The Bancroft Strategy

  Being in his presence made all her past ambitions seem so shrunken.

  “So the first task of doing good is to avoid doing bad,” she said, finally, musingly. They were walking downhill now. She heard a soft fluttering and looked up to see a brace of wood ducks lift up into the air before her eyes, in a cloud of vibrant plumage. Tucked behind the knoll, it turned out, was a small, clear pond, perhaps half an acre in size. Water lilies clustered around its banks. The ducks had obviously decided to wait among the trees until the human visitors had moved on.

  “God, they’re lovely,” Andrea said.

  “That they are. And there are men of a certain stripe who can’t see them without itching for a shotgun.” Paul Bancroft approached the pond, picked up a pebble from near its edge, and with boyish skill skipped it across the water’s surface. The stone bounced twice, landing on the opposite bank. “I’ll tell you a story.” He turned to face her. “Have you ever heard of Inver Brass?”

  “Inver Brass? Sounds like a lake in Scotland.”

  “And so it is, though you won’t find it on any map. But it’s also the name of a group of men—and originally it was all men—who came from around the world and met up there back in 1929. The organizer was a Scotsman of great means and ambition, and the people he gathered together were men of the same stamp. It was a small group, too. Six people: all influential, all rich, all idealistic, all determined to make the world a better place.”

  “Oh, that’s all.”

  “Does it seem so very modest?” he asked jestingly. “But yes, that was why Inver Brass was founded. And, from time to time, they would send vast sums of money to distressed regions, the idea being to diminish the suffering and, in particular, the violence that arose from deprivation.”

  “A long time ago. A different world.” There was a distant chittering of a squirrel somewhere in the canopied woods across the glen.

  “As it happens, though, the founder of Inver Brass had ambitions beyond his own life. The group was regularly reconstituted in ensuing decades. One thing remained the same: The leader, whomever it might be, was always code-named ‘Genesis.’ As the founder had been.”

  “An interesting role model,” Andrea ventured. She found another small pebble, made an effort to skip it along the water, but the angle was wrong. It plunked down and disappeared.

  “Maybe more of a cautionary tale,” Bancroft countered. “They weren’t infallible. Far from it. The fact is, one of their feats of economic engineering inadvertently led to the rise of Nazi Germany.”

  Andrea faced him. “You can’t be serious,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Which pretty much canceled out all the good they did. They thought about causes and effects—and forgot that effects, too, are causes.”

  Through scudding clouds, the sun dimmed and brightened. Andrea fell silent.

  “You look…”

  “Stunned,” Andrea said. And so she was: a trained historian, stunned by the history of Inver Brass, stunned by the casualness with which Dr. Bancroft had related it. “The notion that a cabal like that could have shifted the course of human history…” She trailed off.

  “There’s a great deal that never appears in the history books, Andrea.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Inver Brass. From a lake in Scotland to the ascent of the Third Reich. This takes a little getting used to.”

  “I’ve never met a faster study,” the aging savant murmured in an almost intimate tone. “You see it before most people do: Doing the right thing isn’t always easy.” He looked off to the acreage on the other side of the long, low stone wall, a stretch of artfully piled shale.

  “You must be haunted by the story of Inver Brass.”

  “And humbled,” he put in with a significant glance. “As I say, the imperative is always to think forward. I’d like to believe that the Bancroft Foundation has some grasp of the elementals of historical causation. We’ve learned that the straight shot is often less effective than the carom shot.” He skipped another pebble across the pond. This one touched down three times. “It’s all in the wrist,” he told her with a wink. He was seventy, and he was seven. He had taken the heaviest burdens in the world upon his shoulders, and yet there was something about him that was lighter than air. “You remember Voltaire’s rallying cry: Ecrasez l’infame!—Crush the horror! It’s mine, too. But the hard question has always been: How? As I say, doing the right thing isn’t always easy.”

  Andrea took a deep breath. Clouds were beginning to gather overhead, not just to scud. “It’s a lot to take in,” she said at last.

