Michelangelo's Notebook Read online

  “What the hell?” was all Peter had time to say.

  There was a brief rustling sound from directly in front of them and Finn caught a quick scent of cheap aftershave before something hit her on the side of the head hard enough to take her to her knees. The flashlight? Maybe, because everything was dark now.

  She heard Peter rush forward to help her, and in the last split second before the blackness swallowed her, she heard a distant terrible cry cut short by a drawn-out gurgling sigh and she wondered who it was making that awful noise.

  6

  The man looked as though he was in his middle sixties. He was on the short side, five eight or nine, maybe, and reasonably fit. He had gray crinkly-curly hair fading back to midskull from a widow’s peak that made his forehead look abnormally large. The eyes behind his round, steel-framed glasses were a very dark brown, almost black. He was wearing a nicely tailored navy pinstripe three-piece suit that was probably something safe, like Brooks Brothers, a simple, no-name, crisply starched white shirt and a Turnbull & Asser tie with thin, dark blue stripes. The shoes were Bally wing tips. The watch on his right wrist was a gold Bulgari that was a little garish but it matched the Yale ring on the index finger of his left hand. There was no wedding ring. He smelled faintly of Lagerfeld.

  Someone had taken a nine-inch-long, curved-blade, Moroccan koummya dagger and jammed it into the man’s mouth, slicing up through the soft palette and into the man’s brain, the exposed end of the weapon sticking out between his lips like some sort of nasty silver-and-black tongue, the long, tooled-metal escutcheon keeping the head lifted slightly off the green leather-and-felt blotter that covered the antique desk. There was very little blood; that was the kind of detail Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad was paid to look out for.

  According to the title on the office door, the dead man with a dagger in his mouth was Alexander Crawley, director of the Parker-Hale Museum at Sixty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Central Park Zoo. Delaney glanced out the tall windows at the opposite end of the office. The old-fashioned green velvet drapes were pulled back and tied off with matching velvet ropes. Maybe a baboon in the zoo had seen something but Delaney doubted it. He never had that kind of luck. Actually, he’d never been to the Central Park Zoo and he wasn’t even sure if they had baboons there.

  There were four other people in the room: Singh from the M.E.’s office, Don Putkin, the crime scene specialist, Yance the photographer and Sergeant William Boyd, his overweight and badly dressed partner. Billy was watching the dead man’s mouth while Singh turned the neck slightly to check for rigor. There wasn’t any. Downstairs at the cocktail party in the main reception hall there were nine hundred elegantly dressed suspects drinking martinis and wondering what the hell was holding up the hors d’oeuvres. Bigwigs, one and all, from the governor and the mayor on down. Delaney sighed. It was going to be a stinker.

  “What’s the word, Singh?”

  The man from the medical examiner’s office looked up and shrugged. “Dead maybe an hour, a bit more. No rigor yet. Strangled, probably with a piece of nylon rope. I’ve picked up a few fibers so far. Basically someone got in behind him and garroted him.”

  “Any ideas about the dagger?”

  “It’s not Pakistani or Indian. I can tell you that much. Too long. Probably Berber. Arabic of some kind, by the look of the design work.”

  “You said he was garroted,” said Billy, still staring at the dagger. “He wasn’t stabbed?”

  “Maybe some kind of ritual thing. The victim was already dead when the dagger was inserted.”

  “Some kind of freak,” said Delaney.

  “Not for me to say.” Singh shrugged again. “Who knows, maybe he just didn’t like art.”

  Delaney’s cell phone twinkled at him, playing the Simpsons theme. His teenage daughter had programmed it in as a joke, and he kept seeing Bart skateboarding through Springfield every time it rang. He popped open the phone, listened for a moment, grunted once or twice and then clapped the phone shut.

  Delaney looked across at Billy. “Go find out if they’ve got an intern here named Ryan, would you? First name Finn.”

  7

  The man sat in full uniform in the empty room. It was nothing more than a cell, really, with bare white concrete walls, a gray-painted wooden chair and a single small opening for ventilation in the far wall, always closed, always covered, even in the heat of summer. The only furniture in the room was an army cot and blanket in one corner, a chair and a long table for his work, a combination draftsman’s lamp and magnifying lens clamped to one corner. It was the only light in the room—the only one necessary. He did not read there, or eat there or do anything else there except sleep and sit in his chair, working. Sometimes he thought for long periods at a time, but any thinking he did could be done in the dark. There was no sound except the hollow thunder in the distance and the rustling noises of small animals and mad things that could just as easily be in his overburdened mind.

