Moving Target (5 page)

Holding the pen in a way which seemed odd to a modern man—so that the quill was at a right angle to the vellum, and the whole arm rather than the hand provided the motion—he reached out to dip the point into a pot of ink which he had made following a recipe that was older than the chant he hummed. Though he preferred lampblack as a personal matter when he was replicating ancient manuscripts, the stubborn client had insisted on the ancient combination of iron sulfate and ashes of oak gall. The resulting ink was pleasing enough to work with but faded to brown as years piled up like autumn leaves.

That wouldn’t be Erik’s problem. When the ink began to fade, he would be long dead. At least now that he was no longer working for the Security side of Rarities Unlimited, he had a better chance of living long enough to collect most of the Book of the Learned.

Before he could touch virgin quill to ink, the phone rang.

E
rik was tempted to ignore the ringing demon, but didn’t. It might be a paying client. It might be a medieval scholar wanting to discuss some arcane aspect of calligraphy or mixing paints for illumination.

It might be Rarities Unlimited.

He set aside the quill and picked up the portable hand unit that was fixed to the side of his drafting board. As soon as the unit left its charging cradle, the ringing stopped.

“North,” Erik said curtly.

“Niall.”

Adrenaline kicked. S. K. Niall—rhymes with kneel, boyo, I’m not a bleeding river—was the cofounder of Rarities Unlimited, which wasn’t so much a business as a collaboration of international talents held together by a shared reverence for the best that human culture had to offer. Some of Erik’s most interesting assignments had begun with that low-voiced growl or Dana Gaynor’s soothing, feminine tenor. Niall’s specialty was Security, which covered a multitude of operations, some of them quite private.

“How’s life in Smog City?” Erik asked.

“Up yours.”

“That bad, huh?”

“You’re just jealous. L.A. is all clean from the last rain and you’re stuck in Palm Springs with dusty sidewalks and bars full of bad Elvis imitators.”

Erik waited. The other man hadn’t called to talk about the weather and they both knew it. The dark, highly trained head of Security had more work than he had time to handle. On the other hand, Niall and Erik were rock-climbing buddies as well as professional allies. Friends, in a word.

“I have a question for you from Factoid,” Niall said.

Erik blinked. Factoid, aka Joseph Robert (Joe-Bob) McCoy, was the Rarities computer expert and the completely wired twenty-first-century man. Due to the peculiarity of his mind, with or without benefit of computer, Joe-Bob McCoy had command of a staggering number of unconnected facts.

“You still there?” Niall asked.

“I’m speechless. What do I know that Factoid can’t find in his databases or his terrifying brain?”

“The mind of a woman.”

“Sorry, you must have called the wrong number.”

Niall laughed. “He figures that anyone with shoulders like yours must have the secret of the feminine psyche.”

“Better he should ask you,” Erik said dryly. “You’re the original tall, dark, and handsome. Hell, I’ve never even been married.”

Niall gave a crack of laughter. “That’s just it. He figures you’ve got it wired. Women chasing you and none catching.”

“The boy has a great fantasy life,” Erik said. “Tell him to keep on dreaming. It beats the hell out of my reality. Anything else on your tiny little mind?”

“Gently, boyo. This is your boss you’re insulting.”

“I work for Dana.”

“The Fuzzy side,” Niall said in disgust, referring to the Fine Arts side of Rarities, as opposed to the Security side, which he ran. “When are you going to come back to the real side? I could use you.”

“I’m a born-again Fuzzy.”

“Balls.”

“You’ve assured me that Fuzzies don’t have any.”

Niall snickered and gave up for the moment. “McCoy wants a birthday present for Gretchen. I told him to get a vat of oil and a—”

“Way too much information!” Erik cut in swiftly.

“Then what’s your suggestion?”

Erik opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Factoid’s seething ambition to get his boss Gretchen into bed was the running joke of Rarities Unlimited. Gretchen was ten years older than her would-be lover and built like a Wagnerian diva. McCoy had a turbocharged metabolism; no matter how much junk food he ate, he had to stand beside himself to cast a shadow.

“Prayer,” Erik said finally. “If that fails, virtual reality has my vote. There are websites out there that are guaranteed to rot your dick right off. Anything else?”

