“I’ve got to find him,” Gabriel said. “Please tell me where he is.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t say more,” the nun whispered. And then she was gone, her heavy shoes clomping up the metal stairs.
Gabriel circled the crypt like a man trapped in a building about to collapse. Bones. Saints. A bloodstained shirt. How would this lead him to his father?
Footsteps on the staircase. He expected to see Sister Bridget return, but it was Sister Ann. The Irish nun looked angry. Reflected light flashed on the surface of her glasses.
“May I help you, young man?”
“Yes. I’m looking for my father, Matthew Corrigan. And the other nun, Sister Bridget, told me-”
“That’s enough. You have to leave.”
“She said he left a sign-”
“Leave immediately. Or I will call the police.”
The expression on the elderly nun’s face allowed no objection. The keys on her iron ring made a bright jingling sound as she followed Gabriel up the staircase and then out of the convent. He stood in the cold as Sister Ann began to shut the door.
“Sister, please. You have to understand-”
“We know what happened in America. I read in the newspaper how those people were killed. Children, too. They didn’t even spare the little ones. We won’t have such things here!”
She shut the door-hard-and Gabriel heard the sounds of locks being snapped shut. He felt like shouting and pounding on the door, but that would just bring the police. Not knowing what to do, the Traveler gazed out at the traffic and the bare trees of Hyde Park. He was in a strange city without money or friends, and no one was going to defend him from the Tabula. He was alone, truly alone, within the invisible prison.
13
After wandering aimlessly for a few hours, Gabriel found his way to an Internet café on Goodge Street near the University of London. The café was run by a group of amiable Koreans who spoke only a few words of English. Gabriel got a payment card and walked by a row of computers. Some people were looking at pornography, while others were buying cheap plane tickets. The blond teenager sitting at the computer next to him was playing an online game where his avatar would hide in a building and kill any stranger who showed up alone.
Gabriel sat at a computer and entered different chat rooms trying to find Linden, the French Harlequin who had sent money to New York. After two hours of failure, he left a message on a Web site for collectors of antique swords. G. in London. Needs financing. He paid the Koreans for his computer time and spent the rest of the day in the library reading room at the University of London. When the library closed at seven o’clock, he returned to the Internet café and discovered that no one had responded to his message. Back out on the street, it was cold enough to see his breath. A group of students brushed past him, laughing about something. He had less than ten pounds in his pocket.
It was too cold to sleep outside, and there were surveillance cameras on the underground. As he drifted down Tottenham Court Road past brightly lit shops selling televisions and computers, he remembered Maya telling him about a location in West Smithfield where heretics, rebels, and Harlequins were executed by authorities. Once she used her father’s language when she mentioned the area, calling it Blutacker. The German word originally denoted the cemetery near Jerusalem bought with the silver given to Judas, and then it acquired a more general meaning. It was any accursed place-blood ground. If this really was a Harlequin site, then perhaps there was a message board in the area or some indication of where he could find help.
He headed toward East London, asking for directions from people who all seemed to be either drunk or lost. One man who could barely walk straight started waving his arms around as if he were swatting flies. Finally, Gabriel walked up Giltspur Street past St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and found two memorials that were only a few feet apart. One was in memory of the Scottish rebel William Wallace, while the other plaque was placed a few feet away from where the Crown had burned Catholics at the stake. Blutacker, thought Gabriel. But there were no Harlequin signs anywhere.
Turning his back to the memorials, he approached St. Bartholomew the Great, a small Norman church. The stone walls of the church had been chipped and darkened over the years, and the brick walkway was smeared with mud. Gabriel passed through an archway and found himself in a burial ground. Directly in front of him was a heavy wooden door with iron hinges that led into the church. Something was scrawled on the lower edge of the door, and, as he came closer, he saw four words written with a black felt pen: HOPE FOR A TRAVELER.
Was the church a place of refuge? Gabriel knocked on the door, and then pounded on it with his fists, but no one answered. Maybe people were hoping for a Traveler, but he was cold and tired and needed help. Standing in the burial ground, he felt a strong desire to break free of his body and abandon this world forever. Michael was right. The battle was over and the Tabula had won.
As he turned away, he remembered how Maya had used the message boards she set up in New York City. What she wrote looked like graffiti, but every letter and stroke of the pen conveyed information. He knelt in front of the door and realized that HOPE was underlined. Perhaps it was just an accident, but the black line had a slight barb at the end, almost like an arrow.
When Gabriel came back out through the archway, he saw that the arrow-if it was an arrow-was pointing toward Smithfield Market. A big man wearing a white butcher’s apron walked by carrying a shopping bag stuffed with beer cans. “Excuse me,” Gabriel said. “Where’s…Hope? Is that a location?”
The butcher didn’t laugh or call him a fool. He jerked his head in the general direction of the market. “Just up the road, mate. Not far from here.”
Crossing Long Lane, Gabriel approached the Smithfield meat market. For hundreds of years, the district had been one of the most dangerous areas of London. Beggars, harlots, and pickpockets mingled with the surging crowds while herds of cattle were whipped through the narrow streets to the slaughterhouse. Warm blood flowed through the gutters, giving off a faint white steam in the winter air. Flocks of ravens circled above the butchery, dropping down to fight over scraps of flesh.
Those times were gone, and now the central square was lined with restaurants and bookstores. But at night, when everyone had gone home, the spirit of the old Smithfield returned. It was a dark place, a shadowy place, dedicated to killing.
The main square between Long Lane and Charterhouse Street was dominated by the two-story building used to distribute meat throughout London. This huge market was the length of several city blocks and divided into sections by four streets. A modern Plexiglas awning ran around the circumference of the building to protect truck drivers loading supplies in the rain, but the market itself was a renovated example of Victorian confidence. The walls of the market were constructed with white stone arches, the gaps filled in with London brick. Massive iron gates painted purple and green were at each end of the building.
He circled the building once, then twice, looking for graffiti. It seemed absurd to search for “hope” in such a place. Why had the man in the butcher’s apron told him to walk up the street? Exhausted, Gabriel sat down on a concrete bench in a little square across the street from the market. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and tried to warm his fingers with his breath, then gazed around the square. He was at the junction of Cowcross Street and St. John’s. The only business still open was a pub with a wooden façade about twenty feet away.