Michelangelo's Notebook (10 page)

“Depends on your point of view,” said Valentine. “I know a lot of things I didn’t before. I know what you look like, I know where you live, I know that among other things you’re a nude model, a teacher of English as a second language, a recently fired intern at a prestigious art museum and you’ve been involved in two violent deaths. Any one of those facts could be vitally important to the situation at hand.”

“Why does everyone harp on the nude model part?”

“Because it forces people to imagine you with no clothes on. For some people that’s probably very uncomfortable, for other people it’s probably a delight. It’s a lot different than saying you work as a waitress at IHOP, you’ve got to admit.” Valentine sighed. “My dear Finn, it’s my job to look at details, very small details. When I’m doing a valuation of a rare book for someone, the shape of a letter can mean the difference between the work being authentic or a forgery. If I’m advising somebody on a piece of crucial information, that information has to be exactly right. If you look closely at things you see the details, you see the flaws and sometimes you see the absolute perfection. They can be equally important.”

“You mean the Michelangelo?”

“As an example, sure. That may be the problem right there—it might not be a Michelangelo at all. It wouldn’t be the first time someone was killed over a forgery.”

“It was the real thing. I’m sure of it.”

Valentine smiled. “No offense, kiddo, but you hardly qualify as an expert.”

“And you do?”

“You told me you had a digital image of the drawing.”

Finn nodded. She dug around in her pack, which was leaning by the chair, found her camera and handed it over to Valentine. He opened the flap at the camera’s bottom, withdrew the firewire connector and plugged it into the black, flat-screened IBM on his desk. Finn got up and came around to stand behind him as he worked the keyboard. She looked around but she couldn’t actually see the computer itself.

“It’s a server down in the basement,” said Valentine without looking up from what he was doing, as though reading her mind. “It’s cooler down there.”

“What do you have?” Finn asked. “A supercomputer or something?”

“Not quite,” he answered. “But close. I do a lot of work for some people in California. They pay me in computer technology.” He sat back in his chair. “There we go.” On the screen was the Michelangelo drawing, full size. The detail on the screen was flawless.

“Well?” Finn asked.

“I’ve got to admit it looks pretty good. Authentic at first glance, anyway.” He tapped some more keys and the drawing vanished.

“What are you doing?”

“Comparison test. I’ve got some material on file. If we need more, I can get it out of the stacks.”

“Comparing what?”

“The words in the corner there. See if the handwriting’s the same.”

The screen stayed blank for a moment, then resolved itself into a windowpanelike alignment of four sections. Each one appeared to hold a small piece of handwriting. He then hit another key and a fifth pane in the window appeared with the Michelangelo drawing. After another keystroke, the drawing dropped away, leaving only the writing.

“Now we’ll see,” said Valentine. He tapped keys with his long fluid fingers and for a moment Finn found herself thinking that they’d be very sensitive touching her. She wiped the thought out of her mind as quickly as the images on the screen disappeared. Now there were only two sections to the window—one on the left with a scrap of obviously very old handwriting in cursive Italian, the other a blown-up version of the writing on the drawing.

Finn leaned over Valentine’s shoulder, her hair cascading down over his cheek. She read the lines easily:

“What joy hath you glad wreath of flowers that is
Around each hair so deftly twined,
Each blossom pressing forward from behind,
As though to be the first her brows to kiss.”

Valentine picked it up at the beginning of the next line:

“The livelong day her dress hath perfect bliss,
That now reveals her breast, now seems to bind,
And that fair woven net of gold refined
Rests on her cheek and throat in happiness.”

Finn stepped back, blushing, realizing that she’d been standing much too close to Valentine while they read. “It’s one of his sonnets to his mistress, Clarissa Saffi. She was a courtesan, actually.”

“The first one he wrote about her, if I remember correctly,” agreed Valentine. “You’re very good.”

“You’re not bad yourself,” she said, taking another step away, grabbing her hair nervously and holding it against her neck. “Most people don’t even known he wrote poetry.”

“Everyone wrote poetry back then,” said Valentine, smiling and showing off his large square teeth.

He turned back to the screen. “I think poetry took the place of game shows.” He played with the keyboard again. “Now let’s see if we can get them to match up.” Slowly he used the mouse to drag the writing from the drawing across and atop the other one. He fiddled with the mouse, clicking it from time to time, then entered a series of instructions. The screen cleared again, split down the middle with five individual letters on each side:

Valentine then used the mouse to drag one set of letters so that they covered the first:

A
E
I
O
U

“Looks like a match to me,” said Finn.

“Me too,” said Valentine. “I’d say your drawing was definitely a Michelangelo.” He stared at the screen. “Certainly the handwriting is the same.” He paused. “Did Delaney tell you how Crawley was killed?”

“He said he was strangled but somebody stuck some kind of ritual dagger in his mouth.” Finn made a face. “I didn’t like Mr. Crawley, but it still sounds gross.”

“This ritual dagger, what kind was it—do you remember?”

“He called it a koummya or something.”

“Spanish. Andalusian. Sometimes from southern Morocco.”

“You know everything?”

“A little bit about a lot,” he said. “That’s what makes me dangerous.”

“You’re dangerous?”

“I can be.”

Finn went back to her chair and sat down again. “So now what do we do?”

“I’m not sure, exactly,” he murmured, still staring at the screen. “This is interesting but…”

“It’s not the kind of evidence we can take to the police.”

“It’s all electronic, for one thing. There’s no actual drawing. Did Delaney mention anything about finding it in Crawley’s office?”

