Crucified Page 6

  Traitors like Henry "Hotspur" Percy, in 1403, and the Earl of Northumberland, in 1572. This was the home of Guy Fawkes, the Roman Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament with the Gunpowder Plot. And York was where the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin had danced on the end of a rope.

  Remember, remember the fifth of November,

  The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

  I see no reason why Gunpowder

  Treason Should ever be forgot.

  A penny loaf to feed the Pope.

  A farthing o' cheese to choke him.

  A pint of beer to rinse it down.

  A faggot of sticks to burn him.

  Bum him in a tub of tar.

  Burn him like a blazing star.

  Burn his body from his head.

  Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.

  Ah yes, York.

  Had Wyatt had time for a walk, he'd have crossed the River Ouse to amble through the Shambles. That street was like a time machine back to the Elizabethan era. The buildings leaned over the cobblestones until their roofs almost touched in the middle, and in places you could stretch your hands and brush the houses on both sides. The name came from Fleshammels—a Saxon word meaning "flesh shelves"—because butchers displayed meat for sale on the wide windowsills. Since livestock was slaughtered outside on the street, the pavement sloped to a channel where blood, guts, and offal were flushed away. The pandemonium and mess coined another term: a shambles.

  In 1571, Margaret Clitherow married a butcher with a shop in the Shambles. She permitted her house to be used for Mass by Catholic priests, a capital crime in Elizabethan times, and so was executed at the tollbooth on the Ouse Bridge. Made to lie on her back with a sharp stone under her spine, she was stretched out in the form of a cross with her hands tied to posts.

  Then a door was placed on her and weighted down until she was crushed to death. In 1970, Pope Paul VI made her a saint, and her home in the Shambles is now a shrine.

  But enough of blood and carnage; Wyatt was here to work.

  So the American rented a car and drove out of York, forsaking the wicked ways of the city for the countryside.

  Out here, between the brooding moors to the northeast and the Pennine Hills to the west, lay the neglected airfields of Bomber Command. Today, most were little more than crumbling runways with rusty hangars that had long since lost the battle to weeds and grass. But in his imagination, Wyatt saw a time when the rumbling sky beckoned the warriors of the night, and the surrounding villages—a pub or two, an old Anglican church, and a hotel that served meals for the restricted price of five shillings—bustled with men who would never have meshed but for the anvil of war. The tough and the brainy, the pious and the heathen were all forged into seven-man groups that fought their lonely way across the dark landscape of Hitler's Reich and—hopefully—back home.

  Wyatt wondered why Balsdon, who still lived here, couldn't leave it behind.

  The Judas puzzle?

  Mist and drizzle mixed to make the first half of the drive a somber journey. The windshield wipers flicked arches so Wyatt could follow the road through this broad expanse of rolling farmland dotted with ruined abbeys and castles. The legions of Rome had marched the route his tires were treading, and somewhere out there stood three monoliths called the Devil's Arrows.

  Dragged ten miles and raised for an unfathomable reason by pre-historic man, these standing stones were supposed to have come from a barrage shot by the Devil at local churches.

  With weather like this, it's no wonder the local Bronte sisters dreamed up Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and no wonder Captain Cook sailed off to the sunny South Seas. But as Wyatt neared Mick Balsdon's village, a break in the cloud cover let the sun shine through, and an iridescent rainbow arced over his destination. Just as all roads once led to Rome, these drystone walls converged on the tiny community at the center of their web. And on the outskirts of the snug stone village—basically, a cricket pitch doubling as a common, backed by an alehouse called the Cricketer's Arms—Wyatt located the lane that branched off to Balsdon's cottage, down near the old mill stream.

  "Mill Cottage," read the sign at the top of a footpath descending through dripping trees.

  Beside the sign stood a market cross from the plague years of the 1660s. The depression at its base used to be filled with vinegar, and customers would wash their coins in hopes that would save the miller from the Black Death.

  "Kaah-kaah-kaah."

  From somewhere above him in the limbs of the trees, Wyatt heard the cawing of his namesake (though he preferred to think he was named for the chess piece). Folklore holds that a rook can sense the nearness of death, and Wyatt could picture this scene in an Agatha Christie novel. He was Miss Marple in St. Mary Mead, off to see Colonel Mustard about the church raffle, unaware that the old boy had been done to death in the old mill cottage by a bonk on the noggin from a shepherd's crook. Wyatt imagined the bridge across the stream had a story, too. A local suitor would swim across to woo the miller's daughter, but her father refused to allow her to marry a ne'er-do-well. So the lad shipped off to the colonies to make his fortune in ivory tusks, and when he came back to marry the lass with the miller's blessing, he built the bridge across the water as a testimonial to undying love.

  No wonder he was a writer.

  It was in that overblown frame of mind that Wyatt knocked on the door.

  The cottage was fashioned from dark gray millstone grit and had a red tiled roof. Ivy climbed the walls around the mullioned windows. Liz had phoned Balsdon yesterday to ask if Wyatt could see him last night or this morning, depending on how soon he could get free from his promo tour. The sergeant had replied that any time was fine by him. Confined to a wheelchair, he was going nowhere, and his wartime archive on the Ace of Clubs was spread across the table, waiting for all to see.

