The Medici Dagger

by Cameron West

  I dropped the word “are” down below next to “all.” Then I read the remaining top line.

  “Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above you the tangle of the sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.”

  Beckett and I looked at each other blankly.

  After a concentrated moment he pointed at a line on the screen and said, “What if we have a sentence break here? Then it would read, ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above you. The tangle of the sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.’ Doesn’t hold up, does it?”

  I shook my head. “What if we clipped the second ‘you’ out of the first line and stuck it in the bottom? Then that would make it ‘you all are.’ That would be okay.”

  “My dear American friend, I’m afraid Leonardo wasn’t from Alabama,” Beckett chuckled.

  “I’m serious.” I took the “you” out of the first line and laid it in before the word “all.”“Now read the top line.”

  Beckett complied. “ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above.’ ”

  “Continue,” I prodded, “don’t read it as two lines.”

  Beckett sighed. “ ‘Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above the tangle of the sleeping carver’s its mighty whorl keepers.’ Goodness,” he said. “Take ‘its’ out of there.”

  I did, pasting it into the bottom line. I read the new line, my pulse quickening. “ ‘Love each thing of this world for you all are its.’ ” My eyes met Beckett’s.

  We both whispered, “Keepers.”

  I clipped that word from the top line and placed it at the end of the bottom one. I read it.

  “Love each thing of this world for you all are its keepers.”

  I looked at what remained on the top line with a mixture of awe and concern—that I wouldn’t get it, that I wouldn’t grasp Leonardo’s meaning.

  I read.

  “Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above the tangle of the sleeping carver’s mighty whorl.”

  Beckett and I sat back, enthralled, exhausted, and bewildered. The stitches in my back hurt. So did my leg and hand, not to mention my mind. Outside, red and orange scarves of sunset unfurled as daylight faded into early evening.

  After a moment, Beckett said,“I understand the second part of each line, lines two and four, if you will. They are quite straightforward.

  “Love each thing of this world for you all are its keepers.

  “I offer future people my heart and soul.

  “Both very powerful messages,” he said. “Without question. But the first two:

  “Soar with me my friend and you will be the new guardian of the dagger above the tangle of the sleeping carver’s mighty whorl.

  “The lion God and the languid man share the secret the bearded man will never know.

  “I am baffled by them,” Beckett said. “My brain is porridge at the moment. I’ll just jot this down and confer briefly with Mobright. Perhaps the stretch will help.”

  “How much time do we have?” I asked, my eyelids putting on weight.

  “Roughly five hours. In the interest of prudence, I’ll make some preliminary demands in Rome. Isn’t power intoxicating? I wonder what progress Krell’s people are making.”

  I laid my head back on the soft leather seat and began to fade. “No one outpaces the mighty traveler.”

  “Yes, well, we will see, won’t we?”

  I dreamt I was a slice of Wonder bread lying on a tile counter. A beautiful girl in sunglasses appeared with two jars and placed them next to me, the glass of the jars clinking against the ceramic glaze of the tile. I listened with interest to the familiar sound of lids unscrewing. The girl took a whiff of each, a grin crossing her full lips. She picked up a silver knife.From the jar on the left she scooped out a slab of peanut butter and spread it all over me, sweeping the knife neatly back and forth the way they do on Jif commercials. The peanut butter felt cool and soothing.

  Then she dipped the knife into the second jar, digging out a glob of marshmallow which she spread on top of my peanut-butter blanket like a skier carving fresh sweet snow.

  As the girl looked down at me, her waiting “fluffer nutter,” a slice of pumpernickel bread—shaped just like me only dark as a crow—flew into the room. My anger made me hot and my peanut-butter-and-marshmallow spread began to melt. Suddenly the slice of bread landed on me, suffocating me.

  I struggled against its force, heard its perverse laugh. I couldn’t speak or scream because I was bread. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t ordinary bread, I was Wonder bread.

