Bristol House (15 page)

Annie’s right hand was now gloved. Mr. Clemenza nodded approvingly. “Do look at the new acquisitions first. I think you will find them interesting.”

Annie opened the folder. It contained two drawings, about eight inches by twelve, each dated 1530. Both were done in pen and ink on paper, and both had undoubtedly been drawn by the same hand. That the bold black ink had not faded to sepia was remarkable, but not as surprising as the way the artist had labeled his work. The script was the curlicued Tudor writing common to the period that Annie read with customary ease. The words, however, puzzled her.
Domus contineo acqua Fleet.
While she could guess the meaning, the Latin was crude to the point of incoherence.

As for the drawing, it showed a string of two-story houses on a riverbank, built cheek by jowl in the manner that long before the sixteenth century had become common in cities. Annie reached into her tote for the jeweler’s loupe she always carried, screwed it into her eye, bent closer, and read the Latin words again. She turned to the archivist. “Do you see—”

“The Lombardic pattern? Of course. It’s unmistakable. If you look at the first and last house in the row,” he said, “you can easily make out the way the brick and stone have been alternated in the quoins. The same pattern is repeated in the lancet arches above the windows. I’ve seen such stonework nowhere else in Tudor London.”

“Nor have I,” Annie agreed. “Do you have any idea who the artist was?”

Clemenza looked unhappy. “No idea at all. The drawings are labeled, as you can see, but not signed, and as I said, the provenance goes back only as far as the early nineteen hundreds. The ink, however, is definitely iron gall with an addition of carbon black.”

Iron gall ink had been in use for centuries. It was a mixture of ferrous sulfate and a tannin made from oak acorns called galls. The mixture resulted in a pale gray solution that got blacker over time. The addition of carbon black—essentially soot—made it darker still. Nothing written or drawn with iron gall ink could be erased, only scraped off either paper or parchment. It had been enormously popular throughout the Renaissance and was frequently used by the old masters. These drawings, however, were not masterpieces; rather their charm was that they exhibited a draftsman’s accuracy, the buildings as vivid as if they had been photographed in sharp, revealing light.

The quoins, the corners of the buildings that Clemenza called to her attention, were mounted in precise courses of three stone to one brick. The relative uniformity of the bricks was depicted with cross-hatching. The rough texture of the stones presented a greater challenge. Working with graphite or charcoal, the artist could have used a finger to blend the strokes and create light and shadow, indicating the rough surface of dressed stone. Iron gall ink made that impossible. Stippling, marks made with uncountable small specks of ink, had been used instead. It was a technique that required patience as well as skill.

“Do look at the other drawing,” Mr. Clemenza said. “It is most mysterious.”

“This one also raises questions. For instance—”

“Questions about the Lombard influence?” Clemenza looked ready to snatch away his precious drawings and banish her to the outer darkness of Clapham Common.

“No, absolutely not,” Annie said. “You are entirely correct.” A lioness with her cubs had nothing on an archivist with his collection. Annie moved on to the second drawing. It appeared to be the same houses, this time seen from the rear. In the lower-left corner, in print so tiny she had to rely on the loupe to make out the words, was the same date, 1530. In this case the label said “
Domus Judaeorum
.”

***

“You won’t believe what I have found.” Annie was standing on the street, at the entrance to the Clapham South tube station, with her cell jammed against her ear.

“Try me,” Geoff said.

“Can’t. I’m on my way down to the subway.”

“Underground,” he said.

“Whatever. I’ll lose the signal.” She wanted to see his face when she told him.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to Southampton Row.” Maybe he’d suggest she come to his place instead. She’d definitely agree if he did.

“Tell you what—it’s a super day. Go to Russell Square. One stop beyond Holborn on the Piccadilly Line. I think you’ll have to change at King’s Cross. I’ll meet you there in forty minutes. Northeast corner of the gardens. Closest to the tube station.”

Another missed opportunity to see the upstairs bedroom. “You’re on,” she said.

***

“Why is a collection like that located in Clapham, of all places?”

“Because that’s where the billionaire who created it lived. When he died, he endowed the archive and created a foundation to look after it. The archivist is called Mr. Clemenza.”

