The Excalibur Codex (19 page)

‘That doesn’t absolve them.’ Charlotte rose from her seat as they reached their stop.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Jamie joined her at the door. ‘And I’m not suggesting we do. By the end of the war every man in that room had the blood of hundreds, if not thousands, of children on his hands.’

They left the train at Retiro and emerged into what felt like the cleansing sunshine on the Calle de Alcala, with the constant rush of traffic in their ears. ‘This is why I love this city,’ Jamie said as he led Charlotte up a tree-lined avenue into a park that seemed to go on for ever. ‘I thought we could walk through Retiro to the gallery. It’s not too far.’

Fifty paces behind, a man in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans waited until they were out of sight before following in their footsteps. Oblivious to his presence, they walked for a while, enjoying the mid-morning sunshine, overtaken by lycra-clad joggers and weaving through crowds of families with children. Charlotte broke the silence.

‘You must miss her so much.’

Jamie faltered at the unexpected question, uncertain how much Abbie’s memory should allow him to reveal.
‘We … we were at that stage where we couldn’t get enough of each other.’ He managed a tight, bitter-sweet smile. ‘Both trying to play it cool but resenting every minute we had to spend apart. She’d been away for the weekend, but I persuaded her to come back a day early, and, well, that’s why she was where she was.’

Charlotte’s eyes filled with compassion. ‘You can’t blame yourself, Jamie. Nothing you could have done would have saved Abeba.’

‘She was carrying our child.’

‘Oh … I didn’t know.’

‘Neither did I.’

There seemed nothing else to say and they walked on in silence, both suddenly feeling the effects of twenty-four hours without sleep. Eventually, they reached a large boating lake, with sun-dappled green waters and dominated by an enormous monument on the far side. A food stall was selling snacks and Jamie fumbled in his pocket. ‘How would you like to taste the best
churros con chocolate
in Madrid?’

She smiled her thanks, glad the melancholy she’d created had disappeared. He came back with two cups and a white paper bag. Their mood quickly altered, tired minds somehow invigorated by sips of the rich, dark brew as they nibbled the deep-fried dough sticks from the bag after dipping them into the liquid chocolate. ‘I’m honoured you brought me here specially to eat the best
churros con chocolate
in Madrid.’

He grinned. ‘Every cafe, chocolateria and stall in the
city sells the best
churros con chocolate
in Madrid. I hope you’re not disappointed?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Just a little worried about the effect on my waistline.’

They reached a fountain with a winged figure in bronze on a plinth in the centre and Jamie turned right. ‘This should bring us down to the rear of the Prado.’

The Prado was as close to heaven on earth as Jamie thought he could ever come. Paintings were his life, and he was intimately acquainted with several thousand of them, but room after room filled with artistic wonders still took his breath away. Velazquez and Goya, Titian, Rubens and Raphael, vast biblical scenes, miniature portraits, the colour, the depth, the majesty and the beauty captured by the geniuses of their age. What primal urges had first made man lay down images on a cave wall to be admired and remembered? Where had the combination of coordination, commitment, vision and patience come from to create this level of perfection? He discovered to his delight that Charlotte had a passion for the works almost as great as his own. She devoured every piece of information he dredged from his memory about the masterpieces that passed all too quickly as they flitted from chamber to chamber like butterflies in a garden full of nectar-filled flowers. At last they reached a room dominated by a huge painting more than six metres long and three high.

‘I hadn’t realized this was here,’ Jamie laughed. An ornate temple of golden stone dominated the painting,
but the focus was on the reclining figure of a medieval knight in the centre, surrounded by women in attitudes of either shock or grieving. Not a great painting, Jamie would have said: too fussy with its prissy little flower-filled garden and the not-too-well-imagined friezes, and too busy with people hanging around looking sad, but not really contributing very much to the overall vision. He turned to Charlotte. ‘You are looking at King Arthur, as imagined by the English painter Edward Burne-Jones.
The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon
is as good an example of obsession as you’ll find on a gallery wall. He started painting this monstrosity in eighteen eighty-one and didn’t finish it until seventeen years later, at which point he cheerfully dropped down dead believing his life’s work done.’ He shook his head, smiling. ‘Poor old Edward. They say he started to think he
was
Arthur and slept every night in that very same pose.’

‘That must have been a bit of a bind for Mrs Jones. The lady whose lap his head is in doesn’t look too comfortable.’ They exchanged grins. ‘No sword,’ she pointed out.

