What Time Devours (29 page)

He called Kumi from an ivory-colored phone in Tivary’s office, to let her know he was going back to England and that, yes, she should plan to join him there, if she felt up to the journey.

“I can sleep on the plane,” she said. “I’m actually quite looking forward to it. A glass of wine. Quiet. A dumb movie or three. I’ll be fine.”

“I can meet you at the airport,” Thomas said.

“I have a connection to Birmingham,” she said. “Let me get you the details.”

After he had hung up, Thomas gave the contact information for his Kenilworth guest house to Tivary, and then returned to his hotel. The local police might want to speak to him at some point, but thus far they did not have his name and because Thomas had nothing material to tell them, he hoped that he could be back in England before they started asking about him. He called Polinski and left the short version of what had happened on her voice mail, glad he didn’t have to listen to her skepticism.

Thomas wasn’t sure about Tivary. He seemed both trustworthy and trusting, something that would have been inconceivable only an hour or two before. Too trusting? Thomas, Tivary had said, had been tracked down and cornered on suspicion of industrial espionage, but his being pursued by Tivary’s men had also given him an alibi for Gresham’s murder, so once it became clear that Thomas was no spy, the champagne house had no further interest in him.

That too. Thomas figured he should tell the local police what he knew, but he felt too driven to get back to Kenilworth to bear the idea of sitting around in some local police station trying to explain stories of lost plays and a pair of Chicago murders in wooden French. He’d talk to the British police, and doubtless Polinski would want to yell at him, but he would deal with that later. Now he was racing, his mind turning almost as fast as the wheels of the rented Peugeot that bore him back to Calais and the Chunnel. Thomas thought of Tivary as he drove: those bright, intelligent eyes, the easy, old world charm, and he hoped the old man was what he seemed. The presentation of the half-empty folder could have been merely a show designed to send him on his way, the lost Shakespeare play still sitting in the safe where it had been left.

But then why show him the folder at all? Tivary had nothing to gain by producing more evidence that the play had actually been in his family’s possession. If it did not turn up elsewhere, that folder would inevitably bring Thomas—or someone—back to the château. Unless it was just about buying time, and Tivary knew that he would be able to cash in on his secret before Thomas came back . . .

The ideas turned over in Thomas’s head, questions chasing each other, branching off into new questions like the tunnels of the Demier cellars. But he never let his pressure off the gas pedal because in his gut he felt sure that the play had left the land of its fictional characters and returned to the home of its author. Daniella Blackstone had been many things, but she would have to have been a special kind of fool to have claimed ownership of a book whose whereabouts she did not know exactly. Her grandfather had brought it home. He must have.

The place-names flashed through his mind as he drove, and whenever he strayed from the autoroute he saw war memorials. They were everywhere. He knew of the fields of stone crosses and stars, but these local memorials were almost as potent, at least when you got used to how many there were. In the first battle of the Marne, the famous Anglo-French victory that stopped the German advance short of Paris (thanks, in part, to the commissioning of six hundred Parisian taxicabs that shuttled thousands of reinforcements to the front), more than five hundred thousand men were killed, almost ten times as many as the United States lost in the entire Vietnam War. And mind-eluding though such a number was, it was really only the beginning, because the Marne victory was so exhausting for both sides that all they could do was dig in and shell each other for the next four years up and down the largely static front. The troops sat for months in rat- and disease-infested trenches, often half submerged in water, waiting for the enemy to blow poison gas at them or pin them down with thousands of high-explosive shells. Then the trench raids would come, the soldiers pouring over the top with gas masks and bayonets as the machine guns opened up. It was as good an approximation of hell as Thomas could imagine.

He thought of Henry V moving among his troops in disguise on the eve of Agincourt, and the bitter truths the king overhears from his soldiers as they consider their fate. If their cause is just, they say, then even their deaths have value. “But if the cause be not good,” says one, “the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left . . .”

It was a harrowing speech.

He thought again of Ben Williams, who had wanted to be a teacher, and felt an urge to lay flowers in his memory at one of the monuments to soldiers fallen before him.

He didn’t. He kept driving.

Because the thing burning hottest in his mind was Thomas’s flashbulb memory of Gresham’s blood-splashed corpse in the tunnels and the unsettling conviction that being cornered by Tivary’s men had saved him from the same fate. Someone had been stalking those stone passages, someone who had been on the same trail as Thomas, someone ready to kill to get the play.

It was an odd thought that had been floating at the back of his mind for several days. Thomas had been acting on the assumption that the killer—or killers—was trying to recover
Love’s Labour’s Won
, something that—however brutal—made a kind of sense. Someone wanted to find the lost play because publicizing the discovery would somehow make them rich or important: the book was of massive cultural, historical, and financial value, and if its pages could also make careers, turn the finder into a luminary of his or her field, then that value became almost incalculable. But now, anyone who produced the play would immediately become the prime suspect of three murders. So perhaps it wasn’t simply someone trying to do what Blackstone had planned . . .

Thomas kept his eyes on the road and headed north.

The thought lodged and the world shifted as if he had walked into a hall of mirrors or—more unsettlingly—as if he had just left one. Someone didn’t want the play found. Someone wanted it hidden and not because they already had it.

So, why? What could make someone see past the wealth and fame the lost manuscript would bring and make them want to keep it dark? Because the only reason Thomas could think of to keep such a treasure buried was because of what the text itself said. But what could a Shakespeare play say that was unsettling enough that someone would kill to keep it silent?

CHAPTER 58

He pressed one hand to his free ear to drown out the noise of the Calais traffic.

