Michelangelo's Notebook

by Paul Christopher

  Like with Crawley, the guy from the museum, there were going to be lots of suspects. In the museum guy’s case there were about five hundred of them at the reception being held on the main floor and by the looks of things here the colonel’s late-night caller had probably come with the supposed intention of selling the old man the sword that was used to kill him.

  They’d already found the leather-bound, silk-lined presentation case in the front hall. Delaney knew about as much German as he did Gaelic but the names Rommel and Adolf Hitler had jumped out at him. At a guess, the detective assumed there would have been real money involved, and real interest on the part of the colonel. By the look of the house he was a serious collector, so maybe seeing people late at night in his bathrobe wouldn’t have been that much out of the ordinary. Interviewing the Swiss butler had led him to the same conclusion: the colonel often had late-night visitors.

  Delaney sighed and tried not to breathe too deeply as the meat wagon boys lifted the body onto a snap-down morgue gurney. The real question nibbling away at the edge of his thoughts was the strange connection between all of this and the beautiful redhead that seemed to be at the center of events. And that led to the even bigger question—Just what had happened to Fiona Ryan, and where exactly was she?

  36

  They began moving out of the camp with the last of the night. The moon had set long ago and tattered clouds shifted from the north, fading the dim light from the stars. Most of the men except Reid and the sergeant were city boys; the depth of the darkness still spooked them. That velvet night was like something otherworldly, too close to the shadow of death that always hung looming in the back of their thoughts each and every moment of each and every day.

  They moved through the woods quietly, keeping to the paths, pausing at the small depressed clearing that marked the fork of the trails. The men split into two groups there. Winetka, Bosnic, Biearsto and Terhune, armed with the bazooka and the two-inch mortar, took the south path leading to the road by the sniper’s tower. The rest, with the sergeant bird dogging the artsy officer types, headed for the burnt-out old tank at the top of the rise.

  The plan the sergeant had put to Cornwall was a simple one. Their raggedy little group was made from the remains of a 2nd Ranger Battalion from the Normandy invasion. They’d inherited most of a company’s worth of ordnance. Terhune and Biearsto would take out the sniper and his tower with the bazooka while Winetka and Bosnic would use the two-inch mortar to lay down covering fire over the main entrance. When the sergeant heard the first bazooka round being laid down he’d open up with the twin 7.92mm machine guns, softening the flank for the squad made up of Patterson, Dorm, Teitelbaum and Pixie Mortimer, led by Reid and followed by the three officers. If necessary, the sergeant could also provide covering fire if they had to retreat, which he doubted would happen. As well as the bazooka and the two-inch mortar, Teitelbaum and Dorm made up gunner and assistant for the Browning Automatic Rifle. The others carried an assortment of relatively heavy weapons including a couple of Thompsons, a Johnson light machine gun, an M3 grease gun and Patterson’s beloved Pah-pah-shah 71-round Russian machine gun: more ordnance by far than the Krauts in the farmhouse were likely to have.

  The sergeant led his group north through the thinning trees, stopping finally within sight of the ditch. Taking Reid with him again, he scrabbled out to the old Panzer for a final reconnaissance of the farm. It was false dawn, a bare sheen of dull lightness on the eastern horizon. There was no light at all from the farmhouse or any of the outbuildings. Swinging his binoculars around to the abbey tower he looked for the slightest flicker from the sniper’s position. The sergeant gauged the distance between the tower and his own position. A good five football fields, but nothing for a talented rifleman with one of those zs4 scopes on a Krag or even a 43. He figured it would take them the better part of two minutes for his bunch to get down to the side wall of the farmhouse with no real cover in between except a few depressions and one big boulder. Jeez, the sniper could take them all out with ease.

  “You better take the cocksucker like I told you,” muttered the sergeant.

  “You say something?” Reid asked.

  “No. What about Cornwall and his pals?”

  “They know enough to stay back until we open things up.”

  “Good. I figure two minutes to get down to the wall. See the boulder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep everybody left of that on the way down. I won’t traverse the guns on the tank any farther than that.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “I’ll stop firing when you reach the wall. Hit it with a couple of those potato mashers you took off that Jerry a few days ago. Open up a hole.”

  “We take the place?”

  “Not unless Terhune and the others have softened them up, and not until you’re sure the sniper’s out of it. He’s the key. He manages to get out of the tower and find some other spot we are uckfayed. Understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right. I’m going to load the belts into the gun now. At six on the dot—that’s ten minutes—we should hear Terhune and Winetka opening up. When you go in send Teitelbaum and Dorm on point with the BAR, maybe get them in one of those depressions. Then Patterson with that Russian gun of his, then you and the rest. The loos still got their Thompsons?”

  “Cornwall’s got a great gun.”

  “Probably blow you all away the first time they fire. Christ. Who came up with the idea of giving officers weapons?”

  “Not me.”

  “Get going.”

  “Right.”

