by Vaseem Khan
She walked to the lectern in front of the Grand Master’s chair and set the book down. Behind her, a clock struck ten.
Ten.
There was something she was supposed to do at ten.
Zubin. ‘I’ll be waiting at the Café Eden. My train is at ten-twenty. I hope you’ll come.’
If she left now, she might still catch him.
She looked up at Blackfinch. His face glowed with admiration.
Zubin could wait.
With shaking fingers, she untied the string, and removed the velvet wrapping.
Chapter 48
‘Father Alvares will see you now.’ The young curate ushered them forward, past the church’s magnificent organ, and through a door behind it.
Inside, the parish priest, Mervyn Alvares, rose from a seat behind a cluttered desk and greeted them warmly. He herded them on to a small sofa, then took a wing chair opposite.
Up close, she saw that he was possibly in his early fifties, bald, dark-skinned, with handsome cheekbones and a narrow moustache.
‘How may I help?’
Persis glanced at Erin Lockhart. The American nodded. She had arranged the meeting – she knew Alvares, having made his acquaintance through her former lover.
‘Erin tells me that you were John Healy’s priest?’
‘Yes. He came to me. A very troubled young man.’
‘What was troubling him?’
Alvares shifted uncomfortably. ‘I’m afraid that much of what John discussed with me was done so within the sanctity of the confessional.’
‘Healy is dead,’ she replied. ‘Surely, it’s more important that the truth now be told?’
He remained silent, wrestling with his conscience.
‘John Healy made a mistake,’ she continued. ‘The world will soon discover that he collaborated with the Nazis. That error of judgement cost him everything, including his moral centre. He spent his final years running from himself. If we’re to salvage anything of his life, then I must know the truth.’
‘What exactly is it that you think you know?’
‘Healy was blackmailed into stealing the Dante manuscript. But I don’t believe he ever intended to hand it to the Nazis. His aim was to protect it from them. He removed the manuscript from the Asiatic Society and then hid it, where he thought they wouldn’t find it. Having done so, he took his own life. In his mind, he had obtained absolution. This was his great act of atonement.’ She paused. ‘Either that, or he just didn’t want to give them the chance to torture the truth out of him. They’d cowed him with fear once; he wasn’t about to let them do it a second time.’
‘Suicide is a mortal sin,’ Alvares reminded her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But my understanding is that there are three conditions that must be met for a sin to be deemed “mortal”. First, the sin must be grave; second, the sin must be committed with full knowledge of its seriousness; and, finally, the sin must be committed freely. I believe the first two conditions are satisfied in Healy’s case – certainly, as a biblical scholar, a Catholic, and a man who had studied The Divine Comedy extensively, he knew that suicide was a grave sin. But the third . . . I think Healy believed that he had no choice but to end his own life in order to protect the manuscript. He was prepared to endure Purgatory, as penance for his “sin”, the sin of collaborating with the Nazis during the war.’ She stopped, marshalling the arguments she had rehearsed before the meeting. ‘In The Divine Comedy, though Dante clearly states that suicide is a mortal sin, he also paves the way for debate. In Canto XIII, he is led through the forest of suicides, and speaks with the soul of a man named Pietro della Vigna, once the chancellor to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Dante portrays della Vigna as a “heroic suicide”, a man who killed himself as a means of protesting injustice. The episode discusses the morality of suicide, and I think this gave Healy the courage to decide that taking his life for what he believed was a just cause would ultimately be forgiven.’
‘Your reasoning is sound,’ said Alvares, nodding. ‘Though ultimately flawed. I don’t believe we can interpret God’s diktats to suit our circumstances.’
‘Why don’t you just tell us what he spoke to you about?’ snapped Lockhart. ‘All that time he spent here. Sticking Crosses on his bedroom wall. Maybe you’re the reason he killed himself. Filling his head with pious guff.’
Persis put a hand on her arm and the American subsided.
Alvares looked shocked. A silence passed, and then he sighed. ‘Very well. May God forgive me . . . Yes, John came to me. He confessed everything, everything that had happened during the war. He told me that he’d chosen to work with the Nazis rather than suffer their brutality. They’d threatened to torture him; to hang him in his cell at Vincigliata and make it look like suicide. He couldn’t stand the idea of it. Of pain. Of death. He was a coward – that’s how he described himself.