  So why didn't Balsdon answer?

  Wyatt knocked again.

  Louder.

  And still no response.

  Balsdon, Liz had informed him, lived alone. A housekeeper came by twice a week to bring him groceries and clean up.

  The elderly warrior was a fiercely independent man, and he had no intention of going quietly to his grave. No retirement home for him, he'd see out his life in solitude, with a link to the Internet to help him ferret out the secret behind the Judas puzzle.

  Now, Wyatt wondered if his time had run out.

  Had Balsdon died of old age in his cottage?

  Or was he singing in the shower and couldn't hear the knock?

  Wyatt tried the latch.

  The door was unlocked.

  Opening it a crack, he called out, "Sergeant Balsdon? May I come in? It's Wyatt Rook."

  Nothing.

  Then he saw it.

  Blood streamed across the hardwood floor from around the corner to the left of the entrance hall. The hall was no more than a vestibule for shedding coats and footwear. Thinking that Balsdon had fallen and struck his head, Wyatt rushed to his aid—and found himself confronted by a murder scene far grislier than any in Agatha Christie.

  Blood and carnage.

  The room was dominated by a huge fireplace. The vaulted ceiling was spanned by heavy beams dangling farmland relics: sheep shears, a butter stamp, a pig-feeder, a bird-scarer, a flat iron, love spoons, and such. Naked, the old airman was slung by his hands and feet from one of the beams. He resembled a safari beast being carried on a pole. To muffle his screams, the killer had clad the suspended man in the leather flying helmet and oxygen mask of Bomber Command. The oxygen tube hanging from the poor guy's face made him look like a skinny elephant.

  A digital recorder at the end of the tube would have captured a permanent transcript of anything he confessed.

  The ropes around his hands and feet were looped over the beam so Balsdon could be hoisted and lowered as slowly as the killer holding the makeshift pulleys desired.

  Grease and gravity.

  What an ugly way to die.

  The wheelchair, flung a
side, lay overturned in the corner.

  Beneath Balsdon's buttocks, another device took its place—a sturdy wooden stool with a metal triangle bolted on top. The pyramid-shaped chair, glistening with lubricant, had blood streaking down its legs from the pointed seat. Positioned so it aimed at Balsdon's anus, the thick spike had impaled its way through his abdomen, pushing his intestines out of their cavity as it jutted from his belly. His bowels hung down from the Judas chair like the elephant trunk from the face mask. Above the horror, from the hook of a discarded farm utensil, hung an upside-down Catholic crucifix.

  Shocked, Wyatt reached for his cellphone to call the police.

  + + +

  Detective Inspector Ramsey, of Yorkshire CID, was a beefy man with a nose pushed off to one side, as if he'd run into a hay-maker in the pub on Saturday night.

  "So you don't know the victim?"

  "No," Wyatt replied.

  "Never met him?"

  "No."

  "Then why come here to see him?"

  "To look at his archive."

  "What archive?"

  "One that focused on a bomber called the Ace of Clubs.

  He told a friend of mine that it was spread out on the table."

  "The table's bare."

  "It must have been stolen."

  "Why?"

  "For what's in it. Balsdon linked the bomber to a Nazi traitor who was never unmasked."

  "Judas?"

  "Yes."

  Ramsey nodded. "I read the recent interview. So what does the victim's theory have to do with you?"

  "I might write a book."

  "About the Ace of Clubs!"

  "Yes. To reveal why it was shot down."

  "Another conspiracy?"

  "Huh?"

  "Aren't you the author of Dresden?"

  "Yes."

  "A muckraker?" asked the detective.

  "I wouldn't put it like that."

  "There's a lot of money in raking muck, is there, sir?"

  "Where's this going?"

  "Ran out of conspiracy theories on your side of the pond, did you? Is that why you came over here to milk some of ours for cash? Your reputation is that you stop at nothing to get what you want. Unmasking Judas would be a coup. How far would you go, Mr. Rook, to get your hands on the key to that puzzle?"

  "Are you accusing me of murder, Inspector?"

  "Detective Inspector."

  "Are you?"

  "Where were you last night?"

  "In London."

  "All night? Early and late?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "The Judas chair that spiked the victim was stolen from a museum in York hours before Mr. Balsdon was killed."

  "Then I have an alibi."

  "Unless you have an accomplice."

  "Do you think I'd go that far to muckrake, as you call it, Detective Inspector?"

  "Why did you write Dresden?"

  "I was intrigued by a quote. The more I thought about it, the more I had to know."

  "What quote?"

  "At the start of the RAF's bombing campaign, Sir Arthur Harris—'Bomber' Harris to the press, and 'Butcher' Harris within Bomber Command—said, 'The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.

  At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.'

  Near the end of the war—February 1945—Harris had reached the point where he could state, 'I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier.' That same month, his planes unleashed hell on Dresden."

  "So you took him to task?"

  "Wouldn't you?"

  "My grandmother died in the Blitz, and my grandfather was killed in one of the Lancasters lost in that raid."

