The Blood Lance (5 page)

It didn't seem that many years ago when Ethan would convince himself he needed a joint just to get through his high school classes. Of course after he was high he had always felt like he would explode if he went back inside and listened to his teachers, so, inevitably, he went looking for a house where no one was home. At first Ethan had broken into places to see if he could get away with it. He would usually smoke another joint or two, watch TV, and then just take a look about to see what the people had and how they lived. If he saw any cash, of course, he would take it, but in his first few break-ins he didn't touch anything else. It hadn't taken too many times before he was seeing the world differently. He got himself a watch, his mother a microwave. Eventually he brought home a TV, a stereo, jewellery, and CDs. After a while he got a partner because it seemed a lot safer to have a lookout, but his partner was a talker and the two of them ended up getting arrested.

The next eighteen months had changed Ethan's life. He got straight for one thing - scared straight as they liked to say in those days - and he had met a Jesuit priest who spotted something his high school teachers had missed: Ethan had a near-photographic memory.

When he was released Ethan spent nine months in a Catholic school completing two years of course work and learning the equivalent of four years of Latin from the priest. In his spare time, he learned to climb - also with the help of the priest. The following year he entered Notre Dame on an academic scholarship, intending to join the priesthood after graduation. He had liked the course work, especially the history of the Church, and he was top in his class in Latin, but the more he studied the faith, the more his own began to falter. Finally, he realised he could give up the notion of becoming a priest - and ultimately his faith in God - without sinking at once into moral ruin. At least that was the plan. As it happened moral ruin only wanted a bit of encouragement.

He got accepted to law school at George Washington University following graduation with honours from Notre Dame. Before he went off to D. C., Ethan wanted to spend a summer travelling in Europe, the last month of which devoted to rock climbing. A week into the climbing phase of the trip Ethan was at a rock with a couple of friends. They were laying out the ropes when Kate walked up. She offered Ethan a pretty smile and then started up the rock in a free climb. Ethan left his friends and the ropes behind and followed her to the top. It was his first ascent without any sort of security, but worth the risk, as it had got Kate's attention. A couple of nights before Ethan's flight back to the U. S., he and Kate were walking together when Kate jumped a wall and went into an estate. Ethan knew what she meant to do, but just the thought of Kate in his arms in a stranger's bed stirred him, and he jumped the wall as well.

He had followed Kate over walls for the next seven years, making a good living in the process. Roland had fenced the paintings they stole. An ex-boyfriend of Kate's in Italy, Luca Bartoli, took care of the rest of it. Sometimes they went into a house for a single painting, the buyer already waiting for his new property, sometimes they went in on speculation. Their luck had run out in the summer of 2006 with a job that had gone very bad very fast. In the aftermath they got out of the business and left the country. They weren't exactly fugitives, but they had made a mess of things and didn't care to stick around in case the police wanted to ask a lot of difficult questions.

'Where do you find these people?' Reto asked him.

Ethan turned and looked through a window.
These people,
he thought, were some of the most amazing individuals on the continent, but in Reto's world if you didn't climb you weren't worth. . . well, the air you breathed, amongst other things.

'Kate's dad used to say if you want money, the first thing you need to do is find out where it drinks.'

Reto laughed, 'They're not letting go of it, dude!' For Reto, money was just something to get him to the base of a rock with decent equipment. 'Me? I'd rather do a
whippet
than talk to these people.' A whipper was American climbing slang for taking a dive without a rope.

'A bleeding penguin convention, it is.' Renate muttered in faux English.

Ethan looked down at his own penguin outfit. 'Is it that bad?'

Renate laughed, 'It's bad, dude! It's like I don't know you anymore!'

'So where have you been?' Reto asked him. 'I mean like we haven't seen you for years!'

'We've been living in France most of the past year. Before that we were hanging out in New York for a few months.
Hanging out
was Ethan's description of his short stint at NYU after giving up the life of a thief. As it turned out, scholarship, like virtue, hadn't taken. Most of his professors, he had discovered, were singularly without curiosity about certain aspects of the medieval world. Mention the Holy Grail, the Lance of Longinus, the Holy Face of Edessa, or even the Shroud of Turin and they vibrated with a kind of overt anxiety that he had at first found incomprehensible. After a few weeks he figured it out. To an academic, Templar and Grail studies weren't part of serious scholarship. 'If you are looking for the Holy Grail,' his thesis director had told him quite bluntly, 'you're in the wrong place.'

Ethan dropped out that afternoon - a total of six weeks into the semester. Kate, who was struggling with too much city and not enough rock, threw herself at him, wounding him with kisses. They had settled in France a week later.

'Where in France?' Renate asked him.

'We had an apartment in a village a few miles outside of Carcassonne.' A walled, medieval city, Carcassonne was impossible to endure in tourist season, but a different world once the weather cooled and only the locals and the long term visitors settled in.

'The Pyrenees!' Reto exclaimed with delight.

Ethan nodded, smiling. 'It was great,' he said.

Wolfe laughed. 'Americans. . . everything is always
great.'

'What did you like best?' Renate asked.

Ethan smiled. 'Sun. . . rocks. . . old castles. . . everything! It was. . .' He stopped himself from saying
great
. To be more precise about what he had liked required confidences he didn't especially care to extend to the likes of Wolfe and Reto. Besides there was no explaining happily-ever-after, especially to a jealous ex-boyfriend.

'So why leave it for this?' Wolfe asked him.
This
was cold, dreary Zürich - a good two hours to the base of anything worth climbing.

'Kate wanted to get Roland's foundation set up, and we both thought it might be nice to come back and see everyone.'

