William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

“They’re extras,” Shawn said. “No one cares about them.”

“Until their survivors sue,” Gus said.

Gus knew there had to be a way to get past that cop. He simply had to visualize it. He cast his gaze around the gallery until his eye fell on a carved wooden figure about a foot high. It sat in a Plexiglas box standing on a narrow pillar. A card in front of the display case described it as a Melanesian fertility symbol from the early 1600s.

“Okay,” Gus said, “let’s say this is the cop.”

Shawn looked at the little figure, and then at the enormous priapus jutting out from its midsection. “If that’s the cop, he won’t need his gun to stop us,” he said. “He won’t even need a nightstick.”

“Is this helping?” Gus said.

“It’s helping pass the time,” Shawn said.

“We don’t want to pass time,” Gus said. “Time is not our friend.”

“Maybe not to you,” Shawn said. “But I’ve always felt that Pierce Brosnan was a much more compelling actor once he got a little age on his face.”

Gus fought back an image of what he could do with that Melanesian fertility symbol and tried to refocus on the problem.

“Okay,” Gus said, “we’re saying that this is the cop-and that’s all we’re saying on the subject. Our one goal here is to figure out how we can make him move away from the gallery he’s guarding.”

Shawn stared at the wooden figure. Then his face lit up in a smile. “I’ve got it.”

“Yes?” Kitteredge said.

“I said I had the answer,” Shawn said. “Not that I feel like sharing it. Because just standing here chatting with you could be considered a felony, seeing as how you’re wanted for a bunch of terrible crimes. So before we go any further down the road to helping you, I think you owe us an explanation.”

Gus was about to jump in to defend his professor, but before he could speak he realized that Shawn was right.

Kitteredge looked from Shawn to Gus and saw the determination on their faces. “You’re right,” he said. “By helping me, you may have put yourself in terrible danger, and not just from the police. You need to know about the Cabal.”

“But before you can understand the Cabal, we have to go back a hundred and fifty years, to when Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his close friend William Morris were brilliant young men,” Kitteredge said.

Shawn let out a groan. “Are we going to get to the point while some of us here are still young men?”

Gus wanted to shush Shawn, but there was no point. Kitteredge didn’t seem to have noticed the interruption.

“And as many brilliant young men have been throughout the years, they were dissatisfied with their country and their culture,” the professor continued. “They joined with a group of artists and writers called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were attempting to reject several hundred years of art history and return to a style that was based on nature, that re-created the intense colors and abundant detail of paintings from the fourteenth century.

“But Rossetti and Morris were more radical in their approach than the founding brothers. They were appalled by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution and yearned to bring back not only the aesthetic of the Middle Ages but many of its working practices as well. Morris, in particular, was obsessed with the idea of returning to the principles of hand-crafted furniture and objects instead of the mass-produced items factories were now churning out.

“All this is accepted fact and not at all controversial.” Kitteredge stopped and fished in his pocket for his pipe, and then, apparently remembering what had happened last time, pulled his hand away.

“That’s really interesting,” Shawn said as he stifled what Gus knew was a phony yawn. “Now I completely understand why you pulled a knife on a homicide detective.”

“That was background you needed to know to understand what comes next,” Kitteredge said. “Because now we are moving into my own research. And that is far more dangerous. I spent my lifetime studying the works of the Brotherhood. And as I dug deeper I began to discover anomalies and lacunae in the works that often seemed to contradict their explicit meanings. Of course this was of great interest to me; how could it not be?”

“I could explain,” Shawn said.

“So I devoted myself to understanding what these little anomalies meant,” Kitteredge said. “At first, they seemed totally random. But then I began to notice a pattern.”

Shawn gave Gus a significant look. Gus managed to ignore it.

“It took me years to understand that the pattern was actually a code, and more years to work out what it meant,” Kitteredge said. “And even when I had succeeded, I couldn’t bring myself to believe what it was telling me. I went back and reworked all my research until there was no doubt in my mind.”

Gus could feel his heartbeat rising with excitement. “No doubt about what?” he said. “What was the message?”

“Morris and Rossetti and a handful of others weren’t simply planning to bring back the artistic standards of the Middle Ages. They aimed to bring back the political system as well. They wanted to roll back the clock to before the signing of the Magna Carta. They believed that the only way to rescue Britain from the moral decline brought about by the Industrial Revolution, from the poverty that was destroying families and killing people, from the factory pollution that was fouling the air and the water, from the migration into the cities that was wiping out the rural way of life was to bring back the idea of the king as an absolute ruler who would have command over all things political, cultural, and spiritual. That king, needless to say, would have to be someone who understood the Pre-Raphaelite way of thinking and would return England to those glory days.”

“Someone like William Morris?” Gus suggested helpfully.

“Someone exactly like Morris,” Kitteredge said. “With Rossetti at his side.”

“Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “I’m not exactly an expert on royalty, but I always thought that king was one of those jobs you couldn’t just apply for. That’s why I didn’t bother sending an application to Monaco. Because everyone kept telling me you had to be related to the last guy.”

“Inheritance is the standard way of determining the royal lineage,” Kitteredge said. “But that line can be interrupted and replaced. It happened several times in England’s history, usually through violent rebellion or civil war.”

“So these two painters were going to lead an armed rebellion so they could make themselves king of England?” Shawn said.

“They were not violent men,” Kitteredge said. “They planned for a peaceful revolution. The British people would flock to their side and demand that Morris be installed on the throne.”

“Why would anyone think that?” Shawn said.

“Because they were going to have a symbol,” Kitteredge said. “The one thing that would prove to the world that William Morris was the rightful king of England. They were searching for-and I believe they found-Excalibur.”

Shawn and Gus stared slack-jawed at Kitteredge, although apparently for different reasons.

“They thought he’d be crowned king of England because he drove a fancy sports car?” Shawn said. “And one of the ugliest cars ever made, at that?”

But Gus could barely contain his excitement at Kitteredge’s words. “Excalibur was King Arthur’s sword,” he said. “The one he pulled out of the stone. And if I remember right, on the blade it said ‘Whoever wields this sword is the rightful king of all England.’ ”