Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“What do you want?”

“I want as much information on the boy as possible.”

“There is very little. All the files concerning the child were destroyed when he entered the country. It was part of the agreement to take him in the first place.”

“It was an agreement made with criminals. It was an agreement made under duress. You know as well as I do that such agreements have no weight. It is my understanding that files were secretly maintained, that you have kept track of him through the years.”

“This is all too dangerous.”

“Of course it’s dangerous. If it was a walk in the park, as you Americans call it, I would not be here.”

“If the child’s existence were to be discovered the repercussions would be enormous. The Church has gone through a great deal in recent years. Things have been difficult.”

“Of course. If all those whining victims had kept their mouths shut none of this would have happened, right?” The priest with the gun shook his head. “Any evangelist television preacher could quote you Ecclesiastes 11:1, Eminence: ‘Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall be returned to you tenfold.’ What most of them would forget to tell you is that it works both ways, good as well as bad. That’s what this is all about. I need the files on the boy. In addition, I will need as much information as you can give me about the Grange Foundation.”

“One has nothing to do with the other!”

“Crawley’s murder would indicate otherwise.” The only thing he had been told by his employers was that an organization by that name would bear closer scrutiny and that Crawley’s unfortunate demise was somehow involved. The cardinal’s violent reaction was instructive.

“You are trifling with information that can only come to no good. This is insanity. One false move and I will be pilloried in the media.”

“Then perhaps in your next mass you should pray that I make no false moves, for all our sakes. Now where can I find the files on the boy?”

The cardinal looked at the gun and then into the face of the man holding it. Lying was not an option. “They are kept in the records of the Community of Sant’Egidio at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.”

Gentile nodded. Sant’Egidio was a large lay movement that did a lot of work with orphans and displaced children. “Under what name?”

“Frederico Botte.”

“How do I get the files?”

“If I ask for them the office would become suspicious at my interest. Not to mention the fact that the file is very old. It will not have been computerized.”

“I can deal with that. The Grange Foundation?”

“I will find out what I can.”

“No intermediaries, no secretaries. I deal with you only.”

“All right. How do I get in touch with you?”

“I will get in touch with you.” He reached into the other pocket of his dark jacket and took out a tiny Globalstar satellite pager. He dropped it onto the cardinal’s scarlet chest. “Keep this on you at all times. It vibrates. Call the number you see in the little screen. The number will change. Call from this phone.” He dropped another small device beside the pager-an extremely small cell phone.

“One thing more,” said Gentile, standing.

“Yes.”

“Don’t try to have me followed. Don’t try to trace me through the machinery. Under no circumstances call the police. The one thing you must know is that I am not your enemy. You must also know that I would not hesitate to sacrifice you for the common good. Don’t be foolish, Eminence. Please.”

With that, Gentile slipped away, leaving the archbishop of New York shaking nervously in his own bed. Outside, over the sharp neo-Gothic spires of the cathedral, the moon began to rise.

She went to his bed and found him still awake in the darkened room, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling, perhaps reliving a distant violent past. He turned to her as she stood beside the bed, the moon at her back, unbuttoning her shirt, staring down at him.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I know.” She pulled off the shirt, then reached behind her back to unclasp her bra, tossing it on the floor. She slipped the buttons on her jeans one by one, knowing that he was watching her, trying not to think about what he was thinking, trying not to think of anything at all except the moment. He said nothing more.

She slid off her jeans and the plain white cotton panties with them and stood there finally, naked in front of him, the light from behind her turning her hair into a glowing tangled halo, catching the curve of her hips and the long, strong muscles of her thighs with a soft plain glow. She waited like that for a moment, letting him see her, wanting him to see everything that she was, simple in the moonlight, and then she got into the bed with him, slipping under the covers, remembering the touch of his hand on her thigh at the colonel’s house, knowing this was going to happen even then, the touch like a fist in an iron glove and also as tender as a lover.

For the second time she wondered about the abstract moments and twists of fate that could turn a person’s life upside down within the space of time from one sunrise to another. For a split second she thought about Peter and that final, terrible cry, and bizarrely she suddenly had an image of her mother’s dressing table in the house on Doderidge Street back in Columbus and the wedding photograph in its silver frame.

Her mother and father standing together, somber-faced, her father in tweeds and tortoiseshell-rim glasses towering over her mother-so much younger, bright-eyed in a perfect wedding dress and holding a spray of white flowers in her hand, the tall trees and the rose gardens of Whetstone Park in the background, all in that pale yellow of old black-and-white photographs. For a moment she felt very young as she brushed against the hot dry skin of Valentine’s hip and then it was too late for good and all and he reached out and put his hand on her flat, taut belly and she turned to him and he slipped into her immensely as though he had belonged there from the beginning.

He began to move and she moved with him and none of the other things mattered even though she had no idea if she was doing it for him and his pain, for her father or for herself. Nothing mattered at all except right now and that was enough for both of them.

Lieutenant James Cornwall of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit attached to the ALIU-the art-looting division of the OSS-in western Germany sat on a rock with his sergeant trying to find a way into the farmhouse hidden behind the screen of trees. He wasn’t having very much success. His group was running out of food, there were dozens of retreating German patrols in the area, and according to the sergeant, they were sitting ducks if even one German tank decided to move in their direction. He lit a Lucky, pushed his metal-rimmed glasses up on his forehead and wondered how a man who’d completed two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated summa cum laude from Yale could wind up sitting on a rock in Bavaria beside a man who stank of sweat and cigarettes and who carried a Garand rifle strapped to his back. He was assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Parker-Hale Museum. Right now he should have been having breakfast at the Hotel Brevoort and palling around with Rorimer and Henry Taylor from the Met, not getting shot at in Bavaria.

“So what do you think, Sergeant?”

“I don’t get paid to think, sir.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant paused and lit a smoke from the crumpled pack he kept in the well of his combat boot and looked out over the early-morning mist that lay on the hillside and filtered in through the trees. “Well, sir, except for the sniper, I don’t think we’re dealing with combat troops. It’s something else, sir.”