  “That’s why I want you to dine at my place tonight—en famille.” He gestured toward a house a few hundred yards on the other side of the stone wall, mostly concealed by foliage. So Bancroft resided in an adjoining parcel of land, his house a mere twenty-minute walk from the foundation.

  “Seems you live over the shop,” Andrea said, with a careless giggle. “Or next to it.”

  “Beats commuting,” he said. “And if I’m in a hurry, there’s always a bridle path. Is that a yes?”

  “A long-winded one. Thank you. I’d love to.”

  “I have an idea my son would enjoy meeting you. Brandon’s his name. He’s thirteen. A wretched age, everyone says, but he wears it rather well. Anyway, I’ll let Nuala know you’ll be coming. She’s—well, she looks after us. Among other things, I’d guess you’d call her the governess. But that sounds so Victorian.”

  “And you’re more of an Age of Enlightenment guy.”

  Laughter rippled through him.

  Having made the great man laugh, Andrea suddenly felt buoyed by a wave of unreasonable happiness. She was over her head, out of place—and somehow she had never felt more at home.

  You were born to this, her cousin had said, and, thinking of her mother, Andrea felt a moment of coldness. Yet what if he was right?

  Todd Belknap manacled the guard’s wrists and ankles, stripped him naked with a few strokes of a knife, and then chained the manacles to the heavy cast-iron chair. Only then did he switch the lights back on. To overpower such a man required speed and stealth, and those advantages were temporary. The steel fetters were needed to make it permanent.

  Now, in the harsh fluorescent light, the seated man’s olive complexion appeared sallow. Belknap stepped in front of him and watched his eyes widen and then narrow with recognition and realization. The one who had called himself Yusef was both startled and dismayed. The very intruder he had meant to torture had taken over the torture chamber.

  Belknap, for his part, surveyed the gear crowding the dungeon’s walls. Some of the devices were unfathomable; his imagination wasn’t sick enough to conceive how they could be put to use. Others he recognized from a visit he had made once to the Museum of the Pusterla, in Milan, a horrifying collection of medieval torture implements.

  “Your master was quite a collector,” Belknap said.

  In the chair, the Tunisian drew his angular face into a scowl of defiance. Belknap would have to be very clear about how far he was prepared to go. The captive’s nakedness, he knew, would help bring home the vulnerability of the flesh, all flesh.

  “I see you’ve got an actual iron maiden here,” the operative went on. “Impressive.” He walked over to the tomblike container, which was lined with metal talons. Its victim, when forced inside, would be slowly pinioned, his own shrieks magnified by the enclosure. “The Inquisition lives. Thing is, it wasn’t just a fascination with antiques that led your late master to go medieval. Think about it. The Inquisition went on for centuries. Torture, too. That means decade after decade after decade of trial and error. Learning from experience. Learning how to play a man’s pain fibers like a goddamn fiddle. The expertise they accumulated was incredible. Nothing we could hope to rival. Some of the art was lost, I’m sure. But not all.”

  The seated man just spat at him. “I tell you nothing,” he said in his lightly accented English.

  “But you don’t even know what I’m going t
o ask,” Belknap returned. “I’m just going to ask you to make a decision, that’s all. A choice. Do I ask too much?”

  The guard glowered but was silent.

  Now Belknap opened the drawer of a mahogany cabinet and removed an implement he recognized as a turcas, designed to rip out fingernails. He placed it on a large, leather-lined tray in sight of the prisoner. Next to it he placed a steel pincer, a thumbscrew—a vice with protruding studs designed to compress and then crush the joints of a person’s fingers and toes—and a metal wedge designed to dig out, very slowly, someone’s fingernails by the root. During the Inquisition, a common method of torture involved extracting the nails from fingers and toes as slowly as possible.

  He presented the gleaming array of implements to his prisoner and spoke a single word. “Choose.”

  A bead of perspiration slowly ran down the man’s forehead.

