Midnight in Madrid

“Then the bird doesn’t belong to any of you?” Spade asked.

“Belong?” the fat man said jovially. “Well, sir, you might say it belonged to the King of Spain, but…an article of that value that has passed from hand to hand…is clearly the property of whoever can get a hold of it.”

Dashiell Hammett,
The Maltese Falcon

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

Cervantes,
Don Quixote

ST. GALLEN, SWITZERLAND, AUGUST 15

L
ee Yuan had always been a bit of a mystic. Always had been and always would be. He saw things where other people didn’t, believed things that other people laughed at. But his friends and peers accepted him for what he was, a product of his background, and his experience.

Right now, however, Lee Yuan was halfway around the world and completely out of luck. It was not a healthy equation for examining fading artifacts in the dungeons of an ancient stone monastery. It was not a healthy equation for anything.

Worse, Lee Yuan felt as if he were freezing to death. His hands worked as quickly as possible. His only light was that from a kerosene lantern, lit with a small acetylene torch. There was a little heat from the torch, but still, his fingers were nearly frostbitten. He had traveled far. This was where he had been told he would find it.

On a bench built in the sixteenth century, he sorted through artifacts, bits and pieces of ancient times, stuffed together in a decrepit old wooden box. The box was the size of a child’s coffin. It had probably been built for that purpose, constructed by hands that had been dead for many centuries.

Monks had lived in this dwelling since the fourteen hundreds. Who knew what else, what treasures and torments from other ages, were sealed in these gloomy walls?

Well, there was only one treasure that Yuan sought.

Only one that
anyone
sought here.

He worked with bare fingertips that could no longer feel anything. Wool and leather covered his palms as well as much of the rest of his body; even his head was wrapped against the cold. He couldn’t hear anything.

But he had needed dexterity in his fingertips.

First they had stung like the devil, the fingertips. But now, nothing. He had long since zoned out the pain, but frostbite was another matter. He reasoned he could only sift through these items for another two minutes before he would endanger the flesh of his fingers. Once the flesh had frozen, the feeling would never return. He had seen Sherpa guides who had come back from Tibet and Mongolia with gnarled, disfigured hands that extended only to the first knuckles.

An ivory box. A hand-carved crucifix, Italian in origin. Maybe two and a half centuries old. His brain assimilated: from the reign of one of the Clements or Innocents.

Clement the Fifth.

Innocent the Seventh.

Roman popes from the Holy See. The Bishops of Rome.

French Anti-popes from Avignon. The self-indulgent pretenders.

Gregory the Eighth.

Ignatius the Righteous.

A tremendous shiver overtook Yuan and shook him violently. His spine ached.

Yuan the Frozen.

How much colder could it get? His hands trembled. His fingers worked quickly.

Bone. The bone of a man or woman. All flesh long gone. It looked like a wrist bone.

A small gold cross, probably German, judging by the inscription that was not entirely worn away.

Yuan had been on this search for five weeks since leaving Hong Kong. Why had he ever agreed to this? Others could have come in his place to retrieve the artifact. He was forty-seven years old and probably not even the most qualified man that his employer could have sent. Sure, he was highly educated in Western culture, fluent in Mandarin, English, and French, deeply knowledgeable in the traditions of the Holy Roman Church, an expert on their strange procedures.

Send a younger man next time.

He continued to sift through the contents of the box.

A ceramic pot. A small replica of the Virgin. Splinters of wood from other objects.

The True Cross? Sure. Why not? If every splinter that Westerners had claimed to be from the True Cross were authentic, an entire mansion could be built from the splinters. What else in the box?

A small urn, probably for burning incense. Some metal chips. Tiny broken crosses. Broken into small pieces, much like Yuan’s hopes.

Would this trip never end, this journey into oblivion?

From somewhere a voice spoke to him, almost an epiphany.
Careful what you wish for.

He wished he were back home in Asia. He thought of his wife. He wondered if she was faithful to him. He wondered how long, if he didn’t return, before she took up with another man. He wondered about the younger men whom he had trained and worked with. Would they laugh at him in this final quest? Or would they come after him to bring him home?

His eyes assessed the final contents of the box.

A few coins. Fragments of jewelry. Little pieces of nothing.

Nothing. Nothing at all to justify this long trek and search. And certainly nothing mystical. Now he realized that he had been scammed. He should have demanded delivery of his prize in Zurich, or Geneva, or some sane place! Not the monastery where the filthy thieves claimed it had been hidden!

What next?

His fingers could take it no more. The numbness was spreading. A bad sign. He held his fingers near his acetylene torch, almost touching the flame. He could smell the flesh thawing, or thought he could, then burning, then sudden pain. The feeling was back.

He pulled on the heavy gloves that hung at his side. No time for anything except to escape. He turned. He trudged across the small chamber to the base of the spiral stone stairs that had led him down to this claustrophobic place. If hell had frozen over, surely this was it.

He held up the lantern. He looked upward to a blackness that he hadn’t anticipated. He took five labored steps upward and saw what had happened. The old wooden door—his only exit—had closed. And not on its own.

Where had his two sentries gone? His lookouts?

He put his shoulder to the door. He pushed against the aged wooden beams. But someone had bolted the door from the other side, probably the perverse old monk with the scar across the back of his hand who had led him down into this place.

He knocked furiously at the door. Then he kicked it. He called out. He cursed violently.

But he realized that he was a captive and probably no one even heard his screams. No one would come back for him for days, maybe weeks.

There was only one possible escape. He poured the remaining kerosene from his lamp against the lower section of the door and used his acetylene torch to try to burn it.

Lots of smoke. Not much fire.

He coughed violently. Then he realized that he had done exactly what his adversaries had hoped he would do. He would asphyxiate himself in an attempt to escape.

His kerosene ran out. With a final pathetic flicker, so did his torch.

Darkness descended with unwelcome speed. Then darkness embraced everything.

Not just darkness. Blackness.

Yuan was smart enough to know: light was not something he would ever see again. He settled in. So did death’s messenger in a place like this: the bitter Alpine cold.

His mortal end arrived with astonishing ease.