The Magdalene Cipher (32 page)

He's right, Dunphy thought. If Blémont was ever going to get all of his money back, it would have to come from Dunphy—not that it ever would. He didn't have it. Still, Blémont didn't know that
.

“All right,” he said. “I'll do it. What do you want me to say?”

“That you're okay. That she shouldn't look for you. Tell her she's going to Zürich with Marcel. Once she gives him the money—that's that.” Blémont looked expectantly at Dunphy. “Okay?”

Dunphy thought about it. Finally he nodded, and Blémont put the little tape recorder next to his mouth. Then he pressed the Record button and said, “Tell her.”

It was Dunphy's turn to clear his throat. Finally, he said, “
Veroushka
a—it's Jack. I'm okay, but I want you to do something for me. . . .”

When the recording was done, Blémont rewound the tape and set it aside. Then he turned to the Jock and snapped his fingers. “Now we can get down to business,” he said. The change in Blémont's mood caught Dunphy by surprise, but its meaning was soon evident
.

“You haven't got any money, Jack—if you had, Kroll would have found it. And I'll bet there's a lot more than twenty grand missing. Am I right?”

Dunphy's fingers ripped at the loops of cord behind his back
.

“So we'll have to take it out of you,” Blémont went on, “and since it's more than you're worth, I suppose we'll have to take it
all
out of you. What do you say, Marcel?”

The Jock grinned
.

Blémont sauntered over to the workbench, where a length of electrical cord was waiting. “A hanging would be interesting,” he said, then paused and dropped the cord. “Then again . . .” The Corsican picked up a piece of one-inch pipe that looked to be about three feet long. Dunphy figured they'd beat him to death with it—until he saw that the pipe was fitted with a pair of movable clamps, each of which was about a foot from the other. It took him a moment to grasp the tool's significance. Then he understood. The pipe was a portable vise, the kind that carpenters use to hold sections of wood together while the glue sets
.

Blémont was looking at him in a curious way, as if he was sizing him up—which, Dunphy soon realized, was precisely the case
.

“I could crack your skull with this,” Blémont told him, adjusting the clamps to fit the size of his head. “What are you—about a six and a half?”

The cord that held his wrists was virtually untied, but tangled in such a way that Dunphy couldn't quite free his hands. Frantically, but with as much economy of movement as he could manage, he picked and tugged at the cord's loops and lengths, sweat rolling down his cheeks and sides
.

With a grimace, Blémont tossed the pipe back on the workbench and picked up the nail gun. “Too much work,” he said. “But, hey—with this, we could turn you into a real
pelote d'epingles
.
What do you think?” The Corsican waved the nail gun at him, and in spite of himself, Dunphy flinched
.

He'd never heard the phrase before, but under the circumstances, it wasn't hard to guess what a
pelote d'epingles
was
.

“A hundred shots,” Blémont continued, “more or less. Well, definitely less.” He tapped the nail gun against the palm of his left hand. “How long do you think it would take before you bled to death—like Luc over there?”

Dunphy's fingers coiled around the cord behind his back. It was loose enough now that he could slip the fingers of his right hand into the cord's nested loops—which he did. It took a moment, but with a tug, he was free, holding the cord behind his back, his face as impassive as he could make it
.

Now what? he wondered, as the elation seeped away. Even if Dunphy were at his best, Blémont would be a handful. And Dunphy was far from his best. His nose was broken, and he'd lost some blood. Where he'd been kicked, his ribs were cracked, and his back was sore enough to make him think that he was bleeding from the kidneys. And then there were the nails. Like slivers of glass, they made even the slightest movement painful. So Blémont would be a problem, if and when it came to that (and it would)
.

As for the Jock, well . . . Jesus, he was a steamer trunk of muscle and testosterone. He'd need an elephant gun to take him down
.

Blémont turned to his accomplice
.
“Dites-moi,”
he said
.
“Que pensez-vous? Le pistolet ou la corde?”

The Jock smiled and replied softly in the same language. Dunphy didn't catch what he said, but Blémont was quick to explain. “He says we shouldn't kill you.” With a shrug, Blémont laid the nail gun on the cushions of a pumpkin-colored couch, then folded his arms to watch
.

