The following day, and the days after, rescue teams fanned out across the mountain but found no trace of her. Except that, on the Friday, a climber came upon her light cotton shawl on a stunted bush near the summit of the mountain. Those that saw no relevance in this were outnumbered. Sister Anna had scaled the mountain. And when those who were so inclined saw the date – Ascension Day – the explanation became clear. She had been ‘taken up’.
It was probably a rash thing to do, but the following Tuesday I, along with a dozen others, climbed the path to the monastery. I left them there with Sister Maria holding court behind a vast tray of dry crusts. I skirted the end of the chapel and made for the landing pad. It was curious the police had not thought to look there when they first arrived; or, if they had, then not carefully enough. There was not much to see after both our helicopters had been there but if you counted the impressions there was still enough to incriminate. Putting on my overshoes – for which I had no further use – I trampled the ground until no signs remained. No one, it seemed, had heard us, or seen the lamp that had guided me in as darkness fell on the Wednesday evening.
The Codex Kusadasiensis – as the earliest extant copy of the Bible is now known – first emerged a year later in the premises of a dealer in antiquities in the little town of Kusadasi, on the Turkish coast. It was part of a miscellany of documents that an intermediary, acting in secret on our behalf, had randomly assembled so that no particular origin could be ascribed to it. At the auction in Paris the bidding was intense, but in the end it went to the Metropolitan Museum of New York for a formidable sum, in spite of its uncertain provenance.
From time to time my wife – whose real name, incidentally, is not Anna but Lianne – and I spend long weekends in that city. We often stay at the Ritz or the Astoria, but we always go to see the codex. Alongside it in the display case is a photograph of the dealer’s house where it first came to light. If you look carefully you can see, in the distance across the channel, the mass of Mount Vathos and its shining white peak. With a magnifying glass – and we really did try this once – you can make out the green and white spot towards the summit that is Moni Agiou Ioanni. Of course, the geography doesn’t wholly explain why we searched for it there but, sipping coffee in Lianne’s Washington study, which we do from time to time under her treatises on biblical archaeology, we congratulate ourselves on having chosen it as the place to start. Hanging on Anna’s wall beside her nun’s habit is an interesting framed composition that our guests invariably assume, erroneously, to be by one of our less comprehensible contemporary graphical artists. We still have to decide when it will be safe to explain that it represents the system of caves and chambers under the chapel of the monastery.
As for the shawl, we had seen it rise into the air as the rotor blades began whirling. Too late to do anything about it, and impossible to predict the fickleness of human nature.
Lianne has never been back to the island. Increasingly I get up to find her having been writing since dawn to complete her account of how, as a research student, she had come across an obscure and still unknown medieval manuscript that led us to the island, and of her imposture as a nun. She says it is better to consolidate her career as a biblical scholar – she has just been made an assistant professor – before our story of the deception breaks. Such is avarice.
From time to time I return to the island, but only to take tourists up the mountain, or occasionally fly them to the monastery in my own helicopter. I aim to arrive about twelve, giving them ample time to tour the chapel and the shrine and for the more intrepid to venture to the summit, where an enormous cross now stands. But if they do the climb the chances are they will have to forego the pleasures of Sister Maria’s crusts. We need to be gone by two; too much exposure of the place could still be risky.
Whenever I am on the island I make a point of visiting Father Kalvos. Sometimes, at quiet moments, I catch him gazing anxiously up at the mountain, for Sister Anna was never replaced.
DAWN LIGHT
Bentley gave one last desperate tug, and he was free, leaving only wisps of his coat sleeve to the teeth of the closing door. Alex, Sargon’s son, was not so lucky. For a moment Bentley contemplated the anguish through the stocking covered head as it moved behind the plate glass. He was reminded of a fish in an aquarium, desperate for food, except that Alex’s gaze was not on him, but searching wildly for escape. Then Bentley saw him produce the gun, which he shouldn’t have brought, because they had agreed it. It was difficult to tell whether the single sudden crack was of breaking glass or gun-shot. Whichever, the clear glass in an instant fractured like a car windscreen does to a stone and Alex, still trapped, was lost from sight – although not to Bentley’s consciousness. Then another alarm began to sound. Bentley’s grip on his case tightened as he turned to confront the options that were as terrible as they were unplanned.
No time to consider that Alex was the one who had hung behind, had minced back across the marble floor and peered over the counter to where the second assistant – the one they had not at first seen – had pressed the alarm button. And, extending his arm and pointing the gun downwards, had not even seen his target as the trigger was pulled. But the scream had told him to run and Bentley, at the door, had waited as long as he dared. Yet, he was Sargon’s son, and Bentley, as number two in the gang, had been responsible.
With his back to the door the choices were stark. To his right the car, black and funereal at the end of the dark alley, had already begun to move, just as they had agreed. Slowly, no fuss, uncompromisingly, it drew forward. Twenty seconds worth of time, maybe. To the left, equidistant, figures moving in the high street, beneath street lamps radiating yellow through the dank night air. The jewels bulging heavily in his case weighed against the fate of Sargon’s son – possible gain against abject failure and worse. So Bentley ran, his coat flapping over his coal-black suit. Towards people, and into a mire from which he might, if he was lucky, pull himself free. The human filter that absorbed him clogged the car’s progress, muffling the crazed horn and the single, wild shot. They had risked much with that, and it quantified his plight.
The street was still unsafe. Along its length the pimps, the three-trick fraudsters, the beggars, were half of them Sargon’s men, with their mobiles communicado, just as capable of swarming – when the order came – as dissolving into the night. Bentley, with his hat pulled down and coat collar up, tripped his way through them as nimbly as his bulky frame allowed.
His car, known only to him – as, heaven be praised, he had just stolen it – was parked too far away to be reached safely. Most of the shops were now closed, and those that weren’t were unlikely to give refuge to a criminal they knew only as an extortioner. And dead-end alleys, in his experience, tended to be just that, in fact as well as metaphorically. Then, suddenly, he was confronted by a back he knew well, moulding itself to the pillar of a traffic light, mobile scrunched between shoulder and jaw, the body seething with alertness despite its sack-like frame. Bentley dared not pass, nor attempt to cross the road. He looked to his side, hesitantly, then again into the depths of a building – a church – that he had never before entered and did not know.
The girl at the door smiled in a way that Bentley barely recognised – benignly, without intent. She handed him a piece of paper as he passed and he took it with head down, but missing nothing. At first he sat in the rearmost pew, but that was too exposed. Further forward now, the pews filled up around him. Thus trapped, he thought again of Sargon’s son. A priest ascended the pulpit. Bentley scanned his companions, identifying one that matched his own appearance whose movements he determined he would follow exactly. For the first time he glanced at the piece of paper he still held – a service in memory of Philip Ironside, he read. The girl next to him, pretty in black but with the hollow eyes of grief, smiled sweetly and asked him how he knew the boy. ‘Only distantly,’ Bentley replied, ‘but he was a fine young fellow. And you?’ ‘He was my cousin,’ she replied, and he watched a tear course down her cheek. Once, while he was kneeling, the door behind banged. There were footsteps, aggressively into the body of the church, but they receded and the door slammed shut. When the service ended the girl smiled again. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll stay a while longer,’ Bentley replied, sinking to his knees and bowing his head, and touching the case beside him, just to be sure. ‘Well, Philip Ironside, you’ve gained a friend by dying, that’s for sure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s a first in my experience.’