The Isis Covenant

XXV

‘I should really call in at the office to let Gail know I might be gone for a while longer.’

Danny gave him one of her looks. ‘So you stay away from the apartment, but you’re happy to walk into the office in broad daylight? Why don’t you pin a notice on your back saying shoot me? Give her a call, but not on the office phone, on her cell. Okay?’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but I can’t hide for ever.’

He rang the number and Gail answered on the third ring.

After the usual pleasantries and a briefing on the latest business she came out with the information he’d been expecting, but hoped not to hear. ‘I’m so glad you called, Jamie,’ she said. ‘I’ve been frightened for you. We’ve had some very odd phone calls and a couple of unlikely “customers” asking questions about your new female assistant.’

Jamie looked to where Danny lay on the bed studying the newspaper and making a call of her own. ‘We need all the customers we can get, Gail.’ He forced himself to be cheerfully reassuring. ‘If we turned away the weird ones we’d be out of business in a fortnight. Look, that’s what I was phoning you about. Why don’t you take a week off and spend some time with your mum? I’m trying to set up some meetings in Germany and I won’t be in the office for a while.’

‘I could do that.’ He sensed the reluctance in her voice. ‘But if there was anything I could do to help. Anything at all …’

He closed his eyes. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? Life couldn’t be that complicated.

‘No, that’s fine, but look, we’ll have a chat when I get back. Increased responsibilities, maybe a pay rise …’

When he rang off, Danny was doing the same.

‘Thanks for your help, sir.’ She laid down the phone, picked up the newspaper and handed it to him. ‘Page four. One of the stories down the side. Just a few paragraphs because Scotland Yard is trying to keep a lid on it for now.’

He found what he was looking for. ‘Two American tourists found dead in a hotel room. Police are treating the deaths as suspicious and have asked for any witnesses to come forward?’

‘That’s right, two American tourists with a rap sheet you could use as a parachute and a cocked.45 pistol under their pillow.’

‘Our guy? That would be quite a coincidence.’

She nodded slowly. ‘And we don’t do coincidences. But that’s not the juicy part.’

‘I’m not sure if I’m going to like the juicy part.’

‘The way they died. The very specific way they were killed. According to your cops, their throats were cut by some kind of metallic ligature. That’s precisely the same MO as the Hartmanns in Brooklyn and the London Hartmans.’ She picked up the Gestapo report on the boy’s death in Berlin from where it was lying on the bed. ‘Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is also uncannily similar to our unknown child victim in nineteen forty-five.’

‘Hartmann must be in his eighties. Dornberger nearer a hundred. They’re not running around London killing people with a piece of piano wire, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Maybe not, but someone is.’

‘Why would our man — assuming it is a man — kill someone who was sent from the States to kill me? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘None of this makes sense, Jamie. We just have to try to make sense of it. What does he achieve by killing them?’

The seconds lengthened into minutes as he turned it over in his mind. ‘I think there are two possibilities.’ She nodded for him to carry on. ‘Either he wanted them out of the way to have a clear run at me at a time and place of his choosing — he wants me dead, but for some reason not now — or he wants me to keep looking for the Crown of Isis …’

‘Which means …’

Their eyes met. ‘We’re closer than we think.’

‘Why not a combination of both? He killed them because he thinks you can lead him to the diamond and once you have …’

Jamie told her about Gail’s strange calls and visitors and got up to close the curtains. He looked out from the window and saw a hundred others staring back at him from a dozen tower blocks. The killer could be behind any one, which triggered a worrying possibility.

‘How did he know where to find them?’

‘As your Sherlock Holmes would say: Elementary, my dear Saintclair, elementary. He knew where to find them because he was watching us when they hit you. But I don’t think he is now.’

‘I’m not sure I go along with that, Danny. I prefer to stay nervous.’

She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. If he knew where I was the chances are he’d know who I was. If that’s the case, why would he be asking your secretary about your new female assistant only a few days ago, while we were still in Germany? I think he lost us.’