Blémont's bemusement worried Dunphy even more than the nail gun, and his worry turned to fear as the Jock picked up a sawhorse and carried it across the room to where Dunphy sat. Still smiling, he spoke to Blémont in French, then set the sawhorse down a few feet away
.

“Your English is as good as mine,” Blémont told the Jock. “Tell him what you're telling me.”

The Jock smiled and shook his head
.

Blémont rolled his eyes. “What he said was, he can break your back across the sawhorse.”

Dunphy felt his jaw drop
.

“What do you think?” Blémont asked
.

Dunphy's stomach turned over. “I think you're a sick son of a bitch,” he answered, trying to find the courage to move. If he was fast enough, he might get to the door—and, if he was lucky, through it
.

“I've done it before,” the Jock explained. “In Cyprus, on a bet. Left the bastard flopping—like a fish.” He made a little flapping motion with his hand
.

Blémont winced
.

“When it happens, it's like a shot! Pow!” The Jock clapped his hands together, by way of illustration. The air compressor came on again, and Blémont raised his voice so he could be heard
.

“A thousand francs,” the Corsican shouted, “if you can do it in one try.” He looked at Dunphy. “Are you a betting man?” Dunphy returned his gaze with a glassy stare. “No? Well, I don't blame you,” Blémont muttered
.

“You'll see,” the Jock yelled, taking a step toward Dunphy. “Basically, it's
la clean-and-jerk
.
a” He looked his prisoner up and down. “How much do you weigh?” The compressor cut off
.

“Fuck you,” Dunphy replied, more quietly than he'd intended
.

“I think, maybe . . . eighty kilos.” The Jock turned to Blémont. “No problem! I can do one hundred, easy. It's all in the grip.” He looked Dunphy squarely in the eye and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You're not going to like this,” he confided, “but you'll have a long time to think about it.” Then he reached for Dunphy's belt and seized it in his right hand. With his left, he grabbed him by the collar, took three quick and shallow breaths, flexed his knees, and leaned in
.

If Dunphy had waited another second, he'd have been too late: the Jock would have had him in the air above his head. From there, it would have been a slow turn—and then the body slam across the sawhorse. His spine would have snapped like a pencil
.

But he didn't wait. With a sharp nod, he drove his forehead into the bridge of the Jock's nose, smashing the septum, then swept the big man's legs with a slashing kick and a backhand to the side of his face. Blémont gaped as the Jock crashed to the floor, sprawling, even as Dunphy sprang from his chair with a snarl of pain, swinging wildly
.

So wildly, in fact, that none of the punches landed, though the Corsican was driven backward, as much by surprise as by the fury of Dunphy's attack. With a crash, the two men piled into the workbench. For a moment, Dunphy had the best of him, but the moment didn't last. The nails were tearing him up inside, while the Corsican was fresh and strong. Dunphy could feel his own strength ebbing, even as the Jock scrabbled, growling, to get up from the floor
.

I can't do it, Dunphy thought. I haven't got enough
.

He had Blémont by the throat, but the Corsican was throwing punches, and some of them were landing—hitting Dunphy in the mouth, the ears, and, once, on the soft pulp of his nose. Then the Corsican brought his knee up, hard and fast, slamming Dunphy in the groin. With a cry of pain, he rolled away, and Blémont hit him again, sending him flying toward the end of the workbench. Breaking his fall with his left arm, Dunphy saw Blémont coming at him, and reached, reflexively, for the first tool his hand could find. Coming up with a hammer, he swung it in an arc and, to his amazement, buried the claw in the Corsican's temple
.

With a look of mild surprise, Blémont came to a stop and straightened up, the hammer hanging from the side of his head. Like a bull who doesn't yet know that he's dead, but stands in the ring with a sword through his heart, the Corsican swayed. Then his legs went out from under him, and he crashed to the floor. A seizure rippled through his body, sending a tremor from his head to his feet, and then he was still
.