  “Then I’ll choose for you. I think we should start small.” He spoke in a coaxing voice as he glanced around the shelves again. “Yes, I know just the thing—how about the pear?” Belknap asked, his eye falling upon a smooth ovoid object with a long screw projecting from the end, like a stem. He brandished it in front of his captive, who remained silent. La pera, one of the most notorious implements of medieval torture, was designed to be inserted into the rectum or vagina. Once inside, the projecting screw would be rotated and the iron pear would expand while spikes began to protrude from small holes, mutilating the victim’s internal cavity in a slow and excruciating manner.

  “Feel like a bite of pear? I think this one would like a bite of you.” Belknap pressed a lever recessed in the frame of the heavy iron chair and a hinged panel swung down from the center of the seat. “You’ll see. I’m full-service. Not a clock-watcher. Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, that’s what I’ll do. And when they find you in the morning—”

  “No!” the guard yelped, his sweat-slick flesh beginning to emit the acrid stench of fear. Belknap’s calculation appeared to have been correct; his captive was evidently shaken as much by the humiliation of the prospect—the forcible penetration itself—as the bloody agony that would ensue.

  “Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself,” Belknap went on, relentlessly. “The wonderful thing about this chamber is that you can scream as loud as you like, as long as you like. Nobody will be able to hear a thing. And, like I say, when you’re found in the morning—”

  “I tell you what you want to know,” the guard blurted, a whimper in his voice. “I tell you.”

  “The servant girl,” Belknap barked. “Who is she? Where is she?”

  The guard blinked. “But she vanished. We thought—we thought you had killed her.”

  Belknap lifted an eyebrow. “When was she hired? Who is she?”

  “Maybe eight months ago. She was checked out thoroughly. I made sure of it. Eighteen years old. Lucia Zingaretti. Lives with her family in the Trastevere. An old family. Modest. But respectable. Devout, in fact.”

  “The kind who understand about unthinking obedience to ultimate authority,” Belknap said. “Where?”

  “A ground-floor apartment on via Clarice Marescotti. Khalil Ansari was very particular in who he would permit in his establishments. He had to be.”

  “She disappeared the night Ansari was killed?”

  Yusef Ali nodded. “We never saw her again.”

  “And you—how long were you with Ansari?”

  “Nine years.”

  “You must have learned a lot about him.”

  “A lot and a little. I knew what I needed to know in order to serve. But not more.”

  “There was an American. Kidnapped in Beirut. Same night as Ansari was killed.” Belknap studied the Tunisian’s expression as he spoke. “Did Ansari arrange this?”

  “I do not know.” The response was uninflected, expressionless. Not careful, not crafted. “We were not told about it.”

  Again, Belknap studied the Tunisian closely and decided he was telling the truth. There would be no shortcuts here, but then he hardly expected that there would be. For the next twenty minutes, he continued to burrow in, gradually eliciting a vague picture of Ansari’s establishment on via Angelo Masina. It was a coarse mosaic pieced together from large tiles. Yusef Ali had received instructions that his master’s business concerns were, in effect, under new management. The basic elements of the management team would remain in place. The security breach had been identified and remedied. The security staff was to maintain vigilance until further instructions arrived. As for events in Beirut or the Bekaa, Ali had no direct knowledge. Ansari had dealings there, yes; everyone knew that. But it had never been a posting of Yusef Ali’s. One did not ask needless questions, not if you wished to remain in Khalil Ansari’s employ.

  But Yusef Ali had been in charge of security at via Angelo Masina. Which left the servant girl. Belknap’s one lead. The Tunisian did not have to be pressed further to provide the exact address where her family lived.

  The chamber was growing muggy, close. At last, Belknap glanced at his watch once more. He had, if not what he needed, than all he was likely to get. He noticed that he still held la pera in his left hand, had been gripping it throughout the interrogation. Now he set it down and moved toward the door to the soundproofed dungeon. “They’ll find you in the morning,” he told Yusef Ali.

  “Wait,” the guard said in a hushed, urgent voice. “I have done what you ask of me. You must not leave me here.”

  “You’ll be found soon.”

  “You will not release me?”

  “I can’t take that risk. Not while I’m making my exit. You know that.”