“You’re kidding me. As in
The Godfather
. Clemenza sleeps with the fishes?”

“That was Luca Brasi.” Annie said. “‘Luca sleeps with the fishes.’ Clemenza was a different bad guy
.
”

“You are an absolutely amazing woman.”

“I absolutely am. Anyway, I don’t think my Mr. Clemenza’s a mafioso. He’s sweet, really. Looks like a grasshopper. I visited when I was here six years ago, and after all this time he went straight to those particular two drawings because he recalled my interest in vernacular buildings.”

“Why would he not remember you? How often can he have seen red curls like this?” He was twisting one around his finger.

That was becoming a habit. Nice. “My hair was much shorter then,” she said.

Geoff pulled back and studied her with exaggerated attention. “I don’t think I’d like shorter nearly as much.”

“There’s a lot about the short-hair period you wouldn’t have liked. A lot I didn’t like either.” She changed the subject. “These drawings are a real lead, Geoff. More proof of Jews in London in 1530, living somewhere on the banks of the Fleet.”

“In Holborn you think?”

“No. The sketch was a cityscape, four houses sharing party walls. Today you’d call it a terrace. Holborn was totally rural at that time. But it’s a start, and I’m much further along than I was before I found it.” She’d told him only what the inscriptions said—houses near the Fleet and Jews’ houses—and not about the anomalies. She needed to think more about the fact that the Latin was not only clumsy and incorrect but seemingly inappropriate in the context. Something else was nagging at her as well, though she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“Well done, Annie,” he said. “Give the girl a prize.”

“None deserved. It was sheer luck. Listen, last night—” She stopped speaking in favor of nibbling on her lip.

“Another sighting?” he prompted. “To use Rabbi Cohen’s apt term.”

“Not exactly.” She told him about the singing. “It was the Salve Regina. It’s a Latin hymn to the Virgin Mary. Men’s voices. And when I got close to the bedroom door, it was hot as—” She broke off. “I was about to say hot as hell. That’s not the best analogy, is it?”

He laughed with his eyes, she noticed. And today he had on jeans and a black leather jacket over a starched white shirt. Open at the neck, no tie. Gorgeous, Annie thought. There was no other word for him.

“Not the best,” he agreed. Then: “Tell me something—do you think hell exists?”

“I’ve no idea.” She was fingering her bracelet. “But I don’t think anyone I’ve ever known would be sent there.”

Geoff took her hand. “I’m guessing your twin is dead.”

“Yes. Since we were seventeen. AIDS. Ari liked living on the edge. I doubt he’d have accepted treatment after he was diagnosed. Even as a little child he knew he was gay. So did I. Probably before I knew what it meant. I think my folks knew as well.”

The super day had clouded over. Annie shivered. Geoff started to take off his jacket. She reached into her tote. “Keep your clothes on, Sir Galahad. I’m becoming a Londoner.” She pulled out a plaid scarf large enough to pass for a shawl.

“Ach, the Black Watch tartan,” he said with an exaggerated Scots burr. “It suits you, lassie. The green matches your eyes.”

Annie pulled the shawl close, seeking its warmth. “Remember I told you my aunts separated us when we were eleven. I never knew Ari was sick, and when he died, I didn’t know about it for a week. I was at college in Boston at the time and they didn’t tell me.”

“Stuff happens, Annie.”

He still had hold of her hand. Neither of them moved to break the contact. “It does,” she agreed. “But I’ve got good memories as well. Like that song you played at your mother’s the other day . . . Ari used to do Fred Astaire imitations. My folks bought him a top hat and a cane for our ninth birthday.”

“What did you get, high heels and swirling chiffon?”

“A sketchbook and crayons. Two left feet. I was never going to be Ginger. By the way, your mother said your playing was terrible, but I thought you were great.”

Another chuckle. “Coming from a woman who can recognize James Galway on the flute, and keep the characters in
The Godfather
straight
,
that’s high praise. Even if undeserved.” He still hadn’t let go of her hand, and he leaned in. Annie leaned closer as well. “I can’t believe I haven’t kissed you yet,” he said.

“I like ‘yet,’” she said. “And can you tell me, kind sir, how the English feel about public displays of affection?”