“It’s Thomas Knight,” he said into the phone. “Are you busy?”

“I’m leading students around Chitchen Itza,” said Deborah. “Frankly I could use a break. How are things?”

He told her about the surgery, that—so far—things were looking up.

“Good,” she said simply.

“But I wanted to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“You told me that you had an argument with your Shakespeare professor years ago about the authorship question,” said Thomas. “What was the gist of the argument? Can you remember?”

“I can, but there are a lot of people better qualified than me to explain it.”

“Let’s just say I’m not sure I can trust those people right now,” he said. “Every Shakespearean in the world has something to gain or lose where this missing play is concerned. Just tell me what you remember.”

“Okay. But this is my Shakespearean party piece: the thing I wheel out to impress people at cocktail parties. Take it with a grain of salt and remember that I’m kind of ventriloquizing my old professor.”

“Go ahead,” said Thomas, shouting as a semi rolled by, honking.

“The book I read was about the seventeenth Earl of Oxford,” said Deborah. “Edward de Vere. Of the various people who might have written Shakespeare’s plays, he’s the front-runner these days. His supporters call themselves the Oxfordians.”

“Right,” said Thomas.

“You’re a fan of
The West Wing
, right?” she said.

“What?” he shouted.

“
The West Wing
. Martin Sheen. You had it on in your hospital room.”

“Right. Sure.”

“And what if I told you that the person who supposedly created and wrote most of the show . . .”

“Aaron Sorkin . . .” inserted Thomas.

“Aaron Sorkin,” Deborah agreed, “could not possibly have invented the show because he never worked in or near the White House and had no experience in law or politics? What if, more to the point, I could show you that numerous episodes he supposedly wrote contain characters modeled expressly on people Sorkin could not possibly know, people specifically from Richard Nixon’s administration?”

Thomas pressed the phone harder to his ear.

“So who are you saying wrote them?” he asked.

“The only person with the contacts, the knowledge of how government works, the intimate knowledge of the people sketched in the show,” said Deborah, “was former President Richard Nixon, himself.”

“Wait,” said Thomas. “Nixon was dead by the time the show aired.”

“That’s the genius of it,” said Deborah. “Nixon couldn’t be seen to be writing for television, particularly if he was revealing things about his former colleagues in the show, so it had to be done secretly. He was paid up front, but the contract clearly specified that the shows couldn’t be aired till after his death.”

“But . . .” Thomas shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s crazy.”

“Right,” said Deborah. “It is. But it’s a pretty good approximation of the Oxfordian argument about Shakespeare. It’s bad history, bad textual scholarship, snobbery, conspiracy theory nonsense, and self-promotion. I don’t think there’s a scrap of good sense in it and I don’t think one new play could possibly alter that.”

“This is what your Shakespeare professor said?”

“He used a different analogy, but the gist is the same.”

“It’s good,” said Thomas, surprised at how much sense it made to him.

“I’ve had years of museum fund-raisers to perfect it,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. “That helps. Look, sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

“Keep me up to speed,” she said. “On the other thing, I mean.”

“I will. I’m going to see her in England. She’s flying out. Her choice.”

“Good. Okay. Wish me luck.”

“On what?”

“This dig. Today’s is my last day playing tour guide. Tomorrow we have to finish the surveying of the site and then we start digging. Real soon after that we’ll find out if I know what I’m doing.”

“You’ll be great.”

“Let’s hope so. Okay. Bye. And Thomas?”

“What?”

“Look after yourself, okay?”

“Okay.”

Thomas hung up and drove to the station, only to find that there had been some unexplained delay with an earlier train, resulting in several cancellations. Unless he was prepared to wait a day, he would have to take the ferry to Dover and a train to London from there. Thomas cursed and blustered but the attendants were unmoved and uninterested.

“Monsieur, I cannot change this. So you must make the choice. Delay or ferry. Which do you wish?”

He chose the ferry.

It was a clear day and the water was calm enough that he barely sensed the movement of the boat. He had expected something small, but these were the big roll-on, roll-off car ferries, and there were hundreds of people aboard. There were kids everywhere, running around and clustering around arcade games that beeped and flashed. Hoards of sun-pinked English people weighed down with bags of wine and cheese waited in lines for the duty-free shops. The boat felt like something halfway between a dilapidated cruise ship and a low-end mall. Thomas, tired and increasingly irritable, fled, climbing the metal stairs and pushing through heavy doors until he found himself on deck.

He sucked in the sea air, steadied himself, and walked toward the prow. There was no one out here. Gulls wheeled, screeching, overhead, riding surprisingly strong gusts of wind, and Thomas could taste the salt in the air. It was a little cold, but he couldn’t imagine why anyone would stay belowdecks. They had barely left the harbor behind, but he could already see the white cliffs of the English coast rising up in the distance. Their journey would be a little over twenty miles.

Strange, he thought, that so small a distance could generate such difference in language and custom, such separate-ness. For an American, for whom considerably larger distances generated difference usually only in nuance, it was doubly strange. He thought of the little American towns spreading over the Midwest and South, with their strip malls, their Wal-Marts, their McDonald’s, and wondered how long it would be before everywhere became the same. At least in Europe the generic urban sprawl had to go around the castles and ancient churches. In the States it felt like a disease spreading across the country, contaminating everywhere, eating up whatever had been there before like . . .

The wind blew the thought away, and as he turned his face from it, he saw a single figure inching along the rail. It was Julia McBride.

CHAPTER 59

She hadn’t seen him. He was fairly sure of that. But that was about all he could say. He moved quickly around the deck and ducked into the first door he found.