  Yusef Ali’s eyes widened. “But you must.”

  “But I won’t.”

  After a few long seconds, the man’s eyes clouded over with resignation, even despair. “Then you must do me one service.” The manacled guard jerked his head toward his pistol, still lying on the floor. “Shoot me.”

  “I said I was full-service. But not that full-service.”

  “You must understand. I have been a loyal servant of Khalil Ansari, a good soldier and a true one.” The Tunisian’s gaze was downcast. “If they find me here,” he went on, in a strangled voice, “I will be disgraced and…made an example of.”

  “Tortured to death, you mean. As you have tortured others to death.” Where are you now, Jared? What are they doing to you? The urgency of Belknap’s mission seemed to push against his chest cage.

  Yusef Ali made no demurral. He must have known precisely how agonizing and humiliating such a death could be, having helped inflict it upon others. A slow and excrutiating death that would strip every atom of dignity and pride from someone who valued dignity and pride above all.

  “I do not deserve it,” he declared, his voice harsh and defiant. “I deserve better!”

  Belknap turned a vault-style wheel and retracted a series of dead bolts. The door glided open and a coolness drifted inside.

  “Please,” the man husked. “Shoot me now. It would be a kindness.”

  “Yes,” Belknap agreed levelly. “That’s why I won’t.”

  Chapter Five

  As Andrea Bancroft made her way along the bosky path to Paul Bancroft’s house, her mind filled with drifting skeins of half-formed thoughts. The air was fragrant from the mounded borders of lavender, wild thyme, and vetiver grass fringing the gentle berm that subtly screened one property from another. Bancroft’s house seemed to be of similar vintage as the foundation’s, and in a harmonious style. Like the foundation’s headquarters, the facades of aged brick and red sandstone melted into the landscape in a way that made it all the more impressive when at last its outlines could be clearly made out, and one realized how much of it had been in plain sight all along.

  At the door Andrea was met by a uniformed woman of around fifty; her hair was a mixture of red and gray, and her broad cheeks were freckled. “You’ll be Miss Bancroft?” she asked, with the faint brogue of an Irishwoman who had spent most of her adult life in Am
erica. Nuala, wasn’t it? “The gentleman will be down presently.” She gave Andrea a look that segued swiftly from appraisal to approval. “Now, what can I get you to drink? A taste of something nourishing?”

  “I’m fine, I think,” Andrea replied hesitantly.

  “You’re telling me. How about a light sherry, then? The gentleman likes it quite dry, if that agrees with you. Not like the sticky stuff I grew up on, I can tell you that.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Andrea said. The servants of a billionaire were bound to be stiff and starched to the nth degree, weren’t they? But the Irishwoman was practically loosey-goosey, and that had to be a tribute to her employer. Paul Bancroft was obviously not a stickler for ceremony. This wasn’t someone who wanted members of his staff to walk on eggshells, terrified of a trespass.

  “One fino coming up,” the Irishwoman said. “I’m Nuala, by the way.”

  Andrea shook her hand and smiled, already beginning to feel welcomed.

  Nursing her glass of fino sherry, Andrea began to take in the prints and paintings that hung in the dark wood-paneled foyer and adjoining parlor. She recognized some of the images, some of the artists; others, no less captivating, were unknown to her. She found herself drawn to a black-and-white drawing of a gargantuan fish on a shore somewhere, a fish so vast that it dwarfed the fishermen who surrounded it with ladders and knives. A dozen or more smaller fish spilled from its mouth. Where a fisherman had sliced open the leviathan’s belly, another bevy of smaller fish had tumbled out.

  “Arresting, isn’t it?” Paul Bancroft’s voice. Andrea had been studying the picture so intently that she had not heard him arrive.

  “Who’s it by?” Andrea asked, turning around.

  “It’s an ink drawing by Pieter Bruegel the elder, from 1556. He called it Big Fish Eat Little Fish. He wasn’t one for decorous indirection. It used to hang in the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, in Vienna. But, like you, I found myself drawn to it.”