  Reid slipped away into the darkness and the sergeant snaked his way up to the open turret of the abandoned German tank and slithered inside. Trying to be as quiet as possible, he began feeding the long belts of ammunition into the twin machine guns. The rounds had different colored tips, so they were probably a mixture of tracer, ball and incendiary, just like their American counterparts, but it would have been nice to know which was which. It took him less than two minutes to load both guns with 250-round belts. He peeked out through the gradually brightening slot in the turret. He glanced at his watch; all hell was going to break loose out there in about five minutes. He grinned. The sergeant could hardly wait.

  37

  Michael Valentine moved through the rooms of the top floor of the Ex Libris building methodically. Every area of the apartment had been torn apart; no drawer was left unopened, every cupboard had been searched. The intruder had come in through an airshaft vent and exited through a small unalarmed bathroom window. Following behind Valentine, Finn Ryan was horrified by the damage. Valentine ended his survey in the kitchen.

  Valentine sat down at the yellow Formica table. “What did you do when you heard the glass breaking?”

  “I thought the thing to do would be to investigate.”

  “And then you thought again.” Valentine smiled.

  “It wasn’t like in the movies. The girl goes out onto the moonless dock to look for her boyfriend and a hand comes out of the water and grabs her ankle. I’m not that stupid.”

  “The real thing.”

  “After Peter . . .”

  “The glass breaks and . . .” Michael prompted.

  “I turned around, got back into the elevator and went back to the office. I phoned the cell number you gave me.”

  “So he never made it down to the office, never got to the computer.”

  “No. I was there most of the day.”

  “It looks like he did a fair amount of damage, but nothing irreplaceable.”

  “What if he comes back?”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen. If he was really looking for something he would have come down to the office.”

  “He was trying to scare us?” asked Finn.

  “I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re getting too close to something. We’ve been doing a lot of digging. There could be, probably are, alarm bells ringing.”

&n
bsp; “Did you find out anything when you went to your dealer friend?”

  “Lots,” said Valentine, and then he told her about what Peter Newman had said and about his visit to Eric Taschen. In turn she told him about her efforts on the computer.

  “So what does it all mean?”

  “It means that there’s more than one thing going on. The murders of Crawley and Gatty are connected, and so is the third guy I told you about—the one my connection at One Police Plaza told me about, Kressman I think his name was. So far there’s no real evidence but it looks as though they were all involved in some sort of deal to put stolen and looted art onto the open market. I don’t think that particular set of killings has anything to do with you at all. The whole thing with the Michelangelo drawing was just bad timing. I think Crawley would have died anyway.”

  “Peter wasn’t bad timing.”

  “No, which means that one of Crawley’s partners in crime was worried about what you’d found. Whoever that was hired Peter’s killer and the Vietnam gang member on the courier bike.”

  “So there’re two killers out there?”

  “Yes. One wants you and that drawing wiped off the slate. The other is interested in the group that Gatty, Crawley and this Kress were involved in—the ring that both Newman and Eric Taschen mentioned.”

  “They have to be connected.”

  “Yes. Presumably the art is the common factor.”

  “The stolen art market?”

  “From what you told me about the history of Greyfriars it has to go deeper than that. This Carduss Club is obviously some kind of secret society, like Skull and Bones at Yale, except a little less obvious.”

  “According to what I found out they disappeared in 1945 or something.”

  “So did Skull and Bones, except they didn’t disappear at all—they just changed their name. Your Delaware-numbered company—they have the least restrictive incorporation laws in the world; that’s why the CIA always uses them for their proprietary companies, like Air America.”

  “You don’t think this is some kind of spy thing, do you?” She looked at him carefully, trying not to think too much about what he really was or what his real relationship had been with her father. Maybe that could come later but there was no time for it now.

  Valentine’s expression darkened. “No. It’s big, though. The man they just found murdered in Alabama was dealing in hundreds of millions of dollars.” He shrugged. “It’s not hard to get into big money when you’re dealing in Michelangelos.”

  “So what do we do now? Detective Delaney must have figured out I wasn’t part of any plot to kill Peter by now. Why don’t we go to the police?”

  “It’s not just your boyfriend. Now it’s Crawley, Gatty and Kressman as well. That’s four murders in as many days and millions of dollars’ worth of stolen paintings. Enough motive to keep you in jail for a long time; enough motive to have you killed. Somehow you’ve stumbled on a conspiracy involving a lot of big-time people—people with things to hide and the ability to keep them hidden at all costs. Until we know exactly who those people are and how far the conspiracy goes we stay away from the cops.”

  “None of it makes any sense. From what I read, these people were already rich. Why did they want more?”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with money at all.”

  “Then what?”

  “Power. I’ve got a thousand volumes down in the stacks about groups from the Knights Templar and the so-called Illuminati all the way through to the Shriners. It’s never really about money. Power and how to hold on to it. Good old-fashioned Yankee xenophobia. People are afraid of change and they group together and try to stop it. China tried to ignore the rest of the world for a thousand years, but even they had to start changing things in the end.”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve dealt with this kind of thing, is it?” Finn asked.

  “We’re all dealing with it. All the time,” answered Valentine. “The battle between the old and the new has been going on since time began. This is just another version.”