Cork Street, in Mayfair, had been the centre for London’s most successful commercial art galleries for as long as anyone could remember. It was close to Jamie’s office in Old Bond Street and he regularly made the rounds in the search for business and the hope of being offered a decent cup of coffee. Cork Street wasn’t the kind of place you were likely to pick up a bargain, but sometimes, if a gallery owner was keen to move a picture on, Jamie might be offered a commission. Micky Janelis ran his business from a discreet townhouse in the small mews that cut off at a dogleg from the main street. The only clue to his line of work was the Renoir self-portrait in the front window that may, or may not, have been genuine but that to Jamie’s certain knowledge had never been offered for sale. Micky was an old-school collector who specialized in the Impressionists and revelled in his self-appointed role as the street’s elder statesman and relentless bête noire of all things modernist. He was a diminutive, untidy man in a rumpled suit and spotted bow tie, with spikes of grey hair that shot like fireworks from either side of his bald head. From what Jamie had heard, Micky could have comfortably retired a couple of decades earlier, but claimed it was only his passion for art that kept him alive.

When Jamie pressed the entry buzzer and Micky discovered who it was, he greeted the younger man like an old friend.

‘Jamie Saintclair, as I live and breathe, I thought you was dead, or off to Tahiti, chasing the ladies like Gauguin with the profits of that Raphael I heard about. You come to spend some money with Micky, huh? You spreading it about? Come, I got something to show you. Just in this week. Look.’ By now he’d blown through to the gallery like a mini whirlwind with Jamie in his wake. He pulled back a black velvet curtain in the centre of the wall. ‘Just for you.’ There was a twinkle in his eye as he unveiled the picture. ‘What you think, eh?’

It was a very simple painting. Just a tree- and gorse-covered hillside overlooking the sea. The hill all green and gold, dappled with pale flowers, trees twisted and spindly-trunked with shadowed, drooping canopies, and the sea a light sapphire shot with splashes of aquamarine. But it was the sky that told him what it was. Clouds that were solid, but also ethereal, seeming to move across the immense blue vastness with the graceful ease of swans over the surface of a lake. At first, you thought they were white, but when you looked more closely you saw the purples and the golds, the azure and the peacock, and in the distance, the ghostly threat of a storm. It was one of his early pictures, Jamie decided, when he was learning his craft, but you could already see in that sky the first stirrings of the Impressionism that brought him his fame.

‘I thought all Monet’s stuff was in the big galleries or private collections?’

Micky Janelis huffed. ‘Rich men, they get bored, they come to Micky.’ He said it as if that was what fate had always intended for him. ‘You like it?’

Jamie forced a smile, though inside his guts were churning. ‘Like it, Micky, yes, but want it? No. How about old Pierre-Auguste in the window? Always fancied that. How much?’

‘Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.’ The old man shook his grey head. ‘You know he gave that painting to my grandmother in Paris when the Prussians were on the doorstep and everybody thought they were going to die. It’s a family heirloom. It would be like selling one of the kids.’

They wandered through the gallery, Micky talking about the market with a relish that belied his years. ‘Genius has never been a better investment, you mark my words. You got yourself an Old Master, one of the greats, you stick it in the vault for a year and you make twenty million, no problem. You want a coffee?’

‘Actually, Micky old chum,’ Jamie chewed his lip, ‘I was hoping for a word in private.’

‘You want a loan?’ Micky asked when they were in his oak-lined office. ‘Maybe I hear that the finder’s fee for your Raphael is stuck in traffic. Micky don’t give loans, but for you, I break a rule, just this once, okay?’

‘It’s not money, Micky.’ Jamie’s heart and his feet were telling him to get up and walk out, but he remembered the contents of the second sheet of paper and stayed where he was. ‘I’m looking for an introduction to some old friends of yours. Some old army friends.’

Micky sat back in his chair. The smile was still there, but it was as if a veil had closed over his eyes. ‘You know Micky wasn’t in no army, Jamie. You heard the story. Micky was a refugee …’

‘Sure, Micky,’ Jamie reassured him, ‘I’ve heard the story. Everybody has. You were a slave labourer for the Nazis. East Prussia, wasn’t it? Then the forced march ahead of the advancing Russians. Frostbite and eating your shoe leather and drinking bloodstained snow. What was it you said one time? Oh, yes. Our yardsticks were the corpses of the fallen. Anyone who lay down never got up again. But Micky was tough. Micky never lay down and Micky made it?’

