Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  There had been more political assassinations in Switzerland by the twelfth century than had ever taken place in the United States and the only country with fewer was its next-door neighbor, Canada. Even that bland and desolate country of ice and snow had suffered more distinct “terrorist attacks” in its time. It was, Father Gentile knew, mostly a matter of not learning from history-which the Americans were very good at, preferring to believe that, on a world level, all other nations revolved around them like planets around the sun. Perhaps a few more wealthy, certifiable zealots and madmen like Osama bin Laden and airliners thrown like so many sticks and stones would eventually teach them.

  He reached the open doorway of the bedroom and paused to screw the suppressor onto the tapped muzzle of the ugly little Beretta Cougar he carried in his right hand. He looked into the room. Bannerman was asleep, snoring lightly, his thick gray hair on the single pillow. He slept on his back in the exact center of the large bed, hands folded across the coverlet like a corpse, sheet drawn up to his chin. Gentile could see the collar of his silk pajamas. Probably from Gammarelli’s, around the corner from the Pantheon. He crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He gently tapped the cold end of the suppressor against the bridge of the cardinal archbishop’s patrician Irish nose.

  “Wake up,” he said quietly.

  Bannerman’s snoring broke and he muttered something. Father Gentile rapped him on the nose a little harder. The cardinal’s eyes shot open, the pupils widening, pain creasing the man’s forehead.

  “What the hell?”

  “Wake up,” Gentile said again. “We must talk. Keep your voice down; believe me, you don’t want us to be interrupted.”

  Bannerman’s eyes crossed in a silly expression as he focused on the muzzle of the suppressor. It was now four inches away from his nose. A shot that close would blow his brains all over Jesus and his donkey.

  “Who are you?” said Bannerman. He was an old man, well into his seventies, but his voice was still firm and strong.

  “Vincit qui si vincit,” the priest with the gun responded. He conquers who conquers himself.

  Bannerman’s eyes widened at the quotation. It was something every man in his position knew and also dreaded. In those few words and their response lay the seeds of a scandal of unimaginable proportions. Bannerman knew in an instant who the man was, what his authority allowed him and whom that authority came from. He also knew that he would be a dead man if he didn’t give the correct answer within the next few seconds. They were words he had never expected to say.

  “Verbum pat sapient,” he whispered. A word is enough for a wise man.

  “Are you a wise man, Eminence?” asked Father Gentile.

  “I know what you are here for. I can read the e-mails from ASV as well as any other man.”

  “What am I here for, Eminence, the Archivo Secreto Vaticano aside?”

  “You’re here because of the murder of Alexander Crawley. To investigate his death.” The cardinal eased himself up on the pillow, eying Gentile in the half-light coming through the bedroom window.

  “Only partly, Eminence. I have been charged with a much more complex assignment than that. Crawley is no more than the tip of the iceberg. There will be more killings, as you well know. The more killing, the more danger to the Church and her situation. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

  “What do I have to do with any of this?” asked Bannerman. “This is none of my doing. It all happened more than half a century ago. This is all Spellman’s doing-him and his damn chorus boys! He was Pacelli’s friend, not me.”

  “You are Archbishop Spellman’s inheritor, I’m afraid. It comes with the proud-looking manteletta you keep in your closet over there. It is as much a part of your congregation as the people of New York.”

  Bannerman sat up fully, aware that the gun barrel followed his movements, its aim never far from a spot roughly between his eyes. He watched the man sitting beside him on the bed carefully. Early middle age, fit, ordinary face, the obscenity of his holy collar. He wondered if the man really was a priest at all, or whether the guardians of the ASV simply chose their operatives wherever they could. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that the man was here, now, in his bedroom and with a gun.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want as much information on the boy as possible.”

  “There is very little. All the files concerning the child were destroyed when he entered the country. It was part of the agreement to take him in the first place.”

  “It was an agreement made with criminals. It was an agreement made under duress. You know as well as I do that such agreements have no weight. It is my understanding that files were secretly maintained, that you have kept track of him through the years.”

  “This is all too dangerous.”

  “Of course it’s dangerous. If it was a walk in the park, as you Americans call it, I would not be here.”

  “If the child’s existence were to be discovered the repercussions would be enormous. The Church has gone through a great deal in recent years. Things have been difficult.”

  “Of course. If all those whining victims had kept their mouths shut none of this would have happened, right?” The priest with the gun shook his head. “Any evangelist television preacher could quote you Ecclesiastes 11:1, Eminence: ‘Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall be returned to you tenfold.’ What most of them would forget to tell you is that it works both ways, good as well as bad. That’s what this is all about. I need the files on the boy. In addition, I will need as much information as you can give me about the Grange Foundation.”

  “One has nothing to do with the other!”

  “Crawley’s murder would indicate otherwise.” The only thing he had been told by his employers was that an organization by that name would bear closer scrutiny and that Crawley’s unfortunate demise was somehow involved. The cardinal’s violent reaction was instructive.

  “You are trifling with information that can only come to no good. This is insanity. One false move and I will be pilloried in the media.”

