“Well, it seems that a man reported to Whittlesun Police that his wallet and passport were stolen from him six months ago. When asked why he was carrying around the passport, he said that he regularly takes the Newhaven-to-Dieppe Ferry, which was a reasonable enough explanation. But the reason he waited six months to report it was that he finally began to suspect that it was stolen while he was at that very theatre. You see, he performs in their plays.”
“So, why did Hamm become suspicious of Symington?”
“He didn’t, initially. But he checked all the recent reports of lost passports, both in the local files and with Immigration, and found another filing of a stolen passport three months before the first theft. He called the fellow and asked if he had any connection to Whittlesun Theatre. The man seemed quite proud of his turn as Captain Queeg.”
“Was that passport stolen while he was at the theatre?”
“Not that one. It was taken from his house, he believes. He always kept it in the same desk drawer.” Bartleben recomposed himself on the end of the bed. “But here’s the loop. Both names showed up on Mr. Kamatta’s list. We didn’t find the passports themselves, and so perhaps he finished them, and handed them over to Lasker for future use.”
“We need to check entry points across Britain to see if either character crossed through customs.”
“I’ve started the process, but I need to get back to London.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I have an Air Malta connection in two hours.”
Bartleben saw the idea flit across Peter’s face: he waited for Peter to ask him to arrange tickets for himself and Joan on the same flight. But Peter didn’t say it; in fact, he didn’t come close to saying it. He winced again as he flexed his bandaged arm.
“And what else do we know about Symington’s involvement?”
Sir Stephen moved to the window. The disinfectant smell increased. For some reason, there was no view to be found of the great Valletta Harbour. “How well do you know Detective Hamm?”
“We had our adventure together. I seduced him into danger, I’m afraid. A good man.”
Bartleben turned back to the bed. “Here’s the story, the way I understand it. Hamm went to see Symington. Maybe he was still in the flush of his good detective work regarding the passports, though I expect he was just being fastidious. After some evidently aggressive questioning, Symington admitted he knew of Lasker’s plan to disappear. And now we know that Lasker was planning to abscond with a considerable amount of skimmed profits from the garage, and the proceeds from the shady export scheme. But Symington denied knowing that Lasker was organizing a fraud; he claimed he knew nothing about the cars.”
Peter finished the line of logic. “But he wasn’t in a position to deny knowledge of the theft of the passports from his crew and cast.”
“Symington is in serious trouble. Aside from the aiding and abetting charges that Hamm says will be preferred, he’s likely to be fired from his teaching job and dismissed from the theatre.”
Peter had liked the philosopher in Symington, but had no explanation for his role in the escape. He suspected that he had bought in selectively to the romantic elements of André’s plan and had failed to consider the potential for havoc. Naiveté is also a romantic’s impulse, the belief that all will work out well if motives are pure and trust is established. Taking someone into your confidence is a con man’s first principle. The passport dodge should have alerted Symington to Lasker’s nasty side.
Bartleben returned to his bedside; he began to fidget, and tapped on the iron frame of the hospital bed.
“What are you not telling me?” Peter asked.
“Hamm struck the man. The theatre director’s filed a complaint of police brutality. This all comes from Hamm himself over the phone.”
“Very unlike the Ronald Hamm I know.”
“He told me it was just after he viewed the corpse of Anna Lasker.”
Bartleben moved off a pace, towards the wide door. The conversation wasn’t so much ending as fading out. It had been short, almost abrupt. Stephen had come a long way to offer comfort, and Peter felt a need to offer something back. Unfortunately, Peter’s wrap-up comment came out as a seer’s prediction. “He’ll head back to the cliffs.”
Peter regretted having to confront his doctors, who were merely doing their professional best. After all, their Hippocratic tradition stretched back to the knights themselves, the Hospitallers, who had established the most humane clinics in Europe for their time. The young resident in charge of his case wanted him to remain for observation — echoes of Whittlesun General — but Peter resolved to go. The doctor was intimidated by Joan’s nursing qualifications, and by his patient’s promise to see his own physician as soon as he reached England. The head of surgery — the whole staff knew that a Scotland Yard detective was under their care — argued that Peter needed skin grafts on his forearm, but, at age sixty-seven, Peter wasn’t concerned about cosmetic repairs, and Joan, having forced the staff to unwrap his bandage, expressed optimism that the wound would heal without their monitoring.