‘Sure, Jamie, or Micky wouldn’t be here. Why you joking with me? Why you teasing an old man?’

Jamie took the envelope out of his pocket. ‘Like I say, Micky, I’m looking for an introduction to some old friends.’ He placed the second sheet of paper face up on the desk between them. ‘You say you were never in the army? Well, I have a different version of the Micky Janelis story, and maybe Micky isn’t such a hero. Are you telling me you never heard of the Rumbula Forest?’

The old man’s face didn’t so much go pale, as a sickly mustard yellow, but he hadn’t lived with a lie for sixty years without learning how to act.

‘Sure, I heard of the Rumbula Forest. Every Latvian heard of the Rumbula Forest. That doesn’t mean every Latvian had anything to do with what happened there.’ He picked up the paper and threw it back across the desk. ‘What is this shit, Saintclair? You abuse my hospitality and my friendship over this Soviet bullshit propaganda. Get out of here.’

Jamie picked up the paper and read: ‘In November nineteen forty-one, I was one of some twenty-four thousand Jews taken from the Jewish Ghetto in Riga to the Rumbula Forest. The able-bodied men were separated from the women and children and the old, but for ten kilometres I was able to march beside my father and my twelve-year-old brother, Jacob. A number of people were killed on the way because they could not keep up, either by Germans of the Aktion Squad or, more cruelly, by men of the local militia, the Arajs Kommando. I was frightened, but my father reassured me. When we entered the forest, my father and brother were singled out by a local man who was known to me. He forced them out of the column at pistol point and pushed them into the trees. I did not know what to do, but it seemed better to follow them. My father and brother were ordered to dig a deep pit, while the other man watched, calmly smoking a cigarette. When the pit was completed to his satisfaction, he ordered them to return the spade they had used. He picked up the spade and I saw him smile before he brought it down with all his strength, edge first, on my father’s head, splitting his skull in two and exposing his brains. Then he did the same with my brother. I was standing ten metres away among the trees while he used the bloody spade to fill in the pit. I escaped into the forest, where I fought with partisan units until October nineteen forty-four. The local man’s name was Mikhailis Janelis, a boy I had known from school. This is my testimony. Anna Gurenstein.’

‘Tas ir jāšanās muļķības! Get out! Get out! Get out! And take your manure with you.’ Micky’s hands shook as he gripped the desk and a vein in his neck pulsed ominously. Jamie wondered if he was about to have a heart attack, but he stood his ground.

‘And Mikhailis Janelis’ military record? Is that bullshit, too, Micky?’ He slapped the execution photograph on the desk and the gallery owner recoiled as if it was a hissing snake. ‘You’ve changed a lot, Micky, but not your smile. I recognized that fucking smile as soon as I walked in your door. I wanted to punch it off your face, and if you don’t cooperate I might just do that yet.’ He carried on relentlessly. ‘Volunteered for the Latvian SS Legion in early nineteen forty-two; fought at Leningrad until forced to retreat in spring of ’forty-four. Accused of war crimes during the retreat. I’m assuming this is one of them, Micky, but with your record I’m pretty sure there was worse. Trapped in the Courland Peninsula until late nineteen forty-four, wounded and evacuated to East Prussia. Evacuated from Konigsberg to Germany. Surrendered to troops of the US Ninth Army on the fourth of May nineteen forty-five.’

‘War crimes?’ Micky spat. ‘What the fuck do you know of war crimes? Terrorists. Back-shooters and mutilators. At least the Americans treated us as what we were. Patriots. The Waffen SS units of the Baltic states are to be seen as units that stood apart from the German SS. We do not consider them a movement that is hostile to the United States,’ he quoted from memory. ‘Does it also say that I stood guard with my comrades at the Nuremberg war trials as an ally? Does it state that I advised the CIA on Latvia during the Cold War.’

‘No it doesn’t, Micky.’ Jamie felt the anger draining from him as he exchanged stares with a defeated old man. ‘So it looks as if your former allies have all abandoned you. Maybe they didn’t know about Anna Gurenstein and the Rumbula Forest, but they do now.’ He picked up two sheets of headed notepaper from the desk and placed them in front of the other man. ‘I need a name and an address, Micky, of a contact in the Waffen SS — the man who gave me this reckoned you still keep in touch with your old mates — and a nice polite letter of introduction asking him to cooperate with me. Do that for me and we’ll forget this ever happened.’

