The cellar door opened and the light came on. Footsteps sounded on the stone staircase. Peering cautiously over the top of the desk, Ben saw that it was Madame Lamont. She was wrapped in a dressing gown, her grey hair tousled and her feet encased in furry slippers. He half expected to see a .38 in her hand. Small woman, big trouble.
But as the housekeeper reached the bottom of the steps, Ben heard her singing to herself and realised the old woman was half drunk. She must have been boozing all evening and then passed out for a while in her room; now she’d come looking for some more. Madame Lamont shuffled across the floor in her slippers, making her way to the little table between the wine racks. She settled herself in the chair, ripped the cork out of the bottle and poured a brimming glassful, which she knocked back in a gulp.
Hell, Ben thought. So much for the dead man’s last drink. What was he going to do? The old dipso could be here for hours. He didn’t have time to wait for her to drink herself unconscious again.
Madame Lamont was about to launch into her second glass when Ben came up behind her chair and hooded her with the cover of one of Lalique’s cushions. The old woman began to screech and struggle. If Jude could see me now, he thought grimly as he lashed her securely to the chair with the curtain tieback rope. But Madame Lamont was a tough old bird, and from the fury of her struggles, he didn’t think she was about to expire from a heart attack any time soon.
Ignoring the muffled cries, Ben ran back to Lalique’s office and started leafing through the little address book that the priest had kept hidden in his secret compartment. Its pages were virtually empty, other than for a small handful of contacts that Lalique had entered by their first names only, either to conceal their full identities from prying eyes or simply because they were familiar to him. Under S, Ben found ‘Simeon’ listed alongside his Oxfordshire phone number; under W was the name ‘Wesley’, together with a number bearing the international prefix for the U.S.A. Flipping through the pages, the only other name Ben could find was someone called Hillel, with an Israeli number.
Hillel. Could he have been the burly Middle-Eastern-looking man in the photo? If so, Lalique must have kept this address book solely as a record of the group of associates involved with the sword. Remembering the woman called Martha, Ben searched under M. There was no trace of her, which seemed to confirm his suspicions that Martha, whoever she was, must have been peripheral to the group.
Across the cellar, Madame Lamont was still in full voice and she was fighting her bonds like a tigress. Ben’s knots were good. He was confident she’d settle eventually.
Laying the address book aside he returned to the sketch pad. The fact that Fabrice Lalique had drawn the sword told him a number of things. One, it was a lot quicker and easier to take a photo than to do a detailed line drawing, however talented the artist. That implied to Ben that Simeon and his colleagues might have been unwilling to photograph the sword, in case the images fell into the wrong hands and aroused the wrong kind of curiosity. Had Fabrice perhaps sketched it without the others’ knowledge, maybe working from memory afterwards? Such extreme secretiveness begged even more questions. Just what was this sword?
Two, it suggested that Fabrice must have been in the sword’s presence at some point. Had that been in Israel? In America? Where was it now?
Three, given Lalique’s skill as an artist, Ben had to suppose that the drawings were a good likeness. With that in mind, it wasn’t the strange sickle shape of the weapon that perplexed him. It was its plainness, the absence of any kind of adornment. In his experience, and the experience of all history, when men killed one another in order to possess an object, it was generally because that object held some significant value. And value generally boiled down to hard cash. A sword of serious historical importance – perhaps once having belonged to a king or an emperor – could be expected to be heavily encrusted with precious stones and bear the flourishes of the most proficient craftsmen of its time. But this one had nothing of the sort.
Maybe it was made of solid gold, Ben thought. It was impossible to tell from the sketch. But then, gold was just gold. Once melted down, it might as well have come from anywhere. Someone with the cash to hire professional gunmen and organise phone taps and elaborate fake suicides and accidents could buy all the gold they wanted. Why this particular sword?
Ben still had too many questions, but he didn’t think he’d get any more answers here tonight. Pocketing the sketch pad and the address book, he picked up his flashlight and Lalique’s desk phone. He turned off the cellar light at the switch near the steps, then switched on the flashlight and walked back over to where Madame Lamont was still struggling to get free. He obliged her by liberating one hand, into which he pressed the phone. The old woman squawked obscenities at him as he removed the cushion cover from her head.
‘Call your grandson,’ he said in French, then headed up the steps and left the darkened cellar, shutting the door behind him. By the time the police arrived to rescue her, he’d be far away.
Chapter Forty-Two
Jacques Rabier had fallen asleep on the tatty sofa in the kitchen and was snoring loudly as Ben returned to the farm. Ben could barely remember when he’d last slept himself. He sat down wearily at Rabier’s grimy kitchen table and took out his phone and the address book he’d recovered from Fabrice Lalique’s office. He flipped the address book open to the letter W, and dialled the number Lalique had written for the American called Wesley.
Four a.m. in France; it would be late afternoon to late evening in the States, depending on which time zone Wesley lived in. The dialling tone droned on until it eventually cut off. There was no answerphone. Ben shrugged and leafed back through the address book to H for Hillel. Again, he stabbed out the number and waited. It would be around dawn in Israel, so there was a good chance somebody would be up and about to take the call.
After several rings, a woman’s voice replied in rapid-fire Hebrew. Thanks to his theology studies, Ben’s knowledge of biblical and classical Hebrew was sharper than his understanding of the modern language, and he missed most of what the woman was saying to him. He was a lot better at Arabic.
‘I was looking for Hillel,’ he said in English, and the woman switched to English with the same transatlantic twang of nearly everyone who’d learned the language outside of Britain. ‘This is Hillel’s Coffee House, Zion Square. He’s not here right now.’ There was music playing in the background, and a buzz of chatter and activity. Ben knew that these kinds of places were often open twenty-four hours a day. He’d been in a thousand coffee bars like it in his time, all over the Middle East and Africa, and he could well imagine the scene – the poky interior, fading decor, smoky atmosphere, harried waitresses run off their feet for twelve hours at a stretch.
‘Zion Square in Jerusalem?’ he asked, remembering the name from his last visit to the place.
‘Sure,’ the woman said nonchalantly. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Will Hillel be in later?’ Ben asked.
‘He doesn’t come in that often. Might pay a visit late afternoon. Who’s calling?’
Ben ended the call without replying, and immediately started hunting for Hillel’s Coffee House online. Its colourful website quickly confirmed that it was a popular all-hours café in Zion Square, off Jaffa Road in downtown West Jerusalem, owned and run by Hillel Zada and his wife Ayala.
When Ben saw the photo of the place he realised he couldn’t have been more wrong about it. The coffee house was as upmarket as any five-star restaurant in London, Paris or Rome. Its smiling owners were pictured standing in front of the bar, surrounded by glitzy decor that had quite obviously had a ton of money thrown at it. Ayala was in her fifties, tiny and trim, much-bejewelled, dark-haired with streaks of grey. Her husband was a large, burly guy around age sixty, decked out in a loud flowery shirt that had four buttons open and revealed two gold neck-chains, each as thick as a rope. An even chunkier gold identity bracelet dangled from one thick, hairy wrist.
It wasn’t the first time Ben had laid eyes on the Israeli. He was the same man who’d