The Jock came at him like a nose tackle, charging hard and low, looking to take the American down by the knees. Dunphy rolled to the right, and around the workbench, his hands searching for a weapon—any weapon—but there was nothing. The Jock crashed into the bench with his shoulder, driving it into Dunphy as if it were a tackling dummy. Clambering to his feet with a snarl, the Jock turned the corner with far more speed than Dunphy himself could muster. For a moment, their eyes locked as the Jock considered the distance between them and the number of steps it would take to cross it—three—while Dunphy came to grips with his own mortality
.

Then he turned for the door—but the Jock was on him before his foot could leave the ground. And the Frenchman's anger was so great that, instead of taking Dunphy by the throat and breaking his neck—which in Dunphy's weakened state the Jock might easily have done—he began throwing punches. And the punches landed hard, bouncing Dunphy off the wall and the workbench. Then he was caught and shoved across the room like a shopping cart, crashing into and over the pumpkin-colored couch. The air exploded from his lungs as his shoulders crashed against the wooden floor. And then the Jock came across the top of the couch in a racing dive, flattening the airless Dunphy
.

I'm gone, he thought, hands flailing. Brushing something, something heavy and hard, knocking it away
.
Nail gun
.
But where?

The Jock's thumbs were pressing hard on Dunphy's windpipe, and it seemed as if the slowly spinning room was growing darker. Dunphy's eyes bulged until he thought they would explode. Then his hand found the nail gun for the second time, and bringing it up in an arc, he pressed its muzzle against the broken bridge of the Jock's nose, and—

Szzzunkk! Szzzunkk! Szzzunkk!

Chapter 26

He wanted to stay there, there on the floor, until he healed or died. It seemed to Dunphy that he was broken inside and out, and that the only thing that he could safely do was lie there. But after a bit, his eyes fell upon the
Contre la boue
banner over the workbench, and he remembered that he was in enemy territory
.

Behind the lines
.

Pushing the Jock's lifeless body off his own, he dragged himself to his hands and knees, and stood, swaying in the twilight
.

He must have been out cold for hours. It was nearly dark now, so that his shadow stretched across the floor and halfway up the wall. Using the furniture to steady himself, he made his way past Blémont's corpse to a telephone that sat upon a rolltop desk in a corner of the room. Lifting the receiver, he dialed the number for the Broken Tiller
.

“Boylan.” The voice was low and matter-of-fact, almost a whisper, as if its owner was expecting bad news
.

“It's me,” Dunphy said
.

There were a few seconds of silence, and then, “Where are ya?”

Dunphy thought about it. Looked around
.

“Where are ya?” Boylan repeated
.

“I don't know,” Dunphy replied. And glanced around the room. “Upholstery shop.”

“Where?”

“Hang on.” One by one, Dunphy pulled open the drawers of the desk until he found a stack of invoices, each of which bore the same name and address. “I think it's . . . something called Casa Tapizada. Saragossa Street. In Candelaria.”

“You
think
a?”

“Yeah. I can't be sure.”

“Well
,
ask
someone!”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because they're
dead
.
And I'm not feelin' that good myself.”

It took Boylan, Davis, and Clem half an hour to get there, and when they did, Clem buckled at the scene. The Alsatian, with his scarlet girdle. Blémont with the hammer buried in his head. The Jock
.

And Dunphy himself, the last man standing, looking for all the world as if he'd taken a swan dive into a dry pool
.

“Jay-sus Christ!” Tommy cried, blanching even as he rushed to his friend's side. “What happened?”

“I fell down,” Dunphy told him
.

They took him to a village in the mountains, where Boylan knew a retired gynecologist, a Scot, who supplemented his income by performing an occasional abortion. The man gave Dunphy a healthy shot of recreational codeine and extracted the nails from his body, one by one
.

There wasn't anything to be done, really, about the broken nose or ribs. “The nose will heal,” the doctor told them, “and as for the ribs, well . . . they don't seem to have punctured anything of great interest—or we wouldn't be talking about it. So, all in all, I'd say that while it sucks to be you, it isn't fatal. Anyway, that's my prognosis, and I'm sticking to it.”

