Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

He felt the blood pooling now into his shoe, and he looked down to see that his heel was leaving a bloody quarter-moon on the sidewalk. But it was not fresh blood, and he could sense that the bleeding had slowed. A few more steps and he arrived at the taxi stand, slid into the backseat of a Fiat.

“Speak English, mate?” he asked, smiling.

“Yes,” came the gruff reply.

“Good man! The railroad station, please.”

The cab shot forward and he lay back in the seat, feeling the blood sticky in his groin, his mind suddenly loosening itself in a tumult of thoughts, a shower of broken memories, a cacophony of voices:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

In the convent of the Suore di San Giovanni Battista in Gavinana, Florence, twelve nuns presided over a parochial school, a chapel, and a villa with a pensione for religious-minded visitors. As night gathered over the city, the suora behind the front desk noted with unease the return of the young visitor who had arrived that morning. She had come back from her tour of the city cold and wet, her face bundled up in a woolen scarf, body hunched against the weather.

“Will the signora be having dinner?” she began, but the woman silenced her with a gesture so brusque the suora closed her mouth and sat back.

In her small, simply furnished room, Constance Greene furiously flung off her coat on her way to the bathroom. She bent over the sink, turning on the hot water tap. As the sink filled, she stood before the mirror and unwound the woolen scarf from her face. Beneath it was a silk scarf, stiff with blood, which she gingerly unwrapped.

She peered closely at the wound. She could not see much; her ear and the side of her head were crusted with clotted blood. She dipped a washcloth in the warm water, wrung it out, and gently placed it over her skin. After a moment, she removed, rinsed, and reapplied it. Within minutes, the blood had softened enough for her to cleanse the cut and examine it more clearly.

It wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first. The scalpel had scored deeply across her ear but had only nicked her face. She gently probed with her fingers, noting that the cut was exceedingly sharp and clean. It was nothing, although it had bled like a stuck pig-it would heal with hardly a scar.

Scar. She almost laughed out loud as she threw the bloody washcloth into the sink.

She leaned over and examined her face in the mirror. It was thin and haggard, her eyes hollow, lips cracked.

The novels she had read made pursuit sound easy. Characters followed other characters halfway around the world, all the while remaining well rested, fed, refreshed, and groomed. In reality, it was an exhausting, brutal business. She had hardly slept since she first picked up his trail at the museum; she had barely eaten; she looked like a derelict.

On top of that, the world had proved to be a nightmare beyond all imagining: noisome, ugly, chaotic, and brutally anonymous. It was not at all like the comfortable, predictable, moral world of literature. The great welter of human beings she had encountered were hideous, venal, and stupid-indeed, mere words failed to describe their true loathsomeness. And chasing Diogenes had proved expensive: through inexperience, being cheated, and rash expenditure, she had run through almost six thousand euros in the past forty hours. She had only two thousand left-and no way of getting more.

For forty hours, she had followed him relentlessly. But now he had escaped her. His wound would not slow him down: it was undoubtedly a trifle, like hers. She was certain she had lost his trail for good-he would see to that. He was gone, on to a new identity, and no doubt heading for the safe place he had prepared for just such a flight, years ago.

She had come so close to killing him-twice. If she had a better handgun… if she had known how to shoot… if she had been a millisecond quicker with the blade… he would be dead.

But now he had escaped her. She had lost her chance.

She gripped the sink, staring into her bloodshot eyes. She knew with a certainty the trail would end here. He would flee by taxi, train, or plane, cross a dozen borders, crisscross Europe, before ending up in a place and in a persona he had carefully cultivated. It would be somewhere in Europe, she was sure of that-but the certainty was of little help. It might take a lifetime to find him-or even more.

Nevertheless, a lifetime was what she had. And when she found him, she would know him. His disguises had been good-but no disguise would deceive her. She knew him. He could alter everything possible about his appearance: his face, clothes, eyes, voice, body language. But there were two things he could not alter. His stature was the first. The second, the more important, was something she was sure Diogenes had not thought of: and that was his peculiar scent. That scent she remembered so well, strange and heady, like a mixture of licorice underscored by the keen, dark smell of iron.

A lifetime… She felt a wave of despair so overwhelming that she swayed over the sink.

Could he have left some clue behind in his hasty departure? But that would mean returning to New York, and by the time she did so, the trail would have grown too cold.

Perhaps he had dropped some unconscious reference, then, in her presence? It seemed most unlikely-he had been so careful. But perhaps, because he had expected her to die, he might have been less than vigilant.

She walked out of the bathroom, sat down on the edge of the bed. She paused a moment to clear her mind as best she could. Then she thought back to their earliest conversations in the library of 891 Riverside. It was a mortifying exercise, excruciatingly painful, like peeling back a raw bandage of memory: and yet she forced herself to continue, summoning up their first exchanges, his whispered words.

Nothing.

She then went over their later meetings, the books he had given her, his decadent disquisitions on sensual living. But there was still nothing, not even the hint of a geographical location.

In my house-my real house, the one that is important to me-I have a library… That was what he had told her once. Was it, like everything else, just a cynical lie? Or was there perhaps a glimmer of truth?

I live near the sea. I can sit in that room, all lights and candles extinguished, listening to the roar of the surf, and I become a pearl diver…

A library, in a house by the sea. That wasn’t much help. She ran over the words again and again. But he had been so careful to hide any personal details, except for those lies he had so carefully crafted, such as the suicide scars.

The suicide scars. She realized that, in her recollections, she had been unconsciously avoiding the one event that held out the greatest chance of revealing something. And yet she could not bear to think of it again. Reliving those final hours together-the hours in which she gave herself to him-would be almost as painful as first reading the letter…

But once again a coldness descended over her. Slowly she lay back on the bed and stared upward into the darkness, remembering every exquisite and painful detail.

He had murmured lines of poetry in her ear as his passion mounted. They had been in Italian:

Ei's’immerge ne la notte,

Ei's’aderge in vèr’ le stelle.

He plunges into the night,

He reaches for the stars.

She knew that the poem was by Carducci, but she had never made a careful study of it. Perhaps it was time that she did.

She sat up too quickly and winced from a sudden throbbing in her ear. She went back into the bathroom and went to work on the injury, cleaning it thoroughly, covering it with antibiotic ointment, and then bandaging it as unobtrusively as possible. When she was done, she undressed, took a quick bath, washed her hair, put on fresh clothes. Next, she stuffed the washcloth, towel, and bloody clothes into a garbage bag she found stored in the back of the room’s armoire. She gathered up her toiletries and returned them to her suitcase. Pulling out a fresh scarf, she wrapped it carefully around her face.