‘He travelled around Italy with a team from the Gestapo, looking for old manuscripts. He helped them identify and track down scholars who possessed such items. He stood by as men – and sometimes their families too – were murdered. Stood by while their houses were ransacked. And then he sat down and examined the plunder they’d taken.
‘He told me of one instance when he was forced to look through a manuscript while an old Italian colleague, his wife, and their three children lay dead against the wall in the same room. He’d led the Nazis to them. Without him, they’d still be alive.’
Lockhart groaned beside her.
‘John hadn’t expected to survive the war, but somewhere along the way he gave his captors the slip and returned to England. To a hero’s welcome.
‘In time, the shades of all those who’d died because of him returned. He began to see them, first in his sleep, and then in broad daylight. He couldn’t escape them. Wherever he went, they were there.
‘That was when the idea of salvation began to seep into him. He’d studied the Bible – now he began to study Dante. He ended up in Bombay so that he could examine Dante’s great work about human salvation.’
‘But why Bombay?’ asked Persis.
‘Because he wanted peace. He wanted to be where few people knew him. He was looking for the answer to his troubles. How could a man who’d done the things he’d done find a way to Paradise?’
‘Why not just use a recent translation?’ Persis persisted. ‘Why this manuscript?’
‘He’d already looked at every translation he could find. He wanted to return to the source. To see if Dante’s many translators had overlooked something. Something that would free his mind.’ He sighed. ‘John wasn’t thinking clearly.’
Those words stayed with her.
An hour later, sitting at her desk, typing up an addendum to the report she’d submitted four days earlier, she couldn’t help but think of John Healy’s suffering. He’d shown weakness, and that weakness had cost lives. Both during the war, and now, in Bombay.
She had little doubt that if he’d immediately alerted the authorities to Otto Skorzeny’s plot to steal The Divine Comedy, Franco Belzoni – and possibly Francine Kramer – would still be alive.
She would never be able to find it within herself to forgive such weakness.
And yet . . . John Healy was a victim, too, of a war that had revealed, over and again, the true ugliness of the human condition.
She remembered now the envelope he’d left in his bag before taking his own life. The lines from Inferno that he’d written on the note she’d found inside. ‘Midway upon the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, For I had wandered from the straight and true.’
She felt certain that those lines had been specifically chosen; that, in Dante’s words, John Healy had seen his own predicament.
He had lost his way and had never really been able to find it again.
Perhaps that explained why he’d ultimately taken his own life. For a Catholic, suicide was a mortal sin. But by sacrificing himself for a higher cause, perhaps he’d hoped to balance the scale
s, to recover what he’d lost.
His soul.
In some ways, she felt sure Healy identified with Dante, lost in the forest of his own moral abasement, gradually finding a way to Heaven – via Hell and Purgatory. Perhaps, that’s why saving The Divine Comedy had meant so much to him.
She glanced at the clock. She’d agreed to meet Blackfinch for lunch in less than thirty minutes. A Chinese hole in the wall, the Dancing Stomach represented a sort of neutral ground. A setting to throw cold water over anyone’s romantic aspirations.
They’d simply be two colleagues celebrating the successful conclusion to a case over a plate of noodles. Prawn crackers, the kind that disintegrated as soon as you looked at them. Maybe dumplings too. And if the conversation should veer around to a possible trip to the Elephanta Caves, then who was to say she might not find the idea worth considering? It had been a while since she’d visited Elephanta Island.
If Blackfinch tagged along, well, that was up to him . . .
Her thoughts oscillated between Zubin and Blackfinch, two men who couldn’t be more different if they tried. Where was Zubin now? What was he doing?
And Archie Blackfinch, an enigma wrapped up in a riddle wrapped up in the most awkward, middle-aged Englishman she’d ever met . . . Yet, the man seemed to turn up whenever she needed him, with his badly knotted ties, his frayed elbows, his expression of a bemused cocker spaniel—
A newspaper slapped on to her desk. A copy of the morning’s Indian Chronicle. Birla loomed over her. ‘Channa’s been up to his old tricks.’