“Screw ’em,” he said before he kissed her.

Nice, nice, nice. Apparently he thought so too. He pulled back, but not very far, stroked her cheek with one finger, and kept looking at her. “Can we,” Annie said, “try that again? I want to see if it’s as good as I thought it was.”

Even better.

“Listen,” he said when the second kiss ended, “there’s something I have to tell you. Rotten timing, I’m afraid.”

She could still taste him. She’d done some fucking in the last few years, probably more in the years she mostly couldn’t remember. That’s what it had been—just fucking. The greater intimacy of a kiss? Years and years. “I am an expert on rotten timing,” she said. “Fire away.”

“I’m going to be gone for a bit. In Syria, doing some interviews for my book. The blokes I met through Blair—they’ve set up a meeting with some of the earliest architects of the so-called Arab Spring.”

“That’s great.”

“I think it may be. Useful anyway. But being away for a week . . . I’m leaving in a few hours. I’ll miss you.”

“Me too.”

“I want you to have a couple of things.” He pulled a card and a key out of his pocket. “The key is to my house. In case you need a bolt-hole.” She started to say something, but he hurried on. “The card’s got directions about using the alarm system. Maggie’s e-mail and phone number are on the reverse. I talked to her this morning, and she says they’re not even close to breaking the code, but in case you want an update, or think of something that might help, that’s how you find her.”

He said he had to leave then, that he was already cutting it close. Annie remembered that she hadn’t told him about the note she’d gotten that morning from Frau Wolfe in Breisach. One reason, she realized, was that she didn’t want to feed Geoff’s suspicions about Philip Weinraub. They raised too many questions about the academic worth of whatever she might discover in London. That particular revelation could wait for a better time.

***

Annie unlocked the door to number eight, holding her breath as always, and reached for the remote. The radios came on. The BBC was talking about a meeting of the G-20. She went into the drawing room. She flicked a switch. The radio went off and the TV came on.

She was looking at a soccer game. The announcer was discussing the likelihood of Portsmouth avoiding something he called relegation, which Annie gathered to be a demotion of sorts. Geoff was a big Portsmouth fan. She wondered if he’d found somewhere at the airport to watch the game.

She left the television on—it served the same purpose as the radio—and went looking for a piece of string or ribbon, eventually turning up a length of narrow red satin in one of the kitchen drawers. Annie threaded it through the key to 29 Orde Hall Street, then hung the ribbon around her neck and tucked the key into her bra. In case she needed what Geoff called a bolt-hole. She’d already memorized the instructions for getting into his place without setting off the alarm.

She went into the dining room and switched on her laptop. A quick supper of canned soup and toast, then work.

Artifacts five hundred years old could not be subjected to a photocopy machine, but Mr. Clemenza had allowed Annie to take photographs of the two drawings. She uploaded them to her laptop and enlarged each one until it filled about two-thirds of the screen—anything bigger turned the images into blurs—and spent the next hour examining both, inch by careful inch. Leaving aside the bad Latin, something else was bothering her about the inscriptions, a memory she knew was there but could not access.

After an hour she needed a break and went into the kitchen to get a bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon, now her London go-to drink. For one heart-stopping moment, she thought she heard something other than the radio and walked closer to the once-more-closed kitchen door that opened onto the back hall. She listened carefully for a few seconds. Nothing.

In the dining room, the second drawing was on the screen, the one that showed the houses from the rear and was marked “
Domus Judaeorum
.” She had been looking at it so long, she almost couldn’t see it. Time for a new perspective. Annie rotated the image counterclockwise, then sat back to study the upside-down view. Nothing new to be seen. Why should there be? It was a drawing, the Tudor equivalent of a snapshot, and there was no reason to think—Jesus. Yes, there was. Plenty of reason to think.

Some of the tiny dots that composed the stippling were slightly lighter colored than the rest. They had been done, she surmised, with iron gall ink to which no carbon black had been added. And some, she realized as she cocked her head and squinted at the screen, were simply missing. The result—looking at this drawing from this particular angle, if she managed to focus in exactly the right way—was a strip of difference running through the intricate work. That strip formed a series of letters.