by Peter Murphy
‘Wow,’ Sam whispered.
‘Well, don’t hold back, Arlene,’ I said. ‘Tell her what you really think.’
Arlene threw her hands up in the air.
‘Well, I’m sorry, hun, but do we really have to take all this crap from her and not say a word? I’ve had it with that broad. The way she went after Sam with all that bullshit. She’s way out of line, and it’s about time someone told the gal some home truths. Besides, I wasn’t lying, hun. That’s exactly what they say about her. She could do Pain in the Ass for America in the Olympics.’
‘Thank you, Arlene,’ Sam said. ‘If you hadn’t held me back she might have got even more of a mouthful.’
Arlene laughed.
‘From you, darlin’? Now, that I would like to see.’
‘I can be direct when I have to,’ Sam protested.
‘I bet you can, hun,’ Arlene smiled. ‘I just beat you to it, is all.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here and face the music.’
We made our way down to the main entrance to the courthouse, where we found Jordan, standing by the security desk, looking somewhat bewildered. When he saw us, he walked right up to us.
‘What did you say to my client?’ he demanded of Arlene.
‘Nothing she didn’t need to hear,’ she replied.
‘She’s stormed off in tears. I don’t even know where she’s going.’
‘She’ll get over it.’
‘She says you called her a witch. What does that make me, a warlock?’
‘You, hun?’ Arlene replied. ‘No, hun, and I think I speak for all those present when I say you ain’t no warlock. Y’all are just a weapons-grade asshole.’
Outside, inevitably, Sam and I were cornered by a crowd of reporters and TV crews brandishing microphones and hand-held recorders. A female television anchor from the DC area led off with the question on everyone’s mind.
‘Miss van Eyck, how do you feel now about appearing in Revenge of the Zombie Cheerleaders?’
Sam smiled. She looked strong and confident.
‘It’s not the kind of thing I would do now. But I was younger then, I didn’t have an agent to advise me, and I was just starting out. When you’re just starting out, you can persuade yourself that having any kind of work is better than having none. You take a role like that because you persuade yourself that someone might notice you, some big-time movie director, perhaps, that you’ll be the one in a million. Eventually, you grow up and realise that there’s no big-time director waiting for you in the wings, and that maybe it wasn’t such a smart career move after all. It’s a rite of passage.’
‘So, you would advise young actors not to follow your example?’
‘Maybe. But I think it’s the kind of lesson we all have to learn for ourselves, and everyone has to make their own decisions.’
‘And you don’t think it reflects badly on your wider family?’
‘No. I agree with the judge on that point, and apart from Mrs Perrins and three other people who couldn’t even be bothered to come to court, I’m not aware of any members of the family who feel in any way embarrassed by the movie.’
Which said it all, really. After about ten minutes, the questions petered out, the interviews ended, not with a bang but with a whimper, and we went back to the office. The great van Eyck porn scandal was pretty much done.
51
The following afternoon Arya called and asked me to come to the house on the way home from work. She was coy about what, if anything, she had found. I tried to coax it out of her, but she wasn’t having any of it, and she hung up as soon as she could. All the same, I felt pretty sure that she must have found something. If the whole thing had been a waste of time, she would have told me – wouldn’t she? The conversation left me with a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I left the office as early as I decently could. Overall, I was feeling fairly optimistic. We were in high spirits after Judge Morrow’s demolition job on Jordan. There had been no negative messages about the result of the hearing, and several very positive ones in support of Sam, including one from a doubtful-sounding director in Los Angeles, who hinted that he had a role that could make her a star. She referred him to her agent, which, she calculated, would probably be the last she would hear about it. But we had survived two jurisprudential near-death experiences, and we were happy about it. Now, we just needed a break on the evidence.
Arya had papers scattered all over the dining table. I recognised a number of them as astrological charts, but there were endless scribbled notes on several yellow pads. She also had several books and a calculator to hand. It all looked impressive enough, but there were no obvious screaming headlines. She sat me down next to her at the table.
‘So, how did you get on with Isabel?’ I asked, as lightly as I could.
She laughed. ‘I got on very well indeed with her. I really like her, and I’m sure the two of you would have got on like a house on fire.’
‘Oh?’
‘No question. She’s a bright girl, very spirited and very articulate, probably a bit too much for her own good sometimes in 1813. She speaks her mind, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets her into trouble once in a while. In fact, I’ve changed my mind completely about what she had to say on the subject of the schooling of girls.’
I smiled. ‘How so?’
‘Well, originally, I thought she was playing it straight, giving us the 1813 party line about the schooling of girls. Didn’t you?’
‘Sure.’
‘But not any more. Now, I think she had her tongue in her cheek, to say the least.’
‘She was poking fun at the Neanderthal attitude to women in 1813?’
‘I think we’re looking at a piece of early nineteenth-century sarcasm. Complete waste of time schooling girls like me. Yeah, right.’
I had to laugh. I’d never seen that before, but the more I thought about it, I was sure Arya was right.
