Eric Lustbader - The Testament

"How did you know where I'd been taken?" Bravo said.

"I followed my suspicions. I've had my eye on Paolo Zorzi for some time."

"Now this is just like old times."

Rule smiled, his eyes briefly touching Bravo in that familiar way.

The trees were thick in this area, a lush wetness spread beneath them. The rich air smelled dank.

"I want to thank you," Bravo said.

"I should thank you for saving my skin with Zorzi."

"You would've found your own way out," Bravo said, "but that's not what I mean."

Rule shot him a quizzical look.

"The winter Junior died I was royally pissed off at you."

"As I recall, you made no bones about it."

"I'm sorry about that."

"Old news."

"No, it isn't. I was angry at you for taking my father away."

"Yeah, well-"

"No, listen, Uncle Tony, I need to say this. I was a kid then, I was only thinking of myself, my own pain. I wasn't thinking of how bad it must have been for my father." There was a small silence. He wished Uncle Tony would say something, add an affirmation. "You knew he needed to get away, didn't you? You knew he would break down if he didn't."

"He sounded so bad when he called I knew I couldn't let you see what might become of him. A child shouldn't see his father in such grief, it was hard enough on you as it was."

"Where did you go?"

"Norway. We went hunting, moose and red deer mostly. Your father was some crack shot. One day-it was snowing, I remember-we came across some tracks that were unfamiliar to me. Very fresh they were, otherwise the snow would've covered them. Anyway, Dex got excited. He made us track the damn thing until the snow grew blue as the sun neared the horizon. Just for this one look we got of it-a wolverine. Even in those days they were rare enough."

"Did you shoot it?"

"Are you kidding? Dexter was in awe of it, he put up his gun and just sat in the snow like a little kid, watching. And you know I think the beast knew we were there-or at least that Dex was there, because once it looked in our direction and flinched. But it never bared its teeth and it didn't run." They were in a small grove of slender, wind-whipped pines now, and Rule pushed a springy branch out of their way. "That was one memorable trip. I saw your father sink down to the depths and then rebound. Out there in the whiteness, communing with that wolverine, he found the salt of life again."

Bravo felt once again the terrible weight of his father's passing, but this time it was leavened with a brush as if from the wings of a great bird that had swooped out of the blackness of the night. I guess you could call us outsiders-it's far more difficult for us to find ourselves. Sometimes I ask myself what I have to do in order to be saved. Revealed to him now was yet another layer of what his father had told him that summer afternoon in Georgetown-the difficult truth that he himself had learned about human connection and the world of the outsider.

"You were always a good friend," he said, his throat and his heart full, "to my father and to me."

Rule cuffed Bravo affectionately. "Sometimes you remind me so much of Dex it's uncanny." He paused, then, sobering, "I know how Junior's death affected all of you-especially you. You did everything you could. It wasn't your fault."

Bravo shivered, hearing an echo of Jenny telling him the same thing. For a moment, he flashed on her as she had been in Venice-the hotel room, the shower, the bed. He heard again the voices of the deliverymen, floating up from the canal like morning vapor. He felt her caress, heard her whispering in his ear. Then he heard again the eerie, evil report of the ice cracking beneath his feet. She had caressed his father, had whispered in his ear just as she had with him. He felt a certain horror, a creeping along his spine, and he shivered again as they pressed on.

They came to the crumbling stone foundation of the church without seeing another soul. Part of the building had latterly been turned into the dog kennel. One wall of the old church reared up, black and glistening, as crevassed as an old soldier's face. It had been broken in two.

"Now what? There's not much here," Rule asked as they surveyed the scene.

Bravo stared at the wall. Remember where you were the day you were born. Remembering St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital had brought him this far. Where was the hospital in Chicago? He strained to recall. Then he had it: 2233 West Division Street.

He went to the break in the wall-the division-and walked ten paces west, ten being the sum of the four numbers of the hospital's address. He knelt on the grassy ground at the base of the wall. Rule joined him and together they began to dig with their hands. Three feet down they found a parcel wrapped in oilskin.

Far out across the water, trembling lights from the Lido pointed like a crooked finger toward them. A gull cried several times, the plaintive sound diminishing into a sudden rush of air.

Mindful of the police search that had doubtless already begun, they headed back to the motoscafo at a quickened pace. Bravo unwrapped the package. Inside was a small silver Greek cross. Wrapped around it, like a beehive or a wasp's nest, was a skein of red threads.

"What do you make of it?" Rule said, peering over his shoulder.

Bravo shook his head.

They reached the boat without incident. The tarp was in the same position in which Rule had left it. Quickly, they stowed it and cast off. Rule handed Bravo the flashlight. While he maneuvered the motoscafo away from Lazzaretto Vecchio, Bravo switched on the flashlight and holding the Greek cross in its beam unwound the short lengths of red string. There were twenty-four. The area on the body of the cross that was now revealed had three words etched into it. Bravo knew that this was a two-key fractionation system cipher. One of the most famous field ciphers, it had been employed by the German Army during World War I. The first two words were the keys, the third word was the encrypted text. He opened his father's notebook to a blank page and began to work.

The cipher system was based on the ADFGVX cipher, which used a 6?6 matrix to substitute-encrypt the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and ten digits into pairs of the symbols A, D, F, G, V and X. The resulting biliteral cipher was only an intermediate cipher, however. It was then written into a rectangular matrix and transposed to produce the final cipher.

What Bravo came up with was a single word: sarcophagus.

"Where are we headed now?" Rule said at length. "Do you know?"

"Back to Venice," Bravo said, pocketing the notebook and cross. The red threads he dropped into the dark, ruffled water as if they were the last vestiges of his father, who had been here and, by this gesture, was here again.

Dawn was extending its long pearly fingers across the flat expanse of the lagoon. For a few moments they were alone on the water. The oblique light turned the surface into sheet metal through which their boat cut cleanly, like a honed knife. Birds called and circled, roused from the sleep by the dawn and the hunger in their stomachs. They swooped and called to one another as they hunted, submerging themselves briefly to snatch a fish between curved bills.

There were other hunters on the lagoon. As the motoscafo rounded the end of the Lido, they saw the police launch, and immediately Rule cut his speed.

Bravo came up alongside him. "What are you doing?"

"You'll see."

Rule had not changed course. In fact, so far as Bravo could tell, he was pointing the bow of the boat directly at the police launch. And now, though Bravo knew that the flatness of the lagoon in certain light could fool the eye and even create mirages, just like in the desert, he was certain that the police launch, having spotted them, had put on speed. He could see the bow lift and the new charge of foam fountaining behind it.