by Roger Curtis
Father Kalvos dropped Sister Anna at the Department’s complex at the foot of the mountain. We three sat in the coffee room over steaming cups, surrounded by posters depicting the island’s fauna and flora and dire notices warning travellers against too close a familiarity with them. I congratulated myself that my Greek was now good enough to hear that Sister Anna was not yet a fluent speaker. She seemed nervous, and that was out of character. Her sparing smile appeared to result more from inner musings than the events around her. She reminded me of a philosophical prisoner being introduced to her cell. I thought of making a joke about it until it struck me that that was precisely what she was about to become. Never had my self-restraint been so tested as on that occasion.
Father Kalvos said, ‘Sister Anna tells me she is used to being alone, but I have told her she must signal to us if ever…’ He paused, choosing his next words carefully, ‘… it becomes difficult to cope. After all, Sister Maria and Sister Helena have been alone together for many years and the parting will be difficult for both of them. Hard as I tried, it was impossible to persuade Sister Maria to come down from the mountain.’ Then he whispered so that only I should hear, ‘There is no longer a need for a religious house up there.’
Sister Anna looked at me and said, ‘Father Kalvos has lectured to me on horticulture and, look, even given me some seeds to plant.’ As she spoke I saw wrinkles at her eyes: tiny crow’s feet from stress and sleepless nights that I had never seen before.
My unstifled expression of surprise must have worried her. She looked anxiously towards Father Kalvos to see if he had noticed. But he was studying the mountain through the window and concern for his charges was all I could see written on his face.
We walked together to the helicopter. Father Kalvos and Sister Anna said little to one another but perhaps they had already made their farewells. I stowed her suitcase and noted its lightness relative to its size. Then I saw she was watching me, and again there was that transient nervous smile. Throughout the flight Sister Anna looked out, across the sea, to the storm clouds that were gathering over the Turkish coast.
From a long way off we could see Sister Maria on the landing pad and, beside her, Sister Helena in her wheelchair. Closer, we saw that they were clasping each other’s hands. They continued to do so until the moment when Father Kalvos and I lifted Sister Helena into the helicopter.
Sister Maria would not let me accompany them to the building. ‘Your responsibility is to Sister Helena,’ she said. If she recognised me she gave no sign of it.
As they were walking away Sister Anna turned. ‘How often will you come?’ she asked.
‘As often as I’m needed,’ I replied.
They were the only words she spoke to me. Our second parting had been no easier than our first.
In the weeks that followed I had no further contact with the monastery. On the rare occasions I flew nearby nothing moved. I had no excuse to visit, and there was no invitation to do so, though I held myself in readiness. Easter passed. The bright sunshine – others might have supposed – led me to the path up the mountain. High up the season started later and the garden was still forlorn. I walked slowly, the better to scrutinise the buildings. The few windows that were not shuttered were dirty and lifeless. I continued on, past the helicopter landing pad and up the path to the summit of the mountain. It was a risky strategy but one for which I saw no alternative.
From the summit the other islands were black shark fins in an infested and darkening sea. When the sunlight finally left the tip of the mountain like an extinguished flame I set off back down the track, knowing that no other walker would have ventured to remain here so late. If all else failed I could lay out my sleeping bag in the wood-store, or even in one of the sheds that housed the garden implements. A lost traveller – especially one as foolish as me – would be believable.
I was in luck. The door from the terrace was not locked – but then what need was there for security? My overshoes were quite silent on the flagstones of the corridor as I made for the chapel. I listened at each of the doors as I passed, watched by the suspicious eyes of erstwhile saints in the faint candlelight. The door to the chapel was ajar, just as we had agreed it should be.
In the light of a single candle, even from the side, her drawn features were plain to see. When she turned the relief we saw in each other’s face nearly made us cry. We realised the fulfilment of our dream was almost within our grasp.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, ‘she sleeps till four and is very deaf – so often have I put that to the test.’