‘I think Isabel had a sharp tongue in her mouth,’ she said, ‘but at the same time I think she was very loyal to Jacob.’
‘As her employer?’
‘As her teacher. I think she would have valued his teaching above whatever money he paid her. She valued her mind, and she had a very good mind. I would guess that she was a wonderful teacher, in her turn, for her daughters.’
‘And you got all that from running her birth chart?’
‘And a good deal more, but we won’t go into that now. Interesting as Isabel is, her birth chart doesn’t take us any further in tracking down your documents.’
I must have looked crestfallen.
‘Don’t be discouraged,’ Arya said, shaking her head. ‘I wouldn’t have expected to get that from Isabel’s chart. I studied Isabel because I wanted to get inside her head, because she gave us the detail on the two events, and I wanted to see what she saw. But anything of any practical use to us I’d expect to find in the other two charts.’
She reached across the table and pulled the two charts towards us.
‘These are the charts for the two events she gave us: the occasion when she took the papers to the Brother in Philadelphia; and the occasion when she began to make her record of it all.’
‘Do they have something to tell us?’ I asked, getting excited again.
Arya was silent for some time.
‘I think they might,’ she replied. ‘But, Kiah, you have to understand that this is a matter of interpretation, and interpretation can be wrong.’
‘You seemed very clear about Isabel’s chart,’ I pointed out. ‘You obviously got a lot of detail about her.’
‘Yes. But birth charts are one thing. You’re drawing conclusions about what someone is like, but your conclusions are quite general. They’re accurate, but they’re general. Event charts are quite different. With an event chart, you’re asking the c
hart to yield up some hard facts. There are rules about reading an event chart, and there are facts to be found, but in the end it’s a matter of interpretation, and as I said, we can always get interpretations wrong. It’s like weather forecasting in a way. You look at the weather patterns, and your experience tells you it’s going to be fine all day, but you still get the odd thunder shower after you’ve left your umbrella at home.’
I smiled. ‘What kind of weather do you predict in this case?’
She sighed and looked at the charts for several seconds.
‘I started,’ she said, ‘not with the charts, but with the clue in the document itself. You remember I asked you about the capital B at the beginning of “Brother” and I asked you if you were sure you’d copied the document exactly as written?’
‘I remember.’
‘I just thought that was odd. It’s not as if she uses capitals for all family words, is it? She uses “wife”, “husband”, “father” and she doesn’t capitalise any of them. But with “Brother” she uses the capital B twice. With such an old document you could write it off as random – such things as spelling and punctuation were pretty fluid back then, and writers were often inconsistent in how they wrote. The writing can often look careless to readers today. But not this girl. I’m sure of that, now that I’ve got inside her chart. This girl would take grammar and spelling seriously. Well, you’ve seen the original, I haven’t, but I bet it’s neat and well organised, and I bet she’s consistent with her spelling and punctuation.’
‘Absolutely right,’ I replied.
‘Which means that she used the capital B for a reason: she was trying to tell us something.’
‘And you have an idea what it is?’
‘I have an interpretation. I keep saying this, I know, but it’s important that you understand. It’s an interpretation.’ She paused. ‘But it’s an interpretation that follows from both charts. When you get the same interpretation from two charts dealing with events some distance from each other in time and place, it supports the case that you’re on to something. It doesn’t prove anything; we’re not talking about proof in relation to what we’re doing now. But the interpretation works with her careful use of the capital B, and that gives me a certain confidence.’
She pulled the chart for the delivery of the documents to Philadelphia up close between us.
‘An astrological chart is composed of these twelve squares, which we call “houses”. Each house has associations with different aspects of life: work, family, relationships, health, and so on. But each house can represent a number of different things; that’s why it’s always a question of interpretation. We’re interested in learning more about the delivery of documents to Jacob’s “Brother” in Philadelphia, so I went to the house that represents, among other things, Jacob’s brothers. He had seven of them if I recall correctly?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And guess what? There’s nothing going on in that house at all.’
I stared at her blankly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a total lack of energy there, no planets in the house, nothing transiting in any interesting way, totally quiet.’
‘What does that tell you?’ I asked.
‘That we’re not dealing with the seven brothers,’ she replied.
‘But –’
‘On the other hand, there is a house in both charts with a lot of energy. That house deals with… it’s not easy to express this, but things that Jacob was attached to outside his usual business, some kind of cause he believed in or society he belonged to. Sometimes men refer to each other as “Brother” in that context, don’t they? For example, if he’d been a military man, you might look at the army, they might be his brothers in arms –’
But for the first time ever, I was ahead of her.
‘The Freemasons,’ I said. Even as the words left my mouth, I asked myself how I could have missed it. In fairness, we were new to the case. The family had missed it for more than 200 years. But you could hardly blame them. The seven brothers had been a very effective decoy.
‘The Freemasons call each other “Brother”,’ I added.
Arya was smiling and nodding.
‘Of course, and they would use the capital B, wouldn’t they, because it’s a title? Isabel would have known that, and she would have known that writing it that way would give us a clue.’