  The evil slice laughed again and pressed harder, squishing my peanut-sugary coating till it spilled over my crust and onto the white tile. I peeked around the enemy and glimpsed the horrified girl. Not to worry. I’ll save you. I began to spin myself, clockwise then counterclockwise, the thick spread a welcomed emollient.

  My anger and confidence swelled with each gooey turn, generating more and more heat. Giving myself a final clockwise spin, I roared to life like a propeller, rotating with such speed that centrifugal force flung my wicked attacker off me, across the room, and into a dog dish. I heard the four-legged clicking of a hound’s nails on linoleum as I hovered in front of the astounded girl. “Soar with me,” I said.

  Then I awoke, panicked, desperately wanting to stay in the dream state, to follow where my unconscious might lead. I knew Ginny was the fluffer-nutter girl. We were about to soar.Where?Above the tangle, came the response.What tangle?Of the sleeping carver’s whorl, of course.

  Then I was lost.The sleeping carver. Carver of what? Wood? Marble? Could it be marble?Leonardo used to say that sculptors covered in their marble dust looked like bakers covered in flour.Oh my God.I remembered Ginny’s translation:“He is gone now, back to dust.” I’d thought it was Francesco Melzi, going to dust the furniture—just a simple note about a common task. It wasn’t. In a blast I knew who the sleeping carver and the bearded man were. They were one and the same.

  My eyes popped open. “The sleeping carver, the bearded man. It’s Michelangelo!” I shouted.

  Beckett was back in his seat. Mobright stood behind him.

  “Oh my . . . how in the blazes did you arrive at that?” Beckett asked.

  I told him.

  “Fantastic!” he exclaimed, practically dancing in his seat. “Now go on. The exact location is above the tangle of the mighty whorl, Reb. Whereisthe mighty whorl? Where did Michelangelo go back to his marble dust from?”

  A prickly second, then another blast. “The Sistine Chapel. The tangle-of the mighty whorl is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I know it.”

  Beckett gasped. I continued.

  “Michelangelo interrupted his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to do the statue of Moses for Julius’s tomb.”

  “Reb, you’ve brought us to the brink of discovery,” Beckett exalted. “Now where is it in the Sistine Chapel? Don’t dally. We have less than two hours till touchdown.”

  I began massaging my temples.

  “What are you doing?” Beckett asked.

  “It helped me think once before when somebody did this.”

  “Here,” he said, quickly stepping behind me. “Allow me.”

  His gesture surprised me. So did his gentle touch. I imagined his fingertips were those of the silver-haired Mona. Instantly I envisioned her, urging me to clear my mind of both the past and the future. “You are now with Leonardo da Vinci,” her voice echoed in me. “You are now with Leonardo . . .”

  Sandals on the Sistine Chapel floor, eyes lifted to the ceiling. I scanned the frescoed sea of color and serpents and ancient people, twisting and fleeing, perching and hovering.

  “Where are you, languid man?” I demanded, my mind wide open, scrutinizing Michelangelo’s tumultuous whorl. “Who are you?” Then the enormous ceiling went blank, with the exception of one spectacular sce
ne—the apogee of Michelangelo’s masterpiece—God reaching his awesome hand out to touch the extended fingers of . . . a languid man.

  “It’s Adam!” I shouted. “Adam is the languid man!”

  “TheCreation of Adam,” Beckett uttered. “That’s it!”

  “Yessss!” I replied with steely certainty. “The Dagger is between the outstretched fingers of God and Adam. Just above it. In the ceiling. I’m positive.”

  “My Lord,” Mobright gasped. “The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!”

  Beckett pulled out his hanky again, dabbed his brow. “I’m awestruck,” he whispered.

  I grinned and winked at him, giving my earlobe a little tug.

  Mobright departed to get us some tea.“I have just one question for you, Reb,” Beckett said. “How the deuce did Leonardo get the Dagger up there? The ceiling is nearly sixty-five feet high. Did he use Michelangelo’s scaffolding?”

  “No, he couldn’t have. That was taken down immediately after he suspended work so the ceiling could be viewed.”

  “Well it’s not possible that he went up from the ground. He must have gone down through the floor above.”