Micky’s shoulders slumped. His hand shook as it reached out to pick up a pen and began writing. ‘You’re a fool, Jamie, out of your depth. They will eat you alive.’

‘I’ll take a chance on that, Micky.’ The Latvian pushed the papers across the desk. Jamie picked them up along with the photograph. ‘Perfect. If it helps, which I doubt it will, this could save someone’s life. I’ll leave you with the other stuff, but I’ll take the picture, if you don’t mind, just in case … I’ll say cheerio now. I doubt we’ll be seeing each other again.’ He turned to leave. ‘And by the way, I’d have that Monet checked out again, there’s something not quite—’

The familiar click of a gun being cocked froze the words on his tongue and when he looked round Micky Janelis was pointing a small, shiny, but still very dangerous pistol at him. The hands that held it were shaking a lot, but not enough to miss from four feet and the dead eyes said he had nothing left to lose.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Micky. Think of your kids. If you kill me all that’s going to happen is that the people who gave me this stuff are going to send it to the Daily fucking Mail and you’re not only going to be in jail, but all over the front page labelled as Britain’s last Nazi war criminal. Just put the fucking gun down, please. This is getting to be a bit of a habit and it’s not good for my digestion.’

Micky shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. You could never understand. My father was a police sergeant in Riga. A big man. We had a good life until the day in nineteen forty the Soviets took over and the NKVD came and took him away. He had been denounced as a Nationalist by one of our Jewish neighbours. When the Germans threw the Russians out we found his body in a mass grave along with two hundred others. He’d had his head smashed in and we could only identify him because of his police uniform. When the Nazis started killing the Jews, I was glad.’ He nodded slowly, as if he was speaking about someone else. ‘Yes, I was glad. I volunteered to help guard them, but that was not enough. You must help with the dirty work. I discovered the Jew who denounced my father quite by accident. As soon as I saw him I knew what I must do. I didn’t even notice the girl.’

There was a long silence, and Jamie noticed the gun had stopped wavering and was aimed right over his heart. In the unlikely event he survived this, bullet-proof underwear was going to become part of his permanent wardrobe. He considered pleading for his life, but from the look in Micky’s eyes that wasn’t going to help.

‘I go to Mass every day and say a prayer for those people, and all the rest, the ones whose faces will never leave me. I pray for their forgiveness and my salvation, but if God hears, He never responds. For sixty years I have had to live with what I have done. And now, this?’ He shook his head and tears fell on the scattered papers. ‘Now this.’

‘Well, Micky, old boy, I’m afraid that’s between you and your conscience. Now,’ Jamie said carefully, ‘if you are going to shoot me, it might as well be in the back as the front. So I’m just going to turn and walk out of that door. As I say, this is between you and your conscience, so if you let me walk out of here, you’ll never hear from me again.’

Very slowly, he turned until his back was to the gun. He opened the office door as gently as if he was defusing an unexploded bomb and his spine cringed in anticipation of the bullet that was undoubtedly coming his way. It was almost with disbelief that he found himself in the gallery on the way to the front door. With a last glance at the Monet and a silent prayer of thanks, he reached for the door handle.

The sharp crack of the small-calibre pistol snapped the silence in two. For a moment he wondered if he’d been shot after all, but it was followed a second later by the clatter of the gun falling to the floor. His first instinct was to get out before he had to explain to the cops what he was doing here with a dead man. His hand actually touched the door handle before he changed his mind and walked back through to the office.

Micky Janelis was in his chair, his head thrown back and the pulse of blood from the little hole in his forehead weakening with every passing second. The hooded, unseeing eyes told their own story. Behind the dead man the wall was splashed red on white with a random modernist pattern that might have pleased Jackson Pollock, but would have mortally offended Micky. Fortunately, none of the splashes appeared to have reached the surface of the desk. With one hand Jamie scooped up the incriminating documents and crushed them into his pocket.

‘Goodbye, Micky,’ he said. ‘No hard feelings, old son.’