‘No, by the time Arthur reached Avalon, Excalibur had been safely returned to the Lady in the Lake.’

‘So how did it come to be hidden away in an English mansion house in nineteen thirty-seven?’

‘That, my dear, is what we are going to find out.’ With a last look at the painting he turned away. ‘But first I’m going to show you a real masterpiece.’

They were delayed in the steel-and-glass entrance hall
of the Reina Sophia by an altercation between the blue-shirted security guards and a young tourist who didn’t want to give up his rucksack. Jamie stood patiently in line behind the man, waiting to hand over his own bag. His unease grew as the confrontation became louder. Almost in slow motion he watched the visitor’s hand creep towards the toggle holding the neck of the rucksack. Jamie opened his mouth to shout a warning, but one of the guards was already making a grab for his holster. Too late. The young man tugged at a cord connected to something inside the bag. Jamie stepped back out of the line of fire as the cord came clear and pushed himself between Charlotte and the threat, horribly aware this might be his last moment. In the same second the guard pulled his pistol and aimed it at the suspect’s chest, prompting screams of terror from those around who hadn’t noticed the movement, but could see the gun. The young man froze, the rucksack in his left hand and the cord, with some kind of diplomatic pass, in the right. ‘
Ruso. Padre. Embajada,
’ he protested weakly. Still shaking, Jamie led the way up the metal stairway as he was being escorted away.

‘Just for a minute there, I thought …’ Charlotte breathed.

‘Yes, me too. My legs are weak.’

‘Still, that was very brave.’ She reached across to kiss his cheek.

He could still feel the warmth of it as they climbed to the second floor and through a stone walkway to the
main gallery. A doorway to the left led to a series of open rooms where obscure artworks stood out stark against the bare white walls. As they entered a large central chamber Charlotte was drawn to a series of small drawings that were unmistakably familiar, but infuriatingly mysterious. Jamie drew her through another opening to the left.

‘Wow.’

‘Wow, indeed.’

The painting on the far wall was even larger and more complex than
The Last Sleep of Arthur,
and a hundred times more powerful. At over eleven feet tall and almost twenty-six feet wide, it dominated the room, dwarfing the crowd of tourists, mainly Japanese, it seemed to Jamie, who stood back enthralled to study its message. He led Charlotte forward through the couples and family groups until they stood directly in front of the picture. For anyone who had only seen it in a magazine or a book, the effect of Pablo Picasso’s
Guernica
was astonishing. The painting had a magnetic quality that drew the viewer in to be part of the terrible drama unfolding on the enormous canvas. In the wake of the bombing of Guernica by planes of the Condor Legion, piloted by Germans sent by Adolf Hitler to trial a new, merciless brand of conflict, Picasso had been driven to embody the awfulness of war in a single painting. To do so he had eschewed the crimson of gushing blood, the sunburst at the centre of the explosion, or the obscene pink of torn flesh, for a monochrome blandness that
depended on the stark agony of his images to carry its message. Here was death and dismemberment, a mother weeping over her child’s limp body, a gaping mouth that would never speak again, a severed arm, the fingers still holding the stump of a broken sword, a horse pierced through by a spear of wood and at the mercy of a rampaging bull. In the centre, a chaos of stylized symbolism. To the right a man, or a woman, writhing in agony at the heart of an inferno.

‘It’s breathtaking.’ Charlotte broke the hushed silence with an almost reverential whisper. ‘A work of true genius.’

‘Yes.’ Jamie smiled at her reaction. ‘But old Pablo worked hard to be a genius. For every one of his paintings there are a hundred examples of ideas he tried and discarded. Those pictures you saw out there are details of the painting, reworked until they were perfect. Only then did he start on the canvas. He completed it in the summer of nineteen thirty-seven.’

‘When Wulf Ziegler stole Excalibur from an English country house.’

‘Exactly.’ Jamie moved aside to allow a party of Spanish schoolchildren through to the front of the crowd, pondering how well-behaved they were compared to their English counterparts he’d seen in museums and galleries. When they were past he moved to Charlotte’s side and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘The raid on Guernica was a trial run for the planes and pilots who would pave the way for the Blitzkrieg and Hitler’s early
victories in Poland and France. It didn’t matter to the Nazis that fifteen hundred innocents died to prove the experiment worked. Why should we be surprised that Himmler and his acolytes were prepared to kill five children in an attempt to ally themselves with the forces of darkness? The more we discover, the more convinced I am that the ceremony happened and the sword existed.’