  “Then perhaps in your next mass you should pray that I make no false moves, for all our sakes. Now where can I find the files on the boy?”

  The cardinal looked at the gun and then into the face of the man holding it. Lying was not an option. “They are kept in the records of the Community of Sant’Egidio at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.”

  Gentile nodded. Sant’Egidio was a large lay movement that did a lot of work with orphans and displaced children. “Under what name?”

  “Frederico Botte.”

  “How do I get the files?”

  “If I ask for them the office would become suspicious at my interest. Not to mention the fact that the file is very old. It will not have been computerized.”

  “I can deal with that. The Grange Foundation?”

  “I will find out what I can.”

  “No intermediaries, no secretaries. I deal with you only.”

  “All right. How do I get in touch with you?”

  “I will get in touch with you.” He reached into the other pocket of his dark jacket and took out a tiny Globalstar satellite pager. He dropped it onto the cardinal’s scarlet chest. “Keep this on you at all times. It vibrates. Call the number you see in the little screen. The number will change. Call from this phone.” He dropped another small device beside the pager-an extremely small cell phone.

  “One thing more,” said Gentile, standing.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t try to have me followed. Don’t try to trace me through the machinery. Under no circumstances call the police. The one thing you must know is that I am not your enemy. You must also know that I would not hesitate to sacrifice you for the common good. Don’t be foolish, Eminence. Please.”

  With that, Gentile slipped away, leaving the archbishop of New York shaking nervously in his own bed. Outside, over the sharp neo-Gothic spires of the cathedral, the moon began to ris
e.

  24

  She went to his bed and found him still awake in the darkened room, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling, perhaps reliving a distant violent past. He turned to her as she stood beside the bed, the moon at her back, unbuttoning her shirt, staring down at him.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “I know.” She pulled off the shirt, then reached behind her back to unclasp her bra, tossing it on the floor. She slipped the buttons on her jeans one by one, knowing that he was watching her, trying not to think about what he was thinking, trying not to think of anything at all except the moment. He said nothing more.

  She slid off her jeans and the plain white cotton panties with them and stood there finally, naked in front of him, the light from behind her turning her hair into a glowing tangled halo, catching the curve of her hips and the long, strong muscles of her thighs with a soft plain glow. She waited like that for a moment, letting him see her, wanting him to see everything that she was, simple in the moonlight, and then she got into the bed with him, slipping under the covers, remembering the touch of his hand on her thigh at the colonel’s house, knowing this was going to happen even then, the touch like a fist in an iron glove and also as tender as a lover.

  For the second time she wondered about the abstract moments and twists of fate that could turn a person’s life upside down within the space of time from one sunrise to another. For a split second she thought about Peter and that final, terrible cry, and bizarrely she suddenly had an image of her mother’s dressing table in the house on Doderidge Street back in Columbus and the wedding photograph in its silver frame.

  Her mother and father standing together, somber-faced, her father in tweeds and tortoiseshell-rim glasses towering over her mother-so much younger, bright-eyed in a perfect wedding dress and holding a spray of white flowers in her hand, the tall trees and the rose gardens of Whetstone Park in the background, all in that pale yellow of old black-and-white photographs. For a moment she felt very young as she brushed against the hot dry skin of Valentine’s hip and then it was too late for good and all and he reached out and put his hand on her flat, taut belly and she turned to him and he slipped into her immensely as though he had belonged there from the beginning.

  He began to move and she moved with him and none of the other things mattered even though she had no idea if she was doing it for him and his pain, for her father or for herself. Nothing mattered at all except right now and that was enough for both of them.

  25

  Lieutenant James Cornwall of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit attached to the ALIU-the art-looting division of the OSS-in western Germany sat on a rock with his sergeant trying to find a way into the farmhouse hidden behind the screen of trees. He wasn’t having very much success. His group was running out of food, there were dozens of retreating German patrols in the area, and according to the sergeant, they were sitting ducks if even one German tank decided to move in their direction. He lit a Lucky, pushed his metal-rimmed glasses up on his forehead and wondered how a man who’d completed two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated summa cum laude from Yale could wind up sitting on a rock in Bavaria beside a man who stank of sweat and cigarettes and who carried a Garand rifle strapped to his back. He was assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Parker-Hale Museum. Right now he should have been having breakfast at the Hotel Brevoort and palling around with Rorimer and Henry Taylor from the Met, not getting shot at in Bavaria.

  “So what do you think, Sergeant?”

  “I don’t get paid to think, sir.”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant paused and lit a smoke from the crumpled pack he kept in the well of his combat boot and looked out over the early-morning mist that lay on the hillside and filtered in through the trees. “Well, sir, except for the sniper, I don’t think we’re dealing with combat troops. It’s something else, sir.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some kind of special mission. Six trucks-Opels, not Mercedes. That means they’re gas, not diesel, and that means they’re meant to move fast. Six trucks like that wouldn’t be used to guard troops, and they wouldn’t waste more gas on them lights like they were doing last night. It’s maybe bigwig Krauts taking a powder, but you’d think they’d be in staff cars. The officer I saw was wearing a general’s uniform but he was too young, no more than thirty-five. He’s gotta be a phony.”

