Blue Moonlight

by Zandri, Vincent

  I don’t give the pain in my hand, the sweat burning my eyes, or the five-hundred-foot drop any more thought, either.

  I just do it.

  I begin to slide and crab my body to the left toward the concrete seam. That’s when I see the injured goon to my right, crawling on his belly, a pistol in his hand aimed at me. He’s wearing sunglasses, black pants, and a T-shirt. He’s stripped himself of his leather coat, exposing the wound in his left collar. It’s a larger wound than I thought. I didn’t just graze him. I actually put one through him. Through the upper shoulder area. He must be supporting himself on his sheer size, strength, and loyalty to Boris, his boss.

  He fires once and the round whizzes past. It’s a near miss. But he’s close enough that the second shot will likely find its target either in my head or chest.

  No choice.

  I pick myself up onto my feet and, leaning into the stiff wind and balancing myself like a man on a severely angled high-wire, make a run for the ladder.

  I don’t approach the ladder on foot so much as I dive for it.

  I grab hold of the topmost rung with my good right hand and pray to God the rung holds without popping out of the old concrete.

  I bear my entire weight upon it.

  The rung pulls out from the concrete seam, sending my heart into my mouth. But it doesn’t pull out the entire way. I have no choice but to find a foothold on a lower rung and begin the downward climb. It’s exactly what I do.

  I can only pray the concrete-embedded ladder rungs hold.

  More bullets.

  They zip past my head as the big Russian takes my cue and gets up on his feet. It’s only a matter of time until one of those bullets connects. Problem is, the big goon has terrible aim. Maybe because he’s got no sense of balance now that his shoulder has been shot through. He runs at me and shoots, all the time his body slowly sliding in toward the steep-angled dome. It’s as if his feet are giving out from under him in slow motion. He doesn’t make it another five feet before the black soles on his boots give way, as if the dome were alive and purposely slipping out from under him.

  From where I’m holding on to the metal rungs, I see his dark eyes go wide, his mouth ajar with terror. The automatic slips out of his hand and careens down the dome, click-clacking its way over the tiles until it goes silently airborne, then cracks to the piazza. The goon tries to hold on by digging his fingernails into the tiles. An understandable but futile gesture because, let’s face it, dude is truly fucked.

  Gravity wins the day, and he begins to slide.

  Slowly at first.

  Then faster and faster, his chin bouncing over the tiles, fingernails scraping and tearing as he tries to stop his ever-speedier downward progress. He’s eyeing me the entire time he’s slipping, dropping, picking up speed. Until he’s made it all the way down the length of the dome and disappears, falling as soundlessly as his weapon before joining it with a soggy thump on the cobbled piazza below.

  My entire body trembling, I descend what remains of the concrete-embedded metal rung ladder. Even from five hundred feet up on top of the tiled Duomo with the wind buffeting against my head, I’m hearing the horrified screams of the bystanders who gather around the dead Russian. For the first time all day I feel like I might live to see the sun set on sunny Italy.

  I. Might. Live.

  I maintain a steady climb down, trying to look neither down nor up, but only at the concrete band just inches from my face. I descend as fast and as safely as I can until I come to the long, angled rooftop of the cathedral.

  With the Russian goon having fallen to his death, much of the attention that had been focused on me must have shifted to his crushed remains. It’s very possible the people are confusing him for me. He’s the bigger man, but we are both dressed all in black, both wearing sunglasses, both carrying weapons. From a long enough distance or, in this case, height, the Russian fits my description to a T. If all those tourists are making this mistake, it’s possible the police are too.

  It takes only a few seconds for me to make it to the cathedral parapet. I climb up onto a narrow marble walkway that runs perpendicular to the cathedral roof and make a crouching search for a door or a trapdoor opening. I know there has to be some kind of access to the interior of the structure because it only makes sense that the rooftop be accessible for repairs.

  I find what I’m looking for on the far side.

  A small metal door with a skeleton-key padlock that’s got to be almost as old as the cathedral itself. I press the barrel of the .9 mm against the lock and pull the trigger. The lock doesn’t shatter so much as disintegrate.