‘You said we needed a description of Excalibur before you would know whether it was worth pursuing?’

‘Exactly and Rolf Lauterbacher has given us one. He recited a line from the coded journal.
His was a sword of the most ancient lineage, a broad-bladed, battle-notched iron man-killer.
’

‘What does that tell you?’

‘It tells me it’s worth continuing. Excalibur, if this is Excalibur, would be a much older sword than the others used in the ceremony, which were all medieval. In design it would have been cruder, simple, heavy and double-edged, and if the Arthur tales have a foundation in truth, it would have been tested in war. The reference to iron is also significant, because it would have been forged in an age before the production of steel became more than an accident of the smith’s choice of ore.
A broad-bladed, battle-notched iron man-killer
would describe it very well.’

‘So we’re ready to take the next step?’

He nodded, his eyes still on the picture. ‘Sometimes you have to look beyond what you can see, because the message is in what you sense. The message that painting
sends is more than that war is terrible. It’s about mortality and the inherent inhumanity in men, and it’s conveyed in the images you can’t see, unless you know what to look for; the skulls formed by parts of different figures, the second bull goring the horse, lost in the carnage. I have a feeling Rolf Lauterbacher’s journal is like that, and if we can look beyond the horror of the ceremony we’ll discover the missing fact that will guide us to the next clue.’

‘Then why are we standing here?’

‘Because I have another mystery to solve first. And I’m not sure I want Mr Gault to know about it.’

They took a cab back to the hotel, but Jamie surprised Charlotte by asking the driver to turn off the Calle de Alcala and back into the area they’d visited the previous day.

‘This won’t take long,’ Jamie assured her as they stopped outside the Lauterbacher apartment.

He rang the doorbell and Inge Lauterbacher appeared a moment later, a frown of puzzlement on her face that was instantly displaced by resentment. ‘I told—’

‘I apologize for the intrusion, Fräulein, but there is one more question I must ask you.’ He pulled the journal from inside his jacket. ‘I wondered if there was any reason why your father would have gone to a great deal of trouble to remove a single sheet from his journal?’

‘You’re late,’ Gault growled as they walked into the hotel room. ‘The boss is expecting your call in ten minutes.’

‘I thought you wanted to talk over where we are?’

‘We don’t have time and there’s no point in going over it twice. I faxed him a description of the sword. He’s very excited.’

Jamie suppressed a rush of annoyance. He’d wanted to gauge Adam Steele’s reaction to the breakthrough himself. Then again, there was no reason why Gault shouldn’t tell Steele about the details in the coded book. He pulled out the sat-phone.

‘No! He was very specific about the time. One thirty on the dot.’

A knock on the door heralded Charlotte’s return. ‘I’ve booked the tickets,’ she said brightly.

Gault glared at her, managing to look simultaneously mystified and furious at not being consulted about whatever scheme they’d concocted on their trip to the
galleries. Jamie ignored him, glanced at his watch and pressed 2 as the minute hand hit the half-hour mark. Again there was the frustrating delay as the first call rang out and he had to repeat the process.

The urbane Adam Steele sounded like a schoolboy who’d opened his birthday card to find the last Cup Final ticket. ‘So you’ve confirmed it? Bloody fine job, Jamie. I confess that even with the Ziegler testimony I was still doubtful. Christ, Excalibur, the sword of Arthur, and it exists. It really exists.’ Jamie tried to interrupt, but Adam Steele in full flow was like a burst dam: unstoppable. ‘What a fool. I’d always visualized the sword as one of those gilded monstrosities you find in the Royal collections, a sort of deadly ornament. But it wouldn’t be like that at all. A
sword of the most ancient lineage, a broad-bladed, battle-notched iron man-killer
.’ He chuckled as he quoted the words. ‘A proper fighting weapon from the Dark Ages. A warrior’s sword that held back the Saxon hordes. And it was there, in that castle in nineteen forty-one. Yes, I know, you bloody pessimist, you’ll tell me that just because it existed then doesn’t mean it’s still in one piece now. But I
know,
Jamie, I feel it in these old bones of mine. Find it for me, and offer whoever has it however much they want for it, within reason. And if that doesn’t work, Gault will come up with a solution. Remember that. When it comes to any negotiations Gault is your ace in the hole. Just find it for me.’ He waited for a response, but Jamie let him stew, exchanging a grin
with Charlotte as the seconds passed. ‘Jamie? Are you still there? What have you got? You’re holding out on me, you bastard. You know something.’