The real concern was infection. To guard against it, the doctor put Dunphy on a regime of powerful antibiotics and placed him under Clementine's care in a suite of rooms on the second floor of the villa
.

None of this came cheap. In return for his professional services, hospitality, and silence, the good physician asked for and got five thousand pounds. Clem would have much preferred to have taken Dunphy to the hospital in Santa Cruz, but that was out of the question. “The massacre in Candelaria” was front-page news, and every paper in the Canaries was obsessed with the fact that one French gangster had been “stapled to death,” while a second had been killed with a hammer. For Dunphy to show up at an emergency room looking like a pincushion would not have been a good idea
.

So they stayed at the doctor's house in Masca, where they wiled away the hours on the terrace, reading and playing chess. Dunphy's wounds healed nicely, and without infection, though his nose was more beaklike than it had been before. And there was progress, too, in their shared quest to fathom Leo Schidlof's murder
.

One evening, as they sat amid the bougainvillea on the terrace, sipping sangrias, Dunphy complained to Clem that “after all the shit we've been through, we're still on the run. We aren't any closer to the truth than we were a month ago.”

“That's not true,” Clem said. “You told me you learned a lot in Zug, about Dulles and Jung—”

“And Pound,” Dunphy added. “And that there's something called the Magdalene Society. But that doesn't get us anywhere. All I've really done is double the number of questions I had to begin with: like, who's Gomelez—or
was?
He'd be ninety or one hundred now. And the
Apocryphon
a—what's that got to do with anything, let alone Schidlof? It's like I'm asking the wrong questions, because if you want to know the truth, all I really want to do is get back to where I was six months ago.”

“No, you don't,” Clem told him
.

“I don't?”

“No. Because you can't go back—you never can.”

“Why not?”

“Well, to begin with, what about your friend—Roscoe?”

She was right, of course. You couldn't step in the same river twice, especially after someone you cared about had been strangled upstream. Dunphy sighed. “So what's the point?”

Clem shook her head. “There isn't any point. You just . . . don't have any choice. Neither of us do.”

The day before they left Masca for London, where Dunphy hoped he'd find Van Worden, Clem brought him a letter that she'd found while packing. “This was in your slacks,” she said, handing it to him. “I think you must have taken it from Zug.”

Dunphy glanced at the handwriting and nodded. He'd almost forgotten about it. The letter was dated April 19, 1946. “My dear Carl,” it began
.

I apologize for my delay in replying to your most recent communiqué. My brother and I have been working almost nonstop in an effort to establish the postwar infrastructure to implement the geopolitical goals that have become our destiny. Returning Jerusalem to the Jews is, I think, a legitimate and easily defended foreign-policy objective of the United States—however much it may destabilize the region in the near term. Still, we appear to hold the moral high ground, and that, of course, is always a great convenience
.

The unification of Europe is a horse of a different color. The Soviets will do everything to oppose it, and so the stage is set for what must certainly be the next great confrontation. That we will emerge triumphant, I have no doubt. It is a matter, only, of diplomacy and war
.

A more difficult task will be to impinge directly on the collective unconscious by propagating the archetypal patterns described in the
Apocryphon
. To create Zion is one thing—it is, or will be, a nation much like other nations. But how are we to create a world in which

It's a tall order but not, I think, an impossible one. We developed a technique in the OSS called psy-ops. (Suggest you leave this to me.)

Allen

Dunphy read the words a second time, and then a third:
The beasts lay butchered in the fields
a—and so they did. And he remembered something Gene Brading had said: “Near the end of my hitch, we started making these designs. . . . The Agency called them agriglyphs. . . .”
The grain encrypts itself
a. . . . And something else, something he'd said about Optical Mag-ick:
“They did Medjugorje, too. Roswell. Tremonton. Gulf Breeze.”

Which meant that Dunphy had been right. The twentieth century was a light show—a conglomeration of special effects masquerading, first, as reality, then as history. And all of it contrived by a handful of powerful men with very peculiar ideas. But why? he wondered, looking out across the mountains toward Africa. For what?

