by F. G. Cottam
Wheatley was silent for a moment. He said, ‘I learned to cross an ocean without spending every waking moment vomiting over the side. I think that was probably my single greatest accomplishment, Father. And, of course, I learned to tie a fairly impressive array of nautical knots.’
Lascalles nodded. He looked at his glass on the table they shared. If anything, it was getting gloomier in the dugout, the wick of the storm lamp hung behind Wheatley burning ever shorter and its flame more feebly. There was just enough light for Lascalles to see the liquid in his glass tremor with the shock through the earth of great and distant shells exploding.
‘You don’t believe in magic, Father Lascalles,’ Wheatley said. ‘No more than you believe in God. No more than I do. This meeting is a charade. I think you should do the dignified thing. Give me a clean bill of spiritual health. Then go home and struggle with your own absence of faith.’
Lascalles took his matchbox from his pocket and shook free a match and stroked it sharply against the rough side of the box. He smoked a pipe in those days and his English waterproof matches were the long-shafted, brighter-burning sort designed to kindle a reluctant bowl of pouch tobacco. Wheatley held out the flat of a palm to shield himself from the glow of the flame and Lascalles saw two things. He glimpsed a couple of the bronze symbols strung from the runic bracelet on Wheatley’s exposed wrist. And he saw the skin on Wheatley’s brow, below his cap, above the raised gloved fingertips hiding his eyes from the flare of sulphorous light.
‘His skin was white, the colour of soft cheese,’ he told Mason and Seaton, both sipping wine now, instead of water, from their goblets. ‘And it was moving. It was stretching and pulsing as though tiny worms wrestled beneath it as it repaired itself, regained its life and cell structure. There seemed something both urgent and furtive about the process. It was hideous. Seeing that, knowing the significance of the symbols strung around his wrist, I knew that the bombardier whose testimony I read had been telling only the unembellished truth.’
‘Did Wheatley say anything?’
‘He said, “You’ve the manners of a potato farmer, Father. I’ve been disfigured by a gas shell and don’t wish to be stared at until I’m properly healed.” And then he laughed. Of course, he laughed.’
‘But you’d exposed him,’ Mason said.
‘My son, it was I who had been exposed. I had strutted through the English trenches to our assignation, the master of situations. For over a year by then, my secret scepticism, my clandestine but total lack of belief had protected me. I was immune to the dangerous optimism engendered by faith. I understood the meaninglessness of war and life. I had long ceased entertaining hope. I was perfectly equipped for survival. And then I saw what I saw that afternoon and was confounded. And exposed.’
Seaton said, ‘What did you say in your report?’
‘Only that I could not wholeheartedly recommend him.’
‘And what happened?’
‘I believe he was given a medal, decorated and then transferred. You have to understand the circumstances. Canvas field hospitals adrift in seas of mud, staffed by boy doctors recently qualified in the genteel examination rooms of Edinburgh or Oxford. Young men engulfed in horror. And the Germans did use experimental ordnance. Both sides did. His story would have been more plausible than the truth. That’s assuming he was even subjected to an examination. I cannot tell you if he was. I can tell you that I never saw him again and remained, in a curious way, always grateful to him.’
‘He restored your faith,’ Mason said.
‘He did, Nicholas. He proved to me there is a Devil. And what on earth would be the point of a Devil, my friends, without a God?’
Mason excused himself. He said that he wanted to smoke and would feel more comfortable doing so outside. Lascalles assured him that smoking was a tolerable vice in the room they were in, but Mason was emphatic. It was a lie. He had no cigarettes on him and no intention ever of smoking another one again. He had smoked all he had in Whitstable and bought no more on the TGV, where supplies in the buffet had been plentiful and cheap. The truth was, he had been shocked by how short of breath he’d felt on the run in the morning with Seaton. A decade of alternating between self-pity and fear had done little evident harm to the Irishman’s lungs or legs. His bank balance and love life may have suffered, but his fitness was impressive and his pain threshold surprisingly high. It had taken seven tough miles to bleed the competitiveness out of Seaton and the experience had left Mason short-winded and somewhat disgusted with himself. He liked to win. It was a matter of pride. And he liked to be in the best shape he could. That was a matter of survival.
