Blue Moonlight (20 page)

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 three 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.