  “You mean the roof?” I asked. “How would he do that?”

  “No, not the roof. Though you know your history, you’re obviously unaware of the layout of the chapel. It has four levels. Two below, the chapel itself—which is designed rather as a fortress, with high windows—and then above it a guards’ room which leads to a machiolated gangway.”

  “What’s machiolated?”

  “Walls with holes cut in them, firing slits. The point is, Leonardo could have first paced off the exact spot below God and Adam and then gone above to the guards’ room, paced it off again, and dug down.”

  “That’s very good. But how would he do that if the guards were there?”

  “My question, exactly,” Beckett sighed, tapping his pen against the tip of his nose. “Even at night, and we can be sure he must have done this at night because—”

  “He called Michelangelo ‘the sleeping carver.’ ”

  “Right. And the ‘gone back to dust’ bit. If Michelangelo had stopped his work on the chapel to take up a sculpture, that would have given Leonardo the opportunity. But if he took it, he most certainly would have had to go after dark.”

  “Still,” I said, “that leaves the problem of the guards. No chance they would have taken the night off, huh?”

  “Guarding the pope? Thiswasthe Vatican in the Renaissance. No one turned his back on anyone. Swiss guards and all that.” Beckett chewed on the end of his pen for a minute.

  “So, then,” he said, “how did he do it?”

  Mobright entered carrying a tray of Danish and tea. “A selection of pastry, sir,” he announced, then retreated once again.

  “Blueberry twist?” Beckett asked, offering me the plate. I declined; then it smashed me—the dream I’d had at the Baby Face Nelson Suite. Leonardo on the floor of the cruller case, staring up, in a harness attached to a long rope. Of course.

  I pulled the laptop to me, furiously tapped the computer out of sleep mode, and opened the two files with Leonardo’s pages. My eyes darted to the drawings—not the Dagger, not the Circles, but the harness, the nested tubes, and the hoisting system.

  “Include me, please,” Beckett said.

  “What if these particular drawings aren’t randomly placed on these pages like so many of Leonardo’s other sketches?” I said.

  “Go on. I’m with you.”

  “What if these three nested triangular tubes with the rope and pulleys are really a telescoping mast that could be mechanically raised to the ceiling?”

  “Of course! Then the harness was for him, the hoisting system a differential he used with a rope attached to the mast to raise himself to his rendezvous with God and Adam. Brilliant! You do lift your mental weights, don’t you?”

  I barely heard Beckett’s words. Time stripped away and I was there with Leonardo in the dark chapel as he raised the mast, with the aid of the differential. I watched him step into the harness and pull himself arm over arm, up the long rope, carrying in his cloth backpack a drill, a bag of wet plaster, his paints and brushes, and a dagger.

  Who else could have done this but Leonardo? Who else could have conceived of it? Melzi could have helped him carry the equipment. Short hop across the courtyard from the Belvedere. Maybe they took an underground route.

  Leonardohadcarefully paced out the floor. He knewexactlywhere to go. In the black of night, in the hollow stillness of the Sistine Chapel, by the singular light of his massive genius, he ascended to the ceiling, cut the hole, and slid the Dagger vertically between the outstretched fingers of God and Adam. Then he sealed the opening and repainted it, supremely confident that not even the brilliant Michelangelo would ever know.

  Finally, he descended, while the guards above the thick ceiling paced in their uniforms, slapping their thighs to keep warm in the chillnight air. They never learned of the intruder below. Neither did Michelangelo—the sleeping bearded carver.

  “Well . . .” Beckett said, patting his lips. “My goodness. I guess I’m on again. I suppose I should grease the Vatican wheels, shouldn’t I? Do excuse me.”

  I was rebandaging my leg and contemplating the odd juxtaposition of pain and the electrifying tingle of discovery when Beckett returned.

  “Have you gained us access to the chapel?” I asked.

  “Naturally, albeit with significant difficulty. The pope’s away just now. We’ll go in from above, of course.”