He walked through a chilly vestibule that smelled of wood polish and holy water. The priest had offered them wine but, as with the food, had taken none himself. Mason well remembered how spartan had been the conditions they had found him in, huddled over his rosary, at that riverbank in Africa. Here, he suspected that Lascalles lived even less indulgently. Was it habit? Was it penance? The opulence of the library they had been shown to was strictly for public consumption. This seminary sang with the hard and vibrant piety of self-denial and rededication. He knew without having to see them that Lascalles’ quarters here would in no way reflect the man’s pastoral history or present distinction. They would make no concession, either, to frailty or to age. His choice would be a stone cell and a truckle bed and maybe the luxury of a bucket under it to piss in during the night. Lascalles was not here, as Seaton had assumed, to count out his last days in smug contemplation of his own past spiritual glories. Lascalles was here to purify his soul and face his maker and His judgment.
It was cold in the courtyard. The snow was soft and powdery under his feet in the cold. It had stopped snowing. But there were four inches of fresh powder light as spun flour under his feet and Mason wished for a moment, with all his heart, he was occupying one of the chalets in the town below, looking forward to taking the cable car to the top of the glacier in the morning. He closed his eyes and pictured the long tricky traverse and the steepling off-piste descent he had skied down so often from the top of the glacier, descending through the pale wilderness, with its blue shadows and silences. Turning ever downward. Down the remembered valley into Argentière.
He knew the mountains, too. He had climbed Mont Blanc and the Grande Jorasse and the Matterhorn as part of his training. It had been challenging and interesting to learn to do. And Mason had enjoyed the technical demands and accomplishment of each of his climbs. But he had loved far more to ski. With his eyes still closed, he felt as though he was very nearly grieving for the sensation of it now. Jesus. It was almost as though the Irishman’s sadness was a contagion, as though Paul Seaton’s persistent melancholy had crept uninvited into his own psyche.
He opened his eyes. But the mood would not lift from him. He thought for a moment about the Irishman’s lost unreconciled love. Lucinda had been her name. He’d had lovers of his own, but he didn’t think he’d loved any of them the way Paul Seaton had so briefly and poignantly loved Lucinda Grey. He’d had more than his share of drunken one-nighters. He’d had a fairly prolonged passionate romance in Germany, interrupted by the professional complications of postings and leave. And he’d embarked on a dangerously stupid affair in Ireland with the wife of a Provo quarter-master. He’d done it simply to spite the man, a murderous player regarded as untouchable for ‘operational’ reasons no one ever properly explained to Mason. But he’d become very fond of Sinéad, with her grey eyes and her lethal temper. She’d never have left the bastard, though, regardless of the circumstances. The love of her two young kids welded her to the marriage.
If he thought about it, nearly all of Mason’s significant relationships had been with other men. He’d taken lives and he’d saved them, too. More of the latter, he hoped, than the former. He had hated his enemies and he had sincerely loved his comrades. And he had shared his own life most intensely when its very survival had depended on their loyalty and their courage, and their coolness unde
r fire, with his brothers in arms.
Except for his sister. She was the exception to his soldierly rule. He loved his sister very much. He loved her more than he loved anyone. He loved her innocence and possibilities and the incandescent brightness of her nature. She was a one-off, was Sarah. When they made her, they broke the mould. He knew that a big part of his love for her was selfish, because the thought of facing the world without a blood relative left living was a terrifying one. It meant familial destruction, stark isolation. It gave that dark word, loneliness, the depth of an abyss. His mates loved him, if they loved him, through his deeds and wisecracks. Sarah just loved him. And he loved her. And it wasn’t entirely a selfish love. It couldn’t be. Because Nick Mason knew that he would give his life protecting hers.
Sell, he thought, rather than give. Sell was by far the more accurate term. And not cheaply, either. It had started to snow again and he looked upward and blinked against the heavy flakes drifting down against vaunting walls. Nick Mason would never have given his life. That was alien to his nature. But he would sell it for his sister’s sake. And he knew that whoever tried to take it would be obliged to pay a painfully heavy price.
