John Connolly - The Black Angel

The room in which we now stood was impressively modern, with a pretty good view of the river through a row of five long windows. The carpet was white, and the seating areas furnished entirely with black leather. There was a wide-screen TV and a DVD player in a console against one wall, and a series of black bookcases stretched from floor to ceiling. Most of the shelves were empty, apart from a few pieces of pottery and antique statuary that were lost in their minimalist surroundings. A large smoked-glass dining table stood to my left, surrounded by ten chairs. It looked like it had never been used. Beyond it, I could see a pristine kitchen, every surface gleaming. To the left was a hallway, presumably leading to the bedrooms and bathroom beyond. It was like a show apartment, or one that was on the point of being vacated by its current owner.

Bosworth was waiting for us to speak. He was clearly a sick man. His right leg had already spasmed once since we had arrived, causing him some distress, and there was a tremor in his left arm.

“Thank you for seeing us,” I said. “This is my colleague Louis.”

Bosworth’s eyes flicked between us. He licked at his lips, then reached for a plastic tumbler of water on the small glass table beside him, carefully ensuring that he had it firmly in his grip before he raised it to his mouth. He sipped awkwardly from a plastic straw, then returned the tumbler to its table.

“I spoke to Ross’s secretary,” he said, once he had drained the last of the water. “She confirmed your story. Otherwise, you would not be here now, and you would instead be under the supervision of this building’s security guards while you waited for the police to arrive.”

“I don’t blame you for being cautious.”

“That’s very magnanimous of you, I’m sure.”

He snickered again, but the laughter was directed less at me than at himself and his debilitated condition, a kind of double bluff that failed to convince anyone in the room.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the leather sofa on the other side of the coffee table. “It’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of company, other than that of doctors and nurses, or concerned members of my own family.”

“May I ask what you’re suffering from?”

I already had some idea: the tremors, the paralysis, the spasms were all symptoms of MS.

“Disseminated sclerosis,” he said. “Late onset. It was diagnosed last year, and has progressed steadily from the first. In fact, my doctors say the speed of my degeneration is quite alarming. The vision in my right eye was the first obvious symptom, but since then I have endured the loss of postural sense in my right arm, weakness in both of my legs, vertigo, tremors, sphincter retention, and impotence. Quite a cocktail of miseries, don’t you think? As a result, I have decided to leave my apartment and abandon myself permanently to the care of others.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s interesting,” said Bosworth, seemingly ignoring me completely. “Only this morning, I was considering the source of my condition: a metabolic upset, an allergic reaction on the part of my nervous system, or an infection from some outside agent? I feel it is a malevolent illness. I sometimes picture it in my head as a white, creeping thing extending tendrils through my body, implanted within to paralyze and ultimately kill me. I wonder if perhaps I unwittingly exposed myself to some agent, and it responded by colonizing my system. But that is the stuff of madness, is it not? Agent Ross would be pleased to hear it, I think. He could pass it on to his superiors, reassuring them that they were right to end my career in the manner in which they did.”

“They said that you desecrated a church.”

“Excavated, not desecrated. I needed to confirm a suspicion.”

“And what was the result?”

“I was proved right.”

“What was the suspicion?”

Bosworth raised his left hand and waved it gently from side to side in a slow, deliberate movement, perhaps to distinguish the gesture from the tremors that continuously shook the limb.

“You first. After all, you came to me.”

Once again, I was drawn into the game of feeding information to another without exposing too much of what I knew, or what I thought might be true. I had not forgotten Reid’s warning from the night at the Great Lost Bear: that somewhere there was one who believed that a Black Angel dwelt within him, and so I did not mention the involvement of Reid and Bartek, or the approaches made to me by Stuckler. Instead, I told Bosworth about Alice, and Garcia, and the discoveries made in the Williamsburg building. I revealed most of what I knew about the map fragments, and Sedlec, and the Believers. I talked of the auction, and the painting in Claudia Stern’s workshop, and the Book of Enoch.

And I spoke of Brightwell.

“All very interesting,” he said, when I had finished. “You’ve learned a lot in a short time. He rose painfully from his chair and went to a drawer at the base of one of his bookshelves. He opened it, retrieved what was inside, and placed it on the table between us.

It was part of a map, drawn in red and blue inks upon thin yellowed paper, and mounted on a piece of protective board. In the top right-hand corner was a black foot with taloned toes. The margins were filled with microscopic writing, and a series of symbols. It was similar in content to the fragments I had seen in Stuckler’s treasury.

“It’s a copy,” said Bosworth, “not an original.”

“Where did this come from?”

“San Galgano, in Italy,” said Bosworth, as he resumed his seat. “The monastery at San Galgano was one of the places to which a fragment was sent. It’s no more than a beautiful ruin now, but in its time, its façade was noted for the purity of its lines, and it was said that its monks were consulted during the construction of the Siena cathedral. Nevertheless, it was subject to repeated attacks by Florentine mercenaries, its revenues were plundered by its own abbots, and the Renaissance in Italy led to a falling off in the number of those willing to answer the monastic call. By 1550, there were only five monks left there. By 1600, there was only one, and he lived as a hermit. When he died, the San Galgano fragment was found among his possessions. Its provenance was not understood initially, and it was retained as a relic of a holy man’s life. Inevitably, rumors of its existence spread, and an order came from Rome that it should be entrusted to the care of the Vatican immediately, but by that time a copy had already been made. Subsequently, further duplicates were created, so the San Galgano section of the map is in the possession of any number of individuals by now. The original was lost on the journey to Rome. The monks transporting it were attacked, and it was said that rather than allow it to be seized along with their money and possessions, they burned it in a fit of panic. And so, all that remain are copies such as this one. This, then, is the only piece of the Sedlec map to which many people have enjoyed access, and the only clue that existed for many years as to the nature of the directions to the statue’s resting place.

“The original creator of the map invented a simple, but perfectly adequate, means of ensuring that the location contained within it remained unknowable without all the parts of the document. Most of the writing and symbols are merely decorative, and the drawing of the church refers simply to Bernard’s concept of how such places of worship should look. It is an idealized church, and nothing more. The real meat, as you’re no doubt aware, is here.”

Bosworth pointed to a combination of Roman numerals and a single letter D in one corner.

“It’s simple. Like any treasure map worth its salt, it’s based around distances from a set point. But without all of the distances involved, it’s useless, and even with all of them to hand, you still need to know the location of the central reference point. All the boxes, all of the fragments, are ultimately meaningless unless you have knowledge of the location in question. In that sense, the map might be regarded as a clever piece of sleight of hand. After all, if people were busy searching for what they believed to be crucial clues, then they would be less likely to try to find the thing itself. Each fragment does, however, offer one piece of useful information. Look again at the copy, particularly at the imp in the center.”