But it was Detective Bahti who finally pulled off their exodus. He showed up an hour after Bartleben left for Luga Airport; he had actually shaved for the visit. He appeared nervous to Peter but claimed to be at the hospital merely to check on his nephew. He lightened up as he recounted the events in Marsalforn after Peter passed out, the rush to the helicopter and the flight to the Valletta hospital. To Peter’s amusement, he and Joan hit it off. Since she had been reading Conan Doyle, Joan had acquired a taste for skulduggery and international intrigue. Bahti reminded Peter of Tommy, in his easy way of embellishing stories of criminal mayhem. Crowded around the hospital bed, the three of them spoke in hushed tones, although there was no reason for it. Bahti eventually suggested that he take on the role of chaperone to the two Brits for their remaining day in the capital. Peter perceived that the detective might be angling for a job in the U.K. — he mentioned the Metropolitan Police three times — but as the impossibility of this became self-evident, Bahti had the discretion to drop it. He went to see Peter’s young doctor (to whom he claimed blood links) and recommended that he guide the couple to the cathedral, as a test of Peter’s stamina. The detective guaranteed that Peter would return for a final examination at the clinic. Only then would the decision be made to let him fly home.
As it turned out, their visit to the church of the knights wasn’t quite the lark their little cabal planned.
At first, the doctors resisted Bahti’s test: the cathedral would be extremely crowded in the early afternoon; it would be better to rest for a day more. But, as the trio escaped into the Mediterranean sun, Joan and Bahti watching Peter for signs of enervation, the fresh air and the opportunity to leave behind the banality of the clinic to engage in a “tourist experience” revived Peter, and they maintained their happy, conspiratorial mood.
Bahti led them through the side streets of old Valletta, up from the seaside hospital, until they emerged onto Republic Street and found themselves facing the pillared entrance to the Co-Cathedral of St. John. It was referred to as the “Co-Cathedral” since it shared primacy on the island with the church in Mdina, the old capital. The mass of tourists, as had supplicants for centuries before them, waited in an obedient line that trailed down the dusty front steps. Peter again noted the Arab influence in Malta; much as the Knights of St. John might have resisted the Ottoman assault in the Great Siege, the East had everywhere shaped the look of the island. The detective ignored the line of visitors and led them past the crowd into the cool antechamber, the air and shadows anticipatory of the sacred rooms beyond. Bahti approached the nearest custodian. His whisperings led the docent to shake his head in sympathetic sadness, and he looked over at Peter with concern. Bahti led them around the ticket booth, picking up audio guides on the way. He paused before they could gain the interior of the church and reached for Peter’s hand.
“I promise to pick up two British Airways tickets
out of Luga for the morning. I will call you on your mobile to set a rendezvous time. If Albanoni will let me, we will meet again at the airport.”
Peter shook his hand and Joan kissed him on the cheek. Left alone, they stopped to get their bearings, always a wise approach in a cathedral cavern as vast as this one. He had experienced Chartres and Toledo and other great churches, and he had felt a competitive tone to most of them, an impulse towards excess in decoration and dimension, designed to outdo other monuments to God. He at once felt the difference here. Yes, every corner was filled with carving and embellishment, each side chapel lavishly honouring a suborder of knights, but this house of God, entirely baroque in its formal style, displayed another sensibility: defiance. This, it was immediately evident, was a warrior’s church, not so much built to glorify the deity as to exalt His soldier servants and commend, unapologetically, their armoured souls to heaven.