He sighed. It was a nice thought to go back in on, that, after the satisfaction of his fictional cigarette. It sounded just the right note of defiant machismo Paul Seaton would have expected from him. He suspected that Seaton didn’t rate him, thought him little better than a boorish stereotype. But that was okay. He didn’t really rate Seaton, not in a fight, he didn’t. Seaton’s bottle had gone a long time ago. It wasn’t his fault, but it was a fact, nevertheless. Seaton was shot. They were going to have to go to the Fischer house and confront the thing that held the three surviving girls in thrall. Theirs was a desperate enterprise, compelled by need but with scant chance of success. Mason could feel in the reluctant recesses of his soul that this was going to be much more dangerous than his encounter in Africa had been. And he knew in his soul that he had only been the victor then by a breath.
What worried him more than the frailty of his ally, though, was the Havana-loving enigma, Malcolm Covey. Covey possessed an oily omnipresence. He was slippery and clever. And the vague unexplained ambiguity of him was disconcerting. Mason had started to feel a faint menace at the mention of his name. He would have to ask the priest about Covey. Seaton could be appallingly stupid, for someone reasonably bright. But there were no flies on Monsignor Lascalles. Not yet, there weren’t. He turned a circle on the balls of his feet, taking in the heights of gloomy stone and the pale void of falling crystals above them. He pulled in a breath that stiffened his lungs with cold, and followed his own fading footprints back inside.
He met with silence on his return. But it was a companionable silence, there in the library. He knew that Seaton and the priest knew that he had not escaped its enclosure for a cigarette. But he knew equally that in the scheme of things, his small deception mattered to neither of them.
‘Something else happened, didn’t it, Father? Something else happened in Wheatley’s dugout that you didn’t tell us about.’
‘It was unimportant, Nicholas.’
‘Tell us anyway. Knowledge is power.’
Lascalles smiled. ‘Faith, my son,’ he said, ‘is power.’
‘Nevertheless.’
The smile twitched on the priest’s face in mellow firelight. The flames from the grate were fading in their fierceness now. But Lascalles’ expression showed that his memory burned bright and undiminished. ‘His dugout was sturdily revetted. There was a cot with an army blanket, the card table between us and the chairs we sat in. He had books on one of two shelves. Cans of bully beef and coffee and his whisky bottle sat on the other. In the corner, on an upturned packing case, was a Victrola phonogram. In other circumstances, the scene might have seemed almost what you English describe as cosy. But even without the other factors present, the pervasive smells of cordite and lice powder, and the small breach in the roof planking from a recent mortar attack, would have prevented that smug illusion. And something else. Something shared the table he sat at, next to the cards displayed from his pack. It was a Webley revolver, the grips missing and the cylinder torn out of it. He must have been wearing the weapon when he was hit. There it lay, like some skeletal relic, mute proof of the power of an explosion no one mortal could have survived.
‘I wore the uniform of a captain during my secondment during the war. On entering Wheatley’s quarters, I had taken off my cape. There had been no invitation to do so. But I had been anxious to occupy as much of my subject’s time as possible. Anyway, the garment was hung on a peg. As I rose to put it back on, Wheatley did not, as would have been common courtesy among men of his rank, rise with me. He stayed slumped in his chair. Abruptly, the Victrola began to play.’
Seaton said, ‘Do you remember the music, Father?’
‘I recognised it instantly. I did so despite my incredulity. You must remember that, in 1917, gramophones were very primitive contrivances. Certainly they did not possess the capability to turn themselves on.’
‘What was the music?’
‘An obscure song by a Vatican composer, written in praise of the Almighty, rightly infamous as one of the few songs recorded by the last surviving castrato.’
Seaton said, ‘Did it sound normal?’
The priest scoffed. ‘If a castrato ever sounded normal. And then for a few bars only. The melody became corrupted by a sort of syncopation. I was fastening the collar of my cape, effecting to ignore this sinister pastiche. Satan’s little joke, you see. Choral music corrupted into what even I recognised as the American craze. It was music meant to be sacred, played as ragtime.’