  “Your conclusion?”

  “Like I said, some kind of secret thing, hot-footing it, you know. They’re carrying something-loot, papers, something valuable.” He paused and cleared his throat. “And then there’s the broad.”

  “The woman you mentioned.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A phantom perhaps, wishful thinking?” Cornwall said with a faint smile.

  “No, sir. She was real enough.”

  “You mentioned before that it might have been some relation to the occupant of the farm. What about the hypothesis?”

  I don’t know about any hypo thing, but I know she was real and if she was some farmer’s wife or something she wouldn’t have been walking around free like that in the middle of the night.”

  “Do you think it might be important? Tactically.”

  “Tactics aren’t my business any more than hypo-watsits. I saw a broad. I thought you should know, that’s all.”

  “All right,” said Cornwall. “Now I know.”

  “So what do you want to do?” the sergeant asked. “The sniper saw us coming. They’ll make a move before we do, try to break out, maybe.”

  “What would you do?”

  The sergeant smiled. He knew that Cornwall was looking for more than just advice. He was asking for some kind of plan because he didn’t have any fucking idea of what he was doing.

  “Depends on whether or not you want to keep those trucks from getting blown to shit or not.”

  “That would be preferable.”

  “Then we hit them first, before they can do anything. Hold them down with the fifty-caliber, blowing the fucking sniper out of his fucking tower with Terhune’s M9 and go in hard.”

  “Day or night?”

  The sergeant resisted the urge to tell Cornwall not to be an asshole. “Night.”

  “All right,” the lieutenant said again. “Let me think about it.”

  Just so long as you don’t think about it for too fucking long, thought the sergeant, but he kept his mouth shut and thought about the broad and the bogus general instead.

  He reached out and let his long, bony index finger play over the faded photograph pasted neatly into the Great Book beside the careful drawing of the farm: Stabsfuhrer Gerhard Utikal of Einsatzstab Rosenberg, last seen in the early spring of 1945 near Fussen and Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps. In the picture he was in his early thirties, wearing, illegally as it turned out, the uniform of a Wehrmacht Hauptman, squinting into the sunlight in three-quarter profile, trees and a large ornamental pool behind him, the snapshot probably taken at Versailles or the Tuileries Gardens in Paris sometime between 1941 and 1943, his years of duty there.

  The naked, gray-haired man smiled vaguely, remembering. Gerhard Utikal had been the first, so long ago now. According to all the files Utikal had vanished like smoke, but in time he’d found him, living in Uruguay, dividing his time between an apartment on the Playa Ramirez in Montevideo and a huge ranch in Argentina on the far side of the River Platte. By then Eichmann had been taken and the Butcher of Riga, Herberts Cukurs, had been liquidated by an Israeli death squad after boasting to journalist Jack Anderson that he was “invincible.”

  Utikal wasn’t invincible, just smarter. Instead of keeping a set of neatly pressed Nazi uniforms in his closet like the Latvian had, he had chosen instead to hide in plain sight, adopting the identity of one of the interned sailors from the scuttled battleship Graf Spee. It worked for the better part of twenty-five years, but not quite long enough or well enough.
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  The naked man put the tip of his finger over the face in the photograph. The first of many, and more to come. Utikal had screamed as the first tenpenny nail was pushed slowly into his left eye, then died, twisting horribly in the chair as the second three-inch sliver was pushed into the right. The naked man closed the Great Book.

  “Mirabile Dictu,” he whispered softly. Miraculous to say. “Kyrie eleison.” Lord, have mercy on our souls.

  26

  Valentine’s kitchen on the top floor of Ex Libris was a paean of praise to a fifties that Finn had never known. The floors were covered in blue and white linoleum tile, the cupboards were yellow with chrome handles and white interiors, and the two small country-style windows that looked out onto the roof garden planted with staked tomatoes were trimmed in blue chintz.

  The stove was a forty-inch Gaffers amp; Sattler factory-yellow four-burner gas range with a thermal eye, heat-timer griddle, and a fifth burner. The refrigerator was a 1956 turquoise Kelvinator. There was a Rival waffle maker on the yellow-flecked Formica countertop along with a bullet-shaped chrome toaster and a huge chrome breadbox that actually hid a very up-to-date microwave.

  There was a four-seat yellow vinyl and chrome dinette set in the middle of the room, and off in one corner there was a sky blue vinyl breakfast nook under one of the windows. Finn, wearing her panties and one of Valentine’s crisp Sea Island cotton white shirts, was lounging in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee brewed in the big silver GE percolator. Valentine, nude except for an idiotic barbecue apron that said “A little sugar for the chef makes sure the cookin’ is sweet,” was making scrambled eggs at the stove. Finn reached out onto the breakfast nook table and toyed with the green-skirted, hula-dancing, ukulele-playing ceramic boy and girl salt-and-pepper shakers. According to the tail-swinging, eye-rolling cat clock over the sink it was just after eight in the morning. Apparently everything in the fifties had been in pastel shades of “cute.” Tellingly, there was no visible dishwasher-or at least one that she could see at first glance.