“Just a simple man earning his thirty pieces of silver,” Edie breezily remarked.
“Rubin is a businessman. The heirs, on the other hand…” Having been in the same business, he knowingly shook his head. “I suspect the dirt is still fresh on the dearly beloved’s grave.”
“Well, ol’ Ben has been a’moldering in his grave for more than two hundred years. That said, I don’t want to wait until we get back to Scotland Yard. Let’s look inside the pouch.”
“Wasn’t it Chaucer who coined the phrase ‘patience is a high virtue’?”
“To which I say, virtue ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Just ask any fallen woman.” Edie tilted her head and seductively smiled at him. A curly-haired temptress. “Come on. Just one teensy little peek.”
“Given that I’m so enamored—”
He broke off, impolitely jostled by a harried passerby carrying an oversized black umbrella.
“Out of the way, old man,” the ill-mannered passerby muttered as he scurried past in the opposite direction.
Sorely tempted to bark out his own rude refrain, Caedmon craned his head, glaring. “Cheeky bastard,” he muttered under his breath, the chap already out of barking range.
“Lucky for you, I happen to like older men.” As she spoke, Edie pulled him toward a narrow passageway that bisected Craven Street. Little more than a paved alley between two buildings.
Their backs turned to street traffic, they huddled close together, giving every appearance of being two lovers sharing an intimate moment.
Reaching inside his anorak, he removed the pouch. Edie, barely able to contain her excitement, tugged on the leather thong that fastened it, releasing the loose knot. Holding his breath, his companion’s excitement contagious, Caedmon lifted the flap and scanned the contents. It contained what appeared to be a dozen sheets of yellowing paper. Well aware that they were irresponsibly handling rare ephemera — viewing the document in the rain, no less! — he slid the pages several inches out of the pouch. Just far enough to read the elegantly penned title at the top of the first page.
Edie was the first to break the silence. “Coincidence? I think not.”
“Nor I,” he murmured.
Like Edie, he was taken aback that Franklin had titled his work
CHAPTER 56
Softly humming, Saviour Panos turned onto St. Martin’s Lane, the pouring rain coating everything in a wet patina. Amused at how easy it had been to jostle the Brit, he twirled his big black umbrella. All was going according to plan.
As he strolled past a shoe shop, a sales clerk arranging leather footwear in the window silently appraised him. Saviour lifted his chin to acknowledge the admiring glance.
After listening to the surveillance tapes from last night’s conversation, Mercurius had initially expressed delight upon learning the Emerald Tablet had been brought to England. But delight soon turned to alarm. And though Saviour didn’t have the intellect to fully grasp the connection, he knew that the Creator’s star was the symbolic embodiment of the Emerald Tablet. Mercurius feared what would happen if the threesome actually
About to turn onto Cecil Court, he glanced in a plate-glass window — and smiled. Feeling very much like the conquering hero.
An instant later, recalling the infuriated expression on Aisquith’s face, he chuckled.
“Soon, Englishman, your goose will be thoroughly cooked.”
CHAPTER 57
d
Alone in the flat, Rubin Woolf sang the silly ditty in a booming voice. Old Hollywood musicals were a secret obsession,
Still annoyed that he couldn’t accompany Peter Willoughby-Jones to Craven Street, he trudged upstairs. He preferred to await the eleven o’clock appointment in the comfort of his boudoir. Opening the door at the top of the landing, he entered the foyer.
Almost immediately, his gaze went to one of the photographs displayed on top of the court cabinet. Hit with an inexplicable burst of nostalgia, he walked over and picked up the framed picture. Long moments passed as he stared at the scowling, bare-chested punk rocker who had glared at the camera that memorable night.
He carefully replaced the photograph. Then, lost in thought, he idly watched the slow-moving minute hand on the German-made cuckoo clock, counting the seconds until the little shutters on the clock flew open, the nesting chick shrilly announcing the hour.
He should have chucked the gaudy old-fashioned clock years ago. Should have. But could never summon the courage to toss it on the rubbish heap. A glutton for punishment, he kept the annoying cuckoo clock because it was the only memento he had of his long-dead father.
And, as fate would have it, the clock was the only memento that Chaim Woolf had of that violent night in 1938 when the Jewish community in Berlin was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of smashing glass and raucous jeers, the SS banging at their doors.
Kristallnacht.
The spark that ignited the Holocaust.
Chaim had been a lad of eight, forced to witness an unspeakable atrocity — his father, Menachem Woolf, a veteran of the Great War, foolishly standing his ground with a rusty firearm as the windows of Menachem’s antiquarian shop had been smashed with a sledgehammer, as the books and volumes that lined his antiquarian shop were tossed onto a fiery bonfire. The SS officer in charge acted with the detached efficiency for which the German people pride themselves: He put a single bullet in Menachem Woolf’s head, killing him on the spot. Then, to show he was not the monster that the screaming Chaim accused him of being, he removed the handcrafted Bavarian cuckoo clock from the wall. The only item in the room that had not yet been smashed. Handing it to the tearful child, he patted Chaim’s head and said, “Never resist — and never forget.”
Indeed, that night stayed with Chaim Woolf for the rest of his life. Even after his mother, two small children in tow, paid a small fortune for the three British visas that secured them safe passage out of Berlin. They arrived in England just in time for the blitzkrieg of German bombs that nightly rained down on the scurrying, frightened denizens of London.
Rubin learned of these things from his aunt Tovah. She’d not been given a cuckoo clock on that long-ago night. Instead, she’d been bequeathed a badly scarred face from having been shoved into the bonfire by a gang of local boys intent on “joining the fun.” It was his aunt Tovah who told Rubin about that monstrous episode, hoping he’d understand why, each year on November 10, his father would sit for hours on end, in the dark, sobbing uncontrollably. Rubin only understood that living with his father was akin to living with a ghost. Chaim Woolf walked and talked and took meals with his family, but he had no ties or bonds with the living.
Rubin had always asserted, rather strenuously in fact, that he didn’t care. What use did he have for a father who lacked the emotional fortitude to overcome his inner demons? Chaim Woolf’s retreat from the world bespoke a weakness that made his son cringe.
As the line of poetry popped into his head, Rubin derisively snorted. Sylvia Plath.
