by A D Davies
Silence reigned as the waiter brought their drinks. Jules sensed they were intrigued, but no one wanted to be the first to ask him to elaborate.
Conversation 101, section B, clause 1: only offer personal information where appropriate.
When the waiter left them again, Jules said, “Doctor’s got a stethoscope, plumber’s got a wrench, and archeologists got their trowels. I got my brain. My body. In synch. They gotta be at the top of their game. Peak fitness. You already know my parents were murdered and robbed. In a Backgammon Pizza place, right?”
Sitting next to him, Bridget laid a hand over his. “Oh, I’m sorry, we didn’t think—”
“Don’t worry, it ain’t PTSD or anything like that. I can handle other people eating pizza. But I always knew I had to get my mom’s bracelet back. While I was bouncing around foster care, I started looking, even when the cops didn’t care no more. To keep outa trouble, I needed escape routes. Best escape route is where the people chasing you can’t go. That needs fitness. It needs focus. Add jujitsu and aikido into that, and I ain’t got room for saturated fat and sugar.”
“Like in Prague,” Dan said.
“Right. So, I got into the treasure-hunting game. Learned to dive, with oxygen and free diving too, shoot guns, solve incomplete clues. So I don’t have time for... this.” He circled his finger around the table. “Or TV or movies or bowling or whatever you do for hobbies. I funded my travel through locating sunken ships, lost paintings, even old stashes of coins.”
This period of chat had gone on too long. He was volunteering too much. They knew a little of it already, so he didn’t want to bore them as they did him.
He chose to finish up where they met. “When I got close to my mom’s bracelet again... Prague... that was the final stop. Or was supposed to be.”
The waiter delivered their orders. Jules’s grilled chicken was presented alone on a white side plate, and he was directed to a salad bar. He ordered more water before heading over. No one added to their alcohol tab except Dan, who made a point of requesting something American. He got Bud.
When Jules returned from overloading a second plate with salad, they were all into their fat-and-grease-soaked dough.
“No time for TV or movies, does that mean no time for friends?” Dan asked. “No girlfriend? Must be lonely.”
“Another choice,” Jules said.
“How do you choose to be lonely?”
From everything Jules had read about social situations, he concluded Dan was being a bit rude. Or “pushy.” He hadn’t overstepped any line, though, and no one else in the group called him on it, so Jules resumed the brief personal disclosures. “It’s called a disconnect. You know how when overweight people say they can’t lose weight? Well, there’s a disconnect between how much they wanna lose weight and how much they wanna eat pizza.”
Toby paused, a slice three inches from his mouth.
“They want the pizza more than they wanna lose weight. So pizza wins. They switch that around, wanting to lose weight more than eat a pizza, they break out the grilled chicken salad instead. Me, I want my mom’s bangle more than I want friends. More than I wanna watch a superhero movie and more than want a regular girl in my life. I ain’t lonely.”
Bridget bit into her ham and mushroom. A small bite. Chewed. Swallowed. “You’re alone because you have something more important to work for. That’s not the same as choosing not to be lonely.”
“How?”
“She’s right,” Dan said. “Think about it. The fatty choosing between pizza and salad is hungry. He might choose pizza over salad because the fat and sugar fires more pleasure synapses in the brain. But if he chooses the salad, he still wants the pizza, even if he’s not hungry no more.”
“Anymore,” Toby corrected.
“Shut up. My point is, you’re not choosing to eliminate loneliness. You’re choosing to be lonely. Big difference.”
Again, Jules detected an awkwardness in the lull. He figured it was time to tie off this chapter. “Same result. I’m better off this way. I’ll eat my pizza when I don’t need to be so fit.”
“What flavor?” Bridget asked.
“Pepperoni, red onions, and tuna.”
“Eew.” Harpal made a gagging gesture.
Dan smirked. “You really never ate pizza before, huh?”