  “Of course,” I repeated. “There’s no way Krell’s people could know this. Even if they do, they’d have to make arrangements to get Tecci into the guard room. You’d know about that.”

  “We’d know, yes,” Beckett concurred. He removed his hanky, mopped a few beads of sweat from his brow. “How is your leg, anyway?”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “How about your neck? The middle of the bandage is dark with blood. It doesn’t look very good.” He looked genuinely worried. Tired, too.

  “Neither do you,” I said. “What about all your pills? You said they don’t help. With what?”

  “Tennis elbow,” he replied with a half-smile. “Afraid I won’t make Wimbledon this year. Now, about your neck . . .”

  “I’ve been hurt a lot worse than this. Tell me, please, any word on Ginny?”

  “Nothing so far, I’m afraid. Mobright has our best men on it.”

  “This is terrible, Beckett. All of this is meaningless if she’s hurt, if she’s . . .”

  “I understand your concern, but you simply must not think the worst. Where would you have gotten if you’d been preoccupied with her when you were soaring? You’d have crashed for certain.”

  “All right. So . . . we get the Dagger and then what? We let Krell know that we’ve got it, that we want to trade it for Ginny?”

  “You want the Dagger, too,” Beckett said, strapping himself in. “Your father wanted it, you want it. Remember the noble purpose.”

  “If she’s alive and there’s a breath left in me, I’ve got to save her. That’s my noblest purpose. Everything else comes next.”

  “Of course. I comprehend you now much better than I did before,” he sighed, patting my hand lightly. “You’re not the crass ruffian I first believed you to be.”

  “And you,” I said, “are not the arrogant . . . well . . . yes you are.”

  Beckett laughed. “That’s the spirit. A little jocularity. Now, I’ve given this some thought,” he said. “I believe we can meet both our objectives. Once we’re in possession of the Dagger, we’ll make it known to Krell. He will have to respond. He’s trapped. The man is an angstrom away from acquiring the Medici Dagger, the very thing he believes will ultimately save him. He’ll have no choice but to negotiate. And when he does, we will have him, and then you will have Ms. Gianelli.”

  Beckett sat back in his seat and smiled. “Relax, young man,” he said. “You’ve done the impossible. We
are now in the golden chair.”

  eighteen

  Fear and excitement had been my daily bread since I’d become a stuntman. But yearning, caring, passion, purpose, connectedness, they were all new to me. Something extraordinary was happening-—the reweaving of my torn fabric, thread by thread.I looked at Beckett. One thin leg was draped over the other. He bobbed it confidently. The bottom half-inch of an ankle holster was intermittently visible below his pant cuff.

  Weapons. I needed them.

  “I want my guns back,” I said.

  His leg stopped bobbing. “Oh yes. I’ve been meaning to ask you about that small one. Very interesting.”

  “Where are they?”

  Beckett turned away, leaned toward the window to catch the view. “You’re an unofficial guest. No name, no nationality, no guns. There is no latitude with this.”

  I heard the usual shrill sound of tires hitting tarmac as we touched down at Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

  We were met by a black Mercedes sedan chauffeured by the wide-shouldered Pendelton, whom I had last seen when I stripped off his blazer in Milan. Mobright climbed in the passenger seat. The two exchanged a brief blank glance.

  No baggage claim, no customs, no waiting. The A12 Highway along the Tiber, left on the GRA, right on Via Aurelia to Mussolini’s

  wide road into St. Peter’s. Past the basilica, Michelangelo’s monstrous dome, and Bernini’s four-deep colonnade, we zipped with grave officiousness around the throng to the Sistine Chapel.

  Pendelton parked in a place where it seemed you’d either get a million-dollar ticket or be condemned to eternal damnation. He exchanged words in fluid Italian with a man wearing the cassock of a high-ranking official.

  The priest shook hands hesitantly with Beckett and introduced himself in English as Cardinal Gaetano Lorro, the Vatican secretary. In his worldly eyes was the look of anguished anticipation, which no amount of formality could disguise. I was not introduced.