“One of our sources at Sotheby’s heard rumors of some unknown, very high-quality manuscript pages surfacing.”

“Twelfth-century Celtic?” Erik asked instantly, knowing that this was the real reason Niall was on the phone.

“I called you, didn’t I?”

“Insular script?”

“I don’t know.”

“Latin or vulgate?”

“Hell, boyo. I’m no Fuzzy.”

“Did the pages come to Sotheby’s?” Erik asked.

“No. House of Warrick. New York office.”

“Shit. If the pages are really good, the old man will buy them for his auction house, or even himself. Just because he prefers fifteenth-century manuscripts doesn’t mean he doesn’t buy others. Did Warrick contact you?”

“No. Our mole did. The stuff is in for preliminary appraisal only. Color copies, not the real thing. Nothing was said about selling.”

“Any kind of appraisal is the first step to selling,” Erik said impatiently. “I want to see those pages. If that fails, at least get me the copies. Find out the owner’s name.”

“Factoid’s working on it, but nothing has been entered into Warrick’s computer yet, or if it has, it’s on a secure computer. Or maybe the boy’s holding out for a really spiffy gift suggestion from you.”

“Chocolate syrup.”

“What?”

“Tell him to pour it into her—”

“Talk about too much information!” Niall cut in hastily. “I’m too young to hear this stuff.”

“Bull.” Before Niall could argue, Erik said, “Get me the information about those pages.”

“Since when did you start giving orders to your bosses?”

“I’m an independent consultant, remember?”

“On retainer.”

“Want it back?”

“Not today, boyo. I’ll wait until you piss me off.”

The sound changed, telling Erik that his employer/friend had hung up with his usual lack of ceremony.

“Good-bye to you, too,” Erik said.

He punched the end button and put the unit back in its cradle.
His left hand picked up the quill. His right hand reached for the penknife.

The front-gate buzzer went off.

Erik cursed. He turned, looked through the south window, and saw the white, purple, and orange van of FedEx delivery service. For a moment he was tempted to ignore the interruption. He wasn’t expecting any shipments. On the other hand, the unexpected was often the most interesting thing that happened on any given day.

He went to the intercom on the other side of the room, punched a button, and said, “Need a signature?”

The crackling “Yes” was just barely audible.

He really had to do something about that intercom. Antiques were fine in their place, but that place wasn’t in a security system. Although the rest of the system was beyond cutting edge, one of Rarities’s security consultants had a brilliant, if bent, mind. Erik admired Joella’s work, even if he didn’t understand her genial paranoia.

“I’m on my way,” he said into the intercom.

Setting aside the virgin quill, he went quickly down the stairs and out the large remodeled kitchen to the side gate where all deliveries came. The driver was new, female, and didn’t look old enough to vote. But then, since Erik had turned thirty-four, more and more people had started looking young to him.

“Thank you,” she said with a quick smile.

He took the package from her and smiled back automatically, but his attention was all for the package. She left while he held the parcel with fingers that were sensitive despite the scrapes and calluses left by his rock-climbing hobby. The package was too thin to hold much of interest, unless some cultural moron had shipped him naked manuscript pages.

Curious, he pulled a big pocketknife out of his jeans. The black plastic handle was deliberately rough, which allowed a good grip despite mud, rain, ice, or blood. The wicked, serrated edge of the knife could go through nylon webbing like lightning through night. The blade made short work of the package. He closed the knife with a distinct click and pulled some papers out of the parcel. The cover sheet was written in a modern hand that had no patience for beautifully executed letters.

Dear Sir,
    Enclosed please find color copies of two manuscript leaves. If you feel they are worth a formal appraisal, please contact me at the number on top of this page.
    Thank you.
    Serena Charters

He raised tawny eyebrows at the energy that fairly crackled through the words. He wondered if Serena knew that her name, like his, dated back at least to the twelfth century. If she knew, she probably wouldn’t care. Twenty-first-century people were obsessed with the future, not the past. At least, most of them were.

Erik wasn’t. It was the past that haunted and intrigued him, the past that was his passion.