'Kate!' Reto said. The others, turning and seeing Kate coming toward them, called out to her as well. No one complained to
her
about the penguins inside. Not one stuffed shirt joke. They told her she looked beautiful, which she did.

The house,' Karl told her in English, 'is unbelievable.'

'The
paintings
are unbelievable!' Renate cooed. '
Three
Picassos?'

'It was Roland's collection. Ethan and I just picked out the wine.'

They lifted their wine glasses in
salute
. Wolfe said in English, 'The wine is
great
, Kate.' His eyes cut mischievously to Ethan.

'How were the Pyrenees?' Renate asked.

'Pure,' Kate whispered. 'There are places that haven't changed in a thousand years. And caves! You wouldn't believe what we saw in the caves!'

'What did you climb?' Wolfe asked her.

Kate smiled serenely. 'Absolutely everything.'

'Leave the ropes at home?' Reto asked.

'What do you think?'

Kate was a free climber as much as possible. She liked to say it was the only way up a mountain. She trained with ropes sometimes, and some mountains required it, but when she wanted to summit most peaks, she took it as a free climber if it was possible and sometimes even if it wasn't. Ethan usually tagged along with dreadful notions of his mortality nagging at him, but he always made it - close call or not. With Kate it just was not possible to hang back or hesitate. And at the top, you had done it with your own hands and feet, and that was a feeling that took the teeth out of every fear.

'That attitude is going to get you killed someday, girl!' Renate told her.

'Not Kate,' Reto laughed. 'Ethan maybe, but not Kate!'

Kate looped her arm into Ethan's and said, 'I want you to meet someone. Do you have a minute?'

'Bartoli,' she whispered when they were alone.

Ethan stopped. 'Giancarlo or Luca?'

'The old man. Watch yourself, Ethan,' she added. 'Giancarlo can read minds.'

Giancarlo Bartoli was standing at the lake with his back to them as they walked toward him. When Kate called to him, he turned and tossed his cigarette aside. Bartoli was somewhere in his mid-seventies, tall and gaunt with a mop of white hair, deep lines creasing his red face, and pale, grey, merciless eyes that missed nothing. Like Ethan he wore a tuxedo. Against the wind he also wore a yellow cashmere coat.

Roland had considered Giancarlo one of his closest friends. Kate had told Ethan she had vivid memories from her childhood of visits from Giancarlo when her parents were living in Hamburg - long nights in which the two men drank and talked about art and politics and history. About everything, really. Roland would send her off to bed and then laugh at her when she would sneak back and find a seat on her father's lap again. As she listened to their talk - always in Italian - Kate had always imagined that the two men controlled all of the important things in the world.

Ethan could understand the friendship between the two men. Kate's father had been an affable man with a salesman's instincts for putting people at ease. He had also possessed a razor-sharp intellect - to keep things lively. As a young man he had been like Kate - audacious and always searching for new challenges. By the time Ethan knew him, Roland had settled into a world of his own making. He was getting grey, but not so much slowing down as savouring things.

For his part Giancarlo Bartoli was a good deal more than a shrewd businessman. Like Roland, his passions were varied and complex. He loved art, opera, and history above all else, but he was well versed in languages and law. At university he had toyed with a career in higher mathematics before settling on the more practical aspects of that discipline. As a young man he went often to the mountains - skiing nearly at the level of an Olympian and climbing with the same enthusiasm as Roland had in his prime. As an older man Bartoli had taken up sailing, circumnavigating the globe once on a twelve man team that he captained.

Shortly after Kate was born, Giancarlo Bartoli had stood with her parents to take his vow as her
padrino
- godfather - at the christening. Kate was not Bartoli's only godchild, of course, he probably had twenty or so, but she was his favourite, and he made no attempt to disguise his special affection. Every year at her birthday - at least until she was completely grown - he would send her some elegant gift that showed genuine care in its selection. With it came long, handwritten notes that gushed with grandiloquent laments at time's passing or gave stirring anthems to the beauty of youth that fades before it is ever truly discovered in a mirror. Ethan knew enough Italian to be impressed with Bartoli's poetic accomplishments. He also understood that to Kate he was family.

Giancarlo greeted Ethan warmly in very good English. Ethan answered him in Italian. Hearing an American speaking Italian pleased Bartoli no end. Had Ethan lived in Italy? No, Ethan told him, but when he had first met Kate she had told him she could never marry a man who could not speak Italian. 'I took my first lesson the next day.'

Bartoli laughed with pleasure at this, turning to Kate. 'I like this man, Katerina! 'I'm just sorry to have missed your wedding. . . but of course I was not invited. . .'

'It was a small wedding,' Kate answered. She was blushing. 'The two of us, a witness and a priest.'

'You only needed to call. You know that. I would have been there to make it five if I had to travel halfway around the globe!'

'It was my fault,' Ethan told him. 'Once I got her to say she would marry me, I didn't want to give her time to change her mind.'

Bartoli asked them about their year in France and wanted to know about the mountains they had climbed. Talk about the mountains went on for a while, and then he wanted to know about their plans for the future. Were they going to stay in Zürich or return to France?

Kate looked at Ethan. 'We're going to spend the summer in Zürich. Then, who knows?'

'Any chance I can talk you two into forming a business partnership with Luca and me?'

'What kind?' Kate asked him.

'An associate of mine saw a very fine Cezanne last summer in a private home in Malaga. Reasonable security, but nothing the two of you couldn't get past.'

'We are out of that line of business for good,' Kate told him.

This raised a curious eyebrow and Bartoli turned his gaze on Ethan. 'My fault again,' Ethan said. 'I finally figured out stealing things was probably not the safest way to make a living.'