‘Have you found it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I’ve left it hidden in one of the caves.’
‘So can we agree a day?’
‘Yes, yes, please,’ she replied, with tears trickling down her cheeks.
I had no qualms about violating the sanctity of the chapel. It was not until much later that I pressed the small vial of sedative into her hand.
I waited until two, then crept out of the building to the wood-store, where I sat contemplating the grey mass of the mountain rising almost sheer above me. When the first rays of the sun illuminated the summit, so that within minutes it became a great pyramid of golden light, I began my descent of the path.
No-one could quite remember the sequence of events the following Thursday. Some said that Sister Maria had signalled with the torch that was trained on the police station four miles away on the coast. Others, who had been walking on the mountain, claimed that they alone carried the information Sister Maria had given them. Whichever it was, it was clear by the evening that Sister Anna had disappeared.
The following day, and the days after, rescue teams fanned out across the mountain but found no trace of her. Except that, on the Friday, a climber came upon her light cotton shawl on a stunted bush near the summit of the mountain. Those that saw no relevance in this were outnumbered. Sister Anna had scaled the mountain. And when those who were so inclined saw the date – Ascension Day – the explanation became clear. She had been ‘taken up’.
It was probably a rash thing to do, but the following Tuesday I, along with a dozen others, climbed the path to the monastery. I left them there with Sister Maria holding court behind a vast tray of dry crusts. I skirted the end of the chapel and made for the landing pad. It was curious the police had not thought to look there when they first arrived; or, if they had, then not carefully enough. There was not much to see after both our helicopters had been there but if you counted the impressions there was still enough to incriminate. Putting on my overshoes – for which I had no further use – I trampled the ground until no signs remained. No one, it seemed, had heard us, or seen the lamp that had guided me in as darkness fell on the Wednesday evening.
The Codex Kusadasiensis – as the earliest extant copy of the Bible is now known – first emerged a year later in the premises of a dealer in antiquities in the little town of Kusadasi, on the Turkish coast. It was part of a miscellany of documents that an intermediary, acting in secret on our behalf, had randomly assembled so that no particular origin could be ascribed to it. At the auction in Paris the bidding was intense, but in the end it went to the Metropolitan Museum of New York for a formidable sum, in spite of its uncertain provenance.
From time to time my wife – whose real name, incidentally, is not Anna but Lianne – and I spend long weekends in that city. We often stay at the Ritz or the Astoria, but we always go to see the codex. Alongside it in the display case is a photograph of the dealer’s house where it first came to light. If you look carefully you can see, in the distance across the channel, the mass of Mount Vathos and its shining white peak. With a magnifying glass – and we really did try this once – you can make out the green and white spot towards the summit that is Moni Agiou Ioanni. Of course, the geography doesn’t wholly explain why we searched for it there but, sipping coffee in Lianne’s Washington
study, which we do from time to time under her treatises on biblical archaeology, we congratulate ourselves on having chosen it as the place to start. Hanging on Anna’s wall beside her nun’s habit is an interesting framed composition that our guests invariably assume, erroneously, to be by one of our less comprehensible contemporary graphical artists. We still have to decide when it will be safe to explain that it represents the system of caves and chambers under the chapel of the monastery.
As for the shawl, we had seen it rise into the air as the rotor blades began whirling. Too late to do anything about it, and impossible to predict the fickleness of human nature.
Lianne has never been back to the island. Increasingly I get up to find her having been writing since dawn to complete her account of how, as a research student, she had come across an obscure and still unknown medieval manuscript that led us to the island, and of her imposture as a nun. She says it is better to consolidate her career as a biblical scholar – she has just been made an assistant professor – before our story of the deception breaks. Such is avarice.
From time to time I return to the island, but only to take tourists up the mountain, or occasionally fly them to the monastery in my own helicopter. I aim to arrive about twelve, giving them ample time to tour the chapel and the shrine and for the more intrepid to venture to the summit, where an enormous cross now stands. But if they do the climb the chances are they will have to forego the pleasures of Sister Maria’s crusts. We need to be gone by two; too much exposure of the place could still be risky.