He flipped the cover page over to show the copy that lay beneath. He wasn’t expecting much, because color copies were difficult to judge even when they were made carefully. This one was barely adequate. The colors were faded and uneven, as though the printer had been out of ink or out of adjustment. The writing was so light as to be indecipherable.

Yet his breath came in and stayed: what little he could see of the text was written in an elegant calligraphic hand that was as familiar to him as his own.

The language of the text was Latin. The marginal commentary was in the vulgate that was Anglo-Saxon and Norman combined. The few words that were dark enough to make out sent adrenaline spiking into his blood.

The Book of the Learned.

The thought echoed in Erik’s mind, the pattern as clear to him as if it had been printed in letters an inch high. He had been enthralled by the Book of the Learned since he was nine and had seen his first leaf in a collection of old books and family papers his great-aunt had showed him. He had seen many other manuscript leaves since then, pages from books older and newer, more richly illuminated, more perfectly written script . . . but he had never seen a manuscript that moved him the way the Book of the Learned did.

Perhaps it was simply that the name of the Learned calligrapher and illuminator of the book was also Erik. Whatever the reason, his fascination with the book had driven him to learn Latin, Old English, and the fine arts of illumination and calligraphy.

Heart beating rapidly, he looked at the next color sheet and the next. The copies were so bad he wondered if it was deliberate. The pages weren’t sequential, but they were definitely part of the Book of the Learned. The calligraphy was unmistakable, as was the style of the decorated capitals, a combination of pagan and Christian sensibilities that was unique to the manuscripts he described as Insular Celtic.

There were four pages, both sides of two unbound sheets that looked like they had been removed from a bound manuscript. The last page had no writing. Its colors had been so badly reproduced that the painting was almost impossible to make out. Erik stared and kept on staring until he finally saw the images.

A man and a woman in medieval dress.

The man had sun-bright hair cut so that it would fit beneath a war helmet. His cloak floated on a breeze, revealing the chain-mail hauberk beneath. A peregrine falcon rode his left arm. At his feet lay a staghound the size of a pony. He was watching a woman weave on a loom that was taller than a man. Her unbound hair tumbled in a fiery torrent down her back to her knees. She was looking over her shoulder at him with eyes the color of woodland violets. Instead of castle walls, the two people were surrounded by a rain-drenched forest, as though nothing on earth existed but a man and a woman caught in the mists of time.

More than anything else, the lifelike rendering of the people told Erik this was a secular rather than a religious manuscript. In the early twelfth century, the church was still so concerned about the possibility of idolatry that it insisted all representations of human figures be two-dimensional to the point of woodenness.

Slowly Erik let out a breath he hadn’t even been aware of holding. Nor did he remember walking back up to his turret studio and studying the wretched color copies. Yet he must have done just that, because when he looked up he was in his studio and the copies were spread across the floor in a patch of sunlight.

The woman’s hair, which he remembered as fiery, looked more like a wan taffy color. The man’s hair was equally faded. His clothes weren’t distinct. The proud peregrine was only a shapeless bundle on his left arm and the staghound could have been a mound of earth at his feet. Her incredible violet eyes had no color.

Yet Erik had seen it so vividly. All of it, the sun-bright and the fiery, the violet and the gleaming links of chain mail, the peregrine and the sleeping staghound. He was as certain of it as he was of his own heartbeat.

After a few moments Erik shook himself and came to his feet with the coordination of a man used to climbing rock faces. Without looking away from the copies, he picked up his phone and punched in the number at the top of the cover letter.

No one answered. Not even a machine.

He punched in Niall’s private number. Not his really private one, much less his most private one; but still, not the usual number.

“What?” Niall snarled, his accustomed telephone greeting.

“Tell Factoid that the woman who sent the color copies to the House of Warrick is called Serena Charters. She lives in Leucadia. She wants to know if the pages are worth a formal appraisal.”

“Are they?”

“Yes.” Sighing, Erik mentally kissed his next few Rarities Unlimited consulting fees good-bye. He should have done this years ago, but had been too stubborn. Too cheap, too, with the girls finishing off advanced degrees. “Also, I want a complete provenance search on some illuminated pages I own. I’ll forward the specifics to Gretchen. And yes, I’ll pay for a rush job.”