She glanced at the article, a round-up of the events leading to the recovery of the Dante manuscript. A photograph showed the manuscript being handed over by a glum-looking Neve Forrester to the head of the State Bank of India to be stored, henceforth, in the vaults of the bank’s Bombay headquarters.
Persis’s contribution to the manuscript’s successful return had been all but erased.
Instead, credit for the investigation’s positive outcome had been given to Roshan Seth, to the wounded George Fernandes, to ADC Amit Shukla, to Archie Blackfinch. The men peripherally involved in the case.
For the woman who had solved it, who’d risked her life for it, no more than a minor mention.
A geyser of anger roared through her.
Her thoughts whipped about like a kite in a high wind, eventually latching on to something Jaya had said, about her being a modern woman . . . Weren’t they all modern women? Hadn’t they earned that right? They’d stood shoulder to shoulder with the men of this country during the Quit India years. They’d shed blood and tears. Sacrifices had been made, and for what?
She thought ahead to the reunion with Dinaz. Another woman who’d slashed and burned her way through the jungle of male ego. It would be interesting to compare scars. But for now . . .
‘Are you okay?’ Birla was looking at her with concern.
She ignored him, her insides seething.
Her eyes alighted on a card on her desk. The card given to her by Jenny Pinto.
She picked it up and stared at it.
Snatching up the phone, she dialled the number.
On the fourth ring, the call was answered.
‘Jenny Pinto?’ She waited for a reply. ‘It’s Persis Wadia. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll be delighted to do that talk. But be warned. I won’t be holding back.’
THE END
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Author’s Note
Although this is a work of fiction, many of the ingredients have been culled from fact:
- The copy of The Divine Comedy held at the Asiatic Society of Bombay for almost two centuries is thought to date back to the 14th century, though one historian has suggested that it dates from the 15th century. Either way it is considered a national treasure, so much so that it is now held in a bank, and only brought out for special occasions.
- The manuscript was gifted to the society in the 19th Century by Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay.
- Mussolini tried to buy the manuscript in the 1930s but was rebuffed by the Indian government.
- Mussolini was rescued from an Italian prison by Otto Skorzeny, a top commando and Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS, and the last chief of the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence agency.
- Skorzeny was arrested after the war but escaped from the internment camp at Darmstadt, Germany in 1948. His escape was engineered as I have described in the book.
- Skorzeny later turned up in Egypt where he worked as a military advisor for Gamal Abdel Nasser. He later spent time in Argentina, as an advisor to President Juan Perón and acted as a bodyguard for Eva Perón. He died in 1975, aged 67.
- George Wittet was the principal architect behind the Gateway to India monument. He is buried in the Sewri Christian Cemetery in Bombay.
- The POW camp at Vincigliata (the Castello di Vincigliata Campo P.G ) housed many senior British prisoners.
- The book cipher clues in the novel were all created from the 1611 King James Bible – which can be found online.
- Freemason’s Hall is a prominent building in Mumbai, over a century old, and largely as I have described. The Freemasons have been in India since the 1700s. They are still going strong.
- Byron’s poem So We’ll Go No More A Roving reads as follows:
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
Acknowledgements
A follow-up novel is, in some respects, as difficult as the beginning of a new series. If this book works at all it is thanks to the efforts of many.
So, thank you to my agent Euan Thorneycroft at A.M. Heath, my editor Jo Dickinson, and my publicity team of Steven Cooper and Maddy Marshall.
I would also like to thank the rest of the team at Hodder, Sorcha Rose in editorial, Amanda Mackie in production and Dom Gribben in audiobooks. Similar thanks go to Euan’s assistant Jessica Lee. And thank you once again to Jack Smyth for another terrific cover.
My gratitude also to Dominick Donald, crime author and military historian, whose eagle eye has been invaluable in fact-checking some of my wilder flights of military fancy; and to my friends and UCL colleagues, Enrico Mariconti and Hervé Borrion, who straightened out my mangled, Google-translator Italian and French respectively.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to the Red Hot Chilli Writers, Abir Mukherjee, Ayisha Malik, Amit Dhand, Imran Mahmood and Alex Caan, not just for your work on the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast (tune in if you haven’t yet heard us!) but for being the best literary companions anyone could ask for.
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