Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“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

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.