‘Jacob was a high-ranking Mason. It makes perfect sense that he would trust his “Brother” with something important to him.’
‘So there you go,’ Arya said. ‘Now all you have to do is identify the “Brother” he trusted so much.’
I called everyone together early the next morning. As quickly as I could, and glossing over the exact chain of reasoning that had led me – or rather Arya and me – to my conclusion, I explained that I now believed that our best chance of finding some of Jacob’s loan certificates lay not with his biological family, but with his masonic family; that the search the van Eyck family had been pursuing, spasmodically but over a very long period of time, had been misdirected; and that we now had less than three weeks in which to redirect the search successfully. There was a long silence, rather than the barrage of questions I had been expecting. Some of that was no doubt due to the veil I had drawn over Arya and the astrological aspects of the breakthrough. I had drawn that veil, not because I felt any personal embarrassment about it – I’m still Indian enough at heart that it didn’t feel all that strange to me – but because I was acutely aware that time was closing in on us, and I didn’t want any doubts or questions about the new direction I was advocating. If I was wrong, I was wrong, and we probably wouldn’t survive our third near-death experience. But I had to go with my instincts. If anyone asked, I would tell them the whole truth, and I would tell them the whole truth in any case once the case was over, one way or the other. But if I was right, I wasn’t even sure whether we had enough time left for a new search, and every minute was precious. I needed everyone onside.
‘All because of the capital B,’ Powalski commented. ‘I didn’t even see that.’
‘Me neither,’ Sam added. ‘And you know what? This explains something else I thought was really strange.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘That Isabel didn’t tell us which one of Jacob’s brothers she gave the papers to. Of course, if it was someone outside the family, it would have been too much of a risk after what had happened at the loan office, once the documents Jacob gave the loan officer disappeared. This “Brother” would be someone prominent in public life with contacts in Washington, and she must have thought that anyone in public life would be a target, that someone from the Treasury might nobble him and get him to give up whatever papers she gave him. With the family, that wouldn’t have been a concern. She would have named the brother.’
I nodded. ‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘Frustrating as it is, because a name would really be useful right now.’
‘You can say that again,’ Powalski said.
‘So, where do we go from here, y’all?’ Arlene asked. ‘Seems to me, we’ve just opened a whole new can of worms here.’
‘We have,’ I replied, ‘and that means that we have to be really disciplined, and use our time to the best advantage. This is what I want you all to do. Make some notes.’
Everyone was poised, pen in hand.
‘Jenny, I want you to find the website for the Grand Masonic Lodge of Pennsylvania. They probably have membership lists going back to the dawn of time, and we need lists for each year between 1778 and 1813. Powalski, if they don’t have those lists on the website, I want you to fly to Philadelphia, get yourself inside the lodge and talk to the Grand Master, or the highest official you can find who will talk to you. The Masons are very historically minded. Those lists exist somewhere.’
‘Got it,’ Powalski said.
‘Once we have th
ose lists, Sam, you and I need to go back to see Aunt Meg. We have to figure out who on the list might have been a particularly close friend of Jacob’s. My guess would be a family living in or close to the Merion Township area, but it could also be a business connection. Aunt Meg should be able to put us on the right track.’
‘Right,’ Sam replied.
‘Then, we make a list of suspects. Arlene, Powalski, we will then need you to make use of the LDS site, and produce a family tree for each of the suspects. We have to start calling their descendants to see what information they have. This is the kind of story that might well get passed down through the generations in a family. There will be someone, somewhere, who knows about it.’
Powalski was shaking his head.
‘I’m not so sure about that, Kiah. Freemasons are pretty obsessive about keeping each other’s confidences, and it seems to me that Isabel would probably have sworn him to secrecy. He may not have confided in his family.’
‘Possibly,’ I conceded. ‘But if she swore him to secrecy, I would have expected her to tell us that. Remember, she was trying to give us clues. Plus, we have to remember that she expected him to go to Washington to plead Jacob’s cause, and once he did that, it would be difficult to keep anything quiet for long. So you may be right, and if you are, we’re probably screwed, but we have to find out who this “Brother” was, and who his descendants are.’
They were nodding around the table.
‘In any case,’ I added. ‘We have nowhere else left to go. This is the ballgame.’
52
Dave Petrosian
I have to hand it to Harry. It may have taken him some time to come to terms with the hard truth that Judge Morrow was going to keep us in a case we had expected to walk out of on summary judgment. But once that reality finally sank in, he rose to the occasion magnificently. He arranged a conference the following day with Maggie Watts, Ellen and myself, featuring a cameo by the Attorney General, who attended for just long enough to allow Maggie to sell him on the idea that we urgently needed some more resources. As a gesture of good faith, Maggie pulled three of our own attorneys off other cases – not a popular move with their colleagues who had to take them over for a while, but Maggie can be very persuasive when she wants to be. Her diplomacy worked with the Attorney General too. Within twenty-four hours, we had two attorneys and four paralegals seconded to us from our Criminal Division, and a promise of more if we needed more. With the staff we already had assigned to the case, the search we had to make suddenly seemed feasible.
