Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“I wonder where this goes?” Valentine said quietly. He headed into the tunnel.

“I’m not so sure I want to find out,” said Finn, but she followed him anyway.

The tunnel turned and twisted half a dozen times as they moved forward. Here and there narrow niches had been cut into the walls, bodies interred and then bricked over, but the crumbling brick had long since vanished and the old interment sites were empty. The rails at their feet seemed strangely out of place in this dead place, the low lightbulbs overhead in their metal screen safety baskets even more so. Finn tried not to think of the weight of the earth directly above her head; tried to breathe evenly in the oppressive, gloomy passage. She’d never been particularly claustrophobic but this was something on a completely different order of magnitude. Hell wasn’t hot, it was just like this-empty and buried underground. Buried alive.

They moved through the passage for a lifetime and then finally came to another widened antechamber. The rails ran across it to a heavy iron door set on massive hinges bolted into the wall. The door was some kind of dark heavy wood, the strap hinges as old as the stone walls they were attached to. A pair of obelisks had been neatly carved in half relief into the stone on either side of the door, then picked out in whitewash and some dark, ancient stain. Words had been neatly hammered into the rock over the entrance, picked out in black and white the same way as the obelisks.

“Silence, Mortals, you are entering the Empire of the Dead,” Finn read out aloud. “Nice.” She looked at the door and then at Valentine. “Are we going in?”

“I think we’ve come too far to back out now,” he answered. He tapped the rail with the toe of his boot. “They’re not using these to transport old bodies. This is a warehouse, not a crypt.” He stepped forward and grabbed the wrought iron handle. He pulled open the door and stepped through.

There was a deep, guttural moan like the sound of some wounded animal, and then the lights went out. Finn screamed, the terrible scent of fresh-spilled blood suddenly in the air around her. She screamed again, feeling the air rush from her lungs as the stony floor of the tunnel rushed up to greet her. In the distance, echoing, came the flat hard sound of a shot being fired.

For a single terrible instant Finn felt consciousness failing her and a sudden vision of the last instant she had seen Peter’s face appeared before her. Heart pounding, she got to her hands and knees then pushed herself to her feet. Screaming Valentine’s name she stumbled forward, arms outstretched, fingers clawing at the empty air. She lurched to one side as something struck her hip with a grunt and she felt her cheek smack hard into the rough wooden surface of the door. She lost her balance and twisted away, smelling blood and the thick reek of some kind of cheap men’s cologne or aftershave. It touched some kind of vague sense memory on the edge of conscious thought and then vanished. Close beside her she could hear the sound of ragged breathing and the dull hard sound of a bunched fist smashing into softer flesh. She fell to her knees again, realizing that the floor beneath her was smooth concrete now, not gravel. Bizarrely, filtered down from above her head she could hear the children playing in the park.

“I am the Baby Jesus.

I never, ever lie.

I am the Baby Jesus,

And if you don’t believe me,

You will surely fry.”

The children’s voices were coming through the old ventilation system that brought fresh air down to the crypt, still somehow connected to the surface. Pushing to her feet a second time, arms outstretched again, Finn reached a smooth wall in the darkness and edged along it, feeling desperately for a light switch. The smell of blood had been replaced by something else: the heavy pungent odor of spilled gasoline. There was a horrible sighing sound and then the sound of something heavy crashing to the ground. She felt a plastic switch plate underneath her hand and flipped it upward. The lights came on again and she saw where she was.

The bunker was arch-roofed and enormous, at least a hundred feet on a side, stacked with aisles and rows of crates and wooden boxes, old suitcases, trunks and huge strapped sheet metal steamer chests that reached up to the ceiling, twenty feet overhead, interspersed with steel support beams installed to keep the old stonework from collapsing. A tall crate nearby was open and a Dutch master portrait by Franz Hals leaned against it. The label on the crate was clear, if faded, and had the distinct lightning bolt runes of the Nazi SS. A steamer trunk was open beside it, filled almost to overflowing with thousands of old-fashioned spectacle rims, solid gold, lenses gone. Over everything was the reek of gasoline and out of the corner of her eye Finn saw the familiar red shape of a plastic five-gallon container. The twin narrow-gauge rails that ran into the room ended at a buffer made from a heavy slab of oak beam. A flat pallet dolly rested against the wood: a simple way of transporting plunder from the vault to the loading bay beneath the house on St. Luke’s Place.

“Michael!”

“Here!”

The sound came from behind the large crate. Leading to it she saw a bright trail of fresh blood. She ran forward, pushing the crate out of the way. Valentine was pushing himself upright, grabbing at a pile of flat crates for support. At his feet lay the body of a man, still alive, clutching his belly, groaning, hands clasped around the haft of a long, bone-handled hunting knife. He was gray-haired, in his sixties and wearing some kind of olive drab-colored uniform-the uniform of a World War Two infantry sergeant, much too large on the small man’s frame. Finn recognized him instantly.

“It’s Fred!”

Valentine grunted painfully, finally standing erect. There was a large bloody slash across the shoulder of his heavy sweatshirt. “Who?”

“From the museum. He was a security guard,” she answered faintly. “I used to say hello to him. Just a shy old man.” She stared at Valentine’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Just a graze. I’ll live.” He bent over the man on the floor. “I’m not so sure about him.”

“What was he doing here-how did he know about this place?”

“Presumably he figured it out just like we did. From the looks of things, he was about to torch it all,” answered Valentine. “God only knows why, and God knows who he thought he was.” He looked at the uniform. There was a faded patch at the shoulder. A gold-and-red stepped pyramid on a blue background. Seventh Army. Cornwall’s unit. He glanced out across the enormous vault and shook his head, then reached out with a bloody hand and touched his fingers to the side of the man’s neck. “Faint,” he said. “If we want any answers we’d better get him some help.” Valentine stood again, weaving slightly, leaning against the crates at his side for support. “You go. Phone 911. Get the cops and an ambulance.” He looked out across the room again. “We’ve got the evidence we need now. It all adds up: The Foundation, Cornwall, Crawley, Gatty, all the other names. All part of keeping this a secret. The more people who see this the better.”

“You sure you’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Go.”

Finn turned and ran.

Finn ran through the twisting passageway, her breath coming in hard gasps, her mind whirling with a thousand different thoughts and images as she tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. It didn’t work and as she made her way back to the basement of the Grange Foundation all she could think about was the drawn, pale face of the dying man on the floor of the bunker, the knife sticking out of the upper end of his gut, the thick, blood-black gout of color spreading across the front of his white shirt, his slim, piano player’s fingers clutching at the blade’s bony handle.