  Uh-oh, Wyatt thought.

  THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER

  LONDON

  "A Judas chair?" Liz said. "Why's it called that?"

  She'd met Wyatt at King's Cross Station, after his long and eventful daytrip to York. Taking a cab to his hotel in the heart of the capital, they'd headed right to the bar on the revolving top floor, and here they sat sipping drinks—a single-malt Scotch for him and a gin and tonic for her—as the lights of London slowly swirled beneath their table.

  "How well do you know the Bible?"

  "Minimal," Liz replied. "Just what you pick up here and there. My mom was a second-wave feminist in the burn-your-bra years. She thinks the Bible's a sexist putdown of women."

  "And you?"

  "I never got into it."

  "God is dead?" Wyatt asked.

  "I wouldn't go that far. I've never seen a burning bush, I'm not Adam's rib, and She—by that I mean God—doesn't talk to me. Until I hear from Her, I'll remain a skeptic."

  "What? You didn't slip me this in that teashop?" Wyatt joked. He touched the cartilage in his throat.

  "I don't get it," Liz said, popping a peanut from the bowl on the table into her mouth.

  "The tree of the knowledge of good and evil grew in the Garden of Eden. God forbade Adam to eat its fruit. But the serpent—Satan in disguise—persuaded Eve to eat from the tree and share the fruit with Adam. After he took a bite, Adam became aware of his nakedness. The end result was that God expelled them from Eden and cursed Eve by commanding Adam to rule over her. Thus was born original sin, us having to wear fig leaves, and"—he wagged his finger at Liz—"the need for you to keep your blouse buttoned up."

  "I'm not wearing a blouse," she said, plucking her black pullover with her fingers.

  "You were in the teashop."

  "What do Adam and Eve and my undone blouse have to do with a Judas chair?"

  Wyatt moved his Scotch aside and placed his laptop on the table. He found what he wanted on the Internet, then turned the screen around for Liz to read:

  By his sin, Adam, as the first man, lost the original holiness and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but for all human beings.

  Adam and Eve transmitted on to their descendants a human nature polluted by their own first sin and hence deprived of God's original holiness and justice; this deprivation we call "original sin."

  As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the domination of death, and inclined to sin.

  "And that," said Wyatt, "is why you mustn't tempt a weakling like me with undone buttons."

  "Original sin?"

  "No. Concupiscence. The passed-on pollution."

  "Con -what?"

  "Lustful desire," he replied.

  "Peanut?" Liz asked, holding one out and throwing him the sexiest of pouts.

  Wyatt grinned.

  He liked this concupiscent game.

  "So what about your cartilage?" Liz prodded, eating the forbidden peanut herself.

  "The Bible doesn't identify the tree of knowledge.

  Mediterranean tradition says it was a fig tree, because Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their genitals. Malum is the Latin adjective for 'evil.' But used as a noun, malum means 'apple.' When the Bible was translated from Latin by northern Europeans, a mix-up occurred, and the forbidden fruit became an apple. The larynx in my throat is more prominent than yours because the apple Eve gave Adam stuck in his gullet when he swallowed. So men have 'Adam's apples.'"

  "I still don't know what a Judas chair is."

  "Want another drink?"

  "No, I've got a pile of work to finish up tomorrow before I leave for Germany."

  Wyatt motioned to the bartender for their check.

  "Christianity is based on original sin. Without mankind's fall from paradise into ongoing sin and death, there would be nothing for Jesus to redeem us from with his crucifixion. Without original sin, he would be a messiah without a mission. And why was Christ crucified? Because of betrayal. And who betrayed him?"

>   "Judas," said Liz.

  "Why?"

  "Greed. Thirty pieces of silver."

  "That's in the Gospel of Matthew. But what's the deeper reason given in the Gospels of Luke and John?"

  "Give me a clue?"

  Wyatt punched the keys of his laptop and showed her the result:

  Luke 22:3

  Intravit autem Satanas in Iudam qui cognominatur Scarioth unum de duodecim.

  "Satan?" said Liz.

  Another keypunch revealed the translation, and the similar passage from the Gospel of John:

  And Satan entered into Judas, who was surnamed Iscariot, one of the twelve.

  John 13:2

  Et cena facta cum diabolus iam misisset in corde ut traderet eum Iudas Simonis Scariotis.

  And when supper was done (the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray him).

  "Judas is the villain of the crucifixion of Christ, yet the Bible tells us little about him," Wyatt said. "Betraying his master to the temple priests earned him a paltry sum: those thirty pieces of silver. Jesus exposed him as his traitor at the Last Supper, then left Jerusalem with his eleven faithful disciples for the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. During the night, Jesus awoke and warned his followers, 'Look, my betrayer is at hand.'

  Judas entered the garden with troops carrying torches, clubs, and swords. He told them, 'The man I shall kiss is the one. Arrest him.' Then he walked up to Jesus and said, 'Hail, Rabbi,' and kissed him. A scuffle ensued, during which a disciple—the later St. Peter—cut one ear off the high priest's slave with his sword.