“It’s what I was ordering on the night... you know what night.” Jules was beginning to bore himself. “Someone else’s turn to speak. Like how about the boss tells us what’s next?”
Through a mouthful of dough and cheese, Toby said, “Sicily. When they release the plane, we’re flying to Sicily.”
After Charlie departed for the Tube home and the guys discussed a final beer in a pub around the corner, Bridget asked Jules if he’d take a walk with her, citing a need to stretch her legs before hitting the sack. Minutes later, they were strolling beside the Thames on a wide sidewalk known as the Embankment, accompanied by joggers and cyclists enjoying the final glow of daylight.
“All major rivers have rich histories,” Bridget said, conscious of her southern drawl extending her vowels as she lectured. “Rivers were where the first major settlements grew from. Both farming and fishing were early man’s greatest resources.”
“Yeah,” Jules said.
“Over the years, as man started asking questions like ‘Where did we come from?’ and ‘What’s it all about?’ rivers were one of the things revered the world over, even worshipped. From the Britons all the way to early Asians and South Americans. The Thames was no different.”
As they passed Cleopatra’s Needle amid the hundreds of commuters and tourists, the glow of streetlights reminded her of the passage of time and how it waits for no one no matter how much they wish to hit the pause button.
But she’d seen how Jules grew frustrated about conversations that led nowhere and held no purpose, so instead of regaling him with a multitude of tales featuring Mesolithic man, she inquired after something more relevant. “We heard about the bangle through Valerio’s interest, which came from one of Toby’s old friends in Russia. How’d you come to it? How’d you track us in Prague?”
“I got lucky too. Traced a bronze belt buckle to a private stash, stolen ten years ago from a guy I done a few jobs for. Needed this item verifying, and he knew I got a rep for asking about an ugly stone bangle that crops up now and again. So he asks if I wanna see it. He wanted me to double his fee, but I couldn’t afford it even with the belt buckle, so I said no. But I listened around the black market. Traced it back to your seller. Couldn’t believe it when I cracked their double-blind drop and found—”
“Us.” Bridget couldn’t help a smile. How both had gotten lucky, their paths crossing purely by chance. Or fate, as Toby would have it. The word actually slipped out: “Fate.”
Jules shook his head, and she blushed. She didn’t believe in fate, nor would someone such as Jules. Why was she embarrassed? She wasn’t trying to impress him after all.
He said, “When you look long enough, spend enough time in this game, the same names and faces show up. Ain’t fate. It’s hard work plus intelligence plus logical deduction. But what I don’t get is the things I saw with my mom’s bangle. What makes it glow like that? The metal?”
Glad for the change of tack, Bridget put her hands in her pockets and found herself walking closer to Jules as she explained. “We didn’t know about the light effect until we saw it that night. My research started with the Cult of Aradia and worked backward through the Herodias witch myths until I got firm, verifiable accounts. Once we pushed away the mystical, we got a straight trail to Saint Thomas and the Mary bangle. Toby went deeper. Remember, we said it was Herodias’s brother who gave it her? Well, he got it from somewhere. It’s hard to say, really, going by non-written languages, because the art tends to fade. It isn’t an exact science.”
“I thought you only dealt in certainty.”
“We only act on certainty,” Bridget corrected. “‘Actionable intel,’ you called
it. But unlike you, we think the history is important. Where something came from can indicate where it’s going to.”
“Shame there’s no actual instruction manual, eh?” He cracked a smile.
Was that his attempt at a joke?
Jules’s comments about events staying with him no matter what perhaps pointed to an eidetic memory or a mild, highly functional form of Asperger’s whereby he retained vast quantities of information while struggling socially. Last night, after Jules insisted on heading to bed early, Toby suggested the man might have savant syndrome rather than Asperger’s.
Neurological trauma—often physical but not always—could alter a person’s ability to learn, whereby they demonstrated profound skills in areas in which they’d seen little training such as playing a musical instrument or computing. It would mean that Jules fell into the small numbers on the autism spectrum, but Bridget was keen to point out that autism wasn’t a superpower.