  “There were a dozen names on that list of trustees. I only tracked down a few of them. How are we going to know which one is next on our killers list?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. We don’t even know if there’s only been the three murders— Crawley, Gatty and Kressman. Peter Newman seemed to think that Crawley’s boss, James Cornwall, had died of natural causes. Maybe he was wrong.”

  Finn reached out and wrapped her fingers around Valentine’s hand, squeezing hard. “Okay, like I said before, what’s next?”

  “We dig a little deeper. We need to know what kind of stakes we’re playing for, and just exactly who the players are.” He paused. “We’ll have to see my hacker friend.”

  “Hacker?”

  “Computer freak. His name is Barrie Kornitzer. We went to school together, way back when.”

  38

  He stared down at the tiny figures on the page, ranged through the trees, drawn and inked and colored so carefully like miniature signposts indicating the spinning out of time from the single frozen moment they represented: here they were safe and alive, without the knowledge that some of them would soon be dead, as carefully erased as they had once been drawn. He stared at them and at the bloody page and suddenly he was in another world, one that had never really been and if it had existed, it existed in a time that had long since vanished.

  At six a.m. the attack began. Dawn was a faint purple line and the men moved like dark insubstantial ghosts through the slow, seething mist that rose up off the dew-wet fields. Watching through the gunnery slot of the ruined Panzer, the sergeant saw the blossoming of the first bazooka round and a few seconds later heard the heavy thump of its projectile. Almost instantly the air was full of sound. The first round from the bazooka took out a large section of the abbey tower, but not enough to silence the sniper. The sergeant could hear the flat sound of the high-powered rifle as it searched for a target in the thick screen of trees on the far side of the road. Then the bazooka announced itself again, this time shattering the upper section of the tower, spraying crumbling masonry and roofing tiles in all directions. The tower must have been built of wood originally, wood that was now tinder-dry after centuries of curing. A moment after the second shot from the bazooka, it was a blazing torch. So much for the sniper.

  Following the second round from the bazooka, the sergeant could now hear the steady, rhythmic pounding of the mortar as it lobbed its two pound bombs into the entranceway. He pulled back the cranks on both machine guns, manhandled the traverse so the guns both lined up roughly with the barely visible roof of the granary and the main house and opened fire, hot shell casings spewing down around his ankles as the belts emptied in time to his ragged bursts of fire. Every few seconds he paused, traversed the guns a little and then fired again, watching the movements of Reid’s five-man squad as they spread out to flank the farmyard enclosure.

  Reid and Pixie Mortimer moved first, slipping out of the woods and running across the dark road at the first shot from Terhune’s bazooka. From the far side ditch they managed to get to the big boulder halfway down the sloping field. The other three, Patterson, Dorm and Teitelbaum, followed on their heels, dropping down into the first of the shallow depressions that looked as though they might once have been drainage ditches or perhaps the ancient remains of some sort of weeping tile bed for sewage.

  Not for the first time the sergeant found himself almost dumbfounded by the amount of crap the ordinary foot soldier was supposed to carry. Teitelbaum, the BAR gunner, for instance, carried the gun, sling, cleaning kit, twelve twenty-round mags in a webbing belt, a trench knife, frag grenade, hatchet, sidearm, regulation boots and clothing, plus personal gear amounting to almost exactly a hundred pounds. Even a lily-white officer like Cornwall carried the same as a grunt and more: ammo pouches, clips, binoculars, map case and anything else specific to the mission. In addition to that Cornwall and his arty pals were carrying Thompson
submachine guns and the requisite loads for them. It was a wonder any of them could move at all.

  Teitelbaum and Dorm set up the BAR on the edge of the ditch, Patterson covering them with booming rounds from his Russkie 71. So far the sergeant had only seen small movements in the front yard of the farm below, but by the time the abbey tower was alight there was a full range of fire from the house and outbuildings. Pausing to listen, the sergeant heard nothing but rifle fire and scattered bursts from some sort of light machine gun, probably an MP43 or the larger M34. With Terhune and the others pounding it in from the front it looked as though it was going to be easy pickings unless the Krauts had some kind of secret weapon in those trucks.

  With covering fire from the BAR, Reid and Mortimer moved out from behind the boulder. There was a burst of fire from the upper floor of the farmhouse and suddenly Pixie was down, his legs cut out from beneath him as though he’d stumbled over a wire, his chest torn open by a stitch of rounds, half of his forehead and most of his brain demolished by a second firecracker string of shots from somewhere else. Reid didn’t pause even for a second. As Mortimer went down the Indian threw himself forward into the grass and rolled his way under the old battered farmhouse wall. The BAR swept over the upper floor of the house and the sergeant could see Reid pulling out a boxlike Russian M28 mine and smashing down the arming fuse. He scuttled away to the left, keeping to the wall but putting as much distance between himself and the demolition charge as he could. There was a heavy crumping noise, a blast of dirty brown smoke and masonry from the wall and then a hole the size of a pair of barn doors appeared.