“No. He kept on asking me where I saw it last, I kept on telling him Crawley had it in his hand.” She frowned. “I think he figures I stole it.”

“There must be surveillance cameras.”

“There are. I don’t know if I’m on them. If I am then that’ll prove I didn’t take it.”

“But it would also prove you photographed them,” said Valentine, “which might be enough reason to come after you at your apartment.”

“I thought of that, but it still doesn’t make any sense. It’s as though the very existence of the drawing, phony or not, is evidence of something… something worth killing for.”

“It’s like I said about going around in circles.” Valentine smiled. “Eventually you get to the little dot of truth at the middle of the vortex. Which I think perhaps you just did.”

“What truth?”

“The existence of the drawing is worth killing for.”

“What kind of truth is that?”

“A dangerous one.”

The man in the priest’s collar got off the Delta flight from Rome at three fifteen, ran his small black fiber suitcase through the machines and then showed his Vatican passport to a hard-eyed uniformed INS man. The passport identified him as Father Ricardo Gentile and his occupation as priest, which seemed fairly self-evident. In fact none of the information on the passport was true, and the passport itself, although genuine, did not exist on any records at the Vatican passport office in Rome. The INS man handed him back the passport after a brief glance then gave him an “I am the first line of defense in the war against terrorism” nod and allowed him into the United States.

Father Gentile followed the crowds out into the afternoon sunlight, picked up a cab and told the Nigerian driver to take him to the JFK Holiday Inn. He avoided speaking to the driver in his native Anaang although he spoke it fluently; the last thing he wanted to do was make an impression on anyone at this point. As usual the dog collar was bad enough.

The drive took only a few minutes and by three forty-five Father Gentile was checked into the office building slab of the hotel at the junction of the Van Wyck Expressway and the Belt Parkway. The room was narrow, simply furnished and small. The color scheme was predominantly a grape-tinted purple. His window looked out over some sort of Japanese garden. He couldn’t have cared less. He swished the blinds closed and switched on the desk light. There was no overhead; it was something he’d been noticing recently on his travels, the lack of overhead lighting. He went to the closet, found the hard-shell suitcase that had been left for him earlier that afternoon and unlocked it with the key that had been Fed-Exed to him the day before in Rome. He removed the contents, which included two suits, several Arrow shirts in different colors, still in their wrapping, a pair of black James Taylor and Son elevator shoes that added two inches to his height and a Glock 21 10mm automatic pistol with a fifteen-round law enforcement magazine and a Patrick Johnakin muzzle-up spring-loaded shoulder rig to go with it. He stripped off his priest’s clothes, redressed—complete with the Glock and holster—then neatly placed everything into the hard-shell suitcase and locked it again.

He reached inside the pocket of the suit jacket and withdrew two wallets, one large and European, the other an ordinary American-style bill-fold. The large wallet identified him as Peter Ruffino, an Italian agent of the Art Recovery Tactical Squad (ARTS), which was itself a division of Allied International Intelligence, or Alintel, a worldwide concern representing everybody from Lloyds to the British Museum, including several royal families, dozens of major corporations and even a few governments.

The other wallet was filled with the Homeland Security credentials of one Laurence Gaynor MacLean. Both sets of documents were authentic and subjectible to deep background checks. As Father Gentile was well aware, despite endless denials of its existence, the Vatican secretary of state had the single-longest-running intelligence department in the world, an organization that in one form or another had existed since St. Peter came to Rome and underground Christians had chalked the sign of the fish on catacomb walls. Documents and the “legends” to go with them were never a problem. Gentile decided on the Homeland Security persona of good old Larry MacLean, working for a minute in front of the bathroom mirror to spin away his Italian accent and replace it with something vaguely Midwestern, then left the room.

He went down to the lobby, asked for a taxi to take him into the city and half an hour later he was in Manhattan, checking into the Gramercy Park Hotel and telling the desk clerk that Delta had lost his luggage once again. He registered as Laurence G. MacLean and paid with a Bank of America Visa check card that was hooked into what was effectively a bottomless well. He spent ten more minutes in front of the bathroom mirror of his suite practicing a flat Kansas drawl, then left the hotel and began to work.

The store was called simply “Maroc” and occupied a tiny space on Lafayette Street about three blocks away, at the corner of Grand. A tinkling bell announced Finn and Valentine as they entered. It was like some kind of doorway that took them halfway across the world—the air was suddenly full of the scent of cumin, caraway and cinnamon, the walls hung with rugs of every size and color, tables piled on tables, stacks of everything from baskets to ancient muskets—all of it overseen by a fat man at the back smoking an oval cigarette and wearing a fez, dressed in a pure white linen suit that made him look as though he’d just stepped out of
Casablanca
. Finn expected Humphrey Bogart to appear at any minute with Ingrid Bergman right behind him. Valentine gave the man a small Islamic salutation and the man replied in kind. He looked at Finn curiously and Valentine introduced them.

“Finn Ryan, this is my friend Hassan Lasri.”

“Salaam,”
said Finn, doing her best. Lasri smiled.

“Actually it is
Shalom,
since I am a
Juif Maroc
as they say in that other language of my nation, but it was a good effort.” He smiled again. “I am like a well-trained dog—I answer to any number of calls, especially from such a pretty
checroun
as yourself.”

“Checroun?”

“Redhead. They are said to be particularly lucky, among other things, and since my own name brings me nothing but bad luck…” He shrugged.

“
Lasri
means left-handed in Arabic,” Valentine explained.