  Turning to face the small door, I search for a knob. Only there isn’t one. Or there isn’t one any longer. I raise up my right leg and kick in the ancient relic of a door.

  A tight, narrow shaft appears for me. If I had to guess, I would say the shaft hasn’t borne witness to a human presence in centuries. I enter into it anyway, patting my pants pocket for my Bic lighter.

  Closing the door behind me, I thumb the business end of the Bic. The flame creates a small orange glow of light. To my right is a stone wall littered with graffiti from another, ancient time. I guess the language to be Latin, mixed with the occasional passage in Italian or French, along with some freakishly ancient dates like 1654, 1710, 1732, and a few more from the early nineteenth centuries. Some of the graffiti is carved into the wall rather than painted on.

  It’s impossible to stand upright.

  People were shorter back in the fourteen hundreds.

  With the glow from the Bic flame lighting the way, I keep moving through a corridor that angles gradually downward. It doesn’t take me long to realize that not only am I walking inside a secret passage that’s located inside the cathedral wall, but that it hasn’t been traversed in a very long time.

  The evidence is right under my feet.

  Bones. A thigh bone here and a skull there. Tattered remnants of clothing. Rusted chains and shackles that hang from the stone walls in various places. The floor is soft under my shoes from moss and mold that’s grown there over the years. The smell is organic. Like the moldy worm smell you get after a brisk rain.

  The smell is death and decay.

  I keep walking, for a time that seems to last far longer than it should, as if the cathedral has spontaneously doubled in size since I entered into the secret shaft. I can only imagine that the shaft not only served as a private portal but also as a place of torture for heretics. The Roman Catholics used to burn sinners at the stake right outside the cathedral doors. It only makes sense that they imprisoned them also.

  Renaissance-era Christians: the conquerors of heaven, defenders of hell.

  I keep heading down into the shaft, making a sharp right here and a gradual winding left there, until finally it levels off and the temperature cools noticeably, the sickly smell of ancient dead air dissipating. I walk the remaining few feet and eventually come to another steel door with yet another padlock securing it. I pull out the .9 mm and blow this lock away just like the first one.

  Pushing the door open, I’m not exposed to the bowels of the cathedral. Instead, I find myself climbing a short flight of stone steps up into another building altogether. It’s an empty space surrounded by eight stone walls. An octagon. It takes me a moment to gather my bearings, but soon enough I’m able to deduce that I’m inside the Rotonda di Santa Maria, another Brunelleschi building almost no one ever visits since it’s located directly in the center of student housing. I only know about it because when I first came here, right out of college, I partied with some of the art students. We smoked cigarettes and drank wine right outside the rotunda on the stone steps.

  So much for reminiscing about the good old days.

  Back to the watch-your-ass-or-die days I’ve known so well as of late.

  In the near distance, the sirens continue to blare, but not for me. For a big Russian who fell from the Duomo.

  I check my watch.

  Almost thre
e in the afternoon.

  Two hours before I’m to meet up with Lola. If memory serves, the Accademia is located not far from here, off the Via Guelfa. For a brief moment I think about hiding out there in the presence of Michelangelo’s white marble statue of David, the Goliath slayer. But then I think better of it. I’m not here as a tourist, like I was my first time. It’s possible my face has been broadcast to every security guard and cop in the city, even if they do somehow believe the dude who fell from the Duomo is their man. I’ve lost both my computer and my backpack and have no means of getting them back. Luckily I have my passport, wallet, cash, and smartphone stored inside the pockets of my leather jacket, or I’d really be in a fix. I also have my weapons. Soon as the authorities go through the stuff I left behind at the Uffizi, they’ll realize the big spattered Russian is not me, and they’ll begin an intensive search throughout the city.

  The rotunda is currently empty and off-limits to tourists.

