Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (17 page)

“Ha! Flemish wind next?”

“Yep.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nope. You?”

“I’ll think about it. Come home soon.”

It was the middle of the night in Las Vegas, and Malcolm Frazier was sleeping beside his wife when his mobile phone vibrated and chimed him awake. One of his men was calling from the Ops Center at Area 51, offering a perfunctory apology for disturbing him.

“What’ve you got?” Frazier asked, swinging his feet onto the floor.

“We just intercepted cell-phone traffic between Piper and his wife.”

“Play it for me,” Frazier demanded. He shuffled out of the master bedroom, past his children’s rooms, and he landed on the family room sofa as the file started playing.

He listened to the audio then asked to be patched through to DeCorso.

“Chief! What are you doing up at 2:00 A.M.?”

“My job. Where are you?”

He was sitting in his rental car, by the side of the road within sight of the lane to Cantwell Hall. Nobody was coming or going without his noticing. He had just peeled the cellophane off a chicken sandwich and wound up greasing his cell phone with mayonnaise. “Doing my job too.”

“Any sight of him?”

“Other than screwing the granddaughter last night, no.”

“Moral turpitude,” Frazier mumbled.

“Say again?”

Frazier ignored him. He wasn’t a dictionary. “Funnily enough he just called his wife. Not to confess. He told her there’d been a ‘breakthrough’ and that he wasn’t finished yet, another three clues to find, he said. Sounds like he’s on a fucking scavenger hunt. Now you know.”

“The food here sucks, but I’ll survive.”

Frazier had personal knowledge. “I know you will.” Then he added, “Keep your head down. The CIA promised the SIS they’d find out what happened to Cottle, and our CIA liaison guys are asking us some halfhearted questions. Everyone on our side wants it to blow over. It’s the other side I’m worried about.”

Frazier had trouble getting back to sleep. He replayed the strategy in his head, trying not to second-guess himself to the point of madness. He had decided to let Spence run free for the time being to give Piper the rope he needed to do whatever the hell he was doing in England. So far, so good. It looked like Piper was onto something. Let him do the work, Frazier thought. Then we’ll reel him in and reap the benefits. They could always pick up Spence and the book. He wouldn’t be hard to find. Frazier had his house in Vegas under surveillance, and guessed he’d surface well before his DOD. Spence was a dead man walking. Time was not on his side.

When the housekeeper put a plate of fried bread on the table, Will looked at it suspiciously. Isabelle laughed and urged him to keep an open mind. He crunched down, then said, “I don’t get it. Why would you ruin a good piece of toast?”

Fried eggs, mushrooms, and streaky bacon were served up in short order, and out of politeness, Will forced himself to eat. His hangover was making everything arduous, even breathing.

Isabelle was fresh and chatty, like nothing had happened. That was fine with him. He’d go along with the game or delusion or whatever it was. For all he knew, maybe this was how kids hooked up these days. If it felt good, do it, then forget about it—no big deal. It seemed like a reasonable way to handle things. Maybe he’d been born a generation too early.

They were alone. Lord Cantwell hadn’t surfaced yet.

“This morning I researched Flemish windmills,” she said.

“That was industrious of you.”

“Well, as you were going to sleep half the day, someone had to start in,” she said saucily.

“So where’s the next clue?”

“Haven’t got one.”

“One what?”

“A clue! Your brain’s not up yet, Mr. Piper!”

“I had a rough night.”

“Did you?”

He didn’t want to go there. “Windmills?” he asked.

She had some pages printed off an Internet site. “Did you know that the first windmill was built in Flanders in the thirteenth century? And that at peak, in the eighteenth century there might well have been thousands of them? And that there are currently fewer than two hundred in all of Belgium and only sixty-five in Flanders? And that the last working Flemish windmill ceased operation in 1914?” She looked up and smiled sweetly at him.

“None of that’s helpful,” he said, gulping more coffee.

“No, it isn’t,” she agreed, “but it’s gotten my mind cranking. We need to have a thorough look around for any objet d’art, image, painting, anything whatsoever with a windmill motif. We know there aren’t any books of interest.”