Savant syndrome would allow Jules to do some things extremely well, but in other areas, he would be distinctly lacking. Such as interacting with large groups. Such as obsessing over issues that most people would let go of once they became seemingly impossible to overcome. Issues like a loved one’s missing jewelry...
Utterly disconnected from normality, his life had been consumed with locating this singular object, leading to fanatical attention to keeping his body fit and his mind sharp. What he did to Dan’s guns in Prague was off-the-charts focused.
Cool in one way.
Worrying in another.
Bridget grew up in a household where anything “wrong” with someone was their own fault. The poor needed to stop being lazy to get jobs, the sick needed to work harder to obtain insurance, and the depressed, anxious, and delusional needed to just snap out of it. Only recently had Bridget understood that certain shortcomings in the brain, like the inability to connect to others, was as easy to “snap out of” as a broken leg or the flu.
But did Jules really have an illness? Because, when it came down it, some people were just jerks.
And that was the odd thing: most of the time Jules closed himself off, while other times he appeared to be making an effort, either with conversation like back in Pizza Hut or with his act of banter and chitchat, of almost joshing with Dan during the raid in Windsor.
I’ll get the recipe later.
So what did it mean?
His quirks, she decided, overrode any physical appeal he possessed. And there was plenty of physical appeal, so those quirks must be huge.
But he’d still made a joke, no matter how lame. Perhaps there was no savantism. Maybe he was putting on an act. Another quirk?
“Books are more reliable than people,” she said. “Toby can draw on his experience and tell you your mom’s bangle is three thousand years old based on drawings, writings, and vague references that might be related or might just be something similar. I mean, how many items like this must’ve been made? Hundreds? Thousands? But firsthand accounts of real events, journals like Plato’s, Marco Polo’s stories of his journeys, still exist, kept in the Vatican, sealed away.”
Jules was watching her closely, weaving between passersby with what must’ve been remarkable peripheral vision.
She said, “What?”
“There’s a phrase I heard, but never seen it in real life.”
“What phrase?”
“Your eyes’re sparkling. Like for real.”
“You’re making fun of me.” Her cheeks flushed again. She looked away until they cooled, waiting for the punch line. When it didn’t come, she hooked a strand of hair behind her ear and returned his gaze. “They really... sparkle?”
“Not literally, but they may as well. You go for old books, huh?”
She nodded. Swallowed. Searched for the words. “Genocide, war, violence. Those are constants throughout humanity’s time on this planet. But one of the greatest tragedies ever, in my opinion anyway, is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.”
“Which one?”
“What do you mean which one?”
“I had sniffs and rumors of relics folks wanted, stuff they thought was saved from the fire. I never verified the objects, but I know there was more than one fire. At least three, maybe four.”
“Well, yes, but most accounts were written long after the events. The last one was when the Moors took over the region, but the only version of that was written five hundred years later. The first we know of was 48 BC, Caesar’s siege. Accidentally destroyed great works dating back hundreds of years.”
“What works?”
“Lots. A guy called Berossus is said to have chronicled world history, including the great biblical flood, and dated the Earth at four hundred thirty-two thousand years. Which is about ten times older than the Old Testament says. Sappho was a female poet and musician so talented men often called her a goddess. But the biggest loss is probably the works of Aristarchus of Samos. In the third century BC, he calculated that the Earth orbits the sun. Not the other way round as most folks believed at the time... and for the next couple thousand years. He also figured the solar system was way, way bigger than other astronomers, and he worked out the right order of the visible planets.”
She absorbed and accepted that her cheeks were stretched and her eyes were wide... sparkling... as Jules continued to watch her and smile.
“Just think where we would be if Aristarchus had been recognized as the genius he was or if scientists down the line had access to his work instead of waiting for Copernicus to conclude the exact same thing eighteen hundred years later.”