They flew into London on the first of June, using the forged documents they'd acquired from Max Setyaev in Prague. Dunphy was used to traveling with false ID, but Clem—who wouldn't even jaywalk—was nervous. And the immigration line was a long and serpentine one that took fifteen minutes to navigate so that by the time they arrived at the front, Clem was using her new identity as a fan
.

“Number eight, Miss.”

An elderly Sikh immigration officer waved her over to one of a dozen podiums, where a much younger man sat, fiddling with his stamps. Dunphy marveled at the transformation in the man as Clem materialized in front of him, laughing and pressing her passport in his hands. Dunphy couldn't hear what was said, but it didn't matter. It only took a second, then they were old pals, him beaming, she giggling—
wink, wink, On-yer-way-then!
Soon, she was riding the escalator down to the baggage carousels inside the Customs area. Then it was Dunphy's turn
.

The immigration officer was a thin young man with cold blue eyes and a dark beard that formed a shield around his mouth, then followed his jawline to where it met with his sideburns. After a bored glance at Dunphy's broken nose, he leafed through the passport's immaculate pages, looking for stamps
.

“Mr. Pitt,” he said, pronouncing the name as if he were spitting out a seed
.

“Yes.”

“Coming from? . . .”

“Tenerife,” Dunphy replied
.

“Holiday or business?”

“Bit of both.”

“And what business would that be?”

Nothing too interesting, Dunphy thought. “Accountancy.”

The immigration man glanced over Dunphy's shoulder. “Just yourself?” he asked, sounding doubtful
.

Dunphy nodded. “For now. I'm meeting friends in London.”

“I see.” The immigration officer frowned and gestured at Dunphy's nose. “Fight?”

Dunphy shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “No. I was mugged.”

The immigration man grimaced. “Las Americas?”

Dunphy nodded. It seemed to be what the man wanted
.

The immigration officer shook his head. “Spanish bastards,” he muttered, and brought his stamp crashing down on the passport. Then he handed it back and smiled. “Welcome to the British Isles, Mr. Pitt!”

Finding Van Worden was not hard. The dialing tones on the tape recording indicated that Schidlof's call had been a local one. It was a simple matter, then, for Dunphy and Clem to find an Internet café in the Strand, where they looked him up on the Web. To Dunphy's surprise, the professor was living on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. He must have jogged past the place a hundred times
.

“Are you coming with me?” Dunphy asked
.

“Of course,” Clem said. “But shouldn't we call ahead?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed? While Dunphy had no way of knowing if Schidlof had actually met with Van Worden, one thing was certain: Van Worden would know of the professor's demise soon after calling him. And knowing that, he might be cautious about meeting strangers. “Let's just surprise him,” Dunphy told her
.

As it turned out, Van Worden was the sole occupant of the
Faery Queene
,
a rusting houseboat moored in the lea of the Battersea Bridge. Uncertain of the protocols for boarding vessels in the middle of a city, and unable to bring himself to shout “Ahoy,” Dunphy led Clem up the gangplank and onto the boat. Coming upon a door, he knocked tentatively and waited. When no one answered, he knocked again—louder, this time
.

“Hang on!”

A moment later, the door was wrenched open by a distinguished-looking man in his late forties, holding a glass of red wine and a clove cigarette. “Help you?” he asked, swinging his head from Dunphy to Clem, and back again
.

“I'm looking for an Al Van Worden?”

“Ye-esss?”

“My name's Jack Dunphy,” he said. “Are you . . .”

“Ye-esss?”

“Well, I was wondering if we could . . . have a chat. It wouldn't take long.”

Van Worden looked them up and down. “You're not Jehovah's Witnesses, are you?”

Clem giggled
.

“No,” Dunphy said. “Nothing like that. We're friends of Professor Schidlof.”

Van Worden blinked. Took a sip of wine. “Chap who died.”

“Right.”

“And you say you're friends of his?”

“Only in a sense. We're following up on an inquiry that he made.”

Van Worden nodded, more to himself than to Dunphy or Clem. “Can't help, I'm afraid.” And with that, he began to close the door
.

“Actually,” Dunphy said, pressing his toe against the bottom of the door, “I think you can. Schidlof thought so, too.”