Mason looked up at Lascalles. ‘You’ve been an adversary of the devil for a long time,’ he said.
But Lascalles did not comment on the observation. Instead he said, ‘Are you not curious about your baptism?’
‘I think I’ve guessed most of it. When my father was trading in Africa, I think he became involved in magic. Juju. Powerful magic. It’s why the house by the sea he bought in Whitstable is not the safe sanctuary from disturbance Paul thinks it ought to be. I think you saved my soul and I expect my father was grateful. But you believed he passed something to me. Let’s call it a capability. I think you have followed my career. Christ alone knows what influence was put to use to enable you to do it, but that’s what you’ve done. And I think what happened with the Kheddi was a sort of audition. You summoned me there. It was your little test.’
‘Not mine. Yours. And you passed it.’
‘Bullets killed the Kheddi, Father.’
‘Bullets fired from your gun. It was not bullets that destroyed the demon, Nicholas. You did that.’
‘I’m not as good at guessing games as Nicholas is,’ Seaton said. ‘I haven’t had the same expert grounding in subterfuge as our intrepid soldier boy. I can’t guess who Malcolm Covey is. Or what part he really plays in all this. I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me.’
Lascalles looked at him. And Seaton felt a flush of embarrassment. Absurdly, he’d felt jealous when the priest had referred to Mason as ‘my son’. And Lascalles had done it twice. He felt childishly resentful of the history the two men shared. He felt excluded. And now he felt that Lascalles could see his resentment written plainly on his face.
‘Klaus Fischer died in Buenos Aires in the spring of 1983,’ Lascalles said. ‘He had reached the age of eighty-eight. It was a long life. Such a man would have compelling reasons for going to his death reluctantly. But die he eventually did, twelve years ago, peacefully it was reported, in his sleep. Five months after his death, you were visited in hospital by a man who seems to have shared many of Fischer’s characteristics.’
Seaton nodded.
‘Not in his dotage, of course. But in his formidable prime. Think of the girth, of the flamboyant attire and the cigars. Think of that teasing expertise on the subject of the occult. Did he enjoy music?’
Seaton thought about this. ‘I only went once to
his home. I was renting a bedsit in Dalston, scraping together the fare to get me away to the States. I was obliged to list my address with the hospital and he must have got it from them because one morning the postman delivered a note from him inviting me round for tea. As I say, I went only the once. He owned a large flat in a mansion block in Victoria. He showed me his listening room. He possessed a stereo system that must have cost him several thousand pounds.’
‘It’s impossible,’ Mason said.
‘Jesus,’ Seaton said, ‘the hypnotism.’ He had remembered the words of Pandora’s journal, the hypnotic power she had witnessed in Fischer, confined to the boat cabin with him on their wretched crossing. He put his head in his hands. And the priest crossed the distance to him and put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
‘Courage, my son,’ he said. It is not your fault. Nothing prepares us for such encounters.’
Mason said, ‘You really think it’s him, Father?’
Lascalles shrugged. ‘I can tell you only this for certain. Before 1983, there is no record of the existence of a Doctor Malcolm Covey.’
‘They’re so clever,’ Seaton said.
And Lascalles frowned. ‘There is no “they”, Paul. We face only one adversary.’
‘I’ve seen them, Father. They have tried to do me harm.’
‘Manifestations.’
‘Is Covey a manifestation?’
‘Paul,’ the priest said. ‘I would say you are named in honour of the appropriate saint.’ Steel had replaced the avuncularity in his voice. Both of the men in the room with him tensed. It was very late by now, approaching two in the morning. But Father Lascalles seemed to be strengthening with the hours rather than having his age betray him with fatigue. ‘Fischer burns in hell,’ he said. His voice was like a file reducing iron. ‘They burn in hell, all of those who served him at the time and in the place we are discussing. Covey may or may not be a man. But he is a mere servant, a puppet. We face the foe we have faced since the Fall. Him only. To forget this fact would be fatal for both of you.’