Although he had visited hundreds of churches, Peter never knew where to begin in exploring the many-mansioned maze of a Catholic cathedral. In this church, erected by the knights to memorialize themselves, the altar down the long nave to the left seemed to both him and Joan a good place to start. Alone in a church, Peter often experienced a kind of gestalt, a claustrophobic reaction to the hermetic chapels and tombs: how did I get here, at the exotic end of the world? But this time, with Joan accompanying him, the sensation was different. They were on an adventure together, and this new, absolute and self-contained universe suited their mood. He felt good, the drugs suppressing the pain in his arm but leaving him fully awake. As they wandered up to the altar beneath the great vaulted ceiling, cherubs by the hundreds vying with full-feathered seraphim on every gilded pilaster, Joan whispered, “I never remember the difference between rococo and baroque.”
“I don’t know either,” Peter whispered back. “Why don’t we just count the angels?”
There were no depictions of the Annunciation on the walls over the altar, but he did discover a fine painting of Mary’s visit to her sister Elizabeth, at which she announces her miraculous conception. Peter pointed to it, but Joan had already stepped well back from the altar and was examining the amazing inlaid floor that ran the length of the nave. The knights had commemorated all their comrades who had perished in the Great Siege of 1565, and then made room in the cathedral floor for the gravestone panels of successive Grand Masters. The stones set into the floor, one after another, were elaborately decorated with pieces of white, black and orange marble; most pictured skeletons holding scythes or weapons, resulting in a Grand Guignol, Halloween impression. But the displays, replete with escutcheons and banners, helmets and pikes, honoured noble dying as the precondition to eternal living. Each tomb was annotated with prayers of intercession and encomiums to the heroic deeds of these Soldiers of God. The defiant Knights of St. John knew all the angles on Death.
Back a few more metres into the nave, Joan’s eye was caught by a panel that depicted a smiling skeleton jauntily poking a bony finger at the shield of one of the Grand Masters, a Knight of Provence, who had died in 1601 and was now interred in a direct line from the main altar. She read the inscription: In mortis starabo ante Filium hominis.
“In death I will stand before the Son of man,” she translated. Peter had by now wandered off to a side chapel in search of Annunciation scenes, but the acoustics allowed him to hear her clearly. He went back to the nave, avoiding stepping on the inlaid tombstones, and stood beside her. She repeated the inscription.
“I bet he’ll stand before Him as an equal,” Peter said.
They passed two hours in the cathedral, entered all the chapels and read every inscription. They were eventually drawn to a separate chamber that held the Caravaggios, huge paintings depicting the Beheading of John the Baptist and Saint Jerome Writing, the latter showing the saint contemplating a skull. The former scene depicted the seconds before John’s bloody execution. On a floor panel placed equidistant between the masterpieces, a rictus-grinning skeleton was shown climbing out of a long coffin. The cathedral provided a full education in the notions of death and eternity, of great deeds and salvation. They left chastened and quiet, and not quite prepared for the afternoon sun.
They went only as far as the terrace outside the cathedral, where they ordered lemonades. Peter checked his messages and found that Bahti had succeeded in getting them a midday flight the next day.
Freed for the balance of the day, he and Joan wandered to a café on nearby Theatre Street and ate a leisurely meal. Peter ordered a Cisk beer, and a second. His arm had begun to throb from about the moment they entered the chapel with the Caravaggios, but he didn’t tell her. They toasted one another. It was time to get back to England, to begin the final act of the tragedy of Anna and André Lasker.
CHAPTER 28
The coppers had come up short. Had doomed themselves with their hackneyed Big Story. Had begun to believe it themselves. The Rover despised them. They told everyone they were scribing the arc of a chronicle across the cliffs, and all they had to do was wait. They would soon preside over his dying fall into a screaming sea; it was inevitable, they said. But his fate — neither biblical, nor mythical, nor tabloid lurid — wasn’t in their hands.
Not until they saw through their own disgraceful, slack assumptions. They took solace in their bureaucracy. How dare they consign their faith into mere watching to get the job done? You have to deserve to win. They kept a vigil and patrolled and scanned the serrated shoreline, the saw blade that slashed back at the sea, that was now giving in by measures to the massed tides.