  He stood and went to the heavy steel door in his room. First he made sure all the locking mechanisms were in place and then he undressed slowly, hanging each piece of his uniform on the brass hook on his door. His boots he took and placed neatly at the end of his army cot. When he was completely naked he returned to his chair and sat down again. He saw that he was hard but he ignored it. He’d had no one to share his passion with for many years, so it was better to simply disregard it.

  He reached out, picked a fresh pair of surgical gloves out of the box on his table and ran his fingers over the thick, carved leather cover of the immense, heavy book that sat in the absolute perfect center of the table.

  The motif of the cover was simple and explicit, one of the first such things he had attempted: a deeply carved cross, lines radiating out from it like beams from a star. Hanging upside down was the Virgin Mother, hands nailed to the upright, legs spread on the crosspiece, revealing her agony at both her crucifixion and the birth of the only child she would ever have—a child born ascending, not to earth, but to his place beside his Father. God’s child, his power killing her even as she died willingly on the cross to bear him, never to know the immensity of what she was birthing. The wonder of him and the fury, his commitment to a just and true revenge for the world. The naked man prayed briefly to the Mother then opened the book to the last page he had been working on and began a new verse.

  Since it was the first of the column it would need to be illuminated as in any Bible. He opened the small glue pot, and, using his finest brush, he drew a faint line of the thin, sticky liquid along the penciled outline of the letter. He blew on it carefully then used a block of gold leaf, sliding a single sheet off the block with a cotton swab to cover the glue line.

  He waited patiently, letting the tissue-thin leaf set with the glue, then used a wider and softer sable brush to remove the excess gold. He’d already chosen the color he would use for the interior of the letter: copper red, just like the girl’s hair, like the smell of fresh blood on a hot summer day, the way it must have been so long ago.

  8

  Finn sat huddled on the end of the couch as the paramedic dabbed at her temple with an alcohol swab. The woman was black and fat and very gentle.

  “Must have used some kind of sap or something. Skin’s barely broken. There’ll be a bump but not much else. You were lucky, girl.”

  Finn nodded slowly and tried not to look at the huge stain on the carpet runner closer to the door. She didn’t think she was lucky at all, but at least she was alive. Not like Peter. She felt the hot tears welling up in her eyes again and swallowed hard. The sound she’d heard before dropping down the dark well into unconsciousness had been Peter dying, his throat opened up in a single slashing sweep that had murmured past her like the wing of a night bird and then turned into that final, horrible liquid gurgle.

  The apartment was crowded. Two paramedics, packing up now, at least three uniformed cops and two detectives. A crime scene techn
ician was covering everything with fingerprint powder and whistling softly under his breath. The paramedic was speaking to her again.

  “Sure you don’t want to come to the hospital, let the docs take a look at you. You maybe got a concussion. I don’t think so, but still, you never know.” The paramedic frowned. “There’s the other thing too, maybe you want to have that checked.”

  “I’d know if I’d been raped,” said Finn. “I wasn’t.”

  “Okay then, sweetie-pie,” the woman said. She snapped her plastic equipment case shut. “We’ll be on our way then. Sorry for your trouble and your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You bet.” The paramedics edged out the door, skirting the bloodstain. One of the detectives came out of her bedroom, and she wondered why he’d been there in the first place. He’d introduced himself as Detective Tracker, which she’d thought was hysterically funny when he’d first said it. And it had been just that—a matter of near hysteria. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her boobs and he had bad breath. He was tall, broad-shouldered and had greasy hair.

  “You and this Peter kid friends for long?”

  “A couple of months.”

  “Sleeping with him?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Sure it is. You were sleeping with him. Some other guy gets jealous, breaks in and waits, like that. You’re not sleeping with him, you got to wonder why, see?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping with him.”

  “So you didn’t know the guy who killed him.”

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure? You said it was dark.”

  “I don’t know anyone who goes around killing people.”

  “Anything taken?”

  “I haven’t really looked.”

  “Could have been a robbery then.”

  “I guess.”

  “Not much to steal.”

  “No.”

  “Student, right?”

  “Yes. NYU.”

  “Peter too?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you get together—same classes, mutual friends, what?”

  “He’s . . . was in the fine arts program.”

  “So? What’s that got to do with anything.”

  “He took a life drawing class. I model.”

  “Like, naked?” His eyes dropped to her breasts again. For the first time in years stares actually bothered her.

  “Nude.”

  “Same difference, sweetheart. You don’t have any clothes on.”

  “It’s different, Detective Tracker, believe me.”

  “You think maybe it could have been someone else in the class?”

  “No.”

  “Nuts everywhere in New York.”

  Her head was pounding. All she wanted to do was curl up on the couch and go to sleep.

  “It wasn’t anyone from the goddamn class, all right?”