  I remove the weapons from my pockets and place them in a far dark corner. I try one of the narrow exterior doors to see if it’s bolted shut from the outside. Turns out it’s not locked at all. No wonder I can make out dozens of empty wine and liquor bottles strewn all about the place in the rays of sun that leak in from the overhead louvers. The famous place has become a home for bums. Welcome to Renaissance reality. For now, anyway, the bums are nowhere to be seen. But I know they’ll be back. For the present time, though, the joint is mine, all mine.

  I take a seat beside my weapons, setting my right hand on the grip of the .9 mm should I require its services in a hurry. I press my back up against the stone wall, close my eyes. In my head I picture a small, white, naked, curly haired David kicking Goliath’s giant ass.

  I must have fallen asleep.

  Because when I wake up with a start, the daylight is mostly gone. The place isn’t entirely dark, but dark is certainly filling it up fast. In one of the eight corners opposite me sits an old man. At least he looks old to me from where I’m sitting. My immediate reaction is to feel for all my weapons.

  They’re still there.

  I stuff the .9 mm into my shoulder holster and the .22 into my coat pocket. The fighting knife gets re-sheathed.

  The old man is drinking wine from a tall bottle.

  “Buona sera,” I whisper, the soft sound of my voice echoing off the bare stone walls.

  “Sera,” he whispers, after taking a deep drink off the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Since that’s the extent of my Italian, I ask him in English if he lives here.

  He just shakes his head, which I take to mean, I don’t speak English.

  I stand, brush myself off, and check my pockets for loose change. I pull out a couple of euros, cross the length of the floor, and hand them to him.

  “Grazie,” he whispers, taking the coins in his free hand while stealing another pull off the bottle with the other.

  “Prego,” I answer.

  I make another check of my watch.

  Four forty-five in the afternoon.

  I meet Lola in fifteen minutes. Our first meeting in nearly a year since she made the fatal decision to go off with her former lover and father of her now-deceased son.

  Exploding bullets still ring in my ears. My left hand throbs from a sliced and diced pinky finger. Shards of crushed Duomo rooftop tile still stab my knees, chest, fingers, and palms. But it’s the thought of Lola that sets my heart pounding.

  For the narrowest of seconds I feel like asking the old man for a pull off the bottle. But then I get a good whiff of him and think better of it.

  It’s begun to rain when I step outside onto the Via Guelfa. I pull the collar up on my leather jacket and take a right down the narrow neighborhood street, the soles of my boots slapping against the cobbles. Slipping into a corner bar I order an espresso, a pack of Marlboro Light cigarettes, and a new Bic lighter. A translucent red one. I drink the hot espresso from a little white cup while the attractive, middle-aged, blond woman behind the coffee bar stares up at a small LCD television that’s mounted to the wall in a far corner.

  While the rainwater drips off my leather jacket, I light a cigarette and glance up at the television. The scene being broadcast is all too familiar. A large man trying to balance himself atop the Duomo. A man dressed in black, who can’t possibly balance himself because he’s shot not in the collar like I originally suspected, but through the left shoulder. A man with a gun in his hand whose feet slip out from beneath him, whose body slides down the length of the Duomo until he drops like a sack of rocks to the cobbled pavement below.

  I sip my coffee and smoke my cigarette and anxiously wait to see if there is any footage of me either standing atop the Duomo or traipsing across the cathedral ceiling. But thus far, anyway, nothing.

  My hunch has turned out to be a good one. With the Russian goon and me dressed so much alike, he acted like my stunt double during his fall to his death.

  I should be feeling good about his death. I should be elated that he bought the farm and I’m alive to watch it on television, knowing that the police are not looking for me. Yet.

  But I’m not happy.

  Maybe there’s some truth to the notion that every man’s death diminishes all of mankind, but my built-in, shockproof shit detector tells me this is more personal than that. Because of me, another man is dead. I don’t care if he’s trying to kill me first or if his intentions are to retrieve a flash drive that contains information that might potentially kill a massive number of innocent people. He’s still a man, and I’m responsible for his death.

  I’ve had a bellyful of killing. When will it ever stop?