In this killing zone, where was there room for the rational, the settled? They imagined the shore to be linear, like their thinking, but how could that be correct when the rocks fell in sections each day and reshaped themselves each night into images no more fixed than figures in the clouds? Viewed from space, the land shifted no less than the hurricane whirls around its eye, day after day fragmenting the hunters’ best maps into useless fractals.
No wonder they couldn’t find him. He’d baited them with spurious clues. “Six kilometres” was a false, nonbinding mark on a sextant; he could kill from any distance, and planned to do so very soon. He had looked up “6.” It was the day of Man’s creation, a lucky number on the die and the mark of Pythagorean luck. And there were six senses. There were seven senses if you counted prescience. Maybe tomorrow he would switch to “7.” Or seven could signify sex, the strongest sense.
He would never be caught by the policeman’s linear arithmetic but only, maybe, by the mystic’s algorithm. He preferred to kill in sanctified places within sight of the ocean waves, but he wasn’t wedded to them; he could kill under an oak tree for all it mattered to him. He liked the ritual, but there are many rituals. That’s what makes a horse race, or a religion. God, he felt good. He might perform his rituals in another county, another country, or on another shore. Scotland might be nice.
As the saying goes, he wasn’t looking for trouble, but he was looking out for trouble. There were hunters with tiny pieces of the puzzle. That detective in black, who asked some of the right questions but failed to read between the lines of the answers. The others had shunned him. There was the girl in the cloak — why did she dress in a cloak? That bothered him — who showed up like a wraith in unexpected places along the coast. There was the reporter and her competitive drive to confirm every one of the trite morality tales peddled by the Task Force. She might venture out on the rocks once too often. First, he would reward her: one more girl should blow the story national and give her the scoop she craved. The story would be irresistible; it sure was overdue. They couldn’t suppress it any longer. For the endgame, he would change his “pattern” and go after the damsel in the cloak.
Let the games begin!
Finally, there were an irritating number of policemen doing just about everything but look for him. What the devil did they think they were doing out there on the cliffs? It was getting so crowded. It was probably a good time to move on.
Oh
, and there was one other, a new one. Looked like a hermit, dressed in that cloak. Was it possible that he was a kindred spirit?
They wouldn’t find him, because not one of them could integrate the pieces. There was no tried-and-true, no plodding towards the truth. Only a mutation could catch him. Only a mutation could catch a mutation.
But first he would snare the cloaked girl, the one with the red hair.
The ache in Peter’s arm refused to fade away. It was all the more irksome, since he needed to be in fighting trim for his descent to Whittlesun. He had taken the train up to London to St. George’s, the hospital that served the Yard, but his doctor would prescribe only time and low-level painkillers for his wound. It had been three days; the gash had stayed clean, thanks to Joan. The doctor, a man older than Peter by several years, promised that it would heal with an “ugly but not angry” scar. He thought that Peter, almost Frankensteinian already with scars, might like the imagery. As a novice policeman, Peter had been horrified by his first cicatrix, a slash wound from a Liverpool brawler, but now, like much else in his profession, superficial wounds were exactly that, nothing more. He was indifferent to the surgeon’s joking. “Your corpse will be easy to identify,” the doctor added, making Peter think of Bartleben; it was his kind of bureaucrat’s joke.
At the cottage, Peter assembled hiking gear, heavy boots and gloves, along with a squall jacket; he also dredged up a set of Royal Marine–grade binoculars. He called Tommy Verden and they compared lists of equipment. Tommy would pick him up two days forward. In normal circumstances, he would have notified Maris and Jack McElroy, but the hassle was too much. If they met Task Force operatives on the heights, he would explain their presence as best he could. Peter wouldn’t be alone. As well as Tommy, he would mobilize Bartleben to reinforce his expedition from London. Jerry Plaskow, with his tabulations and his knowledge of the coast, would be invaluable in their search for Lasker. Finally, he would enlist Ron Hamm in the cause.
Walking Into the Ocean Page 35