“Good. You’re going full throttle. I’m glad one of us is.”

She was enthused, a young filly straining at her bit for a morning run. “Yesterday was one of the most stimulating days I’ve ever had, Will. It was incredible.”

He looked at her through his bilious haze.

“Mentally stimulating!” she said, exasperated, but then at a whisper, under the washing-up noises of the housekeeper added, “And physically stimulating too.”

“Remember,” he said with as much gravitas as he could muster, “you can’t disclose any of this. They’re some very serious people who will shut you down if you do.”

“Don’t you think the rest of the world should know? Isn’t it a universal right to know?” She curled her mouth into a bright smile, “And, parenthetically, it would launch my academic career in a spectacular way.”

“For your sake and mine, I’m begging you not to go there. If you don’t promise me, I’ll leave this morning and I’ll take the poem with me and this’ll be unfinished.” He wasn’t smiling.

“All right,” she pouted. “What shall I tell Granddad?”

“Tell him the letter was interesting but didn’t shed any light on the book. Make something up. I’ve got a feeling you’ve got a good imagination.”

They began the day with a walk through the house, looking for anything remotely interesting. Will brought along another cup of coffee for the road, which Isabelle thought was very American of him.

The ground floor of Cantwell Hall was fairly complicated. The kitchen wing in the rear of the house had a series of pantries and disused servants’ quarters. The dining room, a well-proportioned front-facing room, was located between the kitchen area and the entrance hall. Will had spent all his time the previous day in the Great Hall and the library and this morning he was shown another large, formal room facing the rear garden, the drawing room, which they also called the French room, holding a starchy collection of eighteenth-century French furniture and decorative pieces, which looked unlived-in and unvisited. Will also discovered that the reason the Great Hall was windowless was because its front-facing wall was no longer the outer wall of the house. A long gallery had been constructed in the seventeenth century, connecting the house and a stables area which had long ago been converted to a banqueting hall.

The gallery originated through an unnoticed entryway in the hall. It was a high-ceilinged, darkly paneled corridor lined with paintings and the odd piece of stone or bronze statuary. At its other end, it emptied into a vast, cold hall that hadn’t hosted a banquet or a ball in a good half century. Will’s heart sank when he entered. It was filled with packing crates and piles of furniture and bric-a-brac covered in sheets. “Granddad calls this his bank account,” Isabelle told him. “These are things he’s decided to part with to pay the bills for the next few years.”

“Could any of this stuff date back to the fifteen hundreds?”

“Possibly.”

Will shook his throbbing head and swore.

The banqueting hall was connected via a short corridor to the chapel, a small stone sanctuary, the Cantwells’ private house of worship, five rows of pews and a small limestone altar. It was simple and quiet, Christ crucified looking down on empty pews splashed by morning sunlight that filtered through stained glass. “Not used much,” Isabelle said, “though Granddad wants the family to do a private mass for him here when his time comes.”

He pointed over his head. “Is this the spire I can see from my bedroom?” Will asked.

“Yes, come and look.”

She led him outside. The grass was thick and wet, the sun made everything glisten. They stepped into the garden, just far enough to get a glimpse at the stone chapel, and the sight of it almost made him laugh. It was a curious little building, a novelty with a distinctive Gothic architecture, two rectangular towers at the front facade and at its center over a rectangular nave and transept, a steep pointy spire that looked like a lance thrust into the air.

“Recognize it?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“It’s a miniature version of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Edgar Cantwell had it built in the sixteenth century. I think the real thing made an impression.”

“You’ve got an interesting family,” Will said. “My guess is the Pipers probably cleaned the shit off of the Cantwells’ shoes.”

To Will, the only good thing about the long hours that followed was that his hangover slowly resolved. They spent the morning rummaging through the banqueting hall, focused on Flanders and the wind, but cognizant of the remaining clues as well—a prophet’s name, a son who sinned—as vague as they were. By lunchtime he had a fair appetite.