Whenever I am on the island I make a point of visiting Father Kalvos. Sometimes, at quiet moments, I catch him gazing anxiously up at the mountain, for Sister Anna was never replaced.
Dawn Light
Bentley gave one last desperate tug, and he was free, leaving only wisps of his coat sleeve to the teeth of the closing door. Alex, Sargon’s son, was not so lucky. For a moment Bentley contemplated the anguish through the stocking covered head as it moved behind the plate glass. He was reminded of a fish in an aquarium, desperate for food, except that Alex’s gaze was not on him, but searching wildly for escape. Then Bentley saw him produce the gun, which he shouldn’t have brought, because they had agreed it. It was difficult to tell whether the single sudden crack was of breaking glass or gun-shot. Whichever, the clear glass in an instant fractured like a car windscreen does to a stone and Alex, still trapped, was lost from sight – although not to Bentley’s consciousness. Then another alarm began to sound. Bentley’s grip on his case tightened as he turned to confront the options that were as terrible as they were unplanned.
No time to consider that Alex was the one who had hung behind, had minced back across the marble floor and peered over the counter to where the second assistant – the one they had not at first seen – had pressed the alarm button. And, extending his arm and pointing the gun downwards, had not even seen his target as the trigger was pulled. But the scream had told him to run and Bentley, at the door, had waited as long as he dared. Yet, he was Sargon’s son, and Bentley, as number two in the gang, had been responsible.
With his back to the door the choices were stark. To his right the car, black and funereal at the end of the dark alley, had already begun to move, just as they had agreed. Slowly, no fuss, uncompromisingly, it drew forward. Twenty seconds worth of time, maybe. To the left, equidistant, figures moving in the high street, beneath street lamps radiating yellow through the dank night air. The jewels bulging heavily in his case weighed against the fate of Sargon’s son – possible gain against abject failure and worse. So Bentley ran, his coat flapping over his coal-black suit. Towards people, and into a mire from which he might, if he was lucky, pull himself free. The human filter that absorbed him clogged the car’s progress, muffling the crazed horn and the single, wild shot. They had risked much with that, and it quantified his plight.
The street was still unsafe. Along its length the pimps, the three-trick fraudsters, the beggars, were half of them Sargon’s men, with their mobiles communicado, just as capable of swarming – when the order came – as dissolving into the night. Bentley, with his hat pulled down and coat collar up, tripped his way through them as nimbly as his bulky frame allowed.
His car, known only to him – as, heaven be praised, he had just stolen it – was parked too far away to be reached safely. Most of the shops were now closed, and those that weren’t were unlikely to give refuge to a criminal they knew only as an extortioner. And dead-end alleys, in his experience, tended to be just that, in fact as well as metaphorically. Then, suddenly, he was confronted by a back he knew well, moulding itself to the pillar of a traffic light, mobile scrunched between shoulder and jaw, the body seething with alertness despite its sack-like frame. Bentley dared not pass, nor attempt to cross the road. He looked to his side, hesitantly, then again into the depths of a building – a church – that he had never before entered and did not know.
The girl at the door smiled in a way that Bentley barely recognised – benignly, without intent. She handed him a piece of paper as he passed and he took it with head down, but missing nothing. At first he sat in the rearmost pew, but that was too exposed. Further forward now, the pews filled up around him. Thus trapped, he thought again of Sargon’s son. A priest ascended the pulpit. Bentley scanned his companions, identifying one that matched his own appearance whose movements he determined he would follow exactly. For the first time he glanced at the piece of paper he still held – a service in memory of Philip Ironside, he read. The girl next to him, pretty in black but with the hollow eyes of grief, smiled sweetly and asked him how he knew the boy. ‘Only distantly,’ Bentley replied, ‘but he was a fine young fellow. And you?’ ‘He was my cousin,’ she replied, and he watched a tear course down her cheek. Once, while he was kneeling, the door behind banged. There were footsteps, aggressively into the body of the church, but they receded and the door slammed shut. When the service ended the girl smiled again. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll stay a while longer,’ Bentley replied, sinking to his knees and bowing his head, and touching the case beside him, just to be sure. ‘Well, Philip Ironside, you’ve gained a friend by dying, that’s for sure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s a first in my experience.’