Jules stopped and leaned on the wall, gazing out at the river. Bridget joined him, her shoulder leaning against his arm. She still wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to wrap it around her.
He didn’t do it. He simply said, “Even if the astronomy book survived, you think the Christians woulda let folks believe it?”
“Impossible to tell. If the knowledge was widespread, they may have had to incorporate it in the same way they incorporated other religions and bent theirs to keep the locals in line. You know there’s a goddess whose birthday is the 25th of December? The early Christians built churches on top of temples dedicated to her existence and—”
“Thank you, Toby,” Jules said.
Bridget stopped. She could talk for hours on how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam had spread so effectively due to the fluid nature of their hierarchies. “Books are more reliable than people.”
“Yeah, people say a lotta stuff they don’t mean. ‘Anything you need, just ask’ and ‘Stay in touch’ or ‘I’ll be back one day.’” He swallowed. The wind blew in from the river, setting the spring leaves overhead fluttering and a line of lights on a boat dancing. “Let’s head to the hotel. It’s nine o’clock. Sleep’s as important as diet.”
It was as if Bridget had poked a hole in his armor, but he’d patched it up again almost instantly, shutting out his amusement at her enthusiasm for old lost tomes. She fell in step beside him and played along, changing the subject. “Sure. Big day tomorrow.”
“So who is this guy? Alfonse?”
“Oh, Alfonse is a sweetie. You’ll love him.”
Part Three
Basically, we are a whole world of people desperately trying to figure out what is the dark side of our natures and how much can we explore without becoming something else —William Peterson
If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril —Sun Tzu
Chapter Thirteen
Sicily
Alfonse Luca was a big man. As tall as Jules but rotund, meaning he filled the doorway of the villa, which gaped atop the white stone steps at the peak of his vineyard. A light shade of brown with thick curly hair, he exuded Moorish ancestry with Caucasian genes just about winning through, and his open manner gave him the air of a retired game-show host.
“Bridget, my dear!” he called as the team—minus Charlie, who felt she wasn’t needed at this stage—stepped from the miniv
an. “You look ravishing as always. Tell me these men are not ogling you too much!”
Bridget beamed right back at Alfonse, not shyly as Jules had come to expect of her. Toby led the way up the stairs, followed by Dan and Harpal, with Bridget and Jules bringing up the rear. While the men wore the sort of casual gear they carried over from the day before, Bridget had donned a light summer dress for the Mediterranean sun. It was not quite summer, but Sicily was far warmer than the UK or northern Brittany and positively hot compared with the cold snap embracing Eastern Europe. Her hair shone in the early-afternoon haze.
While Jules did not believe in the supernatural, he had met people and seen things—dancing head aside—that he could not explain. He didn’t dwell on those things because they were irrelevant to him, but he admitted they were interesting to a degree. Especially when the electrical lights last night caught Bridget’s eyes as she waxed lyrical about lost books, and how he thought for a split second that the light came from within.
As Alfonse strode past the three men ahead of Bridget and embraced her with three kisses on the cheek, Jules adopted the expression he practiced for such occasions as meeting gregarious benefactors and potential clients: relaxed shoulders, a high but not surprised brow, and a smile exhibiting a gap to glimpse between five and seven millimeters of teeth.
Holding Bridget’s shoulders, Alfonse focused on Jules. “And is this the young man responsible for your radiance?”
“Oh!” Bridget gestured to Jules. “No, no. This is... this is Jules. Jules Sibeko. He’s partnering with us on our latest expedition.”
Alfonse threw his head back and laughed. “Expedition! Ha! I love your words.” He thrust a hand at Jules, who grasped it and pumped it in a mirror of the man’s enthusiasm. “Alfonse Luca. Delighted to meet you, sir.”
“Likewise,” Jules said, waiting for the other man to disengage.
Alfonse let go with a slap to Jules’s arm and spun to the trio of men higher up. “So, Toby. I hope I did not rain too badly on your plans.”