  In my mind I picture the seventh level of hell, and I see myself occupying a place of honor along with the other infamous men of violence. Men who lived by the gun and died by the gun. I’m no better than any of them.

  Dante would have loved me.

  I finish my coffee, set the cup back down into the white saucer. The little metal spoon makes a clinking noise when the cup brushes up against it. I set a ten-euro note onto the bar for the cigs, the lighter, and the coffee, and I motion for the blond woman to keep the change. All one euro of it.

  I step back out into the darkness of an early Florentine night. The wet cobbled street takes on an eerie glow that reflects the light of the streetlamps as obscure white bulbs. The cigarette still burning between my lips, I pull up the collar on my leather coat and feel the light raindrops slap my face. Every one of them screams of loneliness. Every one of them bears the likeness of Lola.

  My former lover turned fugitive.

  She’s sitting at the bar to my left when I walk through the door of Harry’s American Bar. Except for the bartender, she’s alone. Her long dark hair is draped over her left shoulder, and the skin on her chiseled face is tan and rich. She’s shed a couple of pounds since I last laid eyes on her, not that she needed to. But from what I understand about her present condition, she’s been under a lot of stress lately.

  When she turns to look at me, her big milk chocolate brown eyes melt into mine. As she crosses her black-booted legs under a brown leather miniskirt, I feel like the rainwater dripping down my cheeks could, in fact, be tears.

  To my left is a picture window that contains the words “Harry’s American Bar” in big gray block letters. Through the glass you can see the Victorian-era streetlamps that illuminate the red, common brick knee-wall that runs the length of the swift-flowing Arno. To my right is Lola, in her tights, turtleneck sweater, and thin brown leather jacket.

  The barkeep is a distinguished middle-aged man in a white shirt, black bow tie, and matching trousers. He politely asks me what I’ll be drinking. Jack Daniels, I tell him. Lola says she’ll take the same.

  The bartender tells me in perfect English that Jack is a fine choice on a cool, rainy evening like this one. But he has no idea just how cool things are around here, and quite possibly, how cold they might get.

  I go to take the stool beside Lola
’s.

  “Can we grab a table in the corner?” she asks. “Better not to risk being seen through the window.”

  She’s right, of course.

  “Sure,” I say.

  The bartender tells us he will bring our drinks to us.

  She slips off the stool. When she passes by me on her way to the table, I get a quick whiff of her rose petal scent. It doesn’t take a psychologist to tell you that smell can provoke profound memory.

  In this case, it steals my breath away.

  We sit down at the table and just stare at one another.

  Finally, I work up the strength to make words. “You look good, Lo,” I say. “Don’t look like a kidnap victim to me.”

  “Whoever said that?” she asks, smiling, brushing back long, thick hair.

  I’m slightly taken aback, as if she just reached out and gently flicked the tip of my nose with her index finger. My stomach constricts. I feel my pulse throbbing in my head and injured hand.

  “My contacts in New York led me to believe you’re being held against your will,” I explain.

  She exhales, sits back. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Since when did you resume smoking?”

  “Since my life went to hell.”

  I pull out the pack of Marlboros and hand her one as the barkeep brings the whiskeys in clear drinking glasses set on small white plates. He also sets out a small pitcher of drinking water, should we want to add some of it to the whiskey.

  When he leaves I say, “Can you smoke in here?”

  “It’s Harry’s,” Lola says.

  “Of course,” I say, reaching across the table with my lighter and firing up her smoke.

  I light one for myself and return the pack to my coat pocket.

  “Which is it, Lo? You being held against your will or not?”

  “Yes. I mean no. Or…yes, yes.” She’s smoking and nodding. “What I mean is, I came here of my own free will. Christian told me he was doing some business here with Interpol. That we would be here for some months. I desperately wanted to get out of the States and to forget about losing Peter and you, and I trusted my…my…significant other.” Pausing, smoking. “It was only after a week of our stay here that I learned about the flash drive and his true reason for being here. That’s when Clyne revealed himself.” Her smoking hand begins to tremble. “They stand to make a lot of money. While risking the lives of millions of poor, poor people.”