The old man was up and about and joined them for sandwiches. His memory wasn’t all there, so it was easy for Isabelle to deflect him from the Vectis letter. However, he did remain fixed on the purported Shakespeare poem because it seemed that financial worries were foremost on his mind.

He inquired again about Will’s intentions and was reassured that if the research went well, the letter would be his. He encouraged his granddaughter to be as helpful as possible, then rambled on about auction houses and how he’d have to let Pierce & Whyte take a crack at the business owing to their success with the last auction, but that Sotheby’s or Christie’s made more sense for something of this importance. Then he excused himself to do his correspondence.

Before returning to the banqueting hall, they took advantage of Lord Cantwell puttering around the ground floor to sneak upstairs and have a poke through his bedroom. Isabelle couldn’t recall whether there was anything of interest up there as she hadn’t entered in years. But it was among the oldest rooms in the house so it couldn’t be ignored. The bed was not yet made and smelled strongly of an old man’s incontinence, which neither of them commented on. The few paintings were portraits, and the vases, clocks, and small tapestries were devoid of windmill motifs. They beat a hasty retreat back to the banqueting hall, where they toiled for the remainder of the early afternoon, prying open crates and examining dozens of paintings and decorative items.

By late afternoon, they had gone through the dining room and the French room and were sweeping back through the library and the Great Hall, becoming increasingly discouraged.

Finally, Isabelle begged to stop for tea. The housekeeper was off doing shopping so Isabelle decamped to the kitchen, leaving Will in charge of starting a fire. The task got him into Boy Scout mode, and he diligently started rearranging fireplace bricks and building a platform of kindling that would optimize airflow and prevent smoke kickback. When he was done, he carefully placed the logs, lit his structure with a wooden match, sat back, and admired his work.

The fire caught quickly and began to send flames high into the vault. Fewer wisps escaped. Will’s old scoutmaster in Panama City would have been proud of him, prouder than his frozen-hearted father, who had verbally beat him up about most of his early accomplishments or lack thereof.

A melancholy was descending. He was tired, he was disappointed that he was getting his old cravings back. The bottle of scotch was still up in his room. As his mind wandered, so did his eyes. One of the blue-and-white Delft tiles lining the fireplace caught his eye. It was a charming scene of a mother walking through a field with a bundle of twigs under one arm and her toddler son on the other. She looked perfectly happy. She probably wasn’t married to a bastard like him, he thought.

Then his gaze drifted to the tile below it. He froze for a second, then sprang up, and when Isabelle came back in with a platter of tea, she found him standing by the fireplace, staring.

“Look,” he said.

She put the platter down and drew closer. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “Right in front of our eyes. I tapped on it yesterday.”

On the bank of a meandering country river was a small windmill, delicately painted in blue and white. The tile artist was skillful enough to make one imagine that the mill blades were about to be turned by a breeze rushing down the river valley, for in the distance, birds were dipping their wings in an unseen gust.

The tea went cold.

After Isabelle made sure her grandfather was upstairs napping, she fetched the toolbox from the hall closet and let Will choose his implements. “Please don’t break it,” she pleaded.

He promised to be careful but gave no guarantees. He selected the smallest, thinnest flat-edged screwdriver and a light hammer. Then, holding his breath, he began gently tapping the chiseled end into the smooth, hard grout.

It was slow, painstaking work, but the grout was softer than the tile, so it gradually yielded to the steel. When a vertical line was cleared, he started on the top horizontal one. In half an hour, both horizontal rows were grout-free. Because he was working so closely to his exuberant fire, he was slathered in sweat, and his shirt was damp. He thought he might be able to tap under the tile and pry it loose without removing the last row of grout. She was almost pressing against his back, watching every move. She gave nervous approval.

It took only three light, oblique taps of the screwdriver to make the tile lift from the fascia a satisfying eighth of an inch. Blessedly, it was in one piece. Will put the tools down and used his hands, raising and lowering the tile fractionally, then wiggling it laterally.

It came free in his hands, intact.

Immediately, they saw a round plug of wood in the center of the exposed square.

“That’s why it sounded the same as the others when I tapped on it yesterday,” she said.