  “Slow down, honey, I’m not the bad guy here.”

  “Then stop acting like it.”

  One of the uniformed cops smiled. Tracker frowned. There was a knock at the door and it opened. A tall, very thin man stood there. He had dark hair that needed cutting and a pinched angular face with deep-set eyes that matched his hair color. He had a smear of five-o’clock shadow on his cheeks and chin. He looked Irish. The man stared down at the pool of blood congealing on the carpet runner and frowned.

  “Who the fuck are you?” asked Tracker. “This is a fucking crime scene and you’re in the way.”

  The thin man reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a small, worn leather folder. As he pulled it out Finn saw that he was wearing a shoulder holster. Tracker saw it too. The man flipped open the folder and pushed it into Tracker’s face.

  “Delaney. Lieutenant Vincent Delaney, Special Action Squad.” He smiled. “You are?”

  “Tracker, Twenty-third Precinct.”

  “That’s nice. This is Miss Ryan?”

  “That’s it, Loo.”

  “I’d like to speak to her if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m in the middle of an investigation here.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Delaney. “Not anymore.”

  9

  Dawn was breaking over the Vatican, the secret city behind the high walls still deep in shadow, the trees along its winding paths and around its ancient buildings whispering between themselves in the faint morning breeze.

  Lights were on here and there. The man in the long black soutane could hear the faint sound of chanting as he came out of the State Department offices in the papal palace and turned down the narrow gravel walkway that led between the Belvedere Palace and the old brick power plant.

  He clutched the decoded message from New York in one hand and quickened his pace down the path, his plain black lace-up shoes making crunching sounds on the dew-damp gravel. Once, early in his career, he had been in awe of this place and saw it as the active seat of God’s will on earth.

  Over the years his hair had thinned and his vision began to blur, but if anything, he now saw the Vatican with much clearer eyes. Once, he’d seen himself as a privileged priest, brought here for his piety and his love of Christ. Now he knew better; he’d been brought here for his facility with cryptography and his language abilities. If he’d gone to Harvard instead of Notre Dame he’d probably be working for the CIA right now.

  Ah well, he thought, even God had need of spies, it seemed.

  He continued down the path, then found a small entrance and went up into the library. It was not really the Vatican’s library, but rather a tourist showpiece with its dozens of frescoed arches and its display tables of manuscript artifacts that were more colorful than important. He found a second staircase and went up to the floor above.

  A long hall led down to a heavy wooden door guarded even at this time of day by an ornately uniformed Swiss guard complete with pantaloons, helmet and halberd. The priest knew that underneath the puffy-looking jacket the guard had a Beretta S12 submachine gun on a quick release sling on one side and a Beretta M9 service automatic on the other. The secrets of the Prince of Peace were guarded with some very sophisticated ironmongery.

  The priest dug his plastic laminated ID card out of the pocket of his soutane, held it up where the guard could see it and watched him snap to attention. The priest gave the young man a brief nod then opened the door marked ARCHIVO SE-CRETO, the secret archives of the Vatican.

  The man he had come to see was in the first of a score of rooms in the archives, waiting patiently at a plain wooden table, seated on a plain wooden chair. Around him were deep wooden shelves piled with documents. There was a small window looking down into the Pigna Courtyard. The man in the chair was Carlos Cardinal Abruzzi, presently the secretary of state, the second-highest position in the Vatican next to the pope himself. The priest knew that Abruzzi was far more powerful than the slight old man who sat in Peter’s Chair. All the threads of power came to Abruzzi’s hands eventually, and he plucked them like a well-played harp. He was aware, as few Catholics, or even Catholic clergy were, that the Vatican was less a center of religion than it was a center of business and government. In point of fact it was the second-largest corporation in the world and had an international population of almost two billion to govern, at least spiritually.

  “What have you got for us, Frank?” Abruzzi asked, using the diminutive of the priest’s first name. The priest handed over the decoded cable.

  “Dear me, Crawley murdered,” murmured the cardinal. “How unfortunate.” The tone of his voice held no compassion or regret. “A Moroccan dagger?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then we know who the killer is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, at least he’s come to light after all this time.”

  “Rather dramatically.”

  “He’ll have to be found and dealt with before the police trace him.”

  “Yes.”

  “An intern photogra
phed one of Michelangelo’s drawings?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do we know this?”

  “She was seen on the security camera at the museum.”

  “Was any attempt made to recover the photographs?”

  “Yes. It failed.”

  “She’ll have to be stopped as well.” The cardinal continued to stare at the note thoughtfully. “This could be a great opportunity for us, especially with Crawley dead.” The cardinal paused. “Is there any connection between his death and the girl?”