this was just a subject.
The most necessary question had yet to be answered.
Why did subject think anyone would be tortured over knowledge of a bowl?
“You’re after the bowl. I don’t have it. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want it. I don’t know. I won’t know,” groaned Martins, closing his eyes against pain. They did that. So many did that.
Subject knew it was the bowl, and if he lived he would know it was the bowl, and no one could be allowed that. To know it was the bowl Great Britain was after or to know it was a “poorish bowl” someone would kill for, to know how important a seemingly lowly bowl was was to ask that first right question that could lead to the one answer Rawson had promised he would never allow. The Crown could not allow the question to be answered.
Why the bowl?
Why that bowl?
This was realistically the most dangerous risk of exposure of Her Majesty’s secret …
Subject had to die. Gotbaum had not gotten that far before his heart gave out. And Gruenwald did know the identity of the man who sold him the sapphire, only proved after the torture began. But he did know Rawson, so he had to die. Especially after the bodyguard had to be disposed of to get to him in the first place. And then, of course, Feldman. Crafty Feldman with the misinformation. He knew it was the bowl because there were more questions after he had offered up the ruby. And he, of course, knew Rawson.
They all had to die. Vern Andrews was an accident of the Foreign Office. Battissen the work of Martins. But the rest, all seemed to get going like this. They always got going.
It happened in these times, no matter how hard Rawson tried to be professional, no matter how he told himself he was dealing with a subject and not a person, it almost always became a person, a groaning person, a person open to everything you wanted to give it, excruciating, teasing suffering that could seize Rawson with a passion that consumed will and even presence of mind.
It had started almost as soon as his revulsion subsided in those early days in the Banai security headquarters, where he learned how Hadir kept slaves honest and couriers more honest, where the truth could be tickled and banged and grabbed and torn out of a person, where he felt his own body tasting the pain, licking the groans like a hungry dog. It was evil. It was vile. And more often than not, he would leave the headquarters with an exhilarating sense of release and a sticky stain in his pants.
As others in the headquarters assured him, this was not unmanly, but a sign of manhood. Many torturers felt that, the good ones at least.
And he had become good.
And so he took Dr. Peter Martins in the expensive suburb of Cairo, and in the morning, Dr. Martins was found with the tape over his mouth, both ears torn off, and his belly opened over his pants, while Harry Rawson was in flight to New York City.
XXVII
He who was the paragon of knighthood strove so furiously that he drove his opponents back, doing them such damage with his keen sword-edge that no armour could prevent his spilling their bodies blood.
—WALTER MAP
Queste del Saint Graal, 1225
“Gee, is it good to hear from you, Harry,” said Artie.
“Yes, what’s happening, old boy? You’ve been phoning me at the Sherry Netherland. You’ve phoned my London flat. You’ve even left word at the embassy.”
“Yeah, Harry. I’ve got good news,” said Artie, keeping the voice not too upbeat, even faking a smile at his end of the telephone at Frauds.
“Must be,” said Rawson. “I say, where is Claire? Has she forgiven me yet?”
“Don’t you wanna hear my good news?”
“Decidedly.”
“I think I’ve run across your poorish bowl. I can try to get it as a collar, in which case we may lose it. Or I can set up a buy for you, some secluded place and they hand you the bowl.”
“I should rather the latter.”
“Let’s meet for dinner tonight,” said Artie.
“What about lunch?”
“Tight. We’d have to make it about one-thirty or two.”
“Fine. I’m at the Sherry Netherland. Do bring Claire. I think I can come to some arrangement that would be satisfactory to all parties involved. I never did wish to prove her father a thief, you know. Tell her that, if you would.”
“Sure. And good to have you back,” said Artie, who knew now that Rawson had tried to reach Claire first. “I’ll do that. And you do want her to come for lunch then?”
“If she’s willing.”
“Sure,” said Artie and hung up. He saw wet blotches on the black receiver. Sweat. If he smoked, he would have lit up now. He noticed his hand was shaking when he reached for a pencil.
He wrote down the time Rawson had phoned. It was 10:22. Claire should be in the air by now, that is if she had gotten to the airplane, that is if everything were working according to plan. Plan? It wasn’t a plan. It was a path through a nightmare. And the nightmare was being awake, hearing Claire explain what was going on in the world, what had been going on in the world.
In a nightmare he could wake up. Claire had awakened him to this one. What could he do? Go back to sleep? He had been sleeping. She was the only one awake.
He had wanted to reach out for the protection of the police. He was a policeman. He could call on that. But Claire had pointed out too convincingly that it was more probable his own government would back Rawson over Arthur. And this included the police force, not necessarily his brother officers, but certainly the superiors. The higher up one went in the police department the more vulnerable the person was to government pressure. Arthur just could not count on them.
She had thought it all through. They had to reach Rawson first. They had to get Rawson going in the only direction he could, and still it was all too chancy. Artie wished he had learned to reason. He was sure there had to be a safer way. It was just that he could not think of it. And, more important, neither could Claire.
The night before she had been weeping silently in his arms. They both knew they were dead, and they could not talk about it because the place wa
s bugged, and between them was the poorish bowl, the mention of whose name had killed so many. Her Majesty’s Holy Grail, Great Britain’s lease on greatness. Tell me where it is, old boy, and then die because you know I asked. Die because just telling me who was down the road was not enough. Die if you tell me what I want to know, old boy, old chap. Charge. Ours not to reason why.
Who had sent it? Someone who knew what Artie and Claire knew and hoped the monster would take them as his last sacrifice.
When Claire had stopped trembling, she gave Artie a quick kiss as though she were off to the office and then got a yellow legal pad and a pen and sat down in the living room. She used the sofa, away from a window, scribbling, pausing to think, and then going on.
She asked for tea and gave him a smile. The fear was still in her eyes, but there was that courage he used to think was insanity. He saw her tilt her head back and forth, weighing something and then scribbling some more.
She looked up at him once, at the chair on whose edge he had been sitting so long it cut into his buttocks, and gave him a wink. He walked over to the couch to see what she was writing and then he shook his head violently at her. She raised a hand, signaling everything was all right. Artie put his hand to his forehead. What he had seen was words like Grail, Empire, Death, Survival, Torture, Advantages, Benefits, Losses, Risks, and, of course, her weighted probables and improbables. They were subject headings. She was putting them into writing, all under the four levels of probability she used to find her way through history. He thought putting it into writing was too much of a risk, but her hand signaled she somehow had taken care of that.
About three o’clock, Artie dozed off with his head in her lap while she used his chest as a pad rest. His gun, instead of in the closet where he usually put it when off duty, rested on the floor near his right hand. The “tulip” he had given her for Christmas was ready nearby in case somehow someone might get in and force him to surrender his own weapon.
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