Then he thought of Sargon in his office overlooking the boxing-ring. They would all be there now, at their wits end – Cowley, Quintex, Elias the Greek – heads bowed, desperate to account for the double failure. They would try to call on Bentley’s mother, and his sister Beth. He was glad that he’d moved them to safety, though for him that was a usual precaution before a job. Then, with no other leads, they would wait in his own room next to the Spread Eagle and when he didn’t appear, trash it. Sargon would contact tougher men better trained to seek out and kill. And it would take a hard man to get Bentley.
His mother was hard like himself, and responsible for creating him in her own image. But Beth, his sister, was guileless, a teacher by vocation who never quite believed the mountain of circumstantial evidence that spoke – or rather screamed – of her brother’s fifteen years of crime. He was Uncle Ben to her fatherless child and the nearest thing either of them had to a family.
Within the church the mourners had gone, but a new set immediately invaded the space behind him. An older crowd this time, milling around a sharp voice that lectured them on city churches. As a body they marched into one of the side chapels, leaving Bentley to contemplate the piles of clothing draped over the last pew. He took off his overcoat and exchanged it for one that was colourful and loud, with a bobble hat to match. Then he found a scarf for which he had nothing to offer in exchange. More confident now, he set off to look for his car, hoping that the police had not yet traced it. Once he looked back, and in his mind saw his own name, Philip Bentley – for Philip was his name also – on a similar order of service. But the church was black and desolate and he knew of no-one, besides his sister, who would remotely wish to hand out anything that had to do
with him.
An hour later he was still driving aimlessly. Then he realised that the petrol in his tank was a precious commodity that could not be wasted. Distance equated with motorway access, so he sped north, hitting the M11. Someone had once told him that he would never like East Anglia because the sort of cities he frequented did not exist there. So when the choice of the Midlands or Norwich presented itself he chose the latter. For mile after mile he saw only trees, and black spaces that were fields. Apprehensively, he was confronting the unknown. He stopped once for petrol, but the lights around him were just an oasis in a desert of darkness. Driving on, there were stars above, brighter than he had ever noticed before. Quietly, insidiously, tiredness gripped his body and stilled his mind. Sargon’s son behind the glass became no more than the soft movement of a shadow, the case lying on the seat beside him almost an irrelevance. His light-headedness encouraged him to drive on, around the outpost of the city that was Norwich, beyond the airport, eventually into deeper blackness. He negotiated tiny villages, faintly pocked with light and, linking them, narrow lanes across which bats and night owls flew. He came to a sign marked ‘to the beach’ and followed it into a car park in which stood an abandoned caravan and a cart bearing a load of waste under a tarpaulin. He drove to its furthest boundary, marked by a row of white posts, drawing up to them as far as he could go. He switched off the engine. Then he slumped over the wheel and slept.
Sargon sat behind an antique rosewood desk with his legs stretched out between the pillars. On the desk was an open and empty briefcase. The lamp that he had set up to examine its contents, of which there were just a few meagre banknotes, he now trained on Cranford’s face. Looking from behind, across the boy’s shoulder, Bentley observed Sargon’s impatiently mincing feet which, given their surroundings, resembled the maw of a predatory crab. Bentley, who had been amused by this often enough, wondered if Cranford had made the same association. But perhaps he had other thoughts on his mind right now. Bentley knew what those movements of the feet presaged; but Cranford was too new for that, and had not calculated the odds.
